IF
Clayton Smith
Part V: Colemine, the Prince
Chapter 1:
In Which We Witness a Major Breakthrough
Cole dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed. It was time to accept it. They were never going to get out of the Writer’s Bloc.
They’d tried everything they could think of to dissolve the wall of barricaded creativity. They tried writing, which was something Cole had learned from his father…sometimes, when Donald Slawson had writer’s block, he just wrote line after line of nonsense in order to break past the blockage. The children gave it a try, tracing their fingers in the shapes of letters on the walls, but that just made the pads of their fingers red and raw. On Etherie’s suggestion, they closed their eyes, pretended the walls weren’t there, and tried to walk through them. That plan only left Emma with an incredible headache. The Stranger even fired a few bullets at the wall, aiming upward. They bounced off and ricocheted somewhere into the air above them, leaving the Writer’s Bloc completely and frustratingly unharmed.
They were officially out of ideas.
Cole sighed. He hoped Polly was having better luck than they were, wherever she was.
The Stranger sat down in frustration. The inability to solve this problem, or any problem, set his teeth on edge, and he needed something to calm himself down. So he pulled out his rag and set to work cleaning his revolver, carefully and meticulously, taking up as much of their inestimable time as he could.
The children sat down nearby, all of them except for Willy, who seemed to have a boundless supply of energy and who contented himself by pretending to be a human bullet, ricocheting off the corners of the walls.
“How long have we been here?” Emma asked, rubbing her poor, tender forehead.
“Feels like days,” Cole said. He laid back on the floor and closed his eyes. I’ll just lie here until I die, he thought. It won’t be so bad.
At least it was quiet.
“We’ve tried everything,” Emma pouted, kicking the heels of her feet gently on the floor. “I want a donut.”
Etherie brightened then, and pulled herself into a seated lotus position. “Strictly speaking, we haven’t tried everything.”
“Sure feels like it,” Cole said miserably.
“But that’s not quite right. We’ve tried everything we could think to do. But we haven’t tried doing none of the things we can’t think to do.”
Cole opened his eyes and stared up at the whiteness above. He blinked. He blinked again. “What?” he said.
“We’ve been consumed with the failure of our actions. But we haven’t tried practicing inaction yet.”
The Stranger snorted as he pulled his rag through the barrel of one of his guns. “Feels like we’re pretty inactive right now,” he said.
“Physically, yes. But not mentally. Mentally, we’re all still trying to break through the walls.”
“I’m trying to break through the walls with my fist!” Willy cried, slamming his hand against a wall. Cole flinched as it cracked against the hard surface, certain that the other boy had just shattered his knuckles into a hundred tiny pieces. But Willy’s skeleton was apparently more rubber than bone. “I’m a psychopath!” he screamed.
Etherie ignored him and continued: “Sometimes the best way to see the solution to a problem is to remove yourself from it. Since we can’t remove ourselves physically, we should try to remove ourselves psychically.”
Cole shrugged. “Worth a shot, I guess.” He pulled himself to a sitting position, doing his best to copy Etherie’s pose. Etherie had her right foot drawn up onto her left knee, and her left foot propped on her right knee. Cole pulled his right foot onto his left knee, but struggle as he might, his left leg refused to bend far enough to get his left foot on his right knee. So he settled for a half-done post instead and hoped that it would suffice.
“Emma, will you join us?” Etherie said. Emma nodded, but she had even less luck than Cole getting her legs to cooperate. Etherie shook her head. “You don’t have to sit in lotus. Try shavasana instead.”
Emma frowned. “Sha–sha–?” Her eyebrows knitted themselves together in concern. “What?”
Etherie smiled sweetly. “Shavasana, corpse pose. Like this.” She uncrossed her legs and straightened them out in front of her. Then, with a deep exhale, she lowered herself onto her back and let her arms rest gently at her sides.
“Like a nap?” Emma said.
Etherie nodded. “Sort of like a nap.”
Emma plopped backward, far less gracefully than her friend, but to more or less the same effect. She stretched out her fingers and her toes and lay with her eyes closed, her chin pointing straight up at the whiteness overhead. Cole decided that he, too, would prefer this shavasana pose. He lay down and settled his hands at his sides. Etherie nodded, satisfied. She curled her feet back into lotus pose and touched the forefingers and thumbs of each hand together.
“Now. Keep your eyes closed, and focus on your breath. Make it slow and full. With every inhale, breathe in your calm. Exhale your worries and fears. Breathe in your space; breathe out your stress. Fill your lungs with air, sending oxygen to the very tips of your toes and the very crown of your head. Exhale the toxic emotions of the day into the air.” She demonstrated by taking a long, slow, deep breath in and releasing it in a loud, full exhale. “Breathe in through your nose, and out through your mouth. Match the length of your exhale with the length of your inhale. Breathe. Just breathe. Just be.”
Cole did as he was instructed, drinking the air deeply into his lungs, feeling them expand against his rib cage. As he exhaled through his mouth, he thought that the idea of sending breath to various parts of his body was a strange and pointless thing to try…but upon further reflection, maybe he was wrong about that, because on his second inhale, as he focused on sending breath to his hands, they began to tingle.
Emma must have felt something similar, because on her next exhale, she actually cooed. Cole peeked one eye open and stole a glance at her. She was grinning from ear to ear.
“Now imagine yourself as a tree in the forest,” Etherie continued. “You are tall, and strong. The wind blows gently across your limbs, caressing you gently. You sway, and your leaves rustle, and you just are.”
Cole frowned. In his mind, he was a small tree, a sapling, like the one that his father had planted two years ago in their front yard. Cole could see it from his bedroom window, and he saw it every day, so it was by far the easiest tree for him to picture. But tall and strong? The sapling was not tall and strong. He furrowed his brow and imagined what the tree would look like after a logical amount of growth due to healthy rainfall, decent temperatures, and several years.
He was actually startled to see the tree in his mind stretch into an image of a tall, broad oak.
He was really starting to get the hang of this “imagination” thing.
“Now it is time to drink from the earth. But instead of water, your roots absorb pure light, given to you by Gaia. The light is warm, and of a consistency that is known to you alone. It is tangible. It is a light you could hold in your hands.”
Cole heard a sound then, a strange sound, as if someone, the Stranger, maybe, or Willy, was snorting at Etherie’s guided meditation, but from far, far away. The sound was carried to Cole’s ears on the breeze, and it was hardly distinguishable from the rustle of the wind through his leaves. The other world, the world in which he sat with his classmates in a troublesome room, seemed so far away from the forest...
“Take a ball of the light into your roots. As it travels up into your trunk, it grows, exp
ands to fill every fiber. It travels up to your lowest branches, spilling out to their very tips, turning even your leaves into soft, white shapes of light. The energy moves up to your higher branches, and you feel the warmth now, a warmth that fills you, makes you feel safe, makes you feel grounded to Mother Earth, its source. It makes you feel distinct and separate from your fellow trees. This is your light. It fills you alone. It is your light.”
“My light,” Cole murmured. He smiled as the warmth of the earth’s energy spread through him, tingling the tips of his branches.
“The light fills every part of you now, from your lowest root to your tallest branch, and you are transformed. You are no longer a tree, but a creature of pure light. Your energy transcends what was once a tree, and you take the shape of your true form. Maybe you are a rabbit. Maybe you are an island. Maybe you are a glass of lemonade. Whatever you are, that is what you are.”
Cole sighed happily. He was a comet, shooting straight into the sky. He left the forest far below and gazed with wonder at the majesty of creation as the blue sky above and around him faded to black. He shot through the troposphere, through the stratosphere, through the mesosphere, through the thermosphere, up, up, up into outer space, where he glided peacefully, a streaming comet of pure light. And he was happy.
“Your true form has taken you to a new place,” Etherie continued in a soothing, yet commanding tone. “You are where you were always meant to be. You have arrived in your place of perfect peace.”
Yes, Cole thought, that’s exactly where I am. He was speeding through galaxies, watching entire solar systems spinning in and out of existence, witnessing the collapses and explosions of stars, rocketing past novae and supernovae and ultranovae. He beheld the entirety of the universe, in all its complexities and chaotic logic. And he wasn’t alone. Two other comets joined him. That was his mother, there, on the left, and his father, trailing behind a bit, on the right. Together they roared through space, happy, calm, content.
And somewhere, trillions and trillions of lightyears away, across an infinite expanse of space, deep within the Milky Way, in a solar system orbiting a yellow star, on a tiny planet called Earth, inside the imagination of a collective people, sandwiched between an ocean and a rickety old building called the Bates Motel, within the confines of a structure known as the Writer’s Bloc, a teeny, tiny, insignificant white block fell away from the wall that held it and crashed into a zillion grains of sand on the hard white floor beneath.
The Stranger leapt to his feet in surprise. “Willy! What’d you just do?”
Willy, who was now lying face-first on the floor, having dove to the ground to avoid being crushed to human soup by the giant, falling Lego and only succeeding by a very narrow margin, now scrambled to his feet and shook his head violently. “I didn’t do anything! Swear!”
“You must have done–” But before the cowboy could finish, another block high above began to grind its way out of the wall, as if it were being pushed from the other side. It wriggled loose and tumbled forward, down toward the child below. The Stranger sprinted forward and drove his shoulder into Willy’s chest, knocking him backward just as the heavy block slammed into the ground where he’d been standing. It, like the first block, shattered into a pile of sand.
“I swear! I didn’t do anything!” Willy cried.
A third block started to scrape its way out of the wall, and the Stranger grabbed the boy by the shoulders. “Move!” They ran back toward the center of the room just as the third, and then a fourth, and then a fifth block all crashed down from the wall and splintered into sand.
“It’s them,” the Stranger said, nodding at the three children breathing deeply in the center of the Writer’s Bloc. “I don’t know how, but they’re doing it.”
The immense crashes of the blocks sounded no louder to Cole than a set of wrinkles being ironed out of a sheet. He was far, far away, tucked safely in the vacuum of the universe, where only Etherie’s voice could reach him. “Remember your breathing,” she instructed him across the universe. “Remember who and what you are.”
Back in the Boundarylands, the wall was crumbling quickly now, and the white room was filling with so much sand that it began to creep up over their legs.
“Why aren’t they moving?” Willy asked, incredulous.
The Stranger gritted his teeth. He didn’t know. And he didn’t like it.
“Wake up,” he urged, shaking Emma by the shoulders. She shook her head, resisting the pull of her mind back to her body. The Stranger, desperate, slipped his arms beneath her and lifted her up, carrying her to a safer distance. “Try to wake the others,” he called over his shoulder.
Willy leapt up and stood over Cole’s horizontal form, one foot planted firmly on either side of the other boy’s waist. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “WAKE UP!” Cole didn’t flinch. He just lay there with a big smile on his face. Willy reached down and grabbed him by the shirt collar. He gave the boy a rough shake. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” But still, Cole remained asleep to the world. The blocks continued to fall, and the sand continued to spread. It was over Willy’s ankles now, and soon it would cover Cole’s head, sift into his mouth, and clog his throat and his lungs. Willy, desperate now, reached down, grabbed Cole’s cheeks in his hands, and pulled with all his might. “Coooooooole!”
Eons away, a bright comet of light that called itself Cole felt a tug on its tail. Cole the Comet tried to pull free, but whatever had his tail had it good. He skidded to a stop, but the other two comets sped past him, continuing on their celestial trajectory. “Mom! Dad!” he yelled, but the pair of streaming comets arced away from him, leaving him alone in the darkness of space. Cole turned back to the tugging on his tail and slowly began to imagine a world where he was not a comet, but a boy, a boy with parents who were human beings, and not comets. A world where he was on a quest with four of his friends and an imaginary cowboy to find a poor creature of his own creation that he’d banished into sadness…
Cole’s eyes shot open. Willy stood over him, pulling at his cheeks.
Cole furrowed his brow. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice garbled by the flapping of his cheeks.
“Saving your dumb life!” Willy cried. He grabbed Cole’s arm and helped him to his feet. Cole struggled up through the sand, dazed, confused, and wondering how in the world it was possible that they were about to be swept away by a sandstorm.
“What’s going on?” he asked, brushing off his arms and trudging through the sand to where the Stranger stood with a dazed-looking Emma. Etherie, too, was resurfacing from her meditation, and she pushed herself away from the oncoming wave of sand with an easy grace.
“What’s happening?” he called over the sound of crashing blocks. Panic crept into his throat as he watched the walls collapsing around them. He felt his entire body literally trembling in fear.
But the Stranger was actually smiling.
“You did it,” he said, shaking his head with a grin and slipping his newly cleaned six-shooter back into its holster. He’d snatched it off the floor just before the sand swallowed it up. “I don’t know how, but you did it.”
“We did?” Emma breathed, her eyes wide with amazement. “I was a Danish.”
“And I was–” Cole trailed off, trying to remember the specifics of his trance. The memory was slipping away, like water down a drain. Something about a planet...wasn’t it? Or a star? “I don’t…really remember,” he said softly. He glanced over at Etherie. “How did we do it?”
“We stopped focusing so hard on the problem and just let our actual selves be,” she said with a satisfied smile. “And in doing so, we beat writer’s block.”
The group huddled together as they watched the blocks of the southern wall come tumbling down, falling like boulders in a landslide. A dark night sky set the backdrop for the world on the other side, its billions of stars twinkling and winking
in the distance, beckoning the captors of the Writer’s Bloc to a wide open land and the fresh air of freedom.
“We really did it!” Cole cried, throwing his arms around Etherie. “You did it!”
“No,” she said, smiling at him strangely. “I think we all did.”
“Don’t know about you,” the Stranger said, stepping forward onto the pile of sand, “but I’ve had just about enough of this place.”
Cole couldn’t agree more. “Nothing to stop us now but a little bit of beach.”
Chapter 2:
In Which a Bad Dream Gets the Upper Hand
Dr. Mandrill stepped into the motel room. The floorboards beneath the thin carpet groaned with a low, eerie creak. He smiled. “Horror motifs.”
“The bloc isssssh there,” the Tooth Fairy hissed, curling one of his claws toward a door in the back of the room.
Dr. Mandrill strode over to the door and pushed it open. His hand searched the wall for a light switch, and when he flipped it, a sickly-yellow glow flickered to live from a fluorescent bulb overhead. The room before him was a small, sparse bathroom with white tile walls. Dr. Mandrill yanked back the shower curtain, nearly pulling it from its squeaky metal rings. “Here,” he instructed.
The Tooth Fairy hunched into the room, the claws on its toes clicking against the dry tile.
“Yesssssh,” he whispered. He traced one finger over the wall tiles, almost tenderly. “Yessssssh,” he whispered again. He clicked over to the far side of the bathroom, a mere two steps for the massive creature, and he lowered his shoulder and rammed forward, driving his sharp bones into the shower wall. Pieces of tile broke and fell away, clattering into the porcelain tub.
“Again,” the dentist instructed.
The Tooth Fairy hit the wall again, and again, driving harder and harder. He broke through the tiles and smashed through the hard plaster beneath, breaking it loose so that it fell away in dusty chunks, exposing the structure’s wooden frame. The Tooth Fairy hissed and grabbed two vertical two-by-fours with its huge, hungry hands and ripped them out with a loud CRACK. A piece of the outside wall came out with the studs. It should have been faded, weathered clapboard, like the other exterior walls of the motel, but instead what came back with the beams was a huge, white brick.
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