8 Gone is the Witch (20 page)

He pointed up at the falls. “Is short cut. Like wormhole.”

“A wormhole? To where?”

“Other universe. You home now.”

“Wait,” said Carlos. “What’s he talking about? Are we back in our own universe?”

“No.” I waved my hand to dismiss that notion entirely. “We’re not home. Look
behind you. Have you ever seen a waterfall from space back home?”

“I don’t get it
then.”

“We’re still in the dark universe. We’re just on the other side
of it now. Jerome, why did you say we’re home?”

He pointed
at himself. “My home. You stay.”

“No!” said Tony. “We don’t stay. We go. You hear?
We are going to find our friend. We’re going to rescue her, and then we’re going to get the hell out of this God forsaken nightmare. Do you understand?”

“Okay we go.”

Carlos said, “That was easy.”

“Wait.
” I looked around at the relative fortress that our natural terrain offered. “Check it out.” I hiked my thumb up over my shoulder. “First of all, we got the river behind us.” I swept my hand over the rocky cliffs towering several hundred feet high in a horseshoe shape around us. “These walls offer good protection from animals, treklapods or whatever other mutant creatures this place has to throw at us.” I then pointed at a narrow pass carved out in the base of the rock running parallel to the river. “And see there? That’s a defendable strait if ever I saw one.”

“What’s your point?”
asked Tony.

“My point is that we
’re all tired and hungry. We need to stop and get some sleep, and this place is as good as any. I mean look. The sand is soft; it’s comfortable. We have natural defenses.” I gestured along the base of the cliffs to the row of washed up driftwood. “There’s plenty of fuel to keep a fire burning.”

“She’s right
,” said Carlos. “We could all use a rest. We’ve been through a lot.”

I could see Tony
wavering. “I don’t know...”

“I could sleep,” said Ursula, who until then had shown little
in the way of complaining. “If thou wert to rest, I would welcome thee thy kindness.”

“Okay, fine
. We’ll rest. Sleep if you can, but when I say it’s time to move out, we––”

“We move out,” I said. “Got it.” I turned to Carlos. “
You want to collect some firewood?”

“Sure, I’ll
help you.”

I laughed. “Pah...lease. I meant you and Tony.”

“We’ll do it,” said Tony. “Carlos and I will get the firewood. You three just stay put. I don’t want anyone wandering off. Once we’re all settled––”

“Eat!”
Jerome cried.

“What?”

He pointed out at the water, “Eat,” and started toward the river.

“
Jerome! Where are you going?”

He called back. “You stay.
Jerome get food.”

“What food?”

“Is surprise. You see.”

Sure,
we’ll see, I thought, because we needed another surprise like we needed a hole in the head. I told Tony and Carlos to ignore him and to just go and get the firewood. In the meantime, Ursula and I moved up the beach a ways to a cluster of small boulders in the sand that appeared prearranged in a circle fit for a campfire.

“What do you
make of this?” I asked her. “You think someone put these here?”

She shrugged with indifference. “`Tis not
Stonehenge.”

I took that to mean she
could hardly care less.

We got on our hands and knees and
pushed the sand out in a circular pattern, forming a crater some four feet around and a foot deep. Carlos and Tony returned a short while later with their first load of driftwood. They dumped it in the center of the pit and stacked it in pyramid fashion like the skeletal frame of a teepee.

“Okay,” said Tony, looking at me. “We don’t have any matches, so it’s up to you.”

“No problem,” I said, confident I had done it the night before and therefore could do it again.

I herded everyone back
from the edge of the pit, assumed the stance of a Western gunslinger, strictly for effect of course, and spun a zip ball up in the palm of my hand.

Now, I don’t deny that
I knew something was wrong with my zip ball. I could see that from the start. For one thing, it had no zip. It didn’t churn with excitement. It just sat there, sputtering like an old neon sign. It wasn’t the usual power sphere, round and full like a baseball borne of blinding light, electric sparks and energy. Instead, it looked more like a flattened golf ball, dipped in white talcum and spackled in blue pigment.

I didn’t want to let it go. I
knew it would flop. Yet, I couldn’t keep holding it in my hand. I pitched it at the logs and watched it break apart like sand, fizzling in a pitiful spit of static glints as dull as a Fourth of July sparkler.

I know.
Imagine my embarrassment.

“What was that?” Tony asked.

“That was me warming up,” I bluffed.

“Yeah? How’s that working for you?”

“Do you want to do this?”

He stepped back and presented the floor without further comment.
I readjusted my stance, held my hand out, palm up, blew into the wind and conjured up another zip ball.

Unlike the previous, the second
zip ball was much brighter, fuller. Unfortunately, it was much the same in disappointment. It spun in place for all of two seconds before disappearing in a puff of blue smoke and white light.

“
Lilith.” I could tell that Tony was losing patience with me. “I’m soaking wet. I’m freezing and I really am not in the mood for games.”

“What games?” I immediately tried spinning up another
zip ball. “You know, I don’t understand. This has never happened to me before.”

I tried it three more times before Ursula nudged her way to the edge of the pit, balled up her fist and pitched a six-foot bolt of lightning at the logs, turning them instantly into a flaming inferno.

“Wow!” said Carlos. “Girl’s got game.”

I said to Ursula, “How did you do that?”

She shrugged. “I thought naught of it, is all.”

“What?”

“You can’t think about magick,” Tony said. “You just have to do it. Remember? We learned that our first night here. You can’t act. You have to react.”

“What
the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you can’t be showing off. The more you try, the harder it is to––”

“LOOK!”

Carlos point
ed to the river; his mouth bent in a crooked smile. Ursula took one look and screamed. It was Jerome, though by himself, not overly frightening. I mean, we had gotten used to his less than attractive appearance. What surprised us is what he carried out of the water.

“What the
...” Tony put his arm out to ease me back. “Is that what I think it is?”

I pushed his hand
down. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s a treklapod?”

“Yes.”

“Then yeah, it’s what you think it is.”

“W
hat’s he doing with it?”

“Why don’t we ask
him?” I stepped around Tony and walked up to Jerome, meeting him at the water’s edge. “Hey Peewee.” I nodded at the bug. “Whatcha got there?”

He looked up
at me and smiled. “Is treklapod.”

“Yes, I see that.
Is he dead?”

He looked at the thirty-pound bug
lying upside-down in his arms, its pencil thin legs bent and broken; its rhino horn lobster claw frozen open on top of its head. Jerome held the creature out and shook it, causing its harden-shell body to rattle like dried bamboo sticks. “Is dead. We eat now.”

I laughed. “Eat?
Oh, I don’t think so.”

Carlos came up
behind us. “Did he say we’re going to eat that thing?”

“Yes! Can you believe it?”

He poked the calcareous creature with his bolo knife. “You know, it does look like a giant crab. I bet you
can
eat it.”

“Yes!”
Jerome said. “Is good eats.” He nodded toward the fire. “I cook now. You see.”

Carlos stepped back and presented an unconstructed path to the pit. “Great
. Have at it, mi amigo.”

Jerome waddle
d back to the fire pit with his toothpick arms stretched around his trophy. Standing at the edge, he twisted his body and heaved it in. It collapsed the wood teepee into a flatbed of burning kindling and began cooking immediately.

Internal j
uices soon boiled, allowing steam to hiss out through cracks in the bug’s shell. Ursula found the eerie high-pitched screech it made unsettling. I found it disgusting. Carlos found it downright entertaining.

It’s true
that when Jerome first pointed to the river and said he was going to get us something to eat, I thought the pigmy pipsqueak was going spear fishing. When he came back with that hideous hairy bug, I thought I might have to yield to the dry heaves. That said, I have to tell you it wasn’t bad.

Carlos suggested the
treklapod looked like a crab, and it rather tasted like one, too. Especially the horned claw. The meat inside it was... well, out of this world.

I could tell that
Jerome had barbecued one or two of the uncommon delicacies before. His singular expertise in the matter proved it. After the bug’s internal fluids boiled away, Jerome knew to continue basting the shell with water until the meat inside had thoroughly cooked. Barring that, it would have been nothing more than just a mushy pile of muck inside.

He even knew to snap the needle-tipped end
s off the bug’s legs and use them as toothpicks. I’m not too proud to say that we all did it.

Later, with our bellies filled, we sat around the fire, talking, some of us leaning
against the flat boulders, others sitting on top.

We tried to guess how long we were
in the ES, compared to real earth time. Tony put us there two days, Ursula at three. Carlos felt we had been roaming the dark universe for a week or more. I supposed it all depended on how tired one was. I had gone through cycles of exhaustion and exhilaration so many times, I would have agreed with anyone who said it’d been a month.

“You have to count the times we slept,” said
Tony. “That’s how you measure relative time. Our bodies know. We bedded down only once before tonight. That’s when Carlos rode that floating rock. Remember?”

Carlos said,
“Yes, but that was a week ago.” He was sitting on a purple boulder, picking at it with his bolo knife. “Wish I had that rock now. I could ride it all the way to the Dark Fortress, my feet hurt so badly.”

“
A week?” Tony laughed. “Carlos, even by Eighth Sphere standards, it couldn’t have been a week. Before tonight, we had only eaten once. Now I know you can’t go that long between meals.”

“Aye,” Ursula added,
“but had we not rested two days at the bridge before crossing?”

“
Two days?” Carlos scoffed at that, though he still did not look up from the oddly colored rock he’d been scratching. “Are you delirious? We weren’t at the bridge ten minutes before we crossed it, though it did take a full day to get to the other side, as I recall.”

Tony came back,
“A day! You’re both out of your mind. We crossed it in a half-hour!”

“No,” I said. “It was
five hours if it was a minute, maybe six.”

We all fell silent as the reality
set in. None of us could say for sure how long we were on that bridge, or how long we were in the ES for that matter. It occurred to me that we had all suffered bouts of static skips in memory throughout our journey.

I looked at Tony and Carlos.
Both appeared different somehow, as if marked by separate measures of time. Tony’s stubble, for instance, barely had the makings of a five o`clock shadow. Yet Carlos, who had come to the ES clean-shaven, sported the scruff of a week-old beard.

“Carlos?”

He glanced up at me briefly. “Yeah?”

“Did you have that beard this morning?”

“I don’t know. When was this morning?”

I saw Tony looking as though he was just noticing it for the first time.
“Yeah, Carlos. When did you grow a beard?”

Carlos reached up
and felt his chin. “I don’t know.” He went back to scratching on the rock. “You know us Cubans. We’re a hairy lot.”

“Methinks not,” said Ursula, wagging her finger at Carlos as if
supporting Tony’s assertion. “Thou had but naught on thy chin this late morn. I see thee now and know what time doth pass doth pass thrice for thee.”

I said to Ursula
. “You think?”