Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (15 page)

But even so — even if my speculations were totally off the mark, and the Dark Tower people were as gentle and sweet as gentle can be, Dad said they were the ones keeping his organization from reaching Mom again.

I did not know much of anything. But I knew if these guys were the ones blocking the path back to Mom, then it was my duty and pleasure to kill them.

Does that sound bloodthirsty to you? It should.

But I should have kept my head and used both hands, not dropped Grandfather Mikhail’s sword, and not jumped down the trapdoor hatch.

I did not just shout the F-word like you might do when you stub your toe. No, this was my battle-cry, and I meant to bellow it loud enough to startle the Frost Giants so that they thought that Thor was upon them.

Except, of course, all that happened was glop spilled out of my mouth. I made no noise, my lungs seized up with a spasm, and the choking, retching sensation which had not affected me much in the Uncreation now took control of my muscles, twisted my body like a dishrag and rolled me up into a lump. (My lungs were still full of goo, remember?)

The place into which I fell was crowded and shiny where I landed, a place as narrow as the aisle of a passenger jetliner, and cramped with plumbing and boxlike gear sticking out of the walls. It was like the kind of place two fat ladies cannot pass each other without saying
excuse me
.

No, don’t think of an aisle. Think of a stairwell or a fire escape, because there was an acute angle to the left and right, leading to ramps going sharply up and down. It was claustrophobic.

I don’t know quite how to describe that gear lining the walls. Imagine if the engineer making the boiler room painted all his pipes and valves with zig-zagged designs, or decorations of fanciful birds-of-paradise or goggle-eyed gnomes, and at the fuse boxes and electromagnet housings he capped them with the heads of stylized dragons with curling tusks and emerald eyes. And everything that is not made out of black cast iron is made out of yellow gold. It was all barbaric and high-tech and Art Deco all at once. The light came from foot-long wooden sticks in the corners where deck met bulkhead, and overhead were similar sticks. The sticks rested on marble squares spaced every six feet or so. Every other square was horizontal or vertical, so the lamp sticks formed an alternating pattern. Some sticks were parallel to the deck, some perpendicular.

The place had an M.C. Escher look to it, with ladders running both horizontally and vertically, and hatches of the same round shape whether set in bulkhead or deck, as if this chamber was meant to be used no matter which way gravity was flipped.

There were armed men underfoot. I landed right between two of them.

I did not hit the deck feet first as planned, nor while making noise as planned. Instead the naked wolf-headed man-thing, covered in blood, and me, covered in Oobleck and lung-vomit, hit bottom at the same time, both of us with limbs twitching, neither making any noise louder than a gargle. The fastenings on my Dad’s jacket had come undone in the fall, and now it was flopped halfway up over my head, exposing my back, half blinding me. I landed on my face in a pool of spewed-up Oobleck.

If you saw this scene in a comedy film, you’d laugh. It was ridiculous: a pratfall.

If it had been a sporting event, like a ballgame, where the sports star the crowd is cheering for turned an ankle sliding into home plate and missed and slid into the hotdog vendor’s stand instead, the crowd would have groaned in disbelief, and the game been lost.

But this was not a game; that one fumbled moment of muscular convulsion had lost me my life. There was no comedy involved. I was a dead man.

I mostly landed on the dying wolf-thing, which perhaps saved me from a broken back. I heard a gasp and a cry from the men filling the narrow space.

There may have been a guy on the ladder at whose foot I fell, who got knocked off, or maybe he jumped when Fido the hairless dog-man collapsed on him, because I was not the only guy on the ground. From the noise, it sounded like more than one guy had been knocked over. Many pratfalls. Remember this place was as cramped as the landing of an emergency stairwell, so everyone was in everyone’s way.

From beneath the face-hugging jacket tail, I saw several pairs of feet: some in sandals and in leg armor called greaves, at least two pairs of feet that looked like the legs of baboons shaved bald (feet with thumbs, in other words), and one pair of bare feet that were so pale white that they glowed with phosphorescence.

And, before I had a chance to speak, or move, or raise my head, or blink, I felt something sharp hit my back, tear the bathrobe and punch through my skin, then slide between my ribs, puncturing lung and heart and who knows what else. I found myself staring down at the triangular point of a narrow spear blade protruding nine inches out from my chest. Blood mingled with the black fluid of Uncreation poured out, and this time the blood did fountain like you see in the movies.

There is some prayer you are supposed to say before you die. I could not remember it.

I was so astonished, so outraged, so scared. It seemed unfair. That is the raging crazed, zany, hysterical, insane thing that exploded in my dying brain. It was an offense, a trespass, worse than finding your brothers had set off your baking-soda volcano, your science project you worked four weeks to put together, and ruined it. Worse than finding your house had been broken into by foxes, and the kitchen tore up; worse than fearing your Dad maybe was never coming back, or discovering your Mom actually was never coming back.

So unfair. Dying is so unfair. It was obscene.

The spear was cruciform in cross-section, and very narrow, so it looked more like an awl or the spike on a prospector’s hammer than like what you’d normally think of as a spear point. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, every little flick of tarnish, every dint and irregularity. It looked like it was made of brass, a dull yellow metal, heavy and cold.

I closed my fingers on the protruding steeple of metal coming from my chest, and, roaring, rose to my feet. This time the roar actually did come out, along with a gallon of Uncreation fluid. The spear shaft swinging from my spine must have yanked itself loose from the hands of the spearman, because I could feel the weight of the shaft swinging like some freakish wooden tail behind me, tearing my flesh and organs. Warm blood poured down my back. I reached behind me, groped, grabbed the spearshaft, but I was not at the right angle to pull it out. Instead I took up a fold of my Dad’s Kevlar coat-tail, gathered it into a ball in my palm, and drove the spearpoint backward. I could feel it scraping against bone and wiggling around in my lung cavity.

I yanked again with my other hand, and felt the spear —actually, call it a javelin, since it was only four feet long or so — come into my grip. I lofted it in front of me, and saw the darned thing. It was about half wood and half bronze, with a heavy bronze ball at the butt, decorated with a zigzag design, and a ball of hair tied at the root of the blade. It was covered with my blood, bright and red arterial blood, and the smell of it filled my nostrils. The blood was all over my hand up to the elbow and was gushing out of my chest. The spearpoint was not barbed like it should have been. Had it been barbed, I could not have worked it free from the wound.

A gasp of awe, a breathless noise of pure terror, came from each side of me. I looked up.

I could see my grandfather’s sword, miraculously undamaged in the fall, sticking up out of the throat-mess that had once been the throat of Fido the dog-faced boy. It was a little too far away for me to grab it, but I measured the distance with my eye. The big two-foot long flashlight was only a few inches from my foot.

I was surrounded by men in costumes. Three of them were aliens: two hairless wolfmen-looking baboon-things big as apes, and one pale and phosphorescent narrow-skulled bald guy with no eyeballs in a long black cloak but no socks or shoes.

The rest were soldiers from some sword and sandals epic: corsets made of metal scales sewn to linen jerkins, long skirts decorated with colored fringes, greaves on shins and sandals on feet, onion-shaped caps of metal with coppery cheek-guards, and round black shields decorated with starbursts. The shields were tall, round at the top and square at the bottom.

Copper cleavers shaped like sickles were at the soldiers' belts. Quivers on their backs carried both arrows and bow. These were dinky double-curved bows shaped like the letter
m
, not the fearsome yew longbows of England nor the elegant asymmetrical bamboo bows of Japan.

All the soldiers had thick red lips, large and dark and almond eyes, and square black beards, but no moustaches. They were wearing eyeliner, and had dark lines drawn on their cheeks like football players wear.

At the moment all those mouths were gaping, all those eyes wide and white-rimmed with fear.

Everyone in the place was shorter than I was. The horsehair crests of the helmets were about at the level of my shoulder. I ate a lot of red meat growing up, so there.

Also in the back was a guy with a black beard dressed something like Abraham Lincoln in a long black skirt, except that the tall black stovepipe hat he wore on his head had no brim. On his chest was a silver starburst ornament, and on his brow a black tattoo of the same design. From his cold expression, I pegged him as the leader.

So. Two werewolves, one vampire, ten men at arms, and the guy in the black hat was their magic user. Fourteen against one.

I think I was simply out of my mind at that moment. Temporary insanity.

Because instead of running or charging or talking or anything, all I did was take the two fingers of my left hand and stick them into the open wound in my chest as deep as I could. It was so disgusting that I cannot say. I think I felt my heart pushing against my fingertips: lub-dub. Lub-dub.

The first deer I ever killed, a pretty grand six-point buck—I had spent an hour in the brake, waiting for him to stand up—I hit and killed it with this exact shot: quarter rear through one lung and the heart. He died before taking a step.

I was in a nightmare.

In a nightmare, you do not ask questions, and things don’t make any sense. Your mind just plays along, and pretends that whatever is happening is something that could actually happen. The reason why you can never tell you are asleep when you are asleep, is that part of your mind (call it the “hey—this is freaking impossible!” part of your mind) is turned off.

Now, in real life, if I stood up after a deathblow, with a hole all the way through me, dead even though I was not dead, I would be freaked out something awful. But in a dream, if I had a nightmare that I was wounded with a hole all the way through me, dead even though I was not dead, I would think it was a really freaking weird dream. It would scare the heck out of me, but I would still do the things you do in a dream, like run from the monsters you can never get away from. Or fight the creatures you cannot fight.

So I laughed. What a freaking weird dream!

My laugh was a pretty weird-sounding laugh, considering all the blood and puddings glurping out of me, and it scared me. I was not the only one. Three of the guys standing at the corner turned tail and started running when I laughed. Their sandals went clang, clang as they rushed up the ramp going up.

Of the other two guys behind me, one was trying to climb to his feet, which is harder than it sounds when you are gripping a four-foot long stabbing spear in both hands in a narrow passage. The other did not have his spear in hand, and his shield was slung behind him out of the way like you’d do to free both hands for a good grip. He had a look on his face that showed he was the stabber.

I still had his spear in my hand, covered in my blood. I had practiced this move a hundred times a day, every day except Sunday, for the last four years before sunrise. It was always what I did after sword forms and before stick fighting forms. I always hated my dad for not letting me sleep in like normal kids, and hated my brothers for always being better at it than I was. Well, every second, every split-second of that time I spent resenting my dad was wasted and worthless. I was stupid. Because, boy, all that practice was worth it.

The move was basic
yari no kami.
Your right foot is a yard in front of your left, at quarter angle. Right hand on the shaft three feet above the left. Lunge by stepping the right foot forward, bending the right knee, straightening the rear leg. Right hand loose to let the spear shaft move, thrust takes its power from the left hand, drive the point directly into the navel of the imaginary opponent. Recover by pushing off with the forward leg and return to stance.

Of course, this time the opponent was not imaginary. He had a jacket woven with metal plates, but I must have been pretty pumped, and he must have kept his spear sharp, because I drove the point about nine inches into him. I tore the blade sidewise to make a ragged wound that opened like a red mouth. A mouth that spat up. The guy sat down and screamed like a girl, and stuff that looked like spaghetti and meatballs, only thicker, poured out of the wound, along with blood and other fluid. I don’t mean anything against girls. All I mean is that it was a really high-pitched, really long scream of the sort you only hear in horror movie soundtracks.

I would have thought that the screams of real people would sound a lot different than fake ones. Nope. It sounds the same. My whole life, I had heard maybe ten thousand screams and seen ten thousand fake corpses on cop shows, so that now when the real thing was right in front of me and my hands were red with real blood, it did not strike me as anything real.

Thinking back, I remember seeing tears just pouring over the guy's cheeks as he sat there, trying to stuff his guts back inside of him. He was not able to close his mouth, and not able to stop screaming. In retrospect, I feel sorry for him. But at the time, nothing seemed real to me. I was in some sort of shock and I pulled back the spear and waved it overhead, whooping in savage triumph.