Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (7 page)

Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking the advantage of confronting the Black Hats armed with an antique katana and a big flashlight. But I’d rather have a weapon more threatening.

Hmpf. Even after the rifle was in my hands, I felt the same way: I’d rather I had a weapon more threatening. Well, I guess it would work to intimidate anyone not too familiar with guns. A rifle this caliber can certainly kill a man, especially if, after knocking him off his feet with the first shot, you grab the barrel and beat him over the head with the stock.

I should mention it took me more than a minute of fumbling around to get my pathetic yet under-impressive rodent-slaying longrifle into my hands. The image in the night-vision goggles was fuzzy, so I pushed them to my forehead, covered the flashlight with my palm, and twisted it on. A very little reddish light sneaked out, enough to let me see. Hopefully not enough to be seen.

With this, I was able to find the right key on my crowded keyring, and undo the upright locker, the bicycle chain tying the gun down, the trigger lock on the trigger and the steel creel box where I store the ammo. My dad had had it drummed into him at Parris Island to keep everything polished, dry, squared away and locked up when not in use, and so that got drummed into me. There were also local ordinances about firearms storage, and in Sunday School they taught me to respect authority,
render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s
and all that.

However, when a pair of raccoons started tearing up the garbage at the Museum (I think they were attracted by the smell of what the taxidermist, Mr. Gertz, was throwing out back when the Zanzibar Leopard was being stuffed for display), Professor Dreadful was aghast at the number of regulations we had to obey to get county animal control to capture the beasts. He told me to keep my rifle on the premises, and simply had me shoot the vermin, and take a shovel and bury them. Which I guess taught me not to render unto Caesar more than a certain common-sense amount. I mean, even George Washington broke some laws, right?

It took me another moment to load. I could do that in the dark, by touch, so I twisted the flashlight off. I use a 5-round clip magazine. I put the rest of the box (45 rounds) in my dad’s jacket pocket, with a wadded hankie in the box so the rounds wouldn’t rattle when I moved. His jacket has nice big pockets that zipper shut.

I came out of the shed. At that moment, I saw two little red lights in the basement windows, and I swear they looked like eyes. For some reason, they had not shown up in the greenish image of the goggles, but I sure as heck saw them now. They were looking at me.

So I hit the dirt. I lay there a moment, having driven the pommel of an ancient katana more expensive than my entire education into my groin, and trying not to yell.

Then, twitching in pain and trying not to whimper, my squirrel rifle cradled in my elbows, and the antique katana I suddenly cared a lot less about being dragged by its baldric over the grass being pulled like a big stupid metal tail behind me (no doubt picking up dirt and dings, each one of which knocked two hundred dollars off the asking price of the antique), and a honking big flashlight only now and again thwacking me in the buttocks, I crawled across the lawn toward the basement of the Haunted Museum, where I had seen the eyes of the night-creature.

“You know,” said one half of my brain to me softly during these moments. “There is an all night Seven-Eleven not ten minutes away. I could drive there, go in, get myself a Coke-flavored Slurpee in two minutes, and just sit there in the parking lot, loitering for exactly fourteen minutes, sipping my drink. They don’t shoo you away until fifteen minutes pass. I bet I could get a nice greasy hot dog made from authentic meat byproducts swept up from the slaughterhouse floor. Say buying the hotdog of meatlike substances takes another minute, especially if you squirt chili-flavored goo from that little spigot onto it. By my calculation, I would be alive for that whole twenty-seven minutes. Driving back here in ten more minutes to get killed by something, gives me a subtotal of thirty-seven minutes. If it takes one second for the night-creature to tear out my throat, and seven minutes, fifty-nine seconds for my brain to cease functioning from the trauma, blood loss, and general lack of breathing, that gives me a grand total of forty-five minutes. If I go back and get that Slurpee. Maybe, I could not cram a whole lifetime of experience and thought and wonder into that forty-five minutes, but it is longer than your average sitcom episode, so a lot can happen in that amount of time. And I would get a last meal out of it.”

The other half of my brain said, “But every boy my age wants to be a hero. This is my chance. I can save somebody from danger.”

The first half said, “Somebody, or some
girl
? If you had wanted to save people in general, you could have taken that summer job as a lifeguard. You are only here because she’s pretty.”

The second half said, “Wait—are you making the argument that Superman is not allowed to save Lois Lane, if she is a drop-dead gorgeous yet spunky girl reporter, on the grounds that it is a violation of the Equal Rights for Ugly Women Act or something? You can only rescue people for unselfish reasons, not because you are dying to do something to get her to notice you? If your motives are less than pure, you let her die?”

“No, I am making the argument that, if she is in real danger, and if your Dad, who maybe is not your Dad, is maybe a real nutcase, maybe you should just call the police. If you are worried about her, that is. The phone is in your pocket. So far, you have not done anything that has got you caught. Are you prepared to kill someone with that thing? For real? Not a first-person shooter game, not a TV show, not little boys playing Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers — which no boys play any more, except you and your brothers. For real. Maybe the jury will say it was self-defense. You can explain to them about the Moebius coil that opens up inter-dimensional doorways, and tell them the Dark Building, or whatever it is called, was threatening a girl you have a crush on, who does not know you are alive, with exo-dimensional radiation cooties that damaged her cell structure: so you killed the groundskeeper in the dark by mistake. Otherwise, leave the rifle here.”

“I
am
the groundskeeper. And she knows I am alive! She talked to me the day before yesterday.”

“Sure. She said,
where is the key to my father’s desk, please?
And then she said,
get me some coffee, won’t you, please?
”

“I cherish the memory. Two creams, no sugar.”

“You memorized her drink. Meanwhile, she does not know your name. She thinks your name is MARMOSET, because that is what is printed on the nametag of your uniform. Call the cops. You have a phone.”

“I also have a squirrel gun, a wicked cool katana, a honking big flashlight, a bulletproof jacket, and a bathrobe. I can take on Godzilla.”

But by then it was too late. I was at the basement window.

It is very important to set one half of your brain to argue with the other half while you are belly-crawling into possible death during what may be your last hour on Earth. You keep it occupied. Otherwise the two lobes will gang up and bring you to your senses and stop you.

The basement windows of the Museum were semicircles of thick glass, covered with mesh, and designed to be tilted open no more than a quarter of a right angle, exposing a crack like the toothless grin of a jack-o-lantern turned upside down.

I heard a soft noise, like the scrape of nails on concrete, come softly through the crack. Something alive was moving in the basement.

Between each window, some gardener of long ago had decided to make my life easier by planting a bush big enough to duck behind. Duck I did.

That gardener of long ago had also decided to make my life harder by picking holly as the type of bush to plant. I made a mental note to find out whether one of those gun sportsman magazines that are always lying around my house was called something like BULLETPROOF JACKET LIFE. I resolved to write to the editors to tell them my amazing discovery that a jacket that deflects bullets cannot stop the little poking thorns of nasty Christmastime plants, especially if the jacket is too small, you cannot zip it up in the front, it doesn’t cover your legs, and you are not wearing real pants. My legs and chest and stomach were pricked by dead and pointy little leaves, and one innocent little leaf somehow managed to find its way inside my collar and drive a point into my neck that felt as large as a railroad spike.

On my belly, holding my breath, I sidled closer. There were two little red flickering lights I had seen through the thick windows. As I watched, they were growing further apart. For a moment, it looked as if some creature with nocturnal red eyes were coming closer. Then it looked more like the creature were wall-eyed, his pupils growing further and further apart as one eyeball wandered away to the right while the other eyeball stayed where it was.

They were not eyes. They were candles. The power was out but someone was in the basement.

The right candle was now moving away from the first at about the pace of a slow walk. I saw this second light disappear from one window, and then appear and cross the next window, and then the next, until it reached the last basement window, the one farthest from me.

Suddenly, as bright as a lightning flash, white and clear light danced and blinked and streamed from all the basement windows, throwing black shadows shaped like a row of the letter
m
fantastically elongated across the parking lot from the hoops of stone embracing the windows. There was a hum like bees.

I blinked for a moment, half blind, before my eyes adjusted, and I realized what I was seeing. The fuse box was at the back of the building. Someone carrying a candle had walked back to the fuse box and reset the fuse. The light coming from the window was just the fluorescent tubes set in the basement ceiling, flickering into brightness.

But that bee-hum was louder than I thought the basement lights should sound. Cautiously, I pulled my head out from beneath the holly bush where the startling flare of lights had jerked it (ow, ow and ow), and I squinted in through the little crescent-shaped crack of the opened window next to me.

I was between two rooms, with the dividing wall right in front of my nose, so that with my left eye, I saw the main basement area. A stairway as steep as a ladder led down into a utility room with workbenches and a broken washing machine. With my right eye, I saw the older part, the wine cellar beneath the original building. Beyond the wine cellar, to the far right, was an open space with a diesel generator bolted to the concrete floor and thick cables leading up to the Museum proper. Call it the generator room, even though it was in the wine cellar. On the far wall, next to the stairs that led up to the outer cellar door, was the fuse box.

Standing by the fuse box, with a candle in one hand, the door of the fuse box in the other, blinking, was Penelope Dreadful in all her golden-haired glory, long shining tresses, full lips, high cheekbones and regal eyes, looking lovely as Juno, Queen of the Gods. If Juno wore eyeglasses.

She was wearing a lab coat, I remember.

Actually, to be honest, I remember she was wearing dark-soled beige shoes with a small heel and little brass buckles on the ankle straps, nylon stockings, a knee-length dark skirt with a thin brown belt, a white blouse with a rounded collar, and over all this the aforementioned lab coat, slightly too large for her, that made her look adorable.

Actually, to be
more
honest, I remember with excruciating clarity her shapely legs in those nylons, curvaceous hips in that skirt, the leonine flatness of the belly cinched by that belt, and, most of all, I remember that white blouse straining against the rounded glory of her bosom, and how the little white buttons pulled tiny, curving lines of tension across the fabric as she breathed …

Okay. That is too much honesty. Never mind what I remember. I remembered myself with a hot touch of shame beating in my cheeks, and tore my gaze away.

Attractive young woman in a lab coat. Wearing glasses. You got the picture. It was the girl.

What’s more, it was a girl in what looked like absolutely no danger whatever. There was not a science fiction fan in sight.

Actually, the fact that I was not wearing pants while staring at her through the window made me look like the only source of danger here. A sad thought for a would-be rescuer.

Also not in sight were the goggles she wears to ride her putt-putt scooter. When not in use, she parks them low around her neck on a strap like a really big and awkward necklace, so that there is always a twin glint of glass near her bosom whenever she jogs unexpectedly around a corner while you are mopping or something, bright enough to catch and draw your eye. Then you have to pretend you were looking somewhere else without it being obvious you are pretending, even though there is no need for you to pretend because you were only looking at her goggles.

She looks adorable when she puts them on, too, because then she looks like a pearl diver or a biplane aviatrix. Penny takes off her eyeglasses to wear these riding goggles, so I assume either (a) that she is farsighted and therefore uses her eyeglasses only for reading fine print, or (b) that she is nearsighted and therefore she is fated to kill a dozen motorists in a multiple-car crash caused by young men all swerving and flipping their vehicles to avoid a catastrophe of Mister Magoo proportions.

Of course, I have seen her before, many a day, not wearing these goggles, such as when she takes a cab to the Museum, which she does when running late. The extra minutes it took for the cab to go to the motel and pick her up were still quicker than that cranky little scooter. Late, or in a hurry. And cabs run even early in the morning, before dawn.

Which explained why her motor scooter was not in sight.

If you are wondering why I did not call out to her at that moment, I have to explain something embarrassing.