Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (8 page)

I will not bother to describe the sense of crushing disappointment that caught in my throat at that moment. It would make me look silly. Sillier. Hmm... more silly.

I had wanted to help her. Is that so bad? Does that make me sound weird?

I also thought about her all the time, and yes, memorized what she took in her coffee, and I thought her goggles were sexy. So I admit that is weird. You have a lot of time to think when you are mopping floors. But a young man wanting to play the white knight to a damsel in distress is not. It is as natural as doves cooing in springtime.

Yes, I should have rejoiced to find her unmussed and in sound health instead of being tied hand and foot, screaming, dangling above a trashcan whose lid was a ticking time clock, which, when the red countdown reached zero, would pop open to reveal the scarlet eyes of menacing, drug-maddened, man-eating raccoons, whom I could plink off with my low caliber squirrel rifle as they poured forth from the trashcan’s dark depth, clutching sinister knives and forks in their paws. Then their heads could be mounted and stuffed on the walls of the nursery where our ten to twelve children would play. Mr. Gertz could do the stuffing.

Instead I pouted. So sue me.

I’ll remind you that at that point I had been ignominiously wounded in combat by a low-hanging stealth light-bulb, a deadly groin-seeking sword pommel, a butt-smiting flashlight, and a sadistic holly bush. Not wounded, severely, but I wasn’t back at my house sipping improperly-stirred instant hot cocoa either.

All for nothing. I guess I could always help her in some other fashion. Like getting her a coffee with two creams no sugar. Women respect boys younger than them and not able to get into college who bring coffee, and don’t stare at their breasts when they come jouncing unexpectedly around a corner, or so I hear. Just not in this dimension.

I was really in the mood to shoot a science fiction fan just then. Like I said, there was no one in sight.

But there was something in sight, in the utility room, and it might have been a prop from a science fiction show. I turned my head.

The incandescent light bulb in the generator room had come on right away, shining on Penny in all her Penny-ness. The fluorescent tube bolted to the bare rafter in the utility room, on the other hand, hesitated, flickering and fluttering as it came to life. That flash was like a camera bulb going off in my eyes, which were right near the same level as the buried ceiling, if you recall, and I blinked, but I could see the thing burnt into my retina.

In the utility room the table was connected by large cables running through a plug box through a small hole originally meant for wine bottles into the generator room. The worktable was covered with circuit boards and circuit breakers, rheostats, resistors, all surrounding what looked like an upright metal doughnut made of gold and as thick as a child’s leg.

I guess you have to imagine a child of a cowboy, because the kid is really bowlegged. The metal doughnut was an electromagnet, and it was wrapped tightly with naked electrical wiring.

Most doughnuts, if you bit them in half, would be circular in cross section. I want you to imagine this doughnut was triangular in cross-section, like a prism that has been bent in a hoop till its ends touch. I also want you to imagine that the triangle is torqued in a one-third roll before the ends are soldered together, so that there is only one surface to the prism, but this one surface, if you followed it with your finger, would twist around and around on itself three times, like stripes on a barber pole, before it came back to where it started. The hoop looked a little bit like those triangles made of three arrows chasing each others' tails you sometimes see on recycling bins. It was the kind of thing M.C. Escher would draw.

Maybe this was gold leaf covering a core of some conductive metal. If that thing was solid, the Professor was bizarrely rich, or backed by someone who was. Who builds a solid gold circular electromagnet?

Maybe not. The thing was shining like only gold shines, bright as an old Double Eagle coin, and the naked copper wiring was shining a slightly redder shade of yellow, bright as new pennies, and I caught my breath in awe. It looked like some magnificent Aztec idol, barbaric and massive, mated to brilliant modern technology, ambitious and potent.

And I knew the Professor must have been insane. Who uses uninsulated wiring? Anyone brushing up against the machine would suffer a powerful shock.

The second candle, the one that I had thought was the eye of a creature, was glued by its own wax on the table, next to the Professor’s blueprints and notes. I recognized them because Penny had needed my help getting the Professor’s laptop (which I jimmied the lock on his rolltop desk to get to, remember?) to connect to the printer, which had also needed a new ink cartridge. It was page after page of little triangular scratch-marks grouped in neat little squares. The Disaster Cuneiforms. It was the instructions on how to build a gateway to other Earths with other histories, and how to turn it on.

And everything must have been plugged in right, and the instructions must have been followed correctly, because when the power came back on when the new fuse connected, the twisted electromagnet hoop did indeed turn on.

The circuits had taken a moment or two to warm up, about the amount of time it takes for a young man to let out a sigh of lovesickness, then of disappointment, turn his head, blink in the dazzle of a silent explosion of light, and utter a third sigh of awe — and the darned thing started humming.

Humming? Throbbing. I could feel the vibration from the Moebius coil in my teeth.

And that was the moment I screamed.

Because the twisted triangular hoop started to glow. The air around it shimmered like you’d see above a pavement on a hot day, that makes it look like there is water there, when there is no water.

The humming climbed in pitch to a shriek, and the shimmering thickened to a blur and the twisted hoop began to crawl with colored sparks.

The sparks flared and fanned out like a peacock opening its tail, forming an almost continuous circle of many colors, ring within ring.

The outermost was violet almost too dark to see, then a circular band of piercing navy blue and sky blue blending into green, into delicate gold the color of a canary’s wing, into a warm orange like coils in the toaster oven on high, blending finally into the color of a cherry sunset. It looked like the rings of Saturn hovering sideways. Each tint looked pure.

It was beautiful. It was everything I ever wanted in my life: the gateway out of the beartrap of my comfortable life and the window into the Somewhither.

And I was screaming my head off.

Mind you, I did not want to scream.

I wanted to give forth a loud yet manly shout, as penetrating to the ear as the call of the Spartans in battle at Thermopylae, able to be heard over the commotion of war and the screams of dying Persians, but showing no trace of fear or distress. A John Wayne kind of shout, nicely bass.

Nope. I screamed like a dying Persian, or maybe like a Persian eunuch. It was a soprano note.

Did I mention how lovely the Moebius coil rings seemed, a glittering circle of energy in midair, shimmering like summer sunlight refracted into living gems by the spray of mist from a fountain of water?

Let me also mention that I could not think of a single form of energy known to my extensive high-school level of scientific knowledge that would create that kind of beautiful discharge of such bright colors that was (1) not hotter than heck, radioactivity-wise; (2) not far less safe than putting a metal spoon in a microwave and turning it on with the door open; and (3) not creating ions, high-energy particles, gamma radiation, and whatever that junk is that makes the aurora borealis look so pretty.

And I did not know what the machine was. As far as I was concerned, that pretty rainbow ring could have been the freaking Death Star powering up its main-dish industrial-strength planet-cleansing Obliterification Ray. I knew then that Professor Dreadful, even if he wasn’t literally crazy, was a dangerous lunatic. Who would build such a crazy thing in the basement where your own innocent daughter might be wandering?

Remember that from my position above and outside, I could see into the generator room through the one window and into the workroom with the humming rainbow death machine through the other, but that there was a cinderblock wall separating the two.

The darned thing was pointed toward that wall. On the other side of the wall was the most beautiful girl in the world, right in the line of fire and completely oblivious to her danger.

“Penny! Run!” I screamed. “Go up the back stairs! Get away from the machine!”

Through the other window, I saw her head lift, and turn left and right. She could tell I was above her, but not where.

I could see the lovely rainbow ring. It was getting brighter. Little firefly dots of light, like sometimes you see when you splash something on a red stove burner in that kitchen that intimidates you, started to appear in some of the bands of color around the mouth of the Coil.

The voice of Penny seemed weird because it was so calm. Of course, she did not know why I was shouting. She did not know she was in the line of fire from a death ray. The concrete wall was in the way, and the wine shelves.

“Mr. Marmoset? Is that you?”

She has a faint accent or rhythm to her speech, a very precise pronunciation. It reminds me of the way Bollywood Actresses follow British pronunciation, but sound too musical and rich to be Englishwomen.

“It’s Muromets! MUROMETS!” I shouted back, “The machine is dangerous: it is leaking some sort of radiation! Go out the back way. Don’t go back in the workroom! RUN!”

She did not run. Instead she crossed her arms (which pushed up her bosom ever so slightly) and turned her foot to one side (which cocked her hips ever so slightly) and tapped her foot impatiently (which emphasized the curve of her nylon-clad calf ever so slightly).

“Mr. Marmoset, who sent you?”

“The Professor!”

“How much did he tell you?”

Strange. That was exactly what my father had said. Everyone seemed worried about other people not telling me things.

I am sure there was an innocent explanation for it, and that this creepy feeling like Arctic ants crawling over my spine was totally an overreaction. No doubt the town of Tillamook decided to hold a holiday where, once a year, everyone keeps a bunch of secrets from just one unfortunate dupe, and today it just so happened to be my day.

“He told me
everything
!” I said this, not because it was true, but because I wanted her to listen to me. I made a mental note to tell that next time I went to confession also. “Your father told me most of all to get you out of danger!”

She looked thoughtful. “Ah—my
father
—perhaps is not in the best of health at this moment—I am sorry if he frightened you, Mr. Marmoset, but everything is under control.”

I should have known. Of course he told her about the danger. She was his daughter. And of course she did not believe him. If she had, she would not have been here in the first place.

The Coil got a little brighter. The ring of colors was now solid. The throbbing, thrumming rose a note in pitch.

“Miss Dreadful! It’s
Muromets
! We can talk about this when you are a hundred yards away from the building! Move it!
Now
!”

She did that thing girls with escaping hair sometimes do to blow a strand away from their eyes. It involves pursing your lips as if whistling while pouting and turning your eyes up and tossing your head back slightly. It looks adorable on any sufficiently pretty girl.

“Don’t call me Dreadful. It sounds ridiculous. I understand the phenomena I am dealing with, and I am safe from any danger. The seaward of the in carnie ’twould baas the danger of ass troll gee from the Direct Hour.”

I thought for a moment that my ears were dyslexic. I tried to sort out the sounds of her lilting accent in my head the way you do when you are not sure if Jimi Hendrix just sang
Excuse me while I kiss the sky
or
Accuse me while I kiss this guy
.

The crazy words finally clicked into place, but they did not make any more sense to me.
The seaward of the Incarnate World bars the danger of astrology from the Dark Tower
. Or maybe the first word was
Sea Ward
.

“Are you out there? Please come in. You can assist me in drawing down the twilight … If my father told you his plan, he doubtless failed to mention mine is the safer and wiser…”

And she started to move away from the fuse box. She took a step toward the narrow passage running past the empty wine shelves from the generator area to the basement room.

Closer to the death ray.

I was expecting her to melt into a skeleton before my eyes any second. I realized I had wasted half a minute. I could have sprinted to the back of the building, pounded down the stairs, grabbed her, thrown her over my shoulder Tarzan-style, and sprinted the hundred yards to safety (if that was far enough—what kind of radiation were we talking about?) in the same amount of time it had taken me to exchange one hundred words with her. Even now, I might be quick enough to circle to the basement door, leap down, Tarzan her over my shoulder, and hightail it out of the blast radius.

Or it might be even quicker to take my squirrel gun and shoot.

With an instinct more powerful than instinct, I knew I could not shoot at the Moebius coil itself. It was a gorgeous machine. Gorgeous as the patterns on a rattlesnake, gorgeous as a forest fire leaping with wild red and billowing black. It was my ticket out of here. It was not only the gateway into other worlds; it was the escape hatch out of this one. It was the escape meant for me leading to the life meant for me.

Therefore I had to protect it as dearly as my own life.

But I noticed something. If I shot the cable leading to the table, this would simply cut the power. I had the key to the closet where the spare cables were kept. After the emergency, I could plug back the unharmed equipment and warm it back up.