Summerhill (9 page)

Clutching her gun in one hand, Katherine patted at her pockets with the other. “Never should have quit smoking,” she muttered. “We could use a lighter right now.”

“Let me see what I can do about that,” Summerhill said. If there was any sort of plant life here in this dark cavern, maybe there was something he could reach out to, connect with, control. Maybe something that—

There, something very tiny, microscopic, nestled within the miniscule grooves in the not-quite-rock. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t easily identifiable, but it was plant, and that was enough for Summerhill. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and focused his energy into those barely detectable bits of plant life. What he was attempting might well be beyond his abilities, but it wouldn’t hurt to try, so long as he was careful not to overexert himself.

He could tell it was working when he felt the fuzzy patch growing beneath his palm. That patch then spread out from his hand at an accelerating rate. A dull glow started to fill the cavern, getting brighter and brighter as bioluminescent moss blanketed the ground and then crawled up the walls and along the ceiling of the chamber.

With a gasp, Summerhill let go of his hold on the growing swath of moss. He felt a tiny hole in his being, some part of him expended in the effort. A wave of dizziness hit him as his very essence changed, albeit slightly, to smooth out the edge left by using up that part of himself.

In his mind, he could still feel that small part of him that now lived in the moss he’d called into being. It would change and become its own thing, in time, but meanwhile, there was a faint echo of self lingering that Summerhill couldn’t avoid perceiving, radiating throughout the cavern.

Now that there was enough ambient light to see clearly, Summerhill and Katherine first looked around the cavernous chamber before turning back around and letting out sounds of mild shock at the sight of each other. Katherine looked different. She looked enough like Katherine that Summerhill still recognized her, but the details were off. Her hair was still blonde, but not quite the right shade of blonde; it was curly, but the curls weren’t quite the right size. Her fair skin, her eyes—all of it just close enough without being quite right. She looked, Summerhill thought, like someone’s idea of what Katherine might look like if they’d only been given a description of her without ever having seen her.

In place of her hostess’ garb, she now wore a khaki bush jacket covered with large pockets, neatly cinched around her torso. Below that, she wore a matching khaki skirt. Atop her head was a small hat, a black band encircling the crown of it, forming a break in the pale tan. Lastly, in one hand—that hand that had been holding her futuristic stun pistol—she now carried an old-fashioned revolver.

Her wide eyes, fixed on Summerhill, were a clear indicator that he wasn’t the only one surprised by what he was seeing. “Well, you look... different,” she said, and then, realizing that she was being stared at in turn, took a look at herself.

Summerhill patted himself on the chest. He was dressed similarly to Katherine, though he at least had on a pair of pants instead of a skirt. Slung across his shoulder in place of the bag he’d brought from the lifeboat was a heavy leather satchel, its strap long enough to allow the bag to rest comfortably at his hip.

“You look like you’re ready to head out on safari, mate,” Katherine said. She chuckled, then nodded upwards. “I like the hat.”

Though he hadn’t felt the weight of it atop his head before, when he glanced upward, Summerhill saw the brim of said hat. He reached up and checked the fit of it. Not only was it sized perfectly for his head, but there were even holes for his ears. “You sure you don’t know anything else about nevereefs?” he asked as he adjusted the hat out of some reflex.

“It sure doesn’t look like we’re inside a reef,” Katherine replied. “Though I can’t really see where else we could have possibly ended up after that fall.”

“Guess we’ll have to look around.” Summerhill got to his feet, then helped Katherine up. She dusted herself off with her free hand, then patted at her front some more, paying specific attention to the pockets of her jacket. Wrinkling her brow in confusion, she began to sift through them.

“Oh, hey, this should come in handy,” she said as she started to pull a variety of implements out from those deep pockets. Among the items kept on her person were a compass, a tinderbox, a pocket sundial, some handkerchiefs, and other such personal effects. “Not sure where any of it came from, but it’s good to know that we have it.”

The satchel—the one that had replaced Summerhill’s food supply bag—was packed with smaller wrapped packages of jerky, dried fruit and nuts, and crusty bread. A few testing sniffs suggested that it was all still edible, if nowhere near as remarkable as the self-reconstituting meal packages from the lifeboat. If portioned properly, it could probably sustain two people for a couple of days, but not much longer than that.

Summerhill patted himself down to see if there was anything else of note in his pockets. He was outfitted with more or less the same kind of personal gear as Katherine, with one notable exception: he also carried an elaborate, gold-plated hunter-case pocket watch. On the back were engraved the words:
To One of My Favorites.

The sight of it filled him with nostalgia without bringing any actual memories to mind. He didn’t recall ever owning this watch—or any watch, for that matter—though paradoxically enough, he remembered thinking he’d owned a watch, for some reason, which was ridiculous because there was no time to keep track of back in the World of the Pale Gray Sky.

Upon opening the case to check the watch itself, Summerhill let out a quiet bark of surprise. The hands of the watch whirled around the face, their movements constantly changing speed, and sometimes even changing direction. The faint ticking from the watch’s internal mechanisms didn’t sound abnormal at all, and kept up the same, steady rhythm regardless of how quickly the hands were moving, impossible as that should have been.

The Chief’s words came to mind again:
“‘Impossible’ isn’t a word we’re big on here.”

As a timepiece, the watch was useless, a baffling mess of hands that whirled about in nonsensical patterns. It was just as confusing as a keepsake, too, with an old, sepia tone photograph set inside the case.

Katherine leaned in and took a look. “Someone you know?” she asked.

It was the otter-creature from the
Nusquam
, the one Summerhill had bumped into after his last trip to the bar. “Sort of?” he said, staring at the photo in confusion.

Changing appearance after crossing a dimensional barrier was one thing. Finding their pockets loaded with personal effects they hadn’t brought with them was another. Why would Summerhill have a photograph of one random
Nusquam
guest tucked away as a personal keepsake? And what had happened to the watch he’d brought with him from the World of the Pale Gray Sky?

Except he hadn’t brought a watch with him. He remembered now. The otter in the photograph had asked him for the time. Besides, Summerhill knew full well he’d never owned a watch.

He gazed at the old picture some more. The otter’s smile, the look in his eyes—there was a warm familiarity to him, and here, stuck inside the nevereef as far away from anything as he’d ever known, Summerhill found himself missing this unknown fellow, if only on some vague, hard-to-define level.

“Well, who is it?” Katherine asked.

“I’m not sure,” Summerhill said. “He’s not...” He’d meant to say,
“Not anyone special,”
but that wasn’t true at all, was it? A painful lump formed in his throat for just a moment, but he forced it down. “I talked to him back on the ship, but only in passing. I don’t even know his name.”

Katherine checked her own pockets again, but came up empty-handed. “Well, we’ve got more important things to suss out right now. Shall we start by trying to figure out exactly what it is we’ve fallen into here?”

“Yeah,” Summerhill said, his gaze lingering on the otter’s photograph for a moment longer before he snapped the pocket watch shut and stuffed it back into his pocket. He had to focus. It was on his initiative that they’d ended up in this mess in the first place. That made it his responsibility to see them out of it. “Let’s go.”

There was only one obvious exit from the cavern chamber, so Summerhill led the way, with Katherine following close behind. Checking over his shoulder, he saw that she had her revolver in hand. He wanted to tell her to put it away, because it made him nervous, but he also felt that it was probably a reasonable precaution.

The glowing moss had spread a fair distance down the narrowing tunnel, and when it began to taper off, it was simple enough for Summerhill to coax it into growing further. “You’re pretty good at that,” Katherine said, and then her steps grew slower and more hesitant. “It is you doing that, right?”

Summerhill nodded. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it under control.”

Katherine sounded only slightly assuaged. “How?”

“I make plants grow. Never really gave the ‘how’ much thought.”

“A dog that can make plants grow. There’s something my granddad would have never come up with. Any other helpful tricks up your sleeve?”

“I don’t think so,” Summerhill replied. “I mean, unless you count the ‘walking between dimensions’ thing, but I’m not sure how I did that and it doesn’t seem to be helping much in this case.”

Katherine let out a sardonic chuckle. “Try to
really
want it,” she suggested. “Just in case that helps any.”

“I’ll let you know if I start to feel any tingling in the fur on the back of my neck.” Summerhill was smiling now. The atmosphere was a little less unsettling with some light banter to ease the mood.

Soon enough, the cavern tunnel began to gradually widen, and the ceiling rose higher and higher. Summerhill and Katherine kept plodding along, their one-way path set for them. There were only faint ambient sounds echoing their way, nothing distinct, nothing to suggest that anything was lurking around the nearest corner or barreling their way at breakneck speed.

There wasn’t much else to do but stay alert and press on. Summerhill found himself counting his steps when his attention would wane. Keeping the glowing moss growing required some concentration, but soon he was doing it almost without thinking. Katherine’s footsteps fell in line with his own, the cadence reassuring him of her presence.

The dog’s ears shot up as Katherine cocked the hammer on her revolver. “Mr. Summerhill, hold it,” she warned. “What’s going on? When did we wind up in a forest?”

Katherine was right—they were surrounded by trees now, not the cavern walls from before. “I don’t know,” Summerhill replied, looking around at the dark forest. There was no sign of the cavern or any other rock formation behind them. “You’ve been behind me this whole time, right?”

“Yes. I mean—yes, I think so.” With her gun at the ready, Katherine turned and scanned the area around them. “I don’t remember losing sight of you. But I don’t remember leaving the cavern either.”

Summerhill shook his head. He didn’t feel dizzy or groggy or like there were any gaps in his memory. “I’d been focusing on keeping the moss growing,” he said, trying to backtrack his mental steps. “Maybe I just got distracted?”

Katherine stepped in closer to him. “I don’t like this place, Mr. Summerhill,” she said. “I don’t like it here at all.”

“Just stay alert,” Summerhill told her. “Try to not let your mind drift.”

The trees were packed close together, and their branches hung low, forming a canopy that was reminiscent of the tunnel from earlier. Very little sunlight made its way to the forest floor, and the soft, earthy ground felt mossy underfoot.

Summerhill sniffed at the air as he walked, noting that it lacked any defining character, much like back inside the cavern. He wrinkled his brow and tried to inspect the trees around him. It was difficult to say what kind of trees they were, not because Summerhill didn’t know his plants, but because these trees defied identification.

As if she’d read his mind, Katherine said, “These look almost like trees from back where I come from.” She gestured with her gun as she pointed them out in turn. “Those remind me of beech trees, except they’re not quite right, I don’t think.”

Her words brought some new thoughts into Summerhill’s head. Names he didn’t know came to him as he reached out, trying to get to know these trees. He found Katherine’s not-quite-beech, then almost-elm followed by oak-but-then-maple. The lack of distinction felt clumsy, as if reality itself had gotten sloppy.

“Are we in some kind of swamp?” Katherine asked. She used her free hand to grab hold of low-hanging branches to help keep balance with each tentative step.

Summerhill hadn’t noticed anything terribly swampy about the area, at least not until a few steps later, when he realized that the ground
was
damp and squishy and muddy in places. It was still very dark, and hard to see for all the shadows cast by the tangle of weird trees. Farther in the distance, there were occasional faint signs of movement, the brief rustling of branches or the half-glimpsed form of some darting animal.

Katherine had adopted a more confident pace, hopping from tree root to rock to tree root, still using branches and the like to steady herself. “I guess this is what the inside of a nevereef is like,” she said, huffing with exertion as she tugged her foot free of what was either a tangle of swamp grass or a sucking pile of mud. “I wonder if you and I are the first people ever to go inside one.”

They continued to make their way through the somewhat swampy forest. Soon enough, the trees grew spaced farther enough apart that there was no longer just one obvious path to follow, but Katherine and Summerhill kept heading in roughly the same direction. One way was just as good as any other when they had no real means of knowing where they were headed or how to get there, and so long as the blandly-featured landscape offered no indication of a better way to go, continuing to follow as straight a path as possible seemed the most sensible course.

Even as he spent more time in their presence, the plants grew no more familiar to Summerhill. They retained their alien nature, never quite returning his mind’s touch in the way he expected. He envied Katherine, who had no such connection to worry about; her struggles were merely physical as she trudged through the morass. Summerhill felt like he was being silently judged by this forest that would never accept him.

“Do you have forests like this back in New Zealand?” he asked.

“We have forests,” Katherine replied, grunting as she hauled her weight up over a particularly tall cluster of roots. “I don’t know if I’d say they’re much like this, though.”

Summerhill tried to force the roots to shrink, in order to make Katherine’s struggle easier, but they were reluctant to comply. Probably he could force his will upon them, but that would leave him far more exhausted than Katherine would be for simply climbing over them, and so he decided to conserve his strength. The least he could do instead was offer her a hand down, which she took without complaint.

As his furred fingers slid against her smooth ones, he felt a niggling sense of loss in the back of his mind, the shadow of heartache, hints of memories that he knew immediately weren’t real. His mind went to the picture of the otter in the pocket watch, and at once, his throat tightened up and a slight pressure built up behind his eyes. He had an easy enough time forcing the phantom feelings away, though, and their effects had faded completely by the time Katherine’s feet were solidly back on the ground.