The Tower of Il Serrohe (7 page)

thirteen

As if rising from the depths of a pond: light, shadow, and solid objects slowly materialized as Don rose to meet them. A sense of having a body returned. Then the shapes became clearer and finally real as he stepped into a small adobe hut about the size of an outhouse.

Bright mid-afternoon sun thrust sharply honed slabs of light through two small windows high on either side and a doorway in front of him. The windows had no glass, and the doorway was without a door. A breeze carrying the crispness of early fall passed through.

In fact the breeze was a little too cool. Don realized suddenly that he was naked.

“
Sonuvabitch! What happened to my clothes?”

Like a twelve-year-old boy who fears his phallic development lags behind his peers, he deftly covered his crotch, rising on tiptoes to peek out a window. A dead cottonwood tree crowded the east wall of the hut. He saw a wide plain and beyond, about a mile away, a low ridge of trees, their dark green leaves starting to turn golden. Further away were gray-blue mountains, massive beyond imagination, blending into the eastern sky.

Keeping his bare butt back as far as possible, he leaned into the doorway and saw more of the plain; however, only a few steps from the door was a deep arroyo. Beyond that to the west were high sandstone cliffs topped with a thick layer of ancient blue-black lava. Along the mesa he noticed scrub brush, mesquite and, to the south, a tall, slender tower the color of adobe.

“
Where the shit am I? What kind of dream or delusion is this? I must have smacked into the wall behind the bed and now I’m hallucinating. That or one hell of a case of
delirium tremens—I need a beer
!”

“
Oh no, this is all quite real,” the sibilant voice said, cutting right through the shadowed air of the hut.

Don whirled in the direction of the voice. The north end of the “outhouse” was nothing but thick shadow, but there was a hint of a tall man’s shape in the right corner of the back wall. Don instinctively grabbed his butt realizing he had stuck it toward the tall man.

“
OK, so now you know where I am,” the sibilant voice chuckled dryly. “And, by the way, you’ll find clothes in the corner to your left, behind you. One thing left out of the story of Teresa, Pia, and Pita was that when you pass through the Portal, nothing but your own natural body makes the transition unless you are blessed with fur such as I am.”

The shape moved.

“
But are you ready to see me as I am in this world?”

“
What the hell are you talking about? Wait a minute! You’re the voice I heard back there,” Don blurted, pointing to the back of the outhouse.

“
Back where?” The shadow asked with amusement.

Don looked yet again in the half-light and saw an unplastered wall of adobe through a single full-length pane of glass.

“
Holy Shit! It’s just like the other door! Well, no, it’s the same door…” This was getting too confusing. “Hey, this is
my
house, isn’t it? What the hell did you do to it while I was unconscious? Why is it so small?”

He turned back to see the still indistinguishable shadow.

“
I mean, what the hell is this? You play some game talking to me in the dark, for Christ’s sakes, knock me on my ass, rip everything out of my house including walls, doors, windows, my clothes, talk about some other world… the same mumbo-jumbo when you told that trumped-up story about this Teresa woman, whoever the hell she is.”

Another dry chuckle. “Sorry, Don, it’s not going to be as simple as a ‘trumped-up story.’ Perhaps you wished it could be, so you could feel sorry for yourself and drink yourself into numbness—”

“
Feeling sorry for myself!” Don shouted. “You bastard! You don’t know jack about me. Here it is in a nutshell.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “Since my mother abandoned me by conveniently dying in childbirth, it was up to my father to raise me. Skipping the details, the sonuvabitch taught me three things.”

With his fingers, he counted off. “First, he taught me to keep my damned mouth shut and don’t complain because he could’ve left me in an orphanage or with one of my candy-assed relatives. Second, he taught me how to drink for which I’m truly grateful.” An ugly sneer crossed his face. “Third, he showed me how to treat women properly when he shacked up with those whores he made me call ‘mom.’

“
But, hey, I can’t blame him or you for the fact that I married a woman like all those ‘moms’ and now I’m on my way to being just like him. At least he’s still around to blame for how screwed up I am.”

At that point, Don lost all his righteous anger, folded up onto the floor whimpering and clutching his knees. The shadowed figure stepped into the slab of light coming through the door.

After a few moments, Don relaxed his tightly squeezed eyes, opening them enough to see two feet in the dust in front of him.

But they weren’t just feet. Although in the general shape of a man’s feet, they were covered in a fine short fur the color of dark chocolate with each toe ending in an oversized claw that curved into the dirt.

His eyes traveled to the ankles and continued slowly upward onto long slender legs covered in the same dark brown fur. Then he saw a body too slim to be real, partly covered in a furry cape that ran down his legs. Finally, a face with a slightly human shape but—he blinked and looked again—with the unmistakable features of a bat.

A bat nearly six feet tall.

fourteen

Don scrambled backwards in a most unmanly manner before ramming up against the north wall.

“
Jesus Christ, Joseph, and Mary, Mother of God!”

The bat’s face was identical to the one he had seen in his house earlier, only about ten times bigger. The teeth might have been shorter and the mouth vaguely humanlike, but not by much. Just enough to break into a smile and deliver convincingly human laughter.

Rather dry laughter.

“
Sorry, Don, but I could think of no way to effectively break this to you. I am a bat but, as you can see, here in Valle Abajo, I’m bigger in apparent size. Please don’t ask me to explain. Just take my word that the scale of things is different here, as the story of Teresa should have told you.”

“
This is bullshit! I’m dreaming, I’ve got the DT’s, I am going crazy—”

“
No, no, Don. You’re just going through a difficult period of adjustment. You went through the Portal, and now you’re here in Valle Abajo, a place similar but different in important ways from where you were moments ago.”

“
But this can’t be real! Your story has gone to my head. It’s some kind of trick…”

“
Think what you like for now. It may help you cope, but we are wasting time. The Nohmin at the Place of Homes are expecting you, and I have other things to do. Let me give you directions and leave you to your visit. At some point you will meet Raquela of Piralltah Steeples. She is a great-great-granddaughter of Pia.”

After explaining to Don how he could go down into the arroyo just outside the door and how he could find the Place of Homes in the forest on the high mesa to the southeast, the bat prepared to leave.

“
Don, it’s been interesting. I will be seeing you later. And, uh, I apologize for not doing this sooner, but the Nohmin call me Nightwing. My actual name is unpronounceable by the likes of you so ‘Nightwing’ will have to do.”

Don gritted his teeth, grimaced, and looked around. “Well, I don’t seem to be able to control this, this state I’m in now, so what the hell, why not? I can’t say I’m grateful, Nightwing, but thanks for at least giving me a direction to go in this nightmare. Maybe these Nohmin and this Raquela can help me get the hell out of here…”

Suddenly, a thought struck him and he looked back at the Portal. Nightwing followed his gaze and guessed his thoughts.

“
Nice try, but all you’ll get are glass cuts unless you do it the right way.”

“
Oh yeah, asshole? I remember the story. You take a jug of water and douse the glass and ‘pluck you magic twanger, Froggie.’”

For once the bat was caught off guard. “What? ‘Plunk your magic what?’”

“
It’s ‘pluck.’ Just something from an old kiddy TV show.”

“
This isn’t a show, Don, even if you will only accept it as hallucination or nightmare. You have to use Valle Abajo water. There isn’t any around here. The closest place you can get water is the Place of Homes.” The bat smiled. “Catch my drift?”

“
Yeah, asshole. I’m not stupid. Off my nut, but not dense.”

“
But you were right about the magic part. This isn’t home anymore, Don. Things have a natural order here much like your world but with a little something added: magic. Not that overblown hype you see in fantasy movies or popular sword and sorcery stories, but specialized powers some of the people of this valley have.

“
Every group, or clan as they call themselves, has one or two little powers they use in their everyday lives. They can come in handy. Don’t worry yourself, you probably won’t be able to wield any of those powers with your crappy attitude besides the fact you’re a visitor, not a native.

“
Think of it like you had brought along a cell phone. To these people, the science and technology of a device that can allow you to communicate and use thousands of functions, or ‘apps’ as you lazy-assed humans call them, would be magic to these folks. So they’ve got their own little ‘cell phones’ that will seem to be magic to you.

“
And you don’t know—as you would say it—’jackshit’ about magic. So keep your pants zipped and pay attention. It’s ‘The Way Things Are’ around here. Speaking of pants, don’t you think you ought to get dressed?”

Don felt his face redden as he put on the rough leather shorts and moccasins, and a brown woolen tunic. They obviously had been made by someone with little idea of how to make clothing.

“
These clothes aren’t exactly my style,” he observed as he finished dressing. “but more importantly—what the hell’s the point of me being here to
help out
these people if they’ve got some kind of magic, and I don’t have jack? And why me?”

Nightwing smiled. “You wouldn’t understand now if I told you. Just work through it. Slowly.” The smile was replaced by a threatening scowl. “Now move your butt on down the arroyo, I’m late.”

With that, the bat stretched out his arms unfurling gossamer thin leather wings. With a preternaturally quick flutter, he rose into the air and flew to the east, heading for the distant forests of Dream River.

Don listened as the
whap, whap, whap
slowly faded, overwhelmed by the delicate texture of mid-morning sounds in a valley free of modern noise.

fifteen

Don marveled at the similarities and differences of Valle Abajo compared to the middle Rio Grande valley around Rio Luna. What was an imposing hill of a few hundred feet elevation on the mesa west of Rio Luna, here in the Valle Abajo, was a mountain peak rising nearly forty-five hundred feet higher. The land was so spread out from the east it forced the Dream River to curve around through what looked like a miniature Grand Canyon.

To the west, a wide plateau sat about three hundred feet up the steep trail Don had followed alongside an arroyo. The Nohwood, consisting of mountain cottonwood and pine, sat at its south end. In the distance, on slightly elevated open ground north of the Nohwood, he saw the Place of Homes.

He was grateful it was autumn here because the climb would have been more than he could have managed in warmer weather.

“
Damned screwed up world!” he complained to the universe, which wasn’t particularly interested in his opinion. “It’s day here when it’s night back… back home, and it’s fall here when it’s spring there. I wonder why the east and west aren’t reversed, too!”

Don leaned against a scrubby piñon to keep from rolling back down. “Everything is so damned vast! If this is a dream, why do I feel such agony climbing this slope? Dammit, I’ve never felt things so acutely even when awake and sober back home; this must be real, but how can it? HOW CAN IT?” He hollered, listening to the echoes resonate and fade in the afternoon hush.

The universe had no answer, at least, not for Don.

Looking eastward, he saw the wide tangle that swept on for miles before the edge of the Dream River came into view. To the northwest were the tall sand cones.
That must be the Piralltah Steeples,
he thought. Between him and them were the high lava cliffs with a defiant tower marking the point where the cliffs turned west and blended into the plains that stretched out beyond the northwestern horizon.

The color of the desert plains behind it, the tower was too perfectly round and gently tapering to its summit to be natural.
So this was the mysterious Tower of Il Serrohe.