On The Surface Tension Page 8

  “Whoa, almost lost you there, pardner. Didn’t want to jump in there, looked bad.”

  “Thanks,” said Ron, getting his bearings back. “Must try to avoid those things,” he said shakily.

  Less than five minutes later, however, another dream whirlwind took them both by surprise. Ron and Strong found themselves next to a large, hairy man who was relieving himself against a stone wall. Torrents of urine coursed from the man, while he moaned loudly, head back, eyes rolled back in their sockets. They were both overcome with the irresistible urge to pee as well and fumbled their pants open in haste to join him. They peed for what seemed like an eternity, then were deposited out of the dream back onto the dusty plain. They were both covered with urine.

  “Goddamn it,” said Strong. They did the best they could to clean themselves by rubbing dust on their clothes.

  “What the hell was that?” wondered Ron out loud.

  “Probably some dude who had been sleeping a long time and had to go. I’ve had a dream like that,” mused Strong.

  “So if that was a dream, then why did we actually piss ourselves?” asked Ron.

  Strong considered this with growing concern.

  “I guess while in the dream we have physical effects of what is going on in that dream.”

  They both mulled over the ramifications of this.

  “Well, we have to do better at avoiding them. I’ve had lots of violent dreams,” said Strong.

  “I still don’t remember most of mine,” said Ron.

  “That doesn’t mean you are not having them. They are probably either too mundane or horrible to remember. Let’s get out of here as fast as we can.”

  They looked around and realized with a sinking feeling that they had no idea where the dream had deposited them and which direction they had been going.

  “Shit. Now what?”

  Ron pursed his lips with a sour face. “No idea. No sun, moon, stars, no landmarks, no footprints. We may as well pick a direction at random. Once we get off the plain, we’ll ask where Pornlandia is and go that way along the edge of the plain. I’m sure everyone will know where that is.”

  They picked a direction and started out.

  They were able to travel three hours, dodging whirlwinds, before another one caught Strong from behind. Ron was able to stay on the perimeter, reach in and grab Strong by the arm rather quickly. Strong was shuddering when he came out.

  “I won’t ask,” said Ron.

  “Yeah, don’t. It was a fat woman. Who must have been a big fan of oral sex.” He paused and shook his head in an attempt to clear it. “Yeah, I think I know what the elf meant by not wanting to go through Pornlandia.”

  They trudged on, warily, across the Dream Plains. It occurred to Ron, like ice water in his veins, they might be there for a long time. If not forever.

  —5—

  Tracey waited. The police arrived, and checked the house for Maurice, but he was gone, of course. Tracey did not tell them that Maurice had just left. They insisted on keeping an officer in the house in case Maurice showed up as promised. It took them two days to agree to leave, instructing Tracey to call if she had the least hint that Maurice was around. Not many people had simply vanished from the King County Jail like that. They continued investigating Ron’s disappearance, but quickly ran out of leads. When someone isn’t even in the same universe, there are no tracks to follow.

  Chris and Jeremy’s disappearances were also being independently investigated, but none of the agencies involved knew that there were two others who had gone missing. Tracey was in no hurry to inform them; it would have just ratcheted up the complications exponentially. She knew that they would eventually find out, but decided, with no support or evidence whatsoever, that she would resolve the situation before that happened.

  After four days of woodenly plodding through her daily routines, the dream that Maurice had predicted came.

  She rolled over in her sleep at three in the morning and her eyes fluttered open, sensing movement in the room. She sat bolt upright, and saw an odd, translucent green, cylinder-shaped creature with undulating hair all along it, floating gently in the air near the door.

  “Oh, a Flying Pickle,” she thought, and with that memory all the other memories came flooding back by themselves: the Underground base near the Denver Airport, the Mods and “Space Command” people, Bodie, the rift, the Sea Tribes, the Dive with Bell the Oceanic, Maurice and Leonard, Eiffelia and her Stripes. She even remembered the life as the wife of the richest man in the world and its evaporation into the amalgam of the old world as it would have been had they never traveled through the rift. One moment her life had been limited, the next it was as though the veil had been lifted and her fuller, more experienced Self had replaced her. She realized how Ron must have seen things all along.

  She stood there, wide-eyed, until the Flying Pickle left the room. She knew she had to follow it.

  It floated down the hall into the living room and through the front door as if it wasn’t there. She followed, wondered briefly whether she should change out of her pajamas. By the time she opened the front door, it was already a good ways down the street. She hurried after it, afraid to lose track, not even locking the front door.

  She was able to run along the grass of adjacent yards only so long; soon she was forced onto the paved streets. The gravel dug into her bare feet and was painful. She paused, wondering if she should run back to the house to find some shoes, but was afraid that the Flying Pickle would not wait for her. She chased after it, as fast as her tender feet could carry her.

  The Flying Pickle ducked down an alleyway between two house’s back yard fences, and she followed, stirring a dog into frenzied barking. An overhanging blackberry vine caught her momentarily, and she almost lost sight of her quarry. Tracey pulled herself free, tearing her pajama sleeve, and emerged onto a sidewalk on a busy street. She saw the creature half a block away to the South. She followed, passing a convenience store and a closed strip mall.

  Pain shot from her left foot: She looked down with a stifled cry and saw that she had stepped on glass shards from a broken bottle. Blood gushed from her foot. With a curse, she saw the Flying Pickle getting farther away. Steeling herself against the pain, she limped after it, leaving red footprints on the sidewalk.

  The Flying Pickle made several more turns, taking her farther away from known areas. She lost track even of what part of town she was in.

  Tracey thought she was gaining on it, but it took an abrupt right turn into a neon-lit doorway and vanished.

  She hurried up to the building where the door was and read the neon sign in the large plate-glass window: “House of Kong Chinese Restaurant.” Another neon sign, this one in blinking red and yellow with a stylized martini glass, read “Lounge.”

  She pushed her way into the shabby, dimly-lit restaurant, and glanced around for the Flying Pickle. It was nowhere to be seen.

  A Chinese woman sat behind a counter with a cash register, with folded takeout menus in a pile. A torn paper lantern hung behind, showing the dim bulb inside. There was an opening to the lounge area, with jukebox music and garishly-colored light leaching from it, and a mostly empty restaurant area. The carpet was thin and sticky against her bare feet, and the heavy smell of broken oil and five spice was in the air. Tracey noticed that the Chinese woman was eyeing her bloody foot with obvious ire.

  “Where did it go?” Tracey asked with urgency.

  “You can’t come in here like that. You leave,” the Chinese woman scolded.

  “No, I have to find where that...there was a...it looked like a green glassy cucumber with little hairs all over it—it flew in here,” she mumbled.

  The Chinese woman shook her head. “No flying green thing. You go.”

  Tracey took stock of what she looked like: torn pajamas, sweat-plastered hair, bloody foot. She felt the overwhelming urge to burst into tears, but it passed quickly, leaving a dead calm, tinged with desperate denial.

  “No, I nee
d to find that Flying Pickle,” she said flatly. “Or,” she added as an afterthought, “is this where Andrew Morrow is?”

  The woman regarded her a little too off-handedly. “No Andrew Morrow. No Flying Pickle. Go away now.”

  Tracey folded her arms across her chest. “I want to see Andrew Morrow. I’m not leaving until I do.”

  The Chinese woman stared at her coldly for a long moment, then picked up the phone behind the counter, dialed it, and spoke into it briefly. Tracey had a moment of elated triumph that lasted only a second.

  “Police on the way now, you better go,” said the woman.

  Tracey felt deflated, but had nothing to lose now. She stood her ground.

  Long minutes passed, while the two of them regarded each other.

  “Police coming. Any minute now.”

  “I’ll wait,” Tracey answered.

  She waited.

  “Can I be of some assistance?” said a voice behind her. Tracey turned, and was face to face with a rather obese Asian man in a black and white Yukata with a bamboo pattern. His hair, on the rotund head, was short-cropped. He wore circular framed glasses that hid eyes deeply set in the fleshy eye sockets. His mouth was slightly parted.

  “I’m here to see Andrew Morrow,” Tracey said curtly.

  “I am Andrew Morrow, at your service,” the man said.

  “Oh,” said Tracey, “I was expecting....”

  “A Caucasian man?” he finished for her. “I have an English name and a Hawaiian body,” he smiled. “I am glad you finally found me. Maurice said that you would come looking.”

  She stood regarding him, not knowing what to say.

  “Would you like to come up?” he invited.

  She nodded. He bowed to the Chinese woman behind the counter, then led her through the alcove between the restaurant and bar areas to a door that she had assumed was a broom closet. He opened it, revealing a staircase leading up. Morrow gestured to her to ascend, which she did.

  The stairs were solid stone, which seemed out of place with the construction of the restaurant, and were cold against her bare feet.

  “Sorry, I’m bleeding all over your stairs,” she said feebly.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said, with a dismissive wave as he climbed behind her.

  She emerged at the top of the stairs and was shocked. The room was much bigger than the entire restaurant below, with stone walls and huge wooden beams supporting a vaulted roof. Heavy wooden shelves lined the walls, filled with antique books, rocks, animal bones, and other mysterious artifacts. There were several large picture windows which looked out on incongruous exteriors: one showed a mountain slope at dusk; another looked into a dark forest at daytime, a third showed a rocky coastline at night, and a fourth appeared to be looking into deep space. Tracey at first assumed that they were merely extremely realistic back-lit light-boxes, but then realized that they were not. Doorways led off into other chambers of unguessed size and scope.

  “Is this one of those places like the garden or the floor between floors that the Mods keep? One of those ‘bigger on the inside than outside’ places?”

  There was a stone table, with overstuffed chairs. Morrow smiled, motioned her to be seated, and took one of the chairs himself. He sat for a moment regarding her, fingers templed. She did not know what to say, where to begin.

  “Would you like some tea?” he said finally. She nodded gratefully.

  Morrow rang a little bell that he picked up from a side table, and a strange little person appeared. He was small, bent, and almost looked like a wizened monkey. Tracey looked more closely, without meaning to be rude, and thought that it might actually be a monkey.

  “Some tea, please,” Morrow said. The monkey man disappeared, and returned before long with a tray bearing a porcelain pot and two cups and saucers. He poured, asked her with his eyes whether she took cream or sugar. She shook he head and thanked him.

  When they were seated back in their chairs, the strangeness of the situation, the cold of the night, and her exertion finally caught up with Tracey and she began to shake uncontrollably.

  Morrow called for a blanket, and the monkey man brought one and draped her with it. He returned again with a basin of water and slippers, and bathed and dressed her wounded foot.

  Soon, Tracey felt much better and more comfortable.

  “Maurice said that you are not a human being,” she said eventually.

  He barked a laugh. “He’s one to talk.”

  He didn’t seem to be in any rush to say anything else on the matter, but Tracey decided to push the issue.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, I would like to know what you are, if not human. You look like someone playing at being a human being or wearing a human mask badly.” She was reminded of Mr. Stone and Ms. Lake, who also had that air about them.

  “Ah, I must try to do better. Well, if we can’t proceed without getting this out of the way, let me tell you my tale.”

  Tracey sipped her tea, and scrunched further into her blanket. Morrow sat for a moment, collecting his thoughts, then let forth a great sigh.

  “I suppose I should begin at the beginning. You are, I believe, familiar with Eiffelia.”

  “We have met,” Tracey frowned.

  “Yes, good work getting rid of her among the Tribes.”

  Tracey narrowed her eyes. “How do you know about that? I only just now remembered it happened at all.”

  Morrow smiled. “I have a method of seeing many things, in many places and times.”

  “Maurice mentioned that I should ask you about that...I can’t remember what he called it. Something-orium.”

  Morrow raised his eyebrow. “Something-orium? What kind of ‘orium?’”

  Tracey shrugged helplessly.

  “A vomitorium?” he suggested. Tracey stifled a giggle, shook her head.

  “A valedictorian? A moratorium?”

  She shook her head, trying to remember. She knew Morrow knew exactly what she was talking about and it annoyed her that he was playing dumb.

  “Crematorium? Sanatorium?”

  “It did start with an ‘s,’” she offered.

  “He must mean my Scrytorium.”

  “That was it,” Tracey confirmed, pointing her finger. “What is that anyway?”

  “Like I said, a manner to see many things. All in good time. First, though, my tale. You know of Eiffelia, but Ron had a more intimate experience with her. This is his fate, and fortunately less so with me and you. Ron observed her being fed in the trench by giant scorpions.”

  “I did not know that,” she said, brows furrowing. “Giant scorpions?”

  “Yes, a holdover that she kept from her old prehistoric days. More recently, your son Jeremy had some dealings with them on her home planet of Cambria.”

  “What kind of dealings? Is he safe?”

  “Yes, for the moment. So is Chris. But we will discuss them later. Now we need to talk about the giant scorpions.”

  Tracey forced herself to patience in hearing about her children later.

  “Sounds like you have had some dealings with them yourself,” she managed.

  “You could say that. I used to be one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, you heard that correctly. I began my existence as a little tiny baby giant scorpion, bred for millions of years for the purpose of serving Eiffelia. On the Earth you visited, before you managed to wipe it clean of her, we stuffed meat into her pores. On Cambria we did the same but also ran around on the land harvesting the excess human beings. In days past, when she warred with other sponges, my kind served as her armies against her rival sponges.

  My job was one of the beach enforcers, like Jeremy had to face. I was gone years before he got there, though. Once I was fully grown, we chased ragged people around on the beach at the base of a giant cliff, and ate what we caught. Every now and then, a new batch of criminals or unwanted and unneeded people would be dumped on the beach; we would gorge on the weak of body or mind
, and the rest would join the other ragged people to be picked off later.”

  “That is horrible.”

  “Did you expect anything better from Eiffelia? Well anyway, one fine, sunny morning we saw the transport gliding over the trees and hurried down to the beach where they offloaded the meat. There were four of us and ten new victims. They lost no time running away for the beach or the trees once they saw us. We scorpions gave chase, of course. I remember one of them caught my eye, though: He ran slowly, straight along the beach. That intrigued me, since only the ragged pack who lived around there did that. So I chased after him. We ran along the beach for a while, then he did something that really confused me. He started to sing.”

  “Sing?”

  “Yes. It was the damndest thing. I had never heard music, of course, and had no idea what he was doing. But there he went, singing while running for his life along the beach. I was intrigued. So instead of eating him I captured him and put him in a cave.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “Nice didn’t enter into it. I just wanted to see what this noise was all about before I ate him. And I had to keep the other scorpions off of him in the meantime. I didn’t have to lock him into the cave, either; the other scorpions lurking around in the brush was enough to keep him trapped in there.”