by Adam Carter
“Actually, I named him Homer. I always knew him as Old Man Robes, but that’s a bit of a mouthful, so figured I’d shorten it to O.M.R., which still sounds a bit odd. Say the three letters quickly enough and it sounds like Homer, so that’s what I decided to call him. That,” she shrugged, “and because he’s sort of like my holographic security service, which is a pop-culture reference I pulled in from the real world.”
“Ah. Been a long time since I was there.”
“You called him Abel.”
“I did, yes.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s his name.”
Tarne frowned, although Kiel offered no more, for she now sat upon the edge of the cliff-face, watching the pteranodons flying about in distant circles. “Aren’t they marvellous, Heather?”
“I suppose, when they’re not trying to eat you.”
“They eat fish.”
“Don’t trust scientists, me.”
“Nor do I. They eat fish because I told them they eat fish.”
“Ah. You have a lot of control over them, I take it?”
“I have control over all things in my worlds, Heather. In time I shall become master of all, once all obstructions are removed from my path.”
“Obstructions like Abel and me?”
Kiel released a long sigh. “You think too highly of yourself. You’re a nuisance, not an obstruction; and Abel? Well, he’s just an old man. That, at least, is not a façade.”
“How old is he, then? I mean, where did he come from; who is he?”
“He is Abel,” Kiel said simply.
“That doesn’t tell me much. The only Abel I know is like in Cain and Abel.”
“Yes.”
Tarne stared at Kiel’s back in abject horror. “You mean to tell me that Old Man Robes is the son of Adam and Eve?”
“No, I mean to tell you that Old Man Robes believes he is the son of Adam and Eve. Heather, have you seen anything since coming to these worlds which really seems odd to you?”
“Hmm, let me think about that one a moment.”
“Precisely. Anything you can imagine, we have here; and everything which is beyond your imagination, we also have. We have Blackbeard, we have Dracula, we have Iago and Desdemona, we have Victor Hugo, we have Winston Churchill ... Hell, we probably even have John-Boy Walton and the A-Team somewhere around here. Maybe even together. My point is that within these realities, anything can happen, and does on a frequent basis. So a man claiming to be the second son of Adam is not really something which makes me gasp in shock. Do I believe him, though? Better question would be do I believe anything I see here?” She shrugged. “None of it’s real, Heather, but much of it, probably all of it in fact, is based upon reality, or at least the fiction within reality with regards to worlds like that Dracula one.”
“Baron von Tier, his name was.”
“Dracula by any other name, dearie.”
“So what you’re saying is that this is some form of fairy-tale existence and that whatever we imagine can exist and does on a regular basis?”
Kiel nodded. “Our dreams, our nightmares, particularly our nightmares. They all exist here, all of them.”
“So who is Abel, then? I mean, why are the three of us aware of what’s going on about us, but no one else is? The others aren’t real, is that it?”
“That’s it precisely. However it happened, we three were caught inside this realm and are unable to escape. Abel’s been here longer than all of us. He says he’s some form of custodian, although I’m not even sure I believe that. I personally think he’s just someone who’s been here too long, and so therefore someone who has greater mastery over the forces here.”
“How long have you been here?”
“How long have you?”
Tarne shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Nor do I. Time’s funny like that. When you flit from world to world, you have no way to measure how much time’s passing. Plus we really don’t need to eat or sleep or drink or even get rid of bodily waste. We can if we want, we can do any or all of them, but we have no real need to. Therefore our natural cycles are broken, since we can’t even count days by how many times we’ve gone to sleep. And judging things by the phases of the sun and moon is useless since they change from world to world.”
“So how do we get out?”
“I don’t think we can. I used to look for a way out; then I gave up. I think ... I think that was Jagrad’s problem.” There was a tremor to Kiel’s voice then, and Tarne suspected there was even some regret within her at having slain Darkthorne so viciously. Tarne felt some small sympathy for her, although at the same time wondered whether she could knock Kiel down the side of the cliff with one solid kick, since she was still sitting upon the edge of the mountain.
“Why did you kill him?” Tarne asked instead, her own voice breaking slightly at the memory.
“At the time, I saw him as an obstruction. Something to be removed. I knew one of our little party was from the real world, and long had I suspected Jagrad. I never thought there would have been two among you, though.”
“So why did you kill him?”
Kiel swallowed and when she spoke it was clearly an effort. “He was lost, insane. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. You did realise he was insane, didn’t you?”
“I did sort of suspect, yeah.”
“Well that was because he couldn’t accept where we were, what we were doing. The shifts between realities without one story finishing was my idea. I knew that if we finished one story and then moved onto another, we might continue that way forever, so I figured that if we got only partway through before shifting from past to future, to present, then back to past to begin the cycle anew, it might make one of you start to notice that we were doing things all over again.”
“I remember noticing.”
“I expected it to be just Jagrad. I’m actually surprised Sparky noticed anything, considering he wasn’t even real.”
“He was real to me.”
“I know he was your friend, Heather, he was my friend too. It’s just ... after you’ve been here a while, you start to lose all sense of morality. Have you noticed that yet? You start to see everyone as not being real, so you think to hell with them and you’ll do whatever you like. It begins with small things, like pushing people over in the street or telling your boss exactly what you think of them; things which you would do only if you were dreaming. It quickly progresses to larger things, and it’s amazing how swift that process is.”
“I’ve noticed, yes,” Tarne said, thinking back to her own experience in the office and sitting afterwards on the bench beside the fountain. That was her beginning and, if Kiel had spent a greater number of years in this realm, no wonder she was so callous.
“I think that’s why I killed Jagrad and Sparky,” Kiel said in a small voice. “Sparky was inconsequential, because although he was my friend, he was still never real to begin with. And Jagrad ... Jagrad had lost his mind, he’d become a liability, and he stood in my way. I’d killed so many already, one more didn’t seem to matter that much. So I killed him, and once I’d done it, only after I’d done it, I began to remember that Jagrad had actually been alive, that he had been a living, breathing human being and not simply one of these ... these mindless constructs.”
“Abel called this a programme of some sort.”
“A good enough analogy I suppose, but utterly wrong.”
“What’s the truth?”
“Something you can only discover for yourself.”
“Something Jagrad shan’t be able to discover at all now.”
“He already did. And it was that which pushed him over the edge. He couldn’t comprehend the truth. Either that or he couldn’t accept it.”
“And you do and can?”
“I don’t want to know the truth. I only know that the fewer real people there are here, the stronger I become. And maybe, just maybe, if I’m the only living being, I may be abl
e to use that life energy to live again in the real world. So far as I know, there are only three of us left in here now, which means there are only two who might oppose me.”
“So you haven’t learned anything from Jagrad?”
“I’ve learned how to kill living beings and how to feel remorse, Heather. I’m sorry, I truly am, that I haven’t learned more.”
“So you still intend to kill me?” Tarne asked in a small voice.
“I’m sorry,” Kiel replied in an even smaller cry, “but I have no choice.”
“Then I think it’s time you understood that since last we met, I’ve learned a thing or two as well.”
Tarne rushed for her foe, pushing her over the edge of the cliff. Kiel fell, not even bothering to flail her limbs. Tarne did not glance over the cliff to see Kiel fall, and instead prepared for her imminent return.
“Poor deluded Heather,” Kiel said, standing behind her now, “do you really still believe that physical attacks shall mean aught within this realm?”
“No,” Tarne said, “that was just to buy me time.” The ground between the two women cracked wide and fire spewed forth from the fissure. Tarne turned to face Kiel through the flames and brought her arms up that she might hope to conduct the rhythm of the flames, although Kiel hit back immediately with a terrible gust of wind which doused them completely.
“That was a good effort,” Kiel admitted. “I’m surprised you possess the strength of mind for it.”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of, Sara.”
“That was delivered a tad melodramatically, Heather.”
Tarne’s only response was to smile.
“Why are you smiling?” Kiel asked cautiously. “You must realise you can’t possibly rival my power, having had comparatively so little time to prepare? I must say I find your sense of security somewhat suspect.”
“Your alliteration astounds me, Sara.”
“You’re even calm in your voice. What is it that makes you so certain of yourself?”
“Only that I at last understand that it’s not the two of us who’ll do battle, but rather our control of our surroundings. Or in other words I don’t have to fight you at all, when I can just allow something else to fight you on my behalf.”
Kiel was about to ask what she meant by this when the entire mountain began to shake. Kiel fell against the rock wall of the cliff and Tarne laughed aloud. “Still clinging to physicality, Sara?”
“What have you done, Heather?”
“Awoken the Great Nagoola, that’s all.” As she spoke, a giant reptilian head appeared from the side of the mountain, and both women could see a creature ten times larger than anyone who had ever scaled the side of the cliff. “I don’t know what the beast is,” Tarne admitted, “although I assume it’s some form of tyrannosaur. They can’t climb the sides of mountains, I already know that so you don’t have to tell me, although I’m beginning to understand the so-called laws of physics don’t apply here. Imagination is the only limitation, and that’s where I can defeat you, Sara; because my imagination is vaster than yours. I’ve existed more recently in the real world and knew a present there which was only your future. And in my present there existed more answers and technological achievements than you could ever understand.”
“We had visionaries in my day also, Heather. Imagination is not held back merely by the lack of television and jet packs.”
“I’m surprised you know the term television, although if you knew anything about my present you’d know jet packs are still a thing of the future.”
“Past, future, it’s all irrelevant, Heather. What can be imagined can exist.”
“But if you know how something works and not just that it could, your imagination is given credence.”
“Then it appears you truly do know something of this realm,” Kiel said reluctantly. “And to think, I always considered you the easier of the two obstacles blocking my path.”
“Perhaps it’s time to rethink your priorities,” Tarne suggested, and then the tyrannosaur struck. Tarne knew Kiel would dispatch the beast easily, and did not intend to wait around for her to do so. Instead, Tarne stumbled down the cliff-side. Her movements however, were painfully slow, and before she had travelled even twenty metres, a shower of green and red petals engulfed her. Shaking her head to free her vision from the strange rain, Tarne watched as a pteranodon swooped close to her, Sara Kiel upon its back. Tarne realised then that the petal rain must have been all that was left of the tyrannosaur, and she shuddered at Kiel’s power.
“Abel’s not here to save you this time,” Kiel informed her calmly from the back of the flying beast. “He’s been severely delayed, and by the time he reaches you it’ll be too late.”
“There’s no need for us to fight, Sara,” Tarne shouted. “If we put our minds together, we should be able to think of a way out of this mess. Two minds are better than one and all that?”
“One mind shall rule.”
“Well there goes that idea.”
Kiel swooped for her and Tarne clung to the side of the mountain for dear life. There was no glorified cry of reckless bravado as Kiel passed her by, for Tarne suspected Kiel did not even want to kill her, and only felt she must under some deluded sense of logic and ambition. Tarne looked all about her as the pteranodon came back in a wide arc for another pass, and could see nothing which might help in her struggle.
And then she realised that if she was going to survive this, she would have to begin trusting her own mind. She clung to the cliff, yet the cliff was not real. She similarly clung to the beliefs that at least some portion of what she saw about her must have been real, yet it was not so. The sky about her was sky only because her mind had made it so; similarly the land was land only because of this reason. Therefore if she released the cliff and sailed through the sky, the impact upon the land would do nothing to her, purely for the reason that it did not exist as anything other than an extension of her own mind’s imaginings.
It was difficult, she found, to place her faith in such an abstract concept, yet she had been telling herself for far too long now that nothing was real, so she felt it was about time she started acting as though she believed it. Her five senses were telling her in unison that the world about her was real, although she knew from experience that it could shift at any given moment, that its atoms could re-form into something else with but a single command. She remembered the old tests of trust, where one person would fall backwards and simply accept that their partner would catch them, and she understood now she would have to employ a similar strategy. It was all or nothing for her, and Tarne knew at last that this was the final world. This was the world in which she would have to take down Sara Kiel for all time, or else be killed in her stead.
“Let’s do this,” she said, and released her hold upon the cliff. She fell backwards slowly at first, although quickly gained momentum. She sailed through the sky, watching the ground charging for her, and promised herself that the ground was doing no such thing because the ground did not exist any more than did the air through which she was falling. She needed to touch the ground, she told herself; she needed to land safely upon that which was not real, and she had to do it now.
Heather Tarne lightly touched upon the ground and breathed deeply and surely.
Glancing upwards, she could see no sign of her enemy. She wondered what had become of her. Then thunder tore through the ground, and Tarne watched as trees she had not noticed before were parted as something large and vile stepped through. Its body was huge and bulbous, yet undeniably sleek. The forelimbs were small and weak, although its legs were mightily muscled and Tarne knew the thing could easily outdistance her, even through the problem of the trees. Its tail was long and tapering to a thick point, kept in the air to counterbalance the massive head which was formed almost exclusively of jaw. The back of the creature was kept horizontal and Tarne fancied she might even have been able to place a spirit level upon its beck and find no tilt existing there.
“Like him?” Kiel asked, appearing ten metres from where Tarne stood. “He’s called a daspletosaurus. He’s a tyrannosaur, and an especially mean one at that. He’s also been asked politely if he wouldn’t mind devouring you, and he’s nodded his ready agreement to it.”
“How nice for him,” Tarne said, concentrating hard herself. The trees parted behind Kiel and something even larger stood there. It very much resembled the daspletosaurus, although it stood taller. “Meet tyrannosaurus rex,” Tarne said.
“You’ve gone for the rex?” winced Kiel. “Honey, that’s like the most well-known dinosaur ever. If you want to show you actually know something, go for something which is going to get the audience running for their encyclopaedia.”
“I’m not trying to show I know anything,” Tarne protested. “I’m just trying to stay alive, so I chose the largest land carnivore ever.”
Kiel laughed. “I may not know much about your present, Heather, but even I know that’s not true.”
“Mine’s still bigger than yours,” Tarne said, and the tyrannosaurus lunged for Kiel. Kiel, however, did not move, for her daspletosaurus charged for the enemy beast and they collided so that the attack upon Kiel was diverted. The tyrannosaurus bellowed at its adversary and the daspletosaurus lunged for the throat of its foe. The tyrannosaurus pulled back, striking down with its powerful leg, carving a series of bloody gashes across the thigh of the daspletosaurus.
Kiel stepped away from them, paying them no more heed than she would have two clashing beetles at her feet. “Your power used up yet?” she asked.
“Power can never be used up,” Tarne retorted. “Energy can never be created nor destroyed, only transferred, and I choose for all energy within this realm to surge through me.”
“And I choose for it not to. Stalemate, I think.”
“Then there’s only one way to determine a victor,” Tarne said.
“You would suggest ...?”
Tarne considered that, then grinned. “Let’s see which dino really has what it takes.” With those words, her corporeal form disintegrated into its component atoms and Kiel turned about to view the battle of the behemoths behind her, and smiled.