The World of Tiers Volume Two: Behind the Walls of Terra, the Lavalite World, Red Orc's Rage, and More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

  Sam gave Jim a cigarette, and they walked down the street talking about the fight with The Blob and his buddies. Then Sam slipped Jim an upper. Jim felt more than just an upsurge of spirits and nerves. The drug hit him in the center of his brain like an atomic missile striking dead on target. He had never been hit so suddenly or with so much force by so little. He was abnormally wide open, the walls broken, the army in the castle sound asleep.

  He was able a few days later to recall slices of what happened in the next six hours. The rest of the nightmare pie was gone, eaten up by the black beauties, marijuana joints, beer, whiskey, and angel dust his friends had given him. Until then, no matter how tempted, he had always refused even to try dust. It had sent three of his friends into convulsions and then fatal comas. But the deluge of the lesser drugs and the booze had washed away his fear.

  Jim and Sam went first to Bob Pellegrino’s house. Here they waited until Steve Larsen and Gizzy Dillard came, then drove away in Bob’s 1962 Plymouth, which, for a wonder, was running. On the way to Rodfetter’s Drive-In, Bob opened a fifth of moonshine “white mule.” Steve provided a six-pack of Budweiser he had gotten his older brother to buy for him. Half of the liquor and all of the beer was consumed by the time that, whooping and yelling, they got to the drive-in. A joint was half gone by then, and each had swallowed a black beauty.

  Rodfetter’s was the hanging-out place, the “in” site, for the Central crowd whose parents were blue-collar workers. Jim and his friends did a lot of horseplay and monkeying around there for several hours. They did not, unlike the other students there, do much carhopping. Outside of their small group, they had no friends or even close acquaintances. They were the pariahs, the untouchables, and the unbearables, and they claimed to be proud of it.

  Jim did not remember just how long they were there. During this somewhat hazy time, he had smoked more joints and drunk the warm beer Pellegrino produced from the trunk. Then Veronica Pappas, Sandra Melton, and Maria Tumbrille had shown up with some LSD. Veronica was the lead female singer for the Hot Water Eskimos; Maria, her understudy. Sandra was the rock group’s manager. Her nickname was “Bugs,” but her close friends used it only when she was not present. Sandy took offense when she heard it. Unless, that is, she was in one of her deep-blue, very deep and blue, depressions, lower than the mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, farther out than the cold and dead planet, Pluto.

  Tonight, she was in a way-out talkative and jumping-up-and-down mood.

  Sometime during the evening, while they were sitting on the Plymouth’s hood or leaning against it, Steve Larsen brought out some LSD in sugar cubes.

  “I been hoarding this,” he said. “Saving it for the right time. Tonight’s the night, Halloween. We can go ride broomsticks with the witches, ride all the way to the moon.”

  Jim later remembered that he had said something about it being hallucinogenic, though he had trouble pronouncing it.

  “I mean, it gives you visions, makes you see the fourth-dimensional worlds, things that aren’t there, scary things, all of space and time at once. I don’t need that. I get visions naturally, and I don’t like them. No, thanks.”

  “It ain’t like heroin and cocaine,” Steve said. “It don’t hook you, ain’t habit-forming. Anyway, you ain’t had them visions for years.”

  “Oh, well, why not?” Jim had said. “What’ve I got to lose besides my mind, and I don’t have one, anyway.”

  “It’s a ticket to heaven,” Steve said. “I never been there, but this shit’ll take you to a place even better.”

  “All the way around the universe faster’n light, so they say,” Pellegrino said. “Coming back you meet yourself going.”

  Jim ate the cube and then inhaled deeply from a brown stick. They passed it around until it was a short butt. Steve put it in his jacket pocket.

  It must have been after that that someone suggested they drive out to old man Dumski’s apple orchard and push over his outhouse. It was an old Halloween tradition that the ramshackle wooden crapper be turned over. Or that an attempt be made to do so since not many had succeeded. The orchard farm had been in the county. But, as Belmont City spread out, it had annexed the area around it.

  Dumski’s was at the end of a dirt road that led for half a mile from the main highway. It was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The house had burned down years ago. Dumski lived alone in the barn. The city had been trying for some time to make him build a house, one which would have indoor plumbing and a flush toilet. But the old recluse had defied the city authorities and taken them to court.

  He had a huge dog, a rottweiler, one of that black-and-tan, huge-headed, sinister-looking, and terrifying breed used in the film The Omen. The brute roamed the farm area day and night and was only tied up when harvest time came. Since Dumski had gotten the dog, nobody had trespassed on his land.

  “Anybody got downers?” Jim had said. “Put a bunch in a hamburger and feed it to the dog. He falls asleep, then we go in.”

  Those were the last words of good sense uttered that night. Bob Pellegrino purchased a big hamburger, hold the onions. He put a dozen downers in the bun, rewrapped it, and they were off, eight jammed into the Plymouth like circus clowns in a trick car, giggling and screaming while WYEK lobbed the barrage of “A Day in the Life” throughout the car, its quicksilver shrapnel shells exploding inside their young souls. The Beatles had sung that twelve years ago, shook the world with it in the primeval rock-dawn when Jim had been only five years old. Bob “Guru” Hinman, the ancient disc jockey who loved the hoary old stuff (so did Jim) would be playing next Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” which Guru claimed had started rock ’n roll.

  Veronica sat on Jim’s lap in the back seat. He was to remember vaguely that she was messing around with his fly but not what happened when she opened it. Probably nothing. He had not had a hard-on for two weeks, that’s how depressed he had been. And he was supposed, at seventeen, to be at the peak of his sexual drive.

  Dumski’s apple farm was on the other side of Gold Hill. It took about twenty minutes to get there because of all the red lights they hit, though Bob went through some. Then they were on the highway. The headlights showed trees on both sides. There was no oncoming or passing traffic. Jim kept waiting for the hallucinations, but they did not come. Or were they already here? Maybe this mundane Earth was the basic hallucination?

  Bob slowed the car down but not quickly enough. They had passed the turnoff road to Dumski’s. After Bob had backed the car up and got it heading down the dirt road, Sandy said, “Hadn’t we better turn the radio off? It’s loud enough to wake up the dead!”

  They all protested because Bob Dylan was in the middle of “Desolation Row,” and they wanted to hear it to its end. They compromised by turning the volume down. As soon as the classic song was over, Bob turned the set off. A moment later, he turned the headlights off. The moonbeams coming through gauzy clouds and gaps between them were enough to show them their way.

  The car moved slowly out of the tree-lined and shadowy roadway and stopped in front of the gate in the barbed wire fence.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jim did not remember much of what had happened since they had been at the drive-in. Many details were long afterward given by Bob Pellegrino, who had not boozed and drugged it up as much as the others because he was driving. But he was not in what could be called a chemically unsaturated state.

  The barn loomed dark and sinister in the intermittent moonlight. If Dumski was inside, he either had no lights on or the shutters fit tightly over the windows. There was neither sight nor sound of the rottweiler. The outhouse, said to be a three-holer, was an indistinct shape about eighty feet from the barn and to the left of the group. It had been somewhat distant from the house, the remains of which were a tumulus. Old Dumski had to trudge a long way to use the outhouse.

  They piled out of the car. Bob had cautioned them to be quiet, but Gizzy slammed the door after getting out of the car. Before he could be reprimanded by Bo
b, Gizzy got sick. He went back down the road and into the woods so that the sounds of his vomiting would be muffled. Even so, they were too loud for Pellegrino, now the mother hen of the group. Just after he started to walk after Gizzy to tell him to pipe down, he stopped. A deep growl came from the darkness on the other side of the fence. That hushed the youths.

  After a few seconds of looking around frantically, they saw the huge dog behind the gate. That it only growled and that it was such a shadowy shape made it more menacing. Pellegrino, murmuring, “Here, doggie! Nice doggie!” approached it slowly. When he got close to the gate, he threw the hamburger over it. It landed with a plop. A few seconds later, he turned and whispered, “He bolted it down.”

  Sandy Melton had added acid to the hamburger while they were on the highway. She had said something about wondering what kind of hallucinations a dog would have. Jim remembered that later because it had struck him as very funny. The dog kept on growling. Then, after a few minutes, the growls began to get weak. Presently, it started to wander away, staggering. Before it was thirty feet away, it collapsed.

  The gate was bound with a heavy chain, the ends of which were secured by a big lock. Jim went over the gate, the top of which bore strands of barbed wire. He helped Pellegrino over, and they assisted Sam Wyzak and Steve Larsen over. All of them had bloodied hands but did not feel pain.

  Sam said, “Holy Mother! The barn just turned into a castle! It’s made of glass and diamonds, and it’s shimmering in the moonlight!”

  Nobody thought to tell him that there was, at that moment, no moonlight.

  Jim was having no visual hallucinations, but he did feel as if his legs had stretched out, like the kid in the fairy story with the seven-league boots, and that he could reach the outhouse in one stride. He was distracted, though, because the girls refused to go over the gate. They could feel the barbs, and they had seen the rips in the boys’ clothes. “Besides,” Sandy Melton said, “who’s going to take care of Gizzy? We might have to run like hell. We don’t want to leave Gizzy behind.”

  “You’re right,” Bob said. “OK. This won’t take long; we don’t need you, anyway. You get Gizzy into the car.”

  The three boys walked along the gravel road running from the gate to the heap that had been the farmhouse. Before they got to it, they angled across toward the outhouse. Just as they reached the stench-emitting crapper, a break in the clouds flooded moonlight around them. They could even see the crescent carved in the door.

  Jim was surprised that Bob, Sam, and Steve also had reached the structure with only one stride. They did not look as if their legs were elongated. Then Bob said, “Where’s Sam?”

  Jim turned to indicate Sam, who had been by his side. But Sam was no longer there. He was standing at a point halfway between the gate and the outhouse and was staring fixedly at the barn. Later, Jim would figure that he had just thought that Sam had walked all the way with him. Or had someone else, someone unknown, been at his side?

  “OK,” Bob said. “We don’t need him. But don’t forget to bring him along when we go back.”

  They went to the north side of the outhouse, and all three began pushing on it. The structure rocked back and forth but would not tip over.

  “Man, it’s heavier than my mother’s doughnuts!” Bob said. “Listen up. We gotta get it oscillating, get it into the right frequency, then, when I give the word, all shove together hard as hell!”

  They began rocking it again. Just as they finally heaved and the wooden shack toppled over, they heard a yell. They started to whirl to see who was making the noise. Then a shotgun boomed, and they heard pellets cutting through the leaves of a nearby tree. Steve, yelling, ran away. Pellegrino grabbed Jim when he fell backward. They screamed as, locked together, they hurtled into the hole and bounced off the slimy dirt wall and into the godawful excrement. They hit feet first and were quickly up to their necks in the loathsome stuff.

  The shotgun boomed again. Faintly, Jim could hear the shrieks of the girls. Steve Larsen was no longer yelling. Jim and Bob screamed for help. For a second afterward, there was silence. Then he heard a growling. The next he knew, the dog was in the hole. It came down like a vengeance from the gods, landed right in front of Jim and Bob, splashed their heads and open mouths, came up like a cork, and began struggling.

  Jim’s toes touched the bottom or what he hoped was the bottom. Bob, who was taller, had his whole head sticking out from the muck. Jim was up to his chin. But the crazed dog knocked him back, and he went under again.

  Later, Jim knew that the rottweiler had recovered somewhat from the drugs and run, or maybe walked, since it was still weak and dazed, to the hole. Not very alert yet, it had fallen, or maybe jumped, into the hole.

  Now, he and Bob had to keep from being bitten by the dog—those powerful jaws had a 600-pound pressure—or being scratched by its flailing forefeet or being thrust under by its weight. They could see only very dimly because the moonlight did not reach to the bottom and their eyes were covered by the slime. Then Bob got sick and was vomiting, and that caused Jim to throw up also. The puke didn’t make things any worse—nothing could—but it certainly did not help their situation. Moreover, it was very difficult to avoid the dog while heaving their guts out.

  Finally, though weak from his efforts, Jim reached out and grabbed the dog by its ears. Frenzied, he shoved its head under the surface.

  At that moment, a flashlight shone from above, and a cracked old voice yelled at him.

  “Leave the dog alone, or I’ll shoot you! Don’t touch him, you …!”

  Jim did not understand the following words. Dumski had switched to Polish.

  “Don’t shoot, for God’s sake!” Jim cried. He released the dog. It emerged, sputtering and growling, but it no longer tried to attack him. It had occurred to the dog that it had better save its strength to keep from drowning. Or to keep from choking to death. It dog-paddled furiously just to stay above the surface.

  “Yeah, you damn fool!” Bob yelled. “You’ll kill the dog, too!”

  Pellegrino was not worried about the rottweiler, but he had wits enough to know that Dumski was in a terrible rage, out of his mind, if he did not think about what a shotgun blast in that narrow shaft would do to its occupants.

  “Oh!” Dumski said. “Don’t go away! I’ll be gone for a minute.”

  “Sure. We’ll just leave,” Bob said. He groaned. “Oh, God, what a mess!”

  It seemed like a long time before Dumski returned, though it must have been only two minutes. Puffing and panting, the old man kneeled at the edge of the hole. Then something struck Jim, not hard, across his face. He did not know what it was until Dumski shone the flashlight down on the rope he had dropped.

  From far away but still loud enough to be heard over the screams of the girls came the wail of a siren. The cops were coming.

  “Tie the rope around the dog!” Dumski said.

  “How about us?” Bob shrieked.

  “The dog comes up first!”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Jim screamed. “How are we going to do that? It’ll bite our hands off!”

  “Get us out of here!” Pellegrino shouted. “I can’t breathe! This stuff’s choking me to death! I tell you, I’ll die if I don’t get out of here soon!”

  “Serves you assholes right,” Dumski said. “Tie the rope around the dog, then maybe I’ll think about getting you out.”

  “We’re gonna die!” Bob bellowed, then choked as a wave of excrement caused by the animal’s struggles slapped him in the mouth.

  “Get the rope around the dog!” Dumski shrieked. “Quick about it, or I’ll leave you to die!”

  That just could not be done without getting bitten. But the siren, which had been getting nearer, died. A door slammed. A man yelled something. Dumski muttered something and then was gone. Jim thought about shoving the dog under again. If it was dead, it would be easy to tie the rope around it. But Dumski would shoot them if the dog died.

  Another stretch
of seeming-forever passed. Then Jim heard voices approaching. Dumski had unlocked the gate and let the cops through it. Jim had never been glad to see the police before this; now, he was very happy. Never mind what was going to happen to him after he got out of the hole.

  A flashlight held by a cop illuminated the hole. The cop laughed loudly for a while, then said, “For God’s sake, Pete, look at this! You ever see such a sight!”

  Pete looked down and laughed. “Man, you boys’re in deep shit, and that’s a fact!”

  They went away with Dumski. After another long time, they came back with a ladder. They let it down and told Jim and Bob to climb up it. But the dog was between them and the ladder, and it would not allow them to get on it. Meanwhile, Dumski complained that the dog had to be gotten out, and, if the boys came out first, who’d tie the rope around it?

  “We’re not getting down there,” a cop said. “You can go down and tie him up. But the kids gotta be got out first.”

  Dumski argued without success. The ladder was moved to the other side of the hole. Jim went up first. He was so weak and his hands were so slippery on the rungs that he had a hard time getting up. He had to drag himself out of the hole and onto the ground. The cops would not help him. Bob came up then and lay down, breathing hard, by his side. Old man Dumski, grumbling, went down the ladder after it had been moved back to the wall near the dog. Then the cops hauled up the rottweiler. When it tried to bite one of them before it was halfway out of the hole, it was dropped back into the mess. Dumski screamed at them that the splash had gotten him even filthier. Finally, the dog was hauled up again, the cops bitching about how disgustingly slimy the rope was. Dumski came up at the same time and pulled the dog off to the barn, where he hosed it off. The dog howled as the cold water struck it.

  “You two better go over there and get hosed off, too,” the cop called Pete said. “No way are you going to get into the squad car stinking like you do now.”