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

  Jim by now really did not care about anybody except himself. Sam was still in a trance, enthralled by the barn, the glittering Emerald City of Oz in his mind. The squad car had driven through the gate to a place near the barn. Its headlights shone on the huddled-together and forlorn-looking girls. Evidently Steve had escaped, and Gizzy had stayed in the woods.

  Pete went to the squad car and called for backup. His partner, Bill, started Bob and Jim toward the barn so that they could be hosed off. Before they got there, the dog attacked its owner. The events of the night, plus its drug-dazed condition and its resentment of the cold water, had confused it. Or perhaps it knew that it was attacking Dumski. It may never have liked the old man.

  The dog knocked Dumski over and fastened its teeth into his left arm. Dumski screamed as the jaws clamped down and its teeth struck bone and blood soaked through the sleeve of his jacket. The cops could not get the dog to let loose. They shot it dead. That made Dumski furious. He attacked the cops, who had to handcuff him before arresting him. Then Pete called for an ambulance.

  Afterward, Bill hosed off Jim and Bob. They yelled with the shock and danced around, begging for mercy. None was given. Then Pete went inside the barn and got some towels for the boys so they could try to dry themselves off.

  “We’ll get pneumonia!” Pellegrino cried.

  “You’re lucky if that’s all you get,” Pete said.

  CHAPTER 12

  “A hell of a mess you got us into,” Eric Grimson said.

  His mother murmured, “Jim, how could you?”

  He restrained his desire to say, “It was easy.”

  He was wrapped in a blanket and on the back seat of their 1968 Chevy. He had not stopped shivering since the cop had doused him with cold water. His father, out of pure meanness, had refused to turn the car heater on. Though Jim had sloshed water around in his mouth in the courthouse and had spit it out a dozen times, his mouth tasted of human excrement. Well, why not? He’d eaten shit all his life.

  “It’s a lucky thing for you that Sam’s uncle is the night judge,” Eric growled. “Otherwise, you’d be in jail.”

  “Juvenile hall,” Jim said.

  “What the hell’s the difference?” Eric said loudly, gripping the steering wheel as if he wanted to tear it off the column. “It’s just a station on the way to prison, anyway! I’ve known since you was twelve years old you was hell-bound for prison!”

  “Please, Eric,” Eva Grimson said softly. “Don’t say that.”

  The car traveled through deserted streets and by dark houses. Halloween had long been over, and everybody had gone to bed even though, in this area, very few had work to go to in the morning. The time from when the cops had appeared at Dumski’s to his release in his parents’ custody had been long. After being frisked, he and his friends had had to walk a line to test their sobriety. Afterward, they were tested with a breath analyzer. All flunked. Two more tests which I couldn’t pass, Jim had thought. Their rights were read, and they were handcuffed, jammed into two squad cars, and driven downtown. They had been in a holding cell for an hour before being marched to a room where blood and urine samples were taken. Jim’s brain was fogbound but not so much that he did not realize that traces of the drugs would still be in his bloodstream.

  An hour later, they were again taken to a holding room, and a half hour after that, they were in night court. The culprits’ parents were also there, except for Sandy Melton’s father, who was out of town. Jim’s mother was weeping; tears dripped on her rosary beads as she told them. Eric looked hung over and very furious.

  Sam’s uncle was an old shriveled-up bald man with a long face and a big beaked nose with many broken veins. Those features and his long skinny neck, his whiskey-shot red eyes, his bald head, the black gown, and his hunched-over shoulders made him look like a vulture. However, Jim thought, the judge must have felt more like a canary who sees a cat. His nephew Sam was facing some serious charges: trespassing, destruction of private property, drunk and disorderly, under the influence of drugs, and breaking the curfew law. He was possibly involved in injury causing loss of a limb and, if Dumski died, aiding and abetting manslaughter. He could be charged with contributing to the dog’s death. Dumski was in the hospital, and he might lose his arm.

  These were not issues to take lightly. Judge Wyzak couldn’t let his nephew and the other long-haired freaks off easy. But if he dealt with them as they really deserved, his sister-in-law, Mrs. Wyzak, would wring his neck. Not figuratively but literally.

  The alleged culprits were minors, and that gave the judge a way out for the time being. He lectured them severely and then released them into the custody of their parents.

  At least, Jim thought, possession of drugs and alcohol was not one of the charges. The girls had gotten rid of the bottles and capsules as soon as they heard the siren in the far distance. Sandy Melton had frisked Sam Wyzak, removed his pills, and tossed them into the woods. Jim had never had any drugs in his pockets, and Bob Pellegrino had dropped his while he was still in the outhouse hole.

  After the judge dismissed them, Sam’s mother had grabbed him by his ear and pulled him along behind her while he whined and windmilled one arm. Jim thought that she must think she was Aunt Polly and Sam was Tom Sawyer, for God’s sake!

  The car pulled up into the oil-stained gravel driveway by the house. “Home, sweet home,” Eric Grimson said. “Ain’t it something? An out-of-work crane operator, a Holy Roller Catholic cleaning houses for rich people, and a hippie loser who’s stupid and crazy. I could stand the stupid if he wasn’t crazy, and I could stand the crazy if he wasn’t stupid. Now he’s gonna be a jailbird. His bimbo sister’s got two bastard kids whose father she can’t name, and she’s living in sin with a man old enough to be her father, a nut who makes a living reading palms and tea leaves and doing astrology charts! We’re living in a shack that’s gonna drop all the way to China one of these days, not that I give a damn! Where did I go wrong, God?”

  “God doesn’t care for us pissants,” Jim said as he got out of the car. He slammed the door hard.

  His mother said, “Jim! Don’t blaspheme. Things are bad enough.”

  “He’s got a big foul stupid mouth, your son has!” Eric yelled. “Why in hell couldn’t he have been one of your miscarriages?”

  “Please, Eric,” Eva said softly, “you’ll wake up the neighbors.”

  Eric howled like a wolf. Then he said, “Wake ’em up? Who cares? They’re gonna read about your son in the papers anyway, know all about us, as if they didn’t already know! Who cares?”

  Jim opened the side door. His father began chewing out Eva because she was supposed to have made sure that all the windows and doors were shut and locked. Jim turned in the doorway and said, “What’s the difference? What do we have that’s worth stealing?”

  He went into the house, but his father stormed in after him and grabbed him by the shoulder. Jim lunged ahead and ran up the stairway to the hallway, leaving the blanket in his father’s hand.

  Eric shouted after him, “I might have something worth stealing if it wasn’t for you and your mother!”

  Jim ran into the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it. He brushed his teeth with the salt and baking powder from the rusty cabinet above the bowl. Then he cleaned his fingernails and shucked off his clothes, which were still wet. While his father stood in the hall by the door and yelled, now and then thumping his fist on the door, Jim showered. It took a long time for him to feel clean.

  He did not turn off the water until it suddenly became cold. That would anger his father even more. He was always stressing the need to conserve on water and gas. At the same time, of course, he was always yelling at Jim to take a bath.

  Despite the cooling-off effects of the shower, Jim still felt hot inside himself. If his anger could be seen, he’d be glowing in the dark. Everything had gone wrong today, like it did most days. Gone wrong? That was an understatement. It had been one humiliation after another. Shame after shame, f
ailure after failure.

  He stood in the fog-filled and warm room for a minute or so. As soon as he left it, he’d have his father on his neck. And, sure as cause and effect, he’d hit his father whether or not his father struck him first. The red cloud building up in him made that certain.

  Reluctantly, he unlocked and opened the door. Eric Grimson was not there. Voices came from the kitchen along with the odor of coffee. His father’s tones were subdued, and his mother’s were barely audible. Maybe the old man had quieted down, though that did not seem likely. The furnace came on, its fans drowning out the kitchen noises. The heat struck Jim’s legs. He was grateful for that since he had started shivering again as soon as he had left the muggy bathroom.

  Naked, his damp clothes draped over his arm, he walked quickly to his room. He closed the door behind him, dropped the clothes on the floor, and went to the closet. Just as he reached into it to take his pajamas from a hook, he was startled by a loud bang. Whirling, he saw his father charging through the doorway. Eric’s face was red, and his hands were clenched. Whatever had gone on in the kitchen, it had not pacified him.

  “Get your clothes on!” he howled. “Don’t you have no decency!”

  The unfairness of the insult—after all, his father had burst in without asking permission—squeezed the anger in Jim down to a tiny hot ball. A little more heat, a little more pressure, and it would go up, out, and away. But it would take Eric Grimson with it.

  “From now on, things’re gonna be different!” his father yelled. “You’ll either shape up or ship out, that’s for sure! First thing …!”

  He looked wildly around, then reached into his back pocket and brought out a jackknife. He opened the blade and began slashing at the posters of the rock groups and stars. Before Jim could yell in protest, he saw the Hot Water Eskimos being cut into strips. Then Eric attacked the poster of Keith Moon.

  “All this shit’s gotta go!” Eric screamed.

  The red-hot ball exploded in white flame.

  Shrieking, Jim jumped at his father, clamped a hand on his left shoulder, spun him around, and struck him in the nose. Eric Grimson staggered back against the poster, blood running from his nostrils. Jim hit him in the shoulder with his fist though he had meant to strike his chin. Eric dropped the knife and closed with his son. Face to face, wrapped in each other’s arms, grunting, wheezing, they swayed back and forth.

  “I’ll kill you!” Eric screeched.

  Jim screamed and tore himself loose. He leaped back. He was panting, his heart beating so hard that it seemed to him that it would tear itself apart. Then, piercing the drumming of blood in his ears, came the clicking of a lock. So loud was the sound, the lock had to be huge. The key turning in it also had to be gigantic. A groaning followed the clicking. It sounded like a very heavy door with rusty hinges being opened.

  The floor dropped, the walls tilted, and books tumbled out from the shelves. Jim and his father fell on the floor. They got up quickly, looking at each other with wide eyes. Plaster dust fell on them along with chunks. Jim saw them bounce off his father. The white dust covered Eric’s head and shoulders and powdered the two streams of blood trickling down from his nose.

  Eva Grimson screamed in the kitchen.

  “Oh, my god!” Eric howled. “This is it!”

  The house lurched again.

  “Get out! Get out!” Eric shouted. He whirled and ran out of the room. He had to lean to one side to compensate for the slope of the floor. Even so, his shoulder struck the side of the doorway.

  Jim began to laugh, and he kept on laughing. The house was going to fall deep into the earth. Maybe his parents would get out in time, maybe not. Whatever happened, it would come from fate, from the Norns. Justice and fairness had nothing to do with it. And he would stay here and go down with the ship. Let the earth gulp him down. It was better so, and it was also laughable.

  Jim did not remember anything after that. He was told that his parents did get out of the house and scrambled across the front porch, which had been torn away from the main structure, and across the gapful yard and onto the sidewalk. But they then had to go across the street because the cement they were standing on was shoved even more upwards and made larger fissures. The house lurched and sank another foot. The neighbors on both sides of the Grimsons’ house ran screaming from their leaning houses. The whole neighborhood came alive, lights going on, people coming out on the front porches and crying out questions, children being bundled up and put in cars for a quick getaway.

  Sirens wailed in the distance as the police cars and the fire engines raced toward Cornplanter Street.

  Eva Grimson began crying out that someone should go into the house and rescue her son. No one volunteered. Eric insisted, over and over, that Jim was just delayed because he was putting on his clothes. Eva said that Jim must be hurt, and he was probably trapped.

  Just as the squad cars and fire engines and ambulances pulled up, Eva ran toward the house. Eric and two neighbors grabbed her and held her while she screamed and struck at them and begged them to let her go.

  “You’re a coward!” she said to Eric. “If you were a real man, you’d go after Jim!”

  The lights had gone out in the house; the power lines had been torn from the house. Suddenly, two small lights appeared in the doorway. They were candles, one in each of Jim’s hands, and they shed illumination on his wild face and naked body. He could not be seen below the knees, however. The house leaned so much that he had to stand on a floor which dropped steeply away from the bottom of the twisted doorway.

  Jim shouted something unintelligible to the people across the street. He jumped up and down, waving the candles, which he had picked up from the floor in the room his mother used as a shrine.

  Seeing these, Eva began struggling even harder. She shrieked, “The candles! The candles! They’ll set the house on fire! He’ll burn, burn, oh, my God, he’ll burn to death!”

  The cops and the firefighters had by then cleared away most of the crowd so that the engines could be moved closer to the house. A fire department lieutenant and a police captain questioned the Grimsons but got only hysterical and confused answers. They could, however, see Jim in the doorway.

  “Nuts, completely off his rocker,” the captain said.

  Shortly after this, another light shone in the house.

  “Fire! Fire! For God’s sake, save him!” Eva cried.

  That must have deepened her agony. The candles she had lit for the Holy Family and the saints were going to cause Jim’s death and put him for eternity in the greater flames.

  The firefighters had discovered by then that the pipe to the nearest fire hydrant had been broken by the shifting of the earth. They brought the water truck up close and attached their hoses to it. Meanwhile, the captain and the lieutenant had ventured as close as they dared. Using his bullhorn, the policeman was urging Jim to get out of the house.

  The earth shrugged beneath the crowd. The beams in the house snapped with loud reports. The house slid down and tilted even more. Jim disappeared from the doorway, dropped down and backward. The spectators ran away.

  “Son of a bitch!” the lieutenant said. “Someone’s got to go in after the kid!” He looked around for likely volunteers.

  The flames were getting big on the side of the house nearest the driveway. Smoke poured out and was caught by the wind. The house next to it was going to catch fire soon unless the hoses could stop it. And, since the gas lines to the house must be broken, the fire could cause a hell of an explosion.

  The lieutenant could not see Jim Grimson, but it was evident that he was throwing objects through the doorway. The spotlights from the trucks showed him, a few seconds later, that these were statuettes of the saints and the Holy Family. Most of them were broken.

  “The kid’s crazy as a loon!” the captain said.

  It was then that the name of Jim Grimson sparked the captain’s recall. Pete and Bill had told him about the stoned-out and drunked-up youths who’d pushe
d over old man Dumski’s outhouse and about two of them falling into the crap. Until now, the captain had failed to connect the hilarious incident with the people who owned this house.

  “The kid’s hopped up,” he told the lieutenant. “I heard all about him earlier tonight. Maybe we should forget about him. He’ll be better off if he doesn’t make it.”

  The lieutenant looked reproachfully at the captain. He did not say anything, but he got what he was thinking across to the captain. No matter how worthless or vicious the subject was, he, she, or it had to be saved.

  “Just kidding,” the captain said. “But I’d sure hate to lose good men.”

  The lieutenant ordered that ropes and a ladder be brought out. He asked for volunteers and got four, from whom he picked two. One was a black fireman, George Dillard, Gizzy’s father. He had long ago given up his hopes that his son would be a lawyer, and he knew Jim Grimson only too well. But he was brave. Moreover, if he rescued the kid, he would gain another handhold on the rung of the ladder to higher rank and pay. God knows he needed it, and if he had to put his ass in a sling to get it, he would. Black firepersons were not promoted very often despite affirmative action and equal opportunity quotas and all that. Not in Belmont City, anyway.

  The man who accompanied him was a wild man of Irish descent who was eager to be in on the rescue attempt. The more dangerous it was, the better he liked it.

  Ropes tied around their waists, the loose ends held by other men and two women, Dillard and Boyd moved across the broken yard. Their smoke masks made them look like two enormous insectine St. Francises on an errand of mercy. They could see that the insane youth inside the house was still throwing objects out through the front doorway—a coffee pot, coffee cups and drinking glasses, a skillet, table cutlery, a portable radio, albums of records, clothes, and photos.

  By now, the flames were leaping from the side of the house, though not from that part which was below ground. The hoses had been turned on it but, so far, without avail.