“I had a few boneless wings left over,” Marty explained, following Nate’s gaze. “Just took a wild guess you didn’t have time to snatch dog food out on your adventures. You hungry?”
Nate glanced uncertainly in the direction of the kitchen, where Kyle and Zach were laughing about something or another. “Think I’m fine.”
“I told them you had too much to drink and didn’t feel like talking,” Marty said, apparently reading his mind. “Here.”
Nate took the water and the pills and sat down on the edge of his bed, feeling overwhelmed.
“Marty… Thank you.”
Marty shrugged. “Just trying to be a good friend.”
Nate arched an eyebrow. “Good? Dude, you didn’t bat an eye when I showed up with a stolen dog spouting off about how we’d just been chased by, and I quote, ‘something big,’ in the park. I’d call that better than good.”
He shrugged again, smiling. “Guess I’m just dumb enough to trust that poor mug of yours. Though I wouldn’t mind hearing the whole story now, if you’re up for it.”
“Yeah…” Nate said, nodding slowly.
Marty sat down at his desk chair, waiting patiently until Nate gathered his thoughts, leaned forward, and started to tell his friend everything he dared of the Level 5 Shit Storm that had gone down that night.
Sleep didn’t come easily that night, and when it finally did, it was fraught with cold sweat nightmares of roaring monsters, and alternating snippets of Todd Mackleroy beating him senseless and taking Gwen and Emily both to Todd’s Pound Town, just for Nate’s stomach-churning delight.
The creepiest by far, though, were the feverish deliriums of cackling wizards watching Nate from the shadows. Once, he thought he’d actually awoken and pulled the blinds to find the ragged wizard from Zeno’s staring straight at him through his bedroom window, bushy brows furrowed with sinister intent. It was only when he’d remembered that his window was at least fifteen feet straight up from the driveway below, and that the strange old man would’ve had to have been hovering there in midair, watching him sleep, that Nate actually woke up from that one.
Bad as the ogre nightmares had been, Nate was pretty sure that last part was the mental image that was going to haunt him for good.
When he finally woke properly, bright sunshine was flitting through the blinds and radiating off the old cream colored walls, and the events of the previous night felt as if they must’ve simply been a few more in the long line of odd nightmares—nothing more than the confused byproducts of some magically bad combo of beer, pizza, spiked jungle juice, and maybe a few concussions.
The fluffy corgi that yawned, stretched, and padded up from the corner of his bed to come say good morning, though, reminded Nate that at least some of it had really happened. Which in turn reminded him that he needed to go find his phone. Or get a new one. And maybe find Gwen, too. And probably swear Marty to some kind of secrecy after everything he’d told him last night—which, while admittedly lacking in any details about strange vanishing wizards or ogre space invaders, had still been more than a little packed with the crazy sauce.
Lastly, he realized with a heavy heart, scratching Copernicus behind the ears, he needed to decide what to do with his stolen goods.
“Did that really happen, boy?” he asked quietly, dreading every part of the thought of taking the corgi back to Emily’s.
Copernicus yipped what might have been an affirmative. Nate was too distracted by Zach’s voice out in the kitchen to tell.
“Was that a dog?”
Nate made a shushing gesture at Copernicus, as if the corgi might actually understand, then rolled his eyes at the futility of it when Kyle’s footsteps came thudding down the hallway.
“Who has a dog?!”
“I swear I just heard a dog bark in his room,” Zach said.
“Naaate?” Kyle called.
“Don’t—” Nate started, just before the door flew open.
And there was Kyle, hands spread wide. “Nate, m’boy! How goes it? Strange tidings of…” He trailed off, frowning at Copernicus. “Huh. That is a dog.”
Zach poked his head around the corner. “That’s Emily Atherton’s dog.”
Kyle’s ears perked at that, and he glanced around the room as if half-expecting he might spot Emily herself hiding behind the dresser or under the desk.
“What the hell’d you get into last night, man?” he asked when his search proved inconclusive. His eyes widened as they settled back on Nate, like he was just properly seeing him for the first time. “What in seven hells happened to your face?”
Nate could only stare, his head whirling at once with everything and nothing, attempting to sift out some kind of workable answer. “Uhhh…”
“Hey, good, you’re awake,” came Marty’s voice from the hallway, a second before he poked his head in beside Zach’s and gave Nate a knowing look that shifted to surprise at something on Nate’s face, then quickly back to controlled composure. “Can I show you something outside real quick?”
That settled it. Marty really was the best.
“Uh, yeah,” Nate said, sitting up and crawling out of bed. “Yeah, can you guys just let me get changed real quick?”
Marty gave a thumbs up and vanished like a good guardian angel. Zach and Kyle stood there looking uncertainly between him and Copernicus for another few seconds.
“Did you get in a fight?” Zach asked.
“Uh…” Nate touched the dully aching side of his face and winced. It must’ve been a hell of a bruise. “No, I just kinda bit it at the party. Again. Long story.”
“Guys,” Marty chided from down the hall when neither of them looked particularly satisfied by the answer. They traded a look, then Kyle waved his hands in an excuse us fashion, and they shuffled off down the hallway.
Nate padded over—a surprisingly painful endeavor after last’s escapades—and closed the door on their muttered questions to Marty. He let out a deep breath and turned back to Copernicus. “We’re gonna have to work on your timing with the barks, boy.”
The corgi made a small whining noise, and tipped his snout upward in what Nate could’ve sworn was a defiant gesture. Nate just shook his head and went to grab some fresh jeans and socks. He paused when he saw the black-and-blue hammered-meat-slab reflection that was his face in the mirror.
“Great,” he murmured, reflecting that, at the very least, he could be sure someone had indeed pounded his face in last night. Not that that bit really mattered right then.
“Come on, boy,” he said, pulling on the pair of sneakers he’d been too rattled to remember to leave at the front door last night. “Get your shoes. Time to go for a walk.”
Copernicus, who Nate was sincerely beginning to suspect might in fact be fluent in human speak, gave an excited whine and did a happy little tap dance on the faux wood floor. It was only then Nate remembered he didn’t even have a collar for the dog. Or anything else.
Add that to the long list of things to take care of today. Move over, computations homework.
Finishing with his shoe laces, he reflexively turned to grab his phone, remembering even as he did that the device was gone, and probably lost forever.
He stopped halfway, chiding himself, then froze.
His phone—the same phone he’d last seen sailing through the dark night to smack into the back of a giant something’s head in an explosion of white rice—was sitting right there on the corner of his desk. With it was a small note, written in a script that somehow looked both elegant and shaky, like it’d been written by a drunken Shakespeare. Nate hardly cared about the odd handwriting. He was too busy gaping at the six words on that yellowed scrap of parchment.
The leaky pocket gets the rice.
9
To Get to the Other Side
Aching head still spinning, Nate pulled the front door closed behind him and turned to find Marty and Copernicus watching him from the chipped-paint concrete steps.
“You okay, buddy?” Marty aske
d. “You don’t look so good. In addition to the Mike Tyson Punch-Out look, I mean.”
Wincing a bit with the effort, Nate sat down beside his friend on the steps, decidedly not okay, and not sure what to say about it. Not sure what to make of any of it, other than to feebly hope he’d simply been far drunker than he’d realized the night before, or that someone was playing the mother of all pranks on him.
Because otherwise, all signs pointed to the fact that the strange old man from Zeno’s actually had visited Nate as he slept last night.
The leaky pocket gets the rice. Who else could have possibly left that note? It wasn’t something that could’ve been intuited by anyone who hadn’t been there. And if he’d recovered Nate’s phone post-ogre, then… This was insane. So insane that Nate couldn’t help wonder if maybe he hadn’t simply fabricated all of it in a drugged stupor, and written the note himself.
Maybe there’d never even been a ragged wizard to begin with. That would certainly explain how the guy had mysteriously vanished when Nate had tried to tell the doorman. That part alone was mentally suspect as shit—not to mention the walking bullshit alarm that was his recollection of the beast in the park. It was all inconceivable.
What was much easier to believe was that some douchebag had spiked the Iota Nu Nu juice, and that Nate had tripped balls, imagined a strange encounter in a bar, and then gone and thrown his phone at a spooky noise in the dark. And sure, there was Copernicus here to corroborate some of last night’s events, but just because he’d stolen a dog didn’t mean he’d actually seen any of what he thought he’d seen.
People had done crazier things on drugs, hadn’t they?
“Nate?”
He looked at Marty, a sick feeling in his gut.
“Dude, you look like you’re about to unravel.”
Unraveling. That was one way to put it. Nate couldn’t imagine he looked much less insane when Marty’s words reminded him of an old favorite song lyric, and a manic grin pulled at his lips.
“If you want to destroy my sweater…” Nate said, pulling the phone from his pocket and holding it up for Marty’s inspection.
“Oh!” Marty’s expression went from pleasantly surprised to confused. “You found it?”
“I guess I did.”
Marty frowned between Nate and the phone, clearly not missing the lack of relief in Nate’s voice. “Is it working?”
Nate thumbed the screen awake and showed Marty the list of texts and calls and the other various notifications he’d missed throughout last night.
“Good as new,” he said quietly.
“Well that’s… good,” Marty said, still frowning.
Nate turned the phone display back to himself, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t just agree with his friend and leave it at that. He stared at Gwen’s name on the list of missed messages, wanting to open her text but all too aware of his brain doggedly pointing out that it didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with his emotional bullshit while it was worrying about the ragged man who’d apparently invaded their home last night—the ragged man he might well have fabricated, though the presence of the note in his pocket did seem to beg to differ.
Unless Balls Nate had happened to have eclectic calligraphy skills and a hidden ream of parchment stocked away somewhere, that was.
It was all too much. Too many questions. Too few hopes for answers.
Luckily, Copernicus’ bark yanked him free from his reveries before they could swallow him whole. The corgi was staring up at the pair of them from the base of the steps, tail wagging expectantly, having apparently grown bored with sniffing the bushes and reached his threshold for patiently waiting.
It was a perfect sunny October Saturday, that wagging tail said. A perfect day for a walk. Obviously. The leaves were even changing. How perfect could perfect get? And maybe the little guy had a point.
“I think I’m gonna go for a walk,” Nate said, tucking his phone away and standing up to a rousing crescendo from the Orchestra of Odd Aches and Pains.
“Yeah, I figured we both could, if you’re feeling up to it,” Marty said, looking off in the direction of the park. “Look around, see if we can find any signs of what happened last night, that sort of thing. Animal control was already packing up when I went and scoped it out this morning.”
That gave him a healthy jolt. Beaten and utterly bamboozled as he’d been last night, Nate had completely forgotten that Marty had mentioned calling the service after he’d finished with his less-than-complete retelling of the park stroll from hell.
“Did they, uh, find anything?”
Dead ogre, perhaps? Or maybe the droppings of one terrified college senior, right around home base?
Marty shook his head. “He said there was nothing unusual in the area. I didn’t see much either. Just some Gandalf-looking dude drinking on the bleachers at the crack of dawn.”
Marty might as well have pushed him down the steps.
“Uh…” Nate licked his lips, fumbling for words. “Actually, Marty, I… Would you mind if I went alone? I just, uh… I think I need a little time to get my head on straight.”
It might not be the best idea, charging off to find the ragged man at all, much less to do it alone, and as battered as he was, but Nate wasn’t really sure how else to play it if any single part of this madness was actually true.
Marty was eyeing him suspiciously. “You’re not, like, trying to keep me out of danger or something, are you? Because, if so…” He pointed to Nate’s professionally bruised face.
Nate shook his head, trying not to wince. “No, man. You said the coast is clear anyways, right? I just… Honestly, I just need some fresh air, and I need to think about what happened last night.”
Marty looked less than convinced. Nate doubted his friend had missed the way he’d reacted to the mention of the Gandalf-looking drunkard. But finally, Marty gave a reluctant nod.
“Okay, man. Just call if you need anything?”
Nate patted the pocket where his inexplicably restored phone was tucked away. “Will do. Thanks, buddy.”
Copernicus fell into happy step beside Nate as he descended the steps and set off across the street toward Hamilton, doing his best to keep his pace casual for Marty’s watching eyes, wondering with each step if he shouldn’t turn around and call his best friend in for backup. He didn’t know. None of this made any sense at all.
He stuck his hands in his hoodie pockets and marched on anyway, sure that, no matter what, he wasn’t going to be able to think about anything else until he’d at least seen that baseball field and confirmed for himself there wasn’t a giant dead ogre thing lying there.
No enormous alien carcass in sight.
Just a group of guys playing ultimate frisbee, and a handful of park-goers out for leisurely strolls—or, in one case, a heated game of fetch—with their loyal pooches. From the far corner of Atherton Street, beyond the lanes of zipping traffic, all appeared right with the world. A normal day in the park. Textbook, even.
Except for the old man on the bleachers.
He sat by the baseball field in his ragged gray robe, tipping back the last contents from a cup that Nate knew, even at that distance, was the same odd clay cup he’d seen in the man’s hand last night at Zeno’s.
It hadn’t all been in his head.
The ragged wizard was here. And as the wild-haired man set his cup down on the bleacher, Nate couldn’t push aside the feeling that the man was expecting him—that he could in fact feel Nate watching right that very moment.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, boy,” Nate muttered.
By way of reply, Copernicus touched a forepaw to Nate’s leg in what was either a sign for I’ve got your back, bro, or Please don’t make me cross this street on my own four paws.
Nate glanced back in the direction of the house, thinking again that he’d been a fool not to bring Marty along, and that he should probably just turn around right then and do his damnedest to forget any of this had ever happened.
But he couldn’t forget. Would never forget the terror of being run down by that hulking monstrosity. Or the uneasy feeling that, somehow, this strange old man was connected, and that he knew where to find Nate—knew how to break into his bedroom in the dead of night, for Christ’s sake.
No. He couldn’t turn away from this. He needed answers. And the last thing he wanted was to drag his friends into this. So, he scooped up Copernicus, checked both ways on Atherton, and set off across the street at a jog. Once they were safely to the park grass, he reluctantly set the corgi back down and continued on, Copernicus trotting faithfully by his side.
The ragged man didn’t turn as they approached, nor did he stir or even glance over as Nate rounded the bleachers. Nate paused, unsure how to proceed, wanting in part to start right in with the questions—to ask him who the hell he was, and what he wanted, and to embrace his inner Todd and not take “no” for an answer. But something about the man’s aura stayed Nate’s tongue.
Instead of demanding his answers, he cautiously mounted the bleachers, ascended a few rows, and stood facing the ragged wizard, instinctively waiting for the man to speak.
After an uncomfortably long stretch, the man stirred, his dark eyes returning from somewhere far away to fix on Nate from beneath his bushy, dirty gray mane.
“Are you ready then, lad?”
Nate frowned. “Ready for what?”
As soon as the words left his mouth, it was like a stopper had been pulled.
“Were you in my house last night?” he pressed on, unable to stop. “Were you here in the park? Were you—was that thing… What was that thing? And what do you want with me?”
The ragged man, looking either grim or bored, only gestured for Nate to sit. Reluctantly, Nate did. Copernicus posted up beside him, a silent totem of support. Their robed companion blew out a long sigh. Even from several feet away, Nate could smell the stale alcohol on his breath, yet the man’s eyes were sharp and clear enough as they studied the distant tree line.
The Eighth Excalibur Page 8