by Jack Dann
“Charlotte’s Web?” ,
“Dad, that’s for kids.”
So they watched The Dirty Dozen and when they threw those grenades down the shafts and the German officers in the bomb shelter were panicking and screaming, Jared felt a moment of breathless panic himself, but then he thought: At least the good guys were doing something, even though some of them were going to get killed in the process, even though some of them would never get home.
They were saving the world, maybe. Or helping to. We’re just saving Mom.
But to Jared, that was better than saving the world. He didn’t care about the world.
Saturday morning, Jared was up before the sun. He wanted to wake Dad, but he waited. And not long. Dad usually slept in on Saturday, but today he joined Jared at the breakfast table, pouring out Cheerios and stirring a couple of spoonfuls of brown sugar into the bowl and eating them, all without milk.
“That’s so gross,” said Jared.
“Better than watching the milk turn grey with sugar,” said Dad.
“Do we have to wait till, like, noon or something?” asked Jared.
“There’s a lot of oat bran in this stuff,” said Dad. “I think I’ll need to use the bathroom before I can go anywhere or do anything.”
“Yeah, and you’ll read a whole book in there.”
“Reading, the best laxative.” Dad said it in his Lee Marvin voice, which was a pretty good imitation.
“You might as well stick a plug in it,” said Jared. “When you’re reading, you never let fly.”
“I can’t believe you’re speaking of the bodily functions of your father.” This time Dad was doing Charles Bronson. It was nothing like Charles Bronson, actually, but somehow Jared knew that was who he was doing.
“We’re giving an interstellar worm an enema today, Dad. I got rectums on my mind.”
And Dad went into Groucho Marx. “I don’t let anybody say my kid’s got poop for brains.”
“Poop?” said Jared.
“Got to get used to saying ‘poop,’ now that Mom’s coming back.”
“Is she, Dad?”
Dad’s Groucho Marx grin didn’t fade, but his voice came out like W. C. Fields. “I’ll never he to you, my boy. Now finish your breakfast, you bother me. ”
“That’s all you got? Lee Marvin, a half-assed Charles Bronson, Groucho Marx, and W.C. Fields?”
“I did three others that you didn’t catch,” said Dad. “And besides, I had Cheerios in my mouth.”
“Oh!” said Jared, doing the old family joke associated with Cheerios. “O-o-o-o-oh.”
Which would have been the cue for Dad to launch into singing “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oh’s,” but instead he reached across the table and covered Jared’s hand with his own. “I can’t really eat much this morning, can you?”
“You see anything in my mouth?” said Jared.
Dad pushed back from the table. “I’ve gotta see a man about a hose.”
Jared followed him out into the backyard. Dad unlocked the back shed and set down the clothes he had brought for Todd and Mom, while Jared unspooled the hose and dragged it across the lawn. Of course it got heavier the farther he pulled it, but it didn’t slow him down. Quite the contrary—by the time he reached the shed, he was running.
“Careful,” said Dad. “Let’s do this methodically and get it right.”
Jared watched as Dad found the gap in the air, following the pictures taped to the wall. Then he pushed it in, and kept pushing, and pushing. “Get me more slack, Jared.”
Jared went back to the hose reel and pulled it until it was stretched tight. He could seezDad back in the shed, pushing more and more of it into the hole in the air, so it looked for all the world as if it were disappearing.
“It’s pushing back,” said Dad. “It wants to get it out.”
“Wouldn’t yow?” asked Jared.
“Turn the water on. Full blast. Every bit of pressure the city can give us.”
Jared turned the handle, turned and turned until it couldn’t open any more. He could see Dad bracing his back against the shelves, pushing forward against the worm’s efforts to expel the enema.
Jared walked closer to the shed, to ask whether any water was coming back or whether it was all getting through, when he saw the elf walking toward him across the back lawn.
Careful not to speed up, Jared continued toward the shed, but instead of talking or even letting himself look at what Dad was doing, he closed the door, loudly saying as he did so, “Hello, Eggo. Why didn’t you tell me that was your name?” With any luck, Dad would realize that they didn’t exactly want the elf to know what they were doing.
“You never asked,” said Eggo. He headed toward the sideyard fence beyond where the worm’s anus used to be and started stripping off his clothes in order to stow them back in the box. Only when he was down to his pants did he turn around and look at Jared, who was now leaning against the corner of the house, looking as nonchalant as he could.
“What are you watching?” he asked.
“All these years I see you, you never fell me anything. One time you talk to Todd, and suddenly you’re full of information.”
“You were a baby.”
“I was, but I’m not now.”
“So . . . what do you want to know?” Eggo returned to stripping off his pants. He was buck naked now, stuffing everything into a plastic bag before putting it into the box.
“When are you going to get Mom back to us?”
“I didn’t take your mommy away from you,” said Eggo. “It’s none of my business.”
“You’re like half a worm,” said Jared. “All asshole, no heart.”
Eggo reburied the box and stood back up. By Jared’s rough guess, it had been about five minutes since he started the water running. That was three hundred seconds. So in the other place, it wouldn’t even have been running for two full seconds yet.
Eggo was looking at him. “What are you doing?”
“Math in my head,” said Jared.
“I mean with the hose. The water’s on, I can hear it, but you’ve got it flowing into the shed.”
“Through the shed and out the back window,” said Jared. “It’s the only way to reach the very back of the yard without buying a longer hose.”
But Eggo wasn’t buying it. He was striding toward the shed now.
“It’s none of your business!” cried Jared. “Haven’t you done enough? Why don’t you leave us alone!”
Eggo turned back to face Jared. “Everything’s my business if I decide it is, ' he said. “What are you hiding in there?”
The elf glanced toward the place where there had once been a shimmering slit in the air. He walked toward it, searching. He waved his hand. “What have you done?” he said. He whirled and faced Jared. “You moved it, you little moron! Do you know what you’ve done? I’ll never find it! It’ll take months!”
“Good!” shouted Jared. “I hope it takes you years, because that’ll be centuries here, and I won’t ever have to see your ugly face and your ugly butt again!”
The elf’s face was turning red as he strode toward Jared. His hand rose up as if to smack at him—to swat him into oblivion, as if he were a fly. But then the elf looked at the hose again and then at the shed and then he took off running straight toward it.
“Dad!” shouted Jared. “Don’t try to fight him! He’ll kill you!”
Eggo flung the door of the shed open—flung it so hard that it ripped from the hinges and sailed like a Frisbee halfway across the lawn. Jared saw that Dad must have understood what was happening, because instead of holding on to the hose, he was gripping the chain saw and pulling the cord. It roared to life just as Eggo reached for the hose.
“Just how dense do you think you are!” shouted Dad.
Eggo backed off a little, but he was holding the hose now, pulling it out. “You moved it! You can’t move it!”
“We already did,” yelled Jared, “and yo
u’ll never get it back exactly where it was!”
“You’re drowning my city!” shouted the elf.
“You kept my mother there when you could have brought her home!”
By now Dad had stepped out of the shed and was approaching Eggo. “Drop the hose!” he yelled. “I don’t want to see how much damage this can do!”
Eggo roared and smacked at the chain saw with his left hand. It flew out of Dad’s grasp, staggering him; but the elf came away from the encounter with his hand bleeding. No, spurting blood.
The deadman switch on the chain saw shut it down, now that nobody was gripping the handle. The sudden silence was deafening.
“What have you done to me!” wailed Eggo.
“You want me to call 911?” asked Jared.
“Drop the hose,” said Dad.
“I’ll bleed to death!”
“Drop the hose.” Dad was picking up the chain saw again.
Eggo stamped his left foot repeatedly, spinning him in a circle as he howled and gripped his bleeding hand. It was as if he was screwing his right foot into the ground, and indeed it was already in the lawn up to the knee.
“You are Rumpelstiltskin, you little jerk,” Jared said. “You told Todd that you weren’t!”
“We’re going to get them home, and you’re not going to stop us,” said Dad. The chain saw roared to life.
With a final howl, Eggo pulled his right foot out of the ground and ran into the house. Not through any of the doors—he leapt for the wall and his body hurtled through, leaving torn vinyl siding and broken studs and peeled-back drywall behind him. Jared ran to the gap in the wall in time to see Eggo dive through the worm’s mouth.
He turned around to see Dad already back at the shed, pushing the hose back up into the worm’s anus.
“What if he hurts them?” asked Jared. “He’s gone back and he’ll find them.”
“We can only hope they’re already on their way.”
“The water only started a couple of seconds ago, in that world.”
“Then I hope they aren’t wasting any time,” said Dad. “What else can we do?”
Once Mom understood what Todd was talking about, he began to ask her questions. She didn’t know any answers. “If I try to go anywhere, either the wind starts lifting me or people see me and start throwing rocks or . . . screaming, or calling for other people to come and look and . . . I’m naked.”
Todd knew perfectly well she was naked. But to his surprise, it didn’t feel like she was naked. She was so misty that it was as if she were wearing the leaves behind her—he saw them better than he saw her.
“But you have to know where he comes from.”
“He comes from the same hole in the air that we came through,” said Mom.
“Then where does he go?”
“How can I tell, from here in the leaves?”
“I mean where does he head? Which way? Uphill? Downhill?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Downhill. I just didn’t—I can’t think. It’s like my mind is fading along with my body. I think bits of me have been blowing away. I’m being shredded. I’m leaving pieces of me in the tree. Todd, I don’t even know if I can go home. Maybe if I get back there I’ll die.”
“You’ll have a better chance there than here. Can you hold my hand?”
“I can’t hold anything,” she said.
But when he held out his hand to her, she took it. And he felt her hand in his. He could hold on to her. Better than he could hold on to the branches, because she wasn’t so hard and unyielding; he didn’t feel as if his body would tear itself apart if he held her too tightly. “Stay with me,” he said. “We’ll try to get closer to the mouth of the worm. If he goes this way, the mouth has got to be down here, too.”
The faster they moved, the more control they had, or so it felt. Their feet touched the ground very lightly, but they didn’t bounce up and into the air. With the wind coming from their right side, they had to keep correcting in order to move in the direction they intended. But soon enough they emerged from the trees and there was a town.
It looked vaguely oriental, mostly because of the shape of the roofs on the nearest houses. The colors of the walls had once been garish, but they were faded, the paint peeling. But there wasn’t time to study the architecture. People were milling around in the streets, jabbering at each other. They didn’t speak a language Todd had ever heard before. How could they? Only Eggo had had a chance to learn English. There’d be no talking with these people. No asking them for directions.
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. Because now he could see what they were all excited about. The street was covered with a drift of water. Not puddles, a drift—thicker than a mist or a fog, but not rushing anywhere, just hovering.
It was the trickle of water they had sent through the hose when they first tested it up the worm’s anus. Only here, it was a lot of water.
Which meant that the original position of the worm’s mouth wasn’t far from here.
“Come on,” he said to Mom, dragging her around the crowd.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s water from our world, isn’t it? Todd, I’m so thirsty.”
He couldn’t force her to stay with him, though he thought it was a bad idea for her to head toward the people. He needn’t have worried, though. They were apparently so freaked out by the water that it made them jumpy. When Mom started drifting through the crowd, they parted for her, and some of them screamed and ran away. She knelt in the pool of water and drank.
Todd could watch her gain solidity as she did. Apparently the lack of water had desiccated her, faded her. Now she was more solid, and more naked, but still it didn’t bother him. It was like seeing a baby naked. There was a job to do, no time to worry about embarrassment.
He drifted toward her; but the moment he touched the water, it felt familiar and real—and cold and wet. He slogged through the water to where she knelt. “Let’s go now, Mom, before they start figuring out just how solid we aren’t.”
She drank just a little more, then took his hand. They made better progress now that she could find a little better purchase for her feet, more strength in her legs. At the same time, being more solid made her more vulnerable to the wind.
They found the source of the water—a house. The people had broken down the door, apparently to find out what was causing the mini-flood, or perhaps to make sure no one was inside, drowning.
Todd also saw that the water trailed off in another direction.
“When we moved it, the hose stayed with it for a few steps. I think the new location must be in that direction.”
He pulled her along. She stopped and drank again. “I need that water,” she said. “Don’t leave it behind.”
“There’s plenty of water where we’re going,” he said.
“But you don’t know where we’re going..Just. . . this direction.”
“Mom, we only took a few steps before the hose fell out, and here it’s hundreds of yards. So the final location could be a mile farther on. We’ve got to keep moving.”
A crowd of people, many of them children, were following them as they drifted out of the water and on up the streets. Todd tried to figure what a straight line would be, extending in the direction that the thick low fog had trailed off, but the streets weren’t cooperating. He kept trying to double back to get in the line, but nothing led in the right direction.
Until finally they reached a street with a high fence enclosing a park, with green lawns and stately trees. He wasn’t sure exactly where the line from the hose-water would have intersected with the park, but he knew it was bound to reach it somewhere. Quite possibly the real flood, when it came, would pour out in this park, which would make it much easier to see.
As if on command, there was a loud crashing sound not very far off, and when Todd looked in that direction, he saw a wall of water rushing toward them—toward the whole length of the fence.
There was no point in trying to face it
head-on. They had to get around the flood, behind it. And for now, the only way to do that without having to slog through water was to get above it.
He led his mother up into one of the trees. But in this wide open park, they couldn’t climb hand over hand, tree to tree. There were wide gaps, and all they could do was leap, hoping they wouldn’t get taken by the wind and drift away.
It was slow going, but they made steady progress, and Todd did a fair job of estimating how the breeze would influence their flight. It was kind of exhilarating, to leap out into the air and drift only slowly downward, over the rushing water.
And as they moved around the water, they found that it was flowing out of a huge house. The crashing sound had been the stone front wall of the house giving way, crumbling from the pressure of the thick fog. Which seemed absurd. Except that the water would be coming so hard and fast out of the hose on this end that it wasn’t water pressure that knocked down the wall, it was the explosive force of air pressure.
He heard shouting behind him, which wasn’t a surprise; but it was growing closer, which was. Most of the people had fled from the flood when they saw it coming at them through the wrought-iron fence. But now there was someone plunging ahead through the water. It was easier for him than it would have been for Todd or Mom—the water was only fog to him, though it was a very thick one.
It was Eggo. And he was aiming something at them.
A gun. He had a gun.
Eggo fired. The bullet passed through Todd. He felt it, but not as pain. More like a belch, a rumbling. But that didn’t mean the damage wasn’t real.
“Why are you doing this!” shouted Todd.
He could see that Eggo didn’t hear him. “Keep going toward that house, Mother.” He let go of her hand. “Go! Don’t make all this a wasted effort!”
She went, looking at him once in anguish but plunging ahead.
Todd headed straight toward Eggo, who was reloading the thing. It was a muzzle-loader. He only had a musket. Thank heaven he hadn’t figured out how to make an AK-47.
“Don’t be stupid!” shouted Todd. “Stop it!”
Now the elf heard him. “No!” he shouted. “You wrecked everything! ”
“The sooner we get back home, the sooner this flood will stop! ”