The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  If a sigh could echo off the walls, hers did. The change of venue from Syracuse must have cut off whatever psychic connection she and Brewster had, casting her adrift in a sea of loneliness.

  She rolled away from the window and closed her eyes, willing to repeat her subway nightmare or endure whatever mayhem waited in Sanctimonia just to spend a little more time with the man fate had surely thrown into her life for a reason. And even if destiny never schemed, even if her encounters with Brewster had been nothing more than two lucky spins on the random wheel of alternate realities, she still wanted him. He fit her like a glove.

  No. Far more than that. How could she give short shrift to their burgeoning relationship with a mere cliché? Even the most fleeting thought about the man quickened her breath.

  If recent “dream” events were what her mother had confirmed—true interactions rather than the isolated fantasies of her subconscious—she was willing to endure another round with the barbarians to reach Brewster again. Twice she’d been vulnerable and twice he’d given her what she needed, hospitality the first time and tenderness the next.

  Unfortunately, dreaming was no longer an option. Sunlight flooded the room, bouncing its rays from one wall to another, leaving no corner where she might scurry and hide. When she tried pulling the sheets over her head, asphyxiation picked up where nature left off.

  Her cabin retreat wasn’t getting off to a good start.

  She crawled out of bed and stood in the middle of the room, staring at nothing, until she summoned enough energy to shower and dress. The day stretched ahead as an agony of endless time to be endured until another night might come along, one that simply had to bring a visit to Brewster’s neighborhood.

  She headed into the only other room, a tight living space merging into a dining nook and kitchenette. Stale memories permeated the cabin and sprinkled its trappings like dust, coating the old couch and upholstered chairs, the throw rugs thinned by time, the vases filled with cat’s-eye marbles, and the magazines scattered about for rainy days. She turned toward the fridge, but a billeted army of half-finished rag dolls ambushed her from their makeshift barracks on the dining room table. The few finished ones scolded with silent demands for her to stuff and sew their friends together. She shuddered and kept going, found a yogurt, wolfed it down, and escaped outside.

  A gulp of crisp country air helped. She took another, spread her arms, gazed at a clear blue sky, and circled in a slow three-sixty. That did the trick. She got into her car and headed toward the nearest village with something resembling vigor. She wasn’t quite ready to paint the town, but she’d be damned if she’d let depression paint her.

  Carla spent the morning in the local towns, shopping for antiques and making small talk with gabby storekeepers, many of whom she’d known since early childhood.

  “Your head barely came over that counter the first time your parents brought you here.” The comment by an old woman selling leather goods triggered the fond memory of a gumball machine that used to stand sentinel in the doorway of her shop.

  Later, in a haberdashery, the bearded owner came up to her while she tried on a hat. “What happened to that fella on your arm last time?” His question summoned a twinge of longing for the missing fella’s recent replacement, Brewster.

  “The weather’s picking up tonight.” Almost every shopkeeper expressed that notion one way or another, stirring a tingle of anticipation each time. The dusting of snow in Syracuse the day before had ushered in a remarkably early brush of winter. Heavier squalls were expected to blow off the lake and across the plateau later in the evening when the wind shifted.

  She hoped so. A snowstorm’s ability to hide the world’s worries beneath a pristine blanket of white had always enchanted her.

  She enjoyed lunch in an old diner with a wonderful outdoorsy atmosphere, shopped some more—mostly just browsing—and later spent an hour or so hiking a trail half-hidden by fallen leaves near the cabin. She zoned into a fantasy of Brewster at her side. Her vapory breath became his, and the frozen twigs crackling beneath their feet comforted her.

  Just before twilight, Carla found her way back to the cabin. She took a stab at working on the dolls until the confinement of lonely spaces pressed down on her again, forcing her attention to a bookshelf for possible diversion. She went over and flipped through a few dog-eared paperbacks, but she’d read most of them during previous stays, and the others just didn’t pull her in. That didn’t leave much. The cabin had never seen a TV, having always been intended as a place where one might take a breather from modern life. In this case, she would have welcomed the distraction of a bad sitcom. She’d left her laptop home, another device that might have helped her while away the time, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with the thing after nearly being driven up a wall setting up the software for her silly webcam two nights earlier.

  The webcam.

  A question tickled the back of her mind but not loudly enough to make its concern be heard. She went back to the dolls and eventually got lost in her craft. The project kept her busy and worry free until the evening wore on to a late enough hour for a woman to go to bed without feeling guilty she had no life—not that such a notion should have concerned her in any event. She had more lives than she could handle!

  Carla retired to the bedroom and had a shivering fit once she undressed. The wood-burning stove struggled gallantly to heat the place, but sweaters and heavy blankets had always been the rule. She slipped a cotton nightgown on, added a terrycloth robe, got back into bed, pulled the covers to her chin, and gave herself up to the stream of random thoughts that invade a person’s mind when all other distractions have been removed.

  The webcam.

  Presuming she’d traveled a year forward in time to meet Brewster, how had they been able to see the live feed from her apartment? Did she somehow snatch the man from his date on the calendar and flip the pages backwards twelve months, or did her camera shoot its signal through a time warp? She puzzled over the mystery until she reached the pre-dozing stage when clarity makes one final burst before giving things up for the night. The answer came in a flash.

  The morning before, after being swept out of Brewster’s bedroom back into her own, Carla awakened to discover the power had gone out at 2:32 a.m. according to the clock on her nightstand and the microwave in the kitchen. The webcam went down along with everything else, and the last signal it sent must have frozen on her website. Evidently, that image hadn’t refreshed for a full year!

  Why would she leave the camera off for so long? On the other hand, why not? That stupid camera and its interactive website had been too sophisticated for her simple mind to handle, and she didn’t care to play with it ever again.

  But wait. Did fate now preclude her from turning the webcam on again if she did get the notion to try? The possibility sent a tingle of dread down her spine, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on why a simple metaphysical question might trigger any emotional response at all.

  Rather than spiral into a chasm of unanswerable questions and escalating anxiety, Carla steered her thoughts to a more whimsical mystery. Assuming she’d been bouncing out of her dreams and into one alternate universe after another, how did she always arrive fully clothed? She’d recently read a novel about a time traveler, and he always showed up naked wherever he went. And who was in charge of costuming? She usually came dressed for the occasion—a summer outfit in Manhattan, a peasant frock for Sanctimonia—but not always. In her two meetings with Brewster, she’d been suited up like some dark-haired slut Barbie not available on any toy store shelf she’d ever seen. She had to admit the brazenness had been titillating, but a vague sense of manipulation unnerved her as much as the earlier question about trying to change her fate.

  A draft hummed into the cabin in a spooky, Halloween sort of way. Carla’s mental meanderings had left her vulnerable to the kind of fear a dark, lonely atmosphere was great at creating. She cuddled the blankets around her like a cocoon and rolled towa
rd the wall, defeating any possible attempt by the window to trick her into mistaking the shadows of rustling tree branches for dreadful creatures of the night.

  * * *

  Once again, Carla knew she was dreaming. Her amazing, newfound omniscience thrilled her with its possible implications. She was building up to something. Perhaps the time would come when she could break the shackles of a forced script and overcome her body’s refusal to forge an alliance with her will. Maybe that time had come.

  But no, one of her legs moved, then the other, taking her the wrong way again, steering her down the despicable flight of stairs in the midst of bustling Manhattan. Frustration throbbed her temples from a corner of her brain so distant she might as well have been watching through the lens of a telescope. She repeated her death march into the forbidding cavern of the subway station. Once there, she engaged in the same brief verbal sparring match with the mystery man lurking behind her. The same train exploded into the station. She screamed and fell toward the tracks once again.

  A flash blinded her. And then, for the length of a breath, a sweet intake of country air, nothing more happened. The train’s roar still rang in her ears and its headlight brought spots to her eyes, but she’d cheated death again by escaping to a different place. Something had snatched her away, a force more powerful than she could imagine, preventing her from falling to the tracks and meeting an inevitable fate that still hadn’t occurred in all these many iterations of the same nightmare.

  A burst of inspiration eased her pounding heart and calmed her labored breath. For the first time, she considered whether the theme of her dream might be redemption rather than death. Perhaps if the reel ever played to the end, the man would latch on to her arm and save her from falling.

  Carla tried to keep hold of this amazing notion and redefine her plight as a mere test, a gauntlet of sorts with a frail spirit at one end and a stronger one at the other. Then, a second flash revealed the folly of any attempt to tie a tidy bow around her dark wanderings. Another existence announced itself—softly at first, through the scent and tickle of grass at her face—then harshly. A net raked the exposed skin of her arms and legs where the fabric of her frock had bunched. The cruel hemp tightened, and bright sun glared into her eyes from the wrong angle, coming straight at them rather than from above her head. She’d been taken down and now lay on her back—the defenseless, desperate, doomed, and, above all, disappointing prey of hunters who simply couldn’t be allowed to win. But they had.

  The two barbarians brought shade, bending over her to leer, guffaw, and even defile her with spittle before taking up the net and dragging her toward the woods. She screamed, hoping to alert those who needed to be spared, and then groaned, remembering her village lay well out of earshot.

  “Quiet.” One of the men kicked at her, and his partner joined in, grunting with the effort and bringing explosions of pain to her back and sides. She curled into a ball and tried to cover her face. A glimpse of her abandoned crossbow lying useless where she’d left it shamed her. She’d failed her charge of watching for invaders. They’d caught her by so swift a surprise she hadn’t had the opportunity to light a signal flare and stall them with arrows until reinforcements might arrive. Families lived in the village around the meadow’s bend…children. She prayed these savages had stolen through the woods on their own and didn’t serve as scouts for a larger raiding party.

  A final kick between her shoulder blades forced a choking gasp out of her. She writhed on the ground, helpless to fend off any additional blows.

  Thankfully, the barbarians must have vented their urge for violence. The beating stopped. They gathered the net and began dragging her again.

  Carla hadn’t lost her omniscience yet. She was able to distance herself from the terror and escape into a safe corner of her mind. A voice of logic rose above the clamor of pain and anxiety. She’d been whisked out of the subway to Sanctimonia, but her memory of another life, a calmer one in Upstate New York, lingered. At least for the moment, she maintained enough clarity to raise questions.

  Would she be aware of these multiple personalities if she were crazy?

  No, not according to any clinical literature she’d ever read. And she had her mother’s confirmation of duplicate worlds in the form of the talisman the woman had received in a dream.

  Okay then. Presuming sanity, how sound was the back-to-back nightmare theory as opposed to the notion cosmic wormholes had sprung into action, bouncing her from one time and place to another? The subway scene’s repetitive cycle bore the closest resemblance to a dream, but even that horrid play came choreographed with sights, sounds, scents, and touches far too sharp for her simple subconscious to conjure.

  Carla staked her money on wormholes. Her soul had hit the spin cycle again, beginning the circle from one reality to another, then a third, a fourth, and hopefully home. Better yet… Brewster’s engaging smile flashed through her mind. She wished herself into Northbrook and clicked the ruby-red slippers of hope. A dream might allow such a thing, enabling her to flee a desperate situation. On the other hand, a wormhole in charge of her wanderings and ultimate fate wouldn’t grant leave until it was ready. A wormhole would take its own sweet time.

  Grass gave way to rougher ground, announcing her cosmic puppet master’s decision to torture her a while longer, scraping and bruising her as the barbarians dragged her into the woods. “Please give me leave.”

  Her plea to the mysterious higher power torturing her soul elicited a laugh from one of the bastards who’d snared her. He must have imagined himself the target of her appeal, and her blood boiled at his audacity. She’d never humble herself before a barbarian. No. A prisoner should remain quiet and steadfast, steeling herself and clinging to anything dear for strength while keeping an eye out for the moment the tables might turn.

  Carla closed her eyes and summoned the shimmering mirage of Brewster. He touched her cheek but soon faded and dissolved, along with her omniscience, leaving her baffled by the brief lift of spirit. She knew only one reality. Her name was Maynya and she resided in Sanctimonia, body and soul, both of which would undoubtedly soon be ruined.

  “Help me get her out of this net, Phineas.” The barbarians had dragged her up against a tree.

  She looked across at a boot, then up at the heathen who wore it. His metal-plated vest reflected a hint of sunlight filtering in through the forest canopy. The man’s partner came over and leered down at her. Both of the monsters were heavily bearded and tattooed. They stank of sweat.

  She put up a fight, curling her hands into claws and hissing until one of them grabbed her by the hair and brought his face so close to hers their noses touched. “It’s all the same to me whether you go along with this or we nail you to one of these trees and leave you here to die.”

  Maynya guessed that wasn’t true. These men had been looking to steal a woman and sell her in the market, not kill her. But wrong decisions are often made in the heat of a moment, and her captors seemed fully capable of making one. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have beaten her in the meadow, potentially causing enough harm to reduce whatever value they hoped to get for her in the market. She needed to focus them on their greed. “I’m sorry,” she said. She tried to keep her tone soft. “I won’t fight anymore. Let’s not damage the prize.”

  “Do you hear that, Emil? This whore thinks she’s a prize.” The dark-haired speaker, Phineas, smirked and kicked at her again, sending a glancing blow to her side. Then the two invaders wrestled their net off her, reigniting the rope burns already marking her legs.

  The heathen named Emil, the shorter and lighter-haired one, clamped a thick hand onto Maynya’s throat. He squeezed until tears welled in her eyes, then shifted his grip to her chin and forced her up. She scrabbled to keep pace with him. Her back scraped against pine bark, ripping the upper part of her garment. Once he had her on her feet, he pinned her against the tree, choking the breath out of her. Phineas came up beside his partner and moved a rough hand between her legs
. Only the blessed but woefully thin fabric of her frock protected her from complete violation.

  One of the barbarians ripped her top down the middle. Her breasts came free. The fiend settled warm hands on them, bringing a chill to her soul.

  She had to think fast. “I’ll fetch a better coin if left a virgin,” she said.

  Phineas guffawed. “You have too many years in your eyes. Where I come from, even a girl of sixteen would be hard-pressed to make such a claim.”

  Maynya’s stomach turned at the suggestion these two men would take a girl that age and the awareness they most certainly had. “A proper woman saves herself for a husband,” she said.

  “And what does a proper whore do? We’ll spare your honor if you get on your knees and show us.”

  “I’m not a—”

  A slap brought stars and knocked Maynya to the ground. Both barbarians loosened the ropes binding their trousers. She fought her fury back as the bastards exposed their pitifully small mastheads. From somewhere within, a voice of compromise tried to save her. Take what’s offered and gain control over these creatures. If you bite, they’ll kill you.

  CHAPTER 19

  From agony to ecstasy to fear

  The barbarians shimmered, faded, and disappeared. The ground hardened beneath Carla’s knees, and the rays of sun filtering through the forest faded to near darkness, eased by a glow off to the left. She turned toward a streetlamp and choked back a sob. She’d fallen through the wormholes to a different place, a better place, the only place she wanted to be.

  Her heart remained two steps behind, pounding with rage, but she knew from experience how to steady herself. She rolled onto her side and took deep breaths, quick at first. Then slower, slower still, until she calmed so completely she could have drifted off. She stared through half-lidded eyes at a neighborhood in its own state of rest. Every window was dark, and not so much as a single porch light joined the streetlamp’s lonely battle against the midnight pall. The ghost-town atmosphere reminded her of the notion she’d had the last time she visited. Did anyone live behind those suburban walls, or was she gazing at the backdrop of a cosmic stage where only Brewster performed?