by Jim Stein
Though it took Pina a long time to say her goodbyes, the time to leave came all too soon. I ruffled that big, blocky head one last time, shook hands with Dwain and Dawa, and left the third world behind.
I woke late the next morning with legs aching from playing fetch. Sun streamed through the clouds overhead, cooking moisture off the siding and what was left of the porch. After months of desert climate, all of us had trouble coping with the humidity. Today promised to be oppressive.
When I saw it was nearly noon, I dressed and rushed out to the vortex. The normal entourage of watchers had dwindled to just a bored gray-robed woman and a painfully thin young man the height of an old-time basketball star. Pina and Koko stood watching what was left of the vortex.
“Won’t be long now,” Pina said.
The mighty vortex had shrunk to a dingy dust devil standing about waist-high. Light sparkled through the thin column showing the outline of the domed hut. I knelt and stuck my face into the swirling wind. The air was cold. Pushing into it was like pressing through a snow bank. The substance of the vortex gave way at first, but grew colder and denser the further I crawled.
“Careful,” Pina warned. “It’s been visibly shrinking. You don’t want your head in there when it closes.”
I gave her the thumbs up and started to back out. Two figures emerged from the hut on the other side. I blinked into the icy wind and strained to make out details as if looking through a grimy window. The small person was clearly Dwain. I could tell by that mop of hair. The broad form next to him had to be Max, but he had some sort of misshapen lump on his back.
Pressure from overhead pushed my face into the dirt and forced me to shimmy all the way out. The portal was an impossibly small toy tornado two-feet tall and nearly as wide. The winds slowed and dust curled out of the main body as it dissipated. As the energy dipped below what was needed to keep the sand and dirt spiraling up, the scene clarified for a moment.
Dwain paced back and forth waving. Max stood on his left, tail wagging, but with worried eyebrows darting left and right. His nervous expression calmed when a gray-green hand reached down to stroke his head. Ralph sat astride my dog’s shoulders, grinning his sharp-toothed grin. He rubbed a long furry bundle against Max’s cheek. My dog jerked his head left and turned back with Mr. Rabbit dangling from his mouth. I raised a hand, matching Dwain’s wave, the vortex spit out one last gust, and the doorway to the third world vanished.
Epilogue
I
FINISHED running the peeler over the carrot in my hand. The raw scent from the orange curls in the sink reminded me of how Max used to thump around in the kitchen while Piper and I cooked. He liked having a captive audience to admire his hunting prowess. He’d shake his toys, pounce on Mr. Rabbit, and generally show what a big badass he could be. Mr. Rabbit was wily himself and often flipped up onto the counter to escape. It’s a wonder he never ended up on the menu.
“Not getting any younger here,” Mom called from the kitchen table where she sliced the veggies I peeled for the stew.
“Sorry.” I took the last of the carrots and potatoes over.
My kitchen happened to be north facing, so still had all the windows, which made it easier to work in than my parents’ place with its open air east-facing first floor. Although the sand had retreated, it swept through town with enough force to blow out windows and doors. The township had people scouring old storage containers looking for suitable replacements now that magic no longer held back winter.
Fallout from our little catastrophe varied. Most residential neighborhoods like ours suffered damage from the avalanche of sand, but Bryn Mawr hospital and the larger structures had been whisked away before the desert flowed in to fill the void. Over the past three weeks, we’d confirmed that everything was back in its place—or at least within a few feet of its original location. Mom still hadn’t said much about where she, the staff, and patients had gone during the weeks they’d been missing.
Now that the excitement was over and Mr. Conti’s caravan of refugees had returned, New Philly’s citizens worked on putting the pieces back together and coming to grips with the supernatural phenomena that rocked their lives. The number that simply accepted events at face value remained a pleasant surprise. Many more, like Mom, preferred to try to forget the whole affair. A few inevitable yahoos insisted we go to war and wipe out the nasties before they attacked again—ignoring the fact that they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
Mom chopped in machinegun bursts, dumped the carnage into her slow cooker, and grabbed the bottle of merlot—her secret ingredient for beef burgundy stew. She gave the dish a liberal pour, then surprised me by taking a big swig directly from the bottle. She swept dark hair shot with more gray than I remembered out of her face and repeated the ritual twice more.
“Drunken beef stew?” I asked with a none-too-subtle glance at the clock.
“Alcohol boils off.” She used the half empty bottle to wave away my concern.
Yep, Mom didn’t like talking about it, but the dark circles under her eyes said she wasn’t sleeping well—nothing new for an on-call nurse, but the drinking certainly was.
“So, pretty crazy fall around here.” I sensed she needed to talk because drinking at three in the afternoon certainly wasn’t going to help.
She eyed me, eyed the bottle, and blew out a breath. When she closed her eyes, I figured the topic was off limits. Mom would talk about it when she was ready. I turned back to the kitchen sink to collect the peelings.
“We went…somewhere else.” Mom shut down when I turned back, so I focused on cleaning up my mess, which for some reason let her continue. “The whole building, everyone in it. It got so dark outside that we thought there’d been an eclipse. But gray fog swirled all around the hospital. A few aides went outside to check and never returned.”
“I’ve been in those mists. They’re sort of a nothingness between worlds.”
“Between—” She barked out a little laugh, reached for the bottle, but simply picked at the label. “That makes sense, because it felt like we moved around. The fog occasionally lifted to reveal different colored skies, or plunge us into deep winter, all kinds of madness. And, Ed,”—she swallowed hard and this time waited for me to turn and face her—“there were creatures out there.”
We talked for a good twenty minutes, teasing out details of what the hospital staff had been through as they popped between realms. They’d touched down in the third world at least once, which begged the question of why everything didn’t just get pushed through and stay there for the duration. Maybe some principle of physics prevented overcrowding or protected us from a Star-Trek-style anti-matter annihilation.
I’d be interested to hear if others had similar experiences. People had gone missing from all over the city. Most of Bryn Mawr’s staff and patients were safe at home, but Mr. Conti and Deputy Vance still worked on a full accounting. Sherriff Connolly remained on the missing-in-action list along with about a hundred others. The list of confirmed dead grew slowly because Vance wouldn’t add anyone unless an eye-witness came forward. With all the nasty insects and spiders running around, we’d yet to find an actual body.
“You and Quinn seem to be getting along quite well.” Mom must have had enough supernatural talk because she didn’t even use a clutch as she shifted the conversation and slammed it into high gear. “I hope you’re taking precautions. Your father isn’t ready for grandchildren.”
“Mom! I—you—” I floundered for a response.
“Oh, please.” Her confidence was back now that she was on the offensive, and damned if she wasn’t enjoying herself. “You tested negative for the C-12 virus, and I’ve seen how you fawn over each other. I can’t wait to get to know her better over dinner. You never bring the poor girl around.”
“You’re not going to talk that stuff with her. You can’t.”
She just gave me a noncommittal smile and recorked the wine. Sometimes having a nurse for a mom was a w
onderful thing, other times…not so much. I like to think our little chat helped her work through the trauma. It would take more time to settle on the level of acceptance or denial that fit her best. Hell, that was true for all of us.
After dinner, I did my best to keep Mom from getting Quinn alone. I don’t think she had any true intention of talking sex-ed with my girlfriend, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious.
“Your dad’s great and your mom’s an absolute delight,” Quinn said after our company left, Piper headed to bed, and we were alone on the couch. “And what a cook! We should have them over more often. She could give me lessons.”
“That’d be great,” I said, while my inner voice screamed and clawed toward our stack of overused excuses.
Falling asleep on the couch felt like old times, except our bodies were pressed intimately together and I didn’t have to worry about the furry footstool snoring and letting out choking gas. It was a bittersweet reminder of how far we’d come together, and I resolved to do all I could to keep us moving forward.
***
“Ed?” Pina’s high pure voice sang my name.
Her being in my house was hardly an oddity, but Pina always preferred to let me sleep, saying I looked too peaceful to wake. Since losing Max, she’d been absent more than not—to the point her little closet room had accumulated a thick layer of dust, a thing her presence magically keep at bay when in residence.
I cracked my eyes open to find I lay on a sandy floor in front of a cheery fire. Shadows danced on the white adobe walls. We were in a true dream.
“There’s my sleepy head.”
Pina stood over me and ruffled my hair the way I would have done to Max. Koko sat cross-legged on the other side of the flames, looking like his peaceful and enigmatic old self. Just as I vowed to practice looking that detached, the old man smiled and the merry sparkle in his eye had me flushing at my unkind thoughts.
“Everything okay?” I sat up and shooed Pina’s hand away.
“Balance returns to the worlds.” He shrugged as though there was more to the story.
“But?”
Undoubtedly he had some new mission or a dire warning to convey. Those were the only times he brought me into his realm.
“Don’t look so wary. I simply felt we should talk. You have done well with little to work with. Brightness”—he waved Pina to his side and wrapped a fatherly arm around the beaming sprite queen—“pointed out how distracted I have been lately.”
I thought he’d say more, but the pair simply stared for an uncomfortably long moment. It was good to see them bonding again, although I still worried about Pina’s fawning adoration for the old god. But after losing Ralph, Max, and Dwain, I was happy she had an anchor. Time flowed differently for these spirits, but their silent regard lasted way too long.
“What is it you’re trying to say?” I finally asked.
“The vortex threw many worlds out of balance, and things recover slowly. I thought you should know that the Dark Court is in turmoil and scrambling for new leaders. You and your half-brothers and half-sisters should be safe—or as safe as you can be from their attentions. Your friend Manfred is turning out to be quite the force behind the scenes in the new order. They seem more receptive to the notion that mankind’s existence might be a good thing after all.”
I thought of the worlds I’d seen wink out and the angst it caused Manny. But the hospital and other parts of New Philly had drifted around until they found their way home.
“Will their home world ever return, or was it actually destroyed?”
“Difficult to say, but I think the event would have been considerably messier if it had utterly destroyed those realms. Time will tell.”
He smiled at the phrase and leaned on his glowing staff, which I hadn’t realized was in his hand. I rummaged in the pouch at my hip. I’d lost the ability to be surprised at the change of clothing that so often accompanied entering the dream world, but was happy to see I wore a leather vest in addition to my breechcloth. My fingers closed around the wooden shaft that I knew would be there, and I held out the fragment of staff that had guided us to Lifebringer.
“Ah, very thoughtful of you.” Koko took it from my hand, held it to the top of his staff, and the two fused together.
“I sort of borrowed a little bit to give Dwain.” Pina said when she saw me trying to figure out why his staff still looked short. “He wanted it for an experiment with the shield, and I thought—after all he’d done for us—it would be okay.”
She looked up at her mentor, lord, and quite literally god, with anxiety written across her porcelain features. Koko’s smile was open and genuine. It struck me that he looked down at Pina in much the same way she looked up to him, and that their relationship might be more complex than I had always assumed.
“Our young hero is quite welcome to it,” Koko said. “Unless I miss my guess, he yet has a surprise or two in store.”
Again with the awkward silence. The fire cracked merrily, its heat a warm balm. I inhaled the clean scent of dusty sand and stone. It would be easy to simply zone out and “be” in the moment here. I gave it a try, but didn’t last long.
“Okay, then.” I clapped my hands. “Thanks for the updates and let’s keep in touch.”
“That we will.” Koko turned away, but Pina cleared her throat and when he didn’t respond elbowed the old god in the thigh. “What? Oh yes. Edan, I’m proud of you, son.”
Pina smirked and gave a little nod. I don’t know why the simple statement mattered so much, but it did.
~
About the author
Jim Stein’s hunger for stories transporting the reader to extraordinary realms began under one meager bulb, a towel stuffed beneath his door to avoid parental censure. He huddled with Tolkien, Asimov, and all the greats and unknowns plucked from the drugstore shelves to spin tales of the imagination. After writing short stories in school, two degrees in computer science, and several decades as a Naval officer, Jim has returned to his first passion. He writes speculative fiction advocating the underdog and embracing protagonists with strong moral fiber, often overlaid with supernatural elements and a few dark twists. Jim lives in northwestern Pennsylvania with his wife, Claudia, and his muse, Marley the Great Dane.
I’d be eternally grateful if you’d share your opinion of Strange Medicine or any other books on my author page at Amazon https://amazon.com/author/steinjim. Just click on the book you want to review, click on reviews, and select “write a review.” It need not be long, only takes a minute, and is so very helpful to new authors. – Jim