IF: Boundarylands

by Clayton Smith

  IF

  Clayton Smith

  Part II: Boundarylands

  Chapter 1:

  In Which We Discover the Importance of a Valid Passbill and Are Mindful of Our Precious Fingers

  Cole gave himself a good shake. Walking through the portal was like walking through a giant dryer sheet as it drew in and dissipated the static electricity of the world’s largest sweater. He felt fibrous, and waxy, and his skin crackled with energy.

  “Where are we?” whispered Emma, her eyes round and searching.

  “The Way Station,” the Stranger answered. But a more precise answer might have been, “On a dock— a massive dock, along with hundreds of other people.” There was no sign of the pink portal they’d just tumbled through; there was only a great body of water on one side, and a huge brick building on the other. Most of the people on the dock seemed to be milling toward a row of turnstiles set before the building entrance. A long sign that ran the length of the structure read WELLWHICH WAY STATION.

  “Where’s the pink door?” Polly asked, biting her lip nervously. “How do we get back?”

  “That was our way in,” said the Stranger, “not our way out.” He pushed forward into the crowd of people and beckoned for the children to follow.

  Cole peeked over the edge of the dock and into the water below. It was blue, a bright, turquoise blue, the color of postcard oceans that never quite lived up to the hype when you saw them in person.

  “Ooo…pretty,” Emma breathed, joining Cole at the edge of the dock. Cole agreed, but as he gazed down at the water, something nagged at his brain. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was wrong with the water.

  “Does it look normal to you?” he asked Emma. “The water, I mean.”

  She nodded. “It’s pretty,” she said again, with a bashful smile.

  It was Willy, of all people, who saw the problem with the water as he poked his head over the dock. He picked it out immediately. “It’s going the wrong way,” he said.

  Cole was so completely surprised by both the truth of this statement and the fact that it came from Willy’s lips and not his own that he nearly fell into the ocean. The waves were rolling backward. Instead of flowing in toward the dock, like waves should, they rolled out toward the center of the ocean. “That’s wrong,” Cole murmured, amazed. “Why is it doing that?”

  He suddenly felt a presence very close behind him. An old man with a grizzled beard and pinched temples leaned over his shoulder, following his gaze down into the water. “Yar, that’s the way of it, lad,” the old man said. He wore a heavy-knit sweater and smelled of tobacco and salt. “Backwards is forwards, an’ forwards is backwards, for that thar’s the Sea of Confusion.” The old man gave him a knowing little nudge, then turned and hobbled across the dock, his one wooden leg going thump-thump-thump.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Polly pleaded.

  Cole looked up and saw the Stranger disappearing into the crowd. “We’d better stick with the cowboy,” he agreed.

  The children hurried through the milling throng and fell in step behind the Stranger. He weaved through the crowd, dodging sailors, fishermen, shoe shiners, a mime, a group of astronauts, a troupe of circus folk, and more than a few creatures that didn’t look quite human. The Stranger led them to one of the turnstiles near the far end of the building.

  “It’s an elf!” Polly shrieked, delighted. Sure enough, an extremely small man sat at a high desk just behind the turnstile, his stunted legs swinging freely between the bars of his stool.

  Upon hearing Polly’s proclamation, the small man scowled down at the group. It was an extremely effective scowl; the little man had tough, weathered skin, bushy white eyebrows, and a scraggly old beard to match. The children shrank back from the venom in his eyes, but the Stranger just chewed his cheroot. “Got some visitors,” he said, knocking a shelf of ash from the cigar.

  The elf gave a sour frown. “Lemme see your passbill,” he said. Little flecks of drool flew from his lips when he talked. One of them landed on Etherie’s cheek. She swabbed her face with her sleeve. Cole didn’t know about her aura, but her face had sure flushed a pale shade of green.

  The Stranger turned his back to the angry little creature and pulled down the back of his collar. The elf climbed up on his stool and peered over the nape of the Stranger’s neck. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him; he clamored back down onto his seat with a grumble and made a note on a pad of paper on his desk. “Go on through,” he said.

  “The five of them are with me,” the Stranger said, gesturing toward the children.

  Now the elf grinned. Two crooked rows of yellow teeth ground against the insides of his cracked lips. “Where’re their passbills?” he hissed.

  “They’re with me,” the Stranger repeated. His right hand eased itself down toward his holster, but his cold, piercing eyes never left the elf’s.

  “Aye, mayhap, but you ain’t a passibill, are ya? Or if you are, you’re the ugliest I ever seen,” the creature snarled back. “No one gets in without a valid passbill. Stay with them or be about your business, but if they ain’t stamped, they ain’t going through.”

  “Maybe we can get passbills?” Cole offered helpfully. It occurred to him that he had exactly two dollars and seventy-five cents in his pockets, and that probably wasn’t enough to buy a single passbill, much less five of them. But maybe the people in the Boundarylands operated on a barter system or something. It was worth a shot.

  The gnarled old elf just laughed. “Get a passbill! Har-har-har! Sure, you go get a passbill. Turn around and go ask a mermaid, maybe she’s got a spare in her clams!” He choked on his own laughter.

  “I’m not gonna say it again,” the Stranger said through gritted teeth. “They’re with me.”

  “Tell you what.” The elf leaned over his desk and brought his nose within inches of the Stranger’s cigar. From somewhere beneath his desk, he pulled out a silver hunter’s knife that was bigger than his arm. The sharp edge of it gleamed in the sunlight. “They can go with you, and I’ll take naught but their precious fingers for passbills. Hm?” He gestured toward Cole with the knife. “How ‘bout you, Skipper? Bring me your hands, boy, and let’s make you pass-worthy.”

  The Stranger moved like a flash of lightning in a midnight storm. He grabbed the hand that held the gleaming knife and twisted it back, slamming it against the desk and rendering it useless. In the same motion, he pulled the six-shooter with his right hand and had it cocked and pressed against the elf’s temple before he could utter his first moan of surprise.

  “They’re coming with me,” the Stranger said, his voice even. “Fingers and all.”

  “You wouldn’t dare shoot an officer of the Boundary! I know you wouldn’t!” the elf cried. But even Cole could see that his eyes told a different story.

  The Stranger clicked his tongue and motioned toward the turnstile with his head. “Go on,” he said to the children.

  Cole didn’t need to be told twice. He hurried through the gate, both terrified and relieved to be on the other side.

  The other children weren’t exactly close on his heels. Emma and Polly stood gaping at the Stranger, their hands balled into fists at their sides. Etherie stood serenely tapping her lips, as if trying to discern what made the little elf tick, exactly. And Willy was a kid in a candy store. He hooted and hollered, jumping excitedly from one foot to the other. “Bang, bang!” he cried, making little guns with his fingers. He ran forward and slugged the elf in the leg. The Stranger hissed at him, and Willy high-tailed it through the turnstile. The girls eventually followed, edging their way through the gate. Their eyes never
left the barrel of the gun.

  When all five of the children were through, the Stranger pulled back on the elf’s knife hand until he released the blade. It went clattering to the ground. The Stranger kicked it under the gate and told Cole to pick it up. Cole did so reluctantly, holding it like he might hold a rattlesnake.

  “Keep this between us,” the Stranger said to the elf. The elf nodded his agreement, wincing at the pain in his wrist. The Stranger released him, then he holstered his gun and pushed through the gate. He plucked the knife from Cole’s hand and tossed it into the Sea of Confusion. “Let’s go,” he said.

  He crossed into the station house, and the five children followed.

  Chapter 2:

  On the Finer Points of Flexible Cartography

  “How do we find Broken?” Cole asked, half running to keep up with the Stranger’s long strides. The gunslinger didn’t answer; he simply walked on, with undeniable purpose.

  “Slow down!” Polly whined. Her legs were faltering, and she had no servants here to carry her.

  “Keep up,” panted Emma, who was huffing and puffing along, “or we’ll never stay together!”

  Cole was surprised to see that Etherie was matching the Stranger’s hurried pace easily. “Most of these people have no auras whatsoever,” she confided as they walked, looking around at the other creatures in the building. “It is most intriguing.”

  They were inside the station house now, hurrying across a marble floor toward a line of merchant stalls against the far wall. The ceiling towered high above, supported by massive marble columns. In the center of the expansive room stood a tall, four-sided clock perched atop a post of intricately molded green cast iron.

  The Stranger led them across the station to a kiosk situated in the back corner. It was a small, square stall of wooden construction, tucked in among a number of much larger, garage-style shops. The little sign on the front of the kiosk read, “The N.E.W.S. Stand.” The Stranger strode up to it and rapped his knuckles on the counter.

  “Oh, let me guess!” A short, plump grandmother with half-moon spectacles rose to her feet inside the kiosk and settled her weathered hands on the counter. “You’re in the market for a pan-directional globule.”

  “We need a map,” the Stranger said, his eyes squinting in the glare of the station’s fluorescent light. “I’d have you be quick about it.”

  The old woman smirked at the Stranger and peered over the counter at the children with her rheumy old eyes. “This your lot?” she asked suspiciously. The Stranger made no reply. He just chewed on his cheroot and drummed his fingers on the wooden counter. The woman’s mouth turned down at the corners. “All right, all right, I’ll get you your map.” She turned and hobbled over to the far corner of the stall.

  “Why do we need a map?” Cole asked, suddenly worried. “Don’t you know where we’re going?”

  “I do,” said the Stranger. “It’s getting there that’s the tricky part.”

  “Broken can’t have gone far,” said Etherie. “Perhaps we should spread out and search for him here in the station. If we work to project our astral beings into the further corners, we’ll be twice as quick about it.” She put her fingers to her temples and concentrated.

  “You won’t find him here,” the Stranger said, sounding irritated. “Too much time has passed.”

  “It has not,” Polly protested. She looked at her watch, a plastic Cinderella piece with a digital display. “It’s only...32:71? Oh no, my watch is broken!” she cried, stamping her foot. “Look!” She held up her watch to the rest of the group. The numbers flashed from 32:71 to 003:456 to 12:52 to -6:99.

  “Clocks must not work here,” Cole mumbled. He remembered what Gaia had said about time moving differently in the Boundarylands. Maybe their real-world watches couldn’t keep up.

  “Then what about that, genius?” Willy asked, pointing up at the cast iron clock in the center of the hall.

  Cole raised his eyes to the clock’s face and gasped in surprise. “It’s not a clock at all!” he said. “Look!”

  The face of the non-clock had only one hand, and instead of twelve numbers painted around the outside, there were four words; Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, and Never. The hand currently pointed at Today. Cole found himself drifting toward the non-clock, wholly mesmerized by its incongruous nature. He approached the base of the post and saw a small silver plate tacked on to the side, near the bottom. He squatted down and read the words stamped into the plate: Chronological Barometer. A product of Schlupp & Schloop, Inventors- and Chronologists-at-Large. Pinch Rim, the Boundarylands.

  “What’s a chron—chron—ch—”Emma sounded out over his shoulder.

  “A chronological barometer. I don’t know…but a regular barometer measures atmospheric pressure,” Cole explained. “I think this one is meant to measure chronologic pressure.”

  Emma blinked. “Huh?”

  “I think it’s supposed to tell us if we’re moving forward or backward in time,” he said with a frown. The notion of time fluctuations—measured time fluctuations, to be precise—was rather troubling. “I guess we’re moving like we’re supposed to be,” he said, nodding up at the hand pointing to Today. “So that’s good at least.” But as he said this, the hand began slowly easing itself down around the clock face until it came to a rest halfway between Tomorrow and Never.

  “Almost never? What’s that mean?” Emma asked.

  “Must be broken,” Cole murmured. He shrugged. “Come on, let’s get back to the others.”

  By the time they’d returned to the kiosk, the little old lady had unrolled a map and spread it flat on the countertop. “Here, now!” she said in her sweet, grandmotherly croon. “One map of the Boundarylands. You’ve got the Wellwhich Way Station, where we are, here...the Sea of Confusion...the Place of Doors, here...Sandman’s Corner...oh, this patch of land is Dougal’s Unicorm Farm, you lot will like that!”

  “A unicorn farm!” Polly squealed.

  The old woman smiled down on her. “That’s right, dear. It’s all here. Why, if you leave now, you could be there by moonfall!”

  The Stranger set his knuckles on the fresh white paper of the map and leaned so close to the old woman that she could hear his teeth grinding as he said, “I want a map, crone.”

  The smile vanished from the woman’s face. She glared at the Stranger over the rim of her glasses. “This is a map,” she insisted, stabbing the paper with her finger for emphasis.

  “This is a souvenir,” the Stranger grumbled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a match. He struck it on the counter and lit the end of his cheroot. Smoke rose from the tip in lazy curls and made the woman’s eyes water. She broke her gaze and looked down sullenly. “You take us for tourists,” the Stranger continued. “Not very smart.” His blue eyes blazed. “Go fetch us a map.”

  The old woman scowled at him, but she whirled around just the same and scurried over to a locked drawer on the far end of the stall. She pulled out a key that hung on a chain beneath her red and white paisley dress. She slipped it over her head, unlocked the drawer, and pulled out another sheet of heavy paper, this one battered and yellowed with age. Creases crossed the surface like train tracks, and the edges of the paper were frayed and soft. But as she spread this new map on top of the other, false map, it wasn’t the frayed edges or the creases that caught Cole’s eye. It was the ink with which the lines of the map were drawn. It was black as tar, and shiny, as if it had been dipped from an inkwell just moments before. But the ink must have been as old as the rest of the map, and by the look of it, the rest of the map was very, very old.

  And the sheen of the ink wasn’t even the map’s most intriguing property. As he looked at it, certain lines and boundaries faded away and were replaced by new, different lines and boundaries. One second the map showed an open pasture near the top right-hand corner, and the next second the pasture was
gone—a lakeside village had taken its place. Off to the left, a rectangular city morphed into a river, which in turn faded into a forest, and then to a mountain range.

  The ink disappeared and rearranged itself all over the map, first here, now there, so that the shiny black marks rippled and roiled across the page like a pot of boiling water. In the whole map, there were only two pieces that never changed; the Wellwhich Way Station, and the very center of the map, a circular area labeled “the Pinch.”

  The Stranger reached for the map, but the old woman slapped his hand down and pinned it to the counter. Cole half-expected their fingers to come away covered in ink. “Not so fast, there, charmer. You ain’t bought it yet.”

  “How much?” the Stranger asked warily.

  The woman rubbed her wrinkled chin. “Hmmm…a rare specimen like this? Fetches a goodly price, I’d say.”

  “I have two dollars and seventy-five cents,” Cole whispered to the Stranger.

  The old woman cackled. “What’s this? Dollar-money? Oooh—let’s see it now, sonny!” Cole dug in his pocket and retrieved two neatly folded bills and three quarters. He placed the cash on the counter. The woman took off her spectacles and held them out a few inches from her face, examining the coins. “Real one-quarters!” she cackled. “I’ll be!” She replaced her glasses and slid the coins back toward Cole. “About as useful as a third shoulder.”

  Cole was crestfallen. “It’s not enough?”

  “Not enough? I should say not!” she hooted. “We don’t truck in coins or paper here. Do I look like an alchemist?”

  Cole, who had never seen an alchemist, had no idea if she looked like one or not. “I…don’t know.”

  She squinted at him suspiciously. “Well, I’m not. You’ll need a better currency than this, dearie!”

  “What’s your price?” the Stranger said.

  The woman pulled herself up on her tiptoes and studied each of the children in turn. “The plump one there will do,” she said, licking her lips hungrily. The old woman patted her belly. “She’ll do quite well.”