IF: Boundarylands

by Clayton Smith

  “Willy, look out!” Polly screamed. Willy, who had been trying to catch a fish with his bare hands, looked up just in time to see the old man’s sword arcing toward his head. His throat let loose a whimper of fear. Terror rooted him to the ground; his feet refused to run…not that it would have made much difference. The swordsman’s skills were sharp and quick, and Willy barely had time to blink, much less roll out of the way.

  The sword came hurtling down toward him. Polly shrieked, and Cole heard himself cry out. But just before the sword sliced into Willy’s skull, the blade bowed outward as if it were made of rubber. It curled in on itself as the old man swung it down, breezing by Willy’s head and leaving it whole and unscathed. A split second later, when the hilt had swept completely over him, the blade snapped back to its normal, rigid state, the heel of it missing the skin of Willy’s neck by no more than a few centimeters.

  And the fight raged on around Willy, but every time it looked as if he might catch a fist or a foot or a blade or a throwing star, the offending item always just missed him, usually defying physics to do so. It was almost as if the boy were protected by an extraordinarily strong and entirely invisible bubble.

  Cole whirled around to face the Stranger, his mouth hanging open in shock. “We can’t be hurt here?”

  The Stranger shrugged. “Hurt, sure. Just not by them,” he said, nodding toward the ninjas.

  “How did you know?” Cole asked, amazed.

  Now the Stranger actually grinned. “’Cause this ain’t a normal imagination,” he said. “It’s a moving picture.”

  “A moving picture?” Polly asked.

  “A flicker, maybe. That what you call ’em? Or a film?” The Stranger plucked a new cheroot from his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. “You know. A movie.”

  “We’re in a movie?” Cole asked.

  “Yep.” The cowboy struck a match against a nearby stone and held the flame against the cigar until the tip glowed cherry red. An errant throwing star flew at his chest, but he ignored it. The sharp piece of metal broke left at the last second and planted itself in the temple wall instead. “And movies go on scripts. If it ain’t in the script, it don’t happen in the movie. I’m guessing ‘Cowboy and five helpless children fall into backyard and get slaughtered by ninjas’ ain’t in the script.”

  Cole’s eyebrows arched with curiosity. A million different questions raced through his mind, and he plucked one out as it flew past. “How did you know it was a movie?”

  The Stranger pointed up toward the sky. “The black bars.”

  Cole raised his eyes, startled to discover that there was no sky in this place, but a massive expanse of black instead. It wasn’t just darkness; it was much too solid for that. It was as if a great block of pure obsidian had been laid over the world like stone coffin lid. It seemed to Cole that he could almost reach up and scrape his fingers along it.

  And he noticed something else, too; there was another black block beneath their feet, extending out from beneath them as far as the eye could see. It was partially covered by grass—in fact, it looked as if the grass were actually growing through it. Cole crouched and put his hand into the grass and down into the blackness. His fingers pushed right through it, and he felt nothing—no pressure, no temperature change…nothing at all. But his fingertips were lost in it, all the way up to the second knuckle.

  And suddenly, Cole knew what it was.

  “It’s widescreen,” he breathed, his eyes widening in amazement. “We’re in widescreen!”

  “If that’s what you call it,” said the Stranger, far less impressed by it all. “Best get your hand out of it now, before you lose it.”

  The group began to wind down, and the Stranger set to building a makeshift camp in the old kung fu movie for the night. He started a fire with scavenged wood and a piece of flint he kept in his pocket, and they ate some sort of meat from an animal he d caught in a crude, homemade trap. He wouldn’t tell the children what sort of creature it was and had made them go play on the far side of the yard while he skinned and roasted it. The children weren’t particularly hungry, but they ate anyway, seeing as how the cowboy had gone to so much trouble.

  Even so, they ate cautiously.

  And they didn’t eat much.

  The brawl had wrapped up, and a host of ninjas lay strewn across the grass, unconscious, and perfectly still and quiet. After a while, Cole didn’t even notice them anymore.

  By the time dinner was done, the fire inside the temple died down, and the orange glow diffusing through the paper doors blinked into almost-darkness. Polly, having decided that Emma could be trusted now that she had earned the approval of Princess Lemon’s servant, was busy teaching the other girl some of the finer points of wandsmanship near the pond. They’d found a stick that was more or less straight, and Emma was mimicking the swoops and spins of Polly’s light-up star wand. Every so often Polly would set the star alight, and Emma would run to the fire, stick the magic end of the wand into the burning embers, and wait until it was tipped with red light. Then the two girls would dance across the yard, hurling magical spells into the air and being generally good witches.

  Willy was playing with a stick of his own, one that he’d chewed into a sort of point. He’d taken off his shirt and tied it around his head and smeared mud on his cheeks, and he was now crouched at the edge of the pool, stabbing at the water with the not-quite-lethal spear, shouting, “For the Republic! For the Republic!”

  Etherie, meanwhile, had found a quiet space to meditate at the base of a cherry tree. Its bright pink blossoms drifted down around her and collected in her lap. Her lips moved softly and silently, and her hands massaged the spongy earth at the base of the trunk as she sent her spirit into the roots of the tree and became one with the world around her.

  But Cole found himself much less able to carry on as if it were just another night. His mind was sorely troubled. He needed to speak to someone, if only to hear his thoughts come out of his own mouth, in his own voice. Any sort of conversation seemed to make the Stranger weary, but there was really no one else. After all, he was the only adult in the group, and adults usually had advice to offer…even if it was sometimes terrible advice. He didn’t think the Stranger would give bad advice, though. Plus, he was supposedly from this world, the world of imagination, and he might have unique insight into the matter that was trouble Cole at that particular moment.

  The cowboy sat cleaning his gun by the firelight. Cole approached him shyly, making sure to clear his throat and rustle the grass as he walked so the Stranger would hear him coming. This was unnecessary; it had been centuries since anyone had taken the Stranger by surprise. Cole stood nervously at the edge of the fire’s glow, wondering how best to interrupt the cowboy’s work.

  “Well, you gonna have a seat or not?” the man said without looking up.

  Relieved, Cole hurried over and lowered himself onto the grass. Now, he wondered, how to begin?

  Finally, he asked, “Where are we? Really?”

  The Stranger raised an eyebrow, but kept his eyes trained on the empty cylinder of his six-shooter. “Big question,” he said.

  “I don’t mean this specific place…or imagination. Or movie.” Cole gestured to the temple and its serene yard. “Or whatever it is. I mean all of it—the whole of the Boundarylands. Where does it exist?”

  The Stranger snapped the cylinder into place, gave the barrel one last wipe with his oiled rag, and slipped the revolver back into its holster. Then he tucked the rag into his back pocket and shook out his cramping fingers. “Still a big question,” he said, not unkindly. “Truth is, I don’t right know how to answer it.”

  “Can you give it a try, at least?” Cole asked.

  The Stranger sighed and thought a minute. Then he laid one hand out flat in front of his chest. “Say this is your world—the real world.” Then he laid his other hand directly on top of it.
“And this is the Boundary. Okay?” Cole nodded. But the Stranger frowned. “But it ain’t really one on top of the other…they’re sort of...” He spread his fingers and locked them together. “We can cross over to your world, if we have an Anchor, and sometimes the two worlds are pretty much one and the same.”

  Cole chewed at his bottom lip. He understood what the Stranger was saying, sort of, but it didn’t clear anything up, and it didn’t really answer his question. “So that’s how it works…but it doesn’t tell me where it is – where we are.”

  The Stranger raised an eyebrow. “Where do you think we are?”

  Cole’s thoughts felt sticky in his brain. “I guess what I mean is, are we really in some land of imagination? Or are we in a land of my imagination?” And now, he realized, he’d hit it square on the head. “Is all of this happening in my head?”

  The Stranger leaned forward, his eyes serious. “Truth told, I’ve never thought about that,” he admitted.

  “It’s possible, right?” Cole asked. “You’re imaginary, and you think you’re Miss Twist’s imaginary friend, but how do you know you’re not from my imagination? If I imagined that Miss Twist imagined you, you’d be an imaginary who thought he was an imaginary friend, when you’re really just from my imagination…”

  The Stranger snorted. “You’ll want to watch that line of thinking,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing likely to send you right over the edge.”

  “What if I am over the edge?” Cole said desperately. Now that the words had unstuck themselves, they just flowed. “What if there’s something wrong with me—the real me? What if I couldn’t handle the stress of school and friends, and I just snapped? What if the real me is in a hospital bed, or a padded cell, and you’re really a pillow, or a broomstick? Or what if I had an accident on the way to school this morning? Maybe I got hit by a car, and I’m in a coma in some emergency room, dreaming that we all went on this insane mission in an imaginary kingdom. That’s possible, right? I mean, that makes more sense than actually going through some magical portal into a whole world of imaginary friends. It would mean that this— all of this—is almost certainly in my head.” He gestured to the world around them. “Right?”

  The Stranger removed his hat and set it on the ground. “If what you’re saying was true, I’d be a figment of your imagination, and not an IF. Yeah?”

  Cole shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Though technically, you’re imaginary either way, and we’re sort of friends...” He let the sentence drift. He was glad for the darkness; it would make it hard for the Stranger to see his face flush red.

  “Not the same,” the Stranger said. He turned his back to the boy and pulled down the collar of his shirt. “Look here,” the cowboy instructed. Cole pushed himself up to his knees and peeked over at the nape of the cowboy’s neck. Stamped into the skin were two overlapping circles, one solid, and one broken.

  “That mean anything to you?” he asked.

  Cole squinted thoughtfully and examined the circles. “No,” he decided. “What is it? A tattoo?”

  “Something like that. The solid circle is the Anchor,” the Stranger explained. “The dashed one is us. The IFs.”

  “Were you…born with that?”

  The Stranger flipped up his collar and turned back toward the fire. “It’s always been,” he answered. “It’s an IF mark. Every IF has one. It’s how you tell us apart from the other imaginations.”

  “That’s your passbill,” Cole realized, remembering the scene back at the turnstile into the Wellwhich Way Station.

  “Among other things,” the cowboy grumbled. “If you ain’t never seen it before, then I don’t think we’re in your head.”

  “Why not?”

  “Every IF in the Boundarylands has this mark. Every IF. And there’s a lot of us. It’s the most well-known brand in the realm, even more than the Royal’s mark. Those circles are important. Wars have been fought over them. Kingdoms have fallen over them. You get me? They’re important.”

  Cole bobbed his head from side to side, working out the Stranger’s point to its logical conclusion. “And if they’re so important here, they would have to be important to me if this were all in my head.”

  The Stranger shrugged. “Seems like it.”

  He drew his knees into his chest and stared into the fire. “I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.”

  The Stranger raised an eyebrow. “You don’t take comfort knowin’ you’re not crazy?”

  “Not really,” he admitted. “Because if all this is real, I have a feeling we’re going to have much bigger problems than me being insane.”

  The Stranger settled down against his log, picked up his hat, and dropped it over his eyes. “Tell you one thing,” he said, settling in for the night. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Chapter 8:

  “Well, This is Going Well”

  Miss Twist sighed. This whole thing may have been a bad idea, she thought, and not for the first time.

  “We need to find Gaia, fast,” she sighed as she paced in front of the chalkboard.

  “Yes,” Frau Mütter nodded. “Who knows what sort of awful accident might befall her, alone in a strange world?”

  “That is a concern,” Miss Twist agreed. “And also, if Principal Ortenour finds a strange woman running around the school campus and comes around to investigate and finds that I’ve let the children pop through a trans-dimensional portal on the chalkboard into an imaginary world…” Her words trailed off as she considered the consequences of such an event. “Well, I don’t think he’ll be thrilled.”

  “Without her here with us, the doorway’s not as strong,” Mr. Puffles said sadly, nodding toward the chalkboard portal, which had indeed lost some of its sparkling pink luster.

  “If we don’t find her soon, it’s possible the portal may close,” the Servant agreed.

  “Even with all of you here?” Miss Twist asked.

  Frau Mütter shrugged. “Who can say? Doorways are unstable to begin with, and they usually work the other way around.”

  “Even if the doorway remains, her tie to Etherie may be severed if she wanders too far,” the Servant said, inspecting the cleanliness of his fingernails.

  Miss Twist sighed. “I’d better go find her, then. You three stay here, out of sight. If anyone comes in the room, hide.”

  “I’m too big to hide,” Mr. Puffles cooed sadly. He pushed a finger into his round belly.

  “The coat closet should be big enough for all of you,” Miss Twist said. “Just be quiet, and be careful, and if you see a short, self-important-looking bald man walking around, for heaven’s sake, do not let him see you.” Her shoulders slumped as she headed toward the door. “I hate going outside in the summer,” she sighed.

  She pushed her way out of the classroom and headed off in search of Gaia.

  Chapter 9:

  On What It Means to Have Reel Trouble

  The next morning, the children awoke to find that the movie was moving on without them. As they yawned and stretched in the morning light, the Stranger nodded toward the horizon and said, “Look there.” Cole squinted toward the rising sun, which was flickering strangely in the distance. He looked closer and realized it wasn’t the sun that was flickering; it was the air, quivering and causing the sun to shimmer.

  “What is that?” Cole asked.

  The Stranger grunted. “It’s our cue to leave.” He kicked dirt over the fire’s remaining embers and set his hat on his head. “Everyone ready?” The children gathered their scant belongings and looked expectantly at the cowboy. He nodded once and turned to face the wall behind them. “Up we go.” He laced his fingers together and crouched down in front of the wall.

  Willy ran up first, planted one foot in the Stranger’s hands, and leapt as the cowboy pushed. The poor boy nearly launched over the wall and past the
lintel into the passing imagination beyond. “Careful!” the Stranger growled. “Don’t cross till we’re all up.” Willy settled himself atop the teakwood wall and kept his feet drawn in close to his body.

  The Stranger helped Etherie up next, then Polly and Emma. As the girls climbed to the top of the fence, Cole looked nervously back toward the sunrise. The flickering was intensifying. The world looked like it was flapping now, and it wasn’t just on the horizon. Some of the trees in the distance shimmered and waved like a mirage. They weren’t actually shaking; their branches and leaves were completely still. But the trees themselves were bending and warping…

  And then the sun on the horizon disappeared altogether. So did the part of the sky surrounding the sun, and the distant mountains that met that portion of the sky. The world flapped again, the horizon vanished, and in its place appeared a great expanse of total whiteness. “What’s happening?” Cole yelped, his voice trembling.

  The Stranger squinted into the distance. “We’re running out of film. Gotta move.” He laced his fingers again, and Cole set his foot in them. He reached up as the cowboy hoisted him, and he grappled for the top of the fence. His fingers slipped; he almost toppled back off the Stranger’s hands. He gasped and shot an anxious look over his shoulder. Now the trees just on the other side of the fence were waving like sheets caught in a windstorm.

  The flapping was closing in on them.

  “Up!” the Stranger urged. “Now!” He lifted with a grunt, and Cole flew up to where the black rubber lintel ran perfectly along the top of the wall. He came to a hard landing on his knees and pitched forward, but Willy and Polly grabbed his shoulders and kept him on the wall.

  The flickering was closer still, and now the garden wall on the far side of the yard was wavering like it was caught in a tide pool. The Stranger leapt and pulled himself up to the top of the wall. The wooden planks below the lintel began to shift and sway, and they all threw out their arms to keep balance. Cole shot a panicked glance down into the lawn. The world bounded up and down like a ribbon. The imagination across the lintel before them was a smoldering junkyard full of busted tires, rotten fruit cores, oily rags, spoiled diapers, twisted metal, melted plastics, and filthy stacks of garbage piled three stories high.