Parallel U. - Sophomore Year

by Dakota Rusk

Finally Peragon spoke. “I’m not yet convinced of the truth of this. We’ve had correspondence from Jocasta Foxglove over the course of these past few months.”

  “Forged,” said Eddie. “Or written in her true hand, but in her office at Parallel U., not from her coven seat. And brought to you by one of her minions.”

  He cocked his head and dug his little finger into his ear; clearly a nervous gesture while he weighed his thoughts. A moment later he said, “Have you any proof of what you say?”

  “None. I guess I was counting on her reputation doing the persuading for me.”

  Peragon raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that in my experience, Jocasta Foxglove is an ambitious, amoral schemer whose only goal is to expand her own power base. And I only met her once. I’ve been counting on someone who actually knows her being better acquainted with her character.”

  Peragon sat back in his chair and idly stroked the head of one of his hounds. “It’s true, what you say. Priestess Jocasta is a dangerous woman, capable of any atrocity.” Suddenly he turned his eyes on us, and his look was no longer friendly. “And you have given her the means to do harm on a scale none here have ever dreamed of.”

  Eddie actually choked; he obviously hadn’t anticipated this being turned back on him. “I didn’t give it to her,” he said. “She took it—and then took me—prisoner—”

  Peragon dismissed this with an impatient wave of his hand. “What is that you want of me?”

  “We want you to recall her,” Eddie said. “Summon her back from Parallel U., and keep her from getting up to any mischief in other parallels.”

  The high priest leaned forward and placed both his hands on the table. “First,” he said, “you misunderstand how our society is run. We are neither hierarchical nor militaristic, as so many of yours are. Priestess Jocasta is not my lieutenant; she is not mine to command. I cannot ‘summon’ her anywhere or dictate her conduct. And even if I could, I doubt I could compel her to refrain from wreaking whatever havoc she wished in other parallels, because you have provided her the means to do so, which I myself do not possess.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Eddie surreptitiously pull his wrist up into his sleeve, concealing the Hopper from view; it was lucky thing he hadn’t actually specified what his “device” actually was.

  “If you ask me,” Peragon said, rising to his feet, “there are two malevolent agencies at work here. The first is Priestess Jocasta, with whom we will strive to deal in our own way. The second is Terminus, and the constructs it dispenses that fly so hideously in the face of nature, and which enable the weaker of our species to project their damaged wills onto the innocents of field and forest, hill and glade. And as you are here—you representatives of Terminus—we will turn our attentions to you first.”

  Eddie raised his hand and said, “Whoa—I mean, hold the phone there, Chuckles—we’re the good guys. I mean, we came to you, remember?”

  Peragon looked past us, then inclined his head. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a trio of armed guards approach from the rear of the room.

  “Eddie,” I said in a low voice, “we should go.”

  “What?” he said, still half-focused on Peragon. And then it was too late; each of us was in the grip of a guard, too tightly to wriggle free.

  Peragon narrowed his eyes, and I knew what followed would be bad.

  “You said this new means of traversing the Veil is portable,” he said.

  “Did I?” Eddie replied. “Gosh, I’m a kidder! Imagine that—something that small, doing something that big!” He attempted an ironic laugh.

  Peragon nodded to his guard, who roughly began to pat Eddie down (while Eddie protested that his civil rights were being violated; he was really flailing at this point). It was no time at all before the guard held up the wrist bearing the Hopper for Peragon to see.

  “I’ll have a look at that, please,” Peragon said.

  The guard unstrapped it, and Eddie came a little unstrapped himself. “It won’t do you any good,” he blared; “you don’t know what to do with it.”

  Peragon, who’d now taken the Hopper from the guard, studied it for a few seconds, then looked up and smiled. “You’re wrong. I know exactly what to do with it.” And with that, he dropped it to the floor and crushed it repeatedly beneath the heel of his boot. By the time he was finished, it was in pieces.

  Eddie howled like an animal in pain.

  “You’ve arrived at an opportune time,” Peragon said, returning to his chair. “We’re celebrating the Yule Sabbath. It’s a holy night for us.”

  “For us as well,” I said, daring to speak at last. I nodded at the other Fabia and said, “We also revere this night, and honor it in our own way.” It was a desperate gambit to find some common ground with him—to make him see us as something other than adversaries. The solstice seemed made to order.

  He looked at me in surprise, as if he’d almost forgotten I was there. “And what,” he asked, “does ‘honor it in your own way’ mean?”

  I looked at Fabia, who wore a perplexed expression. I’d forgotten; she didn’t speak English—she wouldn’t know what I was attempting here. I turned back to Peragon and said, “In our culture, we choose this night to celebrate Sol Invictus—the everlasting Sun.”

  He regarded me warily. “And what form do these celebrations take?”

  “Well…we gather for a family meal. We exchange gifts and…” My mind kept tripping over itself; surely there must be something else—something to make the whole thing sound less trivial. “Sometimes we sing,” I added meekly.

  Peragon cocked his head and grinned, as though I were a small dog who had let loose an especially adorable growl. “Let me tell you how we honor this night,” he said. “We devote it to Diana, the goddess of the moon and patron of the chase. And yes, a meal is among its many rituals, but there are others more finely tuned to the goddess’s delight…chiefly the Wild Hunt.”

  At the sound of this phrase the hounds stirred again, and panted in excitement.

  “The divine, you see,” he continued, “is reflective of nature, in that both are great, and both are terrible; and we do not select which aspects we worship. To us, it is all sacred.” He smiled, almost gently. “You will discover as much tonight. I only wish it could be to your benefit.”

  He waved us away; within moments the guards were leading us out of the room and back down the spiral steps. Eddie looked utterly defeated; he couldn’t even bring himself to meet my eyes, though he must have felt the urgency of my stare.

  At the base of the tree we were given new guards, and marched for some mile or more outside the city. Fabia and I were separated from Eddie, then deposited into a holding cell cut deep into the earth, in which a few other sad, hopeless women languished. The iron grate to the cell was replaced, and we were left, in the cold and in the dark.We sat in silence for a time. I think neither of us was quite ready to believe we were just being left there. The only sound was our breathing—and by that I mean Fabia’s and mine. The other women seemed almost to be too wraithlike to draw breath.

  Finally Fabia said, “We need a plan.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I’ve been thinking.”

  “So have I.”

  “Of course you have. And I wonder if we haven’t come up with the same strategy.”

  “I’d be very surprised,” she said a bit impishly.

  I chose to ignore it. “As I see it, we have only one hope. For some reason, Peragon is keen on us seeing this ‘Wild Hunt’ of his. I’m going to guess there’ll be a time when he’s sufficiently distracted by it that you and I can reconnect with Eddie and make our escape. From there we’ll head toward Jocasta Foxglove’s coven, and find some place of concealment where we can wait until she, or any of her followers, returns from Parallel Prime. Then we attack, disable them, take their Hoppers, and go home.”

  “That’s a very long-range plan,” said Fabia. “It also depends on Jocasta Foxglove and her coven retu
rning at all, which from everything you’ve told me seems unlikely. She sounds like she’s moved on in a big way.”

  I tried not to let her words discourage me. “Rowella, then. They’ve been using her for their own ends, but she has family here—family who will ask questions if she’s away too long. Sooner or later they’ll have to bring her back.”

  “Or,” said Fabia—and I heard the rustle of her leather skirt, as if she were reaching into its pouch—“we could use this.”

  “Use what?” I asked.

  By now my eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to make for slight visibility at the points where the grate allowed hazy gray light to dribble through. Fabia extended her hand into the murky shaft of one such spot, and I saw that she was holding a Hopper.

  I cried out in surprise, and she immediately shushed me. “Do you want to bring them back here?”

  I composed myself, then threw a quick glance at the other prisoners. They were no more than murky shapes in this darkness; they appeared not to have moved.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked, my voice as low as I could make it.

  “I swiped it from the desk in Eddie’s lab, when you two weren’t looking.” She can’t possibly have seen the astonished look on my face, but maybe she guessed it. “I thought it might come in handy,” she said; “at the very least, I didn’t think we should leave it for the witches to use.”

  “It’s the one he was working on when I came in,” I said. “There’s not even a cover on the panel yet. I’m not sure it’s functional.”

  “Well, I’m sure it had better be.”

  “The buttons aren’t even marked.”

  “If he’s used these things as often as you say, he’ll probably be able to operate it by touch alone. Muscle memory.” More rustling leather; she was replacing the Hopper in her pocket. “Anyway, it’s all we’ve got.”

  “All?” I gasped, nearly ecstatic. “It’s everything! Now all we have to do is wait for Peragon and his thugs to be distracted by something in the Hunt, then grab thirty seconds alone with Eddie and he can jump us out of here!”

  She was silent for a few moments, and I had a sudden feeling I was about to hear bad news again.

  And sure enough, I was. “Fabia, I think maybe you misunderstand what Peragon means for us,” she said.

  I frowned. “It seemed perfectly clear. Their ‘Wild Hunt’ is later tonight, isn’t it?—Well, we’re going to be there. He said so.”

  “But not as spectators. Didn’t you tell me earlier that the pagan society here is a fusion of traditional European witchcraft and Druidism?”

  “Yes. What’s your point?”

  “My point is…didn’t the Druids practice human sacrifice?”

  Suddenly the moon rose—the moon, Diana’s avatar; and as its milky light trickled down to meet us, everything tumbled into place.

  And as dank as it was in that cell, I felt the chill grow suddenly deeper.

  21

  A few hours later we were brought back up above ground. Our cloaks were taken from us, and some women—priestesses, presumably—adorned our clothes and hair with holly berries and mistletoe. The same was done with the women who shared the cell with us; they reacted dully, as if already dead.

  We were herded over to a kind of pen, along with the prisoners from the male holding cell. We’d anticipated this, and had decided this was our best chance to reconnect with Eddie; all we had to do was find him, give him the Hopper, and let him jump us out of this parallel. But as we drew nearer to the pen, my heart sank—it was already filled with dozens of men, not to mention frightened animals (deer, oxen, dogs, even a duck) who were also apparently slated to serve as sacrifices before the night was out. The pen, as we were shoved into it, was a churning, chaotic mass of flesh, and it took all my focus to keep close to Fabia; I didn’t dare look for Eddie, or I’d lose her as well.

  Finally, after we’d been in there for what seemed an eternity, a kind of quiet fell over the prisoners, and looking up I could see why. High Priest Peragon and several dozen of his councilors appeared, bearing torches and accompanied by their hunting dogs and—more ominously—wielding what looked like long bows…a pretty fearsome weapon, especially if you’re on the wrong end of it. He turned his gaze on us in the pen and his features looked placid…almost serene.

  “The moon is in her fullness,” he said, amidst the whirr of crickets and the whining of some of the smaller animals. “As of this hour, the great goddess will remit by degrees her hold over the world, and with each passing day allow her brother Sun ever greater sway over the world. She will expect our fealty for this great gift; she will wait upon our gratitude. And so we offer it to her, in the form of this hunt.”

  From off to my right, someone in the pen spoke up: “I don’t suppose you’d consider just a nice greeting card and some bath salts?”

  Eddie! My heart leapt at this evidence that he’d recovered his broken spirit.

  The next thing I heard was his grunting; apparently one of the guards—who were salted through the pen to keep order—had shut him up with a blow. But I’d gotten a fix on his voice, and so had Fabia; so together we now pressed our way through our fellow prisoners in an attempt to reach him, while Peragon continued to drone on about the sacred part we were to play in the turning of the world.

  We were stopped by a guard, who stood before us, blocking our way, and held out his hands to make his intention clear: we were to go no further. But I spied Eddie in the crowd just beyond him, a small trickle of blood oozing from his temple.

  “Eddie!” I cried.

  He looked my way, just in time to see me get the same blow to the head that he’d suffered; in fact it was so forceful, it knocked me to my knees. But it was worth it; we now had a fix on one another. And while I struggled back to my feet, I saw Fabia lift her wrist and point to it—a gesture that caused Eddie to raise his eyebrows so high they almost leapt off the top of his head. He looked at me and I nodded. He broke into a dazzling grin.

  Then the crowd around us stirred. The pen had been opened; everyone was leaving it—in fact, fleeing it—running, literally, for their lives. We had to do the same, or risk being trampled to death.

  Suddenly it was all chaos again, and Fabia and I had to hold fast to each other’s hand to avoid being separated.

  “We have to find Eddie now,” I said. “We don’t know how long before they set loose the hounds.”

  “We’ll never find him if we keep moving,” she said, and she pulled me into a halt. “Stand by me—hold on—”

  I clung to her, doubling our mass, as the fleeing prey bumped and knocked into us in their haste to lose themselves among the trees.

  Within moments the ground had cleared of all but the last stragglers; we disentangled ourselves and looked up—

  —and there was Eddie, loping towards us.

  “I won’t even ask how,” he said. “I’m just happy I’ve got two of you on my side.”

  “It’s the unit you were working on at your lab desk,” I said as Fabia retrieved the Hopper from her pocket and presented it to him. “Please tell me it’ll work.”

  His face fell momentarily. “Oh, yikes,” he said. “That’s going to take some doing. I can’t remember where I left off.”

  “It looks sort of finished,” I offered desperately. “Except for the covering panel.”

  “Yeah, well, there are some connectors in the panel that are crucial,” he said, applying the Hopper to his wrist. “But maybe we can sub for them manually. Here,” he said to Fabia, “put your finger right there.”

  She didn’t quite understand him, so he guided her forefinger to the place where he wanted it. She looked up for his approval, and he winked.

  “Now if I can just get you to do the same here,” he said to me.

  But there was no chance of that. I felt a prickling at the back of my neck, and I knew what it meant. I glanced over my shoulder; the hunting dogs had been unleashed and were tearing towards us, grunting horribly
and leaving a spray of saliva on the wind.

  “No time for trial and error,” I said, grabbing him about the waist. “Just make the jump now, Eddie.”

  “Okay, but no guarantees, this isn’t—”

  “Now,” I screamed.

  I startled him into action. His fingers danced across the unmarked keypad—he cursed the darkness, cursed his frozen hands—and all the while the dogs pounded ever closer; I could almost smell their breath now.

  “Eureka, baby!” Eddie said, as the Hopper’s panel suddenly lit up—he’d activated it!

  “Now, the coordinates,” he said, scrambling over the keypad again.

  But the hounds had reached us. And I knew what I had to do.

  I let go of Eddie, broke away from him and Fabia, and threw myself headlong into the first dog. I toppled it off-balance, and the two of us rolled over from the impact.

  “What—” Eddie cried. “What the hell’s she doing—”

  As I grappled with the dog I’d attacked, the others in the pack had to divert around us, which gave Eddie the extra milliseconds he needed—

  “Fabia!” cried Fabia, just as a hound leapt at her, its fangs poised to tear at her throat.

  But when he clamped his jaws shut, she wasn’t there.

  They’d made it—they’d jumped!

  But now I was in deep trouble. I was virtually alone, surrounded by a pack of bloodthirsty beasts.

  And yet—it seemed that Eddie, in his absence, was now returning the favor I’d granted him. I’d given him the infinitesimal sliver of time he needed to get away—and he was doing the same for me.

  Because the dogs were momentarily disoriented by the disappearance of their prey. Later, when I reflected on it, I imagined it probably had something to do with smell—the scents of Eddie and Fabia, so potent and so close, and then suddenly, impossibly removed; but also, I’d noticed on the few occasions when I’d accompanied Eddie on a hop, the very faint, very brief electrical tang it left in the air—something that was almost certainly unlike anything the dogs in this parallel had ever encountered before.

  They were only disoriented for a moment; but it was enough for me to break away and dive into the thick woodland just a few yards off. I’d only just entered it when I heard them come galloping after me. I couldn’t possibly outrun them.