by Dakota Rusk
He and Merri shared a look; which made me glance at Gerrid, to see how he was taking it. It was clear from their body language when they arrived that the Merri-Darius romance was all out in the open, and that the couple didn’t feel entirely comfortable around Gerrid as a result—which explained why none of them had been paying much attention to me, down in my basement hovel. They’d been juggling their own interpersonal issues with their duties on the Advisory Board.
Gerrid sensed my eyes on him; he turned to face me and gave me a wan smile—as if to say I’m okay, don’t worry.
Meanwhile, Darius continued. “The concept of a sleeper who’s dreaming all of reality, isn’t an uncommon concept. Some Hindu sects believe the universe is a dream of the god Vishnu, and that it will all blink out of existence when he awakes. There’s also the Red King in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. And there are figures in other parallels that seem basically to be Azathoth with a different name. In this parallel he’s believed to be a creation of the twentieth-century novelist H.P. Lovecraft, but the god’s existence in other parallels, under other names given by other writers, suggests that this concept—whatever its source—might be bleeding through the Veil into certain highly susceptible minds. Some choose to write about it; others possibly just go mad.”
Gerrid said, “How can something that doesn’t exist do that?”
Darius paused, as if weighing Gerrid’s question for any hint of challenge or defiance; it was heartbreaking, to see these old friends being suddenly so wary and careful of each other. “Well, obviously, it couldn’t do that if it didn’t exist. But possibly there’s something that does exist, that does bleed through, and is interpreted by those it touches in ways that make sense to them.”
“None of this makes sense to me,” I said. “Let’s say Azathoth is real. And let’s say that Jocasta Foxglove and her followers worship him; we already know, from having been to Parallel 17, that her beliefs were considered a scandal even there. All right. Fine. What’s that got to do with Parallel U.? What is there about it that makes Foxglove and her minions want to take over the whole university?”
That seemed to stump everyone for a few moments, till out of nowhere Merri said, “She wants to wake him.”
I blinked, and looked at her. “Are you serious? Why would she do that? She’d cease to exist. Everyone would.”
“Maybe that’s what she wants. She’s a nihilist. She wants everything dead. Or better yet, erased—vanished, like a dream.”
We sat and pondered this some more; then Eddie said, “So she means to play cosmic alarm clock to the big blob o’ bad at the center of existence, and make the whole time-space continuum burst like a balloon. Is that something we should even worry about? Because it’s pretty clear there is no Azathoth; she’s just acting out a sick private fantasy. No one’s actually going to get hurt by it…except maybe a few more unlucky cats.”
“I think the cats are just preparatory spells,” said Darius. “She’s making these minor sacrifices to appease, or win over, or appeal to the god—or other gods, who knows. But when she goes for the big job—actually waking Azathoth—who knows what that will entail? People could get hurt. She could easily switch from feline sacrifices to human ones.”
I sat back and sighed. “So what do we do?”
“What we’ve been doing,” said Darius. “We watch…and we wait.”
“Wait for what?” asked Eddie.
He shrugged. “We’ll know it when we see it. That much I’m sure of.”
I threw my hands in the air. “That’s it? Seriously? Because I haven’t got it in me to sit on my haunches any longer.”
Darius laughed. “I know, Fabia; you’ve said it often enough: you’re happiest when you’ve got something to hit. And believe me, if there were something worth hitting that would help us get to the bottom of this, I’d be all for it. But as of right now there isn’t; so unless someone has a better plan…”
No one had a better plan.
As a superhero group, we were proving pretty lame. And actually, I wasn’t too sure we were a group any longer. When they left, Merri and Darius went one way and Gerrid went the other; they exchanged no words, not even a goodbye. And as soon as he and I were alone, Eddie started getting itchy.
“Just fair warning,” I said, eyeing him as his fingers lightly tapped the Hopper on his wrist: “if you jump out of here and leave me behind again, I will wait patiently for you to get back and then pull your lungs out through your windpipe.”
He motioned me over to him. “All right, then, you can come along. You’ve earned it.” As I approached, he said, “You just gotta promise to respect a guy’s crib…”“This is the parallel you took Merri to,” I said when we arrived. “When she was recovering from being poisoned, freshman year.”
“Yep,” he said.
We stood on the beach, ankle deep in the sand, letting the waves wash over our feet and then recede again. “It’s my own personal getaway,” he continued. “My mom doesn’t know anything about it…or about the gorgeous local boys who are always willing to do their bit for hometown relations.” He flashed me some side-eye. “So you can’t tell her.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. Though the idea that I might someday see the university’s ex-President, Sharon Mason, seemed a remote possibility; there was just so much else that I—that all of us—had to get through first.
But standing here in this tropical paradise, I felt the gloom of uncertainty lift from me, as surely as its toasty warmth melted the rigid hold of winter over my bones. The sun was low in the sky, suspended as if for one final look before plummeting behind the horizon line; and while I was luxuriating in the soothing beauty of it all, this suddenly struck me as odd.
“Just a minute,” I said. “It was the middle of the morning when we left Parallel Prime. Why is it sunset here?”
Eddie grinned at me impishly. “I like sunset.”
“But…that would mean you’ve figured out a way to travel across time, as well as space and dimensions.”
He shrugged. “I’ve had some limited success with it. You get a lot of good ideas when you’re locked up in a lab for seven months. Actually,” he confided, “this was my first chance to give it a shot. That was an experimental jump.”
For a moment I was again blown away, both by this boy’s seemingly limitless genius and by his maddening audacity. I punched him in the arm. “You might’ve told me! I didn’t sign on to be your guinea pig.”
He groaned and clutched his arm where I’d hit him. “I was going to jump, and you threatened to brutalize me if I didn’t take you,” he snarled. “You didn’t say you’d brutalize me either way.”
“Oh, stop it. I didn’t hit you that hard.”
He barked out an oh-really-no? laugh, then lifted his arm limply and tried to move his fingers. “I will never regain full command of my motor functions. God, you’re a beast.”
He started up the beach to the small thatched hut at the top of the rise. “Come on, I’ve got some fermented coconut wine the locals make that’ll put hair on your chest.”
“Be right there,” I said, waving him on. “I just want a few minutes more.”
He disappeared into the hut, and then I felt free to give in to the impulse that had gripped me ever since we materialized here. I set my boots down far enough away to keep them dry, then tested the sand; it was packed enough, here away from the surf, to only lightly give in to my weight.
And so I ran. With the wind at my back and my arms and legs like pistons, I lost myself in three-and-a-half minutes of glorious, all-consuming motion. I hadn’t been able to train in nearly a month, and these few moments of pushing my body to its limits reconnected me with myself in a way that nothing else I’d been striving for could have.
I walked back to my starting point, my skin filmed with sweat and my breath coming in gasps, and happy—not for any quantifiable reason, but happy just to be.
I collected my boots and headed up to the hut.<
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Eddie had poured out some of the local wine into mugs made of coconut shells, and had selected some ambient music from his Hopper; it lilted around the walls of the hut and made it seem…almost pleasant. But in fact it was a mess in there—dirty, disheveled, squalid. Of course it was; it may have been situated in a tropical paradise, but it was still a fifteen-year-old boy’s bedroom.
The wine was vile at first—viscous and tangy—but after the first mug I got used to it; and by the third I was a convert. I felt looser and less stressed than I had in months; but I made it a point to stop before I got drunk.
Eddie, unfortunately, was smashed by the bottom of his second mug; of course he was younger than I was, and smaller. And the alcohol loosened his tongue, too.
“I miss my mom,” he said morosely, after having laughed about some childish anecdote mere minutes before. These were words I never thought I’d hear Eddie Mason utter. He usually pretended barely to tolerate his mother.
“Why don’t you go and see her?” I asked.
He looked up at me with big, liquid eyes. “She was shot up pretty bad, you know.”
“I remember,” I said, recalling how she’d taken a bullet to the chest—a bullet meant for Eddie.
“It’s taking her a long time to convalesce. She has to stay nice and quiet, and not get overly excited.” He gave a little half-sob, half-laugh. “But the woman’s a bloody wizard. If I showed up now, she’d take one look at my face and know that there’s major trouble going on, and that I’m in the middle of it. And if I denied it, she’d know I was lying.” He shook his head. “No; until she’s fully healed, it’s better if she thinks I’ve been off selfishly having fun all these months, instead of battling freaking witches tooth and nail.” Then he shot me an accusatory glance. “What is going on with you super-types, anyway?” he said. “That meeting we just had…it was like none of you could stand to be anywhere near each other. Except for Magnetic Girl and Living Doll. They were obviously resisting the urge to braid themselves together like a pretzel.”
I shrugged. “Teenage romance,” I said, hoping I could leave it at that.
“Teenage hormones, more like it,” he said with a sneer. “Don’t any of you realize, we’re up against some serious nastiness here—I mean, you were almost murdered—and all we know for sure about is the little teeny-tiny tip of the iceberg? We’re in trouble if we can’t pull together and make like an actual team.”
“Well, I don’t know what we can do about it.”
Our conversation sort of dissolved after that. I drifted off to sleep in the hut’s single hammock, while Eddie slept on the dirt floor (not out of any sense of gentlemanliness, but because he’d already passed out there).
And it was only a few hours later that I woke up with a start, with the realization that contrary to what I’d told Eddie, I knew exactly what to do next.
27
It was the measure of Valery’s utter shock at seeing us that he wiped the lens of his glasses with his tie twice—once when he first caught sight of me, then again when Eddie stepped out of the shadows and said, “Hey there, Ivan the Terrible. Glad to make your acquaintance. Heard a boatload about you.”
“This, I take it,” Valery said, as he fumbled his glasses back onto his face, “is the long-lost Eddie Mason?”
“In the flesh and twice as pretty,” Eddie replied with a beaming smile. I’d forgotten that he and Valery hadn’t ever met; with all the interlocking calamities they’d both been involved in during freshman year, it seemed almost not possible.
Valery looked like the stuffing had been knocked right out of him. He glanced around the room and said, “Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Be our guest,” said Merri. “Plenty of chairs.”
He pulled up the nearest one and lowered himself into it as though he’d suddenly aged twenty years. “And you’ve been holed up in this…place for the past…how long?” he asked, looking at me.
“Since Jocasta Foxglove tried to have me murdered,” I said. “Or really, since I rescued Eddie from the prison in Parallel 39, where she had him making Hoppers for her.”
He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I should’ve known the relative calm was too good to be true. I’d even thought this might be a nice, quiet time to focus on giving up smoking.” He scanned our faces. “I don’t suppose any of you has a pipe on hand…?”
We didn’t, of course; and during the retelling of everything we’d been through up to now, Valery occasionally dipped into his jacket pocket, instinctively reaching for the pipe and tobacco pouch that were no longer there. I knew he’d be back in his office no longer than thirty seconds before he was lighting up again.
“And might I inquire,” he said after we’d brought him up to date, “why I’m only just hearing about this?”
“We didn’t want to compromise you,” said Darius. “We didn’t really have anything solid till now.”
He looked a little crestfallen; but then Eddie chimed in, “You’re needed, Ivan. The superhero team’s falling apart; it’s up to you to whip us back into world-beating shape.”
“ ‘Superhero team’?” Valery asked dubiously.
“Us, big guy!” He went around the room, ticking us off: “Magnetic Girl, Living Doll, Warrior Nun, Overbite Boy, and yours truly, Daimon Seed. And now we’re complete, with our fearless leader, Ivan the Terrible.”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” Valery muttered.
“As a matter of fact, same here,” said Gerrid.
“The point is,” Eddie continued, leaping up and pacing the perimeter of the room, “we know the Witch Queen is up to no good. We need you to coordinate our efforts to find out what exactly, because everybody here is riding the Hormone Express.”
“Actually,” said Darius, “my hormones are synthetic and I have complete control over their dispersal through my bloodstream.”
“Thanks,” said Eddie. “I’ll make a note of that for when I market our role-playing game. Meantime, Ivan, over to you.”
Eddie sat down again and we all looked at Valery, who looked back at us, essentially stunned.
“All…all right, then,” he said with a sigh. “I suppose… I’ll make some ground-level inquiries among the rest of the faculty to find out whether anyone else has noticed anything unusual with regard to Foxglove and the witches. Meantime, all of you continue as before…except for you,” he added, turning to Eddie. “No more returning to Parallel 39 and playing prisoner.”
“But if I don’t do that,” Eddie protested, “they’ll know I’ve escaped and get super-suspicious.”
“Exactly. It might force their hand—prompt Jocasta to move up her timetable. Presuming she has one. And we’ll be watching.”
Eddie nodded in appreciation, then turned to me and muttered, “He’s good. Totes respect.”
“What about me, then?” I asked. “If she knows I’m back, that’ll force her hand, too. Can I leave this grim little basement, and let myself be seen?”
He shook his head. “Too risky. I’m counting on Eddie’s disappearance to spook her into action; but your reappearance would just make you a target.”
“That’s okay,” I said, desperate to persuade him. “I’m fine with being a target. It’d be much easier to fight off a bunch of would-be assassins than to sit down here doing nothing.”
A sudden flicker of mirth passed between everyone else in the room; and then Merri, Gerrid and Eddie chanted in unison, “Give Fabia something to hit,” and laughed. Possibly I should’ve been hurt by it; instead I felt a kind of pride.
“I’m hoping it won’t come to that,” Valery said. “But Fabia, you and Eddie are needed down here. We now know Jocasta uses these tunnels for ritual services; you’ve got to monitor them—see if you can pick up any further intelligence from them, or determine whether there’s an increase in their frequency or intensity.”
“Like, if they replace the cat with a different kind of sacrifice,” Eddie said. “Say, a student.”
>
Valery looked suddenly stricken, and wiped his lenses on his tie a third time. “God forbid that should happen,” he said. “But in the event it does—Fabia, you have my encouragement to hit everyone and everything in sight.”
There were a few more procedural questions after that; then Valery and the others went back up to the campus, leaving Eddie and me alone again.
“I’m not sure that worked,” Eddie said. “I mean, Ivan’s great; I was a little worried at first that he’d just stay all dithery and ‘Oh my’ the whole time, but he snapped into leadership mode pretty quickly. I just don’t think he bucked everyone up as much as I thought he would.”
“You thought?” I asked, flopping down onto a sofa with a wobbly armrest. “It was my idea to bring him in, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatevs.” He sat down on a small stool and started tapping his foot. “Listen,” he said. “Fabia. Hey. Warrior Nun.”
I was lying with my face against the back of the couch; I didn’t want to look at him. “What,” I said icily.
“I know this totally blows for you, having to keep hanging out in this basement. Admittedly you have my scintillating company to dazzle and delight you, but I know you’re a doer, not a sitter, and this is pretty much killing you.”
“Pretty much,” I said glumly.
“Me, now—I’m not bothered. I was chained to a desk in Parallel 39 for seven months; I got used to isolation. This place is like Disneyland by comparison, if only ’cause I’ve got a whole tunnel complex to explore, instead of a single concrete bunker.”
“I’m very happy for you,” I said flatly.
“My point is this,” he continued, and I could hear him scoot his stool closer to me. “You’re a hero, you know? Not like me…I’m more of the wizard archetype—the guy behind the scenes. But you’re the classic champion: the solitary figure on the front lines, shouldering the burdens, meeting the enemy head-on.”
“Which is exactly the opposite of what I’m doing right now,” I said, annoyed that he was trying to talk me out of the self-pity I was actually enjoying, in a morbid kind of way.