My hand would reach into the dark. In its place, blues and greens and browns and maroons would spring. Purpura. Dabs and streaks revealed secrets hidden deep underground. Pastel highlights and sepia shadings uncovered the marvels of planet Earth.
As I pushed away the shadows, and my hand worked the details, the tunnel came to life with the mural that had astonished me years ago. Years ago? It wasn’t until years in the future that I would inadvertently unlock the door and witness this hallway and its masterpiece.
The ceiling and staircase proved a challenge, but with some stretching and leaping, and balancing on bannisters, as well as color splatter techniques, the ground floor mural shaped itself. The wounded Shadow God had apparently placed billions of years of waypoints for me to follow, but no ladder to finish the job.
Another mystery of God logic.
The doors got their icons—earthworms, moles, and ants on one; fossils, liquids, and rocks on the other. I left the gaping dark area where the steel door had stood, not able to fathom what I was supposed to do about it.
With each detail drawn in, the dark of the mansion receded and the debris vanished, revealing small black and white stones littering the hallway. They were of the same unknown material as the feathers I had given Greg and Teresa, each one carved into a somewhat recognizable shape. A sort-of animal or a geometrical whatsit. Curved thin squiggles, trapezoids, a three-headed bear, a spider with an enormous dick, and more—a number four, a lopsided three, whatever. And here—a feather. All manner of creatures and shapes, black and white, were piled and scattered on the floor.
A jaguar.
Yes.
I crawled around, turning each sculpted creation in my hand, searching methodically while admiring the craftsmanship, the oddity, and the originality of the figurines, until finally, I came across what I had hoped to find—the winged-dog balancing a star on its nose.
The stone miniatures were representations of the formula’s power symbols for tunnel travelers.
As I proceeded to wipe away the inky blackness and render the stairway and second floor with depictions of, among others, whales and squids, oaks and palm trees, streams and four-legged creatures, I instinctively knew the Shadow Creature wouldn’t be completely healed until the puzzle of the carved stones became apparent, and I resolved it. As my rainbow hand fleshed out the details of the curious little apeman on what I thought of as Amelia and Jenny’s door, I stared into the eyes I was creating, hypnotized as each precise movement of my fingers revealed another memory, another healing clue.
Sheoblask said Doctor Steel was preparing a time-jump. The gap in the wall was where the steel door had been. In my vision as I was hurled into this mess, Steel had stood in the hall fidgeting with a complex black and white pattern when the tunnel had blown.
According to Tuma, his witnessing of the catastrophe had been his hearing the sounds of an avalanche. Of course—these black and white stones being dislodged could account for that. That makes sense. But how do I get all these pieces littering the mansion floors back into place? Is that what I’m meant to do? Put together a physical jigsaw puzzle?
I worked my way up to the third floor and drew in the vista of the mountain and blue sky of Pigeon’s door. There was no feather ornamentation in place, so I decided that’s where I would begin to piece together the scattered bits of the formula. For hours or days, or maybe eons, I combed through the carved pieces, separating the feathers from the rest. I formed piles of other similar pieces, and of all the bizarre shapes I came across, only two stood alone without a similar piece. One was my winged-dog. The other was an intricate sculpting of a cigar.
Must be Stogie God’s.
Though I felt no need for food or water and fought back the urge to smoke, I did nod off from physical exhaustion. Once, after I awoke, I heard what sounded like choral musicians tuning their vocal chords. I walked to the door of the garden and saw the Creator, the Manager, and the Wild Hair standing near the fountain. They were watching with intense concern as the Stogie God swirled his hand in the water. Sometimes, they would point at the liquid or comment on his actions. He toiled aggressively, with obvious exertion and concentration. God, I was glad to see them. I burst out laughing when, damn, I noticed that even then Stogie God had a scowl on his face and a cigar in his mouth. I tapped on the glass door to get their attention, but they didn’t hear me or chose to pay me no heed. I banged and yelled and rattled the door, but when they still never even glanced my way, I fought back the temptation to open the door, figuring why disturb the gods in whatever they were up to. Might just screw things up again.
I hauled all the feather shapes up to the third floor. While rummaging through them, my hand lit up with a spark and a snap, snatched up a certain piece, and placed it on the door. It looked and fit perfect. Immediately the mansion began to hum with an energy that enhanced the feeling of life and creation that I had covered the walls with.
Far out. Maybe this is going to work out fine.
I had come to believe the hallway doors led to different dimensions, so, while curious, I didn’t dare attempt to open them or even knock. As I walked back to the first floor, with a new life vibrating through the building, I sensed stirrings in those rooms. Looking back out the garden door, I saw about fifteen beings milling around, talking quietly in small groups. Male, female, human, alien, plant, animal.
My heart leapt.
“Pan.” I yelled and pounded again on the glass. He was laughing and fondling the ass of a volcanic-haired woman whose tits looked like they were peaked with snow and ice.
The old goat, it’d surprise the hell out of him to see me.
I grasped the door handle, but in an instant, a soft but insistent presence encircled my hand.
“What good would come of it? This doesn’t exist to them.”
It was Shadow Creature, now a slumped, slightly transparent, more indigo than ebony, figure. My immediate impression was that the god was tired.
“I... I don’t know. I don’t know anything. It’s just I’m alone, lost at the beginning of time. I thought a familiar face would welcome me also.”
“I understand.”
And I knew it did. Lost, at the beginning of time.
“Do you know me? Before, when I first arrived, you didn’t.”
“I do now. You’ve cleaned and healed much of the damage. I’ve watched from the gateway where I’m trapped. You learned well.”
“You taught me well.”
“You’ve healed the physical section of tunnel I once was. What’s left is the essence of my pain.”
“The doorway of nothingness down the hall. I first saw it as a steel door in New York.”
“Yes.”
“I can sense the loss.” Blue sparkles floated from the dark, forbidding hole at the far end from where I stood. I stared at my feet, hurt that Shadow Creature wasn’t human. I dropped my hand from the glass door handle and gestured weakly at the group of strangers in the garden. “What’s going on?”
“A gathering of the Gods. Their time has begun. Mine is about to end. I glimpsed the nothingness they have no knowledge of. In a sense they are my children, though I am created by them—a lesser god in this new universe, nothing in the previous reality that spawned this one, but a bridge between the two.”
“What’s Stogie doing?”
“Creating the tunnels. Chaos rules this transition and they have things to do, worlds and ideas and creations simmering inside them. The tunnels are the beginning of the way for them to hold back Chaos.” The Shadow Creature chuckled. “Stogie the Tunneler is about to create me.”
“He is?”
“Yes, as soon as time enters the formula.”
“Uh, why can’t we let him in here and he can show me how to put all these carvings together?”
“No, the way it works is, he’ll come up with the concept of time travel when
you put all the pieces together.”
“Does time exist yet?”
“You and I are the closest thing to it at the moment. But they’ll think of it soon.”
“This is the nuttiest fucking way to create a universe.”
“Your being here as the tunnels are created is the reason you have the natural ability to see into them and destroy them.” It hooked its arm with mine. “Come, let’s move on.” And the ancient, wounded god walked with me down the Monster Mansion hallway at the beginning of the creation of the universe, leaning slightly into me. Its step faltered. I could feel the shadow fading.
Christ, I was killing it.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course. I’m about to become what I was. What I was created as.”
“I’ll never understand how you exist before all of those other gods. It’s like this universe flip-flops at the whim of another.”
Shadow Creature shuffled along beside me without answering right away. Finally it sighed, then spoke. “I’m just a way. It’s a mystery that even gods can’t answer, isn’t it?”
At the gaping hole of nothingness that was the lost time tunnel as well as the Shadow Creature’s essence, I took a guess and sent my hand through its ritual power gesture. The winged-dog carving glowed from where I had kept it apart from the other pieces. Picking it up, my hand moved unwaveringly to the center of the dark doorway. A sprite of blue light flashed as the sculpted talisman touched, then stuck to the shadowed area as if the void was a solid surface.
An exhausted but grateful whisper sounded, “Thank you. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
I approached my task as I would a jigsaw puzzle—finding corner pieces, edge pieces, then painstakingly fitting patterns of black and white shapes together. My hand tingled and blue lights popped when one carving interlocked with another. It was a relief I didn’t have to figure out some time enigma and could just continue to use magic and my artistic instinct.
I kept up a constant chatter with the Shadow Creature as I worked, thanking it, sometimes breaking down and crying, pleading the god to come up with another solution. But I would gather myself together, feeling helpless to fight fate, and start to ramble again, bringing up memories. Remember when I used that knife to dig out that bullet? Don’t you think the Polczewski pandas was the coolest miracle? So, does Teresa know you brought her into my dreams?
The darkness never responded to my utterances, and with each piece I set in place, my remorse battled with my resolve to do the shadow’s bidding even as I felt its energy ebb. As I rebuilt the doorway, sometimes a shudder or a rasp would pass through my mind, and I knew that soon the Shadow Creature would no longer exist.
Then, I held the last piece. What would happen? What would change? Was I repairing a ruined tunnel of no use to anyone but the travelers, or about to send the universe into an alternate reality—a reality where my life wasn’t shaped by the quest to heal a broken god?
Maybe my best hope to see Shadow Creature again was if the universe, like a lung breathing in and out, repeated itself over and over. I would relive my moments with the god again in some yet to be duplicate of this universe. I may have already done so millions of times before.
I don’t know.
Goodbye Shadow, my old friend.
And I slipped the last piece, a detailed replica of a fat, stinking cigar into place.
Ping.
And I was in the cabin near Mount Saint Helens, the time travel door looking like a perfect mosaic of black and white charms.
The room was empty. The fire blazed. There were no longer broken pebbles on the floor.
I think I might have laughed—I think I might have cried.
Chapter 48
I was tired and emotionally frazzled but gathered my strength and walked around the cabin. I made sure I didn’t open any of the closed doors that had enigmatic symbols on them. Outside, I found and examined the portal’s ceramic box. The sparsely peppered monkey and fish decor told me tunnel traffic looked thin at the moment. I called and searched for Piddles, then confident she wasn’t within the portal area, I approached the magical barrier to look for her in the wild wooded valley. After flicking my fingers through their ritual, the wall rippled. As I stepped through, I felt a tug and a suction that held me briefly.
Like a hug.
Odd, never felt that happen before.
Following the route that Jehingofratubalaz had led me on, I finally came upon Piddles chewing on the piece of seaweed that had lain on the forest path. I could sense tunnel systems nearby but not the ruined area of nothingness that Cassandra and I had been pulled into.
Cassandra.
I sat hugging Piddles and wiping at a dampness on my cheeks, thinking about the bird woman. I saw her at the curandera’s ceremony. She got what she wanted—to live in the tunnels.
I didn’t want anything to do with god passages anymore.
“C’mon, girl. Let’s go home.”
Piddles and I cut across rough terrain and slopped through marshes, then followed streams and rivers continuously downhill, moving away from the accomplished mission, going on to find my new self.
We came out into civilization, strangely enough, near the area I recognized as The Bridge of The Gods on the Columbia River. I stuck my thumb out.
Almost immediately, a pickup truck rolled to a stop.
“East, I’ll go east.”
“How far east?” The driver, a long-haired, hook-nosed Indian asked.
“New York, uh, I guess.”
He reached over and yanked on the inside door handle of his pickup truck and grunted. “You have to pull from the outside at the same time. Now, pull.”
Piddles sat between us, her head poking out of my knapsack.
The gears of the old truck stuck a bit, but the engine sounded solid as we picked up speed.
I was in no mood for conversing, and the Indian man drove, a serious frown on his face, without saying a word either.
Exhaustion overtook me.
When I awoke, the sun was setting behind a dusty hillside peppered with scrub-brush. The truck was parked near a building with a rusty sign that proclaimed itself to be Snake River Groceries, Gas, & Guns.
The driver stood at the edge of the dirt parking lot, streaks of orange and pink sky backlighting him. Piddles was at his feet, eating a mound of food placed on a wooden board. As I climbed from the cabin, I immediately wondered if Sheoblask or Doctor Steel had planned another ambush. Or Stogie and the other gods. Maybe I was being delivered to update them on my progress. Maybe Sheoblask had clearance to put his personal threat of revenge into motion. Or Steel had his psychic manipulatory grips into me and would never let go.
Grabbing my knapsack in case I had to move fast, I approached the driver.
“Your dog needs to eat and drink. Maybe run and play.”
“Hey, thanks, man. I really conked out. Been hiking up near that old volcano for two days. Seems like from the beginning of time.”
The man stared at me thoughtfully.
Piddles lapped at water from an overturned hubcap.
“Snows coming. I hope this truck’ll make it over the Tetons.”
“It seems to run good.”
“Too light for heavy snow. The bed’s loaded down with a lot of scrap. We’ll see.”
“Where are we?”
“Idaho.”
“How far can you take me?”
“South Dakota. Take about two days.”
“Wow, far out.”
I watched Piddles sniffing around, poking her nose into holes and brush. She barked at a rabbit, spotted another, and took off after it, yapping.
The man boomed with a full belly laugh from deep within him. “Ha. What were you two doing up in those mountains? And you barefoot. You hippies trying to live natural gotta learn t
o have some sense. Ha, ha. We’re sure to come across some snow. Ha, ha.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, leaning back, finishing his great burst of joy with a whoop. Chuckling, he said, “My name’s Lawrence. Nice coat.”
“Thanks, I think it’s bear. I’m Deets.” Suddenly, my paranoia dropped away. “So, it’s all the way to South Dakota, then. Far out. Hey, I’ll pay for the gas. You hungry?”
“Sure, but save enough for a new pair of shoes.”
Across Idaho and through Wyoming we swapped stories, railed against the establishment, cursed the meager heater, and took turns driving. We suffered through a wicked snowstorm as we crossed the Tetons, then waited it out in a barracks-style building on the Wind River Reservation.
I felt I was back in the world again, with real people, not gods or immortals or self-sacrificing shadows.
Lawrence ran a motorcycle and auto repair shop back in Tacoma. The bed of the truck was cluttered with handlebars, motorcycle tires, a beat-up engine, and the skeleton of a Yamaha, plus a mess of assorted car parts. A picture of a Triumph Bonneville was clipped to the passenger’s overhead window visor.
In Casper, Wyoming I took down the photo. “This bike’s humongous.”
“I rode it for years.”
“Listen, man. Why don’t you drop me off here? I’ll catch a bus to New York. That way you can cut across to Pine Ridge without worrying about me.”
“I wasn’t worrying about you.”
“Hmm, well anyway, I left a Harley up in those woods by the volcano.”
He nodded. “So what’s up with the Harley?”
I ripped out a page from my drawing pad and sketched the trails and landmarks of my route through the logging areas to where the bike was stashed as best as I could recall.
“Anyway, if you can find it, it’s yours. Papers under the seat. It’s not mine, but it’s not stolen. Call it a gift of the gods.” I stuck the Triumph photo back up on the visor.
“Maybe I’ll search for it.”
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 32