Nan remained cautious. “I would not question your word. But I have been eyed by boy children as well as men of any age. That is why I dress conservatively, trying not to provoke attention. You may believe you are indifferent, having had no experience of this nature. The risk—”
“Try him,” Dell said, amused.
The four girls stripped and stood bare. Santo did the same.
Almost reluctantly, Nan disrobed and stood as lovely as the dawn of woman. Dell was entranced. He had to avert his gaze lest he fall in love with her on the spot.
“I can see you are pretty,” Santo said.
Nan went to him and embraced him. “I don’t turn you on. It’s like me hugging another girl,” she said in wonder.
“Yes. I’m sure you are a fine person, like my sisters, but I’ll never be interested in your panties.” Indeed, he was unfreaked, and would remain so when he became a man.
“So I guess you are ready to go,” Dell said. Had she hugged him like that, he could have freaked out.
“Um, one more caution,” Nia said. “This is a paradise for children, with an ambiance that discourages memory. You could be swept away by that, being children, and see no reason to return to the nasty outside realm.”
“But that would ruin everything!” Nan protested.
“Yes. I would hate to have to answer to our children’s folks, who are trusting us to keep them safe. So we need to make sure you will return, all of you. I think you should have an adult along, in case you need a reminder.”
“An adult can’t get in,” Kadence said.
“Yes. But an adult spirit might ride with one of the children, the way Kadence’s spirit rides with Ula, only to observe, keeping his head down.”
“His head?” Dell asked, suddenly feeling the relevance.
“You’re not that far into adulthood. You could ride with Santo.”
He couldn’t get his head around it. “But I’ve never—I know nothing about—”
“I appreciate your point,” Nan said to Nia. “Forgetting is a danger. We should have that safety net.”
Dell remained uneasy with this, but had to concede the point. There was a serious risk going into the Mountain. He had a reservation, however. “What happens to my—my body, if my spirit is in the Mountain?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” the peeve said. “It just lies there unconscious after you sniff the soul vapor in the supply cabinet. You might as well be asleep, and dreaming of the Mountain.”
And of course Dell had trouble sleeping alone at any time. “Suppose something happens, like another storm at sea? When my body can’t react or help itself? This makes me nervous.”
“I will hold your hand,” Nia said. “And see to your body if there is need.”
And that was it. He trusted her beyond all others.
He lay on a bed, and Nia brought the little jar of vapor. She opened it and held it by his nose. Then she took his hand, sitting beside the bed. He sniffed, and his awareness drifted up and out, and across to Santo. He entered the boy’s head, finding a comfortable lodging. It was like entering an unfamiliar house. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” Santo replied.
Dell found that he could see out the boy’s eyes, hear via his ears, and feel what the body felt. He could also talk with him mentally. “Let’s be on our way. I won’t interfere unless you start to forget.”
“Yes. None of us want to forget.”
The three pairs of children took hands and lined up. “We’ll go first,” little Woe Betide said. She reached out with her free hand and touched Santo’s hand. “Here’s the address.”
And that sufficed. Dell read the way Santo fixed on it, orienting his power.
Now Santo formed a tunnel. It was only a small portal just big enough for one person to climb through, or two if they jammed together.
“Last one through is a rotten tomato!” Woe Betide said as she and Win jumped through. Squid and Kadence followed, hugging as they stepped through.
“We’re rotten,” Santo said tolerantly.
“Yes.” Nan hugged him and they half dived, half fell through.
Dell was picking up Santo’s impressions, and they were only of getting safely through the hoop-like hole. Dell stifled the impressions he would have had, jammed against this lovely creature’s softnesses.
Safely through, Santo let the hole expire. He would make another one when it was time.
The six of them paused, waiting to see if there were any signs of their discovery. There were not. They had made it in undiscovered. They breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Now they looked around. They were in a pavilion with paved paths extending out in six directions, each wending through a different type of flower garden. It was lovely. There was the sound of children chatting and laughing. In moments a group of them came charging down one path, through the pavilion, and out on another path, all of them bare. The last one was a little girl who slapped the closest person, which happened to be Win. “You’re it!” She dashed off.
“Act childish!” Nan whispered.
Win tagged Squid. “You’re it!” She ran off.
Squid tagged Woe. “You’re it! Run where we need to go.”
Woe nodded. “I’m going to tag somebody!” she cried, and ran down one of the paths. The others followed, doing their best to seem as childish as they looked.
Out in the open, Dell saw that the entire inside of the mountain was neither rock nor a series of caverns. It was a giant domed garden, a crafted landscape with fields of different kinds of flowers interspersed by fairy castles and miniature train rides. They clambered aboard a train, only to discover that it was really a kind of boat floating along a canal. The canal angled upward and the craft followed it, heedless of gravity, until it was high above the dense foliage. Then it tilted into a waterfall, and they screamed gleefully as they plunged downward. It was a good thing that none of them were afraid of heights or falls. This was fun!
At the base the boat zoomed through a sprinkler that was watering the plants, soaking them as they screamed again. But of course it didn’t matter, as they were bare and would soon dry off again.
The boat slowed to a halt near another pavilion, or maybe a gazebo. This one was filled with different flavors of Eye Scream. A number of children were eating it, and some were making different flavored snowballs and throwing them at each other. Their group joined in, taking mouthfuls and smacking each other with handfuls. Nan smeared her body with chocolate and vanilla so that her body looked painted rather than developed, marking it. She was technically still a child, but it was better to look as much younger as she could.
“This way,” Woe said, and ran off the path into a huge patch of chocolate mud. They chugged through it, getting thoroughly coated, screaming gleefully. Probably for Win the screams were genuine; she was young enough to appreciate mud baths.
They emerged from the mud into a field of cotton candy. Every time they plucked a strand from the ground where it grew, a musical note sounded. Then they splashed through a goldfish pond, losing much of the mud, and arrived at another pavilion. This one featured magic mirrors that made them look excruciatingly fat, thin, tall, short, or like ogres or elves.
Farther along there was a library pavilion, where kids constantly yelled, naughtily breaking the silence. Then another, featuring pillows for pillow fighting. They took pillows and whammed each other until feathers flew, literally. And another with many gates for swinging on.
“I could actually get used to this,” Nan confided to Santo. “No responsibilities, no discipline, nothing to do all day but eat and play.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, and whammed her with a pillow he had hung on to.
“Oh? Well take that,” she said, and plastered him with a raspberry mudball she had saved.
Then they were wrestling on the lawn, she not much
larger than he, tickling each other and laughing. Dell stifled his impressions to the vanishing point, he hoped. They were being children. Just so long as they didn’t forget what else they were.
“We’re here,” Woe Betide said.
They were at a gazebo like the others, anonymous in the throng of them. This one featured water bombs labeled A B C D E F and G. “Don’t burst the F-Bomb,” Woe warned. “Not here.”
Nan took it and held it. “Aw, I want to throw it at someone,” she said.
The other children were snatching up the other bombs, ready to throw them. They were forgetting why they were here.
TIME TO GO HOME, Dell thought fiercely to Santo. MAKE A HOLE.
“Oh yeah,” Santo agreed. “Nan, don’t throw that bomb! We’re going back.” Then to Squid: “Fetch in the others. It’s time to go home before we lose ourselves here.”
Squid, alien as she was, was quickly to appreciate the danger. “Win! Woe! Kadence. Here to me. Now!”
“Awww,” the three chorused. But they obeyed the voice of authority and gathered in, however reluctantly.
Santo made a hole and they tumbled through, pair by pair. He and Nan clasped and forged through last.
They were in a pile of limbs and torsos, back in the yacht. They extricated themselves, laughing. Nan had managed to hold on to the F-Bomb, intact.
“The wanderers return,” the peeve said, and the dogfish flashed a smiley face.
Then they sobered. “That was close,” Squid said. “If you hadn’t reminded me, Santo, I might have gone and lost myself in that garden playground, even though I’m not really a human child.”
“Me too,” Woe Betide said.
“And mee,” Win and Kadence said together.
“Dell, get back to your own body and wake,” Nia said. “We have work to do.”
Oh. Yes. Dell floated across to his supine body, where Nia still held his hand, and filtered in. In half a moment he had infused it, and opened his eyes. “Thanks!”
“That was you reminding us?” Nan asked. “Thank you!” She still had streaks of mud and raspberry mudball on her body, and her hair was a mess, but she remained surpassingly lovely, as Dell could now let himself appreciate.
“That was close,” Win said. “I am a child, but now that I’m out, I’m relieved to be back in the real world. My folks would have been most distressed if I hadn’t returned.” The others nodded soberly.
“We thought that we might get caught by the Piper and locked in,” Squid said. “But it was just being there with the happy children that was the trap.”
“Time for me to go,” Woe Betide said. “But it was the most fun I’ve had in decades.” She was six, but had been that age for those decades. She morphed back to the Demoness Metria. “Wow!” she said. “I’m reading her memories.”
“Are we ready to detonate the F-Bomb?” Nan asked. “Much as I dread it.”
“So do we,” Kadence said. “We children always want to sneak a peek at whatever the Adult Conspiracy is hiding, but a bomb? That’s scary.”
“Do it, trainee,” Metria said. “It’s for you and them to share, so now’s the time. If it violates the Conspiracy, it won’t go off.”
Nan held the bomb aloft. Then she dropped it on the deck. It exploded, dousing them all with its liquid.
There was a moment of pained discovery.
“Oh, fudge!” Nia swore. “I thought it might just be a bad word the children wouldn’t understand, but it’s not.”
“It is not,” Nan agreed grimly.
Now Nia quoted the last line of the poem, finally complete.
“Look not into my eyes, for my name is . . . Fear.”
Chapter 7
“In Your Dreams”
“As I see it,” Grania said, “This is a challenge. We shall have to face our worst fears and overcome them. I suspect that each of us has a different fear. Until we recognize and handle them, we will not be able to proceed further on our missions.”
“I agree,” Nan O’Tech said. “I hate the thought, but it is what I needed to know. I thank you for your assistance; I could not have gotten this information without you.” She was speaking literally, because Santo’s holes and the children’s presence had been essential.
“And we needed Woe Betide’s help getting it,” Dell said. “So we each did the other party a favor.”
“Yes,” Nan agreed. “I sincerely appreciate the way you prevented us from getting lost in childish innocence, though I enjoyed being childish with you, Dell. In another week, when I am adult and know about such things, I would like to meet you again. Perhaps we could have more to do with each other on an adult basis.”
Dell’s knees felt weak. This stunningly lovely creature wanted to—to date him? What sheer bliss!
Then he asked himself the key question: Suppose she were not beautiful, would he still be interested? Actually he would, for she was a phenomenal person, but that lent him perspective. He braced himself and spoke. “I am just an ordinary guy, nothing special physically or mentally. You are an extraordinary girl, about to be a truly remarkable woman. I would hold you back simply by being what I am. So the answer is no. You must seek your own level, which is far beyond mine.”
Nan nodded. “This makes sense. I will, with regret, leave you alone.” Then she crossed over to him and kissed him. She might technically still be a child, but girls of that age did know how to kiss, innocently.
When he recovered, he was sitting on a bed and Metria and Nan were gone. Obviously he had freaked out, but there was a residue of utter joy.
“Good thing she wasn’t yet a woman,” Nia said. “You’d have been lost.”
“I’d have been lost,” he agreed.
“Now the question is, how may we tackle our worst fears? I have a notion, but you and the children may not appreciate it.”
“A notion?”
“The dream realm. That’s the home of the greatest variety of fears.”
“But we’d have to be asleep. That’s no way to accomplish anything.”
“I am thinking of the gourd.”
“Oh. I guess.”
“I will talk to the children. If they agree, we will harvest some gourds and undertake a joint excursion, perhaps tomorrow.”
He nodded. “And here I thought we’d be going places in the boat.”
“We will be, in due course.”
The children agreed. They steered the boat to a suitable patch of vines, and the children went out on a gourd-collecting chore. Before long they had six fine gourds. They seemed perfectly ordinary, except that each had a little hole in it.
“Now to review, so that you can ponder this at leisure overnight,” Nia said. “Our next clue is ‘In Your Dreams,’ which means we shall need to do some dreaming in order to discover the next stage of our mission. We interpret this to mean that we can do this by using the gourds, because we can do it as a unified group that way, as we can’t with ordinary dreaming. When a person puts his eye to a gourd peephole, s/he seems to enter the realm of dreams, and can depart it only when an outsider interrupts the contact. Normally immersions are limited to an hour or so at a time, for physical health and mental safety. Therefore the peeve and dogfish will monitor us and sever the contact in an hour, unless circumstances indicate otherwise. Are we clear so far?”
“Oh, sure,” Win said. “We know about the dream world. We’ve been there before. That horror house is fun. So are the candy gardens.”
“And the dream sets,” Kadence said. “Where they are making bad dreams for folk who deserve them. Just don’t mess with them, or the Night Stallion will kick you out, maybe literally, leaving a hoof-print on your bottom.” The others tittered appreciatively.
“However,” Nia continued grimly, “our immediate purpose is to seek and handle our worst fears. That is unlikely to be pleasant. This will no
t be idle entertainment. The dream realm can become positively scary on occasion. So any who prefer to avoid this trial may opt out of the session with the gourd. Probably Dell and I can handle it and make it to the next clue. The ultimate responsibility is ours.”
“Yes, this cruise in Fibot is for you and Dell to deliver it to its new owners,” Kadence said. “So you have to do whatever it takes to get it there. But for the children it’s just personal discovery. So we don’t have to do it. Especially me, since I’m not really part of this mission.”
“Then why stay around?” Win asked with the directness of her youth.
“Because I really like being with other children from the future, even if it’s not the same as my own future. I’ve been with many people, but none quite like you.”
“Win didn’t mean anything, okay,” Santo said. “We like being with you too. And your future is our future, now.”
Dell saw that Santo understood about being different. He was becoming a diplomat. He also saw that Kadence had a more mature perspective than was ordinary for her age. She had faced oblivion, and knew that most other things were relatively minor. They could have made a good couple, but for his orientation and her technical nonexistence at this time. They did seem to be becoming friends.
“We’ll do it,” Squid said with certainty. “You ’dults would mess it up on your own.”
Win clapped her hands, applauding the opinion.
“But think about it,” Nia said. “The best time to opt out of the gourd is before you enter. You won’t be able to when you’re in the middle of a siege of fear.”
“Aw, who’s afraid of fear?” Win demanded. “That’s just more ’dult worry.”
Ah, the comfort of inexperience, Dell thought. Win had a horrific background she had escaped, but there were things she had yet to learn.
They remained anchored on the lake, preferring not to have to be concerned about the location of the boat or where it was headed while they dealt with the dream realm. They would surely be sailing through the air again, once they navigated their fears and gained the next clue.
Nia joined him at night, taking his hand without being asked. “You understand that the gourd is unlikely to be fun tomorrow.”
Fire Sail Page 12