Only Marrow remained on the original side. “It is my turn,” the skeleton said. “But I hesitate.”
“That is understandable,” Chex said. “We have all had very difficult experiences.”
“I have no concern about a bad dream,” Marrow said. “I do not dream, because I am not alive. My concern is that either there will be no reaction, because there is nothing in me to generate it——no fear, no shame, no guilty secret—or that my attempt to cross will trigger an error that will blow the program.”
“Do what?” Esk asked.
“This trial is geared to living folk, with dreams,” Marrow explained. “If one without dreams enters it, the mechanism could clash, unable to orient, and the entire setting could be compromised or destroyed. I am uncertain whether this should be risked.”
“He has a point,” Chex murmured. “He is a creature of the bad dreams; how can he have one of his own?’”
“What happens,” Esk asked, “if the program, ah, blows?”
“This entrance to the framework of the gourd would be closed off,” Marrow said. “You might be trapped here, with no route of escape. Or there could be emotional or physical damage to the three of you.”
“Marrow iv a good guide,” Volney said. “We may not complete the quevt without hiv advive.”
“Then maybe we should risk it,” Esk said.
Chex nodded. “Maybe we should. There is after all no indication of trouble; there is a skeletal zombie ready. Come on through, Marrow.”
The skeleton shrugged. “It is, as the saying goes, no skin off my sinus cavity.” He marched into the grate. The zombie skeleton met him, and the two merged.
A picture started to form. It showed Marrow, standing in the passage, exactly as he was. Then it dissipated, and Marrow was standing back where he had started.
“It tried to make a dream for him!” Esk exclaimed.
“And found nothing on which to fasten,” Marrow said.
“I’m not sure of that,” Chex said. “There had to be something even to start it, and I think we should understand what it is. It could be significant.”
“He was bounced without a dream,” Esk said. “It thought there was going to be a dream, so it started it, but then it found out there wasn’t, so it ended.”
“But there was a dream,” she insisted. “A simple one, but nevertheless a dream. That suggests that Marrow does possess some reality on our terms.”
Now Volney was interested. “What could vuch a reality be? He hav no life.”
“The picture was just of him, unchanged,” Esk said. “For a moment I thought it was him, until it faded.”
“Indeed it was me,” Marrow said. “Since I have no life, I have no dream. It was just a picture of me as I am.”
“Yes, it was,” Chex agreed. “Therefore, that must represent your deepest fear or shame.”
“I have no fear or shame,” Marrow repeated.
“That may be why you were rejected,” Chex said.
“Because it accepts only those who can reconcile their dreams, and I had none to reconcile,” Marrow said, nodding his skull.
“No. Because you refused to come to terms with it.”
That amused Esk. “Why should he come to terms with what doesn’t exist?”
“Because it does exist,” she said firmly. “Had it not existed, he would have passed through without challenge. But there is a zombie doppelganger waiting for him, and he can’t pass until he overcomes that deepest spectre within him.”
“There is nothing within me,” Marrow protested. “My skull and rib cage are completely hollow, as you can see.” He knocked on his skull with a knucklebone, and the sound was hollow.
“So was the skeleton in the dream,” she agreed.
“You mean he’s afraid of himself?” Esk asked incredulously.
“Perhaps.” She gazed at Marrow. “Are you?”
“What could there possibly be to fear in that?” Marrow asked, irritated.
“You are avoiding an answer.”
“But there is nothing in me to fear by me,” the skeleton said. “I exist only to generate fear in living human folk. I have no other reality.”
“So your dream suggests,” Chex said. “Does that please you?”
“Why should it? I have no right to be pleased or displeased. It is merely my situation.”
“Again, you avoid an answer.”
“How do you think I feel?” Marrow demanded.
“I’d be pretty upset,” Esk said. “Here my deepest fear was that I counted for nothing in Xanth, so my life may have no meaning. You aren’t even alive. That’s one step below me, even.”
“It would be foolish of me to wish for life,” Marrow said curtly. “It involves messiness.”
“How can a creature who isn’t alive be foolish?” Chex asked.
“Life is just a mass of awkwardnesses about consuming substance and eliminating substance,” Marrow said. “Of discomfort and pain and shame. The end is exactly what I already am: dead. It is pointless.”
“But life has feeling,” Chex said. “And you have feeling. Is your deepest fear that you can never be any more than you are now?”
“But I can never be more!”
“Why don’t you try the gate again,” she suggested.
Marrow shrugged and walked back into the zombie. This time a more substantial picture formed—of him, as he was.
“But I don’t want to be like this forever!” Marrow cried abruptly. “And maybe I don’t have to be! If Esk can make of himself something worthwhile, why can’t I aspire to be more than a spook?”
The dream held for a moment more, then faded. And Marrow was on the near side of the gate.
“I will hug you,” Chex said. She did so.
Marrow seemed dazed. Esk could understand why. The skeleton was coming alive, at least in aspiration. That was an enormous advance.
Esk marveled, privately. He understood how living folk could become dead, but not how dead folk could become alive. Was this a genuine process, or merely an illusion spawned by this realm of dreams? Suppose Marrow only thought he was starting to dream, and therefore to live?
“Let’s move on,” Chex said briskly. “We now have better notions of our motives and natures, but it will come to little unless we find that containment spell.”
All too true! They moved on along the passage, which seemed brighter now.
“No more rot,” Volney remarked, sniffing the floor. “We have pavved beyond the vombie region.”
“I am glad of that!” Chex said. “Not merely because I am not partial to rotting flesh, but because this means that this is indeed an access to the whole of the world of the gourd, not merely the zombie segment. This path is proving itself.”
Then the passage terminated in a blank wall. The path went right up to that wall and into it, but they could not pass through that solid stone.
“What now?” Esk asked, dismayed.
Chex passed her hands along the wall, feeling for crevices or loose panels, while Volney sniffed at the bottom for any evidence of impermanence. Both found nothing. The wall remained completely solid and immovable.
“Any notions, Marrow?” Esk asked wryly.
“Perhaps. There is obviously a way through this barrier, as there was through the last. We have but to find that way.”
Esk suppressed a sharp response about restatements of the obvious. “Then what is your notion?”
“This is the realm of dreams. Perhaps a dream is needed for the wall.”
“You mean if we dream we can pass it, then we can?”
“More likely we shall have to handcraft a dream, as is generally done here.”
Chex became interested. “How does one handcraft a dream of passing through a wall?”
“One designs it and implements it,” the skeleton said seriously.
Chex showed signs of suppressing the same irate response that Esk had. “Could you be more specific?”
“Certainly. It is pos
sible that if we portray a passage through the wall, it will operate as portrayed.”
Chex seemed doubtful, but she scouted about the passage until she found a fragment of stone that was black and crumbly. She used this to mark a black line on the wall. She extended it into a crude picture of a door. Then she pushed against the door. Nothing happened.
“Let me try,” Esk said. He took the rock and drew a doorknob. Then he made as if to grasp and turn that knob.
It turned. The door opened out of the wall.
Startled, they piled through. They entered a large gallery in which many lovely pictures were hung.
“Exhibitions at a picture,” Chex remarked, looking around.
The path led past scenes of rivers and lakes and waterfalls, past scenes of deserts and badlands and dry holes, past scenes of snowy forests and flowering bushes, past scenes of strange houses, including one with chicken legs, until it stopped at a portrait of a gargoyle. A stream of water was issuing from the monster’s mouth and splashing into a pond below.
Their path went up the wall and into the pond in the picture.
Esk sighed. “I’ll try it,” he said.
He poked his finger at the pond. His finger passed into the picture, and he felt the wetness of the water. He pushed his arm through, and it got wet too. Finally, he put both arms into it, ducked his head, and dived forward into the picture.
He splashed in the pond, which was deeper than it looked. He swam, and in a moment hauled himself out onto the pavement beyond the pond, dripping. He looked back, but saw nothing except the rest of this landscape, which was a pleasant country village whose source of water was evidently this fountain. The sun was high in the sky, buttressed by fleecy clouds. He had entered the world of the picture.
The path traveled on down a road, which led into an ordinary forest. There was nothing to indicate that this was the world of the gourd.
There was a splash behind him. Volney Vole appeared in the water. In a moment he caught the rim of the pond and hauled himself out, as Esk bad done.
Then Marrow arrived, appearing from nowhere. The skeleton could not swim; he simply put his bone feet down and walked along the bottom until he came to the edge. Then Esk reached down and caught a bone hand, and helped haul Marrow up and out.
“There will be a splash,” Marrow warned.
Indeed there was, as Chex landed in the pond. This time Esk was watching closely. She appeared as if jumping out of a mirror: first her front section, then her hindquarters. The mass of her body caused the water to rise and overflow. She had a difficult time climbing out of the pond; she got her forepart clear, but Esk had to catch her hands to help her brace and lift a hind foot, and Marrow grabbed that hind foot and lifted it to the rim. Then they helped roll her up and over that brink as she hauled her other hind foot up. She got on her belly, precariously poised by the pond, and finally managed to tilt her body away from it so she could get back to her feet.
“If this is the easiest and safest path,” she grunted, “I would very much dislike the most difficult and hazardous one!” She shook herself, spraying water out. “I hope we don’t have far to go yet!”
They walked down the road to the forest. As they passed the first trees, the path abruptly diverged from the road and plunged into the thickest tangle of vegetation.
Chex sighed. “I should have known.”
But something was nagging Esk. “This path seems familiar, somehow.”
“Naturally,” Marrow said. “It is the Lost Path.”
“And the lost containment spell will be on this path!” Esk exclaimed. “We’re getting close!”
Buoyed by this realization, they piled onto the devious path. Only Marrow seemed apprehensive. “There will be no escape by having your eye contact with the window to the gourd broken, this time,” he warned.
That chilled Esk’s enthusiasm. But he saw no alternative but to forge ahead. If they became trapped on the Lost Path despite the guidance of the pathfinder spell, then their dream of saving the Vale of the Vole was vain. But if they did not take this path, the dream would be abandoned.
Chapter 14. Elements
The path was inordinately convoluted, but as they traveled it, it seemed clear enough, just as had been the case when Esk was on it before. Soon the familiarity was unmistakable; he remembered the contours. Before long they would come to the place where—
“Say, Marrow!” he exclaimed. “Will you be where you were?”
“I am here, of course,” the skeleton said.
“I mean that if you entered my world the same way I entered yours, just in mind rather than in substance, your body should—”
“I doubt it. We magical creatures lack your grip on reality; we are entirely where we appear to be. So neither I nor Bria Brassie will be on this path; you found us, so we are no longer lost.”
Chex nodded silently; she had evidently figured this out for herself.
“That makes sense,” Esk said. But he remained nervous; suppose the skeleton did appear in the path?
But when they came to that spot, only the dent left by Marrow’s hipbone remained in the ground. Marrow’s explanation had been correct. His whole existence was where it seemed to be. There were indeed differences between the living and the magical creatures.
Before, he had had to hold Marrow’s bone hand to get him unlost; now Marrow was walking independently, because he had been found. Evidently the pathfinder’s path superseded the qualities of the Lost Path, and none of them was lost.
Something red bounded away. Chex was startled, but Esk reassured her. “That’s only a roe. Roes are red.”
She gave him a peculiar look, but did not comment.
Then they reached the potted plant. “That’s a violent,” Esk said nonchalantly. “Violents are blue.”
She looked at him again, and again stifled her comment.
“It was supposed to be planted on a median strip, but they rejected it,” Esk continued.
She finally bit. “Why?”
“Because they didn’t want any more violents on the media,” he explained innocently.
“That does it!” she exclaimed. “I am going to throw you into the thorn bushes!”
“Please don’t; that would nettle me.”
She took a step toward him, but was interrupted by Volney’s squeal of laughter. Embarrassed, she faced away instead.
“I suspect she is the one who got nettled,” Marrow remarked. They went on in silence. Soon they passed the eye queue vine, and the lost vitamin F, and the other items, until they passed the place where Bria had been. Esk remembered her kisses of apology, and felt himself flushing.
“Here is where the brassie picked up that accommodation spell,” Marrow remarked.
“The what?” Esk asked, startled.
“The lost accommodation spell. Elves and other creatures use them when they want to breed with folk the wrong size or type.”
“How can it be lost, if the elves use it?” Chex asked.
“It’s not listed in the Lexicon, just as the eye queue is not, so it is lost,” Marrow explained patiently.
“Just how does an accommodation spell accommodate?” Esk asked, now quite interested. He remembered how friendly Bria had become about that time, and wished he had realized the spell’s nature before.
“If an elf wishes to breed with a human being, or an ogre or whatever, the accommodation spell, when invoked, makes them appear to be of similar size. Thus they can accomplish their desire with reasonable dispatch.”
“Suppose they are different in type, rather than in size?” Esk asked. “If, for example, one were flesh and the other metal?”
“The spell would make them compatible,” Marrow said. “Those elven spells are quite potent. They could breed.”
“I suspect that someone has designs on someone,” Chex remarked. She glanced at Esk’s flush. “And that someone doesn’t mind very much.”
“Is it, uh, one of those one-time spells?” Esk asked. “L
ike the pathfinder, where one person can only—?”
“No, it’s continually invokable,” Marrow said. “I was haunting an elf once, in a dream, and he was living with a mermaid on a regular basis. He was afraid of death, not of loss of the mermaid, and he had been with her for years.” He made a fleshless grin. “I assumed the semblance of an elven skeleton and chased him right to the edge of the water, but then the mermaid put her arms around him and shielded him from the fear I represented, and I had to retire. She had a bosom like that of Chex, except that it was glistening wet.”
“My pectorals get glistening wet when I exercise in hot weather,” Chex remarked.
“But what—what about an unreal person?” Esk asked with tormented excitement. “How could she—?”
“We have already seen some progress, with Marrow himself,” Chex murmured. “Sometimes the unreal becomes real, in association with real folk.”
They continued walking the path, but Esk was hardly aware of the other details along the way. Had Bria’s apologies really been because of the nature of her culture, or to impress him? She had impressed him, all right! But what had been her motive? Was her true interest in him, or in getting unlost, or in trying to become real?
The more he considered it, the more it seemed to him that she had wanted some avenue out of her predicament, and he was what had been available. So she had left the gourd with him, and now had independence of a sort. She could use that accommodation spell with any other male; why should she bother with him? He wished that thought did not bother him so much.
“Well, look at that!” Chex exclaimed, startling him out of his reverie. “Our path diverges from the Lost Path!”
“But the containment vpell—ivn’t it lovt?” Volney asked.
“Perhaps not in quite the way we assumed,” Chex said. “Or perhaps there is a section of this lost path that is neither easy nor safe, so we must detour past it.”
They followed the pathfinder’s path. It led into a region completely different from their recent experience. Splashes of color formed in the air above it, spreading and changing and dissolving. Strange sounds sounded, groans and whines and unpleasant laughter. Smells wafted by, some like perfume, some like rotting brains.
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