“No, you’re a liar, and murderer. You're going to kill me,” she cries.
“Shut up. Don’t say that,” he says.
“Stop. Get off me, you're hurting me, you’re hurting me,” she screams.
“Hahaha, don't scream fire,” he laughs.
“Gonna kill an innocent girl?” one Ribbit shouts.
“Are you?” he answers triumphantly. He knows the Ribbits aren’t good gamblers, their orders don’t allow them to embrace the randomness of reality, only logic and rational thinking, just following orders and nothing more. Not willing to kill an innocent girl to catch a wanted man, not publicly anyway. The light of the train's nose grows in its rapid approach, leading the reverberating and rising rumble drumming through the ground and up her shaky legs. The shrieks of metal wheels meeting the InterAlto’s amber rails sounds like soothing harp strings to his ears. The sound of his safe escape nearing him, now in the station, and creeping to a complete stop.
“Son of a bitch,” a Ribbit says
“Coward,” says another “You soulless bastard, you’ll pay for this, for everything you’ve done when we lock you away in the tombs, for good this time.”
“Bitch of a big bad vault knocker hiding behind the safety of a skirt,” one says and the three Ribbits chuckle.
“The big bad vault knocker who always gets away. Anyway,” Cider laughs, “who is moral? the one who sells his soul for another’s ideals? Or who sells their soul for their own?” he asks gloatingly, as Anna's scratching at him, and biting at his arm still wound tightly around her neck, nearly foaming at the mouth while ferociously growling swears and curses. The aluminum sided ride of the rail glides to a soft stop. The doors slide open with a chime and a mechanical clunk. Opening to its humming light bulbs, bench seats and advertisements to the situation on the station platform. The ringing bell of the doors sliding open to the only sanctuary he knows, sounding like sirens sweetly singing just for him to hear. A second passes, then another, and another. The five of them are bound in this moment of escalating anticipation of him to make his escape.
“Embrace each realities randomness gentlemen you'll,” he says, tightening his grip on her neck, nearly closing her throat, and bluing her red flustered face. Taking two steps and diving through the open doors into the safety of the waiting train. He turns in the air and hits the floor and it’s familiar speckles with a thud. She lands on him landing on his back to bear the brunt of the fall. He lets her go, she lays coughing and rubbing her rug burned neck. His nose meets the train door's glass as they slide closed, he's waving and smiling, watching his suited pursuers running after the train as it leaves the station, until tripping over each other and fading from view.
“Never catch me!” he shouts triumphantly.
“Hey asshole!” He turns around to be smacked, hard, and loudly across his face by a wound up swing from an emotionally wounded Anna.
“What? we’re safe ain’t we?” he says.
“Shut up!” she snaps as the reality of this Alto begins slipping away from around the train.
“Don’t be like that, the stakes were high,” he says. The passing painted black poles breaking the silence of solid white walls as the lights blink like beating drums over both the rails and the station, both fleeing from the window's view. She sits weary, and wary of Cider sitting beside her. With each kiss of her drowsy eyelids the station strobes, until slipping in and out of her sight. Then a pop like a raindrop splashing into a puddle lasts for a split second, then the popping sound of them entering complete darkness. In a window back lit by the pitch black wrapping around the train, she sees a reflection of herself, disheveled inside and out.
Then the train, and the two, splash out of this existence. Leaving the Alto entirely in the dust, and gliding on the timeless glistening amber rails interweaving interdimensional scenes of InterAlto travel through the Altonevers. She thinks she wants to make a habit of it, of seeing herself in the window in that moment of popping between the visible and the void. She does as she continually plunges in and out of the physical persistence of each passing station along the amber rails infinite path.
CHAPTER SIX
Standard fare
They pass through too many stations to count. Being aboard the InterAlto and plunging in and out of each and onto the next has a funny way of blurring the passenger's sense of the passing time. Anna stands at the train door gawking in awe each time they clunk open, eager to take in the new sights, aromas, sounds, and colors. To see the peoples and cultures of each new Alto they pass, like she's running past windows shopping the sleepy town they’ve fled from, though experiencing entire realities passing before her eyes and senses.
She's staring stoically with slumping shoulders, thinking after several stops of nothing in particular, simply sailing where speed is just a thought through a massive cloudy stellar ocean, serving as a sky to another. Stopping at comparatively small stations, sometimes containing entire civilizations in a single sweep of her eyes. Thinking, that to see everything from afar in the dark of distance is far less stimulating to her senses then to see the detail of some things up close. Pondering that to peer into space is to have your eyes closed, to see the simplicity of everything in one’s mind from afar, and to open them to the world around you is to see the greatest detail of something that is seemingly a simple sight and small to the dark of night.
One Alto Anna liked, where all the structures looked like glass sculpted and blown into the shapes of flower bulbs and semi-spherical splashes of water. A hundred story city aglow at night and clustered by its colors, to compliment below and contrast above. Giving her the illusion that splashes of light are rising from bottom to top.
Two board the train, they're fluid encased in translucent faceless bodies with colors swirling around their heads and floating freely through them as they move. At another stop, a passenger boards and leans against a pole, standing out even among the motley of multiversal strap hangers. She's made of amethyst and gold with sapphire and ivory accentuating her joints. She has glowing globes of light elliptically revolving above her hips as her torso, with proto-planetary looking dust belts clothing her as a dress would, while she's dressing the windows and walls with the light of the tiny suns of her stomach. Out through the door of the stop she boarded from, there are many gargantuan rotating pillars of shimmering gas with enormous granite islands gravitating into and around them. An unevenly fragmented metropolis floating with each of its structured stone sections larger than a moon. Wrapped in shades of gold and ivories, with thousand foot statues resembling robed gods enraptured in robes woven of neutron stars light.
“That's a Dietess. They have a bunch of stops of their own, all over the place,” he says.
“A goddess?”
“No they just call them that, but they can do a bunch of mystical stuff.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno,” he shrugs. The train emerges into the black of blissful space saturated with distant galaxies smearing streaks across the sky. Delightfully distracting her mind from her senses and sense of self.
“Where are we going?”
“There's a place nearby where I know a guy who can help us.”
“Help with what?”
“Getting you home, safely.”
“I thought everything leads back to Central?”
“It does like tentacles or the thread of a web, but it's tangled a bit, a lot,” he says.
“Infinitely of course,” she says.
The train of the InterAltos takes the form to look like the trains of whichever Alto they come to a stop at. Though only for as long as it’s presently in that Alto. It’s a train , and presents itself to whomever may be in its presence, the indigenous, may understand it, as a train.
“How's it possible that we're riding on a thing that changes what it is, based on how the people entering will perceive it,” she asks.
“It doesn't, it's a train the whole time, it appears how they understand a train to loo
k,” he answers, though not actually answering her question “What did it look like to you on your first ride, in your standard?”
“Like a normal subway car, that’s what it looks like when it’s between places too. What does it look like to you between Altos?”
“It’s never actually between them, the interim themselves are their own Altos, but it looks like a train. One that’s a little older, with wood and not plastic,” he says.
On the train is a bubble with glasses and a hat reading a newspaper, and groups of people, men and women with peacock feathers as body hair and eyebrows. All dressed in tuxedos and gowns and drinking from fancy glasses. Eyeing them coldly is a penguin fiddling with a cob pipe in its beak, thinking of them as distastefully taking his taste in clothing. A few rowdy weather kids are taunting a drunk, who's wobbling at the knee while watching the wallet of a hippo shaped man, watching the backside of a girl with pearls around her neck that’s carved of wood. His hippo shaped wife hits him on the head with her purse. The doors slide open and the wino is gone with the breeze.
“Did you see that?” Anna asks, but he’s already laughing.
“Yeah that chic in the black skirt's carved pretty fine,” he says.
“Anything in a skirt huh.”
“Look at the conifers on that one, and I bet she’s Sappy too.”
“Jerk,” she adds an elbow to his ribs.
“To see you smile, sure,” he says smiling at her.
“Where are all these people from?” she asks.
“I thought that too, everywhere, anywhere. I don't know probably from where they look like they're from,” he says.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Underfoot
The trains slows, then stops at a leaky country station surrounded by fields shaded by crudely cut stone pillars primitively painted with swirls and stars. The doors chime and slide open to a wide dirt road cleaving gossamer spotted emerald grass hills.
“This is the place?”
“Yeah, but we're a ways off,” he chuckles, pointing down the trodden path.
“Don't you see that?”
“See what?”
“The future before us?” he says, and she looks thinking dumb of his attempt at charm, then she does see what he meant. Down the long and winding road she can see mud and wood huts gathered around bonfires. Further down is the sight of wood steeples and mismatched stone cottages, later, even further down the road is burgeoning into the makings of a small city. After that into crowds of Victorian houses, lastly the horizon huddling together and sprouting into a semblance of a city skyline, and beyond.
“Of this place anyway,” she says, and the two disheveled and desperately hungry, fitting in with passing paupers, saunter down the same path. Toward the society that's rising, gradually progressing through the eras around as they step forward. The rich but somber tones of everything around them and the damp dreary atmosphere make her feel as though she's roaming through an expressive picture painted by a Romanticist. The streetlights are become gas lamps rather than flaming pikes, seeing the makings of a modern city creeping closer from the horizon, and storied brick buildings and outlines of skyscrapers emerging with each step. Her mind is presently ablaze with thoughts of what the future of this Alto will be, without even thinking of her present.
“When's the present in this place?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s like that here, so anywhere you are I guess.”
“How far does it go?”
“Who knows?”
“Where are we going?”
“Where? When? not much difference.”
“I need to bath,” she says.
“At the pub.”
“Of course...at a pub,” she sighs.
“It’s a hotel too.”
“Like the last one?” she isn't answered. The breeze is sipping up the smoke of chimneys and smokestacks ahead of them. Cider struggles to light a smoke in the wind, flicking his lighter in vain just before a downpour suddenly falling and visibly draining the crowds of clouds above them. Trekking through the mud in the chill and wind without umbrellas or sight of shelter or firewood. Laughing on and giving up care of being wet to enjoy the weather that’s coating the city's every surface with a glazing sheen of slick. By the time they reach evenly laid cobblestone they’re soaking, and she’s shivering off the cold. Her ears are tickled by the drencher just ended, streaming and trickling through every uneven surface of the city hobbled together city. The whole Alto is hearing the sound rain runoff no matter where you go.
She steps into a still puddle that's perfectly reflecting the white blotted powdery blue sky above. She watches the puddle ripple around her foot. The cobblestone streets are wrought with them, filling every pothole and even slightest odd leveling of incline with reflective puddles and pools. A place where there are nearly as many puddles as there are smoking chimneys sipped by the wind. There’s a bunch of both, and bowler hats too.
“Hey look, I stepped in the sky on the ground,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” he says smiling, then leaps, stomping and splashing the nearest mirror from his feet toward her.
“It was a nice thought to have,” she says.
“What? oh, whatever with your chic stuff,” he says, not stopping his childish hopping.
“Idiot,” she says, then shoegazes to be sure not to miss a rippling of the sky under her feet. Looking up and remembering they look like vagrant out of towners wandering down a sidewalks. After a few minutes of walking, the city around them ages a decade ahead of the last with each step. Time and surrounding is a wavering blur from one point in time and stopping at the time the next foot touches the ground. Strolling down the same long road, of changing storefronts and architectural styles, in scenes of time lapsed still frames that she's immersed in, in the moments between steps. Slowing creeping from a second a foot to a year a foot as they reach what Cider considers to be civilized society. His only requirement being indoor plumbing, and she agrees.
Their pace slows to a month a step when they start passing the people’s from the particular times or places. Through different neighborhoods of this Alto, walking freely through the era shifting city streets, and intermingling as the melting pot of this time mosaic metropolis. Full of mods and motorcycles and the many, many Mohawks , and 68er's hanging hair hanging out everywhere. Soccer hooligans and go-go dancers are rubbing shoulders with knights and people on rocket boots though never far from the town squares and their gallows for hanging. Chimney sweep children with soot covered faces swim in every shadow, like piranhas hungry for the pockets of the passing pedestrians.
The avenues around them become a mismatch of history, where one can see troglodyte steak houses and enlightenment era ale houses right next to each other. Futuristic retro club playing music a hundred years from now, not far from an industrial age steel mill. Often having wood and stone gas lamp lit slums and spherical structures of synthesized substances a stone’s throw away from the another. Medieval castles and gunpowder forts share the same streets as office buildings and sensory strip malls and eco-urban city centers. Always though, overflowing with parlors and pubs, nearly as many as there are puddles. They're everywhere, on every floor and everyone is drunk and drinking. They pass an antique peepshow and an eighteen fifties bath house then a patch of farmland, and another pub, and another pub. No matter where they are, the smell of rain and burning coals never leaving their nostrils.
“When will we get there?” she asks.
“Whenever it is,” he answers. It's midday at a sun splashed intersection, and the Druids are selling drugs on the street corners, to Cyberpunks on rocket boots are sliding and gliding like sidewinders over traffic. The Teddy's are patrolling their turf, snapping their switchblades and staring people down. A hundred years down the avenue football hooligans are flipping a double-decker bus, and tussling with the fuzz. Gentlemen of powder and wig join the melee to fight both sides, cracking skulls with gavels, and swiftly shiving peopl
e with their quills. The two turn a corner two hundred years later, onto a narrow lane and continuing for twenty years across. They come to a rounded L shaped five story salmon colored building rounding the corner of an intersection, across the crosswalk from the two. With thick white curtains closed in the occupied rooms, every open window is filled with catcalling call girls shouting at passing men and making them blush, then flushing them of their cash.
“I think this is it?”
“You think I want to sleep in a whorehouse?”
“There’s no place like home,” he quips.
“Fine, whatever, I just want to sleep.”
“Watch your step,” he says, stepping over horse droppings slicked into the ground as they cross the street. The spacious five floor creaky dive bar reeks of vinegar. It's furnished with filth tinted table clothes carelessly draped over worn wooden tables thrown about the pine walled drinking hall that is the lobby. The place is brimming with shanty speaking lads and lasses holding court in clusters across the room, obnoxiously shouting as courting over the constant clinking of their ale filled mugs. The two move to the bar tended by a grimacing, bloody aproned bull of a woman with the build of a school lunch lady who spends her days polishing mugs and bare knuckle beating deadbeat patrons.
“A drink sir?” she grunts without consonants.
“Bit old for chimney sweeps,” she says.
“We're not sweeps,” says Anna.
“Well your filthy,” she leers at them both “and shady looking he is” the tender states.
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