by Sean Platt
“Fine,” said Clint, sighing and re-shouldering the pack.
Edward kept his eyes on Clint, as if he were trying to decide whether to trust the gunslinger. Finally he said, “You are so totally ugly.”
“I’ll bet you’re ugly on the inside,” said Clint, “without all your pretty magic.”
“I’m beautiful everywhere,” said Edward.
“Rainbows and fairies and gumballs, right? Would you like me to tie ribbons in your hair? How about if we paint each other’s nails? How can you walk out here without an entourage applying lipstick and braiding your mane with bubblegum pink ribbons?”
“What color smoke do your pistols make, gunslinger?”
They stared at each other for sixty full seconds, neither speaking, Clint looking into Edward’s profile so the unicorn could see him. Finally, Edward blinked lazily.
“I win,” said Clint, thinking of the staring contest he felt they were having.
Edward resumed walking. Clint didn’t follow. After Edward put twenty yards between them, Clint just stared after him. Then he felt an invisible snare grab him by the ankle drag him foot-first through the dirt on his back. He scrambled to his feet and walked, and the snare vanished. Soon, they were walking side by side again, neither speaking.
A few hours farther on, dinosaur bones exploded in number until they were everywhere. The many beasts from Clint’s childhood, all mystical and made-up in his mind, were suddenly in reality around him — the skull of the T-wrex, the long and curving backbone of a bronosores. He even saw the giant head crest and horns of the mythical land rhino, which human legend said was the great ancestor of the unicorn. The bones, Edward kept assuring him, were real. Very little else seemed to be. Clint, in his delirium, kept seeing living dinosaurs, multicolored like in the fireside tales he’d heard as a child back in The Realm. He saw people everywhere, and he shot at several before realizing that he should ask Edward about their reality first. Edward, whose head seemed to be clearer, always told him the phantoms weren’t there.
Worse than the visions was the noise.
Clint felt as if he were inside of a giant hive mind, hearing every thought that had ever been thought by every person who had ever crossed the Missouri. There were times when they’d have to double back on their path, and when they did, Clint would hear his own thoughts in an echo, or he’d see something he’d been imagining when they’d crossed the stretch earlier.
The gunslinger heard music that had previously been heard by millions of other ears. So much of it (probably because it had come from other worlds) was unfamiliar. Other songs were very familiar indeed. He heard Joelsongs that could have come from his own hitching ceremony when he’d nearly wed Mai back in Solace. He heard “Just the Way You Are” and even the non-hitching titles “My Life” and “Moving Out.” He also heard dark music he’d only heard rumors of, full of wailings and sounds that could only come from thinking machines — unholy noises deserving of Providence’s damnation. He heard melodies he couldn’t imagine existing, with no clues to their creation. Much was profane or spiked with innuendo. He heard a woman singing about a Disco Stick, then heard the same woman singing about a Poker Face. Worst of all was a girlish song that seemed to be called “Baby.”
His head swam with noise and sight and taste and smell. He saw people that Edward explained were probably the friends, relatives, and enemies of people who’d passed through the Missouri. Some of these phantoms attacked. When they did, they struck the travelers and evaporated into mist. Others simply strode by without heeding them. Many of the figures were mangled and injured, and Edward said that those represented the death fears of other travelers. They even saw monsters that had never existed and had been born solely out of someone’s terror: ghoulem, yandas, and even a crowd of dead-eyed walking corpses that could have been Clint’s own mental idea of xombies.
“They can’t hurt you,” Edward told Clint during a particularly nervous moment that caused the gunslinger to draw both guns and wave them around wildly. “They are mere memories.”
But for the most part, the depths of Clint’s mind seemed to understand that he was seeing things that weren’t actually there. Ghosts approached and vanished without heed. Phantom banshees howled at them before becoming giant spiked lizards, and Clint shrugged them off easily. Mostly, the visions held no horrors for Clint (or for Edward, as far as Clint could see) because terror is highly individualized, and the fears of others didn’t resonate with the gunslinger. They mostly seemed childish to him. Many involved death — and these left Clint, who’d dealt his share of death and didn’t particularly fear his own, puzzled.
Through the worst of it, Clint rode on Edward’s back.
Clint wanted to stretch his legs, but Edward felt that riding was more prudent. The Missouri’s illusions kept threatening to separate them. Clint would see a path and follow it, but he’d quickly fall into a false trail made from someone’s memory. He’d see an expanse and cross it, but just in time the unicorn would pick him up and he’d find himself hovering above a chasm he hadn’t seen. He even saw Edward in his mind, and the mental unicorn projected back to him by the Dinosaur Missouri blurred with the real one. One time, he watched Edward dissolve into blood and sinew and decay. Another time, he saw him sprout wings and fly. One time Edward’s mouth became an alligator’s mouth a second before trying to bite the gunslinger in half. Each time, as Clint screamed and ran, the real Edward grabbed him with his magic and righted him.
“Is it even possible for a man to cross this area without a unicorn?” Clint asked once he was safely atop Edward’s back, plodding forward.
“If he’s very, very lucky,” said Edward. In Clint’s eyes, he saw a false vision as Edward spoke: the unicorn looking directly at him, his head twisted backward on his neck, his eyes and mouth full of fire. Then Clint blinked and they were again a rider and a plain old white mount with a non-twisted neck, plodding steadily forward in the blazing sun.
As they walked, Clint heard everything thought by everyone whose head had ever passed near his. Being up high, on the back of a unicorn, kept him above the worst of the noise, but the assault on his senses was still deafening. He couldn’t shut out all of the images, words, music and thoughts that bombarded him.
“What is a star track?” asked Edward at one point.
“I don’t know,” said Clint.
“It’s a human memory I’m seeing and hearing. Someone who came through this place thought that the Missouri was like a timeless ribbon of energy that existed in a star track.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Edward repeated.
“The memory involves a huge flickering screen, and a man upon that screen named Kirk. This Kirk wore a kind of man’s wig. There was another man named Malcolm who once had a mechanical orange, filled with clockworks.”
“I hear the memory,” said Edward, “but you humans are such idiots. It could mean anything. Or, more likely, it could mean nothing.”
“ ‘Where no man has gone before,’ ” said Clint, quoting something he heard in his mind.
“The man whose memory you’re hearing fell and broke his leg over there,” said Edward, gesturing. “Then he died of thirst.”
Clint looked toward the unicorn’s gesture, and his heart leapt. He tried to scramble from Edward’s back, but Edward’s horn glowed and Clint felt himself pushed down hard.
“ ‘Twinkies! Twinkies!’ ” Edward yelled, repeating the voice that Clint himself could hear in his head. “That’s what our star track man thought as he ran over there. Do you see them?”
Clint did, and his mouth watered at the sight. To the left side of the trail was a pile that looked like stones on a burial mound, but instead of stones, the mound was made of oblong yellow sponges. Being human, Clint connected enough to the memory of the star track man to know that the oblongs were a snack food.
“They’re not real, Clint,” said Edward. “However, the hole filled with sharp rocks that you can’t see below it is very
real indeed.”
“Hole?”
“The hole with our star track man’s skeleton at the bottom. Perhaps you’d like to go down there and ask him about Twinkies and that man named Malcolm?”
Clint fought his hunger, kept his eyes away from the mound, and waited until the impulse to gorge himself faded.
After a few moments (or was it days? Clint was losing track of time), Edward stopped and sniffed the air. Then Clint watched as a man wearing a bright purple suit and rhinestone-studded eye shades walked into Edward and evaporated into mist. When he did, Clint had a foreign thought he didn’t understand: Crocodile rock.
Edward’s ears twitched, swiveling as if on hinges.
“Good news,” said Edward.
“You know which direction to go?” said Clint, staring forward at three distinct paths he suspected might not actually be there. Down one path was a lake filled with aquatic dinosaurs. Down another was what looked like an enormous carnival tent. The other vanished into literal nothingness. Beyond it, Clint saw the dark of outer space.
“Yar,” said Edward. “But that’s not the good news.”
“Then what is?”
“I’ve found Kold,” said Edward. “And Mai.”
CHAPTER THREE:
THE BUBBLE OF GLEE
Clint stared at the back of Edward’s neck. They couldn’t look one another in the eye unless Clint dismounted, but the gunslinger knew the unicorn could feel Clint staring him down. Overhead, a terrydaxl bird dinosaur screeched, swooping low enough for Clint to feel the ghost’s breath on his neck.
“What do you mean, ‘I found Mai’?”
Just in front of Edward’s huge white head, Clint saw Mai appear as if blown together by swirling sand. She was wearing her hitching dress. She smiled like the last time Clint had seen her happy, back during their botched hitching ceremony in Solace three long years ago. She gave him a tiny wave, then her eyeballs fell backward into her head and her face became a dried, gray skull. The phantom Mai blew apart into thousands of pieces.
Clint cringed. Edward said, “I can hear her thoughts. Not in the perverse way that Cerberus hears them, by dipping his horn into her soul, but on the wind, from when she left them behind.”
Clint tried to still his mind and pull Mai’s thoughts from the millions assaulting him, but it was no use. He heard a thousand songs and random thoughts. He watched monsters surround him and Edward from all sides. Edward could filter out the Missouri’s racket and hone in on individual thoughts, but Clint was only a man. Instead of mastering the air inside the Dinosaur Missouri, the Missouri mastered Clint. Every monster and every dinosaur and every walking apparition became Clint’s almost-bride Mai, who this instant was Dharma Kold’s tortured captive. He watched her scream and die from every side, in every possible way. Other thoughts vanished, alongside their noise. Everything was Mai, and her curdled screams of torture and torment. It was as if the place’s old magic saw Clint trying to earn an upper hand and said, Okay, you want Mai? I’ll give you all the Mai you can handle.
Clint closed his eyes and pressed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand against his eyelids.
“Master yourself,” said Edward, trying to turn his head to look back. “I can hear your fear in a holler. Shut it out. The memories I sense are at least a day old. She’s probably clear by now.”
Or dead.
Or she’s been ravaged by the dark unicorn’s torture.
Or they fell into a pit, like the star track man.
Clint opened his eyes and ugly thoughts took form: Mai being killed in a million new ways before his eyes, all in stark color. Vivid like a moving picture.
“I can hear all of the thoughts you’re making now, too,” said Edward. “Focus on your hunger.”
Clint did, again closing his eyes. It was hard at first to not think of a thing, so he instead tried to feel the details of his hunger. He felt his stomach churning, and the acid wanting to eat him from inside. He felt his own weakness.
He opened his eyes and every instance of Mai had become a slice of turkey pie.
“I guess I’m better,” said Clint. In front of him, a slice of turkey pie became a skull and exploded. A slice of turkey pie fell into a pit and broke its leg. A slice of turkey pie was subjected to the manipulations of a dark unicorn until it went insane, spilling pumpkin mash from its innards into a pool in the sand.
“I guess I’d better not dwell,” said Edward. “Let’s just say we’re on the right track. I can sense all of them. They came through not long ago. It’s easy to get lost in here, even for a unicorn, but now I know where to go. If we get lost, at least we’ll be lost with them.”
Several slices of turkey pie snarled as they turned into Dharma Kold. The Kolds advanced, growing large and indestructible, the way Kold had seemed in Clint’s imagination years before. Clint had wondered how he could possibly best Kold, and the Dinosaur Missouri knew it. It magnified Clint’s doubt, twisting the reality in front of his face. The Kolds grew huge, firing poisonous spells and deadly bullets, looming large as carriage wheels.
Clint closed his eyes. When he opened them, the Kolds were still there.
He cringed. He curled into a ball perched atop Edward’s back. His hands fell to his revolvers, though he knew they were useless. He drew one and cradled it like a child.
“You okay back there?” said Edward.
“We’re all going to die in here,” said Clint.
Edward sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want to do this, but I don’t have much of a choice.”
There was movement, and Clint suddenly found himself so distracted by the sight of a large pink balloon growing from the tip of Edward’s horn that his mind unclenched and the giant Dharma Kolds (and the proliferating dying Mais) vanished. The ballon grew larger and larger, now standing straight up. It was as if Edward’s head were a tank of lightgas and he was filling the balloon through his horn, which was the nozzle.
The balloon grew bigger, becoming gigantic, until it was as tall as Edward was wide. Then it was as tall as Edward.
Clint felt his head clear. “What is that?”
“Don’t move,” said Edward.
The balloon jumped from the end of Edward’s horn like a leaping cat. It struck Clint in the face with a force that seemed like it should have unhorsed him, but he managed to stay in place, barely, atop Edward’s back.
Clint opened his eyes and found that everything around him seemed rosier. He felt better. And strangely, his skin felt taut, like he was wearing a skintight but very stretchy suit.
Then the initial burst of near-euphoria retreated and Clint’s sharp gunslinger’s instincts reasserted themselves.
“What the Sands is this?” he said, staring down at his right hand — which, the way it looked now, could never fire a pistol. There were giant pink webs between each of his fingers. The same substance ran down the length of his body, creating webs wherever his body should have had angles. All of his skin and all of his clothing blushed with pink.
“It’s a bubble,” said Edward.
“A bubble of…” said Clint, annoyed despite a strange and pressing joy that was threatening to suffocate him.
“Glee,” said Edward, sighing. “It’s a bubble of glee.”
“I don’t want to be in a bubble of glee.”
“It’s that or go insane,” said Edward.
Clint tried to hold back the euphoria being forced upon him by the bubble, but its magic was strong. He felt as if he were swashbuckling a puppeteer who was bound and determined to cheer him up with an exceptionally dull-witted puppet show — and he was losing.
Clint heard himself giggle, hating the sound.
“What is it doing to me?” he said.
“It’s called a ‘bubble of glee,’ ” said Edward. “Figure it out.”
Clint looked around. Where the landscape had been stark and desolate, it now looked open and inviting. The sand looked like powdered chocolate. The cacti looked like giant striped lol
lipops. He saw no fewer than five rainbows, even though the air held not a drop of moisture. Movement in the corner of his eye made him turn to the once unforgiving sun, and he saw that it was now wearing eye shades, that it had a mouth and two hands, and that it was smiling at the gunslinger and waving.
Before Clint could stop himself, he waved back at the happy sun.
“This is intolerable,” he said.
Edward exhaled loudly. Then he said, “Xombies. Mai dying. A million sand dragons with teeth of steel.”
Everything Edward said entered Clint’s mind as a coherent thought, but then the thoughts twisted into something else. Clint realized that he didn’t care about xombies. He was distantly aware that xombies were terrifying, but that didn’t seem important right now.
Through his pink haze, he watched as a parade of corpses walked toward him holding bouquets of daisies. He watched as Mai was shot, but her wound bled sprinkles like the sort meant to garnish a cupcake. She ate them and was healed. The gunslinger watched as sand dragons blew him kisses, which he felt compelled to reach up and catch.
“Fine,” said Clint. “Glee it is.”
Despite the annoying cheeriness he felt, Clint found that the bubble wasn’t all bad. He could at least think inside of it, for one. His thoughts were of puppies and colorful mushrooms. The Missouri’s soundtrack became the pleasant tinkle of a nickelodeon. Only one piece of music managed to penetrate his pink prison — a bassline that snared his mind. He found himself alternately singing to Edward that Edward couldn’t touch this, then chanting about an unknown object called a superfreak.
Time passed. Rainbows dissolved and surrendered to new rainbows. Fuzzy creatures scampered. Giant billboards now bore phrases like YOU ARE LOVED and FRIENDSHIP IS SPECIAL. On several separate occasions, Clint found himself telling Edward to “chill out” when he stepped around a thing in their path that Edward deemed treacherous, but that to Clint appeared cute.