Mojo and the Pickle Jar

by Douglas Bell

  Mojo and the child drifted deeper into the rapidly swirling fog. The larger they became, the more apparent the motion became. They swelled through the swirling fog and out into an open space. Mojo looked around. They were floating in the still heart of a great vortex. Towering walls of white rushed around them on all sides. Slowly they rose up the funnel of the vortex, up past the white walls, up towards a dim circle of light high above.

  In moments they had grown their way out of the vortex and into a pale yellow sky filled with white eggs. At least that’s what they looked like to Mojo. The sky was filled with white oval objects that looked exactly like hen’s eggs except for small holes in either end which were the mouths of vortexes. Mojo looked down. The vortex they had just come from was on the end of a white egg no different from the rest.

  They rose up through the sky of eggs and Mojo saw that many were spinning, their gracefully curved sides dimpling with motion. Some of the eggs were spinning clockwise while others were spinning counterclockwise. Still others, a third variety of egg, didn’t spin at all. The eggs were not only spinning but busily dancing around each other as well. They circled one another in intricate and—at least to Mojo—wholly incomprehensible patterns. Here were two eggs revolving around four; there four revolving around two; there eight around four.

  Mojo stared dumfounded at the eggs. He couldn’t imagine what they were or why.

  A few seconds more and they had punched through the last of the eggs and were rising through pale light towards a series of brightly colored bands that reminded Mojo of Saturn’s rings except that these rings didn’t all lie together on a single plane. These rings arced all around them in great sweeping circles that resembled pictures he had seen of the northern lights. As they drew closer to the rings he could see they were spinning. Spinning and rippling at the same time. Ripples were running around the spinning rings like stockers chasing each other on an oval track. As they pushed through the rings Mojo saw that they were made of billions of the white eggs.

  Mojo turned around, staring back past the rings to the white ball the rings orbited, looking for the egg they had emerged from, but it was gone. Swallowed. And then even the white ball and its rings were receding, falling rapidly away from them.

  Mojo felt a sense of loss. The earth was back there somewhere. Back in that dwindling white dot down one of those weird eggs through a swirling vortex into a white fog and out into a galaxy of galaxies of galaxies.

  Mojo gulped and turned his head away. It made his stomach churn to even think about it.

  Mojo and the child swelled up into a sea of white balls. As they grew ever larger the balls began to clump together into groups. Then the groups formed white balls of their own, then even these began to recede until nothing was left but a white haze that was similar to the white fog of the egg yet subtly different.

  The white haze began to shade into pink. The child reached over and, without any warning, squeezed Mojo’s shoulder. A mild shock ran down Mojo’s arm. The pink haze became a red smoke.

  Mojo felt different. He tried to figure it out as he drifted upwards through the billowing red smoke. And then he knew. He was slowing. He was still growing, but nowhere near as rapidly as before. He could feel the growing effect running down inside him like a cheap watch.

  The red smoke became brown, striated water.

  The brown water became a dark, grainy ice.

  The dark ice ended and Mojo shot out into bright blue light.

  Mojo swam slowly upwards, the child beside him, rising up through the blue light. He was swimming through a heavy liquid that distorted his vision. He emerged from the liquid and floated into clear air. He was rising towards a dark sky. As he rose higher Mojo realized that it wasn’t a sky but a ceiling. A ceiling with wooden beams.

  Just before Mojo would have bumped into the ceiling the growing effect ground to a halt. Mojo stopped. Suddenly he was no longer rising, no longer expanding. He turned over, his soft transparent body rolling like a water balloon, and looked down.

  He was floating above a large, poorly lit room. There was an old white-haired woman seated on a chair directly underneath him. The woman was holding a glass jar in her lap. There was a faint blue light coming from the jar.

  Mojoe did a double take. Then another. He couldn’t believe it, but it was. It was Grandmother. Grandmother and the pickle jar.

  Not only Grandmother. The old man, Benegas, was seated directly across from her. Benegas’ lips were moving, but his voice was so low that Mojo couldn’t make out what he was saying. Mojo glanced towards the front of the room and there was the entry door hanging from its one hinge. He shook his head in wonder. It was the church. He was back in the old church where they had first met Benegas. He looked down again at Grandmother. At the pickle jar in her lap. There was no doubt about it. They must have come up out of the pickle jar. Out of the blue light. And before that …

  Mojo felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned. It was the child. The child squeezed Mojo’s shoulder for a third time.

  Suddenly Mojo was shrinking.

  Mojo fell like a stone. He fell across Grandmother. As he passed through her he caught a thought, much as he had with the ancient pine tree. This was a much deeper and faster thought, however. It was: “God help me!”

  And then he was through Grandmother and tumbling down towards the glass jar.

  Mojo sensed something was wrong and turned. The child was gone. Mojo looked, but couldn’t see the child anywhere. He peered down. The jar was closer now, rushing up to meet him.

  Mojo windmilled his arms, trying to slow himself, but it didn’t work. He continued to fall rapidly. And then suddenly, just before he dropped through the lid of the jar, the child reappeared. Mojo sagged with relief. The child took his arm and resumed guiding him down.

  The child directed Mojo through the lid of the pickle jar and down into the liquid. The child pulled on Mojo’s arm, guiding him. They swooped around the perimeter of the heart, just catching the edge of the quick blue light. As they curved back, Mojo noticed a large black patch on the heart. The patch ran nearly all the way across the bottom. At first he couldn’t figure out what the black patch was, even though he had the feeling he had seen it before. And then, as they drew closer, he knew. As the deep fissures and angry red swelling of the black patch came into clearer focus, he remembered where he had seen such nasty black patches before: in high school, in health class, in the Perils of Smoking film Mrs. Benitz had shown them at least a dozen times.

  The black patch was a cancer.

  * * *

  They slowed as they curled around the bottom of the heart. They drifted lightly above then onto the surface of the angry black cancer.

  Mojo landed on his feet, straddling a fissure that cut so deeply into the heart that he couldn’t see its bottom. The child landed beside him.

  Suddenly Mojo’s feet slipped. He staggered badly. The flesh around the fissure was slick. It was hard and lumpy and contorted. It had a sheen to it like a beetle’s shell.

  Mojo windmilled his arms. He shuffled his feet looking for solid ground. He didn’t find any. He flipped over. He tumbled down into the fissure.

  Mojo fell down into the fissure, unable to stop himself. He fell slowly, like sinking in water, even though it was air. It felt creepy. Like being swallowed.

  Mojo righted himself. The child was beside him.

  Mojo and the child descended deeper into the black fissure. Waves of heat rushed up to meet them. Waves of wet, sweltering heat. Jungle heat. Jungle stench. Mojo felt sweat break out on his face like a sudden rain.

  They fell deeper into the fissure. Rough, enflamed ridges of flesh appeared on the walls. There were tiny plants, or what looked like plants, growing on the ridges. The plants were grey and flabby-looking with limp fernlike fronds that trailed the surface. They looked nasty. Diseased. Mojo was glad he was floating free and clear down the center. Even the thought of brushing against one of those mushy-looking plants filled him with revul
sion.

  The fissure began to narrow ahead. It closed quickly, but it didn’t make any difference. As quickly as the fissure narrowed, so did Mojo and the child, growing small enough to slip down it.

  Finally, after what seemed like a tremendous distance but was probably only a few millimeters, the fissure closed completely. But that didn’t matter either. They fell right on through, down through the floor of the fissure, down a hole between two bubbling black cells.

  They exited the hole into a vast grey cavern filled with strange trees. The trees reminded Mojo of fungus. They were even nastier than the fissure plants. A white mucus oozed from pores in the trees’ lumpy green leaves and dripped onto the floor of the cavern. The mucus formed slick puddles around the soft sagging trunks. As Mojo and the child drifted down towards the floor Mojo saw something move in one of the puddles.

  As they drew closer to the floor the motion grew more pronounced, more agitated. Now Mojo could see other puddles stirring as well. Bubbling trails crossed the slimy surfaces of the puddles. Something popped up directly below. Mojo could see it clearly. It was a worm. A long grey worm. The worm looked up. It had a human face.

  “You’ve come!” the worm shouted. It turned its snout. “Look! He’s come! He’s come for us at last!”

  Other worms began to poke their heads out from beneath the ooze.

  “Oh, thank God!” another cried, swinging its head from side to side. It was grinning madly. It had no teeth.

  Mojo grabbed the child’s arm, trying to turn him in another direction, away from the floor. Mojo didn’t know about the child, but this was just about as close as he wanted to come to the worms and their puddles. Just the thought of falling into one of those disgusting puddles of mucus was enough to give him the shivers.

  Mojo and the child dropped straight towards the cavern floor. Then, just before they would have splattered into a particularly vile, greenish pocked of ooze, they made a sharp right-hand turn. They shot over the fungus forest, parallel to it, heading for a wide hole in the cavern’s wall.

  “Wait! Come back!” a worm yelled.

  “Don’t leave us!” another cried.

  “You bastards!” a third screamed.

  They passed through the hole into another cavern.

  The new cavern was even larger than the last. It was a great, open pit, much like a copper pit, its sides lined by level terraces. The terraces descended like stair steps to a dim bottom far below. Each terrace held rounded mounds of fungus-tree mucus.

  They sailed to the middle of the cavern and dropped again. The heat in this new cavern was dry. The jungle sweat evaporated quickly from Mojo’s face. They fell swiftly, past terrace after terrace, past mound after mound of mucus.

  There were openings in the sides of the cavern. Worms filed in and out of these in columns of two. Each pair of worms slithered to a mound of mucus and spit on it before returning to the opening. It took Mojo a moment to realize it was tree mucus they were spitting. The worms were carrying mucus in their mouths to the mounds.

  They fell deeper into the pit. As they approached the bottom, the heat increased. The mucus mounds here were dried. Crystallized into a granular form like sugar. Gangs of worms were pounding the crystals with rocks, turning them into a fine white powder.

  Mojo felt something and glanced to the side. He saw a demon squatting on a ledge.

  Mojo grabbed the child’s arm in alarm. The demon was ugly as hell. It was similar in some respects to the demon who had chased Mojo and Grandmother the night before, but different in others. It seemed to have more spider in it, less centipede. It had eight legs covered by thick black fur. It had a bulbous head with a wide, gaping mouth and eyebrows that were as hairy as its legs. It had enormous pincers protruding from green, swollen cheeks.

  The demon leaped to its feet as Mojo and the child dropped past it. “Ssstop!” it buzzed.

  Good luck, Mojo thought.

  The demon didn’t wait to see if they would. It jumped off the ledge and flapped after them on broad dragonfly wings.

  Mojo looked down. The cavern floor was coming up fast. That was good. What was bad was that there was only one small area that wasn’t covered by a mound of crystallized mucus. If they didn’t hit that small area, and if there wasn’t a crack or a hole there …

  “Sssstop!!” The demon had a voice like an air-raid siren. It made Mojo’s ears ring. He could feel the wind from its wings on the back of his head.

  As they drew nearer to the floor a tiny crack appeared. Hope surged in Mojo. This could lead to something. It was like the time Betty Gomez had offered to show him the scar on her upper thigh.

  Then, just when Mojo was certain they were going to drop through the crack before the demon could catch them, a worm slithered across the tiny opening, blocking it. The worm stopped. Looked up. It had a pudgy grey face with a fat man’s tiny eyes.

  “Move!” Mojo screamed down at the worm.

  The worm’s tiny eyes widened.

  “Move, damn it! You’re in our way!”

  The worm gasped. Then: “Help me! Take me with you! I’m not supposed to be here! It’s all been a big mistake!”

  “Move, damn you!” The worm was coming up fast. Mojo glanced back. So was the demon.

  “You have to!” the worm whined. “You have to take me!”

  “I said move it!” Mojo squeaked as he shrank rapidly towards the worm. “Move your butt, or I’ll move it for you!”

  It was an empty threat. The worm was as big as a freight train by now. He could have swallowed Mojo and the child both in one gulp. And if he didn’t close his mouth in the next few seconds, Mojo was afraid he just might.

  The worm blinked in confusion as Mojo and the child fell towards him. Suddenly his supposed saviors—who only moments before had been giants descending from the sky—were no bigger than bumblebees.

  “Why you’re … you’re little!” the worm cried plaintively.

  “Move!!” Mojo squealed anxiously.

  Then the worm saw the demon. His fat little eyes bulged. His grey face turned even greyer. “No!” the worm wheezed in a suddenly frightened voice. “No! Please!”

  Mojo and the child tumbled towards the worm’s gaping mouth.

  The worm ducked his head and rolled into a protective ball.

  Mojo and the child fell past the worm, just grazing his slimy skin, and into the crack in the floor.

  The demon screamed.

  They plunged through the crack into an ocean of brown, striated water.

  Through the water into red smoke.

  Through the smoke into a white haze.

  Through the white haze into an ocean of tiny white points.

  Which quickly became white balls.

  Mojo tugged nervously on the child’s arm. He was getting worried. They were passing through thousands of the white balls. There were thousands more ahead. How would they ever find the right one when they all looked exactly alike? The one that led back to New Mexico and Juanita.

  “Which one?” Mojo asked. “Can you tell?”

  The child smiled at him, then turned away without answering.

  Mojo shook his head. How would they ever find the right ball? And even if they did, how would they ever find the right spinning egg? And even if they did, how would they ever find the right white speck in the fog of white specks? And even if they did that…?

  Mojo sighed. It was too much. He quit trying to think about it.

  The white balls grew even larger and fewer.

  Suddenly the child pulled Mojo to the left. Then to the right. Then back to the left again.

  They were falling towards a single white ball. The white ball mushroomed in size as they approached. Mojo could see its rings rippling. He prayed it was the right one.

  They fell through the rings into the white ball.

  Through the white ball into an egg.

  Through the egg into a white fog.

  Through the white fog into a fire storm.

  Th
rough the fire storm into a black night of galaxies.

  Through the black night of galaxies into the Milky Way.

  Through the Milky Way to the earth.

  * * *

  Mojo opened his eyes. He was lying on his back. It took him a moment to realize he was in the stone corridor.

  “You okay?”

  Mojo looked up. Narn was squatting beside him.

  “I think so.” Mojo pinched his arm to make sure it was solid. It was.

  “Did somebody jump us?” Narn asked.

  Mojo hoisted himself up to a sitting position. Rubbed his eyes to clear them. “I had a vision.”

  “I bet you did. But did you see who it was? The last thing I remember was this big ball of bright light coming straight at me.”

  Mojo nodded. “Me too. That was right before I left.”

  “Left?” Narn frowned.

  “Well, I’m not sure I left left. At least my body didn’t. My body must have stayed here, but my mind definitely left.”

  Narn studied him for a long moment. “I can believe that,” he said finally.

  “No, really. I really had this vision. It wasn’t a dream or anything. It was real.”

  “A vision, huh? Was it the black guy?”

  “No, it was a child. I think maybe it was one of Grandmother’s saints. He took me on a tour of the universe.”

  “The universe like in the moon and stars?” Narn asked as he rose to his feet. He reached down and took Mojo’s hand, helped him up.

  “Yeah,” Mojo said, standing. “It’s big, I can tell you that. Real big. You wouldn’t believe how big the universe is.”

  “Oh, I might.”

  “I think he did it to show me what’s in the heart. He wanted me to know how important the heart is; why we have to get it back to the Madonna right away.”

  “In the heart? There’s something in the heart?”

  “Everything’s in the heart. You, me, the earth, the whole universe, we’re all inside the Madonna’s heart.”