Out of This World

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “So?” Pel demanded.

  Raven spread his hands. “Friend Pel,” he said, “Elani is a sorceress of the first rank, but she can maintain only a single portal at any one time. To open a way to the Empire, she needs must allow the way to Earth to close.”

  “Damn it, Raven,” Pel said angrily, “I told you we were only taking a quick look! Has she already begun? Maybe the portal’s still open.” He started toward the woodshed; he wanted to get home, back to normal reality, out of this fantastic setting he had stumbled into.

  Raven reached out a restraining hand, and on the far side of the clearing Stoddard stepped over to block the door to the shed with his body.

  “No, no, friend Pel,” Raven said. “Know you no better? ‘Tis folly to interrupt a mage at his work—or hers, as it be in this case.”

  Pel glared angrily at Raven, but could think of nothing worth saying; he fumed silently.

  Rachel took her thumb out of her mouth and announced, “I wanna go home.”

  “So do I,” Nancy said, hugging her closer.

  “My lady,” Raven said, “I assure you, at that instant that the last of these Imperials is vanished, that would not stay to our aid, then shall I command Elani to restore the way to your home.”

  “How long will that be?” Pel demanded.

  Raven turned up his palms. “What know I of such magicks?” he asked. “Perhaps the fifth part of an hour, perhaps twice that—certainly no more than the half of an hour.”

  “Well,” Pel said, reluctantly, “I guess we can stand to wait that long.”

  Rachel obviously didn’t think so; she didn’t quite cry, but her expression made it plain that she was holding back tears only by superhuman self-control. “I want Harvey!” she wailed. “I want to go to bed!”

  “Harvey?” Raven asked, with an inquiring glance at Pel.

  “Her stuffed alligator,” Pel explained. “It’s her favorite toy; she takes it to bed with her.”

  “Ah, poor weary poppet,” Raven said, giving Rachel a sad, funny little smile. “It shan’t be long, I promise you.”

  Leaves rustled, and Pel turned to find the crew of the Ruthless marching single-file down the trail toward him, Lieutenant Godwin at their head.

  As he looked at the forest, Pel noticed that the daylight had dimmed; the path was now shadowy and dim. The clouds obscuring the sun were thicker and darker.

  That was all they needed—to get caught in a thundershower in this already-uncomfortable world.

  He stepped aside, and let the Imperials march on past him into the clearing.

  Captain Cahn stepped out to confront them, and the march stopped; the crew stood at ease, facing their commander.

  “All right, men,” he said, “and you, Thorpe—you all know the situation. We’re on Shadow’s home planet here, and we’ve been asked to aid the resistance to its rule. Our first duty is to the Empire, of course, and for that reason I’ve asked these people to open a warp to our own reality, to Base One if possible. Right now the woman Elani is working on it.” Pel heard leaves rustle again, and he turned to see Amy and Ted strolling along the path toward the little clearing, side by side, not speaking.

  He glanced around, and saw Susan standing by the corner of the woodshed, watching silently. They were all back from the clifftop.

  “I’ll be going through that warp,” Cahn announced. “However, if any of you wish to volunteer to remain here and join the resistance, I’m willing to accept that and give orders allowing it. Now, the warp isn’t ready yet. You have until it is ready to make your own personal decisions.” He looked over the nine uniformed people before him, and nodded.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I’ll call you when we’re ready. Until then, stay in this immediate area.”

  Leaves rustled yet again; startled, Pel turned to see Grummetty and the other gnome—no, little person—approaching. The other was a young man with a sparse blond beard, wearing a dark green hooded robe. Grummetty was attired just as he had been in Pel’s basement, three days before.

  Pel was about to say something, to point the little people out to Rachel, who didn’t seem to have noticed them yet, when the ground shifted slightly beneath him.

  Startled, he glanced down at his feet, then looked at Rachel and Nancy.

  They had felt it, too—Nancy was staring at him, and Rachel had raised her head from her mother’s shoulder and was looking about, puzzled.

  Thunder roared overhead.

  “What was...” Nancy began.

  Then the ground burst open beneath them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pel’s first thought, as he began to fall backward, was that Ted was right after all. None of this was real; it was all a dream, and now he was waking up. The dream’s superficial appearance of sanity and logic was disintegrating, and it was going to turn into the more usual irrational dream nonsense, or maybe a falling dream, maybe he was going to fall through the ground and fall for what would seem like hours, and then he would wake up, and he would be back in bed at home, where nobody had ever walked out of his basement wall with stories about spaceships in people’s backyards or evil world-conquering wizards.

  Or maybe he was falling out of bed, for the first time in years, and he would wake up on the bedroom floor.

  Instead he landed on very solid, very cold, hard-packed ground, landed on his backside and one elbow. Nothing vanished or changed shape or behaved like anything in a dream—except for the head that had thrust up through the earth and knocked him off his feet.

  It was black and smooth and hard, with great blazing red eyes and pushed-back pointed ears. More than anything else, it reminded Pel of the terror dogs in the first Ghostbusters movie—but it was larger. Much larger.

  Much, much larger.

  The head, which was all he could see, looked about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

  It stank, like fresh sewage.

  And no matter how much Pel wanted to think otherwise, it really didn’t look like a special effect. It looked real.

  Rachel was shrieking, one piercing wordless yell after another, as she watched the thing thrust itself upward. Black dirt seethed around it, and even over the shrieks Pel could hear the grinding noises it made.

  Nancy started screaming as well, as she backed away with her daughter clutched tightly to her, but she used words: “Pel, no! Pel!”

  Pel scrambled to his feet and backed up a step, watching the thing.

  It was in a pit now; its movements had broken in a circle of dirt about twenty feet across, and the dirt had fallen inward, away—to somewhere. Pel wondered where. Did the thing have a burrow down there?

  One of the huge trees beside the clearing swayed, and wood cracked somewhere.

  The head was not shaped like a dog’s head, not now that he could see it all; the snout was much shorter, proportionately, than any dog’s. Pel tried to find a comparison—the demon atop Bald Mountain, in Disney’s “Fantasia,” perhaps? There was a resemblance, but that was only an approximation.

  The thing didn’t look like anything he had ever seen, not really—not in real life, not in movies, not even just in his imagination. The muzzle wasn’t human; the rest of the face wasn’t really anything else.

  A demon ape, perhaps? But no ape ever had floppy ears like that.

  The head tilted back, the lower jaw pulling free of the crumbling dirt, and then the mouth opened. Pel braced for a roar or a bellow or a shriek.

  None came. Instead of sound, new horrors spilled out, little black things that crawled and flapped and fluttered, things the size of a cat or a bat or an insect. They scampered and scuttled, knocking clods of dirt aside, rustling and thumping, but none squealed or grunted. The only voices Pel heard were human.

  Thunder rumbled again; the daylight dimmed further.

  People were shouting, Pel realized. He looked past the horrors in the pit and saw people on the far side, the crew of the Ruthless, and Raven and his comrades. They were crowding back against the woodsh
ed, calling to each other.

  Something hit the back of Pel’s head, hard and sharp; he heard wings flapping, felt them beating against him, felt the rush of air, and he smelled rotting meat. He started forward, then turned.

  The thing struck again, its claws tangling in his hair—it was glossy black, with wings and talons, and it was flapping and struggling, moving so fast that he couldn’t get a good look at it.

  It was obviously kin to the things in the pit, the things that had come from the monster’s mouth, but it couldn’t have come from there, there hadn’t been time for any of those to have reached him.

  He slapped at it, knocked it away, and it lunged at him again. He knocked it away again, knocked it to the ground, and this time he stamped on it.

  He heard bone snap. He stamped again.

  The thing was like a lizard with bat’s wings, a big lizard, with fangs and talons and a four-foot wingspan. He had broken one wing, near the base, and it scurried for cover, limping slightly and dragging the broken wing behind it.

  He turned for a glance back at the pit; dozens of creatures had poured from the big one’s mouth, and now other things, things like snakes or great worms, things like a cross between a snake and a squid, were burrowing up out of the surrounding soil that the big one had loosened up in surfacing.

  Pel started to turn, to head for the woods, but now he saw where the bat-lizard had come from— there were more of them, in the trees, and in the underbrush, and there were other creatures, things like furry dog-sized spiders, like fanged black stumps walking on pulled-up roots, like gigantic black rats. Oily fur glistened darkly, white teeth gleamed, eyes of red and gold and cat-green shone.

  There were scores of them, all coming silently closer.

  “Oh, shit,” Pel said, his muscles tensing as he backed away slowly.

  The shouting and screaming had faded somewhat, had blended with the grinding of the immense creature in the pit and the rustling of the creatures into a dull cacophony, and Pel heard the sudden loud crack clearly.

  At first he thought it was a tree-limb snapping; he looked up, startled.

  The shouts had suddenly ceased. He turned and looked across the pit, past the huge glaring head, at the people clustered around the woodshed.

  Susan Nguyen was braced against the wall of the shed, her big black purse hanging open from one shoulder. She had a short-barreled revolver clutched in both hands, held out in front of her, pointed straight ahead. Something like a large black monkey lay face-down on the ground in front of her, oozing thin purple fluid.

  Even from this distance, Pel could see she was trembling.

  And most of the others were staring at her.

  Still trembling, she heaved the gun a few inches to one side and took careful aim at the head in the pit; it was turning slowly toward her.

  She fired, and her hands jerked with the recoil. Pel didn’t see where the shot went; he heard the gunshot and saw the flash, but that was all.

  “Come on!” someone shouted, tugging at Susan’s arm.

  Pel suddenly realized that there were fewer people over there than there should have been. Squire Donald was gone, and Prossie Thorpe, and maybe others.

  “Nancy,” he shouted, “run for the shed! Around the pit! They have the portal open!”

  Nancy was already moving, carrying Rachel. Pel started after her.

  One of the creatures landed black and writhing on a crewman’s back—Cartwright’s, Pel thought it was—and the man screamed. Susan turned the gun, aimed at the monster, and then stopped as she realized she would have to shoot Cartwright, too.

  Godwin was pulling at her arm, and she finally yielded; he yanked her around and thrust her through the door into the shed.

  Something flashed red, and one of the monsters near the shed door exploded silently into bits of meat and bone.

  “Valadrakul!” someone called.

  Another creature exploded, this time with an audible bang.

  Something was chewing on Pel’s ankle, and he kicked it away and ran.

  Godwin was by the door of the shed, herding people in; he grabbed Nancy’s shoulder as she came within reach and shoved her through into the darkness.

  Pel stopped, ready to turn and join Godwin in guarding the door, but Godwin’s hand closed on his upper arm, closed tight, and Godwin’s voice barked, “No civilians!”

  He stumbled into the dark, into the shed that had now added the stink of urine to the smells of pine and earth; someone unseen, someone large who smelled of sweat, took him and thrust him at the back wall.

  Pel’s hand flew up to fend off a collision with the wall, and the wall wasn’t there, he tumbled through the darkness into light, and fell forward rolling on sand, thinking for an instant, once again, that it was all a dream and now he would fall forever, or maybe wake up on the bedroom floor.

  Then he landed, grit scraping his arm and cheek.

  He blinked, and saw sunlight on fine white sand, sand that was cool against his cheek and hand, while the air was warm.

  Sand?

  Shouldn’t he be back in his own basement?

  Someone else tripped over his legs and fell, and Pel gathered his wits sufficiently to roll out of the way as others continued to appear.

  He rolled over twice, ending on his back, and then sat up and looked around.

  He was definitely not in his basement.

  He was sitting on drifted sand, sand that stretched off in all directions, pierced here and there by outcroppings of weathered white stone. A few feet away was the largest outcropping in sight, a diagonally-upthrust slab of stone at least ten feet high.

  The sand reached the horizon, but the horizon was too low, as if they were all sitting atop a gigantic dune.

  As he watched, Amy stepped out of the slab of rock—that was clearly where the portal was. She was bleeding from scratches on her forehead, and something had torn up one side of her skirt.

  Pel realized that his own ankle was bleeding; he dabbed at it ineffectually, getting blood on his fingers. The sand seemed to be helping it clot.

  He hoped that that thing hadn’t been venomous. The wound didn’t look bad. It certainly didn’t look as worrisome as the surrounding landscape.

  This was not his basement. He had a horrible suspicion that it wasn’t anywhere on Earth. It would appear that Elani had opened her portal to the Galactic Empire.

  The plot thickens, he thought, fighting back an insane urge to giggle.

  * * * *

  When Prossie fell through the back of the woodshed it was as if a door had been flung open, as if a faucet had been turned on; the wool was gone from her mind, and she could hear again!

  For a long moment she gloried in the sensation, letting the shapeless thoughts of the entire galaxy pour through her. She didn’t look for meaning, didn’t try to find any individual thoughts; it was enough to have the raw “sound” of all those minds reaching her again.

  But after a moment the realization came—that sound was weak and distant. Compared to Earth or Shadow’s world, it was a thunderous, constant roar, of course, but still...

  This was not Base One, obviously. There were no telepaths close by. There weren’t even any people close by—not really—except for the ones who were coming through the warp.

  It was only after she had come to this realization that she bothered to use her eyes, and noticed the barren wasteland around her.

  * * * *

  Pel hadn’t expected the Empire to be an uninhabited wasteland; that didn’t fit very well with any story he had read. He had been thinking more in terms of huge buildings and broad avenues.

  Of course, Luke Skywalker’s home planet had been a desert, hadn’t it? Was that part of the Galactic Empire?

  He knew he should stop thinking in terms of falling into a story; this was real. The idea, however, wouldn’t go away—particularly not when the whole bizarre episode didn’t end, but kept on happening. He left the wound on his ankle alone for a moment and looked aroun
d.

  Nancy was sitting crosslegged on the sand a few feet away, holding Rachel tightly, rocking back and forth, trying to comfort the child. Rachel was crying, and her thin sobs were the only sound Pel could hear.

  Susan was standing, watching the portal, her revolver in one hand, her purse hanging from her shoulder, the flap closed now, but the clasp still unfastened.

  Squire Donald, too, stood a few feet away, his hands swinging uneasily at his sides, as if looking for something to hold onto.

  Prossie Thorpe was walking slowly away, in the direction Pel tentatively identified as east, assuming that it was morning wherever he was. It felt like morning, somehow. She seemed to be paying no attention to anyone else.

  * * * *

  Carrie sat up abruptly.

  “Prossie?” she asked, inadvertantly speaking aloud.

  The contact was weak; wherever Prossie was, it was still a long way off.

  “Hi, Carrie—I just wanted to let you know that I’m all right. We’re back in Imperial space, I think, but I don’t know just where. I’m going to track down someone local and find out. I’ll get back to you when I know more.”

  “Prossie,” Carrie said, “I was so... I thought you were dead!”

  “For awhile,” Prossie told her, “I thought so, too.”

  * * * *

  The sun, Pel noticed, was the wrong color—it was very small and intensely white, not the washed-out pale yellow of the sun in Raven’s world, but white. The sunlight was, for lack of a better term, richer than in the forest they had just left, but it was still not right. The air was thin and he felt light-headed.

  The person who had tripped over Pel’s legs was Soorn; like Pel, he was now sitting on the sand.

  Ted had followed Amy out of the stone; he was apparently uninjured.

  Two of the little people, Grummetty and the woman, were standing beside Squire Donald—Pel had missed them at first. The woman had her hand to her stomach, as if she were ill, and Grummetty’s expression was worried.

  A fluttering black thing burst out of the rock, soaring upward into the thin air; Susan started to raise her pistol, but Squire Donald had his sword out before she could take aim. He shouted, “Leave it to me!”