Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  Answer: If anyone could keep a secret, any priest who ever staggered out of confessional booth, ears ringing from the nauseating repetition of the most perverse and deadly sins anyone can imagine, but mouth zipped shut, he could do it, that is for sure.

  Question: Supposing the Church discovered the secret of the twilight gates first, why hasn’t everyone else found out? Why haven’t any scientists found out?

  Answer: Consider, even these days, if you saw something in the woods that looked like a ghost or a demon, would you tell the local priest, or tell your local scientist? I don’t know about you, but I know who my local priest is. I don’t even know the names of any scientists living in my town, if any do. And, two or three hundred years ago, if you went to a university to find a scholar, more likely than not, he would have been a monk or a priest anyway.

  Question: What about outside Europe?

  Answer: There are stories of lost wanderers seeing strange or horrifying wonders in the mountains or the ruins of jungle-smothered cities, or lights beneath the sea, from all over the globe. Everyone has stories of hapless travelers who wander into strange and elfin lands, where palaces of splendor rear golden domes above pits where dragons crawl, or wondrous gardens that no paths can ever find again. The ancient sages in China or India might have written such things down, but anyone else would only pass them along only as oral tradition, and the modern world would call them legends and ignore them. And in South America or Japan, the first white man in the area was more likely than not to be a missionary from Portugal or Spain. I had read somewhere that Spanish monks burned the Aztec codices. Now I wondered what had really been in them.

  Question: Why keep it secret?

  Answer: There are only three kinds of secrets you keep secret.

  First, there are secrets like where Long John Silver buried his treasure. You don’t tell because you would lose something precious if you told. This might be something the Church was keeping to herself for some advantage. An advantage such as a place to hide from French kings during times of trouble?

  Second, there are secrets like which girl you have a crush on. You don’t tell because it’s no one’s damned business but yours. And I know the Church teaches that occultism and meddling with familiar spirits is no one’s damned business at all, because it’s a business that might damn you. Visitations from strange dimensions might well fit into that category as far as it was concerned.

  Third, there are secrets like how to build a hydrogen bomb. You don’t tell because some mad genius out there in the world could blow up the world if he were told.

  I gritted my teeth. Professor Dreadful was mad. Literally. He was bipolar, or manic-depressive as they sometimes call it, and had to be locked up. He was also a genius.

  Even though there were no police chasing me, I worked the switch on the dashboard that opened the nitrous oxide valve. The Jeep jumped like it was kicked by a mule. Then it was like a ramjet trying to break the sound barrier without taking off. I screamed and hollered because I was scared out of my mind. The road I was on was not exactly straight or flat, and I am pretty sure I left some olive-drab paint from the Jeep sides scraped against the guardrail in more than one place. If there had been a single other car on the road, or a slippery patch, or a large nail, I would have smeared myself all across the landscape.

  I do think I was either going Mach One or Warp Eight. I don’t think I ever had so much fun in my life.

  Chapter Two: The Haunted Museum

  1. The Land of Cheese

  When my dad was a kid, you could get a driver’s permit with your parent’s permission at the age of fourteen. He lived in North Carolina. I have never been there, but I guess it must be the coolest place in the world to live, because there when you are fourteen you can drive a real car. Probably they all drive Red Dodge Chargers with the Stars and Bars painted on the roof and the doors welded shut, doing ramp jumps over dry gulches while their horns play Dixie.

  I should have had my license a year ago. But between my dad flitting off on business trips and my older brother going all weird on us, no adult was around to give me the required number of hours to get a real learner’s permit. Instead, for this year, I am legally allowed to operate farm machinery under adult supervision during the day, and for some reason that includes Jeeps operating on public roads. I guess that is in case farmers find undocumented corn growing in the median strip and need to perform an emergency harvest, when only an offroad Army vehicle is at hand.

  Jeeps are more dangerous and difficult to drive than a car with a nice enclosed top, shoulderbelts, airbags, and automatic stickshift, so the permit rule makes no sense to me. But I am underage, and the State Legislature did not phone me up and ask my opinion, and I do not live in the coolest place in the world.

  I live in Tillamook, the Land of Cheese.

  No kidding: that is what it says on the sign at the township limits. The Professor actually lives near CalTech in Pasadena, way south of here, but he comes up here for the summer, which I cannot figure out at all. I mean, who wants to live in the Land of Cheese?

  There are at least four museums in Tillamook: a maritime museum, a naval air museum, a county historic museum, and this place, the Cryptozoological Museum of Scientific Curiosities.

  The Museum sits on the same hill as the Cape Meares Lighthouse. From the look of it, the building had originally been maybe a morgue or the soundstage for a Gothic haunted house movie; but really someone used to live there. I guess back in the old days they liked being creeped out or something.

  The front doors are tall and peaked like the doors of a Church, and above it is a stained glass rose window with an image of a dragon twisted into a triple knot and biting its own tail. To one side of the door in a glass box like a phone booth is a stuffed replica of a Silverback Mountain Gorilla; to the other side is a statue of the one remaining Hoan Kiem Turtle in the world.

  The door leaves are carved with patterns of stiff, square and octagonal flowers, and each door has a tall, thin window like an archery slit. Through these window slits, you can see the stuffed Okapi, which is a giraffe-necked red deer with striped hindquarters like a zebra. There is a lamp to mark the front exit that hangs in the museum entrance whose light shines just on the head of the Okapi, but not on anything else, so at night the head seems to hang in midair, surrounded by shadows, staring out at you through the thin windows piercing the doors.

  I had never heard of cryptozoology before I met the Professor, but there were still species of life on Earth not well known enough or seen often enough to be classified. Such creatures were called cryptids, and they dwelt on our world unseen by man, or rarely. Not long ago, people thought the Okapi was a myth. Not long before that, they thought the Duck-Billed Platypus, an egg-laying mammal, was a hoax; but they thought that a fur-bearing trout allegedly from subArctic Canadian streams was real, rather than the concoction of a playful taxidermist. The coal-black foxes behind our house were one such unclassified or cryptid breed. I had gotten the summer job with the Museum by shooting one and bringing it in. The taxidermist, Mr. Gertz, had stuffed and mounted it. It stood in a glass case along the wall between the Arctic Gorilla display and the stuffed Giant Moa. I always felt a twinge of guilt and sorrow when I was cleaning that area.

  I mean, I had gotten the job. I didn't shoot a vixen with cubs. But still.

  There are two little towers called folly towers, not tall enough to hang bells in, to either side of the main building. There is a local story that, a hundred years ago, a man was forced at gunpoint to hang himself in the folly tower to the left; and that the robber who killed him was haunted by his ghost until he went crazy, came all the way back into town, broke back into the house, and hanged himself in the tower to the right. No one believes the story, but everyone calls the place the Haunted Museum.

  The first time I talked with her was in front of the Museum.

  2. Squirrel Gun

  So there I was, driving, or being carried along by, the Nitro Jeep
from Hell, well on my way to a life of crime, having broken every traffic law in existence, including at least one aerospace regulation, when I cut the motor, judiciously applied the brakes and merely let the Jeep roll under its own momentum up the hill and into the gravel parking lot. My teeth ached from windburn, and my cheeks ached from the lunatic grin I must have been wearing, and my heart was racing from the adrenaline rush.

  The tires crunch-crunched a bit, and my ears rang from the silence, and I heard the birds twittering. Maybe there was a wee bit of pink in the East. The silhouette of the Haunted Museum flickered against the sky, caught for a moment against the light splashed against distant clouds from the turning beam from the lighthouse on the far side of the hill. The Museum itself was dark.

  I stood up. Knees only wobbled a little. There I was, wearing my bathrobe and moccasins, big black bulletproof vest, cool nightvision goggles, honking huge flashlight tucked through the jacket belt at one hip, ridiculously cool, expensive, antique Japanese sword no one in his right mind would ever take into a for-real battle at the other hip, and my Dad’s blessing and prayer on my head.

  And I could not decide if this was the best night of my life or the last.

  I wondered if the warmth in my chest, the sense of strength, was because I was brave, despite that I was facing some danger Dad had not exactly explained to me? Or if it was because I was Mr. Crazy, Junior, son of Mr. Crazy, Senior?

  The parking lot was empty. Penny rides a spluttery little motor scooter that was nowhere in evidence.

  My grin faltered. Did that mean Penny was not here? Also, since the Museum was dark, it looked like no power was on. I knew how cranky the old fuse box was. If Professor Dreadful had actually left a large piece of machinery running in the building, dimensional-door engine or madman’s harmless tinker toy, it most likely would have burnt out a fuse sometime over the weekend. Whatever radiation my father was afraid of would have had days to dissipate. That is, if he were not mad also.

  Did it mean no one was here? Or did it mean someone — I wasn’t sure who. Science fiction fans in costume? — someone my dad told me to shoot might be even now lying in wait, breathing silently. No, wait. I was supposed to slay science fiction fans with the edge of the sword. Shoot normal looking people. But only if there was no fog.

  I looked up. The sky looked clear to me. Not a wisp of fog in sight. My locker was in the groundskeeper’s shed. I had the key, and it was not that far away.

  So I snuck over to that, keeping out of line-of-sight of the dark Museum windows as much as I could. I did not dare to turn on the one dangling bulb hanging from the ceiling of the shed, even after it gonked me in the forehead. Growth spurts are nice, but you bump into things you used to walk under, and I guess that is what they mean by growing pains.

  Inside the shed was my squirrel gun and a brick of ammo. I shoot a .22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridge, 40 grain weight. I can nail a rabbit or river rat at 80 yards, or a raccoon or fox at 150 yards. If expressed as a word problem, you could say my rifle was to my dad’s 30-06 Springfield as Penny’s motor scooter was to a Harley.

  Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking the advantage of confronting the Black Hats armed with an antique katana and a big flashlight. But I’d rather have a weapon more threatening.

  Hmpf. Even after the rifle was in my hands, I felt the same way: I’d rather I had a weapon more threatening. Well, I guess it would work to intimidate anyone not too familiar with guns. A rifle this caliber can certainly kill a man, especially if, after knocking him off his feet with the first shot, you grab the barrel and beat him over the head with the stock.

  I should mention it took me more than a minute of fumbling around to get my pathetic yet under-impressive rodent-slaying longrifle into my hands. The image in the night-vision goggles was fuzzy, so I pushed them to my forehead, covered the flashlight with my palm, and twisted it on. A very little reddish light sneaked out, enough to let me see. Hopefully not enough to be seen.

  With this, I was able to find the right key on my crowded keyring, and undo the upright locker, the bicycle chain tying the gun down, the trigger lock on the trigger and the steel creel box where I store the ammo. My dad had had it drummed into him at Parris Island to keep everything polished, dry, squared away and locked up when not in use, and so that got drummed into me. There were also local ordinances about firearms storage, and in Sunday School they taught me to respect authority, render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s and all that.

  However, when a pair of raccoons started tearing up the garbage at the Museum (I think they were attracted by the smell of what the taxidermist, Mr. Gertz, was throwing out back when the Zanzibar Leopard was being stuffed for display), Professor Dreadful was aghast at the number of regulations we had to obey to get county animal control to capture the beasts. He told me to keep my rifle on the premises, and simply had me shoot the vermin, and take a shovel and bury them. Which I guess taught me not to render unto Caesar more than a certain common-sense amount. I mean, even George Washington broke some laws, right?

  It took me another moment to load. I could do that in the dark, by touch, so I twisted the flashlight off. I use a 5-round clip magazine. I put the rest of the box (45 rounds) in my dad’s jacket pocket, with a wadded hankie in the box so the rounds wouldn’t rattle when I moved. His jacket has nice big pockets that zipper shut.

  I came out of the shed. At that moment, I saw two little red lights in the basement windows, and I swear they looked like eyes. For some reason, they had not shown up in the greenish image of the goggles, but I sure as heck saw them now. They were looking at me.

  So I hit the dirt. I lay there a moment, having driven the pommel of an ancient katana more expensive than my entire education into my groin, and trying not to yell.

  Then, twitching in pain and trying not to whimper, my squirrel rifle cradled in my elbows, and the antique katana I suddenly cared a lot less about being dragged by its baldric over the grass being pulled like a big stupid metal tail behind me (no doubt picking up dirt and dings, each one of which knocked two hundred dollars off the asking price of the antique), and a honking big flashlight only now and again thwacking me in the buttocks, I crawled across the lawn toward the basement of the Haunted Museum, where I had seen the eyes of the night-creature.

  3. Best Night or Last?

  “You know,” said one half of my brain to me softly during these moments. “There is an all night Seven-Eleven not ten minutes away. I could drive there, go in, get myself a Coke-flavored Slurpee in two minutes, and just sit there in the parking lot, loitering for exactly fourteen minutes, sipping my drink. They don’t shoo you away until fifteen minutes pass. I bet I could get a nice greasy hot dog made from authentic meat byproducts swept up from the slaughterhouse floor. Say buying the hotdog of meatlike substances takes another minute, especially if you squirt chili-flavored goo from that little spigot onto it. By my calculation, I would be alive for that whole twenty-seven minutes. Driving back here in ten more minutes to get killed by something, gives me a subtotal of thirty-seven minutes. If it takes one second for the night-creature to tear out my throat, and seven minutes, fifty-nine seconds for my brain to cease functioning from the trauma, blood loss, and general lack of breathing, that gives me a grand total of forty-five minutes. If I go back and get that Slurpee. Maybe, I could not cram a whole lifetime of experience and thought and wonder into that forty-five minutes, but it is longer than your average sitcom episode, so a lot can happen in that amount of time. And I would get a last meal out of it.”

  The other half of my brain said, “But every boy my age wants to be a hero. This is my chance. I can save somebody from danger.”

  The first half said, “Somebody, or some girl? If you had wanted to save people in general, you could have taken that summer job as a lifeguard. You are only here because she’s pretty.”

  The second half said, “Wait—are you making the argument that Superman is not allowed to save Lois Lane, if she is a drop-dead gorge
ous yet spunky girl reporter, on the grounds that it is a violation of the Equal Rights for Ugly Women Act or something? You can only rescue people for unselfish reasons, not because you are dying to do something to get her to notice you? If your motives are less than pure, you let her die?”

  “No, I am making the argument that, if she is in real danger, and if your Dad, who maybe is not your Dad, is maybe a real nutcase, maybe you should just call the police. If you are worried about her, that is. The phone is in your pocket. So far, you have not done anything that has got you caught. Are you prepared to kill someone with that thing? For real? Not a first-person shooter game, not a TV show, not little boys playing Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers — which no boys play any more, except you and your brothers. For real. Maybe the jury will say it was self-defense. You can explain to them about the Moebius coil that opens up inter-dimensional doorways, and tell them the Dark Building, or whatever it is called, was threatening a girl you have a crush on, who does not know you are alive, with exo-dimensional radiation cooties that damaged her cell structure: so you killed the groundskeeper in the dark by mistake. Otherwise, leave the rifle here.”

  “I am the groundskeeper. And she knows I am alive! She talked to me the day before yesterday.”

  “Sure. She said, where is the key to my father’s desk, please? And then she said, get me some coffee, won’t you, please?”

  “I cherish the memory. Two creams, no sugar.”

  “You memorized her drink. Meanwhile, she does not know your name. She thinks your name is MARMOSET, because that is what is printed on the nametag of your uniform. Call the cops. You have a phone.”

  “I also have a squirrel gun, a wicked cool katana, a honking big flashlight, a bulletproof jacket, and a bathrobe. I can take on Godzilla.”