Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  But this was not a game; that one fumbled moment of muscular convulsion had lost me my life. There was no comedy involved. I was a dead man.

  I mostly landed on the dying wolf-thing, which perhaps saved me from a broken back. I heard a gasp and a cry from the men filling the narrow space.

  There may have been a guy on the ladder at whose foot I fell, who got knocked off, or maybe he jumped when Fido the hairless dog-man collapsed on him, because I was not the only guy on the ground. From the noise, it sounded like more than one guy had been knocked over. Many pratfalls. Remember this place was as cramped as the landing of an emergency stairwell, so everyone was in everyone’s way.

  From beneath the face-hugging jacket tail, I saw several pairs of feet: some in sandals and in leg armor called greaves, at least two pairs of feet that looked like the legs of baboons shaved bald (feet with thumbs, in other words), and one pair of bare feet that were so pale white that they glowed with phosphorescence.

  And, before I had a chance to speak, or move, or raise my head, or blink, I felt something sharp hit my back, tear the bathrobe and punch through my skin, then slide between my ribs, puncturing lung and heart and who knows what else. I found myself staring down at the triangular point of a narrow spear blade protruding nine inches out from my chest. Blood mingled with the black fluid of Uncreation poured out, and this time the blood did fountain like you see in the movies.

  There is some prayer you are supposed to say before you die. I could not remember it.

  6. Broadside Lung-Heart Shot

  I was so astonished, so outraged, so scared. It seemed unfair. That is the raging crazed, zany, hysterical, insane thing that exploded in my dying brain. It was an offense, a trespass, worse than finding your brothers had set off your baking-soda volcano, your science project you worked four weeks to put together, and ruined it. Worse than finding your house had been broken into by foxes, and the kitchen tore up; worse than fearing your Dad maybe was never coming back, or discovering your Mom actually was never coming back.

  So unfair. Dying is so unfair. It was obscene.

  The spear was cruciform in cross-section, and very narrow, so it looked more like an awl or the spike on a prospector’s hammer than like what you’d normally think of as a spear point. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, every little flick of tarnish, every dint and irregularity. It looked like it was made of brass, a dull yellow metal, heavy and cold.

  I closed my fingers on the protruding steeple of metal coming from my chest, and, roaring, rose to my feet. This time the roar actually did come out, along with a gallon of Uncreation fluid. The spear shaft swinging from my spine must have yanked itself loose from the hands of the spearman, because I could feel the weight of the shaft swinging like some freakish wooden tail behind me, tearing my flesh and organs. Warm blood poured down my back. I reached behind me, groped, grabbed the spearshaft, but I was not at the right angle to pull it out. Instead I took up a fold of my Dad’s Kevlar coat-tail, gathered it into a ball in my palm, and drove the spearpoint backward. I could feel it scraping against bone and wiggling around in my lung cavity.

  I yanked again with my other hand, and felt the spear —actually, call it a javelin, since it was only four feet long or so — come into my grip. I lofted it in front of me, and saw the darned thing. It was about half wood and half bronze, with a heavy bronze ball at the butt, decorated with a zigzag design, and a ball of hair tied at the root of the blade. It was covered with my blood, bright and red arterial blood, and the smell of it filled my nostrils. The blood was all over my hand up to the elbow and was gushing out of my chest. The spearpoint was not barbed like it should have been. Had it been barbed, I could not have worked it free from the wound.

  A gasp of awe, a breathless noise of pure terror, came from each side of me. I looked up.

  7. Science Fiction Fans

  I could see my grandfather’s sword, miraculously undamaged in the fall, sticking up out of the throat-mess that had once been the throat of Fido the dog-faced boy. It was a little too far away for me to grab it, but I measured the distance with my eye. The big two-foot long flashlight was only a few inches from my foot.

  I was surrounded by men in costumes. Three of them were aliens: two hairless wolfmen-looking baboon-things big as apes, and one pale and phosphorescent narrow-skulled bald guy with no eyeballs in a long black cloak but no socks or shoes.

  The rest were soldiers from some sword and sandals epic: corsets made of metal scales sewn to linen jerkins, long skirts decorated with colored fringes, greaves on shins and sandals on feet, onion-shaped caps of metal with coppery cheek-guards, and round black shields decorated with starbursts. The shields were tall, round at the top and square at the bottom.

  Copper cleavers shaped like sickles were at the soldiers' belts. Quivers on their backs carried both arrows and bow. These were dinky double-curved bows shaped like the letter m, not the fearsome yew longbows of England nor the elegant asymmetrical bamboo bows of Japan.

  All the soldiers had thick red lips, large and dark and almond eyes, and square black beards, but no moustaches. They were wearing eyeliner, and had dark lines drawn on their cheeks like football players wear.

  At the moment all those mouths were gaping, all those eyes wide and white-rimmed with fear.

  Everyone in the place was shorter than I was. The horsehair crests of the helmets were about at the level of my shoulder. I ate a lot of red meat growing up, so there.

  Also in the back was a guy with a black beard dressed something like Abraham Lincoln in a long black skirt, except that the tall black stovepipe hat he wore on his head had no brim. On his chest was a silver starburst ornament, and on his brow a black tattoo of the same design. From his cold expression, I pegged him as the leader.

  So. Two werewolves, one vampire, ten men at arms, and the guy in the black hat was their magic user. Fourteen against one.

  I think I was simply out of my mind at that moment. Temporary insanity.

  Because instead of running or charging or talking or anything, all I did was take the two fingers of my left hand and stick them into the open wound in my chest as deep as I could. It was so disgusting that I cannot say. I think I felt my heart pushing against my fingertips: lub-dub. Lub-dub.

  The first deer I ever killed, a pretty grand six-point buck—I had spent an hour in the brake, waiting for him to stand up—I hit and killed it with this exact shot: quarter rear through one lung and the heart. He died before taking a step.

  I was in a nightmare.

  In a nightmare, you do not ask questions, and things don’t make any sense. Your mind just plays along, and pretends that whatever is happening is something that could actually happen. The reason why you can never tell you are asleep when you are asleep, is that part of your mind (call it the “hey—this is freaking impossible!” part of your mind) is turned off.

  Now, in real life, if I stood up after a deathblow, with a hole all the way through me, dead even though I was not dead, I would be freaked out something awful. But in a dream, if I had a nightmare that I was wounded with a hole all the way through me, dead even though I was not dead, I would think it was a really freaking weird dream. It would scare the heck out of me, but I would still do the things you do in a dream, like run from the monsters you can never get away from. Or fight the creatures you cannot fight.

  So I laughed. What a freaking weird dream!

  Chapter Seven: The Ur Language

  1. Spearthrust

  My laugh was a pretty weird-sounding laugh, considering all the blood and puddings glurping out of me, and it scared me. I was not the only one. Three of the guys standing at the corner turned tail and started running when I laughed. Their sandals went clang, clang as they rushed up the ramp going up.

  Of the other two guys behind me, one was trying to climb to his feet, which is harder than it sounds when you are gripping a four-foot long stabbing spear in both hands in a narrow passage. The other did not have his spear in hand, and his
shield was slung behind him out of the way like you’d do to free both hands for a good grip. He had a look on his face that showed he was the stabber.

  I still had his spear in my hand, covered in my blood. I had practiced this move a hundred times a day, every day except Sunday, for the last four years before sunrise. It was always what I did after sword forms and before stick fighting forms. I always hated my dad for not letting me sleep in like normal kids, and hated my brothers for always being better at it than I was. Well, every second, every split-second of that time I spent resenting my dad was wasted and worthless. I was stupid. Because, boy, all that practice was worth it.

  The move was basic yari no kami. Your right foot is a yard in front of your left, at quarter angle. Right hand on the shaft three feet above the left. Lunge by stepping the right foot forward, bending the right knee, straightening the rear leg. Right hand loose to let the spear shaft move, thrust takes its power from the left hand, drive the point directly into the navel of the imaginary opponent. Recover by pushing off with the forward leg and return to stance.

  Of course, this time the opponent was not imaginary. He had a jacket woven with metal plates, but I must have been pretty pumped, and he must have kept his spear sharp, because I drove the point about nine inches into him. I tore the blade sidewise to make a ragged wound that opened like a red mouth. A mouth that spat up. The guy sat down and screamed like a girl, and stuff that looked like spaghetti and meatballs, only thicker, poured out of the wound, along with blood and other fluid. I don’t mean anything against girls. All I mean is that it was a really high-pitched, really long scream of the sort you only hear in horror movie soundtracks.

  I would have thought that the screams of real people would sound a lot different than fake ones. Nope. It sounds the same. My whole life, I had heard maybe ten thousand screams and seen ten thousand fake corpses on cop shows, so that now when the real thing was right in front of me and my hands were red with real blood, it did not strike me as anything real.

  Thinking back, I remember seeing tears just pouring over the guy's cheeks as he sat there, trying to stuff his guts back inside of him. He was not able to close his mouth, and not able to stop screaming. In retrospect, I feel sorry for him. But at the time, nothing seemed real to me. I was in some sort of shock and I pulled back the spear and waved it overhead, whooping in savage triumph.

  The score was now one guy behind me, five guys in front of me, along with the magic user, and the three freakaloids.

  2. Butterfoot

  I could not face the crowd and turn my back to a man behind me, despite that he had tripped and was now on his knees, so I stepped on the dying man, and drove the spear at him.

  This guy — let’s call him Butterfoot Joe — he had not dropped his shield. It was held by a strap over his shoulder. Even from his kneeling position he was able to get it in my way and block my thrust. The shield was made of wicker or some lightweight substance, so my lance head penetrated it; but Joe just shrugged and dropped the shield, and my spear now had a four-foot tall surfboard attached to it.

  Shouting, I shoved at him, spear and shield and all, but my spear had a fat knot of hair just below the spearhead, so nothing happened but me pushing at Butterfoot Joe like a bulldozer while he tried to leap to his feet. I mentioned these guys were all shrimpy little fellows, and he was off balance anyway, so he went stumbling back. I twisted the spear sideways, and the shield got wedged across the passage between an ornamental gnome and a pair of pipes. The shield was wedged in tightly enough that it did not drop when I let go of the spearhaft to stoop and pick up both the flashlight and my grandfather’s katana. The shield did not block Joe from coming back at me, but it made him hesitate, because he now had to decide whether to jump over or duck under, or take a moment to wrestle the little barrier out of the way.

  As I straightened, I flicked on the flashlight in Joe’s eyes. The light was brighter than their wooden illumination, so it blinded him a moment. He backed up, but there was not much of a place to back up to, since he had to go around the corner, and now was on the lower part of the ramp sloping up. At that point, Butterfoot Joe just decided to run. I heard his footsteps clanging along with the footsteps of the first three guys: they had not been gone that long. They were still within earshot.

  3. Two Bowmen

  Something hit me in the back pretty hard, and then it hit me a second time. Thwack! Thwack!

  Two arrows were sticking out of my jacket. My bulletproof jacket. The arrowheads had not penetrated, but, even if they had, so what? I was in this magical freaky nightmare land where I could be hurt, but not killed.

  My chest wound was still sucking in air and spurting blood, and it hurt like the hottest part of Hell, but pain-fueled rage and adrenaline were rushing through my body and enflaming my brain.

  Now I turned. No one from behind had charged. Two soldiers standing turned sideways in the cramped space, with bows in their hands and scared looks on their faces. Not scared like you are in combat. I am sure they’d seen plenty of that. Scared like they were seeing a ghost. A dead man who stood up after being stabbed and plucked out the javelin and gutted your team-mate with it.

  I'm not sure why they decided to shoot me rather than rush me. Maybe no one charged me because they did not want to step on the dying guy. He was now behind me, between me and them, rolling on the ground. No one was stooping to try to help him, which struck me as rather cold. He was right in the middle of the puddle I had bled out or vomited up, blood mixed with Uncreation Oobleck, which was slithering like sticky worms from one side of the floor to the other. The dog-faced man-thing was still twitching, but he looked really dead, and he was slumped against the dying guy in the pool of Oobleck.

  The soldiers were either really well trained, because they did not attack me until ordered, or really poorly trained, because they just stood there paralyzed with panic.

  Maybe they did not want to step in the goop. I could see from the looks on their faces that they knew what the stuff was.

  And maybe the place was too narrow to attack me easily. With two bowmen standing in front (call them Mutt and Jeff), they were blocking the way of the others behind them. I thought about rushing forward to see if I could decapitate one or both bowmen, but the two spearmen crowded up behind (or Frick and Frack, if you will), had their spears in their hands. Now they had recovered from the surprise of having people fall on their heads, so they were in position with their footing set right.

  Sure, I was bigger than them, but then, a horse is bigger than a pikeman, which doesn’t do the horse any good during a cavalry charge. More mass and more muscle just means the horse can hurt itself worse by pushing the pointy end in deeper when they collide.

  I hesitated a half-second, and that was too long: Mutt and Jeff, the two bowmen, knelt and raised their shields, making a little wall that Frick and Frack, the two spearmen, could thrust over to get at me. And I could not get at them.

  Behind these four in the front were the two dog-headed hairless wonders. I’ve said before that they looked like baboons, but they were as tall as men, even if thinner. Call them Lassie and Rintintin. Next behind them, where the narrow aisle turned a corner was the third spearman. He was older, and had more plumes on his helm, and he got to stand back away from the danger, so let’s call him the Squad Leader wimp. Next to him was the magic user in the tall black cylindrical hat. I saw no sign of the phosphorescent blind guy in the black cloak. Maybe he was on the ramp leading down.

  Mom did not like that I used to watch scary horror movies as a child. Boy, was she wrong about that. I had already seen so many fake gaping wounds and spurting gushes of blood in my TV life, that I did not freak out. I think I mentioned the real thing is less dramatic looking than the exaggerated close-ups. The smell was no worse than when you kill a buck, except that when a human being loses control of his bowels, our droppings smell really rank.

  They all looked scared of me, except the magic user, who seemed bored. He had a narro
w face, narrow eyes, a thin little moustache barely clinging to the corners of his mouth, and a sneer. He had this little shining toy in his hand, that looked like a compass or a pocketwatch, and he looked down at it, and pushed its golden dial with his thumbs. It was as if he was checking the time.

  I raised the katana in a salute. “My name is Ilya McLeod of Clan McLeod! There can only be one!”

  Mutt and Jeff relaxed, looking startled, and behind them Frick and Frack exchanged glances. They did not lower their spearpoints, but the tension went out of their shoulders.

  They were acting as if they understood what I said.

  The Squad Leader wimp said in a voice of awe, “What occult monster is he?”

  I felt this weird sensation in my ears and in my brain. Because I had understood him before I realized that I should not understand him.

  4. Non-Incomprehensible

  I heard the words the squad leader spoke with my ears: umamu i-idtadum su.

  Somehow, I knew the first word umamu meant beast or monster. The third word su at the end was a masculine singular pronoun, but it was not grammatically necessary. It was for emphasis only: not “what occult monster is he?” but “what occult monster is he?”

  I also knew that the second word idu meant to be unknown and the letter ‘i’ at the beginning made it third person masculine singular, and the letter ‘m’ at the end made it accusative. The ta in the second position put the verb in the imperfect tense: being unknown was an ongoing act. There is no English equivalent to idtadum: “He unknowns” or “he unknownings” or even “he unknownizes.”

  The word also meant strange in the sense of being a stranger, that is, unknown because it comes from outside. Our word occult when it refers to being something hidden or unearthly captures a hint of this.