Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  Broken out by who, John Dillinger? Rudolf Vrba? The Underground Railroad? Harry Houdini? I would have believed that last one, if I had seen the Batcopter in a parking orbit up here at forty thousand feet, with Houdini hanging by his heels in a straitjacket to swing in and pick me up with his teeth.

  Not to mention that she was not speaking English. That ruled out Dillinger. By process of elimination, that left Vrba.

  “Yeah,” I groaned. “You just keep on with your scalding, there, Rudolf. Don’t mind me.”

  I realized she could not hear me too well, perhaps because I was speaking in a gargle-ish voice with a spike through one lung and another through my throat, not to mention sobbing a bit. Just a bit. Okay, a lot. Because all she said back was, “Fear not, Sua’u-su’u-ussushibu-re’u!”

  Try saying that one three times fast. Just another dumb name impossible to pronounce. The word-ending Re’u meant shepherd, and also meant a teacher, pastor, mentor or master. Sua’u meant to fly, to be airborne, and it referred to anything, bird or cloud or moon or angel, that lived in the sky. Su’u meant dove or bird or any winged thing. Ussu meant eagle or vulture. Shibu meant bearded elder, so Su’u-ussushibu was the bearded vulture, a bird also called the ossifrage or petrel. It was the carrion bird that broke the bones of its prey by dropping them on hard rocks, or, in one famous case of murder-by-turtle, on a Greek poet's head.

  So a little girl who sounded about twelve years old was looking for someone known as High Master Ossifrage. Either that or his name was Old Vulture.

  I don’t think it was anyone’s nickname for me. My nickname was Ilya the Boy Pincushion.

  When one of the drops of red-hot metal finally sagged enough to drip down and hit me, I screamed. I was expecting it, of course, since it took a fair amount of time to burn through the thickness of the bars overhead, and I gritted my teeth. But, sorry, being able to survive any wound does not mean wounds do not hurt. I think I have mentioned that about a zillion times by now. This is because I have been hurt about a zillion times, and each time it is still a surprise and it still hurts like hell.

  This time, it literally hurt like Hell, because I was on fire. A molten droplet hit me on my upper thigh and burned through flesh and muscle down to the bone. The smell made me hungry for a hamburger.

  The girl shrieked. “Master Suau Suu Ussushibu!” (Sorry, but I am not spelling that name over and over again with all those hyphens and apostrophes. You just have to imagine she is pronouncing an impossible name that sounds like a hissing hiccough. Or entering a hog-calling contest.) “High Master Ussushibu! I thought you would be standing on the floor, not in the air! I scald the living metal! Do you not see?”

  “Don’t mind me,” I said, or gargled. “Can we stop by a McDonald's after this? I am in the mood for a Big Mac.”

  “Don’t try to talk! You sound very terrible! Did they torture you?”

  “How am I supposed to answer your dumb question if I don’t talk? Of course they tortured me. This is the goddam Dark Tower. It is not the Tower of Fluffy Pillows.”

  At that point, the bars blocking the way above shivered, let out a scream like the scream metal makes when it is torn, and retracted all at once. The hole was open. Freedom beckoned.

  The only problem was that not all the bars retracted. The ones holding me kept me spitted in place like a shish-kabob, as if some incompetent or sadistic cook had skewered each bit of meat and potato multiple times from multiple angles. I could move my head, which did not have any pieces of metal going through it, so I craned my neck and looked up.

  My rescuer was a grinning monkey-ninja wearing a brown outfit, whose face had turned to porcelain.

  She screamed in horror. I guess I looked pretty messed up.

  “Who are you?” she said. “What are you?”

  “Ilya Muromets. I am one of the host of those who yearn for death in vain. I think you can guess why.”

  “You’re naked!”

  “Um. Sorry. You have a monkey face.”

  “It’s a mask.”

  “I know it’s a mask. I assume you could not breathe the air at this altitude. I am wondering why it looks like a monkey.”

  “My punishment name is Pagutu.” The word meant she-monkey.

  “That is an ugly name, if you don’t mind my saying so,” I commented.

  “Where is Master Ussushibu?”

  “Do I look like his appointment secretary? Ask at the front desk.”

  “I was told he was here! In this cell!”

  “Was he? How naughty of him to have wandered away!”

  “How can you—talk? How can you be alive? Your leg is burning!”

  “By now it is just sizzling. I think my blood quenched the metal ingot. It has not eaten through the bone, anyway.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “People keep asking me that.”

  The monkey-shaped mask stared at me for a moment. There was no expression of awe or terror, because it was a mask. If anything, the monkey-face looked like it was enjoying a joke. What the girl behind it thought, I don’t know.

  The monkey face did not match the stark black design of the suit. Nor did it match any other bit of handiwork of anything I had seen here. The Dark Tower looked distinctly Mesopotamian, and anything in it that could be made gold, massive, square or blockish, was made so. Everything was as angular as their chicken-scratch writing. Her porcelain face looked like one of those little decorative things you see in a boutique: flamboyant, lighthearted, gaily painted, adorned with very fine curlicues and flourishes. The eyebrows were droll circumflexes; the cheeks were clownish circles of rouge. After staring at nothing but dark shapes and cruel spikes, it was a relief, it was a joy, to stare at something so ridiculous.

  She stood up. I revised my age estimate upward. Maybe she was fourteen. Her hair was black as India ink, and clipped in a pony-tail over one ear that fell to her shoulder. She was thin as a rail and shaped like a boy. An underfed boy.

  Her outfit looked like she had wrapped her arms and legs in black adhesive tape, put on a tunic and an oversized diaper atop that, and over both was wearing a smock or maybe a poncho. Some kind of garment made of two flaps hanging down in front and back, belted at the middle, and pinned at the shoulders and neck with three round ornaments of wood.

  In her hand was a blade shaped like the letter L. There was a long chain made of coppery metal growing out of the bottom of the hilt, ending in a triangular bob or arrowhead. The chain at the moment was retracted, only about two feet long. The weapon looked like the sickle-and-chain Alexei practiced with, a kusari-gama. So she really did look like a ninja.

  Some girls from my hometown, when they were fourteen, were mature enough to pose for Playboy. I assume it is because in Tillamook we put a lot of growth hormones in our cows which get in our dairy products and get in our children. This girl at fourteen was more waiflike in build, and probably did not have those things in her diet. She did not look like she had much of anything in her diet.

  “We are definitely stopping at that McDonald’s,” I said. “Or maybe a Popeye’s. You need some red beans and rice in you.”

  “What did they do to your eye?”

  “No, I did that to myself. Poked it out with my thumb. Don’t try this at home, kiddies. Everything else is their handiwork, though.”

  “And what is that … moving … thing … in the eyesocket?”

  “My new eyeball. It is almost grown back. My nerves regenerate, and are always ready for more pain. Lucky me!”

  “Where are you from, creature?”

  “The Land of Cheese.”

  “Eh?”

  “Can we get on with this charade?” I said, beginning to feel a little cross. “You are supposed to be pretending to rescue me, and I am supposed to pretend to believe you. Can you make these larger bars retract with your trick? I mean, without dropping me into the bottomless drop under my toes?”

  “Do you know where is Master Ussushibu?”

  “I don’t e
ven know how to pronounce his name.”

  “Well …” her voice sounded uncertain and soft. It had a strange note to it. “… Sorry to leave you like this, creature, but I have to look for him. This may be our only chance before he is moved beyond the twilight to another aeon. Just don’t tell anyone you saw me, please…”

  That was like having a cherry-flavored snowcone dumped into your bathing suit by your older brother when you are napping at the beach. I jerked in surprise, and the bars impaling me rattled, and my dozens of wounds started seeping blood again.

  “Hold it! You can’t be for real! If you are for real, you can’t leave me!”

  She stepped back another step. The monkey was still grinning at its private joke, but the set of her shoulders and spine bespoke fear and uncertainty. “Sorry—but this was not in the plan. I am not supposed to swerve from the plan. The elders told me this many times! I’d like to help you … because you look really … yucky … but I am looking for the Master….”

  I fought back a sense of desperation more painful than the various bars and burns going through me. I tried to speak calmly, “Pagutu! Pa-goo-too! Listen. Listen to me. You don’t want to walk away and leave me here, do you?”

  “The Big Man told me not to swerve from the plan—”

  “But that is because he did not know about me, wasn’t it? I can help you look for your Master Ossifrage.”

  I was using that tone of voice schoolteachers use for idiot children, or child molesters probably use to get Junior into the back of his windowless van for some candy. Soft and smooth and soothing.

  Monkey-mask girl was not buying the soothe-y voice. She was inching backward.

  “Pagutu, if I am free, the guards will come look for me and not be looking for you. Doesn’t that make sense? I could help you. Act as a distraction.” My voice began to get louder, to take on an ugly note of panic. “Do you understand? You are my only hope. Today is when they get her. I cannot even give up my life for her because I can’t die!”

  The monkey face was smiling, but the girl was getting freaked out. Sorry, but I don’t think I was saying the right things. She turned and scampered off. I heard her footsteps, light as a doe’s, receding on the stone floor overhead.

  I screamed at the top of my one non-pierced and working lung, “For the love of God! Don’t leave me! Get me out of here!”

  The footsteps stopped. Then, softly, stealthily, she crept back closer. The monkey face peered over the edge, grinning.

  “Which god?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  She-Monkey said, “By which god’s name did you utter your word?”

  “Um. I mean God. God with a capital G.”

  “The Astrologers say the stars are gods, and they are numbered beyond number.”

  “Your Astrologers are lying-ass bitch whores, and their Head Honcho is as crazy as a bedbug hopped up on psychedelic drugs. Don’t believe a damned word they say. There is only one God, one and one alone.” I guess the Trinity was also three-in-one, but that involved some theological subtleties I wasn’t willing to go into right now.

  “You do not know his name, because you are an abomination.” She spoke that in a tone of voice like a dare.

  “Uh? God’s name? I know his name. It is not a secret. Everyone on my planet knows it. Maybe you never had a Moses in this world? His name is I Am That I Am. The Jews call him Yahweh, but they think that name is too sacred to pronou—”

  At that moment the cell I was in rolled and pitched like a ship in a swell. It was not much, but it was enough to feel it. There was a huge noise, deeper than any noise on Earth, rumbling from outside, like a vibration in a bar of struck iron. The metal of the tower was complaining.

  The monkey mask was still grinning, but her eyes were so wide and white that I could see this even through the thick glasses of her mask lenses.

  I started laughing. Maybe I had gone nuts. I don’t remember why I was laughing, or what seemed so funny.

  She whispered, “Alas! Now I am bound by the naming magic. I must not leave you, and must get you out of here, and yet you are one of the Deathless, the Ever-Suffering, and so you will kill me.”

  “Listen, She-Monkey. Get me out of this darned cell, and I will help you. I’ll be nice.”

  She spoke like someone in a daze. “My mother told me of the One God who is the enemy of the One. She told me there were others who bowed and served in secret. So long ago she said it, back when my name was my own.”

  I did not interrupt her, but I did not understand her either.

  She continued, “I was told to do what was asked of me in the name of the Great Name. I was not told I would be brutally murdered. I must obey. Fate is fated.”

  “Fate is not fated!” I said, annoyed. “I am not going to murder you! I am not going to hurt you or let you come to harm. I swear it by the Holy Rood and my Hope of Heaven, in the name of Saint Bernard and Saint George and Saint Catherine, by John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and in the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the Angels, so help me God.”

  “I don’t know those people.”

  “They are nice people. Real nice. People who won’t like it if I break my word. My dad won’t like it either. He doesn't even like when I break my word to tell him something I promised not to.”

  She did not look convinced. In fact, she did not look like anything aside from a grinning monkey. But in any case, her chain elongated and reached out from her ninja-looking weapon like a snake made of elastic, and wrapped its tip many times around one of the spears impaling me.

  Her copper chain writhed and hummed, and the black bar started to heat up to red hot, and I started to scream. I had been doing a lot of that lately.

  3. Second Attempt

  It took a long time. She thought I was dangerous, and so she was dawdling, and nothing I said could speed things up.

  And there were a lot of telescoping spears. Some were stuck through me. Some were just in the way above me, forming a lattice like a wicker basket. And they had to be heated up to red hot, like an oven, before they would squeal and let go.

  An hour? It might have been longer. Pain slows time like Einstein’s Relativity, and I was also worried about Penny being introduced to the iron hooks, and that slowed time even more.

  The little girl in the monkey mask worked on the ones impaling me from the left, so that once enough were missing from that side, I was able to use my arms and legs to push my body up along the blood-coated spears one way, and have them slowly pull out of my flesh from the other way, but the spears still stuck through me held me up so I did not fall through the hole out into the upper atmosphere.

  (Note to imps in Hell: if you want to torment the damned, getting them to pull themselves hand over hand up along a spear sticking through their sensitive internal organs and muscles is an effective torture even Dante didn't imagine. Make sure they hear the slurping noises as their flesh inches along the metal. That sound will linger in their nightmares, trust me.)

  By this time, my lungs had just gotten weary of screaming, and my other lung had a hole through it you could stick a forefinger into, so I was only making ugly, gasping noises, not bawling at full volume.

  It was only when I was free, and was trying to use my pierced and shattered limbs to climb up and squeeze through the remaining spears to the hole, that I thought to ask. “Listen, She-Monkey, can I ask you a question?”

  “It is best not to call me that. That was my punishment name, and the stars might hear you say it. My mother said my reborn birth name is Abanshaddi.” It meant Mountain Rock.

  “Can I call you Abby?”

  “It is best to use the name as it is, because the stars cannot hear it.”

  “Then I’ll call you Rocky.”

  “Er… Abby is fine.”

  “So, Abby, riddle me this: Why are the Astrologers and their soldiers not here? How come they did not foretell a break out?”

  “All are born once and once alone. But not I.�
��

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t they have people like me on your world?”

  “People like what? I am assuming you are a split character class thief and rogue. Remember to check for traps.”

  From the set of her shoulders it looked like Pagutu, or Abanshaddi, was miffed. I was sorry I made that joke. Not everyone thinks of rogues as lovable. I suppose poor people who don’t get enough to eat think even less of lovable rogues than rich people who never get their stuff robbed. (The reason why Robin Hood is a myth is not because he robs people on the highway, but because, for once, it was the rich people on the highway who got robbed, and poor folk love such unlikely tales.)

  “Look,” I said, sighing. (My sigh was a disgusting gargle, since internal fluids from several organs were streaming down gaping and sucking wounds in my chest and abdomen.) “I meant no disrespect. But when I climb up, the moment I hit the rim, they are going to turn on the Moebius gate set into the threshold and dump me lickety-split into a fresh jail cell. That is what happened last time. Can you damage the gold ring? Put it out of action? Or melt the gold with your sickle and chain there.”

  “Gold, the cunning metal cannot scald. Only living metal.” Cunning metal was Abartemitum: the coppery substance her haunted kusari-gama was made out of. (Temitum also meant sharp, acute, so the name was a deliberate play on words in her language.)

  I said, “If there is a wire leading to the Coil, cut it with your cunning weapon, please.”

  “That is not necessary.”

  “Yeah, I am telling you it is necessary, or I cannot get out! Just cut the wire!”

  The monkey mask shook its head. “To cut the wire may be foreseen by the maintenance Astrologers. You can get out. You must have faith in me and in those who sent me.”

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  “Then you stay trapped, even though the cage is open.”

  Groaning and grunting, I climbed up the remaining spears like a ladder and so out of the cell. The process was more painful and wetter than it sounds, and involved pull-ups using a set of arms with grossly torn muscles and at least one broken bone. The very last part involved clawing at the stone floor beyond the gold threshold, without the strength in my body to pull me up, and me unable to swing a leg up hard enough to get it over the edge, and the girl so grossed out by the condition of my body that she huddled out of arm’s reach, shaking her head when I groaned pathetically for help.