by Brad Ashlock
Her mother had joined her father on the couch; they were watching the beginning of a senior golf tournament. Meeko went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, took a shower, and then went to the closet and put on her red coat, boots, hat, and gloves. She told her parents she was taking a walk. She shut the outside door behind her, stepped from the porch and down the driveway to the sidewalk. It was coated in patchy ice. The sky was overcast. All the houses resembled each other in one way or another, like a family of dwellings sharing interchangeable characteristics, but no matter the combination, the homes never transcended banality.
She walked down Yorktown, took a right on Ticonderoga, and, after a few blocks of curved streets and vinyl sided two story boxes with windows and plowed driveways, she came to the entrance of the park. The playground equipment—monkey bars, slides, wooden constructs of rope ladders and tire swings—were frozen in place not only by the ice that blanketed them but also by the gray air itself, a gray tone of moody sameness, of stillness with all the grainy paralysis of an old Polaroid. The swings and bleachers and soccer field and tennis courts should have been alive with activity, but this was winter; the playground equipment would freeze your butt in the swings, to the slide, and your palms to the monkey bars before allowing its hibernation to be disturbed.
She walked across the frozen sand and through the ankle deep snow to one of the swing sets. The seat was a rubber flap on rusty chains. She sat in it, ignored the wet and the cold, kicked into the ground and pushed herself back. The chains squealed protests. She didn’t swing very high, just barely a swing, just barely enough to get off the ground and look up through the gray atmosphere, toward the darkness, toward the sound of rushing wind and fleeting passages of purple outer space, higher and higher above the playground to the final layer, black like smoked glass, perfectly smooth and gleaming in her mind.
“That’s not the way out,” someone said directly behind her.
Meeko dug her feet into the snow and buckled to a stop. Startled, she looked over her shoulder. Standing behind her was a girl of her age, perhaps younger; she was even smaller than Meeko, in a pink winter coat with white fluff around the hood. She had a dark complexion and strands of black hair played around her forehead from under the white fluff of the hood. The girl had black within black eyes and a button nose.
“What did you say?” Meeko asked.
The girl smiled. “Why were you looking up to the sky?”
“I wasn’t. I was swinging.”
“Oh. Sometimes when I swing I like to tip back and look right up into heaven.”
“Who are you?”
The girl approached the swing beside Meeko and pulled on the chains. “I’m new in the neighborhood. Can I swing with you?”
“OK,” Meeko said.
“My name’s Hope.”
“I’m Meeko,” she said, twirling in the swing now, making the chains coil together near the top bar.
“Is this a nice place to live?” Hope asked.
“It’s OK.”
“I miss my friends.”
“So do I,” Meeko said.
“Are you new here too?”
“No, it’s just that I haven’t seen my friends in a few weeks. I guess they’re all gone on vacation.”
“Maybe we could be friends,” Hope said and smiled.
“So you’ll be going to Challenger?”
“What’s Challenger?”
“A school. Then we go to Valleywood, and then East Kentwood for high school.”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. We just moved here. You must be right.”
Meeko asked Hope where she lived, and Hope named a nearby street. Meeko asked where she had come from.
Hope stopped swinging and said, “Don’t you know?”
“How could I know?”
“Here!” Hope smiled and offered her arm up to Meeko’s face. “Smell. I think you’ll like it.”
Meeko hesitantly leaned forward and sniffed at the pink coat. She pulled away. The sleeve reeked of pine.
Hope laughed and said, “In the pines where the river dies and the snow and dirt as white and brown flies to polish the bones that sink like hard stones and open the doors to the everywhere shores.”
Meeko froze. She was part of the equipment now, part of the gray air, hibernating and waiting for a glimmer of sun to free her of the ice. The ice was fear and it held her fast, locked her in the sameness of the surrounding houses, in the snow and the dirt at her feet, paralyzed her in the ubiquitous white and brown. There was no question, there is only perfection, she thought to herself, but she could only recite it once and the mantra died before it could be of any use, before it could save her from this strange little girl with her black eyes and dark skin and pink coat, and that scent of pine. Hope was laughing now, her head back, her whole body stuck out like a jackknife while she stared up to the gray heavens and giggled.
“Why did you say that?” Meeko finally managed.
The strange girl instantly shot a glance at Meeko, pulled herself up by the chains of the swing, and dug her feet into the ground, stopping her motion.
“You should be very scared because none of this is real.”
Meeko pulled herself out of the swing and ran out of the park. The snow seemed to be sticking to her boots, the wind pushed against her face, and the gray heaven above started to blacken like tissue drizzled with ink that spread across the clouds turning the morning into night. Meeko dared one glance over here shoulder; Hope was gone. All Meeko could see was the swing swinging up into the air, back down, and up the other side, but no one was on it. She ran down the curved streets, heading for home, got to her block and stopped. Her lungs burned. Her hat had soaked up sweat and now felt loose and damp. She stopped because standing directly in front of her was the Indian from her dream, the medicine man.
“Run, Meeko. Run as far as you can. You’re almost out of time. Go!” In his hands was an hourglass filled with pine needles.
Meeko let out a cry of terror, exhaustion, and realization. He was right. He was right; something was wrong here. She didn’t know what, and presently didn’t care. She turned her back to the medicine man and ran away from him and her house, in the opposite direction of the park. She didn’t know where she was going, all she cared about was getting away, getting to the main road, perhaps to Kalamazoo, an avenue that ordinarily would be thick with traffic but one she was almost certain would be devoid of cars, just like the streets of her neighborhood had been.
Where were all the vehicles, where were all her friends? Out of breath, Meeko stopped a couple blocks away from the main road, her hands to her knees. She cast a glance behind her. She had imagined the Indian on her heels, but there was no one there. She caught her breath and continued onward. She walked up Gentian and got to Kalamazoo Avenue. She looked left and right, but the silence had already foretold what she knew would be here: nothing, no cars, just an empty stretch of recently plowed asphalt. What had that strange girl said? You should be very scared because none of this is real. Indeed.
* * *
Joost Lusker dug into his breast pocket and withdrew the enormous key ring that jangled there. Humming, he searched for the key he needed, placed it into the door that led to his master, The Presence, and turned it. He heard the mechanism click. He grasped the cold brass knob, carefully turned it clockwise, and opened the door. The hinges squeaked, like metal against bone, and a quick burst of sound, suction in reverse, escaped along with a flicker of light and blanket of fog. The vapor curled around Lusker’s ankles, yellow-tinted, almost alive, finding the cracks in the floor to hide there like searching octopus tentacles.
After the fog that continued uncurling across the hallway of doors, came the smell of lilacs. Beyond the pleasant summery scent, past the threshold, awaited complete blackness, a kind of darkness that possessed a physicality as impenetrable as stone. This was the night at the center of black holes in the far reaches of space, of t
he singularity, the pupil of the universe from which not even light can escape. Lusker took a deep breath, his chin tucked down like a boy in a school play about to step from stage right and recite Dickens. He stepped through the fog, into the scent of lilacs, into the void, toward The Presence.
The door creaked shut behind him. This was the gloom of blindness; Lusker, in fact, found it less disorienting within the chamber if he simply shut his eyes. He let out the breath he had taken on the other side of the door and said, “Knock, knock.”
The presence exhaled about what seemed fifty feet away (as if distance existed in the black cube).
“Return the key.”
Lusker plucked the 1800s Grand Rapids key from his pocket, held it out into the shadows and dropped it. It never hit the floor.
“I feel a draft,” The Presence said, now seeming a hundred feet away.
“Draft?”
“Many doors…opening.”
“Ah.”
“Your mind, Joost Lusker, is an unlocked door to me. What would I find if I crept through it?”
“Probably a couple prostitutes.”
“Did you enjoy your trip?”
“Immensely.”
“Who is coming?”
“An old man and a child. They want your toy.”
“Mmm. I let it sleep. Pretty. It winds itself up in the mornings and I watch it go. I wonder how it ticks.”
Lusker opened his eyes in the blackness.
“Yes?”
“How does it tick? Maybe you could open it and show me.”
Lusker turned and groped for the door, finally found the handle, and pulled it wide. The hinges groaned as he stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. At last, Lusker’s vengeance would be complete. He would eviscerate the little girl in the black cube before his master. He rushed down the unending labyrinth of doors until coming to the one that led to the alternate reality The Presence had designed for Meeko Russell, fabricated parents and all. He found the correct key on his ring and entered. He stepped out of Meeko’s closet into her false room. He went to her door, found the correct key for that, and stepped into the kitchen. There was no one except of the doppelgangers of Mister and Missus Russell on the couch watching a golf tournament on the television. They glanced to Lusker and then back to the TV. They were automata, virtually useless.
“Where’s Meeko?” Lusker asked them.
“She went for a walk,” the mother said.
“To where?”
The doppelgangers shrugged in unison.
Lusker squinted. He went outside of the house and quickly scanned the street. Nothing. If he had Sebastian with him, he could have the little bitch sniffed out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. She was here someplace. The world outside, although it appeared like Kentwood, Michigan, circa 2003, was in actuality nothing put one of The Presence’s black cubes, a rather small chamber of only about five square miles. Still, that was a lot of ground for such a little girl. She wouldn’t be far, though. She’d be home any minute. Lusker would wait for her, and when she did return home… but The Presence would not wait long; The Presence was infantile when it came to entertainments, like a spoiled Roman emperor. If this sudden desire to see the insides of the girl (her death was incidental) passed, Lusker might again be denied his ultimate revenge. He waited on the porch, imagining her screams.
??
In another world behind a different door, the beast, Sebastian, needed no imaginative powers to hear human screams. It had been through three worlds now: the first, a primordial jungle with seventeen moons populated by bizarre creatures that looked like pumpkins with tarantula legs; the second, a world of phosphorescent fungi and lichens; and the third, the present realm he had invaded on his hunt, Sweet Blossom, Arkansas, 1857. Sebastian’s preternatural nose allowed him to sniff through the veils between worlds; it led him to the secret doors he needed to keep on Naumkin and Cal’s tracks.
Sebastian had emerged from the abandoned mill seconds after Naumkin, Cal, and the escaped slaves had gone through it. The door, Sebastian understood instinctually, was transient; it wouldn’t remain open for long. Sebastian, in dog form, had emerged from the revolving door and had caught a strong whiff of its prey. They must have been here just moments before. The beast had appeared out the open doorway of the mill to the surrounding marsh. There it had discovered two men: one had cradled a disfigured hand to his chest while the other squatted in the mud holding a bloody hanky to his nose.
Sebastian sniffed at them to make sure they were not the old man and the boy. That’s when Dwight Browne and Shorty noticed the huge dog, and that’s when Shorty performed his last stupid act. He had aimed his pistol at the beast and shot the dog in the shoulder. In a blur or black fur, blood, and bright white fangs, Sebastian leapt from the steps of the mill and caught Shorty’s throat in its jaws before the cowhand could even think about pulling the hammer of his pistol back for another shot. Sebastian had then shaken ferociously, leaving Shorty’s head to dangle in his lap by a few strands of ragged sinew and meat.
The screams were coming from Dwight, who had fallen backward and was now, crab-like, trying to scuttle away from the mayhem across the deep mud. He didn’t get far. Sebastian jumped from the widening pool of blood around Shorty, and was now straddling Dwight, its fangs a few inches from the man’s pronounced Adam’s apple.
“No!” Dwight screamed, eyes shut.
“No what?” Sebastian asked, slobber dripping from its maw onto Dwight’s face.
Dwight opened his eyes, his mouth a giant ‘O’, his hands, even the one that had been half blown off from Naumkin’s pistol, pushing against the talking animal’s gore-strewn fur.
“Sweet Jesus!”
“Sweet?”
“No!”
“Sweet chocolate… sweet blood,” Sebastian snickered and licked its teeth.
“God help me!”
“Help me.”
“Oh, Momma!”
“I’m looking for a man.”
Dwight blinked and turned his head away from the hot breath.
“Not me!”
“Old man. Nummmm kinnnn.”
Dwight tried to look into the dog’s eyes, but could not. He stared instead down to the gold cross dangling at the beast’s throat and said, “Naumkin? Yeah! OK! Yeah!”
“Yes?”
“He’s here. In the mill. Didn’t you see them?”
The dog licked Dwight’s wounded hand, bloody and burnt around the edges. Dwight flinched.
“Oh, your li’l paw.”
“Naumkin did it.”
“Wanna kill ‘im too?”
“I don’t know.”
Sebastian snapped at the air and nicked Dwight’s cheek.
“Yes! Oh, Jesus!”
“You help me. Even the odds.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Help you what?”
“Hunt. Through a door.”
“In the mill?”
“Yes. You’ll change. Everything does.”
“Change?”
“More of what you are. More of what you are.”
* * *
One by one, Naumkin and the others emerged from the revolving door. There were two immediate questions: where were they, and who were they. The best they could answer the first question was to fall back on their own familiar knowledge of place, despite its obvious inadequacies in regards to other dimensions. Yes, they were apparently in a forest of some kind, but one with silvery flora and hundred-foot tall…things that could have been trees but shared characteristics from the vegetable and mineral families. Crystalline tinsel draped over the strange plants and the bluish moss of the ground. Through the dense sparkling canopy shone a sky like one eternal rainbow, its soft colors diffuse and alive like aurora borealis. Every footstep resulted in the cracking of the ubiquitous tinsel, its broken bits dancing up into the air like fairy dust.
As for the question of who they now were, Naumkin and Cal were unch
anged—Naumkin the cowboy, Cal the Kung Fu god. However, according to the bizarre laws they were following as travelers through the Everywhere Doors, the former slaves, little Jacob and old Solomon, had indeed become transformed. Jacob stood nearly seven feet tall. He rippled with muscle beneath his dusty leather overcoat, jeans, cowboy boots, and black cowboy hat. At his hips gleamed a pair of six-shooters with pearl handles. Like Naumkin, Jacob had wanted to be a cowboy, not a racist cowhand, but a lone rider of the desert, a hero and instrument of justice. As for Solomon, he looked unchanged except for the old-fashioned double-breasted suit and the new twinkle in his mahogany eyes.
“I know how this place can be. Why it can be,” Solomon said, his uneducated drawl replaced by the calm yet excited tone of a tenured philosophy professor.