by Brad Ashlock
He didn’t though. Glass was his opponent now, his own thirst and fatigue its allies. He wouldn’t tip over his king, he wouldn’t stop the chess clock—he would wait as long as he could, even if it was only for a few more hours, he would wait and maneuver. He staggered to his feet. The others couldn’t look at him; they were lost in their own reflections. Naumkin reached down and gripped his pistols. He pulled his guns from the holsters and fired a few rounds into the glass ocean. He blew on the smoking barrels, re-holstered his weapons, and staggered down the shore in the direction the glass storm had blown. He was too exhausted to glance back at the others; they were not in his immediate thoughts but their welfare was deep in the back of his mind, somewhere with the angel wings and flapping beached dolphins.
He wanted to survive; he wasn’t ready to die because if he died the little girl would die. Cal, too. Naumkin started to wonder, as the distance between him and his companions stretched into a mile, if he was really walking, if it was even possible. He hadn’t had water for nearly three days. Maybe he was still at the shore on his back looking up into the rainbow-sky praying for Jenny to swoop down and rescue him. It didn’t matter. He’d walk until he couldn’t walk any more, and then he would die. The choice to get up and walk was logical: what did he have to lose? The others couldn’t be blamed. Cal had been shredded in the storm, Solomon was an old man, and Jacob was not about to leave Solomon. Naumkin didn’t look back; he couldn’t stop his forward motion because if he did, he might not be able to start again.
His knees buckled and he fell to the powdery sponge ground. The glass ocean was to his left, casting shards at him every time a wave of shattered mirror piece hit against the shore. He closed his eyes and began to die. He was on the grassy hill now overlooking the English countryside. The elephantine clouds were moving in fast-forward above. It was night. There was a fire. The logs crackled and blue gray smoke plumed into the darkness. Across from Naumkin squatted the medicine man.
“What’s up, kimosabe?” the Indian asked.
“Am I dead?”
“Do you want to be?”
Naumkin hesitated. “No.”
“Good. Take this,” he said and withdrew a water-skin. He handed it to Naumkin.
Naumkin uncapped it and drank. The liquid was bitter and syrupy.
“What is it?”
“Medicine. Just enough.”
“For what?”
“For you to set a trap. They’re almost on you now. You have about an hour, a little more if they find your friends first.”
“Who?”
“One of the dogs and The White and Brown. I can tell you what you must do, and then we won’t meet again until all this is over.”
Naumkin leaned forward and listened to the medicine man’s plan.
Afterward, Naumkin opened his eyes. He was refreshed. He got up and looked out to the ocean of glass. This would be his last chance. He set to work immediately. So many things could and probably would go wrong, but he was Naumkin, Master of Defense, the Medvedkin; he was a chess player and he knew how to set a trap. The digging was easy in the spongy ground. The hard part was gathering the shards of glass. They had to be long enough to stretch across the ditch he had scooped out. His hands were a bloody mess, but he had managed to gather the pieces from the sea. Now he concealed the shards of mirror with the glass powder that coated the entire shore. He could just make out the island of solid ground in the middle of the trap; he jumped over the concealed glass shards to it, gave a look around, and lay down on his back.
* * *
Sebastian and the White and Brown were themselves in bad shape; they had not escaped the wrath of the glass storm. To survive, The White and Brown had partially dissolved one of the tree-things in the forest where they huddled until the hurricane had passed. Sebastian had only a few abrasions, but The White and Brown had been hit by many shards, most of which were still in its new grotesque body. Dwight Brown, upon his initiation through the Everywhere Door, had become more of what he was: he was now a blob of translucent white, his internal organs visible through the skin, pumping brown juices. The White and Brown followed the dog because it and the dog wanted the same thing: to kill Tigran Naumkin.
After the storm had passed, the dog and the blob followed Naumkin and Cal’s spore to the sponge mountain, but then had lost it. The after-winds of the glass storm had swept it away. Sebastian had followed its nose, followed its instincts, and now the scent was rediscovered, that sweet human smell of sweat and despair. Naumkin wasn’t far off. Sebastian zoomed in on the spore, followed it to the dunes, and up and over them. The dog and the white and brown overgrown paramecium looked down from the hill at their prey. They had found him. He was alone, but the others couldn’t be far; they’d be easy to find, too. Sebastian pointed its nose into the air, closed its red glowing eyes, and sniffed. Yes, Naumkin was still alive. The dog perked its ears. It could hear the man breathing shallowly. Naumkin was dying.
Sebastian ordered The White and Brown to stay put and then slunk down the dune toward the ocean of glass and the prone human. The dog didn’t want the old man to die before it had a chance to smell Naumkin’s terror up close on seeing his fanged fate. If not for its impatience, Sebastian may have sensed the danger, but the dog was eager to exact vengeance for its fallen brothers. Sebastian’s cautious slinking progressed to a trot, and then to a dead run. As the animal closed in, it envisioned the first strike: to the crotch. At last it’d get those shriveled prunes! Tongue lolling from its snarled maw, it sprinted harder, becoming a black lightning streak. It bounded into the air, landing a few feet before Naumkin, and instantly plunged into the ground. Naumkin sat up, guns in hands, and looked down into the trap. The dog howled in the shallow hole, a long triangle of glass poking up through its stomach and out its back. It looked to Naumkin in disbelief.
Now something else was bounding down the dune just as the medicine man had warned. It was a living horror, a worm-like jellyfish of white and brown that must have been twenty feet long. It tumbled downs the hill turning in and out of itself, its visible inner organs tangling around into complicated knots. Naumkin could sense its madness, its hatred. The White and Brown had followed the man in the cowboy hat his entire life. From the Ukraine to the lower peninsula of Michigan, it had followed; from 1931, the year he was born, to the first stomps of a new century, it had chased him across an ocean to blanket his world in relentless whites and browns, had followed him from Sweet Blossom, Arkansas, to the shores of a glass sea. Just at the edge of the pit where the dog had fallen, it coiled like a spring and shot itself at Naumkin. Naumkin dropped flat to the ground and the blob propelled over him and landed in the ocean of glass. The mirror shards reduced the creature to pulp in seconds.
Naumkin cast a glance at the writhing dog. He reached down and gripped the shard that had pierced it.
“Where’s the door out of here? I know you know, so let’s not waste any time. Tell me and I’ll put you out of your misery. Tell me now!” Naumkin said and twisted the shard.
The dog howled in agony.
“No!” The dog bellowed.
Naumkin twisted the shard again.
“Stop!” it pleaded, the gold cross swinging back and forth around its furry neck.
Naumkin reached to shake the shard this time, but the dog had become a little boy.
“Please stop!” the boy begged.
Naumkin hesitated, but then shook the shard violently. The child was a dog again.
“Tell me and I’ll use a bullet. It’ll be quick.”
“You fool,” the dog spluttered.
Naumkin twisted the shard again. The dog moaned and begged him to stop.
“I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!”
“Where is the door out of this world that leads to Meeko Russell?”
“In the forest. Where you came from.” The dog began to snicker. “You went the wrong way, you old fool.”
Naumkin took aim and shot the dog in the head. He crawled down into
the mirror-spiked pit, pulled the animal up and out of it, got out himself, and hauled the animal up over his shoulders. He trudged back to his comrades. By the time he reached them, he was almost completely exhausted. Since his departure, Solomon had crawled down to Cal and Jacob; they were all unconscious and laying together in an orgy of misery. Naumkin retrieved a shard of mirror from the shore and began harvesting the dead dog. He skinned its back and carved out three chunks of raw meat. He went to Cal first, cradled his head in his lap, and fed him. Cal instinctively chewed and swallowed. Naumkin repeated this process with the others, and then took some nourishment himself.
Eventually, Cal, Solomon, and Jacob all regained consciousness. Naumkin told them everything that had happened. They forced themselves to eat until they had regained more of their strength. Woefully, they marched back to where they had come, again, up and over the mountain, to the forest of glass. The revolving door they had come through in the forest, they discovered, had disappeared. They trekked in the opposite direction and were relieved to find a river of red glass. They followed it through the tall tree-things, the pine-things, to where it died, a giant stalagmite of crystal. Set in the crystal was an old oaken door inlaid with iron. Naumkin opened it, and they all stepped over the threshold into the screaming cicadas and bright moonlight hum.
Part III: Exits
“…the minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better…,” Meeko Russell sang. She had given up knocking on the doors of the houses to ask for help. The homes, the streets, and the sidewalks were empty. She had walked a couple miles now, down Kalamazoo Avenue, west down 52nd Street, and now north down the middle of a random side street. The names of the roads were familiar, but they were lies. She knew that now, she remembered being awake the whole time with her father that night he had carried her from Grandpa Dudley’s mansion, through the woods to the abandoned chocolate factory, and then, somehow, down the floating staircase to, impossibly, her bedroom back in Kentwood. Cold, she got out of the recently salted road to the garage of a small one-story house with tan siding. The door was unlocked. There was nothing in the garage, no car, no lawn mower shoved into a corner, no discarded plastic quart containers of oil—there was only a cement floor and the naked wall studs. She removed her gloves and pressed her warm palms against her cold cheeks, breathed on her hands, and rubbed her ears.
She remembered the time she and Miranda snuck away from school one recess last winter. They went to Miranda’s house because her parents would both be at work. Fearful the police would be instantly notified of the missing second-graders, they cut through backyards. Once they arrived at Miranda’s house, Miranda unearthed the spare key wrapped in a sandwich bag under a snow-covered garden gnome. They had gone inside and soon began rummaging through forbidden dresser drawers. They discovered a Penthouse collection and spent a couple hours looking through it before Miranda’s mother had unexpectedly returned from work. They stuffed the magazines back in the top drawer under the underwear and bong, and ran up to Miranda’s room.
They had gotten away with it. Their teachers had never missed them, and Miranda’s mother was soon out of the house oblivious to the interlopers. They never skipped school again, but Meeko had learned how easy it sometimes was to fall into a crack and observed the world, the secret world that unfolded while she was in class, and return, the new hermetic knowledge unseen and growing within. She and Miranda had kept their lips sealed and their eyes opened. They were invisible. That’s what Meeko wanted to be now. She would hide and watch the secret world unfold around her, she would dig through the forbidden dressers and closets, gather her information like a spy, and wait to return to the normal world, initiated.
The garage was an inadequate place to hide. It was cold and boring. She wanted to be in a house, but she didn’t like the look of the one connected to the garage she was huddled in; it looked trashy. She put her gloves back on and ventured outside. She didn’t know this exact neighborhood very well, but she believed the houses improved slightly after another mile or so.
She continued down the side street that ran north parallel with Division Avenue. The walk warmed her up; she was damp under her red coat. After about a mile and a half, she ambled up Jefferson and took a left on Wesley. She walked until coming to a pleasant enough house, white with black trim. She strolled down the recently shoveled drive into the backyard. Resting against the wood fence far in the back leaned a snow-topped Madonna. There was a crisscrossed mesh fence to the left which demarcated a property line, while tall green bushes and an outdoor grill of stone and iron, set on a cement patio, demarcated the other.
Robotically, she yanked the locket that contained the key from her neck, and dropped it into the grill; it made no sound as it disappeared below the layers of wet ash. She looked back to the house: a large window was directly above a garden faucet. She trudged through the deep snow, dug her fingers into the rubber seal between the pane and the frame, used the faucet to give herself a boost, and looked inside. The knob of the spout turned a little under here boot, and a trickle of water dissolved the snow below.
Within the house, she saw a small den and a couch with a few blankets strewn over it. She strained to look to the left of the room and, through the vapor collecting from her breath on the glass, thought she saw piping for a fireplace. This might work. She hopped off the spout, peeled her gloves off to let them fall to the ground, placed her palms on the cool windowpane, and tried to force it ajar. It wouldn’t budge. She put her gloves back on and went around to the back door. Locked. The front door wouldn’t open either.
“School’s out,” she said, laid on her back on the side of the house, and kicked out a basement window. The broken glass shattered and spread across the cement floor of the basement. Meeko Russell had no way of knowing the synchronicity of this, had no sense that as the grimy glass broke, simultaneously, behind a different door in another world, a glass tempest was approaching the mountain her would-be rescuers had just climbed. There were many connections between the worlds, not just doors, not just people, but events, translated but garbled, vibrating between the dimensions like underwater echoes.
She removed her gloves again, gripped them together and used them as a cushion to push out the remaining triangles that fanged around the window frame. She tossed the gloves down into the basement, and wormed her legs into the window. She squirmed until she was mostly inside, and dropped the rest of the way. Her legs absorbed most of the impact, but she nonetheless fell back and sprawled to her side amid the shards. She pocketed her gloves and looked around. The only light came from the frosted and dingy windows around the edge just below the ceiling of the basement. There was a washer and dryer near a sink at the far end of the room. In the middle was a large furnace that spidered aluminum vents up across the low ceiling.
The cement floor had been painted a rusty red. To her right, stairs led to afternoon light, stale and gray as the day she had played hooky with Miranda. She climbed the steps up to a small kitchen. There was a hallway with a bathroom and two bedrooms; behind her, the window she had tried to open overlooking the backyard Madonna; through the kitchen, a stuffy living room with a chair, television, and an old sofa.
There were no pictures on the walls. She went to the television, but it didn’t work. Neither did the gas fireplace she had spotted earlier in the den. The blankets on the couch worked well, though. She took off her hat, coat, and boots, and wrapped herself in two of the blankets. She sat on the couch looking to Mother Mary, thinking of her own mother, humming Hey Jude for her father, and waiting for the secret world to unfold.
* * *
Joost Lusker was tired of waiting, and, he knew, so was The Presence. He had to find Meeko quickly, before the master lost interest in the possible entertainment of her disemboweling. If only he had help, if only Sebastian had returned, if only there was someone to aid him in the search for her. But there was no one here: this was one of The Presence’s black cubes, a chamber of malleable realit
y designed to keep Meeko Russell content. Lusker scowled and ran a skeletal hand through his white hair.
Then he saw the footprints.
A smile leapt upon his face like poisonous frog. There was no one else here, of course! How could he have been so stupid? He pulled up the collar of his black trench coat, walked across the snowy ground, and examined the prints in the ice of the sidewalk. He went to his haunches and ran a lithe finger down the imprint of delicate boot tread, and then around the outline of the small sole. He was on his way down the road before he was even standing. His strides carried him along Meeko Russell’s trail, his footfalls smashed into her narrowly spaced prints.
* * *
Naumkin, Cal, Solomon, and Jacob emerged from the crystal door into an attic bedroom. The door behind them, nothing but a thin panel board painted white, slid itself shut. The carpet and walls were baby blue. A bed nestled in the corner, no sheets or blankets, just a mattress on a metal frame. Set high in the wall directly to their right gleamed a small diamond-shaped window. They looked out it down into the asphalt street. They could see a lumberyard across from them. Snow had piled on the stacks of wood and the corrugated tin roofs of the warehouses. Below: no cars in driveways, nor parked along the side of the road, nor traveling the four-lane avenue to their left. The streets were stark as they were silent.