Jim did not remember anything after that. He was told that his parents did get out of the house and scrambled across the front porch, which had been torn away from the main structure, and across the gapful yard and onto the sidewalk. But they then had to go across the street because the cement they were standing on was shoved even more upwards and made larger fissures. The house lurched and sank another foot. The neighbors on both sides of the Grimsons' house ran screaming from their leaning houses. The whole neighborhood came alive, lights going on, people coming out on the front porches and crying out questions, children being bundled up and put in cars for a quick getaway.
Sirens wailed in the distance as the police cars and the fire engines raced toward Cornplanter Street.
Eva Grimson began crying out that someone should go into the house and rescue her son. No one volunteered. Eric insisted, over and over, that Jim was just delayed because he was putting on his clothes. Eva said that Jim must be hurt, and he was probably trapped.
Just as the squad cars and fire engines and ambulances pulled up, Eva ran toward the house. Eric and two neighbors grabbed her and held her while she screamed and struck at them and begged them to let her go.
"You're a coward!" she said to Eric. "If you were a real man, you'd go after Jim!"
The lights had gone out in the house; the power lines had been torn from the house. Suddenly, two small lights appeared in the doorway. They were candles, one in each of Jim's hands, and they shed illumination on his wild face and naked body. He could not be seen below the knees, however. The house leaned so much that he had to stand on a floor which dropped steeply away from the bottom of the twisted doorway.
Jim shouted something unintelligible to the people across the street. He jumped up and down, waving the candles, which he had picked up from the floor in the room his mother used as a shrine.
Seeing these, Eva began struggling even harder. She shrieked, "The candles! The candles! They'll set the house on fire! He'll burn, burn, oh, my God, he'll burn to death!"
The cops and the firefighters had by then cleared away most of the crowd so that the engines could be moved closer to the house. A fire department lieutenant and a police captain questioned the Grimsons but got only hysterical and confused answers. They could, however, see Jim in the doorway.
"Nuts, completely off his rocker," the captain said.
Shortly after this, another light shone in the house.
"Fire! Fire! For God's sake, save him!" Eva cried.
That must have deepened her agony. The candles she had lit for the Holy Family and the saints were going to cause Jim's death and put him for eternity in the greater flames.
The firefighters had discovered by then that the pipe to the nearest fire hydrant had been broken by the shifting of the earth. They brought the water truck up close and attached their hoses to it. Meanwhile, the captain and the lieutenant had ventured as close as they dared. Using his bullhorn, the policeman was urging Jim to get out of the house.
The earth shrugged beneath the crowd. The beams in the house snapped with loud reports. The house slid down and tilted even more. Jim disappeared from the doorway, dropped down and backward. The spectators ran away.
"Son of a bitch!" the lieutenant said. "Someone's got to go in after the kid!" He looked around for likely volunteers.
The flames were getting big on the side of the house nearest the driveway. Smoke poured out and was caught by the wind. The house next to it was going to catch fire soon unless the hoses could stop it. And, since the gas lines to the house must be broken, the fire could cause a hell of an explosion.
The lieutenant could not see Jim Grimson, but it was evident that he was throwing objects through the doorway. The spotlights from the trucks showed him, a few seconds later, that these were statuettes of the saints and the Holy Family. Most of them were broken.
"The kid's crazy as a loon!" the captain said.
It was then that the name of Jim Grimson sparked the captain's recall. Pete and Bill had told him about the stoned-out and drunked-up youths who'd pushed over old man Dumski's outhouse and about two of them falling into the crap. Until now, the captain had failed to connect the hilarious incident with the people who owned this house.
"The kid's hopped up," he told the lieutenant. "I heard all about him earlier tonight. Maybe we should forget about him. He'll be better off if he doesn't make it."
The lieutenant looked reproachfully at the captain. He did not say anything, but he got what he was thinking across to the captain. No matter how worthless or vicious the subject was, he, she, or it had to be saved.
"Just kidding," the captain said. "But I'd sure hate to lose good men."
The lieutenant ordered that ropes and a ladder be brought out. He asked for volunteers and got four, from whom he picked two. One was a black fireman, George Dillard, Gizzy's father. He had long ago given up his hopes that his son would be a lawyer, and he knew Jim Grimson only too well. But he was brave. Moreover, if he rescued the kid, he would gain another handhold on the rung of the ladder to higher rank and pay. God knows he needed it, and if he had to put his ass in a sling to get it, he would. Black firepersons were not promoted very often despite affirmative action and equal opportunity quotas and all that. Not in Belmont City, anyway.
The man who accompanied him was a wild man of Irish descent who was eager to be in on the rescue attempt. The more dangerous it was, the better he liked it.
Ropes tied around their waists, the loose ends held by other men and two women, Dillard and Boyd moved across the broken yard. Their smoke masks made them look like two enormous insectine St. Francises on an errand of mercy. They could see that the insane youth inside the house was still throwing objects out through the front doorway -- a coffee pot, coffee cups and drinking glasses, a skillet, table cutlery, a portable radio, albums of records, clothes, and photos.
By now, the flames were leaping from the side of the house, though not from that part which was below ground. The hoses had been turned on it but, so far, without avail.
Before the two firemen got to the doorway, the barrage of stuff cast out of the house ceased. They could faintly hear the howling of Jim Grimson above the crackling of the fire, the sound of the water striking the house, and the cries of the spectators.
They halted when the ground moved again and the house dropped a few inches. Smoke suddenly billowed out of the front doorway and the windows, the glass of which had been shattered and fallen away. Dillard and Boyd did not have much time.
Jim was curled in the living room, holding the painting of his grandfather between his arms and his drawn-up knees. He was wedged in a corner formed by a wall, which was part floor now, and by the floor, which was part wall. His eyes were closed, but his mouth spat gibberish between fits of coughing. Smoke covered the white plaster dust on his body and face. A few more minutes of inhaling the smoke would have killed him unless the rapidly spreading fire had gotten to him first. As it was, he and his rescuers got out of the house only thirty seconds before the house fell inwards. Reduced in size suddenly, it disappeared entirely from sight. Flames and smoke leaped up from the hole. More than one spectator thought that it looked as if a gate to Hell had been opened.
Jim was rushed to Wellington Hospital. He did not recover consciousness for two days, though whether the smoke or his psychotic state, as the doctors called it, was responsible would never be known.
When Jim woke up, he remembered only one thing from the moment the house clicked and groaned. It was a vision, the first in many years. He had seen a tall and naked youth chained to a tree. He resembled nobody Jim had ever seen before. Just within the borders of this vision was a hand holding a huge silvery sickle. It did not move, but it was obviously threatening. It was destined to sweep up and then down, and Jim had no doubts about what it was going to cut off.
The sickle also looked to him like a giant question mark.
Chapter 13
November 9, 1979
JIM'S WARDR
OOM WALL now bore a large five-pointed star. Each arm was composed of five illustrated paperback covers taped to the wall. The topmost arm contained covers from Farmer's first book in the World of Tiers series, The Maker of Universes. The second, The Gates of Creation, formed the horizontal arm on the left. Going counterclockwise, the next arm held covers from the third novel, A Private Cosmos. The next, Behind the Walls of Terra covers. The fifth arm of the star was formed by The Lavalite World.
This was to be Jim's third serious attempt to get into a Tiersian universe. The five-pointed star was his gateway. Most patients called their gateway a mantra. The others, a sigil. Tragil was Jim's name for his entrance device. By combining both symbols in a portmanteau word, he made it twice as powerful as an ordinary gateway.
It was half past eight in the evening. His room lights were out, but the insurance company building across the street provided a twilight strong enough for him to see the tragil. The door to his room was closed. Though it had no lock, it displayed on its hallway side a taped notice that he was "gating." He could hear, very faintly, Brooks Epstein chanting in Hebrew in the next room.
Jim sat in the chair that he had pulled up next to the bed. Staring at the vacant space in the center of the star, he also began chanting.
"ATA MATUMA M'MATA!"
Over and over, the words coming faster and faster and getting louder and louder, he launched the ancient vocal mantra at the center of the star, the round white blankness.
"ATA MATUMA M'MATA!"
Just as a laser structured wild-running photons into a channeled beam, so the chant arranged force lines as a blaster to open a hole in the wall between two universes.
It also was a carriage to transport the chanter through a universe.
He had not found it easy to do. The first time, he had felt himself borne by a soundless but very strong wind toward and then through the hole. He was in a blackness which felt very cold and, at the same time, very hot. These and the sense of being lost and out of control had frightened him even more than his childhood visions. He had lost his courage and striven to swim back against the wind. For a few seconds, he had feared that he would not make it.
Then something had snapped like a rubber band stretched too far, and he had awakened sitting in the chair. He was shivering and moaning and sweating. The clock told him that he had been gone for two seconds. Yet, he had had a sense of many hours having passed.
That was the end of his first expedition.
He had told about this during the group therapy the next day. No one had scoffed at his experience or accused him of cowardice. Anyone who did this would be sat upon at once by the staff member supervising the group. It was strictly against policy for anyone to voice disbelief in the narratives of others. That could invalidate the belief of the traveler in his or her journey and, thus, slow down or even end progress in therapy. Besides, all had gone through obstacles which were different in form but similar in emotional content.
The second time, he had conquered enough of his panic and fright to persist. Up to a point, that is. The blackness and the cold and heat had suddenly vanished. The wind became much weaker. He was surrounded by walls -- lines of force? -- that came up at many angles from some abyss and down from a vast space. They glowed whitely and intersected each other, then continued their extensions through other walls. They formed a jigsaw puzzle in four, maybe more, dimensions. But he could not grasp their extra-dimensionalness, their essences. Across, along, and up were dimensions that his brain knew. These other extensions, however, were beyond his comprehension. Yet he knew that they were there.
That was so weird that he almost surrendered to his fears and went back "home" before he lost his way forever.
Abruptly, the walls fell away. They did not collapse as walls on Earth would. They just disappeared in some fashion he could not fathom. Their afterimages glowed briefly, then were gone.
He was in one of the worlds of the Lords. He did not know how he knew this. But he did. Though he was still frightened, he was too curious to allow himself to be sucked up by the winds of return.
Though he could see, he was not in a body with flesh and organs. Perhaps he was an astral soul. It did not matter. That he was out of Earth's universe and in a Lord's was enough for him.
He seemed to be high above a planet which had the same shape and size as Earth. The sun was green, however. Later, he would find that the color of the sky varied according to the day of the week. A week here was nine days long. And the Lord who had made this world had arranged for the sky color to change every day.
He descended swiftly while hoping that he was going toward his goal. He had selected Red Orc as the one in whom he would be incorporated. But if he could pick the person and the place for his otherworid rendezvous, he could also pick the time. It seemed logical.
He had concentrated, while chanting, on a time many thousands of years in the past, hoping to zero in on Red Orc when he was still a child of seven. The events in the Tiers series would not take place until much much later. He was the only one in the therapy group who had chosen not to travel into the present.
Porsena had asked him why he had done this. Jim had said that he did not know why. It just seemed the right thing to do. The doctor had not continued questioning him about it, but he undoubtedly would note this development for future investigation.
Like Earth seen from the top of the atmosphere, the continents and seas of this planet were nowhere near as clearly distinguishable as on a map. Great cloud masses roamed it, but he could see the roughly cross-shaped continent toward which he was drawn as if he were connected to invisible and spiderweb-thin cables. Down he went, and the land spread out below him as if it, not he, were moving.
Then he was above a gigantic ring of mountains in the center of which was a plain, in the center of which was a single enormous mountain. The top of this was a relatively flat plain with rivers and creeks and many forests. Here and there were clusters of round, cone-roofed houses. He was too high to see any people or animals.
In the center of the plain was a structure so huge and strange that his already almost-overpowering awe became greater. Nine vast pylons two miles high curved inwards like elephants' tusks. Inside the pylons were three floors, the bottom one of which was a half-mile above the ground. It was transparent, thus allowing the few tenants there to see below the villages and farms of the non-Lords. These were along a river at least two miles broad which ran from a lake formed by cataracts from the mouths of vast crystalline statues placed along the edges of the bottom floor. Mists swirled up from the cataracts but did not reach the floor.
The second floor, also transparent, had less area than the first, though it covered at least seven square miles. Like the bottom level, it contained small dwellings and some large buildings and walled-in areas of earth on which grew trees and other plants. Some were fields bearing plants or enclosing pastures on which animals grazed.
The third floor was only two miles square. On it were houses and some gigantic structures the function of which Jim did not know. Many of these resembled somewhat the ancient temples of Karnak in Egypt as they looked when first built. Yet, though they reminded Jim of the Egyptian structures, they differed in many respects. The hundreds of statues at their entrances and sides were not Egyptian or like anything on Earth of which he knew.
At the apex, held within the curve of the inward-curving pylons, was a green emerald. This seemed larger than any cathedral on Earth. It had been carved to make doors and windows and was hollow. Or perhaps it had been made in a mold which provided the openings and the empty space. He would learn that it was tiny compared to the diamond on one of the planets of one of Urizen's worlds. That Brobdingnagian gem was a dam for a river that made the Mississippi seem a trickle in a child's mud pie.
Down he went. Though the emerald reflected the rays of the sun from its huge facets in a glory of many-beamed light, Jim was not blinded. He could see, but he had no eyes to be dazzled. The jewel shot out as if
it were exploding, and he was dwarfed by a facet directly ahead of him and then was through it and inside the temple. That, he now realized, was what the gem was -- a temple.
The vast interior was shadowy except for the very center of the floor. A ray of bright light coming from an unseen source illuminated the floor in the middle. Outside its area were very large and somehow ominous statues. They crowded the floor and were set in a rising series of niches on the curving walls. As they neared the apex of the temple, they became vague figures. Some could not be seen at all from the floor, but he felt their presence.
It was a very scary place for Jim. How it affected the seven-year-old boy standing in its center, Jim could not know. The child, Orc, might have been there several times, but he would perhaps find it frightening. Awing, at least.
Jim called the boy Orc because he knew, without knowing how he knew, that the boy was not yet called Red Orc.
The boy and two adults were the only human beings in the temple. Some other being was there, yet it was hidden. It filled the entire chamber with a brooding menace.
The man was tall, handsome, blond-haired, and blueeyed. His name was Los, and he was Orc's father. The woman was as tall as he, statuesque, auburn-haired, and green-eyed. She was Orc's mother, Enitharmon. Both wore ankle-length gauzy robes which concealed little. His robe had a purple hem band; hers, a blue. He held a censer in his right hand and swung it back and forth slowly while he chanted in a language Jim could not understand. (Though Jim had no ears, he could hear.) From the censer came an orange smoke with an odor that was a mixture of bitter almonds and sweet apples.
Enitharmon held a wand at the end of which was a circlet containing a large and scarlet uncut gem. She waved it in a ritualistic manner.
The boy stood rigid, his green eyes rolled up to look at the ceiling, his arms held close to his sides, one hand a fist, the other open. Now and then, Los stopped his chanting to ask the boy a question. Once, when Orc could not respond properly, the father struck him across his face with the back of his hand. A red mark appeared on Orc's cheek, and tears came.
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