“Barney? Dude, is that your imaginary friend? I don’t remember any Barney.”
“Dude, he was married to your sister. He was just swimming around and the next minute he was gone, and I was wondering if you’d seen him lately.”
“You’re smoking the lawn, man. I don’t have a sister, and I sure don’t know any Barney.”
“Dude, your sister was here just the other day.”
“Look.” Laughing now. “I want some of what you’re smoking. Seriously, dude, you’ve got some imagination.”
“What the hell is that?”
“What, man?”
“That pointy, shiny thing. Ow! Help me! Help me!”
A third fish. “Dude who were you just talking to?”
“No one, man. Are you nuts?”
Duncan wondered if maybe thinking so much about what the fish were talking about was a sign that he was losing his mind, but then figured as long as he didn’t actually hear fish talking he was still all right.
Of course he really wasn’t because the very next day he put two fish heads on sticks and named them Ted and Wanda. He pushed the sticks into the ground on the other side of the fire pit and told himself he wasn’t crazy now because at least he wasn’t talking to himself.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the water one day and nearly fell in before he realized it was his own reflection. He hadn’t even noticed he’d grown a beard. Now he ran his fingers through the length of it. It wasn’t very long, but it was every bit as black as his hair. He decided the look suited his hermit lifestyle.
While foraging he had found a stand of wild garlic. After a few days he was getting tired of roast fish, and he thought he’d make himself some fish and garlic soup.
“If only I had a pan,” he said to Ted and Wanda. “No that’s a stupid idea, Ted. You can’t make a pan out of wood. It will burn up… What’s that, Wanda? Brilliant! That’s exactly what I’ll do.”
A quick search of camp turned up the legging he’d been using as a shovel. Then he popped the knee cop off the legging and shoved it down into the red hot coals.
“Of course it will work… You know, Ted, I don’t think I like your attitude, and you’re starting to stink.” He grabbed the fish head off the stick and threw it in the fire. “What’s that Wanda? Ted? I don’t remember any Ted.”
While the metal was heating Duncan went in search of a good rock to use as an anvil. He hefted the rock and carried it back to camp. “Yes, it is rather heavy, Wanda. Yes, I do have big, strong muscles… I told you, Wanda, I don’t know any Ted.”
While he waited for the knee cop to turn the right shade of bright red he dug out his tongs and his ball peen hammer. When the metal was heated to his liking he used the tongs to drag it from the fire and started forming it with his hammer on the rock.
“Any fool can see I’m making a pan, Wanda!” Duncan said as he pounded away on the metal. “You wouldn’t want to end up like Ted would you?… What do you mean you knew there was a Ted? Who is this Ted you keep talking about, fish lady?”
He made the ball of the knee cop flat and then pounded and bent and pounded and bent till he’d turned the fin into a handle. Then he did the same thing to his other legging because… Well it looked all unbalanced to have a set of leggings with only one knee cop. Besides, Wanda seemed to enjoy watching him work and this way if he ever had more than one thing to cook at a time he could.
He put aside the leather straps and buckles that had been on the knee cops. One could be used to replace the strap that had been on the legging he was using over the fire—which had burned up the first night. If he ever needed to use the legging for armor again, that is.
He ate some soup and thought it was pretty good. That night it rained and he was dry, so he felt satisfied with his little shelter. But as he watched the flickering flames of his camp fire fighting against another downpour, he started to wonder what he was doing.
“What’s the point of me, Wanda? Is it going to be enough for me just to exist? There is a whole world out there with hundreds of different things to see and experience and do. Am I really just going to sit here by the river, fish, eat berries, sleep, and add leaves to my roof? Well of course I care for you, Wanda, and I’m fond of Ralph, too.” Ralph had replaced Ted. He wasn’t as talkative but he also wasn’t as judgmental. “I’m a great inventor. Is this enough for me? And what of the rest of the world? Don’t they deserve to be able to use the things I might invent? Wow, Ralph! You don’t say much but when you do… You’re right. You do never know if you don’t try.”
By the time he went to sleep the breeze was blowing little wisps of rain into his face. He dreamt a hungry lizard dog was chewing at his nose, hanging on to it like they had hung on to his tabard. They’d torn apart his fighting tabard—the one he’d never worn in a battle—and now the lizard dog was going to eat his face. But he was so young and he really hadn’t lived yet. Had he?
The wind started blowing harder. More rain hit him in the face and he woke up screaming. It took him a minute to get his bearings and remember where he was and a moment more to move further back into his shelter so that he wouldn’t get wet. Well, not as wet. If possible it was even darker tonight than it ever had been before, and colder…much colder.
Clutching his damp blanket and cloak to him, he prayed for the morning to come. The fire was now completely out and he was sure at any moment one of those lizard dogs was going to find him and start chewing on his face.
“Wanda, Ralph can you hear me?… Yes, it’s very dark and so cold. I don’t want to live like this. We’re barely into the fall, and I’m already freezing every night. I want to sleep some place with a roof and walls. I want to have fun, to adventure, to see things that most people don’t see. Mostly I just want to be able to see.” He moved his hand back and fourth in front of his face, hitting himself in the nose. “I literally can’t see my hand in front of my face… Can either of you? … Sorry I forgot you don’t have hands.”
He didn’t tell them that he was lonely.
When the rain let up and he got over his dream he went back to sleep, determined to pack first thing in the morning and leave.
He was even more determined to leave when he spent most of the day trying to get his fire going again. There was nothing dry enough to catch a spark from his flint and steel. Finally he tore a small corner from his cloak, frayed it, and sacrificed it to get a fire going.
But by the time he’d caught a fish and eaten and told Ralph what it had been like to be hungry and thirsty and have it be just as dark, he’d talked himself out of moving on. It wasn’t anything Ralph had said. Duncan remembered what it was like to be attacked by hungry lizard dogs and chased by angry Centaurs. The world away from his camp was a big, scary place full of things that mostly wanted to kill him.
He needed to be prepared before he left. He needed to catch a bunch of fish and smoke them. Dry a bunch of garlic so it would keep. If he packed enough food for the road he should be able to make it to some town where they didn’t want to kill him right off.
Ralph wasn’t sure it was a good idea to leave at all, he was a simple fellow. Wanda on the other hand wanted to travel, see new places and things.
The would-be hermit found that being self sufficient was a lot of work without much reward. He could see himself getting a job, making money and having a real place to live. Some place where he wasn’t cold or wet every time he turned around.
Well, he didn’t have the first idea how to go about smoking fish, so he wound up just eating his first few attempts before he got good at it.
By then he’d made a little woven mat out of green cattails to throw over his fire when it rained, and he’d made side walls of the woven mats for his shelter. He made his roof bigger and tighter, weaving green reeds and cattails through it till it was so water tight it didn’t leak anywhere.
Wanda vanished in the night. No doubt she got tired of waiting for him to get his act together. He replaced her with Velma—a home town
girl with a sweet smile who had no desire to leave.
It really did seem like the fish here were stupid enough to just keep inviting all their friends to the spot in the river where it was easy for him to kill and eat them. In short every day it seemed like a worse idea for him to leave where he was and go anywhere else.
Even after he was sure he’d put up enough smoked fish for a week or more, and at least that much dried garlic, he wasn’t in any hurry to leave. In fact, he just kept weaving more cattails and reeds into his roof making it tighter and more solid. He kept putting off leaving even when it started getting colder and colder and he had to go further and further to get wood.
Then one morning when he got up Ralph was gone.
“Where’d he go?” he asked Velma. “Really? Just like that he left. Did he say where he was going?” He would never hear her answer because about then there was a great cracking sound as if the world were being torn in half. Duncan suddenly remembered something he had forgotten. The reason why they call it the Sliding River is that—upon occasion—it moves.
Chapter Three
“Crap!” he shouted at Velma, who agreed. Duncan had seen the river slide a couple of times, and he knew he had to think fast. He gathered everything he had, slung it into his blanket, and tied it with his rope. He started to run, then realized there wouldn’t be time. He knew he couldn’t swim in what was about to hit him. And he definitely couldn’t swim and keep what few things he had.
Then he saw his roof. He quickly tied his bundle to it and then jumped on top and hung onto the ridge pole for dear life.
Velma looked at him, her dead fishy eyes accusing. “Return to the river from which you came, Velma. Swim free! Swim free, my dear friend.”
The would-be white-water rafter knew a little of what to expect. So he just hung on and hoped for the best. The water hit in a huge wave, and he and his roof went with it. He found himself floating down the angry river, hanging on to the roof as much to hold it together as to stay on it.
Tossed around as he was he had no idea how long he just held on, but by the time he washed up on shore he saw nothing but red dirt and dead trees. For a moment he thought he’d wound up in the forest he had burned down. Of course that wasn’t possible because the river didn’t change directions even when it slid. Besides, these trees weren’t burned—they were just dead.
The ground was baked red clay. He saw absolutely nothing living. The greenest thing in his line of sight was his own roof. Duncan and everything he owned was wet. He had used every ounce of strength he had, and he was frozen to the bone. When he grabbed hold of his bundle and crawled further away from the river he dragged what was left of his roof with him and hardly noticed.
Duncan had thought the river gave him security, but it had turned on him, too.
The air was warmer than he was, so he discarded his clothes and just sprawled, spread-eagle on the ground, soaking in the warmth from the ground below and the sun above. He was completely exhausted, spent, and he fell asleep.
He didn’t know if he’d just dozed off or slept for hours when he heard a woman saying in a slightly slurred speech, “Don’t worry children, it’s just a human. This is what they do. They are often found throughout Overlap sunning themselves in this way to make their skins browner.”
“What’s that, Mommy?” a child’s voice asked.
“Never you mind, Suzy,” the mother said.
“I think it’s his winky, Mom,” a little boy’s voice answered.
No man wants to hear his manhood called a winky. That woke Duncan all the way up. He looked down and realized he was completely naked. He hadn’t purposely taken his under drawers off. They must have just come off with his pants. He covered himself quickly with his bundle—still attached to his roof—and somewhat disoriented he jumped to his feet and backed away, dragging his roof as he did so. He looked for and found the people who had been talking—except they weren’t like any people he’d ever seen before. The woman was only about three feet tall and her children were maybe a foot tall. When he tried to reposition his bundle to cover himself better the little girl screamed.
“Calm down, Carmen, you don’t want to frighten it. It might stampede. Humans are more afraid of you than you are of them. Now let’s move on and leave him be. We’ve already woken him up.” She took hold of her children’s hands and led them quickly away.
Duncan closed his eyes and then opened them, but he could still see the strange little people as they walked away. He dug through his discarded clothes till he found his underwear and pulled them on. They were only a little damp, so he must have been out longer than he thought. He untied his bundle from his roof and propped what was left of it against a dead tree to make it a shelter again.
Going over what he’d heard the little woman tell her children he wondered why he should be afraid of those tiny people at all. Duncan laid his clothes across his roof to dry, then started looking for wood. He didn’t have to look far. There were branches from the dead trees down everywhere. He unwrapped his bundle and water ran everywhere. All his smoked, dried fish were now completely rehydrated, as was his dried garlic. He grabbed his flint and steel and worked on starting a fire, which didn’t take too long. Then he went down to the river to fill one of his pans with water.
“Traitorous bastard,” he spat towards the river. He hatefully removed a pot full of water from the now perfectly calm—if slightly displaced—river.
He threw some of the fish and garlic into the water in the pot and put it on the fire.
Looking around he wondered just where he was, and then he had a sudden thought. “I didn’t want to be home or do what I was supposed to do there, but I would never leave because I was afraid of the unknown—so the decision was made for me. I was unhappy being a hermit on the river bank, but I was reluctant to leave because I was afraid of the unknown. and again the decision was made for me.”
This gave him food for thought as he laid his provisions out on his roof to dry. His roof looked a little rougher for wear. It had lost all its leaves and half its sticks and if he hadn’t started weaving those reeds and cattails into the stick pattern, it probably would not have held through the river’s slide at all.
Curiously, he realized that if it hadn’t been for the fear of instant death, riding the river in the slide might have been fun.
He wondered if anyone knew just exactly what caused the river to move. Duncan figured it had something to do with Overlap being made up of the many different worlds it was made up of. Maybe the river didn’t know where it belonged and just kept sliding around trying to figure out where it went.
It never moved very far, never more than a few feet in either direction, but when it did it always left a bit of a mess somewhere.
Duncan ate his soup, put on his nearly dry clothes, and went right to sleep. He was exhausted and didn’t wake up till he heard a man’s voice say, “Well there goes the neighborhood.” He sounded more than a little disgusted. “I told you didn’t I? He’s right where they said he’d be.”
Opening his eyes, Duncan saw only his flood-tossed roof, light peeping through it everywhere. He didn’t see anyone at all.
“Damn,” another voice said with equal disgust. “We just got all those trees killed out from the last time there was an influx of humans.”
“At least there just seems to be the one this time.”
“Come on, Jasper, you know how it is with them. One of them shows up and before you know it there are thousands of them. This one’s just a scout.”
“You’re right. Let’s get rid of him before he goes and gets more.”
The next thing Duncan knew two small sets of hands had grabbed onto his feet and begun dragging him towards the river. Duncan sat up quickly. “Hey! You two!” He tried to jerk his feet away, but to his dismay found that he couldn’t.
“Calm down now,” one of the three-foot men said. “You’ll find it will be much easier if you don’t put up such a fight.”
“N
ow see here…” Duncan started trying unsuccessfully to get away from them.
“Shush, it will all be over soon,” the other one said.
Duncan gave up trying to be delicate and started trying to kick them off him, which they didn’t seem to notice.
“You know, Jasper, I feel a little sorry for him.”
“Don’t do that, Meyer. You know how they are. When they get settled into a place they’re impossible to get rid of. It will be over soon.”
“Oh, you’re right, I know you’re right.”
“No, no, he’s not!” Duncan cried out. He tried to grab, even punch the little men but nothing seemed to faze them. When he actually managed to make contact with one of them his fist felt like he’d hit a rock.
“Now quit. You’re putting up such a fuss,” the one called Jasper said as they pulled him into the water. “It really is quite useless to struggle, and will all be over soon. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” They climbed onto his head, and they were so heavy that he was completely submerged in moments and just fighting to get his head above the water—which he didn’t seem to be able to do.
Then suddenly they were both gone, and he jumped up and gasped for breath.
“That’s what I thought!” a female voice accused. “Poor thing, it looks frightened to death. Now you leave it alone the both of you. It has as much right to live as any other living thing.”
“Ah, but Mama,” Jasper said, “you know how they are.”
Duncan ran out of the water and hurried towards his camp as fast as he could. He dove into his wrecked shelter and came out with his sword. Of course the sheath only pulled half way off so that it hung limp and wet off the end of the sword. He whipped it up and down till the sheath came all the way off. It flipped through the air to land at the feet of the tiny people.
“Look what you’ve done now,” the woman said accusingly to the men. “He’s gone on the offensive.” She looked at Duncan. “There, there now. No one’s going to hurt you. Are you boys?”
The Adventures of Duncan & Mallory Page 5