Gods and Monsters

by Clayton Smith

  Belief in imagination is illogical, the logical storm hissed angrily. A creature who believes in imagination is an illogical being. It lunged forward, desperate and angry. Cole dove to the side, but he was too slow, and the tornado bowled into him, trapping him into its center—the Center of Reason, Eraser of All Illogical Things.

  “COLE!” the Stranger screamed over the thunder and wind.

  It was quiet inside the storm’s center. The air was calm; the winds were gentle. Cole raised his eyes at the twister and saw the purple swells of logic spinning around him. The quiet of the storm’s eye gave him a moment to think. In fact, it was made specifically for thinking. The logical storm encouraged rational contemplation above all other things, and it danced around the thoughtful boy with glee as its highest purpose was achieved. And in the center, amidst all his thinking, Colemine Slawson thought something rather astonishing. He laughed aloud and said with great surprise, “I actually do believe this imaginary world is real!”

  Something in the storm went PING!

  The cyclone snapped in half. The top of the funnel flew straight up into the air, losing itself in the clouds, and the bottom half tottered madly for a moment, then tipped over and spun out of control, skipping and skidding across the prairie on its side. Cole watched in astonishment as the tornado rolled to a stop far across the plain, then exploded into a massive puff of purple smoke.

  And in the end, the only thing the logical storm left behind was the wide, white trail of the Void.

  The cowboy stared at the boy, wide-eyed and astonished. “You took out the storm,” he said, surprised.

  Cole nodded. “I…I think I understand,” he said slowly. “I think I see the Boundarylands for what they are now. They’re real to you. They’re real to Haberdash. They’re real to me right now, while I’m here. And if they’re real to someone, then they’re really real.”

  The Stranger grinned. He gripped Cole’s shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. “Figured you’d come around sooner or later.”

  Cole smiled bashfully. He patted his hand absently over the paper in his rear pocket. “If Prince Colemine can exist, so can anything else.”

  “So can everything else,” said the cowboy.

  Cole nodded. “Yeah. So can everything else.”

  They rejoined the rest of the group, where Haberdash was finishing her rectangle. The chalk lines crackled with imaginary blue light, and the former Tooth Fairy pushed open the door. “Reaper’s Gulch,” she said proudly, gesturing down into the dark opening below. “Just one last thing before you go. If you make it to the castle in the Pinch—er, when you make it to the castle in the Pinch,” she corrected herself, “the prison cells are directly beneath the throne room. That’s where you’ll find your Broken.” Haberdash wrung her hands. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  The Stranger tipped the bill of his hat. “Much obliged,” he said. “And we don’t aim to fail.” He helped the children down into the opening, passing them gently into the world below. Then he gave Haberdash a salute and said, “We’d have been lost without you. We’re in your debt.”

  The fairy blushed as she waved him away. “Get out of here, you’ll make me fall apart.”

  The Stranger smiled a dangerous grin. “Rest assured, fairy, if we can avenge you against your dentist, we will.” Then he turned and dropped through the hole, after the children.

  Haberdash smiled sadly as she pulled the door closed. “I believe you will,” she said to the still air of the prairie. “Truly.”

  Something struck the top of her foot as she turned to go. She stooped and inspected the offending object. It was half of the piece of chalk. It had broken in her hand and tumbled out of her palm without her noticing. The other half had remained firmly in her grasp.

  “Oh dear,” she muttered, plucking the broken half from the ground. Had the chalk been cracked when she was drawing the doorway? Surely not. It would have snapped in half while she worked…wouldn’t it have?

  Still, if there had been even a hairline crack in the chalk as she drew the door, it might have caused her lines to be somehow...off.

  Haberdash took a deep breath and tried to not to panic. “Nothing is for certain,” she breathed aloud.

  But the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she’d sent the children and their cowboy through a fractured gate.

  And if that were the case, then there was no telling what was waiting for them on the other side.

  Chapter 8:

  “Let’s Make Like the Ozone Layer and Disappear”

  Miss Twist sighed. “Gaia. Please come down from there.”

  “This is where I belong!” Gaia screeched from her perch in the tree high overhead. “This is where we all belong!”

  “Yes, and I would love to have a conversation about that, inside,” Miss Twist said, rubbing her forehead with her palm. “I hate humidity,” she added, mostly to herself.

  “You would cage Mother Nature?!” Gaia demanded, crouching low on her branch and eyeing Miss Twist suspiciously.

  “No, I would not cage Mother Nature,” Miss Twist protested. “But I would ask Mother Nature to step inside, where we can have a calm, quiet, cool, and secretive discussion about the fact that if you don’t come back inside near the portal, your tie with Etherie might deteriorate, and she could be lost in the Boundarylands forever.”

  But Gaia clicked her tongue and leapt to another branch higher up in the tree. “I am bonded to Etherie the same way I am bonded to all creatures of Earth!” she said. “Would you have me abandon all for the sake of one? When that one is in the good company of children who are likewise bonded and tethered to their own imaginary Anchors?”

  “It’s too hot out here for me to try to unravel that question,” Miss Twist admitted. She wiped a drip of sweat from her cheek. She took another step deeper into the woods, and the mud on the ground sucked at her shoe. Her foot came right out of that shoe. “Oh, great,” she muttered.

  “I’m sorry, I cannot be held within man’s walls,” Gaia explained, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Etherie will be safe, I know she will, for she is a good and kind spirit, and in strong harmony with the vibrations of the universe.”

  Miss Twist sighed. She wriggled her foot back into her shoe and pulled her feet backward, out of the mud. “I know you think that—”

  Gaia shattered Miss Twist’s words with a scream. “My hand! My hand!” she shrieked. She held out her left hand, inspecting it with wild, fearful eyes. “Look at my hand!”

  Miss Twist squinted up into the tree, and she realized that she couldn’t look at Gaia’s hand. She couldn’t see it because it was evaporating into thin air.

  “Oh dear,” she said, deeply troubled.

  “What is happening to my hand?!” Gaia wailed. She stuck out her right hand and tried to touch the disappearing left hand, but it was so far gone that her right fingers pushed straight through the fading ghost of her left palm.

  “Out of the tree! Now!” Miss Twist commanded. “We have to get back to the others!”

  “What is happening to me?” Gaia asked again, sniffling in shock. She gazed down at Miss Twist, her face pale as a sheet and her eyes brimming over with terror.

  “It’s exactly what it looks like,” Miss Twist said, turning and heading back toward the school. “Something has happened to the children. You’re disappearing because they’re about to cease to exist.”

  Chapter 9:

  In Which We Discover What’s Behind Door Number Three

  The Stranger gritted his teeth so hard, Cole could hear them squeaking from several yards away. He must have bitten his tongue, too, because when he spat, the saliva was pink and frothy with blood. The cowboy wiped his lips with his sleeve and muttered, “She sent us through the wrong door.”

  Cole looked around. The sky was dark, a strange purplish blue, and filled wi
th looming black clouds. They stood in wet, spongy grass that threatened to suck them under with every step. Thin, hazy mists billowed through the air, smoky tendrils that wrapped their long fingers around the travelers and seemed to pass right through them. Scraggly trees broke through the landscape, their long, black limbs scratching outward, casting shifting shadows in the watery moonlight.

  It definitely looked like a place that could be called Reaper’s Gulch.

  “Are you sure?” Cole whispered. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted.

  The Stranger gave a curt nod. “I’m sure. This place ain’t right.”

  “This place is awesome!” Willy corrected him. He sprinted off into the night, hooting and hollering and karate kicking at the air.

  Emma sidled up to Cole’s side, picking her feet up gingerly from the spongy ground, and whispered, “Why is the ground rotten here?”

  “The trees have auras,” Etherie observed, fascinated. “Yellow, with tinges of orange.”

  “Is that…good?” Cole asked nervously. He had a feeling he knew the answer to that question already.

  Ether shrugged. “It’s not so much the color that’s the problem. It’s the fact that an aura exists at all. Trees shouldn’t have emotional spirits.” Cole felt an all-too-familiar shiver run down his spine. He’d been feeling that cold chill way too frequently since they came to the Boundarylands. It wasn’t lessened any when Etherie followed up with, “But yes, those colors are dangerous. Especially, I imagine, in trees.”

  “What do we do?” Cole asked.

  The cowboy’s face was red with anger, or maybe just frustration. Probably both. “We walk.” He pulled out the map and examined their position. The nearest lintel was off to their right. He turned and squinted into the darkness, but even his sharp eyes couldn’t see the boundary between their imagining and the next. “Come on,” he grunted, stuffing the map back in his pocket. “Let’s go.” He stalked off toward the horizon, and the children followed.

  “What sort of dream do you think this is?” Cole asked no one in particular, glancing uneasily at the shifting mists and creaking trees. He was immediately sorry he’d asked the question, because he was positive he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “It feels like a nightmare,” Etherie confirmed. Cole winced.

  “I want a hot chocolate,” Emma whined.

  “Hot chocolate?” Cole asked.

  Emma nodded. “When I have bad dreams, my mommy makes hot chocolate. She says the marshmallows are good dreams, so she puts lots on top. Then, I have good dreams instead of bad dreams. I want hot chocolate now.” She glanced around at the ground near her feet. “Everything here is just rotten.”

  Etherie tapped her cheek thoughtfully. “I should say that the setting is appropriate for a nightmare, but I don’t sense any danger here. In fact, my being is permeated with a spirit of ahimsa.”

  “Ahimsa?” Cole asked, raising an eyebrow. His lexicon was substantial; it wasn’t every day he was introduced to a new word. “What’s ahimsa?”

  “A state of non-violence. I think we’re safe here.”

  “I hope so,” said Cole, but he couldn’t shake a bad feeling about the place. “Not everything that’s dangerous is violent.”

  Willy came running up the hill behind them and spread his arms out like an airplane as he ran down the slope toward his companions. “Rrrrrnnnnnnnnnnn,” he said, tilting his arms and zooming in little loops down the hill. Willy the Fighter Plane was coming in for a landing. Except instead of piloting into the runway, he slammed into the center of a heavy wooden door that suddenly thrust itself out of the wet, soggy ground without warning. The door shook with the impact but remained standing, despite not being secured to anything but air on top and on all sides. The same could not be said for Willy, who fell backward onto the grass like a piece of timber.

  “Willy!” Cole shouted. He ran over to the fallen child, dodging around the door that had sprung up out of nowhere. “Are you okay?”

  “My face feels tingly,” Willy said weakly, staring blankly up at the dark sky overhead. “Am I a train?”

  “Great.” Cole waved the others over. “I think he hit his head,” he said helplessly, which was sort of a stupid thing to say, because of course he’d hit his head, they’d all seen it. But it was something his mother said when other people said nonsensical things. It seemed appropriate.

  Emma hustled over to the fallen boy. She prodded his forehead with her thumb. “Willy’s broken!”

  “Stand back, give him some air,” the Stranger instructed, nudging Emma gently aside. “He just got his bell rung.” He knelt down next to the prostrate child and frowned. “You okay?”

  Willy took a deep breath, then pulled himself up. “That’s a dumb place for a door,” he declared.

  The Stranger couldn’t have agreed more. He instructed Willy to stay put on his backside, then he turned and inspected the mysterious door. It was thick and heavy. It looked to be made of maple wood. Someone had painted it with white stain, but that was a long time ago. The color had faded to a sickly gray, and the stain was peeling away in huge flakes, revealing the battered, weathered wood beneath. There was no doorjamb, just the heavy wood of the door itself sticking out of the ground like a massive tombstone. It leaned a bit to the left, but otherwise, it seemed sturdy. The knob was tarnished brass, and it jiggled loosely in the door when the Stranger touched it.

  “Are you going to open it?” Cole asked, eyes wide. He didn’t know how it was possible to open a door that didn’t attach to a jamb, but he didn’t know how a door just sprang out of the ground, either. So he figured it was possible.

  The cowboy squinted at the knob, deep in thought. “Some doors are best left closed,” he said. He considered the door as he rubbed his stubbly jaw. “Then again, they all lead somewhere, and we’re in need of being led.” He pulled his revolver from its holster and motioned for the children to step back. “Let’s see what we got.”

  The Stranger gripped the loose knob and pushed it firmly back into its slot in the door. It turned easily, with a dull squeak. He pulled back the hammer of the gun and tugged on the knob.

  Something slammed into the door from the other side, knocking the Stranger back to the ground. Out from the darkness on the other side of the doorway leapt a tall man—no, a tall creature—made of burlap rags, laughing hysterically and swinging an ax like a baton twirler at the head of a parade.

  Cole screamed and fell away from the monster, stumbling over a short bump in the earth and tumbling backward to the ground. As he fell, the madman’s ax swung downward and missed his chin by mere inches. If he hadn’t fallen, his head would have been sliced clean off.

  “Run!” he screamed with the little breath he had. But the children were too terrified to move, let alone run. They stood like statues as the ax-wielding rag man whirled crazily out of control.

  Cole rolled out of its path and leapt to his feet. From a bit of a distance, he was able to get a decent look at the monster. It was well over six feet tall and seemed to be made entirely of musty, rotting burlap sacks. Sections of the material were stained dark red. A thick noose hung from his neck, the tail of the rope frayed and trailing his crazed movements by a good three feet.

  Whoever had tried to hang him had clearly and irreparably failed.

  The monster’s eyes and mouth were no more than sockets sawed into the burlap. Strings of the coarse material hung out of his mouth and eye holes, swaying horribly in the cold mist. He sliced the ax through the air, hacking wildly at pockets of fog, laughing so hard that his whole body shook. He turned and beamed at Emma, his mouth curling into a smile. He crept toward her, taking gigantic, exaggerated Mickey Mouse steps, holding the ax high above his head.

  “Emma!” Cole screamed. But his cries didn’t matter much. Emma already saw the nightmare approaching; she just couldn’t do anything about it. Her legs had fro
zen, locking her in place. All she could do was gasp in fear as the creature stood over her and swung the ax down at her neck.

  A shot rang through the air, cracking like a stone whip through the mist. A bullet ripped through the canvas just above the noose around the creature’s neck, puncturing the throat. He dropped the ax and grasped at his neck, covering the bullet’s entry and exit wounds with floppy, burlap claws. Then the creature whirled around, ragged eyes growing wide in surprise, and found the Stranger crouching on one knee, the gun in his hand exhaling smoke from the barrel. His eyes were calm, his hand steady, his entire being assured and confident. He cocked the gun again and said in a careful, even tone, “Back away from the girl.”

  The burlap creature opened its stringy black maw and screamed. The cowboy fired again and again and again. The bullets tore through the burlap as easily as butter—one through his chest, one through his gut, and one through the space directly between his eyes. The creature hissed angrily and crumpled to the earth, deflating like a balloon. The canvas withered and fell in a heap onto the wet grass, little more than a rough blanket tossed on the ground.

  “You okay?” the Stranger asked. He spun the revolver into its holster and leapt to his feet. Emma nodded dumbly. She was scared to death, but physically unharmed. The cowboy sized up the rest of the group. “Everyone else good?” The other children nodded. The cowboy turned to Cole and shrugged. “Guess we shouldn’t have opened that one,” he said.

  “How’d it get here?” Willy said from the outer edge of the group. The rest of the children turned toward him. Cole realized that the boy was as white as soap. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides, and he was shaking. Willy raised his crazed eyes to the cowboy, demanding answers. “Why’d you bring it here?!”

  The Stranger frowned. “Have you seen that creature before?”