The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  We set Connor gently down, and I stood up slowly to see if I could relocate the cable. The light held steady just like Connor had said it would, but it was the kind of light that makes things harder to see, not easier. It was only because a bird landed on the wire that I was finally able to pick it out of the dark pink sky. The bird was some kind of exotic parrot, bright red with black around its eyes. It was as big as one of those hunting hawks, and it opened its massive beak and said, “Uh-oh.”

  I think that scared me almost as much as what happened next.

  The thick jungle vegetation on the dark hillside shook, and there was a vibration low and powerful enough to make my brain jiggle in my skull.

  “What the hell was that?” Mose whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice flat with fear.

  All I could think of was the searcher saying, “Lost another one to the Leviathan.” And all I knew was that a Leviathan is big.

  “There must be some reason,” said Jemma, “they don’t leave this beach, besides the blue juice. I know. We didn’t leave the beehives after dark either. Because of the Shades. And the sentries.”

  “And as far as I can tell,” I said. “The switch—if it’s a switch—is right on the edge of that forest.”

  The trees shook, and again we cowered against that turbo-powered roar. I listened, and recalled the other one down the beach, and it hit me.

  “It sounds like a machine,” I said slowly. “Like some huge machine.”

  “A mechanical T-Rex can eat me just as easy as a real one,” said Mose.

  “I don’t know, Mose,” I said. “Would Orlong have dropped us here just to get eaten? Besides, what choice do we have?” I glanced down at Connor, who seemed to be stirring. “He’s gonna wake up soon.”

  “He’s right.” Jemma squatted down to grab Connor’s feet. “Let’s go.”

  “All right, sister,” said Mose. “But remember…Orlong didn’t make this world. He just mapped it. He might not’ve known what was here.”

  The closer we got to the trees, and to what looked like the end of the telephone wire—or whatever kind of wire it was—the more intense the vibrations got. Pretty soon, the ground trembled so much that clouds of sand and dust were being kicked up into the air as we stumbled along with the potato sack that was Connor. I didn’t know much about the physics of sound, but I knew that these were bass vibrations, like the kind you feel when some hotshot with a subwoofer in his trunk drives by playing a song where every other word is the f-bomb.

  “Fifteen-second break.” Mose wiped his forehead. We agreed, and the three of us slowly dropped into a squat. “Did you ever stand really close to a power station, Jake? You know, one of those big transformers they have out on the edge of the city…”

  “I can’t say I have, Mose.”

  “Well, they hum and vibrate like this. And one thing I can say is that it’d be almost as bad to be fried as to be eaten.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s something electrical. But I don’t think it’s what you’re describing.” I got into lifting position. “Let’s try and get close enough to see if there’s a switch. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  They say that ‘dead weight’ is heavier, and carrying Connor those last few yards to the edge of the forest was the heaviest lifting I’d ever done. That there were three of us hauling him didn’t make it easier, especially when every few feet there was another earthshaking roar.

  “You know.” Mose panted. “In any normal world, what we’re doing would be totally crazy.”

  “Look at it this way, Mose,” I said. “Even if we die here, we go on living somewhere else, right? We’re immortals.”

  “That,” said Mose, “is even crazier.”

  “Shhh!” Jemma pointed up into the trees. “Listen. Do you hear that crackling? It’s coming from up there. Where the wire ends.”

  She was right. It was crackle, hiss, and hum all at once, like static on a radio turned up really loud. And it was getting louder, which told my brain that another roar was coming.

  “Put him down.” I nodded to Connor’s limp body. “And cover your ears!”

  We had just barely set him down when it came. A hundred and thirty decibels of sound, so loud that it made its own wind and blew our hair back. A noise like that means only two things: Stay the hell away and run. But we didn’t. We just crouched down and pressed our palms against our ears, and I leaned in and used my elbows to cover Connor’s. When it finally faded, I looked over and saw that Connor’s eyes were open. He was conscious.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “What the—?” said a very disoriented Connor. And then, when he realized what he’d heard and how close we were to it, “Holy crap! It’s the Leviathan! Get me outta here.”

  The three of us looked at each other.

  “What’s a Leviathan?’ Mose asked.

  “It’s the reason we don’t leave the beach,” said Connor. “It’s alive.”

  If Connor decided to get up and run, even the three of us would not be able to hold him back.

  “Mose,” Jemma said. “Put him out.”

  With one more pinch to the right bundle of nerves, Connor fell limply back to the ground.

  “Sorry, Connor,” I said. “We’ll make it up to you.”

  We managed to get him up again just as the roar receded. I didn’t feel certain of anything, except that we couldn’t go back, Leviathan or not. We were only a few paces into the forest when my back came up against something very big, very hard, and humming like blood surging through the leg of a Cyclops. The hair on my head stood up. It was fear, but it was also something else. Electromagnetism. My hair was standing up because it was being pulled up by static electricity.

  Slowly, with a terrible apprehension, I turned my head to see what I’d bumped into. Then tilted it up. And up. And up. It was a leg, all right. One of four enormous metal limbs of an old gridwork tower that looked like something from the 1950’s: a rusted out erector set monster that rose to the top of the trees and was entangled in jungle vines. Halfway up and pointing down at us, ready to deliver the next blast, was an array of speakers, like the kind you see at sports events or rock concerts. And just above those, in the flickering twilight, was a switch.

  “I guess we know what we have to do,” said Mose.

  “I guess we do,” I agreed. “And it’s not going to eat us.”

  “No,” said Mose. “But it might turn our insides to mush.”

  “Why does it look like it’s been rusting away for a century?” I said.

  “Well, the bartender told me he’d been here for a thousand years.” Jemma examined the tower. “We can climb,” she concluded. “But what about Connor?”

  I turned to Mose. “Moses…you’re built like a linebacker. If we put him over your shoulders, and Jemma and I take either side of you for balance, do you think you can carry him up that far?”

  There were diagonal crosspieces every four feet or so. Not regularly spaced, like the rungs of a ladder, but climbable.

  “Let’s give it a try,” he said. “Worst I can do is drop him.”

  In that moment, none of us laughed.

  “They’re using this noise to keep people away from the switch,” I said. “And telling some tale about a monster. Prepare to get blasted.”

  “I read once that sound could kill,” Mose said. “Make your brains come out your ears. The Army used it on terrorists and stuff.”

  “Thanks, Mose,” said Jemma. “But I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “Look at this place,” I said, talking mostly to myself. “Why is it that every world but your own feels like some kind of prison?”

  “Don’t know about you,” Mose said. “But my world was a prison.”

  “Mine, too,” said Jemma.

  I nodded. “Yeah. I get it.” I grabbed a hold of the lowest crosspiece. “Then let’s keep going till we all break out.”

  The climb to the switch was a nightmare. Connor f
lopped back and forth like the world’s biggest and heaviest ragdoll, and Jemma and I had to stay constantly on guard in case Mose should lose his balance. Every time they hit us with that mechanical blast, the tower shook like an airplane in the world’s worst thunderstorm. All we could do is move rung by rung. The vibrations were so intense, they turned the forest into a blur, and you could understand how sound might really reduce your guts to jelly. The closer we got to the switch, the closer we were to the speakers, and finally, we reached a point where we just had to stop and let it pass over and through us. It was at that same point that the sound became painful. Right down into our bones.

  We had just one thing working for us. Whatever sort of circuit triggered the sound blasts, it was pretty old school. It was a regular cycle. Through my pain, I counted it at about every eighteen seconds. The switch was ten feet above the speakers, two-thirds of the way up the tower. If we could just power past the speakers during the eighteen-second lull, we could make it. If we didn’t—if we got caught right in front of them when the blast went off—they would blow us off the tower. In the brief quiet before the next assault, I shared the plan.

  “We have to time it right,” said Mose, shifting Connor’s weight. “And hope to God it works.”

  “Can you do it, Mose?” Jemma asked, sounding very tense.

  “Just stay real close to me,” Mose said. “And if I start to lose my balance, do what you did when Gordon lost his.”

  “We’ve got your back.” I didn’t know if the laws of gravity allowed me to make that promise, but I felt I had to.

  Almost every kid has done some daredevil things by the time he got into high school. Things that would make his mother scream. I had, too. But the height of the tower and the tension of pulling myself up with one hand while trying to keep the other one behind Mose was triggering my chronic vertigo. Now, at just the wrong time, it got worse.

  The design of this damn thing was some kind of optical illusion. From the ground, it looked concave, like the Eiffel Tower. But when we reached a point just below the speakers, it arched outward and the climb was suddenly twice as difficult because gravity was pulling on us. My shoes began to slip off the metal rungs. I would need two hands to hoist up to the next level, and I had to keep one for Mose.

  Jemma let out a shriek, and I looked over to see her feet kicking in mid-air. She quickly swung her free hand over to the bar. Then my right foot slipped and I had to make a salvage move, too. From the corner of my eye, I saw Connor’s upper body—the part of him that was hanging down—swing away from Mose, and there was instantly twice the gravitational pull. “Oh God!” Mose cried out. “I’m losing him!”

  “Mose!” I shouted. “Hang on! I’ll get beneath you!”

  Mose had Connor by one foot, but the rest of him dangled face down into a fifty-foot drop. Then, suddenly, Connor’s eyes opened again.

  He screamed. A howl loud enough to wake the dead. Or a Leviathan.

  Jemma swung over to grab Connor’s loose ankle, but the reach was too long. She missed it and nearly lost her own hold. The strength was draining from my arm, and I knew if I didn’t use both hands, I would drop like a cannonball. In one awful instant, I had a premonition: I might have to watch my friends lose their lives in order to save mine.

  “Don’t let go!” Connor pleaded. “Please don’t let go!”

  “Jake!” Mose shouted. “Help me! Grab hold of his leg! Jake!”

  From some distant place, foreign but familiar, not of my own history but of a history connected to mine, I heard a younger Mose calling to a younger me across the school playground. “Jerrold! Help me!” In the eye of my memory—Jerrold’s memory—I turned from where I stood near the fence and saw the kids closing in on Mose, and heard one of them shout, “Run, monkey, run! Duck, monkey, duck!” I felt myself launch into a sprint fueled by pure rage. I plowed into Mose’s tormentors like a linebacker and pulled him to safety.

  You do crazy things for friendship. You forget yourself.

  I had a hold on Connor’s shin, just above where Mose had him, and Jemma had managed to grab the other ankle. We looked at each other and then, with a major groan, lifted Connor off Mose’s shoulder and swung him to where he was able to grip one of the horizontals and turn himself right side up. When he was steady, he shot me a look. “I guess I should say thank you,” he said, “but I feel like saying something else.”

  “Nice work, Jerrold,” Mose said and I didn’t question the name.

  Our relief was short-lived. In the next thirty seconds, two very bad things happened. From below, we heard excited voices. I looked down and saw a throng of beach people and their zookeepers carrying tiki torches like we used to see at the Polynesian restaurant. They were looking up at us and pointing. I didn’t see guns, or bows, or any kind of weapon. It was more as if they were spectators and we—the sport. I guessed they’d extended the curfew for our sake.

  From directly above, a hissing and crackling began. There was a loud Pop! and then beginning of a rumble so deep and strong, I thought the whole island might be coming apart. The tower rattled, and the vibration in my hands felt like an electrical shock.

  That was when the Leviathan came to life.

  Its massive uprights and girders, which a moment ago had been rigid, now became more like the bones of an enormous animatronic creature. It shook and twisted and writhed as if trying to shake fleas from its back. Just above the switch, a gaping mouth spiraled open with a rusty crreakk in what would have been the monster’s “head.” It was a mechanical maw large enough to swallow all of us whole, and it was spinning and sucking leaves and dust and sand into its gullet. It was a mechanical black hole, and I knew we were its next meal.

  A fierce, rhythmic chanting rose from below. If I wasn’t mistaken, they were cheering the beast on.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I think we’re being sacrificed to this thing.” I shot a look at Connor. “Is that what they do around here? Do they think it’s some kind of god?”

  “Not today we aren’t!” Mose’s voice rang out. “Follow Moses. Follow the Clybourn Street rat. Around the right side of the speakers! Don’t think. Don’t look down. Just go, go, go! Power it up now! Power it up!”

  They say mothers can lift trucks if their child is under the wheel. This was like that. As if we have superpowers that kick in when all seems lost. Mose moved like a spider, and we followed. We scrambled past the speakers to a place just two meters below the machine mouth. Jemma was first to have a hand on the switch. She locked her legs around the diagonals and reached down to Mose, who in turn reached for me. Three links in a chain, now four, because we had Connor. We were four again, and four we would stay.

  “Pull it, Jemma!” I shouted over the monstrous din. “We’re all good!” And then I yelled as loud as I could, “We’re going home!”

  I don’t think she heard me, but she read my lips, and with all of us as leverage, she brought the switch down. Down, but not down for long.

  Just as I’d learned before, these big switches could have a nasty recoil. No sooner had we closed it than it sprung violently back up, sending all of us flying, like human pinballs that had hit the bumper of an old arcade machine. And just like those pinballs, we were hurled into the drain of the Leviathan’s churning, grinding, sucking black hole mouth.

  Swallowed up by a nothingness with teeth.

  e were falling. That part did not surprise me. We’d been sixty feet in the air when we’d been sucked into the mouth, and there hadn’t seemed any way to go but down. But being in free fall is always like a nightmare, which I why I will probably never skydive. And this was a very long fall.

  For a couple seconds at a time, I could see Mose and Jemma and Connor falling with me. That lined up with Newton’s Laws, which said that bodies in freefall drop at the same speed, no matter what they weigh—or something like that. I had learned them all in elementary school, and the gist had stuck, even if I couldn’t recite them word for word. In fact, one hard conclusion I had d
rawn from multiversal travel was that we carry Newton’s Laws in our bodies, even when they don’t apply at all. They are the familiar world—the one in which things like distance, weight, and velocity help us figure out where we are.

  Let me assure you: I wasn’t pondering this stuff while falling. I was far too scared. The theories came later. I do remember, however, having one terrible thought: what if the metal monster’s mouth had been the entrance to some kind of cosmic drain? What if we never came out of it? What if we’d been switched the wrong way?

  Mose, Jemma, and Connor would pop up for a moment at a time, then flicker out of sight, as if disappearing into little microtunnels in multidimensional space, tubes on some interworld water slide. There were stabs of panic when they vanished because I feared each time would be the last, and that we wouldn’t all come down in the same place if we came down at all. I couldn’t, at this instant—with my arms straight up in the air, nothing even close to beneath my feet, and a scream bursting from my mouth—think of anything worse.

  Then suddenly, I was able to see where they were going: we were falling through—how do I describe this—a cylindrical bubble inside a cylindrical bubble inside who knew how many more? We could slip into other bubbles and away from each other as we fell, and so I was probably flickering for Mose and Jemma, too. As bizarre as it was, the feeling wasn’t completely unfamiliar: the drop inside the beach balls under the city of the Reds. And the underground river that spat us out into Lake Michigan. And the ejection from Orlong’s mapmaking station. All of these things had felt like some kind of propulsion.

  For some reason, and by some design, we were being schooled to see a different reality.

  Then the panic sharpened because it occurred to me that each of these cylindrical bubbles might be a different universe. Newton’s Laws didn’t cover that. No law, as far as I knew, guaranteed that the four of us would end up in the same world. We’d started out in different worlds—connected, but different—and if we were in some kind of spacetime centrifuge, on some interdimensional carnival ride, going home might mean different things for each of us. Then things began to stabilize, and I could see them for more than a few seconds at a time. I think what was happening mathematically is that all those possibilities were being flattened out by our shared history, which was popping the other bubbles one by one and collapsing them into a single reality. Reality has a memory, like a habit someone has of walking to school the same way every day, and that memory, as Gordon had speculated, alters the probabilities.