Earthly Worlds

by Billy Wright

  Earthly Worlds

  Billy Wright

  Copyright 2020 by William Wright.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Earthly Worlds/ William Wright. -- 1st ed.

  LCCN: 2020906454

  ISBN 978-1-7347770-0-0 Print Edition

  ISBN 978-1-7347770-1-7 Ebook Edition

  In loving memory of my youngest.

  Tatum A. Wright 12/10/19 to 1/16/20

  I love all my kids big and small.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Mark, Travis and Colin for your hard work and for believing in my vision and bringing it to life with me.

  Part I

  Chapter One

  A sharp thud knocked Stewart out of his last shreds of sleep. Had something struck the side of the trailer? Something heavy like a stone or a board? He sat up in bed, rolling back the covers.

  Beside him, Liz stirred with a few incoherent noises. As he stood, the floor creaked under his weight, his ears tuned for any sounds. The gray light of predawn filtered through yellow-flowered curtains, crept across brown wood-grain paneling.

  Tendrils of mist swirled around his feet, obscuring the floor.

  That was peculiar.

  Red LEDs beside the bed glowed: 5:18.

  No more sounds came. Or was that a strange kind of horn in the distance, tooting out a simple, staccato rhythm? Was he still dreaming?

  The low-lying mist stretched through the bedroom door, past the kids’ room and down the hallway toward the living room, clinging to the floor.

  Liz’s mumbling turned into words. “What is it?”

  “I think I heard something,” Stewart said.

  “Again?” She rolled away from him with a sigh and curled deeper into the covers.

  It would not be the first time that a strange sound had dragged him from sleep and sent him prowling outside, looking for he knew not what and finding nothing. Not even the first time this week. He suddenly felt like the boy who cried wolf. It had been a weird week. Maybe a family of raccoons had moved in or something. They could make a hellacious racket crawling around on top of the trailer.

  Wearing boxer shorts and a Lord of the Rings T-shirt, he grabbed his old Louisville Slugger, which he kept beside his nightstand, and prowled down the hallway, his feet poofing cloudy craters in the mist. The chill of the desert night raised goosebumps on his arms and legs, even though he was inside. At midday, the Arizona sun would turn the trailer into a corrugated tin oven, but by this time of the night the cold had fully invaded.

  He opened the door to the kids’ bedroom. Two little lumps snuggled up in their bunk beds, breathing softly, watched over by a black Toothless the Dragon doll and the white, dog-like Falcor the Luck Dragon figure, one from the kids’ favorite movie and one from his.

  Stewart eased the door closed, gripped the bat, and walked into the living room. Halos of light seeped through the curtained windows. The rhythmic trill of a cactus wren sounded in the distance, answered by another from a different direction.

  The low-lying mist had disappeared entirely, as if it had never been.

  What could cause that thud he had heard? Someone throwing things at his house? Town ne’er-do-wells were not typically awake and functional at this time of day, nor did they venture much outside of city limits.

  He pushed open the front door and stepped down the cinder-block steps—one of them wobbled under his tread—and stood at the verge of the awakening desert.

  Nearby stood his battered old pickup truck—it was old enough to vote, Liz always said—its color washed out by a film of ubiquitous dust. Their trailer lay at the end of Cactus Wind Road, about half a mile from the outskirts of Mesa Roja. The thud had come from the rear of the house, near the master bedroom, so he circled the house toward the back side, able to ignore the gravelly, stony earth under his bare feet by thirty years of living in the desert. It was still too chilly for rattlers or scorpions to be active.

  He looked past the wire-mesh fence he’d erected to keep the cottontails and javelinas out of Liz’s garden, over the scattered, sun-faded toys his son and daughter had left outside, into the scrub and cactus of the Arizona desert.

  A strange noise came to him, like harsh music or angry conversation heard through a wall. He peered around, looking for the source, but the only thing he could see was desert.

  Something flashed in the shadows, maybe fifty yards away, like the glint of polished steel. He knew this area like the back of his hand, as he had been looking at it every day for almost a decade. Any polished metal was definitely out of place. He gripped the baseball bat a little tighter and walked toward the glint.

  The sounds got louder, like grunts of exertion, metal clashing against metal. A fight. But not a street brawl, more like a medieval battle.

  A shrill, brittle scream. A taunting laugh. A strange smell, like animal dung, rotten meat... and blood.

  The sounds were not just ahead of him now, they were all around him.

  The mist had reappeared, curling around his feet in wispy tendrils.

  “Who’s out there?” he called.

  Then something struck the ground near his feet. A black arrow with half its length buried in the earth.

  “What the hell...?”

  A gigantic shadow loomed over him, a huge man—no, not a man at all. Eight feet tall, broad as the back end of his pickup, swinging a huge club, a face that was all gaping maw, jagged teeth, bulbous nose, and glowing green eyes.

  He cried out and swung the baseball bat. It connected with something that felt like a boulder, and cracked in his grip.

  Something sharp jabbed Stewart in the back of the calf.

  The monstrous beast swung a spiked club that was half Stewart’s size. Stewart hit the deck. The club whistled over him and crashed into metal and something softer underneath. A sharp cry of agony erupted from the blow and then receded, as if smacked into the distance like a line drive.

  All around him, Stewart could hear the clomp of boots and feet. More cries of exertion and pain. He felt he could reach out and grab someone right beside him, but all he saw was shifting shadows, like car lights playing through a patch of mesquite.

  Stewart looked past his upraised arm at the towering creature. It gazed down at him with those lantern-like green eyes. Then a look of surprise came over its face, followed by casting about as if for a place to hide.

  The creature shouted to someone Stewart couldn’t see, its voice like a mix of bear and gorilla in a string of hoarse, unintelligible syllables. Warm spittle showered Stewart’s arm and hair. Then the creature stepped over him and leaped across a nearby boulder.

  Stewart peeked over the boulder, but the creature had disappeared. All he could see were shadows dancing among the rocks. Was that the sound of footsteps receding?

  As silence returned, the air was so still, all he could hear was his own breathing, the pounding of his heart.

  He smelled bad breath, then realized it was coming from the spatter of fluid on his arm. He wiped it hurriedly on his T-shirt.

  One look at his bat told him it was irreparably cracked, splintered, and slightly bent
in the middle. He sighed. He’d had that bat since he was a kid. Most of his scant supply of happy childhood memories were associated with the Louisville Slugger. The only way he’d found other kids to play with was through his ability to hit a ball over the fence more often than not. As a boy, his lumbering size hampered his speed running bases, so his best option was to aim for the outfield bleachers every time. But then, there was that one game, the last game he’d ever played. His team had won the game, thanks to a ball he’d hit over the fence, but they’d somehow lost the whole thing.

  Maybe the bat was salvageable. Maybe with some wood glue and a clamp he could repair it.

  Then a cooling wetness on the back of his calf caught his attention. He was bleeding from a two-inch gash, as if he’d been cut by a small knife.

  Weird. Had he caught himself on a sharp rock? The cut looked too clean for that. He’d better get inside and clean it up.

  Before he stood, though, he grabbed the black arrow still sticking in the ground nearby and pulled it out. Black wooden shaft. Black fletching like raven feathers. An obsidian arrowhead, chipped to razor sharpness. As a bit of a rockhound, he knew his rocks.

  You couldn’t buy anything like this at a sporting goods store. This was handmade. And someone had shot it at him.

  ***

  In the bathroom, he cleaned up the blood with a washcloth, foot propped up on the sink, then grabbed a handful of cotton balls and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  “What the heck happened?”

  Stewart jumped at Liz’s sudden appearance at his elbow.

  Even bleary-eyed, she still took his breath away. “Jumpy much?” she said with a yawn. “What did you do?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “Something really weird just happened.”

  “Here, let me.” She took the wad of wet cotton balls and dabbed at his cut. The peroxide fizzed white in the wound and stung like crazy. “You’re going to need some stitches, babe.”

  “I don’t have time for that. I gotta get to work.”

  “Work shmerk. If this gets infected, you’re going to miss more than a couple of hours.”

  “Time for the Super Glue.”

  “Ugh! I hate it when you do that!”

  Most people didn’t know it, but Super Glue was used during the Vietnam War for battlefield triage, to seal soldiers’ wounds on the way to a hospital. He had discovered this in an old novel.

  Liz said, “At least let me finish cleaning it up.” She dabbed fresh peroxide onto her cotton balls, then onto the cut.

  Stewart gritted his teeth at the pain, and at the idea of having to call in to tell Mr. Richards about being late to work. Mr. Richards did not allow for time off. If you were on the job, you were on the job, and worse, he didn’t like Stewart. It didn’t matter that Stewart was the best locksmith in Mesa Roja, even better than Mr. Richards. Then again, maybe that was why Mr. Richards didn’t like Stewart.

  Liz squeezed the last dregs out of a tube of antiseptic ointment and rubbed it into the wound. “Okay, do your magic.”

  How had he gotten so lucky to have this angel give him the time of day, much less marry him? Not that her parents had approved. Mesa Roja was a small town, and if it was just a little too big to know everybody, you knew someone who did.

  Stewart had always had a reputation as a “bad kid,” at least that’s what he’d been told pretty much every day of his childhood. Nowadays, his in-laws at least spoke to him, but the resentment over “ruining” their daughter’s life emerged in every interaction.

  Nevertheless, even after twelve years together, he still couldn’t take his eyes off Liz’s honey-gold hair, big brown eyes, and plump lips, always ready with a grin.

  He took the little tube of Super Glue gel from the medicine cabinet and squeezed a tiny bead of it along one side of the cut. It burned like fire. Then he pinched the lips of the cut together, and they bonded instantly. Of course, as always, he glued his thumb and forefinger together, too.

  She covered the wound with gauze and taped it up. “Don’t forget Cassie’s birthday present. She wants a doll.”

  “Got it.” He would go shopping today after work. Since he drove the only vehicle and she carpooled to work, he was more mobile.

  “So, what happened?” she asked. “Find some goblins lurking outside?”

  “Well, funny you should say that...” He reached for the black arrow, where he’d laid it atop the toilet tank. But it was gone. “Where the hell did it go?”

  “Where did what go?” Liz said.

  He cast about the room, looked behind the toilet, in the corners. Had it fallen behind something? “I know I set it down right there!”

  “What?”

  “An arrow,” he said.

  “You were shot by an arrow?” Alarm rose in her voice.

  “No, the arrow missed me, but—”

  “Someone shot at you?” More alarm.

  “I don’t know. It was so strange.” He couldn’t muster the words to explain it. Liz often told people that Stewart was not a man of words. Words got in the way of the truth sometimes, and the truth was often too big to speak at once. He was usually happy to let her do all the talking. “I’ll try to explain when I get home. It was so, so strange.”

  Of everyone in the world, she would be the one to believe him. Maybe by then, he could put words to it. She shrugged and stood up next to him. She was tall for a woman, over five feet eight, but still only came to his chin.

  He pulled her close and kissed her, longer and deeper than the peck she was expecting. She molded to him and snaked an arm behind his neck.

  When he released her, she said, “What was that for?”

  He smiled and kissed her again. “Forever.”

  Chapter Two

  As Stewart put the key in the pickup truck’s ignition, he paused to look out over the scrubby, rock-strewn landscape that stretched away from this edge of Mesa Roja.

  Had he really seen that...creature?

  Had all of that been real?

  The very real gash on the back of his leg suggested it was, but how could it possibly be?

  Now, under the harsh morning sun, there was no place for uncertainty. Stark shadows still existed under the rocks and mesquite bushes, but there was no place for mystery.

  He sighed and turned the key. “I am working too many hours.”

  The pickup roared to life. The muffler needed replacing but the engine still purred like a kitten—a very large kitten.

  On the drive to work, he couldn’t get the images of what had happened out of his head, the flashes of shadow, the smell of the monstrous creature looming over him, the slimy warmth of its drool on his skin, but most importantly, the sense he was surrounded somehow by things he couldn’t see.

  When Stewart arrived at work fifteen minutes later, walking into the weathered, main street storefront, Mr. Richards gave him a noncommittal grunt of greeting from behind the counter.

  Stewart responded with his usual, “Good morning, sir.”

  The shop walls were covered with key blanks, a myriad of lock types, and other security-related gadgetry. The air smelled of metal, lubricants, and solvents.

  Mr. Richards was dressed in his crisply pressed blue uniform with its embroidered patches emblazoned with his name, draped over a frame like dry, weathered branches. Stewart wondered how many hours a day the man spent in fastidious grooming. Such a meticulously kept appearance was much easier to maintain by someone who never actually did any work. And he made sure to remind Stewart multiple times a day that that was what Stewart and Eddie were for. He also made sure to remind Stewart almost as often about who had been the only business in Mesa Roja willing to give Stewart Riley a chance.

  It didn’t matter that Stewart’s juvie record was sealed; the town was small enough that people still knew. Felonies had a way of clinging to a person, even if their exact circumstances were secret.

  Mr. Richards handed him a sheet of handwritten scrawl incomprehensible to anyone but Richards h
imself and his carefully trained employees.

  Stewart scanned it. Eight new locks on dwelling doors. Re-keying all the locks on a foreclosed business. Opening an abandoned safe. Inventory. “This is a lot for one day, sir. Can you send Eddie to do the new locks?” Those were the easiest of the jobs, but safe-cracking was not among Eddie’s skills.

  “Eddie’s got his own sheet.” Mr. Richards didn’t look up from his computer screen.

  Stewart glanced at the screen. On it was what looked like a job application. “Looking to hire someone new? We could sure use the help.”

  Mr. Richards closed the file quickly and looked annoyed. “That’s none of your business. Just do your job.”

  Stewart drew back at the hard edge in Mr. Richards’ voice. “Whatever you say, sir.” Stewart always did his job.

  Best to just get to work. So, he passed through the workshop and out the back door to the alley where his work van was parked. The sun was already hot. Arizona didn’t have its reputation for nothing.

  He spent the morning working his way through the job list, during which time he became thankful for a decade’s worth of locksmith experience. Everything went smoothly, efficiently. There was no better locksmith in Mesa Roja. Stewart liked Eddie, a few bouts of negativity notwithstanding, but his coworker would take half again as long to do the same jobs.

  About lunchtime, he decided to eat his lunch in the van on the way to the next job. Mr. Richards didn’t like anyone eating in company vehicles, but Stewart was pretty sure he could eat a tuna sandwich without a major catastrophe. He took a side street that he rarely noticed through the decrepit part of town, where many of the buildings could have been straight out of the Old West. To some people they were “historic,” to others, an eyesore. But Stewart liked them. They made him feel like a cowboy riding his horse through town. He could almost imagine hitching posts and gunslingers clapping their hats tight at a passing dust devil.

  But then he spotted a store with The Cabinet of Curiosities painted in gold on the storefront window. He couldn’t recall ever noticing it before.