Earthly Worlds

by Billy Wright

  “But we looked over there!” she said.

  Hunter shrugged. He thought she might be right, but he had not covered that area himself.

  She gave him a hooded look. “Thanks.”

  He said, “At least we found them.” For a long time last night, after they had gone to bed, she had lain in her sleeping bag quietly sniffling. He had felt sad for her.

  “It looks like the coyotes were chewing on them or something,” Cassie said, examining the tears in one of the dresses, the fabric stiffened as if from dried drool.

  “We’ll fix up their little dresses as soon as we get home,” Mom said.

  “Okay,” Cassie breathed, hugging them again.

  “Now,” Mom said, “you guys go get dressed. Breakfast is almost ready.”

  As Cassie walked back toward the tent, a chill went up Hunter’s spine. He couldn’t help but think that the eyes of one of the dolls moved to look at him.

  ***

  Stewart couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him.

  He stood motionless on the road, his legs ready to crumple.

  A boulder the size of a Volkswagen Beetle had rolled down the mountainside, plowed into the pickup, and came to rest atop it.

  The cab was flattened, the frame bent, the rear axle snapped, all the glass shattered, the engine crushed.

  The path the boulder had taken down the mountainside was clear, a bouncing trench that led up through twisted masses of pine trees into heights he couldn’t see.

  What was he going to tell his family? A boulder fell on our pickup. How could he tell them the truth? On the other hand, how could he lie to them?

  After what they had all experienced, no one would believe this was just bad luck. They had all seen most of the crazy things he had seen. The kids were seeing “little people.” He was pretty sure he had also seen one in Gramm’s storage unit. The bizarre little saboteur under the pickup the night before. The grotesque creatures riding coyotes. If he tried to tell a single soul, they would have him locked up as a crazy person.

  Should he take his family back down to the highway and try to flag down a ride? Some would call that the sensible move.

  But his intuition was buzzing with something he couldn’t put his finger on.

  Ever since he bought the dolls, met the shopkeeper, opened the map, and embarked on this trip, he felt as if one set of invisible forces was herding him toward something, and others were blocking his progress at every turn.

  Was one side preferable? The old shopkeeper had talked about Light and Dark, but what if he was telling a series of carefully constructed lies? What if it was all just nonsense? Should Stewart allow himself to be herded at all? Should he take his family and set off on a different course?

  Threats surrounded them on all sides. None of these attacks or incidents were random. For all he knew, the same forces were squelching his cell phone reception. All these incidents and attacks felt carefully orchestrated. But last night, something in the dark had intervened, or else the coyote cavalry might have killed him and his whole family, dragging them off to vanish without a trace. It was a chilling thought, the idea of being eaten alive by a pack of coyotes, which were normally cowardly, reclusive, and solitary. The idea of something, anything, coming after his kids set his teeth on edge and turned his fists into hammers.

  Sometimes, the best way out of a situation was not to retreat, but to go through it. When you’re going through hell, keep going, as the saying went. He’d spent his whole life going through hell, wondering if there was an end to it.

  It seemed a quiet voice in one ear was telling him to take his family, follow the map to its destination, and trust that everything would work out okay. He couldn’t exactly see how, given that their only vehicle had been destroyed, and he had only liability insurance on it. Even if they made it back home, their family was now without transportation. It also seemed that a much louder voice was in his other ear, telling him to go back, go home, get back to doing sensible things like looking for a job and being a productive worker, a good consumer.

  He snorted at that last, because he resented being forced, thrust, shoehorned, into a box someone else made for him.

  Deep breaths flowed in and out of him, calming, centering, without him having to think about taking them. He had so often found that the quiet voice was more often the right one, because it was his truth emerging from a boiling morass of everyday worries and crises. If only he thought to listen to it more often.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the forest, the whisper of pine needles in the breeze, the chatter of distant birds, the pulse of his blood in his ears, felt the breeze rustling the hairs on his arms and head, smelling the pine needles both in the trees and carpeting the forest floor in layers of decomposition, embracing the way they were being reclaimed by the earth. He ignored the stench of spilled oil and gasoline from the ravaged pickup, moving away from its intrusive tang.

  Continuing his deep breathing, he hiked the two miles back up the switchback road to his campsite. Liz immediately saw in his face that something terrible had happened.

  Cassie was playing with her dolls and Hunter was practicing his taekwondo forms, so they only waved at his return and went about their activities.

  Stewart took Liz out of easy earshot and told her what happened.

  Her hand cupped her mouth, and her eyes went wide.

  “Is it really that bad?” she asked.

  “Junkyard-bound.”

  “What do we do?”

  “You still have the map?”

  She nodded. “You want to keep going.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to take our kids into the wilderness.” She said it slowly, digesting each word.

  “That’s what my intuition is telling me.”

  She took a deep, thoughtful breath, crossing her arms, riding the same quiet train of thought that he had. “If the coyote monster attack was trying to keep us from going forward, there might be more of the same coming.”

  He nodded. “But there’s something on our side, too. I didn’t fight them off last night. Something else did. We’re in the middle of something.”

  “And if we keep going, we’ll find out what it is.” She chewed her knuckle.

  “Through it is the only way. This feels...important.”

  “Do you have any idea how many parents would be screaming at us and calling Child Services for even considering this?”

  “Those parents would be wrong.”

  She chuckled at that, then sighed as if she couldn’t believe what she was about to say. “So, what do we tell the kids?”

  He pointed into the forest. “Adventure is thataway.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The kids took the news in stride. Stewart simply told them, “We’re going to keep going and see where the map leads.”

  And they went, “Okay!”

  And that was that.

  He didn’t tell them about the pickup, but neither had they forgotten the attack. That much was plain as they packed up the camp, casting wary eyes into the forest at every opportunity.

  The dolls’ reappearance sent a little tingle up his arms. Twice now the dolls had disappeared inexplicably and then reappeared. That he had gotten them from the strange shopkeeper, the same one who’d given him the map, could not be a coincidence. They had to be part of the unseen orchestrations going on around his family, but the question was, whose side were they on?

  Stewart strapped the cooler to his backpack with a length of rope. It was a little unwieldy and unbalanced, but he could adjust, and it was easier than carrying it by hand.

  “Hey, kids!” Liz quipped at the sight of him. “Check it out! Dad’s a pack mule.”

  Stewart brayed accordingly, making the children giggle.

  They had enough food and water for a couple more days, thanks to Liz’s tendency to over-pack and over-prepare. At this higher elevation where the air was cooler, under the shade of the trees, they would need less w
ater than if they were trudging across the desert, but he would have to keep a close eye on their water supply. Fortunately, the nearby stream looked crystal clear, so they filled their bottles before setting out. He also had a small fishing kit in his backpack. There might well be trout in some of the larger streams.

  It was midmorning by the time they broke camp and set out. With every step away from the campsite, Stewart felt them leaving civilization—everything that was known—behind. They weren’t just going into the wilderness, but into the unknown.

  The air was crisp and alive, redolent with scents of pine and earth. The sun-dappled forest floor was open and easy to traverse.

  On the map, the nearby stream was clearly marked, and it seemed all they had to do was follow it. Setting off across the wilderness without a clearly marked trail made him nervous, but his intuition kept telling him it was the right thing to do. Common sense told him it was very much the wrong thing to do. They could run out of food or water. Someone could fall and injure themselves. The goblins and coyotes could come back, and this time there would be no outhouse for protection.

  The shopkeeper had said that when they reached the lake near the X on the map, Stewart’s questions would be answered. He was full of questions, driven by the niggling sense that he was surrounded by things he couldn’t see, and that the best word to describe them was “magic,” even though it felt woefully inadequate. The scale of the map was unclear, so he couldn’t be sure how far away the lake was.

  The land steadily climbed as they followed the stream, which was as clear and cold as snow melt. Cassie skipped along next to Liz. Stewart let Hunter range out a little ahead, as the boy seemed to revel in his role as the party’s “scout,” but never too far ahead, always remaining within sight. Given everything that had happened, the boy was smart enough to take his parents’ admonishment seriously. They stopped for a few minutes every hour or so to rest. Cassie whined about being tired, but Stewart could hardly fault her, as she was the smallest of them, requiring more and faster strides for the same distance.

  At about noon, the world turned upside down.

  Up ahead, Hunter froze, cocking his ear. He put one hand on his hunting knife. He looked back toward the family, waving his hand for them to stop and be quiet. Stewart motioned to Liz and Cassie to remain still, then he crept forward to join Hunter, the carpet of pine needles muffling his tread.

  Crouching against the trunk of a pine fat enough to be a redwood tree, Hunter strained to listen, peering off into the gloom under the canopy. Their trek had been relatively free of undergrowth so far, but ahead lay a mass of thickets and deadfall. The stream burbled out from under a thick mass of thorny bramble. The air before it smelled sweetly of flowers. Roses? Stewart knelt beside the boy. Hunter pointed toward the bramble, and it was in the fresh silence that Stewart was able to catch the sound of something moving in there.

  Something big.

  Something moving closer, but slowly, taking its time about it. Leaves rustled and branches snapped. Stewart glanced over his shoulder to make sure Liz and Cassie remained where they were, about thirty yards back. Whatever it was sounded big as a bulldozer, because he could see the branches shoved aside, the thicket swaying.

  “Is it a bear?” Hunter whispered, voice quavering.

  “Bigger than a bear,” Stewart whispered, his voice as soft as he could make it. He squeezed the boy’s shoulder and tugged him back toward where Liz and Cassie crouched behind a tree.

  Together they crept backward, never taking their eyes off the thrashing foliage.

  Then Stewart caught sight of something moving amid the thicket, sweeping back and forth across the top, something brown and pronged. It moved with ponderous slowness but unstoppable strength as it tore through vines and thorny brush.

  Antlers.

  But not just antlers.

  Great, scooped antlers so broad they stretched farther across than the length of a car. Antlers dripping with soft, green moss. But they were not deer or elk antlers. They belonged to a bull moose.

  A bull moose that stood at least twenty feet high.

  Hunter began to emit a breezy squeak. Stewart clapped a hand over the boy’s mouth. Both Cassie’s and Liz’s eyes were as wide as he’d ever seen them. Liz hugged Cassie to her.

  The beast stood breast deep in thorny brambles, but unfazed by them, protected by a thick, earthy-brown coat so deep and dense it might have had small creatures living in it. Its long beard and wise gaze made it look almost like an old man. It chewed placidly on what looked like thick ropes of vegetation. But then Stewart saw the blood-red rose blooms on the vines. The same color as the rosebushes that had shredded the pickup tires.

  Had another trap been laid for them in the depths of that thicket?

  Their path would have led them into the thicket if they wished to stay close to the stream, as the map suggested they should. Would they have stepped on the poisonous thorns, which would cut through the soles of any shoe? Would the vines have come alive somehow and attacked?

  The majesty of the creature brought a lump into his throat as if he were looking at something primeval, as if he had just crested a hill and seen a valley full of dinosaurs below him. The massive creature’s deep brown eyes were the size of volleyballs, and harbored immense wisdom.

  The moose ripped great mouthfuls of leaves from the thicket and brambles, its great square teeth tearing through branches as if they were soft green grass. Stewart had thought that moose spent a lot of time in marshes eating aquatic plants, but this one seemed to be tearing through the tough, woody thicket as if it were the tenderest of shoots.

  They could only watch, mouth agape, hearts pounding at the wonder of it.

  Moose were by no means docile creatures. A moose could be aggressive when threatened, cornered, or when its calf was nearby. Even a normal-sized one could easily kill a human. One this size could send an elephant trumpeting for the nearest horizon. Stewart kept his family behind the trunk of a pine tree, hoping the creature wouldn’t notice them, fixated as it was on its meal. It may have simply viewed the human spectators as beneath its notice, like crickets or mice.

  But how could such a creature exist in modern-day America? Had moose ever grown so large, even in prehistoric times? Could it be some sort of mutation? Stewart didn’t know. And what was a moose doing this far south? Arizona was not their habitat. His mind buzzed with such questions.

  For maybe ten minutes they sat breathless and watched the enormous moose tear through the thicket with the sound of snapping branches and stripping leaves, its legs like furry tree trunks.

  Little by little, it finally moved away through the thicket until they lost sight of it among the trees. It took a long time for the sounds of its passage to disappear, however, and none of the family moved until it had gone.

  Hunter was the first to rouse from his stupor. “That! Was! So! Cool!” He jumped up with both fists outthrust.

  Liz breathed, “That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Mommy, was that a dino-moose?” Cassie said.

  Liz and Stewart both laughed. Liz said, “That’s what we’ll call it.”

  Stewart shrugged off his pack in case he had to move quickly. “You all stay right here. I’m going to go check out the path ahead. We need to keep moving.”

  “But, Dad,” Hunter said, “I’m the scout.”

  “You stay here and guard Mom and Cassie,” Stewart said.

  “Hey, that’s sexist,” Liz said with one raised eyebrow.

  “Yeah, Daddy!” Cassie said. “We’re not princesses. Mommy is like Wonder Woman.”

  Stewart chuckled. “Okay, fine. You got me, Amazon warrior women. Anyhow, I’m going to make sure the dino-moose is gone.” He raised a finger to his lips for silence while he did.

  Unclipping the hatchet from its carabiner, he crept toward the swath of destruction the dino-moose had left behind. Reaching the edge of the thicket, he saw the moose had torn through the underbrush like
a bulldozer. He also got a closer look at the rosebushes that had been hiding just inside the edge of the thicket. Never had a plant looked so malevolent to him, even as it lay in splintered ruin. Its tendrils, very much like the ones that shredded his tires, fanned out from a thorny hub that had been packed with blooms the color of congealed blood. Now, however, that plant had been half-uprooted and soundly stomped into the ground by cloven hooves the size of truck tires. Rose petals covered the forest floor like blood droplets.

  The moose’s passage crossed the stream in the direction they needed to go and then led away into the forest, with no further sign of the creature or any other threats.

  Before long, they were on their way again, but more cautiously this time, taking their time to walk quietly. The encounter with the dino-moose had squelched Cassie’s chatterbox tendencies.

  As they trekked, a sense of warmth suffused Stewart’s limbs, as if with satisfaction or excitement. The air smelled fresher, sharper, and the greens of the pine needles seemed to gleam like emeralds.

  They checked the map often, and both adults felt confident they were following the correct path.

  Stewart noticed that Liz stopped several times, turned to look at something, then shook her head with consternation. “You see something?” he asked her.

  Her smooth brow furrowed. “I keep thinking I see things out there behind the trees, running from cover to cover, like animals or something. But every time I look, try to focus on it...”

  “Every time you try to focus on it, it’s gone,” Stewart said.

  “Right.”

  “I’ve been getting that since the dino-moose,” he said. And he had. Sort of. Maybe he was getting used to it. The truth was, that had been happening to him for a while, ever since he’d been stabbed in the calf by some unseen creature that early morning.

  Cassie gave both of them a knowing look, then giggled and rambled onward.

  The gobbets of sky peeking through the coniferous canopy took on a brilliant blue like Stewart had never seen before, as if it were free of dust and pollution. It was the kind of blue he’d only ever seen in pictures of sapphires and turquoise.