The World of Tiers, Volume 2

by Philip José Farmer

  Jim kicked first. His foot slammed into The Blob’s crotch. Yelling, holding his testicles, Freehoffer fell forward. Before he hit the ground, he gushed yellow vomit. Jim rolled away and escaped the crushing weight of the near three hundred pounds. But the puke showered his hair and the left side of his face and body.

  He got to his feet. Then the stench and the feel of the stuff sticking to him and the thought that it came from The Blob’s belly made him retch. Bent over Freehoffer, he sprayed him in the face with his own vomit.

  Some of the spectators were delighted. Others got nauseated, and a small number of these threw up. Their example caused more to puke. But neither the enjoyers nor the loathers had much time to express their reactions. Nearby sirens announced the coming of the cops. Most of the crowd hurriedly left the scene.

  CHAPTER 9

  As a black-and-white squad car pulled into the alley, Freehoffer croaked out his threats between sobs and long-drawn-in breaths.

  “I’m going to get you! I’ll use the old man’s shotgun, Piss-Face! I’ll blow out your crazy queer brains, then I’ll jam the Polack’s brick up his ass before I blow off his head, too!”

  Dolkin and Skarga had fled. Bob Pellegrino and Steve Larsen had reluctantly left after Jim had told them it made no sense for them to stay to face the music. Sam, however, had refused to desert Jim.

  “Bullshit!” Jim said. He was breathless, too, though not nearly as much as Freehoffer. “You’ve had it, puke-face! Your reign of terror is over! Anytime I see you extorting money from some scared kid, I’m going to jump you, right then and there! I’ll beat the piss out of you!”

  He was shaking so much that his muscles seemed to be trying to tear themselves loose from his bones. Yet he still felt as if he were riding a gigantic surf wave. It was lifting him up and up, and when he reached the crest, he would soar off into the wild blue yonder. The fight had spurted out much of the rage and the urge to do violence that had possessed him all day.

  The cops came then, strolling up slowly, looking around but grinning. They were relieved that they did not have to handle a riot. Jim thought that whoever had reported the fight had exaggerated. Old man Pravit? Maybe. In any case, the police department was understaffed and overworked, like every other department in money-poor Belmont City. It was a wonder that any police car had shown up.

  It was good that Sam had not gone with the others. The cops recognized his name. One of them knew that Sam was the nephew of Stanislaw Wyzak, a night court judge, and of John Krasinski, an alderman. The two patrolmen treated the whole incident as just a heated argument among high school kids.

  Normally, the cops would have spread-eagled them against the wall and frisked them. But they did not want to get the stinking mess on their hands or, indeed, come any closer to Grimson and Freehoffer than they had to. Nor could they get out of the youths the true story of what had caused the brouhaha. Jim refrained from telling them about Freehoffer’s extortions and his threats to kill him and Sam. The Blob evidently wanted to accuse Jim of all sorts of things, but he, too, abided by the unwritten law: Don’t tell the fuzz nothing about nobody. Though the cops knew that they were being lied to, they did not care. If they let the three go with a warning, they would avoid paperwork and getting in Dutch with Judge Wyzak and Alderman Krasinski. However, they added, this incident would have to be reported to the boys’ parents.

  In effect: Go, children, and sin no more. And for Christ’s sake wash your clothes and take a bath. Haw! haw!

  Just before the cops left, one of them scowled and said, “Grimson? Where’ve I heard … oh, yeah … I think I hauled your old man in one night on a drunk and disorderly. But there’s something else. Oh, yeah! Didn’t I read a couple of years ago about you? Something to do with some strange visions and you bleeding in your palms and forehead. It made quite a to-do, didn’t it? Some people thought maybe you was a saint, and others thought you was touched in the head.”

  “That was years ago. I was just a kid then,” Jim said sourly. “Everything’s cleared up since then. Anyway, it didn’t mean much. The paper exaggerated. Anything to get news.”

  He had a flash of the doctor who’d examined him after the stigmata came. Old Doc Goodbone, believe that name or not. “It’s just his overactive imagination coupled with a tendency to hysteria,” the physician had told his mother. “The weird things he saw, the stigmata, they’re explainable, and not by the introduction of supernatural elements. Not common, these cases, but there have been many such reported in medical journals. It’s all psychological. The mind can do strange things. Even the bleeding, which seems purely physical, can be produced by the mind. Especially by the minds of children and adolescents and hysterical women. Little Jim will probably get over this, be quite normal. We’ll just have to keep an eye on him. Don’t worry.”

  His mother should have been relieved and probably was. But she was also disappointed. She had been convinced that the visions and the stigmata were God’s signals that he was destined to be a saint.

  The cop made them promise that they would not start fighting again and that they would go home immediately. A call came in, and the fuzz left hurriedly. Freehoffer looked as if he would like to keep threatening Jim and Sam, but he shambled away down the alley. Jim looked for his book bag. It was gone.

  “For God’s sake, what next?” he cried. “Someone stole it! The books … I’ll have to buy new ones!”

  That was going to make his father even madder. It had been hard enough to get the money for the textbooks at the beginning of the semester. Eric Grimson would have more to raise hell about than just the fight. And Eva Grimson would have to take the purchase money out of what she brought home from her cleaning job. No. His father would insist that his son pay for it. Where would he get the cash?

  Did bad things never end?

  Jim’s mother was still working up on Gold Hill when Jim arrived home. But his father was waiting for him. He began yelling at him to get his clothes into the washer in the basement and to take a shower. Right now. The shock of the shower might kill him, but Jim and the world would be better off then. Jim tried to tell him why he got into the fight. Eric Grimson paid no attention to his explanation. He stood at the top of the basement stairs while Jim shucked off his clothes and put them in the old washer.

  “That’ll take extra soap and water and gas heat and run up the bills, and they’re high enough now, though I can’t say you generally raise the water bill much,” Eric said. “Maybe I should look at this as a God-given chance to force you to take a shower.”

  Jim waited until he had put on clean clothes before he decided to tell his father about the stolen books. But, when he reluctantly left his room, he found that his father was not around. Eric Grimson had gone some place, probably five blocks away to Tex’s Tavern. He’d be spending the money on booze that he could have used to buy the schoolbooks. That reminded Jim that he had forgotten to call in to the fast-food place where he worked. If he told the manager he was sick—which he had done too many times—he would probably be fired.

  Well, so what?

  It wouldn’t be easy finding another job, that’s what.

  But he had promised Sam that he would go Halloweening tonight, and he did not want to miss out on the fun.

  If he could get his mother to one side, away from his father, he might get pocket change from her. She’d dredge it up from some place; she almost always did. However, he knew how hard it was for her to do that. Though she would not complain, her big sad eyes, her air of suppressed reproach, disappointment, and defeat would make him feel like a bum, a parasite, a bloodsucker, a failure, and a really rotten son.

  Her silence and her quiet manner made him feel far worse than his father’s ravings and rantings. At least he could blow off steam when he argued with his father. But her unwillingness to fight frustrated and wore him out. A termite must feel that way when it was chewing merrily along in wood and then ran slam-bang into iron.

  The house was quiet except
for a slight groan or a very faint murmur now and then. Those could be the voices of small shiftings of earth in the tunnels and shafts below. They were warning the heedless humans above of the coming big collapses. Or were they, as in the poem “Kubla Khan” by Coleridge, “ancestral voices warning of war”? Or trolls working away in the abandoned coal mines so they could hasten the ruin of Belmont City’s houses?

  Man, I’m a case, Jim thought. My brain is like a bullet that missed its target. It ricochets all over the place, envisions a hundred scenarios where only one could be real. I’m cut out to be a writer or a poet, not a garage mechanic.

  He sat in a chair in the living room. He faced the fake fireplace and the mantel, which held two glass balls with Christmas scenes inside (turn the balls upside down and then right side up and snow fell on the little houses and people therein), statuettes of the Virgin Mary and St. Stephan, two incense candles, a can of furniture polish spray, an ashtray with a pile of cigarette stubs, and a music box on top of which was a circle of white-clad but nicotine-stained ballet dancers.

  On the wall above the mantel was a large photograph of Ragnar Fjalar Grimsson, Jim’s dearly beloved grandfather, dead for eight years now. Though Ragnar was smiling, he looked as fierce as his namesake, the legendary Viking king, Ragnar Hairy Breeches, whom he claimed to be descended from. His white and bushy beard fell to below his chest. His white eyebrows were as thick and as splendid as God’s must be (if there was a God), and the blue eyes were as penetrating as the edge of a Norse pirate’s war ax. When the old man had died, his son, Eric, had taken down the big painting of Jesus, despite his wife’s pale protests, and had put up the picture of his father.

  It was, Jim had thought, a satisfactory substitute.

  The old Norwegian was a real man. A far voyager on sea and on land, an adventurer, tough, no complainer, a go-getter, largely self-educated, a wide reader, afraid of nobody and of no thing, a quoter of Shakespeare and Milton and of the old Scandinavian sagas, yet one who enjoyed the cartoon strips and who had read them to Jim before Jim could read, stubborn, convinced that his way was the only way but with a sense of humor and wit, and also convinced that most of the present generation were degenerates.

  It was a good thing old Ragnar had died. He’d be deeply disgusted with his son and even more so with his grandson. As for Ragnar’s daughter-in-law, Eva, he’d never liked her, though he had always treated her politely. She was scared of him, and he scorned people he could scare.

  His grandfather had at first been disturbed by Jim’s visions and dreams and stigmata. After a while, he had decided that these were not necessarily signs that Jim was mentally sick. Jim had been touched by the Fates, who gave him second sight, a gift the Scotch called “fey.” Jim could see things invisible to others. Though the old man was an atheist, he did believe, or professed to believe, in the Norns, the three Fates of pagan Scandinavia. “Even today, out in the rural and forest areas, you’ll find Norwegians who believe in destiny more than they do in their Lutheran God.”

  His grandfather had taken Jim’s small hands in his huge and work-gnarled hands. He held them up so that the faint whitish marks on Jim’s fingernails shone in the light. Jim was keenly aware of them and somewhat shy about people seeing them. But Ragnar said, “Those are the marks the Vikings called Nornaspor. They’ve been given to you by the Norns as a special sign of their favor. You’re lucky. If the marks’d been dark, you’d be cursed with bad luck all your life. But they’re white, and that means you’re going to have good fortune most of your life.”

  Destiny. Mister Lum had said more than once in English class, “‘Character determines destiny.’ That’s a quote from Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher. Remember that, and live by that. ‘Character determines destiny.’”

  That had deeply impressed Jim. On the other hand his grandfather thought that character was given you by destiny. Whatever the truth, Jim knew that he had been doomed to be a loser. Never mind what old Ragnar had said about Nornaspor. Jim Grimson was a hopeless case, everything a hero was not. As the school psychologist had told him, he had low self-esteem, could get along only with a few of his peers, all as messed up as he was, couldn’t relate to his superiors, hated authority in whatever form it took, had no drive to succeed, and was, in short, without brakes and on the steep road to hell. Having said that, the psychologist had added that Jim did have great potential even if his character was chaotic and self-defeating. He could pull himself up by his bootstraps. And then the psychologist really piled on the crap.

  Jim sighed. For the first time, he became aware of something wrong with his surroundings, something maybe not so wrong as missing. It took him a minute to realize that he was enveloped in silence. No wonder he had been feeling uneasy.

  He went to the kitchen and turned the radio on. WYEK was into “The Hour of Golden Oldies” and was playing “Freak Out,” the 1966 album in which Frank Zappa made his debut with the Mothers of Invention. Jim had been four then, ages ago.

  Before the album was finished, Eric Grimson came home. And the gates of hell opened.

  CHAPTER 10

  At 6:19, an hour after sunset, Jim raised his bedroom window and crawled out. Thirty minutes ago, he had eaten the supper stealthily given him by his mother.

  Eva Grimson had arrived a few minutes before her husband came home and had started cooking supper. She had asked Jim to turn the radio down, and he had done it. He had said nothing about his troubles that afternoon. Eric Grimson had reeled in at half past five, red-faced and breathing fumes that would’ve floored a dragon. The first thing he had done was to turn the radio off, yelling that he didn’t want that damn crap on when he was in the house. Then, of course, he had started in on Jim. Eva had been confused about it all until her husband told her of the telephone call he had gotten from the police about Jim’s fight with the Freehoffer kid and the pukey mess on his clothes.

  One thing led to another—didn’t it always?—and very quickly father and son were shouting at each other. His mother, facing the stove, her back to them, her shoulders slumped, said nothing. Now and then she quivered as if something inside her had bitten her. Finally, Eric had commanded his son to go to his room. He sure as hell wasn’t going to get supper, he added.

  Presently, silence settled throughout the house. Jim took a tattered and yellow-paged paperback, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, from a shelf and tried to read it. Reread, rather. He was in the mood for this story about the monster made of dead human parts, the doomed outsider hated by all humans and hating all humans, the rejected, the killer of the natural-born and the would-be killer of his maker, a man who was in a sense his father.

  But the godawful old-fashioned prose style had always tended to throw him off. It certainly did now. He dropped the book on the floor and roamed around the narrow room. After a while, the TV in the living room began blaring. Eric Grimson was sitting there, a beer in his hand, watching the boob tube. A few minutes later, Jim heard a knock on the door. He opened it and saw his mother holding a tray with supper on it.

  “I can’t let you go hungry,” she whispered. “Here. When you’re done, put it under the bed. I’ll get it … you know.”

  He said, “I know. Thanks, Mom,” and he leaned over the tray as he took it and kissed her sweaty forehead.

  “I wish,” she said, “I wish …”

  “I know, Mom,” he said. “I wish, too. But …”

  “Things could be …”

  “Maybe, someday …”

  When they did talk to each other, they usually spoke in fragments. Jim did not know why. Perhaps it was because the pressures on them broke off their sentences. But he just did not know.

  He closed the door and devoured the mashed potatoes and gravy, the fried ham, the beans, the celery, and the black Hungarian bread. After hiding the tray under the bed, he sneaked down the hall and used the bathroom. And, about an hour after sunset, he crawled out of the window. If his father discovered that he was gone, too bad.

 
The air temperature had warmed up to the seventies in the late afternoon but had by now plunged into the upper fifties. Though the stiff western breeze had softened somewhat, it was still strong enough to make the air nippy. Clouds had begun to form. The half-moon was draped in thin fleece. It was a good night for Halloween.

  He ducked down when he passed the living room window. The TV was still blaring. When he got to the sidewalk, which was well lit by a streetlamp, he saw that the cracks in the cement had widened. He did not know when this had occurred, but it seemed to him that they were broader and more numerous than when he had entered the house. However, he had been too agitated then to pay heed to them.

  Here came a group of trick-or-treaters, children costumed as witches, demons, Klingons, skeletons, ghosts, Draculas, Frankenstein’s monsters, robots, Darth Vaders, and a single punk—painted face, earrings, and Mohawk, probably his parents’ idea of a real monster. One kid, however, wore a giant naked brain. That seemed right-on to Jim. The true horrors of this world were spawned in the human mind.

  Since the group was heading toward his house, Jim walked faster. Though his father would not be answering the doorbell, his mother might see him when she came out to the porch to drop a Hershey’s Kiss apiece into the sacks held out by the kids. (This neighborhood was slim pickings.) She would not say a word to her husband about it unless he asked her if she’d seen their son. Then she’d feel compelled to tell the truth. Otherwise, the saints, not to mention the bogeymen, might get her.

  Sam Wyzak was waiting for him on the front porch of his house. He was smoking a cigarette, which meant that his mother must be busy in the back of the house and wouldn’t see him. Sam’s father, unlike Eric Grimson, would be dropping candy into the kids’ sacks. He’d be bitching because it interfered with his TV-watching, but he’d do it. He didn’t give a damn if his son smoked as long as it didn’t make any trouble for him.

  Sam gave Jim a cigarette, and they walked down the street talking about the fight with The Blob and his buddies. Then Sam slipped Jim an upper. Jim felt more than just an upsurge of spirits and nerves. The drug hit him in the center of his brain like an atomic missile striking dead on target. He had never been hit so suddenly or with so much force by so little. He was abnormally wide open, the walls broken, the army in the castle sound asleep.