by Jack Heckel
“I knew it couldn’t be that easy.” With a chuckle, I turned over the page.
There were a few more blanks to fill in. I dispatched those quickly. Strangely, there seemed to be a second page that I hadn’t noticed at first. I completed that page, only to find a page after that. It was odd, but I was moving so quickly through the form, that I wasn’t worried.
The next page came with a request to copy the previous pages. I did so without thinking. Yes, it was taking more time, but everyone has to fill out paperwork, and additional copies made sense for filing purposes. I realized that I had written in a section titled “For Office Use Only,” but apparently a helper or intern had left me additional copies of the form on the desk, so I was able to redo it without too much effort. I paused for a moment as I got back to the description. What had I been looking for? It was at that point that I realized I needed two separate sets of forms: one for Dawn and another for Eldrin. I started over.
I don’t know how long I spent in the cubicle, but the next thing I do remember was hearing a voice like an explosive boom from the elevator. “I am come!” the voice shouted.
I was a little irritated, because I was working on my paperwork and there was a sign posted in every cubicle that said quite clearly: quiet is courteous. remember, your neighbors are working too.
Whoever it was, they were not being courteous. “I am the inspector! Nothing can be hidden from me!”
I tried to ignore what was happening, but it was very distracting. The voice was also oddly familiar. Reluctantly, I tore my eyes away from the stack of forms I was working on. An enormous being, at least seven feet tall, shrouded in a black cloak, loomed over the front desk. Its head was a skull, and it pointed a sickly green hand at the demon. “Your time has come, Desk Demon. Prepare yourself!”
I frowned. There was an unusual smell, which made me gag slightly. A little jolt ran through the quill into my hand. It wasn’t painful, but it reminded me that I needed to finish my paperwork. I refocused on the form: What does all work and no play make Jack?
My hand started writing automatically, but my mind was troubled. What does this Jack have to do with Eldrin and Dawn? While I jotted down my thoughts, I decided to review some of the other questions to see if they explained the form’s sudden interest in the leisure habits of this Jack fellow. I glanced at the previous question: List your organs in order of least to most favorite.
“What?” I said aloud, and as I did my hand stopped its feverish movements.
At the desk, the inspector was still shouting. “What is this?”
“A . . . a logbook, Inspector?”
“You call this a log? What are you demons doing down here? This is a disgrace! Take these last entries. All you’ve written here are Hylar, companion, and ‘expected guest’? You call that record keeping? This is no way to keep a tally of souls!”
“Well, you see, sir—”
“Silence!”
The last shout drew all of my attention. I knew that I had heard that voice, but I couldn’t remember where. My head was filled with a fog that was making it difficult to concentrate. For his part, the inspector was so agitated that his head wobbled as though it was going to fall off. In fact, his whole enormous body shook as if he were hiding an entire goon squad beneath a holocaust cloak. Eventually he gathered himself enough to say, “In my rounds, I have found some departments have been falsifying entries to inflate their quarterly numbers. I am of half a mind to call in the . . . auditors.”
The desk demon’s crocodile skull flushed a deathly gray pallor. “I . . . I can assure you—”
“I care not for your assurances. I want proof!” The inspector tapped the fingers of a surprisingly feminine green hand along the top of the desk. I took a step closer to the scene before the quill jolted me.
The inspector glared at the demon. “If I were to ask you to produce these last three patrons—” he sniffed skeptically “—could you manage that, or is it beyond your means?”
“Yes, Inspector!”
“Then do it!”
“Yes, Inspector!”
The desk demon roared orders at a small army of crimson assistants until a half dozen or so of them were scurrying around like lost ants. Two of them ran over to me, pried my hand from the quill, and pulled me to the front desk. This disturbed me greatly, because I was not done with my forms. My head was swimming and my body swayed. To my right stood Eldrin and Dawn looking just as disoriented.
Despite the speed with which the demon had produced us, the inspector did not look happy. He examined us with a pronounced frown. “Very well. I shall let you know in the next thirty to sixty days the results of your inspection.”
The inspector put a gentle and reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Come along. I will need to speak to the three of you.”
The demon extended three of his six arms in protest. “But, Inspector, my thralls! They must stay.”
The inspector spun back to the demon in such a rage of emotion that he swayed a little from the violence of his own movement. “You expect me to take your word for it that these are the three ‘patrons’ from your log? How dare you presume so much? They shall be taken to the Audit Department and interrogated. If they are who you claim them to be, then they shall be returned to you.”
The inspector lowered his voice and hissed, “If they are not, then you will quickly find that there are levels below 7734. Do I make myself clear?”
“Y-yes, sir,” the demon said, standing once again at attention. “As you wish, sir.”
The inspector nodded and turned again, ushering the three of us swiftly toward the elevator. He pushed the button and we waited. My head was finally beginning to clear and I realized that while the desk demon had definitely been up to something, I really didn’t want to go to whatever lower level this “inspector” was taking us to. The auditors sounded full-on creepy.
Once again, I tried to pull in power, but there was nothing there. Every time I felt a tingle of magical energy it would slip away, like trying to catch smoke in your hands. If magic was out, I would have to turn to more physical means. I watched the light above the elevator descend and hatched a plan. The timing would have to be perfect, but it just might be possible . . .
When the light indicated the elevator was two levels above us I put a hand to my head and groaned. “I don’t feel so good.”
The elevator was one floor away. I began to sway, unsteadily, on my feet, and then I feigned a stumble. As the elevator chimed and the doors began to open, the inspector reached forward to steady me.
With a sudden burst of violence, I grabbed the inspector’s arm and yanked downward, simultaneously kicking backward with my heel into where I thought, given his height, his knee might be.
Many things happened at once, and none of them were what I’d expected. First, as I pulled down on the inspector’s arm I ripped away a portion of his body. To my astonishment, Susan stumbled out from under the inspector’s cloak, through the now-open doors of the elevator, and slammed headfirst into the back wall of the compartment. Then I heard a terrible curse as my heel connected with something much softer than a knee. The inspector’s long cloak collapsed, revealing Trevor, doubled over in pain, his hand clutching his stomach, and Tanner desperately trying to stabilize a makeshift framework that had been holding the inspector’s cloak in place. Above it all floated Gray. He looked down at the chaos and said what we all were thinking, the exact wording of which I will leave to your imagination.
Behind us the demon roared in anger. The front desk disintegrated as he rushed through it like a freight train, an army of his red-skinned helpers behind him. With all six of the demon’s arms extended, and with all those claws attached at their ends snapping, he looked like an enormous, living blender set to puree. I no longer wanted to have anything to do with paperwork.
I stood stunned as the demon rushed toward us. Thankfully, Dawn and Eldrin did not. They each grabbed one of my arms and pulled me onto the elevator. We made it
through the doors just ahead of Tanner, who dragged a still-moaning Trevor behind him. Gray darted in last, but he had the presence of mind to slam his face into the button for the lobby and, for good measure, into the close-doors button. The desk demon made a desperate lunge. That he came up three or so inches short is a testament to the power of luck—really, really dumb luck. We heard the satisfying thud of the demon’s head impact against the doors as the elevator lurched and began its slow journey up to the lobby.
Chapter 17
Journey from the Center of Mysterium
We sat, staring at one another and catching our breaths. I did a head count and came up one short. “Where’s Harold?”
“We tried to bring him, but he wouldn’t come down from the statue,” Tanner said.
Trevor added, “He asked us to tell you that he would always be there when you needed him.”
“At least he’s safe,” I said. What I didn’t add was that if he was offering, I really could have used him back in hell.
We lapsed into silence until Susan pointed at me. “You should have seen your face when you pulled me out from under that cloak.”
She started laughing. It was a half-hysterical laugh, but it was contagious, and soon we were all laughing along with her. It was not until we were passing level Q1 that the laughter subsided. I pointed an accusing finger at the three students. “You broke my rules.”
“You’re right, we did,” Susan admitted.
“Thank you.” I turned and stared up at Gray. “All of you.”
“I don’t obey your rules, but I must confess to being a trifle disappointed in you when you didn’t get my reference at the desk.” The eerie light in his left eye socket flickered, and I realized he was winking. Gray was a Trifler. “However, you can blame me. I was the head of the operation.”
This earned another round of laughter, but the adrenaline was wearing off, and it ended in weary chuckles. We fell silent until Trevor asked, “What was that place anyway?”
“And why is it in the basement of the Student Records building?” Tanner asked.
I shrugged. “It was the Confidential Records Desk. We all knew it would be well protected.”
Susan shook her head. “I expected well protected, but I didn’t think that meant that the basement of Student Records would be run by a family of demented demons. Then again, Work Studies aren’t allowed below level 13.”
Tanner pointed at the floor. “You guys are taking this way too calmly. That place has nothing to do with students or records.”
Trevor nodded in agreement. “It’s a soul trap!”
Gray floated down from the ceiling. “You’re right, of course. Level 7734 is not a place the mages in charge of Mysterium want anyone to know about. Normally, none of you would have even been allowed to see the button to 7734, much less access it. But there are many secrets in the deep places under the university. The Administration was too greedy for space, and they dug too deeply. In their quest to store all the knowledge of the multiverse, they unleashed darker forces.”
“Demons?” Susan asked.
The skull shook. “Bureaucrats.”
Dawn sighed and rested her head against Eldrin’s shoulder. “Any place as steeped in magic as Mysterium will have these corners of darkness. The troubling thing is not that they exist, but that the Administration is using them to get rid of people they don’t like.”
“It must have been a mistake.” Eldrin wrapped his arm around her.
“Mistake? More like typical Administration corruption,” Susan spit with disgust.
I looked wearily at Eldrin. “I’m sorry I sent you and Dawn down here for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Dawn said. “We found what you wanted.”
“You got a look at Sam’s and Ariella’s records!?”
“They were actually very efficient,” Eldrin said. “That’s one of the benefits of central control of records.”
Dawn rolled her eyes at him. “Of course, we couldn’t get out of the place once we read them, which is also the result of central control that borders on the maniacal. So, I suppose you have to take the bad with the good.”
“The odd thing is that we didn’t even want to leave,” Eldrin sighed sadly.
“It’s definitely a subtle enchantment,” Dawn said in agreement. “You don’t even notice the forms expanding, or that the number of forms you need keeps duplicating and triplicating.”
“Not to mention the ridiculously effective antimagic warding,” I said, remembering how my onslaught fizzled when I stepped foot in 7734.
“That’s because the wards were everywhere,” Eldrin explained, and launched into a lecture about something called an MMOG, or massively multiwarded occult grids.
“Never mind about all that,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Why is the Administration interested in them?”
Eldrin and Dawn glanced at Susan, the T’s, and the floating skull, and then back at me. From the look on their faces I knew that whatever they’d read was bad. “Not good?” I asked. They shook their heads. I glanced up at the number above the door. We were ten floors from the lobby. What would be waiting for us? I glanced over at Susan and the T’s. Their faces were alight with curiosity. They were no different than I had been before Trelari—innocent. But then Griswald used to say innocence and ignorance were opposite sides of the same coin. Nine floors to go. “Maybe innocence is overrated,” I mumbled.
“What?” Eldrin asked.
“Go ahead and tell them,” I said. “They’re part of the Resistance. They deserve to know what they’re fighting for.”
He cast a questioning glance at Dawn. She shrugged in response. “Right,” he said, and took a deep breath. “As you know, due to your pattern spell and the relationship between Death Slasher and Justice Cleaver, Trelari slipped from its standard orbital trajectory around the Mysterium and began to spin inward, slowly gaining reality as it approached closer.”
Eight floors to go.
“What does this have to do with Sam and Ariella?”
He gave me a level stare I knew all too well. It meant he was getting to his point and would arrive faster if I stopped interrupting. I made a show of sealing my mouth shut as we passed the seventh floor.
He continued. “Once you returned, we both surmised that Trelari had achieved a stable level of reality. We didn’t base our conclusion on any objective evidence, but on an assumption . . . a flawed assumption.”
“What assumption?”
“The assumption that Mysterium is still the center of the universe.”
“What are you talking about?”
Dawn interjected. “He’s trying to say that Sam and Ariella’s reality tested higher than predicted.”
The elevator was passing floor five. “And? Slight variations in reality weights are to be expected between innerworlds, and Trelari is new. There’s no standard yet.”
“Not like this, Avery,” she said soberly, and looked to Eldrin for support.
He sighed. “Their reality exceeded that of anyone from any of the other innerworlds. Higher than anyone, ever. Higher even than a Mysterian.”
“What does that mean?” Susan asked.
Eldrin answered. “It means their reality is more powerful than ours. That means their magic is more powerful than ours, and they can potentially manipulate events here. What it means is that the Administration is right. They are a threat to Mysterium.”
I froze as my view of the multiverse shifted. It was approximately the same way I’d felt the first time I saw the pattern in one of those random dot pictures that were so popular in the 1990s: it was both cool and a bit disappointing. It was cool, because it meant that Trelari might be the new center, or at least co-center of the multiverse, and it was about time someone was. On the other hand, it was disappointing that I hadn’t figured it out sooner. The signs were there literally from the moment I left Trelari. If Mysterium’s reality was still dominant, Valdara would never have been able to seal off her world.
“I saw one that resolved into an image of the Death Star! That was pretty cool,” Trevor said enthusiastically.
Eldrin slapped his forehead in frustration. “Not the autostereogram, you idiot! I mean, it isn’t cool that Trelari’s reality may have superseded Mysterium’s.”
Honestly, I hadn’t even known I’d been talking out loud about the dot pictures, but I was kind of glad I had, because Eldrin’s response was revealing.
“It does explain a lot of the Administration’s actions,” Dawn said thoughtfully.
“Explains it!” Eldrin said with an explosive snort. “Justifies it! Trelari’s current existence puts the university and everything and everyone in it at risk. If they figure out how to harness their powers they could take over. If they don’t figure out how to harness their powers they might destroy us without even knowing that they’re doing it! There is precedent from the early history of Mysterium that even powerfully real innerworlds can be severely damaged by turmoil in Mysterium. In my own world, the link between cataclysms on Hylar and trouble on Mysterium is well documented. As for Earth—” he pointed a finger up at me “—what do you think happened to the dinosaurs?”
I didn’t want to argue. If Eldrin felt this way, then others would. I looked around the elevator. Trevor seemed puzzled, but Susan and Tanner were definitely troubled. They were both fingering their wrists, where I suspected they had written that stupid slogan of theirs. I wondered if they were rethinking their commitment to my “Resistance.” Ultimately, what I felt about the situation didn’t matter; if Trelari had gained parity with Mysterium or exceeded it, the Administration would stop at nothing to find a way to reverse the situation. However, if this information got out, it would start a panic.
Dawn put a hand on Eldrin’s arm. “That’s a bit apocryphal, don’t you think?”