The Darker Lord

by Jack Heckel

  “So, there really was a metal man and an animated scarecrow and a . . . a wicked witch?” she asked, still staring at the apple.

  “I don’t know about all that.” I shielded my eyes as a stray ray of sunlight came filtering through the leaves. “Baum was an almost pathological note-taker, and he published everything. His academic works are largely unknown, and mostly dealt with certain theories he was working on concerning prism-based world-to-world transport. Eldrin tells me it’s still used in ether astronomy to indirectly review the dark sides of planets and certain meteorological . . .” Vivian was watching me with the oddest little smile on her face. “I’m boring you.”

  “Only in the best of all possible ways,” she said, and put the apple into one of her pockets. She stood, stretching, and the wind caught her blue-checkered dress so it fluttered softly. She turned back around and caught me staring. I blushed, and she smiled. “You were telling me about Baum’s research?” she said. “But I’m not sure what you were trying to say exactly.”

  I stuttered back into speech, like a car with a bad clutch. “The . . . the . . . the point I’m trying to make is that the stories everyone associates with Baum are not his research findings, but are actually a collection of parenting books he wrote about his experiences raising a daughter ‘off-world.’ Whether they’re accurate . . . well, as I understand it, Dorothy was extremely precocious. She would go around animating objects, making animals talk, and in general causing no end of chaos. Her dad’s postdoc—who was a Dryadine, I believe—spent a great deal of time running about cleaning up after her.”

  She considered this, while I went back to considering her. I was so engrossed I missed her next question entirely. “Avery?” Vivian said, making my name a question.

  “Hmm?”

  “I believe something is distracting you,” she said, and dropped to the ground beside me.

  “I . . .”

  “Do you remember the night we met?” she asked before I could say anything foolish.

  I laughed. “How could I ever forget?”

  “I had a really good time,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “I’m glad.” She smiled. “You know not everything that happened that night was part of my plan.”

  Those wonderful eyes were full upon me now, and I did not know how to respond, because I wasn’t sure what she was trying to say. My mind kept darting back to Trelari and patterns and mystic struggles, though somehow I knew none of that was on point.

  When I didn’t respond, she said, “You really are the most clueless man I’ve ever known, Avery Stewart. Let me make it simple for you.” She leaned forward, stroked her hand across my cheek, and kissed me. I swam in the sensation of the touch of her lips on mine and the lovely scent of her hair.

  We stayed like that for a while, and then she broke away. “How long do you think it will take Rook to fix his cube?”

  “I . . . I have no idea,” I said in a kind of daze of joy.

  Vivian glanced down the hill toward the road, her head cocked. It was almost like her mind was working through a difficult math problem. Then a wicked little smile crossed her face. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” She lay down in the grass. “Come here, Avery.”

  Later, as the afternoon sun was making its way toward the horizon, we were lying next to each other trying to catch up on all the things that had happened to us since we last were together. Her story was longer, but she had such a desire to hear the news from campus and Trelari, and I had such a need to tell her about what had happened to Harold and Eldrin, that I spent as much time talking as she did. Eventually, we ran out of things to say and questions to ask, and we fell into a comfortable silence.

  I was drifting off to sleep when she spoke again. “Tell me more about Baum’s witch.”

  “What about her?” A shadow passed across the sun. I saw a single dark cloud like a stain on the otherwise untarnished sky.

  She propped herself up on her elbow. “Is it possible that the witch wasn’t real, or wasn’t evil?”

  I considered her question as I watched the cloud. Something about it struck me as curious. It was moving very fast in our direction. “I suppose.”

  I wondered if the cloud might a thunderhead, and if perhaps Vivian and I should make our way back down to the cube.

  “But you know how these things are,” I said. “Whatever the truth of the witch was, now she is associated with all that is bad and wicked.”

  As the cloud got closer it appeared to be made of lots of little clouds.

  “At this point the echo from those writings will have rebounded here, and whether Dorothy or the witch were good or bad to begin with, for the people in this world they would be . . .”

  And the clouds kept breaking into smaller and smaller pieces.

  “. . . legends . . .”

  I rose slowly to my feet.

  “. . . unless . . .”

  A chill ran through me as I realized the cloud was not a cloud at all, but a group of tiny figures flying toward us.

  “Vivian, where are the others exactly?”

  Something in my voice must have caught her attention, because she also got up and came to stand next to me, slipping her hand into mine as she did. “What is it?”

  I pointed a wavering finger at the figures in the sky. She squinted and her eyes widened. “Are those birds?”

  I shook my head. “If we’re right and this is Baum’s world, they’re monkeys.” I grabbed hold of her arm, pulling her toward the little yellow road. “We have to get to the others. Now!”

  We sprinted over the bridge and around a small ridge. I had nearly forgotten cracking my skull on the hypocube, but the exertion of running quickly reminded me. By the time we’d made it onto flat ground my head was pounding. Valdara, Drake, and Rook were standing in a circle about the door of a bright blue outhouse set in a cornfield close by the narrow yellow road. A scarecrow teetered precariously on its stick nearby, and it appeared as though the three were in consultation with the straw man.

  I started shouting, “The monkeys are coming!”

  All three looked up at us at the same time. I pointed blindly behind me. None of them moved. Nor, on reflection, would I have done any different had some madman come running toward me shouting about monkeys. It was not until Vivian and I got to them, and I had a chance to wheeze out the facts, that they reacted. Unfortunately, it did not result in us taking off in Rook’s miracle box like I had hoped.

  “Thing’s busted, laddie,” he said.

  Typical Rook, short, to the point, and entirely lacking in any sort of information I could use. “Where is the cube?” I asked. “Maybe if I got a look at it . . .”

  “What do you mean, lad? The cube’s right here.” Rook hooked a thumb at the outhouse. “Remember, it transforms based on a world’s bathroom standards. Well, here . . . wherever we are, the standard is an outhouse.”

  Now that Rook mentioned it, I did recall him telling us something about the cube’s peculiar camouflage power, but I hadn’t thought through what that would mean in reality. I stared at the outhouse. It looked ordinary enough, right down to the smell. “What’s . . . what’s wrong with it?”

  Rook showed me what looked like a scrambled puzzle cube. I had no idea what the puzzle had to do with the operation of the hypocube, but I had been a kid once, and I’d spent a fair amount of time messing around with their nonmagical equivalents back on Earth. “Well, the first thing to do is to solve the corners,” I suggested. There was a strange silence, and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that everyone was staring at me. “What? Isn’t that the sequence? Corners, then edges, then midges?” I said, ticking off the steps on my fingers.

  “What are you talking about?” Valdara asked.

  “The cube is scrambled,” I explained, pointing at the puzzle in Rook’s hand. “Isn’t that the problem?”

  “No,” Rook said. “It’s supposed to be a sphere.”

  “Oh . . .” I said softly.
“Well, can you fix it, because the monkeys are . . .” I turned around and I could see them coming fast, the cloaks of their crimson robes flowing out behind them like pennants. I looked back at the group. “Not to panic anyone, but they are kind of here.”

  Rook shouted. “You want me to circle a square? You can’t defy the laws of metaphysics.”

  “We fight, then,” Drake growled. “Good. I’ve been itching for another fight.”

  He squared his shoulders and spun his staff. Valdara joined him on his right. Her sword and her chakram appeared in her hands.

  “You two are even crazier than he is!” Rook shouted. “How are the five of us goin’ to fight an army of demented monkeys?”

  Vivian put a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. “They aren’t monkeys.”

  “What are you talking about?” I shouted, and pointed at the cloud of . . . men . . . in Mysterium robes. “Oh gods, Moregoth found us! We have to get out of here!”

  We could see the glowing points, like oncoming comets, as they brought their wands to bear. Valdara cursed quietly about magic ruining a decent melee, while Drake wondered aloud about whether his protection spell would work in this world.

  Rook wasn’t waiting to figure out what or how to fight them. He made a sweeping gesture, which I took to be an invitation to conjure a gateway, and said, “Laddie, would you do the honors?”

  I didn’t bother telling him that what he was asking was theoretically impossible. Instead, I yanked the key from my pocket and began channeling power through it. Almost at once the yellow bricks at my feet turned gray. My spell, like a monochromatic cancer, spread outward, draining the color from the road and the fields and the sky. My heart caught in my chest. The key was consuming the world’s reality. I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought of how much damage I must have been doing the last few days. Moregoth or no, now that I knew I was not going to be responsible for destroying another world, I began to shut off the flow of power, but a hole had already opened in reality. Seeing that there was no changing what had already been done, and no reason to waste the consequence, I yelled, “Go!”

  Vivian was the first one through the portal. Drake and Valdara hesitated, so I added, “I have to be last to keep it open.” With twin nods of acceptance, they dashed through and vanished.

  Rook paused at the entrance to the portal, even as the Sealers’ spells exploded around us. “Where are we goin’, lad?”

  I truly had no idea. “Just go!”

  I gave him a little shove, and Rook stumbled enough to fall through. Moregoth was no more than the length of my apartment away, which I must stress is not very far, when I jumped through the portal. I could see him quite clearly, right down to his fishnet shirt. I heard him scream, “Sealers, DIVE!” as I finally managed to master the spell and pinch off the flow of power. The last thing I heard from Baum’s land, carried on the winds of subether from there to here, were the Munchkins singing, “Ding dong, the witch is gone . . .”

  Chapter 23

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Though the hole I’d bored between worlds had closed, it had not closed quickly enough. Moregoth and the Sealers burst through the portal behind us. You might be surprised to hear that the fact we were being pursued by a small army of Mysterium-trained killers was not foremost in my mind. This was not due to some sudden feeling of invulnerability, but because we were also in the process of plummeting to our deaths. Either my transport spell had been spatially misaligned with this new world by hundreds of feet, or we had been unlucky enough to have randomly appeared at the top of an open mine shaft. Although if it was a mine, it was the strangest mine I’d ever been in.

  Not that I’d ever been in a mine . . .

  Unless you count the Mines of Maria on Trelari . . .

  Which you shouldn’t, because those were basically designed by me, and as we’ve established, I’ve never been in a mine.

  The point is, we were falling down a very long shaft cluttered with all manner of odds and ends: a bookcase, a cupboard, the corner of a table, the top half of an armoire. I suppose it was nice of someone to decorate the shaft, but the effort didn’t do much to improve my enjoyment or comfort, because, as I mentioned, I was falling down it, and it was long, very long, absurdly long . . .

  After several minutes, the falling stopped being terrifying and just became silly. Moregoth and the Sealers were somewhere above me, and had obviously grown just as comfortable with the situation as I had. Deadly bolts of blue energy began to whiz down at us. It turns out falling in and of itself isn’t scary when you never hit the ground. At first I was still so disoriented by our situation that I didn’t really notice that we were under attack. However, when a beam came close enough to leave a smoking hole in the sleeve of my shirt, a healthy sense of danger returned.

  Having jumped into the portal right before me, Rook was fairly close at hand. He saw me poking a finger through the hole. “You’ll probably need a patch. Although a good seamstress might be able to stich it back together.”

  “I think our time would be better spent focusing on how to stop Moregoth?” I replied.

  Rook shrugged and picked a pipe off of a side table we were falling past. “You got us into this predicament. I figured when you were done muckin’ about you’d get us out.” He inspected the inside of the pipe’s bowl, and gave a grunt of disgust. “No tobacco. Typical.” He dropped it into a silver soup tureen set on a passing sideboard.

  He had a point. Not about the pipe. I had no idea if it was typical or not for a pipe to be empty when you found it while falling down a mine shaft, but he definitely had a point about needing to get out of this world. My first thought was to make a new portal, but the others were pretty far below. I was afraid they would miss any gate I wove, and I didn’t want to use the key again as last time it had come close to unweaving a whole world. Another spell sang past my ear and shattered the face of a grandfather clock set against the wall. A spray of splinters peppered my face, and its gong chimed chaotically.

  I decided to take a page out of Drake’s book. I focused my own energies and wove a moving shield and set it between our group and Moregoth. It wouldn’t last forever, but it might buy us enough time to come up with a better plan.

  Once we weren’t under immediate threat of being blown to bits, Rook and I linked arms and did an aerial swim down to the others. I know that physically “swimming” through the air makes no sense, but we were falling down an endless pit with a bunch of crimson-robed maniacs chasing after us with wands. If you can suspend your disbelief that far why not go all the way?

  When Rook and I reached the others, they had formed a kind of falling ring around a little blond-haired girl in a blue dress. “So,” Vivian said with a sympathetic coo. “What you’re saying is this diabolical rabbit lured you into this endless abyss using an ensorcelled waistcoat and a pocket watch?”

  “How big was this rabbit?” Valdara asked as she looked about suspiciously.

  “Vicious creatures, rabbits,” Drake said sagely. “Was it a white rabbit? Was it bad-tempered? Did it have big nasty, sharp, pointy teeth?”

  “Oh, heavens, no,” the girl said in a voice so high-pitched it made my ears ring a little. “See, I was sitting with my cat, Dinah . . .”

  Drake interrupted the girl with a growl. “The cat that disappears leaving only its teeth? Sounds like a nightmare.”

  At this point, everyone noticed that Rook and I had joined them. Valdara narrowed her eyes. “Avery, I don’t know what you were thinking, or even if you were thinking, but you’ve managed to land us in a horror zone: vicious rabbits, demented cats, and then there are these two-dimensional beings that are obsessed with taking off people’s heads.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” the girl squeaked. “They’re nothing but a pack of cards.”

  “What are cards? Some other unspeakable beastie?” Rook grumbled.

  “I think they might be a kind of wolf,” Valdara suggested. “She did say they h
unted in packs.”

  “We have bigger problems,” I said, interrupting Vivian and Valdara as they began to discuss how you might fight packs of two-dimensional wolf creatures. I pointed behind us at the Sealers trying to blast their way through my shield. I was surprised to see it hadn’t already failed, but it wouldn’t hold much longer. As we watched, glowing fractures began to spiderweb across its surface.

  While the little girl examined a bottle that she’d grabbed from a passing cupboard, I gathered the others in a tight circle. “Do either of you recognize this place?” I asked Vivian and Rook.

  They looked at each other and shook their heads. “It might help if it would let us stand still for a second, lad,” Rook groused.

  “Not sure we want that, since it would mean landing, or rather crashing,” Drake pointed out.

  Rook fingered his beard. “Good point.”

  “If you two are quite done,” I said sharply, “this is obviously a reflection of Carroll’s world.”

  Rook shrugged. “I never paid much attention to subworld research. A bit too abstract for me.”

  Vivian scrunched up her face in thought and bit her lip. “Carroll’s world . . . the, um, the dream one? With the tea party and the talking flowers?”

  I almost muttered something about undergraduates, but instead I said, “Close. It was a world he programmed to study the subconscious. It’s full of dream constructs like falling, and talking animals, and—”

  A high-pitched “Oh!” came from the little blond girl. We turned in time to see her grow smaller and smaller until she was about the size of a thimble. I gestured at her. “And body changes, of course.”

  “What’s your point?” Rook asked.

  “That these cats and rabbits aren’t real. They are simply symbols. So—”