Things hadn’t changed until he moved to Manhattan. By twenty-seven, some solid sales experience, a nose for people’s tastes, and a lifetime with his head in books, landed him a job at Barnes & Noble.
He had a small apartment on the Lower East-Side. Actually it was tiny—a lopsided box that leaked and had walls thinner than one-ply toilet paper. But the neighbours were close-knit and sweet, and he had plenty of free time to read. On Saturday afternoons he watched anime re-runs—Ghost in the Shell, Pokémon, Naruto. He had a growing Firefly figurine collection, and by night he worked on his great American novel—two years of work had resulted in a few stuttering fragments that petered out after a few pages, and endless notebooks of angst-ridden poems. But that was okay.
His charge was the science fiction and fantasy section on the upper floor of B&N, wedged into the back corner by the plate glass windows. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. Jack was all too glad to steward and safeguard those shelves, a little pocket of fantastical whimsy, for those who also found refuge and solace in lands of faeries, space aliens, and dragons.
He preferred living in fantasy worlds to living his real life.
The section saw a lot of loiterers, of an afternoon. Stuffed in the back corner, flanked by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bustle of Manhattan and the Public Library, it was the perfect place for nerds to bed down and lose themselves.
A few were regulars. None of the bastards ever bought anything.
Jack criss-crossed the aisles every now and then and cleared out the ones who were getting too comfortable, but besides that he was content to let them stay. He would never admit it to his supervisor, but in his mind this place belonged to them, anyway.
And the truth was, he was one of them; their man on the inside. He loved the smell of books, the tactile feel of them between his fingers—the glue, the binding, the sheer scale of thoughts and tales and characters that populated their shelves. There was no better hangover cure than hunting down some obscure half-remembered title for an old biddy who, ‘was sure it had a green cover, and that the author was French... or maybe Italian’.
So he didn’t save any lives, but it gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Manhattan was the perfect place to work in books. There was always something going on.
Jack jerked as a sharp snap rang out beside his ear. He’d been dozing with his elbow on the counter, staring at a young girl crouched in the far corner with her head in a copy of The Wizards of Earthsea. “Huh?” he muttered.
Mr Schneider took the thick hardback away from his ear and leaned in close. “Get rid of the geeks, we’re closing early,” he said. He eyed the girl, and his lips curled. “That loser’s been here over two hours. I want her gone in five minutes.”
Jack straightened, clearing his throat. “I usually give them three before I turn them out. I think she’s going to pick up the trilogy.”
“She’s a browser if I ever saw one.”
“She’ll buy. My nose says so.”
“I don’t care if she’s planning on buying the whole section. While you and your nose have been daydreaming up here, the rest of us have been setting up for the Peter Knight signing. He’ll be here first thing in the morning—there won’t be room to turn your head in here, soon as we put the signs out before opening. We’re closing up early this time. I don’t want us unprepared again because somebody got the damn flu. Now put on that winning nerd smile of yours, and clear out the trash. And tomorrow, make sure you grab a coffee before you show your face. You’ve looked like crap all week.”
Jack swallowed the urge to defend his fellow nerds’ honour, and set off for the shelves. “Yes, sir.”
He’d been planning to ask Earthsea girl to dinner. He was a sucker for gawky glasses.
Why do we have to dress up the whole store every time some best-seller blunders in? I met Knight last fall. He wouldn’t even let me get a picture with him. Asshole.
Sighing, he made for the back of the store. He was so wrapped up in bitter thoughts that when some of the shelves froze solid before his eyes, he carried on walking.
His eyes registered the icicles spreading, hopping from one spine to another, emitting puffs of diffuse white mist as they went. Spreading out from the paranormal fantasy section—
No shit, a distant part of Jack’s mind jabbed.
—it blossomed into inch-thick sheet ice. By the time the first of the readers noticed, a low rumbling noise from the ether rose up, and from somewhere—everywhere—blue light throbbed, periodically emerging from and retreating behind form of the everyday world.
Jack’s mind simply blanked out, unable to process. He just kept walking. A small part of him even went so far as to continue sulking that he was going without a date tonight.
Then Earthsea girl screamed, scrabbling away from the shelves with a look of blank, unbelieving disgust written onto her face. She scurried into Jack’s heels and wrapped her arms around his legs.
“What the—?” Mr Schneider barked from afar. He sounded a million miles away.
Jack blinked at the girl at his feet, then looked back to the icy shelves, which now twinkled like Central Park at Christmas, having turned a snowy white, even the floor. The mist was billowing up from a few hundred volumes now, pooling against the ceiling and spreading downwards, showering the entire upper floor with stage-show drama.
“Oh,” Jack said finally. That was all he could muster.
It was funny what he learned about himself in times of crisis. Apparently, Jack was the kind of person who looked at a book-store turning into a slab of ice, pulsing with electric blue light, and said, “Oh.”
The rumble was unmistakable now, and the whole upper floor had paused, people open-mouthed. Dozens of books thumped to the floor, dropped from limp hands. The stunned unified gape lasted around ten full, long seconds, seconds that could have been hours.
Then Jack felt it snap like twine cut with scissors, and panic arrived in earnest.
The world seemed to spool up into furious action in the time it took him to reach down and wrench Earthsea girl up from the ground by her elbow. Screams rang out from all directions, coupled with the sound of tumbling shelves and the clatter of scrambling limbs. People downstairs joined in moments later as the stairways filled with wailing customers and staff. Somebody screamed bomb! Another cried terrorists! The fire alarm tripped, barely audible over the shouting and the eerie hum. Then the hum strengthened to an all-consuming rumble, building from nowhere and yet from all directions. Blue throbbing light pulsed faster amidst the paranormal section, blinding and yet without source.
All the while, the icicles continued to spread.
“Come on, we have to get out of here,” Jack yelled.
But Earthsea girl didn’t seem to hear him, china white and limp in his grasp, her gaze fixed on the insanity.
The feral piece of his mind seemed intent on dropping her and running, willing him to turn, but he gripped her anew with a grunt of frustration, and started hauling her back towards the escalators. “If I die because of you, our date is off!”
Half blinded by the blue light pulsing every other moment, he watched Mr Schneider hesitate at the top of the stairs, catch Jack’s eye, then shake his head and vanish downstairs with a grunt.
Fucker.
“Ma said I should’a stuck with the therapy,” Earthsea girl said distantly.
“Move your ass!” he bellowed in her ear.
The viciousness of his voice seemed to reach her, and her eyes cleared. She glanced at him and then the spreading ice, now only a few feet away from them, a white carpet flowering constantly with fresh crystals, crawling towards them like waves climbing a beach.
An unfeminine, guttural moan escaped her and she stiffened. “Oh man!”
Before he could react she scrambled from his grasp and ran screaming for the top of the stairs, leaving him momentarily stunned, gripping thin air.
“Oh,” he sai
d, blinking stupidly.
That’s all I got. Funky blue lights and creeping icicles, and all I’ve got in me is, “Oh”.
It was hard to see the spreading ice through the heavy mist as it descended over his shoulders and enveloped him. The store vanished from sight and panic bubbled up in his stomach at the thought of that ice spreading, unseen. Tumbling onto his hands and knees, he scrambled back towards the escalators, praying it didn’t catch him. The rumble had become a wailing honk that hurt his ears and pressed on his skin with physical force.
As he crawled it reached a crescendo, and the blue light throbbed with a final, blinding flash. With a concussive force that seemed to unzip the air, something exploded from the paranormal section.
The mist was blown against the walls, the carpet of icicles vaporised in a single heaving puff. Jack was blown clear across the store, tumbling end over end in a rain of paperbacks.
God, it’s a bomb, it’s a bomb, it’s a bomb! he thought as he hurtled into the biography shelves, cowering as a shower of books cascaded down onto his head.
He was a mere ten feet from the escalator, and now he could see the last of the people downstairs bursting, screaming, into the streets. Mr Schneider stood at the base of the escalator, his eyes wild and his body frozen in mid-flight. Their eyes met.
“Come on, Jack!” he cried. He tensed as though to scale the steps, then hesitated again, and turned on his heels.
Double fucker.
Jack was on the verge of getting to his feet when he caught movement in his peripheral vision. Half the shelves were gone, blown to splinters by the force of the explosion. The carpet of ice had thrust up in a halo around the epicentre in a fringe of spiky stalagmites, two-feet-high and throbbing that same ethereal blue.
Striding from the chaos was a man dressed in oxblood leather, rivulets of that self-same mist trailing from his shoulders.
Jack gasped as a blast of cold unlike any he’d ever felt stole into his bones—something no Arctic blizzard could muster.
The cold of somewhere else, whispered a distant part of his mind.
Where did that come from? He didn’t know, but somehow he knew the inner voice spoke the truth.
Half paralysed and in spasm from shock and pain, he rolled behind the nearest shard of ice. Too late. Before he could come to a stop, the man stood over him.
His eyes twinkled a fiery crimson—actually seemed to undulate with conflagrations alight behind his pupils.
“Ahoy hoy!” he said, a gargling, thick lilt, the accent almost Scottish, yet also not.
Jack could only blink in reply. “Hi,” he said at last.
The newcomer tongued the inside of his lip, scanning the room, and drew a deep sigh. “Listen, this is going to get crazy real fast, but I need a hand. You feel like going for a bowl of crazy?”
Jack swallowed. A dull throbbing in his fingers bubbled up as the intense cold ebbed. He had gripped the icicle hard enough to cut into his palms.
The man glanced at the bloodied ice. “Yello!” He clicked his fingers in front of Jack’s eyes. “Stay with me. What is this place? Has it started yet? Speak!”
“I…” Jack swallowed.
The man rolled his eyes. “A dribbler. Typical. Never mind, laddie, you can tell me on the way.” Without hesitation he gripped Jack’s collar and tore him up from the ground with inhuman strength, and proceeded to drag him toward the emergency escape. “Honestly, you people are so fragile. First sign of the real world and you roll over like bloody punch-drunk donkeys.”
Jack could only utter a wordless squawk, his heels thudding over the threshold, leaving the frozen shattered book-store amidst a hail of settling snowflakes and shredded paper.
It had all happened in under a minute.
Jack’s mind roiled and his hands bled, but everything around him seemed fuzzy, unreal. It was beyond reckoning, beyond madness.
The back of Jack’s mind spat feebly, I only had an hour left on my shift.
The crimson traveller laughed. “I know, mate, it’s bloody loony. Don’t worry, you get used to it… eventually,” he said, hurtling along the emergency escape passage.
It took Jack a moment to realise he hadn’t spoken aloud, careening along in the man’s wake, bouncing off concrete and scraping his cheek.
This can’t happen. I have plans! It’s Mexican night, he thought miserably.
“Stop your whining.”
Jack sobbed.
The man in crimson kicked the steel service door at the end of the passage and it buckled around his booted foot like tissue paper, flying off the hinges and clattering into the street.
Jack flapped like a rag-doll as they raced along the street, passing white-faced bystanders running or pointing, stupefied, crying out at the wreckage of the store. Amidst the dozens of blurred faces he found himself looking for Earthsea girl.
Kidnapped by an inter-dimensional maniac, and I’m still on the prowl. That’s desperate.
“What the hell do you want from me?” he yelled, a moment before slamming his arm into a newspaper dispenser. Howling, his vision blurred by tears, he wondered when he would wake up.
Any moment, now. No more cheese before bed.
But that wasn’t right. The calloused hand wrapped around his collar was no conjuration of his subconscious. He knew it, just like he had known about the cold. That same strange inner voice, one that hadn’t spoken for a very long time.
They left the bystanders behind on Forty-Sixth and moved into calmer crowds. Jack’s rear-view perspective provided him with an endless procession of frowning men and women, looking over their shoulders at him as he bounced along helplessly.
They were moving fast, faster than any man could move with another in tow. Jack’s stomach quivered as they rounded a corner and fled down an alley, heading out from view of the crowds and into the murk and stench behind some restaurant’s garbage.
Skittering to a stop with a metallic clang, hyperventilating and snivelling, Jack flung his arms up over his head and ducked, waiting for the end.
A sharp twinge in his scalp drew a piggy squeal from his lips. Fresh tears touched his cheeks. He looked up into the newcomer’s face and screamed, “What?”
His kidnapper smiled. “Spunk. Good. You’ll need it, Jacky Boy.” He stood up straight and surveyed Jack a moment.
Jack cowered. How does he know my name?
The man was barrel-chested and bearded, looked around forty, wrapped in a knee-length torn duster over a simple, ancient tunic, boots that looked as though they had seen many a desert, and oiled leather chaps. All of it the same shade of rich, marbled oxblood.
He looks like the world’s freakiest cowboy cum circus performer. What the hell’s he going to do with me? Eat me? Rape me?
A look of disgust crossed the man’s face. “Rape you? What messed up kind of city is this?”
Jack screamed internally, He’s reading my freaking mind!
“Well, stop thinking so loud, then!” the man said.
“W-what’s going on?”
“Like I said, this is going to get crazy, fast. Sorry, m’boy, but the rules of this merry land don’t apply today. Sorry to rock the boat and all, but some pretty big gears under the universe’s hood are about to go properly cockeyed.”
“What are you?”
The man grunted. “A long way from home.”
Jack found himself staring up without a mote of emotion left in him. Now the adrenaline drained out of his system, all that was left was his stunned, lucid mind, too shell-shocked to produce anything other than resigned acceptance. “You messed up my section,” he said. “I just finished restocking the shelves this morning.”
“Not my fault you put them over an Exit.”
“They were nowhere near the exit! They were at the back of the damn store!”
“Not that kind of exit, you idiot.”
Jack resisted the urge to scream. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re a bookworm, working in a place like that, so you’ve read enough rosy crap about doors to other places. Why don’t we skip the little chinwag on the hidden reality behind the world, yada yada? I don’t have time, today.” He picked at a piece of loose skin on his hand as he muttered. He glanced at Jack and heaved a long sigh. “I can feel a heap of stupid back-and-forth welling up, anyway, so I’ll take care of it.” He counted off on his fingers, “There’s a door to elseplace in All Where on the second floor of your bookshop. About a thousand people saw somebody come through it. No, I’m not here to probe your ass. Yes, I’m here to help. Who sent me? None of your damn business. All you need to know is that I’m not the only one, and that all that hoo-hah back there was nothing compared to what’s coming.”
He swooped down until he was a mere inch from Jack’s face, exhaling hot sweet breath from between teeth inscribed with Delphic runes. “You people are about to have a very bad day,” he muttered slowly.
Jack mouthed openly for a few moments, looking down the alley. It was getting dark already, but in New York nothing ever slowed. Crowds milled to and fro up there, normal people going to dinner or to some club or café, unthinking in the embrace of routine.
They don’t have to deal with this shit, he thought.
For a moment he thought about crying out for help. Somebody would call the police, and this lunatic would get locked up like he deserved.
But if they did that, then what the hell did he see back there? He would be just as loony. They’d lock him up in a moment.
What about door number 2: this is all legit. God, please don’t let that be true.
“Sorry, champ, it’s true,” the Scot-but-not said, swooping back up and stepping out from behind the garbage dump, pulling Jack with him. “Now stop your yammering and get your head on straight, because I need you.”
“What?” Jack squeaked. “What? Me? When the hell did I start figuring in your… your… freaky… shit!”
“First person I saw out of the Exit, friend. You’re important, all right.”
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