Considering how Aaran had treated Christy over the years—more to the point, considering how he was directly responsible for Saskia’s disappearance—Aaran thought it was awfully big of him. He wasn’t sure if the situation were reversed, that he’d have been able to do the same. Certainly not before he met Suzi and she did whatever it was that she’d done to him to make him see himself and the world in a different light.
Once the decision to go ahead with their journey into the otherworld was made, people began lifting their packs and moving toward the portal.
We didn’t bring anything, Aaran realized. No extra clothes, no food or water. Nothing.
He was about to ask Suzi if she was okay being so unprepared for the trip when Holly approached them with a pack in her hand. She offered it to them.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Holly shrugged. “I kept thinking that I’d wait until the last moment and then talk Christy into letting me join them, so I packed some stuff. Nothing that’ll fit you, but Suzi should find things she can wear. There’s also some bottled water, a first aid kit and matches, and some food.”
“You sure you don’t want to come?” Suzi asked.
Holly shook her head. “After seeing those guys that came for Robert… nope, I don’t think so. I’m happy to stay here and hold the fort.”
Aaran took the pack. “Thanks.”
“Just bring them back. Saskia, my friends. Everybody.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Holly fixed him with a serious look.
“And you’d better not be playing a game here,” she told him. “Because if you are and you screw things up, I will personally—”
Suzi put her hand on Holly’s arm. “No games,” she said. “We want this to end as much as you do.”
“Right. Of course, you do. I’m sorry. It’s just…”
“Really hard,” Suzi said.
Holly nodded. “I love those guys. If they’re gone for good … I just don’t know what I’ll do.”
“We’ll bring them back,” Suzi assured her.
You can’t know that, Aaran thought, so why make the promise? He saw that knowledge in Holly’s eyes, too, but he also saw how the promise helped, so he added his own to it.
“We won’t come back until we do,” he told her.
The others were waiting for them on the far side of the portal—three poorly-defined shapes seen through the shimmer. Suzi took his hand as they were about to step through.
“Nervous?” she asked.
Aaran nodded. “Guess this is old hat for you.”
“I wish it was. I feel like I’m going to pee my pants.”
Then, before she could lose her nerve, she stepped ahead, into the wall, into the shimmer of the portal. Every inch of Aaran’s skin shrunk from the contact as they went through. But there was nothing there—only a thickening of the air—and then they were on the other side. Vertigo hit Aaran hard. Nausea rose up and he would have stumbled if Bojo hadn’t caught his arm.
“It doesn’t last,” the tinker said. “Here, sit on this rock for a moment and put your head between your legs.”
Aaran gave a dull nod and allowed himself to be led over to a jumble of rocks under a large old tree of some kind. He dropped his head between his legs when all he really wanted to do was lie down in the dirt. But Bojo had told the truth. The feeling went quickly away leaving only a slight queasiness in its wake. When he was able to look up he saw that Raul still looked a little ill, too, but the other three appeared unaffected.
“Apparently it doesn’t hit everybody the same way,” Suzi said.
She had the decency to look a little guilty as she offered him a hand up.
“And some people not at all,” he muttered.
“What can I say? It’s all in the constitution.”
Aaran gave her a weak smile and looked around. So this was the other-world. It didn’t look a whole lot different from the landscape north of the city. Big fields. Mountains in the distance. A forest, mostly evergreens, to his right. When he turned the other way, the view was only a variation on what he’d already seen.
Two paths joined each other in the place where they were standing— dirt trails leading off as far as he could see in four different directions. The tree above was some kind of oak, he decided.
“It’s not what I expected,” he said.
“It changes,” Bojo said. “That’s probably the most disconcerting thing about the otherworld. One moment you’re in a place like this, the next you’re braving a winter storm on a tundra. The transitions can be that abrupt, or as gradual as they are in the consensual world.”
Aaran gave a slow nod.
“Now, this is the most important thing you need to know for the moment,” the tinker went on. “I can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t leave the path. It might change underfoot, it may seem to be taking you in the opposite direction than you want to go, but whatever you do, stay on it.” He pointed to the open field in front of them. “You might be thinking, how can I get lost over there, well, trust me in this. You can and you will if you stray.”
Aaran wasn’t so sure it was as serious as Bojo was making it out to be, but he wasn’t going to argue. Then he had a sudden thought. He looked around again.
“The portal,” he said. “It’s gone.”
A sudden panic made his chest go tight. How were they going to get back?
“It’s not gone,” Bojo assured him.
He made a movement with his hands and the portal shimmered back into view. Aaran stepped closer to look back at the basement. Through the shimmer he could see Geordie, Holly and Dick standing by the stairs, talking. Sitting directly in front of them, staring at the wall was Holly’s Jack Russell terrier. She barked when she could see them and the others turned around. Bojo waved to them, then let the portal close again.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I can easily find my way back here.”
Aaran nodded, but he made a point of memorizing the look of the tree and the stones that were jumbled under it in case something happened to Bojo and they had to get back on their own. Of course, then they’d still have to figure out how to open the portal.
“How does the portal work?” he asked.
“It’s easiest to find a place like this,” Bojo said. “A crossroads—some place where the border between the worlds is thin. And then it’s only a matter of concentrating on where you want to be—holding it very clearly in your mind. That’s why you need to have been there before. You can’t make the same connection with a place you’ve never been.”
“Which way should we go?” Christy asked.
Bojo stood for a moment, looking either way down the path, his brow furrowing as he concentrated on Aaran wasn’t sure what. Every direction looked pretty much the same to him.
“This way,” the tinker said finally, pointing to the right, where the path led toward the evergreen wood. “Robert’s music took us past the worlds that lie back there.”
“Any sign of him or the hellhounds?” Christy asked.
Bojo shook his head. “But they’d be many worlds away by now.”
“Can’t say I’m unhappy to hear that,” Raul said.
“I hope he’ll be okay,” Christy said.
Bojo nodded. “Yeah, me, too.” He shifted the strap of his pack to a more comfortable position. “Time we were going.”
The trip proved to be as disconcerting as Bojo had described. The first time the landscape shifted, all of them except for Bojo stopped dead in their tracks. The fields and distant mountains were suddenly gone and the path they followed now took them along the top of a dune. A beach, with a vast body of water beyond it, lay on the left of the path. To the right was a heath that went on for miles until it disappeared into a haze on the horizon. High in the sky, a solitary hawk moved in slow lazy circles, riding the wind.
“Jesus,” Raul said. “How’d that happen?”
Aaran nodded. The change had come between one step and another.
“The path we’re following,” Bojo explained, “takes us through an area where the worlds lie smack up against each other, sometimes even overlapping. Some of them are only a few acres in size, others as large or larger than the consensual world. What makes it confusing is that they shift their positions and sometimes their sizes. That’s why the otherworld is impossible to map.”
“And is there a Rip Van Winkle effect?” Christy asked.
“Time does run differently in some of the worlds—faster in some, slower in others. In some, time spirals, so that when you walk one way, it’s into the future, another, and you step into the past.”
“What kind of world are we in?” Suzi asked.
“We’re not in a world,” Bojo told her, “so much as walking along the edges of them. On this path, time runs the same as it does in the consensual world, perhaps a little faster. We won’t return to find a hundred years have gone by, though we might be a little older than we’re supposed to be, given the amount of time that will have passed. On the plus side, the air of the otherworld offers a measure of longevity as compensation.”
“What do you mean by that?” Raul asked.
Bojo shrugged. “It can help you live longer.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, but it’s not as simple as that. Unless you have the right kind of blood—the right kind of genes, I suppose you would say—staying too long in the otherworld can affect the stability of your mind.”
“Like in the fairy tales,” Christy said. “You come back a poet or a lunatic.”
“Something like that.”
If you come back at all, Aaran added to himself. In some of those same fairy tales, the characters never come back. Or if they do, as soon as their feet touch mortal ground, they crumple away into dust.
The changes in the landscape, especially the abrupt ones, took some getting used to for most of them. Considering all of his previous experience with the otherworld, it didn’t surprise Aaran that Bojo wasn’t affected. Suzi seemed to take it all in stride, too. Maybe that was because being newborn the way she was, everything felt new to her and she simply accepted the bizarre along with the mundane. But it was harder for the rest of them, even Christy. And that did surprise Aaran.
“But you’ve been writing about this stuff for years,” Aaran said at one point, when he and Suzi were walking on either side of the writer.
Christy smiled. “You don’t really read my books, do you?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“The short story collections are fiction, and yes, there are stories about otherworlds in them, but they don’t come from personal experience. They’re either based on other people’s experiences, which I listened to with the proverbial grain of salt, or they came from my imagination.”
“I wasn’t talking about them,” Aaran said. “And I have read your books—or at least the ones I’ve reviewed. The ones where you collect all those urban myths and make connections between them and old legends and folk tales. In them you allude to personal experiences as well, though you don’t go as much into them.”
“That’s because until now, I could count my truly inexplicable experiences on one hand. I’ve always been a believer and a disbeliever at the same time.”
“It never seems like that in your books.”
Christy laughed. “That’s because people tend to find what they’re personally looking for in them—it’s human nature. The believers believe, the skeptics focus on my own questions, and those with a personal axe to grind against me will find what they think makes me look foolish, even when the examples they inevitably pull out aren’t actually in the text.”
On the other side of Christy, Suzi laughed as well. “I’m guessing Aaran was one of the latter.”
“Maybe I was a bit too enthusiastic,” Aaran said, “but—”
“You had an axe to grind,” Suzi finished for him, still laughing.
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
“That’s okay,” Christy said. “It’s not like you’re alone. The very idea of the consensual world, never mind discussing what might lie hidden within or beyond its boundaries, pushes a lot of people’s buttons.”
Suzi gave him a curious look. “You sound pretty accepting of the negative press.”
“Oh, I have my moments of bitterness, but really, what can you do? You can’t—sometimes I think you shouldn’t even try to—change people’s minds. It just gets their backs up. Better to put the information out and let them deal with it in their own way, on their own time.”
“And if they don’t take the time to assimilate the information?” Suzi asked.
“You conduct your own life as a positive example. Always remain open-minded.”
“People aren’t going to believe in fairies just because you do,” Aaran said. “They aren’t even going to think seriously about it.”
“I know. That’s why in my nonfiction I’d rather focus on the World As It Is—as Professor Dapple likes to call it. The idea of a consensual world— that things are the way they are only because that’s what we’ve agreed to. It’s something that seems completely preposterous to so many people, but the funny thing is that chaos theory—which science does take seriously—is now catching up to the same ideas: how on a microscopic level, it’s the presence of an observer that makes a thing be one thing or another. Until that moment of observation, they’re simultaneously both and their possibility remains completely open-ended.
“And those same scientists are now actually considering the concept of parallel worlds as viable.”
“Well, considering where we are,” Suzi said, “that theory is pretty obviously true.”
Christy shook his head. “These are otherworlds. The parallel worlds theory posits that every time a decision is made, a new world splits off from the original, making for an infinite number of alternate or parallel worlds. They start off very close to one another, but if you think about the decisions in your own life, even the smallest choice can start a ripple effect resulting in utterly changing your life.”
“Like how the movement of butterfly wings in China,” Suzi said, “can affect the weather here. Well, not here, maybe, but back in Newford.”
Christy nodded.
Or like stopping to talk to Suzi had been for him, Aaran thought. It had begun with him thinking of himself as usual, wondering what he could get out of her, and ended up with him being here, in this place, risking his life for other people, most of whom he didn’t even know.
Was there some other parallel world where he hadn’t? Where he’d gone on the way he always did?
Was there a world where he hadn’t forced Jackson Hart to write that virus in the first place?
Before he could follow that line of thinking too far he realized that up ahead, Bojo and Raul had come to a stop. He looked past them to see that the path they were following dipped under a freeway overpass. To their right, the highway was lost in a wide sweep of fields and far-off mountains. To their left, the ocean had long since vanished and he could now see a large city in the distance. Traffic sped by on the freeway in both directions, no one seeming to pay any attention to them.
“Okay, this is weird,” Aaran said.
“Why’s that?” Bojo asked.
“Well, look at this. What’s a freeway doing here? I thought fairyland was supposed to be all pastoral, with maybe a castle or some little village.”
Bojo smiled. “This isn’t fairyland—it’s the otherworld. Somewhere in its reaches you’ll find every landscape you could possibly imagine, and some you can’t.”
“Yeah, but that city …”
“IsMabon.”
Aaran saw Christy perk up.
“Mabon?” Christy repeated. “Really? That’s Sophie’s city. Or at least it was when she was a little girl.” He turned to look at the others. “She started imagining it when she was a latchkey kid and … well, I guess all of that grew up around the few streets she created.”
“You kno
w Mabon’s creator?” Bojo asked.
Christy nodded. “Sure. She’s a friend of mine.”
“Wait a minute,” Aaran said. “Are you talking about Sophie Etoile, the artist?”
When Christy gave another nod, Aaran was about to argue how that was impossible. He’d met Sophie and …
But he caught himself and just shrugged instead. Maybe nothing was impossible anymore—at least not in this place.
“I need you all to wait here for a few moments,” Bojo said, “while I scout the lay of the land under that overpass.”
“Is there something wrong?” Raul asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Bojo said. “But it looks like a place of power—what with that freeway and all those people travelling over what amounts to another crossroads. You’ve already had a brief introduction to what you can meet at a crossroads.”
He was referring to the hellhounds, Aaran realized, which the others had confronted in Holly’s basement. He and Suzi had missed them and he, for one, was happy to leave it that way.
“It won’t take me long,” Bojo said.
Aaran watched him go ahead, then looked at the city again.
“So Sophie made that,” he said.
Christy nodded.
“Does your friend Jilly have a place here as well? When I think about how she goes on about fairies and magic …”
“No,” Christy said. “But she’s been to Mabon.”
“Bojo’s waving the ‘all clear,’ “ Raul said.
Aaran took another look at the city before trailing along after the others. On the other side of the overpass, the landscape did another abrupt change and for a block or two they were walking in a derelict cityscape that reminded Aaran of the Tombs back home in Newford, but this area seemed far older than the abandoned buildings and empty lots of the Tombs. This city appeared to have been deserted for decades—or at least deserted by normal people. By the time they were halfway down the second block, Aaran got the sense that they were being watched, but by whom or what, he couldn’t tell. He just had this prickle in the back of his neck, some vestige of alarm handed down from his own primitive ancestors warning of imminent danger.
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