Rem World

by Rodman Philbrick

  “Too bad we can’t stay up here forever,” said Morf. “Eat waffles for breakfast and then fly all day. What a life!”

  Arthur sighed. He knew that nothing was forever, no matter how much you wanted it to be that way. And he was not looking forward to the challenge that lay ahead of him.

  “The clouds look like they’re made of cotton candy. Have you noticed?”

  “They’re not,” Arthur told him, thinking about his experience with Leela.

  A moment later they whooshed into the clouds. Instantly they lost sight of Leela; she had vanished into the mist. He could tell that Morf, nestled inside his shirt, was getting nervous. It was always a tense moment, entering a cloud, but a few seconds later they burst through, back into the pale green sky.

  And there, right below them, Leela waited, pirouetting on her wings with the skill of a ballerina. Arthur knew he could practice for a hundred years, and he’d still never be able to fly so gracefully, and with such elegance.

  It was like finding a living jewel waiting for him, right in the middle of the sky.

  “You’re doing fine!” she called out in an encouraging way.

  “How much farther?”

  They were above an immense canyon enclosed by high cliffs. The canyon was so deep, he couldn’t see all the way to the bottom. Leela pointed down into the canyon and said, “Miles and miles to go. We’ve only just begun!”

  Before Arthur could think of a reply, she tipped her wings and began a much steeper downward spiral. He followed as best as he could, but every once in a while, Leela would have to wait for him to catch up.

  “Amazing,” Morf said, piping up.

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t mean you, kid. I meant the girl.”

  Arthur would have blushed, but he was too busy trying to keep up. Or, rather, down. Because they were heading invariably and inevitably down. Down until they were below the high cliff walls that surrounded the deep canyon. Down until the sunlight gradually faded.

  Down, down, down, into the zone of perpetual twilight.

  Whereas their morning flight had begun gloriously, in the brightest of morning skies, they had now entered a kind of forever gloom. A not-quite-darkness that was more ominous and frightening than darkness itself.

  “How much farther?” Arthur called out.

  Even in the dimness he could make out the seriousness of Leela’s expression. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ll know when we get there.”

  And so they kept spiraling down and down. Down through the pale, cool shadows.

  Their wing tips almost brushed the canyon walls. Down for mile after mile, until they were so deep, the sky above was no longer visible.

  Down, down, and then down some more.

  As they swooped through the darkening shadows, Arthur felt a chill stealing over him. He wished he could wrap himself up in his blanket, but of course that was impossible. Fortunately Morf was warm and furry inside his shirt, and that helped a little.

  Leela brushed lightly against him, getting his attention. “We’re almost there,” she whispered, as if the very shadows might hear her.

  Arthur looked, but all he could see below him was darkness.

  “You can just barely see the shape of it,” she said. “Like a huge ring. Or an open mouth.”

  Vydel’s Mouth. Yes, Arthur could just make it out. A ring of jagged, stony spires jutting up from the floor of the world. Spires that looked like a gigantic mouth bristling with razor-sharp fangs.

  It was still more than a mile below them, but it filled Arthur with fear.

  “Don’t worry,” Leela said. “You’re supposed to be afraid.”

  “But your people gave me a new name! Arthur Courage. How can I be Arthur Courage if I’m afraid?”

  “That’s what courage is, Arthur. Doing something even though it frightens you.”

  Her words flooded him with warmth, and suddenly he knew what to do. It was the right and only thing. “You must go back, Leela,” he told her. “Right now, while you can still find an updraft. That was the plan. Remember? You were just going to show me the way.”

  Leela hesitated.

  “Go back!” he urged her. “Return to the World Above. Your people need you! You’ll be the Cloud Master someday! Do it!”

  Suddenly she swooped closer, and he felt her lips brush his cheek. “I’ll miss you, Arthur Courage! Good luck! Save the world for me!”

  And then she was gone, soaring upward through the darkening twilight. Arthur and Morf were alone, gliding down into the darkness.

  Not too far below them, Vydel’s Mouth seemed to beckon like death itself.

  “SO WHAT’S YOUR plan?” Morf asked, poking his little head out and sniffing at the shadows that loomed below.

  “I haven’t got a plan.”

  “How can you save the universe if you haven’t got a plan?”

  How, indeed?

  Arthur didn’t have the faintest idea. Nobody seemed to know, not even the Cloud Master. The old legend said the visitor must go through Vydel’s Mouth and find his way home. But how was Arthur supposed to do that? And what was he supposed to do when he got there?

  At just that moment, when he was trying to think of a plan, Arthur caught sight of the Nothing. It was so dark here at the bottom of the world that he’d mistaken the Nothing for just another shadow.

  But it wasn’t just another shadow. It wasn’t anything at all. That was the essence of the Nothing, of course—wherever it touched, nothing existed.

  Impossible. And as Arthur stared in disbelief, he realized that the entire bottom of the canyon had ceased to exist.

  The ring of jagged stone spires had so far kept the Nothing from flowing down into the cavernous area called Vydel’s Mouth, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Once the Nothing had filled the bottom of the canyon—or emptied it, depending on your point of view—it would spill over the top of the spires. Vydel’s Mouth would cease to exist, and with it, Arthur’s chance of finding his way home.

  Arthur was just about to begin his final descent when suddenly the air was split by a terrifying noise.

  CAWWWWW! CAWWWWW! CAWWWWW!

  Huge crowlike birds poured up out of Vydel’s Mouth, rising like black smoke. They headed right for Arthur and Morf.

  CAWWWWW! CAWWWWW! CAWWWWW!

  The mob of crows beat the air with black shiny wings, and there was nothing Arthur could do to stop them. Nor could he get away—he simply couldn’t fly as fast as a bird. All he could do was glide on his blanket-wings, and the glide path carried him right into the midst of the attacking crows.

  CAWWWWW! CAWWWWW! CAWWWWW!

  The air was thick with black, beating wings. Sharp, snipping beaks and terrible dark talons began to tear at his blanket-wings.

  “Get away!” Arthur shouted. “Leave us alone!” But the crows weren’t the least bit frightened.

  One of the shrieking birds landed on Arthur’s head and began to pull his hair. Others hovered just above, using their talons to shred his wings. Fortunately the blanket was very strong, and the crows were obviously frustrated. They cawed and screeched and poked at him until Arthur wanted to scream like a crow—and he did.

  “CAWWWWW!” he screeched. “CAWWWWWW!”

  That was when one of the attacking crows tore open Arthur’s shirt.

  The shirt where Morf was hiding.

  “Nooooooooo!” Morf plunged through the air, heading straight for the sharpest spire of stone.

  · · ·

  Morf was plummeting to his doom, and there was nothing Arthur could do about it. He was so horrified, he could barely feel the crows tearing at his wings. His little friend was going to die, and it was all his fault. He never should have let Morf come along.

  “Morf!” Arthur cried. “I wish there was something I could do! I wish it was me instead of you!”

  And at just that moment he remembered something Grog had said when he left them on the mountain.

  “If you get in trouble, ask
Morf to change, and he will.”

  At that time, Arthur had been puzzled, but with all the excitement of meeting the Cloud People, there hadn’t been room in his mind for figuring out what Grog had meant. He had even less time now, but it didn’t matter, because they were in really big trouble, and there was nothing else he could do except yell: “Change, Morf! Please change!” He yelled as loud as he could and hoped for the best.

  At first, nothing happened. Morf continued to fall head over heels, getting smaller and smaller.

  And then, all at once, it happened. Morf changed. The little creature with the big furry tail morphed into a bird, swooping up and away just before he struck the rocks.

  Arthur was so astonished, he wasn’t aware that the crows had almost shredded his wings to pieces. He concentrated on watching the bird that had once been Morf, or was still Morf in a different form—he didn’t know which.

  The bird was almost the same size as Morf had been before the change. Which meant he was only slightly larger than the attacking crows, and he was outnumbered by the hundreds. But the Morf-bird showed no fear, and it headed straight for Arthur as fast as it could fly.

  The crows were frightened of the strange new bird—they were scared of anything that wasn’t afraid of them—and they swarmed away, shrieking and cawing.

  As the new bird got closer, Arthur saw that it had Morf’s face.

  “Hurry!” Morf urged him. “Those wings won’t last much longer, and I’m too small to save you!”

  That’s when Arthur realized that his blanket-wings had begun to disintegrate. The blanket flapped and tore. Little pieces of it were carried away by the cold wind that seemed to be sucking him down, right into the center of Vydel’s Mouth. Arthur had no choice: He had to go down as fast as he could, avoiding the sharp stone teeth, heading for the impenetrable darkness.

  Down he went, faster and faster, leaving bits of his wings behind. Morf stayed with him, shouting encouragement. “That’s it, kid! You’re doing fine! Don’t give up now, we’re almost there!”

  Yes, but where was there? It was so dark, and the cold wind made Arthur’s eyes water. He couldn’t really see beyond the tips of his disintegrating wings.

  “Hang on!” cried Morf, beating his own little wings to slow down.

  But it was too late. The last piece of blanket ripped away. Arthur ceased flying and began to fall.

  The darkness came at him like a huge fist.

  “Look out!” cried Morf.

  The last thing Arthur remembered was smashing belly-first into the giant rocks at the very bottom of Vydel’s Mouth.

  HE WOKE UP IN the dark.

  “Am I dead?” he groaned.

  “Not yet,” said a familiar voice.

  It was Morf, who had returned to his form as a creature with four paws and a big furry tail. He’d been flicking his tail at Arthur’s nose, trying to wake him.

  “What happened?” Arthur asked. He tried to sit up, but everything hurt.

  “It wasn’t the falling,” said Morf. “It was the sudden stop.”

  “Oh!” And Arthur remembered slamming stomach-first into the unforgiving rocks. “Where are we?” As his eyes adjusted, he was able to see a little.

  “We’re in a bad place, kid,” said Morf, keeping his voice low. “And we’re not alone.”

  “What!” Arthur looked around, but he could barely make out his surroundings. Rocks and more rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, and in-between rocks. Darkness and rocks, that’s all there seemed to be at the bottom of the world.

  “Ssssh,” Morf cautioned. “They’ll hear us.”

  “Who will hear us?” Arthur whispered.

  “Them,” said Morf, very quietly.

  Arthur decided to shut up and listen. And that’s when he heard it. A distant moaning that could have been the wind, but wasn’t. And another, closer, more frightening sound: the scrabbling of claws on a hard surface.

  Cautiously, Arthur sat up. He had to stifle his groans because he’d been badly bruised by his collision with the rocks. His stomach felt as if it had been punched, and his nose was swollen. His hands ached, like he’d been catching baseballs without a glove.

  Scrabble, scrabble.

  Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

  “What do we do?” Arthur whispered.

  “Try not to be too appetizing.”

  Now that Arthur thought about it, the scrabble of claws was a hungry sort of noise. He decided that the best thing to do was remain very still and quiet. Maybe whatever was making the hungry, scratching noise would go away and leave them alone.

  When he was little, he’d tried the same technique on the spooky things that lived under his bed. It had worked, but the under-the-bed things weren’t real. Whatever was making this noise was very real indeed.

  “Hold your breath,” Morf suggested in a voice so small, Arthur could barely hear him.

  Arthur held his breath. The scrabbling claws surrounded the rock where he and Morf were sitting. He kept his eyes squeezed shut because he couldn’t bear to look. Anything that made a noise like that had to be too horrible to contemplate.

  Scrabble, scrabble.

  Much closer. Close enough to touch.

  Arthur hugged himself. The last thing he wanted to do was touch the thing making the claw-scrabble noise. So he didn’t touch anything. But something touched him. Something cool and leathery. Something that was definitely not human.

  Peep, peep.

  It sounded like a newly hatched bird, only much, much louder. Arthur was so frightened, his heart felt like a chunk of melting ice. But he opened his eyes, anyhow. And there, staring right at him, was an eye almost as big as his head.

  “Ahhh!” he yelled.

  The eye blinked.

  Perched on the rock was a creature that looked like a giant brown soccer ball with stubby leather wings and two big eyes. Added to that were a pair of very clumsy feet with overgrown claws, and a curved beak that looked like an upside-down smile.

  “Borons,” Morf said, breathing a sigh of relief. “They’re harmless at this age, I think.”

  “At this age?” Arthur asked. He was thinking that the goofy-looking, leather-bird creatures were sort of cute, in a strange, space-alien way.

  “They’ve obviously just hatched,” Morf explained. “Grown up, they can be quite vicious.”

  Just as he said that, the rock they were sitting on moved. Morf and Arthur scrambled off. The clumsy-looking creature used its upside-down beak to peck at the rock.

  At first Arthur was puzzled, but then he realized that the rock wasn’t a rock at all. It was an egg. With a little help from the weird-looking creature Morf called a boron, the eggshell cracked open, and another leathery, birdlike creature emerged.

  “Why do they call them borons?” Arthur wanted to know.

  “Because they’re not very bright,” Morf explained. “Bird moron, hence the name boron.”

  Arthur soon realized that most of the “rocks” around them were actually boron eggs. They began to hatch, one after another, and sometimes two or three at once. In a very short time the dark, cavernous area was teeming with them.

  And Morf was right. The borons weren’t particularly intelligent. In fact, they were downright stupid. They kept bumping into each other and falling down. Some of them got their big, goofy-looking claws entwined, like shoelaces tied together, and just sat there staring as if feet were much too complicated to understand. Others tried to peck open rocks—actual rocks, not eggs—and when they became frustrated, they fell down.

  “Borons fall down all the time,” Morf explained. “They’re famous for it.”

  “At least they’re not trying to eat us,” said Arthur.

  “Not yet.” Morf sighed and began grooming his tail.

  Arthur suddenly remembered how Morf had avoided crashing by turning into a bird. “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?” he asked petulantly. “Change into a bird, I mean.”

  “I assumed you knew,” Mor
f said matter-of-factly. “I’m sure it was in the instructions.”

  “Oh, bother the instructions,” said Arthur.

  “All morfs can change shape, upon request,” Morf explained. “It’s in our nature.”

  “You mean there’s more than one of you?”

  “There’s only one of me. But there are other morfs, of course.”

  “I had no idea!”

  “If you’d read the instructions—”

  “Enough!” said Arthur. Just then a boron stumbled over and pecked at the back of his head.

  “Ow!” cried Arthur, and the surprised boron fell down.

  Peep, peep, it said, sounding confused. Peep, peep.

  “Peep, peep, yourself,” said Arthur, rubbing the sore spot on the back of his head.

  “May I make a suggestion?” Morf asked casually. “We ought to move along, before their mother returns to the nest. I’d like to avoid contact with an adult boron, if at all possible.”

  “Mother?” Arthur said. “Nest?”

  Before Morf could respond, the ground beneath them began to shake.

  “Oops,” said Morf. “I’m afraid we’re too late.”

  THE NEWLY HATCHED borons didn’t know what to do, so they stampeded.

  “Look out!” Arthur cried as one of them bounced off a rock and nearly crushed Morf.

  Morf dusted himself off and gave Arthur a sharp look of disapproval. “Any suggestions?” he asked.

  “I was hoping you had an idea.” As Arthur spoke, he ducked to his left, narrowly avoiding a boron that was rolling by like a bowling ball.

  Meanwhile the ground continued to shake as the mother boron came closer.

  “I’m fresh out of ideas,” Morf said stubbornly. “You’re the one who’s saving the universe. How about saving us, for starters?”

  Just then two borons collided and fell to the ground, so dazed, they could hardly move.

  That gave Arthur an idea. “Grab hold!” he cried, and he leaped on one of the befuddled borons as if it were a horse.

  Morf shook his head fretfully, but he climbed onto the back of the other boron. There were no saddles, of course, and it’s not easy to perch on top of a giant soccer ball, but Arthur grabbed hold of the stubby leather wings and held on tight as the boron came back to life. “Here we go!” he cried, and sure enough, the borons were off and running, back in the stampede.