by B. L. Morgan
I kept a hand on Johnny’s back so I wouldn’t run into him. The only sounds were the sounds of our shoes grating on the stone steps as we went down and our breathing.
This was not a good way to be doing this. If someone below knew we were coming they could fire into the stairway and get the both of us at one time.
After an impossibly long time of following the stairs down, we came to a level floor. A few steps after that and Johnny came to a door. The door felt cold and was slick to the touch with sweat, it felt like steel.
I went to the right side of the door and flattened myself against the wall. The wall was made of large, uneven, moist moss covered bricks. The same kind I remembered being in the walls of the stairway in Nam. I didn’t like this one goddamned bit.
“Be ready,” Johnny whispered.
“Just don’t shoot my ass,” I told him.
With a loud shriek of rusted hinges, Johnny jerked the door open and jumped to the side.
Silence.
Flickering light.
We peered around the edges of the doorway and saw the same damp musty torch-lit tunnels that we’d seen earlier in Jeanette’s crystal.
I put a finger to my lips in the universal “be quiet” sign and motioned for us to move ahead.
Johnny whispered to me. “Don’t be shushing me. Who the fuck you think you are anyway, Sergeant Rock or something.”
He moved ahead of me down the hall, walking in a semi-crouch. For someone who had never been taught how to do this in the military he looked like he could sneak pretty damn good. He probably picked this up from all the classes he skipped back in high school.
There were no side passages. I was grateful for that. The musty tunnel curved and bent and sometimes the floor seemed to be going even deeper into the ground but at least we had no chance of making a wrong turn. We went forward. It was the only way to go. And at least there was light from the torches in the walls. Walking through complete darkness is not my favorite thing to do.
Ahead of us we started hearing a loud humming noise.
I recognized it immediately as the same hum that I’d heard issued from that portal in Viet Nam. It was a little different now, not the screaming I’d heard before. I didn’t know why but this made me want to hurry.
I started trotting. Not even trying to be quiet anymore. “Move it man,” I yelled at Johnny.
I didn’t know why or how, I knew that the gate ahead of us was open, but it was losing power. I didn’t know how long that portal would stay open.
We were getting closer to the temple that we’d seen in Jeanette’s crystal. I could tell this by the loud moaning sound that we could hear coming from the oval. It was making a loud Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaa sound.
After we rounded another turn we burst into the opening where the statue of what Paul Brady had called Asmodius stood. We could only see his head now and not his body because he stood behind the oval. Inside the oval of stone it was a shimmering blackness where stars winked at us and great distances shown. This was an opening into the void, into the forever.
In front of the stone oval the white man I’d seen dragged screaming was laying on a stone slab. His chest had been sliced open. It was an empty cavity. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. His mouth was locked forever around his last scream.
The stone oval itself had the same hieroglyphics carved into it that I’d seen in the one in Nam. The symbols were pulsating and glowing just like they'd been doing on the other one. But the lightshow here was not as bright and energetic as the other had been.
The both of us looked at the opening in the center of the oval. It shimmered like water in a lake with a growing storm above it.
“You sure you want to do this?” I asked Johnny.
“I already told you I’ll walk through the fires of hell to get Sushi,” he answered me.
“Then let’s do it,” I told him.
A voice came out of the air around us. I recognized it as Jeanette. “You must go through now!” she said. “The gateway is about to close.”
Hell, she’d been watching us the whole way. “Hope you don’t sneak a peak in on someone when they’re taking a dump,” I told her.
“Go through now,” she shouted to us. “And bring my Grandson back so I can slap your jaws for saying that to me.”
“You know you love me Jeanette,” I told her.
Then we took a running dive into the center of the vortex.
CHAPTER 16
Out of the Frying Pan
Diving into the vortex felt something like when I was a teenager and had been visiting some relatives in northern Michigan and took a dare and dove off a dock into the ice cold waters of Lake Michigan in July. The sudden shock of ice cold water all over my body made my muscles spasm and all the air in my lungs had exploded from my mouth on that day. Now, it was the exact opposite.
I felt like I dove right into a hot lava pit. My skin burned like hell. It felt like my flesh was dissolving. I was on fire. All my nerve endings were screaming and I know I must have screamed because of the pain. But I only heard the silence of a vacuum.
I closed my eyes when I dove through and opened them now. Stars and vast yawning distances were all around us. Pitch blackness and points of light and swirling eddies of strange balls of energy floated around us. I couldn’t be sure how close anything was to us. All size is relative to what it is compared to, but out here between the stars, there was nothing to compare anything to.
The only thing that I could tell was close by was Johnny. At least I thought it was him. There was this flaming writhing form of a man where he should be. It looked like the comic book drawing of The Flame from The Fantastic Four. I looked at my own arms and at my own body and it didn’t surprise me that I seemed to be on fire too.
Maybe this jumping through hadn’t been such a good idea. But we were moving. The only way I could tell was that ahead of us, what had been just one more pin point of light was getting larger. Not brighter, just larger. Whatever the thing in front of us was, we were flying toward it.
I wanted to slow down to at least take a look at the thing that was now the size of a dinner plate in front of us. But it was like jumping out of an airplane and deciding you wanted to take a nice slow look at the ground beneath you before smashing into it. We didn’t have parachutes, so there wouldn’t be any slowing down.
I tried to shout something to Johnny. To just hold on for a little while and we’d be out of this. But I knew he wouldn’t hear me. Hell, I couldn’t even hear myself.
Then we were at the thing that had been the size of a dinner plate. It was the size now of the oval we’d dove through. We flew out of it now, or maybe we were spit out of it the way you’d spit out a watermelon seed.
My ears popped and I went to stop my fall with my hands and missed the dirt floor and plowed up the ground with my face. I guess I wasn't cut out for acting like Superman. The dirt didn’t do my forehead any good either. My face wasn’t built for plowing fields.
Johnny came through next, landing on my back with his knees and falling forward over me, he ground my face into the dirt some more with his elbows. He tumbled off to the side and sat up. I pulled my face up out of the dirt.
“Thanks a lot, fuck-head,” I told him. “That’s just what I needed after being fried alive.” My words came out sounding weird. The words tumbling from my lips weren’t the same ones I was hearing in my head.
Johnny stood up and was dusting himself off and answered, “Hey Bro, anytime you want your face stomped in the dirt, let me know and I’ll be on it.” He stopped then. His face wore a perplexed look.
It was probably the same one I had on my face.
“This is fucking weird,” I said and somehow the words I thought seemed a little bit closer to the ones I spoke.
I looked at the clothes Johnny was wearing and pointed at them.
He pointed at my clothes.
He was wearing a rough cloth tunic tied at the waist with a leather belt and sandals. A sh
ort sword was hanging from a scabbard at the belt.
I looked down at what I was wearing. I was wearing clothing very similar to what Johnny had on. A robe tied at the waist of a rough cloth, leather sandals and a sword hung from my side.
We looked around us. We were in a shallow unlit cave. The mouth looked out over green hills. The stone oval behind us was only that, a cold stone oval. The symbols were carved into it, but they weren’t glowing anymore. The center was just an empty space that shone through to a bare wall behind it.
“Shit,” I said. “What the fuck did we get ourselves into here,” And my exterior words seemed to slowly be matching my interior words.
“Well, whatever the fuck we’re in,” Johnny said, “We’re here now. Jeanette said we’d be a part of where we are. I guess the clothes and these weird ass words popping out of our mouths are a part of it.”
“I tell you what,” I said to Johnny. “I don’t mind getting no free clothes, but shit man, I’d rather just do my shopping at K-Mart from now on.”
There was a small leather bag tied to the belt at my hip. It was tied with a drawstring and felt like it had some coins in it. I was hoping those coins were worth quite a bit. I’d jumped into that oval doorway with around eight hundred dollars in my wallet. Now I didn’t even have pockets for a wallet to fit into. I wouldn’t like knowing that eight hundred dollars just vanished into nothing.
* * *
Outside the mouth of the cave a rough dirt road ran down the hill and into a thick forest. We went to the cave’s entrance and looked around.
Where we stood looked more like a small mountain than a hill. To the west of us was water, a hell of a lot of it too. It looked like it was the ocean. Water just went on and on all the way to the horizon.
Sailing ships were out there, but not a kind that I’d ever seen before. They had big square sails and dozens of oars stuck out of both sides of the ships and, in a rhythm to a drum we could hear even from where we were, they stroked the water moving the ships forward.
To the east of us, the mountain on whose side we were on, went off into the distance farther than we could see. Next to that were rolling green hills and we could see the brown roofs of homes in a village on one of the hills. It was too far away to make out any details. Next to that was the forest that the road in front of us ran into.
Looking back and forth between the sailing ships and the village where streamers of smoke drifted into the sky. I said to Johnny, “Hey Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
“No shit, Dorothy, you got that right,” he answered. “Guess we better get our asses on down this road. This is the only way to go and we don’t know how far ahead of us they are, or if they’re on foot.”
We started off down the road in a trot. That lasted maybe fifteen minutes. One of the things I’d carried with me from the other side of the vortex was the bruises to my ribs that Roy Wilson had put there. It wasn’t long before those ribs were talking to me. And Johnny didn’t do much better. It wasn’t long before both of us had degenerated from running to walking at a good pace.
It was day time but angry gray clouds swirled above us and gave everything a gloomy overcast. These damn toga things we had on weren’t none too warm either. In fact the going was downright breezy. I did have on some type of rough cloth underwear to keep the wind off my balls though.
The biggest surprise of the day came just before we entered the forest. I needed to take a piss something terrible. So I stepped off the road, pulled up this robe thing, pulled down these shorts and went to aim Good Charley at the tree in front of me. My hand grabbed more skin than I was used to and when I looked down it looked to me like I had a growth over the end of my dick.
I yelled, “Son of a bitch!” And sprayed piss in a circle around me in the surprise at seeing the head of my dick covered.
Johnny danced back from the flying piss. “What in the hell is wrong with you?” He shouted.
I pointed at my dick while I finished pissing.
“It’s different,” I told him.
“Yeah, well you’re a white boy. It sure as hell is different than mine,” he said. Then he looked in his shorts. “Oh shit,” Johnny said and I think he went a shade paler.
He went to the other side of the road and examined his own dick closer, muttering to himself, “What the fuck is this."
It hit me then; I put my dick back into my underwear and over my shoulder asked Johnny, “were you circumcised?”
“Sir-sir-sir…what the fuck?”
“Circumcised? They do it to baby boys where they cut a little bit of the foreskin off. I think it keeps down infections or some shit like that,” I told him.
“Fuck, I don’t know. I don’t remember shit that happened to me when I was a baby,” Johnny said.
“I bet we were,” I told him. “And I don’t think we are now.”
We came to the forest's edge and entered the woods.
“I'm really going to have to fuck this guy up that grabbed Sushi and those other broads,” Johnny said. “Man, when you start messing with my dick, that’s when things get personal.”
“You got that right,” I told Johnny. “Hell, you can skin me alive and I might not even notice it. But when you start playing around with Old Man Johnson you best have a pussy and a smile on your face or you’re in some serious trouble.”
Just as we stepped into the shade of the forest the clouds broke loose with some lightning and thunder putting on a nice light show for us. Then a heavy rain poured down.
The drops of water seemed to be about the size of quarters when they hit you on the head. Being under the trees, we weren’t getting soaked but enough water was getting through so that we knew it was raining. Cold rain too. Where ever we’d popped out at, after coming through that portal or gate or whatever the hell it was, I was betting we were not in the tropics.
The road through the forest was overgrown so much that we could tell it wasn’t used very often. If it wasn’t for the relatively straight line of it and the thickness of trees on both sides, the road would have been hard to follow. Except for the width of the road, I would be calling it a trail instead.
Neither one of us knows anything about following tracks in the wilderness so I was happy this road appeared to be more or less permanent. As we went deeper into the woods one of the things that hit me was the sheer abundance of bugs and wildlife around us.
What I was used to, and not that I hung out in the woods a lot, was the overgrown spots around East St. Louis and Cahokia. As far as bugs, we had mosquitoes and that’s about it. Any other bugs, except for gnats and flies, you had to look for.
Here, bugs were all over the place. Not that they were flying in my face, but they were making noises that you knew were bug noises, noises that couldn’t be nothing but bug noises. These weren’t just crickets either.
We heard those, but there were a thousand other bugs calling to each other that I’d never heard before. I sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep on the ground in these woods.
As we were moving along I also caught the glint of animal eyes looking at us from the lush foliage on both sides of the road. Sometimes I heard the animals, startled by us, running off crashing through the weeds. More than a few times I caught sight of animals that I couldn’t identify. There were birds all over too. Chirping and whistling to each other. Some of those were familiar to me. Others I’d never heard before.
The smells in this forest were luxurious. Sweet smelling flowers and strong musty smells came off the trees and weeds. And something else, I didn’t smell any kind of engine exhaust. It’s the kind of thing we live with and don’t notice but engine exhaust makes the air smell dead or used up. The air I was breathing now smelled good. It was full of oxygen. This air made you feel good just breathing it.
Well, at least I didn’t see any six-armed green men or Martian princesses or shit like that. So I figured we were at least still on Earth. Though I didn’t have a clue where.
We mu
st have moved through the forest for maybe about an hour or an hour and a half, half trotting or walking fast when the forest came to an abrupt end.
Night came suddenly and without warning. In the gloom of the forest with the rain coming down we hadn’t even known that it was evening. Now, in the dark, we knew we left the trees behind because the rain came down on us unimpeded.
We left the forest and immediately realized it was going to be next to impossible to follow the road. We couldn’t hardly even see the ground, much less tell the difference between the height of the grass in the road verses what was on the sides of it.
Looking ahead we could see a dim glow in the distance.
The rain rapidly soaked us to the bone.
Johnny grabbed my shoulder and pointed to the glow. I could barely make him out in the dark. “That’s where they’ve got to be,” he said.
“If they went anywhere else,” I told him. “We’ve lost them already.”
We set off toward the glow ahead that either had to be a camp or a town.
If anybody ever asks you to take a walk in the rain with them in sandals and a toga, I’d advise you to go tell them to go fuck themselves. Walking in the rain in the kind of clothes we had on was cold business.
By the time we could tell what the glow ahead was, I was even more pissed off about this situation than I’d started out being. I was cold, wet, and shivering and I wanted to kill something, hell, anything.
On the last stretch we walked that night, I pulled the sword from the scabbard and gave it a few experimental swings just to see how it felt. The thing that was strange was that the sword in my hand felt good. It felt like I’d held this sword and used it many times. I was going down the road parrying and slashing at an imaginary opponent and the blade in my hand felt familiar, like I’d been trained on how to use it and had killed with it many times before.
I knew I had never picked up a sword in my life, but when I was shadow sword-fighting, muscle memory seemed to be taking over. I was doing quick effortless movements that were ingrained inside of me. I didn’t have a clue where I’d got the knowledge of how to handle a sword. But I did have the feeling I’d be grateful for this knowledge soon.