A Rag Doll's Guide to Here and There

by Richard Roberts

  Its clawing, writhing, shapeless arms also erased the words “Sandy Golding”, and the nearest row of funny angular houses, and on the other side a tiny tree with a crude sun over it. The monster left gouges in the grass, and splashed puddles all around.

  Not for long. As it reared up on the top of the wall again, the dripping water slid upward after it, sucked back into the mass.

  There hadn’t been time to help Sandy, but now I ran to her. I had no idea what we could do, except maybe back up some more. What was our attacker’s reach?

  It hadn’t hit Sandy last time, and now it rose up, twisting from side to side, sparkling and beautiful and entirely malicious. Arms reformed, slapping at the parapets, and a distinctly Little Miss Snippybritches voice gargled, “I can’t see anything! Where are they?”

  One person hadn’t yelled. The shrivener, its job done, had turned around and walked back inside. The water monster wouldn’t get any help there.

  Girl Running got our attention by jumping up and down on a rooftop, pointing with both arms in jabbing motions back towards the river. “Run!” she yelled, “This way! Follow me! We’re getting out of here! Come on, faster! I know where we can go!”

  She did run, out around the curve of Port Rait’s encircling wall, pointing insistently back behind her the whole way. She kept pointing back in the opposite direction the whole time.

  The monster followed her, slapping at the wall a couple of times. I winced at the beautiful drawings getting erased. Hopefully none of them were alive.

  Anyway, I had a hint to take, a pleasant new experience I would rather have reserved for a less dire moment. Tugging on Sandy’s hand, I pulled her toward the river, following Girl Running’s gestures, not her spoken advice.

  Sandy had gotten it instantly, of course. She remained silent as we ran away from the water elemental? Fake water elemental? A thought to pursue when I had time. Tumbles was not as fast on the uptake, and I had to give him a push in the right direction.

  My heroine, always noble, tried to scoop me up as she ran, but hobbling as she was, I pulled ahead out of reach. If my little legs could run faster than her, she didn’t need the extra burden.

  We had no need of her height to cross the river. The water elemental had sucked the river up the wall, and we had a path of merely damp mud to run over. We could even have climbed up the wall itself, if we felt spectacularly unwise.

  On the other side of the river, Port Rait was… pretty much the same, except the wall ran flat instead of bulging out in a huge circle. Same regularly spaced gates. Same dips in the upper edge that made it look like a line broken into dashes, the way it had been drawn on my maps.

  Sandy winced, and so did I. She was limping visibly now. Every look of pain cut right through me, but all I could do was keep myself and Tumbles out of her self-sacrificing reach.

  We made it to the first gate. The inner portcullis was closed, but nobody manned the customs desk.

  For all the monster or the shriveners knew, we could have run back to the burning Library Tree. This was as safe as we were going to get. I patted the underside of the customs office counter, and suggested, “Sit down, Sandy. Please.”

  I was quite prepared to beg, if it came to that.

  Of course, no sooner had she sat down and lifted her feet off the ground than her pleasant sigh was interrupted. A loud click sounded from in the office, and I jumped up, grabbing the counter edge and pulling myself onto it.

  The inner door of the customs office had opened, and Girl Running slid around the corner of the door frame. “You guys made it! I knew it would work, although I didn’t expect you to be so slow. It was easy for me because once the monster was chasing me, I just had to run until some other paintings started to yell and then I ducked inside Port Rait and who would know? So here I am, and come on, you wanted into the town, right?”

  With a slight groan, Sandy swung around to the other side of the desk, and into the nearly bare office. Really, there wasn’t even any decent filing. Was this what shriveners called order? As Sandy limped to the open door, I helped Tumbles climb over the counter, so she wouldn’t have to.

  Only a faint strain of discomfort shaded the amusement in Sandy’s next question. “There’s a door from the office right into the city? That seems like it ruins the whole point of having gates.”

  I pondered. “Only if your reason for having gates is to keep people out. If you just like having the exits well defined, a security—”

  “YEEEE!” screeched Sandy, recoiling from the open door.

  I looked past her and through it. “Oh, my.”

  The thing on the other side reminded me of a huge and fantastically ugly marionette. It was way taller than even Sandy, with a boxy metal head, long tubular body, and short arms and legs. The tail was more or less an extension of the body, and all the bits were covered by a badly fitting plastic alligator costume.

  Girl Running, turning right angles as she went up and over the top and down the other side of the door frame, chattered, “Don’t be afraid of him. That’s just Gatey the Gator, and I had to get him to open the door, I mean look at me, do you think I can open doors myself? I can’t even squeeze myself onto the floor, and I’ve tried, and it’s a shame because it would be super useful, but I just get dizzy and fall back onto the wall.”

  Sandy paused, frowning as she processed all of this. Standing up straight, she held out her hand. “Thank you for helping us, Mister Gator. My name is Sandy. You’re actually cute, you know that? Like a theme park attraction.”

  The plastic-covered creature didn’t answer, so Girl Running answered for him “Oh, you don’t have to thank him, Sandy the Human, he’s just one of the dancers here in Port Rait and they’re probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever met wandering Here, which isn’t meant to be an insult but the poor things can barely do what they’re told and that’s it.”

  “Hyuk hyuk hyuk,” said Gatey the Gator in a gritty voice even Brenda would have found unconvincing. He swiveled around smoothly, revealing that he wasn’t even standing, just held up on a metal post in a groove in the street outside. With no further conversation, he slid away. It looked like Girl Running was correct, and further conversation hadn’t been an option.

  Poor thing. Well, better than being a sheep, I guess. I would have had to strain to be a better conversationalist than Gatey myself, before Sandy’s glasses.

  We got our first good look at Port Rait, and a vivid reminder that the shriveners were not evil, merely obedient. Left on their own, they’d given Here this.

  The city moved. It might even have been alive. Dancers whisked through the streets on their rails. Fountains turned in place. The pavements themselves bobbed up and down, to the tune of a faint, brassy oomph oomph oomp from farther inside. The buildings had elaborate fronts, pink and white, yellow and cream, blinding colors in stripes and rectangles within rectangles decorating doors and windows. The buildings weren’t flat, either. Bay windows and small towers stuck out from the walls. Awnings overhung porches whose chairs bounced to the rhythm, rearranging themselves in a complicated line dance.

  Down on the other side of this square, I saw two whole buildings gracefully switch places. Actual people type dancers drifted, twirling, along the grooves left by the rearranging landscape. Sometimes they let out squeaks or roars in time to the music. They fitted into the rhythm of Port Rait perfectly.

  We, unfortunately, did not. I tried walking out onto the pavement, and fell from one section to another as the one I stood on rose, and the one in front of me sank. Tumbledown flailed his arms and shouted, “Rar!” in panic when the little square he occupied detached from us and headed down toward the center of town. Fortunately, Sandy was heroically swift and caught him by the hand, pulling him back to us.

  Our own pavement decided to join the circling. Tumbles and I crowded close to Sandy’s legs, while Girl Running really lived up to her name, sprinting across storefronts and leaping from windowsill to windowsill to keep up.

 
; I considered our predicament. “A novel method of transport, but a safe one. Miss Sandy, if we just stand here, eventually—”

  And with that, a building facade decided to fold up, dropping a quite large post on top of me. I barely saw it coming. Dark shadows swept over me, and then whoomp, extreme heaviness occurred, flattening everything from my chin down.

  Thank goodness that did not include my glasses! My relief was palpable, which was another good word I should remember for the future. Unfortunately, the rest of me was also palpable, as in getting mashed up. Oh my, ow, this was not comfortable at all.

  “Heartfelt!” Sandy squealed. She scooped Tumbles into her basket, and leaped from bobbing street to undulating sidewalk, heroically grabbing my head and tugging me with little sideways jerks, determined but not so hard that they would tear me. Each one worked me a little farther free. When my shoulders were out, I tried to tell her how much I admired her strategy. Alas, my squished body produced nothing but a wheeze.

  When she did get me loose, I found that all residual water and mud from my legs had been pressed free. That minor benefit was overwhelmed by my flattened limbs moving only in clumsy jerks, refluffing my cotton only one tightly mashed lump at a time.

  Hopping from stone to stone away from the folded up building, Sandy lifted me to her face, closed her mouth over mine, and blew, hard.

  Floomp!

  Dazed, I waggled an arm suddenly returned to roundness. “Oh, my. This must be what a flops feels like.” I could actually feel my fluff rolling around in my inflated interior, expanding bit by bit.

  “Are you okay, Heartfelt?” Sandy asked, peering into my face with an expression of anxious concern.

  “An excellent question,” I squeaked, my voice all high and whispery. “My glasses are intact. My plastic heart appears to be soft enough that your intervention has pressed it back into shape. My book is downright immune to compression.” I didn’t even have to check on that last one. I’d felt its hard, rectangular shape helping to crush me!

  She grimaced, tucking me under one arm, and hopped from pavement to pavement. “I’m carrying you two the rest of the way. This place is dangerous.”

  “No, Miss Sandy.” Contradicting her hurt worse than the accident, but pressing my hands against her shoulder in token resistance helped settle my will. “I’m sure you have that exactly backwards. If that had been you getting squished, you would be hurt badly. Even Tumbles would merely have had to worry about his candle going out. You are the most vulnerable person here, and in any case, I can see you wince with every step.”

  Guilt flashed over her face, and deprived her of an answer.

  Scanning the walls with my enhanced vision, I pointed at an approaching facade. “There! Take us inside. I see a stable interior and a chair.”

  When we slid past the shiny white shop, it took merely two bounds of Sandy’s enormously long legs to get us through its doorway. Needing no further urging, she set myself and the basket on the checkered tile floor, walked straight over to the heavily cushioned chair, and collapsed into it.

  It was quite a chair. Not a fully upholstered armchair, but made out of metal and stuck into the floor, with thick red pillows sewn onto the seat, and the back, and the arms, and even a little pad behind Sandy’s head. Her feet fit onto a metal plate, while the whole thing fastened right into the floor via a heavy pole. Its structure supported my theory of this building’s safety. It simply would not be possible to fold up over that chair, and the room had two more like it.

  In fact, I quite liked this strange little shop. The paintings from outside Port Rait continued on one of its inner walls, while the opposite wall held a row of large mirrors. Sandy’s chair sat next to one, as did the other two chairs, forming a neat line. Little tables fit under the mirrors. Perhaps this was a dining establishment, and the mirrors allowed whoever to enjoy the art and their meal at the same time? The furniture was certainly sized for a human, and humans were more concerned with food than anyone else I had heard of. Yes, that all made sense. We were in a specialty dining salon!

  That reminded me. Shaking my arms to reinvigorate my fluff, I said, “Miss Sandy, your hunger must be acute. Combined with your pain, I advise you to rest here, and let me go out and find food. Between my natural resistance to squeezing, and the intelligence you gave me with your magic, I’m sure I can figure this place out. I will return with nourishment post haste.”

  Sandy massaged one of her feet with her thumbs, having twisted her leg to pull that foot into her lap. Tumbles earnestly tried to rub the bottom of the other foot with his stubbier, more bouncy fingers. Staring at me with one of those peculiar human expressions, Sandy asked, “Are you sure you’re not the hero, Heartfelt?”

  I was almost ready for that question. “Yes. Entirely sure. This is running an errand, which is exactly what sidekicks are for. You don’t have to do everything. You only have to do the biggest things, and even then not alone. Thanks to you, I am able to perform basic chores like fetching food, even in this challenging environment.”

  “Tumbles can stay and guard me,” suggested Sandy, putting her hand on the dargon’s head. An illicit thrill of prevarication ran through me. Yes, the brave young dargon lacked the wisdom to negotiate these mean streets, and was frankly even clumsier than me. With heroic thoughtfulness, Sandy had given him a reason to stay safe.

  Question: Were shriveners flammable? They did like those cloaks. Even a candle’s puff of flame is enough if it’s used on something that keeps on burning.

  Oh, my. What a terrible thought. Clearly, Pincushion’s desperate urgency to defend her hero’s interests at any cost was a bad influence. I was so fortunate that Sandy was the kind of hero who would resolve any confrontations I missed with properly heroic love and gentleness.

  As I stepped into the doorway again, Girl Running said, “I’m a known associate so I’ll go run around all over town and maybe out along the wall and let someone see me so that they’ll chase after me and won’t even know you’re here and the heat will be off. It was really great to meet you not just because you’re a human Sandy and I hope we get to meet again someday. Bye!”

  And with that, Girl Running ran around the door jam and out of sight.

  Sandy watched her go, her mouth pensively tight. “In and out of my life. I’m used to only having a few friends. Making friends and losing them again is disconcerting.”

  “It’s her nature, Miss Sandy. You can’t change who she is. Although, come to think of it, you probably could change who she is, if you really wanted. I’m not certain how. Would you have to redraw her? Is it foolish of me to even try to anticipate human magic?” I drifted off into speculation, only to be snapped out of it when I saw Sandy wince as she rubbed a particularly sore spot on her foot.

  Responsibility, Heartfelt! You’re only technically a fluff head now! Snapping a salute with one hand, I declared, “I’ll bring you back food as soon as possible. You can rely on me.” Then I ran out onto the street.

  Of course, the street immediately swept me away, but now I needed only watch out to make sure nothing crushed me, and examine the patterns. There would be patterns. Shriveners loved order, after all.

  On the second lap around, it became clear to me that this was navigable. Most of the pavements merely circled around. The buildings… those, I had no idea. The ones that folded and unfolded were too complicated. Staying away from them was important, because they constituted the biggest physical threat. The second biggest danger came from dancers, who spun around a lot and did not look where they were going. A heavily plated yellow thing whacked me quite hard on the back of the head with his tail once, and after that I took care to watch them, since they wouldn’t watch me.

  Alright. I had the basics. Now to do something a bit more complicated. When I spun around to a street, I hopped onto a twisty loop of pavements that ran along one end of our circle, then out into the city.

  This was a bit more complicated. The blocks moved fast, and went up and down in
tempo to a much faster melody than the tune back where we entered the town. And worse…

  Yikes! I jumped, and grabbed a rectangle of street looming in front of me. Pulling myself up onto it, I shivered. Okay, this was definitely riskier. Instead of just a simple loop, the forward and back paths actually crisscrossed under each other. I had almost been jammed into a tiny opening and crushed, and what would that have done to my glasses? Nothing good!

  Okay, but now I knew. Hopping back onto the forward path, I watched it whirl me up toward the gap, pulled myself up while the step was still small, and hopped over to the other side. Yes, this was totally navigable! I could actually have made it quite easily by clinging to one of the dancers, who slid through carefully timed gaps, but that wasn’t a strategy Sandy would be able to use when I led her along later.

  On the other end of the street I crossed into one of many little circles in a huge, semi-open area. The river ran off the walls and right through here, with a whole line of long, skinny yellow boats tied to this side.

  A dock! That might be quite useful…. later. Right now, of course, I needed to find food.

  First thing was to hop onto the flat, still boardwalk by the river. Once there, I could tap my chin contemplatively. “Items of evidence. I see benches, and paths that do not move. This would appear to be a visitor’s area, allowing travelers to safely stop in Port Rait. That street over there looks simple and slow moving, and no doubt leads to the gate by which we originally failed to enter. Travelers need feeding and places to sleep. There should be an inn of some kind nearby. Perhaps I should ask?”

  I was not alone, after all. Half a dozen clothlings were adjusting the ropes tying a boat to the shore, and unloading its packages one at a time while writing down inventories on a notepad. They would certainly know where to find an inn, but… they also worked officially for Port Rait. Even if they weren’t shriveners, they would have to obey those shriveners.