Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Read online

  Once or twice I jumped just in the hope that maybe I would smash my legs and not my head, and get a chance to talk to the men in the diving suits.

  8. I Still Miss Those Five Bars

  I mentioned the psychological trick with the meat. The thinness of the bars on the round hole piercing the cell roof was another psychological trick. I would climb from wall-spike to wall-spike up to the ceiling, and wait, sometimes for hours, for one of the upper spikes to telescope open, giving me a chance to swing or balance on it, and jump and grab the thin bars of the upper grate.

  There I would hang, with the lower opening very open below my toes, and either clouds or cityscape below, or, at night, elfin city lights. And I was strong enough, at least before I lost muscle mass, to begin to bend the bars. I could start to work them out of their sockets. They did not seem very firmly fixed in.

  And whenever one was about to come loose, another bar would grow out of the rim of the opening and take its place, or near enough. Like the spikes coming from the walls, it made no noise, and it did not move particularly fast. Sometimes, it was downright slow, almost lingering, so you would think you might get one more bar free in time before the escape closed up again.

  But like the men waiting when I jumped, the bar always slid sardonically across the opening I’d made at or before the right time.

  And the number of times my hands slipped and I fell out the bottom of the birdcage away through the cold, high air and toward another few weeks or months of brokenbonedom, accounts for roughly half my plunges.

  I knew there were people around, somewhere. I was never conscious when they dragged me back into the cell. I tried to keep a bar I had pulled with so much pain and effort over such a long time out of the overhead hatch, but there was no place to hide them, and someone always took them while I was out falling or being carried unconscious back up. I hated that more than anything. I deserved those bars. They were mine. I had collected five of them. Five! And one I had sharpened into a passable shiv by scraping it for hours against the metal walls. I loved my five broken bars. I swore to myself I’d find them again.

  I did not spend as much time crying as you might think. No water means no tears after a while. I am not sure if I mentioned one reason why I kept jumping out. I was trying to get to that river.

  So I was not thinking straight, not for eternity.

  9. Crazytown, Population: Me

  The pain of living with broken bones and no casts, no splits, no morphine helped with my little excursions into the fringes of Crazytown: I would lie there with all my limbs broken, delirious with pain. Sometimes the bones grew back crooked, sometimes straight. The only other medicine was to try to shove my head into a spike so that it would pierce my brain and bring a blissful darkness of dreamless sleep.

  It seemed like I could heal back from anything, but I also did not, not at first, heal back any faster than a normal mortal. Often I pondered why my chest wound on that first day healed almost instantly. I did not know, but I assumed it was the Oobleck helping.

  Once, an expanding spike telescoped out too quickly for me in my exhausted state to dodge, but it did not impale me firmly enough to keep me on the tip. With my feet dangling above the hungry hole, I struggled a moment, and pulled the painful shaft into my midriff, so that I felt the cold metal in my guts. Still I pulled, eager to be safely higher on the shaft, farther from the drop. The flesh of my back was slowly puckered out of shape into a tent as I drove the spike harder, and then the skin of my back tore, and the spike was all the way through me…

  The cell had succeeded in getting me to torture myself. And kill myself, over and over. The cell was conditioning me, shaping me to the will of the Dark Tower.

  The spike retracted so suddenly that I was slammed against the spikes of the wall, and cut in a dozen places.

  Shouting in rage, next I tried to throw myself out of the hole, and, perhaps as a joke, one of the spikes (the one I named Spike Jones) snapped open suddenly enough to impale me painfully through the calf of my lower right leg, passing neatly between my tibia and fibula, so that my weight did not simply rip the spike through my leg and let me drop. Instead, the impaling spike caught me neatly and prevented my fall.

  I was too weak, and still had too many unhealed broken bones, to do a midair sit-up and somehow inch my pierced leg off the spike pole. The retraction of the spikes was arbitrary, so I did not know if this one would pull back after a minute or after a day.

  In this case, I hung there for hours, head downward, screaming at first, then crying, then praying, while drips and drops of blood and sweat flew out the hole below and into the world of floating clouds and carefree birds.

  Then the sun sank and the world turned dark, and my blood dripped toward a city made of horrible rectilinear squares I wanted to destroy and a river I wanted to drink.

  And a second spike decided at that precise moment to expand and thrust me through the side, into my lungs and heart. I recognized it (since I had given them all names) as Lee.

  That was when something in my mind snapped, and I started laughing.

  There I was pinned painfully through the calf with a second bar running through my sensitive, squishy, bloody internal organs, and I started laughing.

  And I sang a hymn. Sorry, I don’t remember the title or who wrote it. I don’t even recall all the lyrics. Never can recall the second stanza. I used to sing or hum it to myself while I was doing yardwork on hot days, pushing that darned push mower and wondering why, since our backyard was so huge, we could not afford a power mower.

  Ye holy Angels bright,

  Who wait at God’s right hand,

  Or thro’ the realms of light

  Fly at your Lord’s command,

  Assist our song,

  Or else the theme

  Too high doth seem

  For mortal tongue.

  Ye saints, who toil below,

  Adore your heav’nly King,

  And onward as ye go

  Some joyful anthem sing;

  Take what he gives

  And praise him still,

  Through good or ill,

  Who ever lives!

  My soul, bear thou thy part,

  Triumph in God above;

  And with a well-tuned heart

  Sing thou the songs of love!

  Let all thy days

  Till life shall end,

  Whate’er He send,

  Be fill’d with praise!

  You see, I sang it because otherwise I would start swearing and cursing like Alexei when it was his turn to mow.

  It reminded me to suck it up, be a man, and stop whining.

  Maybe you can see why I laughed, despite the impaling spike tearing my insides when my lungs moved, so that I coughed blood with each laugh. I was hanging upside-down in my own personal stratosphere-high hell of loneliness, starvation, insanity, self-mutilation, thirst and pain, and remembering how much I hated the push mower.

  Maybe you cannot see it. Maybe I had just permanently emigrated to Crazytown. But I felt more sane and more alert than I had ever since the eternity of pain began.

  Then and there, I started praying fervently to God and Jesus and Mary and Joseph and every saint I could recall, and some I made up.

  The spikes eventually retracted and dropped me on my head. I missed the hole, somehow, and scrambled to safety, taking that as a good sign.

  And still I prayed, every prayer I could think of, children’s prayers and men’s prayers, the Canticle of Mary, freeform prayer, praises, complaints, Bible stories, babbling, anything. I just kept going.

  No miracles happened that night. God did not send anyone.

  No answer.

  What did I have to lose? I did not stop. I was in hell. Why not pray?

  I know a lot of the cool kids at school look down their noses at praying and meditating, but I can tell you that when you have nothing else to do and nothing else you can do, praying is a lot better use of your time than slowly drowning in t
he mud of misery.

  10. The End of Eternity

  Eternity was still passing slowly, but something had changed.

  I said a lot of rosaries. It is a good way to pass the time, and if my Mom was watching, I’d want her to think her son had finally gotten serious about his religion.

  Of course, I had no beads, so I used the spike tips to keep track of which prayer I was on. And instead of saying the normal routine of five decades of Hail Mary and five Our Father for the Dolorous Mysteries, Joyous Mysteries and Glorious Mysteries, I said twenty-four, so that by the time I had recited all three Mysteries, I had counted three hundred sixty spike points. The remaining five spikes I assigned to the Sign of the Cross, the Apostle’s Creed, the Fatima Prayer, the Hail, Holy Queen. I was not sure if the part where you say we may both imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise is considered a separate prayer or part of the Hail, Holy Queen.

  So at first, I tried to use that last spike for the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but I kept getting stuck at one spot: Mystical rose, Tower of David, Tower of ivory, House of gold, Ark of the covenant, Gate of heaven, Morning star…

  What title comes after Morning star?

  It’s Comfort of something, then Refuge of something else. Help of Christians. I could sure use some help, you know. Then a bunch of Queens. Queen of Angels, Queen of Patriarchs, Queen of Prophets, I could not remember it all. I wondered if she were queen in this somewhither world, or if this world was ruled by parallel evil Virgin Mary who dressed in black and showed a lot of cleavage. Would the rules of physics be the same in all worlds? What about the rules of morality? What if this was the version of Earth where there were only Nine Commandments, and everyone worked on Sunday?

  And why, exactly, is the Virgin Mary the Morning star? Or a Tower of ivory?

  So I finally decided to use the last spike for saying the Memorare of Saint Bernard (yes, he was a real saint and not just a dog).

  You see, I had a lot of time to ponder these things in my heart. A whole lot of time.

  Slowly, I noticed that my healing rate seemed to speed up as I prayed. I assume the cells in my body were responding to my thoughts, my frame of mind, just like the Oobleck between worlds. Breaks that should have taken weeks or months to heal were gone in a day.

  This cheered me immensely. I decided that if I were trapped here for eternity, I would spend the rest of my existence just praising God and praying and practicing reaching a clear and unattached zen state of mind.

  What else should I have done? Climbed out? Jumped to my death? Been there, done that. Didn’t work.

  I had the plan, since I was apparently able to regenerate flesh and bone, of seeing if I could flay myself alive, sew together my own cured flesh as a kind of parachute, and use bones ripped out of my arms and legs to act as a yard-arm to stiffen the parachute, and then fly to safety. Nothing much came of that plan. You try and flay your skin off yourself just using your fingernails and teeth without fainting from the pain. That plan was soon abandoned.

  My other plan was to practice sword forms, do pushups and situps, jog in place until the glowing wooden floorboards threatened to crack, and use an imaginary sword to fence with the unexpected stabs and jabs of the spikes. Slowly, I grew stronger.

  I eventually found a way to get a good night’s sleep, although the solution was a hideous one. I would lie down with my feet facing the hole and my arms stretched overhead, and jam my hands, palm first, onto two adjacent spikes in the bottom rank. If those two spikes decided to expand as I slept, all I had to do was close my fingers and hang on to save myself from a drop. If their immediate neighbors decided to expand, sometimes the spike pole would slide by me to my left or right without piercing my skin or pushing me out the hole to wake me. So I only had to worry about a small group of seven spikes out of three hundred or so. My odds of an undisturbed sleep were about one in fifty. And it made me look in the morning a bit like Saint Francis.

  I found I could slake my thirst in the morning by drinking my own blood from my hands. Gross, I know, but I did it. I lived. I survived through eternity.

  Eventually eternity ended. Something happened.

  11. Water

  The blue light stopped. The floor went out.

  There was a flare of multicolored peacock light right over my head, and a lettuce, nice and fresh and eatable, fell through the bars of the ceiling and hit the floor. The head of lettuce began to roll toward the big round hole in the floor.

  I scrambled after it.

  There were two heads of lettuce the second day, and, on the third, a loaf of crispy golden bread as long as my forearm, like a French baguette. The fourth day included a cluster of dates and a wedge of soft cheese, maybe goat cheese or Brie.

  Each time, the process was the same. The lampwood floorboards would stop shining, and the multicolored fire of a Moebius coil would burn around the upper opening. Someone or something on the other side would drop food.

  On the fifth day, there was a new twist. A dimple of metal forming a spout poked over the golden rim of the upper opening, and a trickle of water started running in some place in the space above the cell where I could not see, and I was tormented with the sound of it for a time, but then a silver thread appeared, hanging between the upper and the lower openings, and I scrambled so eagerly toward it, that I nearly toppled headlong into the air once again.

  Chapter Ten: The Lord of Magicians

  1. The Interrogation

  So I was not surprised in the least when, on the seventh day, an old man appeared in the chamber above mine.

  I say I was not surprised, because the only reason my unseen jailors had for feeding me was to get me in good enough shape to be questioned, or tortured. Tortured more. They wanted me to be coherent enough to answer questions.

  When I say he appeared, I mean he appeared out of the twilight. All the lampwood under my feet went dark, and the Moebius coil set into the upper hatchway lit up. The bars forming the upper grating retracted silently. It was now open, and me with no way to get up there to get out.

  A black ball of darkness appeared in the dead center of the gold-rimmed gap, and it swelled up and filled the hole, but no sudden rush of hurricane winds occurred. I heard a high-pitched whistling like the noise a teakettle makes, but that was all.

  When the orb of darkness shrank and vanished, I saw there was something new in the chamber above me: a golden chair sitting on my roof, and a man on it, peering down through his slippers at me through the hole.

  (In theory, any object ‘Moebius-coiled’ into my continuum should have materialized directly over my head, in the middle of the black sphere. How they managed to land the old man in his gold chair off to one side was a mystery to me. Maybe topspin?)

  There was an old man hidden in black robes seated on a golden throne atop the ceiling above my cell, peering down at me, the way a Collie dog might peer down a well into which Timmy the farmer’s son had fallen.

  He wore a metal cylinder on his head, like a fez made of gold. I suppose it was a crown, but to me it looked like a yellow coffee pot.

  Beneath him was a chair of state made of black ebony and bright gold. The armrests were winged bulls with the heads of bearded kings. Spears of black and gold rose to either side of him, and held a canopy over his head, and the canopy was woven with the signs of the zodiac. I recognized those spears as the snake-like Moebius coil machines, twins to the one that had flown in through the Professor’s handmade model so long ago, during the life I lived before my life in the cage. It seemed as long ago to me as the world before the Ice Age. A film of twilight shimmered from them.

  The man himself was ancient. I could tell from the way he sat and held himself, even though every part of him was gloved or mantled or robed in darkest black. His face was hidden beneath a veil, so only a narrow band showing his eyes was visible. I wondered if there was breathing gear of some sort under the veil.

  “No,” I said, before he could speak.

 
His eyes were the saddest, weariest eyes I have ever seen in a human being.

  Looking at those eyes, I felt a strange sensation in my stomach, as if I had swallowed a bucket of earthworms.

  “Whatever you mean to ask,” I said, “The answer is no.”

  He spoke. Duhumnamar shatar shutittu… As before, I understood the language without understanding how I understood. “The Dark Tower tells and foretells. Have you heard what the Dark Tower tells you, Ilya of the Host of the Undying?”

  His voice was thin and quivering, and yet possessed of a stern authority such as I had never heard before. Many, many people try to speak in voices that sound like they have no doubt: presidents, public speakers, officers. He actually had it. It almost did not sound human. Human beings always have some little droplet of doubt somewhere in their veins. Not him.

  And his voice was even more hopeless than his eyes. It was painful to hear.

  It made me sad that I felt sad for this guy, when all I wanted to do was kill him, and the only weapon I had with me was an icicle I had managed to grow overnight from my brand new water supply, and five date pits. The icicle was eight inches long and pretty sharp.

  Instead of answering, I threw one of the date pits at him. It plinked against the fabric of the knee of his black robe. His eyes did not look surprised, merely weary. Infinitely weary.

  He waited for me to answer.

  I threw the other date pits at him. I managed to hit his hat with a particularly good throw, but did not knock it askew. If only I had had a sling like David in the Bible, I could have put a pit through his skull and killed him. As it was, he did not even seem annoyed.