IF: Gods and Monsters Read online

  IF

  Clayton Smith

  Part III: Gods and Monsters

  Chapter 1:

  In Which Our Story Becomes a Little Watered Down

  The Stranger tumbled across the lintel, huge globs of peanut butter spattering the rocky ground around his boots as he landed smoothly on the bluff. The children toppled after him, somewhat less gracefully, bouncing through the gateway between dreams and collapsing in sticky brown lumps at the Stranger’s boots.

  “Ugh,” Cole moaned, hauling himself to his feet and pawing at the thick layer of creamy peanut butter that coated his entire body. “Gross.”

  “My dress!” Polly screeched. “My dress is ruined!” That, Cole thought, was really the least of her worries, seeing as how her entire face, including her eyes, was cemented over. Well, maybe not her entire face…her mouth seemed to be working pretty well. “I hate being dirty!” she bawled.

  Emma scooped a handful of peanut butter from her cheek and popped it into her mouth. “Mmmm,” she said through a sticky smile. “Ifsh rearry guf!”

  “It’s horrible!” Polly insisted. She scraped the peanut butter away from her eyes and saw just how fully her entire being was coated in sticky, sweet peanut butter. She let out an agonizing shriek.

  “Don’t be such a weirdo,” Willy said, running his tongue around his lips. Then he shook like a dog, and flecks of peanut butter sprayed out in all directions, splattering his classmates.

  “It tastes all-natural,” Etherie observed, sucking the sticky stuff thoughtfully from one finger. “It’s the palm oil in processed peanut butter that’s really worth screaming about.”

  “At least it isn’t chunky,” Cole added helpfully.

  “Yeah—I hate chunky!” Willy cried.

  “I meant if it were chunky, we’d be bruised up,” Cole sighed. “We should count ourselves lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Polly fumed. “Does my dress look lucky to you?!”

  “Be grateful we made it out alive,” the Stranger said gravely. “If nothing else, that was lucky.” And none of them could disagree. Not even Polly.

  The new world where they now stood was stark, and beautiful. They were standing on a plateau of layered brown stone that seemed to be floating in the air, like a flying island. There was a pool of water on the platform, just a few dozen feet from where the group stood. Water bubbled up into it from some hidden spring down below, then swirled lazily in slow, calm eddies…but when the water reached the far end of the pool, it picked up speed and rushed over the edge of the cliff, in a long waterfall that dropped for hundreds of feet before crashing onto another floating platform of stone below.

  The whole thing made Cole’s toes tingle.

  “Where did we go through?” Cole asked the cowboy, scraping the peanut butter out of his hair. “Did we go the right way?”

  The Stranger shook his head. “Not sure. Got pretty turned around in there. We’ll get cleaned up, and I’ll check the map.” He pulled off his peanut buttery hat and reached inside the brim, pulling out a mostly clean handkerchief. He mopped his face with it until he could see clearly, then strode toward the pool of water.

  Just watching him get near the water made Cole’s stomach drop. “Be careful!” he cried, almost involuntarily.

  “Don’t be such a baby!” Willy shouted, plodding after the Stranger. Etherie followed, also unconcerned, but Polly and Emma both seemed to share his fear, which Cole believed to be thoroughly justified. If the idea of losing his footing in a pond and being swept away down a waterfall to the thundering crash of water on boulders half a mile below wasn’t worth a little healthy fear, Cole didn’t know what was.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Etherie said in that serenely confident way that made Cole wonder if she could see into his thoughts. “Something so beautiful cannot be scary, can it?”

  Cole was inclined to disagree.

  The world behind them on the far side of the black rubber mat flickered through its bizarre offerings: first a courtroom; then a parking lot for clown cars; a submarine freeway; then a stately marbled church. And on this side of the long, open threshold, the plateau of rock butted up snugly against the rubber lintel like a wide, flat fungus growing off some otherworldly, horizontal tree trunk. Where the circular edge of the stone pulled away from the lintel, there was nothing; the air there gave way to blue sky below. If Cole crouched down, he could actually see under the lintel. It ran straight out to the horizon from the rock’s surface like a massive television screen. There was more blue sky behind it, if he looked under the lintel…though that was impossible, because he could see the pulpit of the great church straight ahead of him. Then that, too, flicked away and was replaced by the inside of what must have been the world’s largest clock tower, its heavy gears the size of skyscrapers rolling and grinding lazily away. Yet below the lintel, and behind it, the blue sky remained.

  Cole swooned from the dizzying sight and stumbled forward on his peanut buttery soles, and he nearly toppled over the edge. He caught himself just in time and scrabbled back to safer footing.

  Their stone saucer was far from the only island of rock in the sky; the space was full of them. They dotted the sky like stars. By studying the others, Cole could understand how their own stone island must appear: not like a saucer at all, but like a stunted cone, the kind used to hold shaved ice at a carnival. But instead of cheap paper, these were made of solid rock. They tapered off to a point maybe 100 feet below the surface, and then they just...stopped. There was nothing beneath them; they just hovered, floating islands of rock suspended in mid-air.

  The thought of having no solid grounding made him swoon again, only this time, he gave into his weakened knees and plopped down onto a peanut butter puddle with a loud squish.

  “It is disconcerting,” Etherie admitted, nodding slowly off into the distance. “But it’s the water that makes it beautiful, don’t you think? The way it cascades…always pouring from one island to another to another to another. Ooooh!” she breathed. “Look!”

  The children followed her pointing finger and gasped, almost in unison. Two of the stone islands were moving! They were arranged one below the other, with the surge of water falling down from the top and crashing onto the island at the bottom, which was, in turn, filling with water and spilling it over its own edge to yet another stone island below that. But the one floating above actually started falling, slowly as a feather, and the one below began climbing. The waterfall between them grew shorter and shorter, its crashing becoming more and more subdued, until finally the two islands were level with each other, and for one moment the water was distributed equally on both plateaus, forming one giant island of water in an endless sea of sky. A second later, the island that had been below rose above, and the one that had been above sank down below. The flow of water reversed.

  “They all move!” Emma cried. And indeed, most of the islands were moving, floating lazily through the air—up, down, left, and right. Some of them spun in slow circles; some glided in wide arcs. And always the water moved with them, adjusting its flow accordingly.

  “Cool!” Willy yelled. He had hustled over to the edge of their rock and was gaping excitedly at the islands below. “The water goes all the way down to forever!” he cried, pointing down at the seemingly infinite expanse of air beneath them. “You could ride it like a water slide!”

  He leapt toward the pool, about to put his theory to work, but the Stranger slipped up behind him, quick as a snake, and pulled him back from the water’s edge. “No,” he said sharply. “Clean yourselves up, and we’ll go back the way we came and wait for a different imagination.” The cowboy dunked h
is boots into the water, smeared most of the peanut butter away, and tugged them off his feet. Next came his socks, then his vest and his shirt, washing out each piece in turn. The children followed suit, though more modestly, easing themselves into the pool fully clothed and struggling to free their fabrics from the sticky mess.

  Well, four of them eased, anyway. Willy did a running cannonball.

  When Cole had gotten the creases of his clothes peanut butter-free, he crawled out of the water and joined the Stranger, who sat bare chested on the rock, patiently cleaning his six-shooter with his damp rag. “It’s too bad we have to backtrack,” Cole offered.

  The Stranger bared the edges of his teeth. “The sooner we reach the Pinch, the better. But if that junkyard general was right, we’re gonna have a bad time getting there.”

  “Because the Royal wants us...” Cole paused. He didn’t know the right word for it. “Gone?”

  “Dead,” the cowboy corrected him seriously. “No two ways about it.”

  All the moisture evaporated from Cole’s throat. He choked down a hard swallow, then bent and cupped a handful of water from the pool. He lifted it to his lips, but stopped himself just shy of a sip. “Is this safe to drink?” he croaked.

  The cowboy shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

  Cole hesitated and frowned at the cowboy, then gulped down the water. He shook his hand dry and sat down next to the Stranger. “This Royal, he’s strong, right? Powerful?”

  “The most powerful force in the Boundarylands right now.”

  “In all of imagination?”

  “Right now.”

  “Then...why aren’t we already gone—er…dead?” Cole asked uneasily.

  “The Pinch is his place of power,” the Stranger frowned, pulling the rag through one of the gun barrel’s cylinders. “The further you get from it, the less powerful he is. Understand?”

  Cole nodded glumly. “And since we’re getting closer, it’s only going to get worse.”

  The cowboy raised his eyes from his gun and leveled them at the young boy. “It is.”

  “Isn’t there any way to do this that doesn’t involve the Pinch?”

  The Stranger shook his head. “You cut ties with your IF when you sent him away. The only other way to track someone down is to use the Royal.”

  “But the Royal wants us dead.”

  The cowboy nodded. “Yep.”

  Cole frowned. “Then how are we going to get him to help us?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  The other children splashed happily near the edge of the pool, oblivious to their conversation. Cole sighed. “Why would he want us gone?” he asked.

  The Stranger shrugged. “No tellin’. It’s just dark days.” And he left it at that.

  Cole watched the children playing. They looked so happy to be there, to be together, in that place. They looked so joyful. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess we could just...stop. Right? And go back home?”

  The Stranger tilted his head and furrowed his sun-leathered brow. “Is that what you want?”

  Cole rocked his head from side to side as he considered the question. Of course it wasn’t what he wanted, but he couldn’t exactly plunge toward certain death with four other children in tow, either. He felt horrible about the way he’d treated Broken, and he knew that if it wasn’t resolved, there would always be some part of him that felt a little weaker—a little colder. It would always feel a bit like someone had let a draft into his chest. But still...what good was resolving a problem if you weren’t alive to appreciate it? It would be bad enough— irresponsible enough—if the only life in question were his, but with four other children and an adult in the equation? Of course he couldn’t push on.

  Could he?

  “I don’t want to quit—” he began truthfully.

  “That’s good,” the Stranger interrupted. “Because we ain’t got much choice in the matter.”

  Cole’s blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “The Wellwhich Way Station is the way in. Imaginaries, we can leave the realm anywhere and anytime, but only if we’re summoned by our Anchors. Elsewise, and for else-creatures, there’s only one way out of the Boundary.”

  Cole blenched. “Don’t tell me…”

  The cowboy nodded curtly. “Through the Pinch. It’s got the only door out I know of.”

  “So we keep going, either way,” he said. Cole groaned as buried his head in his arms. “Be honest,” he said, his voice muffled. “Do we have any chance of making it out of this alive? Any chance at all?”

  The cowboy grunted and returned his attention to the revolver. He moved on to the next chamber, dipping the rag in water and rubbing it along the curved edge. “A chance. Maybe not a good one, but still…a chance.”

  “How, then?” Cole muttered. “How do we do it?”

  “It’ll take some imagination.” Cole looked up and searched the Stranger’s face for a sign that he was teasing. He found nothing but stone. “If we’re gonna have any sort of chance, you’re gonna need to find yours.”

  Cole turned back to the other children, hooting and hollering across the water. “I don’t think we can count on that,” he said quietly.

  The Stranger snorted. “Ain’t gonna have much choice. You need to find your imagination if you want to stay alive, and find it quick. I’d bet all six barrels that our royal friend’s got more than just the one search party tracking us down.”

  Cole picked up a loose piece of shale and skimmed it across the water. It skipped three times, then disappeared over the edge. “I didn’t think this trip would be life or death,” he whispered, biting his bottom lip. Two tears quivered on his eyelids, threatening to spill over, but he scrubbed them away with his sleeve and took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, sniffing back his running nose, “it’s too late to turn back anyway, right? I guess there’s no use crying about it. We’ll have to take our chances with the Royal and the Pinch.”

  The Stranger gave him a sideways smirk. “We ain’t done in yet. Long as we’re breathin’, we’ve got hope.” He stood up and slipped the gleaming six-shooter into its holster. “Come on. If we’re gonna move forward, we’d best hurry up and go backward.”

  “You don’t think there’s some way we can control the movement of this thing?” Cole asked, bouncing up and down on the rock, seeing if it had any give. “Maybe make it float us over to the next lintel? Wherever that is?”

  “It’s there,” the cowboy said, pointing into the distance.

  Cole craned his neck and strained his eyes, shading them with the back of one hand. He saw something out there, way down on the horizon—practically beyond the horizon…a slight change of color that was little more than a dark speck in the blue sky.

  “Look,” Cole said, nodding downward. “Our waterfall hits that island, that island drops it over to that one, that one drops it onto that one, and when that one moves up higher, it’ll dump it on the other one there...all the way across the sky, all the way to the end. It really is like a water slide.”

  “Water slide!” Willy screamed. He broke away from the girls and kick-splashed across the pool, diving straight for the waterfall. The Stranger reached into the water and grabbed him by the collar as he passed. He hauled the frantic boy out and dropped him on his behind on the hard stone. “Aw, come on,” Willy muttered. “They’ve got bigger slides than that at Slick Willy’s Water Park.”

  “It’s not a slide,” he said fiercely. “Stay away from the edge.” Then he turned back to Cole. “And no, I don’t think we can control how the island moves. I think we better get before it decides to move itself away from the lintel we do have.”

  The children dragged themselves out of the pool and shook off the water, lingering a few minutes to dry in the sun. Then they gathered their things and lined up at the lintel.

  The flow was familiar b
y now, and they watched patiently as the imaginations whirred past. The first scene was a railroad station at night, which Cole thought a decent enough setting, until he saw two figures huddled near the tracks, one lying more or less prostrate on the ground, and one hovering above, knocking the other senseless with a flashlight.

  Maybe that wasn’t the right imagination after all.

  Next came a pirate ship caught in a full-on battle with a much larger vessel bearing the Union Jack flag. Cannonballs whizzed overhead; one struck the mizzenmast, exploding it in a violent storm of splinters and dust. Then this scene whisked itself away and was replaced by a zoo where the animals were the keepers and men, women, and children clung to the bars inside the cages. Then came a field with an enormous tree propped up in its center, a tree that looked somehow both stunted and colossal at the same time—the way a Bonsai tree might look to an ant. Some sort of hieroglyphics were carved into the trunk, spiraling up and around its great circumference, though from this distance Cole couldn’t make out what they were. The leaves of the tree vibrated like hummingbird wings, moving so quickly that they appeared to be translucent spheres.

  “This one,” the Stranger decided. “Hands.” He grabbed Cole’s hand with his left and Etherie’s with his right. Etherie took Polly’s, Polly held Emma’s, and Emma grabbed...empty air.

  “Willy?” she asked, swiveling around.

  “WATER SLIDE!” the boy hollered. He was already halfway through the pool before the Stranger could untangle his hands from the children’s.

  “Willy!” the Stranger roared, plunging into the water, sending a small wave over the sides of the cliff. “Stop!”

  But Willy reached the edge of the waterfall and leapt into its current, crying, “Ya-hoooooo!” He slipped over the edge and out of sight.

  The Stranger gaped after him in disbelief. He peered over the edge and saw Willy disappear into the spray of water, then reappear for a split second before he plunged into the pool on the platform below. After a few seconds, the boy bobbed to the surface, laughing like a maniac and wheeling his arms wildly in the water. The tide ushered him over the lip of that island, too, and onto the next, which raised itself above a fourth island just in the nick of time as Willy sloshed over and spun down the current.