IF: Gods and Monsters Read online

  The cowboy let loose a string of short, harsh words, most of which the children hadn’t heard before, but the meanings of which was pretty easily understood.

  He was rather upset.

  “What do we do?” Emma gasped, her eyes huge and wet as freshly washed dinner plates. “What do we do?!”

  The Stranger gritted his teeth. “We go after him.”

  Chapter 2:

  In Which a Newcomer Comes Along

  Haberdash flapped her wings in frustration and jiggled the top lever of the image replicator, but it was no use. The infernal contraption absolutely refused to engage in replication. What it did not refuse to do was give a sickly click-click-whirrrr, click-click-whirrrr every time she gave the lever a tug. “Blarney!” she pouted, shaking the small metal box like a rattle. “Why don’t you work?” Something inside the replicator went clack-tock. The front casing burst open, and a gleaming metal spring sprang out from inside and bounced around like a demented accordion.

  “Oh, perfect,” Haberdash moaned. “Like that’s in the budget.” She scratched back against the itch to hurl the blasted piece of junk to the imagination’s depths. But she stopped herself, for two reasons. First of all, the Home Office would need the broken image replicator for inventory and examination if they were going to send her a replacement. And secondly, it seemed like there actually was no bottom to this particular imagination, and while the thought of the useless piece of machinery falling literally forever was tempting, the exercise wouldn’t be wholly satisfying without the gratifying crashing sound of its shattering demise.

  So instead of flinging it into the heavens below, she looped the stupid thing’s leather strap over her neck so she could drag it around like a millstone. Oh, what fun.

  “Of course it would pick right now to go on the fritz!” she grumbled to herself. “The Bounti Falls is the rarest, most impossible-to-find imagining in the entire Boundarylands! I’ve been tracking it down for…let’s see.” She squinted her eyes and screwed up her face as she worked out the math. “Carry the two, power of eight, square the root of the ninth cosine…jiminy, I’ve been tracking it for six thousand years!”

  Haberdash heaved a weary sigh and looked helplessly down at the gorgeous and awe-inspiring vision beneath her. The Bounti Falls was, in her estimation, the third most beautiful imagining in the Boundarylands (fourth on the days that the slug demons burrowed underground in the Ember Mint Fields, but that was so rare, and ugh, as soon as they wriggled back in plain sight, with their slimy, mucous-covered tentacles and their googly, oogling eyes…on those days, they might as well be the Dismemberment Fields, for all their terrible grossness). The Falls were especially gorgeous from this height, far above the highest zenith of the most upwardly mobile island where the cascading water could be viewed practically in their entirety, if one had eyes sharp enough to see the lower layers. Dangerous as all get out, those Falls were, but beautiful nonetheless. They would have made the perfect shot for the new brochure…they might have even made the cover. She knew it, she wanted it, and, more importantly, the Home Office knew it, and the Home Office wanted it. And now they wouldn’t get it.

  The Home Office didn’t handle disappointment particularly well.

  Haberdash sighed again. Maybe she could use the shot of the Moonlands instead.

  “What a nightmare.”

  She hovered glumly, thinking maybe she should continue on through the ever-shifting maze of lintels and hope for the best. Plenty of the Boundary’s imaginings had repairmen. Surely one of them could fix a simple, broken image replicator. But even if she did find someone to fix the cursed thing, the Bounti Falls would be long gone. Even with her key, she might not find the right door again. So why bother?

  She fluttered back toward her own door, the dead weight of the replicator around her neck pulling her down toward the islands as she went. She gave the far reaches of the Falls one last, yearning look, and as she did, movement caught her eye from down below. She squinted against the brightness of the day and—good Jupiter, there were creatures down there! Moving, living creatures! Four—no, five of them!—huddled about on an island butted up against the nearest lintel!

  She screeched to a stop in midair and changed course, buzzing down toward the moving figures below. “Hello!” she shouted cheerily. But her words must have been lost in the thunder of the falling waters, because they didn’t seem to register the call. But, ah! No matter! She’d be within shouting distance soon enough.

  Haberdash couldn’t help it. She beamed. Something about the isolation of this place made the presence of these visitors very exciting. She buzzed down toward the tiny figures, wishing against wish that the stupid replicator hadn’t broken. A tourism photo with actual tourists? That was the kind of shot that won awards.

  But as she flew toward the figures on the rock island, something awful happened. The figures began to move, which was not in itself terribly surprising…but it was the direction in which they moved that caused her heart to seize up in her chest. The five little dots were headed directly to the edge of the falls.

  “No!” she shouted out at the top of her lungs. “Stop! Get away! Go back!” But she knew it was useless. The bright, blue void between them swallowed her cries. She was still too far away. She put her head down and pushed herself into a free-fall, but it was no use; she was too slow. She watched helplessly as the five figures pitched themselves over the falls, one after the other, and disappeared under the water’s frothy white foam.

  “Oh dear,” she frowned. “That would have made an awful picture.”

  She saw the group pop back up in the pool of the platform below, and they appeared to be alive enough. They were in for one heck of a ride, though, and that last drop…well, that last one would be a doozy.

  Unless she could get to them before they got there.

  She turned again and made a beeline for the end of the road, the very last rocky island in the string of waterfalls. She was farther from it than the swimmers below, but their path wasn’t exactly direct, and she figured she might be able to beat them to it, if she flew straight and gave it every ounce of strength she had. She passed over the group as they fell down the fall to the third island and was halfway to the end of the line when she realized what those five figures were doing. They weren’t out seeking thrills in the falls, they were sliding around after a sixth figure, another creature that was four islands ahead of them!

  “Oh dear,” she said again, wringing her hands in despair as she flew. “That one will almost surely go over the edge.” Which, of course, was a bad thing, because over the edge of the last island was nothing but blue-sky oblivion.

  Whatever that creature was, it would fall for the rest of time.

  His inability to breathe notwithstanding, Willy was having the time of his life.

  Sure, his mouth, throat, and lungs were full of water. Sure, he kept getting sprayed in the eyes and could hardly see where he was going. And sure, some of the pools were shallow. Like, really shallow. Like, two-inches-of-water-between-him-and-sharp-stone shallow. He was pretty banged up, and his right leg might have been fractured. But man-oh-man, what a ride!

  “Wahoooooo!” he choked out in the middle of a free-fall. Water rushed in and flooded his lungs, and he coughed and sputtered in big, wet heaves. He splashed down into another pool, this one mercifully deep, and he spun in the wake of the falls like a leaf in the wind. “Woooooo!”

  He splashed his way through a few more falls until one of the islands lowered him into a nearby pool that itself was nearing yet another floating island. This alignment allowed the water to cease its furious, fuming foaming and ease into a lazy twist of spirals as it splashed down the series of steps. Willy laughed and seized the opportunity to flick the water out of his eyes, giving him the ability to really see for the first time since tumbling over that very first island.

  What he saw cut the laughter
right out of his throat.

  Just beyond the next island, the imagining ended. There were no more floating rock platters, no more pools to splash down into. The water that slipped over this final rock formation fell and fell…and fell. Maybe it fell forever. And across the chasm, the empty air beyond the platter stretched far, far out into nothingness until it hit the next lintel, miles and miles away.

  Unlike the lintel where he’d entered, this one didn’t start in mid-air. It stretched in all four directions as far as Willy could see, out to the horizons on either side, up to a vanishing point into the sky above, and down, down, down, past the mists and wisps of clouds of whatever space there was below. It was like the IMAX screen at the Prairie Lakes Cineplex three towns over from his house, but bigger. Much bigger.

  Currently, it led to a frozen blue ice cave where a small group of tiny people huddled for warmth over the flame of a solitary matchstick. Willy could tell at least two of them were already frozen to death by the aquamarine hue of their skin. The others broke icicles from their beards and noses, eating snow and freezing themselves from the inside out in the process, from the looks of things. In short, it wasn’t a place Willy wanted to be, even if he could make the leap from the final island to the lintel.

  He dropped down into the last pool, and he clawed savagely at the water, pulling himself to the edge of the pool and heaving himself up onto the rock before the current could wash him away into the endlessness below.

  “Oh, thank the deities of the seven halls!” Haberdash shouted from above.

  Willy’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest when he heard the voice booming out of the lumpy creature with the lacy wings flittering above his head. “I didn’t do it!” he screamed, shaking his head vigorously back and forth. He didn’t know what he was denying. It was just a reflex from too many years—seven years, to be exact, seven straight, with no breaks—of getting into trouble.

  “And good graces that you didn’t!” Haberdash cried, buzzing down toward the boy. “That next step is a long one.”

  “Are you a dragon?” Willy asked, squinting up at the flying creature.

  “A dragon?” Haberdash asked, astonished. “Why no, child!” She burst into a laugh. She dropped a little closer to the rock island with each throaty bellow. “Life would be so easy if I were a dragon, wouldn’t it?” She sighed. “No, I’m afraid it’s much, much worse than that. I’m not a dragon. I’m a—”

  “Waaaaaaaaah!” Emma hollered as she shot over the edge of the island. She splashed down a few feet from Willy, skidding toward the final edge and screaming over the roar of the water. But the Stranger slid down behind her, splashing on the balls of his feet. He sprang forward like a panther and grabbed her by the arm before she pitched over the edge, pulling her to safety. Cole came next, tumbling clumsily over the edge of the penultimate platter and plopping into the shallow end of the pool. He was followed closely by Etherie, who somersaulted blithely onto the rock and landed like a feather. Haberdash, who had nearly been knocked unconscious by all four of them as they fell, hovered away from the scene a little, gasping her relief.

  “Well!” she panted, grasping at her heart with both hands. “Wasn’t that something! An entire corps of you—an entire corps—and not one of you having gone over!” She shook her head in disbelief. “Well, there’s a higher purpose at stake for your group, I should say!”

  Cole crawled his way out of the water and looked around. “Where’s Polly?” he asked, wheezing for air.

  At just that instant, they heard Polly’s approaching cry. She splashed into the pool behind them, which had slowly risen to just above the Stranger’s eye level.

  “Here she comes,” Emma said, lifting her eyes to the floating rock platter.

  And then, several things happened in the exact same instant.

  The imagining on the other side of the lintel flicked away to a desertscape dotted with gnarling cactuses and raspy, gasping tumbleweeds.

  Polly’s feet slid over the edge of the levitating island.

  The Stranger opened his arms, tensing to make a diving catch.

  And Polly’s rock island, which, like the others, had been slowly inching its way upward until now, suddenly shot into the air like a firecracker.

  Half a blink later, a screeching Polly was arcing through space, shot into the air with the velocity of a tennis ball off a tightly-strung racquet. Into the air she flew, higher and higher, until she was little more than a frilly blue speck against the clouds. Her body reached its apex, hung in the air for a moment, and then began to fall. The band of travelers watched in helpless, open-mouthed horror as she tumbled from the sky and crashed into the desert on the other side of the lintel. And then the imagining spun away, the desert was replaced by a bustling theme park, and Polly was whisked off into the hidden and infinite maze of the Boundarylands.

  Chapter 3:

  On the Dangers of Poor Dental Hygiene

  Dr. Mandrill held the vial up to the light and shook it gently. The baby tooth swirled lazily in purple liquid. The sunlight seeped through the thin, underdeveloped edges of the tooth, encircling it in a soft halo.

  My own personal savior, he thought.

  “Do you know what this is, Squeak?” he asked, giving the vial another shake. “It’s a tooth, of course,” he continued quickly. “Even a simpleton as blind and useless as you can see that, I trust.” He chuckled. “But beyond that, do you know what it is? Do you know what it signifies?”

  “Please,” General Squeak murmured, stings of spittle dropping from his lips. “Please.”

  Dr. Mandrill continued, seemingly oblivious. “This is the beginning.” He placed the vial carefully into the chest pocket of his white coat, then ran his hands over his smooth, gleaming scalp. “I trust the irony of that is lost on you. I’ll explain it, shall I?”

  Squeak whimpered incoherently.

  Mandrill nodded and began to pace through the pile of trash, his hands clasped firmly behind his back. “The true beginning, chronologically speaking, occurred some time ago. A dear friend of mine, in the Time Long Before—you weren’t around then, were you? Not even a spark in that first scared child’s imagination. This friend, he was a true believer in the realm. He loved the Boundarylands fiercely. Do you understand what it means to love something with every ounce of yourself?”

  Squeak whimpered and nodded, spitting strings of mucous onto the trash below. His spittle was tinged pink from the blood in his mouth.

  Dr. Mandrill grunted. “I doubt that. But did you know that there are some who would destroy this world? There were then, and there are now. And this man, he engineered a method of salvation that is so…so exquisite. You see, the one thing the Boundarylands has never had, the one thing the realm has never been organized enough to produce, is an army. A real army. Oh, there are plenty of imaginary soldiers running about, of course, fighting their fictional wars, dying their meaningless deaths. But there’s no trueborn, homegrown army willing to die to defend the Boundary. As imaginary beings, we are all of something else. This man, however, devised a way to grow warriors who are of this land.” Squeak trembled against his bonds, the ropes cutting painfully into his wrists. “Ah!” said Dr. Mandrill. “You’re thinking it’s impossible. Nothing can grow in the Boundarylands, nothing can be made here unless it’s made from out there.” He gestured back over his shoulder, though the real world couldn’t be pinpointed by a cardinal direction. “But this tooth,” he said, patting the vial in his pocket, “this tooth changes everything. Because it is with the tooth of a real world child, and only with the tooth of a real world child, that the army of the realm can be forged. This tooth represents my life’s work, Squeak. It’s why I became a dentist: not for the sake of imaginaries, but in the quest for a real child’s tooth. All I have done, and all I will do, is for this tiny gem, this little treasure of enamel and dentin and cementum and pulp. All else…everything else…
is useless to me.

  “I tell you all this not because I think for one second that you’ll be able to comprehend what’s actually at play, here,” he said. He slipped a pair of pliers from his back pocket. “I tell you this because I want you to know exactly how unimportant, insignificant, and useless your imaginary teeth are to me.” He grabbed Squeak’s mouth with his free hand and yanked open his jaw. “I want you to know that when I’ve taken every last one that it was strictly about punishment in the name of the Royal, about the discomfort it caused you, and not one single thing more.”

  Chapter 4:

  In Which We Visit the Department of Tourism

  “Oh dear,” Haberdash frowned, wringing her hands as she buzzed about over their heads. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

  Cole’s jaw, which had been hanging wide open since Polly got whisked away into another world, finally got back to work. “What do we do?” he asked the Stranger in shocked amazement. But the Stranger was already at work, unfolding the blood map and pinning it down with loose stones from the floating island. The children gathered around and watched miserably as Polly’s dot flashed around the map, appearing first in the northwest, then in the south, then at this end of the map, then at that end over there. Sometimes her dot would disappear altogether, absent from the map for several seconds at a time before reappearing somewhere far away.

  “Why’s she moving so fast?” Willy asked, screwing up his face in confusion.

  The cowboy sat back on his haunches. “The map shows the land relative to itself. The map stays put. The imaginings all move.”