IF: Gods and Monsters Read online

  “And Polly spins around and around,” Cole said. The Stranger nodded.

  Etherie placed her hands together at her forehead. She inhaled deeply through her nostrils and exhaled through her mouth. “I’ll do my best to send her my inner calm,” she said. She folded herself down to her knees and set to work projecting her peace into the universe.

  “I can find your friend.” Haberdash floated down to the island and plopped down on the rock, accidentally battering Emma’s hair with her wings. “Whoops, sorry, dear. We just need to get this back to my office, I can track the girl from there.”

  “Your office?” Cole asked uncertainly, glancing around the imagination.

  “Oh, it’s not here, child. No, no, I don’t work in pools of water, ha! Couldn’t get much paperwork done there, could I? No, no, the Autumn Mountains, that’s where I hail from. Gather your things; I’ll take you there.”

  She reached for the map, but the Stranger snapped out, faster than lightning, and grabbed her by the wrist. “We don’t know you,” he said, his eyes cold.

  “She’s a dragon,” Willy said helpfully.

  Haberdash yanked her arm out of the cowboy’s grasp. “I’m not a danger to you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said indignantly. “I’m a perfectly respectable creature.”

  “There’re plenty who would do us harm.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a badge. She held it in the Stranger’s face. “I’m the Assistant Director of Tourism.”

  The Stranger inspected her credentials. “E. Q. Haberdash, Boundarylands Tourism Department, Assistant Director,” he read. The badge appeared genuine enough. Maybe a little too genuine, the Stranger thought as he inspected the Royal’s seal at the bottom. He held up the badge and indicated the stamp. “You’re indebted to the Pinch.”

  Haberdash took a deep breath. Words could be dangerous, even in a place as desolate as this, and she wanted to choose hers carefully. “In an official capacity, I am. To the Home Office of Tourism, I should say. Not specifically tied to the Royal.”

  “And beyond your official capacity?” the cowboy asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Haberdash sighed. “Beyond that, I’m as free as any other member of the realm.”

  The cowboy considered this. He didn’t trust people who claimed to have selfless motives, as a general rule, and the creature’s connection with the Royal didn’t set him at ease. Squeak had made it clear that the Royal was after them, just as the Stranger feared. But on the other hand, they didn’t have much choice. The only other way he knew to find Polly was to wait in place and hope her dream world spun itself back to this lintel. But that could take thousands of centuries, if it ever happened at all. And they just didn’t have the time.

  “Fine,” he growled. “We go. But if I get a sniff of danger—”

  “Oh, visitors!” Haberdash interrupted, clapping her hands excitedly. “Wonderful! I’m pleased to make your general acquaintances. Now, let’s see, where did I put that key...?” she wondered, digging through her pockets. “A-ha!” She triumphantly pulled out a piece of chalk.

  “That’s not a key,” Cole observed. “That’s chalk.”

  Haberdash tilted her head and gave him a sweet, motherly look. “Anything can be a key, if you use it right.” She buzzed over to a drier patch of rock and put the tip of the chalk to the ground. She began to draw a wide circle, humming to herself as she went.

  “What’s she doing?” Willy whispered.

  “Hopscotch?” Emma guessed.

  “I don’t think so,” said Etherie, shaking her head. “Look.”

  As the circle neared completion, the white chalk line began to glow electric blue, and the color of the stone inside the glowing circle drained away to white. When she completed the circle, there was a loud CHOONK sound in the rock, like someone had just unlocked a giant bank safe. The chalk glowed even brighter, and it crackled with energy. The stone in the center was washed over with white light, then replaced entirely by warped wooden slats banded together with two thick metal strips, one at each end. Haberdash stood up, dropped the chalk into her pocket, and blew the dust from her fingers. Then she placed both palms on the wood-slat circle and gave it a good push downward. The door clicked and swung slowly open.

  Cole peeked his head over the edge of the hole. Rather than revealing a cave in the floating stone island, as he expected, he saw a tall, crooked tower standing in an open field. Cole was looking straight down, but the grass was on the left, the sky was on the right, and the tower stuck out to the side without toppling over. The stark and confusing juxtaposition between what was in the hole and what should have been in the hole made his head go swimmy. He suddenly had a very real and very important desire to go off to the edge of the island and throw up.

  “All right, then,” Haberdash beamed. “Let’s be off!” She fluttered down into the hole and beckoned them from the field on the other side.

  “Whoa,” Willy whispered. He got down on his knees, gripped the edge of the hole, and plunged his head through the doorway. His shaggy hair immediately fell to the left, toward the grass. Gravity had gone sideways. “Cool!”

  “Is it safe?” Emma asked shyly, edging her way to the hole.

  “Nope!” Willy yelled, tumbling down over the edge and plopping sideways into the grass.

  “We’ll be safe enough,” the Stranger decided. Cole noticed that he’d nudged the revolver up in its holster. “Careful going through. Down here is sideways there.”

  He took Emma by the arms and lowered her gently down into the hole. “Don’t let go,” she warned, kicking her feet. He passed her down gently into the other world, where she twisted and landed on her backside on the grass next to Willy. Etherie passed through on her own, floating lightly through the circle and landing gracefully on her toes on the other side. Cole went next, in a decidedly less graceful manner. He sat down on the edge of the hole and let his legs dangle down first, which turned out to be a mistake, because once they were through to the other side, gravity pulled them to the left, but on the stone island side of the door, his torso was still pushing downward. “Ooooh geez,” he breathed, his stomach turning squeamish again.

  “Come on, Coleslaw!” Willy shouted. “Jump!”

  “Need a hand?” the cowboy grunted. But Cole shook his head. It was silly. He could do this.

  “The pull of gravity changes by 90 degrees,” he whispered to himself. “The pull of gravity changes by 90 degrees. The pull of gravity changes by 90 degrees.” He took a deep breath and pushed himself off the edge of the rock into the hole. He twisted his body mid-fall so his legs would land under him on the far side, but they got tangled up, and he spun too far, and when all was said and done, he had crashed more or less onto his head.

  “Creatures without wings are so fascinating,” Haberdash noted from above.

  After the Stranger rolled into the new world, Haberdash grabbed the round door and swung it closed. There were no wooden slats on this side of the door at all, just blue sky, as if it had been painted on. The door closed, and there was nothing, not even a seam in the air, to show that there had ever been a door at all.

  “That’s my office,” Haberdash said, nodding to the tower. “Part of it, anyway.”

  As they crossed the green prairie with its yellow wildflowers, Willy nudged Colemine in the ribs. “Look,” he said, pointing to the horizon. “The mountains are on fire.” And indeed, the mountain range in the distance shimmered red and orange and appeared very much to be consumed in flames.

  “That doesn’t seem very safe,” Cole warned. But Haberdash buzzed down to their level and shook her head.

  “Those aren’t fire mountains, they’re the Autumn Mountains.”

  “Named for their reddish-orange stone, I presume?” Etherie said.

  Haberdash burst out laughing. “Stone? Goodness, n
o! Don’t you wee ones know about the Autumn Mountains? They’re not actual mountains, but autumn leaves, in piles more than 14,000 feet high!”

  Willy stopped dead in his tracks. His jaw fell open. “Those are giant leaf piles?!”

  “Of course,” said Haberdash.

  “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” he screamed as he bolted off toward the mountains, pumping his arms and legs like crazy. The Stranger took three long strides and snatched him up by his collar. Willy’s legs pedaled in furious circles in mid-air.

  “We’ve no time for games,” the cowboy said.

  “It’s everything I ever dreamed of!” Willy wailed, waving his arms at the massive orange piles.

  “I said no.” The Stranger hefted the boy around and marched back toward the group with Willy whining and kicking under his arm.

  They crossed toward the tall, crooked stone tower, at the base of which they found a small cottage. “Home sweet home!” Haberdash declared. She buzzed inside, and the travelers followed.

  The interior of the cottage could be described as modest at best. It consisted of only one room, a room that contained a rickety bed, a makeshift table, a small kitchenette, and an exposed toilet in the corner. A faded, fraying rug covered a third of the floor.

  The structure’s tall tower sprouted straight out of the roof, opening into the room by way of a wide circle and defying absolutely all rules of physics and engineering. And yet it stood, taller than the tallest skyscraper Cole had ever seen. And he had seen his share.

  “What’s up there?” Emma asked, pointing up into the tower. The walls were lined with shelves that spiraled up to the very top. They were crammed full of leather-bound books.

  “Those are the Books of Popular Record,” Haberdash explained proudly. She fluttered up to the bottom shelf at the base of the tower and pulled a book from the shelf. She heaved it back down and opened it up to a random page. “Ah! See, look here.” She pointed to a photograph of a man with a long, white beard, wearing a flowing blue robe and a peaked cap of the same color. He stood next to a shimmering orange and yellow dragon. Actually, “standing next to” wasn’t quite right; “unabashedly kissing the cheek of” was probably a better description. “This here’s the great Merlin!” Haberdash gushed. She pointed to a handwritten scrawl below the photograph. “This was taken on the day he christened Crisper Firebelly as Lord Protector of the Realm-Wide Dragonian Reputation, way back in the seventeenth era. You can see he’s performing the ritual there.” She waved a hand up at the shelves above. “All those books are full of that sort of pomp and circumstance. The type of historical show-and-tell that really brings in the tourism dollars.”

  “How do we find Polly?” the Stranger asked curtly. Cole could tell by the way he kept shifting his weight that he was uneasy. And he guessed that when the Stranger was uneasy, he was an extremely dangerous man.

  “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry. We’ll need the current logs. This way, this way.” She flew over to the rug and whisked it away, revealing a trap door in the floor. She grabbed the iron ring that served as a handle and pulled with all her strength. The door creaked open, revealing a winding staircase that spiraled deep into the earth. “Down you go!” she said cheerily.

  “You first,” the Stranger grunted. Haberdash frowned at him, clearly upset with the lack of trust between them, but nodded all the same and floated down into the cellar. The children and the cowboy followed.

  Two years earlier, when Donald Slawson was doing research for his book Sam Carburetor’s Family Secret, he’d taken Cole out to visit an airplane hangar, a location that served as the setting of the all-important climax in which Sam Carburetor stared down a robotic Nazi fighter pilot named Gustave Elk, who was programmed to destroy every person on Earth who had Carburetor family DNA. Sam defeated him with a “puzzle wrench,” whatever that was. (Cole hadn’t actually read the book too closely. It wasn’t his father’s best.) That airplane hangar had been the most enormous, colossal, gigantic, humongous building he’d ever seen. He remembered thinking that an entire city could fit inside it, and there would still be room to spare.

  Haberdash’s cellar made that hangar look like a coat closet.

  “Gracious,” Etherie whispered, taking in the expansive sight. The curved metal ceiling stretched as far as any of them could see in every direction, with not a single wall in sight. The space was packed with large, boxy machines spewing out impossibly thick books along a maze of conveyor belts that zigzagged in wide, lazy spirals from one horizon to the other.

  Haberdash flew up to the nearest belt and hauled a heavy book from it as it passed. She grunted and struggled under the weight. “This is the Recording Room. Each book here represents one single moment in time.” She dropped the book. It fell to the floor with a heavy thud. “Phew. Some moments are longer than others in the Boundarylands. Believe it or not, this is one of the shorter ones.” She lowered herself down to the floor and flipped open the book. The pages were filled with names, numbers, notes, charts, graphs, photos, drawings, and doodles. “This book will tell you where every feature, creature, and object in the Boundarylands was located during this one moment. You see?” She pointed to a page with a photograph of a film noir-style detective wrestling with a man in a black, hooded robe. A scribbled caption beneath the photo read, Edgar P. McCootie, P.I., Chicago office, 1943. Next to that was a map of Atlantic City with a circle drawn around one of the casinos. The map was labeled “Odin.” A larger map on the opposite page showed a large, vaguely United States of America-shaped country with a circle drawn over the west coast. That map was labeled “Panama.”

  “Panama isn’t in California,” Cole pointed out. How were these books supposed to help them locate Polly if the maps inside were so completely off?

  “Well, someone thought it was in this moment.” Haberdash closed the book and flew it back to its spot on the conveyor belt. “Come! That machine there is the main recorder.” She flew over to the largest boxy contraption in the room. It stood taller than Cole’s entire house and was at least three times as wide. Hundreds of conveyor belts spouted out from it, carrying book after book after book, speeding them away as quickly as the chugging machine could print them.

  “How quickly does it work?” Cole asked, marveling at the machine. “How long does it take to print a whole moment?”

  “Oh, it happens instantly,” said Haberdash, fluttering about excitedly. She so rarely got to show off the Recording Room. “The second a moment is over, it’s stamped into existence. Grab the next moment that comes out, will you? We’ll see where your friend is right now.”

  The Stranger, who tended to be wary around machines as a general rule, crept up to where the nearest conveyor belt met the metal wall of the machine. He gripped the next book that appeared from within the box’s dark maw. He laid it on the ground and started flipping through the book. “How do we find her page?” he asked, amazed by the immense thickness of the tome.

  “Let me,” Haberdash said, nudging him to the side. “I’ve got a talent for it.” She grasped a handful of pages, and she rifled through them quickly. Then she grabbed a second handful, flipped through them, and so on, grabbing pages, flipping them, grabbing new pages, flipping them. She read the entire book in a matter of about seven seconds. When she was done, she closed the book and looked up at the group with a frown of confusion on her face. “She’s not here.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not here?” The Stranger’s hand shot toward the gun on his hip. If this was a trap, now was about the time it would spring.

  “I mean she’s not here. She’s nowhere in the book.” Haberdash flipped through it again, just to be sure, but there wasn’t much point. Her eyes were especially keen, and she never missed a page. “I’m sorry, but it appears as if your friend is no longer within the realm of imagination,” she said, scratching her head.

  “I doubt that’s possible,” Etherie mused, tapping
her finger against her lips. “We saw her safely cross the lintel, and the only way out of the Boundarylands is through the center, correct?”

  “Yes, as long as you’re not an IF. IFs can be beckoned, but all other exits go through the Pinch or the Way Station. I agree, it’s strange, but I’m telling you, she’s just not here.”

  “The girl’s right,” the Stranger growled, easing his hat further back on his forehead. “Polly’s still in the realm. She’s gotta be.”

  “And I’m telling you, she isn’t,” Haberdash insisted, crossing her arms. “This system records the precise location of each and every single imaginary creature, feature, and object in the Boundarylands, and if you’re—”

  “Wait a second. Did you say imaginary?” Cole asked. “It tracks every imaginary creature?”

  “Every last one,” said Haberdash, proudly sticking her nose in the air. “And to suggest that—”

  But Cole interrupted her again. “What about non-imaginary creatures?”

  Haberdash frowned. “Why would that matter?” she said suspiciously.

  “The children are real,” the Stranger said gruffly, sticking a new cheroot into his mouth.

  “Real as in…? Wait, they’re real real?” she asked, wringing her hands. “From the real world, real?”

  “As real as anything physical can be,” Etherie said.

  Haberdash gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “I should have known,” she whispered. “I should have known the moment I saw you. I must be rusty. It’s just that it’s been so long since I–”

  “Don’t mean to rush you,” the Stranger said, “but time’s important, and it’s slippin’ by fast. Can you find a real girl in that book or not?”

  Haberdash gave an awkward shrug. “I have no idea. I’ve never looked for a real-worlder before. I don’t know if—hmpf.” She set her jaw and gave a good, solid nod. “Well, let’s check, shall we?” She reopened the book and flipped through it until she found her own name. Her face went pale as she read the entry. “‘Assistant Director Haberdash inspects the main recorder with a Stranger.’” She turned the book around so the rest of them could see the illustration. It was a hasty scribble of what looked like a sausage with wings and a tall stick man with a cowboy hat. “Look! Just the two of us! No mention of the children in the record.” She sighed and sat back on her knees. “Goodness me. We’ll never find your friend.”