“Ajay, hit the ground!” shouted Will.
Ajay instantly dropped flat, just as Elise projected out a hard crack of sound that rippled through the air like a cannonball and hit the center of the swarm square on. The bugs scattered, torn apart by the force of the blast that passed just above Ajay’s prone form.
Ajay covered the back of his head with both hands, grunting and issuing squeals of distress, trying to squirm himself even flatter to the ground as he felt the dead bugs falling onto him and the ground all around him. As Ajay thrashed, Will walked over and knelt down beside him, patting him on the back.
“Ajay, take it easy…Ajay!”
Ajay looked up at him, his eyes manic. “Are they gone? What kind of madness is this? What manner of godforsaken hell have you taken us to?”
“Ajay, snap out of it,” said Elise, moving around to his other side, taking him by the arm. “We don’t have time for one of your freak-outs at the moment.”
Ajay turned his head slightly, saw the bodies of the bugs scattered around him, and looked over at Elise. “Invisible bees the size of atomic jawbreakers, and you don’t think I have the right to freak out?”
“You couldn’t see them with the glasses on,” said Will. “We don’t need them here.”
“Where are Nick and Jericho?” asked Elise as they lifted him to his feet.
“I have no earthly idea. Nick came through the opening just after me, I thought, but I never saw him. I ended up just over there by that big rock.”
“Where’d the bees come from?”
“They came hurtling at me out of a mud hive on the side of the rock that could house a family of rottweilers. How did you two find each other?”
“We were holding hands as we passed through the portal,” said Elise.
“How endearingly touching and a happy Valentine’s Day to you—”
“Knock it off,” said Will. “We came in about a half mile from here, up a canyon around that corner over there. If our distance from where you came in is any indication, the others probably aren’t that far away. Our walkie-talkies wouldn’t work. How about yours?”
Ajay pulled his from his belt. “I didn’t even have time to test it. I’ve been too busy dancing the hornet fandango.”
Ajay flipped the device on, rotating his dial through the full range of frequencies. The static sounded a little more varied than it had in the canyon, with a few spots of quiet, but no more viable than theirs.
“I’ll tinker with it and see what I can do,” said Ajay, “but I don’t think we can expect a normal range of electronic behavior here. This appears to be one place where all bets are off.”
Will bent down and picked up one of the dead hornets by a wing and held it up to take a closer look. A two-inch stinger extended from the rear of its fat body—thick, red, and barbed with lethal-looking spikes. The thing’s face possessed the same unsettling familiarity to human features they’d noticed before in a few of these creatures; this one’s stalked eyes even appeared to include corneas and pupils.
“Another one of their manufactured experiments?” asked Elise, looking at it curiously.
“Building a demonic apiary,” said Ajay. “What a fascinating hobby. Why couldn’t they just order an ant farm from the back of a comic book like normal people?”
“This is apparently what the Other Team does for fun,” said Will. “Create genetically manipulated freaks.”
“Oh, you mean like us,” said Ajay.
“Yeah, but nowhere near as attractive,” said Elise.
“You’d have to ask the other hornets about that,” said Ajay, pointing at the stalk-eyed bug. “For all we know, as far as they’re concerned this one’s probably thought of as a swimsuit model.”
Will dropped the dead creature and directed his attention to the sky, turning around to scan the noxious horizon.
“What are you looking for?” asked Ajay.
“There’s no sun,” said Will. “Even broken up by those shifting clouds, the light’s all evenly distributed. It looks like it doesn’t come from a single source.”
Ajay did a similar scan around the sky. “You’re right, Will; I’m not seeing suns, stars, moons, or any other heavenly body.”
“How do you even know if it’s night or day here?” asked Elise.
“They don’t exist,” said Will. “Unless somebody somewhere has access to a gigantic dimmer.”
“That may be the case, but I know what time it is, to the absolute millisecond, if that’s any help,” said Ajay, pulling out a digital device. “Check that. It’s dead as a doornail—whatever that means. Making a mental note to look up the origin of that phrase.”
He showed the instrument’s readout to them: all zeros.
“What is that?” asked Elise.
“A clock painstakingly synced to the atomic reference of Greenwich Mean Time, an infallibly precise piece of scientific instrumentation, and it may as well be a counterfeit Swatch bought from a West Indies immigrant in front of a Manhattan bus station. I’m supposing there must be some kind of pervasive, generalized electrical interference in this atmosphere.”
“No, it’s something else,” said Will. “Stranger than that. I don’t think we’re even in time right now. The old man said it, too: Time doesn’t exist here.”
Ajay looked up, scrunched his eyes shut, and thought for a second. “My brain is growing quickly, but not fast enough to get a firm grip on that idea.”
“Let’s get on the move, this way,” said Will, pointing away from the canyon. He set a quick pace and the others followed, trudging forward. “I think it gets even weirder than that.”
“How does anything get weirder than ‘outside of time’?” asked Elise.
“Do you have a compass, Ajay?” asked Will. “Not a digital one, magnetic.”
“Do you even have to ask?” He pulled a small circular brass compass from another pocket of his vest and looked at it. “Oh my goodness.”
He showed them the face of the compass as they stopped for a moment. The needle was spinning around violently, first in one direction, then the other.
“Sick,” said Elise. “There’s a kind of strange taste in the air. Are you picking that up?”
“Yeah. Slightly metallic,” said Will.
“I believe that’s ozone in the atmosphere,” said Ajay, licking his lips. “That could have something to do with the electrical interference. It may be interfering with whatever magnetic poles are in place here, if there are any.”
“I was going for something a whole lot weirder than that,” said Will as they started walking again.
“Such as?” asked Elise.
“It’s possible this isn’t even a real place.”
Elise and Ajay looked at each other behind Will’s back: What?
“What I mean is, maybe this whole environment is just a construct of some kind, like a hologram or an artificial thought-form.”
“But certainly that’s refuted by the fact that we’re here…We can see and feel it with all our senses,” said Ajay, agitated. “Isn’t it? Aren’t we?”
“You mean maybe we just think we’re here,” said Elise.
“There might be something to that,” said Will. “Dave told me this zone is a prison for the Other Team, for the crimes they’d committed against nature. I got the impression that this whole place was designed or ‘built’ for that purpose alone.”
“But what sort of mind—belonging to what manner of being—could create something so detailed, so complete, so…so utterly”—Ajay swept his foot along the ground, kicking up dust—“persuasive?”
“I’m not sure our minds can even stretch out far enough to figure that out,” said Will. “But that doesn’t mean a being like this couldn’t exist.”
They looked out at the desolate plain opening ahead of them.
“We already have a word for a mind like that,” said Elise.
They looked at her, questioning.
“Hello? God?” she said.
&n
bsp; Ajay’s look turned calm and somber. “Will, tell me again who you believe is responsible for creating this place.”
“I never told you the first time,” said Will.
“Something, or someone, to do with your friend Dave,” said Elise. “Wasn’t it?”
“Dave called them ‘the Hierarchy.’ The organization he claimed to work for.”
“And who might they be?”
“He said they’re like a kind of gigantic celestial bureaucracy, in charge of overseeing all the different aspects of creation on Earth. Responsible for maintaining every kind of life, people, animals, plants—”
Ajay’s eyes looked up and to the left, accessing his memory storehouse. “Yes. A concept that appears in a variety of ancient, esoteric philosophies or teachings. In sacred texts like the Hindu Vedas, and in diverse schools of thought like gnosticism and the kabbalah, or more recently theosophy—which means ‘wisdom of the gods’—where this idea is often remarked upon and referred to as part of ‘the ancient knowledge.’ Do go on.”
“Maybe you should tell us,” said Elise.
“I’m much more interested in what else this Dave person told you about it,” said Ajay. “Who did he say these beings were, Will, individually?”
“He didn’t talk about them as personalities or people. He described them by their function, like they’re the supervisors or protectors of Earth—”
“As in, highly evolved spiritual beings who have transcended what we would consider personal identities and consequently no longer require physical bodies but who possess the ability to appear in one, or as one, as needed,” said Ajay. “Typically, whenever interacting with us mere earthlings.”
“More or less exactly like that,” said Will.
“Okay, good,” said Ajay, looking around.
“Why is that good?” asked Elise.
“It means we have a working theory, however ridiculous and improbable, to explain what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is happening to us. I feel a good deal better now.”
“You are a strange one,” said Elise.
“Does that give you any idea about what we’re supposed to do next?” asked Will.
“Well, the ‘ancient knowledge,’ not to mention our own scientific method, would recommend we simply continue to rely on our subjective perceptions of all these uncanny experiences. Observe them accurately and dispassionately, compare notes, attempt to reach an objective consensus and respond accordingly.”
Ajay had a faraway look in his eyes, his fingers fidgeted like he was operating an invisible game console, and he was blinking repeatedly, as if struggling with a minor mental short circuit.
“Are you all right, Ajay?” asked Elise.
“I’m not entirely sure. As you know, I’ve done an enormous amount of reading in the Crag’s tower these past few weeks, and while it’s actually becoming easier to assimilate all this new information, I feel as if the physical structure of my brain is changing ever more rapidly…expanding, if you will…which means goodness knows what as far as the state of my mind is concerned.”
“I’m worried about you,” said Will.
“This isn’t an unpleasant sensation by any means, mind you, although to say the entire concept is anything less than seismically unsettling would be a massive understatement.”
Elise stopped and took Ajay by the shoulders, looking him straight in the eyes. “Why is this happening?”
Ajay blinked again, seemed to come back to himself, and looked at them both, clear-eyed again.
“We’re changing, you see,” he said. “We’re all changing, each in our own way, and there seems to be very little we can do about it—”
“Why?”
“Because it’s part of our ‘engineering,’ my dear.”
Elise looked to Will for confirmation. He nodded.
“So while all of the above should be cause for caution and alarm under the best of circumstances,” Ajay continued, “we do at least have the benefit of knowing why it’s happening.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Will.
“We also have each other,” said Elise.
“Yes. Shared experience, in our case, is of the greatest importance,” said Ajay.
“It’s the only thing that’s going to get us through this,” said Elise, looking at them both fiercely.
“By the by, Will, I came across a curious nugget of information in my reading earlier today that you may have some interest in.”
“What?”
“A rather delicate family matter—regarding your family. I came across a birth certificate from the early sixties. One that belongs to your grandfather’s butler, the charming and effervescent Lemuel Clegg?”
“What about him?”
“It seems he’s slightly more to Franklin than a butler,” said Ajay. “He’s also his son—without benefit of wedlock, that is. Born to a woman who apparently worked on the household staff.”
Will rolled that around and found it answered most of the questions he’d had about the man.
“So not only is he Franklin’s son,” said Ajay, “but he’s also your uncle. Named, apparently, after the man your family bought the property from—Lemuel Cornish. Lemuel is not a name that exactly grows on trees.”
“I always knew he was a bastard,” said Will.
“Well, those two bastards deserve each other,” said Elise.
Will and Ajay both laughed.
“And to finally answer your original question about what to do next, Will,” said Ajay. “Given that during our shared history you have yet to lead us astray through a variety of equally hair-raising situations, I will continue to defer to your intuitive leadership skills and say, your call, Chief.”
Will put a hand on Ajay’s shoulder. He appreciated his friend’s vote of confidence, but even more the observation confirmed for him something he’d begun to notice in himself, something far less obvious within him that had started to change. Not in an obviously physical capacity like his increased speed, endurance, or self-healing, but a more subtle internal ability he seemed to now possess. It had to do with decision-making, particularly under pressure; he simply seemed to know what to do, quickly, when presented with tough odds and difficult choices.
But what was this? Could he also attribute this to their purely genetic changes? Or was it something more hard fought, less a gift than a skill he’d learned to develop on his own, through practice and experience? Was this an acquired talent, or more a part of his character?
And what do you call an ability like this anyway? Decisiveness? Leadership?
No, another word floated up inside his mind, and the ability itself informed him that this word was the right one for the quality he was trying to describe.
Intuition. He was learning a different way to think. It didn’t involve effort or work or calculation; it had to do with moving his conscious mind out of the way and allowing himself to realize that, in many ways, he already knew how and what to do before he even had time to think about it.
Will looked back the way they’d come and noticed the path they were following had slowly descended down a very gradual grade. The arid, dusty land underfoot had gradually transitioned to hard, packed ground that appeared more like hardened clay. Will closed his eyes and his senses sharpened; he could also feel, and even smell, some moisture in the air.
“There’s water nearby,” he said.
Ahead, the angle of descent steepened and the path they were on gradually narrowed, eventually rounding a curve to the left and leading out of sight into a valley. The right edge of the path began to drop off into an increasingly deep ravine. For some reason Will found it difficult to see anything else; the rest of whatever else was down below seemed to fade into a vague white haze.
“What can you see down there?” Will asked.
Ajay stepped forward and opened his eyes wide. “There’s a layer of mist or clouds…it’s quite thick…and I believe I can make out a canopy of trees just below it…tall, a variety of speci
es, a mix I would generally associate with a rain forest biosphere.”
“This close to a desert?” asked Elise.
“A very abrupt transition, to be sure,” said Ajay.
“It’s not any more unusual than the rest of it,” said Will.
“No, that part isn’t,” said Ajay, still staring intently down at the clouds. “What’s unusual is that there’s absolutely no wind down below and some of those trees appear to be moving.”
WILL’S RULES FOR LIVING #6:
THOSE WHO CAN’T DO, DON’T.
Will was tempted to run ahead and take a look, but staying together won out. He didn’t really want to push Ajay too much physically or emotionally—he still seemed too fragile—and he could sense that Elise was even more concerned about him.
The temperature dropped steadily as they continued down the path; by the time they neared the edge of the fog layer, it actually felt chilly. Will stopped just before it. The fog started as abruptly as a curtain ahead of them, motionless, bright white, thick as cotton.
They stared at it apprehensively. “Are you sure this is the way to go?” asked Ajay.
“Something really off about it,” said Elise. “It looks like fog but it doesn’t seem like fog.”
“It’s more like…an idea of fog,” said Will. “Almost too perfect.”
“Indeed. There’s no aspect of randomness or irregularity,” said Ajay. “The signal characteristics of water in its vaporous form.”
“What he said,” said Elise.
Will reached out to touch the edge of the bank. His hand moved into it effortlessly. Cool and wet. Moisture beaded on his skin. He brought his hand back out.
“Feels okay,” he said.
“I already know you’re going to ask me to go first, so I may as well save you the trouble,” said Ajay, pulling himself up to his full height.
And he walked right into the cloud. After just a few steps, Ajay completely disappeared.
“Don’t go too far!” shouted Elise.
“I’m only five steps in,” he said. “And I’ve stopped already. Remain calm.”
“Can you see anything?” asked Will.
“I can see the ground at my feet…I can see my hand in front of my face…and that’s about the extent of it.”