THIRTY THREE
JEREMY STOOD NEXT to himself on the rim of the abyss. He slid a glance over to his doppelganger: same hair, but greasy and clumped; same pajamas, but stained and stinking; same face, but scarred and wild. The demon caught him and winked a burning, jaundiced eye.
“We wear you well, don’t we child?”
Jeremy’s guts felt like tubes of water held together by magnetic fields, but he kept his footing. He’d made his choice. He wouldn’t run. Still, he was terrified. In the queer sense of detachment that pervaded him in this place he wondered if he could wet himself. The demon tilted its head and smirked. “Look,” it said, pointing at the flowing stain on the crotch of its pajamas.
“You’re me, then?” Jeremy asked.
“We are us.”
Jeremy turned away and faced over the edge of the crater. A swirling wind blew grit around his bare ankles. He squinted. “It’s not as dark as I thought it would be.”
The demon chuckled. “Keep looking.”
“Why,” Jeremy looked away. “What’s down there?”
“Pain, the truth, the end of some things, the beginning of others.”
Jeremy sighed. Why couldn’t anyone around here give him a straight answer? He held his breath and looked into the crater. For a moment, all he could see was a faint mist, gray and iridescent. There was something else, something under it. Jeremy strained, his eyes slits of concentration. Vague shapes undulated, rolled in and out of each other, dissipated, crystallized and puffed out of existence again. “I don’t see…” Jeremy trailed off. “Waaaait.” The mist cleared and instead of one deep pit, Jeremy stared into two. The top of the crater formed a single rough circle but bottomed out into two distinct holes. The writhing mist cleared and Jeremy sucked in a breath.
He reeled on the edge of the pit, momentary vertigo flooding his inner ear. Everything appeared sideways. He was looking down into a room, but from the vantage of someone within the room. After a moment, he got his bearings. Thinking of it like a couple of round movie screens on the floor helped. “Whoa.”
“Look child.”
Jeremy studied what he could see. The bottom of his binocular view was composed of a dune-scape of blankets and sheets. A leg protruded from the bed clothes, a child’s leg, bruised black and yellow along the blade of its shin. The walls around the room were simple wood panel, broken by one door. Jeremy’s attention stayed on that leg. The pajamas had rucked up to the knee. There was a crescent shaped scar just under the kneecap. He’d fallen at the beach when he was two. A nasty shell had stuck up from the sand…
“Hey,” Jeremy said. “Is that me?” He looked at the demon.
It showed huge cannibal teeth.
“I’m seeing through my body, right? This is where I really am right now?”
“If you choose.”
“Oh, shit.”
The demon laughed.
“So I have to make another choice,” Jeremy said. “I have to wanna’ be back there instead of here. Is that what you’re saying? I just have to want it?”
The other Jeremy’s head tilted, “Do you want that, child?” It pointed. “Look.”
The door to the room opened. A big man with steel-gray hair dressed in a dark suit filled the door. His mouth moved, but Jeremy couldn’t tell what he was saying. There was no sound with this picture. He looked funny though, pissed-off, but kind of satisfied, like he expected or knew something. He walked into the room, still talking, revealing another person in the door.
“Horton!” Jeremy dropped to his hands and knees, peering over the rim of the crater as if he could get closer by bending down. Tears immediately sprang to his eyes. His lips quivered. A terrible longing whipped through him, exhausting and exhilarating. “Oh, man, Horton,” he whispered, then shouted, “Hey! Mr. Horton! I’m here!”
Horton, who appeared to have been keeping his eyes away from the boy in the bed with a fair amount of concentration, now looked over, his eyebrows drawing up.
“Hey,” Jeremy said. “Can he hear me? He can hear me! Horton!” He cupped his hands around his mouth, a boy on his knees shouting into the ground, “Yo! Come in, Mr. Horton! It’s moon base Jeremy, I’m right here!”
Horton stared through the twin holes at the bottom of the deep pit, his face a mask. He turned away and said something to the other man.
“Horton?” Jeremy said. “Horton!” His shoulders fell. “He can’t hear me.” He looked to his double. “Okay, I wanna’ go back. What do I do?”
“Certain, child?”
Jeremy looked back once more. In the second or two that his head had been turned away the scene had changed considerably. The room was suddenly full of people and almost all of them were pointing guns.
* * *