John said, “You’re gonna be looking at my fist, and then Dave’s
“Take a moment and try to understand what you’ve seen,” North said. “You will not be angry once you understand. Your anger clouds you.” North glanced around the room. “I was born here, as I said.
I was trying to think up a new threat of violence for North and then I saw John’s eyes go wide. I turned on the black column and saw activity there in the darkness. Swirling shapes pouring through it. Streaks of light. Life.
North said, “Imagine a garment, woven from a single thread. And imagine that after forming that garment, that same continuing thread was used to weave another garment similar to the first. So you have a thread that is simultaneously part of two garments, but at some point the thread stops being part of one garment and becomes part of the other.”
John waved his hand impatiently and said, “Who gives a shit?”
North gestured toward the column.
“This is the thread.”
I said, “Good. John, pry the bomb from Molly’s colon and blow this fucker.”
North said, “The key to saving your friend, Amy, is through there.”
I said, “You want us to go through? What’s in there? Hell? Is that what happened, this thing opened up and a bunch of you monstrous fuckers came crawling in? That’s why we’ve got so much weird shit in this town?”
“No man has traveled through this portal. Though they have tried it.”
“Then what the fuck are you talking about?” I screamed.
John glanced at Molly and said, “Shit the bomb, Molly.”
North said, “No, the only ones who can travel back and forth are the dark men.”
John said, “Blacks? Is that why there aren’t any in [Undisclosed]? They get sucked in?”
This threw North. He recovered and said, “No, the dark men are the ones who lived but have been torn from their bodies, through death and, well, other circumstances you would not understand. They come from all worlds with sentient thought. They are unrestricted by matter and as such, can exist in one dimension and then the next, in one time and then the next, and then, in none at all. They exist in numbers greater than you can imagine, a dark ocean that flows between worlds. And as more thinking beings are born and die, the ranks of the dark men swell like the waters of a flooding river.”
“Okay!” said John. “Then let’s blow it up then.” He leaned down and grabbed Molly by the shoulders. “We need you to shit the bomb, Molly. Shit it! Shit the bomb!”
She didn’t even try.
John said, “Fuck it. Let’s light the dog on fire.”
North said, “You cannot destroy it. If you could, your universe would vanish into it.”
I looked at him, then spun on Molly. “Shit it, Molly! NOW! SHIT IT!”
North seemed to be losing patience and he said, “Through that passage is the only way to save Amy Sullivan.”
I turned on him. “Are you finally getting to the part where you tell us how to do that?”
“You must pass through.”
“You just said—”
“There is a reason why you have drawn so much interest, Mr. Wong. The ones who run this facility, and others, have devoted more time and resources than you can imagine to developing an ability to pass from one side to the next. You and John here apparently can. And we do not know why.”
I said, “I know why. But I’m sure not telling you.”
North said, “If you do not go in, where will you go?”
He had a point. And we had come this far. I looked at the column and said, “Fine. How do we get in?”
“Just decide that you want to get in and you will.”
I reached out a hand and touched the surface, like cut onyx. Close to it I thought I could see color in the blackness, blue with streaks of white. The column felt as solid as stone, but then suddenly I saw my fingers push into it, like it was made of warm wax. My hand vanished up to the wrist and then elbow and then I changed my mind, tried to pull back and realized I had no chance of doing it short of cutting off my arm. I turned to John to tell him to find something sharp, but at that moment blackness fell over my vision.
CHAPTER 16
THERE WAS A period not unlike the half-waking moments between snooze alarms. A timeless, restless void that could have been a second and could have been ten thousand years. I felt air on my face, a rushing wind that pummeled me. I could not see, realized my eyes were closed, and pried them open. My vision immediately went blurry, air blowing the fluids from my eyeballs. I felt like I was falling. I focused my eyes and saw the ground, way down there, hundreds of feet. Lush green grass and tiny pale shapes that could have been people, little dots that seemed to grow almost imperceptibly.
I started flailing my arms, hoping I somehow had the ability to fly in this world. It was no good. I fell and fell for what seemed like an irrationally long time and then, I wasn’t falling. Instead I was tangled up in something soft and springy like cheesecloth, bouncing twice before landing once and for all.
I laid there for a moment in some kind of netting, dumbfounded, a split second before Molly’s ass landed right on my face.
I struggled to sit up, saw that I was hanging in a piece of cloth the size of a house, suspended high in the air. Above me, a dozen wingless, flying creatures the size of people were keeping it suspended with ropes.
This wasn’t what I was taught to expect in Sunday School, but things are never the way you learn them in the classroom. The cloth convulsed and tossed me again into the air for a dizzying second. John had landed.
We were going lower, down and down. I peered through the translucent fabric, like looking through panty hose. I thought I saw a crowd down there, a flesh-colored sea with a space in the middle. I was half expecting to find gates of carved pearl and a judge waiting for me, half expecting the crowd down there to descend on me, douse me in drawn butter and eat me alive.
We went down and down and down, the air getting warmer and the wind getting calmer. We finally hit the ground with a jolt. I rolled and flailed in the netting, got on my feet, then fell back on my ass. I got a good look at the beasts carry ing the tarp. They were a sort of humpbacked men, emitting a growling noise until the moment they landed. They were naked, with penises I worked hard not to notice, but they wore loose hoods that covered their heads and draped down over their chests.
One of the men walked near, penis flopping with each step; he extended a hand to help me up. I observed that he did not in fact have a humped back, but instead seemed to have some kind of apparatus that was riding on his back with straps made of hard, jointed plastic or something like it.
I let the naked man, hairy as Robin Williams, help me up, and then I withdrew my hand as quickly as possible. He stood back and joined the humpbacks who were forming a loose circle around me and John and the dog. Beyond them, I saw the crowd.
There were maybe a hundred people standing around, every one of them wearing hoods. Every one of them otherwise naked. I observed, with some dismay, that a large percentage of them were el der ly. I noticed that one group of them were holding up a large, colorful banner but I could not make out what was on it.
I said to John, “Oooookay. So, you see Amy here?”
John said, “Dunno.” He scanned the hooded nakedness around us and said, “You know what this is, right? We’re in an alternate universe and this is
The crowd stared at us in silence. Molly sniffed the air. It was cool here, maybe in the high fifties, a mild winter. The grass around us was still green and soft and the landscape was made of the same low hills that Undisclosed was built on, spilling out around us like a wrinkled green rug. My head throbbed from getting clubbed
