The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (41 page)

. . . and found myself in a different place, my left hand still gripping what turned out to be a projecting brick in a tall pillar. We were standing in what felt like a huge railway station, its ceiling arched beyond my sight, its walls dark and blank, with no advertisements, nor even the name of the station. Not that the name would have meant much, because there were no railroad tracks to be seen. All I knew was that we were off the dirt road; dazed with relief, I giggled absurdly – even a little crazily, most likely. I said, “Well, I don’t remember
that
being part of the Universal Studios tour.”

Avram drew a deep breath, and seemed to let out more air than he took in. He said, “All right. That’s more like it.”

“More like
what
?” I have spent a goodly part of my life being bewildered, but this remains the gold standard. “Are we still in the Overneath?”

“We are in the
hub
of the Overneath,” Avram said proudly. “The heart, if you will. That place where we just were, it’s like a local stop in a bad part of town.
This . . .
from here you can get anywhere at all. Anywhere. All you have to do is—” he hesitated, finding an image—
“point
yourself properly, and the Overneath will take you there. It helps if you happen to know the exact geographical coordinates of where you want to go—” I never doubted for a moment that he himself did – “but what matters most is to focus, to feel the complete and unique reality of that particular place, and then just . . .
be
there.” He shrugged and smiled, looking a trifle embarrassed. “Sorry to sound so cosmic and one-with-everything. I was a long while myself getting the knack of it all. I’d aim for Machu Picchu and come out in Capetown, or try for the Galapagos and hit Reykjavik, time after time. Okay,
tovarich,
where in the world would you like to—”

“Home,” I said before he’d even finished the question. “New York City, West Seventy-ninth Street. Drop me off at Central Park, I’ll walk from there.” I hesitated, framing my question. “But will we just pop out of the ground there, or shimmer into existence, or what? And will it be the real Seventy-ninth Street, or . . . or not?
Mon capitaine,
there does seem to be a bit of dissension in the ranks. Talk to me, Big Bwana, sir.”

“When you met me in Chelsea,” Avram began; but I had turned away from him, looking down to the far end of the station – as I still think of it – where, as I hadn’t before, I saw human figures moving. Wildly excited, I waved to them, and was about to call out when Avram clapped his hand over my mouth, pulling me down, shaking his head fiercely, but speaking just above a whisper. “You don’t want to do that. You don’t ever want to do that.”

“Why not?” I demanded angrily. “They’re the first damn
people
we’ve seen—”

“They aren’t exactly people.” Avram’s voice remained low, but he was clearly ready to silence me again, if need be. “You can’t ever be sure in the Overneath.”

The figures didn’t seem to be moving any closer, but I couldn’t see them any better, either. “Do they live here? Or are they just making connections, like us? Catching the red-eye to Portland?”

Avram said slowly, “A lot of people use the Overneath, Dom Pedro. Most are transients, passing through, getting from one place to another without buying gas. But . . . yes, there
are
things that live here, and they don’t like us. Maybe for them it’s ‘there goes the neighborhood,’ I don’t know—there’s so much I’m still learning. But I’m quite clear on the part about the distaste . . . and I think I could wish that you hadn’t waved quite so.”

There
was
movement toward us now – measured, but definitely concerted. Avram was already moving himself, more quickly than I could recall having seen him. “This way!” he snapped over his shoulder, leading me, not back to the pillar which had received us into this nexus of the Overneath, but away, back into blind dark that closed in all around, until I felt as if we were running down and down a subway tunnel with a train roaring close behind us, except that in this case the train was a string of creatures whose faces I’d made the mistake of glimpsing just before Avram and I fled. He was right about them not being people.

We can’t have run very far, I think now. Apart from the fact that we were already exhausted, Avram had flat feet and gout, and I had no wind worth mentioning. But our pursuers seemed to fall away fairly early, for reasons I can’t begin to guess – fatigue? boredom? the satisfaction of having routed intruders in their world? – and we had ample excuse for slowing down, which our bodies had already done on their own. I wheezed to Avram, “Is there another place like that one?”

Even shaking his head in answer seemed an effort. “Not that I’ve yet discovered. Namporte – we’ll just get home on the local.
All will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Avram hated T.S. Eliot, and had permanently assigned the quotation to Shakespeare, though he knew better.

I didn’t know what he meant by “the local,” until he suddenly veered left, walked a kind of rhomboid pattern – with me on his heels – and we were again on a genuine sidewalk on a warm late-spring afternoon. There were little round tables and beach umbrellas on the street, bright pennants twitching languidly in a soft breeze that smelled faintly of nutmeg and ripening citrus, and of the distant sea. And there were
people:
perfectly ordinary men and women, wearing slacks and sport coats and sundresses, sitting at the little tables, drinking coffee and wine, talking, smiling at each other, never seeming to take any notice of us. Dazed and drained, swimming in the scent and the wonder of sunlight, I said feebly, “Paris? Malaga?”

“Croatia,” Avram replied. “Hvar Island – big tourist spot, since the Romans. Nice place.” Hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, he glanced somewhat wistfully at the holidaymakers. “Don’t suppose you’d be interested in staying on awhile?” But he was starting away before I’d even shaken my head, and he wasn’t the one who looked back.

Traveling in darkness, we zigzagged and hedge-hopped between one location and the next, our route totally erratic, bouncing us from Croatia to bob up in a music store in Lapland . . . a wedding in Sri Lanka . . . the middle of a street riot in Lagos . . . an elementary-school classroom in Bahia. Avram was flying blind; we both knew it, and he never denied it. “Could have gotten us home in one jump from the hub – I’m a little shaky on the local stops; really
need
to work up a proper map. Namporte, not to worry.”

And, strangely, I didn’t. I was beginning – just beginning – to gain his sense of landmarks: of the Overneath junctures, the crossroads, detours and spur lines where one would naturally turn left or right to head
here,
spin around to veer off
there,
or trust one’s feet to an invisible stairway, up or down, finally emerging in
that
completely unexpected landscape. Caroming across the world as we were, it was difficult not to feel like a marble in a pinball machine, but in general we did appear to be working our way more or less toward the east coast of North America. We celebrated with a break in a Liverpool dockside pub, where the barmaid didn’t look twice at Avram’s purchase of two pints of porter, and didn’t look at me at all. I was beginning to get used to that, but it still puzzled me, and I said so.

“The Overneath’s grown used to me,” Avram explained. “That’s one thing I’ve learned about the Overneath – it grows, it adapts, same as the body can adapt to a foreign presence. If you keep using it, it’ll adapt to you the same way.”

“So right now the people here see you, but can’t see me.”

Avram nodded. I said, “Are they real? Are all these places we’ve hit – these local stops of yours – are
they
real? Do they go on existing when nobody from – what?
outside,
I guess – is passing through? Is this an alternate universe, with everybody having his counterpart here, or just a little something the Overneath runs up for tourists?” The porter was quite real, anyway, if warm, and my deep swig almost emptied my glass. “I need to know,
mon maître.”

Avram sipped his own beer and coughed slightly; and I realized with a pang how much older than I he was, and that he had absolutely no business being a pinball – nor the only true adventurer I’d ever known. No business at all. He said, “The alternate-universe thing, that’s bullshit. Or if it isn’t, doesn’t matter – you can’t get there from here.” He leaned forward. “You know about Plato’s Cave, Dom Pedro?”

“The people chained to the wall in the cave, just watching shadows all their lives? What about it?”

“Well, the shadows are cast by things and people coming and going outside the cave, which those poor prisoners never get to see. The shadows are their only notion of reality – they live and die never seeing anything but those shadows, trying to understand the world through shadows. The philosopher’s the one who stands outside the cave and reports back. You want another beer?”

“No.” Suddenly I didn’t even want to finish the glass in my hand. “So our world, what we call our world . . . it might be nothing but the shadow of the Overneath?”

“Or the other way around. I’m still working on it. If you’re finished, let’s go.”

We went outside, and Avram stood thoughtfully staring at seven and a half miles of docks and warehouses, and seeming to sniff the gray air. I said, “My mother’s family set off for America from here. I think it took them three weeks.”

“We’ll do better.” He was standing with his arms folded, mumbling to himself:
“No way to get close to the harbor, damn it . . . too bad we didn’t fetch up on the other side of the Mersey . . . best thing would be . . . best thing . . . no . . . I wonder . . .”

Abruptly he turned and marched us straight back into the pub, where he asked politely for the loo. Directed, he headed down a narrow flight of stairs; but, to my surprise, passed by the lavatory door and kept following the stairway, telling me over his shoulder, “Most of these old pubs were built over water, for obvious reasons. And don’t ask me why, not yet, but the Overneath likes water . . .” I was smelling damp earth now, earth that had never been quite dry, perhaps for hundreds of years. I heard a throb nearby that might have been a sump pump of some sort, and caught a whiff of sewage that was definitely
not
centuries old. I got a glimpse of hollow darkness ahead, and thought wildly,
Christ, it’s a drain! That’s it, we’re finally going right down the drain . . .

Avram hesitated at the bottom of the stair, cocking his head back like a gun hammer. Then it snapped forward, and he grunted in triumph and led me, not into my supposed drain, but to the side of it, into an apparent wall through which we passed with no impediment, except a slither of stones under our feet. The muck sucked at my shoes – long since too far gone for my concern – as I plodded forward in Avram’s wake. Having to stop and cram them back on scared me, because he just kept slogging on, never looking back. Twice I tripped and almost fell over things that I thought were rocks or branches; both times they turned out to be large, recognizable, disturbingly splintered bones. I somehow kept myself from calling Avram’s attention to them, because I knew he’d want to stop and study them, and pronounce on their origin and function, and I didn’t need that. I already knew what they were.

In time the surface became more solid under my feet, and the going got easier. I asked, half-afraid to know, “Are we under the harbor?”

“If we are, we’re in trouble,” Avram growled. “It’d mean I missed the . . . no,
no,
we’re all right, we’re fine, it’s just—” His voice broke off abruptly, and I could feel rather than see him turning, as he peered back down the way we had come. He said, very quietly, “Well,
damn
. . .”

“What?
What
?” Then I didn’t need to ask anymore, because I heard the sound of a foot being pulled out of the same mud I’d squelched through. Avram said, “All this way. They
never
follow that far . . . could have sworn we’d lost it in Lagos . . .” Then we heard the sound again, and Avram grabbed my arm, and we ran.

The darkness ran uphill, which didn’t help at all. I remember my breath like stones in my lungs and chest, and I remember a desperate desire to stop and bend over and throw up. I remember Avram never letting go of my arm, literally dragging me with him . . . and the panting that I thought was mine, but that wasn’t coming from either of us . . .

“Here!” Avram gasped.
“Here!”
and he let go and vanished between two boulders – or whatever they really were – so close together that I couldn’t see how there could be room for his stout figure. I actually had to give him a push from behind, like Rabbit trying to get Pooh Bear out of his burrow; then I got stuck myself, and he grabbed me and pulled . . . and then we were both stuck there, and I couldn’t breathe, and something had hold of my left shoe. Then Avram was saying, with a calmness that was more frightening than any other sound, even the sound behind me, “Point yourself. You know where we’re going – point and
jump . . .
”

And I did. All I can remember is thinking about the doorman under the awning at my cousin’s place . . . the elevator . . . the color of the couch where I would sleep when I visited . . . a kind of hissing howl somewhere behind . . . a
shiver,
as though I were dissolving . . . or perhaps it was the crevice we were jammed into dissolving . . .

. . . and then my head was practically in the lap of Alice on her mushroom: my cheek on smooth granite, my feet somewhere far away, as though they were still back in the Overneath. I opened my eyes in darkness – but a warm, different darkness, smelling of night grass and engine exhaust – and saw Avram sprawled intimately across the Mad Hatter. I slid groggily to the ground, helped to disentangle him from Wonderland, and we stood silently together for a few moments, watching the headlights on Madison Avenue. Some bird was whooping softly but steadily in a nearby tree, and a plane was slanting down into JFK.