Little Doors (36 page)

Hazel gripped Pike by the wrist, nailed him with her ardent gaze. “I can almost picture the place he’s talking about.”

“Me too,” said Calla.

Pike shook his head in confusion. “This is too weird. He’s hypnotized you three and now you’re all trying to hypnotize me. Somehow you’re putting pictures in my brain—”

“No,” said the stranger, “those are memories.”

Pike lurched a few feet away, then halted. The man levered open his door and emerged. Squat, wearing a wool suit, he held an old-fashioned satchel in his left hand. He extended his right hand, and Westbrook shook it.

“My name is Doctor Iatros. Take me to a quiet, unfrequented place where we might talk. Quickly. Cockaigne needs you as soon as possible.”

* * *

Many staunch words of comfort from Dormender and vast quantities of reassuring petting from Aniatis and Yodsess had been needed to calm the lumpkin enough to secure speech from the creature. At first, when encountered in the foothills of the Sugar Mountains, the quivering, frightened little furball (when standing, only as tall as the shins of the godlings) had retracted all its limbs and tried to hide behind an outcropping of pink-veined rock candy. Prodded from its niche, the lumpkin had deliberately rolled toward the nearby Great Gravy River as if to drown itself. Rescued from this fate, the timorous citizen of Cockaigne had required fully an hour of coaxing to reach the point where it could sensibly converse.

“Now, lumpkin,” cajoled Dormender, “speak truly of what drove you to fear us, the legendary protectors of your race.”

The lumpkin’s voice piped bitterly. “Many and many a century have passed since any of your kind walked the Land to offer a shield or sword on our behalf. The only one of your breed remaining never leaves Castel Djurga. And he is no friend to any who dares trespass on the Jumbles.”

“The Jumbles?” queried Aniatis. “What unknown territory do you name?”

“For hundreds of parasangs around Castel Djurga, the Land has been rendered fulsomely and morbidly rebarbative. No feature of the landscape offers solace or nourishment, the rude denizens affright, and the very sunlight that falls heavily there abrades the skin.”

Yodsess smacked her mailed fist upon a cinnamon gumdrop big as a hassock. The sweet boulder absorbed the force of her blow, but not the sting of her words. “The Land bordering Castel Djurga was always the fairest spot in this paradise, a harmonious precinct of laughing waters and succulent pasturage! How could it now be so perverted?”

Dormender frowned. “Only through the madness of our comrade Theriagin, I fear.”

Aniatis quizzed the lumpkin further. “You cite unkind inhabitants of these Jumbles. Are they the starostas?”

“No, worse! Even the starostas are affrighted of the Jumbles-dwellers, and venture not within their grasp. If I may be so bold, these dreadful beings resemble—they resemble you, your worships! But primitive, cloddish, puny travesties of your divine features.”

None of the three divinities had any response to this puzzling information, and after a small amount of additional interrogation, they bade the lumpkin to bounce off on his way.

“Too much vilely sweet and egocentric solitude has rendered poor Theriagin a pustule of sickness upon the Land,” Yodsess declaimed.

“Judge not our fellow too harshly,” Dormender urged. “Any of us might have fallen into the same trap.”

“Righting this wrong upon the Land must be our primary duty,” Aniatis reminded them. “Rescue and rehabilitation of Theriagin comes second, if at all.”

“I recall the dark labors we faced when first we arrived in the Land,” Dormender said reflectively. “Those lessons will stand us in good stead now.”

Yodsess raised her sharp labrys called Insight. “Onward then to Castel Djurga!”

* * *

Pike chivvied out the two younger kids who had been using the space under the gymnasium’s back stairs as a lovers’ lane. Arranging several plastic milk crates in a rough semicircle on the greasy gravel, he fumed silently while his companions stared worshipfully at the weird Doctor Iatros. The intriguing stranger had refused to answer any of their questions until they were all settled down on their hard waffle- bottomed stools, shielded on three sides by graffiti-scribbled damp concrete. From the mildewy shadows, they could look down a long open slope of sunlit grass and spot any intruders long before they themselves could be surprised.

Once arranged in this manner, with two children to either side, Doctor Iatros began to spin his tale.

“Ten million years ago, I created a world—”

Immediately Pike interrupted with a derisive exclamation. “Shit, man! I thought the dope spiel was lame, but now we get fairy tales on top of it!”

“My words are indeed deemed myths in my pocket universe, by those who know no better. Here they are literal facts. But even as myths, they contain much truth. Fairy tales too are instructive, but not in the same manner. Now, shall I continue?”

The other three chorused yes, and Pike was forced to consent grudgingly as well.

“Ten million years ago, I created a small universe and named it Cockaigne. It was intended to be an Edenic place, offering its inhabitants an easy life, yet one not without its heroic challenges. Unfortunately, due to my extant immature skills, my universe contained an inherent flaw. A coarseness in the quantum weave allowed all higher intelligences to leak out into the ambient multiverse. I watched with intense dismay as the souls whom I had intended as the guardians of my Land evaporated after only a short existence and pinwheeled away, indestructible but lost, across the cosmos, finding unnatural homes in a myriad of other forms.

“Without sentient guardians to help shape Cockaigne, my creation began to degenerate. Mourning, I left it behind to seek out the original lost inhabitants wherever they might be in the cosmos—a laborious quest, believe me—and offer them the chance to return and help me repair my beautiful world. I cannot transplant you permanently to your native Land, for the congenital flaw remains, irreparable without destroying the place and starting over. But I have found a way to insure that your visits are frequent and extensive enough to be wholly satisfying and productive and beneficial, both for the Land and for your own souls.”

Doctor Iatros fell silent. Westbrook ventured, “Are you, like, God?” The doctor laughed and patted his stomach. “With this body? Hardly!” Hazel said, “Do you have any pictures of Cockaigne?” “No,” replied Iatros, “for your kind of cameras do not work in the Land.” Ever practical, Calla asked, “How do we get there and back?”

As his answer, Iatros reached down to the satchel at his feet, opened it, and withdrew a square of blotter paper about the size of an index card. The paper was printed with smeary blue watercolor lines dividing it into four cells; inside each cell a different blurry symbol shone with a faint indigo radiance: sword, spear, double-bladed axe, and flail.

Pike jumped up, nearly banging his head on the underslant of the stairs. “That’s acid! LSD, pure and simple.”

Iatros paid no heed to the accusation. “These tabs have been soaked in a supraliminal drug of my own devising, tailored to the physiology of your species, which allows your souls to awaken fully and travel astrally to Cockaigne, where they will automatically manifest bodies out of the templates I have installed there. Once embodied, all will come naturally to you. Your return is likewise automatic, upon the timely waning of the drug in your mundane veins. I recommend taking the drug in unison, while maintaining physical contact of some sort. Ideally, to facilitate your temporary abandonment of this world, your psychic rebirth, you should also be naked.”

Pike was beside himself. “Naked! Naked! Now we’re taking orders from a sex pervert too! Have you guys all gone totally nuts?”

“I will not be present when you use the drug. But might I suggest that you make your first experiment soon? I have many light-years yet to cover in my quest, and I would like to leave you with a supply of the drug while I’m away. But not before you satisfy yourselves as to its use.”

“Right, right,” Pike ranted. “Hook us now for free, then make us pay in blood and sex games. Well, I’m not biting, Doctor Asshole! Let’s just see what the cops have to say about all this.”

Bent over, Pike scuttled for the exit. Halfway there, Iatros called out, “Pike! Recall Castel Djurga!”

Pike stiffened, then collapsed to the gravel. His friends hastened to his side and helped him up, laying him down across several crates. Within minutes his eyes fluttered open, and he reached toward Iatros.

“Hand that stuff over, Doc. Cockaigne needs us.”

* * *

Aniatis pulled her begored and steaming spear named Caritas from the guts of the starosta, and the hideous creature, formerly pinned to the trunk of a broadcloth tree, fell to the turf. The mortally wounded yet still belligerent monster whipped its many suckered tendrils in vain, lisped chthonic obscenities from its psittacine beak, shook its riotous green mane, exuded venom from all its stingers, fangs and barbels, and madly clawed scales off its own teated belly. Darting gracefully in and out of the circle of its lashing mace-like tails, Dormender and Yodsess employed sword and axe to amputate and eventually decapitate the evil being. Upon final expiration the creature released a noxious cloud of puce bodily gas; but knowing the eventuality of this ultimate assault, the three practiced attackers had already retreated.

Cleaning their weapons with swatches plucked from the broadcloth trees, the godlings regarded their fallen prey with mixed satisfaction and concern.

“This marks the tenth starosta we have slain twixt the Diamond Lanes and Firewater Creek,” noted Dormender, “a region where once their vile kind were extinct. I thought we had battled long and hard in ages past to confine the feeble remnant of their race to the Sherbert Polar Floes.”

Yodsess slung the gleaming Insight over her brawny shoulder. “Cockaigne has slid inevitably a long way back toward the chaotic conditions reigning when first we regained our home.”

“To think that the starostas once cruelly ruled over all the Land,” said Aniatis. “Why Lord Iatros ever created them in the first place, I shall never understand.”

At the mention of Iatros’s name, all the trees bent and the grasses murmured, though no breeze passed.

“Unriddling the ways of our Creator concerns us not,” Yodsess chided. “Our mission must be to reestablish the critical balances we once so carefully engineered.”

“We are more than halfway to Castel Djurga,” Dormender said, pointing with pristine Salvor toward the east. “Soon, if the lumpkins spoke accurately, we will cross into the misshapen Jumbles. But at the moment, if memory serves, a covey of Roast Fowls is wont to nest nearby, hard upon a patch of Mead Gourds. Let us refresh ourselves, then make hard march.”

They sallied forth in high spirits then, while the elephant-sized carcass behind them slowly deliquesced into the scorched turf.

* * *

Eagerly the four sweaty teens shucked their daypacks and fell with near-unanimous exclamations of relief onto the coarse grass of the clearing.

“Ow!” complained Hazel, “I landed on some kind of pricker!”

“Better than landing on some kind of prick,” Calla dryly observed.

Pike reacted to the bawdy comment unmercifully. Since his fainting spell, he had switched from being the biggest detractor of Cockaigne to the biggest defender of Iatros and his message.

“Shut up, Calla. This has nothing to do with sex. We’re here to find our true home and save it from decay.”

Westbrook shrugged. “We’ll know the truth of it all for sure in a few minutes, won’t we?”

Hazel said, “I still don’t see why we couldn’t stage this test inside.”

Pike patiently explained. “Zonked out in somebody’s bedroom, we’d be more likely to get discovered by horrified adults. But no one ever comes up here, except maybe some other kids once in a while. If anybody stumbles on us, they’ll think we’re just on some kind of nut and berry nudist trip.”

“Trip is the right word,” said Calla. “Despite everything, I’m still half expecting this stuff to be nothing but acid.”

“And if it is plain old LSD—something you’ve talked about trying more than once, Calla—this setting should be safe and pleasant enough to give us a good trip. Okay, enough talk. Everybody strip.”

Westbrook, Hazel and Pike undressed swiftly enough, but Calla hesitated, three-quarters turned away from her friends.

“Oh, come off it, Calla. I’ve seen you naked plenty of times in the locker room already, and you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I can’t help being modest, Hazel.”

“Modesty won’t cut it where we’re going,” admonished Pike. “When I was out of it under the stairs, I saw vague shapes of the things we have to fight, and they won’t care whether you’re naked or not before they try to rip your head off.”

“Which poses an interesting question,” Westbrook said. “Can our bodies here be hurt by whatever happens to us in Cockaigne?”

“Don’t know. But if we ever manage to shut up and do it, we’ll learn that too.”

Naked, the foursome found comfortable spots in the wild pasture in which to sit. A vagrant breeze riffled the fine down on the girls’ arms and tightened the boys’ scrotums. Pike held the blotter paper. Once settled, he ripped it into quarters and passed the emblemed squares out. Regarding each other with fervent determination, the teenagers placed the chalky papers on their tongues, then linked hands.