“Just give it a minute,” said West.
She stared at the void beneath her. If gravity came back right now, she’d be in for a long fall.
“Give me your hand, Number Five.”
West reached out for her. She took his hand. His skin was scaly, cold. Her first instinct was to pull away, but she ignored that.
A cold wind blasted out of the hole, and she was falling. She clung to West with a desperate grip, but there was no way he could keep her and himself from falling into oblivion. But he didn’t budge and, with a single tug, he pulled her to safety.
“Would’ve worked faster if she’d been unspoiled,” said the creature.
“It worked,” he replied. “Does it really matter?”
West and the creature unrolled the carpet, covered the Great Thing, and dragged the coffee table back into place. It all seemed perfectly ordinary, business as usual. Visit another dimension, feed a bucket of chicken to a big hole, fix gravity, go home. West exchanged a few words with the creature in private while Diana waited in the hall. West assured her she could go back without him now, but she had a few questions.
She started with “What the hell ="27">
“What’s in the hole?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“That guy back there called it the Great Thing.”
“There are some who believe that a cosmic something dwells at the center of all realities. It does something important there. There are those who worship it as a god, although why anyone would worship a god they all agree couldn’t give a damn about them always escapes me. But that’s the Great Thing. While I don’t know what’s down in that hole, nobody else does either. I’m skeptical, though, because there are a lot of holes in this universe and while one of them might lead to the heart of everything, I have to figure most don’t.”
“Well, something has to be down there, right?”
He shrugged again. “Don’t know about that.”
“Something ate the chicken.”
“That’s an assumption. All I know is that there’s a hole and every so often, it’s necessary to throw a bucket of chicken into it to keep everything from floating away. What happens to the chicken, where it goes, if something eats it or if it just sits at the bottom of the hole with a thousand other buckets of fried chicken, these are things I don’t know, most probably never will, and don’t really concern me.”
“But why chicken?” she asked.
“You’ll drive yourself mad if you don’t stop asking unanswerable questions.”
“Bull.”
West stopped. He turned slowly with a genuinely perplexed expression.
“I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t just go with this. I think about this. I know I can’t understand it, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering about it. Curiosity isn’t a sin, and asking unanswerable questions is something human beings do from time to time.”
His beard writhed. He nodded to himself.
“Okay. That’s fair. Ask all the questions you want. Just don’t expect any satisfying answers.”
“I guess I can live with that. If I have to.”
He smoothed his beard, and the faint trace of a smile was visible under it. “Then you should do just fine, Number Five.”
They were back in their apartment building, and West prepared to part ways with her. She stopped him.
“One last question. Why did you need me at all for that?”
“Tradition demands that a maiden make the offer. It’s nonsense, of course, but easier to have you do it than argue about it with him.”
“That’s it? It’s just because of some dumb tradition?”
“Does there need to be a better reason?”
“But I could’ve died,” she said. “I almost jumped into that hole. I don’t know why, but I almost did.”
“Some people do.”
Reading West’s face was always difficult, but this time she could see exactly what he was thinking.
“You son of a bitch. You knew that I might jump.”
He lowered his head and mumbled.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I didn’t think you would, but I’ve been wrong before.”
“Is that what I am? Just another disposable resource? Something to be used and discarded just to make your life a little more convenient?”
“I didn’t want you to jump, and I could have taken the chicken myself. But I like you, Number Five.”
She stepped back instinctively.
“The things I do, somebody has to do them.” His shoulders slumped. “Or not. It’s not like any of it really matters in the long run. But I do them anyway because… because that’s what I do. And when I look out into that world of yours, I sometimes wonder why I do it.”
West straightened. As straight as he ever stood.
“Someone like you reminds me why. Someone with the strength of will not to jump into madness when most others would, who can ask unanswerable questions with unsatisfying answers. Someone who doesn’t give up.”
It was her turn to slump. “You’re wrong. I give up all the time. Giving up is what got me here in the first place.”
“No, Number Five. You’re wrong. If you weren’t, you’d be at the bottom of that pit, solving the mystery of the Great Thing. But you’re here, and that says something about you.”
“But what does it say?” she asked.
He ran his fingers through his thick hair and shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe that’s up to you to decide in the end. If you’ll excuse me, Number Five. I can’t sit around talking all day. Some of us have things to do.”
He closed his door.
She didn’t know what she thought about any of this, but if the decision was hers, she decided right then not to worry about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It’d been a week since Diana had seen or heard from Chuck. After the duct tape incident she wasn’t sure if she should be relieved by that or not. The few times she tried knocking on his door he didn’t answer. She decided to give him some space and hope he could deal with his problems.
He finally showed up at her place. She answered his manic beating on her door. He pushed open the door and slammed it shut.
“Hey, Chuck,” she asked. “What’s up?”
“Quiet. It’s out there.”
“What’s out there?”
“Hi, Chuckie-boy,” said Vom.
Chuck paled.
She asked Vom, Smorgaz, and Zap to leave the room so she could talk to Chuck alone.
“Why do we have to leave?” asked Zap.
“Yeah,” said Vom. “It’s movie night, and I just microwaved a fresh batch of popcorn.”
She glared at them.
“Oh, fine.” Vom picked up the bowl of popcorn and shoveled handfuls down his throat.
“Save some for me,” said Smorgaz.
“Get your own,” replied Vom, shoveling faster.
The monsters went into the kitchen. When they were gone Chuck relaxed a bit. He was still on edge, but he was nowhere near the wild energy she’d seen last week.
Her first instinct was to ask what was wrong, but she already knew the answer.
“Maybe we should go for a walk,” she said.
“Out there? I can’t go. It won’t let me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“Chuck, if I could maybe offer you some advice, I think you have to stop being afraid of it.”
“What are you talking about? It’s a monster, a creature that lives to torment me. I’d be stupid not to be afraid of it.”
She said, “But that’s just it. I don’t think it actually wants to torment you. I think it’s just responding to the emotional vibe you keep putting out. If you keep acting fearful, then it will think it should be feared. These things, these monsters, they don’t really mean any harm. They just can’t help it.”