Anatoli sank to the ground, staring at the blank space, mind fried. And the manuscript was gone. The manuscript was gone. From the woods came the sound of men approaching.
“Ah, hell,” Denton said.
He felt the strangest sensation, as if he were removed from the scene, observing his own decision-making process. Not that it was a decision. No, it was nothing as deliberate as that. Even while part of him screamed that he was crazy, nutso, freaking insane, excitement and a slick thrill of destiny, of fate, rocked him into action. It was like that dizzy compulsion some people got in high places. He wanted…
He wanted to jump. He giggled nervously.
He took a step, knees shaking, and another, and another, a weird joy bubbling up inside him. And then he was running and the light claimed him.
Book Two.
On Jacob’s Ladder
14
This world is like an antechamber before the World to Come. Prepare yourself in the antechamber before you enter the palace… This good [the Future World] is not given as a reward, but as a direct result of a person’s binding himself to good. A person attains that to which he binds himself.
14.1. Sixty-Forty Denton Wyle
There was no time to be afraid. The pull was so inexorable, so much larger than himself. He was a bug perched on a freight train. There wasn’t even a thought of resisting.
He must have shut his eyes. The ground, solid beneath his feet, came as a surprise to him; he hadn’t realized it was gone until it was back. Bright sunlight was red against his eyelids, warm on his cheeks. His body felt strangely light. He wobbled, off-balance, put his arms out to steady himself, and opened his eyes.
He half sat, half fell down in surprise. He was in a jungle, a rain-forest eruption of vegetation. The green was so vivid and bright and obscene it hurt his eyes.
Denton was on the side of a slope. About a half mile away was a foaming waterfall that disappeared into the smothering verdure. And flowers! Christ—from where he sat alone he could see a hundred varieties, screaming with color, stinking with perfume. He could taste the breath in his mouth—warm and chewy and textured with scent. The world blurred dizzily. He flopped back on the carpeting of grasses and ferns, heart racing madly, and found himself looking up at a deep turquoise sky. Above his head a magenta phallic-shaped fruit dangled on a fuzzy-leafed tree.
It had to be a dream. Had to be.
It wasn’t a dream.
The vertigo was manageable, if he moved slowly. He got to his feet.
“Hello! Dr. Talcott? Rabbi Handalman? Nate?” His cries were sucked up by the forest. “Molly?” he muttered.
He spent several minutes tromping around the slope but saw nothing, not a trace of an exit anywhere, no microscopic black holes, no shining gateways, and no evidence that any of the others had ever come this way. It was just him and the flowers and a few weird-ass birds. Oh, yeah, and no way back.
Despite the heat he felt a chill and rubbed his arms. Okay. So perhaps jumping through the gateway had not been the most intelligent thing he’d ever done. Where was everyone? Why weren’t they here?
What if they weren’t here? At all? And where the heck was here?
He sank down onto the grass, profoundly, devastatingly, afraid.
The sun rose and set three times. They were three of the longest days of Denton’s life. He feared, yes, he really feared, that it was his fate to be stuck in this place, this Hawaiian Tropic ad on steroids, and to go stark, raving mad.
The dense, bright jungle seemed completely uninhabited—at least by anything that could talk back. There were plenty of small birds and mammals, some of them exceedingly bizarre. But he was no botanist, or whatever, and he didn’t care about the wildlife as long as it couldn’t hurt him—which, for all he knew, it could. The smallest thing could be deadly, so he avoided everything. The only thing he wanted to see was another human being, and he didn’t. Nor did he see any indication that any had ever been here. There were no telephone poles, no soda cans, no paths, no roads. For Denton, who felt most comfortable in the heart of LA, it was profoundly unnerving.
And it was freaking hard. Until he’d found the riverbank, walking through the uncut jungle had been like wading through quicksand. He’d grown sticky from the effort of wrestling with greenery—sweaty and covered with sap. Vines clung to his legs like beseeching lovers. And he kept thinking, in his best bunny impersonation, that he could at any time be done in by a poisonous snake or spider or a man-eating plant or a huge sinkhole. All this mondo vegetation could hide just about anything. Anything.
Once he had heard something extremely large crashing around in the distance. Thank god it had been in the distance. He’d promptly gone the other way as fast and as quietly as he could, but his heart had pounded for a good three hours. He wished he hadn’t seen Jurassic Park.
He knew, of course, that he was actually on another world. He had not stepped through time to some prehistoric version of Earth. The vegetation and even the color of the sky were too weird for it to be Earth. And he had certainly not been teleported to an other-dimensional spirit plane. It was far too corporeal and hot and gummy for that.
If he had any sense of adventure or any curiosity about his extraterrestrial journey, it was not making itself known. All he wanted—all that kept him going—was the idea, an obstinate hope, that he would run into people. Any kind of people. He couldn’t have justified this hope, didn’t even try, just ignored any logic to the contrary. The truth was, he could eat fruit from a dozen trees and the water of the river had not yet made him sick. But even so, he would be dead in a couple of months and he knew it. Denton Wyle was not made to live without other people. This place was smothering and absorbing his very identity into its dense silence, and soon he would not exist at all.
He found a riverbank by following the sound of water, and there he stayed. He had an easier time making his way along the relatively clear beaches—they were soil, not sand, and tuffed with mosses. He also moved easier on the second day, and way easier on the third, because his cuts and bruises were improving rapidly. He felt like he could walk for hours and hours, and that was good, because he had no reason to stop. He kept his mind from pressing the panic button with show tunes, sung sotto voce to avoid attracting beasties.
On the third day the river widened and became tumescent. He followed it, the path growing more treacherous, until the water turned white and fell over a precipice. Looking down from the top of that waterfall, Denton saw a valley below. And he cried.
The vista was mind-blowing. Directly below, the river continued its wide course, splitting a world of green lushness in two like a peach. In the distance were purple phantoms that might be mountains. In the foreground was a swath of lower hills, plateaus, and valleys that ran perpendicular to the cliff. And the sky was deep aqua far above and pink at the seams. The light made the world look translucent.
But Denton had seen awesome scenery for three days now, and he’d just as soon chuck it all for a day at Disneyland. What moved him to tears was smoke. Below the cliff was a horseshoe-shaped gorge in among the lower hills. It was almost perfectly round—a valley bordered by the high salmon-colored walls of a plateau. At the back of the gorge was another waterfall, sparkling like crystal in the light. And that smaller tributary, which ran to meet the river that Denton had been following, came from the narrow, open end of the horseshoe so that the valley formed a protected little sphere of jungle with the river flowing from it like a tail.