It wasn’t just my eyes that were overwhelmed. There was a continuous cacophony going on—things creaking, bells tolling, chasms yawning, pits slurping…. I stopped trying to identify all the sounds, just as I gave up trying to see everything going on. I’d need eyes not just in the back of my head but on top of it and in the soles of my shoes as well.
And the smells! I was staggered by a searingly intense whiff of peppermint, followed by the smell of hot copper. Most of them I couldn’t identify. A hefty portion of the sights, sounds and smells were synesthetic—I could hear colors, could see tastes. Old Mr. Telfilm down the street claimed to be synesthetic, and was constantly telling anyone who would listen about how sharp the sky smelled or how the taste of pasta was turquoise and sounded C flat. Now, finally, I knew what he meant.
I realized that Jay had hold of my arm with his good one and was shaking it. “Joey! Listen up—we’ve got to get moving. You don’t have protective gear—you won’t last long in the In-Between without it.”
“The what?” I reluctantly turned my attention away from what looked like really neat graphic imagery—huge towers forming and rising, only to melt into quicksilver lakes and start over. Jay grabbed me and fastened his metal gaze on mine. “We’ve got to go! I can’t get us back to InterWorld Prime with my arm messed up this way. The pain is too distracting, and any drugs I take will make it too hard for me to concentrate. You’ll have to find the way through.”
I looked at him in utter astonishment. About fifty feet away a trapezoid chased and cornered a smaller rhomboid, then “ate” it by leisurely flowing around and over it. Directly above me an ordinary casement window suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Its curtains peeled back and the window slid up, revealing a howling blackness beyond it from which issued piteous screams, groans and cries. It was either an open window on Hell, I decided, or a look inside my own mind at this point.
I didn’t know which was worse.
“How can I find the way through this—this—what did you call it?”
“The In-Between,” Jay said, his voice muffled through the metal mask. He was holding his injured arm with his other one now. The wound wasn’t bleeding much, but it definitely looked like it needed more than a few Band-Aids. “It’s the interstitial folds between the various planes of reality. Call it ‘hyperspace’ or a ‘wormhole,’ if you want. Or it’s the dark spaces between the convolutions in your brain or the place where the magician keeps the rabbit before he pulls it out of his hat. Okay? It really doesn’t matter what you call it—what matters is getting through it and back to InterWorld Prime. That’s what you’ve got to do, Joey.”
“You’ve really got the wrong guy,” I tried to tell him. “I couldn’t find the back of my hand if you wrote directions on my palm.”
“Because your talent doesn’t lie in navigating the planes—it lies in navigating between them. And that’s where we are now. Pay attention,” he continued, overriding me when I tried to interrupt. “The In-Between is a dangerous place. There are—creatures—that live here, or partly here. We call ’em ‘mudluffs.’ That’s an acronym, MDLF, standing for multidimensional life-form. Which is kind of a pointless label, I know—we’re all multidimensional life-forms, right? Except that you and I can only move freely in three dimensions and linearly in a fourth, whereas they have complete freedom in who knows how many. Including, in many cases, the fourth.”
Now, most of what he was saying was going so far over my head that I feared for local air traffic. But I’d seen Twilight Zone reruns, and I knew what the fourth dimension was. “You mean they can travel in time?”
“We think some can. It’s hard to tell, because there’s a certain temporal flexibility between the planes that can affect all of us. You learn to compensate for it when you Walk—otherwise you can spend a month on one world and find that only a couple of days have gone by in another one. It gets real confusing real fast, so we try to take advantage of it only when absolutely necessary.
“But that’s not important now. My point was the mudluffs—stay away from them. They aren’t intelligent, but they can be dangerous. Usually they stay in the In-Between, but some of ’em know how to squeeze out, like polydimensional toothpaste, into the various worlds.”
I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by all this, and starting to wonder how much of what Jay was telling me was real and how much was just him yanking my chain. “Right. Next you’ll be telling me they’re the ones responsible for all the legends of fairies, goblins, like that,” I said. I expected Jay to laugh, but he shook his head.
“No, those are usually HEX scouts. Binary scouts tend to be seen as ‘gray men’ and all that other Roswell crap. But I think some of the tales of demons probably began with mudluffs. But you’ll get all that in your basic Altiverse studies. All that matters now is making sure we don’t run into any of ’em, and getting out of the way if you do.” He grabbed me, turned me and gave me a push. “What’re you waiting for? Shock’s pretty much worn off for me, and this hexburn is starting to hurt. I want a hot bath and a bloodstream full of painkillers. So pick ’em up and put ’em down, Walker! You know the way! Hit it!”
I started to tell him again that he had the wrong guy—but then I stopped. I looked ahead of us, into that crazy swirling Mandelbrot brew called the In-Between, and somehow I realized he was right.
I did know the way.
I don’t know how I knew—I don’t even know how I knew that I knew. But the route was there, clear and shining in my head. It wasn’t self-deception this time either. This was the real thing.
Simultaneously with that realization, I knew something else—that Jay was right about the mudluffs. There were critters out there that would make two bites each of us and use our leg bones for toothpicks. I didn’t want to run into any of them, and the longer we stayed in the In-Between, the greater the risk of doing that became. They could track us down with senses we don’t even have names for.
I started moving, and Jay followed. He hopped onto my purple pathway and we stuck to it for a while, ducking under writhing Möbius strips and pulsating Klein bottles. Gravity—or whatever the force that kept us on the path was—seemed to be off and on. When I realized that the time had come to leave the purple ramp, the only way to do so was to jump off. That took some guts, if I do say so—it looked like I was jumping into an abyss that made the dive off the ship seem puny by comparison. But the way was shining bright and clear in my head, so I held my breath and stepped off.
My stomach tried to claw its way up my throat and escape, the entire In-Between rotated ninety degrees in several directions at once—and then “down” wasn’t down anymore. I floated among the lazily drifting geometric forms, past what looked like a partly open wardrobe that gave a glimpse of an inner door leading to a wondrous, sun-warmed land, and continued following the map in my head toward what looked like a vortex of some sort.
Jay was right behind me. This wasn’t a true weightless state, evidently—big surprise, considering our surroundings—because I had read somewhere that trying to swim in zero g got you nowhere fast; all the movements just canceled out. You needed to pull yourself along with hand- and footholds, or—better yet—have some kind of propulsion.
We had neither, and yet we sailed along just fine, seemingly propelled by nothing more than innate righteousness. But I started to get nervous when I realized that our route lay into that lazily swirling whirlpool or maelstrom or tornado or whatever it was called—you run out of words pretty quickly in the In-Between.