“saw” nothing of the sort, nor did Robert Benedict actually turn any corner that anyone could see.
Yet now, because something was wrong on the Other Side, he was again going to “turn the corner” and see what he could discover, if anything, that was “different” than before on the Other Side, whether he could explain it to anyone or not. His father remained adamantly opposed to his going. Gail continued to insist that she should go instead, but they both knew that Robert would make his own decision. There had been a time, when he was very young, that they had been able to influence his coming and going across the Threshold, but there had been no time since he was five or six years old that they could actually prevent it. He could go when he decided to go. And now they recognized all the earmarks of a determined young man who had made up his mind in spite of them.
“Don’t try to travel anywhere or do anything over there,” Gail warned. “Just stay put and see if you still feel whatever it was you felt before.”
Robert nodded. He had been through this with Gail dozens of times before, and he understood exactly what she meant, even though they both knew that on the Other Side you didn’t actually “travel” anywhere. That would imply moving from one point to another, and on the Other Side it was all but impossible to pin down a point to travel from, or a point to travel to. Even so, there were…things…that he could do in order to cross back at some different place than he crossed through, and he wasn’t about to do any of those…things…this time.
Just staying put would be enough, for now…
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t do anything rash. And I’ll be back in no time.” It was an old joke; even Gail couldn’t help smiling. And then, to Gail and Ed Benedict, it appeared that their son simply vanished from the center of the room.
To Robert, it seemed that he had just turned a corner…twisted through a curious angle that he knew so well. One instant he was in the center of the Benedict living room; the next he was inside.
—8—
At first, as always, there was the fleeting jolt of surprise and change, a moment of mental breath-holding until he could orient himself. It was much the same as flicking off a light and plunging suddenly into darkness: you paused and waited for your eyes to adjust a little.
There was even an after-image in his mind, momentarily, of the room and the people he had left behind. But that faded quickly, and then he was across the invisible dimensional line that separated these two so-different universes.
At first, as always, it was dark in this place, utterly silent and utterly empty. He felt neither warmth nor cold; temperature, he had learned, was relative and didn’t seem to apply here.
He waited; gradually his awareness of the shape and structure of things about him began to sharpen just as an image appears on a developing photograph. He looked behind him, knowing as always that it would be fruitless. He always felt that his own universe was somehow just behind him, just barely out of reach, around that “corner,” but when he looked, of course, it was always gone.
Darkness and silence…and then, gradually, a sense of moving shapes, structures, geometric patterns all about him—wild, senseless patterns, perfectly incomprehensible, yet very commonplace to him. Here they made sense, and it was here that he was, now, not on the other side. Part of the pattern, he knew, was his own body, which seemed fragmented—disjointed and scattered in space around him at odd angles with the fragments moving about lazily in great, sweeping curves. He could see, now, though not exactly with his eyes; there was always an odd smell on this side, although it seemed to him that the smell arose from somewhere deep in his mind rather than from his nose.
Muscular movement and position sense were useless here; although the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of his body seemed to be floating freely, any “movement” here was more a matter of wanting to go somewhere and gradually arriving there than of actually moving muscles and taking steps. And whenever he did “move,” something odd always happened: the disjointed fragments of his body began corruscating wildly, shifting and whirling in a frantic meaningless pattern until his desire to “move” was satisfied and he “arrived” wherever he wanted to “move” to.
Ridiculous, he thought, to try to explain these sensations when the only explanation that could make sense was to be here, and being here at all was enough to drive any normal, intelligent adult out of his wits. Even Mom could just barely hold on here and she was an old and crafty hand at adapting to strange environments. But he at least was comfortable here.
Or had been, until now…
But this time, again, something was different. Something to do with the Thresholders themselves. Before, he had always been aware of their presence here and there, whoever or whatever they were, but they had always seemed oblivious to him. He could tell their presence by the changing of the strange structural pattern around him; he could even sense whether they were approaching him, receding from him, or going past him—but for years now he had not even been sure they were aware of him. Now, quite suddenly he sensed them around him in great numbers, and he knew, somehow, they were very acutely aware of him indeed.
It frightened him. He felt the same panic he had felt earlier at this sudden change.
Something in his mind told him to bolt, to get out of there and back to his own side fast; earlier, he had done just that, but now he fought down the urge. There was danger here.
Something was terribly wrong—but this time he had to try to understand it.
Experimentally, he tried to “move.” Nothing happened. The fragments of his body and clothing shimmered and sped about him more swiftly than before, but something seemed to be resisting him now, holding him back, restraining him, and more and more he felt surrounded and trapped by the creatures of this Threshold universe.
Robert pushed against the restraint, his panic rising out of control now. Something was wrong here, something he could neither understand nor handle. He wanted out, wanted back across, but the more he struggled to cross back the more he felt invisible fingers clutching at him, trying to hold him here. Suddenly there was a change in the structure of things around him. Solid fragments of something other than his body suddenly seemed to join into the moving cloud about him. Colors appeared before his eyes, oddly shifting colors, but colors…and he had never before seen colors of any kind in this strange world.
Terrified now, Robert Benedict redoubled his efforts to cross back. Whatever was happening here, he couldn’t understand it, and he felt his own mental control beginning to crack. He was still fighting this strange resistance, trying to move back through the angle to cross out again as the colored fragments swirled closer and closer, when suddenly, without a warning, he was released…
Thrust out…
…And dropped two feet through the air to the living room rug, trembling and terrified, as Ed and Gail Benedict rushed toward him.
—9—
He sat up, shaking his head to clear away the overtones of panic that still filled his mind. He realized he must have seemed stunned for a moment; Gail was clutching his hand, urging him to answer her, while Ed grabbed an opthalmoscope and began flashing it in his eyes.
Robert flinched and turned his head. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m fine. But you’re making me dizzy with that light.”