It was scared. I’m not sure how I knew, but it was real clear to me that the little thing was in some kind of distress.
I turned and headed over toward the crevasse. Behind me I heard Jay shout, “Joey! No! Come back!” “I think it’s in trouble!” I called back. “It’s not dangerous.” And I kept going.
I came to a stop near the crevasse, which was closer and bigger than I’d thought it would be. The bubble creature, I could now see, was somehow tethered to the rocks at the edge of the chasm by a thin line of protoplasm or ectoplasm or something.
“Joey! That thing’s an In-Betweener! A mudluff! Get back here right now!”
I pretended I couldn’t hear him.
The strand was clear and thin, like a line of saliva. It didn’t look like it would take much more than a mean look to sever it and free the little bubble creature.
“It’s been tied up!” I called to Joey. “I think I can free it.”
He was coming toward me. If I was going to do this, I was going to have to do it fast. I reached out and tugged on the line. It was stronger than it looked.
“Hey,” I called to Jay. “Have you got a knife? I bet we could cut this.” He didn’t reply. Even through the silver suit I could tell he was mad.
The little bubble creature above us seemed agitated. I let go of the line. It was slightly sticky. I found myself thinking of a spider’s web.
“I know he’s harmless,” I told Jay. “Look at him.”
Jay sighed. He was maybe five, six feet away from me. “You may be right,” he said. “But there’s something about this whole thing that seems wrong. How do you think the little guy got stuck there? And why?”
The strand of web began to vibrate. Then there was a roar so loud that it nearly shattered my eardrums, and I realized that I’d summoned something by pulling on the strand of web. I thought I’d been trying to free the little mudluff, but I’d actually been banging a dinner gong.
A monster reared up out of the abyss.
“Monster” is an overused word, I know, but nothing else applies here. It had a head that looked a bit like a shark’s and a bit like a tyrannosaur’s, mounted on a centipede-like body as thick as a delivery van. I don’t know how long it was, but it was long enough to rise out of what looked like a bottomless chasm; and as each segment came sliding up the rock, it rattled and echoed through the gorge like a huge length of chain. In a lot less time than it takes to tell this, it had risen to a good thirty feet above the edge. It stared down at me with enormous compound eyes, each as big as my hand.
Then it struck.
Its head was the size of my dad’s cab; and its mouth gaped open, revealing jaws lined with multiple rows of teeth, each as long as a steak knife. For all its size it dropped toward me like an express elevator. I was just about to become an hors d’oeuvre when I felt someone smash into me from behind, hurling me forward to sprawl on the edge.
I twisted onto my back and stared—stared at Jay standing in the spot where I had stood just an instant before. Then the huge gaping maw of the beast enveloped him, started to close—
And then that little soap bubble came shooting in from over my shoulder. I realized I must’ve broken the strand that had anchored it when I fell. It hit the monster’s muzzle, splattering over it like translucent goop.
The monster reared back with a roar of rage, dropping Jay’s body. Its mouth was still open—those deadly jaws hadn’t had time to close fully on him, and now it had to keep its jaws open to breathe, because the mudluff had covered its nose with the clinging translucent substance of his body. The monster thrashed about, roaring in frustration as it tried to shake the amoebalike mudluff loose. It succeeded in flinging blobs of the thing’s substance, tethered by elastic tendrils, a few feet away, only to have them snap back and replaster themselves around its nose. Hard as it was to believe, that blob of transparent Silly Putty was actually keeping the Midgard serpent from chowing down on Jay and me!
The monster dropped back below ground level and, from the sounds and the way the ground shook repeatedly, was trying to scrape the In-Betweener off by battering its scaly snout against the rocks. I didn’t wait to find out which one would win. Instead I ran over to Jay, grabbed his arms and dragged him, stumbling and leaning on me, away from the action. I figured that overgrown soap bubble wasn’t going to last long.
I stopped a good five hundred yards away. Jay sat down hard on the sand. The roars and tremors from the now-unseen monster continued. I could see clouds of dust and occasional rock fragments being hurled into view. It would have been funny except for one other thing I now noticed: a trail of blood, thick as paint and wide as my hand, stretching unbroken from the edge of the chasm back to Jay’s body.
I gasped and knelt quickly beside him. The silver suit had been pierced through on either side of his body—two brutal punctures on his left side, three on his right, just above his hips. The monster’s teeth had each left holes over an inch in diameter, and Jay’s blood was pumping from them. There was no way to stop it, and I don’t know if it would have done any good anyway—he’d already lost so much blood.
Weakly he held up a hand, which I grasped.
“I’ll get you back to InterWorld,” I said, not knowing what else to do or say. “We’ll go through the In-Between— it won’t take long—I—I’m so sorry—”
“Save it,” Jay whispered. “It . . . won’t work. I’m bleeding . . . like three . . . stuck pigs. And I think the thing is venomous. You wouldn’t believe . . . how much it hurts. . . .” His voice was muffled and dull.
“What can I do?” I asked helplessly.
“Put my hand on . . . the sand,” he said. “Got to show you . . . how to go . . . the final distance. . . .”
I put his hand down on the ground. He drew something in spastic, jerking movements in the sand.
Then he stopped and seemed to be resting. I felt utterly useless.
“Jay?” I said. “You’ll be fine. Really, you will.” I wasn’t lying. I was saying it, hoping that by saying it I was somehow going to make it so.
He surprised me by shoving himself up to rest on one elbow—his other hand grabbed my shirtfront and dragged me with surprising strength down until my face was only an inch away from his mask. Once again I looked into the wavering reflection of my own features, grotesquely mirrored in the suit’s surface.
“Tell . . . the Old Man . . . sorry . . . made him . . . short one operative. Tell him . . . my replacement . . . gets my highest . . . recommendation.”
“I’ll tell him, whoever he is,” I promised. “But will you do me one favor in return?” He feebly cocked his head at a questioning angle.
“Take off your mask,” I said. “Let me see who you are.” He hesitated, then he raised one hand to his face, prodded the suit material just under the chin with a finger. The material covering his head changed from reflective silver to a dull gunmetal gray and sort of shrank back into a ring around his neck.
I stared. It hadn’t made any difference. The mask was still in place. At least, that was my initial thought, brought on by the shock of seeing Jay’s face.
It was my own face, of course. But not exactly. Jay looked to be at least five years older than me. There was a splotch of scar tissue across his right cheek, and the lower part of his ear was knuckled with keloid growth as well. But there weren’t nearly enough scars to hide who he was.
He was me. That was why that voice had been so familiar. It was my voice. Or rather, it was what my voice might sound like in five years.
I wondered why I had not known all along, and I realized that, on some level, I had.