I followed to the hidden ledge. Commander Zideo was sitting on the ground in mud that was too thin to be called mud and too dirty to be called dirty water. He had slid twenty feet down a steep, slick embankment. A small hidden basin was revealed to us, the edge of which we must have been skirting for some time. I bumped into Helmgarth as I was peering over the top of the ledge, annoyed that he almost caused us both to fall down after Zideo—but also noting his fervent interest in my human’s state.
“I’m okay,” announced Zideo.
Now I know what my dog readership is thinking: Why didn’t I jump down after him right away? And the answer is: mud. Lots of gross mud, and who wants that?
Furthermore, one of the details of this mysterious place caught my attention. It’s not so much that dogs are easily distracted by rodents and wildlife as that we are always keeping an eye on them, devoting some small portion of our attention to them in case the need arises to catch them for food or defend our humans from their gnawing teeth and pecking little beaks. A particularly grating bird-call gained my attention from a squat tree nearby. The cry itself was an annoying sound somewhere between a chewy toy that was being slapped against the kitchen floor repeatedly, and that of a high-pitched, weeping monkey. I was immediately taken with the urge to end this creature’s misery. That’s dark, even for me, but, well… just be glad you didn’t hear it.
The bird was beautiful in a strange, unfinished kind of way. It had the long, dropping tail feathers of a bird of paradise, but a short curved beak, and a black stripe across its eyes and throat, like a robber in a ski mask. (Both dogs and crime re-enactment shows envision home intruders in this way.) The eyes themselves were glassy, black marbles, and the head was crested like a cardinal or a Bohemian waxwing, which I have always thought gives birds a very “big man on campus” type of vibe. There was a splash of bright yellow at its breast and the tips of its wings, which was at odds with the rest of its black and brown coloration. Even as I looked, the wings were brown, and the curved beak was straight, and the black marble eyes were gray and dotted with wild pinprick pupils. The bird-call it was making was also evolving right before my very ears. It’s hard to describe, but it was already turning into what I will say onomatopoeically was a “hyoop hyoop.”
This is a very soft science of course, but I didn’t like that at all. The first call was abrasive and difficult to listen to, but the “hyoop hyoop” felt like it was at our expense somehow.
The bird’s bill elongated into something between a heron’s and a toucan’s, and then it spread its (now green) wings and let out a great, triumphant call, and disappeared in a flash of steely light, a faint beam tracing from the bird to the sky through a break in the canopy.
Listen. I’ll admit we didn’t know much about this world we had fallen and/or jumped into. That was not normal.
I looked at Helmgarth, but he had noticed none of this. He was waving and shouting at Zideo and fretting about the mud.
This cast the shifty forest in a whole new light. What was going on here? What was this place? I looked from tree to tree for answers, but the chittering and trilling of the deep woods continued to resound. In some small part of my mind, I carved out some brainpower to commit to the question, hoping my ponderation would help me stumble subconsciously upon some insight.
Mud covered Commander Zideo’s shoes, which was a problem for him, because he cares a lot about his shoes. He pronounces it weird and calls them “Jordans,” which is some human thing I have never quite understood. On a normal day, Commander Zideo gets very worked up if he finds a scuff or blemish on his Jordan-shoes. When he spots it, he goes, “Ugh!” and licks his finger and tries to buff it out with saliva. One time, I saw him replace the laces because I chewed up the pointy aglets. (Hey humans, I bet you didn’t even know that word!) In any case, they were more than scuffed now. They were soaking wet, submerged in dirty water. The dirt itself suffused the Jordan-shoes, inside and out. He lifted one foot out of the water, and sighed so heavily that it broke my heart. He did not even try to wipe them down or clean them. No man as morally upstanding, personally supportive, and just plain all-around likable as Commander Zideo should have to suffer like that. My human should not have to endure dirty Jordan-shoes. He was the best human I’d ever met, and he deserved so much better.
If I could have, I would have run to him then and licked his shoes clean. But, y’know. Mud.
He turned to me, or Helmgarth, or both or possibly just me. He gave us, me, a look of pure despair. I couldn’t bear to look into his different-colored eyes and see that sorrow running rampant. No. Not my human. I would fix this.
“What are we even doing?” he asked. “What is this place?”
There was a rumbling tremor—but not from the ground. Helmgarth’s feet slid in the mud an inch or so toward the edge that Commander Zideo had tumbled down. He took a step back away from it. Then his body twisted at the hip, and I realized it was because his backpack sort of… jerked sideways. He pulled it back to himself, bracing his thumbs under the shoulder-straps as he often did. He grunted. He turned his back toward the muddy channel and Zideo, bonking my head with his backpack when he did. He began to walk in the slick mud, headed away from us, but making no progress. He walked in place as his backpack bulged in Zideo’s direction, like an invisible arm reaching out for him. Things in Helmgarth’s backpack shifted places, as though stirred and rummaged by another invisible hands. It was just invisible hands all over the place, really, which is not how you want to be.
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Helmgarth strained and pressed forward, trying not to be pulled down the muddy slide. A thin, leather cord knotted loosely was straining to hold one of the backpack’s compartments closed. I heard the sound of a snap, and he both fell forward and was dragged backward. One of Helmgarth’s two side-satchels thumped caught me as he slid past, and we both tumbled down into the basin, cold mud startling me.
His clawed fingers slashed grooves into the mud as we rolled. I got to my feet and immediately began to shake off the dirt and mud from my fur. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be dirty and wet so much as I didn’t want this place to be on me, didn’t want to carry it around and give it any extra help in its unclear purposes. Also the wetness, though. Just yuck. Nobody wants that. By this time, I was very concerned that I would track mud back into Lisa’s house and get yelled at. She is not a fan.
Something fluttered like a bird and stopped in the air between myself and Commander Zideo. It flapped its brown wings, which turned out to be pages. Loose parchment trailed behind it. It was a book—a very old one, massive in its density, the kind of book I had seen Commander Zideo physically recoil from back when he was still trying to deceive someone called “School” into believing he was doing something called “studying.” He’d described one of those old books as “a real doorstop,” and this one fit the description.
It hovered in front of him. That’s not something I had ever seen a book do. It opened, both the front and back cover now visible to me. Light spilled out from its pages, but not the warm orange light of evenings under Lisa’s reading lamp, more the cold, clinical light of a bathroom or—heaven forbid—the vet’s office. Light that brought out the asymmetry of his face and cast shadows that made his nose look crooked. It’s NOT crooked, let me be very clear on that, but shadows can sometimes MAKE it look crooked. It’s a perfect human face. I’m told there are a lot of human’s with faces out there, probably more than I’ll see in my dog years, but Zideo’s is absolutely the standard by which we should be judging faces. He’s great and I love him and his face.
I was still mid-shake at this point, when the strangest sensation came over me. My jowl was stuck, and my skin was all twisted. The flap of my lip would not fall back over my mouth on one side, and cold air dried my teeth uncomfortably. About a hundred of the little particulates of mud that I was (very effectively) shaking off stopped moving in the middle of the air, and hovered just like the book.
I was frozen. Not frozen cold, like the bananas that Lisa stores in her freezer. (It’s supposed to convert them into a desirable desert treat that isn’t “bad for her,” her words. As far as I can tell, it just makes them cold?) Rather, frozen still.
To all my dog readers, I hope you never experience the unusual discomfort of being frozen mid-shake. Human readers, I do not think I can describe the deep dissatisfaction produced by interrupted a good shake-off. I gather it is something akin to not being able to sneeze at the last second, or having someone interrupt an extremely good yawn.
It was torture. I needed to just… finish my shake. Something had paused the universe.
The constant motion of the forest halted. Suddenly, no branches stirred, no fronds or leaves swayed. There was a bubble of frozen stillness around us. Although I could hear birds and creatures far in the distance, the ones in our immediate vicinity stopped their songs and calls, all bleats and shrieks and “hyoops.” The whole world held like the penultimate note of a song, waiting for the conductor’s wand to release it.
“Whah,” came Helmgarth’s voice. “Whah happin?” I found that I was unable to turn my head to view him, but I could see the bottoms of his mud-spattered boots in the corner of my vision, prone as he was. My own flapping lip blocked further view of him; it was very off-putting.
“I unno,” said Zideo. He seemed to contend with the same bodily struggle. His hands were stationary in the air in front of him, and his struck an awkward pose with knees slightly bent. His body did not seem to obey his desire to escape, or to move at all. His chin could not open to speak fully. He flexed some of his arm and leg and neck muscles, but nothing budged. “I unno!” he said, an octave higher. His eyes darted around the scene, from me to Helmgarth to the book. “Summing ih wrong! I cand muv!”
Helmgarth gasped. “By da goz,” he whispered. He knew something. I wanted to turn my head and bite his leg and get him to spit it out, tell us what he knew. But I could not even close my teeth together, could not force them to cross the final centimeter of air. My cold, dry teeth.
Even smells had stopped.
“Issa boog,” said Zideo, tormented. His eyes jumped around its glowing pages. “Uh big boog!”
“You cah, ptooie,” said Helmgarth, trying to spit dirt out of his mouth with limited success. “You cah read ih?”
I could read ih. It, I mean. Not so much read it, as the words that Commander Zideo saw or heard or both were also known to me, simultaneously. The book communicated to us two. I do not profess to know how that works. I had never encountered a book that did that. Typically, I had only gnawed on them.
* Welcome to the Compendium
* Entry: Screenwilds Eastern Forest
Description: ???
* > Return to Game
“Ih say I cah rehurn hoo game!” said my human. Even when he is frozen in space, he can make things sound cool. What a guy.
"Okah,” said Helmgarth. “Do ih.”
Commander Zideo grunted with effort. His throat vibrated with that straining sound that humans do sometimes when they are lifting something too heavy for them, or are on the toilet. “How?”
“Juh… leggo of ih! Leh ih go.” Easy for Helmgarth to say. He wasn’t the one entranced by the magical book.
Zideo figured it out—maybe not really, but one way or another he was able to dismiss the thing, and it vanished in the same dry flutter of pages. I finally shook the shake that had wanted so badly to complete itself.
Rapture. Pure ecstasy ran through my body, shivers tingling against my skin as I finally shook my shake… then fear, alarm, danger as a sudden growl issued from nearby. From a recess in the embankment, behind layers of vines and scrub, feral eyes gleamed.