Chapter 5 – Humberto
Nightmares slip through a comforter like an addict’s needle pricking veins in a train station’s blue-lit bathroom; while, in the next stall, a boomer looks for his lost marbles.
Sofia woke from the horror.
Sofia woke, breathless, heart pounding as the remnants of the nightmare clung to her like shadows. The creatures had returned—trolls, vampires, werewolves, goblins—not as monsters of pure evil, but as twisted guides, warped by the suffering of human souls. These beings, neither good nor bad, exist at the crossroads of despair, where the path ahead vanishes into a yawning chasm of uncertainty. They are the guides we need, the terrifying guardians of the intersection between light and darkness. Without them, we are lost. Without them, we become something far worse—monsters ourselves. They teach us that both darkness and light are necessary to survive, that without their ambiguity, we are left to wander blindly, our humanity slipping through our fingers. Without their guidance to yield, we fall, lost in our own rage and fear. We become killers.
For those who refuse to yield, shackled by their own fear, and consumed by a suffocating loneliness that breeds anger, these creatures manifest relentlessly. They are no longer just lurking in the dark corners of the mind but grow into terrifying specters that haunt every waking moment. They are the reflection of a soul drowning in torment, the unshakable shadow that feeds on the unresolved anguish, gnawing at every thought, every action.
The most terrifying nightmare is the simplest: “There is something in the room.” No details. No form. Just a presence—an unrelenting, suffocating awareness of something watching, something waiting, something that demands to be seen. But these aren’t just fleeting images—they are fractured, splintered moments, shards of a broken reality colliding into one another, like shards of flying glass from a shattered mirror.
The mind struggles to put them together, to form some kind of sense: this before that, that before this, but the horror doesn’t allow for order. It’s all happening at once. The terror is suffocating. Without the guidance of the trolls, the vampires, the goblins—without the terrible clarity they bring at the intersection—we risk losing ourselves. We risk becoming the very monsters we fear.
“What was that?” Sofia shouted as she tried to reassemble the nightmare into a story. “How did I get here, at the top of the world?”
She imagined the house collapsing under the weight of its grass-covered roof—smashed by trolls, slammed by storms.
The Purple Cat slithered into her mind, thought over paw over paw in digitigrade. All other fears—new school, old bullies—gave way. The Purple Cat had been in that park, Sofia saw it herself.
A wave skittered across her body and skipped across her stomach. It plucked the ribs of her chest, slipped into her lungs, entered her arteries, and pricked her heart. It infused her capillaries and traveled to her throat and was out again, skittering over skin and sweeping back across the room to simmer in the shadows.
“What’s happening to me?” she whimpered.
The floor of the room quivered like the surface of the sea, beneath which a subduction slip ruptured the earth’s tectonic plate.
Every object in the room—color without lines; a starry night swirling before a scream on a bridge to the other side. Alone, a good thing, this loss of separation. However, without an anchor chain, and experienced alone, unbounded freedom terrifies—and some search for a safe harbor in thousand-year-old testaments, while others of us stroke the rope or bang the gong.
Something evil had dipped its paw into the shore of a distant galaxy, sending waves of misunderstanding rippling over the plane of the elliptic, frothing space-time.
The closet—Sofia turned to look and saw the closed door.
The room was new to her (it was not her room). The room was the same (it had been her mother’s, long ago). Nothing was familiar—different, but similar enough to fool her.
Pictures of her parents wedding hung on the walls.
A wind blew through a crack in the window paneling, and a hanging ivy’s leaves shivered like blood trickling down a lacerated leg.
Shadows fled in fear, this moment of wrath’s emergence from the bowels of hell.
Sofia looked to the side and tried to discern if she was looking at the shadow of the door, or the door, or if the door was an image without substance—a portal to the abyss.
“It is closed. The door is closed. It is closed,” Sofia kept repeating to reassure herself.
Now the closet door was open.
“No,” Sofia whimpered. “It’s here.”
A shadow moved forward from the corner, near the closet. It advanced toward her bed, behind the light of an orange, smoky glow.
After another flash of orange, the dream was over.
Her fear faded and curtains rose on tranquility. Sofia cast off the blanket and onto her jacket that was lying on the floor beside the window.
She inhaled, she exhaled, and then she saw it.
A brown duck with a green head and a yellow nose and pink feet stood before her. Sofia stared at the duck who stared back at her.
A lit cigarette dangled from the duck’s beak—the tip bobbled like an orange fire-garnet—as the duck twitched.
Then the duck winked.
“Que pasa?” said the duck as he took a drag from the cigarette.
“You talk!” Sofia said with a firm voice.
“And so do you!” the duck quacked back, as he took the cigarette from his beak, and twirled his wings to wave away the smoke. “Yo dich’o que pasa?”
“What? I… I… I don’t speak Spanish,” Sofia told the duck, immersed in a wave of confusion and a turbulence of irritation.
“You’re in Norway.”
“Should I speak Norwegian?”
“Do you?”
“No. What is happening?”
“Then what perturbs you that I speak Spanish?” the duck interrupted. “And what’s with that what?”
“What, what?” Sofia asked.
“You mean, which what?”
The duck took a step forward. Sofia leaned back.
“I am wondering now, if maybe she was right and you’re gonna be more work than we had expected,” said the duck.
“Who is right?” Sofia whispered. “And what’s with which what?
“Now it’s who, what, which and what all at once? The first what,” he answered as he turned to the corner of the room, where the uneaten waffles lay. His pupils dilated and he whispered, “Lovely.”
“What is?” she said, “Lovely? Why?”
“Why what? Those,” the duck replied as he re-positioned himself to get a better view of the waffles. “Is ‘when’ next?”
“Why not?” Sofia’s irritation rose to the occasion.
“Why not? Look, we need to get cracking, Pepper,” replied the duck.
“Where?”
“Rightly so, I forgot ‘where’. Then “where” it will be—you do ask a lot of questions. Give someone time to answer ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when,’ why,’ and ‘why not,’ before you waffle into where. And May I? Why not! Yes, I’ll have one. Don’t mind if I do. The closet, that’s where.”
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“Did you just convince yourself to take a waffle?”
“No, you did.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did, and yes, the closet,” the duck repeated, stepping back, “and I’ve been in that closet for way too long—it’s good to come out. It was getting stuffy in there; and now this room is getting just as stuffy,” he said as he waddled forward toward the waffles.
“Where?” she asked, still waking from slumber.
“I said the closet,” the duck said. “Haven’t you been paying attention, Stella?” as his eyes darted back to the waffles.
“No! Not ‘Where were you?’ Where are we going?” Sofia said before quickly correcting herself, “No, where are you going? And it’s Sofia.”
“My precious, asking ‘Where are we going?’ before we have agreed on ‘Where we were,’ is not quite felicitous to our situation,’” replied the duck.
“But what were you looking at just now?” Sofia interrupted, sensing the duck’s eyes darting toward the corner of the room, yet again. “And what do you mean, we’re both going?”
“On our mission,” the duck replied.
“I’m on a mission?”
“Try to keep your questions straight.”
“You haven’t answered a single one, yet.”
“Whoa there!” The duck opened his mouth in surprise and leaned back. The cigarette remained perched on his beak as he inhaled and exhaled a ring. “Chill the attitude, Pepper.”
Sofia paused a moment, leaned back, and marveled at the duck who was able to talk and hold a cigarette in his beak at the same time. However, she could not grasp the totality of the scene because the duck’s eyes kept darting to the corner of the room, and she was not yet ready to ask herself how this duck knew her nickname.
“OK, so, listen, I’ll cut to the chase,” the duck said as he used his left wing to spiral the cigarette smoke out the window. His mouth was open, brows raised, pupils dilated, the cigarette still perched, like a scientist formulating the unified field theory of physics, or a father putting together a dad-joke about a marijuana-filled beach-aviary with no tern un-stoned. “First, I suppose I should introduce myself. I’m Humberto.”
“Sofia. Did you glue the cigarette on your beak, Humberto?”
“Sofia, yes, I know—you reminded me. Yes, pleased to meet you. Now, let’s get going. We must stop the Purple Cat. No, I did not.”
Sofia sat up and regained her composure.
“But your color: green head, yellow nose,” She reached out to him. “Could you put out that cigarette?”
“My dear young lady, we have a mission ahead of us. Never mind how I smoke or my colors—plug it,” he said with a quack as he pushed the cigarette into a nearby potted daisy, adding, “It calms me down,” and waved the remaining smoke out the window.
“I don’t understand,” Sofia said.
“We have to stop the Purple Cat—pay attention, tweetie pie.”
Sofia stared at Humberto who kept stretching his neck to get a better view of the waffles in the corner of the room.
“Listen, sweet bumble, those funnels are coming back, and they are bringing friends, so we better haul. This is a phase 1, real world order,” Humberto urged, as he snuffed out the cigarette into the soil of a potted plant and blew the smoke out the opened window.
“Funnels?” Sofia asked.
“Yes, like the one that almost brought down your plane, little lady.”
“What will happen to my family?” Sofia asked.
“They’ll be fine. It’s you she wants.”
“What does she want?”
“Well, maybe your dad, too.” Humberto continued fidgeting, placing one foot over the other as he glanced at the waffles. “He keeps losing his marbles.”
“What does she want with me?” Sofia shouted.
“Yes, of course, sorry. She intends to strap you to a gurney…” Humberto replied as he stepped toward the waffles.
“Yes?” Sofia demanded with a flush of red in her face.
“…that lies over titanium gears...”
Humberto took another step toward the waffles.
“And?” Sofia shouted as the blood vessels in her neck pulsed.
“... that will drive shards of glass and, um…” Humberto said as he took another step.
“And?” Sofia demanded.
Humberto’s eyes darted back to the waffles again and his beak twitched, and he held up his wing to scratch his ear as he continued “… sever your… um… your… uh… sever…”
“Sever my what?” Sofia demanded.
“Your, um, hmmm…” Humberto said as he waddled closer, nearly tripping over his webbed feet. “Sofia, would you mind if I took a few of these waffles?” he asked. “They smell heavenly, and I’ve been in the closet for quite some time, and I am quite famished and have not had a moment to eat and I had to travel far to get here and that ice cream cone did not fill me up and we have a long trip and I cannot stop…”
“She will strap me to a gurney and sever my what!” Sofia screamed.
The plate of waffles erupted into the air, Humberto’s feathers puffed, and he continued as the plate rolled to a stop like Euler’s disk which means it took a long time, “she will sever your shadow with a horrible new machine, suck it off with wind and use it to create the funnels that will blanket the sun to destroy all rainbows and remove all the color from the world forever.”
Nanny Agnes opened the door to check on Sofia.
Humberto fell to the side, atop the blanket that was covering Sofia’s jacket, and froze in place, with both eyes open, and ocular muscles, decoupled.
“Sofia, OK?” Nanny asked in the best English she could, as she looked around the room.
“Yes, Nanny, it was just a bad dream. I’m OK now,” Sofia said as she gazed sternly on a motionless Humberto on the floor by the window, then turned back to Nanny in the doorway.
Her father appeared in the doorway, bearing a peaceful, loving expression, and preparing to unleash his paternal wisdom—the words that only a father could say to comfort and soothe any daughter turning red in the anxiety of puberty’s first passing.
“Ahooga!”
Sofia rolled over to hide her smile, giving her dad an unobstructed view of a motionless Humberto, lying atop a blanket rolled up by the window.
Sofia’s father and Humberto studied one another, and time stopped; quite like in that homoerotic moment when the real and playful Captain Kirk danced had sex fought with the anti-matter control-freak Captain Kirk in the wormhole, and the universe almost collapsed; or so they say. However, quite unlike that other moment when Darth Vader told Luke Skywalker who he was (because that would be, like, a little too intense, though this moment certainly warrants mention of that moment).
“This stuffed duck, so cute,” Nanny whispered as she took a step toward it. “That fragrance, smoky and savage.”
Then her dad stepped in front of her, attracted by the fragrant waffles.
“It is stuffed, right?” Nanny continued while dad’s eyes darted back and forth, searching for a semblance of reality, or a hidden candid camera, but finding haven in his new view of the waffles on the floor.
“It certainly does look stuffed,” Nanny insisted, as dad quickly relegated his confusion to the currents and bent down, picked up a waffle laying on the floor near Humberto, and put it in his mouth.
Nanny, mouth agape, said, “I have more in kitchen,” while she studied her son-in-law who replied, “Yummy,” as he studied Humberto who was now fuming, motionless, because he had really wanted all the waffles for himself until the nasty old man came and took one.
Then Humberto winked. Nanny also saw the wink but was more focused on her choice of a husband who had just eaten food off the floor.
“Never mind that, it’s an automatic toy,” Sofia interjected to Nanny. “It’s a toy. It does that a lot.”
“The floor is clean, she was just having a dream,” dad said. “She’s OK. These are delicious.”
Nanny shook her head, and they both cautiously withdrew as Nanny thought to herself, “Well, she gets it from her father,” and closed the door behind her before taking one last glance at the odd-looking duck, and then back at her son-in-law, thinking, “My daughter loves him, so I love him, but he’s enough to make you want to mow the roof at midnight.”
“What were you doing winking at her?” Sofia demanded when they were alone again.
“Had to get them both out and he’d have eaten them all—can’t he ask? I wanted those pieces.”
“Try going for Chinese dinner with him—you have to eat fast.”
“OK, then, we better get moving,” answered Humberto.
Sofia remained motionless.
“Are you coming?” Humberto asked.
“I don’t know. You’re a duck,” Sofia replied.
“Well, what did you expect, a shape-shifting cockroach?” asked Humberto as placed another cigarette on his beak, scratched a match, basked in its orange glow, tilted his head back and took another drag of the cigarette.
Sofia shook doubt from her head, and rose to follow Humberto’s lead, thinking, “It is probably best to do what a Spanish Speaking, chain-smoking duck in Norway says.”
“Wise choice.”
“How did you know I was coming?” Sofia asked.
“You stepped toward me.”
Together, they opened the window.
Before they hopped up, Humberto reached out, picked up the waffles from the floor and tossed them into the air. He leaned his head back to catch the waffles in his mouth and churned them into smithereens, like a blender blending an Octopus-flavored Mint Julep and gulped.
“Delicious,” he replied as he snapped his beak.
Then, while Sofia was occupied separating the curtains and opening the window, Humberto placed a small yellow star atop a pile of clothes, and a piece of paper on top of that.
Sofia smiled as she and Humberto jumped onto the window ledge at the same moment.
Then a thought entered her head; a thought she had never had before: this duck was the enigma she always wanted to understand, and a friend. She turned back to the room. She imagined her mother and father in the other room. She turned to look down at Humberto who had already landed, and his eyes beckoned her to jump. The moon was yellow, the silhouettes dark green, the beak was orange, the feet were pink, the head light green, and dark shadows were eclipsing the stars on the lower horizon.
“They’re coming, precious,” Humberto said when he turned and saw the shadows, “Hurry. You’re now a contender.”
Sofia brushed aside a sudden compulsion to go bowling, and felt she was with an equal—someone like herself. She felt that he would understand her—agree with her, disagree with her, not judge her, challenge her, teach her, and listen to her. She contemplated what her dad had been teaching her: taxis—two directions; planes—three directions; trains—one direction; walking—time travel, yadda, yadda, yadda; but it was time to feel it for herself.
They studied each other as Sofia inhaled a deep breath, adding, “Smells nice.”
“Dior,” said Humberto, “Sauvage, Eau de Parfum,” he continued wistfully, before rushing in with, “Move your ass! This is a phase 1, real world evacuation.”
Sofia imagined the falling pins and the strike and jumped into a new world to greet destiny with a smile that shamed the moon.
Actually, Humberto pulled her out the window, adding, “By the way, your old man’s cool—kind’a cute.”
“He’d agree.”
“Though, I hear he’s lost a few more marbles.”
Together, they scurried into the grove of pine trees.
Sofia took one glance back at the house and saw Nanny’s silhouette climbing a ladder, hauling a lawn mower onto the roof of the house, muttering “Capisce?”
“And a gift?” he thought, as he gently lifted Sofia’s Little Star from beneath the ransom note, written in cut out letter from a magazine.
“Strange,” he thought, “She said she left it on the plane. How did it get here?”
He caressed the blanket’s form and left to retell his wife the story of the time he faked his own kidnapping when he was a child, how Sofia had tried the same trick the previous week, but not as good, and now, just now, with a proper ransom note; and he took the Little Star with him.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.