Chapter 2

Eric

“How long has it been?” asked Heidi.

“‘bout three hours,” Eric replied from the couch. He closed his eyes against the dim light of the hallway.

“How can you tell?”

“I just know. I’m good at keeping track of time.”

“I hate this waiting.”

“Eh.” Eric dug around in his backpack without looking and found Kate’s journal. “This place is full of doors. That’s like its whole thing, right? Gotta be a way out somewhere.” Eric removed Kate’s note from the journal and read it for the twentieth time. Still alive? Kate. He closed his eyes again and rested his head back on the couch.

“We might have to sleep here,” said Heidi.

“Mm-hm. Way ahead of you.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that we’ve lost contact with everyone? Only CHIME works here, and our only contacts are the six of us.”

“Banana Quest forever.” He raised a fist. “We just roll with it.”

“Just ‘roll with it?’ Is that your answer to everything?” She was starting to get mad.

Eric thought up a few snarky comments but decided to keep them to himself.

“How can you be so passive?” Heidi demanded. “Are you even worried about Leah?”

Eric opened his eyes and raised his head until he met Heidi’s gaze. He stared her down until she looked away.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

Eric swung himself up into a sitting position. “Guess we can…I don’t know, just keep exploring? Hell, maybe we can find the break room. I could go for some coffee.”

“We’ll just keep going,” said Heidi in agreement. “Maybe try some doors?”

Eric opened Kate’s museum notes and made a show of inspecting them. “If we try that, then a ‘Dark Man’ might come creepin’. You seen any Dark Men yet, Heidi?”

She shook her head. “No, but it doesn’t really sound like something we should be joking about. Just look at how many exclamation points there are next to that one.” She said this deadpan, but Eric thought he detected a hint of a smile.

“Right.” He stood and replaced the notebook in his backpack. “Let’s go. You guys too.” A large black object lay near his feet, topped by a smaller white object like a dollop of whipped cream on a mound of black pudding. He nudged it with a foot.

The inky darkness uncoiled and slithered over to Heidi, where it grew legs and then waited patiently. The little white dragon tumbled off, and from the floor launched itself into the air. It flapped up to Eric and came to rest on his shoulder. A very real weight settled there, and very real and tiny little claws dug into the strap of his backpack. The dragon awkwardly nuzzled the side of Eric’s head and nipped at his hair.

“Got a name for it yet?” he asked.

“Why does it need a name?”

“Well you at least have to call it something other than ‘it.’”

“Do I?”

Eventually she’d have to own up to the fact that a giant black snake-lizard-thing had made itself her new best friend. Didn’t look like it was going anywhere.

“Let’s go,” he said. “This way.” He chose a direction and led them through an archway. It entered into a narrow stone hall, which became a winding flight of steep stairs, which opened up into a dimly lit garden full of paper lanterns and metal statues. A cloudy sky overhead reflected a golden glow. All the statues in this place depicted either Eric or Heidi; the randomly placed lanterns cast shadows of stark relief. It was cold and humid, like Chicago in winter, and it smelled like the lake.

Heidi came up beside Eric, caught a deep breath as she looked around, and let it out slowly, her exhalation visible as vapor in the cool air. She said something under her breath; Eric thought it sounded like “roll with it.” Her enormous black snake slithered into a nearby shadow and vanished from sight.

Heidi was wearing sandals, cargo shorts, a black tank top, and a blue headband. She was part Hawaiian; she lived in the tropics. She was obviously getting chilled already in their new environment. Time for some fucking chivalry. Eric wordlessly shrugged off his jacket and offered it to her. It was light, but better than nothing. She hesitated a moment before taking it and sliding it on while continuing to survey their surroundings. This left Eric in a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, but he didn’t mind.

A brick wall covered in indecipherable graffiti towered into the dark sky ahead of them. Larger buildings rose to their left, partially lit with blue lights. The lanterns filling the sculpture garden became more varied in color in the other direction.

Eric held out a hand. “What do you think, Frisby?” he asked. The dragon scuttled down his arm and perched on Eric’s hand. He sniffed the air and scanned the area with his tiny eyeless face. After a moment, Frisby shrugged. Eric had never thought he’d live to see a tiny little white dragon shrug carelessly and curl up on his hand. Damn. So cute. He tossed Frisby up into the air and watched as the dragon easily righted itself and soared without apparent effort up into the dark sky.

Heidi said, “Since we don’t know where we’re going, our best chance of finding a way out is to keep moving.”

“Or finding Kate.”

“Right.”

Eric chose to go right, where the lanterns came in Crayola mega-pack variety.

They walked among their own statues in the warm night. The statues portrayed each of them in a variety of stances and situations, engaged in tasks ranging from heroic to mundane. Moody rainbow lighting made weird shadows over everything. He and Heidi stopped periodically to assess the more unusual sculptures. It occurred to Eric as they gazed at one showing himself crashing on some kind of motorcycle that these might have some bearing upon the future. He voiced this thought out loud.

“The future?” said Heidi. “Doesn’t that seem…”

Eric smiled, but little mirth backed it up. “Crazy? Kate could see the future, somehow. At least a little.”

“Oh…I remember you saying something about that earlier. I guess you were serious?” She paused. “That would explain some things. How does she do it?”

Eric shook his head. “She’d always just laugh it off somehow whenever we brought it up. But I think I’m getting an idea. She called this place the Dream Museum, right? And I was seeing her in my dreams–like, the real her, not a me-dreaming-of-her version of her. And obviously we know from her notebook that she hung out here a lot.”

Heidi nodded. “Okay.”

“I wonder if this is how Jim did it too,” said Eric.

“Jimothy?”

“Yeah, he can tell the future too. Or some shit. Maybe he can only paint it. Either way, I don’t think he gets it. I mean, he doesn’t know when he paints something normal and when it’s actually a picture that symbolizes something that’s going to happen. Or something that’s already happened but he shouldn’t know about.”

Heidi frowned thoughtfully. “Okay, I’m not buying that one.”

“Fine, whatever. You’ll figure it out.”

They continued on. Heidi stopped by a sculpture which had her holding a strange handgun while the lizard thing coiled protectively around her feet and snarled at something unseen. Seeing Heidi wrought in metal seemed legit, somehow. It suited her. He briefly entertained himself by matching materials to people. Leah’s statues would be in playdough. For Jim, crayon wax. Elizabeth: antique rosewood. Isaac: some kind of plastic or synthetic space alloy. Kate, he was sure, would be saltwater taffy.

“Okay,” said Heidi, gazing upon her own angry visage. She blew into her hands to keep them warm. “I’ve got a name.”

“Yeah? Hit me. But not literally, please.”

“It’s…what do you think of ‘Bahamut?’” She sounded nervous.

“Bahamut? Like, that dragon from the anime?” Did Heidi watch anime? Did he want Heidi to know he watched anime? Too late.

“Anime? No, it’s from Final Fantasy. You watch anime?”

“No. Well…wait, you play Final Fantasy?”

She looked away. Awkward silence ensued. Eric brought it back to the point. “Bahamut is a dragon.”

“Yeah, I know. But…he’s…black.” Eric heard her embarrassment, although she faced away from him. The eight-legged black serpent looked back and forth between them as though aware that they were talking about it.

“Okay,” he said, “I mean, it sounds like as good a name as any, I guess. We can call it Baha for short, right?”

“Um.”

“What do you think, Frisby? Bahamut a good name for our friend here?” The tiny white dragon made a throaty chirping sound that Eric interpreted as pleasure. It flew in loops above their heads in a way that Eric interpreted as frolicking. But what the hell did he know about tiny white dragons?

“All right, Baha. Let’s roll.” He held a fist out to the giant black lizard. It raised its eyeless head and sniffed the fist. A black tongue darted out and tickled Eric’s knuckles. Then it reached forward and closed its jaws over Eric’s hand. It didn’t bite down, thank god, but the razor-sharp teeth were closed just enough to prevent Eric from pulling his hand out.

“Well fuck,” said Eric, although he had been a hair’s breadth away from instead saying ‘Aaaauugh!’

“Hey…Bahamut!” shouted Heidi, momentarily forgetting the name she had just given it.

Eric reflexively tried to withdraw his hand; the effort shredded the skin around his wrist. He bit his lower lip for a moment to keep from making unmanly sounds in front of Heidi. At least it was his left hand.

Heidi raised a fist of her own, prepared to bring it down on Bahamut’s head, then realized this might cause it to bite. Frisby Wiser swooped around and made distressed, adorable little chirps.

“Yo Baha, ease up,” said Eric, sweating, shaking.

“Yes! Stop!” said Heidi, at a loss for what to do. But it opened its jaws as soon as she told it to stop. It back away and curled up near Heidi’s feet like nothing had happened. Eric continued to hold his hand out. He slowly flexed his fingers. All tendons in his wrist: check. The skin of his wrist: not check. Blood dripped steadily from a half dozen tiny lacerations, some of which had shredded small patches of skin into ribbons. Note to self: those black teeth are crazy sharp.

“Oh god, Eric, I’m so sorry,” said Heidi, bending over to inspect his wrist. She didn’t have to bend far. She took his hand and inspected the damage, not at all put off by the blood. Right. Just for a moment, Eric had forgotten that she wasn’t the kind of girl to be put off by bloody, shredded skin. Now if Leah were here…

Heidi watched him move his fingers. “You’ll be fine,” she said after a moment.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Unless it’s poisonous.” He looked around for something to bind the wound with, although he didn’t really care if he just dripped blood all over for a few minutes until the flow stopped naturally. Normally he would care about that sort of thing, but lately his priorities had shifted.

“Venomous,” said Heidi, but she appeared to have already lost interest in Eric’s wound. She turned instead to her angel (or whatever) and demanded to know why it had bitten Eric. The thing hung its head, looking as chagrined as it could without really having a face. Frisby rummaged around in Eric’s bag and came out with Kate’s scarf in his jaws, which he offered to Eric. The blood had dried, making nasty dark maroon patches on the otherwise brightly colored fabric. Eric, watching Heidi and the snake thing, absentmindedly took the scarf and wrapped a clean part around his wrist. Might as well; it was already bloody. He made a few loops and crudely tied it off, the ends dangling.

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Baha did not reply to Heidi’s questioning, although it (he?) managed to look like a dog being disciplined.

Heidi stopped and turned to Eric. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Well…do we keep him with us?”

She called it ‘him.’ Definitely some kind of bond there. That thing was hers in whatever way Frisby Wiser was Eric’s. And it had killed all those dudes with October Industries. “Yeah,” he said, “we keep…him with us. I mean, it could have bit my hand right off, but it was, like…I don’t know, maybe trying to be friendly?”

When he said this, the giant black lizard-snake-monster perked up hopefully. It could definitely understand them. It could not, however, desist from being creepy as fuck. Eric wondered if having eyes would make the thing more or less spooky.

“Let’s just keep going,” he said. “It’s not like we could stop the thing from following us if that’s what he wants to do.”

Heidi nodded. “Okay.”

The statues became few, but the lights multiplied. Soon Eric and Heidi wandered through a forest of lampposts, each shining with colored light. They clustered thickly enough that Eric could observe firsthand how the many colors of light joined here and there to make patches of something approaching pure white. The rest looked like something out of an insane rave.

“Jimothy would love this place,” he said. He thought he saw further change in the surroundings up ahead.

“Why’s that?” asked Heidi.

“The colors.”

“Ah,” she said, although it sounded like she didn’t quite understand. “Eric, is this really happening? It’s not some kind of dream?”

“Well…” Eric paused and knocked on a nearby lamppost with his good hand. Felt solid enough. Cast iron, painted black. It bruised his cold knuckles. He raised his other hand to observe the wound from the…from Baha. Still there, throbbing with pain. It actually hurt a lot worse now, maybe because the adrenaline had vanished. The foot-long trails of Kate’s thin colorful scarf dangled loosely, dappled in the crazy lights. But Kate’s dried blood was still clearly visible. And her book of notes on this place was in his backpack. And the light-but-very-real weight of Frisby Wiser, the stuffed dragon brought to life, rested on his shoulder.

“…yes,” he concluded. Not knowing what else to say, he continued on in what he hoped was the right direction.

“It’s…”

“Just don’t think about it,” Eric advised, sounding like he knew what he was talking about. “Think of something else.”

“Okay. Keep going. About Jimothy.”

“Jimothy? Oh, I was done. Just saying he’d get a kick out of this place. Painters, right?”

“Tell me about him. You, and Kate, and Liz…you always talk about him. But I guess I just don’t know him very well.”

“Fine, sure. How ‘bout a story? It goes all the way back to when we first met. Jim and I. By the way I’m not like Isaac or Liz or whatever so this story’s gonna kinda suck.”

She nodded in solemn acceptance.

He took a breath and went on. “So I was with Isaac and we were at the hospital, just getting like shots or whatever, no big deal right? Oh yeah, we were like six or something. And we hung out all the time. So we see this other kid looking real heavy, and you know how Isaac is, so we had to go over and see if he’s all right. It’s Jim of course but we didn’t know that yet.”

“Of course.”

“So we’re like, ‘what’s wrong?’ And he tells us he’s gonna die. So we’re like, ‘oh shit that got real in a hurry.’ He wasn’t really going to die. What happened was, his big brother Mike was in some accident and lost a lot of blood. Or wait, maybe it was bone marrow?”

“I don’t think you can just lose bone marrow in an accident.”

“Maybe he was just sick. Whatever, I don’t remember the details. The point is, Jim was around and he was a match, so the doctors asked if he wouldn’t mind donating. It wasn’t really a big deal. But here’s the thing: Jim seriously thought he was going to die. Like, no one fucking remembered to inform this kid that donating wasn’t going to kill him. But he decided to do it anyway, and nobody realized that Jim was waiting to die until after it was all done when he asked how much longer he had left.

“So yeah, that’s how we met Jim. And he had both of us thinking he was going to die too. That shit leaves an impression, you know.”

“Wha…hmm,” said Heidi.

“Anyway, Isaac and I got it all figured out afterwards. And I was an idiot and was all like, ‘dude Jimothy-or-whatever-your-name-is, you’re stupid and you scared us.’ Then Isaac explained to me that Jim thought he was making a heroic sacrifice so it still kind-of counts and Jim still gets the hero cred, you know?”

“Well…”

“But that’s not an isolated example, that’s just how we met. He’s like that all the way through. He’s a little slow and he can’t keep a secret and a regular sidewalk is like a tightrope to him, but he cares about everyone way more than anyone deserves and if everyone on Earth thought like Jim most of our problems would be solved overnight. That’s what I think.”

“I do want to be his friend,” said Heidi, hesitant. “I feel like I can trust him. Don’t laugh.”

“Why the hell would I laugh? You can totally trust Jim. Except to keep secrets and shit like that.”

Heidi spoke again, so softly that Eric could barely hear her. He thought she said, “Why are you all so nice to me?”

He almost said something in response like “Hey, fuck you” as a joke, but at the last moment he stopped himself. Probably not helpful.

The lampposts became squat trees, their lights the leaves. A breeze rose, rustling countless luminous leaves against one another with a clatter like a million tiny teacups clinking together. So many colors of light from so many sources all merged into a single ubiquitous glow of illumination from every direction. Looking at the trees themselves with their hundreds of shifting lights nearly gave Eric a headache.

“This place, on the other hand,” Eric said loudly to be heard over the noise, “Jim would not like.”

“Doesn’t he like colors?” said Heidi back, almost shouting.

“He doesn’t like loud noises, especially when they’re sustained like this. And he’d trip on these roots. Also these lights would give him seizures. That probably should have been the first bullet point.”

“Is he epileptic?” asked Heidi.

Eric shrugged. “He just shuts down if he’s overstimulated.”

“Well, I don’t like it much either,” said Heidi. Baha, a lone patch of darkness in this bright place, seemed to share Heidi’s opinion. He crawled slow and low, head swiveling on high alert. Eric had lost track of Frisby; he had perfect camouflage here.

One tree had a door in it. Not a rustic Keebler-cottage door, but a fancy high-class hotel door with gilding on the polished oak and flowery patterns carved into the misted glass of the windows. Eric glanced at Heidi, saw her raising her eyebrows at him, and entered. Someplace out of the noise and the cold seemed good to both of them.

Baha darted through the opening in a flash before Eric could take his first step. The creature disappeared at once into the velvety darkness beyond. Eric stepped through, followed by Heidi. The door swung shut smoothly behind them, shutting them into a warm silence.

“Where are we now?” whispered Heidi.

“Dunno, can’t see shit,” Eric replied. “Why are we whispering?” As soon as he asked, he realized that the sound of the clattering leaves had vanished. “Why are you asking me, anyway? Like I would know where we are? I haven’t known where we are for—“

“Okay, sshhh. Look.”

“Again, I can’t see shit.” But he saw a pale figure that swooped through the darkness overhead. Frisby. And as his eyes adjusted, he perceived a dim light. He heard Heidi shuffling carefully through the darkness toward it. He followed and almost immediately ran into something. Groping at it in the darkness revealed it to be a chair. And near it, a table.

He edged around this obstacle and followed after Heidi. More chairs and tables, all empty. They became faintly visible as his eyes adjusted. And now he smelled something delicious. Something spicy and oriental. Were they back in the real world? Some huge, empty, dark restaurant?

No, of course not. When he caught up with Heidi, he saw that the illumination came from low hanging lights. Pool-table lights. They hung over a long buffet table, heaped with steaming Asian foods. Chinese? He wasn’t sure.

“It’s Thai,” said Heidi as though reading his thoughts.

“Is it…real?” he asked. Then he realized he had just done the same dumb thing she’d been doing, asking her as if she knew anything about this place. Just as quickly, he realized that it didn’t fucking matter because he was so hungry he was about to eat this food whether it was real or not.

Heidi took a broad, shallow bowl from one end of the table and scooped some noodles into it. She broke a pair of chopsticks and expertly sampled some noodles. She nodded. “Real.”

“Excellent.”

It was the kind of buffet where you design your own bowl of food. Heidi helped him. “Did you know,” he told her at one point, “that Kate eats everything with chopsticks? She has like a million pairs.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Why does she do anything? She designs sci-fi gadgets, sleeps in a pile of stuffed animals, and has a kangaroo for a pet.”

“It’s a wallaroo.”

“That’s worse.”

Heidi smirked. “Stuffed animals?”

“Yeah she’s all about Disney and stuff. Anything that’s ‘cute,’ although she’s got a pretty bizarre definition of that word sometimes. Also she’s a vegetarian.”

“Why are you listing all of Kaitlyn’s quirks?”

“I think, like, I want to keep talking about her in the present tense, you know?”

Heidi considered this while spooning some peanuts into her bowl.

A looming, dark window took up most of the visible area of the nearby wall. A single table lit by a chandelier stood in front of the window. The chandelier was presumably hanging from something, but Eric could make out no ceiling in the darkness above.

Two bowls waited at the foot of this table: a large black one containing hunks of raw meat and a small white one containing assorted nuts and dried fruit. The angels had already found them and dug in without waiting for Heidi and Eric to arrive. The sounds that Baha made as he ate were horrible, but he wiggled his body happily like a dog wagging its tail. Eric saw no sign of whoever had prepared this meal.

The show began while they ate. From the depths of darkness beyond the window came creatures of color and light, like bats or butterflies folding in on themselves, imploding and extending in bursts of gold, sapphire blue, blood red, lime green. The light they exuded moved through the darkness like ink blooming in water. Not until they got close enough to cause ripples did Eric understand that they did indeed exist in some liquid medium, and that the surface of the medium was on the vertical plane, set just a foot or so back from the window. He and Heidi were looking down at the water, as if gravity was sideways on the other side of the window. He refused to let this astonish him.

The creatures in the water danced a complex, almost-choreographed, almost-synchronized ballet. They threw out dissolving clouds of phosphorescence and occasionally touched the surface to create patterns of glimmering ripples. Were they intelligent? Eric tried waving at them. Was that one of them waving back? Hard to say. Maybe they didn’t want to be interrupted in what they were doing. What were they doing? It sure seemed like a performance for the benefit of himself and Heidi.

He and Heidi, Baha and Frisby, all watched for about a half hour. The routine never grew old nor repeated as far as he could tell, although the novelty of it did eventually fade.

“I think it’s a story,” said Heidi.

Eric looked at her, then back at the show. “Huh?” he said, intelligently.

Heidi pointed. “That one keeps running away from the others,” she said, “and that other one keeps stopping her.” She said this in complete seriousness. Eric watched her closely to be sure she wasn’t trolling him, but she seemed fixated on the window.

“Wha…how can you even tell them apart? And ‘her’?”

The living lights in the sideways water disappeared as silently and mysteriously as they had come. Frisby Wiser tapped Eric on the shoulder and offered him a piece of dried apricot clutched in his tiny pale claws. Eric took it and popped it in his mouth. Salmonella? Probably not. After all, Frisby was a stuffed animal until a few hours ago. Also, it was probably rude to think of his angel as a carrier of disease.

Baha saw this occurrence, even without eyes. He perked up with an idea, slithered over to his own bowl, then offered Heidi a leftover fragment of shredded raw meat in his open jaws. To Eric’s amazement Heidi initially looked as though she were about to take it out of a grim sense of duty, but in the end she refused. Baha hung his head, then got another idea to try with Eric. He prodded the dripping, raw gift toward Eric a few times as if to say, ‘here, take it.’ Maybe he was trying to make up for nearly biting him earlier.

Eric took a fork from his plate and skewered the chunk of meat, roughly the size of half a steak. He held it up, to Baha’s evident delight. The creature returned to Heidi and slithered into a satisfied pile around her feet.

“Well then,” said Eric as he dropped the skewered hunk of meat onto his empty plate. “We gonna keep going?”

Heidi sighed. “Sure.” Her tone made it clear she considered such action useless but inevitable.

They rose and departed from the table. Eric looked around briefly for at least some place to put their used dishes, but of course, there was nothing. He did take the opportunity to refill his water bottle before they headed out.

“So,” he said as they wandered off once more into the great unknown, “Final Fantasy. What other games you play?”