Chapter 3

Jimothy

Jimothy awoke from a strange dream. In the dream, someone blew up their house and Michael had to drive him far away. Then Hazel had returned as an angel and the bad guys had caught up to them. And then something incredible had happened, and he had drawn on the air itself with pure colors…

This dream was strange not because of the unlikely events such as Hazel returning in the form of a teleporting white angel, but because so much of it was normal. Just driving. Just hanging out in a hotel room. Just stacking rocks.

Whereas this place…

Jim sat up. Giant papier mâché fish swam slowly all around him. They were the size of parade floats, all in cool colors: blue, purple, pink, turquoise, green. They drifted slowly against a dim blueish backdrop in all directions except his left, where rich red velvet curtains hung in luxurious folds stretching to the sky. Some of the colors, the pink and turquoise, stood out in bright fluorescence. Ripples of light played softly over the entire scene like the refraction of sunlight through distant waves. The air was warm and smelled like the sea. All in all, very much not a part of everyday life.

It made him suspicious. He closed his eyes and checked the Line. There it was, bright and comforting, like knowing at night that the sun hadn’t disappeared; it was just shining somewhere else. Like how Kate said sometimes: the sun is rising somewhere. The Line felt like that. And he saw that he was on the correct side of it. Strangely enough, wherever he was, it was real.

This made Jim happy; he smiled and lay back down on whatever he was on top of. This was a good place to be real. He didn’t remember where he was or how he’d got here, but he knew Mike was around somewhere and that was enough for Jimothy Whyte.

He watched the fish drifting slowly around overhead. How were they doing that? He imagined something like a huge mobile up there in the darkness, slowly spinning and puppeteering the fish around on wires so thin as to be invisible. The fish had fuzzy paper surfaces, like piñatas. He counted over a dozen from here, and each portrayed a different kind of fish. Some of them he didn’t recognize. A lot of them, actually. He hadn’t drawn that many fish. They each moved in the direction they faced; some of them went up or down; most of them slowly turned. It looked like a complex routine to Jim. He wondered how they did that without getting the wires all tangled.

Jim watched the fish in complete contentment for a good half hour. The idea then began to creep up on him, very stealthily at first, that something was not quite right here. Where was Mike? That was the big one. Where were the other people? Surely there should be people here to witness something like this. Otherwise…what was the point? Well, I’m here, he thought. But where was that watery lighting coming from, anyway? Why was there no music? And what was making those certain colors on the fish pop out like that? Glow-in-the-dark paint? A blacklight? He had to know.

He realized that he was not alone. Mike? He tipped his head back as far as it would go to look behind where he lay. The Dark Man stood there. When the Dark Man saw that he had been spotted, he extended something long and dark toward Jimothy. Jimothy’s cane. The wooden one.

“Don’t want it,” Jim said.

“You’ll fall,” replied the Dark Man.

Jim shook his head, even though he thought that the Dark Man’s prediction was probably accurate.

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The Dark Man smiled a grim little smile. “I’ll just leave this here, then.” He bent down and placed the cane beside Jim. Jim realized that both he and the Dark Man were on one of the huge piñata fish. Hard to tell from the top, but this one looked like a shark.

He checked the Line and realized something else. The Dark Man was on the same side as himself.

“That’s right,” said the Dark Man as though reading Jim’s thoughts.

“If you’re here…” said Jim, suddenly very confused. No. No, wait, what? Something’s afoot here, Jim, as Isaac might say, especially if he could somehow reference someone’s foot in doing so. What was afoot here was the Dark Man, being here on the same side of the Line as Jim.

“Where’s Mike?” asked Jim. He remembered his dream, with the angel version of Hazel and the shooting and the explosions and the danger.

“He’s fine,” said the Dark Man, “despite various fiery disasters. So are you. For now.”

It took Jim a long moment of thought to realize that the Dark Man had not really answered his question. He hadn’t asked whether Mike was fine, he wanted to know where he was! So that Jim could then figure out a way to also be in that place.

But when Jim tried to ask the Dark Man another question, he saw that the Dark Man was gone. Nothing but darkness and distant drifting fish where the mysterious figure had stood.

“Oh, man,” said Jim. He looked around. Just the fish. They were still cool, they would never stop being cool, but now it all seemed a little…empty. It now seemed like a big dark place, but in a kind-of scary way, rather than a way in which Michael Whyte was nearby. Because Jim was starting to think that his brother wasn’t actually very nearby at all.

Jimothy got to his feet, succeeding on only his second attempt. He had to use the cane. The papier mâché surface beneath him held his weight and didn’t seem to move, but it was slightly curved. He looked around for a way out. He made a complete circle, and when he came around to where he began, he saw a glowing blue walkway extending from his feet out into the darkness. It was only about three feet wide. Jim glared at it. A challenge. A tough challenge.

He made it about two dozen steps–enough to take him off the fish he woke up on–when he saw the other person. It wasn’t the Dark Man, and it wasn’t Mike. Partly in shadow, it sat atop one of the moving fish passing by overhead. Long dark hair hung in a braid; skin glittered in the dim light as if made of blue glass. The figure didn’t seem to be clothed. A long, thin, upright object next to it turned out on a close inspection to be a fearsome spear, planted tip-down in the papier mâché fish. This creature was shifting slightly, rocking back and forth. It faced away from Jimothy and hadn’t noticed him, for which he was thankful. There was something frightening about it; Jimothy felt instinctively certain that he did not want to be noticed. Yet at the same time…was it crying?

Any question of whether he should attempt to make contact was soon made irrelevant, for in his distraction, he fell off the walkway.

He didn’t really fall; he drifted down like a descending flower petal among the slow giants of the colorful fish. Still unwilling to be noticed by the blue creature, Jimothy clutched his cane tightly and bit his lip hard to keep from crying out.

A papier - mâché manta ray with runic symbols caught him as he fell and ferried him far away. The manta ray took him out of the darkness as though through a tunnel and carried him over an ocean of city lights far below.