Part 2: Next Level / Chapter 21

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I awoke to Darla shaking me by the shoulder.

“Wake up!” she whispered, as she shot an anxious glance toward the wall beside the second bed.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

There was a gurgling, clanking sound coming from somewhere in the wall. No, not from the wall. It was from the bathroom on the other side of the wall. Out of nowhere, I was assaulted by a visceral childhood memory of my mother flushing our dead goldfish, gripped by the fear that I would one day suffer the same fate.

Darla grabbed my arm and twisted it around so she could see my forearm.

“Crap!” she exclaimed.

“What?” I exclaimed back.

She pointed to my Quest Summary. We’d been too preoccupied to check on it before we’d passed out. The next number was 52390930. Now that we’d cracked the code, we knew that meant that the next crazy thing that was supposed to go down would go down at 9:30 a.m. And checking my watch, I wasn’t surprised to see the time was . . . 9:30 on the dot.

“Crap!” I swore, echoing Darla’s sentiment.

We really needed to start paying attention to the time.

The gurgling and the clanking were getting louder and more violent. The whole room started to shake. The wall began to warp, and the wallpaper crumbled and cracked so that the ocean scene began to toss and turn, imperiling the voyaging ships and their intrepid crews.

“What should we do?” Darla shouted, now barely audible over the escalating cacophony.

“Outside!” I yelled, gesturing to the balcony and rolling off the bed in that direction. The hallway was arguably the better play, but the path to the door led past whatever was going on in the bathroom. As we slid open the sliding glass door and rushed outside we heard the bathroom door open and . . . Nancy’s mom strode out.

“Whoooo!” she wailed, waving a hand back and forth as if trying to clear some profound gastrointestinal fallout. “Do not go in there!”

She chuckled at her little joke, then went on, “Just kidding. You’re definitely going in there.”

Then she was yanked back into the bathroom and . . . the wall started to collapse like it was being sucked into a black hole.

And that wasn’t far from the truth. As the bathroom fell in on itself, it revealed a vortex sucking everything in the room into the toilet.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Oh, come on!” I yelled, unable to purge my poor goldfish’s fate from me mind.

We were both swept off our feet and dragged toward the commode. Darla managed to grab hold of one of the railings on the balcony, but I was pulled back into the room, bouncing across a dresser, then onto the desk, which began to slide toward the vortex as I clung on to it.

The inspirational placard imploring me to “Plunge boldly into the thick of life” smacked me in the face and flew off to do some plunging of its own as the black hole protruding from the toilet gobbled it up. The phone that had once sat on the night stand tried to follow, but jerked to a stop in mid-air and began bobbing up and down beside me, tethered by its cable to the far wall.

“Room service,” I heard a bored young woman’s voice coming from the unseated receiver.

“Help!” I yelled back.

“Help you with what?” The young woman responded with all the condescension of disaffected youth.

“The toilet is trying to eat us!”

I didn’t know how room service could assist us in this particular situation, but I was desperate—desperate enough to ignore the burning in my forearm as I spilled the beans on RIP’s latest insanity to a total stranger.

“I’m sorry,” The young woman’s voice came back again. “The toilet is trying to eat you?”

“Yes!”

“Mm. Never heard that expression. Are you, like, European?”

“No, I am not European! I am about to die!”

“Weird time to order room service.”

“I don’t want room service!”

“Okay, bye.”

I heard a dial tone, as she hung up on me. Then the phone line broke loose from the wall and the phone was yanked from my hand as it flew into the toilet vortex.

“Dammit!” I yelled.

Then, just as my hand lost purchase on the desk, I felt Darla grab my wrist.

I looked up to see she’d let go of the balcony railing and grabbed hold of one of the curtains hanging above the sliding door. They were flapping wildly in the gravity storm, making her aerial maneuver a mindboggling feat of acrobatics. She’d taken an insane risk to reach me, but her plan was deeply flawed. The curtain rod couldn’t possibly hold with our combined weight tugging on it.

“Let me go!” I yelled.

“No!” she yelled back.

“You’re just gonna get pulled in with me!”

“The vows say ‘To have and to hold!’ and I’m holding!”

“What?”

“Forget I said that!”

The curtain rod broke free and we both went tumbling through space. As we were pulled into the vortex and swallowed whole by pitch blackness, I lost track of Darla. I was immersed in what seemed to be a swirling body of water—a sensation all-too-similar to being flushed down a giant toilet. Round and round I went, faster and faster, until I was jerked forward, intercepted by a new horizontal current that carried me forth at an even more blinding velocity. It was as if I’d splashed down in the rapids of some transdimensional, purgatorial sewer.

But as I rocketed along, the water fell away and I found myself summersaulting end over end, suddenly surrounded by pulsing blue lightning and a smattering of that damn code that had haunted my dreams—the code that had been crawling up the screen of the TRS-80 in Darla’s attic.

A second later, I hit the ground in . . . my apartment? I bounced off the floor and I was barely able to get my bearings before my surroundings evaporated as the river of lightning returned, sweeping me along at full speed. I hit the floor and bounced again—this time having only a split second to recognize my college dorm room before it dissipated. Onward through the lightning I bounced and rolled, touching down again on the rubber-matted flooring of the gym where I’d worked out in high school, the front lawn of my aunt’s house, the blacktop of a park near my childhood home. Then finally . . . everything went dark again.