“What shall we do, General?” asked Gnorman.
“Let’s kill him,” suggested Gnick.
“Easy, soldiers,” said General Gnarly, an aged Gnome who was drawing close to his seventy-three years and had already survived the Great Gnome War of 1952. “Gneil and Gnelly, head down to the Exchange and make sure everything’s okay. Return to us quickly.”
“Sir, yes sir,” chimed Gneil and Gnelly and took off down the mountain toward the entrance.
“It’s strange,” said Gnorman, “I’ve never felt this unsettled in a long time.”
General Gnarly scowled through his little white beard. His experience had taught him not to jump to conclusions. “Keep an eye on the Dwarf but let’s wait and see what the scouts have to report before we act.”
Robert covered his nose to dampen the smell of blood. The small room had a tiled marble floor, cream-coloured walls similar to ones often found in an old folks’ home, a long oak counter, and bright fluorescent lights. Set into the wall to the right was a large wooden door, much like the entrance to the Exchange in Othaside. Behind the counter was an intricately carved circular door that stood next to a large metal refrigerator.
Robert counted at least sixteen fluffy white dead rabbits littered around the floor, on the counter and one that had been impaled by a knife to the adjacent wall.
“What happened here?” asked Robert.
“Stay here.” Lily jumped the counter, swung open the circular door, and dived through the hole, closing the door behind her. Robert stood alone in the Exchange, now a tomb for dead rabbits, and took a moment to examine his life to date. Something deep down was stirring inside of him and he wasn’t sure he liked it. It felt as if, up until the moment he’d walked into the Exchange, his life wasn’t completely real, that the feeling of not belonging he’d experienced even before he’d found out he was adopted was totally validated. Despite being in an unfamiliar world, despite being dragged around by some strange woman whose pet Fairy had knocked him unconscious, despite being surrounded by the small fluffy corpses of dead rabbits, despite all these things, Robert felt for the first time that the world had a place for him.
The moment was fleeting as he realized someone had killed these rabbits and that someone could still be around. The knife he recognized as the same one the Dwarf had been holding in his bathtub that morning. He pulled the knife out of the wall, letting the rabbit slide to the floor.
The wall Robert and Lily had entered through shimmered slightly, and a tall man with long blond hair, chiselled features, and bright blue eyes stepped through. Robert looked from the tall man, to the bloody knife in his hands, to the dead rabbits scattered about the room, then back to the tall man again, whose face had now adopted a look of rage and anger. Robert realized how this must seem and instantly dropped the knife, which he then thought probably made him look even guiltier.
There was a creak somewhere off to his left and before Robert could begin explaining his innocence, two Gnomes flung themselves at his head, causing him to stagger backward, slip on a dead rabbit, and smash his head into the counter. Unconsciousness, who was quickly becoming a fast friend of Robert’s, came to visit once more.
The cataclysm he had caused had been purely accidental. It was the complete opposite of the dull mediocrity that had caused him to slumber in the first place that had pulled him back to consciousness or maybe even back into existence. Out of everything in any of the worlds he had visited in the past, present, or future, he understood himself and his own existence least of all.
For thousands of years he had slipped out of reality and dwelt where no one would ever dare look for him. He was distinctly aware that he was not fully in control of himself yet and though he had tried, couldn’t yet take corporeal form. Wherever he drifted, sparks of his abilities ran amok. He knew it would be this way until he could contain himself.
His essence floated now in Othaside over the wooden shards of a broken coffee table in Robert Darkly’s apartment. Whatever had drawn him back had happened here in this apartment. Some event, although the only current casualty appeared to be a coffee table, had caused just as big an impact on his home reality and on this one as the cataclysm he himself had caused. His essence giggled in the only way that a non-corporeal creature can. Madness, he thought with a smile, is fundamental.
Robert’s landlady, Gertrude, was on the phone with her friend Beatrice, a semi-retired schoolteacher who lived her life with rigorous structure. Gertrude and Beatrice had discovered long ago that they were far too self-involved to be friends and as a consequence they hadn’t actually seen each other in over five years. Instead, they resigned themselves to a weekly phone call where Gertrude would complain about the hardships of her own life and Beatrice would respond by complaining about her latest ailment. As far as definitions went, it could barely be considered a conversation.
“It’s my arthritis, ya see, flares up every time it rains,” complained Beatrice.
“I always had high hopes of being a prima ballerina in the London Ballet, you see,” responded Gertrude, “but then that bus hit me back in seventy-nine, ruined any chance so when my Jim bought this place it’s where I ended up. Never wanted to be a landlady, bloody ungrateful tenants the lot of them.”
“Feels like someone’s turned my bones to ice, can barely get out of bed and you know how I like to get up early.”
“I slave all day to make sure the building doesn’t fall down and chase them to make sure they pay rent on time but they don’t care, you know, they just don’t care!”
“And then there’s this rash I got. I think it’s because I switched my laundry detergent, never should have don’t that, it’s all itchy and red.”
“Of course I still like to watch the ballet on the telly when it’s on.”
“The doctor gave me some ointment but I don’t think it’s working. And it smells funny.”
“I’m very partial to the tutus. Always liked a good tutu. Of course I’d probably look like a hippopotamus in a tutu if I tried one on now.”
“And then my dog got into the ointment, poor thing hasn’t been able to stop pooping.”
“You know what else irritates me is this weather, this one tenant came in today and dripped water all over my clean floors. Of course I’m going to have to call the cleaner to come back and redo them and you can imagine how much that’s going to cost.”
“Of course that’s nothing out of the ordinary, he has a very sensitive digestive system, does Rexworth.”
“Although he’s a very nice man is the cleaner, a bit young for me but I often catch him looking at me when I’ve got my rollers out. It’s flattering, of course, but completely inappropriate.”
There was a knock at Gertrude’s door. Unbeknownst to her, the fabric of reality was being disturbed by the non-corporeal creature currently floating up on the third floor in Robert Darkly’s apartment. Such knowledge, had she possessed it, may have affected her decision to open the door.
“Oh, Beatrice, I’m so sorry but there’s someone at the door. I’ll have to call you back,” said Gertrude and hung up without waiting for a response. Most of their conversations ended this way.
Reality as she knew it outside of Gertrude’s small apartment ceased to exist and was replaced with something completely different. Gertrude swung open her door with the confidence of a woman who had every intention of berating what she expected to be one of her tenants complaining about something leaking, not working, or smelling funny. It came as a surprise to her when she found that the hallway outside of her room had turned into a jungle, complete with a waterfall, colourful flowers, and an assortment of animals, the most outstanding of which was a hippopotamus wearing a pink tutu.