After a few seconds, I gingerly took my hands away from my eyes. My pupils had finally contracted enough to let me see, and what was there waiting for me nearly knocked me off my feet.
I was standing on top of a mountain! And this was no small ski mountain like we go to in Vermont. This was like Everest! Okay, maybe not that big, but I felt like I was on top of the world. Craggy snow fields stretched for as far as I could see. In the far distance, way down below, I could see that the snow gave way to a green, lush valley, but it was a long, steep trip between here and there.
One question kept running through my head. “Where in heck am I?” Good question, but I had no one to ask. So I turned to go back into the safety of the cave to get my act together and figure out some kind of plan. Just before I turned back I saw, scattered several yards away from the mouth of the cave, these yellowish, kind of smooth, pointed rocks about two feet high. They jutted up out of the snow like stalagmites. Or stalactites. I can never remember which is which. They stuck up and came to a sharp point. I had no idea what they could be, but the word “tombstones” kept creeping into my head. I shook that particularly morbid thought out of my brain and trudged through the snow back to the cave.
That’s when I saw the strangest thing of all. The sun was just rising up over the rocks that formed the cave. But I had just been shielding my eyes against the sun that was shining from the other direction! How could that be? I looked behind me to see that there wasn’t just one sun. There were three! I swear, Mark, there were three suns in opposite corners of the sky! I blinked, thinking my vision was just screwed up or something, but it didn’t help. They were still there. My mind locked up. I didn’t know what to think, but there was one thing I knew for sure-I wasn’t in China.
I stood there on top of this mountain, all alone, sneakers getting wet in the snow, staring up at three blazing suns. I’m not ashamed to admit this, I wanted my mom. I wanted to be sitting in front of the TV fighting for the remote with Shannon. I wanted to be washing the car with Dad. I wanted to be shooting hoops with you. Suddenly the things I had taken for granted in life felt very far away. I wanted to go home, but all I could do was stand there and cry. I really did. I cried.
Then the sound came again, from inside the cave-the same jumble of musical notes that had sucked me into the tunnel and dumped me here. Someone else was coming. Uncle Press! It had to be! I ran back into the cave, overjoyed that I wasn’t going to be alone anymore. But then another thought hit me. What if it wasn’t Uncle Press? What if it was that Saint Dane guy? The last time I had the pleasure of hanging with that dude, he was shooting at us. And I gotta tell you, getting shot at isn’t like what you see in the movies, or with Nintendo. It’s real and it’s terrifying. I could still feel the sting on the back of my neck where I got hit by the shattered pieces of tile.
I didn’t know what to do, so I stopped in the middle of the big cave and waited. Whoever it was would be coming out of the tunnel. Would it be Uncle Press or Saint Dane? Or maybe those freakin’ dogs that wanted to eat me. Wouldn’t that be just perfect? Who was it going to be? Friend or foe?
“Bobby?”
It was Uncle Press! He walked out of the tunnel with his long leather coat flapping against his legs. I could have hugged him. In fact, I did. I ran over to him like a little kid. If this were a movie, I’d have been running in slow motion. I threw my arms around him with the feeling of pure joy and gratitude that I wasn’t alone anymore, and that my favorite guy in the world wasn’t shot dead by that Saint Dane guy. He was safe.
This feeling lasted for about, oh, three seconds. Now that my fear of impending doom was gone, reality came flooding back. And there was only one person responsible for my being here. Uncle Press. Someone I trusted. Someone I loved. Someone who yanked me from home and nearly got me killed about eight times over.
I pushed away from him with a shove that was hard enough to knock him off his feet, because that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted him to feel how angry I was. But as I saw before, Uncle Press was strong. It was like trying to push over a wall. All I managed to do was knock myself off balance and fall on my butt.
“What the hell is going on!” I shouted as I scrambled back to my feet, trying not to look like an idiot.
“Bobby, I know you’re confused about-”
“Confused? Confused doesn’t begin to cover it!” I stormed over to the mouth of the tunnel and screamed, “Denduron.Denduron! ” I’d sayanything to get out of there. But nothing happened.
“This is Denduron. We’re already here,” he said as if that were supposed to make sense.
“Okay then,” I looked into the tunnel and screamed, “Earth! New York! The subway! There’s no place like home!” I ran into the tunnel, hoping the magical notes would pick me up and fly me home. But nothing happened. I came back out and got right in Uncle Press’s face.
“I don’t care what this is about,” I said with as much authority as I could generate. “I don’t even care where we are. I care about going home and going home now! Take…me…home!”
Uncle Press just looked at me. He had to know how angry and scared I was, so I think he was trying to choose his next words carefully. Unfortunately no matter how carefully he chose his next words, there was no good way of saying what he then told me.
“Bobby, you can’t go home. You belong here right now.”
Boom. Just like that. I backed away from him, stunned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to reason with him. I wanted to wake up and find this was all just a horrible nightmare.
Uncle Press didn’t say anything. He just watched me and waited for me to get my act together. But with all the confusing information that had been so rudely input into my poor little skull, all I could squeak out was a single, simple question. “Why?”
“I told you. There are people here on Denduron who need our help,” he said slowly, as if to a little kid, which made me even more angry.
“But I don’t know these people!” I shouted. “I don’t care about them. I care about me. I care about getting me home. What is it about that, you don’t understand?”
“I understand perfectly. But that can’t happen,” he said firmly.
“Why? What’s so important about these people? And where is here anyway? Where is this…Denduron?”
“That’s hard to explain.”
“Try,” I said. I was getting fed up with all the mystery.
Uncle Press sat down on a rock. I took that as a sign that he was ready to start helping me understand things.
“We are far from Earth, but this isn’t a different planet in the sense you’re thinking. It’s a territory. Like Earth is a territory.”
“Territory, planet, what’s the difference? It’s just words.”
“No, it’s not. If we had a spaceship and blasted off from here and went to the place where Earth is, it wouldn’t be there. At least not the way you know it. When you travel through the flumes-”
“Flumes?” I repeated.
“That’s how you got here. Through a flume. When you travel to the territories through flumes, you’re not just going from place to place, you’re moving through space and time. I know that’s hard to comprehend, but you’ll get it.”
I was not so sure I wanted to get it. Maybe it was better to stay ignorant. I looked at Uncle Press and for the first time it hit me that this guy wasn’t the person I thought he was. I always knew he was a mysterious character, but now he was way more ozone-esque than I could ever have imagined.