He was down the hall before he realized it, a queasy feeling in his gut, as if in a funhouse with strobe lights and an unsettling lack of fundamental reality. None of this seemed real, and yet it was so certainly true. The closer he got to the shadowy end of the antiseptic corridor, the more his gut twisted and the muscles in his head and neck tightened. It was as if something weighed down his legs, attacked his thoughts and slowed his progress.
As he pressed onward, every step seemed to reverberate with a vibrating edge that altered the very hallway into something other. First, a stone staircase leading up a torch lit pyramid covered with vines and debris, next a red carpet heading toward a dais with a Nazi swastika banner flying overhead and several black-clad Gestapo waiting beside that bizarre bell-shaped contraption. Another step and he was climbing the stairs to his dad’s study in the old Sodus lighthouse. The next step and Lydia stood in the doorway of their bedroom, smiling and holding out her hand.
Caleb froze, and only now noticed the plasma tendrils and the electrical sparks emanating from the walls, from her body and hair, scaling the walls and dancing on the ceiling.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Lydia was gone, replaced by Boris, standing in the doorway. Behind his shoulder, a larger contraption, similar to the one he had seen in his vision flanked by the Gestapo, shimmered in and out of existence.
“What the hell is happening?”
Boris gave a smile like a mad scientist just off his meds. “Everything you’ve ever wanted, and feared.”
Inside, the space was enormous, and yet not. Like one moment he stood at the back of an incredibly open and cavernous warehouse and the next, in a cramped lab room. The giant bronze bell overhead was the only constant. It seemed to be ringing at a constant dull frequency as it spun, a ring that was greatly affecting Caleb’s emotions, his pain threshold and his very senses with what he could only describe as waves of vibration, invisibly pulsing out in concentric circles from the bell.
“Everything’s a bit screwed up down here,” Boris said. “Don’t you think?”
Caleb held his head as he walked through the doorway, approaching the man who appeared as a silhouette framed with electrical energy.
“A bit worse for you psychic lot, from what I hear.” Boris’s head was a nest of lightning vipers, and his fingertips danced with a violet rippling aura.
Caleb tried to focus his vision, to clear the sights and reduce the variations. The room shuddered, and then held like a movie frame caught in the lens. Now it stayed at just the immense stadium-sized chamber, with the bell in the center, connected at its apex to a multitude of cables, further attached to larger power conduits and pylons and electrical banks on an upper level. Shadowy technicians, soldiers and other figures fluttered in and out of view up there, but he and Boris were the only solid and the central actors in the scene.
“Why not just ask for our help?” Caleb found that his own words sounded strange, distorted.
Boris moved slightly, and now his face was in the light streaming from the central prop, the bell that continued to give off wave after wave of plasma energy. “You mean, like join your little team, then work my way up the ranks so I could suggest some objectives and get you all focused on solving our more serious problems?”
“You were halfway there. You had passed the test.”
Boris shrugged and smiled slyly. “Yeah but you know how I passed. By cheating, and that could only take me so far. I don’t have your talents, and I’d have been found out by your psychic snoops.” He sighed. “Besides, we needed to move fast.”
Caleb lowered his voice. “Then you should have used the powers you have to get to me directly. I could have seen what you needed me to see. And maybe found some other solution besides destroying my team and exposing these people to all the fear and discrimination that’s coming.” He shook his head. “You changed the whole world by that move. And not for the better.”
“Couldn’t help it,” Boris answered. “But you might be right. Either way, you’re here, and yes there’s no escaping it. I do need you.”
Caleb studied the device and the energy pulses. Saw farther, and analyzed the details. The people in that other space-time. “Can they see us?”
“Nope. Partly because of what’s happening here in terms of dimensional time-space, but also because I’m giving them other things to look at. Things which don’t include us.”
“I see.”
“Yes you do, because I allow it. Them, not so much.” Boris approached the bell. “So if we crank open the doorway now, which I can do — then you can do your thing and seek the right destination for us.”
“But not for your masters?” Caleb glanced at him sideways. “I know you don’t fully support them. You’re more rogue than servant.”
Boris’s eyes darkened, as if he were seeing his own far-off visions. “You have no idea what I am, but you’re right about one thing. There will be a reckoning, some day. Or perhaps my freedom alone will be enough.”
Caleb studied him, and wished he had more time and could know the truth of everything he had said. The man’s clouded eyes and smooth expression offered no answers, no clues to the mystery that was this adversary.
“Now though, our time is done. I can’t keep the others — and my masters, your enemies, at bay forever. They gave me some leeway and trust me as much they might trust a tool or a sharp knife, as long as I keep slicing and dicing. But we have to finish this now.”
“So what’s the end result of all ‘this’? I find you a comfortable alternative universe where the comet never hits, where life survives and…” Caleb frowned and looked at him suspiciously.
“What?”
“I’m wondering, in this other universe. If no danger from the comet, maybe there are also other benefits to you or your so-called non-masters.”
“Like?”
“Like maybe the absence of me. No Morpheus Initiative? Maybe in this other world, the Keepers fail, we fail, and Waxman — or Robert Gregory — succeeds. He foils the traps under the Pharos and obtains the Emerald Tablet. Mason Calderon succeeds in his mission and the entire human race suffers a face worse than the comet?”
Boris grunted. “Now that isn’t some place I care to visit either.” He looked away, his eyes shimmering in the electrical fray. “The same as I wouldn’t want you to select a world where the Nazis won or where there’s no such thing as YouTube.”
“Okay, you’re good with the stick,” Caleb said. “Now what’s the carrot?”
“The carrot is that you can pick one for yourself. One time offer. For example…” He pulled a device from his pocket, like a Smartphone but thicker. Adjusted a dial and tapped in some numbers.
The door appeared, shimmering and perfectly rectangular, framed in electrical finery.
A hand on his back, forceful but not aggressive, more like nudging a friend into a room where a surprise party awaited, or perhaps the girl of his dreams.
And this one wasn’t so far off. The lightning tendrils left his body after gently tagging the skin on his arms, neck and cheeks with pinprick-like energy. He stepped into a place and time not only familiar, but full of sorrow and joy.
Bookshelves and shafts of light cascading over marble pillars and dancing on polished tiles. Countless books stacked neatly as high as the eye could follow, up to the massive decorated dome. Soft music piping through the cinnamon-scented, pristine air. So many pages, so many stories and so much wisdom, all for the sampling by those such as the delicate creature at the first table, her light auburn hair around her face and shoulders, touching the edges of the aged volume.