Through the Gate and Beyond
This is a continuation of an ongoing story. It begins with Part One, so if you’re wanting to start out at the beginning , I recommend you go there. Or go to the previous Part Sixteen.
Chapter 49: The Deal
Inside, my eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. What looked like a quaint farmhouse from the outside was a single, large, room on the inside. The walls stretched up to the roof’s apex and were covered in an extremely old-fashioned, flowered, wallpaper pattern. The room smelled sour, like spoiled milk or an old, dirty, gym sock.
There was only one piece of furniture in the entire place. A wooden desk sat on the wall opposite the door. On the desk sat some kind of electronic gear, glowing with life. It looked like it had been top-of-the-line stuff in the 1970s maybe. Now, it just looked old. My grandfather had stuff like that, stacked in the corners of the basement like relics from a bygone age. Wires ran in tangles between boxes. There was a book of some sort, open, on the desk. An old-fashioned phone handset rested on the book. It was attached to one of the electronics boxes. Even though I didn’t recognize any of the boxes or understand what the lights and dials meant, I was suddenly hit by a brief but sharp feeling of loss. I missed the computers and cell phones I’d not touched in… what, six weeks, maybe more?
As I stepped into the house, Mur’s voice crackled from the phone handset. “Are you coming? My, my, you are so slow. So untrusting!” He was in a manic mood, pretending to be supremely happy. That joy was unsettling. I knew it was a lie.
Brad stepped in behind me and quietly closed the door. Hesitantly, I walked over and picked up the phone. “What do you want, Mur?” I said, trying not to let fear creep into my voice.
“Want? Why, I want us to be friends again!” he said in what felt like a patently false cheerful voice. It reminded me of that clown in “IT”. The voice creeped me out. Everything about this creeped me out. I looked up and saw Brad rubbing his arms, trying to quell his own goose bumps.
“We’ve never been friends, Mur. Not even once. You’ve made that quite clear.” I wasn’t going to believe this stupid act.
“Not true! Why, you stab at my heart with that sentiment! I have worked tirelessly to make you better, stronger, to make sure you would survive here! Please, come back to the palace! We have so much to talk about, so much to share!”
“Made us better? How?”
“By sending others to… to help you learn!” And there it was, the first crack in his perfectly cheerful demeanor.
Brad, suddenly angry, grabbed my hand holding the phone. “How? How did killing my dad make me stronger, Mur? Huh? Answer me that!” his voice held more anger than I think I’d ever heard from him. I stepped back from him in shock.
But before I could recover, Mur said, “Now, now, I meant no harm to him or you. I don’t control everything here.”
Brad took a deep breath. “What. Do. You. Want?” he said through clenched teeth. I noticed a tear slide down his cheek, but I wasn’t sure if that was grief or anger that he was fighting to contain.
“I want to see you again! We left on such awkward terms!” he said, again with the too-sweet voice.
“You know, we can tell you’re full of shit, Mur.” Brad said in a quiet, emotionless, voice.
There was a moment of silence. “I wanted you dead. But that proved more difficult, more costly, than I’d bargained for,” Mur said, in an impatient voice. There was an edge of anger there. It set the hairs on my neck on end, but at least I believed this to be closer to the truth than the rest of the crap he’d said.
“So why are you sending birds to fetch us, Mur?”
“The City is not my place. I do not go there.”
“So what do you want, Mur?” I asked, interrupting as Brad started to speak. I wanted to keep us on track, before Brad got angry again.
There was another brief pause. “I want a peace between us. Before you interrupt, I mean that. I want you to quit killing my friends.” He said friends like it was some sort of inside joke.
And then it hit me. He was trying to make a deal. “Peace you say. You want peace with us. What will you give us?”
“That I give you your life should be gift enough,” Mur said in a snarl.
“Tell you what, Mur. You leave us the city. You swear to never send anyone after us again. In fact, you stop coming here entirely. You and your friends,” I twisted the sound of ‘friends’ just as he had.
“We need that food. I worked a long time to get those delivery routes set up!” he said, angry once more. I shuddered at what he must have done to get minions on another world to ship vast quantities of food on a daily basis to this world.
“The city is ours, Mur. We claim the City of the Dead as our own.” Brad said. I felt something, some kind of change in air pressure. It made my ears pop. I reached out and took his hand. He tried to smile at me, but couldn’t quite get there.
“We claim this City, Mur. It is ours and you are not welcome here,” I repeated, squeezing Brad’s hand tightly. Static burst through the speaker. Or maybe a snarl of anger. I held the phone away from my ear. Brad managed to smile, this time. But it was a hungry smile. I can’t say I liked it, but I echoed it with a hungry smile of my own.
“You think you can dictate that? To me?” Mur said angrily.
A sudden and hard to describe calmness washed over me. I winked at Brad. “I do. I do because I know your name, Mur. Not your nicknames, but your name. And I think that frightens you very much.”
Silence answered me as he digested this proclamation. “You are playing a dangerous game, child.” Mur’s voice was a cold, angry, whisper.
“Yes, I suppose life is dangerous. Especially here. You’ve taught me that,” I said quietly. “This city is ours now. You and yours are not welcome here.” Again, the air pressure changed, making my ears pop. The static burst through again. “And more. You will stop sending others to harm us. You won’t seek our harm at all. You’re going to see to it that this city remains ours.”
Again, silence. “If others from our world get trapped here, you’ll see them safely into our care. Our care, not the gargoyles or the other minions you have out there. Agree to that, and your servants may have safe passage to claim what food we don’t eat.”
Mur didn’t answer.
“We get the city. We get new travelers from our own home world. We get our safety. We get the food we want from your deliveries.” I swallowed. “You get the food you need. We leave you and yours alone. You leave us and ours alone. We all get peace.”
Through the handset, Mur laughed a short, harsh, bark of a laugh. “Are you really so naïve? I’ve been here since before your species knew how to write down words. I’ve been here since your people were making art by splashing paint over their hands on cave walls! You think to dictate terms to me?” His voice was angry and incredulous, like he wasn’t used to people standing up to him. I guess he wasn’t. I didn’t expect that many folks had dared over the years.
“Muire — “ I started to say his name with careful deliberate pronunciation just as I’d heard it in my dream. Mur screamed in rage, drowning me out. I held the phone away from my head, letting the sound wash over me.
I waited for him to stop screaming. “I said we know your name.” I stopped, reigned in my fear and anger. Then I continued, forcing my voice to sound childlike and innocent, “What would the gargoyles do, if they knew your name?”
Again, Mur screamed. I waited until he stopped. “Do we have a deal?”
He didn’t answer. “You know, if you’d prefer, we can shut down your food supply. It wouldn’t be hard. Lock you out of the park, see to it that your food is tainted or just simply destroyed. We can make life hard for you, Mur. Like you’ve made it hard for us.” Brad’s eyes got big as I dropped the threat. He tightened his grip on my hand.
Mur didn’t answer. In a tired voice, Brad said, “You told us once that there was power in three. I believe there’s even more power in five than in three. And our two newest friends? They’re more than willing to go after you. They’re tired of your shit, Mur. We all are.”
“What’s it going to be, Mur?” I asked.
Still, he said nothing. “You called us, remember?” Brad asked. “You started this shit. Are you afraid to finish it? It’s okay, Mur. We’ll tell everyone you kicked our asses. No need to lose face over it.” I gave him a look. No need to antagonize him with that!
“Half the city. Everything on your side of the river you can have, except the street from the park to the river and the buildings along that street. Those are mine, to guard passage for my food. You can have what you need from the park, but you will not harm that food or disrupt my servants who go to get it.” Mur’s voice was strained and seemed to be delivered through clenched teeth. “I will do what I can to get new travelers to you, but I will make no guarantees for their safety. And you will never step foot on my palace grounds. Not ever. Not for any reason.”
“And you will withdraw your spies from our half of the city. Your minions are not welcome here anymore. This is our land.” I said, trying to think of anything else we had forgotten.
“Your land, as you said. No spies.” I could hear Mur’s anger rising again.
“Agreed.” I said. Brad repeated it. Reluctantly, so did Mur. Again, I could feel power flowing around us in the air.
“It has not been a pleasure talking to you, Mur. But I’m glad we’ve come to terms.”
The electronics all went dark. I gently set the phone handset down.
Brad pulled gently on my hand, dragging me towards the entrance. I didn’t resist. Back outside, the leaves had fallen from the trees, leaving them bare and dead-looking. The reds of the vines and tree leaves had faded to a dull, dead, brown. I wondered if they’d ever been alive here, or if that had all been an illusion.
At our feet, the crow lay, just in front of the door. Its neck was obviously broken. It was the only bird we’d seen in days. For some reason it made me sad, even though it had been a tool of Mur’s. “Let’s go,” Brad said impatiently. We went back down the alley and back to the house. I was somehow afraid we’d been trapped inside long enough for the trees to die, but Amber was waiting just inside the gate. We’d been gone maybe an hour or so, she said as she let us in. She was glad to see us back, and safe.
In the house, we told everyone what had happened. “Does that mean it’s over?” Rachel asked hopefully.
“I hope so,” Brad said, but he didn’t sound any more confident than I felt.
“I think we still need to be careful. But maybe it won’t be quite so bad. Maybe,” I added doubtfully.
“Something tells me he isn’t done with us,” Amber said quietly. I looked up at her. “I don’t know. I just feel like something,” she paused, “I don’t know. Something bad. I feel like something bad is coming.”
I realized I felt it, too. I’d been trying to make myself feel hopeful, but a dark cloud of dread was still floating in the back of my mind. I took Amber’s hand and squeezed it. She closed her eyes and reached out for Jessica’s. Jessica smiled nervously and took Rachel’s hand. Rachel took Brad’s, who took my other hand, closing the circle.
Together, we’d face whatever was coming. Somehow.
Chapter 50: Realizations over Tea
“He’s going to screw us. You know that, right?” Brad said quietly as he poured hot tea into our cups. It wasn’t the same as mocha coffees from that little local-owned coffee shop on the way to school, but I was learning to love it almost as much. After yesterday’s adventure with the red house, we hadn’t talked much about Mur. “I mean, it’s kind of in his nature, isn’t it?”
I sat at the table, holding my cup as the water warmed it. Brad moved on to pour Amber’s tea, then Jessica’s, then Rachel’s. He poured his last. Everyone was watching to see how I’d answer, but I didn’t know what to say. I sighed and blew on the tea to cool it. Without looking up from the cup, I answered Brad’s question as best I could. “Yeah. He’s going to screw us. I mean, he hates us. He’s pissed that we backed him into a corner rather than bowing before him. Of course he’s not done trying to break us.”
I blew across the tea again, trying to summon that sense of peace that tea always used to bring me. Used to, back before we came here. Back when Mom would make tea when I was stressed or upset. God, I used to get stressed over the stupidest shit. I’d give anything to only have school projects and peer pressure and what clothes would be least out of style this week for me to worry about. I sighed again and forced those thoughts away. The idle time we’d had recently were making it hard to fight off depression. “Do you think he’s bound to the agreement, or can he just blow us off anytime he likes?”
“I think words and ideas have power here. Maybe not absolute power, but…” Rachel said quietly.
“Definitely some power. I think he can find loopholes. But I don’t think he can just play politician and run roughshod over us like a human on Earth could,” Amber said in agreement. “Or at least, I hope. Maybe. But he’s not going to forgive and forget. No more than a mob boss would.”
I nodded and sipped my tea. “But how will he attack? What’s his play?” None of us had any answer for that question. So we did the best we could. We stockpiled those foods we knew wouldn’t spoil. We kept the doors and windows secured. We packed and repacked our backpacks, trying to build up the best possible set of supplies for if we had to run. Brad called these our “Bug-out bags” but I didn’t much care for the phrase.
We tried to practice with weapons. I wished we’d had real martial arts training. Some karate would be helpful, probably. I mean, we had nothing to go on but our own experiences and memories from obviously faked martial arts movies. The training was awkward. I mean, trying to pretend we were fighting an enemy while standing in the yard looked silly. But every time I started to feel self-conscious about it, I would picture the gargoyles, all aroused and trying to kill us. That shut down my reluctance. I still couldn’t convince myself this training was helping, though. But it kept us busy for an hour a day. It helped keep us in shape. I think I feared that as much as anything. If we got soft here in the nice cushy house, we’d be easy targets.
I was done being an easy target. That thought kept me practicing when I wanted to quit.
We kept exploring out from our home. Always in groups of two or more. And always in specific directions. “We’re going to look to the east today.” Just in case we didn’t come back, they’d know where to search. And we never stayed outside past dark, ever. We rarely found much of interest, but sometimes we’d stumble across cloth we could salvage for clothing or bandages, or other materials we could use somehow.
Rachel, the least mobile of us because of her legs, had taken to inventorying the library. Only about a third of the books were in English. There were at least two other languages in the books we had. But Rachel thought she’d found a book that was reprinted in one of the other languages, based on the few images in the text. She was trying to learn the language from that book. But it wasn’t easy. She could only guess at the pronunciation of the symbols or even what the symbols meant. But she was trying. We kept bringing her all the paper we could find, so she could make notes.
These routines dragged on for about two weeks (God, I wish we’d kept track of the days). It was lulling us into a sense of normalcy. But knowing we were stuck here was still hard. My dad’s birthday was coming up, or had just passed. It was hard to keep up with exactly how many days had passed. But knowing we were right around his birthday had me missing the real world even more. He was turning 42. I missed him. I missed mom. What did they think happened to Brad and me? How much grief were they going through, not knowing?
“Should we go challenge him or something?” Jessica asked one morning.
I choked on my tea. “What?” I’d been lost in thought about Dad and his birthday. He always asked for chocolate cake with chocolate icing. And Japanese steak-house for dinner. It was a tradition. I shook my head. “Challenge him?”
“To a duel. Or something?” Jessica repeated doubtfully. “I don’t know how these things work.”
I set down my tea cup, gently, so it wouldn’t spill. “No. No, I think in a duel, he’d crush us easily. We only seem to frighten him when we’re together.”
“Together and holding hands,” Rachel said.
I looked at her. “Right! When we’re touching, we’re stronger than him.” I don’t think I’d put that together, really. Not consciously, at least.
“He knows that, too,” Amber said in a somber tone, looking down at her own cup of tea.
“Fuck. You’re right. We probably need to be more careful about splitting up to explore. Maybe that’s not so safe after all,” Brad said.
I took another drink from my cup and set it down, playing with the handle. “How hard would it be to expand our courtyard wall?” I asked.
Brad looked at me. “What do you mean?”
“Like, if we wanted to build a second wall that enclosed the surrounding buildings, how difficult would that be?”
Brad thought about it for a moment. “Hard, but not impossible. We have plenty of bricks, if we don’t mind tearing down a building. But there’s no cement. Or mortar? Whatever it is you use in walls.”
“Oh. Yeah. I hadn’t thought about mortar.” I sloshed the last of my tea, gone cold now, in the bottom of my cup.
“What about just blocking off the street between buildings?” Rachel asked. “It would be easier to build some kind of barrier there than building a whole new wall.”
Brad nodded. “Hard work, but something to think about.”
“The house not big enough anymore?” Jessica asked, with a hint of sarcasm.
“No. Just thinking about safety. When Mur sends us new people. I feel like we’re going to outgrow this house eventually.”
Jessica got up and poured another cup of tea. She poured for me and then for her. Some thought hit her and she jerked, spilling tea around her cup. “Shit! Of course, why didn’t I think of that!?”
Everyone looked at her. “What?” Amber asked when Jessica didn’t immediately continue.
My stomach churned, suddenly seeing what she realized. “He promised to send us any new arrivals. But he didn’t promise to send them immediately.” I said.
“So?” Amber asked.
“If he puts them in the hole where we found Jess and Rob, or some other dark, evil, place? I’m sure he has as many dark, evil, holes as he could ever want. How long before they snap in places like that?” Amber closed her eyes, but I could see the tension, the fear, there. “What would they offer to do in return for their freedom or decent food?”
I looked up, seeing Robin’s eyes, how big they’d gotten. “If he’d offered you freedom and safety? What if he’d told you he could send you home? M loves to tell half-truths; he could easily leave out the part about how time moves differently here. Would you have been willing to try to hurt us or kill us for that? Before you knew us, I mean? Would it have been enough?”
She covered her mouth with a hand, but didn’t answer. Jessica said, “I want to believe we wouldn’t have. But that place was bad. Really bad. A few more weeks there and I don’t know what I’d would have been willing to do.” Her voice was very quiet. She was looking at her cup, refusing to make eye contact. I could see her hands shaking. “I don’t know how far I’d be willing to go…”
I got up from the table, so fast my chair fell over with a bang that made us all jump. I practically ran to Jessica. “Hey! Hey, you’re not there. The hypothetical didn’t happen, remember?” She looked up at me, a strange expression her face. I leaned in and kissed her, hard, on the mouth. “It didn’t happen,” I said, after pulling away from the kiss.
“He had said there was a way out. That he wasn’t ready to show us, yet,” Rachel whispered. “That we weren’t ready.” She was crying. Oh. Oh god. “But you found us before… You saved us!”
Jessica stood up. She was crying too. “I should’ve told you. He never said what the way was. He never said… I’m so sorry,” she whispered. I grabbed her up in as tight a hug as I could muster.
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.” I whispered quietly into her ear. “We should apologize to you. For not finding you sooner. For not getting you out of there faster.”
Jessica took a moment before returning the hug. “I can’t be positive,” she paused, trying to get the words to come out. “I don’t know… but I don’t think maybe we weren’t the only people he had trapped.” She set her tea cup down, hard, sloshing tea everywhere. Her hands were shaking so bad. “We heard voices…” she quit trying to talk through the tears. Brad stood up and put his arms around Robin, who was also crying.
We stood there, trying to work through the memories of their darkness, for a long time. But finally, Amber said, quietly, “So what do we do when he sends them here?” My stomach dropped. I thought I was going to throw up for a second.
I looked up from Jessica’s shoulder, making eye contact with Amber. “I don’t know,” I said, not trying to hide the fear in my voice.
“We can’t just kill them,” Rachel said in horror, mistaking my tone.
“No. No we can’t. But,” Amber said quickly, then swallowed. “But we can’t trust them either, can we?”
She was right. Damn Mur and all he’d done, she was right. I was crying too. We all were. I had no idea what we were going to do. But we had to get ready. We had to get ready for what was coming. Because as sure as the sun rises in the morning, shit was coming. It was coming for us. And it was going to be bad.
If you’ve read all of this (126,000 words!!!), then thank you. This is by far the longest work I’ve ever written. I never imagined, back in 2017 when I said “What if this image is connected to yesterday’s image? What if it’s the same story?” that I’d ever string together 62 separate images over two years into a novel-length arc. I’ve since removed a couple of chapters that didn’t flow well, but it still holds together pretty good, given that I had no control over the source images. I’m pleased with this. No. I’m pleased with the characters. The story is okay. But I care about the characters. I hope you did too.
Please, leave me feedback? I seriously appreciate reading feedback on what I write.
It is October of 2019. I’ve begun the next set of chapters. I’d love for you to read the story as it continues, once more into this strange world.
Thank you,
C
