Call Me Ishmael

Chapter 7

Author's Note: Chew twenty times before swallowing, and even then, think carefully prior to doing so! You can buy this book at Amazon, B&N, and at Smashwords for any other device.

The street was quiet.  To the north side, all of the houses were familiar; empty and quiet, but familiar.  There was the house with the half-completed siding job, just as the contractors left it when immigration authorities had shown up over a month ago.  Two houses further on, I could see the corner of the dog pen that neighbor had erected to keep his four or five dozen yapping animals from being flattened by teenager-driven muscle cars.  Everything looked the same.  And it wasn't a movie set, or anything like that.  It was real.  I touched the rough bark of a large maple tree; they were the same maple trees as always, and a gentle zephyr stirred their five-lobbed leaves.  Pastoral, almost.

Looking south was another story.  In my dimension there was a newer module home, brought in on a truck.  If you ask me, when they bring a house in on wheels, that makes it a trailer, no matter how much it cost.  That didn't matter here.  It was gone, and in its place was a stockade fence.  The fence was of metal, not wood, and strung about with a heavy wire between stout poles.  Every ten or twelve seconds, a large burst of sparks  jumped from one pole to the next, circling the property.  The house inside this barricade was actually a castle, complete with moat.  A small dirigible appeared to be moored to the top of the tallest turret.

“This is bizarre,” I offered.

Finnie looked around.  “What?  Your house sits on one of the seams between the dimensions, so things get a little fragmented here.”

“Is that what happened to Winston?  Did he get fragmented?”

“No, he appears to have turned into a pig.  Now, that was bizarre.  It was like something out of a fairy tale.  Or the Odyssey.   Unless the dimensions are grinding together…”  She lapsed into silence.

“What?  Excuse me, what?”

“Dimensional grind.  A theory your father has.”  Finnie waved the thought away.

“My father.  At the undisclosed location.  Where is your family, Finnie?  Or are you all alone, too?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.  We have other things to do besides talk about my...my father.”

I nodded in agreement.  Finnie was the sort of woman I did not want to argue with.  After all, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and even to breathe the same air that she had just finished exhaling made me so breathless I was scarcely able to inhale.  And then there was the very real possibility she would simply kill me if I disagreed with her.  “Okay.  Well, maybe you can tell me how much time is left of our forty-eight hours.”

“You were asleep about eight hours, so about forty.  Plan on less; it's safer that way.  We have to talk to your father at the base, so we’ll meet him there.”

I swallowed, feeling my whole reality, the past, the wasted years, slip down my throat and into my stomach.  That hurt.  The past was covered with sharp points, and it cut my throat on the way down.  Alive after all these years, I thought.  Questions filled my mind like cheap candy in kid's Hallowe'en basket:  Would I know my father?  Would he know me?  What would he think of the man I had become? 

I considered these rather deep thoughts as we walked down the street, away from the castle-type building, and toward a tall glass tower on the next block.  A concrete wall in front of the building formed one side of a deserted gazebo.  The paving stones in around the gazebo were arranged to form letters, and with some difficulty I made out the words.  The process was difficult because at some point in time, many of the paving stones had been pulled up and replaced incorrectly.  Still, I puzzled it out.