Alex Reynard
The Library
Alex Reynard's Online Books
PART TWELVE
Several hours passed in silence. Toby had dumped the snacks onto the backseat and tossed the basket out the window. Then he laid down with his feet among the food and closed his eyes. He kept them closed as Junella barked the order for George to get going. He kept them closed as the skate-car jolted to movement. He kept them closed for the better part of forty minutes until he started feeling carsick.
'Oh, that'd be wonderful. Can you imagine the looks they'd give you as they watched you wipe up your barf from the seats?'
Toby sat up, inadvertently knocking some candy bars onto the floor.
Junella glanced up at him in the rear view mirror. Their eyes met, and hers said, 'It's fine with me if you wanna stay like that the whole trip.'
Zinc was simply staring ahead at the highway.
He looked away from both of them out the window and was unsurprised to see the landscape had changed yet again. The swamp was gone. Now it was some kind of ruined village surrounded by a sickly forest. Everything here looked like a gnawed-on corpse. The houses were uninhabitable. Their walls appeared to have been chewed away by giant ants. Many structures had collapsed roofs; some weren't much more than foundations and tilted beams. The trees and other plants were a uniform grayish green, like they were all infected with something that was slowly draining their life away.
They passed a wide-open field and Toby saw a playground. Everything there, slides, swings and climbing castles, was made of skeletons. Bones bolted to bones.
This sight did not make Toby feel afraid, just weary and tired. He was tired of seeing horror.
He rolled down the window for some fresh air. The wind ruffled his fur and thankfully didn't stink much. He looked down at the road. Their skate-car's blades were carving thin grooves in the asphalt, like the grooves on Junella's arms. Toby looked up front and could see George through the windshield. He was running along at the same speed as before, but there was no joy in it.
Toby laid back against the creaking faux-leather seat and closed his eyes again.
'I want to go home. I'm tired. I make everyone around me miserable. At least if I was home I'd be alone. Things would be normal. I'd know what was going on. I could just take my pills, take my bath, go to bed. Each day would be like the last day. No more jumping in fright at every, single, absolutely, every, every, EVERY stupid little thing that happens to me...'
He cast a sideways glance at the candy bars and chips, all vibrating slightly from the car's movement.
He picked up the first chocolate thing he saw, unwrapped it and took a bite. It tasted incredible. It tasted so good it almost made him angry. He was so deep in his bad mood, he didn't want to be taken out of it. He wanted to find little green grubs in the chocolate, or for it to taste like wallpaper paste.
He ate the whole thing and afterwards barely remembered it. All he tasted was aftertaste. He crumpled the wrapper up methodically into the densest ball he possibly could.
He considered throwing it out the window, since littering couldn't possibly matter in this dismal place, but couldn't bring himself to. He stuffed the little foil and paper ball into his pocket.
Looking out the window, the scenery was different again. Now they were driving across a lake. There wasn't even a bridge: the road somehow existed right at the surface of the water. Waves splashed George's hooves as he ran onward.
In the water, Toby could see hundreds of buoys. All painted black. Or were they buoys? They looked like people. Hairless, midnight-painted people, wading up to their chests. They had no faces. Or their faces were too dark to see. Toby watched a bird fly down, land on one of their heads, peck at it, and fly away again.
He ate another candy bar.
***
The sullen silence within The Fearsleigher was eventually broken by thousands of fishes attacking the car.
Soon after the road had slipped beneath the surface of the water and then crumbled away entirely, a plague of leaping, chomping, eel-like sea creatures had descended upon them in numbers so great it blocked out the sunlight. It had happened with the suddenness of a lightswitch being flicked. One moment none, the next, uncountable numbers of them, all thudding and splatting and scraping against their vehicle from every possible angle. Junella had the windshield wipers on max, but it wasn't accomplishing much more than just smearing orange blood all over the glass.
Toby flattened himself as far back into the seat leather as physically possible, staring in revulsion at the dozens of snapping mouths all desperately trying to break through the windows and make a meal of him. They moved far too fast to get a clear look, but as far as he could tell, they were like slime-covered cancerous gym socks with a mouth at one end that was nothing but a ring of teeth. He remembered a nature program about lampreys, but these must have been the jumbo-sized prehistoric kind. Either that or they'd been hanging out in a nuclear reactor's runoff.
At least the armor was keeping them out. Toby had been stricken with heart-pumping paralysis when they'd first started their kamikaze bombardment, but relaxed little by little as he realized that all they were accomplishing was bursting themselves like water balloons.
And then Zinc pulled the door handle.
Toby's eyes nearly popped straight out of his head. But before the mouse could let out a shriek, Zinc had cracked the door just enough to let a single one in, clamped his wrench-jaw down on its face, and had it fully subdued and the door closed again in an eyeblink.
As Toby watched in disbelief and disgust, Zinc pulled its head straight off, chucked it in the ashtray, then took a bite from the still-wriggling body.
He turned around in his seat to give Toby a slime-covered smile. "Sushi."
Toby felt his stomach roll over.
"Eyyy, you didn't scream this time! Good job!" the canine ribbed as he took another sloppy bite.
Toby blushed. "I almost did," he admitted.
The endless surround-sound splats of fish were not loud enough to prevent conversation. Zinc nibbled his lip. "Look, uh..." He tapped Toby's knee with a wrenchtip. "I'm sorry we gave you a hard time at the store. I realize you were only trying to help. It just... wasn't help we needed."
The mouse looked down at the seat. "You don't have to tell me that. I know already. I knew right after it happened. I felt like a dumb little kid." He raised his eyes to meet Zinc's. "I get that you guys are mighty heroes and I'm just nothing. I get that it's better if I don't help, since I don't know this place like you do and anything I try will likely screw things up."
From the front seat, Junella muttered, "Ain't that the truth..."
Zinc shot her a 'Cool it!' look, then turned back to Toby. "That's a harsh way of puttin' it, but yeah, pretty much the case. And I'm not unsympathetic neither. You've been here... less than two weeks?"
Toby nodded.
"You're in better shape than some people that new. Some folks, they just curl up and go catatonic. They break. You're at least still able to hold a conversation, and while you're gettin' dive-bombed on all sides by uglyfish, too!"
That made Toby smile. "Thank you for trying to make me feel better. I apologize for interfering with you and Mr. Trachea back at the store."
Zinc beamed. It was his natural inclination to want to put bumpy things back to smooth as soon as possible. "Settled and done." He took another bite of fish. "Yuh wanf summ?" he offered with his mouth full.
Toby was about to definitively decline, but then he stopped himself. Feeling like he must be absolutely out of his mind, he sat up straight and said, "Allright. Pull me off a little piece."
Zinc's grin did cartwheels. "Seriously? I asked just to tease ya! Maybe you ain't hopeless after all!" He ripped off a rubbery-looking scrap and handed it over.
Toby knew the texture would likely be the worst part, so he accepted the clammy morsel between two fingers, closed his eyes, and popped it in his mouth without thinking. He was expecting the worst flavor possible, and was primed to reflexively gag, but...
He chewed a few times and swallowed. "That... wasn't terrible," he assessed. "Kind of like a kippered herring dipped in rubber cement."
"Want more?" Zinc asked with a chuckle.
"Noooooooo," said Toby.
"It helps to have an undiscerning palate," he said as he slid back into his seat.
Junella was giving him a look.
"What?"
Her look intensified. Her vinyl features pointed at the canine like an arrow. Her eyebrows went up, demanding an answer from him.
"Whaaat!?
"One bite of fish does not a leopard's spots change," she lounged.
He rolled his eyes. "C'mon, Juney! I'm just tryin' to keep this from being one of those long, silent car trips where nobody says a damn word because everybody hates each other!"
"Oh, I see. Is that our most important priority on this trip? Chitchat?" she sarcasmed.
He snorted and savagely ripped off another chunk of fish, not minding that a few drips landed on her.
She did not take her orange eyes off of him. Her expression was smug on top, but coldly merciless beneath. "You can play nice with the wimp all you want, but what he says now doesn't change what he's gonna do the next time we need him to stay put and stay quiet. I recognize his type now. I'd prefer a catatonic one! Catatonic ones don't butt in with their good intentions!"
Toby was putting tiny holes in the leather from squeezing the seat in his claws. "I can hear everything you're saying about me, you know."
She turned around and smiled a poison smile at him. "I know." Then she went right back to looking at Zinc.
Toby leaned forward. "Hey! I already told Zinc I get it. I told him I'll try to-"
The fish abruptly stopped attacking.
Toby blinked, both in surprise and at the comparatively-blinding sunlight that suddenly poured in.
"THANK GOODNESS!!!" George roared in relief from in front of them. "I can swim just fine, and they weren't slowing me down, but that twice-bedamned SOUND of all them SMACKING INTO ME!!" He snorted and shook his head to flick away the fish-slime. Then glanced behind at his passengers. "My apologies for the outburst."
"None needed!" Zinc called out.
Toby tried to rejoin his train of thought. He tapped Junella's shoulder and tried to sound assertive. "Miss Brox, I understand that our relationship is just a business transaction and you don't have to like me, but I'd at least like a little respect."
She slowly turned to face him, moving like a coiling cobra, and her tickled-pink smile was ear-to-ear. "No," she said simply.
Toby deflated like a balloon. "Excuse m-me?"
"Respect is something you earn, pinkie. You haven't earned mine. At most I'll tolerate you. But there's no words that are gonna come outta your mouth that are gonna make me change my opinion of you. I've had clients like you before. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt until I was sure. But in the store, I saw it. You're not just a wimp. You're a coward who thinks he knows what being a coward isn't. You're someone whose whole idea of bravery comes outta comic books. You're useless to real people."
Zinc put a wrench-hand over his face and sunk down in his seat. "Yowch..."
Toby's eyes did not leave hers. Purely because he was sure that if he looked down, he'd see all his guts spilling out from how deep Junella had cut him. His lip trembled. He wanted to punch his own face to force tears from coming out.
"What do you expect from me?" he said softly, his voice trembling. "I've never had a chance to be brave. I've barely ever even had a chance to be alive."
She looked puzzled at that.
The mouse's voice grew more firm. "For almost my whole life, I've been in a hospital bed. I've been on more pills than you can imagine. I've had more sores, more headaches, more fits of dry heaving, than you can possibly imagine. I've had..." He tried to name off some of the diseases he'd been diagnosed with, but all their names eluded him. "...A lot of health problems! Any syndrome you can name, I've probably at least come close to it."
Junella did seem to be softening slightly.
"I lived with just my mom for most of it; her taking care of me while I spent every day so sick I could hardly walk across the room I never left. Just watching TV or reading books. Eating bland food for dinner and having nightmares all night. Then, just before I died, or went into a coma, or whatever it was that landed me in this craphole place, I found out I've got yet another terminal disease, Munchausen Syndrome Byproxy, and-"
Junella snickered.
"WHAT'S FUNNY ABOUT THAT!?" Toby shrieked.
The skunk actually backed up a bit. She'd seen a flash of something deep and red in the mouse's eyes for a split-second. Her expression turned into a kind of queasy pity. "You seriously don't know?"
He fought to slow his breath down. "What are you talking about? Why did you laugh at me when I said I was dying!?"
For a moment she wanted to reach out and comfort this poor deluded dummy. Her hand began moving towards his cheek. But she thought better of it and stopped herself. It was best not to get too close to crazy. "That wasn't why I laughed. I'm sorry. If you don't know, you'll find out eventually, someday. But... Allright, I get your point. I get why you're you. But still, that doesn't make it any easier for me in my position, you savvy?"
Toby fell back in his seat, arms crossed. "At least I'm aware of it. At least I'm not going to waste time arguing with you about calling me a coward. Sure, I am. I can't guarantee I won't ever panic again and mess things up for us, but I'll at least try not to. Heck, I'll let you tie me up if you feel like you have to, like they used to do with sailors to keep them from running off and getting drowned by the sirens."
Junella flinched a bit at that. She wasn't sure if the kid was exaggerating or if he honestly thought she'd be that cruel.
It was Zinc's turn to smile smugly at her. "We do have some leftover rope!" he chirped.
She glared daggers at him. "Shuddup, you."
Junella went back to staring out the windshield at the seemingly-endless water that was now frosted with a foot-thick layer of fog.
Toby fidgeted in the silence for a while. "Are we..." He leaned forward. "I know we're not 'okay', but do we at least understand each other?" he asked Junella.
She didn't look back at him. "Sure."
Hoping to cut the tension a little, Zinc tossed the tail-end of his fishy snack out the window and reached around into the back. "That left an aftertaste like an autopsy table. Scoot me a peanut-butter bar, wouldja?"
Toby appreciated Zinc allowing him the chance to feel a tiny bit useful. As Zinc crunched into the candy, Toby asked, "Do you have that book you mentioned? So I could practice reading things without the words going all wormy?"
His eyelids clinked as he winced. "Shit. It slipped my mind." He slid back into his seat and rooted around in the glove compartment. "Ehh, this'll do." He passed a yellow pamphlet over his shoulder. "Here. Travel brochure. Should be simple enough."
Toby accepted it and felt his guts churn as all the text on it turned into squiggles. He blinked hard and tried to concentrate only on the drawing of the smiling, chainsaw-wielding wolf standing in front of several big blocks of ice. Okay, so it was advertising some kind of ice-carving festival. That gave him some context to work from. And in fact, when he focused in as hard as he could on the brochure's title, he was able to make out, "FREEZE YOURSELF NEW!" That didn't make a lick of sense, but it remained consistent enough for him to be semi-confident it was the real title.
Zinc watched Toby staring intently. "It's all about force of will. Nearly everything here is. In fact, once we get to Coryza, remind me to buy you a willwatch to practice on. Seriously, remind me: I know I'll forget."
Toby looked up from the pamphlet. It was already giving him a small headache. "I've heard of willwells," he said. "I'm assuming a willwatch is similar? What are they?"
"They're basically big and small versions of the same thing. Except one stores will and the other's just for practice. Willpower is how we pay for things here. Mostly. A lot of people barter for everyday goods. And of course there's spots like Trachea's. But in almost any business, there's a willwell. Willpower is literal power in Phobiopolis. Remember how I explained about the doors? How they're made with unstable kaka in 'em? There's this stuff, this ore, that most everything else is made out of. Yeah, you can do it the hard way and grow your own veggies or chop down trees or dig up metal. But you can also take a chunk of imaginite, think real fuckin' hard at it, and it'll become whatever you want it to."
"Cool!" Toby said.
"You had some of that candy yet? That's imaginite."
The mouse felt somewhat strange to have eaten something that used to be a chunk of minerals. But the taste was undeniably good.
"There's almost noplace here stable enough to put a big factory, so anything you find that looks manufactured is either part of someone's nightmare and it showed up here by itself, or someone made it outta imaginite."
Toby nodded. "Okay, so then, if the name's any indication, a willwell is a way to store willpower? So you can use it on imaginite?"
Zinc lit up. "Heyyy! Quick on the draw, champ! I'd give you a blue ribbon if I had one!"
Toby laughed shyly.
"You got it exactly right. It takes a lotta willpower to shape imaginite. You, by yourself, right now could probably make a candy bar out of a chunk of it in twenny minutes. It might come out a little kooky, but it'd be a candy bar. If you're a small business entrepreneur, like if you make violins or some fancy crap like that, you could probably knock out a real good one in about an hour. But this is too slow for mass production, you dig? Like, picture a restaurant. The chef can't be sittin' there all day staring at rocks while the orders come in."
Toby thought he had it. "...So the customers somehow put their will in a willwell and the restaurant uses that to make the food faster."
A vigorous nod. "The kid's on his way!" he praised. "You come into a shop, you get the stuff you want, then you stare at their willwell and try to get this little red line to move from one end to the other. It looks like a parking meter. And it's a lot harder than it looks. It depends on the furson though. Juney's aces at it, she'll show you later. The more you push the red line, the more willpower it's collecting. Then, I'm not a hunnert percent sure on this part, but some kinda hose comes out the back and they point it at some imaginite and it becomes new goods for new customers."
"That makes a lot of sense," Toby said. "I haven't really had time to think about it, but just now I realized that normal money wouldn't work here. Especially if you can just make more out of imaginite."
"Some places still use money. Well, actually, only EC does," Zinc corrected. "They don't have a problem with counterfeiting there. Luxy took care of that! Holy shit did he ever!"
"Luxy?"
Zinc chuckled in a 'That's too good of a secret to spill just yet,' kind of way.
"Allright then..." Another question came to Toby. "Where did willwells come from in the first place?"
"Simple. A while back some guy named Tony John Tony thought they'd be a good idea, then he ogled a block of imaginite for a while until one popped out."
It seemed so obvious he felt silly for asking. "And then he used that one to make making the next one easier, and so on and so on?"
"You got it!" Zinc said. "So, anymore questions while I'm in a teaching mood?"
Toby blinked. "I can't think of anything offhand. Thanks though, really. I think I want to try reading this pamphlet for a while. Now that I know it's just a matter of how hard I try, I'm feeling a bit hopeful."
"You'll get it," Zinc said with confidence. "The blurry-wordy effect's never permanent. Not unless you're lazy as hell or illiterate in the first place. You seem like the egghead type. You'll be tearin' through Tolstoy in no time flat."
The mouse was glad for the vote of confidence.
"Pitch me another of those peanut things before you get started?"
Toby did, and decided to try one himself.
***
Time passed, and Toby was not sure whether it was a help or a hindrance that the pamphlet had turned out to concern such bizarre subject matter. It made it hard to trust what he was reading.
It was like herding camels. Each word resisted his attempts at forcing it to act sensible. So he'd have to run through a list of potential words it might be, and when he hit on the right one, it kind of squirmed unwillingly into place until it clicked. Words like 'the', 'to' and 'a' were a piece of cake. But some proper nouns were near-impossible and had to be skipped. Toby thought it was unlikely that this place was owned by Mr. Wrghrblrrrrngdngfnmp.
From the first page, he'd gotten a clue as to the content, although the idea itself was unsettling. The pamphlet was advertising a type of spa or salon where people could go to completely change their appearance. They would be melted down and turned into a great big block of ice. Then people with chainsaws would carve the ice into a new look. When the chainsaw-artists were satisfied, the ice would turn back into a furson. There were great big assurances at the bottom of every page that the procedure was completely painless, but Toby knew there were plenty of things that felt weird as heck without being precisely "painful". He didn't think a chainsaw makeover would be pleasantly ticklish.
Though the more he thought back, he'd heard about lots of cringe-inducing things living people did regularly to themselves in the pursuit of beauty. Getting melted, frozen and chopped wasn't really any crazier than injecting botulism toxin into your eyebrows or wearing seven-inch high heels. And he remembered what Piffle had said about how Phobiopolis had a habit of changing people against their will. Some folks might go to this "chainspa" just to get back to normal.
Toby was nearing the end of the second page, where it described how customers could also take a chance and let the stylists choose a random form for them. The customer would get a brand new look, plus the thrill of not knowing what they would become until they looked in the mirror. From glancing at the illustrations on the other pages, they were just bragging about the hotel you'd stay in, the pool, the buffet, etc.. Though the last page had a picture of a dead shark with party balloons tied to it. Toby had no idea what that might indicate.
"MADAM BROX!!" George called out, startling Toby considerably.
The mouse looked out the window and the landscape had, unsurprisingly, become something else again. Now they weren't in the middle of a lake, but the middle of a river. It was straight and wide as a two-lane highway. On the sandy shore, billions of bugs all crawled around doing typical beach things: sunbathing, volleyball, eating ice cream cones. The sheer amount of movement was nauseating (it looked like the shifting words on the pamphlet). And these weren't just ordinary bugs. There were wine-colored boulder-sized pillbugs. He saw a spiny caterpillar the size of a log, and earwigs big as cats. There were crustaceans too. A whole delegation of crabs waved their claws in unison like hula dancers. Toby even saw lobsters scuttling along, sheathed in redundant medieval suits of armor. It made his brain hurt. There was just too much happening for his eyes to handle. He wanted to be out of here quickly.
Though not as quickly as they were about to be.
"What's up?" Junella shouted out the window to her equine engine.
George, still swimming along without a hint of fatigue, looked back over his shoulder, head swiveled a crackling 170 degrees. "I sense a waterfall up ahead!" he warned. "We are fast approaching it!"
Junella patted the side of the door. "Right on time," she gospeled happily.
That made Toby a wee bit nervous. He leaned forward. "We're, uh, going to get out of the water, right?"
He guessed her answer just from the dangerous tilt of her smile. "Nope!"
"Oh. It's just a little bump then?"
The mustelid's grin widened. She was very obviously taking pleasure in his fear. "Nope twice! Taller than any in the waking world, and we're going right over the edge!"
George twitched. He shouted back, "Sorry to eavesdrop, but did I hear you correctly, Madam!?"
"Loud and clear!" she showtuned. "Steady on! That's an order! Up and over! All the way down!!"
Toby could hear the roar of the falls now. He turned to Zinc. "She knows what she's doing right?"
"Always," he said unhesitatingly. "But that doesn't mean I gotta like this part!" He pulled on his seatbelt.
Toby didn't need it suggested he do the same. He was belted in quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. He looked up at the rear view mirror and saw Junella's crazed eyes reflected.
"Whassamatter? 'Fraid of falling?"
"Yes!! Of course!" The roar was getting louder now. The water was splashing higher and higher against the car windows. "Something's going to catch us right!?"
"Nope thrice!!" Junella sang. She tossed back her head and cackled like a Broadway witch.
"I fear we are nearing the point of no return!" George shouted. There was no need for him to swim anymore; the current had him in its grip and was pulling them all towards a white, foggy void where the entire world seemed to end. It looked like the empty page an illustrator forgot to fill.
Junella's giggles were pure insanity. "RAMMING SPEED!!!"
"I'm gonna barf, I just know it," Zinc commented.
Toby screamed.
George bellowed.
And then they all went over.
Toby wasn't sure if he blacked out due to the g-forces or because he just really, really wanted to. One moment he was clawing the carseat to rags, candy bars tumbling weightlessly around him, Junella's shrieks of laughter barely audible over the deadly rumble of rushing water...
Then came a nice interlude of dark and quiet.
*******