PART 4
“Thank you for breakfast,” Jack said to Ms. Reed. “I’ll see you later.”
“Alright, have a nice day,” Ms. Reed said tepidly, continuing to work on the day’s crossword puzzle.
Jack grabbed his skateboard, patted Bridges and his endearing grin on the head, and rode straight into the woods, following his normal path.
He hopped over a couple roots, and continued into his usual clearing. He was surprised to see LeCrae waiting for him instead of Ethrym. LeCrae was a large beetle, around the size of Jack. He had a soft cream coloring, and wore a fallen leaf upon his head like a hat.
“LeCrae? Long time no see.”
“Indeed, Jack, indeed. It is nice to make your acquaintance once more. How long has it been?”
LeCrae’s voice was soft, yet sure of itself, much like the flow of a river. Jack knew that this was part of why LeCrae was so effective in the ways of deception.
“Not sure. Something like a year, probably. I’m guessing you’ve been doing alright?”
“Hmm. Too long, too long… and yes, I certainly have. Ran into a bit of trouble recently with a ladybug spirit, but that’s how it goes.”
“Is it?”
“That’s just the thing with ladybugs, Jack. They lie.”
LeCrae shook his beetle head lightly, recounting some sort of unpleasant memory, then readjusted his leaf hat, settling himself.
“I’d like to catch up with you, child, but I come with a request.”
“I figured. You’re not the type for small talk.”
LeCrae scuttled over closer to Jack.
“A job for you, of course with no… erm, physical reward I can offer you. If I was part of your realm, I’d-”
“I understand. I’ll hear you out, can’t make any promises, though.”
“Many thanks, young Jack. If there is ever a time I can properly repay you, I’ll be sure to do so. You’ll always have a place in my burrow, child. My request is as follows.”
Jack sat down in the grass, making himself comfortable.
“Your people are destroying a part of our forest, presumably to expand their territory. I understand that this is inevitable, however there is a particular tree that must not be destroyed. It contains… well, think of it as the heart of the forest.”
“The… heart?”
“Hearts pump blood to the rest of the body, no? Well, as you’re aware by now, as spirits we do not possess true corporeal forms. We exist because of the… let’s call it the blood of the forest being pumped into us at all times. Within the heart contains the form of the soul, so to speak. If the heart is destroyed, both the idea of our existence and the blood that sustains us will go down with it.”
“I don’t really get it, but that’s a pretty big problem, I think.”
“You think correctly.”
“So how come you’re alone? If there’s just one spirit asking me, it doesn’t seem all that important, really. I’d expect at least a half dozen of the spirits to have come with you if it’s actually life or death-”
“Do you call me a liar?”
“No, LeCrae, I don’t need to call you a liar. The other spirits do that part for me. But do I believe that you’re a liar? Yeah, probably.”
LeCrae stared at the ground for a moment, motionless.
“Alright, I’ll tell you the truth.”
“That was quick.”
“But! You mustn’t tell the others.”
“I told you, LeCrae. I can’t make any promises. We both know I’m the only human I can talk with ya’, so you don’t really have much power here. Now spill it.”
“I… alright,” LeCrae said, resigning himself, “what I told you of the tree was true. Within it is a heart. It’s just not the heart for the whole forest. Some hearts sustain many life forms, some just a few. This one so happens to be linked to my love, Pryxis of the Grass.”
“Pryxis? Never heard of her.”
“She’s not the sort to make herself known to strangers. She’s wonderful. Gentle. Kind. Compa-”
“I get it. So that’s it? You need a tree protected? I’ll see what I can do.”
“Truly? Oh, Jack, you merciful child! I will not forget this, as long as I should live.”
Jack sighed, stood up, then kicked a rock into a tree nearby.
“Come on, show me the tree we’re talking about here.”
With that, the boy and the beetle walked onward.
*****
Toby awoke in a cold sweat (not that he could tell the difference between the sweat and the chlorinated water clinging to his gooseflesh skin). He sat up, looked around, and began to shiver violently. He staggered to his feet, and made sure he was alone.
He had no idea how much time had passed, or how he’d gotten out of the pool. He coughed, and realized his lungs felt as though they were on fire.
Did I… no, that’s impossible. If I did…
Toby stationed his meandering train of thought and gathered all the materials he’d brought, preparing to leave. Once he was satisfied he’d left no trace of his time in the facility, he set the pool tarp back in place, and left the swimming center.
The fact that his eyes needed to adjust to the moonlight surprised him. The moon felt particularly bright tonight. Toby made a mental note to begin the study of astronomy.
Then, with a click, the light was gone, and Toby’s pupils expanded. Once he could finally discern shape and contour, he saw the silhouettes of two figures in front of him. He couldn’t make out any features, but they looked to be roughly Toby’s height and weight. As they stepped closer to Toby, he learned that his estimations weren’t necessarily ‘rough.’
In front of him were two Toby’s, dressed in different clothing, and with different haircuts accompanying them. Yet, Toby couldn’t shake the feeling he was looking into a mirror. The two drew close enough for Toby to make eye contact.
It was unmistakable. The two boys were Toby, and Toby was the two boys.
“I’m sure you have questions,” the boy with a buzzcut said.
“We’ll answer them, but before we do, put this on,” the boy with a ponytail said, tossing Toby a hoodie that he gratefully accepted, “you look like you’re about to freeze to death.”
The feeling in Toby’s body began to return to him, and his mind started to snap into form, like an injured bird recovering its instinct to fly.
“You know,” drowned Toby said, “I’m not sure how many questions I have. Instead, could I try and-”
“Hypothesize?” all three boys said at once.
A few seconds of silence passed, then the trio started laughing. Not a pure, deep laugh, but one genuine enough to provide Toby with a bit of comfort.
“Go for it,” Buzzcut said.
“Alright, let me go through my data. First, I injected myself with this substance, and fell into that pool. Second, I’m certain that I’m the only person on the planet who would have any reason to be in that swimming center at this time tonight. Third, I woke up, perfectly alive, on solid ground. That leads me to my hypothesis.”
“Before you give it a shot, let me ask you…” Ponytail said, stamping the heel of his sneaker against the ground, “would you believe me if I told you that you drowned in that pool? That this is the afterlife?”
Toby pondered it for a moment.
“No, I wouldn’t. Occam’s razor, after all.”
“Good, I was just checking. Proceed.”
“My theory is as follows: you both are somehow, someway, alternate versions of me. I won’t speculate as to how you got here, or how you knew I’d be in that pool, as I expect you’ll fill me in on that, and I’m quite impatient. With that being said, it’s also likely that you beat me to the truth of time travel, or at the very least interdimensional movement.”
“Oh, and why would you presume something like that?” Buzzcut asked.
“Because you’re me. And there’s nothing I care about more than time travel.”
The two other boys shared a glance.
“Let’s go on a walk,” Ponytail offered.
The boys wound up at a small public park equipped with a play structure, a swingset, and an oversized abacus. Ponytail took a seat on a swing, and buzzcut leaned against one of the bars holding the swingset in place.
Toby anxiously bounced on the balls of his feet. He needed to warm up a bit more, and his mind was swarming with questions.
“So,” Toby began, “I think the best place to start would be for you to explain exactly what time travel, or at the very least the traversal of interdimensional reality, looks like. So, is it infinite, branching realities? Traveling back to the past of a singular existence? Give me something, I’m sure my mind will naturally infer the rest.”
“You know,” said Buzzcut, “we all hear ourselves talk, sure, but it isn’t until you can subjectively perceive your personality that one realizes how insufferable they truly are…”
“He’s not here for games,” Ponytail said sharply, “you should know better than anyone that we hate wasted time.”
Buzzcut sighed. “Fine, I’ll explain my end, but I won’t be the one to answer your questions, which I’m sure will be suitably thorough and bothersome.”
“I understand,” Toby said.
“As far as we know, there’s only one timeline. I should make that clear first. There may be more, but neither I nor our brethren over there have found any evidence as such. Also, I studied time travel as a corollary to my true research: the study of perceptive metaphysics. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s even possible to go back or forward in time.”
Buzzcut began to pace, which Toby understood to signify the undertaking of deep thought. “With this being said, you can create your own reality easily enough.”
“You can what?”
“I’m sure you’re aware of the double slit experiment?”
“Hmm…. in which a person observing a substance changed how the substance behaved? Sure, but how does it relate to creating another reality?”
“Well, the double slit experiment opened the door to the idea that reality may or may not behave differently when perceived. You see, light waves act strangely when someone’s watching them, and light is just another building block of reality, after all. Why wouldn’t matter behave similarly?
Buzzcut awaited a response, received none, and answered his own question.
“Because unlike light waves, there aren’t examples of matter… misbehaving.”
“You’re wrong-”
“I know, but I’m talking about the laws of nature, the pillars which hold up scientific order. Things that are-”
“Replicable. I get it. Go on then.”
“It’s like this. Imagine you’re in a pitch black room. Inside, there could be furniture, carpets, other people, or just about anything else. My hypothesis was simple: The objects inside don’t truly exist until you observe them. In the pitch black room, you’re surrounded by substance that will become something once you see it. Until then, it’s more like… play-doh.”
“Play-doh?”
“Indeed. And when the light switch turns on inside that room, the play-doh becomes a chair, and a table, and a desk.”
“I see… please, send me your notes on this, I’ll catch up shortly. But you said it’s possible to create your own reality, right?”
“Indeed.”
Toby shook his head. “How?”
“Well, in short, you just need to turn the lights off in the room. You need to dissociate the mind from the outside world, something you were well on your way to achieving chemically through your cocktail of drugs. Then you spin around so you’re focusing on new Play-doh, turn the lights back on, and you’ll find yourself observing something entirely new. A new reality, even.”
Ponytail hopped off the swing, stretching his legs. “Well, I guess it’s my turn. I’ll do my best to wrap this up, I’m getting cold and I’d like to leave. Toby, this reality used to be mine, but now it is also ‘observed’ by this version of ourselves right here,” he said, motioning to Buzzcut. “Actually, it was technically formed by the both of us. The story goes something like this: original Toby here became obsessed with the idea of creating his own reality. He studied his field much like you’ve occupied yourself with time travel, but unlike your pursuit, there was a pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. He formulated a working hypothesis, turned the lights off in the room, and focused on a slightly different reality in which I exist. I, of course, am both you and him. The difference being that my area of obsession was chemistry, specifically human brain chemistry. See, in this way, we all have a different specialty. Yours being time travel, of course.”
Toby began pacing, taking as much time as he needed to process things (four minutes and thirteen seconds). Then, he looked back at the two boys. “I have many more questions, and I’m not certain I understand this just yet, but I will, and that’s a promise. For now, I have a lair you can use while you’re in this reality. I’d really like to know why you came here, but I’m cold, and as I have sufficient grounds to make an assumption, I think we all want to go home.”
“We know where your lair is,” Buzzcut said, “after all, we built the same thing in our realities.”
Ponytail chuckled. “We’ll make ourselves at home. I agree with our third iteration. Let’s all get some rest, and reconvene tomorrow. Well then, shall we?” Ponytail said, waving over Buzzcut.
Toby watched as the two sauntered off in the direction of his lair.
This is… odd, terrifying, exhilarating, maddening, so confusing it may lead my brain to tangle itself into oblivion, Toby thought, but at least it’s interesting. That’s enough for me.
*****
Ace shone a flashlight into the doorway. The beam, almost lonely in its task to illuminate the unknown, picked up nothing but the concrete floor. A dank aura emitted from the doorway, Ace would have sworn she heard a faint tapping sound echo from the darkness. She took a step inside, then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Come on now, sweetie,” her father said, “you can’t expect me to allow my only daughter to be the first one into a room like this.”
Ace turned back to her father and smirked. “Ah, Chief. Nice of you to join us. Find this place easily enough?”
Chief Rawlings sighed, then led a group of officers through the doorway. As the men began to disperse, Ace reached a realization.
“Hey, Dad?”
“What?”
“You waited until I’d stepped into the dark, mysterious secret chamber to take over, didn’t you?”
Silence, all the officers stopped moving out of second-hand embarrassment.
“Unbelievable,” Ace muttered as she walked through the doorway once more.
The police had reached the edges of the chamber, some finding more bookcases, some finding tapestries. Ace estimated that this room must have been at least triple the size of the first.
“Hey,” Ace called out, surprised to find her voice echoing, “anyone find a damn lightswitch?”
“Language, honey.”
“Piss off,” Ace said just quietly enough to be safely out of her father’s earshot.
“Found it!” an officer called out.
A click, and at last there was light.
Ace’s mind immediately expanded to fill the room, taking in every detail. Much like the first room, beige walls were covered by shelves full of strange books as well as large, obscure tapestries with symbology Ace didn’t recognize. This detail was taken in almost subconsciously, Ace’s conscious mind solely occupied with the display in the center of the room.
A flat stone the size of a dinner table served as the base to a… figure of sorts. A grotesque, many-limbed creature’s skeleton constructed entirely of bones. It must have been close to ten feet tall. Atop its skeletal neck rested a bull’s skull. One of the officers closest to the structure cried out and leapt away from it. Ace guessed that no one in the room blamed him. Slowly, Ace took one uncertain step toward the display, then another. She made absolutely sure that this… thing wasn’t somehow alive, and reached out a (regrettably) shaking hand toward the creature’s leg. The bones were cold to the touch, and as Ace ran her fingers up and down, she confirmed that not a shred of flesh remained.
“Alright, we’ve seen worse,” Chief Rawlings lied assuringly, “let’s get to work. Men, does anyone have any idea of what sort of bones we’re dealing with here?”
The officers turned to one another, still somewhat shell-shocked from a demon spawn appearing from the darkness. Then, a young redhead, new to the force, raised his hand.
Kelly Crawford was always a timid boy. The sort of boy to enter new situations with earnest intentions of succeeding, only to realize he wasn’t the sort of boy to find success easily. Rather, he was a person to stumble upon success unintentionally, as though tripping and falling over a bit of buried treasure.
When Kelly was in second grade, he was stuck in the outfield of the Sleepy Grove Little League team. The outfield, for second graders, was some sort of unassailable wonderland that represented a dream of something more, since the idea of hitting a ball that far was physically impossible. Well, nearly impossible. On a bright and sunny Saturday, Kelly decided to fill his generally uneventful stint in the outfield with a chase of sorts, the pursuit of a butterfly. The creature zigged and zagged, yet never flew high enough for Kelly to give up on it. The butterfly fluttered its wings, making the war against gravity seem beautiful, majestic. Kelly was entranced, slowly falling under the spell of a seemingly magical being. It flew directly between Kelly and the sun, creating a sort of eclipse for the boy. This has to mean something, Kelly thought. If he’d known the term ‘profound’ in second grade, he definitely would have used it.
He wasn’t wrong. The profundity of the situation made itself perfectly clear just moments later. Just a few seconds after Kelly had started his chase, Sleepy Grove’s one and only pitching machine malfunctioned, and threw a pitch far too fast. This wouldn’t have been much of an issue, had Paul ‘Young Babe Ruth’ Jenkins not been at the plate. He took this error of technology as a challenge, and propelled the already zipping baseball high and far. Just high and far enough, in fact, to squash a beautiful little butterfly on the ball’s descent, and smash its remains on a preoccupied outfielder’s face.
One broken nose and embarrassing story later, and Kelly Crawford had generated a bevy of nicknames (of course, nearly all of them derogatory). Yet, Kelly was good natured to his core. Even through ensuing depressive episodes, he never faltered, worked hard, and eventually joined the Sleepy Grove Police Department in a hope to make his community a better place. His whole life, he dreamed of stumbling upon just one opportunity to be useful. The trouble was that Kelly didn’t fill his time with the cultivation of useful skills. Rather, the bullied child became fascinated with a nearly endless number of… ‘niche’ hobbies. Hobbies which stayed decidedly away from the concept of utility. Finding opportunities to be useful with these hobbies would be like finding buried treasure. The thing is, Kelly had a propensity to stumble upon exactly that.
“I know all about animal bo-,” Kelly said, the twenty-four year old’s voice loudly and unmistakably cracking.
In Kelly Crawford’s mind, the world as he knew it began to fracture.
This is just the sort of thing to happen to me, he thought, my study of zoological remains finally comes in handy, and what do I do? Screw it up. Embarrass myself. Make myself look like a fool! Damn it Kelly, why can’t you get anything right?
Kelly began to descend his mental staircase of despair. He looked up, and saw all his colleagues staring at him blankly. His descent quickened, he’d begun jumping down multiple steps at a time. He looked up at the lights on the ceiling, and saw the butterfly.
Floating, flittering, darting back and forth, exuding grace as though it was created for the sole purpose of inspiring wonderment. Kelly knew it wasn’t real. It wouldn’t be long before he sprinted out of here, feeling claustrophobic and short of breath. This sort of thing happened to him often. He thought himself a veteran in his battle against anxiety.
It was at this point that an uncharacteristically strong hand grasped Kelly by the collar, both figuratively and literally, and threw him back to reality.
“Spit it out, kid,” Ace (eight years younger than Kelly) said, “you look like you’re drowning or something.”
“Ah, I, um, ah,”
“I get it, you know your vowels. Throw in some consonants for good measure, will ya’?”
“These b-b-bones, they’re from all sorts of different animals. I’ve studied stuff like this, give me a chance to look them over!”
“There ya’ go, he’s like a stupid phoenix rising from stupid ashes. Well, get on with it,” Ace said, rolling her eyes.
Kelly took a few minutes to take stock, cataloguing the different arrangements found on the manufactured creature.
“This skeleton includes the bones of either twelve or thirteen different animal species, depending on whether or not a couple of the bones have been carved or reshaped. Amongst these, the most prevalent origin is canines, with either five or six species represented. Next, two different species of deer, two different species of foxes, the squirrel species common to Sleepy Grove, the bones of one, single cat, and…”
Kelly’s voice trailed off.
“And what?” the chief asked.
“And…” Kelly started, clearing his throat, “the bones of one human male.”
Odds and Ends 
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