Summerhill (19 page)

“No, no.” Summerhill scrambled to his feet and backed away, vaguely aware that being close enough to smell the otter was a bad thing. “I—He—The other me,” he said, waving towards the unconscious copy of himself. “That’s for you. For me. For us.”

He fell over onto his hands and knees at the edge of the creek. He caught his reflection in the water and immediately yanked his head back to look away. His stomach churned.

The other Summerhill stirred and groaned. His tail thumped the ground, sending up blades of grass and flower petals. The plants surrounding him grew more healthy and vibrant by the second.

“Summerhill, please, tell me what’s wrong!” Tek was frantic, pacing back and forth in his tiny spot, unwilling to approach either of the two dogs. “Should I run and get help? What do I—”

“No, it’s okay,” Summerhill blurted, and he smiled as he looked back into the otter’s face. Yes, there was still something inside him that remembered, still some pieces that he hadn’t pulled away. “This way I can stay with you.”

Tek didn’t understand, Summerhill could tell. Summerhill didn’t understand, either. The otter kept looking between the two Summerhills, opening and closing his mouth as he tried and failed to form coherent questions. Eventually, he mustered up the capacity to say, “So, now you’re in two places at once?”

“He’s me. The part of me that gets to stay with you.”

Tek wasn’t crying, but tears—whether they were tears of sorrow or panic or something else—were forming in his eyes. “But what about the rest of you? What about
you
you?”

Once again, Summerhill looked at his reflection in the water, and this time forced himself not to look away. “He is me. He’s me, so I can stay here. Because I can’t stay here. Can’t stay behind. Can’t be trapped.”
Trapped.
“Have to escape.” Skyscrapers. Gray sky.

“Summerhill, I don’t think you’re in the condition to go anywhere. I think you need a doctor.” Tek looked around the empty field and the open valley, as if desperate to know which direction to go. “Just wait here. I’ll—”

“No!” Summerhill snarled, his lips drawn back as a low growl rumbled in his throat for a second afterwards. “I can’t. I
won’t
.” Skyscrapers. Gray sky. Cruise ship past future Katherine time reality pocket watch.

“I promised not to abandon you,” Tek said, and now he’d found some forceful conviction within himself, and hearing it made Summerhill look up as a part of himself registered, however faintly, how proud he was of the otter.

The other Summerhill lifted one hand up. It hovered above his face, and then his fingers wiggled and splayed, their movement tested for the very first time. His tail thumped the ground some more, pace quickening and force increasing.

Tears started to form in Summerhill’s own eyes. “Take care of him,” he said, nodding to the other Summerhill stirring from its catatonia. The inside of his mouth started to dry up, and with some difficulty, he added, “I feel like I’m going to miss you.”

Tek stood there, mouth hanging open, the words not coming. He was still just standing there when Summerhill lifted up one arm, balled his hand into a fist, and slammed it down hard against the ground, causing the flower-strewn world to disappear around him.

Eighteen

Grief

Everything went dark, as if Summerhill had flipped a light switch.

Skyscrapers. Pale gray sky. Prison.
Nusquam
. Katherine. Pocket watch. Time. Back and forth. Find Katherine.

Find Katherine. Find Katherine. Stick with her and everything will be fine. Find Katherine.

One eyeblink later, he was someplace else.

He didn’t bother to ascertain where he’d ended up. He’d escaped, and that was all that mattered, but he felt neither joy nor relief at that. How he’d managed to do it was a mystery even to him, but he didn’t care about that, either.

All he cared about now was the terrible thing he’d done. Still down on his hands and knees, his whole body shook with heavy breaths and dry sobs. His stomach churned, his chest grew tight, and then he threw up.

The entirety of his being—what was left of it, at any rate—was overcome with guilt. He could feel the hole in his mind where the missing part of him had been. A very real part of him was gone, and he wasn’t ever going to get it back. He might as well have hacked off a limb.

This was worse than just losing a limb, though. A leg or an arm was a part of the body. What he’d torn away had been part of who he’d been as a person. Experience and memories, feelings and emotions, thoughts and quirks and little bits of personality—ripped away, gone forever, discarded as if they’d been nothing.

His fingers clawed at the ground. Beneath him was hard earth, cold and dark and dry. Lifeless. There was light, very faint, but Summerhill didn’t lift his head to see its source. Instead, he stayed on all fours, crawled away from the puddle of his vomit, and then fell onto his side on the ground and curled up on himself.

He started to cry. Where his tears hit the ground, tiny leaves and petals sprouted, coming into existence for just a moment before dissolving back into the barren soil. His sobs were heavy, and they echoed clearly back to him, as if he were in some earthen chamber of some sort. Still he refused to open his eyes or lift his head.

Oh, he thought he’d been so clever! He’d thought he could solve both of his problems in one fell swoop, appeasing a clingy, would-be lover while leaving himself free to continue on his mad journey unfettered. Only now, now that it was said and done, did he see and appreciate the true extent to which he’d mutilated himself, and all in the name of trying to take the easy way out of a no-win situation.

Well, now he was out, and he was alone, and he didn’t even have his entire self to keep him company. His was a journey to search the cosmos for who he really was, and when confronted with a stumbling block on that path, he’d taken a part of who he was and thrown it away. He’d even had the chance to see the sort of person he’d be if given the chance to settle down and live a normal life, and he’d thrown that away, too, because it had been mildly inconvenient.

Beyond merely feeling shame and regret at what he’d done to himself, he also felt—at least on some level—jealousy that the other part of him would get to know life with someone who cared about him. The rest of him might never find home, or find Katherine, and he was filled with sorrow at realizing that the part of his self he’d seen fit to get rid of might have a life worth living while the rest of him suffered.

He wailed, and the sound of his cry rang back in his ears three times. He wanted so badly to beg forgiveness, and yet he had no idea from whom to beg it. Here he was, weeping alone in the cold darkness, in a place that might not even have a name. Perhaps this was his punishment.

He deserved the World of the Pale Gray Sky. He deserved nothing more than the confinement it represented, a prison of solitude, a prison of ennui. There he could be kept isolated, safely hidden away, unable to bring further harm to others or to himself, and he could let his mind get overtaken by the death of inspiration and the death of imagination.

As he thought about how he might return there and relinquish his freedom in favor of self-imposed exile, his blunt claws scraped at the tightly packed dirt. Anxiety surged within him as he made random, desperate scrapes. The very thought of going back made his heart race with panic, and he tried so, so hard to think of a reason how and why another version of himself had helped him out of there in the first place. He scoured his mind for any hint of distinct memory and dug harder at the top layer of dirt, trying to reproduce something that even vaguely resembled words.

There had been... there had been
something
. If he’d been trapped in the World of the Pale Gray Sky, it was because someone wanted him stuck there. Why confine someone? To keep them from doing something. Something that needed his attention. Something bigger than himself.

Choking back his final sobs, Summerhill forced himself back to his feet, the damp ground left swarming with microbial plant matter that would die off all too soon. Yes, he’d lost sight of what was important. He’s lost Katherine, and he’d even lost part of himself, but that wasn’t going to deter him. There was something out there waiting for him, and he’d find it. He wouldn’t go back. There was no going back.

And if there was no going back, then that meant he could only press onward. And the first step to doing that was figuring out where he was and how he was going to get out of here.

For a few seconds, the sound of a ticking watch echoed faintly somewhere in the distance, its mainspring in working order, its gears in alignment, its ability to track the passage of time smooth and flawless.

Summerhill at last took stock of where he was. He was in fact in a cavern of some sort, as the previous echoing of his cries had indicated. Before him, embedded into the natural rock, was a set of large doors, fully twice as tall as he was, with massive handles and metal knockers to match. Torches burned in sconces set into the rock wall on either side.

The doors themselves were rather ornate, each side carved with matching symmetrical patterns, and in the flickering torchlight, Summerhill could see the different colors as well as the metallic gold and silver trim used throughout. With all the painting and ornamentation, it was impossible to tell by looking whether the doors were made of wood or stone or something else altogether.

Behind Summerhill was nothing but darkness that stretched on forever. He recognized it as the darkness of the nothingness between worlds, the same nothingness through which the
Nusquam
sailed. Without any temporal context, though, Summerhill had no idea if the
Nusquam
was out there right now, or if it had yet to be built, or if it had long ago ceased to be. Even if it did currently exist, there was a lot of nothing out there, and Summerhill wouldn’t be lucky enough to run into it by chance twice.

That left the doors as his only way out. He rolled up his sleeves, noticing that they were the sleeves of the dull, greenish-gray shirt he’d worn back home. Dismissing the change in fashion as being of no real importance, he approached the door with refreshed purpose and determination. He wasn’t going to stay here and wallow any longer.

First, Summerhill rapped on the door with its knocker to see if anyone would answer. He doubted that anyone would, but it was the polite thing to do. After a minute passed, he knocked harder. The doors were definitely made out of some sort of heavy wood, and the sound of Summerhill’s knocking echoed ominously off of the curved cavern walls, back into the emptiness.

“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone in there?” The echo magnified the uncertainty and lingering despair in his voice, despite his attempts to quash it. He couldn’t be discouraged, though—not now. “My name is Summerhill.” Now he shouted louder, still doubting that his voice would even carry through the thick doors. “Please, if there’s anyone there, can you let me in?”

Silence. He banged on the door harder, with the knocker and with his fists. He shouted and he kicked and he made the loudest ruckus he could, but to no avail. The doors remained shut. Still no sound came from the other side.

Kicking the dirt in frustration, Summerhill growled and paced around the empty cavern. He took a few moments to catch his breath and recompose himself lest he slip back into helpless dejection. Very well. If nobody was willing to let him in, then he would just have to barge in. He took hold of one of the doors’ oversized handles and pulled. The door did not budge, though.

The dog grabbed hold with both his hands and tried again, and again the door stayed firmly put. Was it locked or barred from the inside, or was it just too heavy to pull? Summerhill dug his heels into the dry ground and pulled harder still, but still the door did not yield. He strained his ears as well as his arms, hoping to catch some sound that might indicate that a bar or a locking mechanism was under stress, but there was no such sound. Panting, he released the handle and took a step back, dizzy from exertion.

He had no fire, nor anything to cut or chop with. Wood this heavy wouldn’t readily buckle just from pounding or kicking at it, either, nor would it—

Wait. Wood came from trees. It was dead, sure, but trees were still a kind of plant. Summerhill could do something about plants.

With one arm fully outstretched, Summerhill placed his palm and spread fingers against the door. He fixed his gaze at that spot, and then concentrated, calling out to the dead wood. Faintly, very faintly, the dry fibers within began to stir. Summerhill narrowed his focus even further, and started to exert his will upon the wood.