Yesterday, I showed you guys the first chapter of Cross-Purposes, one of two books I am currently considering recording and releasing as an audiobook podcast early next year. Today I’m going to give you the first chapter of the other book under consideration, The Last Portal. This is a zombie novel, but I hope the first chapter will be enough to convince you that there’s a bit of a twist to it. Read ‘em both, please, and use the comment section below to cast your vote. Which one would you most like to listen to as a podcast? Keeping in mind that the “loser” of this little competition will more than likely be recorded eventually. I’m just trying to decide which to present to you first.
The Last Portal
Chapter One: The End
NOW
Skip had never realized how sweet the air of Ezzix was until he accepted he was breathing it perhaps for the last time. It wasn’t sweet in a metaphorical sense, either, not in the way that his grandfather often talked about the sweetness in the town before the car factory moved in and started belching smoke into the air. Each breath of Ezzix air carried on it a different sweet fragrance – honeysuckle with one breath, then a hint of peppermint, then a warm cake baking in the oven. He stood by the familiar Wisdom Well, ready to ride down the bucket he was almost too big for, and he wondered once again how he had never noticed the changing aroma before. In a place of so much magic, this small one had somehow escaped him. He took one last breath – pumpkin pie with whipped cream – climbed into the bucket, and began his descent.
At the bottom of the well, he knew he would find his tunnel, leading in a slow slope up towards the bottom of a toy chest rooted at the foot of his bed. It had been some time before he really played with any of the action figures, games or stuffed animals that lay in the chest, but he kept them there for appearances’ sake. When he needed the portal, he carefully took the toys out and hid them in a cardboard box under his bed. He couldn’t take the chance of his mother deciding to clean up his room again – the last time she had filled up the empty chest and blocked the portal, the Prime Minister and the Queen’s honor guard needed to escort him to the Mirage Mountains to get to the only other one left open to him at the time. It was sealed, now, like all the rest, and even if it wasn’t, Skip didn’t relish the thought of another encounter with the Echo Chorus. Of all the creatures he had met in Ezzix, the Chorus was still perhaps the most confusing.
Skip carefully guided the bucket down the well, finally coming to rest on a ledge about two feet above the water line. The tunnel began here on the ledge, beneath a small stone arch just large enough for Skip to crawl through. The keystone of the tunnel archway was carved in the shape of a toy soldier, and the tunnel itself had a soft green glow, but no source of light. It had been a long time since he stopped wondering how that worked.
He reached back into the bucket, where Callie was still waiting. He stroked her underneath her chin, and her yellow eyes closed as they always did when she purred. Her sweet, cat-shaped face couldn’t exactly form into a smile, but somehow, he always got that impression from her anyway. “Almost home, girl,” he said. “Are you sure you want to come with me? It’s a lot nicer here, most of the time.”
As if in answer, Callie leapt out of the bucket and landed neatly on the edge of the tunnel, the picture as always of feline grace. Her orange fur looked green in the light of the tunnel, but her eyes were still yellow. They flashed as she looked back at him and meowed softly. The message was obvious: What are you waiting for?
She was right, of course. It was time to go.
THEN
The first time Skip made this climb, back before he was Skip, when he was just plain Scott, he’d made it alone. He was seven years old then – nearly six years ago – and incredibly bored.
“I don’t have nothin’ to do,” he said to his mother on that rainy April morning. She wouldn’t let him out of the house, none of his friends could come over, and schoolwork certainly wasn’t an option. He’d read all of the picture books on his shelves about a hundred times, and the chapter books he was slowly graduating to weren’t enough to keep his interest when he wanted to go out and find an adventure. He remembered distinctly the flash of lightning that illuminated his mother’s thin face. “Scott Francis Montgomery!” she shouted. Scott firmly believed at this point in his life that the only reason children were given middle names was so their mothers could express their displeasure more efficiently. “You have a shelf full of books, a cabinet full of video games and a chest full of toys! How can you possibly say there’s nothing to do?”
“I played with all of these,” he said, picking up a robot that was supposed to turn into a fire truck, although Scott never quite managed to get the arms to fold up behind the ladder assembly like they were supposed to.
“Since when do kids only play with toys once?” she asked. “It’s like you’ve forgotten how to use your imagination!” She frowned then, turning around and leaving her only son in his bedroom, alone with a chest full of toys exhausted of their potential. He looked at the chest – a heavy cedar thing with a bright red cushion on the lid so it could serve as a bench. The sides of the chest were hand-carved with a marching row of toy soldiers, the sort that Scott imagined his grandfather played with when he was a child – big beefeater hats, rifles with bayonets shouldered, wide teeth above and below a gaping mouth. The only place one still saw such toys, Scott supposed, was on Christmas decorations, but somehow it remained emblazoned as a symbol for “toys.” There were thirteen of the soldiers marching in a row around the left and right sides of the chest, and across the front. The chest – which actually had once belonged to Scott’s grandfather, had been at the foot of his bed for as long as he could remember. He had never even seen the backside.
Scott slumped against the toy chest, giving his best pout to the empty room. The only way he could pout more would be to grow an extra lip. After about 30 seconds of this, though, he realized that there would was no point without his mother in the room. He turned around and planted his chin on the cushion, arms folded in front of him, and nibbled on his lip. He stared at the wall for a while. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. He rolled over again and shoved his face into the cushion. He picked his head up and began counting the stripes on his wallpaper (142). Finally, out of utter desperation and a lack of anything else to do, he lifted the lid of the toy chest and looked inside.
He’d played with these toys a thousand times each; he knew them all intimately. But maybe if he dug deeply enough he could find something with a little energy left in it. He sifted through the toy robots and action heroes, all of whom had fought innumerable battles against the forces of evil (represented by the toy robots and action villains, piled on the other side of the toy chest). His laser swords weren’t any fun without someone to dual with. The same went for the games stacked neatly at the bottom, all of which were marked “for two or more players” in bright white letters that made him resent his mother a little for not understanding his dilemma. He still had his stuffed calico kitten and other dolls, but he hadn’t touched them in a long time, as he was A) too old for them and B) a boy. A year later, he would resolve to put them aside to some day share with his baby sister. On this rainy day, though, his sister wasn’t in his mind, wasn’t even in existence. For now, he just scooped the stuffed animals out and tossed them on the floor next to the pile of robots and heroes. He took out the games last, hoping that perhaps at the bottom of the pile he would find a jigsaw puzzle he hadn’t already assembled so many times he could do it with his eyes closed. He didn’t.
He put the games on the floor and slumped back against the toy chest, lid still open. He put his feet up on the stack of boxes and tilted his head back, forgetting that the cushion wasn’t there as usual. Instead, his head hung over the edge of the chest.
“Bo-ring, bo-ring, bo-RING!” he shouted, kicking out. He shoved himself up onto his feet and sat on the edge of the open chest. He kicked again, knocking aside the character that had been his favorite superhero three movies ago, shoving away the stuffed panda bear his grandmother had given him last Christmas, completely misunderstanding that boys his age didn’t play with dolls anymore, pushing off from the board game he’d begged his parents for the month before his birthday, which he’d played with once and dismissed as too confusing, boxing it up for good. He kicked one more time.
He lost his balance.
He noticed the strange green glow as he fell back into the toy chest, and so he was thinking about that instead of wondering why, when he should have hit the bottom of the chest, he actually just kept falling.
He’d actually fallen for about 20 seconds before he realized he should have stopped, and by then he’d already been falling for so long that it seemed rather silly to start screaming now. The hole in the bottom of his toy chest didn’t go straight down, but in fact seemed to be at a rather steep slant, and soon he wasn’t falling so much as rolling.
Why was there a hole in the bottom of his toy chest again?
He rolled until he bumped into a stone wall, bouncing off slightly, but not enough to really hurt himself. He bounced a few more times, finally coming to a stop. He was dizzy, having spun around about a dozen times during the slide. He lay there, eyes tightly closed, taking slow, deep breaths until the lumps in his stomach worked themselves out. When he managed to open his eyes without wanting to throw up, he peered back up through the shaft. The grade was steep, but not too steep to climb back up, once he’d caught his breath. He’d been digging through that toy chest for as long has he could remember – how could there be a hole there that he’d never seen before? Did his parents know about this? Was there an earthquake that opened up a hole inside the toy chest? Had his father, perhaps, dug this hole as a secret escape hatch while Scott was at school? And what could he need to escape from?
No. That’s the sort of explanation adults came up with. Children were free to just accept the facts: there was suddenly, and without reason, a hole in the bottom of his toy chest that had never been there before. Sometimes the obvious explanation was the best one. He shook his head back and forth, trying to clear out the screws that were knocked out of place. The slope back up to his bedroom was just there, to the right… he’d climb up as soon as…
If the slope was to the right, why was he feeling a draft coming in from the left?
He turned to see that, at a 90-degree angle from the slope he’d just rolled down from, lay a second tunnel. This one was more or less level, and seemed to stretch out far into the distance, the soft green light illuminating it until it ended in a black dot. How far did this tunnel go? He wasn’t quite sure where he was in relation to the surface, but he started to imagine crawling to the end of the tunnel only to pop out in Timmy Lawson’s basement, where his dad’s pool table was.
On the other hand, somehow this felt like the sort of thing he should tell his own father about. Strangers with candy, strange smells from the oven, anything that looked like smoke… Dad had given him a whole list of things to report as soon as they happened, and although “mysterious tunnels opening up under the toy chest” wasn’t on that list, it seemed to Scott as though it should be. He looked back at the slope towards his room, calculating in his head the angle of descent and trying to figure out just how far he’d fallen – how far he would have to climb.
“—elp–”
What was that?
Another draft came in through the tunnel (and although he wouldn’t remember it later, he noticed how strange it was that a wisp of air so far below ground carried the aroma of chocolate). He tilted his head, listening at the trail of air, trying to figure out if he actually heard anything or if he just imagined it. With the next draft of air (the smell of his mother’s strawberry shampoo), he heard a distinct voice, a girl’s voice, carried by the wind.
“Help me.”
He didn’t even spare a glance back at the shaft leading to his home before he began to crawl towards the woman.
The tunnel wasn’t really that long, not as long as it looked, and within a few minutes, the black dot at the end was growing bigger, more defined. It resolved into a hole, and as he grew closer, he could see a figure there. When he climbed out of the tunnel, onto a ledge about two feet above a pool of water, the girl was easy to see. She looked like a teenager, a few years older than his sister Sara, with a mane of long blonde hair that flowed straight down from her scalp, framing her upside-down face as she dangled from the rope. She was tangled up badly, and the bucket was lashed to her right foot, which was about three feet above her head.
When he crawled out of the tunnel, some of the dust in the air tickled his nose, and a sneeze announced his presence to the girl. She looked down at him, just noticing that she was no longer alone.
“Who are you?” she asked. “How did you get here?”
He laughed.
“You’re asking me?”
NOW
The tunnel was smaller than it used to be. Scott was twelve years old now, only a few days short of thirteen, and he had realized some time ago that his chances to use this tunnel would soon have ended even were it not for the Age Barrier that was about to seal him off from it permanently. His shoulders now brushed against the sides of it with almost each swing of his arms ahead of him, and the sharp turn that brought him from the well tunnel to the slope up to his bedroom had become almost unnavigable. Still, he managed to wiggle around the bend and pull himself up the slope. If there was any advantage to his size, it was that the slope wasn’t as long as it used to be.
He’d been gone about a week this time, but he knew his mother would be okay. About a year after his first trip to Ezzix, Zixi placed the enchantment on his family that made them sort of… ignore his frequent absences. But he had to put in an appearance every few days, or the enchantment would get strained and begin spreading to other people. When he was ten years old he spent a whole month in Ezzix and came home to find the entire town had forgotten not only him, but their own names, their families, and any and all sports statistics they’d memorized. Zixi needed to use the last of her age potion to make herself young enough to use the portal so she could come to Earth and reverse the spell. His birthday was on Sunday, in six days. Six days before he could never use the portal again. He was going to come home, put in a quick appearance, and then go back to Ezzix for one last adventure.
Just the thought of it made his chest feel heavy, broken and empty, and because he felt that way already, he didn’t immediately notice that something was wrong when he reached the top of the slope, pushed open the lid of the toy chest, and climbed out.
It was dark, but that wasn’t unusual. He often lost track of time in Ezzix, and on the few occasions he tried to keep track of it, he had learned that the passage of time while he was gone didn’t always exactly coincide with the way it flowed back home anyway. What he should have noticed, and didn’t, was that his digital clock was off. The red power light on his television that always glowed whether the set was on or off did not glow. The low hum of the air conditioner that had lulled him to sleep so many times was not present. All the thousand little sounds that run through a house with electricity were gone. Scott’s mind was still back in Ezzix, though, and he did not notice.
Scott had learned some time ago not to simply announce his presence after returning from a visit to Ezzix. His first instinct was to shout out the fact of his return to his parents and sisters – “I’m home! Did you miss me?” The first few times that happened, though, it was followed by an intense interrogation session about where he had been for such a long time. After Zixi placed the spell on them, though, it just resulted in confusion. When Scott told his family he was “home,” none of them realized he had ever been gone.
Instead, he quickly realized, it was better to simply march into the living room and integrate himself into whatever activity was transpiring as though he had been there all along. He’d once come in during a Monopoly game and simply placed the iron on Marvin Gardens, picked up the dice and rolled. Nobody questioned a word of it.
He gently pulled open the door to his bedroom. The hallway was dark, which struck him as unusual. His mother often kept the hallway light on overnight for the sake of Callie, who used that time to prowl. Sara had tried to explain to her once that cats could see perfectly well in the dark, but Mother said something about reading it in a magazine and went right on doing it.
The only light this evening was a dim blue glow of moonlight coming down the hall from the living room. For it to be that bright meant the curtains were open, and Mother usually closed them at night. For the light to be that color meant the streetlights outside were not on, and Scott finally realized what he would have known as soon as he emerged from the toy chest, had he been paying attention: he had returned home during a power outage. That was another way in which Ezzix was superior to Earth – the lines of magic never failed the way electricity did. Although he wondered what could have killed the power – it didn’t sound like there was a storm outside.
He emerged from the black hallway to the blue living room, expecting it to be empty. It was close – his father and sisters were absent, most likely in bed, but his mother was in his father’s rocking chair, back turned to Scott, facing out the big bay windows.
There was a soft mew from behind him and Scott looked back to see that Callie had not ventured forth from the hallway. Her yellow eyes floated in the darkness, and Scott could tell from the shape of them she was frightened. He’d seen that shape often enough.
“What’s wrong, girl?” he whispered. “It’s just a blackout. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Mew,” she repeated, and then for good measure, she reached one paw out of the darkness, batted the air, and hissed. For the first time, Scott felt a chill. Callie was such a sweet-tempered creature. She never hissed unless there was real danger, and experience had taught him to trust her judgment in such matters more than his own.
He looked back into the moonlight, pouring into the living room through the windows. His mother was terribly still.
“Mom?” he whispered at her. When she didn’t answer, he said it again, louder. “Mom?”
She stirred in the rocking chair, and a wave of relief rushed over him. He stepped out into the living room and walked up to her. “Mom, is everything okay?”
He reached out and touched her shoulder. It was cold – extremely cold. For a moment, he wondered if he had imagined her moving before, but now her head began to turn slowly towards her son. Behind him, he heard Callie hiss again.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
Scott watched his mother turning her head. He saw the left side of her face first. The eyes that had looked upon him so often with love and concern were empty now, and her face – usually immaculately clean – was streaked with dark smudges that, in the blue light, Scott took for dried ice cream or chocolate sauce. It didn’t make sense. His mother was the most meticulously hygienic person he knew. She never let a drip go a second without wiping it away, let alone allow one to dry on her skin.
Her face turned the rest of the way, and any illusion of it being covered in chocolate was shattered. A huge piece of her right cheek was missing, muscle and teeth revealed to the air, and her flesh was torn straight up to her eyeball, which hung hideously in its socket, rolling around in her skull, focusing on nothing.
Callie hissed again, but Scott didn’t hear her that time. Her kitten-hiss was by far drowned out by the screams that escaped Scott’s mouth just before his mother lunged, biting, at his throat.
* * *
And there you have it, folks. Two beginnings. Which one should I roll with?
Twenty-eight days and 62,731 words later, I’ve crossed the finish line, my friends. I’ve completed work on the first draft of Opening Night of the Dead, my 2009 National Novel Writing Month project, with three whole days to spare.
“So Blake,” you ask, “What do you do now?” You’d think I would take a break, wouldn’t you? Sure, maybe if you didn’t know me at all. I am putting aside Opening Night for a while, though. Every writer learns some things about his own technique and style after a while, and one of the things I know to be true is that I cannot begin editing a project as soon as I finish the first draft. It’s still too fresh, I’m still too in love with the little lines and the little beats that a more objective eye can tell need to be changed — or even removed — to make for a better story. I need at least a few months before I can even think of beginning the editing process.
Except for the two Green Lantern titles and the odd prologue, it’s taken four months for Blackest Night to touch upon any regular DC Universe titles. But look out, friends, because this week’s Doom Patrol #4 opens up the floodgates. To be honest, I haven’t sampled this version of the Doom Patrol before. I’ve read some of their previous incarnations, but I’ve never been a huge fan, and if it weren’t for the Blackest Night tie-in (and the Sinestro Corps ring that came with the book) I wouldn’t have picked this up. Still, I’m dedicated to reviewing the whole of Blackest Night here, and this counts.
My first eBook is available!
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