Chapter Six
The Walk
Benny and Baliwick had been walking for quite some time now, and although it was not quite as exciting as walking through Evertime, here was still a touch of magic about the place. There were houses along the way, a few of them, and they all looked like they had been recently splashed with blue paint. The job was only half-done, though. The paint was splotchy and hastily applied. Brown wood showed through in many places, and on most of the houses the doors and roofs had not been painted at all. It was like the yellow not-quite-brick road he was marching along. Someone had tried to make it the way it was in all of the wonderful books he had read, but had not quite succeeded. In his mind’s eye he saw the same houses with a perfect coat of blue paint on the sides, the roof, the windowsills, the doors, the fences. He saw little, smiling people in bright blue clothes dancing around them as they walked, barely taller than Benny himself. He imagined the blue slowly giving way to green, instead of being just an accent on vast green fields with enormous gray mountains in the distance.
“Where are all the people, Baliwick?” Benny asked. “I haven’t seen anyone since we got here.”
Baliwick’s voice grew very soft, as though he were ashamed of what he was saying, although the tone of his voice suggested no such thing. “No, Benny, I’m afraid you haven’t. The people who live here are all elsewhere at the moment. They are nomadic, you see.”
“Nomadic?” Benny asked.
“That means they do not live in any one place. They travel. They journey from country to country, usually following the work that the seasons bring. At this time of year, they leave their homes and go to more hospitable climates.”
“Oh,” Benny said, trying to return his attention to the walk ahead of him. He couldn’t quite do it, though. Something about what Baliwick was saying simply did not ring true.
“Baliwick,” he said, “if people journey looking for work, why did they leave this place? The orchards are still full. They stopped in the middle of their harvest.”
“Benny…”
“And the weather is wonderful here, too.”
“Benjamin,” Baliwick said. His voice was growing stern.
“And if they’re gone, who painted the road? Why didn’t they finish the houses? Why–”
“Benny!” Baliwick snapped. He placed one hand on Benny’s shoulder and squeezed, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to enforce that he was the one in charge. “Benny, I want you to look out at those mountains. Do you see them?”
Benny didn’t have much of a choice about seeing the mountains. Baliwick used his grasp on his shoulder to tilt Benny in that direction. The mountains were very far away, massive clusters of stone. Here and there he thought he saw sparks along the mountains, the mouths of caves perhaps, and in each of them was light, dancing reds and yellows, mingling into a third color just as the red and yellow finger paints he used in art class, mingling, creating—
Flash.
For a split-second there was light behind Benny’s eyes, a brilliant flash of orange, and when it was over he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. He felt safe smiling again.
“Benny?” Baliwick hissed.
“Yes.”
“What were you asking?”
“Nothing, Baliwick.”
Baliwick’s thin smile returned, like a fracture spreading across a mirror. “Wonderful, Benny,” he said. “I’m so very glad to hear that.”
* * *
The children followed the woman in the trenchcoat out of the diner. She was still smiling, a fact which served only to frustrate Linda. “Look, I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” she said. “but what do you know about us?”
“That you aren’t from around here,” the woman said. “And that you haven’t learned where to have conversations yet. Are you planning to go back to the woods?”
The children glanced at each other. It was Gene who finally shrugged and said, “We haven’t planned at all, really.”
The woman sighed. “Then I also know you need more help than I thought. Meet me down the road in an hour, I’ve got to take care of something.”
She turned and started to walk off in the direction of The Black Cauldron.
“Hey,” Kevin said, “who are you, anyway?”
“Call me Nancy,” the woman said. “If you’re lucky, that’s all you’ll need.”
She turned again, walked, and vanished into the other shop.
“Well that was helpful,” Kevin said.
“Are you sure we should trust that woman, Linda?” Gail asked. “We don’t know anything about her.”
“We know she bought us lunch.”
“That doesn’t mean she won’t just wind up leading us to her gingerbread house in the middle of the woods.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Kevin said. “I could use some dessert.”
“Let’s not panic,” Linda said. “If she wanted to do us any harm – soon, anyway – should could have taken us out to the woods and tricked us into her oven right now. All I really want is to find Benny and find the way home, and she’s the only person we know here.”
“But we don’t really know her at all,” Gail said.
“I know, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Let’s just listen to what she has to say. Between the four of us, I think we’re smart enough not to get tricked.
“Do you trust her, Linda?” Gene asked.
Linda thought. “Yes,” she said, surprising all of them, including herself. “I think I do. I’m not sure why – there’s just something familiar about her.” Kevin and Gail both looked at her strangely, but Gene was nodding. He seemed to understand.
“So we’ve got an hour,” Gene said. (“Not that we’ve got watches,” Kevin added.) “What do we do until then?”
“I wouldn’t mind getting a better look around this place,” Kevin said. “Let’s check out that bookstore. Maybe it can tell us a few things.”
All of them, even Gail agreed to this. They walked down the sidewalk to the bookstore. It looked normal enough inside. None of the books were walking around or moving or even changing color. Linda let out a relieved sigh. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s take a look around.”
Linda wandered over to the children’s books, the way she’d done hundreds of times with Benny in one bookstore or another. She started to glance around at some of the titles. A lot of them were familiar – The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. These were all books she’d read – or at least heard of – in her own world. But they were also all old. When she began looking at more recent books, things changed. There was an entire shelf of books by Isaac and Jan Asimov titled Norby the Mixed-Up Robomancer. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were still there, but instead of titles like The Smuggler’s Cave and the sort that she remembered, they were called things like The Wizard’s Cove or The Spectral Caper. Among the most recent bestsellers was a book called Ender’s Game by an Orson Scott Card, which by the cover seemed to be about a young boy in a spacesuit hurling fireballs at other children in spacesuits. She made a note of these, intending to look up the titles if (when! When, not if!) they got home.
Kevin was in the section of sports books, flipping through statistics. The games he was reading about seemed fundamentally the same, but as they progressed through time actual records seemed to change. Around 1950, for instance, baseball players began recording a statistic for “base captures,” of which the all-time record holder was a man named Walt Buchanan of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1963. In the football records, statistics became seriously inflated around 1962 or so. The all-time record holder for a field goal was Bill Baxter of the Green Bay Packers, nailing an 85-yard kick in 1969. Two years later, the numbers began to drop again and there was a footnote saying that, beginning in 1971, “Exomantic enhancements” were banned from the game.
Gail was looking at the magazines. All of her favorites were still there – Seventeen, Teen Cosmo, that sort of thing, but she didn’t recognize any of the people in them. The most recent Tiger Beat had a photo feature on a sandy-haired boy who was the star of some TV show called Eddie Mancer, E.X.C. She read a few paragraphs and gleaned the fact that, on the show, he played a “teenage magic specialist.”
“Magic?” she said. She shouldn’t have been quite that surprised, she supposed, but seeing the word printed there so clearly was quite a surprise.
Gene, as usual, was the one proving to be most helpful. He came up to Linda in the children’s books with a hefty volume he’d found in the history section called Spells Over the Pacific, about World War II.
“Linda, you’ve got to see this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I’ve been looking over this book – it says that World War II ended in 1939.”
“That’s not right,” she said. She wasn’t a history expert by any means, but she knew that date was a good five years too early.
“No, listen to this,” he said. “Six months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a group of ‘exomancers’ that had been operating a ‘secret conclave’ in London made themselves public for the first time and stopped the Japanese army dead in the Pacific. This says there were only about 50 of them, and they stopped the whole Japanese army! Then a group of American exomancers charged France and ended the war in Europe. By the end of the year peace accords were signed all over the world.” He closed the book. “That’s like the word we saw in the newspaper – what’s an exomancer?”
“I know one way to find out,” Linda said. She led Gene over to the reference books and picked up a copy of Webster’s Dictionary.
“Duh,” Gene said, laughing at himself.
Linda flipped open to the “e”s. “Here it is,” she said. “‘Exomancer: one who practices exomancy.’ Well that’s helpful… here. ‘Exomancy: magic from without’.”
“‘Magic from without’?” Gene repeated.
“That’s what it says,” she said. “Whatever’s going on in this world, it’s a lot different than anything back home.”
* * *
“You’re late,” Nancy said. She was standing on the sidewalk at the edge of town, near the woods that had brought the children to this strange world in the first place.
“Hmph. Like you’re never late,” Gail grunted.
“Not for a long time,” Nancy said. “Don’t you kids have watches?”
“We used to,” Gene said, looking down at his naked wrist.
“When you’re going through Evertime, have a watch,” she said. “It’s real easy to lose track of time out there.”
“Ever-who?” Linda said.
“You mean you don’t even know the name? How did you kids wind up here in the first place?”
“We were chasing somebody,” Linda said.
“I figured that. You’re looking for something.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody in Evertime is looking for something. But if you aren’t careful, something you don’t want can find you. Always wear a watch – that’s rule number one. The rest of the rules you’ll pick up along the way, if you last that long.”
“Boy, that sounds encouraging,” Gene said.
“Glad to hear it. Now, based on that money you were flashing around, I’m guessing you guys are either from Kane Forest or Siegel City.”
“Um… Kane Forest,” Linda said. “I’ve never even heard of Siegel City.”
“Evertime again. There are a lot of worlds out there – one per pool. A lot of them are a lot like your world, and a lot of them are a lot different. But there’s one place that’s unique to each universe, and that’s where the Evertime pool always is. Your world is the only one that has a Kane Forest. Or a Timberton Parish, for that matter.”
“How special for us,” Gail said.
“Where are you from?” Gene asked.
“Boston,” Nancy said, smiling. “But I got here through Siegel City. Come on. We can walk and talk at the same time.”
She turned and started off into the forest. The kids looked at each other, then started after her – Linda first, then Kevin, then Gene and Gail.
“So again,” Nancy said, “How did you guys get here?”
“Why should we tell you?” Gail said.
“Because it’ll help me figure out what to do with you guys.”
Linda glanced back at Gail to indicate she should keep quiet, then explained how they had chased the man in the black coat through Kane Forest, losing him and Benny both in the pool. Nancy stopped her there before the story moved on to their own plunge into Evertime.
“A guy in a black coat?” she said. “Tall? Thin build? Long, black hair, looks like he wrung out a snake over his head and greased it down with the oil?”
“Yeah, I guess that sounds like him,” Linda said.
“Baliwick,” Nancy said. “That ain’t good.”
Linda was surprised to hear the woman use that word her mother always told her not to use, but she was more surprised that their quarry suddenly had a name. “Who’s Baliwick?” she asked.
“The boogeyman, the Headless Horseman and the Gunk all rolled into one.”
“The Gunk?” Kevin asked.
“Sorry. I forget these cultural references aren’t the same in every world. He’s a nasty guy, and like everyone else in Evertime, he’s looking for something. If he’s taken your brother, then Benny either knows something Baliwick wants to know or Baliwick thinks he does.”
“Must be the second one,” Linda said. “Benny doesn’t know anything he didn’t read in a book.”
“You got something against books?” Nancy asked.
“Not exactly. It’s just that Benny spends more time with them than he does in real life.”
Nancy shrugged. “Real life is overrated. It got you here, didn’t it? So after you saw Baliwick go into the pool, how did you get there?”
“Linda and I stopped at the edge,” Gene said. “Then those two knocked us all in.”
“It’s a good thing they did. If you’d have gone in separately things would have been a lot worse. When you go into Evertime, time stops flowing. If any of you guys had watches, you would have noticed the hands don’t move while you’re there. Remember that, any time you’re going into Evertime, make sure everyone in your group is in contact – holding hands or tied together or something.”
“Oh goody,” Kevin said. “Touchy-feely stuff. I can’t wait until we get to do some more of that.”
“Seriously?” Gail asked.
“No.”
“Anyway, we wandered around the pools and finally we wound up here.”
“You just came in blind, Linda? You didn’t know where you were going or what we were doing?”
“We didn’t feel like we had much of a choice.”
“Well, you lucked out, finding me. I don’t know Evertime as well as some people I’ve met, but I can get you back to your world.”
“You can?” Gail said.
“No!” Linda shouted. “We can’t go back yet! We’ve got to find Benny!”
“Linda, I promise, I’ll do anything I can to find your brother and bring him back, but I can’t let you go wandering around Evertime by yourselves. I told you that you were lucky to find me – believe me, you have no idea how lucky. There are a lot of good people out there, but there are an awful lot of nasty people, too. Baliwick doesn’t work alone.”
“He didn’t seem that scary.”
“That’s because he didn’t want you. And bad people aren’t the only dangers, either. Remember the trees you saw in Evertime? Remember how strange some of them looked? If you hadn’t had the sense to jump in a pool with a tree that looked like it could grow on your own world you might have ended up some place with a methane atmosphere or 20,000 leagues underwater or someplace even worse. I’m not trying to scare you, Linda, I’m just telling you the truth. If you aren’t careful when you pick which Evertime pool you go into you could be dead in seconds. Dead. And you’re no good to Benny if that happens, are you?”
Linda could almost feel her friends’ resolve start to crumble around her, but she was standing her ground. “Okay, then, we know what trees to look for now. Thanks for the warning.”
“You’re pretty stubborn, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes you’ve got to be. My brother is out there somewhere. I’m not going home without him.”
“Hmm,” Nancy said, this time looking a lot harder at Linda. She wasn’t certain, but Linda thought for a moment she almost saw the trace wrinkles of a smile begin to form at the corners of Nancy’s mouth.
“It never fails,” Nancy said. “It’s always the spitfires.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Look here.” Nancy pushed past a bush and stepped out onto the edge of the Evertime pool that had delivered them all to the world of Lewiston and the color-changing money and the Nazi-Busting Exomancers in the first place. “Come on, kids. Join hands.”
“I told you, we’re not going home yet!” Linda shouted. She was nearly jumping with anger now, and her shoe landed in a blotchy patch of mud beneath a tree. She grumbled and tried to wipe the mud off on the bark.
“I heard you, kid,” Nancy said. “And I’m not asking you to anymore. If I dropped you off at home you’re just stubborn enough to jump back into the pool and start this whole mess over again. I don’t have time to babysit you there, either.”
“No?” Gail said. “What are you doing that’s so important?”
“I’m looking for something,” Nancy said. “Same as everybody else in Evertime.”
“Where are you taking us, then?” Gene said.
“To someone who can probably help you find Linda’s brother better than I can anyway. We’re going to pay a little visit to the Infinity Bar and Grille.”
Next: Chapter Seven-The Arrivals
If you somehow missed the deluge of TV ads, in-theater trailers, magazine covers, action figures, cereal box giveaways, and automatic transmissions stamped with the logo, in just a week there’s going to be a new Star Trek movie. This film is intended as a “reboot” of the franchise, featuring a young Kirk, Spock, Scott and company in their earliest days with Starfleet. Apparently, this new film is somehow going to be in-continuity with the classic series, even though much of what we’ve seen so far drastically contradicts a lot of the classic series. (This is the reason that some geeks, like my good buddy Chase, have pre-emptively declared a jihad against the film pretty much from the moment the first teaser trailer was released a year ago.)
A couple of years ago, I contributed the script for a short story to a graphic novel anthology entitled Futurius: Tales From the Plex. It was a nice little story I’m still proud of. Ryan and Radar was the story of a kid (the titular Ryan) who had a tendency to retreat into a superhero fantasy of his own making whenever he was faced with a problem. The “high concept” was that the artwork in the “real” world, Ryan’s world, would be loose and somewhat cartoon-like, while the “fantasy” world of the superhero Radar would be more like the “realistic” comics of the day. In this first story, in which Ryan has to deal with a loss that can be pretty devastating to a kid, the artwork was handled by a highly talented young artist named Matthew Weldon.
For a few years now, I’ve been waiting patiently every six months for the latest installment of Fantagraphics’ beautiful hardcover editions of The Complete Peanuts. The set, which will ultimately collect every comic strip Charles Schulz created in the 50-year lifespan of the comic strip, will eventually encompass 25 volumes and take 12 years to complete. Although I’ve gotten every book in the series faithfully, I’ve fallen a little behind in actually reading them, so with the time off last week, I sat down and read the 10th volume in the series, which came out last fall, and now I’m going through volume 11, which just hit stores.
Volume 11, 1971 to 1972, is full of major moments that I remember vividly. When I was a kid, my local library had a few books of Peanuts comic strips that I checked out and read over and over again. Clearly, the strips must have originated in these two years, because some of the comics and stories I remember most fondly are to be found in this volume: for example, Peppermint Patty going to “court” over the dress code that tells her she has to wear a skirt. The summer camp where we first met the bespectacled girl who would become Peppermint Patty’s sidekick, Marcie. Snoopy’s adventures as “Joe Cool” and his infatuation with Miss Helen Sweetstory, author of such obviously brilliant novels as The Six Bunny-Wunnies and Their Layover in Anderson, Indiana. To the writer in me, this last bit appeals greatly. It’s just hysterical stuff.
Evertime Realms 
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