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Maligoth

Chapter Thirty-two

Wallace drew close enough to stick his head through the portal and look to either side. He could see or feel no difference between the two worlds, except that when he retreated and moved around the side of the portal, there was no bicycle lying on the ground.

He stepped through, fearing his hesitation would be construed as a refusal to accept the bait that was being offered and that the portal would vanish and its mystery would haunt him forever. He felt more like a pawn on a chessboard than a victim, a game piece that could be seduced and influenced, but one that was expected to think and decide its moves for itself.

He picked up the bike and inspected it carefully, ensuring by innumerable shades of faded paint and scratches that it was indeed his own bike, one that Duke had never damaged. He moved far enough away from the portal to ensure that he was alone in the meadow and that there was no collection of tents at the far end of the clearing in this world.

The whine of tires on pavement sounded from the nearby highway, far more traffic than had been born by barricaded county roads of recent memory. He mounted the bike and pedaled across the uneven ground to the woods. He followed deer trails into the trees and within a quarter mile coasted into the open. He rolled down an embankment toward a shallow ditch lining the major north-south highway leading in and out of the nearby twin cities and dropped the bike to observe the spectacle in amazement.

Cars, commercial trucks, semis, but no military vehicles anywhere. And on the horizon loomed the water tower had been torn down when Willington and Dale City had been leveled. But there it stood, just like always.

A thought stopped him dead in his tracks. Wallace remembered what Ghaedor had said about an infinite spectrum of worlds, and he head read enough of quantum theory to suspect that this was a world untouched by Maligoth, a course of human history that would continue untainted by the invasion of the world of his memory. Beyond that, he could not guess what was happening. Were there now two Wallace McFergusons here? Was Aunt Bernice still alive?  What would he say to her should he meet her face to face?

What if he rode into town and found Sasha waiting for him?

The possibilities creeped him out. He sat alongside his bike with his knees drawn to his chin and went through every possible contingency he could think of, and then mulled through them all until they made themselves at home in his imagination. Only then dared he continue.

He had to go see. He shoved the rest from his mind, every inner warning to be careful and not to trust the trick Maligoth was playing on him. Somehow, it had to be trick, a deception, a ploy to separated him from Sasha and Melanie Cass and remove him from the picture. With him out of the way, Ghaedor would be helpless and Maligoth would destroy the world, his world. Even if there were an infinite number of them, only one was his.

He pedaled furiously down the highway, and when the first houses in Willington appeared to view, he ran the bike ran off the road in shock and dumped himself on the ground. The tumble only served to anchor him more firmly in the immediate sensory environment. The nightmare from which he had emerged retreated in the harsh light and heat of the day.

Wallace inspected the bike for damage and continued pedaling his way into town. Panic faded into the background. He stopped for a traffic light, then headed home.

It felt wrong, forcing him to pull to the curb in growing alarm. Home lay in two different directions. A strange remembrance slowly surfaced. He had rented an apartment near Dale City in this world. Had he left Aunt Bernice alone? What about school? His trust fund was conditional, wasn’t it?

Along with his perplexity appeared memories to resolve it. Every question evoked more and more recognition of his surroundings. Sasha had slept late and he had gone for a ride in the countryside as he did quite often on weekend mornings. Home was no longer the dead-end street where he had lived with Aunt Bernice since the death of his parents, but he pedaled down the boulevard to confirm the unlikely memories of his life in this world.

Halfway down the dead-end street to Aunt Bernice's house, he slid to a stop. He remembered now. A lawnmower throbbed in the back yard. Brother Sebastian's car was parked in the drive-way.

"Oh, no."

He remembered the wedding. A sudden influx of fresh recollection pushed the nightmare of Maligoth's invasion further back into the recesses of his consciousness. The obscene memory of Aunt Bernice and Brother Sebastian in the basement of the house the night of the mushrooms in he forest revolted him. How could he think such sick thoughts? He hadn't lived with Aunt Bernice for months. Neither had he gone to college as he had planned. He had met Sasha in the grotto. In time, their friendship had grown.

They had moved in together in a cramped apartment three months ago. He was working in the hardware store for minimum wages. Sasha had taken a job as a waitress. School had been postponed another semester, and the trust fund remained just out of reach. There had never been any mushrooms growing in the forest reading eat me on their mottled pink caps.

"Wallace?"

Lanced with a bolt of lightning from the clear blue sky, Wallace jerked his head around. Sylvia Abdul-Carleton approached, car keys in hand. Her brow furrowed.

"Is something wrong. You look positively ashen?"

He gave her a twisted grin. "No nothing's wrong. I'm just riding around."

"Is Sasha okay?"

"Sasha's fine. She sleeps late."

"She most certainly does." Sylvia relaxed. "Are you two taking my advice, Wallace?"

"What?"

"Birth control. Breeding restraints, Wallace."

Wallace blushed furiously. "Yeah, we're taking care."

"Have you decided on a college yet?"

"We've got one picked out." He remembered that Sylvia didn't want to know where they were going. Sasha wanted her freedom, and Sylvia was determined to give it to her, to prevent her father from tracking her down and causing a problem.

"Hurry, hurry. It's going to take Sasha's father time to adjust to the notion that he doesn't own his daughter, Wallace. He had plans for his darling daughter, and they certainly didn't include you. Sasha thinks she has him twisted around her little finger, but this constitutes betrayal in my husband's eyes, and it's not a safe time for any of us."

"I understand."

She studied him and interpreted his bleak expression as prudent concern. "I don't want to be a cloud hanging over your happiness. Put my husband's face on it, not mine."

She glanced at the house next door. "Visiting?"

"Just passing by. I don't think I'll stop. How are they doing?"

"Wallace, they're the strangest people I have ever known, but I think they're happy in their own claustrophobic way. They've got this new thing going at the church. The world is coming to an end. We're all going to be devoured by monsters."

Wallace fought a sensation like worms trying to bore into his bones. "Yeah, that's plenty strange."

Laughing, Sylvia shook her head and climbed into her car. Wallace whipped the bike around before Brother Sebastian saw him. He watched Sylvia burn rubber onto the boulevard, and then slowed on his way past Margaret Sullivan's house, not daring to look when he caught sight of movement through the front window.

Wallace rode back down the boulevard toward Dale City. He had only one place left to go. Sasha would be up and waiting for him and probably irked that he had left her alone again. Sasha was the center of his life in both worlds, in both sets of memory. In this one, they were content and happy.

He swerved around the flashing lights of a patrol car that had stopped a speeder. An officer stood alongside the car. Wallace only glanced at him in passing, and then he lost control of his bike, careening out into traffic. A horn blared in his ear and a car roared by within inches of striking him.

Nick Waldenski looked around. Wallace stared into his cold and unfriendly face.

"You trying to get yourself killed, kid? You high on something?"

Wallace mumbled an apology and rode on with Nick watching to see if he pedaled a straight line. In this world, he and Nick had never met.

He stopped a block from home knowing Sasha was waiting for him, beautiful and vivacious, a hard-core reality that need never end. College wasn't the future they had chosen despite her mother's assumption, and despite the trust fund that would never be released without it. Murmuring in the depths of the night in his arms, she had told him of other plans just last night. It had been the reason he had gone riding so early in the morning, to give himself time to think.

"Wallace, I want a baby," she had whispered to him. "I want to stop the pills. Now. If it happens, we'll just move away. Nobody will ever know, mother and father will never know, not until we have someone who weighs about eight pounds to introduce to them."

A dream of dreams lay before him for the taking. It left a nightmare to die in the corner of his mind where nightmares dwelled. It couldn't have been real, the portals, the monsters, the death, and a world on the verge of horrifying destruction.

Two memories lingered. Melanie Cass and the blue-rimmed portal. The portal had been his only link to this world. Was it still a link to the nightmare? How much effort would it be to return to the meadow and check it out? If the portal was gone, this was his life forevermore and Melanie Cass was lost to him forever. What would she do without him? What would happen to that nightmare world without his and Ghaedor's intervention?

So he went back, just to see if he had a choice. He turned off the highway later in the afternoon, rode down through the ditch and wove paths through the trees to center of the meadow. The blue-rimmed portal awaited him, a divider between two worlds, one in which Sasha would be carrying his child, and the other harboring a nonhuman creature in her guise.

Off to one side, Ghaedor waited for him, crouched in the grass like a giant grasshopper. It had been Ghaedor after all, and not Maligoth. "Worlds without end," Ghaedor said, his voice like an echoing locust, "are part of the soul of one's being."

Wallace felt like bawling, but he left the bike where he had found it and abandoned the brighter of the two worlds. In that brighter world, Wallace was certain he would return to Sasha without memory of a world within which he had never existed. Approaching the group of military tents, Melanie came running out to meet him in a frenzied panic that subsided when she threw herself into his arms. Armed guards followed behind her. She stumbled to a halt in front of him, limp with relief and gesturing helplessly. She threw her hands up in a shrug of helplessness and brushed tears from her eyes. "Where did you go? We couldn't find you anywhere."

He embraced her. He had come back for her as much as for the Sasha that so desperately needed him. His life was here, the responsibility of the Wallace McFerguson who would never be able to shake its memory.

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