Page 3 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Panting, Alice turned and finished running for the trees, only stopping again once she was safely back on solid ground. “Thanks for the save, Mary. I’ll write to Aldo and see if he wants to bring the boys this way for a frog hunt this summer.” She grimaced at the thought of intentionally triggering a cull. Swamp hags were an important part of the ecosystem, but without any local predators, they would overrun their breeding grounds and start throwing the whole forest out of balance if they weren’t culled. Didn’t make killing them when they weren’t an active danger fun.

“See that you do that,” said Mary. “And pay attention when you’re wandering around out here! Honestly, you know better than this.”

“Guess I do,” said Alice, holstering her guns. “Still, you came to my rescue.”

“This time. What would you have done if the crossroads told me not to?”

Alice looked away.

Mary groaned. “You can’t count on me the way you used to, Alice, you know that! Now get home before that husband of yours starts trying to summon me so he can ask where you are.”

“I’m getting, I’m getting.”

“And, Alice?”

“Yeah?”

Mary hesitated, her face going through the complicated series of small expressions that meant she was fighting against her own rules to say something she thought was going to matter. Finally, in a rushed tone, she said, “Talk to him. I know it goes against everything you think is natural, but you need to talk to him. Nothing gets better if you don’t open your damn mouth. Okay?”

“Okay, Mary,” said Alice, blinking. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” said Alice.

“Good girl,” said Mary, and vanished, leaving Alice standing alone in the Galway Wood, near the edge of the swamp, the late afternoon light slanting through the leaves.

She turned, feeling out her location in the quality of the soil under her feet, and started in the direction that felt the most like home. She was quick, and nothing in the Galway that afternoon was hungry enough to get in her way. She made it home before the sun finished going down.

Thomas’s silhouette was a dark blur in the kitchen window. Smiling, Alice broke into a run, on her way back to him once more.

One

“Best thing about that girl is how much she takes after her daddy. Worst thing is how much she takes after me.”

—Frances Brown

A dimension that may or may not have a name, making bad choices, which is pretty much par for the course

Now, whatever that means

THE THING, WHATEVER IT was, had erupted from the ground in front of us in a writhing mass of tentacles, sort of like the world’s largest sea anemone. They could have all been part of the same massive, subterranean beast, or they could have been unique individuals working in concert to ruin my day. With most of the thing still buried, I had no way of knowing, and at the moment, I had better things to worry about, like the fact that it was trying to kill us.

The part of me raised to respect nature and appreciate the need of all living things to participate in the great and glorious web of life wanted to know more. Wanted to get right up to the edge of the hole and look down, figure out the body plan and likely behaviors of the thing, determine whether we were dealing with one or many—begin the scientific process at its most basic. The part of me that has been surviving in hostile dimensions for half a century said that part was being bog-stupid, and we should shoot the thing until it stopped moving.

If there was something important here for us to learn, we could learn it from the corpse. Lots of naturalists have worked exclusively from dead things. It’s a time-honored tradition, and you know what it gets us? A lot less dead naturalists, that’s what.

Most of our ragged band of refugees had been smart enough to scatter when the ground started heaving like a cat trying to hork up a particularly difficult hairball. A few of the former Murray guards and some of Thomas’s trained soldiers had formed a rough perimeter around the noncombatants, assorted polearms and other weapons lowered in a bristling wall of pointy pointy ouch ouch. I didn’t begrudge them the attempt at creating a defensible position. Just showed they had marginally more common sense than the rest of us.

“The rest of us,” in this case, was me, my husband, and my husband’s semi-adopted daughter who he’d acquired during the fifty years we spent living in different dimensions. And it says something about the tentacle geyser in front of me that that sentence was not the weirdest thing about my day.

Or maybe it says something about my life. It can be difficult to tell sometimes.

The tentacles varied in diameter from about the size of a hose to bigger around than my torso. They waved threateningly, seeming to follow the vibration of our footsteps as they slapped at the ground. This wasn’t as novel as it sounds. Lots of things that live underground use vibrations to hunt. They were dark pink, with an odd, leathery texture like an elephant’s trunk, and probably meant whatever we were dealing with was the local equivalent of a mammal.

“Always nice to know what’s about to eat you,” I muttered, unholstering my mother’s revolvers. One major downside of where the thing had emerged: if I chucked a grenade at it, a lot of people would get hurt, and I wasn’t willing to dismiss them as collateral damage. Not after spending six months shepherding them across dimensions in a vain attempt to get them to someplace they could call home.

Well, this dimension was out of the running, if it was going to go sprouting tentacle fountains all over the damn place.