The Stranger's Magic: The Labyrinths of Echo: Book Three (19 page)

“You can say that again,” I said, perplexed. “Are you . . . sure you know what you’re talking about? I mean, I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn’t. But I know very well what I’m talking about.”

“I thought Tekki really was a lot like me,” I said in a plaintive voice. “Now it turns out I don’t even know the real Tekki.”

“Well, you do know the real Tekki a little. The night she poisoned you by mistake, that was the real Lady Shekk. She was very, very scared then. But, as I understand it, that was when you
fell in love with her,” said Juffin. “Besides, when you look at her, she looks like you for real. This isn’t some cheap acting, boy. This is Magic. And what do you care about
what’s going on with her when you’re not around? If you think about it, it’s none of your business.”

“Right.”

“Here’s something to ponder. You can’t actually know the ‘real’ anybody. Including yourself. Why should Lady Shekk be a sad exception to this beautiful rule?”
said Juffin.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “But why are you telling me all this now?”

“Now is as good a time as any. Besides, it might not have occurred to you for the next thousand years.”

“Recently the ground seems to keep disappearing from under me,” I said. “When it returns, I realize that it’s all for the better. It’s like a miniature
death—the World becomes more beautiful afterward.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” said Juffin. “Now let’s get down to business. We just kicked out two beautiful ladies and are sitting here gossiping. As if
your bedroom is the only place in the World one can have a good long talk.”

“Maybe it is,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“You lie down in your favorite spot and fall asleep, the same way you do when you want to sneak into the Corridor between Worlds. I know it’s too early for you and you don’t
feel tired, but I’ll help you. Trust me on this. Now, when you find yourself in the Corridor, look for the Door to the World with sandy beaches that you and Shurf were talking about, and
enter it. I’ll be right behind you. You’re in luck here: I’m an experienced traveler. You won’t have to do anything to help me. You’d have a much harder time with a
novice. Now go lie down and try to sleep.”

I settled in the middle of the soft bedcover. The rack with the video gear was pressing against my back. This inconvenience felt as pacifying as the presence of Juffin himself. Now I really was
prepared for anything.

“This is the best way to treat insomnia,” said my boss, producing a huge cartoonish hammer out of thin air. “Don’t even think of dodging, or it won’t work. How do
you like my new trick, Max? Much more fun than the old ways.”

I was so taken aback that I didn’t know how to reply. Things like this didn’t happen to me very often. A bright pink hammer smashed down on my poor head.

I didn’t feel the hit, of course. Nothing much happened, in fact, except that I felt really sleepy. It didn’t resemble general anesthesia: my sleepiness felt very natural, as though
I hadn’t slept for days and had just now finally reached the bed. I even had the illusion that I could wave off this drowsiness if I wanted to—but I didn’t want to . . .

And then I fell asleep. What else could happen to a person when Sir Juffin Hully sang him a lullaby.

And again I was in that improbable place where there was nothing—nothing at all. Even I wasn’t there in a sense. I can’t explain what the Corridor between Worlds is. Experience
isn’t a boon here. Rather, the more often you end up in this bizarre place, the more you realize that you’ll never be able to explain it to those who haven’t been there. Our
ancestors, unfortunately, didn’t provide us with the necessary vocabulary when they created the languages we must resort to now, for lack of anything better.

I am still surprised that some part of me is fully capable of finding its bearings in this irrational space. Somehow I knew exactly which of the Worlds I had to allow to envelop me, which of the
shining dots I had to allow to grow until they obscured all the others so that I could again feel the bright sand crunching under my feet on the empty beaches of my childhood dreams.

I sat down on a warm, red-gray rock and looked around.

Something was amiss with this alien yet so familiar World. A few moments later, I knew what was wrong. There were other people here besides me—far away by the water, but not so far away
that I couldn’t see them. But I remembered this World as empty and abandoned. That was one of its signature qualities. For this is how we construct a picture of someone we love in our memory:
facial features, the voice, a mannerism, a way of responding to an event—all these things make the person predictable, recognizable, and, thus, beloved. When one of these features changes, it
unnerves us, for we lack the courage to say goodbye to our old friend and let a stranger into our lives.

Recently I had had to learn to accept such changes without giving way to tantrums. Things had just happened the way they had; I had no choice but to accept them. But the changes that had taken
place in the World of sandy beaches I used to love disgusted me right from the start. Even if I could have written that feeling off as a reflex, that emotion was soon replaced by a strong sense of
foreboding.

I got up from the warm rock, forgetting that I should probably wait for Juffin, and walked to the sea. To the sea, where there were people who shouldn’t have been there at all. They just
couldn’t be there, period.

A small motley crowd was walking toward me: tattered old gypsy women in colorful skirts and headscarves that glittered with golden threads. One of them carried a scruffy baby in her arms.
Another kid, a bit older, was grabbing onto the skirt of a different woman. They began to nag and whimper. Their voices, as piercing as the shrieks of a seagull, were plaintive and brazen. Of
course they demanded money, using their dirty babies as an argument. One of the women offered a range of esoteric services by way of bait and lost no time in urging me to “cross her palm with
silver.”

“I can see your destiny, pretty boy! You’ll live a long life. You’ll be rich—if you don’t die today, that is.”

The woman sidled up to me at the speed of a race car. How can she run so fast in the sand? I thought. Then I reminded myself that anything was possible in this World.

And then I lost my mind.

I still can’t explain why a bunch of grungy gypsy women made me so furious. Moderate run-of-the-mill irritation would have been an appropriate response to being surrounded by a school of
brazen, slatternly beggars. Yet a wave of insane, uncontrollable rage engulfed me and began dragging me away with it.

To my surprise, I liked my rage. I liked letting it take me wherever it wished. I liked riding the crests of its waves. I was ecstatic. Quite physically ecstatic. Each square inch of my body
quivered in joy, anticipating a tempest, and the air around me also quivered in the same sweet way, as though the air was an extension of myself. I could no longer sense where my body ended and the
surrounding environment began. I had never felt better, however insane that might sound.

The gypsy ladies did not seem to sense any misfortune in the offing. They didn’t change their course. They kept coming toward me, mumbling something about my destiny and their starving
children.

“So you’re a fortune-teller, honey?” I whispered to the loudest of them, surprised at the tender trembling of my own voice. “Too bad you couldn’t foretell your own
death, sweetheart.”

I didn’t spit at them, even though my poison would likely have killed them all instantaneously. At that moment, it seemed that I would derive too little pleasure from such a primitive
procedure. With the utmost delight, as though stretching my body after a good night’s sleep until the joints cracked, I stretched my arms toward her. My forearms were already covered in long
dark spikes. I somehow knew that each spike was as poisonous as my spit, but piercing through someone’s body with the spikes was infinitely more enjoyable than spitting. I had never felt
anything like it in my whole life!

When the spikes pierced her, the woman fell dead on the sand and turned into a heap of dirty, lice-ridden rags. This was no metaphor: her body had indeed disappeared. Only the colorful, tattered
fabric was left lying there. The woman—the human—had never existed. I should have guessed sooner. There were no people here, only a series of mirages—each one more disgusting than
the next.

The raucous friends of my first victim hesitated, but I didn’t wait for them to reach me: I ran after them. The left side of my mouth was smiling a voluptuous smile, but the right side
remained senseless and immobile, like after a shot of Novocain. Thank goodness no one offered me a mirror. I doubt that Sir Max from Echo would have liked the spectacle.

Moments later, everything was over: an unattractive heap of assorted colorful rags lay on the sand, and I moved onward. I walked to where the dark silhouettes of other apparitions that
desecrated my beautiful once-empty World could be seen against the background of silvery-white water. Frankly speaking, at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to forgive real people for
such trespassing. I was determined to kill anyone who happened to get in my way, no matter what their damn bodies were made of.

The strangest sensation was the ringing quiver of space around my arms, delightful and tormenting at the same time. The horrendous spikes were gone, but I had no doubt they would appear again as
soon as I neared the next victim.

I knew in advance what I would see by the water. Yet when I came close enough to make out the details, I gasped: this was too much! On the bright sand of my beach was all I had once
hated—with a helpless, inexplicable but tormenting hatred—about the seaside. Ugly, fat women in bright bathing suits, eating food from plastic bags melting in the heat of the sun, their
thin-legged, big-bellied husbands sipping warm beer from burning-hot bottles. Raspberry-pink sunburned girls in bikinis, with disgusting pieces of paper stuck to their peeling noses, and their
bow-legged companions in skin-tight swimming trunks. Drunk teenagers, obese men in boxer shorts, loud old hags . . .

I remembered one trip to the beach with my parents. I was around five—a horrible age when you have just begun to realize your absurd but absolute dependence on the will of grown-ups, but
you have as yet no strategy for a guerrilla war against them. Nothing particularly memorable had happened to me that day, but when I got home, I snuck into a closet and cried there in the dark, my
face buried in the folds of an old coat that smelled of mothballs. “I don’t want to grow up! Take me away from here!” I said again and again, addressing no one, fearing that being
among those horrible, ugly creatures would turn me into one of them. That I would grow a beer belly, my face would turn purple, and then . . . then I would die, obviously. What else was there to
do? Loiso Pondoxo couldn’t even begin to imagine the black magic of my home world.

“Oh, what an excellent idea,” I whispered. “I don’t know who decided to pollute my wonderful World with this human garbage, but letting me kill them all at once was a
brilliant plan!”

Then I picked up the familiar sweet mixture of beach smells—perspiration, sunblock, fortified wine, boiled eggs—and lost my human form. Not metaphorically but literally. The creature
running around the beach like a hurricane could not have been human. Its (my?) arms turned into something unspeakable and started ripping the pink and chocolate flesh all around into shreds. It was
sublime.

“This is my world, get it?” I yelled. “Everything here will be the way I want it to be! And I don’t want you here! Get out of here, you bastards! Go to hell, to your
resorts, to Golden Sands, to the Florida Keys, to Palm Beach! Just get out!”

Sometimes they died a regular organic death. Sometimes, however, I noticed that the meat of the flesh turned black and shrank like burned paper. I didn’t care.

I regained my senses when it was all over. I found myself sitting on the wet sand. Kind, lazy waves were licking my boots. They had already turned my footwear into a mess that was painful to
look at. I felt peaceful and empty inside. The preceding events seemed like a vague but sweet dream. I felt quite emotionless about it.