5212 words (20 minute read)

Chapter 3

I could have had Dora call me a cab, but I thought it would be faster to run out and hail one myself. Sprinting towards the main thoroughfare, I knew there was little or no impact I could have on Dorothy Gale’s life – whether she was faded or not. Yet I felt a burning desire to get to Oz, and quickly.

I had to prove to myself that Dr. Torquemada was full of hot air, and that Dorothy Gale’s fading was simply a bizarre hoax that had somehow found its way across realms. Rushing around the corner by Duke’s bar, I bounded into the street, blocking traffic. The car horns all blared, for once with good reason. I hopped between the vehicles, nearly getting hit by one car after another. Ahead was my target – a yellow Plymouth taxicab. I dashed into it, pushed the elderly passenger out blocks ahead of his destination, and shouted an apology disguised as a courtesy.

“Thanks aplenty.”

The elderly man waddled off, a smidge offended. At least he knew that I had been sincere in my thanks. Every character in my world, be they featured or atmospheric background, knew that when I was truly grateful, I always said “thanks aplenty.” When I didn’t mean it, I usually said “thank you” or any other variation. Every pulp detective has a catchphrase. Mine is perhaps a little lame, but it’s all I’ve got.

“Where to?” the driver said, entirely unperturbed.

There are certain benefits to being a lead character. Your world is often set up to serve you, at least with simple things like getting around.

“To the nearest twister,” I said dramatically.

The driver just looked at me, confused.

“Off world,” I explained, kicking myself for trying to sound urgent and cool – who the hell was I trying to impress?

The driver nodded, though I detected some poorly disguised apprehension. He swung down a side street, making sure we had some space ahead. Then, he floored the gas pedal. The Plymouth rumbled across the uneven pavement, quickly picking up speed. The white-rimmed tires splashed through puddles, sending sprays of water up into the air. The engine roared, the interior of the car rattled, and the driver said a small prayer, closing his eyes. We were doing forty, rapidly heading for the rear end of a parked gasoline truck.

“Please, please, please,” the driver mumbled.

“Hey, this your first time off world?”

Before he could answer, the taxi tore through the dimensional wall of my realm. The fuel truck we were about to hit folded onto itself, no longer a three-dimensional object, but appearing rather like a printed picture on a page. A flash of letters tapped against the windows like hail, and I could read quick little descriptions of the street, of the taxicab, and of me. I even saw my name spelled out. Then, we were outside of my book.

What had been my reality was now a world left behind. Looking out the rounded rear window, I saw the rift into my story rapidly vanishing in the distance.

We were driving through a tunnel. It looked almost identical to the Broadway tunnel in Downtown, Los Angeles. There were no lights, leaving the tunnel mostly dark. The gray concrete walls and the near-black pavement made it all the more bleak. There were tram tracks in the asphalt for the Red Car, yet only taxicabs traversed this path. This place was not inside my realm, and only portals – taxicabs – could venture through it. Unlike the Broadway tunnel from my world, this one was long. It stretched ahead for an eternity, with a faint light at the tunnel opening far, far in the distance.

I glanced out the side window. Unlike riding in a car back in my world, this seemed fake. The exterior of the cab looked like rear-projection from an old movie, unstable and wobbly. It was, of course, because the tunnel itself was an illusion.

We were actually inside the stem between my story and the Nexus – traveling through the great nothingness that surrounded stories.

The view of my little world grew ever more distant in the rear window. Normally, I’d only see the tunnel entrance behind me, but at that moment, the entire realm came into view. My story was mostly unread, so the illusion of traveling through a tunnel was occasionally broken. I could see flashes of what was really there, outside of the stem. The walls of the tunnel would suddenly blink out of existence, revealing this sad truth.

My world was an oasis in the nothingness, shaped like a planet, yet its size was only a fraction of the human Earth – it only really needed to house the Greater Los Angeles area, Bhutan, and Tangiers, after all. Looking at it, I saw that my world was only a half-dome, resting atop a foundation of scrambled letters. These letters blended into each other, forming a sea of words and sentences. Their buoyancy prevented my realm from sinking into the dark nothingness below. The formed words gave my home a cradle. Atop these words, my world was an island poking out from the nothingness. They carried my story like the titan Atlas carries the ancient Greek globe.

Another flash, and the tunnel walls were solid again.

“Are… are we there yet?” the driver asked.

“Not yet, pal.”

He didn’t dare open his eyes.

I made the journey off world almost every day. It didn’t scare me, though I could see how unnerving a world portal would be for a first time user.

Portals are funny things. They are different for each and every world. In my realm, the portals are cabs that travel through an elongated version of the Broadway tunnel. Why? I haven’t got the foggiest. If I had to guess, I’d say it was because in all three books about me, I often use taxis to get from one chapter to the next, and the Broadway tunnel was often part of that journey. Somehow the universe of fictional stories thus chose taxicabs as my off world transport.

The taxi flew down the tunnel. Luckily, it was a straight path, so the driver keeping his eyes closed for the trip wasn’t going to be an issue. Now and then, the walls would again flash away, and I’d catch quick glimpses of the nothingness beyond it. There were no stars, just other distant worlds. Some were bright with life force, while others were almost too dim to see.

In these flashes, I’d also see the actual shape of the stem – a string stretching through the emptiness. Each realm has them – tethers of energy connecting the story to the Nexus.

The wheels of the cab clacked across the uneven asphalt, thumping over dips and potholes. It wasn’t the smoothest ride. The cab driver still kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut. A more experienced dimensional traveler would be moving far faster through the stem. I considered yelling at him to speed up, but I grudgingly bit my tongue. I’d seen this coming the moment he turned down the side street back in LA. All that, including flooring the gas pedal, had been entirely unnecessary. Had he known what he was doing, the cab would have torn through the rift the instant I asked – no need for all the dramatics.

Unlike me, the driver – his city license telling me his name was Gus – didn’t seem to know how to use portals. Had I been the rude type, I might have insisted on driving, but I don’t treat junior characters with such disdain. It simply isn’t right.

I took a closer look at the man, catching his reflection in the rear mirror. He briefly opened his eyes, looked at the tunnel ahead, and then promptly closed them again.

Gus was one of my world’s atmosphere characters, somebody added into the background to give it scope. He wore a blue-gray cabbie uniform, much too tight around his stomach. Gus was in his late forties, with mildly unkempt gray hair poking out from beneath his yellow cab company cap. He had a round nose, a weak chin, chubby cheeks, and droopy eyebrows that made him always appear mildly confused. But his hazel eyes were deep, revealing both intelligence and warmth. No, Gus wasn’t stupid. He knew all about life force. He understood our lack of it meant we weren’t going to exist long. Going into the Nexus reminded him of our mutual mortality, and I felt bad for dragging him into my excursion, however much I needed to go.

I usually called up my regular cab driver, Charlie, when I wanted to travel beyond. He was somebody my author had actually created, debuting him in the second novel as part of my urban network of helpers and sidekicks. Having been written brave, Charlie handled this inter-world journey well. If the tunnel momentarily blinked out of existence, Charlie would simply smile and say “there she goes,” and then we’d go right back to whatever conversation we were having. Charlie also often traveled by himself, though usually to see the worlds of other taxi drivers; interesting company like Travis Bickle, Latka Gravas, or Benny the Cab.

Poor Gus mumbled something about wanting to get back home to the missus, and I wondered if he’d named himself. Many atmosphere characters, most of them not even mentioned in the book or film or game they came from, made up for the fact that they were background ambience by giving themselves tidbits of story and full lives. That was remarkable to me, as most major characters religiously avoided stepping outside the boundaries created for them by their authors. Gus, however, had chosen his own name, inventing a life for himself as a regular Joe, earning a living as a Los Angeles cabbie.

Gus. The name suited him. He looked like a Gus.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I was in a hurry. Couldn’t get my usual driver.”

“No problem, Richly… uh, I mean, no problem, mister.”

I stifled a laugh. No anonymous character in Dashiell Hammett’s worlds would make such a mistake.

The stem of energy, connecting my world to the Nexus, was nearly dry. Ahead, the light at the end of the tunnel grew brighter, the shine from the life force acting like a beacon. It was a welcome sight. All readers, all viewers, and all gamers in the human world – their energy came to us via the Nexus. It was the sun by which all stories lived, feeding us, and maintaining us. Approaching it made me feel like a man wandering the desert, finally seeing water on the horizon. Or perhaps, a better analogy would be this: I was like a moth to a flame. Yet, the glow ahead was not meant for me, and all I’d get for approaching it was heartache – the emotional equivalent of becoming a scorched, dried-out husk. The fresh life force was reserved exclusively for worlds being savored by human readers. It felt unfair, but since my story was an undiscovered one, there was nothing I could do about it, however much I wanted to.

The light was overwhelming to behold, even from a distance. Gus still kept his eyes shut. Terrible that it was, the glow of life force remained a wonder of the fictional world. If this was his first time, I didn’t want him to miss it, even if he was scared.

“Hey, Gus,” I said.

“Yes, Ri… yes, mister.”

“Please, call me Richly.”

“Will do. Thanks… Richly.”

“Hey, why don’t you open your eyes? You don’t want to miss this sight, trust me.”

Gus reluctantly opened his eyes, looking ahead. He trembled, ever so slightly, but he kept looking.

“Have you ever been to the Nexus?”

“Um, a couple of times. When, uh, somebody wants to go off world.”

That was obviously a lie. He was trying to appear cool and collected in front of me. I smiled at him. He didn’t need to pretend. Gus was okay in my book. I wouldn’t think any less of him for not traveling, and I certainly wasn’t going to call out his little fib.

“I guess you never get used to it, no matter how often you go, right?”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“You don’t like it much, do you?”

“Nope. I mean, I appreciate your business and all, but I’m more the homebody type.”

I nodded. Gus fidgeted nervously.

“The Nexus is quite something. You know what it is, right?”

He turned his head and looked back at me.

“Not really, I guess.”

“It’s the energy point from which all of written human imagination radiates, billions and billions of eyes upon our tales,” I said, channeling Carl Sagan as best I could. “If somebody reads about us, then that energy goes into the Nexus, which distributes it to the story that was read, or seen. Not bad, eh, Gus? What do you think of that?”

“Um… that’s neat, but the way you talk about it feels kinda expository.”

“Hah! Funny guy.”

I’d been right. Gus had a brain. The dialogue in my books was often expository, and I sometimes lapsed into explaining things. It was a bad habit. I chuckled, shaking my head, and soon Gus smiled as well. I was pleased to see him distracted. I’d better keep it up.

“You should go on your own sometime and see it, truly see it.”

“Uh, well… the missus always says we should travel more.”

He drummed his fingers across the wheel. We kept driving down the tunnel, ever so slowly. I wondered if Gus knew that the trip could be completed in a near instant, if only he pushed the pedal down all the way.

Apparently not. We kept moving down the tunnel at a snails pace.

I sighed, taking solace in that there likely was no real reason for me to hurry. Whether Dorothy Gale had faded or not, I wouldn’t be able to do much about it, no matter how much Torquemada paid. How fast I arrived at my destination was entirely up to Gus. At least, I could control the pace of the second half of my journey – from the Nexus to Oz.

Once inside the Nexus, I could, in fact, travel to any extant world. All I had to do was find the portal I was looking for and…wish for it. Sounds simple, but calling it that would be an insult against cosmic elegance. The Nexus recognizes each character ever written, and connects to every world there is. It’s like an all-knowing entity – not exactly alive itself, but the source of life – the sun of our galaxy of stories. Nothing can exist beyond its reach. When a portal arrives, traveling through it is an almost instantaneous process. Unless you have Gus the Cabbie for a driver, that is.

The Nexus beamed at us as we approached. The tunnel was no longer black, but a pale, almost washed-out white. There was another flash, and the walls blinked out of existence for just a second. Gus immediately closed his eyes. I, however, used the chance to look out into the vastness. Here, close to the center of our universe, I saw cones of life force extend from the surface of the Nexus, traveling out into all fictional worlds. The stems weren’t solid, but rather like condensed, illuminated paths of fog, floating out from the center. Traveling inside them gave an illusion of the world it was connected to. I wondered what it said about my world, that our stem’s illusion looked like an unlit, endless version of a Downtown LA tunnel.

There was another flash, and the tunnel walls came back up. Had my world had more life force, the illusion would have been permanent. Journeying through it wouldn’t have brought on bouts of cosmic horror, scaring the wits out of first time travelers.

Speaking of which, the cab slowed down. I’d stopped talking, giving Gus time to get scared again. I wished he would floor it. Charlie often got me where I wanted to go in a jiff, though sometimes we took it slow so we could chat, a chance for me to regale him with tales of various worlds I’d visited. And he reciprocated, telling me a cab-related ghost story or two, about how he’d get summoned to the Nexus for passage to my world, only to have nobody there – yet the door would open and close on its own, and he’d feel a presence in the cab, going to my world. We’d laugh and joke, both of us knowing full well nobody sane was going to visit our realm, at least not until this particular day.

“The Nexus really is a wonderful sight,” I said, coaxing Gus to speed up. “Once you’re inside it, you feel the power and energy of the collective worlds… you feel everything.”

Gus opened his eyes again and nodded, eager to please, yet I knew this was hard on him. The Nexus was a reminder of everything we lacked.

Ahead, the bright light of the tunnel exit bloomed like a supernova. I leaned forwards, looking out the front window. We were about to arrive.

 The front of the cab hit a translucent barrier that was at the end of the tunnel. It slid inside like a needle through jelly, depositing us in the Nexus. The cab settled on the vaguely transparent floor.

Gus quickly got out to open the door for me – he was a complete service kind of guy. I stepped out of the cab and took in the immensity of the Nexus. The place was an inverted sphere, a globe where gravity was reversed. The shining core was above us at the center, and everything else in existence was below us. I felt the power and radiance of the place flow through my body. It was like I was standing inside a grand cathedral, or perhaps a massive railway station, but the Nexus looked like neither.

Instead, it was almost otherworldly in appearance, an endless curved horizon, bright from the shine of the core above, and dark from the vastness of the emptiness below.

I could hear the echoes of travelers talking, and I could see them mill about, exiting and entering portals. They were ahead of me, spread out on the curved horizon. If I looked straight up, I could have seen the pinprick shapes of even more travelers, standing on the other side of the inverted globe. The Nexus was simple and elegant, but its peculiar topsy-turvy gravity would still have made M. C. Escher envious.

Gus cast a quick glance up. He immediately looked like he was suffering from vertigo. At the center of the globe, the core of the Nexus hung like a miniature star. It was impossibly bright, reflecting all the energy of human readers, all at once. Gus couldn’t stand the sight. He then made the mistake of looking down. Below us, through the glassy floor, we could see for eternity, down into the emptiness of our universe. It wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the thousands of life force-strong worlds far, far below. They gave a sense of the enormous scale of the fictional realm, and the drop was steeper than anything else in creation. Should the see-through floor give below our feet, we’d be falling forever with no way to return to the warmth of the Nexus. The ground felt solid enough, so there was no chance of that happening. I glanced back at Gus, trying to seem reassuring. It didn’t work.

“Don’t worry, Gus. I’m not going to ask you to wait.”

Gus exhaled, relieved. I didn’t need him to stick around. From inside the Nexus, finding a portal back was easy. Unlike when I was in another world – where I had to physically track down the portals to use them – here I could summon them with a wish, and the portal would come get me. I’d make sure to spare Gus the burden, hailing Charlie instead.

“That’ll be a buck fifty,” Gus said.

While I dug up the change, Gus summoned up some courage and braved another glance up at the wonder that was the Nexus. His eyes were round, overwhelmed by the colossal output of energy from human readers. The man appeared dwarfed, and I felt like a heel for bringing him.

“I need a drink,” Gus said.

“Go to Duke’s Bar. You know it?”

Gus nodded.

“Tell Duke that Richly Drawn sent you. That’ll get you one on the house.”

“Gee, thanks, mister.”

I paid the fare and waved him goodbye.

“Thanks aplenty, Gus.”

He hopped back into the cab, quick as a bunny. The car slid through the barrier, tumbling back down the stem to our homeworld. Below me I could see the tunnel. From my angle it looked like a deep shaft. Gus’s cab sped down it, and he was gone in a flash. Traveling to the comfort of his own reality lit a fire under him, and he was back home in a heartbeat.

I walked across the Nexus surface. First time I was here, I had also been afraid, even though I knew only portals could penetrate the barrier. Most characters didn’t stick around long enough to get scared. To them, the Nexus was simply a waypoint. Once they had seen it, they didn’t care to remain for long. Portals would appear through the membrane, and off they’d go. Immediately, they jumped to their destination, usually travelling for less than a second. In and out. Quick as lightning. Indeed, several of them flashed past me now, only a few stopping for a couple of brief blinks. I decided to wait and look. Once in a while, you could catch a glimpse of a famous character, like Eliza Doolittle, or Tony Stark, or King Arthur. Sometimes, you’d even see infamous characters like Fu Manchu, or Uncle Remus, or – cue the jeers – the fictional version of Hitler.

Not today. The few faces that stopped for a tick or two were entirely unknown to me. They were in the same boat I was – creatures and humanoid characters from works that were rarely seen by the public.

I realized I was putting off summoning the portal. Was I afraid of being made a fool of by Torquemada, falling for a practical joke? Or was I afraid he’d been telling the truth?

“Quit stalling, Richly,” I told myself.

I imagined the portal to Oz, and it appeared. The tornado twisted out from the bright stem connecting L. Frank Baum’s universe to the Nexus. It circled rapidly through space, coming straight for me. The tip of it penetrated the membrane. I quickly put my hand on my hat to keep it from flying off. The portal waited for me to enter. I stepped into it. The twister lifted me off the ground, pulling me up into the whirling cone. I tumbled about inside the tornado, spinning back and forth. Then it yanked me through the barrier. I fell away from the Nexus.

Around me, I could see all the things the tornado had picked up – cows, houses, debris, a mean lady on a bicycle…

The journey wasn’t unpleasant, unlike what I imagined a real tornado would be like. The illusion was also complete. There were no flashes of the vast emptiness beyond. Oz was too rich of a world, too sated by life force. The illusion couldn’t be conquered. 

Below, the Land of Oz approached rapidly. I felt like I was falling towards ground, pleased to make the journey quickly.

Suddenly, there was a flash. I could see beyond the illusion of the portal. I could see the space beyond it, beyond the stem.

I saw the realm of Oz, fully and completely.

It was a staggered world of two dimensions, layered on top of each other. The natural realm of Kansas and the American Midwest supported the bigger, upper dimension of Oz, spread out atop the clouds. Below both worlds, there was a tower of words, mixed with flickering images of celluloid film. Oz had a deep, endlessly strong foundation. It could never buckle and collapse into the sea of the void, for the scope of it was astounding, and the quality of the letters forming its pillars were pure and unyielding.

Yet, I’d never seen it like this before. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. Somehow, the illusion had broken, but how could it be?

I blinked back into the tornado, and I thought for a second I was imagining things. Then, it happened again. I got to see what was behind the curtain. The portal illusion flickered away, revealing the true nature of Oz. It was immense and gargantuan, bigger than I’d ever imagined.

Oz made my homeworld seem puny. Which of course, it was. The size of a world depends on the material on which it is based. Mine is small and built on a poor foundation of jumbled, messy letters. It also resembled a miniature planet – or at least, a fraction of one, as much as was needed by my stories. Places I visit, like Tangiers and Bhutan, are represented, but other locations, like Australia, Russia, and the South Pole are just mentioned as being “real” – but without any weight, extraneous characters, or reality to it.

It’s a simple rule – the bigger the created literary, gaming, or cinematic work, the bigger the fictional realm. Places like Westeros and Middle Earth, and, on a much bigger scale, the galaxies of Star Trek and Mass Effect are gigantic. That’s because they are built that way, by necessity of story. There is so much to explore in them.

It gets a lot easier with more intimate works, like worlds created to be limited to a few areas and a few characters. My Dinner with Andre is one of them. I went there once, but I kept interrupting their conversation, and had to excuse myself. My presence in that realm was almost too much. Sure, they mention things that exist in their world outside their dinner conversation, and those characters and places exist, but the realm itself was mostly focused on a single New York dining venue. There weren’t any good places to get lost in a story about two guys having a conversation over dinner.

Still, it shone brightly, because My Dinner with Andre is a well-known art-house film, often revisited by audiences. I envied it.

Traveling inside worlds is much harder. Once there, you are bound to the rules of the realm, and you can’t simply wish upon a star and find yourself in another place entirely – not unless your name is John Carter and you want to go to Mars. Some realms, like Star Trek, are much easier to explore, because of warp speed and transporter beams (which, by the way, also double as the Star Trek portal). Actually, due to some badly thought-out plot points in the film Star Trek into Darkness, where Khan somehow beams across the universe without the need for a starship, trekking through the Star Trek universe has become even easier. Suddenly, that one logic flaw made the universe so much smaller. I used the opportunity the moment it presented itself, and I’ve revisited Star Trek many, many times.

“Snap out of it,” I told myself, noticing that my pace had slowed to a crawl.

The flashes of the real Oz had rattled me, making me as slow Gus had been. There was another flash, and the portal illusion was back in full force. The tornado whipped around my body, as if nothing had happened.

I wasn’t supposed to see what I’d just seen.  Something was wrong with Oz. I had no time to lose.

The tornado deposited me somewhere on the Yellow Brick Road. I stumbled out of it, fell sideways, and landed in a heap of rotting apples.

“Yuck,” I said, brushing the pulp off my coat.

“Say, what’s the big idea?” a talking tree protested.

“Nothing, nothing, I just got apple sauce all over me.”

“Them are good apples.”

“Of course they are. You have splendiferous apples.”

I gave the cantankerous talking apple tree a polite nod and quickly walked away. From my first visit to Oz, I knew better than to antagonize the talking trees. They had good aim and were not above throwing bits and pieces of themselves at unlucky travelers.

“Now, where am I?”

I looked around, feet planted squarely at the center of the Yellow Brick Road. Around me, there were patches of talking trees. Open fields of grass swayed across gently rolling hills. Dense forests lay further ahead, and in the distance, the bright emerald towers stretched up into the Technicolor sky. I wondered why the place resembled the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, and not the other iterations of L. Frank Baum’s world. Sure, this version, with actress Judy Garland lending her Americana pigtails and beautiful voice to Dorothy Gale, was the best known, and perhaps even the most beloved. But there had been many other cinematic and game adaptations of the world, not to mention the fourteen-strong original series of books written by Baum himself. Literally hundreds of other stories by other authors followed, published and unpublished, professional and fan-fiction, yet Oz preferred – at least at that particular moment – to see itself in the splashiest Technicolor. Each hue brimmed with full, pure primary colors, enough to make Natalie Kalmus proud.

I looked back up again towards the Emerald City. It was as ever a sight to behold – a brilliant, beaming beacon on the horizon. Yet, I got the funny feeling it was trying hard to beam – harder than usual. Lowering my gaze to the road, I studied the yellow pavement. The color faded, growing dimmer by each step taken away from the Emerald City.

The brief failure of the portal hadn’t been a fluke. Something was wrong with Oz. I looked up. In the direction of Munchkinland, the colors were even more muted. The Technicolor washed away, and the horizon was grim, dark, and gray.

No, worse than that.

The world looked like it was bleeding, the life force seeping out of it.

Oz had stopped shining.

Next Chapter: A few different portals