The Reaches

[Near]

He returned the last-plucked volume to its spot and crossed the width of the library to pull something from a different quadrant, just in case the phenomenon was limited to one shelf, one side, one section. But no: new place, same view.

Whether because his assiduously maintained wine buffer was working to keep some distance between him and the weird, rough edges he was so close to brushing against; or because it was simply too strange to wrap his head around, he couldn’t maneuver the situation in his head so that it connected to anything. Not a past experience to which a comparison might be drawn (not even Jude’s previous performances, which had evoked urgent and unambiguous reactions), not a whodunnit theory, not an appropriate emotional response. He was stuck in a mode of neutral puzzlement, staring at another page of print all crossed-out, crossed-out, crossed-out, until Jude offered his opinion that it was bad.

This nudged him in the direction of agreeing. Yes, bad. Not good. Maybe. Why bad, though? This book he let tumble without ceremony from his hand into a nearby chair and dug into the morass that his hair had become with his fingers.

“Of what?”

[Jude]

This was a troublesome situation. There was a real chance that Jude's pursuers were on his trail. While their arrival was not imminent, Jude was questioning the viability of his layover at the Farr estate. Inebriation helped to prevent him from panicking, but there was the first shiver of panic, that nervous, yelping animal that currently lay dozing in the back of his mind. If the nightmares of the future grew any clearer, panic would be roused, free to wreak havoc as it bounded from one side of his brain to the other. No, no, not yet.

The other part of the troublesome situation was how, exactly, to get Near to understand it, and to understand it in such a way that he decided to help Jude, as opposed to the purely self-interested solution of throwing him out. Maybe that's what he should have gone with in the first place, and Jude could have been hitch hiking his way to Seattle.

Jude slumped lower into his chair. By now only his shoulders were touching the back of it, the majority of his torso along the seat, his long legs sprawling out across the floor. "Ohhh," Jude said, biting his lower lip, his tone darkly comedic. "I'm just a magician, what would I know?" His eyes drifted to one side, and he harrumphed a laugh under his breath. Hadn't Near seen any horror movies? He should know what happened next.

[Near]

The dog.

Lew, after a dealer Isa had known once, maybe still knew. Surely still knew. Namesake because they had the same jowls and droopy eyes, dealer and dog. He had toted her over to Near's place one night when it was raining, rain-drenched intrusions a running theme, just said he'd found her without getting into wheres and hows, and Near never asked. They were so skinny and forlorn, both of them, the boy and his dog. Near's apartment was a shoebox, but there was no ban on pets: ask the lady upstairs with her bug-eyed Pekingese. What could he do, say no, back out into the rain with you? Not when Isa's claims of having his own place at all were as doubtful as they were. Better to towel them off and keep both of them.

Isa loved the dog.

Now she was somewhere down the hall, howling. Hound-howl, loud and drawn-out and heavy with the melodramatic tragedy hunters might prefer as accompaniment when they were out chasing foxes, but that had become the source of some antagonism between Near and his neighbors. *Shut your fucking dog up*, except it wasn't his fucking dog, was it? He only fed it, walked it, paid for its rabies shots.

Jude was useless.

"Nothing, apparently," he leveled at what was most likely a rhetorical question. "I'm going to take the dog outside."

[Jude]

His eyes wobbled toward the door, toward the sound of the dog howling. Jude clasped his hands tightly in his lap, and felt their clamminess. He was drunk. He was tired. The dog was making unpleasant noise. Jude had never had any pets, not in the sense that he'd possessed them long enough to form an attachment, not in the sense that they'd been near him to live. He only heard animals cry shortly before they died. He had only been to a zoo one time, when he was ten (his version of it), and all the animals, in some fashion or another, had expressed a negative opinion of him. The elephants had been the worst.

With Near taking the dog out, Jude felt he had a moment to relax. Well, not relax. He felt like he could have a moment unsupervised, which gave him leeway to do things he wasn't supposed to do. First, he picked up the wine bottle and poured the dregs into his glass. Somehow he managed to tip it all into his mouth without spilling. Then, briefly invigorated, he dragged himself up, one hand on the chair for balance.

The room swam. His head felt warm, the insides of it mushy. His shadow, bifurcated by two opposing lamps, rotated around him 360 degrees, first one direction, then the other.






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The voice felt closer. He lurched toward the door, the sweat of his hands now leaping to the back of his neck, his armpits. Paranoid. He was drunkenly paranoid. He heard three more thumps in the library, or maybe that was the sound of his heart in his ears?

"Near?" His voice wandered from room to room ahead of his body, echoing in all the empty space. "Near? I... need to go to the store. We need to go to the store." Still he did not want to explain himself. How far could the nearest store be?

[Near]

The dog cut her howl-in-progress short as Near stepped into the hallway. In the wishful theater of his mind’s eye, she recognized him and wagged her tail, offered up a droopy-faced glance of pure canine appreciation. In reality, she looked annoyed at having been interrupted, and he found himself batting back acknowledgement of how the night had left him craving any indication of appreciation from anything in his general vicinity -- dog, kid, oil portraits on the wall -- just some scintilla of warmth to counteract the spreading chill: he had never belonged in The Reaches and he was in no way equipped to deal with whatever the hell the kid was doing.

“Come on,” he said anyway. Lew stared. “Come on.”

On the stairs, out of Jude’s line of sight, Near took the opportunity to fiddle with his phone again, dialed up: The Epistle of Jude, often shortened to Jude, is the penultimate book of the New Testament and the Bible as a whole and is traditionally attributed to Jude, the servant of Jesus and the brother of James the Just. Atheist or agnostic or damned or whatever he was, Near had, before the great undoing, doodled through enough religion-focused lectures to know that everything went to shit in the ultimate book, which was mostly likely not a literal prophecy but a metaphor for everything going to shit in the first century AD. Or maybe it was a metaphor for whatever was happening right now. Jude cometh before the shitstorm. Thanks for the warning, Pops.

He scanned the sitting room for a coat and found none, noted the out-of-commission gun still leaned against the couch where he had left it. Lew at the back door, stretching. Mill, who wrote a tedious defence of Utilitarian ethics, which sounded okay until you rode that wave out far enough and realized it was about to reach ground on an impossible shore where the world contained just one extremely happy person.

From somewhere, above, small, his name. What he claimed as his name. Had the kid said his name?

“What store?” Flustered. He didn’t know where to answer. Or where there was a store.

[Jude]

Jude would argue that he hadn't done anything yet. The Family would beg to differ: he ran. Jude had wisely not explained why he was running, so perhaps he could claim that he was experiencing a belated burst of teenage rebellion. He was bored. He was curious. He wanted to see the world on his own! How convincingly could he tell these lies, if push came to shove? He tried to rehearse the excuses in his head as he clutched the handrail, descending the staircase with great effort.

Now he really felt sick. The edges of nausea extended beyond his view, the borders of body-nausea and soul-nausea melting into one another. Yes, that's what it was, soul nausea, though he could not have elaborated further. It was like smelling something unbearable, but the smell was not a smell, and the organ that was turning over was not the stomach but the mind. There was another wave of happy relief at Near's answer: good, he was still nearby. Near-by. By the way, Near...

He followed the sound of Near's voice, talking loudly in its direction as he came closer. "Just the closest store. Whatever store that is. I'll bring my bag. I have money."

Near had equipment enough. He had a car and a driver's license. He didn't need to understand; he only needed to accept, and even then for a limited amount of time. They just needed to be not here right now.

[Near]

First, guilt. Cold and tidal. Even if some sophomoric little fragment of him had wanted to wreak anything worse than loosening the kid up, he had never hoped to make him into the blanched, miserable-looking thing that came lurching down the stairs. Shit. Time to move on to water.

After, when the chill pulled away (gravity: it was a couple of glasses of wine, not like he’d poured Everclear down his throat, for Chrissake), what remained was uneven terrain gnarled by Jude’s alarm, a larval thought that he should probably defer to despite there being no indication that anything had changed between now and then.

He squinted a series of glances toward the dog, the window -- raindrop streaks -- the rifle, the kid. Still too fuzzy in his own head to make any solid connections. “Um. Pretty sure I shouldn’t be behind the wheel right now. Don’t drink and drive, and you’ll stay alive, you know that one? Plus I don’t have a damn clue where there’s a store … Gas station a couple of miles out, I guess …”

[Jude]

Don't drink and drive, and you'll stay alive. Something in the sentence tripped the final wire, and Jude looked fully alarmed. He was standing fully upright, but there was a drunken sheen of sweat on his face and a light in his eyes. See, this was the problem with being drunk: it was harder to maintain the boundary between himself and t̷͎̀h̷̬̃̉e̶̟̥͊m̸̘͆͠. It was harder to maintain any of his psychic boundaries; he felt like a cracked vessel. He was trying to paddle a leaky canoe across a lake. Abandon ship.

Now completely convinced that lying to Near was the best of all bets, Jude resolved to do so with impunity. "Okay. You're right. That's probably a bad idea." He also looked at the rifle, his eyes lingering. No. He didn't know how to shoot a gun either. "Well," he announced, "I'm going to go for a walk. With my bag."

Plan: go to the room he'd been sleeping in, get bag, go for a walk. In the woods. Away from the house. Indefinitely. He probably had a few hours until they got here -- teleportation was not in the wheelhouse of the Family, thank god, and neither Jude nor Juliet had ever tried. What is something got misplaced, going between here and there? A finger? A toe? A head?

Plan: go back up the stairs, to room, to get bag. Oh, the stairs. Fuck the stairs. He returned to the foot of them, and stared upwards forlornly. These stairs had been fun once, when he was younger. Always something magical about stairs. The unknown, just above you, or just below you. Possibility. Wonder. The opportunity to fall and break your neck.

[Near]

The kid’s eyes bugged at the MADD slogan.

Lew, oblivious, scratched at the door with one paw, nails overgrown. Sharp. Her whine, a drifting alto, always brought to mind subtle threats. Jude looking at the gun, but it wasn’t loaded, remember, kid? Or else Near would be worrying about easy and foolproof methods of corpse disposal instead of whatever was happening now, some going on a walk with my bag that Helen Keller would have called bullshit on, Jesus.

“Jesus,” the word spilled out onto his tongue, past his lips. Jude didn’t even believe himself, stood there gawking up at the stairway like it was Mount Everest and he was waiting for his Sherpa to offer a piggyback ride.

“Fine. Fine.” Gentler the second time, more resolved. “Get your shit and come on. I’ll drive slow. Gotta find my keys though. Take care of the dog?”

[Jude]

It was hard for a person to be drunk when they had little experience navigating those choppy waters. Jude didn't have much practice at compensating for this lack of coordination, or his increased emotional lability. They were coming, they were coming, they are already on their way. What had he been thinking? I thought I had more time, he whimpered in the back of his brain. More time. Like it would have taken longer for them to notice he was gone. Like they would have tried a few other places first. Like they wouldn't activate his inter-dimensional microchip -- Jude the runaway prize poodle.

Up the stairs, up the stairs, into the guest bedroom, grateful he'd mostly packed his things and only had to stuff a few into his bag. He took a moment to sit on the bed and press his hands to his face, as if he could juice some of the panic and inebriation out. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. He couldn't tell Near. Near would do... something. Something in opposite direction of what needed to happen.

Back down the stairs, backpack on his shoulders, trying to get the dog. The dog who did not like him. Jude stretched out his arms and leaned slightly forward. "Here, doggie." He would have left the dog, but Near's car, Near's rules.