Everworld #3

  Enter the Enchanted

  K.A. Applegate

  Chapter

  I

  I was far from home.

  As far from home as it is possible for a human being to get. Not a far place, a place apart, a place not touching reality, isolated.

  Forget the normal. Normal was gone. Normal belonged to the real world.

  There was magic here. Not magic like, “Ah, the moonlight was magic.” Magic as in cause and effect didn’t always cause or effect.

  The magic that negates al human knowledge, that invalidates ten thousand years of human learning.

  Usually gravity worked, sometimes not. No way for that to be, of course; gravity isn’t something you can turn on or off, if it were it wouldn’t be gravity. If gravity could come and go, wax and wane, then things could fly when they could not possibly fly.

  Like a dragon, maybe.

  Can’t possibly lift something as heavy and dense as a dragon, all that scaly skin, all that muscle, all that dense bone, not with wings, not with leathery wings like a pterodactyl. Wings that were not a tenth of what they had to be, not a hundredth of what was needed to raise this creature, this logic-killing monster into the air.

  An elephant with wings. Dumbo, but not cute.

  And fire. Could fire bum inside a living creature? Absurd.

  Ridiculous. Fire inside what, the belly? The intestines? The liver? Liquid flame spilling out of flesh, out of the monster’s mouth, and that was supposed to be real? That was happening?

  Fire needed air to burn; where was the air in the belly of the dragon? How could I understand anything when a creature as heavy as an elephant with liquid fire dribbling through its carnivore teeth was flying through the air?

  I stood, rooted, yes rooted, like my toes had grown down into the dirt looking for water and now I couldn’t move them because my feet were attached to the earth itself, or whatever passed for earth in this hideous, terrible place.

  Run? How could I run from the dragon who pressed the tall trees down with the wind from its impossible wings and flamed the dry bushes in the night?

  I could only stare. A miracle, that’s what it was.

  A dragon.

  “Damn it, April, run!” Jalil yelled.

  His face was wild, not like Jalil, eyes wide, mouth stretched into some indecipherable shape, half grin, half howl.

  Only Jalil cared. About me. And not all that much. David and Christopher were mesmerized, bewitched. More magic. Senna had gone to them, touched them, spoken to them, and they had lost themselves.

  They stood with pitiful swords drawn, defiant and foolish, waving their impotent weapons up at the killer from the sky.

  Jalil grabbed me, pulled me, dragged me. My feet moved, missed a step, tripped, up again, and now I ran. But not far. I had to stop, to see.

  “Go back to your master. Merlin! Tell him I am not his!” Senna screamed. Her voice was a tinny, faraway shout, a sound all but erased by the vastness of the noise, the howling wind, the bellows sigh of leather wings, the crackle of underbrush bursting into flame.

  The dragon inscribed slow, tight circles above the clearing, a living tornado, flying like a bird of prey, an eagle with green-and-yellow skin, with talons that could carry away a child, a man, a horse; what couldn’t it carry with gravity meaningless?

  Jalil and I huddled in the woods, unprotected by bowed trees and whipped grass and dirt flying in little cyclones. But the dragon didn’t care for us. It watched Senna.

  Have her! Take her! I cried silently. This is her nightmare. Not mine.

  Not mine, you monster.

  I pressed my hands over my ears. I saw Jalil’s mouth moving but did not hear his words.

  Lower the dragon circled, lower, talons wide, ready to tear or take.

  My hands slipped away from my ears. Reached for Jalil.

  Something solid to hold on to. Jalil, the prophet of reason.

  David thrust upward with his sword, just miss-tag the dragon’s belly. Now Christopher, thrust-tag, stabbing, missing, a pathetic ballet. They were five-year-olds playing with sticks.

  “Move aside, mortals,” the dragon said, a bass tumble that vibrated the ground. “I was not summoned for you. Only for the witch.”

  Jalil’s face, outlined, shadowed by the light of the dragon’s fire. He shook his head, disbelieving.

  Did it occur to you, at long last, Jalil, that all reason, all logic has been superseded?

  “It spoke!” Jalil cried.

  David and Christopher, two marionet es jerked up and down on their strings, stabbing, missing, fal ing, leaping up as though this were all a game, competing to see who could serve Senna’s will.

  Suddenly, the dragon dropped straight down. Senna leaped aside, plowed into Christopher, the two of them hit the dirt.

  The dragon’s wing, almost gentle, smothered David, pushing him down into the grass. The dragon’s head snapped, reaching for Senna, missed.

  Christopher was scrambling up from beneath her. The dragon snapped again, Senna twisted, bringing Christopher around as a shield.

  It was almost quiet now. Weird after the dragon’s wind. Almost silent but for David’s shouts of “Senna! Senna!”

  From somewhere a sound like the beating of hooves.

  The dragon had a stubby horn on the end of its muzzle. It thrust the horn between Christopher and Senna and pried a yelling, fighting Christopher away from her.

  Senna lay there, scared, helpless.

  A terrified whinny. A horse?

  “Hold!” a voice cried.

  Near! I turned. Jalil with me. Four men on tall horses. Four men in glistening armor, head to toe, hand to neck. Huge swords sheathed, lances laid across the armored necks of masked horses.

  “Do not interfere, my lords,” the dragon rumbled. “It is Merlin himself who has called me here.”

  One of the knights lifted the helmet from his head. Long black hair spilled down to his shoulders. Eyes that had to be blue looked over the scene, taking it all in.

  “I honor Merlin as a great wizard,” the knight said. “But you are a great liar, dragon. Even if you speak the truth, Merlin is not my master.

  You and I have our own matters of honor to address.”

  The dragon hesitated. Senna was helpless before him. David incapacitated. Christopher he tossed casual y aside to land against an elm tree, a crumpled action figure, joints all twisted.

  “This is not the time or the place,” the dragon said. “I am in the service of Merlin the Magnificent.”

  The knight spurred his horse forward a few feet and seemed to notice me for the first time. He seemed puzzled by Jalil and me.

  He walked his horse forward till he was just beside me. “I did not see you, my lady. Please forgive my failure to pay proper respects. I hope to atone for the oversight as soon as I have killed this evil dragon.”

  The dragon roared, but it was a sound of frustration more than a threat. “Another time, Galahad,” the dragon said.

  It flapped his wings, rose from the ground on its own private tornado, then swooped treacherously and suddenly toward the four knights.

  Galahad (Galahad? The Galahad?) ducked and the dragon swept by overhead. It was the snake tail that caught me on the back of my head and knocked me staggering into Galahad’s horse.

  A mailed fist reached down, grabbed a hasty handful of my shirt as the dragon flew off into the night.

  The world was spinning, swirling, darkening at the edges. My knees buckled but the knight held me up ef ortlessly.

  I saw straight black hair. Steel-gray eyes, not blue. A face … a face …

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m April.”

  Then the world went black. But not a fade-out. Only a quick cut to a very different scene.

  “April?”

  I blinked. Class. Drama class. Eyes all watching me, some bored, most expectant.

  “April?” the teacher said. “Do you need the line?”

  “The line?” I echoed weakly. “No. No.” I shook of the sudden transition. Unconscious in Everworld, back in the real world. Back in my real life, picking it up from, well, from myself.

  Class. A dramatic reading. Me and Jerry Bell. I was Ophelia.

  It was not my first sudden, shocking return to a life that played on without me in this other reality.

  Not my first transition. Just the first one I came close to regret ing.

  Chapter

  II

  My world had recently gone deeply weird. One minute life was life. Friends, family, school, church, the play I was rehearsing. The next minute it had become fear and violence, an anarchic lawlessness that extended down to the level of the fundamental physical laws.

  I’ve known magic in my life. The magic that comes as an unexpected bonus from real, true things. The applause of an audience is magic. A kiss can be magic. Or not. It was magic when I saw my cousin’s little baby girl for the first time.

  That’s the magic of the real world. That’s my magic.

  But I had grown up with Senna. We share a father. He had shared two women: my mother, and Senna’s. Senna came into our family at an early age; I was four and, as far as I ever could see, she was treated as an equal by my mom. Despite the fact that she was the child of my dad’s affair.

  They lied to me about it, of course. Told me that Senna had always been my sister, that she had simply arrived in a different way.

  Twisting my reality, trying to make me believe that what I knew was wrong. Anything rather than explain the truth.

  Later I understood. People being weak, people doing wrong, that’s part of life. And I tried to accept this new person, this strange lit le girl almost my age.

  But Senna didn’t want acceptance. She wanted nothing from me.

  She was complete and apart. And for her, somehow, though I never came to grips with it, never faced it, the world was different.

  From that time on I’d suspected that even in our world, even in the real world, there were degrees of reality. Not the total “throw Newton and Galileo out the window” magic of Everworld, but the tiny gaps in the structure of reality. Just peeks and glimpses of strangeness, all somehow caused by or coming from Senna.

  In our shared rooms, in our shared home growing up, Senna was different from me. Different from everyone I knew. We had become two factions, two political parties, two opposing worldviews, Senna and I. She was the party of Weird. Me? I wanted to be an actress. A dif erent weirdness, maybe, but one that came from a need to represent the truth.

  Or maybe that’s just what I told myself. Maybe, like so many wanna-be actors and already-am actors, I just wanted to escape a life I saw as boring.

  Boring in contrast to the compelling, exotic creature who lived in the room on the far side of our adjoining bathroom.

  As she grew and I grew we did not grow together, my half sister and me. And yet, on that damp, gray morning down by the lake, I was there, drawn, transported, pulled, compelled, maybe just curious, but I was there. Me and David and Jalil and Christopher.

  Summoned. Called. That’s how it felt. How else to explain that we were all there, all where we’d never have been otherwise, but for her?

  We could have just watched when Fenrir, Loki’s monstrous wolf son, broke the barrier between Everworld and the real world and dragged Senna away. We should have just watched. But we ran.

  Ran in the wrong direction, it now seems. We ran to her.

  It felt at the time like we were rescuing her, David in the lead, of course, yelling “Senna!” with his mind churning up the visions of heroism that make up so much of his difficult personality.

  We ran, toward a wolf the size of a bus, toward Senna, toward a universe that could not possibly exist, but for the fact that it did.

  We don’t exactly know what Everworld is. We know it is a universe constructed by the fugitive gods of ancient Earth. We know that recently alien immortals have found their way in. Interlopers in a private chat room. We know that one of these alien gods is Ka Anor, god of the Hetwan. We know Ka Anor scares the heck out of the established gods. Scares them like nothing ever has before.

  And we know that the four of us are there in til s lunatic asylum: me, David, Jalil, and Christopher. We know Senna is the reason we’re here. But that doesn’t explain anything, either.

  None of us knows. None of us understands.

  David doesn’t do “theories,” of course. That wouldn’t really work for him. He wants us al to see him as some kind of direct, straight forward man-of-action type. That’s his self-image. What he wills himself to be. But he wears his bruises and scars on the outside, out in plain view where anyone, at least any girl or woman, can see them.

  David thinks no one sees the insecurity, no one sees the uncertainty. If he just keeps talking tough and gritting his teeth and racing toward each new danger, wel al forget the failings we’ve seen; we’ll buy the image. We’ll forget how he broke down before Loki. Well somehow not see the shadows cast by earlier failings, failings that gnaw at his insides during every quiet moment. We’ll never ask whether his own fear is what makes him brave.

  It’s what makes him comical and fascinating and even a little wonderful, all at the same time.

  Christopher? Christopher keeps trying to convince himself that life is one big sitcom. Like he’d be able to make sense of it all if he could just go back and watch the entire I Love Lucy.

  The world is too complicated for Christopher. Not that he’s not intel igent, he is. But he needs the world to make sense, and he needs it to fit, to be predictable. He wants the big pendulum to swing in a narrow arc, not too far. And when it doesn’t, he takes the world and forces it into place, organizes it with humor and narrow-mindedness. He’ll chop off the ends of the arc.

  Too sad? Kill it with a joke. Is someone too near to touching his heart? Push the person away with a harsh cheap shot guaranteed to alienate.

  Now, Jalil does do “theory.” Jalil does little else.

  And of the four of us, he remains the most opaque to me. Also the most interesting.

  Jalil believes in nothing but a reality that can be demonstrated in a laboratory, written up in a paper, and then replicated in another lab. So he says, and I believe him. I have the respect for him that believers sometimes have for nonbelievers. He’s not lukewarm, not half in and half out, not just covering his ass, not pretending to a belief system he doesn’t live.

  Jalil looks out for himself, so he says, and that I don’t entirely believe. It’s him I look to instinctively for support.

  All of us are involved in some way with Senna. David as her most recent conquest. Christopher as the spurned lover. Me as her half sister. And Jalil? No one knows. No one but Jalil, and Senna.

  David loves Everworld, Christopher wants out, and Jalil talks about parallel universes, and hey, that’s as good an explanation as any, I guess. Not that it really explains very much.

  When Jalil talks about parallel universes I picture two soap bubbles floating through the air. One contains all we know to be real. The other contains an entirely separate set of laws and truths and realities.

  Fall asleep over there, in Everworld, lose consciousness, and suddenly we’re back in the realworld. That seems to be the key.

  Consciousness there keeps us there.

  But knowing that, or at least believing that, doesn’t tell me how I can avoid going back, how I can grab on and hold on to my own world.

  And I do want to hold on.

  Chapter

  III

  I finished reading the scene for the class. Not my best performance, I was a little distracted. A little distracted by the fact that I, or some version of me, my twin, had just been saved from a dragon by Galahad. Sir Galahad, I suppose I should say. Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Galahad.

  Yeah.

  And now I was here. Class, with the clock on the wal above the door, the good old time-only-moves-one-direction clock ticking away the minutes. I had been here al along, of course. Had been here and there.

  It was one of the paradoxes of this lunatic life. You knew when the two “yous” first rejoined in the real world because you’d get this sudden news flash, this CNN Breaking News: The other you is about to become a human sacrifice, or dragon food, or prey to some alien.

  The bell rang.

  This just in: April O’Brien is losing her mind.

  “You did great, really brought the character to life,” my friend Magdalena said as we filed out into the hal .

  I sighed. “Magda, you’re sweet, but if you’re ever going to make a career out of acting you’ll have to learn how to lie.”

  This was my life. This was me. Don’t let it affect you, April. Don’t let it take over your life. This is you, the real you. Who cares what that other April is doing or having done to her?

  That’s her. Not you.

  “Acting? Hey, I want to direct. But, just between us, honey, you do seem a little spacey. I know what it is, too. It’s the vegetarian thing. See, I’m sorry, I know it’s not my business, but sometimes I think you need to eat a little meat.” She batted her eyes suggestively. “Mario comes to mind. ‘Cause that’s all beef, baby.”

  I laughed. The laughter seemed fake. Her face, fake. The room, the hallway, the kids all crowding around, sauntering or rushing to their next class, fake.

  I was in the middle of two lives at once. I had all my memories of being here, and all my memories of being there. I remembered Mario asking me out last night. And I remembered Galahad grabbing my shirt just moments ago. Both real. Both interesting.

  Mario was another drama guy. And he was actually straight. And Magda was right, he was all dark, brooding eyes and smooth chest and full lips. Antonio Banderas as a senior.

  “He has bad teeth,” I said. We reached my locker and I stepped out of the river of moving bodies and grabbed the steel shore.

 

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