This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.
“What have you got there this time Michael? You know I always liked your second name better,” said Gregor as he shuffled around the room.
“What about my third?”
“It lacks something dear. It lacks… I don’t know… spunk!”
“What’s wrong with Christopher?”
Simon was gawking around the room. It looked like a combination of tech-boy Christmas and James Bond’s nightmare in here. Gadgets were piled to the ceiling in all kinds of little bins and various safes and other storage containers.
Simon looked up and noticed that Xip was using his tongue and little suckers on the ends of his fingers to climb the walls.
“Well, let’s see what we have here Mr. Christopher,” said Gregor. “You’ll be needing something to get through the barrier with then, or whatever it’s called.”
“I suppose so.”
“Yes, well Xip!”
Xip, stood on the wall, straight out like anyone who normally stood upon them, and looked down at Gregor not just with an attentive ear, but with little tendrils that were extending out of his slimy head.
“What do we have for dimensional travel then?”
Xip put up a finger, licked his eyeballs, then jumped down to a shelf covered in soft burlap bags. He wheedled his way in behind one of them, and pushed it back, using his entire body until it was on the way down to the ground with a whistle.
Gregor caught the bag without even looking at it and opened it up. “Yes, this might do.” He pulled out headphones, two sets of them, ones that totally cover your ears.
“You know, dimensional travel is largely a matter of vibration, these should get you through the portal nicely. You just put them on and turn them on, and the rock music they play is enough to keep you on the right frequency to get you through the gate.”
Simon put them on and phased out for just a moment. He pulled them from his head and fell over zapping back, clutching a workstation nearby.
“Oh man,” he said and dropped the headphones.
“I don’t think so Gregor,” said Michael. “What we need is something to tether to this world with. We might not make it out alive using those.”
“Dangerous you say?” Gregor said it with a lisp. “Well, maybe not. Xip!”
Xip saluted Gregor. He was standing sideways on the wall about ten feet up in the stacks.
“Let’s have the dimensional bullwhip then!”
Xip nodded and made a flying leap to the other side of the shelves from where he was, and caught it with his tongue, pulling himself up to a shelf filled with children’s metal lunch boxes of all kinds and styles. He opened an Indiana Jones lunch box, shook his head, and moved on to a Star Wars lunch box, and his eyes bugged out for just a second, then closed the box again.
Gregor chuckled.
“What was that?” Michael adjusted his hat. “What did he find?”
“It’s where I’ve been stashing the chocolate.”
Gregor laughed to himself again.
Xip rummaged through the lunch boxes, eventually coming up with an A-Team lunchbox, a big van on the side. He opened it up, and pulled out two bullwhips, and dropped them down to Gregor.
“Here they are,” said Gregor. Multidimensional bullwhips. He cracked them both at the same time like he was some kind of action hero, which he wasn’t.
“Here.” He held them out to Michael.
“How do they work?” Michael and Simon took the bullwhips.
“Careful not to crack yourself on the chin now. These are designed to attach to something, anchoring them in the real, or at least our world, while you tie them to your waist and go through the portal. They are designed to vibrate at both frequencies at the same time, keeping you anchored. Handy!”
Michael nodded in disbelief, but with interest.
“Aren’t they too short?” asked Simon.
“I was going to ask that,” said Michael.
“No actually,” said Gregor. “They are designed to stretch without much problem. They will always trail away from you, in a semi-transparent state, pointing right for the portal.”
“So we’ll have to work fast.”
“Yes, these will be your silver cord friends,” said Gregor. “If someone severs it, it’s all over, you’ll be stuck for good. At least that’s the way I think it works. There are always other ways to get through.”
“Like what?”
“Like the portal that’s already there!” Gregor smacked Simon on the head, but lightly. Was Gregor wearing blue plastic gloves earlier? Simon couldn’t remember.
“Michael cracked the whip.” There was a slight hum in the air. “I like these.” He set his down on the table.
“What about some standards for Simon here?” asked Michael.
“Is he to be your new partner then?”
“At least for a while.”
Simon stood there.
He looked at them.
“You think I’m good enough to be your partner?”
“Look, you’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. It’s pretty quick, but I need some help here and there. There’s always room for some help. Besides, I think my zombie head guys like you anyway. Is there a problem?”
“No, it’s just that… Well, yesterday I was a Janitor, and now all of this…” Simon looked around himself.
“I know. Think about it. I could use you.”
“Okay then.”
Simon held his breath for a moment and exhaled, he was on board.
Michael turned to Gregor. “Clothes.”
“Clothes?”
“Michael, now, what is this?” Gregor looked between them.
“He’s a shapeshifter.”
Gregor took another look at Simon.
“Okay, so what’s the other form then?” Held his finger and thumb up to his chin, thinking.
“Now?”
Michael said “Yeah, go ahead and show him. This is good.”
Simon said, “Okay then, here goes.”
He closed his eyes, and his clothes mostly ripped here and there anyway, tore completely off. He was standing there, in his troll form, gray-green skin, and slick black hair, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“He’s still getting used to being able to change.”
“Is this an effect of the portal?”
“I think so, but I think he may be stuck with it. I’ve seen him do this between pulses now.”
“I see.” Simon turned to Gregor. His voice was calm and deep. “What do you think?”
“Well, you definitely have trouble with clothes. I think I have what you need though. Xip!”
Xip jumped down on top of Simon’s head.
Simon looked up, and Xip walked forward to stand right on his face so that he wouldn’t fall off like he’d done this a million times before. He jumped off and stood on the table with the dimensional bullwhips.
Gregor sat down in a small task chair before Xip. “What do you think? Anything that might help him?”
Xip stood up, excited.
“You have an idea?”
Xip nodded quickly.
Gregor leaned in his ear, and the little gecko guy whispered.
“Yes, Xip, I think that might very well do. Go get it.”
Xip saluted and shot up into the air like a rocket, bouncing off the walls and ricocheting off the shelves like he was in a giant pinball machine. When he hit the top, he popped open a cereal box that had been filled with packing peanuts and took from it a small black amulet, smooth polished stone, with a green light buried deep within it that gave it not so much a glow, but a quality that was pleasing to the eye. They could hear him down below, squealing with delight as he found it in the bottom of the cereal box. Getting down was trickier. He tried two or three methods, before just giving up and jumping. He hit a button on his belt and a tiny plastic parachute opened up, and he sailed on down with the amulet in his hands.
Xip handed it over to Gregor and gave a brief smile and a wave to them all.
“Thank you,” said Gregor. “I can’t think of anyone better to give this to than you. We’ll have to calibrate it first, but then after that, I consider it yours. So, you’ll have to throw off everything.”
That wasn’t difficult, as most of the clothing was already torn beyond belief.
Simon took the amulet.
“Okay, put it on.”
Simon nodded and put it on. It was cold, at first.
“Did it warm up?”
“Yeah.” Simon touched it.
“Okay, now take it off for a moment, and change back.”
Simon took it off, put it on the table and changed back.
“Okay, now put it back on and let it get used to this form of you.”
Simon did as he was told.
“Did it warm up again?”
“Yes. It’s actually pretty comfortable.”
“Good, now let’s get you set up. I don’t have much more than sweats, lab coats and sneakers here, but you are welcome to them. The amulet you have on now recognizes both of your states. If you are wearing or carrying anything with you when you change, it all gets stored in the amulet. You can dress now, then change to the Troll creature, and dress again. After that, it will always store the other set of clothes, so changing back and forth shouldn’t be a problem for you. If you are going to need something, like the bullwhip or something, then the easiest thing to do is just put it down before you change. The opposite is true for your other form. Change into the troll, then put on whatever you like, then when you change back to your normal form, whatever you had on in that form will now be in the amulet.”
“Thank you,” said Simon.
He dressed in a jumpsuit, sneakers and lab coat, and then transformed into the Troll, put on an oversized black sweatsuit, with a hoodie. He changed back and forth several times to watch in a nearby mirror. It worked perfectly.
“Thank you very much.” He turned and shook Gregor’s hand. “Where did this come from?”
“Like everything else in here, it’s what we call a gift from out-of-town, but this one used to belong to a Chinese Zen-Mookie master who could transform himself into the form of a great Tiger-man.”
“What happened to him?”
“Unfortunately he fell fighting with us during a particularly difficult invasion.”
“I never heard of an invasion like that before.”
“It’s only because he was very good at his job, he and Michael David Christopher here, the man with three first names.”
Michael nodded. “I can’t think of a better use for it. You should definitely have that. Old Mooke, he got good enough with that amulet that he could eventually pull the same stuff out of the pockets of the two different outfits with ease. I think he also figured out how to store multiple outfits in there for each of his forms. You ought to be able to figure out all that in time.”
“It’s an honor to wear it.”
Michael looked around. “Where’s Xip?”
Gregor looked around. He was unaccustomed to being without Xip very often.
“Xip?” He called out.
There was scrambling on the other side of a large shelf system.
They turned the corner and looked up. Xip was pulling the tarp off of a large automobile, that was parked on a shelf about thirty feet in the air.
The tarp fell to the ground, and while Michael could see the wheels, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was.
“Xip, what’cha got up there?” Michael took off his hat so he could see better.
Damn if it wasn’t.
Way up high, the engine revved, with Xip at the wheel, and the car lifted off the floor, and the wheels tucked away, then the car, for lack of a better word right now, glided off the shelf, and floated gently to the ground. It was a real space roadster. The combined efforts of himself, a good friend of his in High School, a friend named Harvis, who turned out to be from a planet some ways away, his father’s convertible Cadillac, and a shop class where the teacher was the one absent for the day, was this shining machine. Black, and beautiful. Michael’s father had only let him drive it once.
“Where the hell did you get this?”
It hovered on its own, keys or no keys about two feet from the ground. Michael brushed his hand across its smooth surface.
“Xip, where? How?”
Xip just smiled back.
Gregor smiled. “We were going to wait for your birthday, but I think you should have it now, what do you think?”
“How, I mean, my Father…”
“Oh, I know. We’re not sure how it got into the collection, but we knew when we saw it that it had to be yours again.”
“Gregor, thank you.”
Michael shook the old man’s hand and took the keys.
“Just remember to put the wheels down if you’re parking it in public right?”
“Right.”
Michael couldn’t believe it.
“I think we have our ride out of here.”
“What about Lenny and Harry,” asked Simon.
“Don’t worry about them. I’ll have another assignment for them momentarily. Hop in.”
Michael and Simon hopped in the old caddy, and Michael fired her up. The engine still sounded just as sweet as before.
He pulled up and headed for the ceiling, where a portal began to slowly open, and they popped out the top, exiting from what looked like the side of a small mountain, about a mile away from the original house they came in through. When Simon looked back at where they had come from, it looked like they had exited through a giant sculpture of a porcupine eating leaves off a tree. It was a virtually unknown monument in the giant stone carving world. There was a single lemonade stand and a bathroom, three parking lots, and that was it, the only car in the lot belonged to Zorzman, and he runs the lemonade stand, and uses the bathroom all day. He was a former agent, himself, and waved them off on their way, and went back to his copy of Catcher in the Rye.
Michael and Simon rode across the sky with the top down. It was sunset, and the air was cool but not too cool. They both put on sunglasses, which were in the glove compartment, barely touched since the last time Michael had this car out.
They left the Mesas behind and back out toward the eastern shore. The going was slower, not exactly like riding in a spaceship, the speeds for the space roadster weren’t much better than a regular car, a hundred miles an hour or so. That’s all you needed.
“Check the map there Simon.”
Simon opened the glove box and pulled out a map, noting the year. “Nineteen seventy-three?”
They laughed and threw the map behind them.
Lucky I installed one of these before I lost her the last time. Michael pushed a toggle switch, like the thumb button of an old car radio, and a piece of the dashboard flipped over revealing a small black and white television on it.
In just a moment, the television faded from static to an image of the road below them. A voice from the radio spoke.
“Michael, it’s so good to see you.”
“Thank you, Gretchen,” he said to the car. “Take us home.”
“Very well, happy to assist,” said the car.
Michael put his feet up on the dashboard and leaned his seat back. Simon also leaned back, and they let the car fly them back across the country to Atlanta.
As they were getting closer, they could see the purple mist up ahead where the lines had been drawn, and the beasts were within.
“Let’s hear a little news.”
Michael pulled the car down and parked it in the lot of a breakfast diner.
“Gretchen, can you get us some news?”
“Sure thing. Satellite news is so much easier to tune in on, here you go.”
The navigator on the little black and white came back and soon there was the face of a television announcer.
“This ought to be national news. Wonder how they are going to cover this one up.”
“You never know,” said Gretchen.
The announcer pointed to a map of the United States.
“Right now, the clouds seem to be covering Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama, and there are trace reports that the darkness has started to drift into Louisiana, but there are no substantiated reports of that so far. All we know is that it seems to be coming from an area near Atlanta. We’ve had no contact from them in all this time, save for patches of time that seem to be miraculously clear of all disturbance. There seems to be an ebb and flow to the smoky mist, and the damage that it’s causing, though as soon as it clears there’s no evidence of any disturbance at all, and all of our reporters that we’ve sent into the field haven’t yet returned or reported.”
“Well, one did there, Charlie.”
“That’s true, we did have one reporter, well one of the production assistants from the mobile crew did return, but his mind is empty.”
“He can’t remember anything he saw in there?”
“No, he can’t remember anything at all. The only reason we know about him is that he was found on the side of the street with nothing but a badge, and a microphone boom, and a sack lunch at three fifteen this morning, and he can’t remember his parents, the school he went to, his name, any of his passwords or the name of his dog.”
“Nothing’s gotten through to this guy?”
“Nothing that we can come up with.”
Michael licked his finger and put it into the air.
“It’s almost time.”
“For what?” asked Simon.
“We’re due for another pulse.”
“It’s all going to clear off?”
“Yep.”
Foom!
There was a large deep noise, a sucking, and a blowing at the same time that washed over them.
“There it is.”
“On the screen, the announcer looked up from his desk again.”
“We have word that the clouds are blowing away again, or at least being drawn into the epicenter somewhere near Atlanta, and we’re hoping to get a bead on that location now. We’ve got Satellite looking down near that area. Gill, turn on that camera and see what you can see there.”
The camera flipped, and all Michael could see on the screen were rolling clouds. As they began to blow away, a solitary mouth whipped up out of the clouds and landed on the camera’s face. The last thing they saw before all went black was a snarling mouth, full of jagged teeth, then all was quiet.
“Gill?”
The camera winked back to The announcer, in his shirt and tie.
“Well folks, we still don’t know anything, and that’s the news.”
Michael flipped off the screen.
Michael cranked the car, pulled up the wheels and sped off for Atlanta.
Soon they began to get into the mist.
“Get down low, I’m going to go in on the ground.” Simon stood up in his chair.
“What are you doing?”
“A little reconnaissance.” I’ll meet you there. He jumped forward to land on the Car’s hood and rode it like a surfboard.
Michael pulled closer to the ground, and before he knew it, Simon gave him a salute and jumped off the car.
“Simon!”
Simon landed on the ground, in the middle of the mist. He watched as Michael rode on ahead of him.
Simon was in his element now. The part of him that was from this world of strange creatures opened its senses and threw himself into it. He ran through the neighborhoods and jumped houses like they were stepping stones. He closed his eyes and allowed his other senses to take over. He was surprised at how keen they all were. His sight was good, but his hearing could almost see all by itself, and his sense of smell was phenomenal. He smelled a wet cat, hanging out under a bridge and understood the feeling of contempt for its surroundings and its longing for its master’s warm bedroom. Simon saw a future where the cat made it home alive. He also saw one where the cat became a six-foot monster with three mouths and fourteen eyes and a strong hankering for bad sushi.
He jumped forward and rolled into a clearing, which later turned out to be a parking lot, and found himself surrounded by the large shaggy creatures, and calmly reached out for one of them.
He took great tufts of hair into his hands belonging to one of them and pulled himself up onto the back of the beast and looked around at them. They were grazers. He could tell they were rooting around in the dirt and eating small underground things. Some of them were munching grass, and others were eating mushrooms and earthworms. He stood on the creature’s back and looked around, the mist seemed to be clearing somewhat.
Soon what was under his feet was made of metal.
He looked down and realized that he was standing on top of a minivan with his hands on his hips with a lopsided smile.
He slid off it and looked around him. He was standing in the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by cars that were all parked where the beasts were standing before, none of them in their original spaces, but kind of all over the place.
He walked through them and wondered for a moment, then began to bound off once more, clearing the tree lines in a single bound, and moving on through them towards the remains of the Sublight Group’s headquarters.
It was a longer slog than he’d thought it would be, but he really didn’t have any indication of how long a distance it was on foot anyway.
When he found the burger joint again, where Michael’s other car was parked, he was in time to see Michael pull up in his space roadster, right next to the other one, and get out.
Fred and Moxie were in the front window of the place still, and they hit the glass when they recognized Michael.
Moxie was first out the door, slamming Michael with a huge hug, and Fred was second, much more laid back, but you could tell he was happy to see Michael. “Well, if it isn’t the man with three first names,” he said.
“Good to see you both.”
Moxie, Fred, this is Simon.
Simon flipped quickly back to himself from his troll-like form.
“Hi,” said Simon.
“Simon, this is Fred and Moxie. They are useful people to know in this world.”
Michael took both of them around the neck and walked them back into the place.
“Jen!”
“Michael you dog, where you been keeping yourself?” Jen threw her towel into the cleaning water and gave Michael a big hug around the neck.
Walter turned. “Ah Michael, what’ll ya have there?”
“Just a burger, a couple for my friend Simon here.”
“Fries or chips?” said Walter, “I can never remember.”
“Chips, I think.”
Simon and Michael sat down at the bar, and Fred and Moxie sat down with them, but not before Moxie had added five or six songs to the jukebox.
“You have time right?” asked Walter.
“Oh yeah, we ought to have another pulse soon. But yeah, time.”
“Yeah, what is all that then with the monsters coming out to boogie?”
“It’s a long story, I think we have a portal down there on the other side of town. We’ll have to close it up, but we have to see what we’re up against first.”
“Yeah,” said Jen, “it turns all the cars in the lot into great wooly beasts, they wreak havoc in the asphalt.” She pinched Michael’s cheek and wiggled it.
“Who’s your friend here then?”
“This is Simon. He was caught in the blast when the portal exploded. He can shapeshift now.”
“Ah well, isn’t that nice,” she said. “Isn’t that the way it always is. If there’s a nuclear meltdown someplace there’s always a superhero that comes out of it, all powered up and ready to go. Are you Michael’s new partner yet?”
“Yeah actually. I think I am.”
Walter and Jen laughed with each other for a moment. “He’ll find out.”
“What do you mean?”
Michael stood up, “I’ll let them have their fun.” He smiled at them as he hit the restroom.
“All we’re saying is that Michael goes through his partners.”
“What, burn out? Is he just an asshole?”
“Nah, nothing like that, it’s just that his kind of life is a bit intense. Not everyone can keep up with the adventures he goes on. Sooner or later they take a back seat, and help him occasionally, like us. He is a riot though, and we love him to death, but he does keep the adventures wild.”
There was a.flush from the bathroom, soon Michael was back with them, and the burgers were served.
“Eat up, I think it’s about to get rough.”
Michael plowed through his, he was ready for the next challenge, even bouncing his foot a little, waiting to leave.
Simon worked through his burgers, sharing the occasional eye with Moxie.
Fred sat on the table and asked Michael how the old space roadster was doing. It had been a long time since he’d seen it.