Slide in All Directions

I probably shouldn't have given Charisse such a hard time about the hallucinations.

But you know hindsight, everything's always perfectly focused, like a picture that's been sharpened so many times it's all hard around the edges. How was I supposed to know what she'd go and do to prove to us all that what she was seeing was real?

See, Charisse is my friend Chet's kid sister. Their parents are friends with mine, they all met in post-grad and they moved to the same edge city before any of us were born. They lived about an hour away by transit. Chet's a real good sort, he and I used to swap stuff all the time, even though we were getting to the age where that sort of thing isn't really supposed to go on between boys and girls who are just friends. My mom kept asking nervously if I’d been to the clinic recently, and I was pretty sure she thought that Chet and I were interfacing more than our ring drives, if you know what I mean.

I hated to break it to her, but there wasn't a chance of that. Chet's a good sort, but he's not, you know, sexy. Not to me, at least.

Anyway. Charisse and her hallucinations. Charisse is about four years younger than Chet, which was supposed to make them be close enough in age to understand each other but far enough apart so they wouldn't compete, but it somehow didn't work. Mostly because Charisse is sort of a super-genius, in that way that ten-year-olds sometimes are. Her father was appalled, he didn't mean to have a kid at either end of the bell curve. I think her mom was secretly proud, but she hid it.

The thing about being a sort-of-genius is that it comes with what the school people call "mental instability". In other words, kids who are that smart are generally a little nuts. It's generally not a big deal, they can medicate most anything these days, but you just have to watch kids for the signs. It's not like it's hard; we get tested every so often, so our folks can see the results of the tests and make sure we're mostly mid-bell-curve-ish.

Which is why we figured that Charisse was just being hyperimaginative when she started telling us about the things she was seeing. She might be off the end of the curve one way, but her nuttiness had up until then been confined to the usual little-kid stuff. Chet and I were sitting in their media room playing yaz cards--I was winning for once, I'd figured out a strategy that Chet hadn't caught on to yet--and said, "There's a fairy in the garden."

Chet's dad was totally into organic gardening and had been since it was really cool, about twenty years ago. Old news by now, of course, but he claimed it kept his hands busy and his blood pressure low. Charisse liked to play in the garden, she took her trucks and her horses out there and made up stories for hours at a time. Anyway, she came to us and told us about the fairy, and we both just looked at her. "What?" Chet asked, finally.

"A fairy. Outside." She was giving her brother a very good are you stupid? face. Ten points to Charisse for that look. "Come and see."

"We're busy." The card holder pinged irritably and a yellow light came on, letting us know that Chet was dawdling. He slapped the pause button. "Why do you think there's a fairy in the garden?"

"Because I saw it, stupid. It's little and it has wings. It doesn't talk, though. And it's naked," she added offhandedly.

I folded my cards and put them down. "Is it a boy fairy or a girl fairy?" I asked.

"Not either. It looks like of like those old dolls Mom collects. Agnes, are you going to come with me and see?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's from Fairyland and it's come to take you away. Isn't that what all the stories say? Maybe you look tasty. Maybe it wants to kill you and eat you."

"Yeah," Chet joined in. "It's not a cannibal if what wants to eat you isn't human!"

There were tears starting in Charisse's eyes. "You guys don't believe me! Well, you're just stupid, then."

The teasing went on for a few minutes after that, as we started making fun of her imaginary fairy friend, telling her what horrible fate the fairy had in mind for us all. Finally, she stomped off, and we returned to our yaz game. I won, but it took only two three more games for Chet to figure out what I was doing and come up with a counter, and we were back to mostly ending in draws.

I was over at Chet's house two or three times a week, and every time I went Charisse wanted me to come see the fairy, who had evidently taken up residence in an avocado tree. "It's purple," she told me once. "Your favorite color is purple." I'd roll my eyes and go back to what I was doing.

Christmas came and with it was the school drama performance. Charisse was in one of the plays, written by a student a few years ago, called "The Star of Joy and Hope's Needing". It was this strange thing that was sort of like the Christmas pageants that you see in old movies sometimes, but without any of the weird mythic overtones. Charisse was one of the attendants to the Star of Joy, and she was wearing a shiny silver hoodie and silver pants, just like the fifteen other little kids on stage who were playing attendants. The school auditorium smelled like too many years of school lunches, and the chairs we were on were hard and cold, but Chet had pleaded for me to go along for moral support. So I was here.

Chet elbowed me as the senior playing Hope did her monologue where she calls out to the Star of Joy. He pointed a little bit at Charisse. "Why does she have a doll in her hood?" he whispered.

"I dunno." But as I looked closer, it seemed that the doll was purple, with black hair, and its eyes were way too large for its face, like an alien.

Then it moved.

It grabbed Charisse's hair and pulled. Without looking, she reached up into her hood and pulled something out. It looked like a carved stick, but she put it to her lips and began to blow.

Nobody could hear it at first. The sound started soft and sweet, and then grew louder and more shrill. It covered the voice of the girl playing Hope, and all of the attendants to the Star of Joy put their hands over their ears. Then everyone else in the auditorium did the same thing.

You probably know the rest of the story, and you've seen the pictures. How a rip opened in the fabric of the universe and things poured out, things terrible and beautiful and just plain old weird poured out. And kept pouring out.

Here's the secret:

You know how you've been feeling like you're being watched? Like there's something standing over your shoulder, maybe whispering into your ear, but when you turn around there's nothing there? You maybe told your doctor that you think you're going paranoid, and he gave you some meds for it, but the feeling stays?

You thought you were the only one?

You're not.

Because one of the things that came out of the rip in the universe looked right at me with its faceted honeybee eyes and then faded into nothingness. And ever since, it's been following me around. Every one of us has one. Every one of the ten billion of us has one.

Charisse was gone when the tear sealed, gone to nobody knows where. I haven't seen Chet since, his parents locked themselves and him up when they found out that Charisse wasn't coming back.

Like I said, I should have been nicer to Charisse.

My shadow's name isn't pronounceable. I just call it Eyes. It wants me to come with it to where it came from. Yesterday, it gave me a pipe like the one Charisse used to open a place between here and there.

The pipe's in my pocket, heavy as a gun.