Crap Kingdom (6 page)

Suddenly the king and Gark burst in. Or rather, the king entered normally and Gark burst in. It seemed like it was maybe the only way he was capable of entering a room.

“We’ve got it! We’ve got it,” Gark said. “We have reached,” he said, drawing himself up in an attempt to look important, “a
compromise.
”

“Yes,” the king said, “that is what you might call it, if a compromise was an agreement between two parties where one of the parties holds all the power but is merely making concessions to the other party so the other party will stop annoying him.”

“Here it is!” Gark said. “Here is our compromise plan for how you may remain here and be our Chosen One and fulfill the prophecy that foretold your coming.”

“Though it is my desire to see you fail spectacularly for reasons I explained to you in private,” the king said, “it is also my concern that any attempt at heroics on your part might inspire certain segments of the populace, and this would be a very bad thing, as heroics have been tried before in the service of the kingdom of Chhhhdddrrrdd, and they were a heartbreaking failure. In fact, it is what inspired my policy of reduced expectations, and I do not wish to see that work undone. That is why, if you are to be our Chosen One, you will do so in a limited capacity, in a preexisting role here in the kingdom. I am prepared to offer you the title of Executive Assistant to the Undersecretary in Charge of the Royal Rat-Snottery.”

“Rat-Snottery?”

“There are these big rats we get in the fields around Grrrhhetphtpp,” Pira chimed in, “but they like, have this condition where their noses get so filled up with snot they die before they’re big enough to eat.”

“Precisely,” said the king. “So it is the task of the Rat-Snottery to clear said snot from their noses and bottle it. It is quite versatile. Used for a variety of things.”

“It’s actually not so bad with the technology they have now,” Gark said. “You don’t even have to do it with your mouth anymore.”

7

“YOU SHOULD REALLY
check out the Rat-Snottery,” Gark said. “I’ll take you by there. Come on.”

And then they were out in the street, or whatever they called the endless tangle of dodgy spaces between countless blanket forts and lean-tos and half structures. Tom was speechless. His “destiny” was a job. His mom was already pestering him to get a job in the real world. And he’d been dreading it and avoiding it, but he might have embraced it and gotten a job at Kmart if he knew that waiting on the other side of a portal in a clothes Dumpster in the parking lot was a gateway to a world in which he was a hero. He didn’t think he’d feel the same way if he knew that, waiting on the other side, was just another job, especially a job as assistant to the guy in charge of rat-snot.

As they walked, he tried to distract himself by looking at the garbage around him. He stepped over a cereal box with a soccer player’s picture on it. He didn’t recognize the player or the brand of cereal.
Is this British garbage?
He looked up from the cereal box and he saw something magnificent, something that must have been garbage from a special effects studio.

Standing just outside of the nameless kingdom, its eyes staring straight into Tom’s when he looked up, was a replica of a fantastic creature. It was a sort of a dragon-dog, just a little bigger than any dog he’d ever seen. Its skin was a rich purple marbled with blue, and its dark green eyes were a thousand miles deep. He wondered what movie it had been in, or what art exhibit, or whether it had simply been in some lunatic sculptor’s basement for years, the guy going down every day to work on it just a little bit. It had been worth all that time, he thought.

Then it blinked.

It was alive. Tom ran toward it. He felt he had to. There was something in its big green eyes that said,
Get here as fast as possible.

He’d been trailing behind Gark, who was talking so fast trying to sell him on the Rat-Snottery that he didn’t notice his Chosen One slipping away. Tom covered the patch of dirt between him and the edge of town in seconds and ran out to the beast. It was so still except for the blinking. It didn’t have fur or feathers or scales, but skin like liquid glass holding in a churning sea of purple and blue. There was a storm system inside of it, with little rivulets of blue electricity that would become visible every so often, like if the veins on your arm were constantly shifting beneath your skin and were also made of lightning.

Magic,
Tom thought.

The beast flared its nostrils and reared up on its haunches, exposing a belly criss-crossed by the same blue streaks as the rest of its body, with one long yellow interior stripe running down its center. Standing on two legs, it was easily twice as tall as Tom. Tom was aware that he should probably be scared, but he couldn’t find fear anywhere inside of him. He just felt awed and calm. Then it started to fall forward, and its front paws landed on Tom’s shoulders, and the force would have driven him straight into the ground were it not for what seemed like some graceful weight distribution on the part of the beast. Its mouth was big enough to bite his head off, but he still couldn’t find any fear, any survival instinct. He was filled with a totally un-Tom-like certainty that everything was going to be okay. He looked into the twin translucent planets of the thing’s eyes and all of the sudden, he was somewhere else.

He was high above an unbroken layer of cloud that stretched on forever in every direction, and he was falling, or rather not falling, but gliding down, fast as anything, and he saw something small breaking the cloud layer the way a boat cuts the water. Through the V-shaped break in the clouds, Tom could see a crystal kingdom on a jagged mountaintop, a thing of insane precision and daring and beauty. The sun glinted off the cloud-parting spire that crowned the kingdom, and Tom was fully enveloped in the glare.

Then he was down there, circling a network of structures cut out of diamond, connected by sky tunnels, built into the side of a hellish and inhospitable mountain. He saw strong men in crystal armor filled with colored cloud, gorgeous girls in long dresses that were half vapor. They lived in homes that were like bubbles, their transparent walls filling with a rainbow of swirling gases when they needed some privacy. Smoke and flame of every color shot through the city’s heart. A void howled at the center of it all, and a huge orb of glass like a miniature gaseous planet hovered just outside of this void. He saw ten thousand crystal-clad soldiers marching in a bowl-shaped parade ground. As he descended toward the ten thousand soldiers, he realized these weren’t just images flashing before his eyes, he was a part of this: the soldiers began looking upward and hailing him. A hero’s welcome. A Chosen One’s welcome.

“Tom! Tom!” Could it be the men greeting him? No, it was a single voice, coming from very far away, struggling to be heard over the fierce wind that blew out of the void. The voice grew louder.

“TOM!”

It was Gark.

Tom remembered where he actually was just in time for something to hit him in his side, sending him rolling out of the creature’s grasp. Gark had tackled him, and they’d both fallen into a human heap. There was a roar that sounded like it came from six huge metal lungs, and Gark was knocked off of Tom by the beast. It stood over Tom on all fours, claiming him, and its internal lightning ricocheted up to its once-peaceful green eyes and set them on fire. The eyes met Tom’s and he was immediately in the fire and then breaking through it, and then he was back above the kingdom.

The cloud cover was draining away in every direction, and for the first time Tom could see that the mountainside kingdom of diamonds was surrounded by vast plains of permanent war, and he was everywhere at once, watching slave armies being driven against one another like opposing tides by diamond-armored men dictating their movements from the orb hovering over the battlefields. He saw the valley parade ground converted into an arena for gladiatorial combat, the stands full of bloodthirsty fans, and one combatant was a centaur-like thing driven mad by starvation, and the other combatant was Tom.

Then he was back in the nameless kingdom and it was on fire and all the citizens were being driven out, single file. Among them were the king and Pira and Gark. And then Tom saw Gark in real life, and he was relieved to see he had not been captured. Partially he was relieved because he sort of liked Gark, but also he was relieved because Gark had snatched him out from under the dragon-dog and was pulling him back toward the kingdom, which was not actually on fire.

The creature unleashed another metallic six-lunged roar.

Gark yelled, “
Slowwave truepants!
” Tom thought:
That’s a weird response.

They ran a few more steps, then Gark yelled, “
Close!
” He stopped running and let Tom go. Why was he stopping? He was just standing there, and the creature was running straight at them. Gark was definitely a goner. The dragon-dog leapt, but then crumpled in midair just inches from Gark’s face. It fell to the ground, like it had collided with a window. The mixture of gases beneath its skin roiled as the thing stared Gark down with pure hatred, and its internal lightning began to congeal in little pools of energy on its skin, gathering and meeting and growing until the thing barked and sent the concentrated electricity at Gark like a dragon’s fire-breath, but made of blue light. It was impressive, but it danced away harmlessly over the surface of the invisible barrier that had protected them. The monster turned and slunk away over the featureless surface of the land beyond the nameless kingdom. Gark turned to Tom.

“Whoa! Sorry about that.”

Tom just stared at him. Gark offered him a hand, and dusted him off once he was standing upright.

“So, now you’ve met an Elgg.”

“That’s an Elgg?” Tom was still trying to catch his breath.

“Yup. It’s an emissary of the Ghelm. They’re the people we share this world with. Or . . . I dunno if ‘share’ is the best way to say it. They’d enslave us and burn our whole village if it weren’t for the Wall. We can cross it going out, but nothing can come in. And if we cross it going out like you just did and we want to get back in we have to bring it down for a second and put it back up.”

“I thought you guys said you didn’t have magic.”

“We do! It’s just that our native magic’s something different entirely. You want to see an example?”

“Sure.” He waited for Gark to give an example. Gark just stood there.

“Ew, who farted?” Gark said.

Tom smelled it too. “Not me!” he said, which was the truth.

“Neither did I,” Gark said. “In fact, no one farted. But the spell makes you think someone did. That’s
our
magic.”

“Oh. Great.”

“The Ghelm send those things over here, hoping to catch one of our citizens outside the Wall. They’d take them back and torture them and try to find out how to bring it down. There’s a couple of words, and everyone knows them, but no one would ever tell. Ever.”

“Maybe what I’m supposed to do is like . . . defeat them?”

“Sure! Maybe you’ll work so hard in the Rat-Snottery we’ll accumulate tons of rat-snot and they’ll be really intimidated and surrender?”

Tom realized Gark was not being sarcastic.

“Speaking of which, they close soon! We’d better hurry so you can check out your office.”

“I’ll check it out next time.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s late at night in my world. I should probably be heading back.”

“Oh . . . okay,” Gark said. “Let’s go find my conveyance.”

There was a diaper hanging on a stick poking up out of the sea of old clothes. Gark told Tom that all he had to do was hold his breath and hold on to the stick and go ten or so feet down and before he knew it, that little part of the universe would swoosh around like a revolving door and deposit him back in his own world. The sun was on its way to setting and the water was cooling off. The oarsmen who had agreed to take Tom and Gark out to this spot lit a torch as Tom climbed into the water.

“So,” Gark said, “I’ll be back tomorrow and then we’ll get started?”

“Give me a few days, okay?” Tom said.

“I really think you should’ve taken a look at the Rat-Snottery,” Gark said. “They’re doing some great things these days with nostril wideners.”

“It’s just . . . I have to think about it,” Tom said.

“Think about what?” Gark said.

“All of this,” Tom said. “It’s a lot, is all. So, I’ll see you in a few days?”

“Uhm . . . okay,” Gark said. “Are you mad at me?”

“What?” Tom said. “No! No. I mean . . . the pretending-to-be-my-dad thing. That was . . . weird. If you could not do that again, that’d be good.”

“Yeah,” Gark said. “Yeah . . . that was dumb.”

“It’s okay,” Tom said. “Well . . . bye.”

“Bye,” Gark said, the way you said it when someone was leaving much sooner than you’d expected them to.

Tom grabbed the pole and went down hand-over-hand into the water. Despite the burning, he opened his eyes and watched the dark hulk of the bottom of the raft outlined in the dying daylight and the glow of the oarsmen’s torch as it rowed away from him. The boat had disappeared and his lungs were starting to burn as much as his eyes when the revolving door turned and spat him and a whole lot of soapy water back into the donation box.

The box’s chute screeched as he pushed it open. He climbed out. It was still nighttime. He took his phone out to check the time but he remembered his phone was very likely broken from having been underwater. The screen was dark. He held down the power button. The screen flashed bright white before going dark again, this time for good.

Tom started walking home, a boy in saturated clothing walking alone through a darkened subdivision. He didn’t love the idea of almost drowning twice every time he wanted to make a trip to his nameless kingdom. At least he’d know better than to bring electronics next time.

He reached the apartment building. Tired as he was, he took the stairs two at a time so he could be home that much sooner. From the open balcony hallway of the second floor he could see the sun just starting to rise in the distance. He tried to put his key in the door as quietly as possible.

There was someone sitting in the recliner in their living room. It was his mom. She was asleep in a bathrobe. Quiet as he’d tried to be, her eyes sprang open as soon as he stepped off the welcome mat.

“Where were you?”

His life in this world was about to get worse.