Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

We waited until he’d gone in before following. I didn’t want to spook him. I’d chased enough weirdos for one day.

The inner office door was locked, but I leaned on it and it popped open. Grayson Thursday looked up at us. He didn’t look as surprised as he should have, but I don’t think it’s because he was expecting us. He just wasn’t very good at showing human emotions.

“Okay,” I growled. “Sit down. You aren’t going anywhere until we have some answers.”

He did manage “puzzled” pretty well. “Didn’t we finish our conversation earlier?”

“Can that crap. Tell us the truth about Monk’s Point.” I flopped the stack of print-outs down on his desk. “Tell us why stuff’s been happening there for a hundred years, and probably more. And why it always seems to happen on the same damn day of the week.”

His mouth worked for a moment. He really didn’t look right and it was starting to bug me. If you’re going to wear a disguise, at least try and be convincing. I yanked out my gun and stuck it in his face. “I’m losing my temper here. You’re a lousy fake, you know? Your watch is upside down, your shoes are on the wrong feet, and your pupils don’t contract when the light changes. Now talk to us or I’ll blow your head into little bits. That may not bother you personally very much, but I’m betting it will be at least an inconvenience.” I was also betting on the fact that he wouldn’t know and couldn’t guess that I’m not the kind of guy to shoot except in self-defense. Sometimes when you’re huge and red and scary-looking like me, a bluff is your best move.

He waved his hands frantically. “No! Don’t! We have no right!”

Now he’d confused me again. “No right to what?”

“We have no right to damage this body.” He patted himself gingerly, as if it was a rented tux and he was afraid he might wrinkle it. “It is only borrowed. Its owner is in a comatose state, but he may recover someday. Please do not ignite your weapon.”

I turned to Albie Bayless, who looked pretty confused. I felt sorry for him. Even I’m not completely used to this stuff, even though I do it for a living. “Sit down, Albie,” I said. “I think we’re finally going to get some answers.”

“As you’ve guessed,” Grayson Thursday said, “my people are not natives of your earth. Or, to be more exact, we are native only to a small part of your world — the portion that happens on the day you call Thursday.”

“I’m lost already,” said Albie cheerfully. “Or I’ve finally gone crazy.”

“Our dimension intersects with yours, but at an angle, so to speak — our lives only touch yours once every seven of your days. We have explored your dimension, but we have no physical existence here and normally cannot interact with the inhabitants, so our visits had only ever been for the furtherance of science…until things went wrong. You are so far from us, so different, that other than these few scientific expeditions we might as well be in different universes.”

“Thursday’s child has far to go,” I said.

“What’s that?” Thursday asked.

“A nursery rhyme. Bayless, you must know it. ‘Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go…” And Grayson’s people are Thursday’s children, I guess.”

Grayson Thursday nodded. “Very appropriate — disturbingly so. Because it is not us but Wednesday’s Children who are the problem. The are indeed ‘full of woe’, and it is our fault. We bred them too well. We gave them enough life to be aware of their own condition, their own…shortcomings.”

“Okay, now you lost me,” I said. “Try again.”

“We are an old race.” He shook his head. “We were tired of striving, of struggling. We wanted rest. So we created a race of servants for ourselves. Not like us — we made them primitive, without emotions…or so we thought. Creatures that would not object to servitude.”

“To slavery, you mean.” I scowled. “Let me guess. They didn’t feel the same way about it as you expected them to.”

“After many thousands of years, yes, they did become restless.” It was hard to tell, but the stiff face looked a little ashamed. “There was an…uprising. We realized that we had created a permanent problem. Our servants were more numerous than us. We could not destroy them — we are not that kind of race.”

“In other words, you could make and keep slaves but you couldn’t kill them.”

“You mock the complexity of our problem,” Thursday said sadly. “But it is more or less true. So our greatest thinkers devised a way to solve the problem. We found a parallel dimension, one that had no outlet back into our world. We transported our unruly servants there and left them to make their own lives. We even apologized, but they were too savage, too discontented to feel anything but hatred toward us.”

“Imagine that.” I sat up and tucked my gun back in its holster. “Let me guess. The place you dumped your slaves leaks into our dimension. Right here at Monk’s Point.”

He sighed. It was the closest to human he’d seemed so far. “Yes. We did not know that at the time, of course, or we would have sent them somewhere else. Apparently all our parallel dimension intersect your timeline here in this dimension. Thus, the Wednesday Men, as you might term them, imprisoned one dimension over from us. Full of woe — and anger. And once a week, if conditions are right, their prison touches on this world.”

“So why are you here? And what are you doing about Monk’s Point?”

Thursday grimaced. “We have done the best we could to keep them there. We have filled the place with attractive host-bodies — you see, like my people and I, they have no physical forms here, and must find things to occupy. Thus, we have provided once-living shells that attract them. And the house is warded with various defenses. It does not always work, I’m sad to say. Sometimes the flow from what you would call the Wednesday dimension is very strong and they spill out past the barriers we have made. That is when…unfortunate things happen.”

“Yeah. And your job is to show up here once a week, when the Thursday dimension opens into ours, and pay off the victims or their families. To keep them quiet, or just to ease your own consciences?”

“Please.” He actually looked pained. “We encourage silence, of course, but I am here to repair, in a small measure, the harm we have done.” He shook his head. “We did not mean this to happen, but we no longer have the power to move our former servants to another place. They have grown too strong, too canny — we could never trick them again as we did the first time.”

“Well, isn’t this just sweet,” I said, and looked at Albie, who was busy scribbling notes. “Why are you bothering, Bayless? You’ll never be able to print this story.”

He looked shocked, his face suddenly old and helpless. “What do you mean?”

“Well, leaving out the fact that you’d get put in a nuthouse, let’s not forget that you called in the BPRD, and this is now government jurisdiction. But we’ve got bigger problem, anyway.” I turned back to Grayson Thursday. “Do you want to make up for what you’ve done? End this problem once and for all?”

“Of course, but it cannot be done…”

“Hey, buddy, in our dimension, we never say ‘cannot’. For one thing, we use contractions.” I stood up. “I’ll tell you what you need to do.” I grabbed Albie’s pen and handed it to him. “You’d better write it down, because I’m guessing your dimension goes back out of phase with us at midnight, so we won’t be seeing each other for a week. If you get this wrong, we’re all in trouble. Big trouble.”