Neil Gaiman - Interworld

“They’re bringing her in now,” said the jellyfish man. “Look!”

I raised my head.

The ship—it seemed as big as the auditorium—that was materializing in the air in front of us looked like every pirate ship you’ve ever seen in old movies: stained wooden planks, big billowing sails, and a figurehead of a man with the head of a shark. It was gliding toward us about five feet above the ground, and the green grass of the football field tossed back and forth like the surface of the sea as it passed.

The big me couldn’t have cared less about ghost ships sailing through the air, as long as the witch lady and I were together. The little me that was trapped in the back of my head was sort of hoping that all this was just a bad reaction to some new medication the nice doctors were trying on me in whatever mental hospital they had me locked up in.

A rope ladder was thrown over the side of the ship.

“Climb!” said the witch woman, and I climbed.

When I was up over the side of the ship, huge hands grabbed me and dropped me on the deck like a sack of potatoes. I looked up to see men the size of wrestlers dressed like sailors in pirate movies. They had scarves tied around their heads and worn old sweaters and battered jeans, and were barefoot. They were more careful with the witch woman, lifting her carefully over the side of the ship. They all backed away then. I guessed that they didn’t want to touch the jellyfish man or Scarabus, the tattooed guy, and I couldn’t really blame them.

One of the sailors looked down at me. “Is that what all the fuss is about?” he asked. “That shrimp?”

“Yes,” said the witch woman coldly. “That shrimp is what all the fuss is about.”

“Lumme,” said the sailor. “Are we going to drop him overboard, then? Once we’re under way?”

“Hurt him before we get back to HEX and every warlock in the Tarn will want a little piece of your hide,” she told him. “He dies our way. What do you think powers this ship of yours, anyway? Take him down to my quarters.”

She turned to me. “Joseph, you need to go with this man. Stay where he tells you to stay. To do otherwise would make me very unhappy.”

The idea of hurting her made my heart ache. Literally— there was a stabbing pain inside me. I knew that I could never do anything to make her unhappy in any way. I would wait for her until the world ended if I had to.

The sailor showed me down a flight of steps into a narrow corridor that smelled like floor polish and fish. At the end of the corridor there was a door, and we opened it.

“Here we are, my fine shrimp,” he said. “The Lady Indigo’s quarters for the voyage back to HEX. You stand here and wait for her. If you need to relieve yourself, there’s a lavatory back there, through that door. Use it; don’t befoul yourself. She’ll be down when she’s ready. Got to chart our course back now, she does, with the captain.”

He was talking to me like you’d talk to a pet or a farm animal, just to hear the sound of his own voice.

He went out.

There was a lurching, then, and through the round cabin window I could see the evening sky dissolve into stars, thousands of them, floating in a violet blackness. We were moving.

I must have stood there for hours, waiting beside the door.

At one point I realized I needed to pee, and I went through the door that the sailor had pointed to. I suppose I expected something cramped and old-fashioned, but what waited behind the door was a small but luxurious bathroom with a large pink bathtub and a small pink-marble toilet. Which I used and flushed. I washed my hands with pink soap that smelled like roses and dried my hands on a fluffy pink bath towel.

Then I looked out the bathroom porthole.

Above the ship were stars. Below the ship the stars continued, shimmering points of light. There were more stars than I had ever imagined existed. And they were different. I didn’t recognize any of the constellations Dad had taught me when I was young. A lot of them were impossibly close—close enough to show disks as big as the sun, but somehow it was still night.

I wondered when we would get where we were going.

I wondered why they were going to have to kill me when we got there (and somewhere inside me a tiny Joey Harker screamed and yelled and sobbed and tried to get my body’s attention).

I hoped that the Lady Indigo hadn’t returned to find that I wasn’t waiting for her. The idea of disappointing her ripped through me like a knife in the heart, and I ran back to the doorway and stood at attention, hoping she would come back soon. If she didn’t come back, I was certain I would die.

I waited another twenty minutes or so, and then the door opened and happiness, pure and undiluted, flooded my soul. My Lady Indigo was here, with Scarabus.

She did not spare me a glance. She sat on the small pink bed, while the tattooed man stood in front of her.

“I don’t know,” she said to him, apparently responding to a question he had posed to her in the corridor. “I cannot imagine that anyone could find us here. And as soon as we reach HEX, there are guards and wards such as there are nowhere else in the Altiverse.”

“Still,” he said sulkily, “Neville said he picked up a disturbance in the continuum. He said something was coming.”

“Neville,” she said sweetly, “is a jelly-fleshed worrywart. The Lacrimae Mundi is sailing back to HEX through the Nowhere-at-All. We’re practically undetectable.”

“Practically,” he muttered.

She stood up and walked over to me. “How are you, Joseph Harker?”

“Very happy to see you back here, my lady,” I told her.

“Did anything unusual happen while you were down here waiting for me?”

“Unusual? I don’t think so.”

“Thank you, Joseph. You need not speak until next I tell you to.” She pursed her big lips and went back to sit on the bed again. “Scarabus, contact HEX for me.”

“Yes, my lady.”

He touched a tattoo on his stomach, a tattoo that looked a bit like something from the Arabian Nights, a bit like Dracula’s castle and a bit like the world seen from space. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his pupils were flickering with light—not glowing steadily, as they had when he had summoned the ship to the football field.

He spoke in a deep sort of voice then, the sort of voice you’d get if you dipped Darth Vader in a giant vat of maple syrup.

“Indigo? What is it?”

“We have the boy Harker, my lord Dogknife. A world-class Walker: He will power many ships.”

“Good,” said the syrupy wheeze. Even under whatever spell I was under, that voice made my skin crawl. “We are ready to begin the assault on the Lorimare worlds. The phantom gateways we will be creating will make a counterattack or rescue impossible. When they are empowered, the usual Lorimare coordinates will then open notional shadow realms under our control. Now, with another fine Harker at our disposal, we will have all the power we need to send in the fleet. The Imperator of the Lorimare worlds is already one of ours.”

“We have the Cause, Lord Dogknife.”

“We have the Will, Lady Indigo. How long until you dock here?”

“Twelve hours, no less.”

“Very well. I shall prepare a vat for the Harker.”

She looked at me and smiled, and my heart leapt up within me and sang like a cardinal in springtime.

“I would like to keep a souvenir of this Harker,” she said. “Perhaps a hank of his hair or a knucklebone.”

“I shall give orders to that effect. Now, good day,” and the tattooed man closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said in his own voice, “Ow. That left me with a killer headache. How was Dogknife?”

“Excellent,” she said. “He is planning our assault on the Lorimare worlds.”