Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Chapter 10
A Novel
If you’re joining us just now, follow the snake’s tail to the Prologue or climb a ladder to the Table of Contents.
Chapter 10: “Let Madame Blavatsky Read Your Fortune”
“Where are we going?” Evan asked. The lurid red glow was dim but shed enough light for him to see they were still dressed like heroes in a low-budget fantasy film.
Niyati was in front of him. “We’re still in the vestibule of your katabasis.”
“I already faced my ‘dark half’ back there,” Evan said, refusing to look behind him.
“You’re not out of the clear yet,” she replied, waiting for him to catch up.
They approached another curtain. They’d already passed through fifty. “How many goddamned curtains do we gotta go through?”
“Evan, please stop swearing.”
They heard a calliope piping out a sickly tune on the other side of the crimson cloth. A scratchy noise underlay the music, as if it were were being played on an antique gramophone.
Niyati lifted the curtain and Evan stepped through. They were in a carnival tent. Grass was at their feet. A flap of the tent was partially open and they could; it was nighttime outside.
There was a booth in front of them with a wooden sign over it that read: “Let Madame Blavatsky Read Your Fortune.” The figure behind the glass was a shriveled cadaver swathed in red robes, like an old world fortune teller. Her eyes and mouth were sewn shut with black laces. Her lifeless hands rested on a crystal ball; and in the crystal ball four hundred unborn universes formed a cloud of light that was supposed to look magical but was merely an illusion created by the electrical apparatus under the table that the cadaver was working with a foot-pedal.
An auburn-black card shot out of the slot under the window. Evan removed it and flipped it over so he could read it: “I can only read your fortune if you give me something you hold dear.”
Evan looked at the corpse. The laces over the eyes snapped apart. The cadaver’s eyelids fluttered open. Someone was inside the corpse, wearing it like a costume. The faraway look in the eyes was familiar to Evan.—The textbook! It was Madame Blavatsky who was wearing the fortune teller’s skin.
Evan knew right away what she was trying to do. She was trying to trick him into giving her the dream he was currently in. She must have suspected that he knew what she was up to, because another card shot out of the slot with such force that it fluttered and fell on the grass.
Evan bent down to pick it up and heard the sound of breaking glass. Niyati screamed.
The cadaver’s face was slammed against the window. The glass had cracked at the point of impact and formed what looked like a spider’s web. The laces that had sealed the cadaver’s lips snapped open and its jaws distended. Spiders crawled from the parted mouth, and climbed up into the web of glass.
Madame Blavatsky’s eyes stared greedily at Evan from behind the dead mask. Her left arm grew long and stretched out of the booth’s back door. The arm bent around the corner and its taloned hands tried surreptitiously to snatch Evan’s dream away.
“Evan!” Niyati cried.
He jumped up and grabbed her by the arm. “Let’s get out of here!”
They ran from the tent and found themselves at a fairground. They were dressed casually, as if for a date. Niyati held a cone of cotton candy. She gave it to Evan who threw it in the trash, but it fell on the ground. He picked it up and put it in the bin again, because he didn’t want to acquire the reputation of being the litterbug of the Astral Plane.
They walked briskly through the arcade. There were shooting galleries, skee ball machines, whack-a-moles stations, and a line of plexiglass boxes with robotic metal claws reaching down for prizes. But instead of the prizes being stuffed animals, the claws were reaching for severed hands. Everyone stopped what they were doing as Evan and Niyati passed.
Although they saw rollercoasters, ferris wheels, and tilt-a-whirls in the distance, Niyati and Evan couldn’t get to these. They were corralled into what looked like an open-air amphitheater, but was actually the entrance to the fairground’s haunted house ride. The ride was walled in by a junkyard heap of eighteen-wheelers that rose nearly a hundred feet into the air. The headlights of some of the semis were on and the engine brakes and air horns sounded.
The front of the haunted house looked like the stage of a death-metal concert. It was six-stories high and painted black. The arches and balconies were thronged with animatronic goblins, skeletons and ghouls that danced and gamboled or spun around on the iron rods that ran up into them. Ghosts, witches, zombies dangled from wires. They jiggled maniacally and their hinged mouths opened and closed as the speakers blared out a cacophony of eerie laughter.
One of the security checkpoint officers from Sydney gave Niyati and Evan their tickets and told them to mind their step. There was no queue for the ride. They climbed four rubber-matted ramps. The matting was corrugated, which was fortunate since the rubber was slick with blood.
Gordon’s dad was the operator of the ride. He was drunk and wearing a black cape and fake Mephistophelean beard. “You were the biggest mistake I ever made,” he said. “Fucking worthless runt. The world would’ve been a better if you’d never been born.”
Niyati drew Evan’s attention to the dead passengers in the car emerging from the rubber flaps at the end of the ride. She told Evan that it couldn’t be all that dangerous or people wouldn’t play the game. He nodded and handed Gordon’s dad their tickets. They climbed into the car and took their seats.
“Wait!” Evan exclaimed. “My seatbelt’s not secure!”
Gordon’s dad shoved the iron lever forward, as Evan’s unconscious right hand touched his seatbelt on the airplane. The car passed through the curtains and lurched forward, causing Evan to gasp. (The plane had hit turbulence.)
“If you think that’s bad,” Niyati said, “wait till you see what’s coming.” Evan wondered again if she was really Niyati or just the unborn universe in disguise.
The crazy sounds of a 1930s cartoon could be heard behind the green and orange fluorescent walls. They were heading down the clown’s mouth under a banner that read: “Games of the World!”
They came to a diorama of wax mannequins: three elderly women in a retirement home. They had evidently been playing Old Maid with the girl who was no longer sitting with them at the table.
The child’s eyes were black pools. “I won! I won!” she kept saying.
Niyati told Evan that the girl was a demon older than Time and that her name was Manat.
The girl turned away from the car and went back to the table to deal another hand. Evan heard one of the mannequins complain that the girl was cheating. But it could only have been the child who spoke in that ancient voice.
The car tilted to the left and plunged forty feet before leveling out again. It entered an ample hunting lodge. Wax mannequins in jodhpurs and bush hats stood with elephant guns before a wall covered with trophies: the heads of the apes from the university library in the Canadian Colony of Norway.
One of the mannequins saw Evan gasping in horror. “Hunting primates,” it said (although its lips did not move). “The most dangerous game of all!” Then its right hand broke off at the wrist, exposing a shriveled monkey’s paw that retracted into its hollow arm. “Make a wish!” it said, as the car slammed into the double doors at the other end of the hunting lodge.
They entered a bowling alley full of women’s skeletons in pink shirts, some with matching scarves tied around their necks. Several wore sunglasses, which seemed illogical at first, until Niyati explained they were doing this to conceal the heiresses’ identities. It was league night; and what Evan and Niyati were seeing was a tableau of a recurring scene from America’s favorite sitcom. But all the actors and actresses were dead, because they had never really lived at all.
The sitcom’s main character was about to score a spare. She stood at the end of the lane with her ball raised to her chest. She was covered in cobwebs, as were the bowling pins. A black rat scuttled down the gutter. Her friends at the scoring table were arranged in attitudes of inextinguishable mirth. The canned laughter laughed as the car exited the bowling alley.
There was a clack-clack-clack-clack sound as the chain between the rails tugged the car up a hill. Evan looked over his shoulder and saw Madame Blavatsky’s face staring at him from inside one of the bowling ball chutes. She was grinning because she knew that neither Evan nor Niyati had figured out the trick.
The next room contained two “live” actors (if that’s the right word to use). The man in the fascist uniform stood over his superior.
“General, what are we to do?”
The General sat at a table in front of a wall map. He had been playing chess with himself and had lost. The rebels were ascending the palace steps. A recording of a mob could be heard pouring out of the hidden speakers. Niyati thought the recording was for another ride, because the voices were baying for the witch to be burned. But the General looked up from the chess board and Evan saw that the other half of his face, which had been turned away from him, was the face of Madame Blavatsky.—So he had been a witch after all!
At the dictator’s right hand lay a revolver. As the car made its way out of the room, a shot rang out. But the mob in the recording booed; and the canned laughter was not amused.
The car listed precariously to the right and Evan grabbed Niyati so she wouldn’t fall. Her seatbelt had come undone and the car was shaking violently. They were climbing the side of a mountain in a heavy snowstorm. Chinese pagodas covered all the mountaintops. Some of the pagodas were materializing out of nowhere, hedging in the others. Evan saw that the track the car were on ended about sixty feet ahead.
“Oh my God!” he exclaimed. But the car was diverted to a side track that led into a dimly lit pagoda.
Two mandarins in yellow brocade sat on cushions playing Wei-Chi, the ancient game of Go.
“The object of the game,” Niyati said, “is to keep your pieces from being surrounded.”—No sooner had she said this than Evan wondered why she was sitting so close to him. He pushed her away and felt something breathing down his neck from behind. This startled him because now he was surrounded. He turned around and swiped at the thing behind him but there was nothing there. It had all been a ruse. And now that the mandarins had distracted Evan, they seized Niyati and attempted to drag her from the car. The flesh on their faces hung in tatters. As the car sped out of the pagoda, the zombie mandarins struck the wall and exploded into dust.
The ride made a sharp right and a piece of timber struck Niyati’s head. She cried out because it drew blood. But the blood was fading, even as it coursed down her forehead. There was a reason for this: the room they had entered was a house of mirrors, and it was no longer Niyati sitting next to him but her reflection.
The chilling voice of the spy villain spoke over the intercom: “This, too, is a game, Mr. Evan. I am toying with your perceptions.”
The bionic right hand of the bald man in the shadows pressed a red button, as the bongo drums sounded and a plucked guitar played a suspenseful tune. Niyati screamed and pounded on six separate panes. The panes were transparent glass or mirrors, but Evan wasn’t sure which. The six images of Niyati were backlit with fluorescent lights that turned into hypnotic spirals that began to spin. Human eyes became the eyes of cats. And between the glass, Evan could make out the sleek metallic walls of the spy villain’s alpine lair on the Austrian-German border.
“I wonder which one is your beloved Niyati,” the villain said. “Choose wisely, Mr. Evan, or she dies.”
“I choose. . . I choose the reflection sitting next to me in the car!”
“Nooooo!” the spy villain shouted and pounded his bionic fist, for his plot had been foiled.
The car moved through a dark tunnel of impressionistic trees, some of which overhung the car. The flat scenery created the not-very-convincing illusion that they were moving through a forest. Silhouettes of owls were cut into the trees, but became real owls resting on real tree limbs when looked at again. The scenery moved away on rollers, and now they were outside.
It was a moonlit night. The car sped down the steep declivity of a windswept valley of tall grass. A castle stood in the hollow.
The car accelerated and Evan raised his arms and cried out “Woohoo!”
The grass brushed up against the sides of the car and whipped against their cheeks.
Niyati touched Evan’s shoulder and pointed to a place in the distance. There was a score of cyclopes with saucer-like eyes that emitted moonbeams. The giants turned to face them, and the eye beams moved like searchlights. They blinked in confusion and began to walk.
“Umm,” Niyati remarked.
“We should make it to the castle before they get to us. They’re really far away.”
The cyclopes trod slowly over the grass, their cloaks knifing in the blustery wind. Each one was over fifty feet tall.
“They have a long stride,” Niyati noted.
When the car reached the bottom of the moonlit valley, it slowed to a crawl. The cyclopes continued to move at an unhurried pace. But then they turned their eyes to the moon and howled.
Evan and Niyati had never heard anything like it; they covered their ears, closed their eyes and screamed in agony. (Evan arched his back in his seat on the airplane and whimpered.)
“Your ears and nose are bleeding,” he told Niyati.
“So are yours!” she exclaimed.
As they neared the castle, the drawbridge lowered.
Then the car choked and stopped and the amber “check engine” light came on.
“What the FUCK!?” Evan shouted.
The cyclopes were about a mile away. The grass barely covered their padded feet. They began to execute a victory dance as their tattered shrouds flapped in the wind and exposed their hideous nakedness.
“Why isn’t it moving!” Evan shouted.
“Trying starting it again!”
There was a key in the ignition and a steering wheel materialized in front of Evan. He turned the key twice. Both times the engine choked and died.
“Piece of shit car!”
“Just turn it on!” Niyati screamed.
“Oh my God,” Evan groaned.
“What?!”
“It’s a stick shift! . . . I never learned to drive a clutch! I mean, a buddy tried to teach me but he gave up!—We gotta get out of here and run for it!”
“I can’t undo my seatbelt!” Niyati exclaimed.
“Neither can I.”
The cyclopes went down on their hands and knees and began crawling toward the car. Their eyes shot moonbeams over the floor of the grassy valley. All the beams converged on the car.
The jaws of the creatures were prognathous and their teeth were razor-sharp, like the teeth of piranhas. Their lips were purple.
Evan tried starting the car again. It bumped forward and stalled.
“You have to ease up on the clutch while—”
“I know I know!” he said.
Unfortunately, the cyclopes were land crawlers by nature, so their progress was even faster now that they were on their hands and knees. They lifted their eyes to the moon and howled again.
Evan and Niyati were paralyzed by the sound. Their ears and noses continued to bleed.
“Evan,” Niyati said. “This is a test! You have to confront your anxiety. You don’t have enough confidence in yourself. That’s the problem.”
Evan looked out the left-hand side of the car at the approaching monsters. He tried to remember that one time he’d gotten it right. (What was it he did?) He remembered he started the car, everything was going hunky-dory, and his friend said “See, that’s all there is to it!”—And then he downshifted, the car died and his friend said, “Bro, I’m done. You’re never gonna learn.”
Evan closed his eyes, eased up on the clutch and depressed the gas pedal. It engaged! The car moved forward. He shifted it to second gear, and then to third!
The cyclopes stood up and saw they had been outmaneuvered. They began to eat one another in frustration.
By the time Evan and Niyati made it to the drawbridge, the chain under the car was pulling it again. The dashboard and steering wheel had vanished. They passed over the bridge and into the castle.
For some reason the creepy carnival here made me think about something I read years ago about a hypothetical rollercoaster designed for the purpose of euthanasia. I guess there was something about the G-forces that was supposed to do the job? Maybe just the thought of a game or diversion made into something deadly is especially unsettling...