Terebithia

By Aaron Majewski

The U.S…. magicalized.

An invisible rabbit who smokes too much and a giant talking tarantula named Gwendolyn make Chicago one interesting place for yo yo wielding Alliance Heavy, Terebithia. Too bad the whole world’s about to explode!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lorain O'Neil
• Release date: Feb 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386647188

Aaron Majewski

Author, screenwriter and playwright

Book preview

Chapter One

WHEN IT HAPPENED THE world disappeared and the sky vanished in blackness. I lived and died and lived and was reborn in that blackness. That sure didn’t happen to everyone.

When the sky finally did come back it was full of new light, light so bright it hurt my eyes, as if the noon sun had decided to stand full blaze right next to Earth, so close you could reach out and touch it if you were chucklehead enough to try (and you’d be amazed how many people were). There were stars too, lots of them, a whole lot more than where I think I came from anyhow, because maybe the Earth was younger ―maybe stars that died a long time ago were reborn, just like me. The end result was that after it happened, the night sky was as brightly lit as the middle of the day unless there was some (bless-ed!) cloud cover, so if you didn’t have a good pair of shades (I prefer Ray-Ban or Le Specs) you were royally screwed. Over the years that’s changed, settled back down to normal (not that I remember normal too clearly), and since we don’t have much electricity now, we have nights that’re darker than a latrine’s bottom.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Hi there, name’s Terebithia, no last name. I’m the Heavy for the Forsytscian Alliance, all one hundred pounds of me sopping wet, with my yo-yo. I gauge the yo-yo adds maybe another pound (it’s one heckuva a yo-yo) and you know what? Me and that yo-yo are one of the reasons the Alliance owns Chicago, so don’t make fun. Yeah, it’s Chicago as it is now, not like it was before, but still... owns it. Us. And we mean to keep it. Me, the yo-yo, and Zippity.

Zippity’s full name is (you guessed it) Zippity Dooh Dah Day but I call him Zippity for short unless my ass is really in a pickle and then it gets shortened to plain ol’ Zip real fast. I’m pretty sure Zippity was inspired by someone who was famous back in the 1940’s: Harvey. But you have to be a geezer to know who Harvey was.

Harvey was a six foot tall invisible rabbit ―Jimmy Stewart starred opposite him in the 1950 movie, a movie that was one of Laura’s favorites. We watched it together countless times. Now the Harvey in the movie, and the play he came from, was a pooka ―a mischievous Celtic spirit that took animal form and could stop time in order to make a happy ending for everyone.

So not Zippity.

Zippity don’t give no happy endings to everyone. Busts their balls more like. True, just like with Harvey and Jimmy Stewart, Zippity only talks to me, and jeez you should hear the mouth on that rabbit. My rabbit, not Jimmy Stewart’s. Talk about parody, Zippity is a parody on steroids. He’s the essence of creative freedom, artistic satire, comic imitation, and I think that Laura (quite the devotee of the movie) somehow made Zippity... for me. So no matter how many times I’ve told Zippity his muse was never REAL, he just never believed me.

When Zippity showed up, all six foot three invisible inches of him (seven if you count his ears), he and I just sorta adopted each other. Zippity was the real reason I’m a Heavy for the Alliance. Zip never talks in a way anyone else can hear him, only to me, which ―natch― makes me the Jimmy Stewart go-to gal for anyone who wants to converse with a six foot tall invisible bunny, which is surprisingly an awful lot of people.

As to what happened thirteen years ago (if you can judge time right in this place, who knows?), was that there was a massive asteroid the size of Jupiter that plowed uninvited into our solar system. It packed a wave of pure light nobody’d ever even conjectured about before, much less seen. Everyone went nutso, riots galore as The End Is Nigh And This Time We Mean It went viral. They were wrong of course, but right enough in that we were our own downfall, we tore our societies apart in expectation of The Astral Arrival, but the day it reached us it didn’t crush Earth at all, it merely folded around us. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Wrong. Something happened, something nobody had described or anticipated, something weird (and doubly weird for me). No one’s strictly sure what transpired but there’s a general theory most of us believe and I think it’s probably accurate.

You know all that stuff people wrote about in the past that modern people scoffed at? Stuff like fairies, goblins, magic, all of that? Well, what if it really had ―did― exist, just not in our world, but in its own? Sure, sometimes one way or another it might have leaked through to our world, but never overwhelmingly, never dominating us. Now ―what if― that asteroid pummeling we got somehow resulted in that chock-full-o’-magic world somehow being blended with ours? Two worlds sorta melding together into one. I know, sounds nutzoid, but that’s the only explanation that fits what the world looks like now: a mixture of what the real world used to be, but now all harum-scarum souped together with what a world of legend and myth I bet would’ve looked like. Both worlds mingled and all of it real.

In other words, both worlds got a screwed up BA-VOOM, like a fat uncle doing a whopper bellyflop in the kiddie pool, and then... we both ended up with this.

And we all know that kiddie pool just ain’t gonna hold up.

We call the magical beings from the other world who appeared here as being from the Unseen World though that’s not what they call themselves. As far as they’re concerned they’re just as real as us (they think we’re the interlopers) and since a slew of ’em can chop your head off (and worse) in about a millisecond, I tend to agree with them.

Regardless, they are all the gobsmacking kick-in-the-pants type, and make you totally understand why humanity either left them behind or shut them the hell out, from our world at least. But they’re not shut out now, they’re here, we got ’em all: Seelie Courts, faeries, goblins, every vestige of what human nightmare and fantasy apparently originated from ―we have it now out the wazoo and more. Lucky us.

What we didn’t get in this new melded world was governments, they fell immediately, collapsing amidst the chaos. There is no United States anymore. Europe is a mess, and no one makes land down under. Up in the Arctic I hear some one-eyed guy sits under a tree claiming to be the One God and demanding allegiance of the North, but there’s lotsa lunatics like that around, they come and go. The guy’s bodyguard stalks around with a huge hammer and tosses lightning bolts (saw him once, scary dude, not like the movie) so I’m guessing the bodyguard might be Thor ―to us in the former world just a story but now, here, a genuine little pyro.

In the Middle East from what I’m told, is a former Goddess name of Asthirtite-of-the-Sea who spends her time giving milk and honey to her followers and smiling her Goddess-smile as her Son eats the babies of both her faithful and detractors alike. May not be true, but heh, note to self, never go for a visit.

But to be honest with you it isn’t that great in Chicago either; inhabitants starve, die, plead for mercy on the streets, all while predatory glittering things run rampant terrorizing and feeding and being generally a pain in my posterior. A woman I adored, a woman who helped me a lot after everything changed, who taught me a whole bunch of what I needed to know to survive, she died here in the streets. And the thing of it is that Laura died so I could live (which in her own wisdom she seemed to consider exceptionally important) and also so a bunch of rat bastard cowards could die later instead of there and then. That was my fault and also how we ended up owning Chicago.

I was messed up for a while after The Big Bang happened, and I broke into the home of a drunk who was also a very powerful Magician, but I guess I’ll get to that rather sordid tale later. And if you’re wondering, yes, we have magicians now, witches and wizards too, practitioners and druids, the lot. Magic, real magic, it’s all here.

And it’s awful.

It’s not the nice Harry Potter magic, nope. When the two worlds melded, we got quite the snootful of magic. Magic flooded the nervous system of every living thing here, like a drug, effervescing full force in some in an instant. Some it annihilated, some it turned into minor magicians (and like as not drove mad), others it did nothing except make them a bit giddy for a few minutes. And a few got a dose that’s sometimes a curse and sometimes a blessing and almost always impossible to tell for sure which.

Unfortunately the magic also turned some people into Wielders of Power, those’re the guys tramping around in robes carrying staves, the dumbasses. I used to think the worst one was Sythcian (Turkish name maybe) who I once dumped a surfeit amount of exceptionally cold water on, then had to slap around a bit too when he popped up swinging his magic around. Eventually I dragged him off to the Great Hall of the Formian Battle Giants who were holding Lake Michigan hostage; it was imperative that we negotiated an alliance with them, I gave them Sythcian as a gesture of good will since he’d been a Warlock of the Fey, which they hated. They didn’t manage to hang onto the clever conniver though, which was convenient because after Sythcian escaped he got his act together and now we’re friends.

And if you haven’t worked it out, yes, I’m that one. The rather notoriously known Heavy who created the Alliance between a famous thaumaturologist Magician (the drunk whose house I broke into), the Giants, and us. Now as far as I’m concerned, a lot of Alliance members seem to live for killing and bloodshed and mayhem and scheming (okay, not the Magician, he’s grumpy though, literally ―that’s what we call him behind his back) and keeping them out of mischief is one godawful botheration, but the point is we survive and that’s what counts.

I’m guessing I was eight years old when the asteroid hit and thirteen when Laura was killed and we forged the Alliance with the Giants. The Alliance is a bulwark behind which several thousand souls manage to hide from the very bad things roaming the world ―not guaranteed safety mind, but better than ‘out there.’ I felt old back at the ripe age of thirteen and now at twenty I feel positively ancient. A life chocked with problems does that. Problems like, ever since I assassinated the Duchess of Queens I’ve been having to fend off a way-too-insistent marriage proposal from a cringeworthy black market gang-banger who dearly needs to settle down ―not with me.

Real romantic, huh?

And I still haven’t found them ―my family. I think. Maybe. You see while every other human on this planet vividly remembers what life used to be like, I don’t. My memories pretty much start with that blinding light I told you about. I know I must have lived in the normal world because, well, I know how to speak English’n all ―and I know what everything is, I just don’t remember how or when I got that knowledge. So I’m guessing I must have gotten quite a bump on the noggin the day the asteroid walloped us and that’s why I don’t even remember for sure whether I have (had?) a family. So finding my family ―if they exist― is another of my problems.

But the real nail-biter always thrashing around in my gut is that I know this world is not right, and it’s got to be fixed before something even worse happens.

But how? I think, I feel, the answer is out there. Like Dr. Somerville says (he’s a physicist so he says lots of things like this) for every action there’s an equal and opposite one, waiting to blow, so I figure to rectify it all maybe I just have to find that opposite one.

Or create it or steal it.

I think I’m getting closer to figuring it all out, maybe even how to find my family as well, at least if you judge by the increased attacks that have been made on me (and Dr. Somerville) lately. But if I can stay alive, and hopefully him too, I might just pull it off.

Chapter Two

SO ALL OF THAT IS WHY I was sitting in the dark, in an empty back booth of a crumbling ruin of what had once been a gloriously greasy ol’ spoon. I was wearing a windbreaker three sizes too big for me while I waited for some info on my possible family that in all likelihood was not going to show up which meant Gunther, one more informant of mine, had probably bitten the dust. It was dark in the diner because the only light came from a pair of candles beside the long defunct cash register, where owner Chris was pretending not to be checking me out as we listened to the soft strains of a lute being idly tuned by a doe-eyed young man who came through town every few months. The lute player had a dreamy look on his face, he always had a dreamy look on his face except when he was talking, that’s when he instead became animated like a wind-up toy you kinda wanted to pulverize. His name was different any time you asked and he just gave an inscrutable smirk if you called him on it but he was an uncommon wealth of information on what was going on outside of Chicago, at least when he wanted to be.

I took a sip of Chris’ lukewarm ‘coffee’ and grimaced. It was chicory, real coffee is as rare as hen’s teeth although Mr. Grumpy Magician has some. I don’t know where he got the coffee plants, but whenever I meet him on Alliance business I always get real coffee with a spoonful of honey and fresh heavy cream and I am in heaven.

It was night, so the street outside the diner was lamentably dead and still, with no sign of any scuttling beggars or lurking watchers, much less Gunther showing up and giving me the info I’d paid him for. I knew if anyone out of the ordinary did bop up, Chris behind the counter had seven shotguns ready and waiting, eight gauges with everything from double O buckshot to silver to (supposedly) an enchanted one that could put holes in things that wished exquisitely not to become holy. Chris packed that way because his diner was located on the edge of the territory that fell under the Alliance’s protection. It was an area held by treaty backed up with two score and a half Giants who liked to kill, and some of the things they liked to kill were the things that had a tendency to collect at the extremity of Chicago’s borders, so there ya go. Chris’ rinky-dink diner was sometimes front row center for horrific action between the Giants and things that liked to pay us surreptitious visits in the night.

As for Gunther he obviously wasn’t going to show and I wondered if I’d been set up but I didn’t think it likely. Gunther yearned to bed me, not murder me. But in addition to news of my family he’d also been supposed to bring me some intel on uncorrupted tree seedlings that were vital to reclaim our soil before it eroded too badly, so if he wasn’t dead and didn’t have a sterling excuse for his no-show, I was gonna make him wish he were dead.

I clasped my tin cup to soak up the last of the heat as my fingerless leather gloves shifted across the smooth metal with a satisfying soft rasp.

Out late tonight aren’t you, Terebithia?

The lute-player slid uninvited into the seat across from me, his lute held in the crook of one arm cradled like a child. And again I wondered: which world was he from? Ours or theirs? I mean, he did play the lute for Pete’s sake.

I’m a big girl, I answered sourly, Ivan or Kevin, or—

Craven, he recited with a passably non-committal smile as he deliberately set one arm on the table but at my censorious glare also stowed his lute against the battered stuffing of the seat and stretched his other arm along the back so I could see both his hands. He knew I’d learned the hard way to be cautious. So why are you here at this time of night Terebithia? he continued, instead of safe and warm in your blankets, perhaps with someone to help warm them? I was taken aback, he was somber, not his over-energized self at all.

"Why should I tell you?" I asked, irritated at his nosiness.

He shrugged. No reason, but you shouldn’t be surprised when young men are solicitous of your interests. A pretty thing like yourself naturally draws the concerns of others.

Before I could stop myself I huffed a breath ―I’m not pretty, I know it, not compared to some anyway. Unh. Right.

He chuckled, pleased that his compliment had gotten a rise out of me. The roads are getting more perilous, he said in a prudently measured tone. Things are moving out there. Even Chicago may not be safe for you, not for much longer. A lot of beings know of your quest to find the answer, the key to put things back the way they were, and they fear if you succeed you may doom them to nonexistence.

Nah, nobody thinks I can do it. Except Somerville. Everybody else just thinks we’re nuts.

You’re wrong. There are those who know you too well, or have heard of you. They are not prepared to chance it. And they too are searching for this key. You are not alone in this. Unfortunately.

Maybe I should just go hide then, I fumed but I knew it could be true, I’d heard the rumors as much as anyone. And I knew the threats against me weren’t just coming from the usual suspects, but also from The Territories, where individuals who controlled exorbitant tracts of land had developed power-hungry thirsts for more. And threats had come from unnamed sources too, people I just couldn’t get a handle on. Things were moving out there for sure and soon, I knew, nowhere would be truly safe. I needed to find my answer and I needed to find my maybe-family and I needed to get us all okay. "So why are you here?" I asked him.

His non-answer was To visit the Giants, perhaps they’ll like the sound of my lute.

If they don’t they may just throw you in the stewpot.

I thought under the terms of your treaty with them they aren’t allowed to do that anymore.

I laughed but his face grew serious.

One hears rumors, Terebithia. Vast things move in the shadows, gods and godlings and their servants ―restively probing for something― or someone, fomenting discord not by intention but by their blindness. Mostly rumor and guesswork, no one really knows or else they aren’t saying.

He waited for me to respond, obviously trying to glean information out of me.

I don’t know anything... Craven. My role in the day-to-day operations of the Alliance is practically non-existent. Anyway, it sounds like stuff you’ve half made up.

True enough, Tabby, he chortled at my barefaced b.s.

I’d clocked him once ―to make him stop calling me Tabby Cat― so it became Tabby. I swear, sometimes you can’t win for losing.

I hope you’ll be careful, Tabby, out here so late.

I’m always careful. I took another sip of my chicory and tried not to frown.

Chris over there looks like he wants to bar the door and retreat to his room. Can I walk you home?

You don’t know where I live. Maybe I’m going in a different direction than you.

This is a marvelous way to find out.

At least he wasn’t all handsy like some I could name. I shook my head, he didn’t need to know where I lived. I’m going, alone though.

As you wish. You can’t blame me because I tried.

I slid out of the booth and stood over