The Sock - Book 1: Journey: Adventures in Parallel Dimensions, #1

By Sigur-Björn

An Ancient Secret - A Deep Mystery - A Parallel Dimension - And One Guy—looking for his sock.

Nobody expected Steven Ph. Bearlyman to amount to anything. He had no talent, no job, and no prospects. But he had a sock. An old sock. And a very special sock this turned out to be, coveted by a pandimensional race of people—once the rulers of Earth, but now departed.
We're talking about the Romans, here. Julius Caesar and his peeps.
Beside a bunch of buildings, the Romans left behind an obscure artifact that has the power to unlock the mystery of life, and grant universal dominance to its possessor: An old sock, now owned by Steven Ph. Bearlyman. The Romans had it, they lost it, and now they want it back.
Crawling into a dryer to look for his missing sock, Steven accidentally discovers a gateway to a parallel dimension, and is immediately thrust into the middle of a multidimensional plot that has been thousands of years in the making.
Now the fate of the world—all the worlds—rests in the hands of this lanky loner from Los Angeles. Only he can save us. But first, he must find his missing sock.
The Sock, or Steven Ph. Bearlyman's Adventures in Parallel Dimensions is an epic saga, spanning several books, about the world's greatest mystery: Why do only socks disappear from dryers? Why not boxers, bras, or bib overalls?
If you like action, mystery, and just plain laughing out loud, you'll love this hilarious series that will forever change the way you look at your wardrobe.
Discover the secret behind the history and the mystery of life by securing a copy of Book One of The Sock today. The Adventure Starts Here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nomads Unlimited Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393134299

Book preview

Steven Ph. Berryman was a misfit. He was born a misfit, grew up a misfit, and in about an hour or so, he would disappear a misfit.

But he didn’t know that.

It was night.

A dull night.

A dull, uninspiring night on the Westside in Los Angeles, California.

There is no way to undersell just how desperately dull and uninspiring this night really was. You’ve had a night like this; we all have. If you are a happy-go-lucky type, you have the good sense to stay in and order pizza. If you’re a brooding poet who despairs over the human condition on the best of days, this kind of a night might finally send you over the edge, and you decide to end it all in the village pond, town creek, or city sewer.

The sky was gray on this particular night on the Westside in Los Angeles, with low hanging clouds further dampening the energy, threatening rain without ever delivering.

That kind of a night.

Except for the untimely (if entirely predictable) death of a minor poet, nothing big ever happens on a night like this. There just isn’t enough energy in the air for the collective consciousness to drum up a significant event. Nefarious organizations don’t steal elections on a night like this, volcanoes have the good sense to lie dormant, and your favorite entertainment channel leads with a story about a semi-scandalous thing done by someone who is almost famous for being almost famous.

No energy.

Definitely not enough energy to change the course of history and humankind’s understanding of the universe. Not even close.

Yet, that’s exactly what was about to happen on the Westside in Los Angeles on this most uninspiring of nights.

Acreaky, old, mustard-yellow ’73 Pontiac Firebird cruised down the street, music blaring from its speakers in fierce competition with the backfiring engine. On the radio, a group of sensitive poet types were waxing lyrical about the perils of love, and just how badly it can hurt.

Didn’t Steven Ph. Bearlyman know just that.

This was the name of the driver, Steven Ph. Bearlyman.

Sitting behind the wheel of the rust-eaten Firebird, Steven cranked the radio up to find further solace in the words of those erudite poets of the airwaves.

Not much chance of them ending up in the village pond. They’d nailed down this whole human-condition business in their timeless verse, and according to them, someone out there somewhere was crying at this very moment.

"Ooohhh, look at my face

My face has a trace

Of tears down the cheeks

I’ve been crying for weeks"

. . . the singer proclaimed.

Steven knew exactly how the poor man felt, because he too was crying. There weren’t actual tears streaming down his face, but there might as well have been. If you happen to be an emotionally stunted male—and if you are male, that’s what you are— you know that feeling like crying is as close as you’ll ever get to actually crying.

And Steven felt like crying.

Because of love.

So he sang along to the song on the radio. Let’s make that sang along. If you’ve ever been around when an asthmatic goose is being strangled—and who hasn’t—you get the idea of what Steven’s singing was like.

Steven was in his midtwenties. While not exactly handsome, he was not bad looking either. He was lanky in a way that made him look taller than he was, with an angular face, pale skin, and hair that seemed to be locked in a perpetual battle between red and dirt-blonde. He had a character look. Special, you might say, although Steven himself was under the impression that he was butt-ugly.

The traffic light ahead was about to change, and despite a hollering protest from the clutch, Steven forced the car into third gear and floored the pedal. By the time the engine got the message, the Firebird had completely failed to make the light before it turned red.

On the radio, the DJ said something about the lyrics of the song being a direct translation from a newly discovered Latin poem from the time of Julius Caesar.

Steven looked at the glass ornament hanging from the rearview mirror. An equation claiming that 7 × 7 = 7000 was etched into the glass. It had been left there by the Firebird’s previous owner and Steven had kept it, mainly because the equation made about as much sense as his life.

Things hadn’t been going Steven’s way lately. By his own estimate, his luckless streak had been going on for about two decades, give or take. If he wasn’t flunking out of school, he was getting fired from a job or tripping over a black cat. In short, he didn’t know how to adult. Not a clue.

Mind you, when he was growing up, Steven hadn’t known a great deal about how to child either. In truth, bad luck didn’t bother him all that much. He was so used to things going against him that he’d long since stopped categorizing things like getting a parking ticket, being hit in the face by a stray baseball, or accidentally swallowing a jellyfish as bad luck. It was just life, and it had become the norm for him.

He was sort of hoping that swallowing a jellyfish would be just a one-time thing, and if he stayed away from the Pacific Ocean, the odds were with him.

What really did bother Steven was the stage he was at now: when he felt like crying.

Because of love.

That, he couldn’t take. Happened a lot, though. In fact, it had just happened hours earlier and was the reason Steven was now headed to the laundromat.

But as he parked his Firebird outside a laundromat on Venice Boulevard, the strain on Steven’s malfunctioning tear glands was about to become the least of his worries.

Because he was about to disappear.

Millennia ago, seven great civilizations on Earth each made a sock.

One sock per civilization. Seven single socks. Not pairs.

This is true.

The first sock that was ever made—the first sock in the history of the whole world—was red. That really is it as far as information on this particular garment is concerned.

Where was it made?

Who knows?

When was it made?

A long time ago.

Unsatisfactory information? Sure. But it gets better, because not only is the color of the next sock known, the location has been nailed down, as well as the approximate time the thing was made.

The sock in question—the second sock ever made—was orange, and it was made in Mesopotamia. You don’t have to be geographically challenged to struggle to point at Mesopotamia on a map, but we’re talking Iraq/Iran territory here. This orange sock was made by the Sumerians, who ruled the roost in ol’ Mes at the time. This happened way, way back in the something-hundred BC. In fact, it happened so far back in the BC, that the AD was but a twinkle in the Good Lord’s eye at the time.

The next specimen in the chronology of sock making was a yellow garment made on the banks of the Nile by the Egyptians. They were followed by the Indians who made a green sock on the subcontinent.

A good few hundred years later—still way in the BC, mind you—the Chinese fashioned a blue sock on the banks of the Yangtze.

Next up were the Greeks.

Greece is often referred to as the cradle of civilization, which it isn’t, proved by the fact that the Greeks are sixth on this all-time civilization list of sock makers.

Lots of civilization-type stuff happened before the Greeks came along. And just like there is no medal for placing sixth in the shot put at your local track-and-field meet, you can’t be labeled the cradle of civilization if there are at least five bona fide civilizations beating you to the punch.

Still, there the Greeks were, at number six, and they made a purple