InterWorld by Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online Page B

feet the chaos continued. Geometric shapes rolled and tumbled, changing into different forms or merging into one another; colors pulsed; the air carried the scents of honey, turpentine, roses…it was like a 3-D collaboration between Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Jackson Pollock. With a liberal dose of Heironymus Bosch and the really cool old Warner Bros. cartoons thrown in for good measure.
    So much for pleading insanity, I realized. I truly wasn’t lying on a gurney watching a mind movie while waiting for some doctor to put a padded stick in my mouth and pump enough volts through my skull to revive the Frankenstein monster. Nope. This was real . It had to be. No one, sane or insane, could imagine all this.
    It wasn’t just my eyes that were overwhelmed. There was a continuous cacophony going on—things creaking, bells tolling, chasms yawning, pits slurping…. I stopped tryingto identify all the sounds, just as I gave up trying to see everything going on. I’d need eyes not just in the back of my head but on top of it and in the soles of my shoes as well.
    And the smells! I was staggered by a searingly intense whiff of peppermint, followed by the smell of hot copper. Most of them I couldn’t identify. A hefty portion of the sights, sounds and smells were synesthetic—I could hear colors, could see tastes. Old Mr. Telfilm down the street claimed to be synesthetic, and was constantly telling anyone who would listen about how sharp the sky smelled or how the taste of pasta was turquoise and sounded C flat. Now, finally, I knew what he meant.
    I realized that Jay had hold of my arm with his good one and was shaking it. “Joey! Listen up—we’ve got to get moving. You don’t have protective gear—you won’t last long in the In-Between without it.”
    “The what?” I reluctantly turned my attention away from what looked like really neat graphic imagery—huge towers forming and rising, only to melt into quicksilver lakes and start over. Jay grabbed me and fastened his metal gaze on mine. “We’ve got to go! I can’t get us back to InterWorld Prime with my arm messed up this way. The pain is too distracting, and any drugs I take will make it too hard for me to concentrate. You’ll have to find the way through.”
    I looked at him in utter astonishment. About fifty feet away a trapezoid chased and cornered a smaller rhomboid,then “ate” it by leisurely flowing around and over it. Directly above me an ordinary casement window suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Its curtains peeled back and the window slid up, revealing a howling blackness beyond it from which issued piteous screams, groans and cries. It was either an open window on Hell, I decided, or a look inside my own mind at this point.
    I didn’t know which was worse.
    “How can I find the way through this—this—what did you call it?”
    “The In-Between,” Jay said, his voice muffled through the metal mask. He was holding his injured arm with his other one now. The wound wasn’t bleeding much, but it definitely looked like it needed more than a few Band-Aids. “It’s the interstitial folds between the various planes of reality. Call it ‘hyperspace’ or a ‘wormhole,’ if you want. Or it’s the dark spaces between the convolutions in your brain or the place where the magician keeps the rabbit before he pulls it out of his hat. Okay? It really doesn’t matter what you call it—what matters is getting through it and back to InterWorld Prime. That’s what you’ve got to do, Joey.”
    “You’ve really got the wrong guy,” I tried to tell him. “I couldn’t find the back of my hand if you wrote directions on my palm.”
    “Because your talent doesn’t lie in navigating the planes—it lies in navigating between them. And that’s where we arenow. Pay attention,” he continued, overriding me when I tried to interrupt. “The In-Between is a dangerous place. There are—creatures—that live here, or partly here. We call ’em