The Ever After

Chapter Twenty-Three: The City of Ether

MAY WOKE TO WET DROPS LANDING ON HER face. She blinked her eyes. Large green drops were falling from the sky, and John the Jibber was sitting beside her. He had her knapsack in his hands.

"Er, time to go, lass."

May sat up, her eyes darting to her bag. "What's happening?"

John laughed. "Just a little ectoplasm shower. Get yer house ghost up and let's go." He handed her the sack, as if that's what he'd been meaning to do. May looked at it for a moment, uneasy.

She shook Pumpkin awake. He grunted and sat up, rubbing his eyes and looking around. He grinned pleasantly at May, let out a long, leisurely yawn, then he stuck out his purple tongue to collect a few ectoplasm drops. "Can't I sleep a little longer?"

May groaned and pulled him up. They climbed the hill together behind John.

"Look lively, Pumpkin. There'll be no time fer yer laziness today," John chided.

Pumpkin stuck out his tongue at John's back, but sucked it in again when he saw May frowning at him. As they reached the ridge, and Pumpkin got a view of the city, he thrust his fingers into his mouth and dropped his mischievous mood altogether.

John had knelt down and was digging in the dirt, and now he pulled out a handful of worms and centipedes, then dropped them into May's hair and down into her bathing suit.

"Ah!" May jumped up and down, trying to brush them off.

"Stand still, girl!" John said, grabbing her wrist to stop her from jumping. "Do ye want to make it past the sniffing phantoms or not?"

May considered. Then she let her arms drop to her sides. "Now, I gathered up some mold this morning, and I've got this stuff on the bottom of my shoe that's been here for about fifty years. . . ." John reached beneath his shoe and pulled out a decayed mass of brown goo. Then he rubbed it over both hands and smeared it on May's arms and legs. May thought she might vomit. She retched a few times and held her nose.

"There, that gets rid of the living scent nicely. Now for me."

John reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny bottle of clear liquid, then squirted himself several times. May read the label: Crook-Be-Gone.

"Mr. Jibber, shouldn't this wait till we're closer to the city?"

"What do you mean, lass?"

"Well, won't it wear off before we get there?"

"My dear, it'll take us ten minutes to get to the city. Perhaps fifteen."

May blinked at him several times, then looked across the long wide plain separating them from the tiny city in the distance. It had to be hundreds of miles away. "Really?"

"It's right there." John pointed in the same direction she was already looking.

"But it'll take days to get there." She looked at Pumpkin, as if to verify she wasn't crazy.

Pumpkin, though he didn't need to cover up his normal ghost scent, had dug up a handful of worms anyway and was dropping them into his ragged shirt one by one. "The City of Ether's in a wormhole," he said absently, dangling a long slimy worm next to his neck. "Everybody knows that."

John started walking across the field, with Pumpkin traipsing along behind him with his worms, leaving May with no choice but to follow. She trailed behind, only noticing after several steps that something strange was happening to the view as they walked. The farther John and Pumpkin got from May, the bigger they seemed to get, compared to the city. Or was it that the city was getting smaller? Yes, the more they walked, the less and less the city looked like something huge in the distance and more like something tiny on the ground. May hurried to keep up with them, catching up breathlessly when they came to a halt. All three of them stared down at their feet. There was the city, the size of an anthill. It reached to May's shins and was surrounded by thousands of tiny curved pebbles stuck in the ground. A spiral pattern was furrowed in the dirt encircling the city scene.