IT WASN’T SO much the screeching noises that came from the king’s royal hunting grounds. Or the putrid smell of death. Or that we’d had to walk about a zillion miles up the river, far from the borders of Babylon. Or the fact that Bel-Sharu-Usur’s guards and wardum were all shaking with fright.
It was the darkness that gave me the willies.
We stopped at the tree line. Although the leaves rustled in the breeze and water flowed gently into the forest via dug-out streams and culverts from the Euphrates, a strange pitch-blackness hovered in the distance. A shimmering ribbon over the tree line. We’d seen it from the river, but up close it seemed to make the ground vibrate.
“There it is again,” Cass said. “That . . . thing.”
“What is that, Daria?” Aly asked.
“King’s hunting ground,” she said. “Animals inside. When mushushu escape from Ká-Dingir-rá, it went here. Now King Nabu-na’id is afraid. He will not hunt here, for the mushushu is vicious.”
“I wasn’t talking about the forest,” Cass said, pointing above the trees. “The darkness. Over the top.”
Daria looked confused. “It is Sippar, of course. You do not recognize?”
“Sippar’s a country?” Marco said. “You need to talk to them about their carbon emissions.”
“Sippar . . . was country,” Daria said, her head cocked curiously, as if she were teaching basic arithmetic to a twenty-year-old. She gestured in a wide circle. “Now is name for all . . . around us . . . You must not go near.”
“Everything around Babylon is called Sippar?” Aly scratched her head. “I think we’re missing something in translation.”
Bel-Sharu-Usur seemed to be taking an interest in this part of the conversation. He jabbered demandingly at Daria, who obediently answered. “What is he asking?” I said.
“He sees everything,” Daria said. “He is surprised you do not know Sippar. Everyone knows Sippar. Thus he wonders if you come from a place of magic.”
She looked up to the sky.
“Can we discuss this later?” Marco said, turning toward the woods.
“He’s right,” I added. “We’re on a schedule.”
“Please give Mr. Peepers a good-bye kiss from us,” Marco said, stepping toward the forest. “Next time he sees us, we’ll be with a dead moosh. And he’ll owe us a trip to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”
Marco and I heard it first.
We had gotten out ahead of Cass and Aly, and the suspicious rustling of branches drew us into a dead run. We lost the trail and ended up in a dense, dark area of thickly knotted trees. “Aly?” I called out. “Cass?”
“Ssssh,” Marco said, crouching low, his eyes darting in every direction.
The air filled with screeches. I couldn’t see the birds above us, but they were everywhere. And they seemed furious. “Yo, angry birds, chill,” Marco said.
“Maybe they sense the mushushu,” I said.
“What kind of name is mushushu anyway? Sounds like some old dance craze.” Marco stood and began moving his hips and arms awkwardly. “Come on, come on, do the mushushu . . .”
“Not funny!” I said. “What if it hears you?”
“That’s the point,” he said. “We flush it out.”
“And Aly and Cass?” I said.
“We’ll find them afterward,” Marco said.
As we moved deeper into the woods, I realized there wasn’t a moment in my life when I wished more for a cell phone.
Crack.
“What was that?” I asked.
“You stepped on a twig,” Marco replied.
“Sorry.” As I moved forward, I thought I saw a shadow skittering through the underbrush.
Marco stiffened. “That’s him,” he whispered. “Moo shoo pork.”
He put a protective hand on my arm. Slowly we inched toward the shadow. The bird noises seemed to be quieting, as if they were watching us. I tried to listen for something mushushu-like—which would be what? Hissing? Snorting? Growling? I heard none of those. But I did hear another sound, a dull roar from deeper in the woods, like a distant engine.
There are streams here, McKinley. That’s the sound of running water. Focus.
But the noise was growing louder, deeper, like radio static. Despite the clear sky, the sunlight seemed to be flickering. I glanced away from the shadow toward the noise.
Beyond the trees was the shimmering wall of black, up close. Way closer than I’d expected. It shuddered and shifted, as if someone had pulled a solid curtain behind the hunting grounds.
“It’s a lizard,” Marco was saying.
I spun around. “What?”
“The shadow? Behind the rock? It’s not Munchkin. It’s a big old—” Marco’s eyes narrowed. “Whoa. Who’s playing with the lights out there?”
The ends of his hair rose upward. The air was changing, the temperature dropping. I could hear strange noises, like voices sped up, mechanical roars, stuttering beeps, high-pitched scraping.
“Sounds like we’re near a highway,” I said.
Marco nodded. “Okay. This is freaky.”
Sippar was country. Now is name for all around . . .
Daria’s words were stuck in my head. And I began to think their meaning hadn’t been lost in translation. “Marco, we know that this place—Babylon—is traveling at the slow time, right?”
“Check,” Marco said.
“And according to Daria, they haven’t had outside visitors for thirty years,” I added.
Marco nodded. “Because everyone else sped ahead. Like us.”
“Okay, so say you’re a Babylonian and you want to go to, like, Greece,” I said. “Or Spain or Africa or Antarctica. What would happen to you if you tried? If the rest of the world sped up, then what’s out there—out where those countries are supposed to be?”
Marco fell silent, looking toward the black curtain. “I’m not sure it matters, dude.”
“No? I think we’re hearing us, Marco,” I said. “Sippar—that black thing—may actually be the line between play and fast-forward. We’re hearing the twenty-first century racing ahead.”
“You have an active imagination, Brother Jack,” Marco said.
“After the crack in time,” I barged on, “this area was isolated. It became a world by itself. With its own rules of space and time. Like Einstein’s spaceship. So that’s why they can’t travel. There is no next town. The next town is in another century.”
Marco sank into thought. “Okay, okay, say you’re right. This would be a good thing, no? Maybe we don’t have to swim through that dumb portal. We can just walk through the magic curtain!”
As he began jogging toward the darkness, I called out, “Are you crazy? Where are you going?”
“A short detour,” he shouted back. “Let’s see this thing up close!”
In a moment he was out of sight. And I did not want to be alone with a lurking wild mushushu.
I followed the sounds of his footfalls until they became impossible to hear. The eerie sound of Sippar was seeping along the ground like smoke, bouncing off trees. Its frequency was hurting my eardrums, upsetting my balance. I stumbled over a root and tumbled to the ground.
That was when I caught sight of Marco, crouching by the base of some destroyed mud-brick structure. It looked like it might have once been a wall, a fortress, a gate.
I wanted to yell at him, to tell him never, ever to run away like that again, but the words bottled up in my throat.
Marco was staring at a small plain that stretched out before us. On the horizon, maybe a hundred yards from us, the wall pulsed like a curtain. For a nanosecond I had a flashback to a time in Nantucket with my dad, where we saw the aurora borealis in the northern night sky, a huge ribbon of color waving like a rainbow flag. The blackness was a borealis with the color sucked out, a borealis with evil designs, moving, swallowing up the ground before it, uprooting trees, sweeping dust like a tornado.
Marco turned. “You ready for this, Brother Jack?”
“No!” I said. “I’m not ready. Wait. Ready for what?”
With the noise of a freight train, the blackness came hurtling toward us.