The Crossroads
“This is so cool! It’s like the web a spider makes when you give it caffeine!”
Clea and the other women looked at Holly with varying degrees of surprise and confusion.
“This place,” she explained, gesturing to the chaotic network of paths between dimensional portals that Elizabeth had transported them to. There was no rhyme or reason to the layout of the pathways, nor did gravity play a factor in their alignments, as some curved up and over or under their neighbors, the portals they led to flipped on their axes, as were the images of the worlds beyond. “It’s like when NASA gave those spiders all those different drugs and then recorded the kind of webs they wove. The ones who got LSD made webs even more geometrically regular than a normal one. The ones on marijuana and sleeping pills just gave up halfway through and wandered off. But the ones they gave caffeine to spun bizarre webs that abandoned the ‘hub and spoke’ model altogether and were filled with random, disorganized cells. That’s what this place reminds me of.”
“Great,” Elizabeth said. “Someone remind me to lay off my morning joe when I get back home.”
Clea was glad Elizabeth could follow what Holly was saying. She herself was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of a space program giving arachnids drugs just to see what would happen.
Meanwhile, Margali chimed in with, “Why is she here, again?”
Clea answered her with a silencing glare. Apparently, no one had ever told the green-skinned sorceress not every thought that went through her head needed to come out of her mouth.
“Well, we might as well get this show on the road,” Elizabeth said, the Coronet of Power shining on her brow once more, an outfit of low-cut, curve-hugging red buckskin complete with fringes replacing her parka and jeans. A fur-lined cape now flowed from her shoulders and sandals adorned her feet. A necklace of bones graced her throat and a worn-looking bag hung from one hip. Her long black hair, now unbound, fell past her waist. In response to the other women’s looks, not all of them complimentary, she shrugged. “Hey, you wanted the Talisman. You got her.”
“I’m guessing the Talisman doesn’t see much action in wintertime,” Holly said brightly, attempting to lighten the mood.
“The Talisman wouldn’t see any action at all anymore if it were up to me.”
With that, Elizabeth turned and led them a short distance along the road on which they’d appeared, ignoring the many branches they passed that led off to portals or to their own multi-branched pathways.
Soon they came to a hub where several of the roads met. There, an improbable tree grew, with a thick gray trunk from which hundreds of arms sprouted, their hands all pointing in different directions. Holly made a disgusted face and Margali wrinkled her nose in distaste, though Clea knew the Sorceress Supreme of the Winding Way would have seen many equally strange things during the course of her magical career, just as Clea herself had.
“This,” Elizabeth announced, “is the Crossroads.”
“The… weird, gross tree?” asked Holly, somewhat timidly after Elizabeth’s earlier rebuff.
“The whole place. The tree is just the… anchor, I guess you’d call it? Those who wander here without a navigator will always find themselves circling back to the tree, no matter how far or long they’ve walked. It’s the alpha and omega of the Crossroads – the first thing you see when you get here and the last thing you see when you die here. You see all those hands?”
Clea looked to where Elizabeth had gestured, as did the other women. The hands were not all human. Some were furred and clawed, some bore talons, some more than five fingers, some fewer. There were webbed hands, and scaled ones, and paddle- and spoon-like appendages which looked unlike any hand Clea had ever seen. They seemed to multiply as she tried to count them, the tree growing taller to accommodate the increasing number. She wondered if that was an optical illusion, or a premonition.
“They say each hand belonged to someone who came to the Crossroads and never left. We want to make sure none of our hands become ornaments on the universe’s ugliest holiday tree.”
“But what is the Crossroads, exactly?” Holly asked. “I know it’s a dimension that leads to all other dimensions, but… how?”
“You practice magic and you’re asking how a place like the Crossroads can exist?” Elizabeth asked, quirking a brow.
“Magic has rules,” Holly retorted.
Elizabeth gave a half-nod, half-shrug, conceding the point. “The Crossroads probably does too – it’s just that no one’s been able to figure them all out yet. But basically, the Crossroads is ‘a nexus of worlds, a realm of overlapping realities, a convergence of choices’. Although, for those trapped here, it’s just another hell.”
“Let’s not get trapped here, then,” Holly said, and Margali, who’d been silent up until now, tapped her staff twice lightly on the roadway to signal her agreement.
“Hear, hear.”
“That also means staying on the path and keeping away from the portals. Though you won’t necessarily get hurt if you step off a path. You might just fall forever. There’s more than one way to be snared by the Crossroads.” Elizabeth was looking pointedly at Holly as she said it.
“Yeah, of course,” Holly replied, her tone implying that it was the most obvious thing in the world and the other woman was a bit dense for even bringing it up. “Stay on the path. Fairy Tale 101.” Clea noted that Holly waited until Elizabeth turned away before rolling her eyes, though.
Elizabeth spent some time considering each of the pathways that branched out from the Crossroads tree, her eyes closed and her head cocked as though she was listening to something the other women couldn’t hear.
Which would be anything other than their own footfalls, voices, and breathing, for the Crossroads were eerily quiet otherwise. Clea wondered if it would be different the closer one got to a portal, but here at the tree, silence reigned. Straining to listen for noises in the distance only resulted in the onset of a low-pitched ringing in her ears.
“I guess it’s more like the spider on ADHD meds,” Holly said, mostly to herself. “Or maybe both.”
“I’m sorry?” Clea asked, unsure if she had heard correctly.
“This place. I said it was like the web a spider hopped up on caffeine would make, but that was before I saw that there actually is a hub and spoke of sorts. Namely, the hand-tree. The only other web that had a hub and spoke but was still super disorganized was the one the spider on Benzedrine made. So I guess this place would be what a cosmic spider god who’d consumed too much stardust and moon cheese would shoot out of its butt.”
“Speak English,” Margali demanded, frowning.
Holly shrugged. “I thought I was.”
Just then, Elizabeth turned her attention back to her companions. “This way.”
Having no reason to doubt her, and glad to let all discussion of spiders fall by the wayside, the others followed when she began walking down one of the twisting pathways. Clea noticed as she passed the Crossroads tree that the hand pointing down this road had an eye on the end of its fingertip. As she walked by, it winked at her. Clea looked away quickly, shivering.
Following pathways in the Crossroads was like hiking in an Escher painting or traipsing along a Möbius loop. When roads curved above Clea’s head, she couldn’t be sure if the roadway was upside down, or if she was. The thought made her nauseous, so she did her best to keep her eyes on the path ahead of her, focusing on Holly’s heels.
Holly, who was following Elizabeth, didn’t share either Clea’s reservations or her dubious stomach, apparently. She craned her neck, trying to see down every branch and into every portal they passed. Some of the portals were so far away, they were just open mouths, glowing orange or green or purple like a carnival ride. But others were closer. So close, in fact, that the worlds inside could be seen, and if one were still enough, heard.
Holly stopped several times to do just that, which in turn caused Clea to stop abruptly, which then angered Margali, who was bringing up the rear. And then Elizabeth would turn around to see why they weren’t following and glare at them all.
But none of that deterred Holly, and Clea supposed she couldn’t blame the young witch. This was the first time she’d ever been in any dimension outside her own, and to see so many worlds that weren’t Earth would naturally pique both her sense of wonder and of curiosity.
Of course, they had a saying on Earth that curiosity killed the cat. Clea imagined it killed a lot of other things, too. Relationships, for one. It certainly had for her. If she hadn’t wanted to see what Stephen was up to while she was away…
Lost in her own dark thoughts, Clea didn’t immediately notice when the heels in front of her disappeared. She didn’t notice anything amiss, in fact, until the screaming began.