The “Stranger” looked human, but there were a few crucial differences. Its limbs were misshapen and coated with a bark-like substance. Two ungainly humps grew out of its back, as well as three tentacles, each black and deadly-looking. A fourth was lying spent on the ground — it had been used somehow to break up the mud. Its feet consisted of two sprawling flippers, and while its head was roughly the size of a human’s, it had no nose and one eye in its middle, a big, empty space with no pupil to speak of.
“Thanks for freeing us,” Lewis said, concealing his disgust. “How did you —”
“Never mind,” the creature replied, shy because of its hideous looks. “This mud will melt and the leeches will return. All of you must hurry to safety.”
“But we’re lost,” Adelaide groaned. “We don’t know where to go.”
“I’ve been following you,” the Stranger confessed. “And I know about your mission to Yellow Swamp. If you’re willing, I can lead you there.”
“Who are you?” Todrus demanded. “And why should we trust you?”
“There’s no time to explain,” the Stranger insisted, pointing to the ground whose surface was melting. “You’ll have to trust me. That’s all there is to it.”
Without further ado, the Stranger hurried off. As it moved, it dragged its feet against the soil and produced an ugly, slapping sound. For a moment the group hesitated, not knowing what to think of this monster. As the mud rose past their ankles, however, they nodded to one another and set off in its wake. If it wanted to hurt them, it would have done so already.
“Have you noticed something?” Adelaide asked a few minutes later. “None of us is bleeding.”
“So?” Alfonse jeered.
“She’s right,” Lewis said, examining his limbs. “I was bleeding when we were fighting the leeches. Yet, as far as I can tell, my cuts are gone.”
“It’s these outfits,” Todrus said. “They’ve bandaged your wounds. That Grumpel has come up with some terrific inventions.”
“Let’s test his other stuff,” Alfonse recommended, “and fix ourselves a meal.”
Everyone agreed, their stomachs rumbling. The last time they had eaten was in Grumpel’s office, and they had burned a lot of energy since. Unfortunately, the Stranger wouldn’t hear of resting — the mud was melting quickly and every second counted.
But they had to eat. Telling the others to continue marching, Lewis removed his food transformer, aimed it at the ground, and sprayed three times. Pop! The soil changed in front of his eyes. From mud it was transformed into a pinkish goop, hot to the touch and delicious-smelling. He gathered up a mound of it and chased after the others.
Todrus flicked his tongue. “This stuff is incredible.” He bolted down a juicy hunk. “The reaction is part hydrokinesis and part enzyme transfer, if I’m not mistaken.”
Gibiwink sighed. “Never mind the science. This goop is tasty!”
After eating a few mouthfuls, Adelaide ran forward and offered some to the Stranger. It was moving as fast as its webbed feet allowed and focusing hard on the path before them.
“You should eat something, too,” she said, handing it the goop.
“Thank you,” it replied. “That’s very kind of you.”
“How do you know where to go?” she asked. “Everything looks alike in this region.”
“The swamp speaks to me. I’m following its voice.”
“Oh.”
Adelaide reported her exchange with the Stranger to the others. Everyone wondered how a swamp could speak, and again they had serious doubts about their guide.
Todrus, though, squeaked with excitement. “It makes sense. It’s ion conductivity. The Stranger was present when Yellow Swamp blew up. It absorbed the ion clusters at large, and these are naturally drawn to the swamp, the same way iron is attracted to magnets.”
“And that’s why we landed so far from the swamp,” Adelaide added. “The chopper picked up the Stranger’s ion clusters and not ones coming from the swamp itself.”
They continued forward. At one point the question arose why Grumpel had decided to ruin this landscape. Lewis said the spill had likely been an accident, that Grumpel had maybe intended something smaller and not realized the effects would alter the region. The frogs disagreed: Grumpel didn’t make mistakes, not when something huge was at stake. The damage was intentional, in other words. Adelaide, for her part, kept watching the soil, worried it would melt at any moment, while Alfonse said that in Bombardier 19 Dr. Gong breeds dinosaurs in the Arctic region and changes the climate to keep them alive …
Everyone ignored him — a pity as it turned out.
Adelaide spotted the wall of haze first, about a mile in the distance. “Excuse me,” she called out. “What’s that cloud up ahead?”
“It’s the Pother,” the Stranger said, breaking off its concentration. “Did I mention it was dangerous?”
The group moaned. “Dangerous?”
“Lethal,” the Stranger declared.
Lewis studied the obstruction. “How close will we go to it?”
“We’ll be walking right through it,” the Stranger told him. “And we’ll be lucky to escape without someone disappearing. I just hope we reach it before the mud gives way.”
The group looked down. By now the mud was up to their calves. If they didn’t make it to the Pother soon, they would be bobbing in the muck again with the leeches in pursuit.
Some twenty minutes passed. Their legs were aching and they wanted to rest, but the mud was rising with each passing second. By now its depths had liquefied, too, and a mass of leeches was swimming beneath them. Only a foot of frozen mud stopped them from attacking. And to add to their troubles, the Pother towered above them.
It wasn’t normal. Neither solid, gas, or liquid — nor animal, mineral, or vegetable, for that matter — it rose from the ground straight into the heavens and stood before them like a mountain range. Never mind its size (it overcrowded the sky), never mind its colour (it was like a blanked-out rainbow), and never mind the sounds it made (it was silent and deafening at the same time) — these features weren’t as worrying as its projection of … futility. The more its outline came into focus, the more it seemed that nothing mattered, that laughter, tears, victory, failure, love, and hate were all the same, life and death, as well … life and death especially.
“I don’t like this,” Adelaide whispered.
“It smells of … nothing,” Alfonse observed.
“My guess is,” Todrus mused, “its atoms have been involuted.”
“Is ‘involuted’ a real word?” Gibiwink snapped.
“Of course it is,” Todrus insisted. “It means the collapse of matter as we know it, like a bag that isn’t a bag but the empty space inside it.”
“A bag of what?” Gibiwink demanded.
Before Todrus could answer, the Stranger drew them to a halt.
By now they were fifty yards away from the Pother. Unlike the usual bank of mist, which was there one moment and gone the next, the Pother was like a barrier … no, actually, like an open gate. Lewis stared into its depths. As hard as he strained, he couldn’t make out its interior, couldn’t see any trees or grass or anything. The roots of his hair tingled like crazy, as if they were hooked up to an electrical socket.
“We’ll need a rope,” the Stranger announced. “One long enough to bind us together.”
“We didn’t bring one,” Lewis answered. “Can we just hold hands?”
“We need a rope,” the Stranger repeated, “with knots that will hold no matter what. If one of us slips for even an instant, he’ll never come back. And I mean never.”
“Let’s search our manuals,” Adelaide suggested as the group shivered at the Stranger’s words. Opening her belt, she took her booklet out. “Let’s see. Refrigeration, relaxation, remembering,” she read aloud from the index. “Ribbon, riches, here we go, rope. We’ll need a drop of polyalienamethylene, a pinch of alienamoxocin, and a pentalienachlorophyll pill.”
“Here they are,” Alfonse and Lewis said, producing three vials between them.
“You need to hurry,” the Stranger advised. “The mud is getting thin.”
Their guide was right. The mud reached past their thighs. The frozen layer was only six inches thick, and below it the leeches were massing together. Some were battering the barrier to break it up faster.
“Let’s make that rope quickly!” Adelaide said with a shudder.
They mixed the chemicals in with some mud. Seconds later there was a puff of smoke and a pool of liquid plastic appeared. When Adelaide pinched this substance and tugged it slightly, it started stretching like mozzarella cheese. She shaped a circle with her thumb and index finger and pulled the plastic through it as she tugged it further. It was forced into a tubular shape and, stretching three yards, five yards, ten, began to resemble a makeshift rope. By the time she produced thirty yards of the stuff, the material had stiffened into something like nylon.
“It’s strong,” Todrus said, testing the substance. “And as good as any rope I’ve seen.”
“Then let’s use it!” Alfonse cried, eyeing the leeches below.
“Can anyone tie knots?” Adelaide asked, flinching as a leech rammed the mud beneath her.
Lewis grasped the rope. He had learned to tie knots from an early age, understanding they weren’t all that different from locks. That was why he arranged the group in a line, separating everyone by six feet. He then looped the rope about their waists and secured it with a “lobster pinch” — the strongest knot in existence. Within minutes they were fastened to one another. A good thing, too, since the mud was cracking up.
“They’re breaking through!” Adelaide shrieked as a leech smashed the surface and scrabbled with its suckers.
“Follow me!” the Stranger cried. “And just keep moving, no matter what!”
Wading through the mud, it crossed into the Pother. Todrus followed, then the Pangettis, Lewis, and a nervous Gibiwink.
They heard the mud dissolve behind them. A mass of leeches flew into the air, slurping, burping, and stabbing with their suckers. Lewis felt one of them graze his neck. When another three lunged, he threw himself forward. The Pother absorbed him as the ground gave way and with a gasp of fury the leeches vanished.
Caught inside the Pother, Lewis glanced around him. Whatever the substance was — mist, gas, vapours, shadow — it was impossible to stare into, however hard he peered. His friends were invisible, as were his arms and legs — he couldn’t spot his fingers when he held them to his eyes. This wouldn’t have been shocking had the Pother been black, but it was white, bright, bedazzling, in fact, as if he were standing at the heart of a light bulb.
“Alfonse!” he called out. “Isn’t this weird?” He received no answer but was bombarded with sound — “FONSE FONSE ISSSNNN THISSSS IIISS EEEEERRD!” The lesson was clear: within this Pother, they were on their own.
Falling silent, he “followed” the rope. Because the ground was invisible, walking wasn’t easy. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t help. And when something brushed against his leg — it was probably Alfonse who had stumbled briefly — he yelled in alarm, the sensation was so strange.
He counted a thousand steps. That done, he counted a thousand more, not just once but ten times over. Lewis was tired, and his legs, if they existed still, were sore. He hoped to reach their destination soon unless — the thought struck him — he had broken loose of the others and was wandering stupidly about on his own. The idea was so frightening that he started to panic until the rope reminded him he was joined to his friends.
No sooner had his panic waned than he felt the presence of something else. Not his friends, that would have been fine, but something odd and … hair-raising.
It was calling his name in a ghostly voice. “Lewis Castorman, Lewis Castorman!” There! A shadow was taking shape, like a vault of some type … it was an XPJ! Lewis tried to work it open — he could see its parts and move them at will. Yes, the tumblers were rolling and the bolts were slipping back. The door was opening and … what was that?
A human head stared back at him.
He strained his eyes. The head belonged to … his father!
“Dad, are you okay?” he whispered.
“DAADAADDDAADDD … YERYERYERYERYER … OHOHOHKAYKAYKAY” came booming back as the head began to fall apart, losing its eyes, ears, nose, and hair until nothing remained except a grinning skull. A second skull appeared, then another, and another, until he was surrounded by a crowd of them, their sockets black, their smiles blood-curdling. One skull bore the face of Ernst Grumpel! Its mouth yawned open and sprayed a chemical cloud.
Lewis missed his footing and hit the ground. Aha! So he was solid still! And his friends were near. These thoughts chased the phantom skulls away.
What were they? A mirage? And would they return? Lewis couldn’t bear to see them again — they had been horrible, grinning in a vault like that. His worries mounted.
Wait! Was the Pother thinning? No doubt about it, it wasn’t as empty and, there, he could see someone’s outline ahead.
“You can relax,” the Stranger said. “The worst is over.”
“Lewis,” Alfonse murmured, “can you hear me?”
“Sure.”
“This will sound pretty weird, but I saw The Bombardier. I could have touched him he was standing so close.”
“I know what you mean.”
“But he tried to kill me,” Alfonse gasped. “He bared these fangs and complained I read too many comics.”
“I saw Beethoven,” Adelaide told them. “He said my playing is an insult to his genius.”
Lewis nodded. The Pother toyed with people’s thoughts, creating fear in place of pleasure. The worst part was that it divided its victims. Suffering was bad enough, but the worst thing was to face it alone.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said to his friends.
They nodded back, too tired to speak.
The Pother was on its last gasp now. It was yellowing at its edges and spiralling off. With a final whoosh, it ended abruptly as they entered a landscape that exploded with colour.
When they were finally free of the rope, the group sank to the ground.