Lift, Scrub, Rinse, Stack.
Lift, Scrub, Rinse, Stack.
Lift (chink-chink), Scrub (Rrr-Rrr-Rrr), Rinse (slosh), Stack (chunk).
Lift (chink-chink), Scrub (Rrr-Rrr-Rrr), Rinse (slosh), Stack (chunk).
It had a beat, not totally unlike his roommate's outre music collection. You couldn't dance to it, but it beat starving.
Lift (chink-chink), Scrub (Rrr-Rrr-Rrr), Rinse (slosh), Stack (chunk).
Gerald would rate it a six, he'd decided a week ago.
Lift (chink-chink), Scrub (Rrr-Rrr-Rrr), Rinse (slosh), Stack (chunk).
Lif- (chink)
Lif- (chink)
Gerald sighed, and fished underneath. The ladle he'd been planning to wash next had caught on something.
He hadn't planned on being a dishwasher, at least not professionally. Of course, he'd been planning on graduating from UPitt. That had changed one night in the fog. He knew he'd started out on Forbes Avenue. He'd just left the O's with a six-pack of that microbrew crap Mary liked and an extra-large order of fries, and was making his way back through the clutter of boutique-like stores and restaurants that cluttered the space between UPitt and Carnegie Mellon universities. He's paused in front of the Carnegie museam when the fog, first romantic, thickened to pea-soup.
Laughing, he'd pretended to sip it. And then, not wanting to wander onto Forbes and get hit, he'd just stopped, waiting for the fog to thin enough to let the streetlights through. After ten minutes of no change, he'd started off slowly, feeling with his feet for the edges of the sidewalk. It had prevented him from falling into the stream, at least.
He hadn't realized it was a stream - at first he'd thought it the edge of the curb. But then the sound of water tossing itself merrily over stones came through the fog, and the sound of cars didn't. And then, as if washed way by the very sound of water, the fog lifted, curling into itself.
At first he thought it was a college prank. Tim, his roommate, was famous for them, everything from crazy-gluing a public phone handset down and triggering it's ringer as people walked by to the classic 'reassemble a car in the office' trick. Looking around the wilderness area he was in, dim light filtering from above, he was able to fool himself that something had been slipped into his drink, that he'd fallen asleep and been transported to outside of the city.
The stars betrayed his happy fantasy. Looking up, they swum in his vision, refusing to set themselves into the comfortable patterns he knew so well. For three summers in a row he had worked at the planetarium, selling tickets and cleaning the seats and floor. Nothing he had seen there would match the spray of stars staring down at him.
An hour later, when the second moon rose, he didn't even flinch.
*****
Gerald watched the moon rise as he drank a beer. It may have been microbrew stuff, but he was willing for anything then. The pizza he'd shared with Mary had been hours ago, and the beer went down well with the french fries dragged through its occompanying cheese sauce.
There weren't any cities nearby. If there had been any, then their lights would have shone upwards, dimming the sky. But it was a warm night, with a cooler mist thrown off by the stream, and trips taken with the Boy Scouts when he was younger were often less comfortable than this.
Gerald hadn't even realized he'd fallen asleep until he woke up. The offending stimulus was somebody trudging around behind him, stepping on sticks, tripping over a rock, and cursing under his breath.
Or at least, that's what he assumed was going on in that strange language. It had the rhythm of cursing, an easy grease on the words achieved only when the words are no longer a release from their shock value as much as the ritual of repeating them.
He chanced a look, slowly turning his head, and was relieved to see someone human. A short heavyset man was picking himself up some fifteen feet away, brushing dirt and leaves from his pants. Very short, Gerald decided when the unknown man stepped towards him - he'd be surprised if his visitor measured more than four feet in height.
Gerald wondered if he should announce himself or play dead, when the choice was taken away from him. The strange little man pulled something out of his pocket which turned out to be a lighter when opened. The other man raised the light, looking around, and saw him.
"Uh, Hi?"
The man flinched, startled, and dropped the lighter. After a moment, he grabbed it up off of the ground, and relit it. Then he spoke in some other language, a query.
Gerald sighed, and just shook his head. He stood up slowly and tried a shrug, to see if they at least spoke the same body language.
The other man looked at him for a few moments, and then grinned, shrugging back at him. He then started making hand gestures, pointing at himself, holding his hand a foot off of the ground, and then turning in a circle, hand over his eyes.
'He's looking for something... A short person? A doll?' Gerald shook his head, and looked around.
The other man went back to his searching as well. The two of them searched in the quiet left over from the bullfrogs and insects singing to each other, instinctually giving each other a different side of the area. After what seemed like ten minutes, a flash of white caught Gerald's eye. "Hm?"
The other man looked up as Gerald walked over to the white, and picked it up. It had been wrapped in some coarse brown cloth, and was a thin and slender doll of a woman in an elaborate gown. The head looked like porcelain, and the tip of one of the doll's elongated ears had been broken off and reglued. As Gerald straightened up, the other man gave a tired shout of happiness.
"An elf?" Gerald had read that hobbit book, once. Hoo-Boy.
The man invited him along, leading him to a fairly large cart, empty, tethered to a sleeping donkey. The stubborn donkey took about as long to get going as Gerald's '73 Ford back in Pittsburgh, he noted with a smile before he sat in the back, where some old bales of hay provided some cushion from the road.
Again, he woke up without falling asleep. This time it wasn't one man waking him up as much as a roar. Jumping to his feet to see where it was coming from, he barely escaped falling from the cart as the road they were following curved into view of the largest waterfalls he had ever seen. Torrents of water rushed over the top, tumbling down in fearful fury until crashing against rocks at the bottom.
"How big is that thing?"
His companion couldn't know what his words were, but his eyes were smiling and full of pride as they neared the edge of the cliff by the waterfall, the road meeting up with an impossible bridge leading to the other side. Gerald's hand clamped to the side of the cart, but he couldn't keep himself from staring at the sight. Poking out of the opposite cliff was a series of large, domed windows of some sort, and as the cart pulled up to a stable on top of the other side, he realized that his new friend must live in there.
The man climbed out of the seat, and beckoned for him to follow. Treading uncertainly in the darkness, he tried to follow his footsteps as they lead to a ramp leading into the earth.
The ramp went down until their heads were level to the ground, and then a bit further, where they ended at a door. The door, opened by a large, comic-opera keyring, opened into the ramp continuing downwards, switching back and forth, with archways every-so-often leading into large, silent rooms. Their way was lit by a series of dim lights, which the short man would turn off as they passed.
They finally reached the bottom, where his friend produced his keyring again and opened the door into a room of light and warmth. A woman, tall and slender as the doll but life-sized, looked up with releaf and spoke in their language again, first happily at the man, and then querilously at him.
The man spoke shortly, and held up his hand for Gerald to wait. So he did. Gerald saw him go around the corner, and then heard a door opening. After that, there was a sharp cry of high-pitched joy, after which the door shut again.
A moment later his companion reappeared without the doll, but with a pendant on a chain. A pantomine started, and Gerald quickly figured out that he was supposed to put it on. A reward for finding the doll? He shrugged again, and his friend shrugged back with a grin as Gerald slipped it over his head.
"There," said his host with relief writ large across his features, "now we can get started."
*****
Gerald woke up into utter darkness, and for a moment had to wrestle with a dream's end of being buried alive. After a second or two of flailing about in the bed, everything that had happened to him came back in a rush.
He tried to take comfort in believing that it had all been a dream as he reached for his nightstand, but he knew that Pittsburgh was never this dark or this quiet. The quiet of a grave. Reality came back with a concrete rush when, instead of his clock radio, his hand found the box of matches he'd left on the table when he'd gone to sleep.
Striking the match, he found the candle that had been the last thing he'd seen before he went to sleep.
The room took on an orange color scheme that danced across surfaces as he swung his legs out of the bed. The room he was in was a simple guest room consisting of a small bed with sheets and blankets that didn't quite match, a smallish wardrobe with a nasty nick in the side, a bedside table with a marred finish, and the sort of 'dead air' feeling a room gets when it isn't usually used even if it's kept clean. The floor was wooden and smooth to the touch of his bare feet as he stood up and got dressed.
Stepping out of his room, he saw Donovan in the living room down the hallway, and walked to join him. Donovan, looking much more rested than when they had met last night in the field, waved at him as he sipped something from a mug. Gerald waved back as another mug appeared in his other hand.
It wasn't magic, though, it was Donovan's wife Aalan. Aalan was elven, he guessed. Tall and abnormally slim, she was also pale as milk, her gentle cherry colored lips and short black hair almost shocking in contrast. Donovan, on the other hand, was short and dusky, although years of comfortable living left him with a chubby look which somehow was not accompanied by a paunch. If he had to guess a race, he'd say a hobbit. As he sipped his drink, he wondered about that. Was a mixed marriage like this normal for this world, or were the two flaunting tradition?
With a bang, one of the doors in the hallway slammed open, ejecting a green-pajama-clad girl who was carrying the doll he'd found last night. Donovan had said he had a young daughter named Susan. The black-haired girl took after her father's skin color but had the same slightly odd eye shape that her mother had.
Susan came to a stop when she noticed the strange man at the table. "Who're you?"
"This," spoke up her father, "is Gerald. He found Annabelle last night."
Susan stood here for a moment, and then gave him a bow. "Thank you! Annabelle gets very scared when she gets lost, and she can't sleep without me."
Gerald smiled. "You're welcome."
Susan grinned, and then ran over to her mother. "Pancakes! Yaaay!"
Gerald took another sip of his ersatz coffee, and found that he'd already drained the mug. "This is really good. What is it?"
"Coffee."
Gerald frowned for a moment. "Not any coffee I've ever had." He wondered if it was coffee, or if the translation pendant he'd been given last night was just feeding him a 'breakfast drink to wake up with' equivalent. After a moment he shrugged and poured himself another mug-full. It didn't really matter. "So, we're deep underground?" Seeing Aalan was beginning to move plates and platters of food to the table, he leapt up to help.
Donovan nodded. "Yup. This is the Seven Fairy Falls Restaurant. I own and run it, with the help of my family and hired help." Pride radiated from the man like heat off of blacktop on a summer day. "People come from near and far to eat here. Some say it's the ninth wonder of the world!"
"Number ten being his pride." The voice was rich with affection and humor.
Chanelle, Gerald remembered, was the name of Donovan's other daughter. After setting a crock of what seemed to be heated syrup on the table, he looked up.
She was tall, like her mother, but her father's influence had stopped her from being as severely slim as Aalan. Her hair was long, and mixed shades of red, orange and brown like leaves in fall. Her heart-shaped face peered out from behind her bangs with eyes that seemed to change color as she walked into the room with an easy grace. She was dressed in a solid white nightgown edged with lace that stood out crystal clear from her coffee-and-cream skin.
Gerald realized he had stopped breathing, and spent some attention to starting the lungs up again as he reminded himself that first impressions were always the most important. Somehow the song 'Chantilly Lace' was echoing in his head as he watched her walk forward. Suave and cool, he thought as he straightened up to greet her.
His right foot caught in one of the chairs at the table, tipping it over onto his legs. Feeling himself fall, he grabbed and managed to upend the warmed syrup all over himself before he crashed onto the floor.
At least some things don't change, he thought ruefully.
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