Running Home – Chapter 11 (Penn and Sword series)

Penn’s eyes unfocus, his mouth left agape. He walks slowly, some horror haunting his frown as he crosses the room to the staircase spiraling upward, out of sight.

“Penn?” I ask, voice small.

He climbs the stairs without pause, without a word. I cast Francis a glance, the small furry thing still pressing its belly to the glowing rock. Content, it seems. Not attacking, at the very least. I follow Penn. After a few turns around the stone-brick stairwell, another room opens up under an arched doorway. It’s a smaller space than downstairs, fitted with a square table and four chairs. A little iron stove stands like a squat toad in the far corner, its slated grill glowing with a small, red-golden fire within.

Penn takes a seat, taps his fingers in irregular rhythms on the table, gaze downcast and his sticky mess of hair hiding most of his expression. If I couldn’t read him before, now it’s impossible. His stiff posture gives no energy, no sign of what he’s thinking. I want to ask so many questions, but I’m not sure how to break Penn’s silence.

His words echo through me. Gone. Their home is gone.

Is that why Francis and the other creepy-crawlies are in Excalibur? They can’t return home? But why attack us? What does that mean for the house? My roommates? Is it too dangerous to stay? Are we safe even now?

Penn keeps tapping an irregular rhythm atop the rough tabletop.

Unsure how to get through to him, I cross my arms tight to my chest and explore the rest of the room. On the left, a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves stand filled with jars of roots and leaves and dried flowers. Hanging herbs decorate the tops like upside-down bouquets, stems and leaves dried out. I examine the labeled and unlabeled jars. Dried green flowers. Crushed indigo leaves. Grainy gray substances. I can’t read any of the names, each word a curvy, dotted language like downstairs. Alien in every respect. Still, I pop off the lid of the gray sand and give it a sniff. Peppery, yet sweet. I immediately sneeze and replace the jar where I found it.

All these ingredients from other worlds… what would Eudora think?

I shake the question away. No, I can’t think like that.

The small room offers no other distraction. I settle at the table with Penn. He still doesn’t speak, as if his frown has glued his rampant mouth shut.

That I barely know him feels painfully obvious and awkward, this magic-man whisking me to another world. With everything that’s happened, caution dictates I shouldn’t be up here in this tower entertaining adventures and magic when I’ve witnessed, even directly felt, the dangers. I shouldn’t worry that the manic energy has left Penn. I shouldn’t miss it. But seeing the source of my mental distraction so idle, so troubled, is bringing back my rolling anxiety.

“Are you okay?” I finally ask.

Penn ceases his tapping. “Of course I’m not.”

“Can you… explain what happened?”

With a sigh, Penn sits up, still not meeting my confused stare. His voice is low, clipped. “They keep destroying worlds. Taking away homes. And for what? Why? Displacing an entire… species of creepy-crawlies.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that.”

“Who?”

When his stormy eyes lift, I stifle a gasp. The anger brewing in their cloudy gray depths feels palpable, as if his magic has zapped my bloodstream with ice. His words come out strained through gritted teeth. “Portal thieves.”

I’m not sure I should speak. But swallow and ask, “Who are they?”

“Thieves of portals. As the name suggests. They’ve run wild for… who knows how long… Longer than my lifetime.”

“But… how could they… destroy… whole worlds?”

Penn’s jaw twitches and he finally releases me from his channel of fury, eyes darting down. “I don’t know. That’s the troubling thing. I’ve never been able to stop them.” Again, he drops into quiet mental stewing.

Eudora used to do the same thing. When stumped over a homework question or brooding over a failed souffle, her usual animation and constant talk of the future would shut down completely. The only thing that got her speaking again was guiding her attention elsewhere.

But this seems bigger than school or souffles. Whole worlds on the line.

Cheesus, other worlds. My mind can’t quite wrap around the idea yet.

My palms go clammy, and I wipe them down my pant leg. “Did the thieves send the creepy-crawlies here, then? Like, an attack or something?”

“They couldn’t have. If the thieves knew how to portal to Earth, you would all be dead by now.”

I snort. “Well, I mean, we’re not defenseless. I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with the United States military, but—”

Penn laughs. Genuinely. He sits back in his chair, wiping at his eyes and shaking his head. “Your military against the portal thieves. Oh, what a spectacle.”

“Excuse me?”

Penn chuckles again. The anger seeps away from his face bit by bit. “Earth is my favorite plane. I told you. Your clashing climates. Your vast cultures. Your food, your music, your art. I adore you little humans, truly.” He casts me a quick wink.

My cheeks heat.

“But as much as you fight amongst yourselves with terrible weapons and clever strategies, you are weak in the face of what’s out there. Just look at how you humans react to invisible bugs. Extermination? Calling authorities?”

The bursting Phoenix Ivy fire-moths flare in my mind, and I can’t deny his words. What would a soldier do when faced with something so foreign? So impossible? If there are plants like that beyond Penn’s red door, what other worlds could there be? Animals, cultures, languages?

Monsters?

My stomach squeezes. “You… keep saying ‘humans.’ As if you’re not one.”

Penn pegs me with another imploring stare. Brow quirked high.

Leg shaking, I meet it. “Who… what… are you?”

The magic-man squints and leans forward. “You ask a lot of questions, Acantha Sword.”

I swallow, frozen by the frightening thought that I’ve been hanging out with an otherworldly creature. He looks so human, though. Two arms, two legs, human facial features, no extra fur or horns or antennae like Francis on his rock. And handsome, smart, talkative. Speaking English without trouble or defining accent. He could be another university student, just a few years ahead, that’s all.

Still, peeking out behind his still open shirt, the series of twisting roots seems more than ink on skin. Somehow a part of him? “What are your tattoos?”

“I like your questions,” he says. “They help me…” He grasps at the air, then his honeyed hair. “Think.” He gives a soft smile. “The others… well, they ask the wrong questions, don’t they? Or they don’t ask at all.”

I wait for more of an answer.

He folds his hands in front of him. “Does it matter to you? If I’m human?”

I consider it, chewing the inside of my cheek. “Maybe.”

“And if I’m not?”

“But you look—”

“One thing I’ve found,” he cuts me off, eyes unfocusing. “Across hundreds of worlds, is that this shape lends itself to a certain level of function. It’s amazing, actually. This same construction of bones and skin and perhaps not the same organs or number of toes, but always this relative form. Across so many portals.”

Heart hammering, I bite my lip. “So, you’re not human.”

Penn smiles. That sad, sad smile. “Right now, we have another mystery to unfold. The creepies.” His stormy eyes shift back toward the stairs, back down to Francis, no doubt.

I press my lips together, wanting to insist on answers, but at least he’s talking again.

Penn continues, “The creepies were displaced from their tunnel world. Cloaking themselves. How many, how few? Who’s to say?”

My back prickles. “Are the others safe?”

Penn shakes himself and stands to button his shirt. “I’m sure the creepies have left our housemates alone as long as they are awake. The creepies are on the defensive, after all. The true victims in all of this. But we should return, yes.” He starts down the stairs.

“They’ll leave us alone then?” I follow him down the stairs. “No more nightmares?”

“That’s one thing I can’t quite pin down. Perhaps I misjudged the creepies involvement in controlling your dreams. Many tunnel creatures are blind. It could be they just mistook your body heat as a source of nutrition. And your sleeping minds interpret them as entering your dreams. Or I misinterpreted what Sarah told me.”

“But why only attack while we’re dreaming? And why not all of us? Why this house? What do we do with them? They can’t just stay here, can they?”

“More and more questions. Has there ever been a human with more questions?”

Huffing, I fix him with a frown. “Maybe I’d stop if you gave me answers.”

At the red door, Penn smiles again. “I didn’t say stop, Acantha.”

My cheeks heat again.

“Come along,” he says. “Let’s check on the fragile humans.”