Eleni joined me and we strolled right on past the house where Larry had guessed the gate was likely to be. Then we stopped at the next house to sniff at the roses in a bush just a step or two into the yard. I put the lens to my eye and casually glanced back to check if the old lady was still watching.
Oh yeah: She was standing by the rail of the porch, her arms folded over her chest, and she was scowling directly at us.
"We'll have to go around the back of the block," I told Eleni.
Luckily, there were no paranoid-about-someone-stealing-their-flowers neighbors on the other street. I hoped our nosy lady hadn't moved to her back porch.
We cut through one yard, then had to detour around some laundry lines.
Larry plucked a sock off the line and started eating it.
"Stop it," I hissed at him.
"What?" he said. "I'm hungry. This is what spreenies eat: freshly laundered socks."
It explained a lot.
We had to squeeze through a hedge to avoid a fence. But when I put the lens to my eye, I saw the elven gate. "There it—"
Eleni yelped. Probably Larry did, too, but I couldn't hear him because a dog started barking. A dog that looked like a cross between a German shepherd and a grizzly bear. A dog that threw itself against the flimsy fence that was all that separated us from him. He was barking fiercely, like he was saying in dog-talk, "Fresh meat! Fresh meat! Fresh meat!"
We backed away from the fence—we didn't want that yard anyway, but the one that backed up to it, which was where the gate was. But like the nosy, crabby woman who suspected us of being flower thieves, that didn't satisfy the dog's territorial instincts.
"Nice doggy," Eleni said in a soothing voice. "Nice doggy."
She didn't convince any of us.
"My, what a fierce temper that dog has," Larry said. He'd been startled enough to drop what was left of the sock, and he was hovering anxiously behind me, keeping me between him and the dog's temper.
"Dogs can see spreenies?" I guessed.
"Oh yeah."
And eat them, too, I was willing to bet from Larry's edginess.
The dog was still barking and I was sure someone was going to come out to investigate and we were going to be stopped short just moments before we would have had success.
"Which direction does the gate work?" I asked Larry.
"Front to back. We need to all hold hands to make sure Eleni doesn't get left behind. My, what big teeth that dog has."
I could leave Eleni behind? Thank you for that information, Larry. After all, it was for her own good.
I had to turn around to face the gate. It looked just the same as ever, appearing to lead through to nothing more interesting than the neighbor's hydrangea bush, but I stepped toward it, trusting it would bring me to Kazaran Dahaani.
"My," Larry said, "what long legs that dog has."
"Larry," I couldn't help delaying to point out, "you're sounding like Little Red Riding Hood."
"No," Larry said, "I mean:
What long legs he has.
"
The hysterical twang of his voice made me glance over my shoulder just as the dog cleared the fence.
Eleni squealed in terror as the animal charged us.
I couldn't leave her behind with that vicious dog.
I grabbed her hand.
Larry caught hold of my hair.
And we all fell through the gate together.
I ran smack into something.
Escaping through the archway, my only concern had been to avoid becoming kibble specially formulated for ... well, whatever comes after
large
dogs.
Humongous, snarling, slobbering, can-eat-small-children-in-a-single-bite dogs?
Whatever. I'd been concentrating on not becoming any creature's lunch. With one hand, I was holding the lens to my eye so I could see; with the other, I was pulling my grandmother along behind me; and all the while I could still hear the furious barking. And I was hoping that was some sort of acoustical illusion of passing between worlds—because the quality of the light had
changed, and I knew I had crossed over to Kazaran Dahaani. As all of this was going on—
pow!
—something and I collided.
Because of my panic, the image of what I'd run into didn't immediately make it from my retina to that part of my brain that makes sense of visual input. I had an impression of pale limbs, sparkles, and a flash of red before I went sprawling onto the ground, landing on someone, still dragging Eleni with me.
In Kazaran Dahaani, I didn't need glasses to see, which was good because I'd dropped the lens upon impact. From my position on the ground, I could clearly make out the fur on the rump of the dog as it leaped overhead to avoid the obstacle formed by Eleni and me and whoever we'd mowed down. I was aware of the dog skidding to a dusty stop on the path beyond us, then doing an about-face, and curling its doggy lips into a snarl directed—I was certain—at my throat. And I could hear a girl's high-pitched, hysterical screaming. Wasn't me, wasn't Eleni, wasn't the person with whom we'd collided.
Oh. That was okay then; it was just Larry. He was hovering in the air out of dog-jaw reach, his hands fluttering almost as fast as his iridescent wings. All of that registered before I caught sight of the strappy sandal of the person I'd run down. Then I saw the
sparkly skirt. Then the red spaghetti-strap top, revealing more of a bony, age-spotted chest than anyone should ever have to see.
I'd run into Tiffanie Mills.
As
her
brain suddenly caught up with
her
retinas and she recognized me, her eyes widened, sending a whole mass of wrinkles up into her hairline—because here in Kazaran Dahaani, Tiffanie was in Ugly Mode.
I was tempted to scream right along with Larry, though the good news was that it didn't really make any difference what evil Tiffanie had planned for me: We had three sets of arms and legs entangled on the ground, and there was no way we could sort them all out before the dog would be feasting on our entrails. In fact, even as I thought that, the dog leaped at us.
"
Stop!
" Tiffanie commanded, managing to get her arm free and her hand held up like a traffic cop.
The dog stopped.
Midair.
Frozen, like a life-sized photo of an action shot, drops of spittle not attached to anything but suspended in the sunlight.
Larry, unwilling to witness our death-by-canine destruction, had fled somewhere between the time the dog's paws left the ground and before its movement—and its barking—had been magically stilled.
In the sudden silence, Tiffanie said, "Don't you give me any of that 'Just protecting myself' nonsense," which seemed an incredibly odd thing to say, until I noticed her shaking her finger at the dog, like a stern kindergarten teacher. "I'm guessing you've been bullied yourself, but that doesn't give you the right to bully others. I'm going to let you down now, but you behave yourself."
The dog lowered to the ground, like a helicopter landing, which apparently unfroze him. He gave a menacing growl, and Tiffanie said, "Don't you take that tone with me. Just tell me what happened."
The dog barked, but though it went on and on, it wasn't that deep-throated I'm-about-to-eat-you sound.
While Tiffanie listened, I pulled my left arm out from under her and my right leg out from under Eleni.
Eleni, I was amazed to see, was looking as though she'd just opened a door to find the Land of Oz on the other side. Which, I guess, she sort of had—a demented, cutthroat, Stephen King version of Oz. I motioned for her to pull her dress back down over her knees, even though it wasn't anywhere near as high up the leg as Tiffanie's. I guess I'd already spent too much time in the 1950s.
"Yes," Tiffanie was saying to the dog, and "Go on," still giving that impression of a firm but kindly primary schoolteacher—or a psychotherapist—and "How do you think that made them feel?"
The dog hung its head in shame.
"Exactly," Tiffanie said. "Making others feel small and frightened doesn't do anything to make you feel better about yourself."
The dog gave a doggy whine.
"I understand," Tiffanie said, "but that only makes you just like the dogs that picked on you when you were small. Is that what you want to be?"
More barking, whining, and growling, and Tiffanie nodded. "Yes," she said. "I think that's a much better idea. Now please excuse me a minute." Still sitting on the ground, she turned and faced me, her skinny, age-spotted hand on her hip. All sympathetic gentleness was gone. "What are
you
doing here?" she demanded.
Despite all the time I'd had to come up with a reasonable explanation in case she asked this most obvious of questions, all I could come up with was "Ahmm..."
Eleni extended her hand for a handshake and said, "You must be Tiffanie. Hi, my name is Eleni." How could anyone resist that smile?
Tiffanie glowered at her, then demanded of me, "What have you gone and done?"
"I haven't done anything," I protested.
"Where did you get those glasses you had back there, and what have you done with them, and why are you following me?"
"Ahmm...," I said again, but I was glancing around on the ground, trying to find that dropped lens.
I spotted it a second after Eleni did.
Tiffanie spotted it a second after I did.
Just as Eleni leaned forward and picked it up, Tiffanie caught hold of her wrist.
"Don't you hurt my—" I don't know if it would have made any difference if my grandmother learned about how many years separated us, but I couldn't bring myself to call someone who looked only a year or so older than me "grandmother," so I finished with "ancestor."
I could tell from the look Eleni gave me that she didn't much appreciate my word choice. She said to Tiffanie, sounding more intent on making a point to me than to Tiffanie, "Yeah, and don't you hurt my
descendant.
"
But Tiffanie didn't let herself get distracted. She shook Eleni's wrist, and my grandmother's grip jostled
loose. Tiffanie snatched the lens up and demanded, "Where's the other one?"
I figured the truth couldn't get me into any more trouble. "Road debris back in 1950-something-or-other."
"Three," Eleni said.
Tiffanie examined the lens, which was scratched from its adventures and had a chip out of the upper corner where the frame had broken away. She looked at the two of us again, and must have decided to believe us. Or maybe she just decided it was time to move on to the next question. "Where did you get the glasses?"
"Isn't it
your
turn to answer one of
our
questions?" I asked.
"Probably," Tiffanie said. "My turn again: Where did you get the glasses?"
"I found them," I said, then got in a question of my own: "What are you doing going to James Fenimore Cooper High, pretending to be just one of the kids?"
Tiffanie ignored that. She said, "'I found them' is hardly a complete answer."
"I found them in my front yard yesterday evening," I snapped. "I don't know where they came from or how they got there."
"Liar," Tiffanie snarled.
Eleni jumped in to defend me. "Jeannette isn't a liar."
"
Jeannette?
" Tiffanie repeated with a smirk.
I figured my credibility was too badly damaged for her to believe Eleni had given me that name, so I didn't even bother.
Tiffanie asked, "So why are you and
Jeannette
following me?"
"We weren't following you," Eleni said. Her voice was calm and quiet, evidence of a reasonable demeanor, a frame of mind both Tiffanie and I were having trouble maintaining. "We all came through the gate just a few seconds after you, but we came from a different starting point." She indicated herself in her gauzy-but-still-covering-everything-up 1950s summer dress, then gestured to Tiffanie in her skimpy, leave-little-to-the-imagination outfit. In fact, it left even less than usual to the imagination, being all askew from our collision. Eleni added, "If we had been following you, you certainly would have heard us, especially the dog."
This made so much sense, Tiffanie couldn't ignore it.
Even the dog gave a short yip to signify agreement.
Tiffanie snorted, then asked, "So why are you here?"
"No," Eleni said in that cool, poised voice of hers, "it's definitely your turn now. Answer Jeannette's question about why you're going to her school."
How did she manage that tone? I needed to practice that. All I could do was nod for emphasis—very like a three-year-old.
Tiffanie snapped, "Well, I'm certainly not jeopardizing two distinct worlds."
"Could you please be more specific?" Eleni asked.
"To have fun," Tiffanie said. "To look good and be popular. For a change."
"Oh," I said, feeling small. Doesn't matter what world you come from: Ugly is ugly, and Tiffanie must have had a difficult time with her real appearance.
Eleni nudged me with her elbow. "You see?" she said, oozing self-satisfaction.
I threw one of her own sayings back at my grandmother, which she had used on me when I was ten and she'd caught me gloating about something or other: "Nice people don't say, 'I told you so.'"
Eleni raised her eyebrows, perhaps surprised to hear me use one of her pet phrases that, as far as she knew, she'd never used in front of me.
Or, more likely, I realized with sudden horror, she
herself had never yet spoken this sentiment but was thinking it was a great one to adopt. Had my saying it to her just now been the reason she'd say it to me later in her life but earlier in mine?
That kind of thinking was bound to give me a headache.
Tiffanie asked, emphasizing every single word: "So ... what ... are ... you ... doing ... in ...
my
... world?"
"We're here to rescue Julian," Eleni said.
Tiffanie's voice dripped skepticism. "From what?"
"Bear..." I rummaged around in my brain for the name Larry had used for Julian's abductor. "Bear Tooth? Bare Naked?..."
While Eleni winced at my language, Tiffanie asked in a voice of horror, "Berrech?"
"Something like that," I agreed.