The Stranger - Max Frei [118]
I slept soundly. No nightmares haunted me. Apparently, the demons in charge of my dreams were taking a smoke break. Good for them.
All in all, the streetcar-microcosm was kindly disposed toward me. When I woke up, I realized I was lying not on a hard seat, but on a short, soft leather divan. It was possible to fit my whole body on it if I pulled my knees way up near my chin. In addition, a scratchy plaid throw, almost as comforting as the one I had left at home, had appeared out of nowhere.
“How sweet you are to me,” I mumbled, and fell into an even deeper sleep.
When I woke up again, the streetcar compartment looked like a dormitory for gnomes. All the seats had turned into short, leather divans, which suited me to a tee. After all, it would be a crime not to take advantage of such creature comforts in the face of the complete unknown. I slept a lot, munched on my provisions, and discovered new magazines now and then, sometimes in the most improbable places—one of them turned up tucked under my armpit; another was stuck in the ticket puncher like a monstrous, interstellar transfer pass.
As for surrealistic landscapes like the double dawn, there were no further surprises. A permanent darkness settled outside the windows of the streetcar, making it easier to preserve my emotional equilibrium.
According to my approximate calculations, this idyll continued for three or four days. Who knows, though, how much time really passed in this extraordinary streetcar? To this day, the most inexplicable phenomenon of that experience remains the fact that I never once felt the call of nature or noticed the absence of a bathroom. This, to put it mildly, contradicts what I know of human capabilities. The whole time I waited with trepidation for the familiar distress signals from my plumbing system, all the while trying to come up with a somewhat hygienic solution to the awkward problem I anticipated —but it turned out to be unnecessary.
My final “awakening” was strikingly different from the previous ones, beginning with the fact that I found myself wrapped not in the scratchy throw, but in a fur blanket. And I could finally stretch out my long-suffering legs. Looking around, I discovered that I was lying not in a bed and not on a divan, but on a very soft floor in a huge, half-dark, and nearly empty room. At the far end of this room, someone was breathing heavily, menacingly, as it seemed to me. I opened my eyes wide, then turned over awkwardly and got up on my hands and knees. The breathing ceased, but a few seconds later something softly nudged my heels. To this day, I don’t know how I kept myself from screaming out.
Instead, still crouched on the floor, I pivoted around and found myself nose-to-nose with another one, very soft and moist. Then something licked my cheek. Indescribable relief nearly robbed me of my senses. Before me was an absolutely charming creature—a shaggy puppy with the face of a little bulldog. Later, I found out that Chuff wasn’t a puppy at all, but a seasoned canine. His compact size and exuberance had misled me.
Soon, a small figure draped in capacious garments flowing down to the floor materialized in the twilight of the room. Peering closely at him, I realized that it was not my dream companion. It was someone else. Could I have come to the wrong address?
“Mister Venerable Head is expected later this evening. If you please, sir, inform me of your wishes,” requested the stranger, a fragile, wizened old man with radiant eyes and a pensive, thin-lipped mouth. This was Kimpa, Sir Juffin Hully’s butler. Juffin himself did indeed arrive later that night.
Only then did it sink in that the unimaginable journey from one world to another had really taken place.
That is how I ended up in Echo—which I have never had cause to regret, even on days as hopeless as this one seemed