Page 5

Leopold

P urple. That was Leopold’s first impression, and it didn’t make any sense. But then again, neither did the sudden attack of vertigo and accompanying nausea, or the weird heavy feeling in his head, or his general sense of… wrong .

In fact, he was fairly used to disasters springing up around him, so much so that he became suspicious when life seemed to be going too smoothly. But he’d never felt so disoriented, so certain that his existence had just taken the wrong exit off the freeway. Wrong. That word again.

He staggered around for a few moments, trying desperately not to puke, and wasn’t sure whether to be relieved when he heard a familiar voice.

It was that bizarre man, the one who claimed to be collecting him, although Leopold still didn’t understand why.

Crispin Something. And when Leopold lurched around a large tree—a large violet tree—there Crispin was, his back to Leopold and his smartphone held high.

“What the hell, Crispy?”

Only, when Crispin turned around, he was…

. Oh God. “What did you put in my Zima?” Leopold knew his voice was shrill, but being unwittingly drugged was bad.

And it was especially bad for him, because he’d long since learned that if he ingested anything more intoxicating than half a bottle of beer, very bad things happened.

The sorts of things that involved flashing red-and-blue lights, hyperventilating insurance adjustors, and the need for Leopold to pick up quickly and move far way.

Maybe he ought to be relieved that the only effects this time—so far, at least—were hallucinations of a purple forest and of Crispin turning into a deer. A deer in tweed trousers.

“Oh, crap.” Crispin slapped a hand over his mouth.

Leopold stalked closer. “ Oh crap is right. What the hell , dude? You don’t just go around slipping drugs to strangers. What did you give me and when is it gonna wear off?”

“I did not drug you.” Crispin managed to look simultaneously offended, distressed, and confused. He somehow also managed to still look like Crispin, even with brown fur, a long muzzle, and short velvety antlers. His ears were even longer and pointier than before.

“Nobody gets this wasted on half a Zima. Not even….” Leopold’s thought trailed away when he realized how odd his mouth felt. His tongue and teeth were all… wrong. Damn that word.

And then there was the strange tickly feeling on his skin. He glanced down; his t-shirt was gone. His chest, like Crispin’s, was now covered in short fur. Maybe he should be relieved he hadn’t hallucinated away his sweatpants and socks.

His scalp didn’t feel right either, however. When he put his hand to his forehead, he felt antlers. “This is bad,” he moaned. “I don’t want to be a deer.” Deer in the woods usually got shot. Would the hunters have purple guns?

“You are not a deer. You have—well, we both have—temporarily taken the form of piwati, an endemic sentient species in Vlotho. Which is, I assume, where we have landed, although I don’t understand why.

I visited here once before to collect a rather interesting flower. It had the most delicate teeth….”

Leopold decided there was no point in continuing this conversation.

He sat down on the grass, which was the precise shade of grape Kool-Aid, and waited to sober up.

The grass was pleasantly soft, at any rate, and it smelled really nice.

Like a bakery or a pan of sizzling bacon, only not.

While Crispin returned to talking into his phone, Leopold plucked a blade of grass and stuck it on his tongue.

Yum! He took another piece, and another, and was considering getting on all fours and grazing properly—until it occurred to him to wonder what he was actually putting in his mouth, back in his non-delusional apartment. None of the options seemed good, so he sighed and stopped eating.

It wasn’t a horrible trip, as these things went.

The weather was pleasant and the foliage interesting.

Some of the trees had leaves that reminded him of the amethyst ring one of his foster mothers had worn.

Maybe when he got a second job and saved a bit of money, he should paint his bedroom walls that color.

The landlord probably wouldn’t mind, and anyway, Leopold’s damage deposit was a lost cause after the Great Spaghetti Sauce Eruption of last month.

Crispin trudged over and folded elegantly to the ground in front of Leopold. “I’m having a bit of difficulty,” Crispin admitted.

“Did you take the drugs too?”

“I don’t know what— There are no drugs. We are both quite sober. But I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a pickle.”

Leopold chuckled. “Then everything would be green instead of purple, wouldn’t it? Unless it’s a purple pickle. Which sounds like a tongue-twister. Or bad porn.” He laughed again.

“Please be serious. This is not a good occasion for joking.” Hands on furry hips signaled Crispin’s disapproval.

“Right. ’Cause everyone ought to take delirium seriously.”

Crispin sighed. “This is reality. I attempted to collect you, as I was sent to do. But there was some kind of… of accident.” Crispin shuddered.

“So instead of returning to the Hall of Mirrors at OotL, we’ve ended up in Vlotho.

And the portal isn’t working properly.” He tapped the phone, which he still held in one hand. The glass was cracked.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Leopold was starting to wonder if this Crispin character was a bit woo-woo in the head.

“It’s quite simple. I am a curator. As I mentioned before, I collect items—or, um, sometimes people—for the Office of the Lost. I have been instructed to collect you.”

Leopold decided to humor him. Why not? He had nothing better to do right now, and that grass was looking mighty tasty.

“Collect me for what? And what’s this office thing?

A government agency? ’Cause if Sacramento has some kind of bizarre tax or something, I’m sorry I didn’t pay, but I didn’t know anything about it.

And now I can’t pay on account of being broke. ”

While Crispin paused, apparently deciding how to answer—or as Leopold’s hallucination struggled to keep up with real-time events—birds twittered prettily.

There was just enough breeze to make the grass ripple and leaves sway, and the temperature was nearly perfect.

Off in the distance a dog howled, but here everything was peaceful.

This was better than getting rained on or flipping channels in his apartment. No wonder people took drugs.

“The Office of the Lost,” Crispin began in an instructional tone, “is in a place outside of worlds, yet simultaneously inside them. The Hall of Mirrors is the nexus that joins realities together.”

“A hub. Sure. Like O’Hare.”

Crispin blinked at him for a moment as if confused and then shrugged.

“I don’t know this O’Hare world, but yes.

A hub. That makes us quite important, you see.

” He puffed up his chest slightly. “And the hub contains the Office of the Lost, which is where I’m employed.

Our function is to collect and protect items that, while they may seem insignificant, are in fact crucial to the successful conclusion of certain events.

The Oracle sends us out to find them. For example, last month I traveled to Hbrthnot and acquired the last remaining copy of the autobiography of Queen Thragell the Fourteenth.

Our oracle has foretold that the volume will one day be indispensable to?—”

Leopold frowned, which felt weird with his extended jaw. “I’m not an item . I’m a person.”

“Yes. Well.” Crispin reached as if he intended to straighten his tie, but all he had on his chest was fur and he let his hand fall.

“Occasionally we’re sent to collect living…

specimens. From your world we have a pair of passenger pigeons, which are quite simple to care for, and also a pair of woolly mammoths, which require a very big room and regular manure removal.

And I’m afraid that if I don’t bring you in promptly, my next assignment will be cleaning up after them. ”

He looked upset and Leopold was tempted to console him, but he didn’t because none of this was real.

Anyway, woolly mammoth shit wasn’t the issue here.

“Fine. You collect stuff. But why me?” Because Leopold suddenly remembered that when Crispin had first showed up at the door, he’d asked for Leopold by name, which meant he hadn’t just wandered there randomly.

Plus he’d had that sucky photo of Leopold on his phone.

And that was weird, because the only ones who knew where Leopold lived were his bosses, his landlord, and his neighbors.

In fact, the entire rest of the world was pretty much blissfully unaware of his existence.

“Why me ?” he repeated, this time a little plaintively.

Crispin, looking forlorn, sat down on a purple-tinged log and sighed. “I don’t know. Bidulla Kronk—she’s my supervisor—didn’t say. She rarely explains my assignments.”

“Well, your boss made a mistake, ’cause I’m nobody special.

I have no particular skills and no money at all, and although I’d love to be related to royalty or a billionaire or a celebrity or something, I’m not.

My dad was a truck driver and my mom worked in an elementary school cafeteria.

” And they’d both died before Leopold was ten, but that wasn’t relevant right now.

“The oracle is never wrong,” Crispin announced huffily.

“Whatever.” Leopold was getting tired of this trip. He wanted to make himself a peanut-butter-and-onion sandwich, catch twenty minutes or so of some ridiculous reality show, and doze off to the sound of rain pounding onto the roof. He stood. “I’m just gonna walk around until I sober up.”

He started to do just that, but Crispin leapt up and ran to block him. “Leopold! You must remain with me. We’re late already and….” He took a few deep breaths before making a visible effort to get himself under control. “My perfecality rating is at risk of dropping below a perfect score.”

“Perfecality isn’t a word, dude.” But Crispin looked so upset, with his big purple eyes—wait, purple eyes? Whatever—and his distressed furry face, that Leopold didn’t have the heart to abandon him. Even if the guy had spiked his Zima.

Leopold flapped one hand. “Fine. I’m ready to go to your office place. Beam me up.”

“But that’s the problem. Thea should be bringing us to the Hall of Mirrors, but instead she’s… doing this.” He held up his phone.

A slightly tinny female voice was warbling about Tommy working on the docks. She was off-key and getting the lyrics wrong.

“That’s Bon Jovi,” Leopold pointed out. “Well, sort of.”

“This is Thea. Well, no. This object is my portable transport device, which often takes the form of a mirror but may incorporate any shiny surface. Thea is the intelligence behind the device. She is supposed to take me and my, er, acquisitions back to OotL, but she isn’t.

There seems to be something wrong with her. ”

“Oodle? Oh yeah. Gotcha.” Leopold scratched his head. The antlers were a little itchy. “Screen’s cracked. I feel your pain. I’ve never owned a phone that’s survived more than a week without me breaking it. Except one, an old… Nokia? That one I lost. At least yours is sort of working.”

The song ended abruptly, which was a relief. Crispin held up the phone and spoke loudly. “Thea. Please send us to the Hall of Mirrors this instant.”

“No can do,” sang the phone with a giggle.

She repeated it on a loop. Then a loud exploding noise came from the phone, and Crispin dropped it in alarm as he let out a terrified yelp.

It landed on a soft tuft of grass, and when he picked it up, the phone didn’t seem in any worse shape than it had been before.

Now it was singing about heaven and sex. Bruno Mars, Leopold thought.

Crispin returned to pleading and arguing with the phone.

Leopold, growing bored, yanked up some foliage and began chewing.

He was hungry and the stuff tasted pretty good.

But even as he munched, worry started to gather somewhere beneath his skin.

There was something wrong. This hallucination had been going on for a while, with no sign of disappearing.

Even more troubling, though, was its consistency.

Sure, the contents were damned weird—turning into an alien deer thing, being collected based on the orders of an oracle—but the details weren’t shifting.

He and Crispin were having coherent if unlikely conversations.

The greenery continued to be, more accurately, purplery.

That howling noise was still going on in the distance.

Only… about that last part. The howling sounded as if it were growing closer, didn’t it?

“Uh, Crispin?”

“If I could get Thea to concentrate, perhaps she could suggest?—”

“Are there, um, predators in this place?” Which shouldn’t matter since none of this was real, but the hair—the fur —on Leopold’s nape was standing up, and his heart was racing, and his few bites of grass were feeling heavy and cold in his gut.

“Predators? I don’t know what—” Crispin stopped himself and tilted his head, as if hearing the howls for the first time. His eyes widened; his nostrils flared. Leopold was sniffing the air too, and there was a definite whiff of something. It was coppery and musky, and it made him shudder.

Crispin swallowed loudly. “Oh, crap.”