Read Online InterWorld by Neil Gaiman - Free Book Online Page B

crevasse, which was closer and bigger than I’d thought it would be. The bubble creature, I could now see, was somehow tethered to the rocks at the edge of the chasm by a thin line of protoplasm or ectoplasm or something.
    “Joey! That thing’s an In-Betweener! A mudluff! Get back here right now!”
    I pretended I couldn’t hear him.
    The strand was clear and thin, like a line of saliva. It didn’t look like it would take much more than a mean look to sever it and free the little bubble creature.
    “It’s been tied up!” I called to Joey. “I think I can free it.”
    He was coming toward me. If I was going to do this, I wasgoing to have to do it fast. I reached out and tugged on the line. It was stronger than it looked.
    “Hey,” I called to Jay. “Have you got a knife? I bet we could cut this.” He didn’t reply. Even through the silver suit I could tell he was mad.
    The little bubble creature above us seemed agitated. I let go of the line. It was slightly sticky. I found myself thinking of a spider’s web.
    “I know he’s harmless,” I told Jay. “Look at him.”
    Jay sighed. He was maybe five, six feet away from me. “You may be right,” he said. “But there’s something about this whole thing that seems wrong. How do you think the little guy got stuck there? And why?”
    The strand of web began to vibrate. Then there was a roar so loud that it nearly shattered my eardrums, and I realized that I’d summoned something by pulling on the strand of web. I thought I’d been trying to free the little mudluff, but I’d actually been banging a dinner gong.
    A monster reared up out of the abyss.
    “Monster” is an overused word, I know, but nothing else applies here. It had a head that looked a bit like a shark’s and a bit like a tyrannosaur’s, mounted on a centipede-like body as thick as a delivery van. I don’t know how long it was, but it was long enough to rise out of what looked like a bottomless chasm; and as each segment came sliding up the rock, it rattled and echoed through the gorge like a huge length ofchain. In a lot less time than it takes to tell this, it had risen to a good thirty feet above the edge. It stared down at me with enormous compound eyes, each as big as my hand.
    Then it struck.
    Its head was the size of my dad’s cab; and its mouth gaped open, revealing jaws lined with multiple rows of teeth, each as long as a steak knife. For all its size it dropped toward me like an express elevator. I was just about to become an hors d’oeuvre when I felt someone smash into me from behind, hurling me forward to sprawl on the edge.
    I twisted onto my back and stared—stared at Jay standing in the spot where I had stood just an instant before. Then the huge gaping maw of the beast enveloped him, started to close—
    And then that little soap bubble came shooting in from over my shoulder. I realized I must’ve broken the strand that had anchored it when I fell. It hit the monster’s muzzle, splattering over it like translucent goop.
    The monster reared back with a roar of rage, dropping Jay’s body. Its mouth was still open—those deadly jaws hadn’t had time to close fully on him, and now it had to keep its jaws open to breathe, because the mudluff had covered its nose with the clinging translucent substance of his body. The monster thrashed about, roaring in frustration as it tried to shake the amoebalike mudluff loose. It succeeded in flinging blobs of the thing’s substance, tethered by elastictendrils, a few feet away, only to have them snap back and replaster themselves around its nose. Hard as it was to believe, that blob of transparent Silly Putty was actually keeping the Midgard serpent from chowing down on Jay and me!
    The monster dropped back below ground level and, from the sounds and the way the ground shook repeatedly, was trying to scrape the In-Betweener off by battering its scaly snout against the rocks. I didn’t wait to find out which one would win. Instead I