WELCOME, Welcome, welcome to Chapter 3. Well, well, well, well, well, as Are would say, to have Ben show up out of the clear blue, or perhaps out of the black of night like that, surprising, surprising indeed. I wonder what's behind it. I wonder if you wonder what's behind it. Let's take a look and find out. Yes, indeed, let's have a look. I hope you enjoy the chapter!!
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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: From Whence I Came
The second installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
3
Cheap Thrills and the Culture Shock of Interdimensional Travel
The next morning, Shawn woke first for a change. I liked those rare occasions because it meant I got to wake up to the smell of coffee. I slipped away from a lightly snoring Bem and accepted a warm mug from Shawn. "What do you think happened to him?" I asked in a whisper, so I didn't disturb the patient. I remembered my magic as an afterthought and built a box around the bed to keep the sound of our conversation from Bem.
Shawn sipped his black tea with milk, a breakfast drink he enjoyed occasionally when he didn't want coffee. "I don't know. I left a message for Neb and Calidi. Hopefully, they can provide some insight. I can't see either of them allowing him to get into this condition without a fight. It's pretty early yet and they may have had a show last night. I'm sure they'll reach out when they get up."
The mention of my former teammate and doctor brought a smile to my face. The relationship between Neb and Calidi had grown quickly once they'd discovered their mutual passion for music. They'd started playing together almost immediately. Their burgeoning relationship drew them even closer once I let them explore my CD collection. Experimenting with the strange sounds from another world became the focus of their time for many weeks as they attempted to recreate the sounds with Solum instruments. Eventually, Neb commissioned an instrument manufacturer to create the first electric guitar on Solum, then she set about mastering it with ease.
Calidi, Neb's future husband, had a habit of singing and humming constantly. He didn't intend to let the secret of the Earth music out, but his habits inadvertently introduced the music to his friends and co-workers. The people Calidi worked around soon heard enough of the strange music to grow interested. They were fascinated by the sound and wanted to hear more. Calidi and Neb, who were a couple by then, added a drummer and an acoustic bassist to enable them to `fool around' as Neb put it.
The enthusiasm of Calidi's friends encouraged the newly formed band to try playing a small club owned by a friend of a friend. The group was immediately popular and soon found themselves regularly playing bars and small clubs. It took no time at all for their sound to reach the ear of a music producer. A woman, Miss Vindictam of Latrunculorum Music, caught their act and offered them a contract on the spot.
Calidi already had a job and Neb didn't need the money, but the excitement of `making it' in the music business and the joy of having an audience for the band's playing, drew Neb and Calidi into this new direction. That was a few years ago. Now, the band that had started as a lark, was the dominant force of the whole of the Solum music industry.
As time went by and the group's popularity increased, the little four-piece band swelled to somewhere between fifteen and twenty members. Each musician was multi-talented and interested in one or more types of Earth rock, jazz, alternative, etc. The group routinely played all-day festival-like shows. The semi-fractured nature of the band, really four or five overlapping bands in one, is what brought them their name. They were like a picture window, split into smaller panes, and they called themselves `Divided Light.'
Shawn and I were already a few months into our travels when Neb and Calidi were getting ready to leave on a world tour of their own. Bem, sensing that he was about to be left alone again, and at a loss for an occupation, saw an opportunity and asked to join the band in some capacity. Neb and Calidi were very familiar with him by that point and Neb knew his reputation as a professional at everything he did. They asked him to help manage the group. Bem accepted and threw himself into the work. He'd been traveling with the band ever since.
Shawn and I made sure that our travel path, and that of Divided Light, overlapped at least a few times a year over the years that we spent traveling. I always enjoyed catching up with the old team and Bem especially. Bem would give us full access passes to whatever show Divided Light was playing in whatever city we found ourselves in. Calidi always cornered me to give me a check-up and beg my brain to remember more lyrics to more music they could add to their repertoire. Bem would join us for a romp or two or three. Despite the permissive nature of the sexual culture on Solum, Bem was the only third that Shawn and I ever added.
It had been about three months since we'd seen them. I couldn't imagine how Bem could deteriorate so far in such a short time. "What can we do for him?" I asked Shawn.
He shrugged a rare helpless shrug. "He's not sick and nothing is broken. He's run down. We need to build him back up. We let him sleep, feed him when he wakes up, and we don't let him out of our sight."
"Oh," Shawn added as an afterthought, "no sex. He's too run down for strenuous physical activity."
I glanced at the sleeping form tucked into our bed. "He's not gonna like that." I warned.
"Yeah, well, I'm the doctor." Shawn decreed. "If you touch him, or let him touch you, you won't touch me for a long time."
I didn't doubt the threat was a real one. Shawn never used sex as a weapon. For him to threaten me with a dry spell, he had to be deadly serious. I asked the obvious question. "What do we do with him when we leave?"
Shawn stared into his tea and moved his cup in little circles to send the contents swirling around. "I've been thinking about that all morning. He's going to have to come with us."
I set my coffee down so I could fool with the bracelet on my left wrist. My eyes automatically went to the matching band on Shawn's wrist. I forced my hands to separate and laid them flat on the island countertop. "I was afraid you'd say that. How the hell do we explain him to my brother? I still haven't figured out how to explain you or the almost six years I've been missing. Joe is going to shit when he sees me. He's probably not even going to believe that this new me is even me. He'll shit again when I introduce you. What he does when Sleeping Beauty over there starts humping my leg, I have no idea."
I dropped my face in my hands to worry. Shawn moved around behind me. He rubbed my back in an attempt to soothe me. "What do I do if he rejects me?" I asked my palms. I pretty much expected that my sister Mary wouldn't accept me, but she and I never got along anyway. She always treated me with unveiled disdain, a lot like my mother did. Joe...he and I had some kind of relationship. I never did anything to make him look up to me, but I did whatever I could for him in my own way.
When my folks were killed, I signed over my third of their estate and my third of the house so Joe would have a place to live when his baby was born. I also did it because I couldn't bear to profit from the deaths that I felt I caused. Mary grudgingly signed over her third of the house. She kept the money though. That's why I made Joe the sole beneficiary for my fat life insurance policy, my 401K, and my liquid assets.
The one and only good lesson I'd learned from my father was the lesson of saving. Despite my catastrophic habits, I lived cheaply and made good money. Assuming my family had me declared dead in the time I'd been gone, Joe would have gotten a windfall to the tune of a half-million dollars.
Shawn interrupted my memories with some common sense. "All you can do is tell him the truth, about everything. There's no lie you could come up with that could explain away where you've been, or how you look, or who Bem and me are."
I raised my face to shake my head and repeated a worry from a minute ago. "I don't even know if he'll believe I'm me. I don't believe it half the time, especially when I see myself in the mirror."
"Hey," Shawn thumped my shoulder, "that's enough anxiety for one morning. Maybe he will, maybe he won't...we can't do anything about it until we're there. One step at a time."
Shawn was right, like he always was. Brooding over the possible negative outcome was a waste of time that wouldn't do anything but fill us both with anxiety. I tried to beat those thoughts down and distract myself with activity. I got cleaned up. Shawn got cleaned up. We made and ate breakfast. We were in the middle of packing up the little we planned to take to Earth when Neb called.
She didn't understand what happened to Bem any more than we did. Apparently, our visit three months before had precipitated a break-down of sorts. Bem went off the rails right after we left. He immersed himself in the traditional rock and roll lifestyle. As I listened to Neb recount the list of debauched hedonism that Bem had been participating in, it sounded like he'd stolen Keith Moon's playbook. Neb tried to reign him in, but he wouldn't listen to her moderating influence. Calidi tried to examine him when it was obvious that he was losing weight, but Bem fought him off.
It took a while, but the doc eventually put his foot down. The timing was coincidental because the break came on the morning after Shawn and I had gotten the call from Ars about going to Earth. Calidi fired Bem as the band's road manager and refused to let him on any of the tour busses. Calidi figured that if he couldn't make Bem take care of himself, at least he could remove the groupies, alcohol, and drugs that tend to follow rock bands. Bem was effectively ousted from the source of his self-destruction. He had no choice but to go home. It seemed that he'd ended his journey on our doorstep.
The discussion with Neb answered some questions but created many more. `Why did Bem come apart in the first place? What did it have to do with Shawn and me? Did his breakdown, for lack of a better term, have something to do with our visit three months prior, or was it coincidence?' We wanted answers, but Shawn and I agreed that we weren't going to ask Bem. We didn't want to risk him getting angry and retreating from us. If he wanted to tell us what happened, he would. Until then, we would limit ourselves to taking care of him.
The patient woke up mid-morning, ate a giant breakfast, and promptly fell asleep in front of the television. He didn't say much and neither did we. Shawn and I finished our own packing and raided Bem's fourth-floor apartment for his basic necessities and a set of fatigues. We announced our intention of taking him to Earth when he woke for dinner.
He was so stoked at the idea, a little of the old Bem came shining through the exhausted version in front of us. "Really? I get to come with you guys? I get to meet Church's family?"
I tried to temper his expectations, both about my family and my world, but Bem's excitement didn't dim. Shawn and I explained our plan to leave in the morning and that we needed to be on the road very early. We'd decided to make the jump at four-thirty. At that hour on Solum, we could get out of Epistylium without the Vic being seen by too many people. On Earth, there'd be very little traffic on Interstate Highway 95, so the jump would be easier and less exposed. We also wouldn't have long to wait until we could barge in on my brother. He was always up early for work.
The three of us talked some more about our plans, but Bem's energy faded before his excitement did. We got another big meal into him, cleaned him up a little, and put him back to bed. Shawn and I followed his example and made an early night of it to.
It was a half-hour drive from the apartment to The HALL to get the Vic, and another hour to the secluded mountain road that Shawn wanted to use for our departure. If we assumed an hour to get ready to go, we'd have to be awake at two in the morning. That was awfully damn early.
Shawn and I got up as planned and got ready. We woke Bem at the last minute before we had to leave the apartment, then drove to The HALL and picked up the Vic. We transferred our things to the much-larger sedan and pointed its buffet-table-sized hood toward the Glosbe Mountains. The drive out of the city was uneventful except for Shawn's constant nervousness.
As a Solum native, Shawn was unused to mechanical devices that made noise. The Vic was making noise, a steady, bottom-end thud from deep in the machinery that propelled the car. I reassured Shawn as best I could, but he refused to be reassured.
I knew by the sound that the engine hadn't spun' any of its bearings and the idiot light' that indicated very low oil pressure only lit when the car idled. Under those conditions, I could probably have driven the thing another twenty-five thousand miles without catastrophic failure. That information didn't soothe Shawn at all. As much as he worried though, that was as little as Bem did. He slept soundly, sprawled across the rear bench seat which was just wide enough for him to lay across without hitting his head or his feet on the armrests that were built into the rear doors.
Shawn directed me to a section of road that was straight enough to get to fifty-five miles an hour. The speed was important for two reasons. The first was to build up some kinetic energy to help with the effort of the jump. The added mass of the car required a little more juice than would be necessary if we were just traveling with people and luggage. The second reason for the speed was the type of road we'd be arriving onto. Interstate 95 through Philadelphia only had two speeds...stopped, or flat out. We needed to be going at least fifty-five for our safety, though seventy-five would have been better.
When we were up to speed, Shawn activated the catalyst his uncle had given him. The windshield filled with dazzling white light that blinded me but faded quickly. When it faded, we were in the center lane of the lower deck of the Girard Point Bridge on Interstate 95, headed north toward Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Shawn exhaled a long breath and put the catalyst in his pocket. I checked the green numbers of the dashboard clock. They said it was 4:37 AM.
I powered the windows down and let the sticky pre-dawn air blow through the car. The rushing wind woke Bem, who sat up and looked around sleepily. It was Thursday, August 14th, 2025, and it was going to be a hot day, as hot and humid as a sauna. I delicately throttled the Vic to build some speed while I listened carefully for any worsening engine noise. When I didn't hear any, I let our velocity increase gradually.
It was the first time I'd had the Vic at highway speed since that bleak November day when I met Shawn, and my life changed forever. The ride was as smooth and pleasant as I remembered. Unfortunately, the gold metal tie-downs that remained from the mission to the Demon's Citadel whistled in the air currents that flowed over the vehicle.
`Should have removed them.' I thought uselessly.
The car cleared the dark tunnel of the lower bridge deck like it was a bullet leaving an oversized gun barrel. Once on the main road, the familiar sights of my old stomping grounds assaulted my eyes. On the left, the dark bulk of the stadiums crouched in their vast, unlit parking lots. On the right was the vague cluster of industrial buildings that was the Navy Yard, itself bordered between the highway on one side and the smooth darkness of the Delaware River on the other. The interstate curved to the left to follow the course of the river and turned toward the city as it passed under Interstate 76 and the approach to the Walt Whitman bridge.
Interstate 95 sprang into the air to become an elevated roadway that carried us over the city. The dense brick sprawl that makes up much of Philadelphia spread out before us like a dirty carpet of masonry and asphalt, punctuated by the harsh glare of incandescent lighting. In the distance, the few real skyscrapers that make up the center city skyline materialized and took form through the hazy darkness. "Welcome to Philadelphia boys!" I shouted. "The Cradle of Liberty, the home of Ben Franklin, the Declaration of Independence, and cheese steaks."
I turned the radio on before the guys could ask me what I was talking about and tuned into WMMR. I hoped their fifty-plus year tenure on the FM dial hadn't ended in the time I'd been absent. To my delight, not only were they still on the air, but they were playing some great, loud rock and roll. None of what came over the air waves to blare through the old paper cone speakers was appropriate for a homecoming, but it was great music. I sang the familiar tunes and beat the wheel with the bass.
Bem's head never stopped moving while he took in the sights and the unique smells as we approached Center City. The view fascinated and repelled Bem. His face was a study of emotion. "What's the city made of?" He asked with childlike innocence.
I answered my friend with too much whimsey, but he didn't seem to notice. "It's made of concrete and steel and sweat and blood and bricks and glass and money and people; all kinds of people."
Bem didn't understand what he was seeing and told us as much. "Where are the trees and grass? Where are the parks? How does anyone keep up their magic?"
"They don't." I laughed and shook my head at Bem's image in the rearview mirror. "They don't believe in magic. Most of them don't believe in nature. This is the world of man."
"How can anyone live here? How can they?" Bem asked with a voice that was a mixture of wonder and horror.
It hadn't occurred to me how different an Earth city would be to someone from Solum. Bem was accustomed to the half-green-space cities of his home world. It dawned on me that Philadelphia must seem like a dystopian nightmare to him. I pulled myself out of my musings to try to answer his question and to assure him that not all of Earth was like our current surroundings.
"Somehow, Bem, somehow people live here. I lived here for years. Over a million and a half people make their home in this city. Cities all over the country are just like this. It'll get greener when we get over the bridge into Jersey." Bem quieted with my vague reassurance and seemed to retreat into his thoughts.
We sped through the city. Our eyes took in the sights and our ears listened to the radio. The route we were on, the route I had driven, in some cases daily, was like riding a bike. Even more than that, driving that road was like breathing the acrid Philadelphia air. I remembered every turn, every expansion joint on the elevated roadway.
My relationship with Philly had always been love / hate. I didn't really like living in gritty South Philly, but whenever I was away for a while, when I came back and saw the city from 95, it made me feel at home. Since I'd been away for almost six years, the skyline was as attractive as a lost lover.
I'd continued to accelerate as we drove until the faded orange needle of the Vic's speed-o-meter passed eighty-five and disappeared into the dashboard. The drone of the engine reached the perfect pitch of urgency as we flashed beneath Route 676 and under the massive masonry structure that supported and anchored the ancient ironwork that was the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
`The Ben' as it was locally known, was the oldest crossing of the Delaware River. I tried to tell Shawn about it over the howling wind, but Shawn didn't care about the bridge history. He was too busy objecting to our velocity. I ignored his protests. We wouldn't be on 95 much longer and I wanted to enjoy myself.
I maintained our speed and looked for more familiar sights. I was rewarded when the pollution-smeared stacks of the first of the two, long-shuttered, coal-fired power plants appeared out of the darkness, visible between the road and the river. After the power plant, came the massive eyesore and the ever-changing artificial mountains of crushed stone and road waste that was an aggregate yard for an asphalt and concrete plant. After it, was the exit ramp to the Betsy Ross Bridge and Aramingo Avenue.
I got off the interstate. I refused to decelerate as we slalomed passed the sewage treatment plant that hugged the river and squatted like a stinking troll almost beneath the bridge. My carmates wrinkled their noses at the stench. I laughed at their revulsion. To me, it was the appropriate odor of getting close to my childhood home. I hit the brakes just enough for the speed-o-meter needle to reappear and tossed the car into the sweeping right-hand curve that led onto the Betsy Ross Bridge. The second abandoned coal burner was the last look we got of Pennsylvania as we crossed the Delaware River to New Jersey.
The difference between the states was night and day as the road became Route 90 through Pennsauken. Residential greenery and single-family homes were a welcome sight to our eyes, jaundiced from the grit and grime of the city. I dragged my foot off the gas to coast passed the toll plaza that served only the westbound lanes and laid into it again as the booths faded in the rearview.
Route 90 usually had a heavy police presence, but rarely that early in the morning. I was also feeling a bit reckless because the worst a local cop could do was issue a speeding ticket to my fake identity. I wasn't overly concerned about that or the strain on the Vic. The engine noise had gotten no worse, and the closer we got to our destination, the lower the risk became that the suffering engine would self-destruct before we arrived.
I threw caution to the rushing wind and continued at full speed until Route 90 ended and became the more congested, four-lane state road that was Route 73. As the designation changed, I slowed to a more sedate sixty-five. That was still ten or fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, but a conservative rate of travel for that road. I ignored the ramp onto High Street and waited for the second opportunity to exit the highway. I trod heavily on the brakes to literally slide off Route 73 onto Laurelton Avenue. I came to a complete stop at the intersection of Laurelton and Woodlawn and made a right into my hometown of Maple Shade.
The town was two square miles of single-family homes built from the beginning to the middle of the last century with a fringe of lower-income apartments around the perimeter. The homes and apartments housed roughly twenty-thousand working-class people.
Bem seemed to breathe a little easier as we made the left from Woodlawn Avenue onto Forklanding Road, the main artery that would take us to the center of town. We cruised passed the ranchers and bungalows that made up most of the town, with their dry, late-summer lawns and old deciduous trees protected behind chain-link fences.
I had to stop as I reached the old freight line just north of Main Street and the center of town because the railroad crossing lights were flashing. I put the car in park and clicked the ignition off. Trains were rare, but when they came, they were usually a hundred cars in length and rolling slow. We'd have to wait several minutes for it to pass.
The ground shook as twin diesel locomotives growled through the dark, their single headlamps giving credence to the dark humor about the light at the end of the tunnel. The blare of twin-note air horns announced the train's approach to the crossing. The rails flexed under the immense weight of the engines, the graffiti covered boxcars, and the smeary black oil tankers. Steel wheels screeched and clacked; acrid, black smoke belched from the hard-working engines as thousands of tons of freight rumbled passed.
I glanced in the rearview to see what our newbie thought of the sight. Bem sat in the middle of the bench seat, his knees drawn to his chest, head down, hands over his ears, and his whole body shaking. I started the car, dragged the old girl around in a hard U-turn, and blasted back up Forklanding Road until the train sound faded. I made a left and followed the other side of Woodlawn Avenue to Woodlawn Field, a collection of baseball diamonds and soccer fields near the town's sewage treatment plant. It was the closest thing to a park that we had.
I shut the knocking engine off, and we sat in deafening silence. Luckily, the wind was in our favor and the air was fresh. Bem slowly unwound himself, but his head stayed down. He seemed embarrassed. "I'm sorry." He said into his chest. "That thing...the noise...I guess it got to me. I must be in worse shape than I thought."
"Don't apologize. It's fine." I reassured my friend. I reached out with my magic and wrapped a shawl of it across Bem's shoulders. I tried to massage some of his tension away. Bem leaned into the touch of my magic and nodded his head in a shallow acknowledgement of my efforts.
Shawn provided his own reinforcement. "It took me a while to get used to how loud things are in this world."
"What was that thing?" Bem asked with a shudder that I felt through my power.
"A freight train," I explained, "it's used to haul large amounts of goods over steel rails. Like the monorails on Solum but bigger and louder."
Bem's expression told me he didn't fully grasp what I'd said. He waved away any further explanation. "Doesn't matter. Is it gone now?"
"It should be."
"I'm OK. I'm fine. We can go." Bem muttered, again into his chest.
I took Bem at his word. I patted his back with my magic and released it, then drove us through town along the same route. This time, I crossed the tracks without impediment and made a right at the intersection that put us on Main Street. Two blocks down, I pulled up and parked in front of what the locals referred to as the `little' Zenith Market.
"What are we doing here? What's a Zenith?" Bem asked as I clicked the ignition off. He still sounded rattled. I supposed he was worried about another surprise.
"It's a grocery store. I need some stuff for breakfast." I answered. "My brother takes very good care of himself. He eats right and exercises. Whenever I used to visit him, any time of the day, I would bring greasy breakfast food and cook it for him and me. It was kind of a ritual. He would get a meal he enjoyed but would never fix for himself, and I would get to see him. I think it'll help smooth out...all this." I gestured vaguely around the car.
I squinted at the hours chart that was posted on the glass storefront. It was Thursday, so the store was following the weekday schedule. "The store opens at six. We've got a half hour to kill before we can get what we need and go to Joe's. We'll see him first, see if he'll help us or not, then we'll have to find a hotel, and shop for clothes. I've also got to drop this heap at PC Automotive, if it's still there, and rent a car."
We sat to watch the sun rise until Bem got bored and asked a question. "What's your brother like, Church? Is he like you?"
I didn't have to search my mind to describe my brother. I'd been thinking a lot about him since I agreed to go to Earth for Ars. I'd been thinking a lot about my whole family, those living, and those passed. I started to explain and used myself as a physical reference.
"Joe is eight years younger than me, about my height, but not built the same, his frame is smaller. His coloring is the same as mine, brown hair and eyes. He usually keeps his hair shorter than mine, well, much shorter now, and he was always naturally lean where I was bulky. Personality...ah...he's very rigid but will bend when he has to. He's honest to a fault, well-spoken, college educated, will swear but doesn't like to, and is religious but not a fanatic. He also has a habit of not believing anything he can't see and prove."
"My sister, Mary, is something else entirely." I continued with an involuntary shake of my head. "She's four years younger than me, about your height, Bem, or a little less, same coloring as Joe and me, petite, and hard as nails. She got all the religious fervor in the family. She can quote the Bible chapter and verse, and never misses an opportunity to do it. She married a deacon and had a couple kids. I don't know if she had any more since I've been gone, but the first two, a pair of twins, took a lot of trying."
"We've got a half a chance that Joe will be OK with us, me and Shawn, but Mary...never. I always got along with Joe even though we never had much in common. Mary and I could never quite mesh. She's too much like my mother, judgmental at the top of her voice."
By the time the family description was finished, and I had answered some questions, it was six o'clock. On the dot of the hour, an elderly man in a blue polo shirt, the uniform of the Zenith Market, unlocked the automatic door and turned the vestibule lights on. The three of us went inside and Bem was confused again. "What is this place? What's it for?" He asked, wide-eyed and staring at his surroundings.
It didn't occur to me until then that Bem had never seen a grocery store. The culinarian food synthesizer made them irrelevant. We made a quick circuit of the market while I explained how food was managed on Earth. I grabbed eggs, breakfast sausage, scrapple, ketchup, white bread, salted butter, potatoes, onions, and coffee.