Chasing the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

shrugged. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the rules.Oh, hot dog.” He lumbered over to the cart on his stumpy legs. “One foot-long, please. Extra everything.”
    The squiddy vendor asked, “You got any money?”
    “What? I’m good for it.”
    The vendor wiggled his tentacles and folded his floppy arms across his chest.
    “Hey, could you loan me a couple of bucks?” Vom asked Diana.
    She duplicated the vendor’s stance.
    “Oh, fine. I must’ve eaten someone with a wallet at some point.” He opened his mouth and reached down his own throat. He spit out a variety of random objects: an old lipsticka dog collar, a license plate, some buttons, and something small and squirmy that was apparently still alive.
    Vom extracted a pair of wrinkled blue jeans from his bigger mouth. He rifled through the pockets and found a few dollars and some change. Enough to purchase two hot dogs. The sticky drool covering the cash didn’t bother the slimy vendor beast, who started working on Vom’s dogs. While waiting, Vom shoved the regurgitated items back into his mouths. Including the squirming thing.
    “Don’t skimp on the sauerkraut.”
    The vendor gave Vom the dogs. He offered one to Diana. She turned it down with a queasy twinge.
    He swallowed the hot dogs in one gulp.
    “You have something.” She pointed to the mustard-stained pant leg snagged on one of his fangs. “Right there.”
    “Whoops.”
    He slurped down the denim like a stray noodle.
    * * *
    They walked through the park, and Vom tried to explain what was happening. Normally she wouldn’t have been caught walking through a park alone after dark, but she figured that the ravenous creature beside her would discourage even the most determined mugger. Or not.
    Nobody seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The giant bugs and slugs and misshapen things lurching on the city streets. Or the tears in the sky. Or the monstrous moon god. All these things remained unobserved by everyone else.
    “Imagine the universe as a tesseract, a single multidimensional hypercube divided into thin, mostly self-contained slices. Now this model is, by its nature, flawed and incomplete. Mostly because each entity perceives its own slice to be the most important, simply from a lack of ability to perceive the other aspects of the complete universe which surrounds them. With me so far?”
    “No.”
    He sighed. “This’d be easier if you had some experience with multidimensional geometric theory.”
    “Yeah, well, I don’t. Didn’t think it would be important. And I don’t think they even offered it at the college I attended.”
    “Okay. We’ll go with the dumbed-down version then.” He spoke very slowly, using sweeping gestures to emphasize his points. “The universe is a very tall building with many floors but no elevators and great soundproofing. And every shred of matter in the universe exists on one of those floors.”
    He paused.
    “Have I lost you again?”
    “I’m not an idiot. I can follow a metaphor.”
    “Each floor is usually completely unaware of the other floors around it. Although sometimes, if one floor gets particularly noisy it might have an effect on nearby neighbors. And sometimes a floor will spring a leak or a window will open for a short while and things might get a little wonky for both floors until the anomaly corrects itself. And other times the floors get shuffled around and in the process something on Floor A ends up on Floor B, where it really doesn’t belong. See, there are connections between floors. Like ventilation ducts or Jefferies tubes or crawl spaces or whatever. Invisible gaps in the fabric of the universe that probably serve some useful purpose, but that also some beings use, unintentionally in my case, to cross floors. And our apartment is one of those trapdoors.
    “But you don’t leave your old world behind. A part of it comes with you, no matter where you go. And so you and I are straddling floors. One foot in our own portion