Nick and the Fox

A Story by Snafu

An accountant falls down a hole. Assuming the rest is caused by his concussion, he goes on a quest to save his younger sister, and to his annoyance there is a floating fox there to tell him the rules.

Up until everything went horribly wrong, Nick was in a pretty good mood. He stepped out of his favorite coffee shop at almost exactly twelve thirty that Tuesday, a paper cup bundled up in one hand. In the fierce cold, the heat from the cup scorched his palm even through his gloves. Still, despite the cold and the prospect of returning to work after his lunch break, it was hard to feel pessimistic when the sky was such a bright, clean, fragile shade of blue, with sunlight glowing on the tangled Chicago streets. It was the middle of February, but from inside it looked like summer.

Nick stopped beside the same intersection he always crossed on his return to work, sipping his coffee and watching for cars. He was not expecting anything unusual"after all, few people expect a massive change in their reality to occur at the end of their lunch break…or at all, for that matter. When traffic slowed, Nick stepped off the curb and began to cross the street"

"And promptly fell into a deep hole in the pavement he would have sworn had not been there before.

Nick barely had time to register that he was falling before he struck the ground hard on his back. For a moment, he could not even tell which direction was up. Then his sense of gravity reasserted itself and he realized where he was: at the bottom of a deep hole, dark as an oil slick except for the single round opening far above. There did not seem to be any sort of ladder or way out.

And as if that wasn’t enough already, he had spilled his coffee.

Grumbling, Nick climbed to his feet, wavering slightly as if he might fall right down again. His head was screaming with pain; he put one hand to his temple and his fingers came away sticky with blood. He had obviously hit his head somewhere on the way down.

“This is just brilliant,” Nick muttered to himself. “This cannot be happening. How did I not notice a giant hole in the middle of the street?”

And then, quite suddenly, Nick was no longer alone. “Because it wasn’t there!”

Nick jumped and let out a small and rather prissy-sounding scream. “What the"!” He whirled around to face the newcomer, almost falling over. “Who the hell are you?”

The newcomer looked amused, which was a bit of an achievement for a fox. “Hi,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “Nicolas Beuman! I was wondering when you’d, ah, drop in.”

Nick took a short, sharp breath and readjusted his glasses. “Oh God. A punny fox. I have a concussion.”

“Ahahah!” The fox let out a bark of laughter. “Now, to serious matters"unfortunately"you are here for a reason. You have things to do, Mr. Beuman. Specifically, you have places to go.”

Nick grimaced. “Yes, to the hospital, obviously,” he said. “For my concussion.”

The fox shook his head. “No! To find your sister.”

“My sister.”

“Your sister!”

“I just said that. I was rather expecting you to actually explain something, rather than keep repeating me.”

The fox laughed again. It seemed ‘serious’ was not his strong suit. “Be as snarky as you like, Mr. Beuman, I don’t mind,” he said brightly. “As for your explanation, your sister has, eheh, ended up in a rather unusual situation. She’s…well, quite frankly she is being held prisoner somewhere far away and I can’t think of anyone more suited to helping her out than you!”

Nick’s grimace deepened, an achievement in and of itself. “Oh dear God. Let me guess. I’m supposed to go off on some magical quest to save my sister"who is undoubtedly in some dark, forbidding castle somewhere"while fighting monsters and learning a life lesson along the way.”

“Well. Not exactly,” the fox replied slowly.

“Oh, good. I was worried for my mental condition.”

“It’s a very well-lit castle.”

Nick stiffened, balling up his fists in rage and frustration. He made a very rude gesture in the fox’s direction.

The fox looked hurt. “That’s not very nice.”

“I’m ignoring you now,” Nick spat, turning his back on the fox. He scanned the walls of the hole, looking for a handhold to climb back out again. “You are a figment of my imagination who is lecturing me on playing nice with others. I get enough of that from my sister, who I will call as soon as I get out of here and get medical attention. For my concussion.”

It was the fox’s turn to frown. “Hey! Why don’t you call her now!” he cried, a mild challenge in his voice. “She won’t pick up. Not now, or in a few hours, or in a few days. Because she is missing. Call her work number. Her friends! No one will know where she is.” His dark eyes glinted as he stared Nick down.

Nick glared back. “Fine,” he spat abruptly, drawing out his cell phone. He quickly dialed her number. It went to voicemail immediately.

Nick stared at the phone for a moment, his angry expression easing into one of surprise and confusion. Anna never let her phone go to voicemail if she could avoid it. She kept her cell meticulously charged at all times, and the only times she did not answer was very late at night, or during an emergency. She even answered in the shower, for God’s sake (although calling Anna and receiving an answer of ‘Oh, hi, Nick! Sorry about the noise, I’m in the shower’ was always more information than he wanted or needed). He thought he could count on one hand the number of times he had been unable to get ahold of her.

The fox looked expectantly at Nick. “Ehhh?” he grinned. “I was right, yeah?”

Nick cursed and dialed another number, hitting the buttons so hard the entire phone creaked in protest. He made three calls: one to his mother (who had no idea where Anna was), one to Anna’s work (she had not come in today), and one to Anna’s best friend (who had not heard from her in two days). Finally, he slipped the phone back into his pocket, looking pale and defeated. He turned to face the fox, mouth set in a straight line, determined. “Okay,” he said flatly. “We’ll do this your way.” As much as he hated feeding into this delusion, he hoped that maybe if he followed this obviously concussion-fueled hallucination to its end, things might make some form of sense.

The fox clapped his paws delightedly, an extremely unfoxlike gesture. “Alright! Let’s go!” he chirped, leaping off the floor. To Nick’s surprise, the creature did not land again, but remained hanging in midair, standing on nothing. He stared blankly at the fox for a moment before shaking his head and filing his surprise away. This was crazy enough without dwelling on how the talking fox at the bottom of a hole in the street got around.

The animal darted forward, running on nothing, head angled so he could watch Nick following from the corner of one dark eye. Then, with shocking suddenness, the ground ended. The fox glided over the edge and floated effortlessly over a black void, his shifty grin reappearing.

Nick shouted a curse and skidded to a stop, pinwheeling his arms. He kicked away from the edge so furiously he went the other way, tumbling backwards and landing on his back yet again just a few feet from the edge. “What the hell is your problem!” he snarled at the fox, who was howling with laughter. “When were you planning on telling me that there was a motherfucking ravine here?”

The fox was almost incoherent. “The look…on your fu-face…Ahahahaha! That was amazing!”

Nick scrambled to his feet. “I swear to God if you weren’t a product of my concussion I would"” He made strangling motions with both hands, glaring wildly at the fox.

“Well, you’re gonna have to go into the ravine anyway,” the fox said, choking down his laughter. “It’s the only way to get into"”

Nick placed one hand on his head. His headache was intensifying by the minute. “"Magical fairy land or whatever, right?”

The fox paused thoughtfully. “Well. There aren’t really fairies…but yeah, pretty much.”

“Of course,” Nick growled.

The fox floated over, grin flickering on and off like an almost-dead lightbulb. “You said you were going to do it my way!”

“Your way is going to kill me.”

“Nonsense!” the fox cried. “And anyway, you don’t have a choice.”

Alarmed, Nick turned quickly towards the fox. “What are you"?”

The fox gave him a terrific push, and Nick flew forward over the edge, plummeting down into the darkness.

Nick opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, for the third time in the last twenty minutes. His entire body ached as if a car hit him and then backed up over him again.

Very slowly and cautiously, Nick sat up, glancing around to get an idea of where he was. Above him yawned blackness so complete it was like a night sky without stars or moon: the ravine he had tumbled down from. Just a few feet to his right, a massive wall of rutted gray stone reared up and was lost in the darkness. Nick pondered going over and looking for handholds, but vetoed the idea almost right away. The cliff was completely sheer, and while Nick had the strange idea that he had fallen more slowly than he should have in the first place, he was definitely not going to trust that idea to save him if he fell.

“This is bullshit,” he muttered as he picked himself up, absently dusting dirt and grass from his pants. “A bump to the head and the laws of physics fly out the window. There’s no way in hell I’d actually survive that fall.” He squinted upwards, trying to gauge height, but it was futile.

Nick took his glasses off and wiped each lens carefully on his shirt. They had become smudged during the first fall and without them he was nearly blind. Partway through, however, he stopped, looking down. He was standing on grass, something he had completely failed to notice until then. He hastily returned his glasses to his face and scanned the cave again. The walls looked uniform, pockmarked and gray as the sky during a storm"but he hadn’t been looking down before. Now that he was, he noticed that the grass grew irregularly, in patches that clumped together and formed what was almost a path that terminated at an unremarkable stretch of wall.

Frowning, Nick approached the wall, reaching out hesitantly with one hand. For a moment, his fingers brushed cold stone; then the rock melted away in a narrow strip only a few feet wide. The path beyond (a real path, not a vague trail of grass clumps) was dark and wound around a corner not far beyond the false wall.

Carefully, as if the ground, too, might melt away the second he touched it, Nick stepped onto the path. He stood very still for a moment, waiting for something strange and horrible to happen to him. When it didn’t, he started forward, still frowning.

He had no idea how long he followed the path, but some time later it turned a sharp corner and Nick was suddenly bombarded with sunlight. After the dim ambient light of the cave and the deeper shadows along the path, the sunlight was so fierce he was struck blind for almost a full minute. When his eyes finally adjusted enough for him to see, he uttered another soft shriek and leaped backwards, nearly falling again. “Holy s**t!”

He was standing on the edge of a precipice. Beneath him spread an ocean of fog, delicate silver-gray and roiling like waves. The fog was so dense he could not see even a sliver of land"there was only fog stretching out towards the horizon. He sensed that he was extremely high up, which seemed completely mad considering how far"and how often"he had fallen since crossing the street back in the land of things that actually made some form of sense.

“Now,” a disapproving voice spoke up, “Is that sort of language really necessary?”

Nick jumped. The fox was back.

The creature hung easily in the air, coat glittering red-gold in the sunlight. Once again he was carrying a wide piano grin. “Hello there, my gravity-challenged friend,” he said cheerfully.

Nick backed further away from the edge and gave the fox a sour look. “Oh, you. And here I was hoping you’d fallen into the ravine and crawled off the die somewhere.”

The fox giggled, which was not the most appealing sound to hear from something clawed and furry. “You are so prickly, Mr. Beuman!” he exclaimed. “You really should learn to play well with others, you know. You’ll give yourself an ulcer.”

“You pushed me off a cliff. I am not playing nice with someone who pushes people off cliffs.”

“Ahahah! You’re overreacting.”

“Like hell I am. Pull something like that again and I swear to God I will make you into a stole. Where the hell am I, anyway?”

The fox looked curiously around. He mumbled quietly to himself (although Nick got the creeping suspicion that he kept his voice just audible on purpose): “Hm, the fog is particularly thick today, that’s bothersome. But you can still feel your way down the stairs, I suppose…”

“Oh dear God. What stairs?”

“And I don’t think the condensation ought to make them too slippery… It’s not like you’d really suffer if you fell down them anyway.”

“That’s a relief, I suppose.”

“No, you’d pretty much die on impact, so…”

Nick made a noise not unlike that of an old-fashioned teakettle letting out steam. “You little"” he spluttered. “You sociopathic little jackass, you are not helping! What f*****g stairs are you talking about? I don’t see any f*****g stairs! And I sure as hell am not planning on feeling my way around the edge of a f*****g cliff to find them!”

The fox was not perturbed in the slightest by Nick’s outburst. “Ulcers aside, I see major, erm, cardiac difficulties for you if you don’t chill out,” he snickered. “I was going to explain. You need the stairs to get off this cliff-thing"”

“"No s**t, I was thinking we were going to take them to Timbuk-f*****g-tu"”

“"And from there you just go all the way down to the ground, so you can"”

“What the hell is your problem"”

“"Find your sister and take her home. Calm down, man, breathe any faster and your lungs are gonna burst out of your chest and make a personal appearance.”

Nick stared furiously at the fox, panting slightly. “Calm down?” He said roughly. “Calm down? I’m losing my mind over here and you’re teasing me. I’ll calm down if you wipe that smug little grin off your face and actually tell me what’s going on here.”

After a thoughtful pause, the fox obliged. At once his grin dropped off and his expression became serious"or at least a mockery of seriousness, because every few seconds his lips would ripple as if a smile was attempting to crawl out of him. He did not do serious well. “There are these sort of trials you have to go through to cross from your world to ours,” he began.

Nick scowled. “Of course.” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Trials. Three of them, undoubtedly, because it’s always three. If one of them involves fighting a dragon, I’m leaving.”

The fox snorted with laughter before remembering he was supposed to be serious. “Actually, you’ve pretty much already done your three trials!” he said brightly. Hovering in midair, he began counting off on his claws, explaining as he did, “You jumped off the cliff edge (well…we’re going to pretend you did it on your own, at any rate), you found and followed the dark path, and all you have to do now is go down the steep stairs! Which are over there, by the way; I would have explained, if you didn’t have such a frightful temper.”

“That’s…anticlimactic,” Nick commented, although he looked rather relieved.

The fox sighed regretfully. “I happen to agree, actually, it’s way too easy. And boring. I have actually been lobbying to include dragon-fighting for some time now.”

For a moment, Nick nearly asked whom exactly the fox was lobbying to. Then it occurred to him that the less he knew about this insane world’s inner mechanisms, the better. He approached the drop-off where the stairs should be and began to climb, mumbling irritably to himself, “After I get back and see a doctor, I’m finding a damn shrink.”

Fog enveloped him almost instantly. One moment, he could see unobstructed clear to the horizon; the next, he ducked below the fog line and everything went blank white. Fog pressed in on all sides, clammy and oppressive. As hard as he strained his eyes, Nick could not see anything. He moved steadily downwards, slipping on slick rocks, nearly blind. The time that elapsed between when he started down the stairs and when he reached the bottom could have been as short as fifteen minutes or as long as an hour. But when he finally reached the bottom, he sat heavily on the lowest stair and put both hands over his face.

The fox floated down beside him moments later, giving off a soft orange glow. “You okay, man? Mr. Beuman?”

Nick glowered at him from between his fingers. “My head aches. My body aches. I have a concussion that is causing me to hallucinate such nightmarish things as the presence of you. So no, not really,” he snapped.

“You also have a little blood there, on the side of your face.”

“Strangely enough, I noticed that.”

The fox gave another short bark of laughter. “Always so sarcastic! Come on, we don’t have far now.”

“I am so tired,” Nick mumbled faintly. “I think I’ll stay right here, thank you, and…rest a little.” The grass beneath his shoes was heavy with dew, but looked extremely soft, and Nick imagined lying down and falling asleep right here. He imagined waking up in Chicago again. He imagined not having a concussion.

The fox darted forward and swiped at Nick with one paw. “Hey!” he barked at him. “Hey, don’t go all sissy on me now, you have things to do! There really isn’t much farther.”

Nick hissed something incredibly unpleasant at the fox under his breath.

“Come on, foul language isn’t the only way to express oneself! And.” The fox threw Nick a sly glance from the corner of one dark, glinting eye. “If you try to stay here, so will I. Which means you get to spend more time with me!”

Nick was on his feet in a heartbeat. “Where to?”

The fox laughed uproariously. “Your sister, of course.”

They continued on. The fox led the way, the sharp orange light glimmering off his fur cutting a circle in the fog. He kept himself occupied by humming something extremely annoying under his breath"Nick thought it might be a horrible version of ‘I Will Survive’. It took a great amount of personal restraint to avoid making a comment about that one.

The thick fog made it difficult to gauge time, but according to Nick’s watch (which was cracked but working) they had been walking for almost an hour when the sky darkened and the fog began to thin. Soon Nick was able to make out a great shape looming above them, jagged and irregular as a mountain. He could even make out crooked spires and dark, gaping windows dotted here and there.

He scowled. “Of course. It’s a castle. How original.”

“Sarcasm. How original,” the fox mirrored back gleefully. “Don’t worry, she’s only on the first floor, and you don’t even have to go inside, she has a window.”

“Wait a second.” Nick cast a suspicious look in the fox’s direction. “If it’s that simple, why the hell haven’t you done it already? Why drag me into this?”

The fox offered another wide piano grin. “Well. Because it’s one of those crazy magical things you keep going on about!” he explained. “I can’t do it, she got herself into it and only someone she’s close to can get her back out of it!”

Nick froze. She got herself into it? Very quietly, Nick said, “How did my sister get here?”

For once fox looked uncertain. “Maybe…she’ll tell you herself. If she wants to,” he replied after a moment. “It’s complicated. It’s not like you, that was cut-and-dried. For her it was…different.” Then, abruptly, the animal shook his head and summoned back a smile. “Enough of the serious, though, there’s something more important at hand!” he exclaimed. “You can’t just go and get her, you have to fight it off first!”

“Wait, what off?”

“It!” The fox waved his paw in the direction of a shadowy copse of trees. Between the trunks Nick could see something moving, something immense and hairy. Many red eyes glittered in the dark.

Nick paled. “Oh God, what is that?”

The monstrous thing moved slowly from the shadows, one heavy, erratic step at a time. It resembled a tarantula, in a way, but bigger and sporting more than twice as many legs. It was a tarantula that could feed on an SUV and walk away still hungry. A regular real-world tarantula looked as cuddly and unthreatening as a kitten beside that behemoth. Nick backed away, muttering under his breath: “Oh s**t. S**t. That’s not real. That can’t be real. I am finding the best shrink I possibly can when I get out of this.”

Telling himself it was not real did absolutely nothing to kill the fear shaking in his chest. He felt something cold against his hand and looked down.

The fox was back and had somehow materialized a sword. He pushed it in Nick’s direction as if he wanted him to take it. Nick stared blankly at him. “This, this is a sword,” he said, speaking very slowly as if the fox had suddenly turned mentally handicapped. “Stereotypic knight-versus-monster thing aside, I am not fighting a tarantula from hell with a sword.” The fox merely grinned back at him wordlessly. Nick felt he wasn’t making this quite clear enough. “This is a three foot long stick of metal. And that thing has probably eaten Tokyo at some point in its career!” he shouted.

“This one’s the gatekeeper,” the fox barked. “Good luck, yeah?”

Nick waved the sword threateningly at him. “When were you planning on telling me about this, huh? You really need to work on your communica"” And then the fox was gone, vanished so suddenly Nick could not even recall the precise second he had stopped seeing him.

Nick grabbed his head in both hands and let out a scream of frustration. “FUUUUUUUUUUCK! What the hell do I do now!”

Attracted by the sound, the spider-creature turned. For a moment, it fixed him with a hundred ruby-colored gazes and appraised him. Then, it attacked.

It was blindingly fast. Nick let out a scream and whirled away, heart pounding, completely forgetting the sword in his hand. In mere seconds the thing was only a few feet behind. From the corner of his eye, Nick saw it stretch out two horrifying black fangs, each longer than a yardstick and capable of scything through a car door. On impulse, Nick ducked sideways a heartbeat before the thing struck. Its fangs dug a pair of deep furrows right where he had been standing"for a millisecond, Nick felt a rush of cool relief. But the creature was already turning at top speed to try again.

Nick’s mind raced. Panic, screaming like a siren deep in his brain, tried to drown out rational thought, but he fought it down. His thoughts presented him a single image: the creature rearing back to bite, fangs spread wide, hideous face momentarily exposed. Nick narrowed his eyes, a plan leaping fully-formed into his mind.

When the spider-thing ran, its legs moved so quickly Nick’s eyes could not follow their movements, but when the it aimed to bite it was forced to slow down. That was his window of opportunity. Nick adjusted his grip on the sword. If this is a hallucination, he reasoned, then this is my head. I’m in charge here!

The monster reared back to strike and Nick responded with a strike of his own: as quickly and with as much force as he could muster, he rammed the sword between those horrible fangs and buried it up to the hilt in the creature’s head.

Its momentum carried it forward, knocking Nick off his feet and hurling him backwards. The thing was already dying. It took another few quick, blurring steps away before its legs gave beneath it and it sank to the ground in silence. But Nick did not see any of that"he had overextended himself, and when the spider crashed into him his vision had flared white for a moment and then went dark.

“Nick? Nick. Nick!”

Nick’s eyes fluttered at the sound. The voice was very familiar, but for a moment he could not quite place it. Where was he?

He opened his eyes slowly, wincing at the light. A face swam into view, but it was fuzzy and smudged as an old painting. Nick touched his face and realized he was not wearing his glasses. For a moment he was puzzled, and then everything flooded back.

“Anna!” Nick sat up and wrapped his sister in a hug. He let go almost instantly, looking awkward. Nick had never been much of a hugger. “Glad to see you’re, ah, okay.” Awkwardness aside, his sincerity came through clearly.

Anna laughed, rising to her feet. “Same. That was pretty crazy.”

Nick ran a hand through his hair, which was in complete disarray. He glanced around for a moment before noticing the very large dark blot close at hand that may or may not have been the spider-creature. “It’s dead? I damn near killed myself.” He winced, running a hand down his back as if checking for broken things. “I feel like a gym punching bag,” he growled. “Or roadkill. Pick your metaphor.” He took the glasses Anna handed him and slid them on, blinking rapidly. There was a spiderweb crack in the corner of one of the lenses and the steel frame was slightly bent, but all in all they were in good shape. “Better than I am, anyway,” Nick muttered aloud.

Then he looked up, his eyes able to focus on Anna’s face again. Unlike her unfortunate brother, she appeared completely clean and devoid of bruises, and furthermore seemed to be in a decent mood. Nick raised his eyebrows at her. “I thought you couldn’t get out?” he questioned.

Anna looked sheepish. “Well, it’s, um, complicated,” she said, her words matching those of the fox. “Like, once you’re in there you don’t really want to come out. Like you don’t even think of it. I only decided to when you got run over by that…spider from hell and I thought you were dead.”

Nick’s eyebrows sank down again as he frowned. “What, the power of love? Seriously?” His voice practically dripped disdain.

Anna swatted him. “Don’t look like that so much or your face’ll stick that way,” she snapped. “Anyway, sort of, I guess. That’s the simple way to say it.” She worked a little disdain of her own into her tone, although it did not occur as naturally to her.

Nick uttered a short, barking laugh. “I would love to argue this further, sis, but honestly…” He sank down onto the grass again, dizzy. “Honestly, I’m pretty shot to s**t here. Let’s just…rest a little bit.”

Anna shook her head. “You must want to come home,” she said, poking him. “It’s not like wandering around some crazy magical place is a big dream of yours.”

Nick glanced up at her. “You mean hallucination-land,” he said dryly.

Anna sighed but did not reply. Instead, she gave him another poke and began to walk away. “Let’s go, Nick, I don’t think it’s a good idea to stay.”

“Why…why not?” Nick sounded exhausted.

“I don’t know.” Anna bit her lip thoughtfully. “It just doesn’t feel like a good idea.”

Nick scoffed quietly, but humored her and rose painfully to his feet. “Lead the way,” he offered.

They walked in silence, moving away from the hulking castle. Anna peeked over her shoulder periodically until it was swallowed up by the fog that grew steadily thicker as they left it behind. For his part, Nick was too worn out to speak much.

When they reached the stairs, however, Nick placed one foot on the lowest step and stopped. “Don’t think I’m making it up these,” he murmured faintly. “It’s…very steep. And slippery.”

“Come on!” Anna cried, her irritation not entirely masking her concern.

It was Nick’s turn to shake his head. “You can…you can go. I’ll rest.” The blood painted down his temple and the side of his face had dried a dark red and a huge purple bruise bloomed beneath one eye. A short line of blood ran down his chin from a split lip. He looked a mess.

Quite suddenly, a bright light sliced through the fog. It was hot yellow-white, like fire, and Nick and Anna could feel the warmth of it brush their faces. When the flash dimmed, Nick could make out a familiar lithe form hanging in the air a few feet away. “Fox,” he said coolly.

The fox grinned back. “Nice to see you missed me!” he cackled. “And"Anna! Miss Beuman! Nice to see you out of that place, yeah?”

Anna looked a little taken aback. “Um, hi…fox,” she greeted him uncertainly. “Do I, uh, know you?”

The fox nodded furiously, a gesture that did not quite match the sentence that followed it. “Not really, but I know you. Or of you, sort of. And I know your brother!” He rounded on Nick, putting one black paw on his forehead to hold him still and looking him over.

Nick waved the fox away halfheartedly. “My headache is bad enough as it is.”

“Ahahah! I bet! You look like you went through a blender!” the fox snickered. “It would have been so with coming back just to see this.”

Nick raised both hands in a rather impolite gesture, which earned him an instant smack from his sister. “Anna, what the hell!” he cried, grimacing in pain.

“Don’t be so impolite!” Anna thundered. He responded with only a grudging grumble. Satisfied, Anna turned back to the fox. “So why did you drop by, if not to laugh at Nick, which I admit it really reason enough?”

The fox gave a great shout of laughter. “I like her, Nick!” he said. “Anyway, I’m actually here to give you two directions.” He grinned disarmingly.

Nick cast him a wary look. “…To where? Are you going to drop us in Lord of the Rings-land or whatever it’s called this time?” he snapped.

“Middle Earth. You need to read more fantasy, it’s a classic example of"”

“Actually,” the fox interjected, “Directions is really a poor choice of words. I’m actually here to"” he waved a paw" “take you directly home.”

At the wave of his paw, Nick and Anna felt their feet leave the ground. “Holy s**t!” Nick yelped, turning over in mid-air. Anna’s eyes were as wide around as saucers.

Unsurprisingly, the fox responded to their startled expressions only with more raucous laughter. He lifted the pair of them up, past the stairs, following shortly behind. When they reached the top, emerging into blazing sunlight yet again, the fox still did not set them down. He carried them down the dark path, his disembodied firelight flickering on the walls, and up into the black void of the ravine. He burned in the darkness like a star.

“Why didn’t you help me this way earlier?” Nick said stiffly, breathing as evenly as he could to stay calm. On all sides there was only air around him, something he had previously experienced only for mere seconds at a time when jumping.

“Because you had to do the tasks!” the fox barked. “Don’t give me that look, Mr. Beuman, it’s the rules! Magic stuff!”

Nick scowled.

Fox dropped them gently at the edge of the first ravine minutes later and sat in midair, tail curled around his feet. He looked pleased with himself. “You are free to go,” he said.

Nick narrowed his eyes. “Is that all? No great quest? I just get to leave?”

The fox nodded and grinned. “Not all quests gotta be huge, mind-blowing things, yeah? You had a quest. Now you get to go back. And that’s what you wanted, right?”

“…Yes. Of course. It just seems too easy.” Nick adjusted his glasses thoughtfully.

Anna reached out across the void and patted the fox’s head. “Thank you,” she murmured. Then she turned and began to walk back, up the tunnel.

For a long, tense moment, Nick was silent. He brushed dust off his sleeves and studiously did not look at the fox. Then, rather awkwardly, he said, “Thank you. For, um, everything.”

The fox only grinned.

The hold Nick had fallen into was gone. Instead, Nick and Anna found themselves in the bottom of an old manhole, water lapping at their shoes. The top was uncovered, and when they heard no cars approaching, they climbed out.

It was almost sunset in Chicago. Nick and Anna crossed the street and stood in front of the coffee shop Nick always stopped at, almost unable to believe the normalcy of the paved streets and sidewalks and softly humming cars. Anna merely looked windswept, but Nick was battered from head to toe: grass was tangled in his disheveled hair, his face was smudged with blood, his tie was askew, and his glasses were crooked and broken. As people passed, they peered curiously at him.

Slowly at first, Nick began to laugh. Anna looked curiously at him before joining in.

“What was all that,” Nick said incredulously. “Wow.”

Anne smiled. “Down the rabbit hole, Mr. Alice,” she countered.

Nick smiled back, then winced at the burst of pain in his face. “I still feel like a car hit me and then backed over me again,” he muttered.

Anna patted him on the shoulder. “Go home,” she said firmly. “You need, like, a lot of rest. You look like somebody beat you. I can call you tomorrow, and we can hang out. I was going to go to Six Flags with Chrissy tomorrow, but she backed out of it.”

Hesitantly, Nick said, “I could go with you, instead.”

Anna frowned. “But you hate Six Flags, you told me the rides were all screaming metal death traps"”

“"Except the wooden ones"”

“"Which were screaming wooden death traps, and that there’s like forty thousand ways to die there.

“There are,” Nick replied grimly. “It’s a dangerous place.” He glanced around, watching people come and go through the cracked lenses of his glasses. “But I can come anyway.”

Anna laughed politely. She thought he was joking.

Nick looked up. The sky was clear as water and just beginning to tint red. It was beautiful out. And there were no giant spider-creatures at Six Flags.

He grinned. “Ha. I think I can handle it.”