Free Forever Freaky by Tom Upton

couldn’t leave you here,” he said. “What
if you need my help?”
    I laughed. “That’s doubtful.”
    “Well, I’m staying,” he said stubbornly.
    “Then stay.”
    He glowered at me, as though I’d just played
some practical joke on him.
    A few minutes later I noticed that something
was happening in the middle stall. The wall behind the toilet
looked strange, shimmering as though invisible heat waves were
coming off it.
    Jack noticed it at the same time I did.
    “It looks like a mirage,” he said.
    “Yeah, doesn’t it?”
    We both rose to our feet and stepped toward
the stall to examine the phenomenon more closely.
    An invisible layer of something that looked
like clear gelatin was swirling and shimmering and slowly growing
thicker, edging forward, enveloping the entire toilet and filling
half the stall. The patterns of motion within the clear substance
were mesmerizing. The shimmers, which had been yellowish, now
became many colors—red, blue, pink, and purple, and a hundred other
colors, some of which I had never imagined. The colors swirled
around a small depression that was forming, growing wider and
deeper. Then, little by little, as the depression grew, the colors
faded to black and so did the clear substance that quickly started
to resemble molten tar. Suddenly the depression flexed and
transformed into a huge gaping mouth that twisted and emitted a
loud wail.
    Jack and I jumped back at the same time.
    “You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked, not
looking at Jack, not tearing my eyes away from what was in the
stall.
    “A huge ugly mouth?” I heard him ask.
    “Oh, good. It’s not just me, then.”
    I looked over at Jack. His eyes seemed twice
their normal size, and his skin was about as pale as mine.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    “Uh, I don’t know. Honestly, I’m fighting off
the urge to run.”
    “Big help,” I snorted. I studied the large
dark maw. There were no visible teeth, which, I supposed, was a
positive sign. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to come out of the
stall.”
    “Not yet,” he said.
    “So any ideas, because I have nothing
here.”
    Jack shrugged weakly. “It looks like a mouth,
but really it’s just a portal connecting one place to another. Why
don’t you try call to Mary Jo? Maybe she’ll hear you?”
    So I tried that, stepping up as close as I
dared, calling out Mary Jo’s name several times.
    Nothing happened at first. Then the mouth
became animated, looking as though it might be chewing an enormous
wad of gum, and then, like somebody about to make a bubble,
puckered up and blew an icy breath.
    An object shot out of the mouth and clattered
to the floor between Jack and me. We jumped to the side, not
recognizing the object at first. When we did realize what it was,
we gave each other a look that cried, What’s with that?
    On the floor at our feet, a tiny wind-up
plastic duck waddled about aimlessly.
    “I don’t get it,” Jack said dully.
    I stooped down to pick up the duck. Its
little legs were still pumping up and down, slowly losing strength
until they stopped.
    “A little kid’s toy,” I murmured.
    “Probably fell through another aperture, some
other place, some other time.”
    I squinted at him. “You mean this kind of
thing might happen at the time?”
    “Who knows?”
    “Well, it would sure explain why I keep
losing hair brushes.”
    Jack seemed emboldened at the harmlessness of
the toy.
    “Maybe I should try a spell,” I said.
    “Really, I don’t think that’s a good
idea.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because we don’t know what we’re dealing
with here. I don’t think trial-and-error is the way to go with this
thing.”
    “Then what? Years of research?” he said.
“This thing—whatever it is—isn’t going to be here forever. One day
it’s going to stop appearing, and then there goes Mary Jo—forever.
Look at that toy—you do know they were big in the 1970s.”
    I sighed. “All right—try a spell.”
    He retrieved the