Prompt Lost – But one of the many many ones about having to find Waldo.
Where The F#@k Is Waldo?
The winds of nothingness swooshed in Harry’s ears as he marched straight through the place beyond the page.
Of all the frightful things he had seen so far, these traversings of the boundaries – the aggressive nowhere between illustrations – were by far the most disconcerting. Although he had already done this five times, he could not stifle a totally rational concern that he would never escape the inter-page oblivion.
All at once the abyssal darkness was banished by a flash of bright light, Harry’s stomach rising and falling as if he were on a roller coaster. Just as suddenly, the sound of ethereal wind was replaced by the maniac screams of a thousand men.
In an eye blink, Harry had materialized in the middle of a war zone. All around him, men in one of two brightly colored uniforms, one yellow, one red, “battled” each other with wanton fury.
The transition into each illustration was extraordinarily overwhelming and physically nauseating. It got harder each time.
Harry fell to his knees, racked with sickness pangs, and heaved into the mud. When he’d finished being sick, he took in the madness through bleary eyes.
Roving bands of yellow and red soldiers raged as far as his eye could see. Some held spears of absurd length, waving them about threateningly at one another. A few engaged in violent melees, some even going so far as to stab members of the opposite force.
But the great bulk of the soldiers were not so much fighting as doing an interpretive dance around the thematic notion of a fight. Here a group of red and yellow soldiers partook in a giant round of tug of war, struggling messily in the mud, spears in a heap beside them. There a team of red soldiers on top of a low wall were throwing water balloons in prodigious numbers at a team of yellow soldiers attempting to scale the wall with ladders. Elsewhere a large contingent of the yellow forces circled in a kind of jig around a smaller, frightened mass of red soldiers tied up in a bundle.
Just like the great majority of people Harry had so far encountered on his insane journey, these soldiers had completely lost their minds.
Harry struggled to his feet and looked at his watch. 7:13 PM. That time did not equate to the time in the illustration, which seemed to be mid-afternoon. Instead, the watch told Harry how much time had passed since he’d been dragged into the book to begin with. Just over 15 hours.
No wonder he was so exhausted. 15 hours of fruitless searching, without a moment of rest. He had begun on a beach absolutely packed with maniac beach-goers engaging in PG bacchanalia. Since then Harry had roamed from the surface of an alien planet, through a giant movie set, and over a featureless hellscape of blue stone – each location a page in the insipid book, each filled to the brim with perpetually lost travelers – adrift in the broadest sense of the word.
These denizens of the book had once searched for the same man themselves. Each had been given the same 24 hours Harry was allotted, and each had failed utterly. Their punishment – as designed by whatever mad, invisible God guided the hand of such things – was to be trapped in the book, forever – doomed to live in whichever illustration their time ran out in – to act as a hindrance to the next poor soul to arrive.
Harry knew all this because he’d read the inscription on the front cover of the book. He’d found the thing in a thrift store and picked it up with great excitement. When was the last time he’d seen one of these books after all? He’d loved them when he was a child, searching for hours, scanning the pages for all the wacky things happening on each outlandish page.
Except this book was different. When Harry finished reading the inscription, scrawled in delicate handwriting with a thin pen, he was no longer in the thrift store. He was no longer anywhere that made any sense whatsoever. He was on that first nonsense beach, filled with colorful rompers and zany happenings. Mindless denizens clamored endlessly, yapping at each other in gibberish, bashing each other over towel space, building miniature hot air balloons, digging tunnels in the sand, or aggressively thrashing in place, in a senseless frenzy.
It took Harry almost half an hour to realize what he was supposed to be doing, where he really was. Harry was being accosted by a group of beach-goers walking on their hands instead of their feet. One of the beach-goers knocked Harry to the ground as he tried to pass by. Harry fell into the sand and when he opened his eyes, not five feet in front of him, there it was.
An impossible relic made real by unimaginable forces. A red and white beanie hat.
Suddenly, it all made terrible sense, and from then on Harry took the inscription – and its threatening 24-hour time limit – very, very seriously.
That was 15 hours ago. Since then Harry had searched like mad, through the insane panoramas of the book. He had found a striped sock. He had seen, he thought, a striped sleeve moving through the masses of tormented party-goers in the Hollywood illustration. A bright blue leg had disappeared into a forest just beyond a giant sea monster in medieval times. Each time Harry had raced like mad toward the specter, and each time he arrived too late, stumbling instead into the boundary of the illustration and traversing the nowhere in between each miniature universe.
Now semi-violent chaos reigned supreme in the midst of an endlessly fought battle. Harry managed to get to his feet, warding away exhaustion with a shake of his head. He rubbed the fatigue from his eyes, trying to parse the madness of yellow and red movement all around him. Peering deeply into the morass, Harry looked for a visual clue – a hand holding a brown cane, or a thin, red, white, and blue silhouette. But all he saw was roving bands of the yellow and red madmen – there carrying a giant cake for no reason, there pole-vaulting into one another over a pit of tar, there laughing hysterically together over a wagon full of beer.
Resignedly, Harry took a deep breath and set out at a jog. He only had 9 more hours before he would be trapped in this place. As he ran through the chaos, keenly aware that failure meant forever in this Sisyphean hell hole, eyes peeled for any sign of blue pants, or a striped shirt, or dumb beanie hat, one question reigned supreme in Harry’s mind:
“Where the fuck was Waldo?”
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