It’s a beautiful circadian progression.
The outdoors is very cool, an island in a sea of muggy asphalt-stove days – or you are enjoying the nippy snow blanket of the morning in the lee of an apartment’s wind shadow. Blue, very blue, the sky was-is-shall-be.
Your foot hasn’t twinged once, as though the guerilla ambush never happened and your legs both terminate in shoes. An uncomfortable wrinkle in your dress chafes against the soft patch between navel and hip bone. A cold spell causes every facial piercing to go a little more sharp and pointy.
Your entire focus today is on getting to work. As it is with one human, so it is with many.
The other end of the transit known as “work” lies past a long cab journey – no, a little jet hop – no, no; that wonderful creation known as the subway, shunting countless souls through the thin skin of planetary landmass. It’s too short for reading a whole novella, and too long for a relaxing dissociation away into thoughts-only living. Not perfect, not terrible… just right.
You get nudged by a little clot of people leaning toward the boarding zone for the contained transit, and you take a deep breath. The line’s moving.
Not too many people are coming along on this journey for the time of day, or the day of the week. Behind, there are five business suited… somethings, maybe accountants or psychiatrists or supermarket clerks. Behind them stretches a handful of other people, including a baby, and several individuals whose occupation or destination can’t be easily deduced. There are three dogs. There are fourteen dogs. There are zero dogs.
Your waiting spot for the line puts you behind a man who may or may not be homeless, but who has the needed ticket for accessing this convenient but opportunistic journey. In front of him, a someone-who-has-no-hair scratches an impressive braid of barrettes up and down their tresses – at least, with one hand. The other hand is scanning a neatly printed code over a reader, waiting for grimy metal to unlock.
The turnstile stile turns, completing the short wholesome poetry of name.
The turnstile gives a beep and stays still as an attendant materializes to investigate the problem.
The turnstile makes no reaction when the slip pauses in its extended position, its owner makes a sudden noise of startlement, and a form begins lumbering back past you (pawing at pockets) with a cry of, “You must be- is it at the HOTEL!?”
A man who may or may not be homeless looks over a shoulder at you, holding his printout with loose tendony digits.
“At least my day’s not going that badly,” he says with a nod at the reverse departee.
Your own hand goes to your own pocket in sympathy. You grab at something through the material of your pants. You begin to say something in reply.
A soft sound creeps its way into your ears, curling over from a spot a bit ahead, a bit that direction. Your ears practically swivel as you take a step.
The world flickers.
Your hand scrabbles against a wallet – warm from your biological furnace – trying to get your ticket ready. The ticket folds back against a makeup compact, and you use a few potent slurs to vent your displeasure. Without any difficulty at all, you extract the perfectly flat document and flip it up to the front of the turnstile.
A click opens up your path forward. A man who may or may not be homeless looks at you from under an arm, and gives you an encouraging gesture. The smell of damp-dust stone sneaks in beside you. The day is scentless, other than the inside-of-the-human-nose mucus odor that sometimes visits in hospitals and other medical settings.
Putting a ticket back where it belongs suddenly runs into complications. A little slump-fingered undeftness sends it floating toward a corner of the boarding zone. You dash after it, and then stop.
Leaning down to grab your small runaway, you notice… something. It’s sat down in the middle of a patch of- well, obviously that’s red paint. It’s too vivid to be anything else.
The something is moving.
A few more seconds of rocking gently in place occur, perhaps deliberately. Silently, the something turns around and stares right back. It has forward facing eyes, and it is partly coated in red paint. It does not blink whatsoever, and zeros in on you as it begins to carefully, slowly close the distance.
This whatever-it-is, approaching as though to better avoid the human eye’s pattern attunement, wants you. It wants you as the thief wants a wallet, or the starving wanderer wants a bread loaf.
Now, as you consider, you need an idea. You need a decision of consequence. What do you do, scout?
[Milestone 1: Who Am I?]
I was Michael Winnacunnet, Man Living Near Portsmouth, second generation transplant from the US. I hoped to get a place working with London florist Haupner and Grouse, seeing as I was getting tired of amateur hobby experimentation between careers (though the nature hikes were nice). Studying biology and communication arts together didn’t have the best potential for job opportunities, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that “advertising campaign designer” felt like a plant-based match made to fit.
It would have surprised my parents, perhaps, but we hadn’t talked since certain growing-up traumas that I refused to think about.
My smiles had lost their verve for a while, but they were making a comeback. The reins were in my hands, the ball was in my court. A beautiful day in April and a single journey separated me from destiny!
Moving into London somewhere might have been needed… and no, that wouldn’t do my pauper’s savings much good. However, having enjoyable consistent career opportunities made anyone more attractive to potential romantic connections, and also meant I would be able to stop fighting my uncle’s dog for couch space. I loved creatures great and small, but Alexander tended to lick and jowl all across my face when I was asleep – sometimes even when he himself was asleep.
Haupner and Grouse, my uncle, the nerve wracking speed of the Tube as it passed under streets inherited from the Romans. All these and more fell from the alpine slopes of my brain.
I had not expected my morning to suddenly grow an encounter with the uncanny. To be fair, I’d never known anybody who truthfully claimed they did either, for all that it mattered. “Horror movie prop kills man seeking work” had a vaguely cool ring to it as an obituary note, but I wasn’t keen on it. Time to run.
[Milestone 2: Orientation]
When my feet stopped spinning their cartoonish loop, the cruelly unappealing door arch to the terminal straddled overhead like a child-sitter watching a mischievous but tired scamp. Passing back through the turnstile didn’t even exist in memory; things went “there” and now “here.” One hand held the thin cardstock that would have eventually put me on the street not far from a place called Echo Bank. The other hand curled around the parting of my collar, as though I’d suddenly gained a need for an air of dignity. Breathing soothed nerves, rather than replenishing air.
A look around decided to happen on its own.
Back near where tunnel adventured into dirty cement, a somewhat limp creature hunched, looking on with the sort of eyes that only the word “soulless” could do remote justice. Long arms with slothlike claws pulled it forward at a speed reminiscent of a purposeful stroll. Motion smudged the outline, revealing only as the distance gradually closed that its exterior had woolly thickness, or the unruly waviness of a sled dog’s fur. The covering in question parted to show a large but narrow gap, containing a host of jagged triangles the color of sand and with a sheen like porcelain.
No legs in evidence – I somewhat dreaded to think what pace the thing could have kept with them, since it had the gliding forever ease of a seal on ice.
Two seconds of watching confirmed the whatever-it-was had a gaze for me alone. Other travelers had taken notice, but (besides a middling height lady that had a phone out) none had tried to interact with it, or me. In half a second more, I turned and began jogging outside onto the newish patch of blacktop, helping to serve the neighborhood’s non-train-travel needs. A very helpful stoplight let me get across the double-South-single-North intersection arm without too much issue. A possibly imaginary click sounded from the utility pole by the crosswalk, perhaps four heartbeats after reaching the far shore of the car riverbed.
A brief window started where green still kept subcompacts and vans and sedans waiting, and then finally they picked up their puzzling through the city once more. Abruptly the thing came crawling into the open, still focused on me with hateful loving intensity. Then, it crawled onto the road.
Exactly as it passed into the path of the wheels, a behemoth with a wide two-pane windshield soundlessly ran the thing over.
Unconsciously I winced at the contact, then uncontrollably let out a bark of a chuckle when a sporty yellow speedster caught the thing as well, knocking it airborne and off the road over a hedge wall.
Needle sharp horn and firm palm heel made contact as the low slung car hit its brakes. The noisemaking van immediately behind it clearly had had a long day, and wanted to make sure everybody knew. The intervening sporty driver’s expression hid beneath their roof’s cover. Mad? Embarrassed? Panicked? After a few heartbeats, though, they decided to keep going and ignore the whatever-it-was that had taken a brief ride on their fender. The van’s horn followed close by, scraping down the road like a dopplery puff coat worn on a middle seat aircraft passenger.
My legs carried me down the sidewalk of their own volition, up to a low concrete retaining wall. Ignoring my interview clothing – the neat suit and trousers abruptly had as much value as linen and cord – I stepped up to the feral privet barrier and looked over. With a branch threatening to go through a breast pocket and ribs, a spy poorly spied.
There it sat, a russet lump on gray flagstones. In actuality, its hairy coat had a rippling sheen, tracking from dead charcoal red to chocolate onion brown. Its thick wool might have been a half inch thick or most of a foot, impossible to tell. A small portion had splotches of a color best named using the word “arterial” and which I still truth-lied was paint.
A large shudder went through the thing.
I had a moment, flinching back with my top half and automatically compensating by throwing the waist-down forward.
Privet hedges, like children, express by biting. Needle pokes were bad. A skull against sidewalk would end much worse. Grabbing a nice sharp twig was enough to save me.
The thing’s shape flowed like chunky water, head torqued in fuzzy increments as it faced me.
Those eyes still had no soul, but now the mouth’s wide span had an “inviting castle bridge” firmness to it. Each huge tooth more closely resembled a wedge of bakelite than enamel. Under the thing’s surface, writhings moved with purpose, bones or organs or veins or bees – I didn’t know what, but deadness didn’t describe the phenomenon.
“Hello!” said the thing in a voice I never, ever wanted to hear again.
Now, say what you would about my life; making a lot of fuss rarely sat high in my ambitions.
“Good morning, who and how are you?” said my mouth through nearly one hundred percent reflex.
The thing lifted itself with its claws, showing a prism or frustum shaped form that ended in legless wideness. I kept glancing at that broad barren pelvic-ish region, expecting to see feet unfold from somewhere, but no. No genitals, scars, or non-fur substrate broke the monotony; those claws, general shape of the whole body, and eyes-mouth decoration made up the whole of attention-drawing features. The (not) blood made an exception, of course. A hump of a head pauldroned by tubular long arms and a rectangular “footprint” trunk… honestly, it looked a bit like jumper cables glued to a carpeted cowbell.
“Hello!” the thing repeated, proving I hadn’t imagined that original exclamation. “I am going to eat you!”
Both eyes had the depth of those googly plastic things. Unless you were a sewing expert, you couldn’t get even a needle through the pupils – the thing’s face suggested, rather than presented, them. No eyelids blinked, maybe because of their absence, or maybe because of their vestigial quality.
“I would prefer you didn’t,” I said from some distance away.
A fold or indent suddenly surfaced across the frontal top of the thing’s head.
“I am going to eat you! Do not worry! I will not stop until then!”
The term “morbid fascination” put on weight as I kept watching, while the red speckled brown head… everted itself, or underwent other opaque muscular action. A human skull and the skull of a dog – or horse, or most big-eared mammal species – diverged hugely when you saw them in a museum together, but the change the thing’s head underwent made me think of a transformation from a primate skull to one that did better with hunting at night. Losing a bit of height, growing forward and gaining predatory definition where previously it had an earthwork smoothness around the jaw, the thing’s head pointed at me with a sudden weasel-long face. Teeth no longer jutted, they scrambled and nearly went to war with each other.
“Do not worry!” repeated that utterly disgusting voice, then abruptly the… the heckler started moving across the old plaza toward an arch.
On the other end of the arch, the plaza joined the curb on my side of the hedge.
I waited long enough to see fuzzy darkness round that corner before turning and running down the connecting lane. Two good solid shoes kept me to a decent clip. Despite getting entirely flattened and then launched, whatever damage the heckler yet bore failed to keep it broken and still.
Perhaps the entity had some specific malice of intent, and perhaps it had sentience. Conversely, maybe its hugely distressing voice was just repeating words like the… Japanese Room? I thought that was what the thought experiment was called. Performing tasks by uncomprehending rote versus the understanding of process and reason.
Well, no percentage in disregarding safety.
Sweat of anxiety joined sweat of exertion. Improvisation had never stricken me as so important yet so lacking, before.
[Milestone 3: Discovery]
I stumbled over a raised brick, as a short stretch of switching between sprint and jog came to an end. I breathed in. I breathed out.
Back on the sidewalk, forty meters or so away, the heckler constructed wide swinging arcs of claw and then closed them. Between it and me stood a family of one, some harried-spined man who kept looking at his comically gigantic phone-tablet hybrid. He leaned on a parking meter with illegible blue graffiti around its post, getting increasingly angry and hunchbacked while glaring between the meter and his screen, and occasionally at the nearby sedan that he presumably owned. He slapped the meter on the metal post, angry enough for violence and controlled enough to avoid expensive public property replacement.
When the heckler came within two long claw-drag strides, he started as though goosed, and half flopped onto the meter as he watched its approach. The unsupervised phone-tablet hybrid hopped off to play with the ground. A thin sharp whack suggested it had broken its entire face.
“Aww uwww auoOOOH!” said the man, as though failing to force an uncooperative sneeze.
As he was standing there, the heckler tried to squeeze past. It managed only partially, what with the obstacle of his bulky middle. He made some gurgly noises that could have qualified as giggling if the listener applied an Olympic level of artistic interpretation. Pipe-round clawed arms kept clawing at the concrete, but could only claw an insufficient combination of strength and leverage from the purchase. A man-cork interfered.
After a few seconds of this, the heckler’s neckless head rotated, and – for the very first time acknowledging the existence of some person besides myself – grabbed at the man’s belly in an almost dainty bite.
“AHHHHH!” the man declared.
He hop-fell away, skin and muscle punctured where blood dribbled out of him and into his shirt. I couldn’t tell if the damage accomplished real evisceration, or merely sliced open flesh in the possibly-vegetarian maybe-nonlethal way some muscle wounds grew. His hands went up as he fell partly off the thin sidewalk. Angles of perspective and movement put him mostly perpendicular to my line of sight, entirely helpless on the ground, and imperfectly hidden behind the sedan’s dumb bulk. Palms raised their faces against his assailant.
The heckler kept observing him for just long enough that an uninformed watcher could see it wasn’t simply waiting or woolgathering. Some three seconds after the gaze left me, those eyes and concentration returned. A man who’d accidentally obstructed a path, doing so no longer. A… prey item, returned to accessibility. “Psychology” maybe wasn’t the right term, but whatever paper dolls moved in the creature’s version of a brain-theater felt closer to my grasp than ten minutes ago.
A glom of memory twisted to the surface.
Whatever experience is had with dogs, I think anybody who has met one will agree the English bulldog is the gentlest, kindest soul of all. Sleepy, flatulent, sporadically enthusiastic, often favoring a specific person with their affection; the American bulldog has some similarities, but also notable differences (mostly for the less endearing). Most of all, living with Alexander taught me the English bulldog is fierce.
No matter how menacing in appearance, he always gave doggy kisses with his oversized droopy mouth. His oblong rump always swung full sideways when he saw me come through the door. He let me sift through his food dish the couple of times something dog-unfriendly fell in there while he was eating. A dog TRUSTS you if you can play muckabouts with the food at mealtime.
Three summers ago, though, I had brought Alexander out for a walk, enjoying the sunshine chafing the trees and daffodils of not-quite-wild Portsmouth. Alexander could always be counted on to be a good dog.
The arrival of a man who evidently took objection to my walking in front of his house with a “quadrupedal dispenser of filth and fleas” had marked an abrupt change for the day. The man had come right up to me, preparing to make something of the issue. He had argued that my intrusion three paces past where his lawn met the roadside gravel warranted a split lip.
Alexander had looked at him, growled once, and put up his hackles.
The man had retreated with speed and silence.
Thinking about that day, I loved him, a little more than almost any other creature alive. Even so, I realized he had unknown depths, and they contained violence. I never feared him, but that tiny bit of posturing got me to wondering whether I should.
The creature interested in me… it was a thing made of unknowns. If its violence had been triggered by some way I’d acted (or failed to act), I couldn’t tell which behavior had lit the fuse. Scarier was the possibility that it chose to pursue for no reason.
When the heckler resumed the chase, I began mumbling under my breath.
“I’m being followed. I was singled out of a crowd. The thing that did this singling out has the ability to speak or mimic English, and a carnivorous agenda. By some impulse it ignores other meaty opportunities, unless they’re in its way.”
A cyclist came out of nowhere. She made a diagonal over the sidewalk onto the road, barely clearing my kneecap with her light metal frame, and barked in surprised indistinct Welsh. Her smell of badger and overheated plastic citrus hit me between the eyes.
“If this is a prank then it’s in the worst possible taste!” I said.
Nobody leaped out of a manhole, and confessed to the worst possible taste in extended threatening pranks.
The sun bounced off two windows and an incredibly polished trash bin lid as I came around a corner, and went for my eyes with broken glass shivs.
My shin bumped off of a capstan that had found itself beside a road instead of on a ship.
I collided with the closed garage door of an automotive shop, whose proprietor was presumably responsible for the capstan’s presence.
After some eye-uncrossing, some road-uncrossing happened, ending at a crosswalk with a tarnished but clean metal drainage grid. The elegant metal walkway sprouting from the grid didn’t look like it should connect to a kebab shop entry, or maybe even exist in this plane of reality. As things were, I just cared about the fact that the kebab shop had a second open door visible through its ajar front.
I went barrelling through and through, the man behind the counter not saying a word.
It is very funny how you don’t appreciate a good alleyway until you need it. My aching sides felt a cool comforting rush. Each of three turns and a duck under a stone archway improved the state of lung-chafing, both escalating the steady low fire sizzling my major muscles and loosening the weight around my neck, leading to a Michael who leaned against the rough-cut limestone while looking up at a baroque “LIBRARY” sign with a smile. No joy like relief, and all that.
About twenty seven seconds later, revelling in the disorderly city silence, the phone in my pocket was in my hand. I’d hit the nine button twice. Whatever that heckler was, it felt like a constable squad could deal with it better than one not-yet-employed florist. Given that it had survived the sort of tender vehicular mercies that would turn a human into chowder, there was a good chance putting down the creature might require more than a decent clubbing. What to say? How to say it?
A confused and angry shout. Crunching like glass being broken and trampled.
“You are surely not serious.”
Something rigid grunt-squeaked against mixed pea gravel and pebbly sand. The noise changed as it came down a turn, getting closer. To call the noise “directed” or “targeted” would not be an error.
I pushed off the archway and went for the simple wooden door of the library. A hand closed on its spindle handle, and as it pulled open the door’s thick reflective glass warmed with daylight. At the mirror edge of a pane moved an earth-toned something.
The library opened its arms to me as the heckler turned a last corner, full of focus and speed and need.
[Milestone 4: Deduction]
My kingdom for a laboratory.
Whatever this thing was, it was tracking me with the perseverance of a mother deprived of her firstborn, and the accuracy of astrophysics equipment. How far was “escape” from here? How long did I need to run to get there? Could I negotiate with this heckler?
That last point bore some thinking. Use of language implied this thing might be at least capable of diplomacy and reason – if I had been selected as a meal, could I talk it into fasting? Assuming not, could it be directed toward something more appealing, like a cow? When thinking of thinking, however usefully abstract, it became very easy to trip and fall into endlessly repeating mirrors; pulling myself back into reality, the question floated into plain view: how do two people hold conversation when the first wants to kill and eat the second?
“With difficulty,” said my lips by reflex, unwillingly echoing my father.
The library might have started life as a mansion, given the sweeping curved staircases and depth of the foyerlike arrangement, but the gold and pink wall decor felt more “poorly executed doctor’s office.” Long, mote-salted streamers of light both enticed and discouraged examination of the left side of the main room. Immensely heavy ranks and files of shadow-dark wood crusted into inspired-knowledge canyons. Intimidating portcullis walls of books spanned the rim of the floor space. While the shelves had pin neatness in their arrangement, the text was anything but. Each volume sat in good condition, and appeared to be put in the subject matter region suited to its title, yet the size of unused shelf space, the broken tooth gaps, and occasionally upside-down books, gave the vista the air of a boy wearing his father’s pants backward.
Lots of details, little that helped.
“I’ll be with you in just a second!” said the tall-collared man behind the clerical station’s counter.
He sat just outside of the windows’ carving beams, revealing a desk that was mostly – but imperfectly – uncluttered. A metal cart rack for movies and DVDs abutted the back of the workstation. Into the cart the man sorted a few more loan returns with slightly sour happiness. They whispered under his gloves. Some small icings of dust caked the edge of a raised shelf, more than a couple misaligned writing utensils and blank forms slouched across the desk’s military outpost neatness.
“Yes, Bettony; no, Bettony; three bags full, Bettony. I have two arms, count them, and my feet can’t exactly scan books on their own.”
The grumbling librarian put a copy of “Labyrinth” next to “The Dark Crystal” on the cart, right before turning my direction. As it happened, the man turned around with exceptional timing, and he ended up doing three quarters of a rotation as I dodged up the left hand stair curve. He had humorously small pince-nez, and he tried to fire eye lasers through them.
“I’m being chased by a… very angry pursuer!” I said over a shoulder, vowels and panting echoing off the spacious ceiling like boxing jabs. “Don’t interfere, you might be- be in danger!”
My shoes snapped up the steps right before adding, “I’m sorry!”
The librarian started to give a reply. Favored odds suggested the reply would revolve around either confusion or anger.
Door hinges creaked.
I kept going. The librarian’s chair turned with a thumbscrew squeal.
“Excuse m- excuse me, sir. I’ll thank you to take off the outfit-”
High pitched laughing seized the rest of the sentence, sudden and carnivorous like a toothsome ocean shadow.
At the top of the wide-rise stairs’ curve, I could resist no longer, and had to check my pursuit. The librarian floated a conflicted expression as he watched the heckler’s plodding in my direction. A rusty knife of horror, but thickly painted by that stretched-mouth laughter. Denial, recurring several layers deep, insisted that this was serious and whimsical and very serious and very whimsical. I knew; I’d had similar freakouts before.
“Just get your friend out of here – we have a policy on dress-up. Nice costume, though, those claws are magnificent. Hey, don’t scratch the floors!”
The laughter barrier started to degrade, each HA spacing out more and more like the expanding distance between cage bars. Before long, the bars had considerable gaps. Between them was something furiously frightened.
In running was a thinking, and the thinking lived inside me.
At the top of the steps I looked both ways. To the right stretched the wide boardwalk of this floor’s book version of the silk road, laid out to cleanly intersect with those other stairs. To the left, the books continued (if only after a right angle following the building corner), but some ladders and a couple of relatively blank shelves gave me an idea.
“Wait, wait. This is a stupid idea. I can just-”
I looked around, after rejecting the stupid idea. A door, a door. I could just find a door out to the back at this level, staff-only signs be hanged, and I could use the up-and-down of whatever stairwells they’d have back there to…
There was no door to the back.
There were no doors of any sort on the upper floor whatsoever, other than entry to a side patio, and a flat steel plate moonlighting as a door. Maybe that one technically led somewhere useful. I wouldn’t be spending the time hammering and hollering at it to get a hypothetical listener to open the thing for me. Looking around, I wouldn’t be spending much idle time anyway; I heard clawed steps approaching.
That man lying fallen beside his car flashed across my view without warning. The fact that the librarian had quieted back down, and nobody else had started a diatribe or screeching, kept me winched out of “collateral damage panic” territory, but not by much.
Avoiding a loathsome balding fold-flap in the carpeting, I skipped over to a big pile of almost-entirely-purple books. The foot of a ladder beckoned, but I had the wherewithal to resist its seduction. Before indulging in my ladder-climbing, one final check on the only thing I cared about checking anymore.
Yes, those unnatural eyes still watched. That mouth sat looking patient. Their owner took a step off the staircase and onto the balcony.
I began climbing.
The flanged wheels had been locked in place, and that was the only reason I didn’t die of a broken neck. Exactly thirty two left-then-right steps should have separated me from the top of the ladder, and sixteen steps were taken instead.
“Forty Dogs Make a Life” flashed past on a shelf. Other than that metallic-green block letter title, nothing stuck. It slurred into a riot of cellophane and leather and fabric covers. My hands ran the ladder’s polished sides. When a huge splinter cleft from a scuffed patch, I took a little of the ladder with me.
I didn’t immediately notice.
Very far above the ground, the long emptiness of a patch of shelving seemed much smaller. A quick check confirmed that my feet would fit into the depth, and the actual planks had… well, an ice sculpture type of craft to their design that suggested it would be very hard to break them (and a terrible shame as well). The ladder’s rugged weight wobbled just a bit as I turned around.
Below was a sweat inducing quantity of nothing, and then a violent shape of brown ambiguity, and then a floridly colored rug running the balcony, and then an even larger amount of nothing before the polished floor of the library’s ground story.
Every fiber of my being lurched.
I looked back at the heckler.
“Planning on giving up anytime soon?”
The heckler hadn’t started moving toward the ladder, or chewing on the bookshelves. That five millimeter gaze sank over me with gauzy strength. It wasn’t easy to tell, but the head seemed to roll to the side a little.
“I am going to eat you!”
“Okay, but why are you going to eat me?”
“I am going to eat you, because it is what I do!”
Memories of jabbing fingers rose. Classmates or chums poking me at school, or out and about, had rarely hurt. It always had an annoyance factor that exceeded simple small pain, though. The heckler talking did something analogous, each syllable like a stiff digit prodding me in the collar, instantly antiquating my sense of self-possession with the casual presumption of thoughtless cruelty.
Hatred of the thing grew quickly.
Had to push the ugliness of that noise down, though. Fearing this thing had kept me alive, where hating it might lead to horrible misstep and devourment.
“Do you just eat everybody?” I asked, holding eye contact.
The mouthparts moved like hands exchanging marbles.
“I eat my prey! You are my prey!”
“And why’s it that I am YOUR PREY?”
“I enjoy those who are familiar! It is good to eat familiar things!”
How should I interpret that? How should I possibly interpret that?
“Would you like to eat a book instead?” I asked.
The world tilted a little, threatening to give me a thrashing if I made the wrong move, as I pulled a book off the shelf behind me without budging anything besides an arm and shoulder. Still almost took the fast way down. When the book turned out to be “Atlas Shrugged” there was a tiny interior Michael who completely lost it.
Ah well, I needed to laugh somehow.
Definitely rolling its head on its neck-hill now, the heckler did the thing that owls do: moving everything but the eyes, because the Eye Fairy had given them only the worst possible muscles for performing side-eye motion. It considered the book. It angled its head back just a little. It considered me instead.
“My prey is you! We met and became familiar! Do not worry! I will eat you!”
Wonderful. A fan of mine, and it just so happened my fan was the rabid sort of whom pop stars could only dream.
“Is there any prey you would prefer over me?”
“You are my prey!”
Writhings pushed out within the hairy flesh.
“Is it possible for me to become… not your prey?”
I couldn’t help but look at the blood spotted around the creature.
“I enjoy eating things familiar to me!”
“Right, this is getting nowhere. How about this: what’s your name?”
The heckler stopped. Animals or people which got stunned or surprised often resembled plants in a way – catatonia dovetailing with sleeping-observing instinct, where throwing a pebble or a stick or making sudden loud noises caused the individual to break free like a painting taking a marathon sprint.
This was different. Whatever manner of horror this entity was, I could only guess, but it became utterly petrified. Not a twitch, not a breath, not a single indication that this creature had ever worn the clothes of life or lifelike replica. Its eyes now matched the rest of it.
“Name is name is name is name is name IS NAME!”
I wasn’t ready.
The words unspooled from the mouth with the same revolting ear-taste as before. However, these began as a thin string. String grew into cord. Cord fossilized into wire. The wire sprouted barbs. Oven heat ran through the wire’s length as it started death rolling with bald savagery.
One of my unusual botanical interests had long been the gympie-gympie plant, that peculiar Australian hazard, and now I had the conviction its victims’ legendary degree of suffering would feel familiar. The world had become an ocean, and I was a snowball sinking to the seafloor.
Frankly, the fact that the heckler moved as awkwardly as it did almost didn’t save me. I shook off the worst of its words’ pain in time to watch it seesawing up the ladder in the least adroit way possible, limb wobblingly slapping on a rung and then its twin following. That jaw mulched air with a distinctly purposeful manner. It may have been the first case of the thing deliberately speaking without language.
I wobbled, flipped the book out of my grip by accident.
By twisted happenstance, it missed the heckler with the narrowest possible margins, and landed like a graceful swan tied to an anvil. The top edge struck a ladder track. Waxy binding fabric split without quite parting entirely, leaving “Atlas” halved lengthwise. If nothing else, at least that volume would need repairs, so I’d managed to spare a soul or two from its empty calorie yammering.
As the heckler came within three or four arms’ reach, I grabbed onto the lip of a dusty shelf, braced with one foot, and slid off of my ladder into space.
My completely unscientific calculations worked.
Fortunately, no dust had sheeted over the shelf, so when the weight of an adult human latched onto four different book-ledges, it became a horizontally traversable handhold rather than a greasy death sentence. I took the second needed to recover from my points of contact with the solid universe changing to toetips and fingers. Without looking anywhere else, they began climbing.
An unexpected difficulty came along five and a half horizontal-shimmy seconds later. Most people would find it tricky to right a kayak when overturned in the water. Equally hard was going from bookshelf to ladder-standing-in-front-of-bookshelf. There was a reaching out, and a grab onto a rung tailor-made for turning wrists, and I managed to hold on with my lungs madly seizing up.
The splinter I’d caught made its opinion very clear when I tried to swing up.
Breathlessly, I realized what needed to happen. Shoes losing their purchase, heartbeat in the moderate hundreds, my sweaty limbs clambered down under the ladder’s shadow. Telegram messaging from toetips started arriving in spiked capital letters.
I’d had little spare focus for anything besides my sorry hide’s safe reunion with ground. Now the angle meant that, even with the need to push my feet against each rung for purchase, half a rotation’s vision field accounted for the library’s upward regions. Nobody had changed the ceiling’s paintwork from the building’s previous ownership, so a fat sandy-black stain sat directly overhead. Much closer hung the ladder with my foe, whose entire body suggested that the sudden drive of “get Michael kill Michael” was still there, but now running into some behavioral guardrail.
Each instant spent wincing or preparing to wince at a hand muscle’s strong pinch was an instant which produced worries up and down, waiting for the leap-land of a large questionably-taxonomic creature falling onto me – or more correctly, the ladder.
I waited.
I waited.
This busy waiting did not see the fruition I’d feared, or hoped. The fact that the heckler clearly didn’t suffer damage or receive repairs the way that normal creatures of flesh did… well, to put it bluntly, it had the terrifying aspect of finding somebody holding up a store or bank while holding an unrecognizable object. Maybe the object was farming equipment. Maybe it was a firearm. Maybe it was something far more dangerous and repugnant than any familiar manner of weapon.
Operating outside expectations, the heckler didn’t take advantage of its wretched resilience by throwing a fuzzily brown missile off its perch. If it tried that, the torrid Newtonian romance between abnormal entity and my ladder would have eventually let the creature get up again – I didn’t think it would be much more traumatic than the one-two motor vehicle punch that from earlier – and I’d be knocked loose. “Crushed” was also possible, but the heckler didn’t seem heavy enough for that.
By the time the creature began climbing back down in hesitating two-step lollygag dance, the distance between my shoes and “ground” was less than the distance between my shoes and the crown of my skull.
“Are you climbing down instead of jumping because it would take you too long to get back up?” I hissed as my foot touched the ugly carpet.
The heckler continued descending.
“What would you do afterward, if I let you eat me?” I asked.
More silent downward travel.
“Let’s see which future comes for us,” I said, then turned and limp-ran downstairs.
Exhaustion had left me by the time I made it to the library’s door. It would not stay long gone.
The librarian smiled faintly and paid no attention to my exit as I left his circle of reality.
[Milestone 5: Adaptation]
“Would this make me a better puppet show performer, or a worse one?” came from a spot two steps behind me, more than from inside my head.
This thought didn’t interrupt my mental arithmetic so much as apply a boot and knock the door off the classroom threshold. Puppets, what? Subconscious, did someone give you a little too much caffeine?
Pretty yet functional houses started replacing the businesses and apartments by the time the thought rolled far enough to trace its trajectory. It had boomeranged out of the psychology department.
Was the heckler capable of thought? No, I couldn’t answer that. When I tried turning the shape of the thing’s behavior around, though, it became a bit more… maybe not understandable, but at least predictable.
Like putting character into Punch and Judy puppets, I grasped the germ of the persona of what was giving chase.
Glancing over a shoulder, the heckler’s shambling hunch followed at the end of a long cravat of sidewalk.
I could probably send it haring off on an inconvenient path if I found the right terrain, given its locomotion – something like a ladder up the side of a building, ready to be kicked free.
I could (if I felt confident) get someone else involved with my eternal flight. Moral support if nothing else.
I could subject the creature to various other testing scenarios without too much difficulty, if I got clever.
Downsides abounded.
Miracle of miracles, a bus waited around the next corner, discharging customers and acquiring new patients in need of a relocation procedure. I managed to join the latter group shortly before the door clenched shut. An irate looking driver with dirty glasses and a stupendously-well-kempt uniform looked at me, up and down, then up, focusing on my highly messy complexion and hair.
“Bad day?” he asked.
“Well, there have probably been worse.”
“Get where you need to go?”
I vacillated, both inside and out.
“I managed to stay clear of trouble, and in good health.”
One corner of his mouth moved up.
“Tickety-boo.”
The bus had turned its lights on. Dying sunlight turned the colors off outside the little cones of life. Directly ahead was an advertisement billboard, with a world class hat attached to a man and proclaiming the benefits of Dewoth toothpaste. I didn’t know anything about Dewoth, and for some reason that made me relieved.
Thirty seconds later I was in a seat beside a person in elaborate fantasy cosplay, and a woman who smelled like the last three generations of her family had lived and died inside a caramel factory.
Over my shoulder and that of my duct-tape-armor companion, the backend window revealed a few people walking by. A few other people navigated buildings farther down the road. Cars were out and about in the late evening, without traffic having locked them in place.
A single woman pushed a trolley right until she confronted a fuzzy form on the sidewalk, then she froze like a scarecrow in a field of cement, then she went perpendicular very fast. The fuzzy form kept on advancing toward my vehicle.
I considered the shape in the rear view of the bus. I considered it with a lightly nauseous self-sense. A sleeve of salve slowly worked its way up each throbbing leg in the meantime.
While keeping tabs on my stalker and my transport passengers, I admitted a few less pleasant things.
I couldn’t lose the heckler; despite many periods of broken line of sight or scent or whatever it was, where I went, it would follow.
I couldn’t kill the thing without sourcing some very illegal levels of force, and maybe not even then.
I couldn’t recruit someone else to give me aid unless I felt confident in their ability to survive abnormal forces. That shapeless hardiness, that searing psionic voice’s damage; this thing was worrying.
Storybook events were not something I’d survived before, but today increasingly complied with the dreamlike tempo of dictates from many a crib yarn. Protagonists find themselves broadly disconnected from their lives, at the drop of a pin. A jealous dragon projects violence until sated by the sacrifice of a village’s most innocent member. Children dance off into the woods, are lost from life for two decades, then return aged not a day from their original selves. Flames consume a castle, leaving its stone entirely replaced by earth and blossoming alien flowers.
When logic’s rules change, best to recognize and adapt.
“I can’t keep jogging forever,” I said in my head. “I need to sleep.”
The heckler had no properties that stuck out as weaknesses, other than it appearing weird enough to draw vast attention. There were plenty of uncertain strengths, like the fact it had enough problem solving to open the entrance back at the library, rather than crashing through a window or something. Instinct didn’t give you the tools to work a pull door. A manner of intelligence (or something that could mimic intelligence, and my hairs rose in grass-wind waves thinking about it) was at play.
“I’m thinking about this all wrong – the goal’s to figure out what’s a failure condition, and avoid that.”
Words expressing as words, rather than Inside Thoughts, became apparent only when the caramel-smelling lady condescended at me.
“Not the right way about it, dearie!” she said in the most lavender-and-emeralds accent ever adopted by sentient life.
“Whhhhmmg?” I responded after a second.
The fact that both eyes caught when I blinked – not dissimilar to glass, tacky after peeling back years-old tape – turned up some small worried coals in my chest. The King of Nod was coming and I owed him money.
“You’re not being utilitarian enough. Don’t worry about what’s least bad, focus on what’s most good. Now think, dearie, if you had the option – what is your perfect life scenario? Not aiming for just ‘rich and well connected’ or ‘indelibly printed on society’ when you could… say, end world hunger!”
The lady stared at me as though this should blow my mind. Her fishing expedition managed to catch a basking shark, at least in her own head.
“I would like to be alive tomorrow.”
“But would that be the best outcome? Would that do the most good?”
“Chances are, ‘most good’ is a farce. It would make me very happy to still be breathing.”
Her sales pitch died as my tone registered. No self-help came out of her purse. No lecture unfolded to ambush me.
After several long breaths, an elbow tapped my ribs.
The faux knight sitting beside the window had pulled up a satchel, and it almost bled energy drinks. One of the hot-colored bottles extended my way in a plastic-bossed tape gauntlet. Some hood-shaded traveler brought the desert a little oasis.
If that silent helmet had come off to reveal the most odorous and rash ridden face imaginable, I still would have kissed it until emergency services arrived to prevent death-by-choking-on-somebody-else’s-mouth.
A slim dye-molded plastic snapping sound came as I lost awareness. When the fog left my vision, there was an open bottle formerly holding taurine and a taste of something that wasn’t cherry-lemon.
As my mother might have said, the best thanks is an empty plate.
The not knight took the empty bottle back, and cream colored teeth peeked through part of the helmet’s visor.
When the empty bottle went lovingly back into the satchel, I had the odd sensation I’d contributed to the not knight’s very unusual fantasy. Both “discomforting” and “enticing” flipped out of my brain’s dictionary. I was the kind of person that found the idea of being an unknown individual’s prurient focus unappealing, yes. That said, the thought of being… well, cherished for any reason at all… it had become oppositely appealing.
Thinking about the heckler, I had started considering the moment of discovery more and more. The thing hadn’t gotten bloodflecked from eating a pig down in the underground. Maybe eating wasn’t even the motive, just the incidental to accomplishing murder, when you were vaguely bell shaped and had been allowed only two awkward limbs and possessed an amorphous shifting-bone jaw. Yes, it had talked about eating consistently. I wasn’t entirely sure what that fact meant.
Funnily enough, the realization – the bone and muscle reification – of danger had not hit home before getting on the bus. I was… well, dead. If something about the equation didn’t get realigned, the deadness would flip from the far side; me times dead equals one.
From skull down spine, along arm to elbow to hand, over thigh and calf atop foot, a baking heat settled in. If the bus were deep space cold, still I’d have sweated.
My phone found its way into my hand. Pinch-pain reminded me of the big old splinter friend I’d picked up at the library, and I hissed through my dry lips. Then using a combination of teeth and uncut nails, I worked out the worst of the wooden invasion. Tiny fragments probably remained, but good enough.
Attention and phone reunited.
How does somebody avoid a never ending and perfectly targeted pursuit? By moving forever, of course.
Browser searches executed. Glorious terrible Internet uniting tremendous work-hours that started under the heading hours of operation bus lines and moved on to include hours of operation train lines and hours of operation cab companies and hours of operation tour companies. Academia had always… not bored, no, but sat heavy and thick like a weighted blanket. Multiple teachers in bygone years had needed to wake up a dopey Michael during study and lectures – especially lectures. The searching went slowly.
“You can’t make the horse drink,” the utilitarian-lecture lady muttered at some point, snapping my brain back inside my body.
I’d always heard that air traffic controllers had a wildly difficult job, but it wasn’t because reading and recording plane identifiers carries some abnormal tax on the brain. It was the stress. Mess up once, and it might be nothing. It might also be a few millions (billions?) or the creation of unsuspecting crash victims. Get worried! Get invested!
I kept studying the ways southern eastish England’s veins webbed across each other. The root systems clashed and collaborated in waves during any week’s events. After a few rabbit holes were followed to their logical end, conclusions unfolded of several sorts.
It would be the utter opposite of easy, but possible, to coordinate a sequence of interchanges so that I could set head down against seat back or door or folded arms. Not much sleep, but a nap on each stretch would provide enough to human successfully – if one didn’t squint too closely. Between taxis, and Tube stations, and bus stops, and lucky improvisation, I COULD do it.
A disturbance fluffed through the leaf-heavy bush ranks on the left, or I guess port, side of the bus. Nobody had boarded or disembarked, so the vehicle idled for form’s sake, presumably.
Fuzzy limbs emerged.
The majority of people paid it no attention. However, the heckler slithered out of the brush exactly as a kimono-wearing person in the row ahead was taking a drink of coffee, looking outside. Slightly gritty noises came from the coffee cup’s owner as the coffee embraced liberation across the coffee cup, the coffee cup’s owner’s hand, the seat behind which the coffee cup’s owner sat, and assorted spots of floor and window. Gagging and coughing aided the heckler’s inconspicuousness by drawing away gazes.
Being that time and tide wait for no man, the driver spurred our diesel horse and started to pull from the curb. Exactly as the bus began sliding into the road proper, the heckler lunged. Fangs briefly glinted. Under the nasal grind of the engine and other noises, almost nobody noticed the faint sound of scraping paint.
Then the creature went stumbling.
My chariot departed. Behind us, the heckler slowly regained composure. Then, it gave slow chase. Contrary to its exhibited shortcutting, the gradually distancing shape contented itself following down the blacktop, even when the bus curled around a vacant lot’s corner. Why? I couldn’t say.
Maybe the creature wanted to keep to hard surfaces for better claw sharpening. Maybe it hated dusty-sandy cement flagstones. Maybe there was some directive it complied with, related to terrifying people with its fangs.
I would not see it until my stop, but a blender-blade mishap of a scar badged the side of the bus. Whatever those teeth were made of, they demanded respect.
The hobbling ceaseless jog followed.
Memory of that unblinking stare set me to shivering. Two parts hate, three parts fear. It was hard to verbalize how wrung out it left me. My eyes glided shut, and they didn’t want to open.
I had to get away.
As with all material human endeavors, my stumbling-block was a disyllable: money.
Two days’ nonstop fare sat in my pockets. If I used credit, that could stretch to seven, maybe eight. Trouble raised its morphing, blood-toothed head when considering long range transit, though. I hadn’t flown on my own before, and had little of the necessaries for getting to and staying in – for example – Germany, or Canada, or Japan, or Brazil, to name some countries I considered. Timing my arrival so that I could get a ticket, make it through security, and then be gone without delay would be “tricky” only because I couldn’t outright prove it as “impossible” in a vacuum.
More importantly, passports were required.
When you don’t plan on leaving home, you don’t always carry your keys. As a result, I could fly only to countries whose customs demanded nothing more official than personal ID. Similar problems if I tried to head through the Chunnel. I could reach most destinations in England without too much sand in the gears. Beyond that would be a trial and a half.
Wait. The English Channel.
I picked up my phone, and started looking at a few other places closer to home.
Spurts of research featured brief eyelid inspections. Ideas interbred in that soft area near sleep’s border. Many of the ideas went spinning off and dissolved, but others found soft rooting ground to anchor, new ideas budding from them in turn over generations. After an unknown number of minutes spent further measuring traffic rates and wondering how easily I could sprint between bus stations and looking up Dijkstra’s algorithm, those ideas attached themselves to my utterly barking inspiration.
More minutes stretched out. I eventually transferred to a cab and gave directions, then changed my mind. I changed my mind again a few minutes later. The cabbie almost threw me out on the road. I apologized, realized I’d need some more supplies, and let out a long, long breath. It felt like releasing my whole soul.
I prayed long and hard that this nightmare might end.
[Milestone 6: Aspiration]
Today had taught me the actual meaning of the word tired. One leg in front of another.
The act of looking over a shoulder ached like the marginless leanness of a starved smoking habit. My neck had a square knot. Every joint wanted to see my blood on the stones. Living hurt.
“Everything top, friend?” asked the very, very kind man who’d decided I was safe enough to allow a hitching.
A quick glance his way, then a lightning glare behind the car. My shoulder related ache began whining. No heckler ran the road. Nothing ran the road.
Morbid pretend-vision slid an outline onto the suburban vista, a tiny neon silhouette shambling along at a great distance. Every few seconds the silhouette teleported somewhere different. Without observation, it was beside the car, and four minutes behind us, and about to leap from a tree, and crashing through someone’s house.
“I… yes,” I stated, with that kind of please-leave-me-alone infinitely louder than words.
“Right.”
The man began polishing the already-heavily-polished ring on his left hand. Without much difficulty, my pretend-vision changed tack and superimposed a kind woman over the seat I now occupied. I thought of that woman, gave her a few physical and personal thorns – like any halfway decent rose – and a smile like a blossom at sunset. Somebody had supported this man’s inclinations toward the thoughtful, the good-Samaritan-oriented. Where was this woman? Or whichever spouse or beloved should actually be in her place?
This man didn’t deserve the risk of transporting me. I had to get gone.
I blinked, just twice, and suddenly we leaped forward an unknown distance. No houses familiar, yet, but I knew that they’d start becoming familiar soon. That felt a bit like… something between returning to my primary school, and stepping out of a plane’s cargo door in-flight.
Five water bottles stretched a convenience store grocery bag. Two and a half protein bars shared space with them. The plastic stickless bindle hadn’t taken long to fill, but it had marked the last time I used London’s regional transit for… maybe ever. Even half sleeping, the bag was fused to me.
No. No. Stay awake.
Finally, the song of the sea picked up. I couldn’t hear it over the struggling engine, but it still pulled me out of my doze. The ocean held a little of every human heart.
Streetlights and rapidly oncoming dawn made this patch of Portsmouth visible. The side mirror showed no pursuant horrors.
I weighed my options.
“You can put me down at the end of the… right here…”
The guy looked at me, looked in the direction I was pointing, looked at my face that was clearly not-quite yawning, and made an unconvinced but uncritical noise as he slowed down for a turning smart car.
I didn’t leap out of the vehicle exactly; when slowdown started, I began leaning into the door with a heavy shoulder. When it became intolerable to sit and wait one moment more, the door popped with that golden happy bell chime that’s a car’s method of saying “check the latch before driving, else you may swerve topsy-turvy and die.”
“She’s not worth it, buddy!” said the guy.
When I turned around to look at him, his eyes weren’t looking at me, but a bit past. The beach and sea both loomed. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was thinking. At a guess, the sudden line between the eyebrows was caused by the bloke having a realization about my motivations, seeing an echo of his own mistakes and life lessons playing out, and an unknown decisionmaking dial going over a bold red line.
“Don’t worry. I’m fleeing the country. It’s a drug thing.”
My benefactor absorbed the words, and I saw his brain try to flee for cover down his neck shaft. His eyes made little pulsating movements that put me in mind of gerbils. He started to say something, and stopped. His breathing almost stopped too.
“Kidding!” I said, almost shouting as I began to laugh. The whinny of nerves came through strongly.
The man whose name I still didn’t know was even more on edge than me, but he began a warbly little laugh that sounded almost prepubescent in pitch. An inkling of my honesty… or something… had come through, and a balloon had popped.
A long drum of heartbeats rattled, before I straightened and wiped away some dewing sweat.
“But seriously, if I ever get the chance, I’ll buy you a whole night of beers.”
The man gave a thin sniff, then: “Todd Blansmere.”
“Michael Winnacunnet.”
At the new old glance of name-skepticism, I added, “Grandmother was Abenaqi, but she loved her husband enough to emigrate.”
“Good luck, Michael,” said Todd, after a few moments’ mulling.
I returned the sentiment.
A set of feet scuffed vaguely southish. A large gearshift stick dragged around and sent a car the opposite direction.
That abrading sharp smell circled me like a mantle, the wafting of an ocean stretched out in its languor.
A bit of listening, and just a second of further contemplation, before urgency returned. I started walking, and in two minutes stood on a low concrete berm looking over a wide low beach. Wave-thrown dying starlight glittered.
At the end of a row of changing shacks, a sleeping bull of a building hosted watercraft and watercraft accessories. The sea-facing side had sprouted a quartet of automated lightposts. Life jackets and sandals sat behind glass. It was the Bait and Switch, owned by Margaret Something – or Something Margaret, couldn’t remember her identity other than the Margaret part – for at least sixteen years.
I scanned the shop’s dark windows, and the large racks to which twentyish kayaks had been strapped. Many straps had strong locks. A couple didn’t, but were so high up as to require a ladder.
My lucky break took the form of a watermelon-electric blue specimen dropped beside the store’s unsanded wall. Two snap-together oars leaned out of the seat opening.
Presumably the previous user had been in a hurry.
I recognized the yellow seat-cushion thing as a flotation device. I hoped it wouldn’t be needed. Additionally, the tube buckled into the boat’s webbing was a bailing pump, and I really hoped it wouldn’t be needed.
My meager supply bag went in.
“Wonder how much of this will be left by the time I reach France,” I said.
My smile almost cracked apart as I glanced southward.
France wasn’t the destination. My destination was safety, and maybe that meant anywhere over the horizon, any ship or port or wonderland. Maybe it meant nowhere.
I’d miss my uncle, and Alexander’s chuffy licking, and my parents in spite of their many bristling thorns.
The boat beckoned.
If the owner of the Bait and Switch deserved a kick in the wishbone for ill pun humor, she didn’t deserve outright theft. Needs must and all that rot, though.
I scrounged around and grabbed some cash from my wallet.
Then, I stopped.
Before striding over to the door and pushing them under, the bills gave me a knowing wink through the security-marked paper. They wouldn’t complain about saying goodbye. They also wouldn’t come flying back if buyer’s remorse (thief’s remorse?) swung around hours or days later, as I tried to pay for a fare with “Excuse-me-I-am-broke-after-covering-past-expenses-please-have-mercy.”
I tucked the bills back with a slimy feeling covering my insides. Then, I swung one oar. I awkwardly wrote SORRY where dirt and sand almost became indistinguishable. Rather, I chopped SOR and the beginning of another R’s vertical line, then stopped.
A dim branch breaking noise traveled earward. It had come from the road, beyond bushes kept cheek-by-jowl beside complacent brick homes. No voice accompanied it; that somehow made it worse.
From such things can one find all manner of strength.
After dumping the half-paddle into the boat with its companion, I hefted my new kayak and hobbled for the water at speed. It would stay afloat for long enough. It had to.
Of course, fortune chose that instant to stick out a foot.
I plowed into the sand facefirst. The boat slapped down beside me – and wouldn’t you know it, the thing landed on the thumb that had been splinter-augmented earlier. More importantly, the boat made a noise most tooth-scraping. A rock had scored a hit, and as I rose to my feet without breath, I tipped the kayak sideways a bit to check the damage.
No puncture, at least not yet, but a practical trench now striped the bottom. I didn’t trust my judgment about many things. The boat’s seaworthiness, however, passed the test eighteen increasingly damp strides later.
My right hand kept in front of the seat and my left hand behind it. Brisk but not-quite cold wind kicked up; it tried to give advice in that way the wind has, with upset-parental-figure enthusiasm and papery slurring. Water rose past my knees. Glass shards of salt infiltrated my mouth and nose. Mud-sand tried to tug off my shoes.
That last one was a sign. Far enough, hopefully.
I essentially poured into the boat.
Sloshing and some banging of thin-skinned body parts. Oars dug into the water and made room for me. Too many impulses and thoughts. The whole of my skeleton spasmed, making me think of those terrible little flinches that sometimes jolted me back awake when almost passed out in bed. However, I didn’t need to figure out the cause to deal with it.
Somewhere between four seconds and an eternity later, my hands were rowing. I wish I knew who was using them, because it definitely wasn’t me. An ache wrapped down from the left side of my neck and under my armpit, starting out gentle and gradually ramping up toward traumatic levels.
Not long after the boat began its journey, I heard a soft set of footsteps moving downshore toward me.
I didn’t look up toward the source until I paddled twenty strokes or so further from the beach, the water high enough to require a snorkel if standing on the seabed. The shape on shore couldn’t be just ignored, though.
I torturously sloshed upright.
Here I sat, because something had to change. Freedom or death, or the choice between them deferred so long that falling asleep for an unknown time wouldn’t decide for me. A little boat wobbling on a big pond.
So now a simple thought dominated my life’s prospects, and it was not the sort of simple thought I would have expected to take the wheel so late in life.
“Hey,” I asked. “Can you swim?”
Sometime in the distant past, a younger Michael had gone out boating with family – likely not too far from the present location, come to think of it. Back then, the idea that sound carries over water had been explained, not believed. The ocean is sound-magical? Preposterous!
In the now, my own voice might have made me jump. It maliciously clapped next to my ears. Fortunately, being tired enough provides one with the fringe benefit of stoicism. My startle reflex had the ferocity of a tiger shaped gummy multivitamin. The oars stayed in my hands, mostly because the string loops on the end where they snapped together were around my wrists.
I sat back in my vessel and watched. Directly under me sat chest depth water, at my best guess. Thirsty and back aching and rib clench tense, and other than that the day was nice.
The heckler stood watching right back. Under its pelt-fur-hair-whatever, it writhed. Over ten, twenty seconds, that writhing grew more agitated, and it felt like there would be verbal reply, or something. Something. Eventually crescendo arrived, and there was…
Silence.
A few blood chips flaked off. Shaking continued.
My woozy brain took that moment to recall that honey badgers were equipped with skin loose enough for them to turn inside it, like a mannequin in a sweatshirt. That wasn’t this. Whatever this was, I was content not knowing.
If the entity could swim, trouble. If the entity could walk after me on the seafloor, a different kind of trouble, but maybe less disastrous. If the entity could not abide saltwater, mystery – maybe the type of mystery that would result in an innocent person getting hunted instead of me.
The trouble with me was that I simply did not care anymore.
It was a terrible thing when growing up, to hear about hopelessness or trouble and then become immersed in it. It was sad, and inescapable, and hurt like nobody’s business – but you felt a crushing kind of peace when you realized your limits and lived with them. Such a stiff blanket peace manifested when lying back. The kayak’s top settled and creaked under-head as a pillow.
I closed my eyes and waited for what might happen, as the sea rocked me into the country of sore dreams.
[Milestone 7: How Did It?]
“You shouldn’t spit on the back that lifts you.”
These words crank out of Murray Edfane within the atrium of Palfrey Obligations, apropos of nothing. Why someone would pervert an idiom like that, Murray’s partner Dale Matthews did not and had never bothered to speculate.
Certainly not where Paulie ever heard.
“Hope we get a bonus,” Dale replies.
“Why would we get a bonus?”
“Because we did our job well and without complaint.”
“We always do.”
Neither Dale nor Murray observe that the idea of a bonus tends toward association with the recipient showing outstanding and therefore unusual conduct; if as a result of continuous good service, it’s typically a “raise” instead. It doesn’t seem to bother them. It doesn’t bother Paulie Ossershire too much either.
Why should it? They’re all here to make a sale, and if Palfrey buys their sour treat, maybe all of them will get a raise.
Paulie looks at the crate beside the freight elevator, shivering a bit.
Both of the guards have some idea of what it is their Company – which remains nameless, always doing business through a rotating array of shell corporations – wants to sell today. They project a strong air of devil-may-care. Whether it is performative is beside the matter. What Paulie and a small cohort of assorted talent have discovered in the subanglican depths will be useful for an organization with deep enough pockets and flexible enough conscience.
Brain highways fire in reverse.
Paulie is one of forty seven people brought together, shoveling toward a sudden and worrisome find of London’s endless blitzscrap. The various limbs of society cooperate in tried and true methods. Announce the event! Shut down the construction! Plan multiple detours! Keep calm and avoid explosives! Someone should start a museum campaign about it, with the rate digging crews are locating scary antiques.
Fortunately, Paulie’s Company has a few representatives in the field, and the higher ups are very happy about the clandestine opportunity. The Home Office people dislike the import of propellants, accelerants, deflagrating substances, or just plain overly spicy powder – so of course any non-military-procurement efforts at collecting weapons grade raw material simply Will Not Do. Solutions? For starters, harvest and creatively lose the foreign-provided supply of underground bomb fruit.
It pays amazingly well.
Paulie, being an atheist of peculiar sorts, has been stuck between two convictions: the absence of moral authority, meaning that “meaning” is a useless luxury, and the ephemerality of life, meaning that human beings should be treasured and preserved. It’s an old dichotomy, hardly unique to the third (or indeed, second, first, or zeroth) millennium. It crosses over into some amount of utilitarianism, and from that perspective a little bit of domestic terrorism isn’t that big of a deal. Not even domestic terrorism, for that matter; potential domestic terrorism! Most of the stuff would make headlines from coast to coast in minutes if it got set loose, and those headlines don’t happen four times a year every year, so obviously there’s either stockpiling or further repurposing going on.
In any case, whether life philosophy has any effect on the proceeding events is very debatable. On the brutally pragmatic side, protecting the status quo has historically preserved more human lives than the anarchist alternative, and the status quo is that society’s always had a teensy weensy bit of domestic terrorism in large enough communities. This in turn means that a forensic chemist – like Paulie – can sometimes turn catastrophe into opportunity when called into a station for confirmation that yes, that is a bomb, and no, you shouldn’t touch it. Every thirty or even twenty such episodes can become a double payday, with the right collaboration and guts of titanium. Dangerous! Somebody who works for the Company might be… misidentified.
It might lead to notice of abnormal bomb-chaperoning behavior, and then a short jump to accusations of conspiracy. A horrible surprise, that would be.
A far more twisty surprise is actually found when a deployment to an unusual excavation ends up discovering no bombs, but some outgassing opaque-to-sensors rock, and a crevice in that rock, and what lies within.
Successive equipment malfunctions. Screaming in the dark. Taking flight over and over as something continuously closes in on some target. Blood, and the smell of blood, and the memory of the smell of blood. Sweating and tracking a voice that speaks English.
Paulie, among the surviving five out of forty seven, hasn’t spoken English aloud for several days.
When they finally apprehend the entity responsible for so many lives lost, the Company doesn’t think for long. It’s lethal! It’s effective! It’s terrifying! “Take it out back and figure out what it is, why it is, and report” gets handed out as direction to all agents who happen to be in the neighborhood.
A train ride carries Paulie Ossershire, Blake Donnovan, Lemuel Prent, Pramoud Alp, and Laroux Lionne to an unmarked warehouse – accompanying them with an improvised sheet metal prison, inside a stronger and well guarded cage. There, they give testimony as to the creature’s characteristics, and receive compensation somewhere between hush money and hazard pay. Two researchers receive injuries, and one more gets killed, while examining the specimen.
Paulie’s notepad scrawlings, fearful and discouraging, get filed away. The dirty man who receives them says nothing about their impact besides offering thanks for providing the detail. No reassurances follow about the terrors of the excavation. No questions probe for theories. No answers, satisfactory or otherwise, appear on Paulie’s email or non-digital correspondence. A bad thing happened, and they survived it, and as far as the Company is concerned that is all the fortunate minority need to know.
Eventually, a deal congeals.
The people who head Palfrey Obligations have a lot of money and every form of investment under the sun. They hear tell of most abnormal violence. They would like to diversify their problem solving options. A considerable sum is exchanged. Upon delivery of the creature, there is agreement that a larger sum will appear in the balance of West Coast Textiles, one of the Company’s many appendages.
A specially-arranged train ride takes some nervous people back into London near Highgate, disrupting days’ worth of travel, because the mythical power of the banknote knows no bounds. The riders are met. A group leaves with a wooden crate containing a cage containing a welded tin box, taken from the rearmost section of the car.
It is easy to tell which people have intimate familiarity with the crate’s contents. Those who don’t, such as Murray Edfane and Dale Matthews, crack occasional jokes on the elevator ride up a silvery cut-glass building’s facade. Silence, and silence alone, unites those in the know.
Eventually, “then” becomes “now” and “numb” slowly transmutes back into “afraid.”
The door opens, and some people in suits and dress clothing exit, joined by a fake smile on Blake Donnovan’s face. They approach the cargo and its keepers.
“Let’s have a look!” says one of the suits.
Upon seeing the flinching hostile changes this sentence causes, she frowns, and declares, “It’s a joke.”
The Palfrey representative’s tone and straitjacket posture suggest this taking-of-offense offends her. Nobody tells her how very, very little they care.
The whole group sees a line begin to clear into the conference room – or lab, or whatever it is that Palfrey and the Company have been using as a discussion arena – and hesitantly approaches the side of the crate. It’s inconveniently large. A guard or two pushing, a person on either flank to watch for collisions (please God, no), and a guard in front to do what scouting parties usually do.
Paulie takes up the forward-ish spotter position that only a sadist would have assigned to one of the recent events’ survivors. Before anybody begins moving, though, a corner of the crate… flaps.
“Oooo,” croaks Paulie.
Closer steps Paulie.
Worriedly examines Paulie.
As a hand pokes the crate and more than a couple occupants of the room make noises from “upset hiss” to “intrigued coo,” the Palfrey lady comes walking over, bold as brass. She stares at the place where the corner shows a little bit of motion. The corner where the siding’s wooden slide groove should absolutely not allow any back and forth, let alone side to side.
Abruptly standing, she trots to the crate’s back. Two flush plastic tabs are popped off the side, as a furor goes up.
Murray Edfane is stepping forward with a bark of “Back off, you stupid cow!” as the Palfrey suit’s hands pull the highly crucial inset dowel handle.
Due to the corner’s damage, the side makes a SKWEEEEEEEEE fit to kill cats when it moves. The damage is made clearer as it continues skidding to reveal a skull-wide dark stripe. Something has chewed through the sliding groove and out the joining seam, fraying thinly lacquered planking with a mean grimace, leaving enough room to allow a rat – or a cat or small dog, if splinters are less of a concern.
The corresponding corner of the cage inside has a disturbance. Dirt and layered sooty residue have been swept. It isn’t too hard to tell where some force or object dragged along the cage’s floor and between the bars like a thick towel.
Farther inside the cage, the welded sheet prison has a cracked nutshell gap.
Of the entity the Company’s people had brought with them, no sign is evident. However, it isn’t hard to imagine a narrow bracelet of time – covering everybody along for the ride, the complacent guards and newbies, and the uncomfortable regret-filled survivors and witnesses – in which all gazes have turned away, and nobody has felt the desire to look at that crate. In this case, the crate’s cargo being absent has some very, very tall consequences.
Don’t look at it.
When you dislike watching a boiling pot, don’t get surprised if it boils over while you’re deliberately staring the other way.
Maybe someone would come along and find the accursed creature, but maybe not. Honestly? If nobody could locate the creature again, then the creature ideally wouldn’t seek out Paulie, or the other survivors, or anyone who still has both breath in their body and affiliation with the Company.
“Good,” is said with a microscopic smile.
“AAAAAGGHH!” the Palfrey lady suddenly shrieks, and turns to berate one of her coworkers. She isn’t even experiencing disembowelment.