jamieproctor.ca

One day, which very well may have been a Thursday, the sun went out.
It was really very distressing. One moment it was there, and then – ffftt – gone. Pretty shocking stuff, especially for the half of the planet that was in the middle of a perfectly good noonish.
Some peopled wailed. Some people cursed. Some people rent their garments and lamented.
Most people were pretty pissed off. “The damned thing was practically new,” they said, and they were right. You’d never see this kind of shoddy worksmanship back in the Precambrian.

There were a lot of decisions to be made in those first few dark hours. Hard ones.
First off, who the hell was going to pay for this. Some folks maintained that we ought to track down god, the universe, or whoever and give them the bill, while others insisted that we should probably get the sun fixed under the table before we ruined the solar system’s collateral. In the end the latter prevailed, if only because nobody could remember our landlord’s contact info.
Options were considered, dismissed, debated, discouraged, pushed forwards.

But the obvious first solution was duct tape. It was cheap, it was durable, and if it didn’t look like it was working we could always add more of it.
Ten billion rolls coalesced in the sky, spherical and mad. Ten billion more were added to get it looking real nice and round. Then we threw in a hundred billion more and everything was starting to look almost normal when it rained and half the sun came unglued from the other half. The whole damned thing nearly fell apart.

So it took a bit after that to work out whose fault that was – obviously someone else’s, it was decided – and then we were ready for the next plan, which was to send some people up to the sun to try screwing it in a bit more firmly.
The problem was, they got a bit confused. It’s righty tighty, yeah, but which right? Whose right? So while they were figuring that out the damned thing got so loose it nearly fell out – and then everyone was so embarrassed that they tightened it so far it got stuck fast. Christ knows how we’ll ever replace it now.

I won’t lie, after that happened things got ugly. Blame gets thrown around when things are bad, especially if there’s nobody obviously screwing up, because that means it’s EVERYONE’S fault and that’s just no fun at all. Who’d forgotten to check the bulb? Who hadn’t bought spares? Who’d been leaving it on all the time, day and night? What, did you think the sun was free? They don’t grow on trees, you know!
Eventually the problem ate itself: nobody really knew why the sun had gone out and therefore it was either everyone’s fault or nobody’s. Therefore, we blamed nobody. Selfish bastard.

With that important business settled, we tried to plug the moon into the sun to see if that’d help. It didn’t. The sockets didn’t match. Frankly, I don’t know who came up with that one, because I’m not even sure they use the same kind of gravity. We’re lucky we didn’t burn out anything or start a fire. You can’t just mess around with celestial engineering like that; this is how people get bolides dropped on them. Leave that sort of thing to the experts.

After that little episode things picked up. More solutions at greater speed, but fewer and emptier results.
We tried shouting at the sun. Didn’t work, didn’t make anyone feel better, caused noise pollution.
We tried begging the sun. It didn’t have ears so that was never really a good idea.
We tried threatening the sun. This made as little sense as the last thing, but felt a lot better.
We looked up the manufacturer to see if we could order a new sun, but they’d gone out of business several billion years ago due to industrial entropy and the whole field of solar construction was still in a state of perpetual collapse.
We even tried making peace with the fact that the sun had gone out and working on adapting to the new understanding: that things were going to be very dark and inconvenient for a long time. That lasted about five minutes before we all went nuts again.

Finally, when all hope was lost, when we’d just about given up on ever seeing another morning, someone suggested turning it on and off again and hell, what do you know, there it was.

Probably should replace the cord though.

On a particular and particularly rocky stretch of a road, a fight was breaking out, or maybe a discussion.
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
The participants collected themselves for a moment to consider their options; the debate was becoming too technical and abstract. A grounded, fully-developed statement was needed.
“You are NOT the most disagreeable of all of us pebbles. I’m much spikier than you.”
“Well I say I AM the most disagreeable of all us pebbles, because even if you’re spikier I’m pleasingly irregular – I can’t sit still against someone’s foot, I’ve got to rock and roll my way around and mess them up heart and sole. I’d take any bet you can name that I’m the most disagree, unpleasant, nasty piece of pebbly business ever to chip off the old block, and I dare you to bet me right now or give up your case.”
“Fine,” said the dissenting pebble. “Listen: an extremely holy and enlightened man is walking down this road. In five minutes, he’s going to step on us. I dare you to hop into his shoe. If you can drive him nuts, I’ll accept your idiot claims to being the most disagreeable, unpleasant, and generally shitty pebble to ever exist.”
And the candidate for that title was pleased, and so the bet was struck.

Five minutes later the holy man came walking down the rocky road, head down, mind above. He was yet holier still than the dissenting pebble had described; just looking at him was like taking a valium. Even the disagreeable pebble felt itself soften a little as his feet approached, but it had a job to do and it knew it. It shook its pebbly head, shrugged its pebbly shoulders, thought of its reputation, and leapt into the holy man’s shoe with the force of a thunderbolt covered in prickly thorns.
The holy man hop, skip, tripped and nearly tumbled down the sloping road, but he caught himself on a little tree and continued apace, unflinching.
“Right,” said the disagreeable pebble. “Time to work.”
And it did.
It worked itself through epidermis and into raw red flesh.
It spun and nudged and whirled and gyrated like a weasel in a war dance.
It sang all the correct pebble songs, such as ‘I’m shifting from toe to toe’ and ‘your heel is a fiery land of pain.’
Soon, very soon, the holy man stopped his walk to mop his brow and have some water. A passerby stopped for a quickie blessing and asked precisely where he was travelling.
“To the sea,” said the holy man. “There’s a holy place there, so it’s very much necessary.”
“That’s a long walk,” said the passerby.
“Oh, that’s not too much of a problem,” said the holy man. “Discomfort is fleeting.”
And he smiled when he said that, and the disagreeable pebble cursed and began to plan the next angle of attack.

For the first hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble rolled constantly from ridge to ridge, never resting, always moving. It left no inch of flesh unjabbed, no callus unshredded.
The holy man hummed holy things to himself as he walked those hundred miles, and those things passed, and the pebble swore and planned again.
For the next hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble sat still, rock still, stone still, immobilized and unyielding as it slowly ate through a single spot in the holy man’s heel until it was practically lodged against his bones.
The holy man sang holy songs to the wind and the birds as he walked those hundred miles, and that thing passed too, and the pebble snarled to itself and planned again.
For the final hundred miles the disagreeable pebble went mad and struggled on top of the holy man’s foot and attacked its soft skin like a rabid dog, worrying and chewing at it with flinty teeth until it looked like he’d gone dancing in a rosebush.
And the holy man stopped, and the disagreeable pebble rejoiced at first, but then it realized they were at the sea, in all its vast blue, and the holy man had only stopped because he had succeeded in his journey.
“Damnation and rubble,” mourned the disagreeable pebble. “I was so close!”
“Not as far as you thought, for sure,” said the holy man. “But farther than you would’ve liked to hope.”
The disagreeable pebble was greatly surprised by this interjection into its private thoughts, and said so.
“Everything talks, and I’ve tried to learn how to listen,” said the holy man. He fished the disagreeable pebble from his abused shoe and held it on his palm. “This is far too big a world for any of us to not learn to get along with all sorts of neighbours. Look! Look at how big it is! Look at the sea!”
And the disagreeable pebble looked at the vast and briny water under its huge sky and was humbled as pie.
“I’m sorry,” said the disagreeable pebble. “I’ve been presumptuous and petty, and caused you pain because of my own small insecurities. Will you forgive me, holy man?”
“Sure,” said the holy man. “Be seeing you.”
And then he overarm chucked the pebble out into the sea, where it skipped seventeen times at increasing velocity before sinking.

The first thousand years the pebble spent screaming. It was a shocking thing for a small pebble from the backroad countryside, to find itself immersed in the deeps.
The second thousand years it spent swearing vengeance as it crawled its way along the ocean floor, buffeted by currents, hurled about by the grinding of the great tectonic plates, insulted by slimy things with bony fins.
The third thousand years the pebble spent getting warmer, hotter, faster as it boiled with fury and also increasing heat as it dropped down back into the earth.

Finally, as its prized ridges melted off, as its perfectly irregular and torturous surface was crushed into a layer so thin that it didn’t exist, the pebble understood.

It understood it was not a pebble, but a particle. An undifferentiated one.

It understood that it had always been this way, and only its own ignorance had kept it so small, so focused on itself.

It understood that it and all that it had just joined were one.

And at that moment, at the pinnacle of its scope, it understood that it remembered the holy man’s voice extremely clearly, along with every one of the seventeen times it had skipped across the water.

And this is how we get earthquakes.

It was eleven thirty in the morning and Carl still hadn’t gone to bed because he’d been conquering the universe.
God knows it had taken too much effort already. He couldn’t afford to stop now.

He’d tried it dozens of ways.
At first Carl had been subtle. He’d tried to establish bare facts.
“I am in charge,” he told the universe. “Me!” he shouted. “Look at the capacity of my braincase! Look at the bumps on my skull! Look at the dexterity of my fingers! Look at the shape of my face! This constitutes my authority.”
Then he’d gotten really cunning, and had appealed to simple logic and rationality.
“I have personally built a coat rack,” he told the universe. “My father couldn’t afford a coat. Therefore, you haven’t got a prayer. Tomorrow I’ll seize you. I’ll take all that’s in you, and I’ll have it, and it will be mine. It’s inevitable.”
Finally, he’d gotten down to brass tacks.
“I, personally, unlike everyone else that’s ever lived, am definitely going to live forever and see my legacy expressed as I see fit,” he told the universe.

Surprisingly, the universe had not responded to his arguments, despite the fact that so many of his facts were totally correct and therefore his conclusions were unavoidable. So there Carl sat, on his roof, staring up at a sky that had possessed the indecency to take away its romantic (in an adventurous sense! Not in any way connected to anything as messy and unscientific as feelings, sociology, hormones, or the anatomy of the human brain) blanket of bright stars on black space for a bland blue sky with tufts of cloud.
“Fuck you,” he told the sky. “Get out of it. Bring back the universe. The universe is outer space, you’re just trying to hide it from me. The universe is mine, and you’re trying to keep it from me. I KNOW YOUR TRICKS.”
The sky didn’t answer him either, not even when he threw his bottle at it.

This was, of course, not the beginning of the whole problem. It had been brewing for years.
It was the universe’s fault. It had definitely promised Carl things, things which it had brutally, painfully failed to uphold – nah, reneged upon utterly!
And they had been such wonderful things. The most wonderful things of all.
Flight! He would soar, he had been told, he was very sure. If not himself, then his car; if not his car; then his species. All of them. Gloriously, eternally, entirely. Everything would fly to all ends of all places forever, and ever.
Prosperity! Everywhere he voyaged, all things would be his, or if not his, used to make something that was, which was useful, and practical, and satisfying. This would be the most beautiful thing of all, and actually useful which beautiful things weren’t so there.
War! In the path of Man – his path – there would be honest, uncompromising, and utterly inferior enemies who would be mulched in a straightforward test of strengths in which they would inevitably come up wanting, unless they sneakily attempted to triumph by means of deceit in which case they would learn that Man was not only a violent animal but the smartest one, and also the best, at everything, consistently and comfortably. It would be good and wholesome, and build character for the young men.
And finally….freedom. He, and every other Man worthy of the title, would do exactly as they wanted and bow to no one and organize themselves according to common sense and the laws of nature as their common sense understood them. They would all agree on these things all the time.
Those were the wonderful things that had been promised to Carl of the universe, and he was pretty pissed that it had welched so thoroughly on him. It hadn’t written him; it hadn’t called; it hadn’t even let him out of low earth orbit for decades. He’d been used in a most outrageous and unseemly way, and he couldn’t believe the universe had the gall to pretend this was permissible or acceptable behaviour.

Sitting there, on his roof, with his beer, without a prayer, Carl tried to remember what his father had told him. Or some assertive older man with a command of orbital physics, which was close enough. It had been a long time, but he recalled something about hard work and determination and maybe apple pie for some reason.
Carl closed his eyes. He gritted his teeth. And he reached out, out into that uncaring universe, grabbed it in fistfuls, wrenched it to him.
Then he opened his eyes and realized he’d almost fallen off the roof and the universe he thought he’d grabbed was actually just boring ol’ air. Instead, the universe was still above him, hiding. Laughing. Flaunting its impossibility in his face. The conniving tart.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t real, but it was still there. An unconquered universe, and Carl without so much as a sword to pillage with.
There must be a way. There had to be a way. But there wasn’t a way, not in all the sky he stared at. He’d wheeled, he’d proclaimed, he’d coaxed, he’d threatened, he’d even pulled out his calculator and done some basic mathematics on it, proving at a single stroke both his utter mastery of the invisible magic that ruled all interactions of matter and his infinite creativity.
Nothing.
Which, in a tiny part of his mind, was what he was beginning to suspect the universe actually was, by volume.
God he hated that nagging thought. It was not only absolutely irrelevant and entirely unconnected to his extremely coherent worldview, it ascribed unnecessary importance to Earth, which was the opposite of the universe. Earth was tiny, squalid, and frivolous. It spent zillions and zillions of atoms every year on entirely useless things like plants, animals, and geography, when if it was halfway practical and sensible it would be building spaceships and large, sentient computers. And it did it all through some kind of random willy-nilliness.
Not like the universe. The universe was cold and pure and pristine and worked in perfect math and everything happened for a reason out there which was why he was tremendously disappointed in it for ignoring him for no reason at all.
“YOU’LL DO WHAT I SAY!” he yelled. He threw his bottle at it, but he’d already done that five minutes earlier and ended up throwing his suntan lotion at it instead. “I WAS PROMISED AN ORBITAL HABITAT AND MINERS IN ASTEROID BELTS! I WAS PROMISED BUSSARD RAMJETS TURNING STRAY HYDROGEN INTO THRUST! I WAS PROMISED SOME KIND OF PROTECTION FROM COSMIC RADIATION AND I WAS PROMISED I’D LIVE TO SEE IT ALL HAPPEN! YOU OWE ME, GIVE IT TO ME NOW!”

An awful lack of silence descended.
It was filled with sound carried by air, with annoying insects and birds and dogs and neighbours being inconsiderate and people calling the police and the stink and stir of that smallest of things next to the universe: a planet.
Carl felt himself going mad from the inside out. But as he opened his mouth to scream, filled with awful, awful atmosphere, a light turned on inside him.
Ah. Of course.
How had he missed it? Naturally, as the universe hadn’t responded to him, it was proof that it agreed with him. His case had been made and he was right. Now that his claim for the universe was acknowledged, all he had to do was conquer.
Patting himself on the back (carefully, with stiff joints), Carl climbed in his bedroom window, walked downstairs to his computer, booted up his obsolete operating system, and carefully began to type.

Naturally, it is in the nature of Man to expand, by force if necessary, and so, it is equally true, that Man shall expand until the Universe is His. Quod era demonstratum.

“Done,” he said.
And then he had another bottle, and saw the man jump over the moon.

Jonathan had many things.
A house.
A cat.
A pile of old and dangerously outdated magazines.
But most importantly, Jonathan had his smile, which was a particular sort of smile, a very specific kind of smile. A sunny sort of smile.
(Oh, and he liked the summer. In Jonathan’s opinion, July was at least three months too short.)
So when Jonathan woke up bright and early one day to see the shade already cooking off the morning pavement with the snap hiss and pop of frying dew, WELL
he was pretty pleased.
Him and his smile, his very sunny smile.
“A good day, to-day!” he told his cat brightly. It ignored him.
There was no time to waste, not on something like this. Jonathan had a quick breakfast of whistles and cereal and hurled himself out on the streets, every pore wide open and sucking in the furious sunshine.
“What a lovely morning!” he told a twitching songbird. It peeped at him and slowly slid backwards off its twig, dangling from its toes.

Downtown, that was the place to go. Jonathan would get a paper there, and some coffee.
So he walked, because the busses were held up by traffic which was held up by all the tires and asphalt melting together into a sort of petroleum omelet, hissing with tar and bile.
“A good day to walk, to-day!” Jonathan sang out at the honking, screaming masses. “A very good day indeed!”
He took the time as he walked to compose another little song, which he whistled freely to the world. Each note scraped and sparked against the air, like a flint and steel.
“A paper!” he said to the last newspaper stand in town.
“A drink!” he said to the fourth of the fourteen coffee shops he’d walked past.
The coffee had evaporated in its cup, leaving only a lukewarm residue of droplets. But the paper warmed his hands as he sipped it, cinders flaking from its edges.
“Heat wave?” Jonathan asked sardonically as it crumbled into ashes in his palms “Balderdash! Poppycock! Why, this is the nicest it’s been since ’08!”
He snorted – which blew away the smouldering remnants of sections A through W – dusted off his palms, and headed down to the park.

It was bright and early in the park. The lake shimmered and steamed, generating its own surly haze. The trees roiled spasmodically in the murky air; half-wilting, half-combusting.
“A lovely day for a dip,” said Jonathan. He took off his shirt and socks and hung them on a panting, immobilized seagull, then splashed in with a slosh and a cheer and a “brr! Lovely!” He swam out to the dock and back again three times – once on his front, once on his back, and once on his side – and then floated there blissfully, staring up at the dried, withering sun. It looked like an old cranberry.
“Wonderful!” said Jonathan.
The sun made a noise like ‘pbblt’ except smaller and exploded.
Jonathan frowned, decided that wasn’t important, and felt the back of his skull touch sediment. The lake had evaporated.
“I could use a nice sandwich,” he said to himself.
The café was closed. The fry truck was fried. And what had happened to the ice cream stand was simply unspeakable.
“Gosh, that’s awful,” spoke Jonathan, who didn’t let that sort of thing stop him. He wrung the sweat and evaporated fat out of his shirt and squinted through the burning plastic and chrome of the marina. “Aha!” he said. “The tuck shop!”
The tuck shop was also rubble, but through a minor miracle one of its fridges was only partially incinerated. Jonathan extracted a single unpunctured Freezie from it, and inhaled its sugary vapour through his nose.

Jonathan’s walk home was brisker than it had been that morning, despite the increased heat and the incineration of whole blocks. Where his path took him uphill he took off his shirt and used it as a sail to harness the searing winds generated by the firestorms; and the sidewalks were liquid and splashed under his feet, sliding him on his way.
As he stood at the door of his house once more, Jonathan stopped for a moment – at first to extract himself from the molten remnants of his sandles, but then to consider some deeper thought, something that cried out for expression.
He looked up at the sky, boiled cloudless and seared red.
He looked across the city, at the running, liquid glass and crackling wood.
He looked down at the ground, which was belching forth pockets of sulphurous gas.
He frowned, pursed his lips, shook his head, cleared his throat.
And he spoke.
“A bit hot out there, eh?” said Jonathan, as all around him passers-by burst into quiet and consuming flames. “Boy, it’s a real screecher.”
Then he went inside his house, which exploded.

His cat made it out just fine though.

Make way, make way!
Stand aside! Clear the path!
Make way for the most important, average, humble, righteous, special and relatable man to ever walk this earth!
Make way for John Q. Protagonist!

Step aside please – give us room to breathe, and breathe softer, lighter, less obstructively. We don’t want anyone to get in the way of the point of view. It’s a dot, not a line, and it sits in his pupil. Don’t clutter it, don’t insert yourself, step meekly and be judged as he sees, ‘cause he sees FIT and FINE.
You, you, you and YOU! You are antagonists now! You dislike him for petty reasons, prepare to be put in your place. You – yes you – behind the counter! You are infatuated with his everday charm, his exceptional attractiveness, and will flirt shamelessly on-shift! Not a love interest though, you can stop existing after this. And you…all the rest of whoever you are. You will be our canvas, our backdrop, our stage. Applaud, swoon, dance, sing, sing, sing! Let the world respond to the act that is the actions of he!

Make way for John Q. Protagonist! He’s a busy man, with so many people to be.
He’s everyone that matters, and he isn’t you but maybe he could be! Buy a lottery ticket to your closest theater, bookshop, or video game today! Step up, step up, no need to be shy – claim a few minutes in the sun as the most important man to ever walk, love, laugh, kill, and live.
(for the ladies, Jane Q. Protagonist will be appearing down the road Thursday night, because we care)
Put on the blank face and be amazed at how much it resembles your own from inside your head. Speak words and watch them matter; take action and watch it succeed; spend time and have it matter, oh sweet god matter, each hour filled with action, emotion, and precious sweet honey-suckled angel-kissed god-blessed meaning – and even metaphor.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist; there will never be another like him! There never was another before him; he’s as old as the first story, and always just in the prime of life. A perfect demographic flashpoint; he’s always the majority, but always goes his own way, fearlessly giving them what they desire! What a democratic maverick! A truly independent man of the people! He breaks all the right rules and makes all the right laws; he’s got his finger on the pulse of the universe and tells us its heartbeat with total confidence in that awkwardly charming way of his. What would we do without him?
Hah, as if we’d ever do anything without him.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist; he needs time and space to mend!
His heart’s been broken, his job’s been lost, his best friend shot him in an alley and left him for dead, his mentor disowned him and his dog died. He needs time and space to mourn, but in a way that makes him look good and leaves him emotionally sound yet wiser.
Pour him a drink, give him some advice, give him some space, pick a fight with him and let him get beaten up and tossed out in the alley like so much garbage to prove how much he cares (more than anyone else, nobody else cares). Soothe him, comfort him, tell him harsh truths; whatever it takes to get his mind moving again before the plot stagnates and we all give up.
Just don’t hog the screentime. Remember, this isn’t about you.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist right this second! Roll out the way under his feet and wrap it back up behind him as he goes, because you never had it to begin with. It’s his way or no way, you see – not that you see anything. You think you had a point of view? You think you had a soul? Get real, get lost, get off your high horse. If you were somebody, you’d be anybody, and you’d be John Q. Protagonist. You may challenge him, you may obstruct him, you may even kill him, but you can’t replace him. Without him, nothing matters, and you’re not even nothing.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist! He’s an ordinary guy just like you with a very special set of skills! He’s hopeless at something; maybe even something important. He’s okay at something; maybe even something stupid and useless. Bet you a dollar that both of those things create a satisfying narrative with some intriguing character development. Go on, BET you nameless troglodyte! Bet against the will of the universe – nay, the universe itself!
PIT YOUR WILL AGAINST A WALL AND LOSE.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist, and steel your empty souls, for their fulfillment is at hand. You oppose him in the most fundamental way: you are barriers between him and the conclusion of this story. Maybe you love him, maybe you hate him; maybe you help him up or shove him down, but you’re all there on the page, clotting it up, weighing down the wordcount, shoving your stubby generic bodies between him and that bold-font THE END.
You disgust us. You try our patience. You wear out your welcome. Get going and good riddance.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist – and hurry! He has no time for you, or you, or you, and you, and yours!
There are three sequels and a prequel due by tomorrow, poor bastard, so give him some space and get lost.

I see you like squirrels. Yeah, me too. Who doesn’t?
They don’t count.
Listen, I’ll tell you something good about squirrels. Something nobody else has ever told you.
I’ll tell you why squirrels have big poofy tails.
No, shut up, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Yeah, yeah, your mom’s an ecologist, but shut up and listen you little scumbucket.

***
So there’s a squirrel. Regular old squirrel, of moderate stature and years. She lived in a highly lovely tree, and one particularly nice spring morning she ran down its trunk and was surprised to see a human being there, leaning against it. It wasn’t at all the season for that sort of thing.
“Hello,” said the squirrel. “Who are you?”
The human being turned its head to look up at her and the squirrel was somewhat surprised to see that it was unmistakeable the great disciple, sage, seer, prophet, fortune-teller, well-wisher, and dogs-body, Kem.
“I’m being pursued,” said Kem, “and I can’t stop to chat.”
“How about a bite to eat?”
“Can’t stop for that either.”
“Jeez,” said the squirrel, “you must be HUNGRY.”
“Thirsty, too,” said Kem. “But you know what I really miss?”
The squirrel didn’t know and said as much.
“Sleeping,” said the disciple-sage. “I haven’t had a nap in a decade. You see, I am continuously and constantly chased by the three great demons of Ignorance, Despair and Cruelty, and if I halt for a moment I’ll be caught and mangled by them.”
“Well, why don’t you put your feet up here and have a little rest?” asked the squirrel. “Being chased when you’re half-asleep never helps – trust me, I’ve lost a few cousins that way. And this is a really shady and most refreshing tree to sleep under. Besides, I can keep watch. You’ll be fine.”
“They are extremely great demons,” said Kem.
“My teeth are very sharp and never stop growing,” said the squirrel.
“Fair enough,” said Kem. And without so much as a good-night or thank-you-very-much the disciple-sage rolled up in a small and extremely holy ball and began snoring.
The squirrel combed through the disciple-sage’s pockets for any stray nuts and found nothing, then immediately climbed up to the top of her tree and began the watch. She didn’t have to wait long. The ground was trembling, the leaves were shaking, and over the horizon came the great demon Ignorance. It was sixty miles tall and forty miles broad and it had to walk bent double and double again to prevent its head from being lost high above the clouds. In each of its huge warty hands it carried a brutally spiked war-club the size of a well-travelled highway; from each of its ears dangled incongruously small but splendid little earrings, decorated with emeralds a deeper green than oak-leaves.
The squirrel was very impressed by Ignorance’s appearance and wondered if there was any deeper symbolic meaning behind it. “I’m very impressed by your appearance,” she told Ignorance. “I wonder if there’s any deeper symbolic meaning behind it?”
“Dunno,” said Ignorance in its small, somewhat flat voice. “Hey, you seen the disciple-sage, Kem?”
“No,” said the squirrel. “Hey, is that her?”
“Where?”
“Just over your shoulder.”
“Where?” asked Ignorance, craning its neck about three times.
“Your left shoulder.”
“Which left?”
“Your left.”
“Huh?” said Ignorance, twisting its head back around the other way six times.
“Now she’s right behind you.”
“Huh?!”
“Right above you now!”
Ignorance spun its head around five times each way, reared straight up, bonked its head on the moon and toppled over into outer space, dead as a doornail.

The squirrel checked the horizon, ate some nuts, explored the inside of the great disciple and sage Kem’s hat, and generally made up things to take up time. At last she sat on a branch, utterly deprived of things to do.
“I’m done,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” whispered the great demon Despair into her ear.
The squirrel nearly leaped out of her fur. The great demon Despair was very quiet, so very quiet indeed that it had crept right up to her in her tree without so much as a hint of a warning. This was in spite of both the fact that it was the size of a mountain range and was being dragged on top of a jeweled palanquin by the innumerable labouring efforts of millions of tiny nagging doubts. In its right hand it held a jeweled flog; in its right hand a blacksmith’s-puzzle made of two perfectly-trapped circlets; in its other right hand it clutched a few stray nuggets of mucus, as it was currently knuckle-deep in its nose.
“Get your finger out of there when you’re talking to someone,” said the squirrel sternly.
“Sorry,” sighed Despair, brushing crumbs out of its palm and flicking them into the distance. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? Well, I’ve screwed this up. Tell me, have you seen the great disciple-sage Kem?”
“Nowhere near here,” said the squirrel.
“Really?” asked Despair. “Not even under your tree, where I followed her tracks?”
“Nope,” said the squirrel.
“Not even huddled under that cloak and hat, which I have seen in the distance just ahead of me ten thousand times?”
“Not in a million years.”
Despair sighed again, a wind that dragged on forever. “Gosh, I’m just WORTHLESS,” it said wretchedly. “I can’t believe I’ve screwed up so badly. I can’t do anything right. I’m not a real person. I’m going to go home and never do anything again.”
And it did, towing its nagging doubts behind it like fishing-lines. The squirrel watched it leave, thoughtfully munching an acorn, then shrugged.

The great demon Cruelty was less subtle – and not merely because it was a vast and crawling thing with a thousand thousand arms and a million claws and sixteen hundred mouths with a billion very sharp teeth. It took an hour and a half to walk from the far horizon to the squirrel’s tree because it kept stopping to uproot and shred every blade of grass and crawling beetle it could see.
“HRRRNRNRNRNRNRNNRNRNRNGHGHGHGehehehehehehehhehehehehe,” it said to the squirrel.
“Hello,” said the squirrel.
“HRURURURURUURruururrrr,” said Cruelty, and it reached out with six of its arms.
“Are you looking for the great disciple-sage Kem?” asked the squirrel very quickly.
“HAHAHahahahayes indeed,” said Cruelty. It tore a few branches off the squirrel’s tree and began to strip the bark off them.
“Why?” asked the squirrel.
“I wish to commit unspeakable tortures upon her,” said Cruelty, idly scouring an ant colony with its heel. “I have plans.”
“Tell me,” said the squirrel.
“I just said they were unspeakable,” said Cruelty, and a wasp-whine of annoyance filled its sixteen hundred mouths. “There will be no words. Only flayings. And mutilatings. And wrenchings. And so on and so forth. There are a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components”
“Astounding,” said the squirrel. “How sure of them are you?”
Cruelty glared at the squirrel, eyelessly. “Very. My plans are astute and exact.”
“Well then luck is your ally! At the foot of this tree, vulnerable, blissful, and unaware, slumbers the great disciple and sage Kem!”
Cruelty clapped with glee and all its hands, knocking every bird in the sky senseless. “Hooray!” it said.
“Now go to work with your plan then,” said the squirrel. “Just don’t mess it up. Because you have only one chance and a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components.”
The great demon cruelty considered this. Then it considered the sky. Then it considered the squirrel. Then it considered the sky again.
Then it opened its mouth and said “well, I would begin at the forearm…”
“I don’t quite understand,” said the squirrel. “How do you mean?”
“Just here, at the nerve.”
“Where?”
“There are no words,” sighed Cruelty, and it held up its thousand thousandth favourite arm. “So. Starting from here…”

What was left of Cruelty in the end was just a few wayward atoms which quickly underwent isotopic decay and vanished just as Kem yawned and stretched herself upright.
“That,” she said, “is the best nap I’ve ever had. And also the only. Tell me, squirrel, did you find yourself troubled?”
“Somewhat,” admitted the squirrel. “But not to any great degree. Your demons are not very clever.”
“No,” agreed Kem. “But they are persistent, and I imagine they’ll be back someday. I think I owe you something all the same, mind. For the sake of a good nap on a kind spring morning.”
The great disciple and sage extended her hand and blew on her palm and then and there, nose to tail, the squirrel’s furry tail shifted and shook and shimmied until it had turned into a marvelous swirl of colour, every shade of the rainbow and more besides.
“Gosh, thanks,” said the squirrel.
“Don’t mention it,” said Kem. “Now shoo! I’ve got a load of ground to cover.”

***

Of course, next Wednesday the squirrel asked for her old tail back, since her marvelous rainbow-fur made her extremely visible to hawks, foxes, and cats. And thus it was that the squirrel acquired her tail, which was the same as her old tail. Sometimes life’s like that.

It was a waste of time, just a stupid waste of time – I said that from the outset. But we were into summer now, where time didn’t exist. Schedules had slipped apart; weekends blurred into Thursdays; nobody had anything to do but nothing.
So me and Sam and Dan went down to the old school, just to kill an evening, any evening, whatever day it was didn’t matter.

The fence was short and wire, didn’t even have barbs. Its mesh was too fat to keep out a rat, or even a raccoon; its frame was too feeble to stop a bear; a coyote or stray dog would dig under in a flash. It only existed to prove its point and hold up a sign.
TRESPASSING
PROHIBITED
UNSAFE
CLOSED
SOLD
LOT
and so on.
We climbed it like it wasn’t there, first Sam, then Dan, then me. Slow Jo. But it wasn’t my idea to come here – it wasn’t anyone’s, really – and I didn’t want to see this place again all that bad.
Neither did Dan. Sam didn’t either, but she’d said she did and so there wasn’t any way around it and here we all were with Sam’s crowbar and the little side door by the gym breaking apart. We probably could’ve pushed it over.
“Dark in here,” said Dan, because he was the one that said the things people had to say.
We pulled out flashlights, switched on apps, poked around until we found the door that still opened and walked into the gym, where the first zombies were.

They weren’t doing much. Standing. Groaning, but softly. Life doesn’t move too fast around here to start with, and once it stops it drops without rolling. Four of them, under a dirty old skylight like bigger versions of the strange moulds and mosses that were sprouting up from the tiles around them.
We took some pictures. Sam whacked one of them a few times with her crowbar, trying to get the head off, but she gave up as fast as could be excused. People are tougher than they look, and zombies are the people that wouldn’t fall apart properly to begin with.
Dan smoked in the gym, like he said he’d always sort of wanted to. Then we went into the halls and the classrooms and the bathrooms and up and down, looking for something and finding zombies, always more zombies. Here and there, still wearing t-shirts and dresses and suits. Sneakers mouldy. Eyes turned off and lungs pumping for nothing, staring up at the ceiling and the water damage coming in through the roof.
One of them did stop us on the second floor – my fault. I recognized one of their shirts and freaked out a little. I explained about middle school drama, Dan said ‘wow, that sucks’, and Sam pulled out the crowbar again.
It didn’t help anyone at all, really. Like getting revenge on a tree.

The teacher’s longue was empty. Just another room, once you ignored the fridge with the two overgrown tupperwares in it. Dan made us spend ages in there – kept insisting that Sykes kept a bottle hidden in a sewn pocket inside the couch, that he was always sloshed after lunch. Sam ended up jumping up and down on it to show him there was nothing there, then the whole thing collapsed into a big explosion of spores and dust. Gross.
“It’s your fault if we all get hantavirus,” I told her. She just laughed at me.
The principal’s office was even less exciting. They’d taken all the paperwork when they shut the place down, so we couldn’t even look up our files or anything.
“They’d just be boring anyways,” said Sam. “Hey, here’s Jo’s: ‘this girl exists. Went home sick twice. Freckles.”
“And yours would just be blank,” I told her. “Since you never came in.”
We busted it up anyways. We had to use the crowbar for something. We had to do something. The desk was just as tough as the zombies – dead, cheap wood that wouldn’t crumple properly. There were no electronics.

It was easy to get onto the roof. They’d taken the paperwork, they’d taken the keys, but they hadn’t done anything with any of the doors that was more complicated than some planks and a few screws.
The lawn looked nice from up there. They’d come by and tore it up real good about six months after the shutdown, but the grass had grown back and all the trees had gone wild and bushy, really real bush-y, not fluffy but like something from ‘the bush.’ They seemed to be eating up the lawn.
Dan had brought beers. Lite beers. We drank them because it was what we had, and we threw some rocks off the roof. Sam bugged me until I threw the zombie head she’d brought with us. “It’s therapy,” she said. “Therapeutic. Do it. C’mon. Just do it. Go for it. Do it. Now. C’mon. Do it.”
I did it. Still wouldn’t blink, but I guess it might’ve helped.

By then it was getting dark – too dark, where’s-my-hand-in-front-of-me dark – so we pulled our stuff together and headed back downstairs after we threw the bottles at the old basketball net. None of us made it. Sam hit on Dan after he missed his shot, but he didn’t notice and she got embarrassed and gave up real fast. Nothing new.
I’d expected the trip home to be bad, for something to go wrong, but really… It was dark down there, and the zombies wouldn’t stop sighing, but it was ALREADY dark down there, and we’d already heard them, and there was nothing new there, just green and crumbling dampness, and, well, nothing had changed.
We talked on the way back, casually, about very important things. Dan was going to ask around at the auto shops; Sam was heading to college.
For me, I looked at the blank, breathing faces around us, and I couldn’t think of much else. Not much else at all.

Apéritif: red Flamburr, aged in a forty-year furnace, curdled in the hate of myriad scorpions and chilled with glacier hearts.

Appetizer: ground-bone bread, newly formed from the freshest fruit of the Carrion-King’s gallows and married to a dark, troubled stormbran dough. Jams and mustards are provided from a wide variety of innards and traitors.

Soup: a rich Bnos-style cream, thickened with marrow from the gallows and lashed with a full brace of grave-onions.

Main Course: Every unfibrous muscle in a Manglefoot’s body, pulverized with tremendous force and braided into a sinewsage over forty feet in length along with the monster’s spinal cord and small intestines. Served rare.

Salad: clotted tumbleweed hearts from the ghostland of the east, where every inhabitant was buried alive, dressed with a thick pint of drakkblood, sweetened in the innarsyrups of gentle everbees.

Assassination: a tangy cyanide/cyanide-like capsule concealed inside one of the tumbleweed hearts by a furtive, cunning, yet fruitless hope. Clears the palate, provides a light buzz.

Cheese: Gorbeg’s own Griffon Green, aged in the Red Caves under the Blue Mountain in the Black Highlands of the Whitemarches. Includes the still-meandering beetles that are crucial to its fermentation. Served with a plate of ladyfingers, gentlefingers, and childfingers of all types.

Fallback Assassination: six inches of cold keenfolk-gleaned steel to the brisket, delivered two-handed by the waiter to the brisket.

Impromptu Snack: the crushed and mangled remains of the waiter, garnished with much chuckling and delight.

Dessert: desert sands from Tir; shaved ice from Altanorici; cold basalt from the flowfields of Burner’s Eye; all boiled to a scream and frozen into edible glass surrounding the chilled organs of an adorable yet delicious creature of unidentified species. Consumers may guess the dessert’s identity for a prize.

Digestif: Deep dark Glou, soused in its own luminescence and infused with hatred by a Longwhorl master-fumer. Topped with a single marbled-over Salaman’s Grape the size of a golf ball.

Unplanned After-Dinner Treat: the marbled-over Salaman’s Grape three more times (up and down and back again) accompanied with violent coughing, followed by six feet of the Carrion-King’s own esophagus, backwards. Garnished with fatal lack of oxygen to the brain.

On a day in the Terramac exactly like every other, something went very wrong and/or very right. It’s difficult to say which, how, or why – certainly the people of the Terramac would never answer. Their past, much like their future, is irrelevant. They will live with the consequences; everyone else, alas, must settle for dealing with them.
In this case it meant coping with an avalanche of molten mountain that scarred half the Baldy range from peak to peak, spattering across slopes and filling valleys with hot bubbles of squirming, coiling….substance. Not quite solid, close cousin to liquid, never a gas and plasma didn’t recognize it.
Still, it was quite something. And when it hardened, well. Things got weird.
Of course, there is never a lack of folk willing to pay for weird.

That was then. Now, riding into the present on Then’s back, four rucksacks stacked high and coiled about in heavy jackets, the admirable, the determined, the steadfast, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet.
She’d come to town. There wasn’t much other choice, up here in the Baldies. It was either stay in your cabin drinking, trapped by a blizzard; or go into town and get drunk, trapped by a blizzard. And Jun didn’t own a cabin. Jun didn’t own a single thing that wasn’t packed on Then or inside her own skull.
But Jun had a plan, which are a notoriously portable form of wealth. And it started there, in Pultro. A boiled town, that got by on milking the odd recluse or wealthy meditant who wanted to sit in its steam caverns for a few weeks imagining the meaning of life until they could taste it. That and the furs and feathers of small things too stupid to escape traps.
Jun walked into the bar and bought everyone a glass of something until they were all her best friends, which cost her a total of one old half-a-coin. It wasn’t very much, but then she only needed to buy two glasses.
The man in the corner told her she looked just like his little sister, then cried himself to sleep. The bartender was more awake, and less able to dodge eye contact or conversation.
“So, I hear this is a pretty famous place,” said Jun.
“What sonuvabitch told you that lie, I will fight him until he turns ugly,” said the bartender.
“Nobody I can remember. Some kind of scholar. But he said there’s one thing about the place that anyone should be curious about, and that’s figment stones. He showed me one.”
“Never heard of ‘em,” said the bartender.
“Here,” said Jun. And she pulled out a little pebble and rolled it in her palm. It was flat, but didn’t seem happy about it; as if all that it required to get itself up and moving again was a little shove.
“Never seen one before,” said the bartender. “Not around here.”
“He said there used to be a mine out here. That it used to be famous.”
“Never known that either,” said the bartender. “Try the Grey Loop, up by Thickethead. There’s nothing there at all.” Then she finished her drink and passed out, and Jun was forced to take her advice or leave it.

She took it. She took it right out of the bar and back to Then, who’d been patiently drinking from the town’s (under-heated, slightly-minerally, well-boiled) public well. She took it with her eighteen miles out of town, plus another quarter-mile vertical. She took it through a maze of boulders that wedger her fast until she had no choice but to drop two rucksacks, and an interesting encounter with something fast and feathered with too many teeth and not enough caution.
Then she took herself back to Pultro, along with Then, two rucksacks, and a pocketful of extremely sharp and pointy fangs, which bought her a few more supplies and a night somewhere dryish.
“Figment stones,” she asked the hosteler, who was frankly amazed that anyone wanted to stay in town, including himself. “Seen any?”
“Never heard of a thing like that thing,” he told her. “You sure you’re in the right place?”
“Absolutely,” she told him. “Folk pay a mint for these thing, rich idiots. You crush them and inhale them and you see, well, just about anything. Everything. All at once.”
The hosteler scratched his face, hitting his nose by random chance. “You could check the old Mork-Matten mine, down the trail and off the dead lumber track. You won’t find anything there though.”

So the determined, steadfast, and driven Ms. Jun Dolet (and Then) set out again, in the opposite direction. She went down the dead lumber track and found that it forked, and that those forks forked, and those forks also forked. Some of the forks were the same, and others just looked the same, and some of them looked like forks but were actually dead ends where the trees had run out, the rocks had grown too thick, or where a Slibbean Icemaw had set up its breeding den. The last one got Then, but in her haste to lose the beast in a thicket Jun had the good fortune to fall directly into one of the surface tunnels of the old Mork-Matten mine, directly onto the long-lost bones of old Malaster Mork, which still had Dep Matten’s pickaxe buried in its cervical vertebrae.
The pickaxe wasn’t worth much, but the story got her a free stay in the cabin of a twitchy trapper on the way back before she could finish freezing to death.
“Shouldn’t have gone out there,” the trapper told her, eyebrows bouncing like electrified caterpillars. She was six foot and more, but through careful cringing and constant furtiveness had attained a height of half her size. “Bad business out there. It’s too cold. Better stay in, where it’s safe. Safer. Safeish. Did you hear that? It was just the wind, but there’s stuff that sounds like it’s just the wind. Icemaws. You scared up one; it’ll be out there now, looking for food until it’s got it. Us, probably.”
“Figment stones,” said Jun. “Not one in the mine.”
“Well, yeah,” said the trapper. “It was an iron mine. You step on anything in there? Could get lockjaw. I almost got that last winter. Cut off my foot, that fixed it. Got a new one. Want to see it?”
“Sure,” said Jun. “But I need to know where to look for figment stones.”
“Not here,” said the trapper. “None around here I expect. Could look by the Manybends. It’s got lots of stones. Big stones, small stones, medium stones. Creeping stones. Those are stones that creep up on you, while you sleep. Sleep creeps. One of them almost got me five years ago, and I haven’t been back since. It’s how I got this scar.”
Jun looked at the scar and a lot of others and slept late, woke early, and set out for the Manybends river with half the trapper’ provisions, all of her liquor, and a murderous, many-headed hangover.
“Really, taking this stuff off her hands is doing her a favour,” she told herself.

The steadfast and driven Ms. Jun Dolet arrived at the Manybends and found that it exceeded her on all counts. It was faster, steadier, more driven, and considerably rougher and more anxious to get to know her than she was. By the evening of the third day she’d been in and out of it five times, of which only one had been intentional.
(The others, in order:
Bear.
Bear on the opposite bank.
Grand Murderfish – a real record-breaker; luckily it had only caught her coat with its teeth.
While drying herself off, a large stone had crept up on her and pushed her into the rapids)
Two of her toes were near-black, but sufficient whiskey and fire put paid to that and they reluctantly came alive again long enough for her to stumble into town and slouch down in the bar, trading a pack full of fool’s pyrite and a (slightly stabbed) Grand Murderfish eyeball for a lot of extremely bad liquor.
“Figment stones,” she told the bartender, and the bar. “Figment stones. They look like….stones. You seen any? Anywhere?”
“No,” said the bartender. “Go home.”
“Never heard of them,” said the bar. “Not once.”
“No such thing,” said the man in the corner.
“I’m going to piss,” said Jun.

And with much weaving and bobbing, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet harnessed just enough of her willpower to get herself to the outhouse before throwing up.
“Hllorpp,” she burped. No more rucksacks, no Then, one jacket, only the very last spec of determination, and her mouth tasted like pure pine sap – which might’ve been what the local booze was made from. It smelt even worse coming out than it did in; an overwhelming haze of stink was oozing up out of the pits of the privy, strong enough to tear your nose off and eat it.
Jun sniffled a little into her sleeve, which was square remulus purple strong major horse revved turn plonk doze bull chuff.
When she woke up a little, she was on her back with her head on dry pine needles, in cold air. Who knew if she’d have come back at all if she’d stayed in there, with the air so thick with…
Well then.

Jun Dolet dug a little next to the privy. Then next to the bar. Then in the middle of the town square. Then she paced around a little, clearing her head enough to make sure that she wasn’t crazy at the moment, and went back into the bar.
“Hey,” she said to the bartender. “What’s this?”
The bartender looked at the little stone in her palm. “Wood chips,” she hazarded.
“Pinecone,” guessed the bar.
“Scat,” said the man in the corner. “Icemaw, I reckon. Best run away.”
“It’s solid figment stone,” said Jun. “The whole town’s lousy with it. You’re drinking booze made from distilled sap from trees growing on top of it; you’re sleeping in dug-out cabins and shanties surrounded in it, the whole damned cauldron of boiled water this place sits above is pooling inside of it, and not a one of you has ever noticed?”
“Noticed what?” said the bartender.
“This. Figment stone.”
“I don’t see any. Do you see any?”
“What?” said the bar. “I can’t see anything. Ever.”
“You look just like my little sister,” said the man in the corner. Then he cried himself to sleep in two seconds.
“I think I see the problem,” said Jun.

She left town the next morning with four new packs: one filled with figment stone; one filled with provisions; one filled with a few samples of the local soil, water and booze; and one filled with the cashbox from the bar, which she’d persuaded the bartender didn’t exist.
One day, Jun vowed, she’d be back. Or rather, she’d pay someone else to come back for her. Figments were a decent enough indulgence, but the idea of spending that much time in them gave her the willies. You could wind up believing ANYTHING.
Thankfully, the world was full of people who’d pay good money for that.

“For Imaginariumia!” shouted Keith as he nobly clove a goblin in twain.
Eddie hated that. He hated that Keith had breath left in him to shout after that charge; he hated that Keith had dragged them into a wondrous land of magic and adventure where the sun always shone and then gotten them both dressed in chainmail and padded leather; but what he REALLY hated was that Keith was always cleaving goblins in twain, or smiting them, or striking them down. Eddie tried his best, but it always turned out like the goblin in front of him – his sword drove up through the goblin’s torso, shredding organs and spilling out viscera, then wedged hard into its ribcage and stuck fast. There Eddie was, in the middle of a battle for the lives of the Good People against the Evil Horrible Unpeople, noble deeds and heroic valour all around him, and his sword was jammed in gritty cartilage.
And the goblin wouldn’t stop whimpering. It was a nasal sound, probably not helped by the puncturing of one of its lungs by the cold-forged, elf-enchanted, dragonfire-hardened tip of Eddie’s blade, Swiffyfangg. Blood was frothing up its windpipe, and it sounded like wet hiccups.
The sword was still stuck. Eddie’s hands were slick with blood and worse – the goblin’s sphincters had relaxed. His mouth had clenched, gibbered, and clenched again; his teeth were grinding themselves down to meal. Finally, he licked his lips, opened wide, and let loose the foulest curse he knew.
“Let GO, darn you!”
At that moment a screaming goblin with an axe reached Eddie, Eddie’s neck, and his jugular, and he lost consciousness permanently.
*
There was a change in the rumble of the guns. Something undetectable, in a pitch that had noting to do with sound and everything to do with the human pulse.
It’s time, said Tom’s heartbeat.
“It’s time,” Peter whispered to him, crouched in the mud.
“It’s time,” said the nameless corporal.
“GO!” yelled the sergeant, and they were up and over the wire, running and screaming – inside, where it’s always louder – into the grey world with its grey sky and its shockingly dull blood pooling everywhere, arms pumping, packs wobbling, guns ready.
Tom couldn’t see the enemy. He wondered if that was a mistake. Tom couldn’t see the sun. He wondered if that was significant. Tom wondered something else, but just then he was interrupted by the accidental discharge of the rifle clutched in the hands of the nameless corporal, who’d stumbled in a hollow. It tore through Tom’s spinal column at the base of his neck and that was that.
*
A twig snapped.
Sarah froze as still as a statue, as still as an unworked stone, as still as the bedrock that insisted, continental drift or no, it hadn’t ever once moved an inch.
One foot hovered just above the dirt, muscles shrieking. She ignored them.
No more twigs, but the game was up. Something was there, something trying to be quiet in that way that mutes sound but raises hairs. On the other side of the copse, something was waiting with a bloody mouth and a deadened pulse.
Sarah checked the revolver – in the quiet way, with her brain alone.
Two shots fired. Four remained.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Ghostly.
Sarah took a step into the thicket into extremely thin and slightly foggy air, fell six feet down a gulley, and landed headfirst, snapping her neck.
*
Dusk parted in a flash of shadows and moulded muscles. Fred and Bert were snatched up as something drove their heads together with nauseating force, cracking skulls and driving soon-to-be-fatal blood clots into brains.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” enunciated Joe as the caped crimefighter whirled towards him. “It’s Capeman!” He fumbled at his gun with frozen fingers, but the shadowed finger was faster and sent a razor-sharp knife spiralling into his wrist with a contemptuous flick. Joe screamed and involuntarily squeezed the trigger, sending forty-eight bullets through the wall of the bank and out into the general public and three through the central mass of Capeman, where they shredded and pulped several vital organs.
*
Fred Steele crouched in his basement, a smouldering mound of pythons stacked like tyres, surmounted by a grey-eyed glare. In his beef-slab hands he held – with immeasurable care and finesse – the power of Azrael, the angel of death, incarnated as the components of a half-made pipe bomb. He sneezed and blew himself up.
*
Despite his best efforts, Colonel Wagner was eaten by the lion.