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The old man walked into the smithy.
It was a short sentence, but one that took a lot of background work to make it happen: managing his knees alone these days took at least half of Araim’s concentration. He’d given up on his hips a decade ago.
He looked at the blacksmith, saw that grin, and felt the old, familiar bile bubble up in his gut. Screw them. It didn’t matter.
“Nails?” asked the blacksmith as he opened his mouth.
Araim nodded his head. See if he’d give the little bastard the satisfaction of a clean reply, if he was going to be that way today.
“Two buckets?”
A second nod.
“Right. Fork it over.”
Nod. Money. Nod.
“Pleasure doing business.”
Nod.
Araim took a bucket in each hand, straightened up as much as he could (about an 82-degree angle, as far as his curiosity and tools combined had told him a few years ago), and headed for the door. Wonderful.
“Congratulations.”
Araim paused, one foot over the doorstep.
“That’s your thousandth bucket right there,” said the blacksmith. “I looked over da’s receipts, double-checked and everything.” He smiled; the big, beaming happy smile of a man who loves his job and life in general. “Look, they’re free from now on, eh? Only fair.”
Araim didn’t know what to say. He tried nodding again.
“One question, though…”
oh no here it came again.
“…you really think you’ll ever need it?”
Araim nodded one last time because it was either that or throw the bucket at the boy’s face. Then he walked up the mountain with legs like hairy ramrods and a spine stiffened by pure fury.

Araim was four years old, and riding six feet off the ground on his father’s shoulders. He’d been crying two minutes ago, but the wind in his face and the sudden surge of height had thrown all that away into the rusty old past, something that didn’t matter anymore. He could see over people’s heads. He could see through windows. He could see all the main street of the town from here, from the road’s birth at the first foothill to the Squeezer, where the valley walls shrunk down together and opened up to the banks of the big wide Serenna river, idling along past them all with no cares and no worries.
“Stupid,” said Araim’s father. His name was Jerub, though the boy wouldn’t know that for almost a decade yet. What else was he but his father? “Stupid, stupid, stupid. You know why that’s stupid, boy?”
“N-“
“I’ll tell you why it’s stupid. Look down there – see? See where the river’s banks slope?”
“Y-“
“Oh, it looks steep enough, doesn’t it? Well maybe the first five feet, sure. But after that it barely rises another two ‘till you’re halfway to the road. One day there’s going to be a flood – a real flood, not this penny-dropping pissflow we get every spring – and then we’re going to watch a lot of damned fools drowning, you can bet your dinner on it. You hungry?”
“Ye-“
“Right. Time to go in.”

Araim came home just as the sun was starting to dip low in the cloud-bruised sky, his feet touching the closest thing to level ground since he’d left the village behind.
They looked so small from up here on the mountain. They were all so small. He’d held up his hands as a child, erased the lot of them with one palm held at the right angle. But sooner or later his arms would get tired, and the hand would waver and drop, and there they were again. Behold Araim, he taketh away, but he also returneth.
God his knees must be hurting if he was willing to distract himself with those memories. There were better ways to keep himself occupied. It was late in the day, this was really more time for dinner than for work, but it had to be done and it might as well be done now.
He picked up the buckets of nails – one in each hand again, the handles cutting into the grooves that had etched themselves into his palms over the years and years – and trudged out back.
Araim’s father had chosen his land carefully. The ground was rocky, but at least here it was flat, and there was some semblance of soil that was clinging grimly to the little plateau that hung off the mountain’s sides like a piglet from a sow. Enough to grow a few measly crops to feed a family of eleven, plus the odd wandering cousin that came back from strange parts with a funny accent and funny gifts.
Nowadays it fed one: Araim. But that was all right. He’d put the rest of the space to right good use.

Araim was eight years old, and sitting on a dusty bench in a dusty house as his grandmother read to him and his four elder sisters and his five elder brothers.
“…and the turtle,” his grandmother said, her voice as droning as a fat bumblebee, “who was the largest and widest and best of swimmers, carried up the whole of the good people on his back. And they floated there for a year and three days.”
“Did the turtle get tired?” asked Araim’s brother Isak.
“No,” said grandmother.
“How did the turtle get that big?” asked Araim’s sister Klass. “All our turtles are tiny. I’ve caught loads of turtles and they’re all-“
“It was the first turtle,” said grandmother. “He was the biggest.”
“What happened to all the other people?” asked Araim.
His grandmother looked at him, and it was Araim’s bad luck to be the third question in as many seconds, because he got the full brunt of a tired old glare, the kind that hardens with age into something like a diamond and cuts like a dull knife.
“They were the loafers, the schemers, the witless and the wretches and the murderers and the thieves,” she said, and each word made him shrink a little more. “While the good people escaped on Turtle’s back and lived together, they fought each other, and they drowned. You understand that?”
Araim nodded.
“Good. No more questions.”

Araim’s back wasn’t feeling any better once he’d scaled the fourth of his ladders, but it wasn’t feeling any worse either. It had passed through sensations altogether and entered a strange realm where the only thing that existed was tingling numbness that seemed to want to spread from your vertebrae through to your brain and blot out vision forever.
He ignored it. The view was worth it from the upper bridge, even if he couldn’t explain it. All the way up a mountain, you wouldn’t think the extra forty foot of height you saw from the deck would make a difference. But it did, and he could never tell why. From this height the clouds of far away looked like plums, curdled by sunset and by guts full of thunder both. Maybe the rain would come soon, give him a shower as he worked, soak him down so far his bones would cool and his heart would slow back to its normal crawling pump.
Well, pleasure later. He’d come up here to at least pretend to do business.
Araim fumbled one-handed and took out his hammer from his belt, where it always hung. The nails were new, but this was an old tool: it had been old when his father kept it tucked away with his saws and mallets. It had been dusty then, and cobwebbed. But half a century had gone by without it sitting idle for more than a day, usually when Araim had to make supply runs into town and the journey back took more wind out of his sails than he’d supposed.
Well, today he’d got a spring in his step. And dinner could wait.
Araim knelt down, took a plank in one hand and the hammer in the other. Nails protruding from his mouth, he began to lay down another piece of his ship.

Araim was sixteen years old, and burying his father.
It was hard. Real hard. Much harder than burying his mother had been. For one thing, there had been two of them to do the job. Even if his father had stopped every few minutes to walk off and cry where Araim couldn’t see him.
But now it was just Araim. Just Araim the baby, the little one who’d never grown up and moved out. Never had a chance to grow up and move out, never had the time to go down to the village and make friends and fall in love. Just Araim, all by himself, taking care of an old man whose shoulders he used to ride.
He paused with a shovelful of dirt – the last? Second last? Did it matter? – and looked down in the evening cool, sweat prickling on his shoulders. The last of the little lights in town were just twinkling out. Early nights, early quiet. Peaceful. Tomorrow morning he’d make the long, hot trudge down there and let them know, and they would all be sad, and maybe they’d even come back up to pay their respects at the grave he’d dug.
And that, more or less, was when he knew what he was going to do. His eyes alit on the river some seconds later, and that was when the word ‘boat’ first crossed his brain, but it had all already been decided.

The lights were going out.
That’s what drew Araim’s eye from his carpentry, that and that alone. It was too early for bed even for townfolk; this was suppertime, dinnertime. There was still daylight left, even if it was fading. Something was going on. People were in the streets now, no, people were running through the streets. Something was moving behind them, pouring through the Squeezer, shining like red fire in the sunset’s death.
Water from the Serenna, bubbling up and over earth and onto cobble and stone, churning and eating at itself with fury. If he squinted hard enough, he could almost see the flecks of black on the waves that could’ve been trees tossed aside in the fury of the storm-fed flood.
Araim stared. Then Araim snorted. Then Araim laughed and laughed and laughed, almost choking on his tongue as his head shook and his knees knocked and his hammer flew from his wide-spread fingers, arms waving as he danced and stomped and roared with glee atop the bridge atop his ship atop the mountain so high, high above the flood. He’d waited and worked and waited and here it was, here it finally was!
Now he just had to move fast enough.
Packing up the house was done in seconds. It was finally happening. The hold was already full. The ladders – those long, rickety ladders that were the bane of his back – were scampered up and down in seconds by a body filled with a glee that cut its years in half and more. It was finally happening.
It was finally happening!
Everything was done. He’d gotten it all packed. He’d even almost finished the bridge – just a few planks left out of place in the cabin floor. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. He had time now, he did; he could wait and watch and stare as the lights winked out one by one until the water lapped at the keel and he took float.
The turtle had made the new land after a year and three days, he recalled. Perhaps he’d do that too. Or maybe he’d just sail and watch the fishes flow by. Who knew? He had time. He had time.
But still… there was no reason not to do this right. It was just three floorboards. He could bend his knee once more.
Three floorboards, twelve nails. Four nails for each board, two nails for each end, one nail for each corner. Bang. Bang. Bang and bang and bang and bang twice over, and the last nail of the last bucket was gone.
Finished. It was finally happening.
Araim picked up the nail bucket, felt the weight in his hands. It would never be heavier than this again. He’d never need nails again. He’d never get those free nails or hear those stupid questions ever again.
He looked out the window, down at all the lights. There weren’t as many now as there’d been a few minutes ago.
Just Araim, all by himself. Araim the ancient, on the water, with an empty bucket that held the weight of a world in it that would drag him down like an anchor.
He ought to just chuck it overboard.
It was finally happening.

How much the ship weighed, Araim couldn’t have told anyone. It was too big to fit on any scale, and the calculations on its size and mass had been done fifty years ago by a different person.
But all the same, it didn’t matter. All you had to do was push just hard enough in just the right spot.
And as Araim felt the dirt and stone begin to slide by under the keel, as he laid his course and set his sights on the flood, as the wind rose into his face and the world shrank small beneath him, he felt the last seventy-five years fall away into the past.

Araim was seventy-nine years old, and he was being buried.
It was hard going, hard soil up where he’d made his plot. But there were many people to do the job – forty grand-nieces and thirty-six grand-nephews and two dozen nephews and nieces and even the four brothers and sisters who were still around. Many hands didn’t make the work light, but they sure as hell broke dirt fast.
Ress the littlest one was free of her father’s hand for a time – a blacksmith’s muscles were in fair demand right then – and she was using it to explore. The world was so small from here, everything she’d ever seen was so small. The village was a half-drowned ant, drying fitfully in the mid-day sun; the river a shining snake, sulking resentfully on the other side of its bank. Even the giant boat, lodged tight in the Squeezer like the world’s biggest cork, was a blurred beetle of a thing. If she held up her hand just right, her palm covered it, and it was gone.
But not really. The village was still there, wasn’t it?

It was a nice day for Sukie, right from the moment she woke up and saw the sun just blushing over a warm sky, to the very second she gripped her net with both hands and felt the good, heaving weight of a swarm of little fat wrigglers, that wonderful burn against your shoulders that came from heaving in enough food to keep you going for weeks and knowing that there was still more to be had.
They were little domeheads, the stubby-armed bodies resembling mushrooms with angry wills of their own, but out of water the fury and spite drained away and left them as sad little sacks, limp and forlorn. But they still packed a nasty bite on their skin, in their slime, and Sukie felt glad for her woven-grass gloves as she emptied the net into the bin at the belly of the boat.
One net. Two nets. Three nets. Oh, this was fine, this would keep everyone happy as they waited for the lot to dry out and stop stinging. The bin was crammed near-brimful, and greed was so enveloping at this point that it was impossible for it not to be good. The sea was smooth and friendly, the trip to shore was not so long, there was no danger and there was no rush.
Why not one more? Just one more?
So Sukie set her net, let it drift, let it idle, waited for those dozens of little squishy bodies to pack into it, soft and silent as ghosts. Not even a full net, really. Just a bit would do. A little bit. She’d yank it up in a moment. And it was just Sukie’s good fortune that she tensed up to lift when she did, because an instant later something slammed into her little net with what felt like a punch in the gut.
“Woof!” said Sukie – all instinct and vowels – and she almost let go. But this was a good net, a net made of the old plastic, a net that time and tide and however many years had left unbroken. Its form had been painstakingly crafted by Sukie’s grandpa from hundreds of little loops he’d found buried near the bottom of a Dump by chance, all arranged in little packs of two-by-three, which he’d stitched together with homemade twine, hope, and the best knots he could possibly imagine. It had been lovingly maintained by all three generations ever since; each winter, the knots retied, the weak links removed, the net shrunk by necessity.
It had been bigger, once, but it was still loved. And Sukie would rather lose her limb than her grandpa’s net.
“Wup!” she shouted – accent on UP, for up! – and hauled as hard as she could, a little thing in the back of her mind wondering what on earth had she caught on, what on earth had she done? The water here was deep, so deep you’d drown trying to find bottom; surely she couldn’t have caught on anything?
And as Sukie’s net breached the surface, she saw that she’d caught on nothing. Rather, she’d caught a monster. She didn’t even have time to scream before it and the net landed on her chest (a shockingly light monster, its snaring had been all out of proportion to its weight) and she was eye to eye with it.
Eyes. Good lord and leavings, those eyes! Those terrible, wide eyes!
“GERROFF!” she shrieked, and shoved, and down went the monster and the net, straight safe into the bin with her catch, which she slammed the rust-lid on so hard that she half thought the boat’s bottom might fall out. Then she heard the thump and thud, and sat on it for good measure.
What in all Earth’s big blue seas had she just seen, what was slapping and kicking and knocking on her cargo lid right at this second? Something she’d never imagined, that’s for sure. No bluey. No roundtop. No domehead. It was small and thick and it had more energy than a toddle, although the shrinking echoes from under her rear seemed to show that being trapped in a bin full of domehead stings was taking its toll.
What was she supposed to do with this? What if it was dangerous? Well, not THAT dangerous – it hadn’t even left tentacles on her shirt, and her gloves were clean of slime from where they’d brushed its body.
She sniffed them. Strange smell though. Nothing quite like it. Maybe Emma would know. She knew things, when she was awake. Maybe she could share them if she promised her an extra bag or two of food. Yeah. That was a good plan. Show the weird thing to Emma, ask her about it. That way what we do with it is her problem, unless she wants to admit she doesn’t know anything, and how likely is THAT?
Sukie cocked her head and listened. Dead silent.
Yeah, domehead stings, that was it. No sound now.

The monster was quiet now, resting in an antique bucket that still possessed fully half of its formerly impressive height, breathing seawater. It hardly moved at all; if it weren’t for the pulsing of its odd gill-like sides she’d have thought it dead. You certainly couldn’t tell from its eyes, those horrible human-like eyes. They wouldn’t blink, stare as she might. Did it even have eyelids?
Best not to think on it.
It was still a nice day, monster in a bucket or no. The sky was clear, empty for once of the long, dreary storms of summer, the waves were calm and tame underneath it and blue as a baby’s eyes. Sukie paused in her paddling every now and then to give her back a rest and to look at the water. Sunlight smiled back at her from below, reflected in glittering sparkles off thousands of tiny plastic shards as a marine blizzard slid by underneath her keel. They seemed to chase her home; the current was her friend, bearing her and all those miniature specks miles in minutes.
She wondered why people had filled the water with them, once upon a time. They must’ve been awfully important, for them to make so many.
“Suuuuukieeeeeee!” a call came from the shore. Tiny figures were dancing on the dock, squawking and waving their arms in the air. A rock was thrown. “Row faster, slowboat! Row row row!”
Sukie paused in her rowing to make a rude gesture and had it copied back at her tenfold. She smiled; it was always nice to teach the younger generation something. “G’wan, help or scrammit!” she called merrily to her audience of cousins. “Helpers get domeheads, scrammers get smacks! Pick it now and get a head start!”
Nobody wanted to be the first to run, everybody wanted to be the first to dip their bag. The mob of hecklers became the crew of dockworkers; the concrete slabs of the dock were aflow with helpers grasping for ropes, fighting over knots, pushing and shoving to prevent the old rust of the boat from grinding itself into red dust against its moorings.
Finally, against all odds and rules of nature, Sukie was ashore with her cargo, which was busily being hauled uphill to the shelters in family-sized bags. The children were careless – barely half a glove between them as they manhandled patchwork sacks of domeheads twice their size – but they were sure they were invincible, and were about due for another rude disabusal of that soon. How soon they’d forgotten what happened to Timm. Well, his arm hadn’t come off after all. Perhaps that was all they needed.
Sukie was travelling light by contrast and by choice; just a single sack of domeheads was hers, clasped one-handed on her shoulder. But at her side came the bucket with its monstrous cargo, and between the two of them she was half-put to a foul mood by the time her footsteps took her all the way up to the edge of the shelter, way up high, under the farthest nook of stone where old, old Emma kept out of the way with her daughter’s daughter.
“’Hoy Sukie-sue,” said the descendant in question, and Sukie swallowed her annoyance. Mary deserved none of it, and she wouldn’t get answers by being grumpish.
“’Hoy Mary-lou. Gramma here?” Mary-lou was Emma’s only family, but she was everyone’s Gramma.
Mary cocked her head. “She’s here, mostly. Had a good nap. What is it?”
“Found a monster. It’s in the pail. G’won, let’s have her take a peek.”
Mary peeked, then shrieked.
“See?”
“The EYES!”
“I know. I’m half put off the sea now, thinking of things like that out there, leering up at me whenever I dip my toes. C’mon, get Gramma. We’ve gotta assuage these fears or you’ll have nobody doing the fishing.”
“Gramma’s got,” said a voice at Sukie’s side, and now it was her turn to jump. “So, what is it?” Emma’s eyes were bad but her footsteps were nigh-inaudible; Sukie’s own theory was that she was too light to make a noise. She’d gone past skin and bone to mostly bone, and the hair had left years ago.
“In the pail. C’mon, look at it in the light.”
Noon was here. The sun puddled at the top of the sky and dozed as the old, old woman looked into the pail at something that looked back. The noon blaze had improved its looks – still that flat blank face where a face had no business being, but now the light glared off its sides, as shining and bright as the plastic snow that had guided Sukie’s trek home.
How was it doing that? How could something alive sparkle like that?
Emma pursed her lips around what was left of her gums and made a funny noise, a cuh-cuh-huh-huh-huh sound like a baby blubbering.
“She okay?” Sukie asked Mary. Mary shrugged.
Cuh-huh-huh-huh-heh. “I’m laughing, that’s all,” said Emma, pausing for breath and starting over. Cuh-huh-huh. “Oh, I’m laughing! I never thought I’d see one! Oh, that’s a sight!”
“Name names, or I’ll say you’re making it up,” threatened Sukie.
Cuh-huh-huh, huh. Huh. And it was all under control, bar the leak of musty old dust-tears from ancient eyes. “Oh. Oh me. Sorry, but it’s been so long. I haven’t seen one of these since my own great-great-grandmother told me. She had a picture, you know, one of those real old ones – it fell overboard with her when she drowned, which was real appropriate and all because of-“
“I don’t hear names.”
Emma punched Sukie, but in a friendly way, and only in the stomach. “It’s a fish,” she said. “A real fish. A real live fish. Oh my. What kind I don’t know, but it’s a fish.”
Sukie felt her forehead wrinkle, and consciously chose to stop that before it got out of hand. “Fish? Fishing?”
“Yes, like fishing. It’s what people netted a long time ago, a long, long time ago. Instead of roundheads and roundtops, folks pulled up big bags of these little charmers. There were hundreds of thousands of them, you know. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Enough to feed more people that you can imagine.” She stared at the fish again and chuckled. “Look at that stare – isn’t that a treat?”
“I hate it. It’s like it’s watching me.”
“Oh come off, rats have faces too.”
“Yeah, but they’re land-food. Land-food has faces. Sea-food doesn’t. This is…weird.”
“Isn’t it JUST? Imagine all those folk long ago, eating these right up. Yum-yum-yum!”
“Gramma, don’t make me smack you, because I will do it.”
“Bullshit,” said Emma sweetly. “Utter bullshit. Besides, if you do that I won’t tell you how to cook this.”
“How to what?”
“What, were you going to dry it out just like the rest of your haul, my baby-sweet? Oh no, they have faces like land-food, you eat ‘em like land-food. We’re going to cook tonight.”
Sukie looked at the fish again. It wasn’t what she’d have called fat, but there was weight on those…bones. Sea-food that had bones. Good lord, if there was real meat in there instead of jelly, what a meal this thing was. It’d top the biggest rat she’d ever heard tale of that wasn’t one of Tomm’s stories. “Reckon I could find more?”
“Convinced already?”
“Argument’s sake, ‘s’all.”
Emma sighed. “Sukie, Sukie, Sukie-sue. How long have you fished here?”
“Since eight.”
“And how long did your mommy fish before that?”
“From seven to thirty.” Sukie could tell what was coming next.
“And in all those years, Sukie-sue, did you ever hear anyone tell of a fish until I just now did so?” asked Emma. “It’s finished. It’s all alone now, and there’s no going back.”
Sukie sighed. “How do you cut it?”
The old woman waved a hand. “Oh, it’s like a rat, or a person, or anything else that’s land-food. There’s bones in there and they’re all the same, from skull to tail. Just pull off the head and cut it in half along the back, you’ll work it out.”
“Right.”
Sukie looked in the bucket. The fish looked back. The sun had scooted behind the clouds of the late day, and in the dimness its sides were less brilliant, dull enough for her to see the batterings, the missing scales, the welts and the sores. There were cataracts across its pupils, milkiness clouding the keen black smoothness.
Maybe the eyes weren’t as human as she’d thought at first. Just panic, that’s all. A shock to see eyes on sea-food.
No, not human at all.
“Hey Emma,” she said, and she couldn’t quite tell why. “Sure there aren’t any more?”

“I said, sure there aren’t any more?”
The old woman wasn’t looking at her. Sukie put her hand on her shoulder, checking for that gentle buzz of breath that signalled a mid-conversation nap, but felt nothing but the regular wheeze of life.
“Oh Sukie-sue,” she said, and her voice was so tired now that Sukie could feel the dust on its edges as it rattled up her windpipe. “Oh my baby-sweet. Do you think I can’t recognize my own kind?”

It was Tony’s fault. As usual.
Yes, it may have been Vanessa’s idea to play hide and seek. Yes, it may have been Vanessa who said when asked that the attic was NOT off limits. Yes, it may have been Vanessa who took her sweet time searching the downstairs bedrooms, leaving Tony’s zero-minutes-forty-seconds attention span and him alone together for far too long.
But the wandering eye that found the old clock was Tony’s, as was the hand that reached out to poke at it. He’d never seen a clock its like before – on one hand, it was an old, old old grandfather clock, the kind whose grandchildren had all had grandchildren and then died on it; on the other hand, although it was so dusty it was hard to tell, it didn’t seem to have numbers on it.
Tony wiped aimlessly at the faceplate of the clock one-handed and stared as the world made less sense by the minute. There was a mammoth at eleven, and a person at noon, and a spider at one, and was that a DINOSAUR at nine o’clock? It was hard to see.
Two things happened, both important. First, Vanessa yelled “FOUND YOU!” at the top of her powerful lungs, making Tony jump.
(That still made it Tony’s fault, okay? Not Vanessa’s fault that he’s so high-strung)
Second, Tony’s hands hopped in place. And as they hopped they jostled the hands of the clock, which felt as though they were made of sandstone, or maybe preserved bone, and sent them lurching on their way prematurely, sinking down from half-past noon to one with a resigned, creaky sigh.
It struck one.
That may be underdescribed. Let’s try that again.
It struck one, and a sound like a thousand moaning winds brewed up inside the cabinet and spewed out with the muttering ire of a hundred over-full nursing homes, circling and sputtering about the attic with dogged determination. As the sound went on – and on, and on, and ON, it didn’t seem to want to end, not even slightly – the air was filled with the sound of awful little legs, tiny dancing bodies, and eensy weensy mashing jaws. Spiders were filling up the room, spiders were standing at attention at Tony and Vanessa’s feet, spiders were mounding themselves up into a great seething pillar of arachnid bodies, its tip narrowing and narrowing until it unfolded into a singular, brightly-coloured spider about an eighth of an inch long.
“Right!” she snapped. “That was quicker than we’d thought it’d be. Well? Clear off!”
“What?” asked Tony. (Which was a very stupid question)
“Tony, what did you break?” asked Vanessa. (Which was a very smart question, and got straight to the point).
“The clock rang, didn’t it?” said the spider, in a horrible little hissing voice that sounded like hairs rubbing together because that’s what it was. “You hard your turn, didn’t you? Come on, you know the rules. We all agreed this was much tidier than just struggling and whinging every time something big went down, so don’t go welching on your word and make this as difficult as it never had to be. Mammals! Look at you, get to run rampant for a few tens of millions of years and it goes straight to your enormous fucking heads!”
“Don’t swear,” said Vanessa, who was used to policing the language of tiny rambling people.
“I’ll swear when I fucking want to, placenta-haver,” spat the spider. “Quit wasting space with your lungbellowry, my children and their children and their children and their children have been waiting long enough already. Now hold still, you’re first on our skeletonization list.”
“Wait!” blurted out Tony. “Wait wait wait!”
“What what what?” asked the spider in a rudely sing-song tone of voice that was quite disrespectful.
“We’ve got to uh….” said Tony, who’d had no plan because he was stupid.
“…Finish the ceremony,” said Vanessa, who had one because she was clever and smart.
“The what.” said the spider. Said, not asked. There was the feeling the sentence had been just… dropped there.
“Ceremony,” said Tony unhelpfully. “We’ve got to uh, have one. Rules.”
“Transfer of power,” said Vanessa.
The spider’s mandibles did something complicated that reminded both of them of their grandmother struggling not to spit out her dentures when she was cross. “Fine,” she said. “Have your stupid ceremony. What does it entail?”
“Tea,” said Vanessa.
“Tea?”
“Boiled water and leaves.”
The spider looked as nauseated as a sixteenth-of-an-inch face with no expressions can be. “Fine. Tea. Yes, do that. I will wait here, try not to throw up, and pray that I am not expected to share.”
“Sorry,” said Vanessa sweetly.
“There are rules, but there are limits,” said the spider. “Eat them.”
“There’s cookies!” shouted Tony.
“Cookies?”
“Like flies,” he said. “But better.”
The spider scratched the tip of her left mandible thoughtfully. “Acceptable. Cookies first, eating you later. But hurry up, later’s closer nowadays.”
“Fix it,” muttered Vanessa to her brother, as she passed him on her way to the staircase. And that was a very sensible thing to say, because only the biggest idiot in the universe would expect what she’d said to mean what Tony did over the next few minutes.

They stood there, the boy and the spider, sizing one another up. Briefly. There wasn’t much spider to size, and Tony wasn’t much to look at from her point of view either. Too few legs to be worth counting.
“’Tea.’ How long does ‘tea’ take?”
“Ages,” said Tony promptly.
The spider sighed. “Ceremonies. Ceremonies, ceremonies, cere-fucking-monies. What is it with you mammals and your attaching loads of pointless bullshit to everything? You chew your food and stick it in a special pouch to digest it, you nanny your babies for ever and ever after you’ve had them, you don’t even eat your mates. Why don’t you eat your mates? Honestly, think about it: how much simpler would your life be if your mother had eaten your father at conception and left you to mature under an eave somewhere, eh?”
Tony shrugged.
“Typical mammal. At least you’ve got good taste in housing – look at all these nooks! We’ll have no shortage of places to stay.”
“The window’s real nice,” said Tony, pointing at the far end of the attic. “It’s got loads of cracks to let bugs in.”
“Where?”
And as the spider was looking, Tony did the dumbest thing. He reached up behind him and tried to fix the clock. But because he was a stupid fat baby, he did the dumbest thing: he tried to fix it without looking. Just grabbed the handle and tugged blind, like a big galoot. And then came the whirring, the whirring and the wailing and the terrible grinding, like a giant eating beef jerky.
“What was THAT?” demanded the spider.
“Nothing,” said Tony hastily.
“I know what nothing sounds like,” said the spider. “I hear it every day in my web. Lots of nothing. That wasn’t nothing. Are you lying to me, tasty boy?”
“I’m not!” protested Tony. “Neither! I’m neither! And it wasn’t me!”
“I didn’t say it was you,” said the spider. “What’re you trying to hide? Are you trying to hide something?”
WE ARE NOT SOMETHING AND WE ARE NOT HIDING.
Both Tony and the spider looked up. Hovering a discreet few millimetres above Tony’s dumb mushroom haircut that made him look like a mushroom was a squid. It was large enough to cause considerable alarm – about five foot from mantle to tentacle-tip – but what added to the impression it made was that it was glowing softly on a spectrum that didn’t quite have anything to do with visible light.
“Awwkp,” said Tony.
“Who’re YOU?” asked the spider.
WE ARE THE CEPHALITES> DESCENDANTS OF THE GENE-WARS> SPAWN OF HUMAN VANITY> DESCENDED FROM ROOKERIES. THE CLOCK HAS TOLLED> IS IT NOT OUR HOUR?
“NO!” shouted the spider. “It’s OUR turn! Our clock just rang!”
ALARMING. WE HAD ASSUMED THIS SITUATION WAS SETTLED.
Vanessa ran up the stairs, kettle in hand along with a fistful of mugs, a tablecloth in the other. She opened her mouth to say something insightful, saw the CEPHALITE, and settled for dropping a mug.
WE SHALL REASSEMBLE YOUR CONTAINER.
“No it’s fine it’s better this way thank you very much,” said Vanessa. “I thought it was spiders? Why are there squids, Tony is this your fault that there are squids?”
“No!” said Tony. “It’s because… because… because the ceremony’s not done yet!”
The spider looked agog at this, and agogness only becomes more impressive with mandibles. “What, you monkeys tied the clock to your stupid little show-plays?”
Vanessa considered the options carefully.
“Yes!” said Tony.
Vanessa sighed.
“Right! Then get a move on and get things working, before who knows what happens. Tea, right? Hop to it!”

Vanessa poured the tea. One mug for her, one for the spider, one for the CEPHALITE, and none for Tony, who was left to his own devices in front of the clock. An ancient, groaning night-stand had been converted into an over-stuffed table. The tablecloth didn’t cover it so much as enfold it, like a starfish sucking the guts out of a mussel. It had effectively become carpeting for half the attic.
“Right!” she said brightly. “Let’s get started. Take a sip.”
There was a pause.
“You know,” said the spider pointedly, “some of us don’t have lips.”
“Oh.”
“And by some of us, I mean both of us.”
“Ah.”
“In short, you can take your sipping and shove it right up your ass, primate.”
“Just a little drink?”
Vanessa noted that Tony had fumbled his way around to the clock hand again under pretense of scratching his back, but one of the CEPHALITE’S eyes was pointed in his general direction.
“No!” said the spider. “No no no!”
Vanessa shrugged. “Fine. I’ll take the mug then.” And she lashed out with her hand right-quick just as she bumped the table with her knee.

If it wasn’t quite like clockwork, it was at least like dominos. In order of events:
-the spider leapt backwards and raised her legs in threat posture
-the tea hop-skip-jumped from side to side and slid ominously towards her
-the spider bit her mug
-the mug spun gently on its access, sashayed thrice, and shattered into ten thousand nine hundred ninety eight fragments

“OAF!” shrieked the spider.
“You shouldn’t have done that!” said Vanessa. “You knocked it over!”
“You scared me!”
“You scared ME!”
WE ARE INCAPABLE OF SCARED.
“To hell with your-“ and then the spider was cut off by the screech and howl of the clock’s bell, as Tony had hastily yanked on its hands until something moved again.
There was silence then. But nobody present expected it to last for long, they were just resigned to the worst. Which it soon arrived as, in the form of small, furtive scuttling noises.
Something nudged Vanessa’s ankle.
“Beg ‘pardon,” said a small, horribly polite little voice that was far too reedy to belong to any human, “but is it our turn again? We don’t want to make any fuss, but we’ve simply been waiting for ERAS, you unnerstand.”
The spider crossed its legs over its eyes. “You,” it breathed. “You, you, you. Just YOU. You had your turn! You had nearly THREE HUNDRED MILLION YEARS of your turn! Go AWAY, grandfather!”
There was a dreadful noise like someone slapping a bag of broken potato chips with a wet towel and something like a cross between a lobster and a cockroach poked its head up onto the table.
“That’s a very rude thing to say,” said the trilobite severely. “No call for that nohow. We heard the bell, we knew our call, honest to chitin we’ve fair grounds for our supposing. Oh now, what’s all this?”
“Tea,” said Vanessa. “It’s a ceremony, and since SOMEONE jumped at their mug, it got messed up. You’re here early.”
The trilobite’s antennae twitched. “Huh. Well, suppose I might as well stick around then. What is that?”
“A mug.”
“Can I have one?”
Vanessa slid her mug over. The trilobite clasped the thing in its legs. “Huh. Warm as right. Now what?”
“Now,” said the spider, “you all go away and let us have our turn, since it’s our turn fair-and-fucking proper, THANK you very much but not really.”
“Not yet,” said Vanessa. “Cookies first.”
“Cookies? We’ve had your damned tea, we’re done. This whole ceremony’s a rolling disaster.”
“It’ll only get worse if you try and stop it.”
“Hang that hang the cookies hang you upside down and suck out your juices,” sang the spider in a happy sing-song. “We are DONE, and-“
The familiar whistle-scream began again. This time everyone screamed with it, except the trilobite, who was busy trying to figure out handles. Even it looked up as the wind faded though – there was a thud.
Preceding the thud, there was thirty-five feet of placoderm filling an awful lot of the attic.
“Hello,” it said, in a voice that had pounded its way to its throat after a ten-thousand-mile swim. “Us again?”
THERE IS CONFUSION, stated the CEPHALITE. AND TEA. AND COOKIES. TAKE SOME.
The armoured fish considered the table. The bony plates it had in place of teeth klinked softly as it thought, jaws that could sever sharks in two absently muttering.
“Nah. Not thirsty.”
“Tea isn’t really about THIRST,” said Vanessa properly. “It’s about style.”
The tiny, rhythmic plinking sound of the last fifteen seconds turned out to be the spider’s head smacking into the tablecloth. “Fine,” she said, between thuds. “Cookies.” Thud. “Get.” Thud. “Them.” Thud. Thud. Thud. “Now.”
Thud.
Vanessa flew down the stairs. The placoderm watched her movements with curiosity. “Huh. They walk?”
MOST OF THEM DID, said the CEPHALITE.
“New.”
“Oh come off it,” said the trilobite. “We were around before you lot and we’ve been walking since era one here. AND our cousins on land, the whole aunts-and-uncles of ‘em.”
The placoderm shrugged shoulderlessly, a current of muscle flowing down its body. “No bones. Different.”
“Typical vertebrate,” muttered the trilobite.
AGREED.
“Agreed doubly,” snapped the spider. “What’s keeping those cookies?”
Vanessa trudged her way up the stairs again, oreos in hand. “We should’ve had homemade,” she said, “but SOMEONE ate them all.”
All eyes turned to look at Tony for the first time in ten minutes, still leaning against the clock with one hand behind his back. He swallowed hard and tried to look nonchalant, and it wasn’t Vanessa’s fault at all that he was so bad at it. Really, if he’d been doing his job properly it’d all have been fixed by then, so he deserved to be called out.
“Sensible.”
“Haven’t we all felt that way?”
EATING IS THE PRICE OF FLESH.
“Indeed,” said the spider. “So, how’s the rest of this ceremony go?”
“Oh, you just eat a cookie each,” said Vanessa casually. “And then it’s all over and it’s your turn.”
“You eat it with your eyes closed!” added Tony. “You have to do that! If you don’t do that, it ruins everything all at once!”
“Can’t. Will look nowhere.”
“I suppose I can stick my head in the crevice of these floor-boards.”
INK WILL ISSUE FORTH FROM WITHIN MY BLADDERS> OBSCURING ALL SIGHT.
“Of course,” said the spider. “Of course of course. I’ll just cover my eyes with my legs. You two should have no trouble with that.”
“Oh, Tony doesn’t need to do any of this,” said Vanessa. “He’s not part of it.”
“But he is,” said the spider. “He has to eat my cookie for me. My jaws are too small – and this cookie has to get eaten, doesn’t it?”
“Well uh you see um there’s eh a bit of a problem if we kind of sort of look it’s just that” said Vanessa, or something really articulate and clever.
“No, no, it’s perfectly all right,” said the spider, as sweet as cyanide. “Come over here and take this cookie for me, will you Tony? There’s a good bipedal ape.”
Tony, who was obviously too stupid to realize that the jig was up, shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Whatever.”
He slouched forwards, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets (in plain sight, the spider’s gaze gloated upon), feet shuffling.
Shuffling quite heavily, maybe, but none of the participants at the meeting were land-dwelling bipeds save for himself and Vanessa. And SHE saw what he was doing straightaways, although she could’ve told him right then and there that it was completely a bad idea.
But Tony shuffled, and Tony stomped, and Tony twisted his heels, and miraculously enough he made it almost all the way to the table when the tablecloth underfoot decided that enough was enough and shucked itself clear of its burden in one smooth motion, surging gently forwards towards him along with the tea mugs, the tea kettle, and a half-box of semi-stale oreos.
Tony was already ducking. Which might have looked suspicious, if everyone hadn’t been slightly distracted.

The tea mugs landed, one after another, directly on the trilobite, making a noise like a steel drum band.
The box of cookies scooped up the spider like a cowcatcher and sailed (screaming brightly) into the far corners of the room.
And the tea kettle missed the CEPHALITE by a whisker (it went on to thank precognition), bounced off the placoderm’s bony mask, and smacked square into the face of the clock with a sound like the end of the world in a trash bin.
“I’LL FIX IT!” yelled Tony. And because the others were too surprised – or too squished – to tell him to stop right there, nobody did anything as he leapt at the clock, grabbed the hands, and twisted them both the only way they could go.

When the screaming died down, the spider had new bruises, the attic had a new window, and the clock needed new innards. Unfortunately the last set had been ground down to something finer than silt, so determining replacements could be problematic.
THIS COULD BE PROBLEMATIC, said the CEPHALITE.
“No fooling,” said the trilobite with a grimace. “D’you remember who made this thing anyways? Maybe we could let them have a go at it.”
IT WON’T BE BORN FOR TEN UNTO TWENTY THOUSAND MILLENNIA.
“Shit,” said the placoderm.
“Does this mean it isn’t our turn again yet?” inquired the newest visitor to the attic from the freshly created window, speaking as crisply as one can past teeth the size of bananas. “I take it this means it isn’t our turn again yet.”
“It was going to be OUR turn!” wailed the spider. “Ours! Not yours, OURS!”
The dinosaur yawned and shook its head, nearly adding a skylight. “Oh, spare me. The thing’s obviously as wrecked as a mammal’s self-esteem. It was never your turn.”
“It was their fault!” said the spider. “Theirs! They wrecked everything! I didn’t see it, but they did it, I know it! Theirs!”
Eyes rolled in the few individuals present that were capable of such.
“Spare me,” said the placoderm.
“Too right,” said the trilobite. “Granddaughter, you’re making a nuisance of yourself. This was a bungle from the right go, and throwing blame won’t make it any better.”
“Right, yeah, absolutely, sure, totes,” said Vanessa brightly. “So I guess that was a false alarm, everyone’d better go home now, such a shame, nice to meet you all, ta-ta?”
There was an awkward moment where no-one spoke. Immediately, everyone tried to fix it at once.
“Well.”
“Not as strictly such, no…”
THAT WOULD NOT BE OPTIMAL.
“Go? GO?”
“We just got here…”
There was a pause again, during which Tony and Vanessa’s hearts hopped out of their mouths and fell into their stomachs.
“Fact of the matter is,” said the dinosaur, “the old system is broken. And we’re all here. Taking turns obviously hasn’t worked, so…”

Anyways, that’s the whole story. And that’s why there’s dinosaurs, trilobites, mammoths, spiders, giant jawed fish, and five-foot psionic squid roaming the street tonight, and why it’s NOT Vanessa’s fault.
Surely mom will believe this.

“It’s a nice day,” Alicia had said. “It’s sunny outside. There’s no school. So don’t you damned well dare turn that computer on, you hear me? Do something you can only do at your age; use your imagination.”
So Jeffrey did. And as usual, it got him straight into trouble.
First he looked outside. The birds were shining and the sun was singing. Boring.
Then he looked inside. The television had been sold last month and the computer was a forbidden zone. Besides, Saul was on it right now, doing Excel sheets. Boring.
Then he wandered around the house staring at things. Boring, boring, boring, boring.
Finally he went up to his room, took out all his clothing, and started rearranging it by colour. This was exactly how boring Jeffrey’s day was, and this was why he thought what he thought when he picked up his last set of trousers to put them away, and what he thought was this.
Hey, I wonder what it’s like to be pants?

And Jeffrey put away his pants, and he went downstairs and had some cereal, and he even washed the bowl out of sheer, unimaginable, mind-bending boredom, but as he went through all the motions the question nagged and nibbled at him. What was it like to be pants, anyways? Who could say, for who had tried? Who would try?
And why not Jeffrey?

There were things he needed to do, he knew this well. Anything worth doing had to be taken in steps, the proper steps, or else it would all fall to pieces. Willy-nilly did nobody good.
First, he had to think like pants. Jeffrey thought long and hard, long and hard, until he realized that that wasn’t working at all. Then he thought long and floppy, long and flat, he creased his brow and plaited his fingers, he filled his mind with corduroy and denim.
Second, he had to act like pants. Jeffrey let his legs hang loose and tucked his arms away into nowhere. He shrugged up his shoulders until his neck was as broad as his waist and he opened his mouth so long he could’ve swallowed a fireplace log. He shimmied until he was looser than a half-empty bag of helium.
Third, he had to be pants. Which, quite suddenly, he was. And this pleased him mightily, for in all of today so far he’d been sure he’d never get to do anything interesting.

As pants, the whole world was at Jeffrey’s disposal, if he should so choose it. He billowed and bustled himself and in the end discovered that his best bet for locomotion was a sort of sailing flap flap flap, which let him move about the house in a fashion not unlike a squid. This so pleased Jeffrey that he almost failed to notice the first great challenge of his panthood, which was that Bop heard him flailing about the kitchen floor, came to investigate, and, filled with protectiveness at the sight of the wild pants dancing about his family’s kitchen, set upon him with ferocious yapping.
This was unpleasant to Jeffrey, who’d been having a good time. He had no ears, but the sound was still offensive, and so he moved to shoosh Bop with a warning pat on the muzzle, as was common. But he’d forgotten his pantish condition and failed to analyze its likely effect on the dog, and as he drew nearer the poor animal broke into the most terrorized yelps and launched itself into an embarrassingly lousy display of canine self-defence.
It was a tragic battle fought that day beneath the kitchen lamps, one with no true cause for celebration taken by either party. For Bop, it was an endless, fruitless struggle to find a part of his foe that wasn’t denim. For Jeffrey, it was a steadily-growing realization of how pleasant it truly was to have hands by virtue of not having any whatsoever, or even any arms.
In the end, the silence of the scuffle was broken by Bop’s disheartened whimper as the confusion overwhelmed him, and he fled to his bed in the corner, tail tucked away and spirit in tatters until someone gave him a treat and told him what a good handsome boy he was. Jeffrey was not entirely pleased by this outcome, but he found it acceptable enough. Particularly as yesterday Bop had peed on his carpet. That would teach him. Nobody messed with pants.

That trial surmounted, Jeffrey began to wander about the house some more, taking stock of his home as pants. A surprising amount of it was now quite difficult to get at, it seemed. Latches were awkward, doorknobs were impossible, and even sliding under doors – which he would’ve assumed prior to his pantsing would be the optimal modus operandi of pant locomotion – was an unlikely task, due to the relative sturdiness and thickness of his pantish self. The one door ill-fitting enough to permit him access this way was the basement, and it was with great relief and anticipation that Jeffrey slipped into that place. He’d always been a little nervous to go down there alone, but as pants he felt indestructible, filled with optimism and the fire of youth in a frame much sturdier and more deftly-sewn than before.
Here Jeffery ran wild and free, cavorting amidst the cobwebs. He toyed with power tools, sashayed through scads of half-crumbled wood and metal, and wove recklessly in and out of rows of carelessly arranged bottles with interesting hazard symbols on their fronts, one of which he immediately spilled all over his pants-front.
This was the second great challenge of Jeffrey’s panthood, and a fierce one it was. This particular bottle’s little picture showed a skeleton hand on it, and at first Jeffrey was hopeful for his future as he possessed neither a skeleton nor hands. But then a strange sensation broke out across him – like an itch crossed with a witch – and he realized to his dawning horror that he was staining, staining away as if he’d been struck with ketchup.
If Bop had been a test of bodily fortitude, this was a trial of spiritual rigor. Jeffrey fought the stain on a conceptual level, controlling his breathing – well, creasing – with the utmost care and a will of iron. Go away, he told the stain, to himself. There is no place for you here, not in my body. I am me and you are you and we shall remain separate. Abandon this place, abandon these pants. Be no more here, be more elsewhere, and we shall both be happy. Go away. Go away. Go away go away go away GO AWAY.
And just then, just as Jeffrey was about to give up, the stain didn’t go away. But by then he’d tuckered himself clean out with the intensity of his thoughts, so he decided it was all right anyways. He had won the battle – not with the stain, but with his own inability to accept himself. And that was truly the lesson that needed to be learned that day.

By now Jeffrey was growing lonely, as the basement was most unsociable but for cockroaches, and he wound his way upstairs in search of companionship. But he wanted his societal introduction as pants to be spectacular, and be spectacular on his own terms. A grand surprise would do, it would, and so he prepared himself accordingly. He folded himself up at the foot his parent’s bed. He’d been quiet for some time now, and he knew that soon either Alicia or Saul would grow wary and begin a hunt for him. They would check their room last, of course, and when they’d just turned to go outside and re-check everywhere else he would spring up and surprise them. Then they would jump, and that would show them.
So Jeffrey waited. And waited.
And waited. Saul was still working on an Excel sheet, if you’ll recall, and Alicia was phoning clients. These were not things that could be rushed through without consequence, and they took themselves seriously, solemnly, and above all, very slowly. And as the sun was so awfully nice and warm through the window, and as Jeffrey was so tired from all his previous exertions, he fell quite peacefully asleep in the warm glow of noon.
He was roused from his slumber by a large hand on his neck, a most curious sensation. Saul had finished his work, the household finances lay demolished for another day, and he had finally roused himself enough to get dressed and go out for groceries. For such business as this pajamas simply would not do, and what did he have here at the end of his bed but a pair of pants such as would suit him – or rather, pant him – most well.
This was the final great challenge of Jeffrey’s panthood, a test of nerves. Specifically, reflexes. There were only a scant few seconds ‘twixt wakefulness and the very real threat of being donned and worn for Jeffrey, but he was young yet and possessed a reaction time that would put a fly to shame. Instinct was yet his ally, and at the sheer horror of the oncoming threat that was his father’s posterior he immediately let loose a most un-pantish yelp of great size and vigor, making Saul jump half a foot and put half his foot through the laundry basket, with no less noise than Jeffrey had made.

There was a bit of kerfuffle and a lot more confusion and consternation as Alicia came rushing into the bedroom to comfort her shouting husband and confront his agitated pants, but then Jeffrey began to make the most un-pantlike gestures, and soon they were all able to explain the whole thing out.
You know.
By pantomime.
When it was all said and done, Alicia started laughing and couldn’t stop; but Saul just sat down on the bed and cried. “I don’t want to have a son who’s pants!” he sobbed. “I was just getting used to having a son with two arms and two legs and a torso in there somewhere, and now I’ll have to get used to it all over again!”
Jeffrey was distressed to see his father so upset, and quickly attempted to unpants himself, in order to placate him. But try as he might, wriggle as he pleased, crease and plait as he would, he found to his rapidly-increasing alarm that he seemed to continue to be most panted.
“All right,” said Alicia tearily, wiping away a last few giggles with the back of her hand, “then let’s fix this. I know just the trick for getting rid of a case of pants.”
So she grabbed Jeffrey by his neck – kindly – and dragged him back down to the basement, flap flap flap. And she put him in the washing machine, added soap, flipped a dial and twiddled a button, and then she sat on the lid of the washing machine until the flaps and creaks turned into thumps and shouts, and she reached in and pulled out a very damp and agitated little boy by the scruff of his neck, like a puma with her kitten.
“Now, what have we learned today?” Alicia asked Jeffrey, as she wrapped him in a towel and hauled him off to get changed.
“Never to use my imagination for anything,” said Jeffrey.
Alicia rolled her eyes at this, but decided it was too late in the day for moralizing anyways, even on a Saturday. So she gave him a bowl of cereal for lunch and let him have a turn at the computer, because after all, hadn’t she been just the same at his age?

And that was the last time Jeffrey was pants. It had been an exciting experience at the start, but by the end he’d considered the whole project to be disarmingly pointless.
Besides, he didn’t like any playtime that ended in him getting collared. If he’d been born a decade or two earlier, his mother reminded him, he likely would’ve gotten belted.

Scal was a thousand thousand years old or maybe a lot more than that – older than dirt, at any rate, or at least the dirt that lay around her little house in the big forests. She’d been sorry for things once, but now she was old and with age had come shamelessness. Older. More shamelessness. Close enough.
Anyways, Scal was lying in her house sleeping one day when a tree fell on her – ow! – right across the middle, like that.
“Eh?” she shouted (Scal had always been a great shouter, but she shouted louder and longer these days). “Who’s up there? Who’s up with that? What’s that going on?” She kicked the tree off herself, looked around, saw a woman with a chainsaw, and put three and six together. “Nine!” she shouted.
“Pardon?” asked the woman. “Are you alright?”
“All-right? Of course I’m not all-right – because you’re WRONG, and you’re standing here being WRONG, and you’ve WRONGED a tree onto my house!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the woman, “but I’m a forester, and I had to take that tree down before it landed on someone’s house; it was old and rotten.”
“It landed on MY house!”
“Ma’am, your house is a small dirt hillock. I don’t even know how you fit in there.”
“Well, it might be perhapsing that I took a snooze for a few longs,” said Scal. “But there’s no excuse for what you’ve gone and done, and here you are trying to make it! Nettles nip your nipples and may a rabbit nest in your ear!”
“Look,” said the forester, “there’s no call for that sort of language. Whatever language that is. Before you go criticizing people, why don’t you try and walk a mile in their shoes? Then you’ll see how it is for them.”
“I don’t have any shoes at all,” said Scal proudly, and it was true. Her feet were bare, bony, and leathery as a sea-turtle, now and ever since the day she was born, whenever that was.
“Well then you’ll never know how it is for me, or for anyone else,” said the forester.
“Oh really? Well, we’ll see about that!” snapped Scal. “Give them here!” And with a quick jump and a punch and a wrestle and a little biting (Scal was never fair in a fight, and also pinched and spat) Scal had procured herself a new pair of forester’s boots. It only took her six tries to put them on the right way round on the right feet, but she felt that they looked mightly fine.
“These boots are mightily fine and I do feel that way,” she told no-one in particular. “Now let’s walk them.”
And walk them she did, one foot in front of the other, checking step by step to see how her mile was going, tromping through the woods.
“I’m a forester,” said she, measuring the trees with a jaunty eye. “I’m monitoring and tagging and logging and learning. I know all about the spruce budworm and the Asian longhorn beetle and I even know what an Asia is, isn’t that something? Hey, you, tree! Come here and taste my saw!”
The tree tasted it, found it not to its taste, and protested by keeling over.
“That’s it for you then, you sluggard. But you were hanging over the road and that was a problem that needed to be fixed. What would we do if you fell on a car, eh? What then? I know what a car is too, mark my words.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you?!” shouted a businessman.
“Nothing,” said Scal. “I’m a forester. What’s wrong with YOU, that you’re being so rude to me?”
“You dropped that tree on my car, you crazy old coot! I have a meeting in five minutes with important people who have important money in important places, and now it’s all ruined forever because of you!”
“Well!” said Scal. “I don’t see why you’re so upset about such silly things, I truly don’t see at all. Here, give me your shoes and we’ll sort this all out then.”
The businessman blinked expansively at this, and a great sense of distress and confusion filled his life in a way he was not prepared nor equipped to express adequately. He felt a man adrift in a world that worked quite differently from how he’d come to expect it to, as a castaway upon a darkened sea. If only he had someone to ask, someone to turn to, someone to explain for him this strange new place that his comfortable life had become. Unfortunately for him the only person present was Scal, who smacked him head over heels and took his shoes without asking permission.
“Hmmm,” said Scal, wriggling her toes in them. “These are BUSINESS shoes. For business. There is no business out here, this is all wrong. I’d best go to where the business is.”
So Scal clambered into the car, smacked its wheel until it worked out of embarrassment, and scooted down the roads and the highways into town. Which wasn’t really a walk, so it didn’t count as her mile. She parked in the biggest space in the biggest lot in the biggest building and marched out into the fresh sunshine and saw profit six ways to Sundays.
“Ahh, business!” she sang. “You! What’s your name?”
The woman stared at her.
“Doesn’t matter and I don’t care anyways, you’re part of the team! Turn in tomorrow at eight so we can fire you without severance for non-compliance! Hurry up or we’ll sue you for breach of contract. That makes me thirsty – do you have a drink? Give me a drink, somebody. Hey, give me that drink, you.”
The man holding the drink indicated with two of his fingers that she should get her own drink because this drink was his.
“That’s ungrateful and unmannerly and shows a lack of appreciation for business,” said Scal most severely. “Don’t you know that I am a businessman and I make jobs for you, with my business? If you keep me happy maybe I’ll hire you and fire you tomorrow too, won’t that be nice? But not anymore. Now I’m just going to leave and it’ll serve you right. You don’t deserve to have a minimum wage anymore. I’m going to see if I can cut your welfare checks, see if I can’t. Bum.”
Scal skipped down the street merrily, then stopped to giggle. “Heh. Bum.”
“Agreed, friend,” said a man in a nice suit. “You look like a good fine businesswoman, am I right?”
“BusinessMAN,” corrected Scal. “These are businessmen shoes.”
“Errr…right,” said the man. “Well, I’m a politician and I’d love it if you gave me a lot of money. I agree with you that the man over there’s a bum, and if you give me a lot of money I’ll see that the bums are put to good use under the helm of fine upstanding citizens like yourself.”
“Hmmm,” said Scal. “That sounds like business to me, but it’s been a mile. I’m done with business now, go ask someone else.”
“Oh come on,” said the man. “Look at me, I’m standing up for the little guy here, I’m just doing what’s best for the people, come on come on. How can I do that without help from all the people, especially the good businesspeople with lots of money like you? See it from my point of view, why don’t you?”
“Good point,” said Scal. “Give me your shoes.”
“Will you make a contribution to -?” asked the man, and that was as far as he got before Scal took his shoes. Past that mostly he was unprintable, so he’s not in this story anymore.
“Hmmm,” said Scal. These shoes were different. They weren’t as comfortable as the business shoes. They weren’t as tough as the forester boots. But they were dynamic shoes, shoes that looked like they talked the talk as they walked the walk. These were shoes that promised a brighter future without neglecting the traditional values of the nation’s past and incidentally my opponent has advocated reptiles in the past next thing you’ll know he’ll want you to marry them.
“My,” said Scal. This was turning into one of the most interesting walks she’d had in decades, even if it was a bit long and rambling. But before you could walk you had to fly, as she’d heard. And she was needed elsewhere in the country, to sit in a big room somewhere and argue extensively.
She walked towards the airport, shaking hands and making promises. A television crew came by and she told them just how much she cared for the taxpayer, in the tones of a man offering sympathy to the condemned. She opened an area business and walked in a parade and got noisily drunk in public while a businessman – or maybe another politician – or maybe a businessman – or a politician – or was there a difference? – handed her a bottle of ridiculously expensive wine and told her that this was just a little gift between friends with no obligations but if she didn’t back bill C-dj8QB3RT she was a dead woman walking who’d be turfed by an opponent with stronger patriotic feelings for the Mink Milking industry.
“I am behind this country five hundred percent because it is the best country in the world,” said Scal, who threw up behind a dumpster. “We need to put those bums to work.” Then she took a rest stop for a while, because her feet were really quite sore now. She’d walked up mountains and under the oceans without a blister, but these shoes were very pinchy and they were making her head swim. Or maybe that was the smog.
“I’m just going to put this all behind me,” she told the press. “Now is not the time for blame games and partisan politics, now is the time for action and I am willing to take that action and that action is to go for a walk in the woods. Goodbye.”
“But what about your responsibilities to the taxpayers?” asked a reporter.
“Well, I’m always something little guy voters,” said Scal, but her heart wasn’t in it. She must’ve walked at least a mile and a half in these shoes already, and the novelty had worn off as much as the soles of her feet had. “But the fact of the matter is that I’m bored stiff and you lot aren’t helping. Gales gut me you’re a tedious natter of toads.”
“Look, it’s my job,” said the reporter. “Why are you blaming me for doing my job? Do yours and we’ll talk.”
“I can do both, just you watch,” said Scal. And then she beat up the reporter and took his shoes on live television. And then, because they were HER shoes now, she reported on it.
“Corrupt councilsenatorMP(P) assaults reporter, drinks in public, makes molehills from mountain,” she noted. “Defrauds electorate I guess or whatever, corruption, sure.”
She wandered in her new shoes, stretched out her muscles a bit, shook her hands loose.
“Businessman eats baby: we bring you both sides of the problem,” she sketched as she watched old people argue on a new camera in a building born of an architect’s mid-life crisis. “Here are my thoughts as expressed in this column’s headline: UNACCEPTABLE Print isn’t dead because it isn’t because. Want to read a letter? Here’s someone’s letter. Here’s my opinion: both sides are to blame. My anecdote overheard in a diner in my twenties is an analogy and I will use it. Watch me.”
Scal got stuck halfway through her column and went for a walk to clear her head, shoes dangling around her neck. She’d walked a good few miles in a good few shoes, but it felt like something was missing. Oh, yes, it was lunch. She’d go home and pack something for the next leg of the trip. There were a lot of shoes out there, surely she couldn’t have gotten them all already.
“Could I please have my boots back?” asked the forester, as she rummaged through her house.
“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” said Scal absently. “There are lots, you know. Just take some. I have.”
“Yes,” said the forester with a wince. She had been keeping an eye on the news the past few hours and was really getting quite alarmed. “Look,you need to stop.”
“But I can’t stop yet,” complained Scal. “I haven’t walked a mile in everyone’s shoes yet!”
“Ah, but I misspoke when I advised you,” said the forester. “You shouldn’t walk a mile in anyone’s shoes at all.”
“Burn down buildings and boulders!” swore Scal. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“We don’t measure in miles anymore,” said the forester. “We use kilometres. If you want to walk in everyone’s shoes properly, you’ll need to walk a kilometer.”
Scal swore a swear that tore the ground new holes and left it blushing. “And start all over?!” she shrieked. “Nonsuch and nothing doing! You and your shoes – ALL of your shoes, and all of your yous – can go dig a pit to the Pacific and fall into it! I’m leaving!”
And she kicked off her shoes and walked into the woods with her head held high.
As a matter of fact, she held her head so high that she didn’t even see the poison ivy until it was up to her ankles. That – or at least two days past that – was when Scal the sorry walked the woods again.
She simply couldn’t be anything otherwise.

Arthur Helman wasn’t sure what crossed his desk anymore.
Oh, he knew the content as well as anything – requests, pleas, wheedles, beggings, simperings, wafflings, and simple bureaucratic twaddle – but there didn’t seem to be a good term for it now that all of it came in as electronic mail. Surely it couldn’t still be called paperwork?
Well, this morning’s appointment was a blessed relief from all that: an honest-to-goodness’-sake in-person meeting. A mixed blessing, of course, since normally an elaborate network of junior managers kept him discretely separated from all of that sort of thing with mechanical precision, but he was so bored that he was willing to pretend to be bored for half an hour as a break.
…Now if only he could remember what the fellow was here to show him.

*Ric-a-ric-ric*

You can tell a lot about yourself from what you think you can tell about someone else. In Arthur Helman’s case, he prided himself on his apparent ability to discern character through one’s door-knock. This one prickled his spine: it was just north of hesitant, west of incompetent, and only a few degrees wide of annoyed. It was the sound-based equivalent of a limp, clammy handshake.
“Enter,” he said.
The door slid open – just a crack, efficiency was at a valued premium here – and in sidled his appointment, whoever that was. It obviously wasn’t for a fashion position; the man looked cadaverous. Properly cadaverous, not its normal use as a synonym for ‘skeletal.’ There were lumps where there shouldn’t be, and a general appearance of swelling.
“Yes, yes, pleasure to meet you, etc.,” said Arthur, refreshing google repeatedly on his keyboard without raising his gaze and crisply pronouncing the period in ‘etc.’ “Take a seat Mr….”
“Salt. Porter,” said the man, who did not take a seat. “Dr.”
Arthur managed not to wince, but only just. The voice was thin, so very thin that it seemed to have been driven to whistles and screeches just to be heard. “Yes, of course. Now, what was it you had to tell me?”
“Show you.” Dr. Porter’s mouth moved compulsively, Arthur saw. It wasn’t easy to tell if he was trying to smile or eat his own tongue. Not just his mouth, too – his entire body appeared to be made up of nervous tics. “Hyptertensile fabric stronger than steel. Lighter. Many uses. Here you go.”
A bundle was deposited on Arthur’s desk without permission, about the size of his fist. With some mild misgivings, he picked it up and watched as it unfurled into a sheet of silky smoothness about the size of a tea-towel.
“Try to tear it. Hard.”
Arthur tired to tear it, and it was hard. He applied the corner of his desk, a pen-tip, and finally a pen-knife, and finally had to admit that it just wasn’t happening.
“Impressive,” he said. “And your request is?”
“Time space and labroom. Need more to make more. Prototype but no mass production yet. Need privacy. Nobody comes in. Nobody. Deal?”
Arthur didn’t even need a moment to think. Yes, for reasons he couldn’t articulate this was one of the most utterly repulsive humans he’d ever spoken to, but this was also one of the most marketable things he’d encountered in years, and he’d happily signed onto contracts with men who’d driven their best friends into bankruptcy over golf disputes. “Deal.”
The handshake was even worse than he’d presumed. Dr. Porter seemed to only comprehend fingers as things that flew out with as much force and speed as possible, and if a palm got in their way so be it.

Three months and three research assistants later, Arthur stood outside the door of Dr. Porter’s laboratory and spoke at him.
“The first says he wasn’t permitted entry. No explanation given.”
Dr. Porter’s brows convulsed, but no commentary was made. He was theoretically a good listener in that he never broke eye contact, but his apparent reluctance to blink sabotaged this.
“The second says she was refused entry three times – again, with no explanation. The third didn’t hear your reply, attempted to open the door, and says you quote ‘jumped at him,’ and screamed until he ran away. When security checked in, you said everything was fine and denied he’d ever been there.”
“He shouldn’t have come in,” whispered Dr. Porter. “You shouldn’t be here. Very delicate all very delicate. Critical stage could’ve had to start over. I need no assistants you should not send more.”
“Not even one? This isn’t a small project you’re on here. You’re supposed to be refining this thing until it can be mass-produced. Did you forget? One man can’t do that by himself, even with the budget we gave you. And that reminds me of the next item on our little talk’s agenda.”
Arthur examined his phone, which he’d laboriously learned to use over the course of eight months and several extremely patient grandchildren. He still felt that a folder lent these kind of moments more rhetorical weight, but carrying around that physical weight was a task best left to the him of a decade or two ago.
“The budget is gone. I realize that is what a budget is meant to do, Dr. Porter, but ideally there is some sort of book-keeping involved in the process. A receipt at least. Perhaps two. Where are your records?”
“Private.”
“Well, this is a private enterprise. Owned privately. By private individuals. Who are employing you to perform tasks that will make them money, privately. And if you are not more public to them about their private concerns they will throw you back into the public sphere very firmly and quickly. And where are the results for this?”
“Inside the laboratory.”
“Good. Show me.”
“Don’t come in!”
Arthur’s hand froze halfway to the doorknob, not least because Porter looked as if he’d have bitten it. He was tenser than a highwire.
“Delicate in there very delicate. Wait.” He slid in through the crack of the door as he always did, and left Arthur standing on the cusp of his own lab for three minutes like a child in detention. He would’ve been insulted, but he felt as though terrible things would happen if he moved.
Eventually the door creaked open – creaked? The place was only a decade old at best – and Porter emerged again, fingers-first. Clutched in the fingers was something silky and smooth, around the size of a napkin.
“This is smaller.”
“Different application different role different results. Emergency bandage naturally sticky surface applied to flesh speeds clotting very tough will hold you together from the inside out. Look.”
This drew Arthur’s gaze to Porter’s other hand, which he was startled to see he hadn’t noticed before, given that it was clutching a live, extremely agitated rat. The rodent was thrashing madly, teeth bared, yet seemed too traumatized to actually bite.
Porter’s fingers jumped, and the thing squealed. Red burst over his palm in the moment before the cloth covered it. Arthur hadn’t even seen him move.
“Anesthetic properties theoretically applicable but no luck so far slightly painful will have to work more to sedate patient.”
Then he was gone, and the door was shut again, shades down. There were no windows in this lab, Arthur recalled. He wasn’t sure if he’d have wanted to look inside, though.

Six months. Half a year of Salt Porter living under his roof; and it was living, he was sure of that now. The security cameras alone confirmed that he never left for sleep, and his few excursions were late-night errands to fetch big brown boxes without labels. Some of the un-noted budgetary expenses, no doubt.
He shouldn’t be there, Arthur was sure of it. Every month more and more leaked out – dripped out, more like, dripped and puddled under his desk and made him uncomfortable in his own skin. The security guards avoided the wing now. The adjoining labs had doubled their days off sick, ‘sick’ or otherwise. He’d have thrown the man out face-first by now, if it weren’t for the way every other month he was pulling out a sample for the board to drool over, a new use for his miracle fabric. A bulletproof vest, a tether, a net. The applications seemed endless, but he was so damned shy of showing them the process, and mass production was always ‘later.’
But this. This might be what he was looking for. It had taken a lot of phone calls, a lot of talking (fast AND slow), and at least one private investigator, but he’d built up his evidence, he’d built up his courage, and most importantly he’d sent a security guard ahead to open the door for him and get Porter out of his face while he carefully explained what was going to happen next. And then he’d never have to listen to that awful voice again in his life.
See, there? The door was open. His pulse was even. It was all fine, all ready, and to show how he felt about this, he thrust the door wider open still as he walked through, relishing its transgressive bang against the wall.
Well, would have. Instead it was a muffled thump. The room was a dimly-lit mess; Porter seemed to have coated every single surface with a thinly-woven trial version of his fabric – chairs, tables, cabinets, sinks… It was hanging from the damned ceiling for Christ’s sake. How did he get at anything in here?
Arthur peered at the huddled figure at its desk at the lab’s far end, the security guard standing resolutely at its side, and he shook it off. He could get the cleaning team in later, this was important. He pulled out his phone, cleared his throat, and spoke as crisply as he could manage.
“Mr. Porter. It looks like I got it right the first time.”
No reaction. Arthur began to walk slowly, like a shark cruising towards an idle surfboarder. “We checked, you know. It doesn’t matter how much pie you promise is up in the clouds, eventually we start asking who’s promising. How long did you think it’d last?”
Dead silence. Relishing the absence of the horrible little voice, Arthur pressed on. “There’s no ‘doctor’ Porter. There was a PhD student, mind you, although his name was Felix. It takes a special kind of arrogant to only change half your name, you know that? And a special kind of stupid to walk that far out of field. Your thesis wasn’t on material engineering at all, it was on – let me see here – ‘Genetics and Arachnid Intelligence in Jumping Spiders’ – and it never got published because it was speculative junk that led nowhere. Just like your work here. You’re not just a con-man, you’re an incompetent one.”
Arthur was really quite close now, and he was starting to grow irritated. Yes, Porter seemed to shut down at criticism, but he’d hoped for some spite, some fire. He’d anticipated seeing the security guard pin him down and drag him off by his ill-fitting collar.
“Whatever you were up to, it’s done. Anything to say for yourself? Anything at all?”
Porter didn’t even turn around.
“Fine. Take him out. His desk can come later.”
Arthur had only waited three seconds when it became obvious to him that something was horribly, horribly wrong. But he was a man who liked to be sure, and it was because of that instinct that he reached forwards towards the security guard and touched his shoulder.
The guard wobbled at his touch like a bag of jello, and something unpleasant and damp spurted over Arthur’s fingertips, bringing fiery pain and sudden numbness with it. He bite back a curse as he yanked his fingers back, watched the guard spin slowly in mid-air, suspended by thinly-transparent strands.
Porter. “What have you DONE?” he yelled.
No response.
Arthur supposed he’d been wanting to do this for some time, but was only just now admitting it. He balled up his aching hand and drove it into the back of Felix Porter’s skull with as much force as he could muster.
It sank in up to the wrist with no resistance. It felt like dry leather, and something tickled his wrist.
Arthur shook his arm, this time not bothering to stifle his swearing, and the body lurched free of the chair with no resistance. It couldn’t have weighed more than ten pounds, and it made a sound like dead leaves as it crumpled to the floor. Arthur himself, overbalanced, was not so discreet. He landed shoulders-first like a sack of bricks, eyes-wide. Which put him in a perfect position to see the ceiling more clearly.
Yes, there were sheets and strands and billows. And hugged in amongst them were shapes. Rats. Sheep. Mice. Test animals. Withered and dessicated like mummies, dry and empty. Wrapped up in fabric – in silk.
And nestled among them, hundreds and hundreds of little silken spheres.
Some were popped open, he saw, in that strangely clear vision that appears when the active mind is turned off.
“You shouldn’t be here.”

Arthur felt his heart leap into his throat and drag the rest of his innards along with it for good measure, yet still worse than the voice – not a voice, it had never been a voice, it was a hiss, a hiss elongated and mangled into a mockery of language – was the small tight click of the door shutting.
Dr. Salt Porter was there in front of it, standing large as life. His body twitching alive, their mouth gnashing. They were jumping out of their skin, tiny eyes glittering in the darkness.
As the increasingly obscured form leapt towards him, Arthur realized that he had been screaming for the last twenty seconds of his life. It was almost completely inaudible over the seething, hissing strum of hundreds of tiny legs rubbing together.
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE COME IN!”

On the eve of October thirty-first, within the last few decades or nearabouts, a small, angry little man waddled the streets of suburbia, swearing, hissing, and spitting to himself over his stout puffs for air. And though none of this was unusual in either behaviour nor appearance, the identity of the man himself was of note: he was a goblin. Oh, Ivrint fit in well enough as far as human looks went – perhaps his belly was a bit too round, perhaps his head a bit too bald, maybe his teeth were too crooked and spiky and his eyes sparkled too delightfully when in the presence of small evils – but it was all for nothing in the face of his voice: he talked so thoroughly through his nose that a head cold rendered him utterly mute, and there was no hiding this from even the most complacent, bored, lackadaisical suburbanite.
Fortunately, those same qualities of his neighbours lent themselves quite thoroughly to apathy, and so though almost anyone who met him guessed Ivrint’s identity before he could say ‘boo’ few cared even slightly.
Well, very few.
Almost no one.
Ivrint sighed as he neared his home – Jack O’Lantern pointedly NOT on display – and the drear reality of his doom sank down over him, slumping his shoulders even lower than their natural angle. Really, it had all seemed so reasonable to him at the time; what reasonable home-owner’s association would not permit a pillar of the community to fend off pests from their yard? Yes, the pests were pets, yes, they were cats, yes, nonlethal traps were encouraged but scarcely mandated, and yes, it was in poor taste to skin and eat the things on your front lawn, but he defied any man or woman to find a specific regulation in the book that he’d actually broken as such. The spirit of the rules had been violated, perhaps, but the letter remained pristine. This was North America, that sort of behaviour was meant to be celebrated, was it not?
Regretably, his punishment was as extrajudicial as his sentence. He was under no official obligations, penalties, censures, fees, or geasa. This was simple a friendly annual request by good honest hard-working friendly pillars of the community who would knock over all his garbage cans every morning for the rest of his life and steal his recycling bins if he refused to bow to their every command.
And it was only one command. Just one. A tiny, teeny, insignificant little command. But it was a command all the same, and the one thing a goblin hates more than not being able to order people around is being forced to do the same.
The sprawling mob in front of his home looked up from their stashes. Rough-spun robes fluttered in the air. Drool dripped from oversized fangs, eyes glowed, knives were brandished against the cool autumn breeze.
A single creature stepped forwards, a head taller than Ivrint and nearly as broad, its face smeared with crimson and hastily stitched together. “Let’s go, stumpy,” it said.
And if there was a second thing a goblin hated yet more, it would be human children. The more the hatefuler.

(A third thing, perhaps, would be peanut butter. The damned holiday was infested with it, and the scent always took days to fade from his nose)

Ivrint’s final stop before his home had been the general store.
“Cindy let go of the stop sign.”
It had been a small, simple purchase, but it was an annual tradition.
“I don’t care if you want to, we’re not walking down to Beachfront Avenue, that’s six miles and the little ones’ legs will fall off. No, you can’t tape that, nobody you want to know would be interested in paying for it.”
Also, a necessary one.
“Clyde, don’t open that gate; there’s no pumpkin and that dog will bite you. Leo, stop hitting Suzy unless you want her to bite you again. Teresa, don’t dare Francis to eat that, you know he’s diabetic and the police would be on you like fleas on puppies. Simon would you…”
Ivrint gagged momentarily, pulled out his bag of horrible throat lozenges that didn’t quite taste like cherries soaked in vinegar, and popped three into his mouth at once – one for swallowing, one for chewing, and one for sucking for ten seconds and then accidentally chewing. He’d empty the thing halfway through the night, if he was any judge.
“… put that d- okay good you already did. Hurts, doesn’t it? Well now you know why you’re not supposed to pick them up. No, Jess, we’re not allowed to play tricks, just take your damned treats. No, your parents won’t care if you tell them that I said that word because they say worse themselves. Tell all you like, just shut up. Oh, you want to tell them something? Tell them this: Ivrint Gattlekrik says your father is the fattest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve hunted denning bears. Your father is fatter than that. And genetics says you’ll be fatter still. That’s right, you eat that candy. Eat it through the tears, fatty. Your fat, fat tears.”

There was always a casualty, of course.
“Look, just put it back on the stoop. Yes, I’m sure they’ll notice; they put out a pumpkin, not ten pounds of smashed shell and guts. No, I don’t care. No, you can’t light the candle again, you’re too stupid to know how – no, I don’t care if you have your mother’s lighter. Hands off – OFF, Cindy! Cindy listen to me NO I AM THE BOSS OF YOU.”
And in the ensuring chase – of course there was a chase, of course there was, every damned year he ended up chasing some kid for some reason for some distance – it all ended as it usually did. The kids split. The kids vanished. And Ivrint stood alone in the middle of the street, one hand locked around the collar of Herman Gish, the tubbiest and least-aerodynamic of them all, and swore ‘till his feet turned blue. Occasionally Herman would chime in with an effort to rhyme along.
Eventually, Ivrint’s jaw got tired and he stopped with a creaking, wistful sigh. There was a job to do, or he’d never hear the end of it. They’d made enough of a fuss about a few cats gone missing, although he was prepared to argue that even a cat was a more enjoyable companion than the presence of Cindy Warburn. Probably. On most nights.
He looked down at Herman. The boy stopped mid-swear, his chins still wobbling.
“C’mon. You can hold the bag.”

Goblins are thieves. Everyone knows that who knows anything about goblins. And like most things that everyone knows, it’s not really true at all. It would be more accurate to say that goblins often like stealing things. It’s sort of a family pastime.
And like most pastimes, it had become a hobby, then nearly a sport. Now it was just one of those things you did. Most Americans followed baseball, most goblins kept an eye on America’s Most Wanted, and for largely similar reasons.
Ivrint could have gone pro back in his youth, a century ago. Nowadays he mostly kept his looting sack around for nostalgic purposes. Nostalgia, and Halloween.
He squinted upwards into the boughs of the tree. It was some sort of spruce that had long ago left its species behind in favour of becoming as large as physically possible, and maybe a little bit bigger. “C’mon down, Suzy.”
Branches rattled at him, followed with a hiss. He sighed. “No, Suzy. I know you’re not a velociraptor. And they don’t climb trees, awright? I saw Jurassic Park four times in theaters, I know this shit. Now get down here.”
The hiss rose to a screech, and a cone bounced off his bulbous nose.
Ivrint spat into his palms. “Awright, don’t say you didn’t have a fair chance.” He grasped the tree and shook violently. After a few seconds, a thought struck him.
“Oh yeah – hey Herman, hold that bag open, will y-“
Around then, Suzy struck him. Head-first.

Two blocks and five children later, the goblin sack was a good deal plumper and squirmier, and Ivrint a good deal sorer and angrier. Suzy had been just peachy – the average goblin skull was lacking in bone, using instead a sort of jelly-like cartilage – but half his head was one big bruise now, and she’d been bitey besides. He could still hear her hissing at him from the inside of the bag, where she’d clambered to the top of the pile. It reminded him of a rattlesnake.
“Get outta there, Leo,” he said.
Silence. The wind rustled down the street in a casual sort of way, sneaking through lawns and peeking in the windows for blackmail material.
“Leo, I’m going to count to five. Ready? Gonna start now, but it’ll take a while. One.”
He waited for a moment, looked up at the stars. Wondered if any of them had to deal with shit like this. “Two. Hey, Leo, you want to know something cool about that yard you’re hiding in? Three.”
Silence.
“That’s old man Murray’s place. You remember how he used to run that alligator farm, right? Four.”
A small splash.
“Well, when he retired, they decided they’d give him a bit of his work to take home with him, and that’s around when he installed that pool you’re standing next to.”
A noise somewhere between a rumble and a gurgle filled the night.
“Fi-”
Leo dove over the fence, muscled Herman out of the way with unnecessary force, and fought his way to the bottom of the sack. Ivrint snatched up the bag hurriedly as Suzy’s gleaming eyes appeared at its entrance again, but even the brief wrestling match that followed couldn’t dampen the haunting sensations of job satisfaction that had filled him at that moment.

An hour later, Ivrint would’ve given an arm and a leg (someone else’s, of course; he wasn’t stupid) to bring back that feeling. One two three fourteen kids in his bag – including Herman, who’d started whining about how tired his legs were – and no Cindy. His voice was growing hoarse, he was out of lozenges, and to top it off the sewers were alive with scurries and guffaws as the imps and bogeys and nasties rustled along their tiny tunnels, giggling and gargling to themselves with delight as they gorged themselves on extinguished pumpkins.
Ivrint’s face puckered inwards with un-delight as he considered the merriment of his near cousins. As bad as kids, they were. No doubt they’d get along like houses on fire.
Oh. Right. That would explain it.
Ivrint dropped the sack in the middle of the road for a moment (ignoring the squeaks, swears, and gut-churning growls – and fumbled in his pockets for a moment, eventually producing a single, jagged key that looked like it had been cold-forged from half a cobblestone. With careful bludgeoning love he hammered it into the nearest storm drain, wrenched violently, and dropped down into something incredibly unpleasant that called his mother something regrettable.
“Yeah, and same to you,” he growled into the face of the imp.
It gave him the wrong finger, failed to correct itself, then hoisted all of them at once as a salvage effort.
Ivrint rolled his eyes. “Right, right. You win. Where’s the kid?”
“Kd?”
Ivrint was round and slow, but his arms were whip-thin and much longer than they looked, which was how they made it around the imp’s neck before the end of this sentence. “Talk or squeeze. C’mon, even imps know this game. Pick one.”
“’lk.”
“I don’t hear it, so I guess I squeeze it.”
“T’LK!” squealed the imp.
“There, that so hard? Go on.”
The imp gabbled a stream of sewer addresses, navigator’s-marks, and tramp-signage that would’ve been indecipherable to anybody with good solid primate in their ancestry, then made a hasty retreat before Ivrint decided to bite its head off.
Not that he would’ve. Probably. He was all full on lozenges and nausea caused by lozenges, but then again a snack might’ve settled him.

Midnight was a dangerous time of night. Halloween was a dangerous time of year. The sewers were a dangerous place to be most anytime, at least if you were easily turned around and annoyed and lost your bearings and slid down the wrong pipe three times running.
Ivrint hadn’t done that, of course. It was something like six times by now.
He trudged down the latest in a series of tiny, cramped, mostly-rusted metal sludgetubes and wished the bag he was dragging would stop griping at least. He could hardly hear himself think, which was probably why they were lost.
“WAUGH!”
Or maybe not.
Ivrint looked up from his feet into someone else’s feet. A bit farther up and he made eye contact with something’s chest. If he nearly fell over backwards, maybe a chin would be visible.
“P’sswurd,” grumbled the troll.
“’Password,’” said Ivrint. It wasn’t a guess. It was a troll. Trying to get it to learn anything else would’ve made its head explode.
“’K,” it agreed, and it slouched back lazily into its burrow as he hurried past it into the main chambers of the undersewers.
Now THIS… this was a bit much. Ivrint lived up above, and he liked it. There was tap water on demand, sugary foods, and best of all, minimal lurking involved, which was a fine thing when you were as round and fat as the average goblin. Waddling was a far more effortless mode of transit, and one that seemed to be catching on in popularity among humans. He fit right in.
Down here it was different. Imps and bogeys and bograts and boogums all LOVED to lurk. Lurking was their bread and butter, their Christmas present, and their favourite colour all at once. It was what they were, not merely what they did. He’d tried sixteen damned times to get the little bastards to come topside to start some sort of co-op with him, and each time he got as far as explaining ‘sunlight’ to them before the shrieking and cowering began. They had less spine than centipedes.
Except on midnights. And Halloween. Halloween midnight especially. They didn’t get braver, but they certainly got rowdier and more moxious. Moxious enough to, say, kidnap a human child and pit her in a knife-fight with blunted butter knives against a hobgoblin.
Despite Cindy losing her knife, Ivrint noted that the hob was faring poorly. Most likely because she’d misplaced it somewhere in his left eyeball, just shy of the pupil. He felt strangely proud at that.
“Alright,” he shouted over the din. “Show’s over. Past midnight. Up and at ‘em. Cindy we are LEAVING. We are LEAVING NOW. We are LEAVING NOW or you WON’T GET CANDY. Are you listening to me?”
Cindy gave the grandest, slowest eye-roll possible and strode over to him with forced casualness, the squelch of her footsteps the only sound in the suddenly quiet and extremely staring hall.
“Into the bag,” said Ivrint.
“What-ev-err-r,” she said. One last, languid roll, and Ivrint was alone with a sack full of children and seven hundred and forty-nine point six extremely annoyed, bored, and curious bogeymen.

A chase scene followed, much of it paint-by-numbers, although it almost got interesting when the bottom of the sack – and Herman – almost got stuck in the mouth of the manhole Ivrint was trying to exit through. But then Suzy got loose, and after that the pursuit waned with remarkable speed. Ivrint considered attempting and then immediately gave up trying to get her to spit out the imp-finger that she’d claimed as a trophy; the girl had tough jaw muscles.
“Right!” he announced to the assembled children as they filed out of his goblin-bag onto his lawn, under the annoyed gaze of their parents. “That’s it! Halloween’s over, you all have candy, clear off. Pick whichever set of adults flinches the least at your funk and head home with ‘em, thank you very much, happy Halloweehaahahah can’t finish that sentence. Good riddance!”
He stomped up the door, slammed it, sat down to undo his laces, and fell over as someone opened it into his backside.
“WHAT?!” he shouted.
“Heyit’smeee…” said Cindy. Muttered Cindy. Cindy made some sort of a noise, at least.
“What d’you want? Go home. Eat too much candy. That’s what Halloween’s for, right? Treats. We already did tricks, you little hooligan. Go for it.”
Cindy chewed her lip and whined a little through her nose. “Liiiiiiiisten.”
Ivrint rubbed his head and tried to figure the bruise from the headache. This seemed to encourage her.
“SolikeIwantedtosaythankssohere’satreatbye.”
“What?”
“Treat! Bye!”
“What?”
Something bounced off Ivrint’s head, the door slammed, and he was happily, blissfully alone.
With a chocolate bar.

Of course the damned thing had peanuts in it.

Jose Adams looked into his webcam and exactly fourteen million five hundred thousand sixty-two faithful, loyal, patient, willing, paying subscribers would stare back at him. In ten hours.
He cleared his throat a little as his prerecorded guest-host startup line played, along with what he knew would be the catchiest jingle written in this decade.
“Good evening,” said a celebrity not worth remembering whom everyone knew, “and welcome to today’s mass broadcast: the forecast that even you can afford! If you’re too slow to catch this one, or you’re missing out on last week’s tips, gold subscribers get archive access! And remember, sharing prophecies without the prophet’s consent is theft, and everyone who does this for the next two years WILL be caught.”
This was a lie, but a very helpful one. It had increased the number of subscribers by several million, all of whom were gullible enough to pay for extra services.
“Now….here’s Jose!”
And there he was. He’d already taken in his breath, and as he counted out the seconds it left his body in a hiss of words.
“All parents whose social security numbers both end in ‘8,’ your daughters will feel blue this week due to green envy, causes may vary. If you are a white male between the ages of twenty-two and thirty who was born in July look both ways twice before crossing the street this month or run the risk of being struck with a semi-truck. Owners of cats that are both orange AND striped should keep them indoors to prevent rabies. A free tip for the gambling men out there: this week’s biggest celebrity drug scandal item will start with ‘C.’ On no account should any children under the age of ten step on sidewalk cracks this week; mother’s backs will not break but their ankles might due to faulty construction work. Construction workers, take the day off for a job hunt, your companies stand a 85% averaged chance of being immobilized by lawsuits and sunk within the next year. Do not trust anyone whose middle name rhymes with ‘orange.’ Begin buying low and selling high. If anyone promises you the deal of a lifetime, they’re crooks. Take your time over lunch but skip breakfast and get home fast. If you see a reptile, run away. Goodbye.”
Jose took off his headset and closed his eyes, basking in the invisible applause of exactly fourteen million five hundred thousand sixty-two loyal, willing wallets. It was like a hot tub for the soul.
“Viewership’s up this week, sir,” said one of the happy, underpaid interns he employed to tell him things he already knew. “Should we get Craig Watson on again next week to do the intro? He’s so well-spoken!”
“No,” said Jose. “He’ll be busy.” He bundled his coat into his arms and counted how much change he’d have. “I’m going to get a coffee and something expensive and baked. I’ll be back at twelve nineteen and forty-two seconds seven milliseconds to do our premium personals.”

Life was good, knew Jose, as he retrieved the most expensive baked object in a two-block radius – some sort of insane genius’s dream of a cinnamon roll. Well, maybe not in general, but his was. And what made that life so good was knowing exactly how long it would remain so: in his case, for the next seventy years minimum. Maybe longer if he got off his ass within the next two decades and started funding some serious science in that direction. Every other billionaire he knew did nothing but fuel lobbyist groups and private think-tanks – nobody ever thought big. Luckily, Jose was there to think for them. Just like he did for everyone else.
He closed his eyes, and bit into something soft and warm. As predicted.
The taste, however, was something else.
At the tail-end of a fit of dry heaves, still foaming at the mouth with spittle, Jose looked at his incredibly expensive, incredibly delicious, yet somehow foul, odorous meal. He looked, and he understood that not all of the white matter caked atop it was frosting. And then his ears kicked in and led his eyes to the source of the trouble: a white-winged cackler circling in the breeze overhead, somehow managing to leer at him through a beak.
A common seagull.

“It can’t be impossible.”
The man over the phone shrugged as he heard that. “It is. Always has been, always will be.”
Jose rubbed his temples and tried to forget the taste of guano, despite knowing that such a thing would not happen for the next thirty years of his life. “I can forecast a researcher in Antarctica and every single slum-dweller in Atlanta. I can describe the exact life-cycle of a given rat. I can read the future of the WEATHER. And you’re telling me that it’s impossible to foresee a seagull?”
“Common gull or black-backed gull?”
“Common.”
“Yeah, no chance. Black-backs you can see, it’s just a bit fuzzy and it’s mostly them murdering and eating smaller things. Commons are like trying to read a newspaper with your ears, through earplugs. And you’re in New York and the newspaper’s on Olympus Mons.”
“That’s lunacy.”
The man over the phone shrugged at him again. Jose had never bothered to learn his mentor’s name, but he was the wealthiest individual in human history by a factor too high to pronounce, possessing more money than all humans born before 1902 had ever accumulated. He spent most of his days on some nice islands he’d had removed from the geography and history books. “It’s how it is. Just accept it. Do what I did and pay somebody to hold a little umbrella over you whenever you’re outside. You’ll be fine. And don’t glare at me so much, I don’t want to have you assassinated. Bye.”
Jose refrained from glaring at the phone; he was the fourth of the man’s apprentices. He contented himself with cursing quietly, pacing rapidly, and spinning around to stare out the window at odd moments.
His intern knocked at the door to tell him that the first private premium personal sitting of the day would be dialing in within the next minute.
“Sir, the first-”
“Cancel that,” Jose snapped. “Something important just came up.”

It had taken him six tries to find a veterinary clinic that had a gull present. ‘Rats of the sea’ didn’t get much sympathy, even from animal lovers, and those were less than affluent. Fortunately, neither were many veterinarians, and it didn’t take much cash to persuade the parting of vet and bird.
Jose stared intently at the thing. It seemed to be smirking at him. You couldn’t smirk through a beak, right? But you couldn’t leer either. He was pretty sure of both those things, but less so than he had been that morning. That was a horrible feeling, and he was eager for it to be over – surely the proximity would do it, surely being this close would fix it. Close enough to touch, and everything got so much easier…
“I know you,” he told the bird and also himself. “I know you better than you do; inside, outside, inside-out, past, present, future and miscellaneous. I have personally counted the number of skeletons in our president’s closet – three and six vertebrae – and peeped the what-ifs of the life of Temujin, Genghis Khan. I know what I will have for breakfast for the next fifty years of my life. I can see all this, and I can see all of you.”
He reached out a hand and concentrated. The seagull bit him.

Jose’s second seagull was not as conveniently restrained as the first had been, but it did not have a broken neck. As he watched it peck at the scattered potato chip crumbs on the boardwalk, he felt a certain inclination to alter that. He’d been staring at the damned thing point-blank for two hours and nothing had happened. He would’ve had more luck prophesizing a stone, something he had a proven success record at.
Jose thumbed absently at the bandaid on his right palm as he considered his options. It was the first time he’d used one in over a decade. “What are you hiding?” he whispered to the bird.
It stared at him. It awrked at him. Then it turned its back and trotted away.

More manpower was needed, obviously. He hired the best men. Then when those men questioned his decision to have them tail seagulls he fired those men and silenced them with payoffs, blackmail, or assassination as needed. Then he hired men who were not quite as good but more predisposed to keeping their mouths shut, some out-of-work ecologists, and just about every amateur birdwatcher in the city.
“Seagulls,” he told them. “Let me know about the seagulls.” And in only a few weeks he did know about the seagulls, he knew as much about seagulls as any man alive, as any head of the National Audobon Society ever had, as much as a seagull itself. Entire libraries-worth of information on seagulls had been sent into his computer. Sometimes he found himself walking very nearly like a seagull.
And yet the one bit of information he actually wanted remained elusive. They seemed to mock him for it as he passed them in the streets, gazing down at him from the lightposts and storefronts with their pudgy bodies and beady eyes.
“I’ll have you soon, you’ll see,” he’d hiss at them.
And the seagull would ignore him, or more likely proclaim aiiek, aiiiek, awk awk awk awk awk, and a great anger would well up inside him like blood in a compound fracture.
A week went by. Two weeks. Two weeks with no progress. Something had to be done.

Jose Adams clung to the underside of the dock as the saltwater lapped against his spine and hoped that he had imagined the shark fin in the harbour, because he didn’t need the distraction now. He was so close to the nest of the Big One that he could almost taste it in his mouth, taste it like the befouled cinnamon roll that had led him on this path of destruction. A week of careful hands-on surveillance, days spent in meditation, nights spent painstakingly drawing together information from the charts in his office and his own eyes. All brought to this.
Now. Now he would see what they were planning.
Carefully, achingly, he used one hand to prise the tiny periscope loose from his wire-tight jaws and shimmied it up the largest knothole he could find. Then, trying to persuade himself that he was only imagining the swirl of water beneath him as anything other than normal wave action, he pressed an eye to the eyepiece.
The view was blurry. Then there was a beak in it.
Jose jerked backwards in terror, lost his balance, and plummeted with a blubbering cry onto the head of a mature female great white shark measuring sixteen feet six inches in length who had been examining him out of morbid interest. She reacted in the only way she knew how.

It was only a little bite, the doctors told him. Just a little bite. A few stitches, really. Walk it off in a few weeks, ha-ha, don’t worry.
Unfortunately, Jose Adams had not required his medical insurance for years, and so the bite inflicted upon him was much larger than one any shark could inflict. Combined with funding half a city’s-worth of private investigators, ecologists, and birdwatchers for almost a month and the angry lawsuits for breach of contract from his advertisers, celebrity clients, and staff, and he was somewhat short of pocket, as well as short of any clothing fancy enough to possess pockets.
Well, needs must. He could make it work, of course he could. He was a prophet, wasn’t he? Any man with that could make money hand over fist in five minutes, and once he saved up a little dosh through the backroom blackmail circuit he could have a new face, a new name, and a new career. Maybe he could even foretell his own death, and wouldn’t that be a kick?
All that was down the chain, of course. Right now he had other priorities. Top priorities.
There was one down the road, pecking at a donut, and Jose’s eyes narrowed.
“Got you,” he whispered.

Six seagulls later and he was no closer to finding one that would squeal. It didn’t matter what questions he asked, what threats he used, how many splinters he shoved into the webbing of their feet, they weren’t giving up a damned thing. His stomach gurgled with rage and indigestion from the half-consumed wad of French fries that he’d fished out of a trash can and called lunch.
“HOW’D YOU DO IT?” he screamed at a sentry atop the nearby coffee shop – possibly one he’d owned a controlling share of, once upon a month ago. “WHY?”
Awrk, it commented. It ruffled its feathers.
Jose felt the bile rise up in him again, and this time it didn’t settle down. He spat curses, spat liquid into the gutter, and charged the bird. Nothing else existed, nothing else mattered – not his future, not the city’s future, not the world’s future, just the future of the bird that stared at him with its beady eyes and yellow beak. He focused all his might and intellect upon that hateful, mocking little face, he tunneled down the world that he’d played like a piano to one atom of one blemish on a single key.
He saw it picking up a French fry from his outstretched palm.
And then, for a great and glorious moment, Jose Adams felt hope rise up in him, lifting him from the ground as light as a feather. His perspective spun, the world shone bright and strange in his eyes, and his heart fluttered like a schoolboy’s before the momentum from the semi-truck left his body and sent him skull-first into the asphalt.
Something hard jabbed his palm.

Jose Adams was buried on his birthday: July eighth. On a pleasant day with a bright sun, cool breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. And a lot of seagulls.

The tibia slid from rock to stone with the smooth, seamless grace of a galumphing walrus, nicking thrice-nicked epicondyles and chipping its shaft and visiting all manner of unspeakables upon innocent bone the likes of which it had all seen at least four times previously, so it was quite all right. Eventually it spun to a gentle stop at William’s feet.
He looked at it. It was the first thing he’d seen for half a hundred miles that wasn’t a rock or ice, so he felt he owed it that much.
“Hello there.”
William looked up and saw the first human he’d met for half a thousand miles. At least, it was probably a human. Last he’d heard nobody’s brought any chimpanzees up this way, let alone any completely bald ones.
It waved at him.
“Hello,” said William. “How are you?”
“Tolerably well, tolerably well,” said the thing on its rock-pile. “I’d be better off still if you’d care to toss that bone of mine back up here. It is my favorite and I miss it so dearly.”
William shrugged, kicked the battered piece of humanity six times until it popped up into his fumbling left-handed grasp, then gave it a gentle underhand toss. It smacked into the thing’s forehead with a sound like a melon being dropped in a basket and sent it gently cartwheeling down the same path that the bone had so recently taken, with even less elegance.
“Ow,” it said eventually.
“I’m sorry.”
The thing waved a hand. “Think nothing of it. The view up there was growing dreary anyways. Oh, my manners! I am nobody of nowhere in particular. And yourself?”
“Will McKenzie,” said William. “Have you seen the northwest passage?”
It squinted to itself. “Oh! That! I was looking for that! That was a while ago, of course. Before I found my bone and built my seat. I was much busier back then, all hurry hurry hurry. No time for rest nor chat nor bone. It’s no wonder my own quit on me, you know? I certainly never gave them a break. Why I’ll have you know I’d barely placed the keystone of my chair in place before my own two legs up and left me behind, the treacherous snakes, and my left arm soon followed. Of course, that was a few long times ago. But I digress: what’s your name again?”
“Will,” said William. “Have you seen the northwest passage or not?”
“Oh! That! I was looking for that! That was a while ago, of course. Before I lost my head and found my legs. Well you see hey now where are you going?”
“The northwest passage,” repeated William, adjusting the hauling straps across his shoulders. They were huge thick things that very nearly became a second coat where they crossed his chest.
“With that great sledge? You’ll never make it, take it from me. My sledge was twice as big and there were dogs on it. And now I don’t have dogs or a sledge and look at how well it’s all turned out for me, eh?”
William looked at how it had turned out for him. One of the rocks on the seat teetered and slowly made its way downwards, landing with inevitable but gentle force on the thing’s freshly-swelling cranial bruise.
“Do you think I could tag along? Please?”

The sledge was stuck on a rock.
“Pull on it.”
William pulled.
“No, no, no! Push it! You’ve got to push it!”
William pushed.
“Oh dear that won’t do that won’t do at all, at ALL! Wiggle it up and down, up and down!”
William wiggled it up and down.
“Maybe left to right then?”
The sledge’s runner snapped off with a tired squeak.
The thing shrugged. “Well, it was a good try. When’s lunch?”
William squinted at the horizon, where the sun hadn’t risen in three months. “Now,” he decided.
They sat down to eat, William with his bulky and inopenable canned food, the thing with its bone. It gnawed on it happily, gums smearing with love across familiar grooves so ancient that they half looked to have started healing over.
William had something better than bones. He had canned food. Modern. Lead-sealed. Air-tight. Unspoilable. Each had enough basic nutrition to keep a man three times his weight walking for three times as long as William could walk, which if William could still do math correctly was nine hours and six pounds four pence. He asked the thing, to be sure.
“Sounds good to me,” it said. “How’s it taste?”
William’s brow furrowed. “Don’t know. Can’t open them.”
“Oh. So what’ve you been eating?”
“The lead seal,” said William. “Soft. Chewy.”
The thing nodded thoughtfully. “Huh. So it is. It reminds me of the days when there was marrow in my bones, back before I found my other bone. That was a while ago, of course. I had a crew, a crew of men, human men, human men who spoke the same language as me and thought the same thoughts as me and laughed at the same jokes as me and grew their beards just like mine. Those were fine days, back when we had days. I think we had days then, now the sun just seems to go up and down.”
“What happened?” asked William.
The thing shrugged. “I can’t remember. But I don’t think it was very nice. We were on a job to find something very impressive.”
“The northwest passage.”
“Right! That! I was looking for that! That was a while ago, of course, when-“
William inserted the bone gently into the thing’s face, where it began to gnaw happily. Little flecks of bone dust came loose from its jaw in its enthusiasm.

They made camp that night by the wreckage of three schooners, each one slightly smaller than the other. It was the first fire William had seen in a hundred days and nights, and he had the thing to thank for it: whenever he tried to bend at the waist unbearable pain lanced through his hips up to his heart and his vision turned black with purple highlights.
“Purple?” asked the thing, dangling from his arms as firewood dangled from its arms. “What’s that?”
William pursed his lips – cracking open a dozen fissures in his skin in the process, which slowly coagulated with red matter in the subzero air – and considered the question.
“Like blue,” he said.
“Like blue?”
“But more red.”
“Huh. What’s a red?”
William pointed at his sores. The thing looked.
“Oh,” it said. “That. That’s funny! Haven’t seen that in a while. That was a while ago, of course. When I was looking for the northwest passage. Have you seen the place? Awful nice. I took the sea route, of course, but then the boat got stuck. That was a while ago, of course. A while ago, of course. A while ago. A while ago, of course. A while ago, of course. It was a while ago a while ago a while ago, of course it was a while ago, of course.”
It blinked.
“Excuse me. But yes, it was a while ago, of course. Are you headed there?”
“Yes. Where is it?”
“Right behind. Forty miles.”
William craned his neck over his shoulder. “I didn’t see.”
“Really? It was right there.”
“You could have said.”
“No I couldn’t. My lips were stuck together and I didn’t want to make a fuss.”
William sighed, a deep and elemental force that welled up from within the tattered leather bags that had once been his boots, or maybe his feet.
“Thinking of quitting, eh lad? Don’t be like that. You’re almost there. Go on, up and get ‘em, chin-first. The early bird worms the day is won. Come on now, let’s be off. Do you need a slap on the back to get you going?”
“Yes please.”
The thing’s hand came down against leather with a firm whack, sending a knuckle bouncing away over the lonely stones, already powder as it cartwheeled. William hiccoughed, spat out a tooth, and hitched up his harness once again.

“Come on.”
The sledge had been left a good fifteen miles back. The last runner had come a cropper sixteen earlier.
“Up and at ‘em.”
The cans had had to be left behind. William had tried to put some in his pockets, but he’d eaten his pockets a month ago in an effort to stave off scurvy with the lichen that had become enmeshed in their fabric. He’d put one in his mouth instead, and discovered that its contents had leaked out months ago. Even the lead solder had rubbed off.
“Go on, you. Go on!”
His left hand was making a godawful racket. The thing was in it, that was the problem. It had gotten very annoyed when he tried to leave it with the sledge, and the way he’d fallen over right after he’d uncoupled the harness seemed to be making it very angry.
“Look now what a world it would be if we all gave up like this. I gave up myself, you could too, but that was a while ago NOT NOW come on and get moving, you’re better than this!”
His right hand was much quieter. He preferred his right hand. It hadn’t moved more than dancing in the breeze since the sixth week he’d worn the harness, but it kept clenched tight around its burden and didn’t smell too badly. The salt air was doing wonders for it, when there was air instead of ice-wind.
Two things occurred to William then. First, that he must be dying. Second, that he hadn’t used his brain this much in more than a year. He wondered if the two were related at all.
“Up! Up for goodness’s sakes and peas and rice and all the little fish! You’re HERE! You’re at the northwest passage! UP!”
“Can’t see it,” said William.
“That’s because your eyes are shut, and you aren’t clever like me. I can see right through my eyelids! You can’t! Stop making me talk loudly, it hurts my throat and I don’t have much left to hurt! Go on! Get up! Go on! UP!”
William used the burden in his left hand to steady himself, opened his eyes, and took one more breath.

He was standing on a cold, icy, rock-strewn shore. Behind him was ice. Ahead of him was ice. Farther on was a bit more ice. But the little compass that dangled on his gutted lapel and the head full of rotted charts told him that this particular ice was ice nobody had ever seen before.
Well, nobody from… home. Had ever seen before. Yes.
Oh, that was right. He’d better hurry.
“Hello? Can you see it?”
No time for that. William dropped his left hand – ignoring the protests that resulted – and applied it to his right. With a vigorous yank he removed it, along with its burden, and struck the stony gravel masquerading as dirt with as much force as he could muster.
Fwip, and the cold breeze took it. The flag flared in its grip like a little second sky. The salt and cold had bleached it blanker than a blanket.
“Iclaimthisinthenameof-“ said William, and then that breath ran out and he died.

For a while he stood there very sturdily, then the cold breeze took him. Fwip.
Thud.
“Ow!”

“This reminds me of back when I had a seat. That was a while ago, of course.”

Lesser-known weather patterns of the western Versnillies, by Horace Wemple, T. C. H.

The Versnillies remain a much-neglected gap in our otherwise-comprehensive knowledge of the workings of sun, wind, rain and moon-glow of our fair planet. Not since the death of Albrecht Pentlecock had a researcher dared set foot in those wild and tropically moist lands, where the mountains are surly, the seas unruly, and the rivers sometimes manage to flow both west, east, and uphill at the same time. Such timid-hearted testiclelessness is not for the likes of a Wemple, and it was with the determination of my heritage that I set forth on a grievous expedition the like of which no man has endured and survived solely for the purpose of returning this priceless encyclopedia of information to YOU, my loyal, safe, warm, happy, timorous little readers, all of whom I treasure more than my life itself. No thanks are necessary, although they are appreciated mightily.
Thanks can be mailed to 4758 Templedown Byway, Herbertshire, Hillditch. No coins please.

The Wobbling Woodbeam
A strange, euphoric shaft of light that is only visible within the stark and august groves of the greytrees. As I appraised the sunbeam I stepped beneath it to better gauge the tempo and beat of its spectrum, and woke up on a poor Versnillian’s roof, from whence he had tried to wake me for three days before giving me up for dead and using me as support for his washing-lines.
Rated: 3 glimmers. Could use more backroom rhythm.

The Eastern Zoloft
A warm, ruddy coastal wind with a rich nose, wide sweetness, and a charming, fruity aroma. Best enjoyed with some cheese, a brisk hike, and some bear repellant, as the east coast of the Versnillies is lousy with the furry pests. A must for sailors and other salties.
Rated: Yalloman-5, leaning towards Yalloman-4Q(a) on a fine evening with some friends and maybe a slice of melon.

Globbids
These clouds are among the rarest in the world, found only on the sixth second of the fourth minute of the eighteenth hour of February 29th, if there happens to be a rainbow of no more than three shades present. Tragically I was unable to see these myself, but the old man who informed me of their existence had some lovely (though aged) photos that I was able to purchase for as little as $5 US. Please excuse the uncanny resemblance to a plate of mashed taties, it seems to be an artifact of the film’s age – along with the strange wire-like striations that appear to hover above it.
Rated: 4.8484784/11.7474 Deweys, 2 SubDeweys. Haven’t seen anything this splendid since the days of Robbleford and his magnificent pictures of Bigfog. Anyone ever find out what happened to him?

Magenta Walloper
A highly dangerous and notorious midnight gale that molested the town of Ziblok during my stay there, consuming no less than sixteen men. After the third night of hearing gut-rending shrieks disturb my observations of the local sunsets, I set about solving the problem and was able to lure the devil in with a set of live bait provided by the local orphanage. Suffice it to say that human intellect and ingenuity won the day as usual, though the spectators (poor, superstitious rubes!) seemed to think otherwise. I was able to give it a well-earned thrashing before it very slowly fled from my mangled yet triumphant figure, and only at the cost of some small number of extremities so unused and unimportant that I shall not deign to mention them here.
Rated: 0.2 Bobbits. A pipsqueak, a piker, unworthy of note in all respect. Pish-posh.

The Monochromebow
Some of the locals told me that I was in fact misled as to the colour of this phenomena and I was merely having difficulties adjusting to my new glass eye, but they were mere peasants with substandard IQs and I have qualified at Mensa-level, so I ruled them out as rubes and brought you, my loyal readers, news of this most intriguing phenomena. I even had time to count the number of bands (one) in its arch before faint-headedness from overexertion set in and I had to be wheeled back to intensive care.
Rated: Square. I apologize for the ambiguity, but my head trauma makes my memories of this entire three-month period rather splotchy, and I don’t believe I understood the concept of numbers at the time.

The Cripplebreeze
An annual event at midsummers that livens the hours and sells shoddy trinkets. During its passing cripples dance in the streets of all the Versnillies so that it may enliven their lifeless, swollen, dragging limbs. Superstitious nonsense and besides it didn’t work. My left leg remained absent.
Rated: Boorish hucksterism.

Berlog’s Bane
Yes indeed, dear readers, I have found what man once thought to be unimaginable, psychedelic myth: a cyclone that cannot be tamed! First documented in Albrecht Pentlecock’s 1834 travelogues, the waterspout that gutted his faithful batman and left his entrails in seven different seas still whirls atop the very lake that he witnessed it spawn from! Sadly, the years have not been kind to the poor thing, and it now measures an astonishing but unimpressive four feet. That said, I saw it disembowel and consume an uncautious sheep while I was taking notes, so its spirit remains commendable.
Rated: F-0.5. Ideal for the children.

Toothbreakers
A ramshackle and altogether unconvincing category of stormcloud inexplicably celebrated in the more economically-depressed areas of the Versnillies, where it is popular with infants, teen-agers, minorities, and the non-British. Altogether fine if you’re one of *those* sorts, I suppose. Takes all sorts. Even if their tastes are wrong. Which they are.
Rated: Over. And I still don’t see what’s so impressive about clouds that rain caramels and toffee. Good grey stout droplets, that’s what a raincloud’s all about.

That Fucker
My dear readers will have to forgive me for my inclusion of phenomena that are technically currents rather than weather or weather-related, but this riptide near my hotel beach really tussled my goddamned crumpets. The little blighter yanked me three shitbirding miles offshore before I could swim across it, and on the return trip a shark of unidentifiable ethnic background made off with my prosthetic leg, so I was left confused as to what slurs would be appropriate for the occasion.
Rated: 7.2(c) GigaBastards.

Kammadon’s Manglewhorl (AKA ‘The Limbmulcher,’ AAKA ‘Screamer of Death,’ AAAKA ‘Splatmaker’)
I’m told this is lovely, and I hear no reason to doubt it. Moving on.
Rated: No I’m good enough thank you very much.

The Fireside Drizzle
So called by the locals for its exquisitely delicate and slightly charcoal-scented droplets, each of which, in all their innumerableness, is no bigger than a solitary mouse-tear. The perfect strolling rain, each breath taken in this delightful shower greatly invigorates the lungs, producing a mos

This, the final edition of ‘Practical British Meteorology,’ is dedicated to Horace Wemple, T. H.C., from XX60-XX14 the editor, publisher, author, and chief reporter of the scholarly journal.
Mourners can take solace in that although his passing was sudden, he died happy, in nearly-adequate health, and entirely unexpectedly at high velocity. It is unlikely that he even noticed the gradual buildup of carbon monoxide in his tissues until his single remaining leg buckled and sent him headfirst into the sidewalk. And really, isn’t that how we’d all like to go?