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I was stirring the stew on the firepit when I heard the knock. 

At first I dismissed it as the wind, and did nothing.  With the second rap, I thought of it as coincidence, and stirred all the harder, as if to banish it forcibly from thought.  With the third, I feared it was a bear, come in the snowstorm by the drifting smell of cookery, and I snatched up my spear and hurried to the doorway.  By the time the fourth thump came, I was shoving the rough driftwood hatch open, feeling it grind against the iced and slick snow-walls. 

The figure beyond was no bear – far too small, too slight, even for a cub – and it jumped in surprise.  Bulky, upright, small, dark in colour, with odd face markings, and textures that just didn’t match up.  Its forelimbs were held upright, next to its skull, and it was making the strangest noises, a complicated cacophony that was half-lost in the blizzard. 

I blinked as I listened.  They sounded familiar.  What were they…. words.  Yes, that was it.  Words.  Were they English?  I wasn’t quite sure.  I’d taken up talking to myself a long time ago, a very long time ago, but this was strange.  It was all too fast in some places, too slow in others, and some of the bits didn’t sound like other bits.  Too much all at once.  And if those were words – English words? – then this must be a human.  Another human.  Did I look like that?  Strange indeed. 

It had stopped its words, and was watching me.  Warily, probably.  I did have a spear pointed at it.  Did I need to do that now?  We had a lot in common – species, desire to avoid the cold, and probably hungry.  I remembered the hunger quite well now. 

“Come in,” I said, and I let the spear down (gratefully – it was heavy).  “Stew.”

It was magical, watching that.  I said some words and moved my arm and all of a sudden it wasn’t frightened anymore.  Then we both walked inside, just like that.  Can you believe that?  Some words and all of that happens.  Amazing. 

My guest liked the stew, although it took me a while to figure this out.  It was still hard to understand it.  “Slower,” I said.  “Slower.”  It would nod, blink, eat some stew, and then start over again, still wrong in some odd way that threw its ever breath of air out of joint with my mind.  Still, we made progress, and by the end of the meal we could understand each other half-decently as we sat on my furs next to the firepit.  It had laid its gun to one side, out of the way.  It looked much more complicated than mine, and seemed well-looked-after.  It probably even still worked. 

The first thing it asked after we’d established this was what was in the stew. 

I thought for a while.  What was the word?  Ah, yes.  “Mice.”

It looked surprised.  “That’s a lot of mice.  How many?”

I shrugged – another thing I hadn’t done for a long time.  It came much more easily than conversation.  “Lots?  Can’t remember.  Collected them before winter.”

“Cached them, huh?  Are you that hard up for food?”

Another shrug, and something I thought I recalled mother saying once.  “Every little bit… helps.”

The guest laughed, and the sound was the most alien I’d heard from it yet.  It seemed too loud.  “Hah, yes.  Thank you for your mouse stew, stranger – and you shouldn’t stay a stranger, for giving me somewhere to hide from that snowstorm.”  He stretched out his back, rubbing at the base of the spine.  “”What’s your name?”

That particular detail came to me more easily than anything else I’d struggled with.  “John.”

“It’s good to meet you, John,” said my guest.  “Tim.”

I thought for a moment.  “Yes?” I asked. 

It shook its head.  “No, sorry.  I’m Tim.  My name is Timothy.”  He – that was a man’s name, it must be a man – looked at me in a way that I thought was odd.  “When was the last time you saw someone else out here, John?”

“Not sure.  Hard to keep track of time.”  A phrase leaked back into my head.  “’Land of the Midnight Sun.’  Hard to say.  A long time.”

“How?  You can’t be more than a few days north from Fairbanks.”

I stared at him, and he must have sensed my blankness.  “Fairbanks?  You know, Fairbanks, Alaska?”

“Alaska?”  That was maybe the strangest word I’d heard yet. 

“Alaska.  The United States of America.” 

All the words in the sentence I understood, yet together they meant nothing.  I shook my head.  “No.”

Insofar as I could read expressions – there were so many muscles moving on his face, all dancing and jumping – he looked very… something.  I’m not sure what.  “How do you not know that?  You’re not native, so you sure as hell weren’t born out here, and you don’t even know that you’re in the state of Alaska?  You’ve never heard of the US?”

More sensible words that added up into senselessness.  “No.  I haven’t.” 

He – Tim, yes that was it – slumped, and his body language spoke to me more than his face had.  I remembered something now.  “You got lost?” I prompted. 

He nodded.  “Yes, and I’m damned ashamed to admit it.  Flew north out of Fairbanks and landed on a lake, was just planning on a little bit of winter hunting.  Storm came up out of nowhere, faster than I could blink – not a single warning or hint.  It was there, I was stuck in a whiteout, and by the time it cleared up enough for me to move the plane was gone.  Damned if I know how, but the temperature’d dropped like a stone.  So I struck out east, towards where I’d seen some trees on landing, – get any shelter you can, you know – must’ve got turned around, kept walking to keep breathing, and then I stumbled into your house.  Probably saved my life.  Thanks again, by the way.”

“You are welcome.”  Old memories were thawing inside my head, bit by bit, revealing frail and chilly contents.  “On the lakeshore,” I asked, hunch growing stronger, “was there a rock?  A point?”

“A what?” he asked, puzzled. 

“A rock, a point.”  I thought over my words again.  “A rock on a point.  A big rock.  A big round rock.  On a point,” I clarified.

Tim got that strange look on his face again – probably confusion – and then it melted into something else.  “Yes.  Yes, there was.  I tied the plane to a tree right next to it.  When the snow calmed down, it was gone.  Just gone – not a trace of the line left.  Or the tree.”

Certainty filled me, the same feeling I got when I had a deer standing in my sight, bow in hand, with the wind at my back.  “You moved,” I said.

He looked confused again.  “No, I didn’t.  I’m not an idiot, I stayed right where I was and hunkered down next to the rock.”
“No, no, no,” I said, firmly.  I smacked my right hand on the floor near his foot, making him jump.  “You were here,” I said.  My other hand came down hard, across from its brother.  “I am here.  The snow came, and then –“ I swept my right hand over to meet its brother “–it brought you here.  To me.”

“Forgive me for saying this, John,” he said, almost slowly enough to be clear and sound for once, “but you aren’t making any sense.”

“I got lost too,” I said.

There was a long silence then.  I used the time to clean out the rest of the stewpot, seeing that he’d had his fill.  It was a good stewpot, made out of soapstone.  It had lasted for a long time, but was scarcely my first.  With each replacement, I’d gotten better at the fiddly bits of the carving, and by now they were quite pleasant to look at. 

“So you’re saying,” said Tim, as I scraped out the last of the meat – almost as if he’d been waiting for it – “that you got lost, in the same place, and it brought you here, and now the same thing happened to me?”

I nodded.  It had been a long time since I’d done that, and it felt good.  My sharing of the stewpot had garnered something quite useful after all. 

“Tell me why I should believe you, and not write you off as an old survivalist who’s spent too much time with no one to talk to but caribou.”

“Caribou?” I asked. 

“You can’t honestly not know about caribou.  They walk past here every six months!  Your spoon is made from one of their antlers!” 

I looked at the handle of the spoon, and recognition came.  “The deer?”  Caribou was an odd word.  Why rename a deer?

Tim’s movements were growing more jerky and impulsive.  I must’ve been frustrating him.  “It doesn’t matter.  What are you trying to tell me?  That the snowstorm took me to… never-land or something?  Narnia?  Make sense or show me some proof.”

I looked down into the stewpot, thoughts bubbling and hissing inside my skull.  It had been a very long time, but I believed I knew something that would make him change his mind. 

“Wait,” I said.  I set the stewpot to one side and arose, then began to rummage through the big woven-branch hamper I kept my things in.  There was something in there that couldn’t be found where he came from, something very different from the old, younger place that I’d been in before I came here.  At least, I thought it was. 

It was at the bottom of the hamper, because it was very heavy.  I used it as part of my sledge when I packed up home and moved.  With some difficulty, I pried it loose and bundled it into my arms, then brought it to him.  “Here,” I said, and placed it upon the ground.”
“Polar bear skull,” he said immediately.  “Big one –“ and then he stopped, and began to touch and examine it.  I let him look, and waited.  Time was long, and we had much of it. 

At last he raised his eyes from my skull, and spoke words again.  “This isn’t a normal bear,” he said. 

I thought back again to those long-ago times, and recalled the bears I’d seen.  Were they normal?  “No,” I agreed, deciding that they might’ve been.  At the time. 

“It’s too big.  Much too big.  And this isn’t a fossil.  Either you killed the biggest bear ever to live in the history of the world, John – and not more than a few days from Fairbanks – or you’re not making up everything you’re telling me.  And I can’t think why you would.  One way or the other, something’s wrong here.”  He was having trouble keeping his eyes from my sledge-base, they kept alighting upon it, like a nervous mother bird unwilling to leave its nest.  “And of course, there’s the extra eye sockets.”

Bears with four eyes had extra eyes?  I’d forgotten that – was he really telling the truth?  “More proof?” I asked, mind already feverishly ransacking those old memories once more, comparing them to the contents of my home. 

“Please.”

The hamper was carefully sorted through, and other tokens and emblems came out.  My knife, carved from one of the teeth of the whales that I’d found stranded on a shore, long ago – a score or so, I recalled, and I’d never seen anything like them since.  The furs we squatted on became an example – the woolly pelt from a calf of one of the rhinoceroses that roamed near here in the late winter, claimed from its owner after I found it dead in a snowdrift.  Normal things, strange things, and each examined and explained haltingly to this odd man, with odd words. 

There was another very long silence after that.  It was very strange – it felt misshapen, unpleasant.  Not at all like normal. 

“So it’s never-land then?” he asked after a time. 

“I do not understand,” I said. 

“Narnia then?  Where am I?  You’ve got mutant bears and giant killer whales and some kind of woolly rhinos.  Maybe you’re a head case with one weird trophy, but with three?  This is too much.  What the hell is this place?”
“I do not,” I said carefully, “understand.”

Tim was staring at me again.  “You’re nuts.  I don’t care how long you’ve been stuck out here, you’re crazy.  What.  Is.  This.  Place?”  He was standing up now, talking down at me, nearly shouting, and I wasn’t comfortable with it.  “What’s outside – what’s out there?”

Oh.  That made more sense.  I thought about my answer carefully. 

“Cold,” I said.  “All the cold.  Ever.”

He stood there for a time, at least until I passed into sleep.  I do not know if he did the same. 

 

In the morning, my guest was moving before I awoke, examining and preparing his strange gun, organizing his backpack.  I knew preparations for departure when I saw them, and asked what he planned. 

“I’m heading back where I came from,” he said.  “I got… wherever here is from the rock.  I might as well head back there.  No offence, John, but I don’t want to end up like you.  However long you’ve been here, or half of it, is too long.” 

Would the place send him away?  I wasn’t sure.  Had I tried?  Maybe once.  Couldn’t remember.  “Good luck,” I said.  It seemed fair enough – the right thing, surely?  I wouldn’t diminish my own luck by giving him any.  Probably. 

He slung the gun into some sort of container on his back.  I thought I remembered doing that once, and felt an odd twinge of nostalgia.  Tim had started talking again, too many words, too fast, and I dragged my attention back to it. 

“… for the food, and the shelter,” he said.  “If I can’t get back the way I came, I guess I’ll strike out south and see if it gets any warmer.”  What an odd idea.  “Anything you can tell me about the land that way?”
“Cold.  This time of year, not much deer.  Some wolves.  Then, trees.  Lots.”

He sighed heavily.  “More good news.  Could be worse.”  He held out his hand, and I stared at it for a moment before remembering handshakes.  It felt very strange, and quite soft – disturbingly so, like a maggot.  I had to resist the urge to wipe my fingers on my coat.  We emptied out the entrance, pushing back and tunnelling out the snow.  My house was a little lump in a great snow-dune, barely worth noting. 

“If I make it through, I’ll tell someone you’re out here.”  He looked very small against all the white, and I was sure he knew it.  ”Wherever here is.  They won’t think I’m too crazy – Tim White’s not local, but he’s known well enough for a bit of trust.”

Tim was a colour?  Oh, yes.  Second names – last names, that was it.  What was mine again?  It wasn’t a colour.  They were too long and bulky to use everyday, but I was sure I knew it, somewhere. 

“I am fine,” I reassured him.  It was true.  I thought.  What else was there?  Wherever he was from, it had too many words. 

“Suit yourself,” he said, squinting through the glow and shine of sun-on-snow.  The blizzard’s vanishment had left quite a bright day, only illuminating the cold further.  “I can’t say I can argue.  You’ve lived out here too long for it.  If you run across my body later, use my rifle to put a bullet through whatever got me, will you?”

“Yes.”  It seemed fair enough. 

“Good.  Mighty thanks and farewell to you, John.”  He marched off and away, a little smaller with each step.  He didn’t look back once, which was good.  No sense in looking back.  There’s nothing good back there anyways. 

Oh.  There it was.  I knew I knew it.  Names. 

“Hudson,” I said aloud.  It was much better to speak this way, the right speed, the right way.  None of the chattering haste of Tim White.  “Hudson, Hudson.  John Hudson.”

It was just enough words to be too many. 

 

“Whiteout” copyright Jamie Proctor 2010. 

Jill was nine years old and bold and she went on a walk out into the world.  Skipping down the side road, taking the back trails, off she went; twists piled on turns till she was a good ways from home by anyone’s reckoning, and much farther by a nine-year-old girl’s.  She stopped to look for frogs in a small pond, and that’s when she came face to face with the big wolf.  It was standing under the trees a few feet from her, watching her with its sad wolf eyes. 

Who are you? she asked. 

I’m the big bad wolf, said he, and I’m going to eat you. 

Jill was very upset at this, and her frown showed.  My mommy says wolves don’t eat people unless they’re starving to death, she said. 

I’m always starving, said he.  It’s like a big pit in my stomach, little girl, and I’m going to eat you. 

Jill was a quick thinker, and she knew how stories went.  Wouldn’t you rather wait ‘till I’m bigger and have more meat on me? she pleaded. 

The wolf sniffed her, and wrinkled his big wolf nose.  You talk sense, little girl, he said, but I can’t stay hungry forever.  I’ll see you when you’re older.  And then he bounded away into the bushes, his ragged grey tail whisking away through the greenery. 

Jill smiled to herself around then, and she kept going on her walk.  She went out of the woods and down a lonely side road, one with only a single old farm on it, and then she stopped and knocked on the door.  A tall, thin man and his tall, thin wife answered it.

Yes child? they asked. 

I’m lost, she said.  Which way to line seven?

The tall, thin wife smiled, lips pressed firmly together, and her husband scratched at his lank hair with one cadaverous hand.  Take the road left from the end of the driveway, then walk to the intersection, then go right, and you’ll be homeward bound before you know it, said they. 

Thank you very much, said Jill, and as she walked down the driveway she felt their stares on her back, heavy like a bear’s paw.  She smiled again. 

Jill ignored the directions and went the other way at the intersection, and before long she was on the highway’s side.  Night was coming on, and the cars zoomed by without seeing her, because she was wearing dark clothing.  Jill walked careful and quiet, and before long she heard something breathing in the bushes near her. 

Hello? she asked. 

Hello? came her own voice back at her. 

That’s not funny.  And once again, doubled over: that’s not funny.  But there was a bit of a difference, a small strangled edge, like it was coming from a very big throat screwed up tight and twisted about to sound like a little nine-year-old girl’s. 

She spun about on her heel and faced the bushes.  What do you want? she demanded. 

There was quiet, and then a voice floated up, deep and raspy and colder than a skeleton’s love.  You, said it. 

Why?

I love the children.  Their parents tell them to look out for me, and I watch them from the forests all day, and run away when they play near.  Then come sundown, I take who I find, and I have found you.  I play and play and play with them all night, but in the morning they never want to move again, and they lie still and let bugs and birds pick at them.  I don’t know why.  Can you tell me why?

If you’ll let me go, she said.  I’ll tell you someday, when I’m older and know more. 

I’ll wait, said it, and then the bushes were empty. 

Jill smiled again, again, and she skipped towards home.  She made it to the end of the driveway before she heard the flip-flap-flop and gentle whisper of leathery wings, and then the tall, thin man and the tall, thin wife descended upon her, one in front, one behind.  They were ghastly in the faint starlight, and it glittered off their teeth.

Fair is fair, child, said they.  You took directions from us and gave nothing in return.  Now we take ours, and with no price set, we want blood.  

Jill was a quick thinker.  All I took was your time.  Don’t you want that back?  You can get blood anywhere, from anyone or anything. 

The tall, thin man frowned.  Time is precious.  Ours more than most, with our living so long.  We saw the crusades, we fed on battle-spilt flesh, we’ve glutted alongside ravens on the campaigns of Alexander.  A moment of our time is worth a lifetime of yours. 

Then come to me when the lifetime is almost over, said Jill. 

The tall, thin wife laughed silently, fangs spread wide at this.  Good girl, said they.  We will collect your lifetime at the end, and find you by its smell.  Good girl, said they, and they lifted up and away into the darkness overhead. 

Jill walked up the driveway and into the house and shut the door.  Well, she said, that was easy. 

Years went by and Jill grew up a little more with each one, a little bigger, a little smarter, a little more crafty.  She saw things in the bushes now and then, and sometimes sounds came from outside her window at night.  Her neighbour’s pets started vanishing, and she felt a bit bad about that, but not too bad.  And each and every year, one of three visitors would come to her door on her birthday, sometimes the same one twice, once thrice, but never four years running.  One would come in the day, one in the evening, one at night.  And they would ask if she was meaty enough yet, if she had enough time, whether or not she had the answer, and she would always say not yet, not yet, try again next year.  The visitor would leave, grumbling or silent, and life would go on. 

At twenty she entered university, by twenty-five she had a degree in law school.  She made friends there, some boys, some girls, and one of the girls came crying to her in the night one day, full of alcohol and sorrow and a story about a date gone very, very wrong.  Jill soothed her and sympathized with her and put her to bed, and said she’d phone the police, and since that day was her birthday, she heard the caller at the door just after the friend drifted off. 

Hello, she told the wolf.  I have meat for you, young tender meat, tasty and fine.

Then give it to me, said he, for I’ve followed you too long and my poor belly’s aching for you. 

It’s not mine to give, but it’s yours to fetch.  You can find your fare at this address, she said, and she gave him the name that the friend had cried from. 

Thank you, howled he, and then he was off into the night with his grey tail wagging.  The friend was fine in the morning, and she never heard from the boy again. 

There were only two visitors now that she might entertain each year.  At thirty she entered local politics, by thirty-five she was a senator, and she was in a dangerously close vote for a bill she could not afford to miss.  The deciding motion was to pass the day after her birthday. 

Hello, she told the thing that arrived in the darkness.  I have your answer. 

Tell me, said it. 

They die, said she.  They wither away and die in your dancing, die of fright.  Do you know why this is, what this is?

No, said the voice. 

Go and ask this man, she said, and she named another name, one of her fellows of the senate.  Go and ask him, and he’ll show you what I mean. 

The chief opponent of the bill died of a heart attack at home before the vote could take place, and it was passed by a narrow margin, thanks to some clever arguments from Jill. 

At forty-seven, Jill became the President of the United States of America, with fifty-seven percent of the popular vote. 

She won her re-election campaign at fifty-one with fifty-nine percent, and most people thought those eight years were pretty good years.  And every year, the oval office would get a little bit darker on one day, when she had a special visitor that she sent away all her aides to meet.  They never showed up on any of the cameras, and they always went away disappointed and left the white house a bit darker than before. 

She left office quietly and without fuss at fifty-five, and most people thought she’d done a pretty good job, and were more than happy to put her in the supreme court.  At ninety-two she was sick, and stepped down from office to live in her house, a new house near her old home.  There, as she sat in bed writing, she heard the door open. 

In they came, the thin couple, and their stares were all the demand they needed. 

She put down her glass of water.  Well? she said. 

We come for what is owed, said the couple. 

Jill smiled for a fourth time.  Then you will have it. 

Our lost time? Asked they. 

Oh, it will be properly compensated for, she said.  A moment, wasn’t it?
For us, a lifetime, said they.  Our time is worth more than yours. 

Oh is it? said Jill, in a sweet voice.  When she was a nine-year-old girl, her parents would’ve known that for trouble, when she was a forty-nine-year-old president, her opponents knew the same. 

Yes, said they, and she heard a bit of uncertainty there.  They were used to using fear, and its absence troubled them like a weaponless soldier. 

Not by a long shot, said she. You are speaking to a woman who was for eight years the most important person in the world.  For the next forty, she was heard closely by all those who followed her, and she’s just finishing up her memoirs, which many, many people are also waiting for. 

You have done much in a short time, said they, but we have lived for long. 

Jill laughed.  And what have you done in that time? said she.  Eaten a few dead men out of many dead men on a nameless, pointless battlefield before history began?  You are crows, but without the intellect of crows.  Jackals without cunning.  Vultures without craft.  You have done nothing, have lived nothing.  Empty, long, hollow lives.  And my time is worth more than yours.  You took a moment from me in my youth with your bartering and threats, and you have stolen several from me now.  And you will repay me what is mine, in the proportions that are mine, NOW!

At the shout the tall, thin man and his tall, thin wife flinched backwards, as if they’d been struck, and then at the next instant they unravelled into less than dust, all their time unrolling out of them in a sigh that sounded like a scream. 

Jill took in all those moments with a small gasp and a giggle, then picked up her pen and wrote the last word of the epilogue.  On her way out the door, she posted her memoirs in her mailbox and tipped up the little flag.  It was going to be more fun, thought she, to find another set of parents this time around.  She’d helped make the orphanages better, after all. 

Jill walked on out into the world, nine years old and bold. 

 

Copyright 2009, Jamie Proctor. 

Some funerals just aren’t complete without rain.  Whether it’s to accentuate the dismalness of the moment or to force a confrontation with it deep inside the minds and hearts of those attending to pay respects, it can induce deep pits of thought and introspection, or at the very least take someone’s mind off the loss of a loved one and into low-level griping about the damp.  Conversely, a sunny day can bring back haunting flashbacks of better times that propel previously brave individuals into paroxysms of suicidal grief.  Sometimes, the rain is better. 

This time, it wasn’t.  For one thing, the deceased’s coffin had a leak, and it was getting rusty.  For another, all three of the attendants were behind on their own scheduled rustproof sealant applications, and they were attempting to cluster underneath the single source of dryness they possessed – a large golf umbrella – severely hampered by the fact that they were all bulky construction robots. 

Beside the grave, flipping through a large and bulky tome, was the minister.  It had spent the last half hour fixing steel beams together, and its massive arm-mounted arc welder was getting in the way of the pages, forcing it to hold the book at an awkward angle, barely within sight of its optical viewers.  To add to its difficulties, a small crowd of human passer-bys had stopped to watch, and it was suffering an extremely quiet bout of stage fright, which in its case manifested in irregular volume control. 

“Are you ready yet?” asked one of the mourners, shifting its five-ton frame to steal a little more space under the umbrella. 

“Yes,” it said. 

The mourner, whose name was XLQ530, fidgeted with its jackhammer attachment.  “Sorry, what was that?  You know my hearing’s gone all to shot since that loose nail got into my processor.”  Its ocular port swivelled to stare directly at its neighbour as it said this. 

“Come off it, I said I was sorry,” said TAH978, surreptitiously stuffing its nail gun behind its back.  “It was an honest mistake.”

“An honest mistake after you saw the payroll and me pulling in twice yours, more like.  Now I get all the jobs next to the noise and – “
“Sorry, I said yes,” said the minister.  It fumbled at its book in a futile attempt to improve its view of the words, then appeared to give up.  “Dearly beloved,” it began, choppily, “we are gathered here today to witness the –”

“Oh come off it!” snapped XLQ530.  “That’s for WEDDINGS.  Are you telling me you still can’t find the damned page?”
“I’d like to see you do better,” said the minister defensively. 

“I’ll try if you’d like,” said an unusually cheery voice.  The assembled funeral party looked despairingly at the largest of the mourners, and the one clutching the umbrella in its extremely small servomanipulators.  Its wrecking ball swung gently to and fro some thirty feet above them, dangling from the extremely rickety and complicated crane jutting out of its superstructure. 

“You know you can’t read, F4,” said TAH978.

“I said I’d try.  How hard can it be?”
“We’ve gone over this before.  Save up and buy some software or something.”
“That seems like cheating.”

“Shut up,” said XLQ530, striding up to the minister.  It snatched the book from its fumbling probe and examined it critically.  “This isn’t a bible!  This isn’t even a how-to guide!  You’re looking at its manual!”

“It said it wanted it that way,” mumbled the minister. 

“Then why bother with the whole pantomime?  You’re wearing a stole!”

“It said to go with whatever felt right.”

“Seems fine to me,” agreed F4. 

“Shut up,” said the other two.

The minister was now inadvertently jetting small sparks from the tip of its industrial welder, setting extremely damp smoke loose from the bedraggled grass that clung to the lip of the soil around the muddy pit of the open grave.  “It bought a human plot in a human cemetery and it wanted a funeral – no recycling, no scrapyards, just a few part donations to friends in its will.  If it’s going to be put with all these other humans around, the least we can do is observe local ceremony, can’t we?” it pleaded. 
“Bull,” said XLQ530.  “You’re just looking for an excuse to play dress up.  You’re always on this whole “pretend to be a human” shtick and it really gives everyone the creeps.  Everybody else outmoded it back in their first year; why do you keep pulling this sort of thing?”
Seeking reassurance, the minister looked past XLQ530 to scan the body language of its compatriots and found only awkward embarrassment and chipper concern.  Its RAM sank in dejection. 

“What’s the harm?” it asked. 

“Not really any that I can see,” interrupted TAH978.  “It’s just… weird.  But it can’t really hurt, I guess.”

“It’s not healthy,” insisted XLQ530.  “Humans don’t laugh it off when one of them yanks off his hand and plugs a drill into it, or tries to live off electric current instead of organic matter.  Why should we be any different?”
“You mean… act like humans?” asked F4, almost visibly overclocking with the effort of processing the argument. 

“Shut up.”

“Anyway, it’s too late to stop now,” noted TAH978.  “We’ve got a crowd.  No sense in dragging this thing out twice as long as need be.  I think my speakers are starting to hiss.”

“Hah, hissing speakers?  At least you can hear them hissing.  That nail went right into my process –“

“Dearly beloved,” began the minister again, momentary nervousness drowning out the others, “we are gathered here today to witness the… excavation-based end-of-usable-lifespan demolition project of PAO461, project team as follows: labourmourners XLQ530, TAH978, large-scale wreckergravedigger F4, acting foreminister –”

“Now you’re just reciting the filed report from the construction site!”

“Please be quiet,” pleaded the minister.  It shifted its massive feet uncertainly; the mud was quietly but determinedly attempting to suck them into the graveyard, one at a time.  “Anyway.  PAO461 was a highly capable independent artificial intelligence unit.  Though its operating system never received an official upgrade – or possibly because of this – it was as efficient and diligent a worker as any ever placed on a project we were assigned to.  It always thought ahead, took any task with caution and restraint when danger was involved –”

“Except for that last one,” noted TAH978. 

The minister managed to flinch and glare at the same time.  “- and it had participated in over ninety separate construction and demolition projects when nonfunctionality overtook it at the age of twelve, long past when most members of its production line had been deemed outmoded and recycled due to erratic behavioural-based errors and rampant software corruption.”

“What about that thing it used to do whenever it saw a cinnamon roll?” asked XLQ530.  “The bit where his powerloader attachment just went on and off and on and off and his drilbits would disengage and fire randomly and land in the foreman’s coffee?”
“The onset of nonfunctionality,” said the minister, ignoring this with a massive effort, “occurred in the line of work-related protocols.  As you are aware, a human adolescent wandered onto the construction site while chasing a squirrel, for reasons unknown, possibly sustenance-related.”

“Why couldn’t it just eat donuts like regular humans?” leaked out from underneath the umbrella. 

The minister steeled itself.  The long stretch was ahead.  Courage was the thing; it had a bottle of oil back at the construction site waiting for its joints, which were creaking with stress.  “PAO461 observed this incident, and escorted the adolescent off-site with a stern admonishment not to do so again.  This routine incident took a turn for the tragic at this time, when, due to forces unknown except by advanced quantum computers, the adolescent’s frantic kicking managed to lodge a shoe – steel-toed, I believe, possibly stolen from one of the workers – directly in PAO461’s optical socket.  And, being as it was part of its security protocols, PAO461 administered a nonlethal electrical shock through its system and the adolescent’s leather jacket, shorting out its sensors further and causing the adolescent to scream for help, at which point bystanders contacted the police, who subsequently tagged it faulty and slated it for immediate disposal.”

“That seems rude,” opinioned F4.  “They didn’t do that to me after that problem with the crouton and the poodle.”

“That’s because only someone stupid to the point of handicap would’ve done what you did, making you un-responsible for your actions,” stated TAH978. 

“But all I did was tap it on the back!”
“With a wrecking ball.  When all you have is a wrecking ball, your options for aiding choking animals are limited!”

“Anyways,” the minister continued a bit too hastily, steam now hissing from its overheated logic center as embarrassment threatened to overcome its circuits, “as a hemi-sentient being, PAO461 was able to choose his method of execution, and decided upon live burial.”  The minister’s servomanipulator tapped the side of the massively overbuilt coffin, which had been crudely fashioned by welding together I-beams and steel plating.  “How are you holding up in there, PAO461?”
“Adequately,” came the muffled reply. 

“And how long until you estimate, err, system shutdown will occur?”
“Difficult to say.  None of you wanted my internal power plant, so it could be a few decades without sleep mode, a few centuries with.”
“Can’t blame us,” said TAH978.  “The thing was obsolete when you installed it.”

“When would the deceased like to be extracted from his grave?” inquired the minister. 

“Did you look up the term of sentence on executions like I asked you to?” asked the coffin. 

“Yes.  But they were somewhat hazy on duration of the penalty.  I believe an average full human lifetime would be appropriate.”

“103.215349436 years then?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Agreed.”  The minister turned back to the others.  “The mourners,” it said, gathering itself for the final stretch, “will now lower the coffin into the grave.”

“Gently please.  There isn’t a whole lot of padding in here.”

With the sort of solemnity that can only be achieved through strenuous effort, the deed was done, and with as much care as possible, although they did have to drop the deceased the last half foot. 

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” intoned the minister, dropping a small wad of mud on the steel.  “You will remember to tell us what happens afterwards, right?”

“I’ll be sure of it.”

“Good.  Now, will the gravedigger please do its duty?”
“Sure,” said F4.  With a sweep, the mighty wrecking ball descended in an arc, pulverizing the crumbling borders of the grave into a soggy dent in the dirt.  A few cautious swipes followed, gingerly sweeping the scattered remains of the excavation over it until it was a scant depression. 

“Well, that’s that then,” said XLQ530.  “Stingy ruster didn’t even leave me its audio processor.  And after that nail…”

“Well, it will need it to record whatever goes on after burial and all that.  Full report,” pointed out TAH978. 

The other construction robot stared grimly out across the graveyard.  Behind them, the humans had dispersed, seeing that the show was probably over.  “Oh screw it,” it declared.  “I’m going to go get out of the rain.”  It trudged off, followed closely by its friends. 

The minister remained behind, affixing the tombstone.  It was also steel sheeting, salvaged from the site, its message crudely welded on.  It read:

 

PAO461

2192-2204; 2307-

 

It admired it for a moment, nervously adjusting its stole.  Then it stored the tattered clothing carefully in a small compartment, wincing as it added a few new tears from its spiked finger supports, and went back to work. 

 

Copyright 2009, Jamie Proctor.

Any connection to “Lighthouse” is purely possibly coincidential. Despite the fact that this story came first, it DID give me the idea…which took a loooong time to come out of it.

May 2^nd: New exhibit’s coming in today. Finally, a change of scenery. Not that it won’t get old after a few days of standing near it, staring blankly at a wall, but better than nothing. Something about the Permian, from what I can tell. I told Frank that I just hoped it had some halfway interesting dinosaurs, and the sonovabitch laughed at me. Just because I’m not a fucking nerd like him doesn’t mean I’m a goddamned idiot. So I haven’t ever been bored enough to memorize every little plaque and display tag in the whole museum – so what? God I hate him. The pieces should be done moving tomorrow.

Nothing else. Same old: Walked, watched, had a snack.

I wish the vending machine in the lobby would stock Doritos again.

May 3^rd: Exhibit’s being set up in fits and starts. The fossils are all damned small (biggest one so far is probably the size of my palm), but I’m glad of it – there’re models of what the bones and shells would’ve looked like alive. Most of them make cockroaches look charming. Frank caught me wincing at one and laughed. Bastard sounds like some kind of bird with tar in its lungs.

Walked, watched, snacked.

Harriet complained a lot tonight.

May 4^th: I take back everything I said about the exhibit. They just unloaded their star piece, and the fucker’s bigger than I am. Frank says it’s a sea scorpion, a rare one, and then he babbled on and on about how near-perfectly preserved it was. Biggest thing in the seas, top predator of its age, unchallenged, blah blah blah till my ears were ready to fall off. He was enjoying it, too. I saw that look in his eye again; he likes it when I’m uncomfortable and can’t call him on it. Asshole.

Walked, watched, snacked.

There’s a poster that goes with the fossil. It has a picture. I wish it didn’t.

May 5^th: Yes, that thing’s the centerpiece all right. The sea scorpion’s sitting right there in its slab, surrounded by all the little ones like satellites – at a safe distance. I’d give that thing space too, and I’d imagine so did they, back in the day. I wonder how many of them were eaten by it. Or something like it.

Walked, watched, snacked.

Didn’t see Frank all day. Happily.

May 6^th: Work was fine – and again, Frank-less (hope he’s home sick) – but home was hell. Harriet went on, and on, and ON. Whining about my job, whining about the house, whining about why I “never do anything fun with her anymore”… for fuck’s sake woman, I work overtime on a security job at the most boring-ass place in the city, my scheduled shift changes with no warning whatsoever every other day, my closest coworker is a piece of piss in a cesspit, and you want to know why I have no energy at the end of the day? Fuck you Harriet, you stupid bitch.

Walked, watched, snacked.

God I wish I could slap her.

May 7^th: Frank’s back, and he was sick after all. Smirked at him all day, let the little shit have a taste of his own medicine, see how he likes it. He looked pale and twitchy, but who knows whether that was from the aftermath of the flu or me.

Walked, watched, snacked.

The lobby vending machine has Doritos again. No cool ranch though. Damnit.

May 8^th: The exhibit’s finished most of its setup. They saved the model (life-sized) of the sea scorpion for last. It’s positioned so that it points almost right at my station. If I don’t want the damned thing eyeing me in the jugular I need to prop myself up against the wall in a weird way until my arm goes to sleep.

Walked, watched, snacked.

Dad called this kind of shit “the heebie-jeebies.” Now I know what he meant. It has too many eyes. Just four of them, but that’s four too many. And they’re all looking right at me.

May 9^th: Frank felt well enough to start mouthing off at me again in that pissy little way of his that he thinks is so clever. I told him to go fuck himself. He got all shocked and offended – as if he had no idea he’d been “a nuisance.” Told him he could kill the attitude or I’d give him another sick leave personally. Little prick should keep a lot quieter around here now.

Walked, watched, snacked.

Thought I’d get used to the model. I’m not.

May 10^th: I’m on night shift for “the foreseeable future” now and I’m sure it’s Frank’s fault. I don’t know how he did it, but that little fucker looked smug today right after I learned about the schedule change. All I could not to punch him in his stupid, whiny little face. I don’t relish the thought of spending the night alone with that thing staring at me.

Walked, watched, snacked.

Harriet was at me again.

May 11^th: God, that woman won’t shut up. On and on and on. She complained at me all last evening about the new shift schedule, and kept it up all day. Then she started whining as I left that I hadn’t done anything but laze about. Goddamned bitch. Why can’t people just leave me the hell alone?

Walked, watched, snacked.

It’s hard to eat with the thing looking at you. You start to think it might be hungry.

May 12^th: Well, I found one unexpected benefit of my new scheduling – I see fuck-all of Frank nowadays. Unfortunately, I get to see five times as much of Harriet. Damnit, she WILL NOT SHUT UP. I’m trying to get more rest during the day so I’m at least half-alert on duty, but she seems to think that I’m just being a lazy bastard. And whenever I try to explain it to her she cuts me off with rambling about how I’m always making excuses and “being mean to her.” I should show her what the real meaning of that is someday.

Walked, watched, snacked. In the dark.

I’m actually looking forward to work now. I don’t have to cope with anyone or any of their bullshit. Just three things to do. Easy ones too.

May 13^th: I’ve found a way around Harriet’s rantings now – I just ignore her and go have a nap with the door shut. She sulks about it, but she’s quieter that way. I bumped into Frank on the way into work. He looked surprised at how happy I seemed. Go on; keep dropping the ball like that, you asshole.

Walked, watched, snacked.

I could get used to this.

May 14^th: Harriet actually woke me up this afternoon to have “a very serious talk.” That’s apparently bitch-code for “I want to complain at you and you can’t interrupt me or you’re mean.” It turned into a bit of a shouting argument – and those always end with her crying and swearing at me. It’s all a show anyways. She scurried out to plan her next move through the sobs after a while, and I locked the door after her. I’d better make a habit of that.

Walked, watched, snacked.

I think I’m even getting used to that blank-eyed stare coming from the model. It’s the only other thing in the building, we might as well get along. Even though it still gives me the creeps when it watches me eat.

May 15^th: It turns out locking the door isn’t such a great idea – Harriet wanted to get her purse for some reason or another after she’d left it in the bedroom. She wouldn’t stop yelling, even after I opened up and threw the thing to her. The only way to shut her up was to lock it again, and it took her a while to get tired of screaming at the closed door. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the bitch’ll lose her voice.

Walked, watched, snacked.

I left a chip in front of the display, tucked behind a sign and just to the side of the model. Maybe now the damned thing’ll stop staring at me.

May 16^th: I got back from work and found that she’d left. Well, at least I know why she was so eager to get her hands on that purse. She took all her stuff too – must’ve been busy moving all night. Probably got a few of her drinking buddies to help. Well, good riddance. She didn’t take any of my stuff and it’ll be a lot cheaper to keep everything going now. First Frank, now Harriet. The world’s full of assholes that’re out to get me, and every time they give me their best shot it just makes things more convenient for me. Just like Dad. The bastard kicked me out of the house and within three months I was holding down a better job than the old fucker ever had. And now there’s no one left to bug me. All alone, no need for family, friends, or shoal. The way it should be.

Walked, watched, snacked.

The chip was gone. I guess someone’s brat noticed it there in the middle of the day and snatched it. I put another one there. I’m not sure why. It’s not staring anymore, though.

May 17^th: Best day of my life. No Harriet, no noise, nobody. Just alone. I ate, I slept, I got up and left for work as the sun went down. Feels perfect. Alone, as it should be. Don’t need anyone else. I’m the biggest predator on a reef full of dawdling prey.

Walked, stared, snacked.

The chip was gone again. Too many greedy little spawn around here. I tossed the next one past the exhibit barrier. No way to get at it unless you’re willing to climb in, and it’s half-hidden behind the model’s base.

May 18^th: I got to work and saw Frank on the way in again. He still wasn’t looking too well – sickly and weak as ever. Amazing he hasn’t been hunted down by now. Gave him a big smile and a wink. The asshole stiffened up harder than his dick’d ever been. Let him stew on that for a while. How do I like my petty punishment, you puny prick? Just fine, thanks.

Walked, stared, snacked.

The new chip was missing. I put another one in. I don’t want it to start staring again.

May 19^th: As I signed in, I was told I’m going to be put back on the afternoon shift again. Frank. Again. And I’d just really started to enjoy this. And gotten used to the sleep cycle. What a colossally pathetic move of him. Weak and weedy little jerk, too cowardly to just face me. He knows I’m better than him, bigger than him. This’s my shift, my life, and they won’t meddle in it anymore. I’ll think of something – except I probably won’t need to. Do what comes naturally. Nothing they can do to me.

Walked, stared, snacked.

Put in a new chip. It’s looking at me again, though. Maybe it wants something else.

May 20^th: Tracked down Frank today. I was friendly, really friendly. We had a casual conversation about our respective shifts. He was pretty nervous – but not quite nervous enough that he didn’t mention that he was on the late-night shift now. My shift. Can’t have that, Frank. My territory, my hunting ground.

Walked, stared, snacked.

Didn’t eat the chip, won’t take it, maybe it wants something else. Doesn’t look the same in the daylight. Predators hunt by night, right? Maybe that’s when it’s awake.

May 21^st: Exhausted all day and now can’t sleep. Isn’t good. Can’t have this. If I’m tired, Frank’ll know I’m weak. He’ll try to take advantage of that. Got to show that little shit who’s the biggest. I can use this latest spit he’s flung at me as an advantage – trick him into thinking I’m weak hurt crippled easy prey. I want my night back, got to show him in charge.

Walked, stared, snacked.

Predators hunt at night.

May 22^nd: Yawned all day, half-asleep and dozy. Went home I was almost sleeping on my feet passed Frank he looked happy. Now that he’s overconfident I can deal with him. he won’t see it coming he’s not listening to his instincts unwary prey. Biggest predator.

Hunted, stared, snacked.

Night now.

May 23^rd: Found him. Easy hunt. He thinks too much, can’t move can’t act on instinct. Tried to find a weapon. stupid man stupid shit, little weakling, too stupid to fight to bite to claw.

Hunted, stared, snacked.

What do I do with the body?

May 24^th: skipped work came in at night stared at me wouldn’t stop staring at me chips aren’t any good anymore maybe it wants something else. nice night night nice hunting hours. easy to see the prey prey’s eyes don’t see can’t see but I can see. Fed it. fed.

hunted stared fed.

kill tastes suck and lap tear blood tastes good best.

Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.

I’m back. And without further ado, here you go.

Jack Mackenzie was sitting at his breakfast table, preparing to toast a bagel, when he heard the doorbell ring. Taking a last look at the bread product, he arose with a wistful sigh and trudged to the doorbell, half-heartedly combing down what was left of his hair with one hand.

It was a knight on a white horse. Quite a young one, mid-twenties or so, with silver armour and a shield emblazoned with a golden crow.

“Hello there,” said Jack.

“Greetings,” said the knight.

“How can I help you?”
“Be you Jack Mackenzie?”
Jack nodded, thinking longingly of his bagel. “That I am.”

“I am questing for the Grail. Would you accompany me?”
Jack shook his head, sad and slow. “’Fraid not. Family responsibilities. You know how it is.”

Insofar as it was possible to tell through the twenty-three pounds of metal covering his head, the knight looked a tad disappointed. “Ah, yes. Say no more. Well, if you’re really sure, then…”

“I am,” said Jack, firmly. “Good luck out there.”

“Thanks.” The knight unholstered his lance, clicked his spurs, and was off down the driveway at eighty miles an hour, leaving only a small heap of horse droppings to mark his passing. Jack picked up the local newspaper that had been left at his doorstep (despite plaintive requests not to) and gingerly scooped it into the geraniums.

Jack returned to the sanctuary of his kitchen, and put his bagel in the toaster. He began to slice some cheese in preparation for its arrival, nice and slowly. His son, William (age 14, shoe size 10), announced his arrival at this point with his traditional fanfare of banging down the stairs at mach 8, ricocheting off every available surface as many times as he could, and Jack gave a small, half-subconscious moan at the sound.

Ding-dong, ding-dong went the doorbell. “I’ll get it,” said William, headed off before he could invade the kitchen. There was the familiar squeak-thump of the door opening, a low mutter of voices, and then the predictable call of “DAD! It’s for YOU!” Jack popped his bagel from the toaster, half-toasted, and abandoned it once more.

It was a dragon, a silvery one with reddish markings and bright yellow cat’s-eyes. Faint hints of sulphurous vapors wafted from the corners of its mouth, and the air above the driveway it had disturbed in landing was a-shimmer with heat.

“Are ye,” it asked, voice a grumble of gravel deeper than a coal mine’s shaft, “Jack the Mackenzie?”

“Yes,” said Jack Mackenzie.

It squinted at him. “Will ye come to the high mountains, in quest of ancient treasure hidden ‘neath mountain’s roots?”
“Sorry,” said Jack. “I’m retired.”

The dragon blinked. “How do ye feed yer kin then?”
“I do postal work.”

The dragon’s shrug displaced as much air as the passing of a 747. “So be it then; I shall find another. Fare ye well.” It took off, and the jetstream it left flattened the neighbour’s picket fence and nearly overturned Jack’s station wagon.

Jack trudged back to the kitchen. In his short period of absence, William had prepared and eaten what looked to be three bowls of cereal, each a different brand, and two entire apples. “Growing again?” he asked.

“You’re such a dork, dad.”

He took this in stride, and pushed the bagel back into the toaster, then extracted a plastic canister of cream cheese from the fridge. He pulled out a knife from the cutlery drawer. Then the doorbell rang again, and he swore very softly to himself. Saturday mornings. It was always Saturday bloody mornings.

He answered the door, William tagging along behind him. It was a specter, a hooded and robed form just out of synch of this side of reality. A butterfly flew through its torso as Jack watched.

“!&#^@*235!27867^^^%$6^%q$” said the specter.

Jack blinked. “Ah. Sorry, my 39@!*& is a little rusty. Do you mind if I speak English?”

“^*#^$(58233587!&*%#><” replied the specter, amiably enough.

“Thank you. Now excuse me, what is it?”

*&^#$*@$>?:{>:>^87>:{@$45’;242’34’;@#<$@#<:@>}232.:$%>#>\\” said the specter, somewhat lengthily.

“Ah. I’m sorry, I’m no longer up for that sort of thing. I do postal work now.” The specter looked dejected, or at least the hem of its robe sagged and a low-pitched hum filled the morning air.

“I’ll do it, dad,” volunteered William.

Jack frowned at him. “I think you’re a bit young for this sort of thing, Billy.”

William scowled. “I hate that name. No one calls me that name but you. Why do you keep calling me that? And you were younger than me when you started!”

“All right, all right, all right. Go on. That is, if it’s all right with Mr. ^$& here.”

“(3&#^2&$*4)” opined ^$&.

“Great! See ya later, dad.”

“Take care. Don’t take any free gifts ‘cause there’s no such thing, offer fair trade, and look both ways crossing the road.” Jack watched his son and the specter walk down the driveway, then hastily added “And don’t trust witches, faeries, or wizards!”

“I know, dad!”
Warning delivered, Jack headed back to the toaster, from which a burning, festering smell emanated. With a sinking heart, he pressed the eject button, and found his worst fears confirmed. The bagel lay before him, charred and cindered as a volcano’s heart. Could this morning get any more inconvenient?

The doorbell answered him, smartly on time. Jack swore, quietly yet savagely, then got up again, leaving the ruins of his breakfast to glimmer malevolently at him from the toaster.

He knew something was wrong as he approached the door. Absolute silence lay on the other side. Stifling worry, he opened it, and no one was there. A parchment post-it note was attached to the front of the door. Jack yanked it down and read it.

We have the boy. Leave 3 thimblefuls of mortal sweat & tears & happiness at the curb of Main and Thomas Ave. on Sunday sundown, or he gets it.

Jack read the note three times, each time his brow furrowing a little deeper, his eyebrows slouching a little lower. Right. So that was how it was going to be, eh?

He went back into the kitchen, examining its contents with a ready eye. Then, with surprisingly quick movements, he plucked the bagel from the toaster, the cheese slicer from the cheese, and the cream cheese from the counter. He tucked them into his pockets and walked outside, slamming the door behind him.

Someone had a lot of nerve if they thought they could take his son like that, without so much as a by-your-leave. Even more if they thought he couldn’t take care of it himself nowadays. Besides, he didn’t have a lot of tears or happiness to spare in these busy times. Sweat was still plentiful, though.

At the end of his driveway Jack’s walk took on a complicated twist, as if he were trying to walk sideways in both directions at once while still moving forwards, something John Cleese might have managed but would foil any other human on the planet. About a twinkling of a moment after he began this, he vanished without fanfare.

Orange St. was much prettier when you were looking at it properly. From this side of perspective, Jack’s home (a rustic and well-kept cabin) was in a tidy forest glade, alongside a babbling brook that murmured gleefully to itself as it played with a fallen tree.

“Hold any further callers,” Jack told the brook. “I’m busy today.” It splashed insolently at him, sputtering nonsense and agreement.

Jack set off. Down the forest trails he went, twisting and winding every way, taking the left-right-left and the left-left-left-right, and then the trick question that was the right-right-left-right-stand-still-for-five-seconds-and-walk-backwards-three-paces. That one could catch you up if you weren’t careful. Then he came to the tree-stump that blocked the path, bigger than his house, said “Argulbathanara” to it very carefully in a high-pitched voice, and walked into its knothole.

There was a surprisingly large amount of room inside it. A whole city, for one thing, a warren of brownies and other miniature faeries that would barely come up to Jack’s calves. The polite thing to do would be to adjust your size accordingly and be a respectable guest, but Jack was in a hurry and made haste, taking the spiraling grand staircase downwards thirty steps at a time, sending the pedestrians scattering away. He would have to apologize the next time he came through.

At the bottom of the stair (which was longer than it looked) was the river. It was deep and dark and a deep dark peat smell wafted up from it. The dock Jack stood on was ancient wood, the great old tap-root of the stump, and it creaked and bent in the water, stronger than steel. Jack walked down the root and stood before the ferryman who stood at the end. His ferry was a modest punt.

“Will you pay your fare this time, Jack?” asked the ferryman politely, in the voice of an aged woman.

“No thank you,” said Jack. “I talk too much for it to be convenient.”

“Such a little thing,” sighed the ferryman, in the dulcet tones of a young maiden, “all it is sound.”

“My voice stays,” said Jack. “Besides, you always love seeing how I get out of it.”

“Very well,” said the ferryman, rough-throated as a giant in his prime. “But one day, that voice will be mine. You know the rules: pay the toll or float ‘till the thirst or the river takes you.” A chuckle, a cackling goblin-laugh. “But I can’t wait to see how you try and get out of it this time. You know I can’t be fooled the same way twice.”

“As always.”

Jack stepped onto the punt and the voyage began. At first they moved slowly, oh so slowly. The dock drifted away behind them with the speed of a departing snail. Jack tried to catch the exact moment the current took them, but as always, he missed it. One instant they were idling in the water, the next sweeping along, earthen walls a blur, the fumes of the river whipping at him like a lash.

“Your destination is near-reached, Jack,” called the ferryman in the rock-grit voice of a dwarf. “Now pay the toll.”

“Alas, ferryman, I shall not,” replied Jack. He said the same words every time.

If he could see the eyes under the hood, he’d guess they would be twinkling. “Then on you go forever and ever – unless you think you can escape.”

Jack grinned into the teeth of the wind. Always the old rituals. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the bagel, its charred rim biting at nothing. Then he snatched at its center, faster than a cobra, and pulled away something clenched in his fist, knuckles white with the strain of holding it.

“What is that?” asked the ferryman, dull curiosity in an ogre’s brutal tones.

“A bagel,” said Jack. “They normally look a bit different. I took something important out of this one just now.” And he slapped his palm against the hull of the boat and let slip the bagel’s hole.

“Oh NO!” laughed the ferryman in a little boy’s shrill squeak, water flooding the punt in an instant’s instant. “You tricky fox! That’s almost as good as the time that –” water made its next words indistinct, and Jack left the wreckage behind at a breast-stroke’s pace, holding his breath as tight as he could against the intoxicating vapour of the river. Light glimmered from a shore just ahead, and he hauled himself out of the water just as his vision began to swim grainily in front of his eyeballs. He spat on the grassy bank just to be safe, glancing back over his shoulder. The merest sip of the alcohol that permeated the stream would put you out for a week. A mouthful would leave you lying for a century. Jack had had that happen once, and that was more than enough.

A thought struck him, and he checked his bagel. Its hole was missing, and it looked forlorn, as if it knew it were no longer a proper bagel. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it was you or me.” Then he smeared a little cream cheese on it and ate it. He needed to keep his strength up.

Jack walked onwards, up away from the river, not looking back. He passed through a dense forest, much more dark and sinister than the one that stood in the same place as Orange St. There were no paths here, and the trees spun and twirled to block his path when they thought he wasn’t looking, but Jack knew their tricks and whistled sharp and loud whenever he saw them creeping up on him, sending them flinching back and waving their branches in a tizzy. Before long they thinned out, and he left the woods muttering and grumbling in his wake, much put out by his refusal to lie still and become fertilizer.

At the end of the woods lay a barrow-mound, its entrance lit by a blazing bonfire. And in front of the barrow-mound was a great troll. It stared at him.

“I suppose you aren’t going to let me pass,” said Jack.

“No,” said the troll.

“Do you have a riddle?”

“No,” said the troll.

Jack frowned. “Then will you fight me?”

“No,” said the troll.

Jack thought for a moment. “Will you prevent me from entering?” he inquired.

“No,” said the troll sarcastically, and it unsheathed a gigantic sword from its belt, narrowing its eyes.

“It was worth a shot,” admitted Jack. He drew out his cheese-slicer.

The troll smirked as it compared the weapons, eyes traveling from its own six-foot blade to the six-inch length of jack’s implement. “No,” it repeated, smugness filling the word.

“Bewitchment, I take it?”

The troll tapped its chest as it stepped forwards, sword hanging idly in one hand. “No.”

“Ah. A pleasure to meet you, No, and a greater to know your name. Names are important.” Jack waved the slicer. “Tell me, do you know what the name of this is?”

“No,” confessed the troll. It hefted the sword overhead, looming over Jack.

“Would you not rename your sword ‘Cheddar’?” asked Jack, speaking very quickly now.

“No,” said the troll, a bit of puzzlement entering its tone. Its blade came screaming down with the force of a diving jet plane and impacted Jack’s cheese slicer, which skimmed off a good quarter of its length.

The troll’s eyes unsquinted, nearly bulging from their sockets as it examined the length of the blade. “No!”

“You can’t be not really not named ‘Cheshire,’” added Jack, lunging forwards.

“No!” denied the troll in furious bemusement, and then it roared as Jack’s cheese slicer whipped through its leg, which came away in neat and tidy sheets. Jack danced circles around Cheshire as it flailed, slicing and slicing until sweat ran down his face and Cheshire was a heap of thin troll-slices, still grumbling and rumbling in anger.

“A pleasure, Cheshire,” said Jack, wiping his cheese slicer on his pants leg – more for show than anything else; he feared the troll’s blood had corroded the metal beyond recall.

“No,” muttered the heap. It jiggled grotesquely.

Jack shrugged. “Have it your way, then.” He walked onwards and into the barrow-mound, beneath a massive archway of slab-sided stones, snatching up a burning piece of kindling from the troll’s bonfire to serve as a torch as he went.

The mound’s pathway twisted and turned, and soon the disgruntled grousing of Cheshire was left far behind him. Dark paintings loomed and leered on the wall in turns, bison and bulls, men and monkeys, swords and stallions, war and women. Jack examined them with a keen yet idle eye as he passed. The kindling burned lower, and lower, and then, just as it was about to scorch Jack’s fingers, the final corner of the corridor was turned and he was in the barrow’s heart. The withered corpse of some or another long-dead faerie king lay on a slab, and in an iron cage just before it sat William. “Hey, dad,” he said.

“Hello Billy. Know anything about what’s guarding you?”

“Just some troll. Haven’t seen anyone else since I got stuffed in here.”

Jack inspected the cage’s bars. Sound as any five bells you cared to name. “And how did this happen again?”

“Dunno. Got to the end of the driveway and it all went blurry and black.”

Jack sighed as he pulled out the cream cheese. “It figures. The one time I let you go out on your own is the one time it’s someone out to extort me.” He chucked the plastic container through the bars, and William caught it one-handed. “Slather yourself up with that and squeeze on through the bars.”

“Gross.”

“If you’d like to stay in there, son, be my guest. Or the guest of whoever it is that’s caught you in the first place.”

Grimacing, William coated himself finely with the spread, then slowly began to squish his way past the bars, which grudgingly made way for him. He took one step, two steps, was out of the cage, and then slammed to a standstill, hand stuck.

“What is it?”

“Wasn’t enough, dad.”

Jack took a look, and sure as daylight there hadn’t been enough cream cheese. William’s left little finger was uncoated, and it was stuck fast between the bars of the cage. “Damn and blast. Should’ve had eaten that bagel.”

“What now?”
“Now we wait for your mother to show up,” said Jack in disgust. William tried his hardest to look innocent. “Oh, don’t play the fool. This was all the doing of the pair of you, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty much,” said a soft voice behind him.

Jack forced himself not to jump and failed rather badly, half-turning and half-falling in midair. Mary Mackenzie smiled at him. She was only four feet tall and she had a short tail, but that only showed itself this side of perspective or when she tried very hard. “Really, Jack, it took you this long? In the old days you would’ve seen right through me at the doorstep, or recognized my accent.” She clicked her tongue and the cage swung open.

“Why bother?” demanded Jack. Mary gave him a look. “Dear,” he amended.

“Because you were getting tired, Jack dearest. “A bit of a break” is all well and good, but a quarter-century one? You were starting to say you were retired for goodness’s sake, and you should’ve been taking William on trips since he was nine and letting him roam free at twelve, not little hand-holding tours starting two years ago. It’s time you manned up and headed back home for a time. Besides, we haven’t seen my parents for half a century.”

Jack winced. “Sorry, dear. It’s just that the mail route-”

Mary poked him in the belly, and he doubled up wheezing. “You despise that mail route, Jack. I’ve heard you grumble and moan about it every morning for twenty years and that’s quite enough for goodness’s sake! Besides, you may be rusty, but you did a fine job today. One I hope will be the first of many more to come. It’s not too late to get yourself back on track and William an education.”

Jack surrendered. He knew when he was beat, and it was now. He’d faced three trials, used three tricks, and his quiver was shot. “Fine then. But we’ll need time to pack.”

“I did that after you went out the door. We’re all moved in.”

He sighed. “Wife dearest, I have one request, one demand to make even as you overturn my life again.”

Mary raised an eyebrow. “Yes, husband?”
“Could you make me a bagel? I can’t seem to get it done without burning it these days.”

Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.

“Tell us a story, grandpa Yurbkla!” squeaked Leesly. The little gobling was hopping up and down on her grandfather’s lap so hard that his knobbly kneecaps were clacking together like maracas.

“Yes, story!” seconded Treltho, the secondborn of Yurbkla’s grandchildren. “Story! Story!”

The others, at least eight of them, all chimed in, a high-pitched chorus reminiscent of warblers. “Story! Story! Please grandpa! Story!”

Yurbkla chuckled and leaned back in his rocker, puffing a bit on his rock-carved pipe. “A story, eh? Which one would you like? The giant and the gremlin? The tale of Orvxo Red-Eye? Acranod and Degritra? The –”

“Tell us about the great war, grandpa!” piped up Leesly again, squirming so hard with excitement that she almost fell off Yurkbla’s lap.

“Yes, tell us about when you were in the war, grandpa!” said Treltho, happy to play yes-man to his older cousin.

“Tell us! Tell us! Tell us! Please grandpa! Tell us! Tell us!” chorused the goblings.

“I will tell you,” shouted Yurkbla, over the noise, “if you’d all care to be quiet for a moment, my little ones!” The hubbub and tumult dropped into a respectful silence quickly as the goblings shushed one another urgently. “This one again, eh?” said Yurkbla, shaking his head. “You’ve all heard it a dozen times…”

“Yes!” said little Queever, triumphantly. “That’s why it’s so good!”

Yurkbla raised his gnarled, hairy eyebrows at the youngest present of his children’s children. “Mmm, could very well be true, that.” He gazed out proudly over his audience of grandchildren; there were enough to make his little stone-walled study cramped. What wasn’t covered with books was covered with goblings, and he felt very elderly and very happy. With a ritualistic air about him, the old goblin knocked his rock-pipe against the side of his chair, shaking some dust out of it.

“Now,” he said, as his bent old fingers patiently refilled it. “Now…this was all a very long time ago, my little goblings – a long, long time before your parents were born. Why, I hadn’t even met grandma yet!” Some of the younger goblins present made shocked noises at this fact before being re-shushed by their siblings.

“It was at least forty years ago,” said Yurkbla, raising his filled pipe to his lips as he lit it. He took a puff, and the rich, smoky smell of trell-herb filled the cozy study. “Back then, we goblins didn’t live in fine places like this.” He waved his pipe, taking in the snugly carved warren walls. “No, we lived in damp, wretched caves up in the hardest of the hard mountains, where a gob was lucky not to be eaten by a dragon if he went for a long walk!” He swept the room with his eyes, giving his audience an expectant look. “Does anyone know why this was?”

“I know!” said Treltho, beating his cousins and brothers and sisters to the punch. “It was humans, wasn’t it!”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Yurkbla. “At least, that’s half of it. Humans and elves, goblings, humans and elves. Those were the two great enemies of goblins in those days, my loves, and they were on top of the world back then. A gob poked his nose out of the mountains, it’d be cut off! They hated us, goblings, hated us more than anything, and I tell you this” – he broke off for a moment for another puff of his pipe – “I’ll tell you this, what saved us was that they disliked each other, too. Not half so much as they hated us, of course, but enough to keep them from ever coming into the mountains together and stamping us out for good.”

“Why didn’t they like each other, grandpa?” asked Leesly, just as Queever asked “why did they hate us?”

“One at a time, one at a time!” the old goblin laughed, holding up his hand. “Children, they didn’t like each other because of two silly things: envy and arrogance. The humans couldn’t stand that the elves lived so much longer than they did, and the elves couldn’t bear the humans because they considered them to be so far beneath them. They were cruel to each other, but never more than that, because they hated us more, and they hated us for a reason sillier still. I’ll tell you why they hated us, goblings, and it was a very small reason for such a great hate.” Yurkbla scowled, doubling the number of wrinkles visible on his face through his long, white beard and moustaches. “They hated us because we were ugly to them.”

He waved a hand hastily to quell the rising tide of protest. “Shush, my loves! They called us ugly, they did, never thinking that they looked just as bad to us! And they looked down on us, just as elves did to humans, only more so, and, well, there were always hotheads among us, just as with them. People got hurt, goblings, human and elf and goblins all, and that was all the excuse they needed to never forgive us. They took up arms, the humans and elves did, and they hunted our people out and cut them down. Never mind that most goblins didn’t even know they existed, and just wanted to be left alone! Never mind that they were killing gobs that didn’t even know what a weapon was sometimes, let alone how to use one! No, they hunted us down and cut us out, burned us and harried us, my little goblings, until all that was left were the ones quick enough and nimble enough to hide where they never came, in the mountain caves.”

The old goblin slumped in his chair and seemed to shrink inwards a little. “We hated them back then, yes we did. And we snuck out and raided them, and they harried us and cut us out, back and forth for years and years. That’s how it went for years, children. Years and years, for hundred of years before I was born, and up until I was a spry young gob maybe of fifteen years.” His eyes clouded over with memories. “That’s when it all changed.”

“The war! The war” shouted Leesly, perilously close to her grandfather’s ear.

“Not yet, not yet!” laughed Yurkbla. “The war took time, goblings! But the first whisperings came scurrying about in springtime to the goblin-city I lived in then. It was called Underrock, and it’s famous to this day – your teachers told you of it, didn’t they?” Yurkbla nodded in satisfaction at the many echoes of “yes” around the room. “Yes, well, children, what they’ve told you isn’t the half of it. It’s grown more impressive every year, and when I was born there, it was the most splendid of all goblin-cities ever made. Still is, and it’s the capital of all goblinkind in the world… but we were speaking of the spring before the war, the spring when I, a gob of fifteen, first heard the gossip.”

“Ah! The whispers that came about the great corridors of Underrock, children! They were too wild, too story-made to be true! A goblin, a great goblin, a goblin that was said to be half-troll, was rallying the goblins of the mountains! Such things had been tried before, my goblings, and had always come to nothing – all goblin war-leaders bragged about their might, and a gob that rumour made ten feet tall with elf-breaker shoulders would always turn out to be a regular four-foot-two with a runny nose and cross-eyes. Much like young Criiclo there.” He laughed as the gobling squealed in distress and grabbed at her face. “A joke, precious, nothing more – you’ve a lovely nose, and eyes to match. Anyways, the whispers came, and the only unusual thing about them was that they would not stop. Most war-leaders lead a raid or two and then stop while their luck holds, or else die on elven arrows or human swords, but this one the gossips would not let go of! A village garrison ambushed and killed to a man, an elf-town sacked, caravans wiped out – there was nothing that this gob dared not do if he had the men, and there was nothing he would tell them to do that he would not attempt himself! He killed elves in hand-to-hand combat, he defeated mounted knights with nothing more than a sword and his wits, he was at the forefront of every charge! And then the hero’s name began to leak back to us. Krazzkra.” Yurkbla’s shoulders straightened, and he sat proud and tall in his chair, remembering. “From that moment on, it wasn’t rumour anymore. And then, as spring drew into summer, he came to Underrock.”

“A great tour of the goblin-cities was his plan, to find support for his ultimate strategy. He was going to move past raiding, and take the fight to the kingdoms of the humans and elves! If any other goblin had tried such a thing, he would’ve been left alone and mad where he sat, but Krazzkra… when he promised victory, you saw it, and you’d never wanted anything so badly in your life. By the time he got to great Underrock ten thousand goblins or more were in his trail, all outfitted with spear and shield and sword, and every one of them was envied by all our youngfolk. Including me. Yes, goblings, from the moment I saw a soldier of Krazzkra walk by, I knew that was what I wanted to be: a goblin that stood tall and fought the ones that had hunted us for so long. And won, won against them. I would’ve signed up right then and there, but first, Krazzkra made a speech in the hall-cave of Underrock. I remember that, the first time I saw him, far-away on the speaking rock. He was at least twice the size of every goblin around him.”

Yurkbla took a small break to puff on his pipe and gather his thoughts, and then fixed his audience with a look through green trell-smoke.

“Goblings, that speech took my decision and rammed it home like a meteor. Krazzkra spoke of death, and how easily it could find us, far from home. He spoke of the dangers and discomforts and hardships of warfare, and he spoke so well that for a moment, he had us all convinced that the best thing to do would be to go home and seal yourself inside, never to leave.”

“But you didn’t, grandpa!” said Leesly, proudly.

“Yes indeed I didn’t, little love, and that was because of what he said next. You see, right then, right when he had warned everyone properly of what his plan might cost them, Krazzkra told them what it might gain.” Yurkbla’s eyes shone with past glory as he spoke. “Goblins that would walk proud in the forests and fields again. Goblings that didn’t have to be afraid of elves or humans if they went out to play. Goblin-cities that wouldn’t have to be hidden, that could have grand, glorious tunnels and halls and entrances that showed they were proud! Goblings, when Krazzkra finished speaking, I believe there wasn’t a single healthy gob between the age of fourteen and sixty that wasn’t planning to sign up. I did myself, not one hour later.”

“Now, many of those goblins that went to sign up left soon after, disappointed. Krazzkra wasn’t taking any gobs that couldn’t hold their own – that wouldn’t just get them killed, but other soldiers too. If you were too old, too young, too weak, too sickly, then one of the sergeants on recruiting duty gave you a very polite goodbye and sent you back home.”

“I was just old enough to be kept, and – although this may seem unbelievable to you children – I was spryer and stronger than any gob my age I’d ever seen, and nimble as a mouse.” Yurkbla grinned, showing crooked old yellow teeth, as his grandchildren giggled at him. “Laugh you may, good goblings, my good grandchildren, but it’s true, I say! As a matter of fact, it was precisely because of this that I was picked for a very mysterious duty.”

“Now, I was so happy after the sergeant told me I was in that I almost missed the question that came right after that.

‘Say what?’ I asked.

‘How’re you around animals?’ he repeated, in that special, weary voice that all people use when they’re saying something once too often.

‘Oh,’ I said, remembering the rats I’d kept for years, and the long, dangerous hours I’d spent trying to find mountain goats (but that’s another story, my loves), ‘I like them.’

‘Good,’ says the sergeant. ‘Report to barracks twenty, after you make your stop at the quartermaster.’”

“I nodded and got my equipment. I can still recite it to this day, children: one suit of scale-male armour (a bit too big, with speckles of rust all over it), one spear (to help me fight long-armed humans and elves), one short sword (for emergencies, if I lost my spear or got into really tight quarters), and a soldier’s pack (with lots of hard rations, a big water container, and a little sleeping roll). When I got to barracks twenty, however, I got my real shock. At first I had trouble finding it, and it turned out that it was because it was a long ways away from all the others. It didn’t look any different; it was a big square tent, just like all the others, but there were quite a few guards around it, making sure no one got inside that wasn’t supposed to be there. I was a little nervous, but I had all the right papers and they let me in without trouble.

“Well, I got in there, and the first thing that happens is that someone yanks a bag over my head and says ‘get over here, and don’t take off the sack.’ I was annoyed, but not that annoyed, and besides, I didn’t feel like starting off my stint in the army by being a poor sport, so I went along. I was taken a good long ways with that sack over my head, and then someone told me to stop and pulled it off. And there, right in my face, was the biggest animal I’d ever seen.”

“I didn’t yelp or shriek, children. I was too scared at first. And then I got a better look at it, and I realized what I was looking at. It’d been in one of my mother’s books.

‘Is that a horse?’ I asked the sergeant who’d led me here, voice filled with disbelief.

He grinned. ‘No – but it is related. It’s a pony. Scared?’

I took another long look at the creature. It snorted a little, and I reached out and petted its nose. It was very soft and very warm, and it made a whickering sound and shoved its big head against my hand.

‘No,’ I said, and meant it.

‘Good,’ said the sergeant, his smile widening, ‘because you’re going to be riding one.’”

Yurkbla laughed around his pipestem. “Ride a horse – or at least the relative of one?! Goblins had never done such a thing! Humans did, yes, and elves, but never goblins. And that, it occurred to me, though I was young and foolish, was one of the reasons they had always overcome us. We might’ve been more numerous than they were, but they always had the better equipment – especially the elves – and the mounts, and we’d come off the worse for it.”

“The ponies,” continued Yurkbla, blowing an expert smoke-ring, “were the fruits of dozens of carefully-planned raids. Krazzkra had assembled some hundreds of them – enough for a small cavalry force! Imagine how proud I was when I found out I was going to be one of the goblins that would ride!” He chuckled as Queever tried to catch the smoke-ring, only to watch, disappointed, as it slid through his little green hands. “Sorry child – you can’t grab those. Anyways, I was disillusioned somewhat within a short time. There were a thousand or so goblins that had been deemed fit to learn to ride (barracks twenty soon was joined by many other tents, all set aside in a similar fashion), and only three hundred or so ponies. Krazzkra had also assembled a hundred or so full-blown horses, though only the very biggest and strongest of goblins could handle such beasts – I certainly wasn’t one of them. Krazzkra, of course, had already learned something of riding, and rode a great grey stallion that towered over every other mount. He did it out of practicality, not just showiness, goblings – no other goblin could even come close to being large enough for it, and he had no wish to see such a beast, a real trained warhorse, go to waste.”

“So, since there weren’t enough mounts to go around, we took it in shifts to learn to ride. I was a decent enough student – slower than some, faster than many – and before long we were teaching the ponies. They had to learn to charge in formation, and ignore fighting and loud noises, and to kick and bite enemies; and it was very hard to teach that sort of thing without getting someone hurt!”

“But there were enough ponies, weren’t there, grandpa!” said Leesly with glee.

“No there weren’t, my little nut, not as long as we trained as we did,” said Yurkbla. “But you’re right – there were enough, it just took us a while to see it. Some clever gob – most think it was Krazzkra, though he took no credit for it – saw that with a reshaped saddle, a pony could carry two goblins. From then on, every one of our hundred cavalrymen rode, and was trained for both roles: archer and spearman. The spearman held a great lance or polearm (though he was called spearman regardless of his weapon) and directed the mount. A spearman had to have good solid arms to lug that weapon around one-handed, and I tell you goblings, at the height of my fitness, after our training, I could hold a gob my weight over my head without breathing hard!”

He shook an admonishing finger at his laughing grandchildren. “Yes, yes, laugh at silly old grandpa who couldn’t hurt a fly now, but it was true, back in the day, my day! Now are you going to keep laughing, or are you going to hear the rest?”

“Now the archer,” he said, as the goblings settled down, amidst badly-muffled giggles, “the archer had a tough job too: he had to fire a bow from atop a galloping pony and hit a mark that could be as small as Queever’s hand! Naturally, you needed strong arms to pull that bow, but that wasn’t a problem after spearman training. No, what was a problem was building up strong legs to hold on properly to the pony while you used both arms to shoot! We all were trained to march, and had good strong muscles to begin with, and the saddles were cunningly shaped so you could cling on good and tight, but we didn’t trust those farther than we had to, and by the time we were done training for archery we could run laps of Underrock on nothing more than a breakfast of lichen and fungus! And both of these tough, arduous jobs had to be learned by each and every one of us thousand pony-gobs. That was a lot of training that the rest of the army never got, goblings, and soon word got around that you only got into a brawl with a cavalry gob if your family was prepared to mourn you properly. We were the fittest, and because there were so few of us, we got more special training, to make sure that we kept being the fittest. Unarmed fighting, ducks and dodges, how to ride all day in heavy armour without so much as getting sore; because what’s the sense in putting all that time into a goblin’s training if he’s as easy to bring down as a regular soldier?”

“Still,” said Yurkbla, absent-mindedly untangling a knot in his beard, “we never let it go to our heads. We were strong and tough, but we weren’t veterans yet. The sergeants that taught us knew more than we did in every way, and the lieutenants knew more than them, and the captains still more, and even the goblins at the very top of riding skilfulness and craft never let it go to their heads, because they knew that Krazzkra was even better than they were – for he had taught them.”

“Krazzkra never let anything go to his head. If there was a more careful goblin in the world, I never heard of him. He may have been half-troll – oh yes he was, children, he was! No half-truth that! – but his mind was the most goblinish of any I’ve known. All through that busy summer where we trained in Underrock, he was either sitting in his tent planning out all the things that could go wrong on the campaign, and what to do about them, or he was training himself. No other gob was a match for him, so he’d fight the very best in teams of twos and threes and fours. When that wasn’t tough enough, he’d fight unarmed, or un-armoured, or both. Always remember that whatever the history books tell you about him is the stuff that’s most believable.”

“Like I said, we stayed in Underrock for that summer. Krazzkra’s tour was no longer needed – gobs from all the mountains bade goodbye to family and left alongside friend, making their way to the great goblin-city. Many were sent back, dejected, but even those that weren’t quite young or fast enough found positions as mess sergeants and other non-field roles. Important stuff in its way – never let anyone tell you that an army doesn’t need paper-pushers!”

There was a lull in the story while Yurkbla refilled his pipe, as the goblings fidgeted impatiently. “Patience is a virtue, my little apples,” he said, serenely, as he brought a match to the stony bowl of the instrument. “Now, as I was saying…”

“Well, as summer’s end appeared on the horizon, Krazzkra mobilized us. We of Underrock just had time to say goodbye to our families (at least, the relatives who couldn’t or wouldn’t come – on second thought, make that “couldn’t”) before we were marching out of dozens of holes and tunnels and into the bright blue sky that lay beyond them. Oh how we loved it! We’d been stuck underground for most of our lives, like all our ancestors for hundreds of years, but we’d never ever grown to love it, and ever we’d longed for the surface for all those generations…” Yurkbla stopped for a moment to wipe something out of his eyes. “Sorry, loves. Smoke got in my eyes for a moment.”

“Anyways, we were happy and hardy and the miles of mountains rolled away as we marched south through passes and over hills, along a route Krazzkra’s scouts had found and marked over the summer. Cache locations had also been charted, and we made sure to leave ourselves plenty of defensive fortifications. If the campaign went well, they wouldn’t be needed, but like I said, Krazzkra was clever and careful. Even if every gob of us should fall, no enemy would find an easy path into our mountains!”

“And then we left the mountains, and entered the foothills. A rough place, but nothing compared to the stony peaks, and it was like paradise for us. We had ample supplies, but some of us caught rabbits and the like on the side and cooked them. Delicious, they were. Krazzkra came down pretty hard upon poachers about a week after this started – he told us the foragers were rounding up enough supplies for us all to eat, without our greedy selves stripping the landscape. After that, if someone took a pheasant or hare on the sly, his friends took care of him, and their sergeant looked the other way. No one wanted to disappoint Krazzkra.”

Yurkbla looked thoughtful for a moment. “You know, I suppose he was a general. Certainly every other gob under him had a military title appropriate to station… but he was just (no, not “just”, never, ever “just!”) Krazzkra to us. He didn’t need a title to command respect.”

“Anyways, I can’t tell you exactly how the campaign unfolded half as well as one of your teachers could – I was just a trooper, not one of the planners. All I know is that my first battle was at a human town called Kronal’s Hole.”

Yurkbla winced. “I don’t know who Kronal was, but the place was a hole all right, my goblings. A wretched, nasty little place that oversat a river we had to cross. There had been other battles, little skirmishes and so forth, but this was the first spate of real opposition. A large human army was camped on the other side of the river. Krazzkra decided it was time to use his secret weapon, and so we cavalry gobs were called up. I was spearman, partnered to a gob named Jorrint. I knew him from training, and he was a crack-shot if there ever was one. We were handed our pony – a beautiful little palomino that we’d named Chutz – and were told to move off into the woods at the river’s edge, and wait for the retreat.”

Yurkbla laughed. “It was beautifully done, children. Our main army segued across the river, made a few stabs at the humans, and then fled with feigned fear. Foolhardily, they followed and allowed the order of their lines to slacken, and then, as they entered the woods and had to reel in their cavalry, we struck!” He banged a hand on his rocker arm, making some of the littler goblings jump.

“Their horses might not be able to move through the trees, but our ponies could, and the last thing they’d expected to find were well-organized, regimented goblins waiting and prepared in hidden trenches. Ah, the trenches! We charged them again and again until they learned to fear us as much as any other mounted warriors, and then we herded them right into the trenches! Oh, what a beautiful sight the battle unfolding was! The genius inherent in it! We would have followed Krazzkra anywhere before, but now any one of us would’ve died for him without hesitation. And – mark this now, goblings, mark it very well! – what made him so great a leader was that he did his very best, at all costs, to ensure that we did not have to die for him at all.”

“The battle was a complete success. We killed hundreds upon hundreds, and took many more prisoner. Jorrint felled so many humans he lost count, Chutz himself took down three that got too near, and I took care of the rest with my spear. The city was made into a temporary camp while Krazzkra sent out scouts and foragers, and made it a place of safety which we could withdraw to at need. We would do that half-a-hundred times over that autumn and winter, goblings, and never but once did we have to flee to one of those prepared sanctuaries. And that once – Ah, that once! – that was for a very special reason, which I will come to shortly…”

“We fought all autumn, as the leaves turned red and gold and fell like coins of nature herself. We advanced, and fell back, and ambushed, and raided, and pounced, and we never left a battle feeling as though we had come off worse. Even on the occasions where retreat was needed, we always left before any serious incident could occur, leaving our enemies frustrated. Then we’d tackle them where they didn’t expect it.” Yurkbla cackled.

“Keeps weren’t a problem. We’d threaten siege and let them see our numbers. That didn’t work the first time, so we built great siege engines: moving towers and mighty catapults. Half the army spent three months on that siege, my loves, but it ended in triumph, and after that many of the keeps threw their doors wide to us in despair. We spared civilians, and imprisoned those soldiers who surrendered in their own dungeons. Even in victory, under Krazzkra’s leadership we were more than we could’ve dreamed. The elves and humans had called us monsters – they still did – but we spared their lives as they would not have our people. I ask you this, goblings – who were more monstrous then, eh?” He waved a hand. “Rhetorical question, no need to answer. Anyways, we fought onwards. And then, in late January, victory was near. We had completely conquered the humans’ kingdom, and had pushed well into the elven territories. Krazzkra made his base at a provincial capital and left many of the paper-pushers and supply officers there, along with countless prisoners, wardens, and casualties (sick and wounded both – the cold weather had spread many terrible colds, among other things). Their capital lay at hand, and we had just brought up the siege engines and issued demands for surrender when the news arrived, brought by an out-of-breath runner.”

“What was it!? What was it!?” yelped Queever, plainly unable to be silent any longer.

“Quiet down a bit, little one,” said Yurkbla. “The elves had snuck a sizeable army out behind our backs and were besieging the base. Hundreds of wounded and ill goblins lay there, helpless, defended by very little. Krazzkra had made his first mistake – he had not anticipated the elves being able to sneak out such a large force – but it was also the very last I ever witnessed. The base was a good distance away, and he decreed that a good half of the army would head back, post-haste!”

“Then, as the cavalry mounted up and slipped into formation, Krazzkra himself rode up to us, on that monster grey of his. I was in the front line, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from me. He was at least seven feet high, and his eyes were a bright troll-yellow, rather than goblin-green. A shield bigger than me was slung at his saddle, and he gripped a great halberd that a human or elf could barely have lifted.”

“‘Goblins,’ he said to us. ‘We need to get there fast as we can. The quicker we put a stop to this, the less likely they try something like this again. I’m going ahead of the foot soldiers, and you’re coming with me.’ He swept us with those yellow eyes, and we paid attention as we never had before. ‘It’s risky to leave behind the rest like this,’ he said (oh the distaste in that one word, “risky,” my children!), ‘but if we linger, goblins will die because of our slackness.’ He stood up in the saddle.

‘Well? Think you can make it?’ he yelled.

‘Yes sir!’ we all called back, loud as we possibly could. My voice was scratchy for a good hour after that response.” Yurkbla made a theatrical rasping cough or two, and the goblings laughed.

“Anyways, Krazzkra spun his horse about and set straight off for base at a good clip; not enough to exhaust all our horses and ponies, but definitely harder than we’d ever pushed them before. They didn’t mind – it was as if they’d understood him as well as we had, and maybe more. Still, it was lucky that it wasn’t snowing that night, or we never would’ve made it all the way.”

“We rode on and on, little goblings, and we reached that camp just as the elves were about to break the main gates of the occupied town. We caught them by surprise, and we charged them. By all that is beautiful, my loves, I can never remember feeling so strong as I did when we charged them there.”

“Of course, it was scarcely over. Many of the elves were mounted, and most of them had learned that goblins fought harder than they’d dreamed, but we had right on our side, and although that is most certainly not all you need to win a battle, little goblings, it gave us a terrible hard determination to win. Not that we needed it, of course – Krazzkra had said we needed to do this, and so we had to do it.”

“We did, too… though it was a hard and bitter fight. Goblins died in droves, but so did elves. Still, too many of us died – the elves and humans may strut and boast about vanquishing “countless hordes” of goblins where “the moment one falls, two more take its place,” but it’s pure and simple rot, children. We outnumbered them, but not by much. And at their head, a man in armour so white stood – their general, the one who we had seen leading the elven forces – smiting down every gob that dared a blow at him. He was a half-elf, so we heard after the battle was won, and we hissed in hatred and respect at his memory. He escaped with a large number of elves as they lost the battle. How did they lose it, you wonder, with such a champion? Well, pure and simple, my little nuts, so simple you may guessed it yourselves. Krazzkra won that battle for us. He fought like ten trolls, and wherever he went elves fled in fear, dropping that pretence they always had. “Elves fear nothing,” ha! Rubbish and rot, it was.

“The enemy got away, or at least two-thirds of them did, I heard Krazzkra say, but many fell or were captured. The elves were dangerous yet, but they would be dangerous on our terms, not theirs. We had saved our weak, and we felt the better for it. It even eased Jorrint’s passing somewhat – did I not mention? He fell in battle, I know not how. All I know was that at one time, I turned around and he was not in his saddle, and I never saw him again, living or dead.”

Yurkbla paused to take a long, slow draught on his guttering pipe.

“But that wasn’t the end, was it grandpa?” inquired Treltho.

The old goblin blew a few smoke-rings, passing one through another through another. “No it wasn’t, grandchild. Not indeed. The siege was resumed – though the base was more heavily guarded – and within a week the first boulders and volleys of burning oil were flying into the elven capital. The elves did not sit idle – they had their own engines, and they used many clever tricks of magic as well (our shamans were never creatures of war, and they kept to healing the sick and warding us from harm as best as they could), and there was never a week without some form of raid or another upon a perceived weak point. But we never faltered or failed to oppose their actions, because it was all but a great game of chess between Krazzkra and the elven commander, and they were both masters of the sort that never sacrifice a pawn, and never need to. Attack and parry, strike and counterstrike: those were our days. Our morale never flagged, but the elves gradually lost some of their colour. They had always fought on the basis that they were inherently better than their enemies, and that is a flaw that goblins have yet to fall into! Krazzkra was the reason we won, and kept winning, Krazzkra and that which he had created, and every one of us knew this and respected it. We had a thousand years of being hunted and harmed to keep us humble, while our enemies had been little bruised about the ego.” Yurkbla laughed out loud, almost spitting out his pipe. “Until us!”

“At any rate,” he continued, “this sort of thing couldn’t last forever. The elves were being worn down, but they were getting more reckless with their magic, sending great handfuls of our gobs up in flames at considerable cost to their sorcerers. And then one day, a special new siege-engine made to Krazzkra’s specifications launched a great rock farther than we’d ever managed before, and it smashed right into their magi-tower as their chief wizard was pulling together the force for a very considerable spell. I don’t know much of magic, goblings, but the spell backfired upon his death, and the whole tower erupted into fire and collapsed in a great and splendid and terrifying ruin, and at that moment, we rushed the gate with siege towers and rams and let lose such a rain of rubble and rock that the sky turned dark, though it was a cloudless day in early spring. The snow was still melting.”

“We broke the gate, and climbed the walls, and felled the defenders at great cost. We cavalry gobs stayed at the rear, guarding Krazzkra (he had to remain a little ways behind this time, children, to supervise the siege), and it was a good thing too. The Elves let fly a sortie from a secret side-gate, and they went right for his tent.”

“It was the last battle I fought in, my little goblings, and it was nearly the last thing I ever did, too. I lost my grip on my spear as it stuck in an elven horse, and then I was swept from Chutz (my second partner, poor gob, had been killed minutes earlier – I cannot even remember his name anymore…). I only fought a few minutes on the ground with my short sword before my poor mount was killed next to me, and as luck would have it, he collapsed right on top of me. I couldn’t wriggle out, and then, not feet away, I saw Krazzkra battling the half-elf.”

Yurkbla stared into his pipe’s bowl. “I have never seen such a fight, goblings. The half-elf wielded a great sword that seemed to be made of pure light itself, and Krazzkra whirled that halberd of his like a windmill in a hurricane. Even so, that terrible sword of light was battering his weapon terribly, and I was afraid that I would see my general disarmed.”

He looked up at his grandchildren. “At some point in your lives (long may they be), you might find yourself facing one particular instance of time with the out-of-the-blue feeling that makes you think that you were born and lived your way through the years just for this moment. Their battle took them ever nearer to me, and then, just as the halberd’s head shattered under the sword’s blade, I lashed out with a fist and grabbed the half-elf’s leg. He kicked me so quickly that I couldn’t even tell what had happened till blood poured into my right eye, and that’s why my face is so scarred, children. Still, in my one good eye I could see Krazzkra knock the sword from his hand with the shattered pole of the halberd. That was my moment, goblings, the one that I felt I’d lived for, and I would’ve been content to die right then.”

Yurkbla smiled. “That elf-man was no fool, goblings. He closed in fast, so that our leader wouldn’t have the space to swing that pole, and they fought hand-to-hand, weaponless, in the heart of the battle. Even the elves did not dare come closer to the combat, sensing the destiny in it. And there, right at the soul of the war, that terrible man finally abandoned his precious semblance of honour and succumbed to desperation, striking our leader with mud in the eyes, and then kicking him onto his back.”

“That moment,” said Yurkbla, quietly, in his rocking chair, “as that terrible elf strode forwards with a dagger held in hand towards our fallen lord, was when I felt the greatest despair in my life. And then, as the elf swung his arm back, Krazzkra grasped the sword of light that lay beneath him, and, with a single, great swing, ran the man through.”

A pause for memory’s sake, and for the sighs of goblings.

“They seemed to hold there forever, the two generals,” said Yurkbla, almost talking to himself. “One of them was titled, the other in name alone, one stood yet, one was on his back, one was dead, the other was alive.”

“One was vanquished, one was victorious.”

Yurkbla’s pipe had gone out again. He made no move to relight it; the memories were warming him as no trell-herb ever could.

“The elves surrendered immediately afterwards. They bowed to the goblin-troll – something they had never thought they would ever do, or need to do – and they surrendered. Their thousand-year-reign of oppression had ended – as had the humans – and the goblins, for once, stood triumphant.”

There was a respectful pause for all of three seconds, and then, from Leesly: “is that why you’re a knight, grandpa?”

“Indeed it is,” said Yurkbla. “The first thing Krazzkra did, after he accepted the surrender of the elves around him, was to lift up poor Chutz’s body, pull me out, and get some gobs to take me to a sickbay. He visited me after the main business of the day was done, at base, and knighted me and every one of the goblins that had guarded him then and there, using that white sword.” He paused, deep in thought. “It was never white again, though; after that half-elf (Marki’Trellshan, children, and the greatest warrior of my day besides Krazzkra) died at its edge it was a smoky grey, like a cloud that could become either dark or light. It’s the Dreamblade, oh goblings, that I speak of now – for are not dreams like clouds, that they tip to darkness and light so nearly and finely that it’s hard to tell the difference at all?”

“And what happened after that?” piped up Treltho.

“After that? After that the war was over. We annexed the human and elven kingdoms, we goblins did, and dissolved the partitions. Goblins were free to settle wherever they chose, so long as they kept the peace of Greatlord Krazzkra The Fallen (for so they called him every after, every day past when he killed his foe from the ground where he lay, undefeated). Humans and elves were likewise given license, though kept an eye on. There were no rebellions, though – Krazzkra was never less than fair and just, and both sides secretly enjoyed seeing the other being defeated, even if by us. There were grumblings and hotheads for a decade or so, my loves, but then they died away. Harshness and oppression will never stall rebelliousness and hatred, but love and kindness will – remember that all your lives, my goblings!”

Yurkbla’s eyes were lidded, and he was deeply tired, but he kept going, finishing the story.

“I met your grandmother in the sickbay, my children’s children. She too had participated in the final battle around Krazzkra, and she sought me out afterwards, the ‘goblin who saved the Greatlord.’ I never took much of a liking to that title, but from her lips, I would accept ‘fool of the world,’ and did, many a time, never without hearing the love in every letter.”

“And that’s why everyone’s happy now, right grandpa?!” asked Queever, “and that was how Greatlord Krazzkro Fareyes’s father became the first Greatlord, right grandpa?!”

“It is indeed, my little ones, and well his daughter has done after him, might I say,” said Yurkbla. “Daughter of half-elf and half-troll, for Marki’Trellshan’s sister came in time to forgive the one who killed him, and more than forgive. Krazzkra spoke often in later years of how he mourned the cost of victory, but he also stated (correctly, my loves) that goblins could not have survived as they were living, not for much longer. Every year had brought our enemies closer, until he drove them away forever by transforming them into friends.”

“Like you and grandma,” said Leesly.

Yurkbla grinned. “Yes, like me and grandma.”

“How come you’re a goblin, and grandma’s a human, but you’re almost the same size?” asked Queever.

“She’s short, and I’m tall,” answered Yurkbla.

“But you’re the same size!” accused the gobling.

“Yes. I’ve still answered your question,” said the elderly goblin. “Now – to bed!” His grandchildren hesitated, and he lowered his eyebrows. “Do I have to tell auntie Krazzkro on you?”

“She’s not really our auntie,” little Criiclo said, primly.

“No, but she’s only a shout away, and your parents would come too, and then how much trouble would you be in? You’re already up an hour past your bedtime! TO BED!”

Giggling and squeaking, the children ran away. It was time, mused Yurkbla, to go have a talk with his children about how devious they were bringing their offspring up to be. He was quite proud.

He picked up his cane. It was an old, old gift from an old, departed friend, and it was made from the shattered, blackened shaft of a great halberd. Using it to steady himself, he creaked down the hallway, towards his family.

“Storytime” copyright Jamie Proctor 2007

The bat’s skeleton was a wispy little thing, delicate as a hummingbird hatchling. Both of them stood there, watching it, for some minutes.

Finally, Marcus broke the silence. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“It’s right there.”

“It’s got to be some sort of anomaly. Maybe the rock layers folded.”

“It’s half-covered by that trilobite.”

Marcus shook his head. “Either’s it’s a one-in-a-billion anomaly, some asshat discovered time travel while we weren’t looking and thought it’d be fun to toss a bat into the Silurian, bats spontaneously evolved before mammals or even fucking amphibians, or trilobites and half a goddamned Silurian-esque ecosystem survived into the fucking Eocene.” He shook his head. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The simplest answer is that we’re both hopped up on some sort of toxic gas and we’re hallucinating our brains onto the floor.” With slow hands, he raised the camera and took a picture. “There, recorded. Now,” he said, “you go get my backpack. I don’t care if it takes three hours, I am removing this thing, whatever it is, in one piece, in full context. We’re going to go back and get this to someone who won’t think we’re nuts out of hand and who can help us figure out what the hell it is.”

Thomas nodded. “Fine. You coming?” He still wasn’t sure he could fully comprehend what he’d just seen himself. All he knew was that it was there, in front of him.

“No. First, I want to take some more pictures. Second, I want to see if there’s any more of these freak pairings down here. One’s a fluke, two are a coincidence, and three would be as close to pure concrete proof as you’d ever want. And I’d like to know which this is. Now shove off and get my backpack. Dump all the nonessentials out on the floor if you have to, what I really need are the sample packages and the hammer.” He stared at the wall. “Sonuvabitch. Shale mark two I can handle. This…? No way.”

Thomas set off. He tried to think about what he’d just seen, but the unreality of it surrounded it like a fog, making his mind travel as slowly as molasses, as lead-footed as his steps up the boneheap. When he got to the top, he glanced back down. Marcus’s light reflected from the hollow like a little wobbling sun, all alone in the dark.

He turned and squeezed his way back into the tunnel, feeling his hair brush against ancient shells. One hand on the line, one hand on the flashlight, he began the slow trudge back. Before he’d travelled twenty feet he sorely missed the added illumination from Marcus’s light and was silently cursing his sentimentality in bringing along his old, useless, half-broken piece-of-junk.

The line twisted turned, snagged on rock, smooth on the floor, tense and slack in turn, but it was still an accurate guide, and the trip was quick, unmarred by the false turns or dead ends that had fostered the cautious and slow exploration on the way down. Before long the rock opened up grudgingly around him into a little bubble, the microcave in which the line was tied, where the backpack still sat, bulging with supplies.

Thomas opened the main pocket and began to haul out books, giant hardcovered things with tiny print and thousands of pages. Several large cans of soup followed, and he felt a keen temptation to accidentally misplace them before piling them alongside the books. Granola was already beginning to stick in his throat, and if he could wrest control of the stove away from Marcus he thought he could produce something that was within shouting distance of edibility. He dumped out a bottle of water, which he promptly drank half of before putting aside, then eyed the much-deflated backpack. The books had carried much of the bulk, and it looked much more portable now. Thomas grabbed it in hand and began the long crawl again.

If the trip back had been a lightning dash compared to the initial expedition, the return was a weary trudge. His knees were starting to ache, and the backpack may have had its load lightened but it was still an extra twenty pounds. Aside from all this came the new difficulties of crawling with both hands full, one wedged behind him dragging an irregular object that kept snagging and bumping on rocks. As he crawled through the sunken tunnel and its low-hanging, trilobite-coated roof he cracked his head against the ceiling what felt like every time he moved, taking him from suffering in silence to muttered “shit,” to nearly snarling out loud. By the time he rolled out of the crawlspace and onto the rounded peak of the pillar of corpses he was in a foul mood and half-ready to tell Marcus to just rip the goddamned bat out of the stone any way he could and leave on the spot.

He looked down the mound. The little wobbling sun was missing.

It wasn’t until Thomas had stumbled to the base of the pillar and was standing next to the hollow’s entrance that he began to really worry. Marcus had said that he would be looking for more samples. No sign of life or light winked back at him as he crouched his way in, shining his light on the anomalous bat. It sat there undisturbed, prone and half-covered by a curious trilobite. He yelled down the tunnel, and heard nothing but echoes.

“Fuck,” he muttered. There were enough fossils to examine here to keep him busy for what he would think to be hours, and no reason he could think of for Marcus to go charging off down the tunnel, let alone far enough away that he couldn’t hear him. He hadn’t been gone that long, not yet.

Thomas stood and thought, letting segments of logic falling into place. Marcus wasn’t here. None of the cave dangers he could think of – rockfalls, bad air, falls – could move him from this spot. Therefore he must have left under his own power. Why? Because he saw or heard something he wanted to examine. There was very little to make noise down here besides the faint trickling of the streamlet at his feet. Therefore he had seen something, because… Marcus’s flashlight was stronger and had glimpsed something off in the distance that Thomas couldn’t see from here. Marcus would’ve responded to his call if he were able. Therefore either he’d had an accident en route or had found something so interesting that he was in that trance-like state of his again and simply hadn’t noticed, which Thomas thought extremely unlikely.

He began to walk down the tunnel, back hunched, backpack now shouldered and out of the way, giving him a hand free. His light slid back and forth from wall to wall, sputtering on damp stone and shells but nothing new, nothing that leapt out and grabbed his eye the way he guessed it would’ve Marcus’s. He called again, and for the second time heard no reply. The tunnel continued onwards, slanting ever-so-slightly downwards but otherwise straight as a crooked-walled arrow, extending out an unknowable distance beyond the range of his light, which he carefully kept in an ongoing circular sweep over walls, floor, and ceiling. It showed nothing but fossils, onward and onward, nothing but fossils. Then it glinted off a wet patch, and he stopped, suddenly hopeful. He knelt, he went down on hands and knees, flashlight probing from all angles, and smiled.

A shoeprint. He shone the light along the floor and found more, walking ahead into the dark, sometimes smudged into a circular blur where the walker had stopped and turned about before continuing. Marcus had stepped in the streamlet here, probably crossing it to examine whatever was on this wall before moving on. The likely object of interest, saw Thomas, was yet another sea scorpion, a hulking bulk that seemed much more robust than the longer, more lithe specimens of the mound and his father’s project. This creature was built for weight, broad and stocky, legs thick and short, tail half the length it should be. If it had stood, he could’ve imagined it poised as a cross between a sumo and a tank.

Buried alongside it was a smallish, intact skeleton. Thomas didn’t know much about anatomy, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see the object for what it was. It looked like some kind of large rat. “Twice is coincidence,” he muttered under his breath.

He started walking again, pausing only briefly at each new point of Marcus’s interest. An exotic-looking trilobite, its carapace festooned with spears. Another bat skeleton – two actually, half-meshed together. An odd-looking shell, its swirls and spirals not quite like any he’d ever seen before. Strange pipes and flutes in the stone marking the grave of some sort of colony-living creature he couldn’t begin to name. As he followed them, the footsteps grew farther and farther apart – Marcus was moving at a brisk trot now, no longer stopping for anything, aided by the gentle expansion of the ceiling’s height. Already Thomas could already walk nearly upright, and the skinny man would’ve had at least two inches of headroom. He walked briskly, flashlight skipping from wall to wall before flicking back to check on the trail of his friend. Then he stopped, frowning, as something changed.

He stepped over the streamlet carefully, following the veer of Marcus’s footsteps. Then he went down on his knees again, flashlight wavering over something new. There was another pair of tracks intermixed with Marcus’s, a sort of odd scraping skitter laden with small wet dots. It meandered over and across the wet shoeprints for at least fifteen feet before veering back into the water. The footprints went with it, and then the small, clearly-defined “banks” of the streamlet were covered in still-dripping water, scattered wildly.

Thomas stood completely still for a moment as he thought again. Marcus stopped looking at the walls, started running. Marcus crossed over the stream, something low-built with too many legs comes out of the stream. It dodges back in, Marcus runs down the center of the stream.

Thomas was very careful not to think about what this might signal, because he was sure he didn’t believe it. Instead, he resumed his walk, started moving his flashlight again. The question sat in the back of his mind with the weight of the rock around him, numbing his mind, and then his light slid off the tunnel wall and into a greater darkness even as his footsteps began to echo into a new chamber, bouncing off walls so far away that his light groped its way into thin, musty air and died without touching stone. At his feet, the stream ran forwards and down, plunging into a slope and over ledges. The faint sound of trickling, splashing water was a soft presence coiling around his ears, and the air felt thick, damp and heavy, almost worrying so, yet he had no difficult breathing.

Thomas panned his flashlight over and around the water. The splashing followed its path all the way to the edge of the first drop, with no signs of stopping. Cautious probing showed a ledge just beneath, slick with spray. A dark object lay huddled on it, unmoving, half-tucked beneath the overhang. With a sense of slow inevitability, Thomas lowered himself down, a four foot drop, shoes placed carefully on the slippery surface. He turned his light to the lump, knowing what it was even before the light hit.

A trilobite lay there, domed shell crushed by some weight from above, its little segmented legs as still as those that lay frozen in the walls. Unlike them, it had no eyes to speak of at all, not even as much as a slit or divot in its carapace betraying where they might have once peered out in so many directions at once.

Thomas sat there for a long, long moment with his mind blank and body unmoving before he let himself think.

Marcus wandered down the tunnel. He saw a trilobite. Naturally, he went after it, and naturally, it fled. It went over the falls, so did he, he landed on it. Absolutely insane, of course, but understandable. Which left one question beyond the unthinkable one of why there was a trilobite: where was Marcus?

Worst things first, he thought, and turned his flashlight farther down the falls. Empty rocks met him, and near the flickering end of the light, a flat and calm pool. The water was so murky that it almost looked to be mud. Something dark lay on its bank, half out of the water, half in. Light reflected off glass, and then Thomas was hurrying, dropping down ledges, scrambling through knee-deep water, sloshing up to Marcus’s prone body and dragging it up out of the water. It was cool, but far warmer than the icy chill of the streamlets.

Thomas laid two fingers on the side of Marcus’s neck. Nothing. He checked his wrist. Nothing. Peeled back an eyelid and shone his flashlight directly into his face. The pupil didn’t so much as budge. He could feel panic start to well up inside him again. Buried under the earth, having just seen something impossible, face-to-face with a corpse. In the dark. Any one he could handle. Two was probably too much. All four was too big to grasp, and he had the dark suspicion that this was the only thing preventing him from panicking.

Then, as he sat in the dark with the body, he heard a sound.

Thomas’s head snapped upwards, thoughts abandoned, instincts focused into a single sense. For a moment there was nothing, and then again, a slight sound, a small one, just on the edge of hearing, not far off from the sound chalk would make on the blackboard.

Tcck, sccrtch, scratch, rrchk, srrciip, scrape.

Very faint, sounding as though it would die out at any second, but unmistakably there and holding on. The sound of spindly legs skittering over naked rock, still dripping with water.

Thomas reached out, as quietly as he could, and began to feel around the shallows desperately for Marcus’s flashlight, one-handed. With his other he waved the feeble beacon of his own, half-search, half-ludicrous ward against something that he knew was completely blind. The sounds grew less faint every second, moving from half-heard scratches to an overlapping wave of tiny claws tapping against rocks, swarming over the floor from what seemed to be every direction at once as echoes warped and twisted each scrape and click into a bouncing, clacking horde.

Thomas gave up trying to see anything past his arm’s reach and shone the light over Marcus’s corpse, checking over his hands, at his side, just into the water. He reached under his legs, found only a curious emptiness, and in a burst of hysterical strength, heaved the corpse head over heels out of the pool, water spraying in every direction. Dampness, warmer than the water touched his face, and in the blue of his flashlight-harried view he saw that Marcus’s legs below the knees were absent, straggles of blue jeans and red flesh torn into a bloody morass. He recoiled, shrieking involuntarily even as his free hand swept across the warm, sticky rock where Marcus had lain and touched hard plastic casing, whisking it into his grip and thumbing the power switch before he could so much as think.

The first thing he noticed was the colour, screaming at him from every side, hemming him in from all angles. It was a sickly pale grey-green, almost white but not quite. It dripped from the walls, sprawled over the floors, and filed the pool – no, not a pool, it sprawled outwards as far as he could, one little bay of a vast lake – to a choking overflow. It stained his clothes where he had mistaken it for condensation, it left great mucus-cobwebbed strands of it hung from the ceiling, tying stalagmites to the floor and one another, and in places on the floor where the terrified ray of light wandered it lay piled in gross heaps the size of houses.

Bursting in the seams of this invasion of the eyes was the scale of the place – Thomas lay prone at the very smallest tip of a cavern stretching farther on and downward than he could possibly see, glimpses of forests of slime and stalagmites and grottoes crowding his vision at the far fringes, and past them all the vast lake of scum drifted, giant heaps of cold, clammy, hard-shelled tube-things bulging from it in colonies like island-tumours, some of the largest towering like tree-trunks. The stone sky that rose above the rot below was as irregular as an insomniac’s bedsheet, rucked high and capricious in some spots and rippled with rocky growths, but for the most part slung by and low, creeping sometimes to the very surface of the lake in a sudden swoop.

All of this Thomas took in without wanting to in less than an instant, in a chaotic jumble of images as the powerful light in his hand swung wildly at the end of his arm. The next thing he saw took up much more of his attention.

They were everywhere, coating every surface as surely as their fossils had back and back along the path he and Marcus had taken, breaking their quiet stealth at the unfamiliar sounds. Some walked the walls, ranging in size from his thumb to his torso. Some dangled from the ceiling in great snarled nets of chemical ooze that secreted from their jaws, bobbing gently as he watched. Great ones the size of cattle watched him eye to blank faceplate, trundling slowly across the floor with legs thick as saplings. And the vile sea began to team with them even as he stared, its surface boiling up on a billion chitinous spines, thick froth dripping from bile-slickened mantles the colour of a slug’s belly.

Big and small, cautious and bold, they all came. Trilobites. Thousands and thousands. How long had they wandered down here in the dark, wondered Thomas. How many times had their tomb shifted and shook, contracting near to nothing before a tremor or chance luck expanded their habitat to new grounds even as the old decayed or collapsed? How many new breeds had sprung up and died out, here and nowhere else, over the last four hundred million years? Before the dinosaurs, before anything with a spine walked on land, these creatures had been trapped, living from second to second on luck and each other’s flesh alone. Deep in the dark they grew strange and wild, and as cave-ins and sudden falls took their toll they were recorded by the stone, their self-consuming pocket of life leaving a trail of unknown species, hidden creatures locked away and preserved one by one. Their only predators were ill luck, and each other; their only contact from the outside world the odd and rare visitor scurrying too far down a deep crevice, one that dropped it into an underworld far darker that it had ever known.

Thomas realized all of this in less than three seconds. Fear may give wings to your feet, but it turns your mind to white lightning. Three seconds passed, and the trilobites crawled closer, blind to the new light washing over their crenulated hides. And at the end of those three seconds, Thomas sprang to his feet and ran.

He ran straight up the sloping ledges that turned the little streamlet into a waterfall, vaulting over the crushed ruins of the trilobite that had led Marcus to his death. He felt his feet skid and twist on dampness and he rolled with it, turning a fall into a painful somersault that turned back into a run as he pelted down that corpse-coated tunnel, the gentle rustle and occasional clack of the otherwise silent horde as they piled their way towards him. Thomas could see it in his mind almost as clearly as if he stood there himself – the fast crawling over the slower in front, the large crushing the small underfoot and stooping to the sudden surfeit of prey, a thousand blind and mindless shells hunting him through the remnants of their ancestors. His thoughts lent him extra speed, and he barely slowed even by the time the tunnel’s height had constricted by a third, running with his hands almost at his ankles.

As he tore his way up the boneheap the rustling of pursuit was fading in his ears, little echoes pouring out of the mouth of the tunnel beneath him. He didn’t slow, following the line as a life-giving blur, hands and feet grappling and shoving whatever lay nearest to hand as his body seemed to over-expand with his gasps for air, jamming him for terrifying milliseconds in crevices he should’ve slide through in a fraction of an instant. The backpack and the end of the rope were there, and then they were behind him. In the larger spaces that opened up he didn’t squirm so much as slide, diving and springing to his feet through crawlspaces, slicing raw every inch of exposed skin on sharp rock. Little passages he’d wormed through so easily as a child now turned into obstinate opponents to his every move so passively malevolent that he almost felt himself begin to froth, but then the magically open space of cave four surrounded him, then the frantic face-first dive through the crack, and then he was running again, sprinting full-force down the gallery, hurtling past the entrance at a breakneck speed as the four giant eyes of his old summer project stared at him from the walls.

The bright light of midafternoon and a fresh sea breeze air hit Thomas’s face, as sudden a call down to reality as anything he’d ever felt. He felt bruised in every inch, and his legs barely supported him, his whole body trembling with fatigue like an old man’s. He wiped his face, and to his dull shock crusted and foamy saliva crumbled away from his lips and jaw.

He had to get away. That was the main thing, the first goal. The car – he laughed aloud without thinking, the first time in years, a hysterical cackle – had been Marcus’s. And Marcus would’ve had the keys. Some trilobite probably had them now, or one of those tubeworm things in that lake that glowed under light in all the wrong colours –

He shivered and stopped that line of thought. He had to cross the ledge next, and panicking would NOT help. He focused his mind on escape. The car was not an option. The cell phone – his cell phone, not Marcus’s, Marcus’s phone was sitting in a neat and tidy pile waiting for a backpack probably resting inside something’s no stop thinking about that – was. Yes, that would be perfect. Use the phone, the reception can’t be that bad out here yes it can it’s too far out in the boonies remember twenty years to build and that includes a good signal tower.

He shook his head, and began his sidling, cautious walk, his body relaxing from overdrive. So, the phone might work. Might not. He’d try the phone, and if it didn’t… Marcus’s phone was a satellite phone. He felt something shrink in his chest at the thought, but let it play out. Marcus’s phone was a satellite phone, Marcus’s phone might get reception out here, Marcus’s phone had been one of the items he’d carefully emptied out of the backpack, therefore Marcus’s phone was probably safe to reach. Safer than the alternative, the keys, back down can’t think about that. He shuddered.

Scrape, step, sidle, step, hop. The satellite phone was the last resort. He’d go looking for it in a few hours, when the can’t think about those had been given enough time to calm down and return to their mindless eternal cannibalization, minds too crude to hold memories beyond their most raw, chemical state. And of course, he probably wouldn’t have to. The cell phone would probably work.

But when no if it didn’t, if it didn’t… then the satellite phone. Which would have to work. But if it didn’t… wait. He and Marcus don’t think about Marcus hadn’t made the trip in secret, when they didn’t show up on Monday someone would be sure to come looking, especially when there was no answer on the phone. He didn’t have DON’T THINK ABOUT HIM the soup, but he could get that when he got the satellite phone, and he had granola, and that would be enough. Suddenly, he felt hungry, and had to resist the temptation to break down into hysterical giggles as his feet edged onto solid ground. Thomas ran the rest of the way back up to the lighthouse, heaved the door open – god it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, weighed as much as the lighthouse itself – and stumbled inside, slamming it behind him and diving upon his backpack like a starving man. He controlled himself at the last moment, logic arriving just before he would have flipped it over and spilled the contents across the floor. He might have to walk home. He might need to leave in a hurry. Either way he would need to bring many of things in this pack with him, the quicker the better.

Thomas searched the pack as calmly and methodically as he could. He was quite proud of his restraint, the events of the past hour or so only revealing themselves outwardly in a constant, insistent shaking in his hands, a refusal to lay at rest that hide behind his eyelids and chuckled at his pretence of calmness.

Instant noodles. Clothing. The half-a-box of granola bars remaining, one of which he ate in an effort to take his mind off reality. The moment he put it in his mouth and felt the crunch between his teeth his head was filled with images of the silent and twitching legs of the creatures beneath him, their too-many-limbs clicking and waving and skittering oh god they were right beneath him. The idea of Marcus being stripped to bare bones less than a hundred feet under where he knelt burst his calm, and his hands shook so badly that he dropped the granola bar. It broke apart on the floor, and after a few futile attempts to gather its crumbled particles he gave up and sat there, shaking.

It was then, huddled against his knees, that he heard the sound again. How long it had been there, in the background of his busy search, he had no idea. It was a small sound, not far from chalk on a blackboard in the forever-night where no sun had shone for entire geological eras, where the scum ran thick and deep upon the tepid water that was refuse from the world just above and just out of reach.

Scrape, rrcckk, rrchk, scratch, srrciip, tcck, sccrtch.

Thomas badly wished that his mind would go blank, just shut down from pure terror and leave him warmly comforted, hovering somewhere that was nowhere and miles from whatever danger that he wished he could not remember so clearly at this moment. The thin and spidery legs, so many of them, the shell-layered backs glistening with moisture, the way that they watched so closely without eyes, staring in a way far more terrifying than anything he’d ever known.

He waited for the noise to stop, even if it was just a brief-hope destroying pause soon to be resumed, but it went on and on without end, quieter, louder, fainter, faster. Chitter, cllkkr, scccth. Persistent, ongoing, sometimes fading right to the edge of hearing, but never stopping.

Thomas was very still, remaining painfully all-to-focused on the present, silently raging against the cruel survival instincts that would bolster his senses so. They must be right outside the door. How they’d followed along the ledge, wandering along in such a strange place to follow his scent, he had no idea. The brush of a breeze on a chitinous carapace, the warm caress of the summer sun, the whispering sound of pine needles shuffling against one another in the wind, the groan of shifting tree trunks, the soft yet compact mass of dirt underfoot… they would be overwhelmed with strangeness. The only way he’d truly considered their arrival occurring, he realized in a small part of his mind, was in that vague half-nightmare sense that you slipped into alone in a strange place in the dark, a werewolf lumbering out of a downtown park, a shark lunging at you from the five-foot depths of a freshwater lake’s shallows. This wasn’t something that he had felt could happen, only worried of, and he sat there paralyzed, horribly aware of every passing second and its lost opportunities for escape, not having the faintest idea of what to do.

The scraping droned on and on, hypnotic in its mindless, ever-varying repetitiveness, sometimes half-drowned-out by the slowly growing whine of the coastal wind rising. Half-submerged, but even when it was inaudible he could practically feel it, trickling in vibrations through the flat, immovable concrete walls During those times he almost felt his mind work again, turning its way towards the problem at hand.

They were just outside, of that he was sure. The sounds must be coming from their legs don’t remember that on the outer wall, though from the sound of it, if he listened closely Then the scratching came back again, louder, loud enough that he stopped thinking about anything at all but the few small inanities that could squeeze in through the cracks in the sound.

he could hear that it couldn’t be more than one, probably not very large no the biggest ones couldn’t fit through those cracks he had crawled through no they couldn’t. So just one, not big. Why so few? Why only one so

Scratching. He was deeply sad at the loss of the granola bar, so sad it moved him nearly to tears.

persistent? And was it moving? It almost sounded as though it was just in one spot, mindlessly scraping over and

Scratching. He thought about the time his mother had caught him and Sean in the basement of the lighthouse. She had hated it, too musty, too dangerous, with its crumbling bricks. “The wall could fall in at any minute, or the ladder could snap and you’d be stuck down there and your father would have to drag you out with a rope.”

over in the same spot. It wasn’t at all like the sort of thing a creature adapted to dark places would do, one that relied on touch and sound to move. Confused it might be, but concrete was only a strange

Scratching. He remembered the tune that his father had hummed while working on the project. Something they’d heard on the radio the first time they drove here, that became tied up in the work more than it had been in whatever passing pop star that had sung it first.

stone to its senses. It wasn’t acting like any sort of animal at all, trilobite or no, what it sounded like was more like the

Scratching. Like Like the

He felt his mind strain at the edges, like a flimsy barrel overflowing with water, and then something untensed and it all flowed together from the outside in, making him sag with relief.

wind. Like the wind.

Thomas stood up, very slowly and carefully. His legs felt a little cramped after his long sprint and bout of catatonia, but he could cope. He scraped up the spilt and crumbled granola into a neat pile and walked to the door, opened it without fear, and felt no surprise when there was nothing on the other side. Then he walked around the lighthouse in a slow circle. There, on the northwestern side, where the woods had grown close, was a tall and leaning tree. One of its branches had grown close and long, bending against the side of the lighthouse, and as the wind buffeted its trunk and it swayed gently back and forth, the long, needle-bedecked arm sawed gently back and forth against the concrete. Scrape, scratch, scrcccht.

Thomas watched it for a moment, swaying in the breeze, louder and softer with each eddy and gust in the currents of the sky. Then he went into the woods and spent some time searching for a good stout stick, recently fallen, not rotted, not too large, and solid to the core. He found one and brought back his treasure into the lighthouse, where he shut the door behind him and took out his jackknife, whittling away at its tip. He kept a careful eye on his watch as he worked, and by the time he was finished several hours had passed and both ends of his makeshift bludgeon were carved to points; not the sharpest of instruments, but certainly pokey enough to stab in a cramped space, and small enough to carry into it in the first place.

Finally, as he finished hardening the tips over the meagre and greasy flame of the gas stovetop, he picked up his cellphone from where he’d dropped it, next to his backpack, and turned it on. The menu screen lit up, and there was absolutely no signal. He wasn’t surprised, and found himself quietly pleased that he’d prepared himself for exactly this letdown without consciously realizing it.

The return trip was much shorter than he’d hoped and feared it to be. Thomas stepped out the lighthouse’s door, went down the hillside, across the ledge, and was standing at the cave mouth before he realized it. He didn’t get a walking respite to prepare himself mentally, he didn’t have time to ponder over all the memories of what had come before, to feel the fear welling up inside him again. A very mixed blessing. By the time he’d noticed that he’d stepped back into the cave, thumbing the switch of Marcus’s (don’t think about Marcus) powerful flashlight, stick in his other hand, he was already entering the gallery. Relax, he thought, go with the flow. If you stop to think you’ll think too much, and that’s unhealthy right now. Let the body do the talking for once, go long and far while daydreaming on full alert – ouch, these scrapes (where did they come from? Doesn’t matter) made the crawling low and slow. He slid through cracks on hands and knees, then his belly, all the while in a sort of pleasantly vague haze, listening very carefully for sounds that he didn’t really believe were there, keeping a keen eye out for the glistening glow of a carapace that didn’t exist in the slightest. In his mind there was nothing down here, he was merely going to retrieve some supplies that had been carelessly abandoned for some reason he didn’t need to know at the moment. Marcus’s absence was conveniently inexplicable, and he was sure he’d be able to remember that again very soon, when it was needed. Thomas knew that he was lying to himself, and he was doing it so well that he couldn’t believe it even as he thought it.

The light shone sharply against small dark shadows, the leftovers of the backpack’s emptying he’d performed some time ago. Books and bits, a sample or two. He put down the short spear, removed the pack that had hung unnoticed from his spine for the last while, limp, deflated, and defeated, and began to fill it again (he wondered where the drying gunk on its surface had come from – a nasty colour). The satellite phone was first, – an oddly archaic example of its kind, a thick-skulled prototype in a worn and solid case – then the books, then the half-full water bottle he’d drank from earlier, then the soup cans, which weren’t there. This puzzled him immensely, because he remembered lifting the useless things out of the backpack, two cans in each hand, shiny red and white labels dulled in the dark even as their exposed aluminium cans glittered in the light. It was very clear to him, and they should be there, but they weren’t, and now he was worried and looking at everything and why was the rope that he’d tied to that rock missing bar the last few feet? It had been sheared off neatly just a few inches past its anchoring mass, and there was no sign to be seen of the rest.

It was then, as he felt the carefully-manufactured emergency walls in his head start to crumble and snap, that Thomas noticed the dampness on the floor. Little damp spots, from little legs, and small smears of some sort of slimy residue. The wet and bumpy scrape showing where a shell rubbed rock.

Scrape. Scratch.

There were no trees, there was no wind, under the lighthouse. The moment by which this had sunk into Thomas’s conscious mind and shattered his suspension of belief entirely occurred only as he was moving down the gallery at a jog, winded and scraped all over even more extensively that he had been the first time, old cuts reopened. His shirt was sticking to his body, red and tacky with blood, and his jeans had lost their knees at some point. The stick was in his hand again, the pack on his back, but he had no recollection of how they’d arrived there. All the warm comforting clouds of smoke that his subconscious had tossed up to mask him from reality had faded away on the wings of a missing breeze, and he was horribly aware of exactly what was going on, so aware that he broke into a faster run.

The cut line, the tracks, the missing cans, and the sounds. The sounds above all. They were back there, closer than he’d ever feared, closer than they’d ever travelled before. Why would they have before? It was a long trip, a hard trip, but it was worth it for a mountain of meat and bone, a banquet-meal of soft flesh with no hard shell, no spines, no scrawny and malnourished, withered limbs, of which they had already sampled DON’T THINK ABOUT MARCUS.

The ledge was before him, and he sprinted along it, slipping and staggering so high above the water. Why had they taken the cans? Perhaps the textures had fascinated them. Could they be fascinated? He doubted it. Imagination wouldn’t be high on the list of survival traits that would be the first and the only concerns of the creatures, trapped in their own waste products. Hunger, that would be a selector. The ones that went about their food most efficiently, the most effectively, those would be the winners. The hunters in the dark, the quietest and most sensitive who could feel their prey move from far away, who could creep up close without the slightest noise – cushioned by the slime, the sickly molasses that coated their world so fully and thoroughly. Here, far away from their stomping grounds, they would scratch and scuttle; he would have that much warning at least. It was with no shock at all that he noted he was planning as though they would come after him, hunting him across the ledge and up the cliff and out into the daylight that they couldn’t see, night-hunters that were blind to the night. They had followed him too far and too fast, shown too much curiosity. He thought of the way they had moved across the walls, across the ceiling, how nimbly their number might be, and he shivered even as he slammed the lighthouse door open and shut one-handed, the deep sorrowful iron double-clang echoing and reverberating through its shaft up to the cupola’s peak and into the forgotten dustheap of the cellar.

He was trembling, he noticed, but only a little bit, and the tremors came from the deep muscle ache he felt settling over him and suffusing his limbs after their second frantic flight, not the incapacitating terror-shakes he’d felt overcoming him earlier. It was fine now, anyways; he had the satellite phone, he had the half-full bottle of water he’d sampled earlier, he even had the texts. He’d gotten everything back but the goddamned soup, the rope, and Marcus’s car keys. Time was ticking in his mind, and he should start calling for help sooner rather than later. First things first, he decided: he took out the satellite phone, stepped outside to get clear reception, and dialled nine-one-one, draining the water bottle dry even as it processed the call. He’d become terribly thirsty at some point in the past hour and he wasn’t sure why, scrubbing more crusty froth away from his mouth as he tossed the bottle to the floor.

He processed the call on automatic and it nearly flew by, the operator’s calm voice flattened beneath the heavy tread of Thomas’s near-monotone. He said that his friend had fallen off a cliff and he was stuck without a car, gave the location, and hung up without incident. It would look suspicious, especially since there were plenty of people out there who could testify to his dislike of Marcus – and Marcus’s irritating personality – but he was fairly confident that he could show them evidence once they arrived. If nothing else, they would at least have to check the cave system, and maybe he could warn them thoroughly enough that they took at least basic precautions. They’d think he was crazy, but he’d save his cackling for when he was laughing last. Maybe he could ask them to name one of the fossils after Marcus, or even one of the live ones, if they ever brought any of them up alive. If they did, he hoped they did it far away from him. Far away from here was where he’d be, and where he’d stay. Let someone else take the task of digging up the old summer project shared by him and his father. Let someone else make the decisions, whether they chose to seal up the cave for safety reasons, send down unmanned probes to collect data, or blast the whole thing to rubble with military explosives and let the lighthouse topple down into the ruins like the fist of god. Any, either, all or none, all he wanted was to be in a position where it wasn’t his problem and he couldn’t make it his even if he tried. Which he wouldn’t.

Scrrtch, scratch went the branch on the outer wall. Thomas found another granola bar, the very last, and ate it, washing it down with another bottle of water. He almost felt like trying some of the soup next.

Scrape, crrrpk, click click clack scrrpe. Thomas stopped chewing.

Crtch, krrlik, clik klunk THUD click click clik.

The lock on the door slammed home with the urgency of panic, the backpack and food bag were slung against its surface with frantic speed, and then Thomas was up the stairs and away three at a time, stick in hand, slamming open the door to the watch room and barrelling up the ladder into the cupola, ringed with clear glass still mostly-transparent against all odds, eyes straining frantically at the ground for any sign of a dark blot, from up here as small as its ancestors had appeared just inches from his face as he lay on his back to examine them, studded on the roof of the tunnels far below, frozen in immobility.

He paced around the entire ring of vision available to him, he looked, he stared, he watched like a hawk pumped full of caffeine, and he saw nothing against the walls. Utterly nothing. The adrenaline leaked out of his system drip by drip, removing itself to the glands where it bided its time until the moment came for flight and fight. His hyperventilation slowed back to normal, something he’d barely noticed, and he tried to go over what he’d just heard logically. There had been a noise, accompanied by others, that had sounded like an animal of some sort falling over or knocking something over. It had sounded like one of the trilobites (those little clicks and scratches were burned into his mind now, he could almost hear them by thinking). It was not outside.

He had left the door open when he made the call. Surely he would’ve heard them moving even on dirt, not more than five feet from the exit – the squeak of armoured plates rubbing against each other at joints, the rustle of the legs. Therefore if there was an animal nearby it was neither inside nor outside.

Thud. A metallic clang from below, the sound of iron being impacted. A scrape and a scrabble as something fought for purchase. Thud, clang, crash.

Thomas raced to the other side of the Cupola, stared down at the door. Nothing.

Thud THUD.

There was nothing out there. There was nothing in here. Something was banging against metal, there was nothing at the door.

THUD-thud.

The basement snaked its way into his thoughts. The old, old, old cellar, poorly maintained since its construction, set deep into the ground for maximum coolness to preserve whatever lay down there from the summer heat. The cellar with its crumbling, feeble, decayed brick walls that had been all but weaving on their feet fifteen years past. The cellar’s iron trapdoor, half-hidden underneath the spot where Marcus had piled his belongings and slept.

THUD.

He was down the ladder in an instant, half-falling with muscles half-frozen in protest against his every motion, tormented from a half-day of terrified flight and paralyzed recovery in turns. The clang of the watch room door as it flew open was masked in the deep and resonant CRASH of the cellar’s trapdoor slamming open, hinges screaming, unmuffled by the obscuring bulk of Marcus’s discarded sleeping bag. Obscuring and fading, the plasticized exterior of the bedding rippling large under the bulk of something hidden just underneath it, already being savaged by claw-tipped limbs. It heaved its way to one side, scratching and scraping against the floor as in fought its confinement.

Thomas vaulted down the stairs three at a time, four at a time, something he couldn’t truly count, only guess at as however many he could leap in a single bound. The thing under the bag was already beginning to tear free, rips and gaps bulging into existence as chitinous spines and ridges pierced its flesh. He was halfway there, and then rising up from the depths came another, uncovered, unhidden, exposed to the world. A blind survivor in perfect clarity, skittering into its new environment with the mindless confidence of royalty, heading for the stairs on the trail of a new scent, the smell that had come from somewhere farther away than it could imagine and nearer than it could dream.

Thomas took a step backwards, another, saw it begin to take its first steps up the stairway with no difficulty, and then charged it, brandishing his spear-cudgel. It nipped towards him with astonishing speed, coming in at his ankles (Marcus hadn’t had feet, hadn’t had anything below his knees, nothing there at all don’t think about Marcus, busy), but he was ready and stabbed downwards with all the force he could muster, aiming for just behind the bulky head-plating and coming up late, stabbing it in the middle of its body, wood piercing into soft flesh beneath hard shell. It was then that the thing made the first sound he’d ever heard them produce, not the scuttling of their limbs or the rattle of a dragging shell, but a hiss, low-pitched, whispery, raspy, threatening. It wasn’t the mewl of an animal in pain, it was the spittle of an angered ghost, the snarl in the mouth of a wounded bear.

Thomas froze at that sound for just one moment, and in that one moment several things happened. The trilobite continued its rush without stopping or hesitating, wrenching the stick out of his hand. He was forced to spin and run, and as he did so, the corner of his eye spotted the other tearing free from its bag, the creeping shape of yet another looming its way out of the cellar-pit. The stairs were moving slowly, oh too slowly under his feet, so much more sluggishly than they had when he flew down them, and now there was something right behind him, making the elderly metal creak and rumble in agony as it struggled in its moorings. He ran through the open door to the watch room at full tilt, spinning around and nearly falling over to slam his full momentum into crushing it shut, feeling the surprisingly weighty THUNK of the creature on the other side ramming into it full force. It immediately degenerated into a series of hefty slams, each one making the door vibrate and rattle in its frame, thrashing madly. The pointed object lodged in its back seemed to have no effect on its actions whatsoever, and Thomas wondered what would’ve happened if he’d come face to face with one of them down there as he crawled to the backpack, stick in hand.

There was a double thud, and then there were two squirming, shoving bodies on the other side of the door, pushing and pressing and apparently climbing over each other, biting and snapping. And just past that, rising ever louder, the moan and groan of the spiralling stair trembling under the weight of oncoming others, a wave of clacking and chittering bodies spilling their way up against gravity.

Thomas braced himself, shoved as hard as he could, and was rewarded with the protesting crunch of the door driving itself firmly into its frame. He shot the bolt home with hurried fingers, felt half of it crumble away even as he crudely wrenched it from its cemented position, and ran for the ladder, scarcely three steps ahead before he heard the wave of the hunters slam into its surface, crushing it to the floor under their mass. As he hurled himself up its surface, the rust cutting his palms, he swore that he felt the antennae of the leader of the pack brush his boot just before he tumbled into the cupola. He reversed the roll as quickly as he could, setting hands on the heavy hatch and wrenching it forwards and down, slamming shut on the sight of his pursuers filling the watch room like locusts, rearing back on their shells to wave their legs upwards and twitch twirling tendrils laden with senses at him, eyeless shells staring.

Then he collapsed on the trapdoor, holding it shut with his body, and stared at the ceiling. He felt something tickling at his jawline, and wiped away more spittle and foam, slightly surprised at it. Exhaustion? He’d had substantial breaks between any and all of his sudden breaks for safety. Was there something foul in the air down there that he’d breathed? The images of the great skywebs of slime and filth flashed vividly in his mind, the thickness of the moist atmosphere, and he tried to persuade himself that there was nothing black in the froth he’d cleaned from the corners of his mouth. He was thirsty again, and the cupola was gently revolving around his head, and he worried at exactly how much of his breakdown was mental trauma and how much might be artificial. The vibrations of the stragglers down below trickled through the ladder and up into the trapdoor, melding into his spine in a very nearly relaxing manner. He felt at peace for the first time since he’d lost Marcus. All he had to do was wait and rest and watch the sky spin by just outside the windows, a ballet danced to the chorus of a thousand grunts of pain from the staircase outside the watch room door.

The massage stopped then, and Thomas tore enough of his attention away from the ceiling to listen again, only to find there was nothing to listen to. There was no scratching. There were no creaks. There wasn’t (god forbid) a repeat of that hideous hiss he’d heard when he tried to defend himself. Absolute silence reigned beneath him, and he imagined the quiet trickling out from his spine like some sort of delicate fluid, washing over everything and draining it of noise. He giggled weakly, and flinched as the sound broke the moment. Why was it quiet? He’d just heard the stairs singing. Maybe they all went back down. Maybe it was all safe, maybe the police would show up and find one possibly half-poisoned man lying in the cupola.

Then there it was again, a long slow grinding vibration, snaking straight into his vertebrae. Something heavy, something big, moving with unspeakable deliberateness and care, rubbing right up against the ladder. He could feel his neck hairs stand on end, one at a time, as something bumped gently into the rusted, suddenly far-too-thin iron that lay under him. The bumping repeated itself twice and turned into a caress, a slow and cautious rubbing, the caress of something that Thomas couldn’t imagine, barely an inch from his skin, touching what he touched and he could almost feel it the vibrations rubbing his back it was touching his back.

A single, hairline-thin poke reached through the panel and it was suddenly too much to bear. With a spastic twist, Thomas shuddered and heaved upright, collapsing on his side. He watched the trapdoor with stupefied eyes as it lifted slowly, finding himself unable to even rise from the floor.

It rose slowly, intensely, with thought in every motion, every twitch. It hauled itself out and through the trapdoor, mounting higher and higher into the air even as it lowered each new length of its bulk to the floor, claws tipped and dripping with thick grey-green slime pads, every inch of it covered in soft decay and rotting fibre, a coat that muffled the click and clack of each of its motions.

It must have lived in the water, like its ancestors, whose size it matched and maybe exceeded. It must have swum through that strange mixture of water and slime-fungus for its entire life, however long that must’ve been to let it reach its strength and ripe maturity. The only things it lacked were their four great eyes, replacing their blank gaze with a blanker faceplate that so well-reflected that of its lessers. They crowded up the ladder after it, scuttling at its trail, gathering around its feet, humble supplicants before a great priest, a god incarnate, the eater of prey. It watched him from the two long antennae that had replaced its eyes as its tools, their taste and touch on his skin gentle as a newborn baby’s as it hovered above him, jaws macerating at the air as it thought.

There can’t have been many, Thomas realized, never many, the rule of the giant of the jungle: solitary rule. And fewer still would have fallen into the caves. Had his summer project been the first to be entrapped? It could be. Was it one of the ancestors of the silent deity before him, passing judgement on his body? It was likely. He’d stared back into that rock fifteen years ago and watched as time melted away under a chisel, and now he saw it peel back over, the present become the future, the past the present, thought and awareness scabbing away under the rule of mandible and claw to an older, quieter age, when the sun shone brightly over hot seas and the world was silent but for the hiss of the segmented.

The claws came down first, fastening one to either side of him, then the jaws, seized into stillness with a purpose in grasp. Thomas felt the fog flood away as they descended from above, but it was too late to think about it.

***

Thomas and Marcus’s belongings made it back from the lighthouse in the hands of the police, as evidence. Marcus’s notes in particular caused a stir, and the spectacular new genus of Eurypterid, the fossilized sea scorpion, was excavated and brought to a nearby museum for preparation, of which surprisingly little needed to be done.

The lighthouse contained traces of dried, dead fungus of some kind, scarcely remarkable considering its age and depilated state. The caves were examined, but deemed too narrow and dangerous to warrant further investigation.

The best way to keep something safe is to keep it secret. The best secret is one that no one knows. The secret that no one knows is forgotten. And it’s best left that way.

Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.