Aldred Up a Tree

There's a frame of reference that would be useful to have here, Aldred imagines. Its absence is leaving perception a jumbled mess, like a Cornell box that has been given a good shake. He has a few facts to deal with:

He is up a tree, a gnarled and ancient affair.

He's holding on to a branch for dear life, but this seems to be unnecessary, as the afghan is still wrapped around him, now transformed into a sort of sling. The knotted ends are on top of the branch, and Aldred hangs beneath.

He is currently facing the sky. It's bright blue and calming, and part of him wants to relax and leave well enough alone. But another part of him can't resist a turn of the head to see what the whole situation is.

The branch sticks out over a cliff.

It appears to be a long way down.

It is morning and it is cold.

He pulls himself to the side a bit and looks down at the foot of the tree. Mercury and an old man (oh yes, Kliet, that was his name) are there. Mercury is wearing a bright red cloche hat with an ostrich feather pin. The hat and pin don't really go together, making her head a smaller jumble within the jumble.

Kliet is holding a large yellowing map of the continental United States, mounted on plywood.

Mercury has an old fashioned cheerleader's bullhorn to her mouth, and is slowly overpronouncing the names of American cities through it. Her accent is the sort that only comes from elocution classes at a young ladies finishing school. A disreputable one.

"NEEEUUUUWPOOOHHHRRRRRRRT."

Aldred takes his hands away from the branch and rubs his face. A wind comes up and he starts to swing gently. Aldred glances at the knot. It looks solid and reassuring. He lets his arms flop back and now hangs in the sling, staring up into the sky.

"AHHHNCOOOOUUUUURRRRAHHHHGE."

There's something infuriating about that.

"SHEEEEEEECAHHHHGUUUOOOOOO."

That's slightly better. The wind picks up and he begins to swing with more vigor. He resists the urge to wrap his arms tightly around the branch, ignores the screaming voice in his head, and concentrates on the sky, willing his eyes to stay open and take in the blue when all they want to do is clamp shut.

"TOOOHRAAHHHHHHNNNTOOOOH."

Oh for heaven's sake...

"Mercury?"

"FEEEEEEEENIIIIIIIIIIICKS-Yes, dear?" She gestures to Kliet, who adjusts the angle of the map.

"That's very irritating."

"What is, dear? SEEEEEEEECAAAAAAHHCUSSSSSSS."

"You naming cities that aren't on that map."

"No it isn't. BAAAAAHSSSSTUUUUUHHHHN."

"Really, it is."

"No dear, it isn't. It's annoying, not irritating. FEEERRRRRAAAAHHNKFOOOOOOHRT."

"The difference being?"

"Irritants just happen. Annoyances are there on purpose."

"I wasn't aware of that-"

"HOOOOOHNOOOOOOOOELUUUUUAHLUUUU."

"-particular distinction."

"Well, that's something for you to think about then, isn't it dear? But I wouldn't spend too much energy on it as-"

The sling swings to the right and he feels a sickening lurch. His eyes snap to the knot, the twists and turns of which are now in motion. Rapid motion. Aldred grabs the branch with his arms and as much of his legs as his gut will allow. The afghan falls away, and he hears Kliet mutter something about cavalier treatment of family heirlooms.

"FAAAHREEEEEEHSSSSNUUUOOOOOO."

Aldred begins to inch his way down the branch, towards the trunk. He hasn't gotten very far when a definitive cracking noise tells him what the immediate future is going to hold. The branch is still partly connected to the trunk, and Aldred's weight causes it to swing in rather than simply fall off. The far end of the branch arcs towards the foot of the tree, carrying Aldred with it, gaining speed like a wrecking ball. At the last second Aldred lets go. The forward momentum hurtles him towards Kliet who seems to be expecting this. He takes a quick step to the side and swats Aldred with the mapboard, deflecting him into a conveniently placed (if dew dampened) haystack.

Aldred closes his eyes, and, though partially winded, breathes in as much of the smell of damp hay as he can. He is greedy for it, in love with all things that stay near to the ground. The impact has driven him halfway towards the center of the stack, and for a moment he considers burrowing in. Instead he pulls himself out and collapses onto the ground, his back resting against the hay. Mercury wanders over and points the bullhorn down at him. He can see up it, all the way to her pursed lips. He thinks he reads some satisfaction on them. They slowly part and one last name comes rolling down the cone of the bullhorn.

"GUUUUUAAAHHHHHHMMMMMMMM."

Aldred considers.

"That's not even a city."

"Does that annoy you?"

He shrugs.

"Right," says Mercury. "I think we've made a fair bit of progress here this morning."

Aldred and Enforced Hospitality

There's something ludicrous about a rocking chair, thinks Aldred. They're meant to be so cozy and homey and relaxing, but the reality doesn't measure up. They creak in a way that refuses to take a proper rhythm. They require far too much effort and attention to keep rocking, distracting you from fully devoting your attention to woolgathering. The ones with arms (as is the case with the model he's currently stuck in) are never built with the portly gentleman in mind. Worst of all the wicker seats are puritanical in their lack of cushiness and have a tendency to poke one. Intimately.

He's been here for six hours now, waiting for Mercury to return with the promised drop of something restorative. Rogue bits of wicker have firmly embedded themselves in his person. He's almost too distracted to worry about infection, or becoming permanently affixed to the rocker, but manages to devote a small part of his mind to this idle fretting. Mostly he's wondering what's become of Mercury. It wouldn't be the first time she's been gone longer than expected (her disappearance for the entirety of 1998 springs to mind), but she usually has the graciousness to not leave him bound with an afghan to an infernal device while she's off and about. He hopes that nothing has happened to her.

The door creaks open and a quaint and ancient man comes hobbling in, holding a trembling tray in his hands. He gives Aldred a carefully composed quizzical look that doesn't quite hide the fact that he knows, if not exactly what's going on, enough to not be as innocent as he's pretending.

"Ah, Mr. Aldred?"

"Yes?"

"Miss Mercury called. On the telephone. Says she's been unavoidably detained. At the, uh, antique mall. Looking at antiques." The man gestures with the tray. "She said I should maybe bring you something. Said you were indisposed. Stuck in the room. Resting."

He looks over the afghan, lets a little more of his wry amusement slip out.

"Comfy?"

"Okay."

"Not too warm? I hope?"

"Yes, fine."

"Rocker treating you alright?"

"It's lovely."

"Great. It's a terrific old chair. Handcrafted."

"It shows."

"It's for sale. If you're interested."

"I'll have to get back to you on that."

"Just say the word. We can come to a price easily."

"I'm sure. You'll excuse me, Mister-?"

"Kliet."

"Mr. Kliet, but as Mercury mentioned I am feeling under the weather and I'm afraid I don't have the strength to discuss this wonderful chair."

"That's real Belgian wicker-"

"Not. One. Second. More."

Kliet can see that he's pushed the doddering a shade too far. Aldred notices the tray has stopped trembling, is in fact now deadly still.

"Right you are. Well, there's coffee here for you. And some cookies too. They're from an old family recipe. The wife-"

Aldred looks a polite amount of poison at him.

"Okay, okay. Cripes, can't an old fella have any fun?"

"Have your fun when you total up her bill."

Kliet snorts as he lays the tray across the arms of the rocker. He carefully untucks just enough of the Afghan to free up Aldred's right arm, leaving the rest of Mercury's sigil or combat origami or whatever it is in place. His movements are deft and professional: Aldred doubts Mercury had to tell him what to do. Crafty old bastard.

Aldred reaches for the mug of coffee, spilling a bit as the rocker follows his shifting bulk. He gulps a good half of it down. It's strong and hot and perfect, the definition of perfect in this case including a generous portion of very good rum. He can feel it working immediately, blotting out the accumulated irritation of the last six hours and making a dent in the enervation that led him to this point in the first place.

"That's...very good coffee."

"She said to give you the good stuff. Said you'd be needing it. Said it was an apology of sorts. Said she won't be back for a bit longer. Said probably not until tomorrow morning. Said-"

"Said 'keep him tied up'?"

"Said that too."

Aldred sighs, but he can't find it in himself to get too angry at Kliet, who is certainly going to follow her instructions to the letter. He knows how persuasive Mercury can be. Confining him to a chair for a day will hardly by the worst thing she's ever put him through. And the rum is very, very good indeed. "Breaking the embargo" good. Maybe even "smuggled out of Fidel's private stock" good. Raoul's, anyway.

"It seems a pity to mix this with coffee."

"It does indeed sir."

"And to drink it alone."

Kliet gives him yet another complex look. He has quite a repertoire.

"Well, I imagine there's no harm in a friendly drink or three with one of our guests. I imagine."

Kliet leaves the room. Aldred hopes he'll be back soon. He doesn't begrudge the man his calculating suspicions, but really, he has no intention of trying to escape. He's just terribly, terribly bored.

When Mercury returns the next morning she's greeted by a very hungover Mr. Kliet. Aldred's snores come rolling down the stairs and play about the room like drunken puppies. They don't cause the pictures to rattle on the walls, but it's a near thing.

"my god," she says. "This is going to cost me a fortune, isn't it?"

Kliet nods, then winces.

Aldred Comes Out of the Fog

The darkness is overpowering. He imagines it as a layer of moss growing between his brain and his skull. He ignored it for too long, and now the space between the soft and the hard is packed tight, and he is blind. Coherent thoughts and sensations that once moved freely between the inside and the outside now burrow halfway through the mossy darkness before being stilled, stopped and suffocated.

"What are you thinking about? Hmm?"

He wishes he knew.

"Oy, Aldred. Oy! Yo! Hello? Hello?"

Fingers snap beneath his nose. The sound comes to him through the olfactory center, synesthetically hitting his brain as the mixed smells of vinegar and burning moss. The smell overpowers the darkness, lightly, but enough that thoughts and sensations begin to move again.

The needy face of a small dog.
A sunny morning in Crete.
A heap of green oranges and orange bell peppers.
Mountford, in a tattered undershirt, yelling something about "foul cologne-drinking Portuguese ruffians."

"Oh lord, I remember that! They completely ruined his bootlegging operation and flipped him to the Guardia into the bargain. He was furious. He ran out and bought an atlas, an expensive one too, just to rip out the page with Lisbon on it to wipe his ass with. Appallingly childish gesture that, but that's Mountford all over, isn't it?"

It's a woman's voice, a voice he should know.

"I saw him recently," Aldred mutters. He is blinking, trying to see anything other than grayness, but his eyes are apparently a few minutes behind his nose and ears.

"And?"

"It didn't end well."

"It usually doesn't." He can see a bit of motion in the gray now, and her voice seems to be coming from there. "Frankly, I don't know why you continue to have anything to do with him. Or he you for that matter. You're both terribly terribly bad for each other, and you're both terribly terribly aware of that fact. Yet you persist in getting in each other's way."

There is shape now to the movement.

"Couple of latent homosexuals if you ask me."

There is now sharp outline to the shape.

"You ought to let him tup you and have done."

There is now color within the outline.

"Or you him, whichever. All I'm saying is that it would do the universe a world of good —or maybe just the world a universe of good— if you boys would give in and get your silly repressed lusts out of your systems."

There is now a gray haired woman in her mid-fifties in the outline. She wears a smart tweed suit, a muted green check affair. She has the air of someone who has practiced at being clever long enough that it has become a near substitute for wisdom. A lit cigarillo is in her hand, an affectation designed purely to distract people by getting them to ask themselves the question "Where on earth does one even buy cigarillos in this day and age?"

"Did you say 'tup'?"

"I'm afraid I did."

"You do know it's the 21st century, right? Has been for a while?"

"I realize you're coming out of a bit of a fog and might feel a touch grumpy, but try not to be too much of a smartass, dear."

"Sorry, I don't know where my manners are. Hello Mercury."

"Hello Aldred."

"Pardon the cliché, but where am I?"

"Would you believe Bucharest?"

"I would not."

"Good. We're in Bethlehem."

"The Jesus town or the steel town?"

"The latter. You were found wandering around downtown Philadelphia, waving a reindeer antler in a threatening manner and shouting something about geometry. Spheres, I believe."

"Oh dear."

"Mmm. Luckily, I happened to be in town, attempting to clear my own head with a bit of history."

"What, the Liberty Bell and all that?"

"Don't knock it. Lots of strength to be drawn from an object like that, if one knows how to approach it sensibly. At any rate, I found you and instantly knew that you needed to be taken someplace quiet yet industrial."

"That's a very specific thing to know instantly."

"You're quite easy to diagnose dear. Oh, and I was already planning on coming out this way for some antiquing anyway. So things had lined up nicely. They often do."

Aldred is finally able to make sense of the room. It appears to be the sort of oppressively tasteful space that she has always favored. Probably a bed and breakfast, probably owned by an old married couple, probably banal and deadening and far too cozy. He's never understood why she favors places like this, but he can't deny that she draws a certain energy from them. Her witchery has always been a clandestine thing, disguised with tweeds and doilies. Aldred finds it baffling, but he's respected it ever since he saw her garrote a man four times her size with an eyeglass chain.

He tries to stand, and the room lurches sickeningly, gray pouring back into his field of vision. She grasps his shoulders and pushes him back down into what turns out to be a rocking chair.

"No dear, I don't think you should get up just yet." She tosses an afghan over him, binding him down with a series of sinister tucks and folds. "You stay right there. I'll just go and see if they've got something pleasant yet medicinal for you. Tomorrow we'll see about getting you back in...alignment, shall we say?"

Aldred smiles vaguely and watches her leave the room. As soon as the door closes he struggles against the afghan, but it's no use, he's bound tight to the rocker. He tries to resign himself to his fate, but the last time Mercury used the word "alignment" at him it resulted in a three month physical and metaphysical training course and a near psychotic breakdown. He'll have to start planning an escape soon , but for now there's nothing to do but let the accursed cosiness cover him and try to mend.

Aldred and the Pond

Aldred can't decide if it's somehow respectful or utterly tasteless that they've turned the bomb crater into a koi pond. Given, it's the perfect shape and saves the effort of digging a separate hole, but still. He's been feeling superstitious for a few weeks now, actively trying to avoid bad omens or anything that could conceivably turn into one. For an imaginative person like Aldred this is a difficult proposition. The day before he left America he passed a pile of new phone books that had been left outside a condemned apartment building, apparently in error. They were already fading and warping, the plastic wrap proving ineffective at keeping out light or moisture. Aldred's scrying mind was compelled to read signs of a fractured future, perhaps involving an injury to the leg (his?) before he forced himself to look away. It didn't help matters that he almost immediately afterwards barked his shins on a badly placed planter. In his experience it isn't usually this simple to connect the dots.

He's finding it irritating that the unseen is proving rather visible lately. Besides the perilous situations it ends up putting him in, it's boring. And cheap. Aldred wants to be teased by the universe, led on with tantalizing glimpses from behind a twitching veil, lifted up by spikes of intuition and buffeted by the unexpected, caressed by tendrils of mystery while he tumbles through that which is sensed and that which is known in other ways...

Good lord, he's getting an erection. That's no way to behave at a garden party, even in one of the more decadent corners of Montenegro. Ill-advised as it may be, he'd best focus his attention on the pond.

The crater is a relic of WWII. There's some debate as to which side brought it into the world, but the Countess prefers to blame Mussolini. Aldred pictures the dictator striding into the garden, kneeling on the lawn, and cracking the earth with his proud and powerful head. More conventional munitions were probably responsible in reality. The perfect circle of the pond makes the image hard to shake though: he keeps seeing Il Duce's giant skull displacing the earth, over and over. The pond water pours from his eyes and koi spawn drips from his mouth, growing to full size carp before hitting the surface. They swim off in tightly organized schools, the aquatic equivalent of the fascist ideal: opulent and regimented and fast, so fast.

It's hardly fair to the koi to indict them with the man's ideology like this, but fairness isn't at the top of Aldred's mind at the moment. All in all, he's not thrilled to be here. The estate, the garden, the pond, his hosts: it's not the atmosphere he wants and needs at the moment. It's all too 20th century. While he's currently terrified of omens, he's also obsessed with the future. It's an untenable position, but it's one he can't come to grips with in a place so mired in the past. he was hoping to find a forward flow to grab onto, here in one of the world's newest republics. Instead it's imported titles, gossip about who did what for Milošević, and wreckage from the 1940s. His disappointment is in turn making him feel childish and paternalistic. He's being an ungracious guest and an ugly American.

He decides to concentrate on the fish. There's a couple dozen of them. They're beautiful as they swim around, but they keep breaking his contemplation, by coming to the surface flapping their lips and making him think of Mussolini again. Two dozen bald dictators, declaiming from the pond, urging him to go faster, go forward. They want him to march into the 20th century, modernizing everything he touches. It's a completely irrational responsibility to place on one man. At any rate their notion of modernity is already hopelessly antiquated: Aldred hears them burbling about tail fins and six lane highways and the need for long distance air travel. History has passed these fish by and they don't even know it. They don't even to know what year it is. He wants to pity them, but he finds himself getting angry instead.

When the Countess wanders down to receive his compliments on the pond, she's rather surprised to find Aldred hopping up and down, shouting about the dead ends represented by futurism and fascism, and occasionally giving the finger to her koi. She thinks he's rather crossed the line from colorful to garish. Once Aldred calms down, he'll agree with her, but by then he'll be back in the states, boldly walking under ladders and daring black cats to cross his path. Omens be damned: he wants the future now.

Aldred Overreacts

It started as a desperate bid for a bit of novelty, and now Aldred is afraid things have rather snowballed. He's got nothing to blame but his own tendency to overreact to tedium. It's a character flaw that has laid him low before, even almost gotten him killed on occasion. More than once he's woken up in the hospital, a disapproving nurse looming over him like some hideously misshapen medical monument, waiting only for the merest flutter of his eyelid to launch into a speech that inevitably began with "Well! I don't know what you thought you were doing, but you're very lucky to be alive..." He would nod, sigh, and if at all possible fall back into a coma for a few days (an imperfect ability that when it worked proved to be invaluable, and was really the only worthwhile thing he learned during a wasted couple of months in Tibet).

Aldred has a nasty feeling that he's on that track again. He had been stuck out in one of the more uninteresting middles of nowhere for weeks now. He had thought he needed a bit of solitude to clear his head and soul. On reflection, he should have gone in the opposite direction. He should have found the noisiest, foulest smelling, most garish urban center going, crammed his brain and guts with the strongest stimulants he could lay hands on, and just had a complete sensory blow out. Even if it was like that time in Macao when he ended up blind for three days and deaf for four, it would have been better than this, this...this place. That's all it was. You couldn't even call it a "dull place" or a "featureless place". One couldn't attach a descriptor to its surface: they simply didn't stick. It was a place, and nothing but a place.

The place was killing him. It was flattening him, sucking the third dimension out of him using some kind of vampiric geometry. The place was trying to kill him with blandness. It wanted to leach the pigment out of him not just until he went white, but until he went transparent. It wanted to suppress his personality, apparently by pasting over it with some sort of cosmic layer of blah. The place was out to blank him. The place was out to erase him. The place wanted to rub him out.

It was also making him a touch paranoid, but that was incidental.

He stood against this attack for a few weeks (trying to prove something, he was no longer sure what), until one morning he simply cracked. Anyone standing outside of his rented (and boring) cottage that dawn would have seen the door fly open, and a determined Aldred launch himself through the opening, wearing nothing but a determined look and a kimono embroidered with dragons. He marched to the highest point for miles, a shriveled mound that dreamt of one day being mistaken for a hillock. He jumped up and down on this for the better part of an hour, all the while chanting "I deny you, I deny you, I deny you, I deny you", until his ankles began to hurt. He then proceeded into the town, shooting the evilest of evil looks at anyone he happened to pass. At a used car lot he selected the least reliable looking salesman, pulled three thousand dollars from inside the kimono, and said "Give me something that will break down inside of five hundred miles, but will last long enough to get me out of this damned place."

Four hundred and sixty miles later, he finds himself eating an ice cream cone and standing next to the smoking ruin of a 1994 Geo Metro, in the square of what appears to be a very nice little town. The kimono is making him stick out a bit, but that was a matter easily fixed. The important thing was that he was finally getting a bit of stimulation. The ice cream was the sort of bland chocolate favored by children and was perfect. The square was a vortex of civic pride, centered on an equestrian statue of someone who had probably committed unspeakable atrocities and was therefore terribly patriotic. Aldred wasn't quite sure he liked what all of this meant, but he was relieved that it meant something.

He strolls as nonchalantly as a big man in a small kimono can, ducking into the first menswear shop he can find. He emerges soon after, clad in a blue seersucker suit and yes, a genuine straw boater. He's delighted to be in a place where such outlandish gear allows a body to blend in. Apparently he's wound up in 1890 somehow, the wrecked Metro the only thing that gives it all the lie. It's a perfect place to be before the Fourth of July, so utterly false. He'll stay for what he's certain will be excellent municipal fireworks. Why not? He's earned it.

Aldred Takes a Seat

It's an admirable coil of rope that Aldred finds wrapped around himself when he regains consciousness. Silken, pliable yet firm, glowing white: it looks as if it would be at home on the deck of a very expensive boat. Aldred reflects that if one must be tied to a chair, waking slowly from the effects of an expertly delivered blow to the head, this is the rope to be tied with. It almost makes the blinding pain worthwhile to associate with such quality goods. Almost.

Groaning, he cranes his neck around, trying to get a sense of where he is. There's not much light besides the pool centered around the chair, and that's dim. He can tell that the floor is concrete, of the cracked and old variety. As his eyes begin to adjust he can just make out a gleam that would appear to indicate a tiled wall. He makes a little experimental shout, and hears a series of rapidly repeating echoes bounce away from him. Finally, he gives a good sniff to the air and nearly gags. The quality is unmistakable, an unpleasant musk reminiscent of urine and exhaust in an overheated urban space. He's in an abandoned subway stop.

How unspeakably gauche.

Aldred tries to remember how he got here. He had been on the beach. His plan had been to take a brisk stroll up to the lighthouse, but he had been distracted along the way by a horseshoe crab shell of unusual fineness. The carapace glistened in the morning light in a way that was simply impossible to resist. Aldred, usually firm of purpose where brisk walks are concerned, had stopped to bend over and examine it. The blow came seconds later. Reflecting now, he has a nasty feeling the shell was set out as bait, by somebody who must know him entirely too well.

Back in the subway tunnel, he hears footsteps and spies a flickering light in the distance. Soon he can make out the figure of a tall thin man carrying a five branched candelabrum. Aldred recognizes the healthy and handsome face of...well, he supposes Mountford is his nemesis, but the word is so freighted with melodrama that Aldred would rather avoid it. He prefers to think of the man as his competitor, his very aggressive and very talented competitor.

Aldred is full of apprehension. After his last encounter with Mountford, he needed to spend six months in Lapland living in near complete isolation while he herded reindeer and tried desperately to remember his name. His aggressive and talented competitor had nearly succeeded in obliterating Aldred's identity entirely. It was not the friendliest of competitions. Granted, it was a fascinating experience, but it wasn't something that Aldred was keen on going through again just yet.

Mountford stops a few feet away from him. He sits down on the floor, placing the candelabrum between them. Silently, he studies Aldred over the flames. Aldred returns his glance, and notices there's something different about Mountford. Even in this dim light, his pupils shouldn't be as dilated as they are. Aldred finds himself with the unshakable impression that while Mountford is here, his eyes are somewhere else entirely, somewhere even darker. After a few more minutes of silent contemplation Mountford speaks.

"You know, they say it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, but to my mind it's best to light a candle and curse the darkness. That way you're cursing from a position of strength."

Aldred forces himself to lock eyes with Mountford and a charge immediately begins to build in the air. Tendrils of consciousness lash out from both men and begin to grapple with each other. As they clash, shared images are formed in each of their minds: an apple tree shattered to splinters by a sudden lightning strike, a ragged pillowcase stuffed with fresh cut heather, the slag heap from a radium mine glowing faintly at dusk, a broken broom on the shoulder of a six lane highway, an incompetent exorcist being tossed from a haunted clock tower...Dozens flash by, none of them lasting for more than a fraction of a second, each man flinching occasionally as a particularly vivid or freighted image deals him a blow.

The flames on the candelabrum have been rising slowly throughout this exchange and are now almost a foot tall. Aldred sweats under their heat but Mountford seems scarcely to notice them. A small smile rises at his lips but doesn't quite make it to his displaced eyes. He's winning: he knows it, and Aldred knows it too. Mountford's images begin to dominate the stream, and Aldred finds himself knocked aesthetically sideways by the idea of a green cube sitting in a brown field. He doesn't have time to recover before Mountford conjures the sun rising in the west over an abandoned farmhouse, which Aldred weakly and only partially counters with a stone obelisk half sunk in an ornamental pond. Mountford snorts with contempt and builds a grand vision of a glass sphere the size of a planet shattering into billions of pieces while still holding its basic shape.

Aldred screams in terror, utterly defeated. In desperation he conjures the image of himself being carried off on the backs of a herd of reindeer. Unlike the other images, this one lasts for more than a split second. Indeed, it sustains for the better part of a minute, the imagined Aldred dwindling into the distance as the seemingly endless herd thunders across the frozen plain.

When the image finally fades, Mountford finds himself sitting before an empty chair, the coils of rope still wrapped around it. He howls with laughter at Aldred's cowardly retreat, an absolute indicator of the complete victory he would have had if the contest had played to its true end.

It's only when he stands up and begins to walk out of the tunnel that Mountford notices that something seems to be off with his vision, as if his depth perception was...gone. A terrible suspicion begins to form in his mind and he runs back to the abandoned stop. He hops up onto the platform and frantically searches for a reflective surface. He finds it in the form of the chromed top of an old trash can. He leans in with the candelabrum, already knowing what his distorted reflection will confirm: that bastard Aldred stole one of his eyes when he ran away.

Mountford's curses can be heard echoing out of the subway for the next five hours. The candles give out after three.

Aldred Makes a Noise

The silence spread subtly yet swiftly across the world on that day. The first things to disappear were machine noises: jackhammers faded out, cars began to glide noiselessly down the road, a million ambient whirs and clicks and electronic buzzings died away. It was an unsettling yet holy thing.

(Aldred notices what's going on immediately and heads for the warehouse he has been renting in case of just such an occurrence.)

The sound of the human voice goes next. Conversations weighty and banal drift away. Songs devolve into humming, getting lower and lower, eventually crossing the line into inaudibility and non-existentence. Cries, shouts, screams, sighs all warble away, suddenly useless and out of place. The verbal, the pre-verbal, the voluntary and involuntary: if it comes from the throat, it is no longer needed in this new and sacred place.

(Aldred muscles open the receiving doors, comforted that they still groan in protest, though not as loudly as he would hope. He runs quickly to the exact center of the warehouse and pounds a rail spike into the floor. He is disturbed that his hammering is already virtually silent.)

The natural world is the last thing to shut up. Clouds and tree branches still give visual evidence of a wind that should be roaring. Formerly babbling brooks roll by in eerie silence. The baseline of insect mating calls that has existed uninterrupted in some places for millennia is gone. The last thing anybody hears is the sound of the body, the high whine of the central nervous system, the low swish of circulation. Then these too are gone. Even the memory of sound fades from every brain. The silence is absolute.

(Aldred ties one end of an enormous spool of heavy green twine around the protruding head of the spike, using a special knot that he has practiced daily but had hoped to never have occasion to use.)

A deadly calm settles across the soundless world. People are beginning to stare up into the sky, jaws hanging loose, their heads so full of bliss there's no room for anything else. The globe seems to be rising and expanding, bringing the curve of the earth towards the dome of the sky. The goal —whose goal?— would seem to be compression, grinding everything on the surface against the seemingly solidified shell of the sky.

(Aldred hunts for the long crowbar, the special titanium one that the perfect masters blessed for him, and panics for a moment that perhaps it is in another safe house, too far from this one to reach in time. A moment later he lays hands on it, sighing noiselessly in relief. He inserts the crowbar through the center of the spool of twine.)

The firmament has begun to darken to a rich deep blue that has never been seen before. The bliss spreading like a noxious gas through the entire world population is doubling in strength ever second. All that crawls, flies, swims, photosynthesizes or otherwise lives will soon be ground into a fine paste sandwiched between the earth and this impossible but now undeniably solid sky.
(Aldred takes a deep breath, then runs across the warehouse floor, out through the receiving doors, leaving a line of twine behind him. For several minutes, the twine lies slack across the warehouse floor. Then suddenly it snaps taut. Aldred has reached the ash tree a mile away and firmly wedged the spool in its forked branches. The tree looks as if it were grown to receive the spool.)

The bliss swells rapidly inside every being, expanding beyond their bodies, merging into one global bubble of joy and shared experience. It is a holy thing, but the peril of the situation indicates that it has been executed ineptly, and that the bliss is destined to be hermetically sealed forever by the barrier of the sky, instead of flowing out into the universe.

(Aldred takes one last look at a sky so blue it's black, gets a firm grip on the crowbar with both hands, and pulls the hooked end across the twine as quickly as he can. He is pitched over backward by the effort and finds himself staring up into the sacred canopy, the awful heavens above. He hopes he wasn't too late.)

Thruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummm.

The note of the vibrating twine starts quietly, all but silently. It builds quickly in the absence of any other noise, rapidly filling the uncomfortably small area of open space left. The note gets stronger and stronger, using everything in the world as a resonator to perpetuate and enhance itself. Waves of sound begin to crash against the sky, battering it with exponentially increasing force. The sky holds, holds, holds... and then is suddenly pushed back, hurtling away and shifting back into gaseous form. The expanded earth sucks back into itself. The note of the twine disperses immediately, pulling every other sound back into existence as it goes.

(That was a near thing, thinks Aldred, respooling twine as he walks the mile back to the warehouse. The crowbar tucked under his arm is vibrating slightly, and will continue to do so for the next few days.)


(Note: Some of you may have read an earlier version of this piece, in case it seems vaguely familiar.)

Aldred and the Arm

Somewhere in the middle of the night, Aldred awakes to the realization that there is a stranger in the bed with him. He's well past the age where this would be a pleasant surprise. Aldred is an inveterate side-sleeper, and the invader's arm is resting on the back of Aldred's head, behind the ear, pointing up as if he were standing close (far too close) behind Aldred and hailing a taxi.

Aldred knows that this is a moment for calm and clear action. Don't panic, act quickly, get to a place of safety. Carefully he works his hand out from under the pillow and lightly encircles the stranger's wrist. Then he slowly raises the whole arm a fraction of an inch, just enough to let him slide out from under this unwelcome embrace. The lifting goes off without a hitch as Aldred has a surprisingly delicate touch. When he tries to slide out from under the arm, however, he finds himself unable to move more than a token amount. The bedsheets must be restricting his movement. Not for the first time, he curses his love of snug linen.

So then, a more radical plan is needed. He's no great proponent of violence, but circumstances have left him with no other option. He tightens his grip on the offending wrist, and takes a moment to steel himself. Then he throws himself out of the bed with considerable force, still holding tight to the arm. He lands on his back, quickly leaps into a standing position, and delivers a savage knee to his enemy's solar plexus, which his grip on the arm should have conveniently placed nearby.

Except that his knee meets only air and Aldred staggers back, desperately fighting this sudden unexpected change in his center of gravity. He tries to reach out his left hand to steady himself as his right is still keeping a death grip on his opponent's wrist, but the only response from his left arm is an excruciating attack of pins and needles.

It's more or less at this point that Aldred realizes he is standing in the middle of his bedroom at 3 am, his right hand locked around his left wrist. There is no invader: his arm had simply fallen asleep to the point where it was so numb he no longer felt it as part of himself. Shortly he will find this hilarious, but his initial reaction is a sickening existential vertigo as his sleep- and adrenaline-addled brain tries to reintegrate the limb back into his sense of self. Aldred almost faints as he goes through the shock of a reverse amputation, the limb binding back to him in a surgical flash of self-awareness. He shakes this strange new limb that is suddenly under his control, as much out of sheer wonder as to get rid of the lingering pins and needles. As they recede so does the sense of newness, and the limb becomes familiar.

Aldred feels a tiny twinge of regret that at the end of it all he has performed no heroics, faced no great dangers, and received no exciting new limbs for his troubles. He gives the same old arm one last contemptuous shake and stumbles back to bed. By the time his head hits the pillow the regret has evaporated, and the chuckling has begun. This quickly gives way to snoring, a consequence of Aldred trying sleeping on his back for once.

Aldred Falling

He falls over backward, more out of instinct than anything else. Gravity is the ancient enemy of men shaped like Aldred, and a wise man bends before an unbeatable foe lest he be shattered. So down he goes, distributing the fall across his ample back, adipose tissues acting as a natural shock absorber. He feels a moment's pang, as his prized gabardine raincoat has only just been dry cleaned after years of neglect, and now here he is, pressing it firmly (to say the least) against the grass. But you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and you can't fall properly without staining a few raincoats. There are consolations at least: the odor of well-crushed clover is wafting up around him. It is a relaxing smell, and Aldred's damaged dignity is instantly repaired.

A contented sigh rolls through his bulk, and Aldred thinks to himself that if one must slip and fall, it is best to have a pastoral setting to do it in. The sky is simply perfect: the rainclouds (presumed architects of his tumble) are parting, and sunbeams are fading in all up and down the meadow. His arm stretches out, walking itself by the fingers across the ground. When the arm reaches full extension, the fingers splay out and then curl in, grasping a handful of clover. The elbow bends, the hand uproots the clover, and travels in an arc to Aldred's nose. He squeezes the clover and inhales deeply. It seems scarcely possible, but his body relaxes further. Tentatively, the hand moves to the mouth and allows it to take a small exploratory taste of the crushed clover.

The flavor is incredible, integrating one more sense into what is turning out to be an ecstatic experience. Aldred the man is no longer there: he is a heap of clover, rudely and robustly growing in the sun, an example to point to if one wanted to define "burgeoning". He is leaves and stems and roots and that glorious smell and flavor, all so delicate and intertwined, following nothing but the sun. He lies like this for hours, until mystic ecstasy gives way to earthy somnolence. As the sun begins to set, his quiet snores ride the breeze like hawks, gliding in lazy circles over the mountain below.