Envy

 The book was quite clear about the amount of mess that would be created if you summoned Envy into too weak a body. 

“Em? Where do you keep the whiskey?” Charlotte called out, her voice echoing in the dusty, unfurnished room.  She kept shuddering and she had to fight to keep her thoughts from returning to what she’d just read.

“At home,” called back Emily.  There was a moment of silence and then the steady pad-pad-pad of slipper-clad feet.  Emily came into the room holding a lump of green wax and a cloth bag closed with a golden draw-string.  “What’s up?” she said, looking at Charlotte.  “You’re shuddering.  At regular intervals, no less.”

Charlotte grimaced and tried to control herself but then her thoughts would start going back to ‘…eyeballs popping like untreated blisters and fountaining forth viscous humours…’.  “The book is quite graphic,” she said.  “I could use a drink.”

“I brought some camomile tea,” said Emily.  “But then I discovered there’s no kettle here.”  She sounded like this was home already despite having arrived only half an hour earlier.  “You could try sucking on a teabag if you like?  That’s probably quite unpleasant, it might do the trick.”

Charlotte tried to consider it but the thought of it brought up ‘…tongue will elongate to the length of their arm and loll from their swollen lips like an opium-fiend falling from a couch…’.  “I don’t think I can,” she said weakly.  “This book’s warnings are meant to be taken seriously, I think.  Are you sure we want to summon Envy?”

Emily wasn’t a pretty woman; some men might call her handsome, but others were likely to compare her to a horse.  Even so, the look of affront on her face at Charlotte’s question was enough to make Charlotte wish that her features weren’t quite so strongly defined.  Her eyes seemed to bulge outward and her jaw, a square, powerful apparatus that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a gorilla, for example, pushed forwards with an audible grinding of bone.

“I am certain,” she said in the tones of someone who is holding back a lot of their opinion, “that We. Need. To. Summon. Envy.”  The emphasis she gave the words, separating them and stressing them, left no doubt in Charlotte’s mind that Envy was being summoned and would be expected to feel happy about it.  “You shouldn’t worry about the warnings, I’ve read them all too.”

Charlotte shuddered again.  “Didn’t they affect you at all?” she asked.

“Not like this.”  Emily turned away.  “I need to finish putting the symbols in place,” she said.  “Do you want that teabag or not?”

“I’ll manage without,” said Charlotte, but her hopes of sounding put upon but determined were shattered by the pad-pad-pad of Emily’s feet as she walked off.  “And where did you find a pair of slippers already?” she whispered to herself.

Charlotte made herself reread the page in the book, hoping that it would somehow help.  It did a little as some of the images were so awful that she found she was blocking out the memory of them altogether, and she was gratified to find that she’d stopped shuddering.  Then she turned the page to the actual summoning ritual that Emily would be carrying out to find out how awful that would be.  The ritual was described in a single, short paragraph and Charlotte read it three times, marvelling at how simple and easy it sounded.  There was a two-sentence invocation and then the invoker just had to slap the intended vessel for Envy with a green lotus flower.

“Em?” she called.  She stood up; there was only one chair in this abandoned house and it had a broken leg so that it wobbled disconcertingly every time she shifted her weight.  She set the book down on the chair, which rocked and creaked.

“What now?” Emily sounded distracted rather than annoyed so Charlotte followed the sound of her voice.

The house had been built a century ago and was narrow but tall, with four floors above ground and a cellar below.  There were two or three rooms on each floor; here on the ground floor there was a narrow hallway containing the stairs, and a large sitting-room for guests and a small kitchen.  The kitchen still had its cupboards and counters intact but any equipment had been stripped out and taken away.  Emily’s voice came from upstairs where the first floor had a morning-room and two smaller rooms that were just empty cuboids that could have been used for anything.  The larger room was now covered in waxy green symbols that shimmered in a light whose source Charlotte couldn’t find.  Emily was standing facing the wall opposite the window, drawing something on it that was as tall as she was.

“Where are we getting a green lotus flower from?” asked Charlotte, squinting at the drawing.  There were curves and arcs and the whole thing seemed to be afraid of straight lines, but it was somehow hard to look away from.  “There’s no such thing, you know.”

“Hah,” said Emily.  She continued drawing.

“No, really,” said Charlotte after a pause.  “The closest you can get is a blue lotus flower.”

“You can get green,” said Emily.  “You just have to grow them the right way.”

Charlotte thought about this, while her eyes tried to follow the curves of Emily’s drawing.  It was like a maze; every time she thought she could see what a line was doing it turned away and she found some other part of the design catching her attention.  She closed her eyes and was startled to find that the design still glimmered on the inside of her eyelids, now in red lines instead.

“Do I want to know how you grow them?” she asked.

“I don’t know, do you?”

Charlotte turned around before opening her eyes and was very relieved not to see the drawing in front of her any more.

“I don’t think so,” she said carefully.  “I’ve finished reading the ritual now though.”

“That’s good,” said Emily.  “You can look round now, I’ve finished.”

“I’d rather not,” said Charlotte.  “It… it’s giving me a headache.”

“Hah,” said Emily.  “Lucky we don’t have to do the ritual in here then, isn’t it?  Well, if you’re ready then, so am I.  All we need to do is go and fetch Envy’s new best friend.”

The treader of dust

 I picked myself up and knelt there, first feeling my nose to see if I’d broken it (I had not, as far as I could tell) and then cautiously groping about the floor trying to find the flashlight, which had skittered somewhere during my fall.  I realised that the floor was not free from dust, but that in here the dust layer was perhaps a centimetre thick compared with the ten centimetres in the hallway.  Eventually my questing yet fearful fingers found the flashlight while encountering nothing more disgusting to the touch than dust, and I turned it and got back up.

I allowed myself a smile.  No matter how strange this journey had been so far, I had surely hit the jackpot at last!  This room was a study of some kind.  There was a mullioned window at the far end — surely the one I’d seen on my approach — and a large wooden desk with two pillars of drawers supporting it on either side.  A wooden and leather chair was sat slightly to one side, as though someone had just stood up and left.  The wall to my left was taken over by bookshelves; three in total of varying heights.  There were books and papers crammed onto every shelf and I had to stop myself from eagerly perusing them and look further around still.  On the other side of the room there was a globe on a stand, a fireplace filled with cold grey ash and surrounded with marble tiling and a coatstand.  The coatstand was, to my relief, empty.  Had there been evidence that someone lived here despite the dust in the hallway I think I might have reconsidered looking for Tesstament, at least until morning.

Satisfied that I was alone and that this was surely where the Testament had been stored I looked first on the desk.  There was a dark-red leather blotter placed squarely and centrally and an ink-well to the top left.  A pen rested against the ink-well but the desk was otherwise clear.  I felt a little disappointed that the Testament wasn’t there, but as I thought about I supposed it made little sense to hide the book here and then leave it out in plain sight.  So I turned to the bookshelves.

There I found only calamity.  I barely brushed my fingertip against the spine of the first book, something ornithological, and it crumbled into dust, cracking and dissolving into a trickle, which became a veritable waterfall of desiccated paper and aged ink.  The whole book collapsed in on itself as though it had been sat there for centuries, slowly and invisibly decaying until my careless caress unbound whatever still cohered it and returned to the dust we all come from.  I stepped back, shocked, and a little wary after my coughing fit of inhaling more dust and starting again.  When the book had finished its particulate descent to the floor I tried, as gently as possible, to ease the one next to it out to look at its cover, but it too disintegrated into a cloud of grey powder rather than be observed.

Now I was worried.  If the Testament was in this same condition I could imagine no way to salvage it and my journey here had been entirely in vain.  I looked along the shelf, placing my hands behind my back to avoid touching anything and holding my breath lest any of the works prove even more fragile than those first two, and to my immense relief could not find the Testament among the books there at all.

Shaking slightly now, with the effort of not breathing while staring at spine after spine, praying not to find the Testament in such a state, I moved to the chair and sat down.

The chair collapsed around me in a plume of the selfsame dust, dumping me on the floor as it, reduced to microscopic fragments, showered around me.  I threw myself forwards to escape from the cloud, dreading the damage that a coughing fit might wreak in here, and collided with the coatstand which, with a single loud crack, splintered and collapsed around me as though struck by lightning.

I got to my feet, wiping my hands ineffectually on my trousers, picked up the flashlight which was rolling on the floor and casting strange chiaroscuro on the ceiling, and retreated to the door.  It was obvious to me that this room was like an old photograph — you could see how things were in the past, but touching it caused it to split and fragment, destroying it piecemeal.  There was nothing to be found in here and I did not want to be held responsible for the devastation that I had already caused.

I paused at the door though.  In the hallway my footprints were clearly visible in the dust, like prints in wet cement, but now — and I was sure that they had not been there when I walked across the hall to this door — there were additional marks in the dust.  They were small and at first I thought they were paw-marks, but when I played the flashlight over them and looked more carefully they seemed like human feet only the size of a very small child.  Or perhaps, I considered briefly, someone who had been a victim of foot-binding at some point.  Nonetheless, there were additional paw- or foot-prints in the dust and they appeared to have approached the door and then retreated while I, unknowing, was reducing the contents of this room to dust.

I stood there for several minutes, my heart racing, blood pounding in my ears even though I strained as hard as I could to hear any external sounds at all, at a loss.  Should I call out, and confront whoever — or whatever — else might be in this house of dust?  Should I leave, perhaps wait until morning?  Or should I press on, find the wretched Testament and leave as quickly as possible?

I pressed on, if only because no sounds came to my ears no matter how hard I listened and because I couldn’t quite bring myself to give up on the Testament when I was so close.  Who knew when someone else might crack the ciphers and follow the starlight path here?

I pushed less hard on the other door and it, too, opened easily to reveal a kitchen.  The stone-flagged floor had a thin layer of dust on it, much less than that in the hallway but similar to that in the study.  There was a staircase off to the left leading upwards and a half-ajar door on the right appeared to guard a pantry.  There was a large table, set around with five chairs, in the middle of the floor and on it, laid open as though someone had been reading, was a large book bound in what might have been leather.

An icy hand seemed to clutch at my heart — what if this room was as aged and crumbling as the study?  The book on the table — surely it must be the Testament.  I desperately wanted to run forward and inspect it, but after all my experience so far such an act would undoubtedly cause the floor to cave in, or the ceiling to collapse… I was too close to fall prey to such traps now, surely.

I edged across the floor, eyeing the ceiling as though it had malevolent intent, and I laid a gentle hand on the nearest chair, dreading its dissipation into a cloud of sinking greyness.  The chair remained solid though, and the one next to it, and the table as well.  I reached out to the book and then stopped.  If the book should crumble away, then I should at least read the two pages that lay open here in front of me so that this journey be not in vain.

I read those pages and now I understand what trap Vermistaad laid to protect them.  I will not write here what I read, though the words are burned so firmly in my mind that all I have to do to recall them is close my eyes.  I read them, and I understood them, and I knew then that the book was entirely safe to touch and that I would not be taking it from that strange little house; nor would I be notifying anyone of my discovery of the ciphers.  The purpose of that book is to summon the Treader of Dust and I cannot imagine what ends that might serve.

I returned to my home for one purpose only: to destroy my notes and computer programmes.  Already Vermistaad’s curse is afflicting me; everything I touch ages visibly and if I maintain skin-contact with anything for more than a minute it begins to crumble into a fine grey dust.  Wherever I walk I leave faint dusty footprints behind as though I am burning the ground behind me.  I took a faint, macabre pleasure in destroying the evidence of my discoveries simply by resting my hands upon them and watching them break down into that fine, clinging dust that will eventually summon the Treader.

These words, intrepid reader, you may have, but there is nothing in here that will help you find that strange house, or the secrets of Vermistaad’s ciphers.  Now there is nothing left for me to do but my hands together and pray that there is some god out there that will take my soul before the Treader approaches and seizes it for its own unthinkable purposes.

Where dust goes to die

 I am neither a brave man nor a particularly well-traveled or adventured one.  I fear to argue with the butcher when I ask for lamb and he picks up beef.  I once took the wrong medicine for two months because my doctor handed me a prescription written for someone else and I could not bring myself to challenge his authority and ask for the right one.  So, finding myself on an overgrown Lancashire moor as the sun set, with only a flashlight, some spare batteries, a backup flashlight and a large kitchen knife sheathed in a teatowel lest I accidentally cut myself, a sense of intense dread came over me as slowly and inexorably as the setting of the sun.  The light seeped away and slowly the landscape became a silhouette of itself and the noises of nocturnal animals waking in their abodes made me shiver and quail.  I turned the flashlight on, and quickly turned it off again; reassured that it was working and terrified that the batteries might die before I found my way back to civilisation if I used it unnecessarily.  I clutched the tea-towelled knife tightly in my other hand and stared up at the sky which, despite darkening, seemed not to want to let the stars out.

Vermistaad calls the constellation that I was looking for Vulgaris but it has a better-known name today and I had looked it up, first in a star catalogue and then in a more useful almanac.  I knew to look for it in the east, and as the sun had set I had carefully set my back in that direction so that I was facing the right way, but now I feared to move in case I disoriented myself and could not find the constellation again.  My feet ached and my legs tingled with the onset of pins and needles and my hand ached from gripping the knife that I hoped I would not need to use and I wished that this was already all over and done with so that I could retire to my bed and shelter under the covers from the terrors of night.

Finally the stars winked into existence as though they’d always been there and I looked among them eagerly.  Standing alone and still for so long had chased my fear back and left my desire to do something — anything! — foremost.  I had a moment of cold panic when it seemed like Vulgaris was missing, but then I found a star in the right place and traced another one to its left, and slowly, with growing confidence, I identified it.  I felt a momentary sense of pride, swept away by the pain of the chill in my toes as I started to move.

Keeping Vulgaris over my left shoulder I looked about for the path that Vermistaad had written about and, as I expected, saw nothing at first.  Then it seemed as though there was a faint flicker of light, as though a firefly had signalled, and then another, and when I concentrated on them there was the dim shape of what might be a path across the moor.  When I started walking along it my doubts dissipated; a faint silvery glow seemed to emanate from it — surely the effect of moonlight on dew settling out of the cooling night-air onto a manmade declivity in the ground.  That there was no moon that night didn’t occur to me until much later, but I am sure that starlight would be an adequate substitute.

The path was narrow and twisty and at times I stopped and cast about me for where it had gone for it seemed to disappear and reappear according to whim rather than geography or geometry.  At one point it vanished altogether and I crouched down on the ground, frantically feeling around for anything to guide me, my breath rasping in my throat and my heart pounding in my chest.  I was certain I was about to be set upon and eaten; that Vermistaad’s cryptic words were guarded by more than ciphers and that I had unwittingly fallen into his subtle trap.  Then the path glimmered back into view and my relief was so severe that I think I would have fallen over had I not been already crouched down so low to the ground.  It seemed, momentarily, as though it was going back on itself, but that thought rapidly dispersed as the landscape around me seemed no more familiar than before.

The path led me thus, hither and thither, for a good twenty minutes before a large, dark object loomed ahead of me.  Seeing that path was leading now directly towards it I turned on the flashlight, holding my breath with anxiety, and cast the pale, whitish-yellow circle of light over the thing ahead.  Brick walls revealed themselves, and then a dark, mullioned window.  I had encountered a house of some measure, and I turned the flashlight off and pressed onwards, sure that this must be where Vermistaad had hidden the Testament.

The path led around the house to the right and ended at a small wooden gate constructed from several palings and held together by crosswise-nailed planks.  The gate was latched but not locked and swung open easily onto a short paved path with a garden on one side and a lawn on the other.  The far side of the lawn — scarcely three metres away, was bordered by a high hedge that I could not see over, and the garden was scraggly at best.  A gardener might have commented more favourably on it, but to me it looked if not dead then trying to die quietly and with dignity.  I hesitated at the door — should I knock?  There was a large iron knocker set in the middle of the door; a simple wrought-iron ring that struck a narrow plate beneath it.  When I picked the ring up though the door moved slightly and, leaning on it, it opened fully into darkness.

I turned the flashlight on and looked for a light-switch beyond the door, reasoning that if anyone lived here they would surely notice my intrusion and make themselves known.  Then all I needed from them was the Testament, whose value they undoubtedly did not know, and I would be gone.  I was trying so hard to convince myself of this that it took me a couple of minutes to realise that there was no light-switch anywhere on the wall by the door.

I stepped into what was a narrow hallway with a door to my left and a door at the end and a cloud of dust swirled up.  I leapt back, sure that this was a diabolic conjuring, a demon spirit set to guard the Testament from would-be thieves and inhaled sharply.  Acrid grey dust was sucked into my lungs and my coughing fit was so loud and long that the tubercular inhabitants of Thomas Mann’s sanatorium would have applauded me.  Every time I coughed myself to asphyxia I wheezingly sucked in a desperate breath that dragged more dust from the air into my lungs.  Only by staggering backwards into the night air until I reached the gate did I finally get free from the dust-cloud and was able to choke off my coughing and recover, leaning on the gate like a geriatric and clutching my aching chest with the hand holding the flashlight.  Though I never noticed myself letting go of it, I am sure that that is where I lost the knife.

Finally, wiping tears from my eyes and sniffing mucus back into my raw throat, I recovered enough to try again.  Now pointing the flashlight at the floor I saw that the house was covered in dust: where I had stepped were two scuffed footprints in dust so thick and ancient that it had felted down into a kind of carpet.  I knelt and carefully poked a finger down into it; I got as far as the knuckle and still did not feel the floor beneath it.  The door however, glided over the surface barely touching it, and by dint of more poking around I discovered that there were steps inside, hidden beneath the dust, and that the floor of the house was lower than the surrounding ground.

I almost gave up at that point, wondering if the Testrament could really have been left in a place this decrepit and filthy.  What sane mind could conceive of this as a safe place for something as valuable as the Testament of Carnamagos?  And then a wheedling little internal voice asked me how sane I thought Vermistaad was when he was writing in multiple languages and ciphers in order to hide something he thought important enough to write a book on.

I placed my feet as delicately and carefully in the dust as possible, picking them up high and setting them down again gently and slowly so as to disturb the dust as little as possible and took the five steps needed to get to the first door.  I pushed on it harder than I probably should have done, because I was certain that more thick dust would lie behind it and probably stop it from opening.  So when the door moved easily and silently, I fell through it and landed on my face.

Vermistaad's book

 As dust falls

It was a Tuesday in June when I cracked the third of Vermistaad’s ciphers and could, after months of struggling, read the second chapter of his magnum opus: Diaries of Carnamagos.  

The first chapter was written in a mixture of Latin and Greek, and though scholars disagreed on the intent behind it, all agreed that it was disturbing material and that Vermistaad must have written it shortly before, or perhaps even slightly after, he was committed to the New Bethlehem Asylum.  All subsequent chapters were seemingly gibberish but many had postulated that they might be written in code.  Several scholars, including deGriff, had investigated the possibility and had discovered the first cipher — an achievement in itself as it turned out that Vermistaad, confusingly, had switched to writing in French.  Sadly the cipher appeared to apply to random sentences throughout the chapter and did not appear to work for any later chapters; the inability to make progress was why many scholars had given up at this point.  It further didn’t help that the deciphered and translated lines were, if anything, more disturbing than the previous chapter.

The second cipher was uncovered by me last year.  I considered letting the scholarly community know about this breakthrough but the additional lines, bringing the total decipherment to a little over half the text of the chapter, was both chilling and thrilling at the same time.  It seemed that Vermistaad had, as the book alluded to, owned a copy of the Testament of Carnamagos and had read it.  That strange tome, of which all copies and editions are considered lost, would be worth a fortune to the occultists and collectors and, as venal as it may be, I did not want to risk letting someone else beat me to such a prize.  Being a scholar does not bring wealth and fortune in general and I relished the idea that I might be able to afford to spend my days in study in a warmer climate with other people looking after the mundane drudgery of life for me.  It seemed a just reward for my efforts to decipher Vermistaad’s text.

The third cipher fell to my efforts (and my computers) only when I considered that Vermistaad might have chosen yet another language to have written in.  Neither Dutch nor German yielded any results, but curiously Portuguese turned out to be the missing link.  When I woke that Tuesday morning and found my computer placidly sitting there with the full, undeciphered text on the screen and an initial translation — poor, as is to be expected when using online translation tools — waiting to be read I nearly fainted.  I forced myself to make a cup of tea and then sat down to drink it and read what Vermistaad had to say.

Even knowing that Vermistaad was quite likely mad when he wrote this the chapter was barely coherent and hints and allusions were so thick that it was hard to locate a single sentence that concretely described anything.  My tea grew cold as I sat there, sifting through his words, trying to make sense of something it was quite clear he had failed to make sense of.  I was certain after a couple of hours that his experience with the Testament had affected him quite severely, and for the substantially worse, but beyond that there was little to go on.  I reached the final page, sat back and stretched, and then was astonished to find that the text was practically lucid!  For four paragraphs Vermistaad explained where he’d found the Testament and that he’d decided, after studying it, that it was not safe to leave it lying around where anyone might claim it.

And then the inchoate mixing of thoughts returned and the last few paragraphs, those that should tell me where he hid the Testament, were as opaque and illucid as all the rest of the chapter.

I poured the tea away, made another cup, and sat down again.  The promise of having the Testament in my hands — or rather, a secure bank vault guarded night and day — was too much to pass up.  I had broken two of the ciphers that Vermistaad had used to hide things; I could find a way to pierce the veil of his confusion and locate the Testament itself.

It took a full week of dead-ends, blind alleys and stumbling around as though in a darkened room full of sharp and mobile objects.  Every time I thought I was making progress with one allusion another one would bring me up sharply and force me to admit that I was wrong.  The hints seemed to link to each other but when I tried following a path through them I invariably found myself turned around and going backwards.  Even when I assumed, improbable though it was, that each hint was intended to be used more than once I made no progress.  But slowly I found small things that were invariable and as I pieced them together the text started to show a greater cohesion than I believed possible.  When I set my pen down Tuesday evening, one week after deciphering the text, I had the strangest set of instructions I have ever been given: under the light of the full moon, when a certain constellation was high enough in the sky, there was a path to be found that would lead to the place where Vermistaad had placed the Testament.

It sounds magical, and it may have been intended that way, but written out coldly and devoid of Vermistaad’s mazing words, I understood it to mean that it was like Stonehenge.  Vermistaad’s path was visible always if you knew what you were looking for, but until then you had to be there at the right time when the light was right and then you could see the way to go.  I did not believe for a moment that strange gods would open diabolical ways for me to tread, or that Vermistaad had (as he appeared to claim at one point) hidden the book outside of time and space; only that I would be pushing through trees and bushes that overgrew a forgotten path in the Lancashire countryside.

I shuddered.  I do not like hiking.

Sandy Town

 The beaches of Sandy Town were, naturally, sandy and so Mr Parquette was unsurprised to see footprints in the sand when he arrived at East Beach for his morning perambulation.  What did surprise the middle-aged, somewhat flatulent, gentleman was the depth of the footprints in the sand and the number of toes each foot appeared to have had.  He stopped, though if he were to admit it he was already out of breath and relieved to be able to stop and recuperate, and used the stem of his pipe to gauge the depth of a footprint.

“My word,” he said, with just a hint of a grumble in his voice, “a three inch depth suggests that someone very heavy indeed left these prints!”

Impressed with his own cleverness, and having no-one around to relate this to, he took the trouble to examine the seven-toed footprint more carefully and determined that while the toes were abnormally excessive, somewhat long, and squashed out a little as though the foot were perhaps of sesquipedalian width, they were, more importantly, webbed.

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian and most-famous mother-hater, sat back from her typewriter and re-read what she’d written.  Then she read it again, counting the number of commas that she’d used and wrote that number down in a tiny black notebook she kept for the purpose.  A reviewer, some years ago, had commented on her predilection for punctuation (in that exact phrase) and she now obsessed over proving them wrong.

“Acceptable,” she said to the empty room.  Sunlight came in through the window, though it was weak thanks both to an overcast sky and the sun coming at angle.  By the evening the sun would be round the other side of the house entirely and she would need to light the lamps in the room.  They were the original gas lamps that had come with the house when she’d bought it and had delicate glass covers and little warning labels about ensuring that the carbon monoxide alarm was working properly before lighting the lamp.

“What is?” came a voice from another room.  Janet stiffened, instantly alert to her audience and mentally reviewing what she’d just said.  Then she relaxed again, remembering that her nephew Edward had arrived the previous evening and invited himself to stay for a couple of days.

“I’m writing,” she called back.  “Are you really only just awake?”

Edward walked into the room wearing only boxer shorts.  He was short, hairy and, while not fat exactly, had a little ripple of excess flesh that wobbled gently over the waistband of the blue paisley-patterned shorts.

“Yes, auntie,” he said.  He stretched, raising both arms to the ceiling and revealing bushy armpits that made Janet think of hedgehogs.  “I’m on holiday; I’m hardly going to rise with the pigs and goats now, am I?”

“What pigs and goats?”  Janet’s house was on the outskirts of a medium sized town and was far from rural.  There was a garden of moderate size that she ignored until the neighbours complained and then cut back viciously to the point of exfoliation and a few more rooms than she really knew what to do with but there were certainly no livestock.  Or even pets.

“It’s a saying, auntie,” said Edward.  “How’s the writing going?”

“Put some clothes on,” said Janet.  Her authorial brain was already considering how to use Edward in her novel: all of a sudden she had the idea that Mr Parquette, whose overall aim was the development of a tourist industry for Sandy Town, might open a small safari park and populate it with dwarf gorillas with mange.  “I might have guests later and you in deshabillé would be immodest and unbecoming for a lady of my stature.”

“I thought that was a euphemism for fat?”

“Deshabillé?”  Janet started reaching for her dictionary; an abused book that she wrote corrections in whenever she resorted to looking words up in it.

“Lady of your stature,” said Edward.  He had, unfortunately for him, not spent a lot of time around his aunt and so never saw the dictionary coming.  It hit him spine-first on the nose and between his eyes and he keeled over like a cow in a slaughterhouse.  He hit the floor first and the dictionary followed him and Janet picked the book up and checked it for damage before kicking her nephew in the ribs to see if he’d wake up.

She’d written another page detailing Mr Parquette’s discovery of the footprints and his decision to publicise them in the local paper as belonging to an aquatic form of Bigfoot before Edward stirred, sat up, and rubbed his bruised face.

“Ow,” he said, probing his nose gently with one hand.  “What hit me?”

“Chambers,” said his aunt unapologetically.  “Thirteenth edition.  Also known as the Big Red Book.”

“You threw the book at me?”  Edward snorted, initially with laughter but then with pain.  Blood trickled from one nostril and he wiped it away with his hand.  “Good shot auntie, I suppose, but I’m meeting Deborah Truitt this evening and I think I might just have to call it off.  Do you have a mirror so I can see the damage?”

Janet snorted as well, but tried to convert it into a cough as the name rang a bell for her.  Deborah Truitt was the daughter of Jack Truitt who ran a small independent publishing house and Janet, while having a publisher, wouldn’t say no to having a secondary one for the books her agent refused to handle.

“In the bathroom,” she said.  There were mirrors in almost all the rooms of the house but sending Edward to the bathroom until he put more clothes on seemed both practical and modest.  “I should think Deborah has seen worse that you though, so long as you keep your clothes on around her.”

“Yes, auntie,” said Edward as he picked himself up off the floor and adjusted his boxer shorts so that Janet had to avert her eyes.  “It’s not a Tinder date, you know.”

“A what now?”

“Online dating,” said Edward.  He walked out of the room and then called, “which bathroom?”

“Any of them.  And put some clothes on while you’re in there!”

There was the click of a door closing and Janet looked back at her manuscript.  Yes, a safari park would fit nicely, and perhaps Mr Parquette could try and capture Bigfoot to put them in the park as well.  Only, of course, for Bigfoot to eat his mother after a home invasion….

Janet sighed and tried to scrub the idea from her mind.  She didn’t need any more reviews harking on about the silly idea that she hated all mothers everywhere.

Sand schooner

 “Ahoy there, the land!” came a cry from somewhere beyond the columns and I started.  I had expected that I would be alone in this place, whether it was Iglé or somewhere pretending to be like it.  Behind me there was nothing, just the red sands of the Sonora desert and the stone columns rising up and marking the edge of the city.

“You!  Yes, you!  Ahoy there!”  The voice sounded slightly hectoring and reminded me of a shopkeeper I had known in Paris who bemoaned her lack of repeat custom while refusing to hear that her attitude was miasmic to an extreme.  I looked around to both sides now and still there was nothing in sight.  Then an odd-shaped sail appeared above a low wall and a sand-schooner hove into view.

The ship was medium length, at least compared with those ships I knew to ply the sands of the desert, and was ivory-coloured all over save for the name which was written in teal along one-side: the Ivy Mariner.  Portholes indicated a single below-deck and the bridge was two-storied in the tradition of the University schooners that gathered seismic data and geological artefacts.  The lower-bridge level would house the instrumentation for study and the upper-level was where the steering and speed of the ship was managed.  A tall woman was standing outside the upper-level of the bridge and leaning on a railing.  When she noticed that I’d seen her she stood upright and waved an arm dramatically as though concerned that I might look away again.

“Ahoy!”

“Hello,” I called back, wondering how well my voice might carry in the dry afternoon air.  “Can I help you?”

“Are you lost?” she shouted back, and uncertain if she could hear me or not, I shook my head carefully and meaningfully.  “I think you are,” she shouted.  “Wait there, I’ll send out a man.”

I shivered despite the heat of the day.  Sending out a man meant this was a private vessel and not a University ship.  The Academics were a well-meaning bunch in my experience, and friendly to a fault, but they would always put you aside in favour of their latest obsession or idea.  The private vessels however were owned by the wealthy of Sonora desert.  They had been granted a number of freedoms and permissions under successive governments, all discretely paid for naturally, until someone had realised that the desert was essentially a self-governing fiefdom that was only a short step away from not having to pay taxes.  The court cases arising from that are still making their way through the Sonora courts, hindered at every step by the fact that all Sonora law enforcement and judiciary are connected, one way or another, to the wealthy who view the desert as their playground.  At the very least, if I were to ‘accidentally’ die out here I could be certain that no-one would investigate my death.

Looking around though my options were limited: I could wait for this man and find out what the lady of the schooner wanted, or I could venture deeper into a city that was trying to fill me with memories that were not my own.  I balked at one, and then the other, feeling as though I had no options at all but to wait for fate to overtake me.

I decided, too late as it turned out, that the city was the lesser evil and turned and walked briskly down what might once have been a street intending to take the first turning that would hide me from the ship and then find a broken house or shop to hide in.  I doubted that anyone would search too assiduously for me: a stranger without water in the desert wouldn’t last long.  They might wait for me to leave and then try and accost me, but once night fell I was sure I could sneak past the ship and try and find my way back.  Though I was as ill-dressed for the cold of the desert at night as I was for the heat of the desert during the day.

I had misjudged the athleticism and interest of the man sent to find me though, and I had barely turned the corner and started looking at rotted brick and crumbling stone, considering which shadows might be deep enough to hide in, when the sounds of light, running footsteps made me tense and a hand landed firmly on my shoulder.

“Wrong way,” said a voice that wasn’t quite friendly.  It was deep, slightly growly, and I wondered for a moment if the man were artificially deepening his voice, perhaps to disguise it.  The fingers on my shoulders gripped tightly, but not enough to hurt.  I doubted I could pull free without prising his fingers loose though.

“I wasn’t intending to wait for you,” I said.  “I have business here in the city.”

“In Iglé?  You need permission to visit.”

“I have permission,” I said without thinking.

“Then you just need to show Madam Friest.  Come on.”

The voice still wasn’t quite friendly and I found myself trapped in my lie: clearly I couldn’t claim she’d already seen my permission, and now when we returned this fellow would tell her about it and I would have to admit that I didn’t have any.  I controlled my anger and regret and turned to face my captor.