Thirsty arroyos

She sat in the cave mouth, pulling the handles off cups.  The tinkle of stressed and fracturing bone china echoed around her, but the echoes drifted out onto the plateau and didn’t reach back into the cave.

I had found the cups three days earlier, part of someone’s cache I thought.  They had been buried, and I’d been using the metal detector (if it was a metal detector; it clearly detected something) and it had made that trilling sound like the whooper bird.  I’d set it down in the dust and scraped away with my trowel, the one with the red-painted handle where the paint was flaking away steadily and revealing rust underneath.  I wasn’t expecting much, as the plateau should have been solid rock over that way, but to my surprise the dust was covering loose scree, and when I levered that up it revealed a small, cubical hole containing a pouch and a large box.  The box contained the tea-set, each cup and saucer set neatly into some kind of black foam that was soft and friable when I touched it.  I brought them both back, but I told Sis and Dad only about the tea-set.  I put the pouch at the bottom of my sleeping-roll

She cast the last handle aside and set the cup down gently with the rest of them.  Her eyes were unfocused and slightly filmy.  Dad said that she was just a deep thinker, but I was growing more certain that she was just mad.  Dad just didn’t want to admit it.  Or put her over the edge.

I turned away, not wanting to know why she’d broken the cups.  They’d still be used, to hold water or flour, or whatever else needed holding when we were looking for a container, but they couldn’t be used for tea now, or ersatz-coffee.  I’d enjoyed having a proper cup again, and feeling, even just for the duration of a cup of tea, like I was back before the crash.

The arroyos were in front of me, and I realised I’d not taken the detector down there before.  Dad would be out hunting, if that’s what you called raiding other people’s goods trains, but as he said, we had to eat.  Of all the oddities that the plateau threw up, food wasn’t one of them, and there were no plants worth talking off – lichens and mosses, but you’d be desperate to eat them and you’d spend all day trying to find enough to sate your hunger.  And then there was tomorrow.  The biggest animals were us humans, and the few horses we’d managed to salvage were too valuable to eat.  No-one had managed to get them to breed yet, and that was getting pressing.  No-one had managed to have any children yet either, but no-one talked about that.

The plateau sloped down towards the first arroyo.  Where the rock was normally a deep red fading to black, it gained new stripes of colour in the arroyos.  Dad said that it meant the rock was sedimentary, laid down over aeons by geological processes that we didn’t understand, and that the colours meant that the land here had been very different over the years.  I wasn’t convinced, but there were definitely layers there, and when you rubbed the different layers then felt different.  The white layers made my fingers tingle, and the yellow ones had a musty, mushroomy smell about them.  That smell came out strongly after the rain, and reminded me that I missed mushrooms.

The edge of the arroyo was above my head now, and I knew that this track led down about eighty feet to a dried-up river-bed.  I’d found a couple of bones and skulls down there, but Dad made me stop bringing them back to the caves.  No-one could identify the bones or skulls, and one of them had been almost too big for me to carry.

“What if something looks after their dead?” he’d asked me, as we sat together watching the sun set.  “What if they want it back?”

Sis smashed the skull with rocks, so I hope they don’t.

I slipped the headphones into my ears and turned the detector on.  I swung its disc-shaped metal head out in front of me.  For a moment it was silent, and then there was a noise like the crashing of waves of a distant shore, and a voice in the roar that uttered, “Let me drink,” over and over again.  I frowned, wondering where the voice could be coming from, and swung the detector head across the ground.  Then I swung it up against the side of the arroyo, wondering if there might be things buried in the layers.

Everything went quiet, and suddenly I knew that I was being watched.  I pulled the headphones off and looked around, but everything was quiet.  It didn’t fool me for an instant.  I’d attracted the attention of whatever it was that lived in the arroyo, and I knew that it was thirsty.  I trembled.

The thing under the blankets

The blankets resisted momentarily, then slipped back.  Long strands of something white stretched out between the blankets and the cocoon-like shape beneath them and then snapped, floating lazily in the air until they fell to the bed again.  Beneath the blankets was a mummified thing.

Jim let the blankets fall and leaned heavily on the cane.  He squeezed his lips shut, refusing to make a sound, and tried hard to slow his breathing, which, through his nose, sounded like a racehorse that had come in first.  He stepped backwards, and again, until he bumped up against the portrait, which put an arm around his waist.

Now he screamed, unable to keep it in any more and pulled away, slashing at the arm with the cane.  There was no strength in it and it fell limply back.  It was the deformed arm, the tentacular hand that had reached for him, and as he stared at it, the pinprick eyes in the swollen head moved jerkily from side to side, and the head began to turn as well.  Jim could see that whatever the thing was, it was pulling itself slowly out of the painting and into the room.

He made for the door and slammed it behind him.  He reached for the key, and then remembered that this door had no lock; the other door on the other side of the attic had the lock.  Looking around him he saw the hole that he’d come in by, and without hesitation he ran over to it, ducking down as the roof sloped down, and standing up again through the hole and pulling himself out on to the roof.  Without really thinking, he slid down the roof, half-hearing the clatter of more tiles coming loose and sliding down with him until he reached the eaves, and then his feet caught in the guttering and slowed his descent.  The guttering groaned, cast iron pulling against the stays that pinned it to the brickwork, but it held and he stopped moving.  He cast the cane over the side, and then followed it, clambering down the side of the house as he’d come up, using the broad window frames and sills, and the crumbling brickwork to provide hand- and foot-holds.  He jumped the last few feet, stumbled slightly, and picked the cane up again.  Then he ran out of the garden and across the street, where he paused for a moment and looked back.  Up on the roof something dark and writhing was silhouetted against the sky, and he whimpered as he ran back up into the village.

When he reached the first streetlamp he made himself stop and lean against it, getting his breath back and trying to make himself stop sobbing.  There were no tears, though his eyes felt dry and hot, and he looked back the way he’d come, dreading seeing the swollen, bloated man from the portrait lumbering up the road in pursuit.  But the road was empty, and at the end of the road the roof of the house was free from odd eruptions.  He watched it for ten minutes, and no-one appeared, and so he concluded that whatever had emerged from the portrait had stayed within the house.

Only then did he look down at the cane and wonder why he’d taken it with him.

William Black

The house had been abandoned for fifteen years.  The windows were boarded up, the door was locked and padlocked; someone had driven metal eyehooks the size of a hand into the doorframe and the door and padlocked them together.  Even the chimney had been blocked up; Jim had been on the roof and seen for himself.  While he was up there, crouching low to avoid being seen by anyone carelessly looking up at the skyline, he’d discovered that the roof tiles were loose.  A couple had slipped his feet beneath him, and when he fell, grabbing at the peak of the roof with his good hand, more still had slipped away.  He’d waited there, hanging on as he heard the tiles fall into the overgrown garden below and hoped that no-one else had heard them.  When, minutes later when his arm felt as though it was on fire, there were still no voices or footsteps below, he’d tucked his legs up, got his feet back underneath him and taken the weight off his arm.  Then, half-crouching, half-lying on the roof, he’d looked at the damage.  A hole into the attic looked back at him.

Peering over the edge of the roof he could see that the street was clear, which wasn’t that surprising; the sun was starting to set and no-one came down this end of the village much at night.  There wasn’t a need too; apart from the abandoned house there was a shed used for shearing sheep, some kind of old stone ring that children played around after school, and a dirt path that led out into the cow pasture and then disappeared.  Satisfied, he pulled more of the tiles loose, dropping them through into the attic so as to avoid any more noise that might be heard.  The house was abandoned, it wasn’t like anyone was going to complain that he was messing up the attic.  And this way, if anyone did come and find it later, it wouldn’t look like anyone had been trying to get in.

When the hole was big enough he slipped through; the attic was long and the roof was slanted on both sides so it wasn’t much of a drop.  He crouched, and waddled a little into the middle of the room where he could stand up properly, and looked around.

It was disappointing; there were some tea-chests that contained dust and dead spiders, and there were a couple of piles of newspapers bound with frayed cord that snapped limply when he touched it.  He moved around, his feet stirring up dust from the reddish carpet on the floor, and then realised that if anyone did come in here now they’d see that someone had been here.  He started dragging his feet, scuffing out the footprints so that hopefully it would look like a largish animal had done it.  Further in there was a rocking horse that creaked and squealed when he touched it, swaying about too many axes to be in good condition.  Against the end wall was a door with a key in the lock, and next to that a fireplace.  Some cast-iron tools were still propped up against it, and there was cold, grey, lacy ash in the grate as well.

He tried the door, and to his surprise found it locked.  He started to turn the key, and then paused and looked at it.  How could it be in the lock on this side if the door were locked?  He turned back, and looked around the attic again, unsure now of what he might find, and if he wanted to.

There was another door at the other end, this time without a keyhole.  He pushed it, and it swung open silently, revealing a rectangle of darkness beyond.  He felt beside the door out of habit and found a light-switch.  He depressed it, not expecting it to work, and jumped, startled, when two small lamps flickered several times, strobing yellow light across the room, and finally came on.  The light they gave was weak and a brownish yellow colour, casting everything in the room in sepia, but he quickly saw that the room had no windows so the light was unlikely to give him away.

The room was tiny, maybe ten feet square.  There was a bed pushed up against the far wall, tight in to the slope of the roof so that anyone sleeping in it couldn’t sit up without banging their head, and on the other wall, next to the door, was a full-length portrait of William Black.

Jim looked at it, seeing the little brass plaque at the bottom with the name, William Black engraved on it, and the years of his life, 1886-1938.  The man was ugly, swollen-faced with mottled skin and bulging eyes that were more white than iris.  Tiny little pinpricks of black were presumably his pupils.  He was dressed in a dark suit that seemed to be straining to contain his bulk, and he was standing but leaning on a cane.  The hand that gripped the cane was normal, if pudgy, but the other hand, laid across his stomach, was missing all but two fingers, and those fingers were fused together and looked almost tentacular.  Jim shivered, and looked down at his own bad hand; missing the littlest two fingers at the knuckles before the palm, and his thumb crooked and almost immobile.  They were different, but close enough to make him shiver.

Suddenly he realised that the cane in the picture was leaning against the frame of the picture.  He picked it up, discovering that it was surprisingly heavy; it felt like it would do damage to someone if they were hit with it.  It was slightly warm to the touch, and fit well in his hand.  He leaned his weight on it, and though the floorboard creaked a little, the cane was silent and stoic.

Then he looked over at the bed, and noticed for the first time that the blankets were mounded up slightly.  Suddenly nervous, he made himself breathe steadily, counting under his breath until he reached ten.  Then, his nerves still all ajangle, but his hand steady and his mind braced for what he might find, he pulled the blankets back.

Icehouse

Marguerite shuddered at Abigail’s words, but she nevertheless sat back in her seat.  She tried to relax, but she was too nervous, and though she forced her shoulders back and tucked her stomach in she looked like she was trying to do yoga in the seat rather than relaxing into a trance-state.  That didn’t stop the trance-state from stealing over her as she opened her mind to it though, and in moments her eyes were open, unblinking, and staring off into a distance that only she could see.

“The Ambassador,” said Abigail, quietly but firmly, aware that Marguerite’s mind could wander in these states.  “Where is the Ambassador?”

In Marguerite’s vision coloured motes swam and danced against a grey background that she instinctively identified not as a colour itself, but as the absence of colour.  She began to hear a high-pitched piping like a flute or a recorder, and then everything seemed to swirl around faster and faster.  From somewhere far off she thought she heard a name, the Ambassador, and with that thought the coloured mote began to fuse together and form a coherent picture.

A short man, squat, with a braced leg appeared in the centre, and she knew without knowing how that this must be the Ambassador.  When he turned to someone he was standing near and smiled she could see his face, and his smile was amazing, it was as though he was smiling at her and only her, telling her how wonderful she was.  She wanted to listen to him, to hear what he was saying and help him out.

The picture broadened and she could see a path of broken pieces of stone laid out across long grass like stepping stones leading to a single-storey building.  The building was built from brick and had no windows, though she could see the junction box for the electricity supply.  It was protected by a wire mesh box that had two padlocks on it and the cables disappeared into the ground.  The Ambassador had turned his face and that amazing smile away from her now and she could think about other things more easily again.  There were people around him, but they were shadowy and indistinct because none of them were as important as him.  There was another shadow though that was important, that was somehow part of the Ambassador, but that was trying to avoid her seeing it.  When she looked for it it slid away, hiding round the other side of the Ambassador every time.

The Ambassador and his party reached the building, and one of the shadows around him stepped forward and solidified.  They were holding a bunch of keys, and Marguerite saw now that the door to the building was padlocked and had two sturdy-looking locks of its own.  The woman holding the bunch of keys had a flushed face and three moles on the side of her neck.  Her hair was brush-cut as though she was military, and black with little white hairs flecking it here and there.  A name appeared momentarily, overlaid on her in a little box, identifying her as Wilhelmina Brabanta, and then it changed to just Billi.  She unlocked the padlock and set it aside, then unlocked the other two locks and opened the door.  The door seemed heavy, as she pulled it open the muscles on her arms stood out and it moved ponderously slowly.  It was dark inside the building and Marguerite saw nothing at first, but then on another level altogether she saw the radiant energy boiling out of the door, washing over everyone who stood in front of it like a wave crashing down on a beach.  They seemed oblivious to it, its power and its danger, and started to go inside, but the shadow that was part of the Ambassador was revealed by it, glowing and growing as it basked.  Marguerite could see a hundred eyes and as many teeth on a lumpy, bag-like body that extruded tiny, fine spikes that attached it all over to the Ambassador, and then its eyes lit on her.

She started screaming.

*

When Marguerite started screaming Abigail slapped her face.  For a moment it looked like she’d have to slap her again, and then her eyes refocused.  Her mouth stayed open, and Abigail wondered for a disconcerting moment if Marguerite was no longer screaming here, but in whatever place her trance had taken her to.  Then, slowly, her mouth closed and tears appeared, shining at the corner of her eyes.

“Where is the Ambassador?”

“He’s at an icehouse,” said Marguerite, her voice shaky.  “With someone called Billi.  Billi Brabanta.”

“Sergeant Brabanta,” said Abigail as though correcting a mistake.  “An icehouse?”  Marguerite nodded.  “Hmm.  Tell me everything you saw.”

Lake Hali

I had, of course, read about Lake Hali when I was younger.  I had spent a little time in the library of the thirteenth arondissement, which curiously is in London and nowhere near Paris at all, and had acquired a card to their reading rooms and the delicate, difficult-to-read books therein housed.  They didn't have most of esoteric tomes that the books they did have referred to, but as I grew older I began to appreciate the wisdom of that.  And the sheer difficulty in obtaining a copy of them.  There was a tale, little more than a rumour that would occasionally come over over a glass of heady wine late in the evening when sensible people would be going home to their families, or wishing they had families to go home to, that there was a quiet initiative to get some of these books typeset so that they could be printed on demand.  Not even remotely an attempt at mass-production, but simply a way to get enough copies available for serious academic study.  The problem, if you could call it that, was that finding skilled people mad enough to do this was hard; so the solution, as it were, was to get mad people to do the bulk of the work and then hire skilled people to finish the job, thus exposing them as little as possible.  Just a rumour, but I still have a living will lodged with a lawyer to make sure I'm never committed to a madhouse in a certain part of North London.
Having read of it, I knew about its most famous resident, but equally it seemed highly unlikely that this Lake Hali, being in the desert, could be the same one that I'd read of, being rather much elsewhere.  I still felt unnerved though by the coincidence of the name though, and it occurred to me that the author of the graffito might have known exactly why they were giving this feature of the desert this name.
I started along the flagged path, trying to step only on the flagstones to keep the music as clear as possible, reasoning that changes to it might alert me to things ahead.  I knew that I couldn't turn back from this now without knowing what the desert had to offer here, and I had some small confidence that I'd survived everything the desert had shown me so far, which might yet save me again.  But I couldn't quite keep my breathing under control, or my heart from beating strongly, and I was gasping just a little by the time the flags broadened out into a terrace and the desert fell away below it into a valley of some kind.
The music clearly arose from the valley and there were higher notes in there now, that might have been flutes and violins.  There was a slightly frantic note every now and then, almost as though a terrified first violinist was sawing at her instrument, trying to reach the end of the piece so that she could flee the orchestra, which I'd actually once seen happen.  The terrace was smooth and flat, with wind-blown sand scattered across it and crunching under foot.  From the terrace three or four winding paths led down, cutting through rock which quickly left the covering of sand behind.  Scrub bushes poked out here and there, clinging tenaciously to the rock, and one or two had obvious bare patches where hands had grabbed hold, either on the way down or the way up.  The valley was steep, at least at this end, and quickly fell away, both in terms of land and detail, but at the bottom, glittering in the sunlight, was a large lake of silver water.
"Lake Hali," said a musical voice off to my left, only just audible over the clicking and beating of the drums.  I turned, tensing but trying to control my face to an impassive mask, as though I'd been expecting to be addressed.  A young man, clearly not out of his teenage years, was stood on the terrace looking back at me.  He was wearing shorts, a faded t-shirt with some band's logo on the front, and a white tennis sweat-band around his left wrist.  His face was smooth, and looked untroubled by a razor, but his eyes were the things I sought out immediately.  Sure enough, they gave him away as being from the desert, for all they were green, nearly turquoise and surrounded by the dark shadows of the chronic insomniac, because they glittered in a way that had nothing to do with the bright sunlight or the reflective sand.
"So the sign said," I said, watching him carefully, ready to back away if he seemed to be approaching.  "Not the Lake Hali, I suppose?"
"Depends which one you believe came first," he said.  "You don't trust me, do you?"
"Do you trust me?" I replied, an automatic response to buy me time to think.
"No," he said immediately, and smiled in a mostly friendly way.  "I've no idea who you are or what you're doing here, but things in the desert that trust you when they meet you are usually powerful enough not to care what you might try and do."
"Don't you live here then?"  I was surprised now, I'd seen no signs that any of the things in the desert moved around much, except for the travelling houses of plants that orbited the abyss.  I'd concluded early on that unless you were crossing the desert there was no survival value to moving away from known sources of food and water.
"No-one lives here, this is Lake Hali," said the boy.  "This is a transition point, a place for things to go to other places.  If you stayed here... well, you'd be noticed."
I shivered, and he grinned.  "Yeah, that kind of noticed," he said.  "You've been here a while then?"
"In the desert?"  I didn't wait for his nod.  "Longer than I'd realised I think.  The graffiti on the stones back there...."
"Seemed a little too familiar?  Hah, yes, I've heard that before."
"You've met other travellers?  People like me?"
"Not like you, no," he said, and I wondered how he was appraising me.  His eyes still glittered, and he hadn't moved towards me, but there was no real warmth in his his tone.  We were talking more because we were both there, and I'd not spoken to anyone in several days.  "But I've met others.  Most of them going to the Lake."
"Did they know what to expect there?"
"I can only hope they didn't," he said.  "I'd worry about that kind of madness otherwise, and I prefer to sleep at nights."
"Did you hear that?" I said, my hand cutting through the air to silence him.  He tilted his head to one side as though listening hard, and shook his head at me.  "The music's stopped," I said.
For a moment he said nothing, and then he seemed to stretch upwards, growing impossibly long and thin, racing to the sky like a stop-motion film of plant-growth.  He stayed like that for a couple of seconds, then snapped back so fast there was a tiny pop of displaced air.
"You can go," he said, his eyes now silver pools of light, reminding me of a night I spent with a stranger in my tent.  "You should go, in fact.  And I think – I hope – you'll leave the desert, too."
"In my own time," I said, and turned away.  I only managed six walking pace steps before terror seized me and I ran the rest of the way back along the flagged path, leaving Lake Hali and whatever was coming from it behind.

Camera obscura

Black and white.

A moment, frozen in time. The brilliance of the sheet of light from the flash-bulb, firing through the air, striking the tableau.  Like lightning, like divine fire.  Desaturating the scene, stealing all the colour, the life; freezing everything in black and white for a moment in time.

Literally freezing everything for a moment in time.

*

The camera now sits in an evacuated bell chamber on an ornate wooden pedestal, where the museum-goers can see it but very definitely not touch.  There is a weight-sensitive plate at the top of pedestal that controls a steel cage.  Pick up the bell jar, even break the bell jar and let air in, and the cage will fall from the ceiling and slam down against the floor.  The cage is actually two cages, one inside the other, so that the camera will be protected from touch even when the cage has fallen.  There are lasers criss-crossing the area around the pedestal, and breaking them will set alarms off and bring security guards running from hidden corridors and unsuspected recesses.  There are, in total, eighteen well hidden traps to protect the camera from anyone trying to get close to it, and over half of them are lethal.  One of the conditions that the museum must abide by to keep exhibiting the camera is that nothing, not ever human life, is more important than making sure that the camera is never used again.

Why exhibit it at all?  The question is regularly asked in newspapers, and agony aunt columns.  Whenever someone else dies because they can't obey a simple Don't touch order, people start demanding to know why such a temptation was put in front of them to begin with.  The right believe that it is part of a left-wing plot to kill off people who believe that tools were meant to be used, not waved around as a deterrant.  The left believe it is a right-wing plot to kill off people who believe in civil liberties.  The centre believe that it is a clever plan to increase government control and get the populace suitably cowed and obedient.

The real reason was listed in a now-censored paper written by Professor James DeWitte and published in the Journal of Occult Paraphernalia by the Arkham University Press: there is no knowing, a priori what will happen when the camera is destroyed, and the potentially outcomes are ineluctably catastrophic.

*

David  looks at the artefact in front of him.  It looks like a large, dirty chunk of ice, though there are no signs of it melting despite the warmth of the museum's Small Workshop.  He walks around it twice, noting the size of it – a little over six feet tall and three feet wide –, its rough-hewn appearance and jagged edges, and the fact that on one side only, call it the front, there appears to be a black and white picture of a street scene.

"Arkham, in the mid 1890's," says James DeWitte.  He's sat down on a claw-footed chair with a carved wooden back that's probably a valuable museum exhibit in its own right.  As far as we know, it's the last time the camera was used.  It froze a moment in time, and that's what you have there right in front of you.  Coalesced, solidified time."

"What happened to the street?" asks David.  He reaches out a tentative hand and touches the ice; it's warm under his hand and feels soapy.  He doesn't see James flinch as he touches it.

"It's still there," says James, nodding.  "We think it had been there for long enough that it could persist in time around the moment when it was taken."

"That means that the people...."

"Finish your sentences, David.  It's a bad habit to get into, expecting other people to follow your train of thought like that.  Yes, the people all vanished, all locked into this frozen moment.  Horses vanished too, and some newer buildings suffered damage.  You can go and inspect some of it still if you like, the street still exists."

"Still exists?"

"The name's been changed, but that's a precaution.  We don't know what would happen to this frozen moment if the street stopped existing."

"It seems like there's a lot we don't know."  It sounded accusing, though David hadn't meant it to.  James nodded, more slowly.

"There is," he says.  "That's why I'm inviting you to research this."

"What do you hope to get from my research?"  David's eyes narrow and he studies James more carefully now, noting the slightly fussy dress: a full three-piece suit with a gold fob chain, a white shirt with heavily starched collar, the highly-polished shoes with pointed toes that are surely three inches longer than necessary.

"A decision."

"As to what?"

There's a longer pause, and then James looks David straight in the eye and holds his gaze.  "As to whether it is safe to destroy the camera or not."

"Why not weaponize it?"

Now James's gaze drops, all the way down to his shoes.  Another long pause, and David repeats his question.  Finally James answers.

"That's the alternative," he says.  "There is a man, let's call him General for now.  He would like to deploy this camera as a weapon.  If it's useful, he'd like to make more of them and deploy them also."

Now David looks a little concerned, and he steps in closer still to the block of ice, caressing its surface as he speaks.  "More might not be a good idea."

"But we don't know how bad an idea it is.  Yet."

"Do we know how to make more cameras?"

"Oh yes.  And that's the problem.  That's why this research needs to be done."

"Why don't you do it yourself?" asks David, his fingers finally coming to rest on the black and white picture that the ice has solidified.  Before James can answer David is pulled inside the picture, disappearing into the block of ice so quickly it seems as though he's just faded away.

"Because I'm too sensible to do that," says James, but there's more sorrow in his voice than anger or rancour.

*

The horse is startled by his sudden appearance on the street and rears, striking out with its hooves and hitting David twice on the head.  Iron shoes connect heavily, denting his skull and rattling his brain into darkness and he falls to the ground, unaware of the horse screaming and raging above him.  Light sleets around him, passing him by, and his last thought is an awareness that he's been left behind, in black and white.

City of the Ilmatu

Three days north of Ilvo we found what we thought was a house; a tiny single-roomed dwelling built of heavy stone blocks that were greened with Arctic lichens. There was an arch where we thought a door had once been, and inside there was barely enough room for the four of us. Rainer, who had organised this expedition, kept looking around for something, while the rest of us puzzled over it.
"It's too small," said Matias. "Even for one person it's just too small. Where would he sleep, where's space for a fire? It's not a house."
"The stone seems rather too much for a folly though." Guldtronen's voice was always deeper than his appearance suggested.
"Actually," I said slowly, "where did the stone come from? There are no quarries north of Ilvo, the land's too frozen. And this stone, it's basalt isn't it? That's volcanic."
Rainer was staring up at the ceiling, which was vaulted and dark. He vanished outside and returned with a torch, which he shone up at the ceiling.
"It's a bell-tower," he said, waving the yellow circle of light over a rusted spur of branching metal that hung down from the ceiling. "It's not a free-standing structure, it's the top of one."
"That's ridiculous," said Matias, but Guldtronen and I had looked down straight-away, and we both saw the iron ring in the floor. I pointed, but Guldtronen knelt and freed it from the dirt. We all backed away, and he heaved on it. For a few seconds he strained, his breath grunting out of him, but nothing happened. Then there was a crack that echoed in the tiny space and part of the floor jerked upwards. Once he'd freed that much pulling the trapdoor open further was far easier, and shortly we beheld a dark square opening into something below the room we were in.
"Ropes," said Matias, accepting that Rainer might be right. "If it's a bell-tower then ropes would have hung down through here. Stairs would have been off to one side."
"Or outside," said Guldtronen. "When we arrived I thought the stonework at the base was strange."
He was right, although we had to dig a little, and in frozen tundra that's no easy task, there were stairs that had been carved into the outside of the tower. Which were useless for us unless we wanted to try and dig the entire tower out with just the four of us and shovels.
There were ropes in the sleds, and in the end we tied one end to a sled because there were no safe anchor points inside the tower. Then, Rainer excitedly leading the way and acting like a child in a sweet-shop, we climbed down the rope into the darkness.
At the bottom, in an icy chamber where our breath condensed in front of us in white clouds, we found a corpse. It was that of a young man with a thick beard, and showed no sign of decay. His eyes had been taken from his head, and his nose had been cut off, we thought; two slits of nostrils in the centre of his face all that was left. In hind-sight, we should have been a lot more suspicious about the lack of decay, but at the time we were more shocked by how he'd been defiled.

The King in Yellow

The ambulance turned out to be for Julie; she had been pregnant and had taken something, some abortifacent to end it. Only she hadn't known how far along she was, and she hadn't listened to whoever had sold her the drug, and... well, it was messy. She had collapsed in her sister's kitchen, landing in the dog's food bowl, and her sister had found her two minutes later, pale, gasping, and being head-butted by the hungry dog.
I sat in the hospital corridor, inhaling deeply and trying to hide it, waiting for the nurses to decide that Julie was strong enough for a visitor. No-one else wanted to tell her the bad news -- the baby, despite being a whole trimester premature, had survived and appeared to be doing well.
The disinfectant they used in the hospital, which I kept inhaling as deeply as I dared, reminded me of the desert, and the King in Yellow.
It wasn't long after I'd encountered the psychotropic sand, perhaps the next day or the day after. I'd spotted some rocks sticking out of the sand, and although it was somewhat aside from the path I hoped I was sticking to, I decided to detour and take a look. If nothing else, they were higher than the sand dunes, and it would be nice to see if there was anything other than sand and sun on the horizon. It took longer to get there than I expected, even though I'd learned by that point that everything appears closer than it actually is in the desert. I did find that the quickest approach was never to take my eyes off it though; whenever I looked away it seemed to try to sidle off and hide. I'd been out in the sun for too long by then to find anything odd about this either.
The rocks were, of course, sandstone, and showed signs of weathering, which I took as a sign that it did occasionally rain in this yellow aridity. They went both up and down, forming a deep canyon that stretched away and turned round corners, and put me in mind of a World War I trench. I could almost hear the crack of rifle-fire, and I could easily spot places to sand-bag and uncoil the barbed wire. I resisted the temptation to go down and play soldier, finding instead a narrow stone tower with a staircase carved around the outside. I followed the steps up, and then in, and then I stopped.
Inside the tower was a room with a paved floor with only a thin scattering of sand across it. The walls were carved with images in panels, that seemed to lead around the room in a dramatic spiral. A throne, or at least a large, ornamented chair, carved from yet more sandstone, was placed at the golden ratio; the point where the two arms of a cross would intersect were they drawn of the length and breadth of the room. Sitting on the chair, was an ancient man dressed in heavy yellow clothes: a thick yellow jacket of brocaded silk, heavy yellow trousers that might have been dyed leather, and yellow Caterpillar-branded boots.
"Look around," he said. "See the history of this place, and understand why I'm here."
"Who are you?" I said. His teeth were yellow when he opened his mouth to speak, and his skin appeared jaundiced.
"The walls will tell you," he said, a yellow, forked tongue flickering over dry lips.
"I want you to tell me," I said. "You're here in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, and you want me to start reading the walls like an archaeologist? If you've already done that, then save me some time and tell me yourself!"
"I carved the damn walls so I wouldn't have to!" His voice started to get louder, but then it cracked and went squeaky, and although he tried hard not to, he started coughing after he finished speaking.
"That was a bit silly," I said. "If you're going to do that, why are you still sitting here? No-one's going to read the walls if they can just ask you instead."
"Just read the damn panels. Or at least, read the last two. They're at the bottom, over there." He pointed, a skeletal finger jutting out from his jacket like a twig on a dead tree.
"No." I was too tired for reading, and his strange insistence was getting on my nerves. "I don't actually care who you are. I'm just here for the view."
"I am the King in Yellow, and I order you to read those panels!"
"I am Lady Muck, and... where the hell are the windows?"
Finally I realised that all the light in the room was emanating from the King in Yellow, and if I ignored its yellowish cast, it was the same sparkly, shiny light as Mordechai had had shining around his eyes.
I turned round and walked out immediately, ignoring what sounded like some kind of fit happening behind me. I got about a hundred yards from the rocks before the tower I'd climbed collapsed in a cloud of dusty sand and an echoing crash like thunder over the desert.

Notions of Convexity

When I was younger I was kept locked in a empty room for weeks on end. The walls were painted beige, and the floor was a soft, dark green, plastic-like substance that indented gently wherever I walked on it, and slowly returned back to it's original shape. At some point I started thing of the flatness of the floor as its normal form. Food was provided for me, and liquids to drink, but always while I was asleep. I saw no-one in all that time, heard nothing other than sounds I made myself, and had only my own thoughts to entertain me.

I worked out after a while how to create self-sustaining dimples in the floor. It wasn't perfectly elastic and would initially overshoot when trying to return to its original state, and I could use that to set up a cycle that would retain dimples for what felt like long periods of time. That allowed me to write, in a primitive fashion, and helped me put my thoughts together.

And slowly, my mind became more convex. I think it became star-shaped from the centre at first, and as my thoughts turned more and more on themselves, the set of all star-shaped points expanded. Because that set is necessarily convex, so my whole mind became convex.

There are odd things in my mind that I found there, that seemed to have always been hidden behind corners before. I wrote down how I'd found them using my floor notation so that I wouldn't forget, and then I came back to them as often as I dared.

The problem with convexity is that it's not the highest level notion. I soon found myself increasing the sophistication of the floor notation, and realised that my mind was becoming subharmonic. And the odd things I found in my mind no longer seemed so odd. When I successfully applied the maximum principle to myself, something inside me seemed to turn through 90 degrees in a direction I'd not seen before, but which had surely always been there, and then there were whole new things to look at.

I used the fork that came with my next meal to prick my fingertips and draw on the floor in my own blood. The design was found in part of my mind that now lived in that extra direction I'd found, and even as I drew it on the floor, parts of it seemed to move by themselves. When I was done there was something organic on the floor. I punched the obvious spot in the design, and the floor rippled, and kept on rippling, the energy for it being supplied from outside. And with the energy came something else.

My subharmonic mind stepped up another level and became plurisubharmonic at that point, and yet more unsuspected directions opened to me, and the something else that I had summoned took up residence in the new directions and helped me see things that hadn't been visible before. This time when the food came I was only feigning sleep. My captor, a woman wearing a pale grey veil, dropped the tray of food as I moved, but my helper had moved faster and was invisible to her, and she became physically completely convex very briefly, and then was no longer my captor.

But the world outside seems so limited and convex, and I long to find a way to enhance its dimensions and show everyone the potential that it has. My helper will then be able to bring its friends and families through to live in this world as well, which can only be good for all us. I am sure of that.

This whole world needs a new, convex, normal form.