Dummies in the desert

The balloon hung off in the distance.  I couldn’t see any heads peeping over the edge of the basket, but that didn’t make me any less nervous.  I kept my hand near my gun, which was conveniently wedged in between my belt and the waistband of my trousers, just in the right place to shoot me in the foot if I was lucky, going through my knee on the way down if I was unlucky.  I didn’t care.  I’d been out in this scrub wasteland the locals liked to call a desert for thirteen days now and I was beginning to feel like Jesus, except that there were no temptations to be seen.  No-one had appeared and offered me dominion over all the cities of the world, no-one had turned up with a mine-cart full of gold ingots and told me that they were mine for the taking, and no-one had handed me a geological map with the sites of four oil-wells marked on it.  I was feeling a little aggrieved.

I looked up at the balloon again, and my trigger finger twitched.  Maybe there was one temptation after all.

All around the wasteland stretched out, pretty much flat except for the lumpy bits, which adequately described my first wife, our first bed, and the sex as well.  Scrubby little shrubs poked up every few feet in every direction, sucking all the moisture they could find from the ground, which was dusty and cracked.  Now and then there’d be a bigger expanse of space, and then a tree would haul itself arthritically out of the ground, a scattering of leaves like a monk’s tonsure all it afford.  I’d tried climbing one of them and the branches had just broken off under my weight, and I’m not heavy.  Especially not being out here for thirteen days, living off bugs stupid enough to get close enough to catch, beef jerky I’d been given before I left, and some can of beans I’d found stashed in a crevice in some rocks.  I figured someone else was  probably starving now, but better them than me.  I looked up at the balloon again then, wondering if they were in there, following me, waiting for a chance to get their cans back.  I hoped they weren’t.

I tramped on, looking for something, anything that didn’t belong here.  Now and then the landscape humped up a little, nothing as sophisticated as a hill, more like a big termite mound, and I’d have to walk round it.  Just as it was getting towards sunset, and the sun was low in the west making me shade my eyes to see anything that way, I rounded another hump in the desert and found myself at a bus-stop.

There was no road, and no sign of any bus either coming, or ever having arrived.  The sign stood there, rusting slowly away in the ground.  It advertised the number 12 route, and the 55 night-bus, only I knew for a fact that Persecution, the nearest town for fifty miles, only had two buses, the 1 and the 3.  The 2 had been blown up accidentally a year back and the town had voted not to replace it.  The road was way off in the distance somewhere, out of sight at least.  No bus would be coming this way, which made the queue all the more puzzling.

When I got a little closer and got the dazzle of the sun out of my eyes I saw that the queue was made up of headless mannequins.  The shop dummies were a little battered, with chips and chunks knocked out of knees and elbows, and most of them were missing at least one finger.  They were all rough to the touch, scoured by the dry earth and near-sand that the wind carried when it got up and started blowing.  They formed an orderly line, the front one actually holding on to the bus stop pole with one damaged hand, one foot raised up on tiptoe as though getting ready to walk.  The whole scene was a little eerie, and I was all set to walk on by and forget about it until I saw the dark patch in the earth near the back of the queue.  Dark like water.

And there it was, hidden at the back, shorter than the rest, the mannequin that had a head.  Only the head belonged to Jenny, the little girl out of Persecution I was out here looking for.  Her blond curls formed ringlets over her forehead, and her filmy blue eyes stared off into the distance, towards the balloon in some unpleasant coincidence.  A tiny trickle of dried blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and more, much more, ran down the mannequin to pool in the earth at its feet.  The head had been put on there while it was still fresh.

Something whined past me, and a puff of earth geysered up beside me.  I dropped like the bullet had hit me, scuttering round in the dust so that I was lengthwise beside the line, hardest to hit.  Someone in the balloon had started shooting at me.  I humped my back like a caterpillar, ignoring the spasm of pain from my vertebrae, and gently pulled my gun free from my waistband.  I would shoot back.  Jenny was a friend of mine.

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.

This way to Lake Hali

The desert was noisy when I awoke.
This was a surprise.  Despite the tough conditions, and the constant fear that some desert animal would decide that the moist, warm confines of my sleeping bag was something they'd like to share, most mornings I woke to near-silence from the desert.  I slept well there, and I appreciated it.  This morning though, there was noise, and (in terms of the desert), lots of it.
I dressed first, in the tight confines of the bubble tent, and then opened the zip-door cautiously.  More than once I'd found that the wind could mound sand up against the door that needed to be pushed away before I let it in and effectively drowned myself in the dry.  There was nothing up against the door this morning, and so I opened it fully and stepped out.
There was nothing to see around me except that small outjutting of rock amidst the sand that I'd picked to anchor the tent against.  Golden brown sand rolled away as far as the eye could see, mounding and floundering like frozen ocean waves, and a relentless cerulean sky met it at the horizon and then stretched back overhead.  On the strange days when the sky and the sand both seemed cast of the same strange leaden colour and I couldn't tell where the horizon was it was easy to believe that I was trapped in some gigantic snow globe, waiting to be picked up and shaken.  But from all around a steady clicking came, like sticks tapping against rock, rhythmic and compelling.  As I stood listening, I realised that there was a quieter counterpoint as well, a dull thudding almost like a drum-beat, that carefully picked its way between the clicks.  For a moment I was intrigued, and then I was wondering what the meaning of it was.
Because if there was one thing I'd learned from my time in the desert, it was that everything has a meaning, but it's vital to know which meanings are the important ones.
I packed the tent away quickly, drinking water for breakfast and deciding to worry about food later on. Until I learned what the noise was I wanted to be able to respond quickly to it, and eating in a place where further food was scarce was not the best way to be alert and reactive.
There was nothing to help me know where it was coming from, no matter how I tilted my head and moved around the hard surface of the rocks it seemed to always be coming from all sides of me.  Finally I tried tilting my head upwards to see if it was coming from there, and even that didn't help.  So I struck out, pretty much at random.  After the night, without a compass, there was no way to know if I was going the same way as I had been the day before.  I'm sure there must have been whole days where I spent my time traipsing backwards and forwards along my steps, not knowing that I kept reversing my path.  The sand was still cool where my feet sank into it, though the surface was becoming warmer and the air was still fairly pleasant.  I gripped a bottle of water in one hand, and strode on.
It was definitely less than an hour later when I stepped onto a flagstone that I'd not seen until my foot struck it.  As soon as I was stood on it fully the sounds resolved themselves, unsurprisingly coming from along the flagstoned path that I could now see poking out here and there from underneath the sand.  The sounds seemed to have more coherence now as well, the clicks could be distinguished into three separate sounds, and there was a musical quality to them, as though insects had decided to have a party using themselves as the instruments.  For a moment I was overcome with the urge to laugh at the thought of cockroaches partying.
I stepped off the flagstone and the sounds became a repetitive clicking again, with a dull counterpoint that was hard to follow.  I looked down, then knelt down and cleaned the sand from the flagstone.  Everytime I touched it the music became clearer, and the whole sensation was like having a blanket pulled off and dropped over my head at a bizarre concert.  The cleaned flagstone was square-cut and looked dressed, but someone, or someones, had carved all kinds of graffiti into it.  Most of it made no sense, some of it made sense but only because of the time I'd already spent in the desert.  That graffiti worried me most, as it made me realised how long I'd spent out here now.
And the last piece of graffiti I found was the most interesting, and the most cryptic.  It was a deep-carved arrow with ragged edges, as though whoever was carving into the rock was enormously strong and had done it in three single strokes with some massive knife.  Above the arrow, in similarly grooved but far smaller letters was the legend, "This way to Lake Hali."

Timeliness

Time is strange.  Everyone notices that some times pass faster than others, some times pass slower too.  For me, after my trip to the desert, some of that is voluntary now.  By concentrating, I can slow time down a little.  It's not much, and it's hard and exhausting to do, but I can drag five minutes out to nearly twenty at a push.  It's useful when I need to get lots of things done in a hurry, but I have to be certain I'll have a chance to rest afterwards.  I don't think it's get me very far stealing things.  Except for the time in the desert.
The sands were mounding all around me, and it seemed like I was walking through a beige landscape of hills, with mountains hinted at on the horizon.  I knew that sand couldn't pile up into mountains, but there were shadows out there, hazed by the heat and probably dazed by the sun.  I kept on walking anyway.  I had plenty of water, refilled at the last oasis, and I'd been told that there was something worth seeing out this way by a rotten little mannikin that had danced and gibbered at me while I filled water-flasks.  I might have imagined him though.  He had black teeth and breath that stank like an abbatoir, his eyes never stopped moving around and didn't ever look in the same direction, and his hair was thin and straggly, protuding from a scabby scalp like spider's legs.
The sand darkened beneath my feet briefly, and I wondered if I was near one of the odd little rivers that seemed to run through the desert.  I looked around, trying to see if there was any green growing nearby, or flowers, or trees, or anything that would confirm water, but there was nothing, just a long, thin strip of darker sand.  I followed it, reasoning that something must be causing it.  Then, abruptly, it turned red like the colour of old brick, and the ground itself disappeared into a heat-haze maybe only twenty feet in front of me. I stopped, of course.
For a moment there was just me, the heat-haze, and the odd-coloured sand, and then the haze shimmered a little brighter and then faded away.  In front of me now was a brick-paved pathway that led into a colonnade that seemed to make its way under a cloudier sky than the rest of the desert.  I hesitated, recognizing that this wasn't part of the desert and was probably therefore dangerous.
"Heeheeheehee!"  The laughter was high-pitched and desperate-sounding, with a wheezy note to it that made me think of asthmatics.  "Heeheeheehee!"  A short man with a protuberant belly and eyes the size of his mouth skipped down the colonnade towards me, naked as an innocent.  As he skipped, he laughed, and his eyes rolled around in his head like those of a madman.  I braced myself, ready to turn and run.
"You're trapped!  You're trappedtrappedtrappedtrapped!"  He was chanting the words, and his lips smacked noisily together on every "-ed".  "You're never going to leave here now you've entered!  I've got you for a friend for ever now!"
"I've not stepped into anywhere," I said, pointing to my feet.  I was still three or four steps away from the brick-paved path.
"Ohnonononnonono!"  Hands flew to his mouth, and then to his eyes, covering them.  He sank to his knees.  "Please come in, there's no traptraptraptrap, no traptraptraptrap really.  Really and honestly.  I wouldn't lielielielielielie to you, nonononono I wouldn't!"
I stepped backwards, carefully, looking over my shoulder to be certain what I walking into.  The sand behind me was losing its reddish tint and growing dark again, which I hoped was a good sign.
"Nonononono don't leave me!  Don't leave me!  I'm so hunhunhunhunhungry."  He started blubbering, wet sobbing sounds that made my skin crawl, and glistening, silvery drool spilled from his mouth and mounded on the sand like quicksilver.
"I don't think I could stay for dinner," I said, standing still and looking at him while I spoke.  When I'd finished, I turned back to looking where I was going and getting away from him.
"Nonononono!"  His voice turned into some kind of rapid, high-pitched scream.  "You don't understand, I'm been so hungrygrygrygry for so lonlonlonlong now."
"Gotta be going," I said, my feet finally stepping onto complete dark sand, free of the reddish tint.  I looked back, and the heat haze was consuming him once more.  He stood up, his face a picture of rage, and waved a fist angrily.  Then he threw something at me, and I dodged to the side, only realising too late that this might have been a trick.  I looked down at my feet, but the sand was still dark and it seemed that I was still safe.  Then something landed beside me, breaking and splashing me with liquid as silvery and globular as his drool, and everything slowed down to a crawl.
I wiped it off, with hands that seemed to flash around uncontrollably fast, and then everything around me sped up again, the strange little man and his colonnade disappeared, and I was alone in the desert once more.  With the ability to slow time down a little now and then, which couldn't have been a gift, and so I distrust it, wondering when it will reveal its poison sting.

Impasse

The doctors called me at 8:21 and asked me to come into the hospital.  Julie was still in her private room with the guard on the door, and her baby was now in a private room in the maternity ward, also with a guard on the door, but for different reasons.  No-one was allowed in to see the baby unless they went in pairs, as apparently it was having odd effects on people.  I couldn't say I was all that surprised.
The receptionist at the desk caught my eye as I came in and told me that I was to go to the fourth floor and the John Philcock room.  I nodded, though I was expecting just to go to the maternity ward which I thought they'd named after some suffragette.  I considered using the lifts, but when I stopped outside them and pushed the buttons I noticed that the lifts had been named as well – clearly some NHS mandarin had over-ordered on signage – and these were the Icarus lifts.  I decided that boded ill for anyone using them, and opted for the stairs instead.
The stairwell had plenty of glass, and I could see the hospital car-park as I spiralled round and up, with occasionally glimpses of the smoking garden for the nurses and recidivist doctors.  At first, I'd not expected to see anyone in the smoking garden except maybe the odd porter or student, but at times it looked like there were more staff outside smoking than there were inside working.  A junior doctor had looked at me with eyes as old as some of the things I'd found in the desert when I'd asked him about it and told me to think about the stress they were under and the likelihood of finding a bar anywhere in the hospital.  I did think about it, and decided that the smoking garden would be my preference too.
The John Philcock room turned out to be a meeting room of some kind.  The floor tiles were cold and icy-blue, the light was a fluorescent strip that flickered just on the edge of vision, the table was formica-topped and too low and the chairs were old wooden school chairs and both too low and too wide.  I could only imagine that they'd originally been constructed for a class of midget Billy Bunters.  No-one was sitting down when I knocked and entered, and the only thing on the table was a manilla folder with some A4 pages inside.
The doctors were patient and careful, but the upshot of the conversation was that they wanted me to take Julie home with me.  I explained that I'd sooner volunteer as a major-organ donor, and asked why they wanted to separate her from her baby.  That's when they all looked at each other and tried not to answer.
They also, it seemed, wanted me to agree to a nil-by-mouth order, followed by a nil-by-any-route at all order, all of which would be carried out under extreme secrecy.
I sat on the table at that point, struck by a memory from the desert.
I found out quickly in the desert that it's very important to keep an eye on the weather.  When the wind blows it might be a gentle breeze that sometimes even cooled you, but it could evaporate sweat much faster and use up your water dangerously fast.  And if it was stronger than a breeze then you would be wise to consider finding shelter, for it doesn't take long for the wind to pick up loose sand, and then at best you get a skin-peel that would cost an arm and a leg in a Harley Street clinic, and at worse you would lose an arm and a leg to the highly abrasive qualities of lots of tiny grit being hurled at you at thirty miles an hour.  I had my tent of course, but when I could I would pitch the tent in the lee of a dune, or sandstone, or on one occasion in the hollow trunk of an enormous tree that I think must have died before the desert even came into being around it.  And crouching there inside my little protective skin while hostile nature howled around me, it occurred to me that this was life in the midst of death.  No sooner had I thought that than there came a tapping on the taut nylon fabric of the tent.  I nearly had a heart attack.
I lowered the zip cautiously and found that there was a man outside, his face cut and bleeding, his clothes tattered, and a nylon rucksack on his back.  He wasn't carrying a weapon, and he had four days stubble, so I took a chance and let him inside.  He gasped a little, sat down heavily opposite me, and took his rucksack off.
He either said his name was Dane or told me that he was a Dane, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention as the zip was getting stuck at the top and not quite closing.  I struggled with it a little while he talked about a motorcycle repair shop in Stockholm for some reason, and finally I gave up and accepted that there might be a small trickle of sand coming into the tent.  I looked back over at my guest.
He gave me a sepulchral smile and asked me how I intended to die.
And so, for the next hour and a half, until the sandstorm died down and I could leave the tent, we talked about the merits and demerits of the forms of death that we knew, arguing for and against pain depending on the circumstance, and bringing the circle to closure: we were life in the midst of death, talking about death in the midst of life, and accepting, at least for the duration of the conversation that there was no separation of the two.
When the wind finally dropped from a howl to a moan, then to a whimper, I left the tent to stretch and eyeball the horizon, to see if this was the eye of a storm or a storm in a teacup.  And I stared at the motorcycle that my guest couldn't possibly have ridden across the desert or that could have survived the abrasive embrace of the storm.
I told the doctors the truth; Julie had left me and attempted to abort the baby all of her own accord, and that I didn't believe it was mine.  They shifted their feet and fiddled with their lighters and agreed that the baby wasn't mine.  I offered to sign the papers, but they pointed out that I couldn't do that while Julie was in the hospital, and so I left the room at an impasse.  It felt familiar.

Psychotropia

Nietzche famously talked about an abyss that looks back into you when you look into it, and I've always taken this to be philosophical drivel. I guess he was trying to say that there are no actions without consequences, but the number of people who've since decided that this is somehow deep and relates to evil is ridiculous. Apart from that, I found that abyss when I was wandering in the desert, and it was far less worrisome than almost everything else I found while I was there.
Some way away from the abyss was a settlement; a collection of one-room huts built on boards that in turn rested on the sand. When the wind blew, the occupants lifted the hinged rooves of the huts like sails and the huts would skate across the sand, rattling and hissing like angry snakes. The occupants would tack into the wind or run with it, always staying within a mile or so of the abyss, circling round it like strange, land-bound birds.
There were about fifteen people living there, although their numbers changed from time to time as people went to the abyss and people-shaped things came back from the abyss. Their leader, at least while I was there, was a woman who called herself Oisha. She had waist-length black hair that she braided like a rope, brown eyes that watered constantly, and skin so brown and wrinkled that I first thought she was one of the people-shaped things that had come back from the desert. When she told me, trying to seduce me, that she was only twenty-two, I dug a bottle of SPF-60 sun-tan lotion from my rucksack and gave it to her, advising her to use it daily until it ran out, and then go and find more. If ever there was someone who needed to wear a burqa, it was her.
I asked her about the people who lived in the huts, and she said that they were travellers, people stopping off at a waystation before they went to the abyss to become consumed by what it showed. She stopped abruptly at that point, and nothing I could say or offer would induce her to talk more about it, and I wondered for days afterwards what she'd said that she thought she shouldn't have. It was clear enough that the people who came from the abyss weren't the same as the people who'd gone to it; many of them didn't appear to have ever had had human form before! But perhaps there was something else. She changed the subject eventually by showing me the fifteenth hut, where no-one lived.
This hut was a garden in the desert; beneath its roof was a verdant green expanse. All around the edges were thick-leaved, glossy shrubs with small green berries, and beyond them were a few fruit trees and then vegetable plants, only some of which I recognized. But there wasn't enough to feed even fifteen people for any great length of time, and I pointed this out.
"People who arrive bring food with them, water too," said Oisha playing with the end of her braid and fluttering her eyelashes at me like a moth trapped by a window-pane. "There are small animals in the desert that can be trapped for meat. Sometimes the abyss... sends meat as well."
I could see from the look on her face what she meant: sometimes what came from the abyss couldn't be allowed back into human society and had to be killed. I wondered then if eating such 'meat' was really the safe thing to do.
"And these shrubs," she caressed a leaf, "suppress the appetite and show you visions that tell you when you should go to the abyss."
"The leaves or the berries?" I asked.
"The berr--" she stopped, puzzled. "The berr--." She stopped again, and left me to talk to the others in the huts. When she returned she was disturbed.
"Some say the leaves, others say the berries," she said. "Some say that what you take influences what returns from the abyss."
I nodded and we moved on, and she never noticed that I'd plucked a branch from a bush to put in my rucksack, leaves, berries and all. Later that evening I slipped away as they all gathered at the fifteenth hut and left them to their dance with death.
Chemical analysis when I returned from the desert revealed that both the leaves and the berries contained psychoactive nerve toxins, and even one berry would be enough to kill a man, though only over a period of twelve hours. The bark, however, contained the psychoactive ingredient without the nerve toxins and could be relatively safely consumed.

The Mariner's Angel

They won't let me see my ex-wife; they say she's not in any fit state. They will let me look at the baby, which is in an anonymous crib in a room with twenty-three other anonymous cribs and a large viewing window. Nurses move up and down the rows, smoothing blankets, checking for signs of cot death (I can only hope that when it happens they start shouting 'Code Blue!' but I suspect they don't), and generally looking after the babies. I can tell which crib Julie's baby is in because the crib is oddly ornamented. When I asked about that the nurse's face went vacant, and she drooled until I went away. I hid round the corner and watched, and her face took a good minute to unslacken after I'd left, so whatever hit her was intended to keep her out for a while.
I've seen ornamentation like that before, and that's part of the reason I'm not describing the child as my baby. I don't think I had anything to do with it, not directly anyway. But I remember the ornamentation from the desert.
I was walking more or less south, it was just afternoon and I was heading towards the sun. The sand underfoot was so hot my ankles felt like they were cooking, and the breeze only seemed to go as far down as my knees. There was no shelter around though, and I wanted to leave the desert now, so I wasn't pitching the tent in daylight. Then I took a step and a hole opened in the sand before me.
I froze, before I realised that the perspective had changed and I was stood at the top of a slope down into a valley. Again, the sand became sandstone as I descended, and the at the bottom was a narrow trickle of water in a stone channel. I tasted it warily, and it was clean and cold, so I refilled my water cannister and looked around. To my astonishment, there was a small boat sitting on the bed of the valley. Its hull was the same colour as the sand, and from anywhere else it would probably have been invisible. I went over to take a look.
I think I could have jumped and grabbed hold of the railing on the side, but there was a rope knotted at intervals hanging down so I pulled myself up that way. On the deck, I stopped.
Tied to the mast, looking tired and thirsty, was a man with an ageless face, eyes as green as jealousy, lips as red as a television vampire's and the soft glow of applied electromagnetism all around his back and shoulders. When he saw me his eyes glistened, and the glow solidified briefly into thousands of softly bristling feathers. He was an angel, an electromagnetic angel.
He croaked, and I held out the water cannister, making sure not to touch his fingers as we exchanged it. While he drank I walked round him; the wire binding him to the mast was copper, there was a grey cube at the base of the mast behind him, almost surely a field generator, and there were earthing wire tied to manacles around his ankles.
"Thank-you," he said, holding out the cannister. I took it back; it was empty.
"Why are you here?" I said.
"The Mariner has tied me here to bring luck for his voyages," said the angel. He didn't sound angry or upset, nor even resigned. He sounded matter-of-fact.
"Seems like a dangerous thing to do, leaving you on your own like this."
"It's been three years and two days."
I knew I shouldn't; I'd seen so much in this desert already that I knew I should have walked away and minded my own business, but I reached out to the grey cube and turned the field generator off.
"Take this." The angel threw a coin to me, and I slipped it into a pocket. Then I jumped down from the boat, ran to the stream to refill the cannister, and hurried back out of the valley from the direction I'd entered. I kept my back turned when the light got brighter and brighter and I knew that the angel was hovering on unseen fields of electromagnetic energy behind me, freed from his prison at last. Finally it faded away, and I took the coin out of my pocket and looked at it. It was covered in tiny, dense carvings of strange aquatic things that seemed to have built a city and be inhabiting it. The more I looked at it, the more I felt drawn into it, so I put it away, but not without wondering who -- or what -- the Mariner was.
Those same carvings are now all over the baby's crib, and no-one wants to talk about how they got there.

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.

More from the desert

I woke this morning and Julie was gone. The wardrobe doors were open and her clothes were gone from the hangers; the drawers spilled only my clothes from their half-open mouths, and the bathroom was blissfully free from millions of cans, tins and bottles. Downstairs was a similar tale; her DVDs were gone from the organiser, the curtains that she'd found in Morocco and had imported were gone and when I walked into the kitchen, her cup was sitting in seven pieces on a note on the table.
I'm leaving you, read the note, and I tsked to myself, that much was obvious. I've taken what's mine that I can carry, I'll be back with a van for the apothecary table and the spice collection. Please don't be here then. We'll talk much later, right now I can't even find the words to write this note.
"Not a problem," I murmured to myself under my breath and rubbed my temples. A headache was building, but it was clear that she'd drugged my coffee last night to ensure I wouldn't wake up, and that was probably the cause. I put the kettle on and wandered out through the connecting door to the garage. Near the door is my travelling trunk -- I've never taken it travelling, but I've put all the things I've brought back in it. To my surprise, there were fresh scratches near both padlocks. I checked the rest of the trunk and there were scratches by the hinges too, and a small crowbar discarded behind the trunk. So Julie had tried to get into it. There was nothing of hers in there. That explained more than her note did though.
The padlocks are just for show. I pressed in a couple of places on the trunk and a thin steel panel in the lid slid back, revealing a recessed combination lock. I entered the combination, wincing only slightly at the memories it evoked, and listened to the steel bolts clunk back. I opened it, cast an appraising glance over the contents, and picked out a soft leather bag of desert sand. The trunk locked automatically when I closed the lid.
I made coffee from the now-boiling water in the kettle and spilled the sand over the kitchen table. It shimmered and sparkled as though still under a desert sun.
I had been in the desert for eight days when I discovered an oasis of sand. There was no surface water and I was running low in the bottles I carried, but the sand here shimmered and sparkled like the sea from a distance, and trees grew around it thickly and with vibrant greenery. I stopped at the edge and looked at it, shading myself under a palm tree. It was undeniably beautiful. There was no breeze, but the sand grains rattled across one another, little currents visible in the larger sea, and the shimmer seemed to create hazy mirages above it. Without quite knowing why I did it, I knelt down and let one hand dip into the shifting, sandy sea.
The rattle of grains became louder and the mass of sand shifted rapidly, dying away to stillness just seconds later. The whole expanse of sand was still and patterned, and in the pattern I recognised myself, stood drinking water near some rocks.
I swept sand into a leather bag I'd been using to carry food when I had some so far, and backed away from the sand. So far I'd learned that there are strange things in the desert, and psychotropic sand seemed like something I should keep, but not walk into. I carried on past, and to my slight surprise, I found the rocks shown in the sand just a couple of hours later. Within the rocks was a small, cold and fresh spring at which I refilled my water, and slaked my thirst.

Sat now at the table, I laid my hand on the sand, and waited. There is only a little sand, so the images come one at a time and are sometimes harder to work out than a cryptic crossword clue. First came Julie's face, then mine looking sad and worried, and now... an ambulance....

Puddlesharks

A beautiful stranger, a woman with crew-cut blonde hair and icy blue eyes, drove the open car along the highway; black asphalt disappearing beneath the scarlet tyres of the car. The car was utterly silent and shone like destruction; only the hiss of the wind of its passage made any noise. In the back seat June lay quietly, her hands and ankles bound with electrical flex, her skirt hiked up to mid thigh and new bruises flowering just above her knee. In her head, over and over, she could hear herself saying 'I want you, I want you.' Periodically the beautiful stranger would turn in her seat, lean over the back of it, and whisper,
'Something says Obsession,' to her.

The hiss of the wind changed subtly as the air around the car thickened like custard and the car began to slow. The highway, which had been a black snake through the desert around them, turned grey and the asphalt gave way to paving slabs. The desert itself surrendered to fecundity, and grass sprang up where previously there had been none. Trees emerged and threw out branches like drowning swimmers throwing up their arms. Leaves cascaded out and down, and somewhere in the distance was the glint of gold.

'Hold your head up,' said the beautiful stranger. 'They're crucifying an Elf tonight.' June lifted her head up, and the car surged back to life.
'Keep your head up,' said the stranger, 'we're moving on.'

The trees thickened into forest, and then silver shards of light darted through the trees and struck the chrome of the car. Brilliant hallucinations filled the air, and even the day-squid, high in the sky far above, was hard to see anymore. June's neck, aching now, relaxed and she let her head back down onto the seat. Again the air around the car thickened like custard, and it slowed down and stopped.

'Let's get out and walk a little,' said the beautiful stranger in her melodic voice, and she reached back and loosened the electrical flex. June sat up, rubbing her wrists and ankles, and eventually pulled the brown, soft-leather satchel from underneath her, gripped it carefully in the hand whose wrist felt strongest, and clambered from the car.
'Where are we going?' she said, her voice loud in the silence around them.
'To see the puddles,' said the beautiful stranger smiling. She lead the way, along a narrow path between the trees where no grass grew and roots were partially exposed. Shrubs and bushes pushed at the edges of the path, taking advantage of the trees retreating from it, but still suffering from a lack of real sunlight through the canopy overhead. Everything seemed tinged just a little with green, even the tiny white flowers on the smallest plants. The walked for a little under five minutes before the path ended at the edge of a large puddle, one big enough that June could have splashed almost all of the water out just by jumping into it.

There were lots of puddles here, spaced irregularly but distinctly, and it was the sunlight reflecting off the water that had thrown darts of light at the car earlier. June grinned, seeming ten years younger all of a sudden, and tensed her legs, ready to jump into the first of the puddles. The beautiful stranger grinned, exposing white teeth in what was very nearly a snarl, and laid a hand on June's arm, stilling her. June looked up, her eyes narrowing and her brow furrowing.

'There are puddlesharks,' said the beautiful stranger. 'Watch.' She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a packet of shark-chum, vacuum sealed for extra freshness with the gaudy packaging in red and white and the flashy logo that screamed Now with extra pain!. She ripped across the top of the packet which tore with a shriek.

'There are monsters and there are angels,' said June quietly. The stranger reached into the packet of chum and pulled out a bloody lump of flesh, and tossed it casually into the air over one of the puddles. It hung there motionless for a second, long enough for June to see that it was a gobbet with long thin bloody tendrils that skirled around it like the only listenable bagpipe composition in the world and then the nearest puddle exploded into a kaleidoscope of rainbow droplets. Water expanded out like a bomb going off in a chandelier factory, and a shark easily 13 feet long arced through the air and seized the meat with a single snap of powerful jaws. It landed with horrible grace in the next puddle, sending up an additional spume of water, and then the water from the first puddle hit them both, drenching them to the skin and shocking June with its coldness.

'Puddlesharks,' she said flatly while the beautiful stranger shook herself as vigorously as an Alsatian.

'Every rose has its thorn, every cowboy sings his sad, sad song, and every puddle has its shark.'

They returned to the car, and June sat in the front seat next to the stranger, where it was easier to hold her head up and keep it up, and the beautiful stranger started the car again and soon they were moving on.

Crossing the desert

When I came to crossing the desert, I worried that I hadn't read enough philosophy. I wasn't even half-way through when I concluded that in fact, I'd read too much. What I saw on that journey has stayed with me for the rest of my life so far, and I doubt I'll forget any of it now. There are days though when I wonder if I'm still crossing the desert, and just hallucinating that I've crossed it; but there are other days when I can't get out of bed because I know I died in the desert and can't possibly be here now.

I think those are my good days.

I had been alone in the desert for four days when I met a man who painted round his eyes with something bright, that sparkled in the sunlight and kept me from seeing his eyes. He was older than me, probably in his late thirties, wore a khaki shirt open at the throat, dusty blue shorts and battered brown sandals. His skin was golden brown, lighter than I'd have expected for anyone out in the desert, and he had a rucksack that held bottles of ice-cold water. He tied an orange scarf over his head to protect himself from the sun, and when he smiled at me all I could remember where his teeth; white and even and somehow evoking the quintessence of toothiness.

I was walking across sand at that point, one of the patches of shifting sandy desert that were part of the whole expanse, but on the horizon I could see the bare brown branches of trees, and that was where I was headed. I had a rucksack of my own, and bottles of water enough for six days, but in the desert it is better to be near water than not. It was hard walking, my feet slipped in the white sand, and where it mounded into dunelets, my calves burned as I struggled to the top. The sunlight glared off it, and I squinted until the muscles around my eyes hurt as badly as my calves. Then a shadow fell across my face, and I looked up, and at the top of the latest dunelet was a man who's face glittered and shone like a biblical angel.

He introduced himself as Mordechai, and tried to shake my hand. I had reached his level though, and had raised my hand to shield my eyes and see him properly, so his hand missed, and he didn't offer again. I wasn't worried. Four days of my own company and my own thoughts had made me understand the metaphor of crossing the desert for investigating my own soul, and then understand that it was nothing more than a metaphor. Thinking like that would let the desert kill you.

He told me that he lived a couple of days away on the edge of the desert, and I asked why he was so far out. He was an artist, he told me, he sought inspiration, and he sought artifacts from the desert to use in his work. He took some smoky glass from his pocket and showed it to me: fulgurite, he said. It was formed when lightning struck sand, and was uncommon in the desert. I admired it for him, but it seemed unimpressive to me. The sand particle occluding it seemed to spoil it, and his argument that it was a part of the desert trapped in solid form and made durable didn't convince me.

He walked along with me, sparkling in the afternoon sun, his gaze sweeping across the sand looking for found-things to turn into art, and I didn't object. At first it was night to have company again, and a few hours later, it was interesting that we were still talking and had not exhausted our conversation reservoirs. When the sun sank behind the horizon abruptly, as it likes to do in the desert, and a chill wind sprang up out of nowhere, I stopped. The stars appeared as fast as the sun had vanished, and a cold light let me see my footsteps, but not the trees in the distance. I did not want to stray from my course in the dark; I was already aware that without a fixed reference the wanderer in the desert will walk in circles.

Mordechai evinced surprise that I was stopping, but when I freed the lightweight tent from the bottom of the rucksack and released the catches on the elastic poles to expand it, asked if he could beg shelter for the night as well. I could find no convincing reason to say no, and so he stayed.

Something, and I don't know what, woke me some hours before dawn. The desert has its nighttime noises, but I had already accepted them, and had slept well both night previously. I woke, lying on my back, and then sat up to stretch. I turned slightly, intending to lie back down and go to sleep again, and saw Mordechai, lying also on his back, his arms akimbo. In the dark, in the tent, with no light source to illuminate them, the stuff around his eyes still sparkled slightly, a softly phosphorescent glow, that I could clearly see now were tiny little tentacles like those of a baby squid. They waved, perhaps filtering the air around them, and the eyes sockets they surrounded were dark and empty, mere holes into a man's head.

I rose quietly, slipped my sandals on, and sat outside the tent for the rest of the night, shivering in the desert's chill, building collapsing walls of sand to try to keep the breeze at bay.

Mordechai left in the morning when the sun came up, not saying a word, and I was as silent. I packed the tent, checked my water, and headed off towards the trees, and tried to forget whatever it was I had walked in the desert with that day.