It was boredom that drove me.   The drugs were simply for something to do.   Acid, peyote, salvia, shrooms, they were all just things to do. I’d read Castaneda, and Huxley, and the others.   The mysticism of it passed me by, the experiences all I wanted.

I was introduced to Petrie by the friend of a friend.   I loathed him.  Petrie was too thin and smiled too much, like Death with a dirty joke he was waiting to shock you with.

“You really want this,” he said and handed me a single blue crystal.  It looked like a teardrop and felt like gel.   I didn’t ask him what it was, wasn’t interested.   He called it “HPL” and laughed.

That night it melted on my tongue, bitter and lingering.    I sat and watched static on my television and waited for the effects to kick in.

Time slowed and I could no longer move.  Not breathe nor blink nor twitch.   Each heartbeat rolled like a peal of thunder taking an hour from start to finish.    Even that stopped.  The television static was truly still now, a collage of visual gibberish.

I could not stop my thoughts.  All else had stopped but not my thoughts.   Time had ceased and only thought persisted.    There was me, and there was an eternal moment that I would never be free of.

In my mind I screamed for centuries.

And my screams were heard.

The things that live in the gaps between moments came to stare.  I cannot describe them, but they felt like the presence of the bereaved.   And they came to stare at me like a freak in a sideshow.   For milennia they came and soon I knew them all.

“Weep,” said Petrie after ten thousand years, and he pressed a glass tube to my cheek.  I blinked then, only once, and a half dozen tears fell and became blue crystal in his keeping.

He smiled and crept away, and left me timeless.

“You have to help me,” she said, “We’re of the same blood.”

Three in the morning and she’d shaken me awake, grinning broadly and asked if I would help her hide a body.

I’d  got used to this since moving into my grandfather’s house.   She came with the territory it seemed.   She was gorgeous, pale and entirely insane.   At the moment she was dressed as a combination Girl Guide and Victorian funeral mute.  Mute.  I should be so lucky.

“The same blood,” I said, “What does that mean?”     I followed her downstairs.  She paused to lick a landscape painting.   Pink cherry blossom vivid and glorious.

“That’s not real,” she said, “Just old oil paints.   And we are.  Kindred.  Kissing cousins”   She looked up impishly, her head on one side.  “Do you want to kiss me, cousin?”

“No,” I said.   “And how can we be… cousins.   You’re in my grandfather’s diary.   A pain in the backside he said.”

“Oh,” she said, “Does that mean you want to..”

“No,” I said as she clarified her question with an indelicate gesture.   “Figure of speech.  Means you’re a nuisance.”

“Oh that,” she said, “Suppose so.   We’re related through his grandfather.   Naughty fellow, Josiah.   Stumbled into mother’s grove and had his wicked way with her.   Took him weeks to get away.   Now help me with this body?”

She’d left it on the floor of the lounge.  Small and ugly, limbs twisted, mouth open, staring eyes fixed on the dusty ceiling.

 “It was him or me.”

It was a ventriloquist dummy.

“Alright,” I said wearily, “I’ll bury it in the garden.”

“Goody,” she said, “face down, with salt in its mouth, or it will come back and haunt me.  You.  Us.  Very bad.”

“Whatever,”

I picked up the little wooden and plastic figure.   A long groaning breath of freed air rasped from its mouth and I felt warm blood sticky and foul on my hands beneath its back.

Face down, I decided, with salt in its mouth.  Oh hell yes.

Crack Continue reading “Poppy” →

Often she dreamed of towers and dragonback flying and strong hands holding hers, of golden rings blazing with power and of long tracks in the wilderness that led, finally, to nowhere at all.

At precisely 06:15 the screen in her apartment blared out its alarm and dragged her upright and attentive while she was still not yet awake.   Stretching and calisthenics until 06:30 and then a breakfast of souring milk and tasteless Libertyflakes before the long walk to work.  Her bicycle, requisitioned a month ago and, melted down, was helping to secure victory against the relentless inhuman enemies of her freedom to obey and work herself to death.

She didn’t think that thought.

Between 08:58 and 13:01 she sat at a desk with a shiny plastic table whose top didn’t quite look like wood.   Documents arrived on her left and she corrected them using a combination of voice recognition software which didn’t work and a grubby grey keyboard that mostly did. 

She dreamed often of a world of glorious cold dawns and sisters with corngold hair, of incantations and dancing barefoot in forbidden places, and of a lover as wild as drunken lightning and  as gentle as summer waking.   She dreamed of a kiss on her lips, and of wearing the necklace he’d given her, a fallen star sheathed in whispergold.

Between 13:05 and 13:25 she ate with the others in ordered rows.  Noodles and soya cubes and the news broadcast at full volume gleeful with imminent victory and sombre reminders that the enemy could strike at any time and hated hated hated the luxuries and freedom that were so commonplace here.   The noodles were undercooked and crunchy.

Between 13:29 and 17:32 she sat at her desk correcting errors and omissions.  She excised a photograph of a dead eyed man from a ministry bulletin from a year ago, it had been placed there in error.  The man had never worked there, though she was sure she’d seen him just once on the day she’d first been shown her desk.   Another error corrected.

She dreamed some nights of a long trail in the wilderness, through grass, that led nowhere.   She’d held the hand of the man who was her wildfire and told him that if she fell in battle she’d want to be buried beyond that horizon, with his necklace on her cold breast.   He’d smiled and said she would never die for he was a king, and he would never allow it.

At 17:36 she began the walk home, with all the others.   The bulletin had promised sunshine and clear weather for the evening commute.   Someone fell into step next to her, took her hand.   This didn’t happen.     He was lean and grim and she did not know him.

“Let go of me,”

“Don’t think I haven’t tried,” his accent was Scottish, his voice insistent, “I need your help”

“What?”

“You need to show me where to dig,”

It was about quarter to six and raining gently.

Hey.

I’m sending you an image.   It will reach you somehow.

You’ve been unresponsive since we got you back from the enemy, but the doctors say your mind is active in a  dream prison they made for you.  A life so real you can’t escape it.    Reasons to stay there.  

I don’t know what dream it is but my words have to reach you. 

Maybe you’ll hear them, or read them in a book. 

Maybe on a screen.

You have to walk through the door to wake up.  The door in the image.

Please.  Do it now.

The grove of trees was secluded, and it was dark.  It was ancient and largely unknown.  And it was waiting.    The eldest of the trees held court there, squatting like a bloated tyrant with a tanglewood crown and grasping miser’s fingers raking the earth around its corpulent trunk.   Healthy things did not grow there, wholesome plants did not flourish.   Birds did not roost in the trees of that grove, not the wise old birds anyway.  Ravens shunned it.   Foolish fledgeling songbirds who fluttered into the tyrant’s little realm did not flutter out again.   Insects and crawling things flourished and dug and bred greedily in the stinking moisture of the hollows of that grove.

An approaching light, flimsy and weak.   Two men picked their way through the night, a lantern held aloft by the older of the two.

“It is much further?” said the younger, a strong young man in his twenties, broad shouldered beneath his roughspun jacket.   His voice carried the barely masked complaint of someone who had been out much later than he expected to have been out, and who had travelled much further than he had wanted to.

“No,” said the older man.   He picked his way between two wiry sentinel trees and carefully stepped down and down and down the grove’s steep sides.   “We’re here Antonio.   Watch your footing.”

Antonio, the younger man peered down into the place that his neighbour had brought him to and he grimaced.  The air was foul.

“This is not a healthy place,” he said quietly.

“What is a healthy place?” said the older man hanging the lantern from a jutting branch.   “Where in all of Tuscany is healthy?  Is safe?”

Antonio recognised the familiar bitterness in his neighbour’s voice.   “My friend, the cholera has passed us by.   You cannot keep blaming…”
“God mocks us,” said the older man, pacing slowly to the edge of the clearing, feeling the earth suck hungrily at his boots.   “He despises us.   I despise him in my turn.”
Antonio crossed himself.

“He took my wife from me ten winters past,” said the older man, “and left only my boy to remember her by.   All the love I had for her I poured into him.   My hopes.   Everything.   And I gave thanks to the Almighty for him.   And then the Almighty showed his undying love again.”   He spat copiously on the earth.    “The cholera hung over our town like an unseen angel seeking who he might devour.   My boy…”

“Please,”

“My boy!” the old man said angrily, turning and pointing a finger at the younger man.   “God showed his contempt for our lives, our hopes, our efforts!   Should I bear it in smiling silence, as a woman bears the fists of the drunkard who beats her?”   He looked up at the distant sky and bit his thumbnail.    
Antonio did not answer at once.   He would let his neighbour’s anger rage and burn itself out, and what good would argument do for him now, here in this place?   This place cared nothing for words.

“My grandmother’s mother came here,” said the old man more quietly now.   “She was born in Palermo, but she fled north with nothing but the clothes on her back and a bundle of sticks.    The priests called her strega, a witch.   And the Inquisition was still a power in those days.  Strega!”    He wiped his chin, clearing it of the spittle that had flown there when he had raged.

“A slander,” said Antonio

“The truth,” said the old man with no shame in the words, but rather pride.   “She found this place, this very place, and she added her bundle of sticks to the old wood that grew here.   Sticks from the woodlands she’d danced in as a girl.”
A gust blew the lantern a little and the shadows moved and encircled the two men.    Antonio shivered and looked around, the older man closed his eyes as though embraced.

“There are trees as old as Eden,” the old man said, his voice soft, “who drank up the water from the ground when Adam and Lilith coupled in the midnight heat.   Who supped on the tears of Eve who wept when the Almighty’s curse fell upon her,”

“We should go home,”

“Trees who sank beneath the deluge and refused to die,” the old man said, his voice stronger now, “who knew their enemy for what He was and held on fiercely to life and waited for their moment.”

Antonio came slowly toward his friend and took hold of him by the shoulders.

“You’re distressed,” he said in a voice that shook with fear for his friend’s wits, “but you must stop this talk.   It is sacrilege.  Blasphemy.”

The old man’s eyes looked into Antonio’s and did not know him.

“Trees that gave their wood gladly for the crosses on the sullen brow of stone beyond Jerusalem.   Who rejoiced to drink the blood that-”

“Enough!” Antonio shook the older man roughly, hoping to break him out of this feverish rage that twisted truth and the world around an old man’s grief.

“He is with us,” said the old man in a triumphant voice, and above them old limbs, ancient limbs moved and creaked in the wind and something cracked and roared and fell.   Antonio looked up too late and raised his hands too late and felt a thunderbolt of dry and eager weight strike him on the head.

When pain woke him it drove away dreams of whispering voices and replaced those dreams with searing hot agony from temple to jaw.   He was lying on the ground in the mud beneath that ancient tyrant tree and he was tangled there in down-drooping branches and thorny vines that clustered around its roots.   Beneath his wounded head there was mud and bloodied water and his heart was a pounding drum that shook his whole body.

The old man was crouching nearby, hunched over the fallen branch that had struck Antonio.  It was bulbous and fibrous, as thick around as a man’s thigh, and the old man was sawing off the smaller shoots and tendrils that writhed and bled grey sap as they fell to the ground.

“Help me,” Antonio said, his voice a phlegmy gurgle.

“See what he has given me,” the old man said, not looking up from his work.   “He is generous.   He that my grandmother’s mother knew by name, see what he has given me.”   He put away the knife into his belt and grunted as he hefted up the hewn log of ancient gloating wood.   “He will restore to me what was stolen.”
“Help me up, help me get free of these…”  He was going to say ‘hands’ but that would have been madness, surely.  “Of this tree.   My head is split, help me to stand.”
The old man shook his head and tucked the log beneath one arm, reaching up to take the lantern from the branch.

“You remain,” he told Antonio, “You remain.   A gift demands a gift, that is the old way.”  He turned away and the night closed around the trapped young man like water rising over the ground.    Crickets and beetles emboldened by the dwindling light crept, then ran, then danced over the captive.
“Don’t leave me here!” he called.  He struggled, thrashing his limbs, but the limbs of this grove’s old master were stronger still and held him fast.   The lantern light was almost gone now, the old man out of sight.  “Don’t leave me!  Geppetto!”    The darkness engulfed Antonio completely and the wind through the branches above him lamented him in mocking tones, and the crawling things in his nostrils and mouth and ears whispered as they feasted and told him of the mighty deeds that the carpenter’s son would bring to pass.

**

My novel A Step Beyond Context is currently on sale at Amazon (until June 24th) – if a dimension-travelling heroine facing down Regency intrigue and cyberpunk mayhem appeals then there has never been a better time to go along for the ride.

When I first became immortal I assumed it would be like being part of an exclusive club of wise and mysterious beings, roaming the earth like gods and angels.  It really isn’t.   There aren’t many of us but we keep bumping into each other.   The world becomes a dull party.  You know their jokes, stories, habits and hang ups.   One minute you’re sitting on a beach watching the sun set and the next some bastard’s bitching about some merchant from Thebes who stiffed him over an amphora of bad wine.    Most of us become solitary.  All of us become bad company.

Not you

Hah.  Maybe.    I’ve been alone too long and sometimes I need to make contact.   Not with another immortal though.    Tedious bunch, like I said.  And the ones that aren’t tedious are too damned dangerous.   I warned you about those didn’t I?

Scared me silly.   I’ve been looking out for Them ever since.

They’re too good at hiding.  I’m putting you at risk by talking to you, I should go.

Please don’t.  I want to learn more about you.  Not just the immortality thing, but you.  You as a person.

Too dangerous.   They are always watching, and they hate the idea of one of us opening up too much to a mortal, exposing our secrets.   But I have to.   The solitude crushes me sometimes.   I just want to watch the sun rise with someone by my side who understands.  Just once.    Idiotic really.  Sentimental.   And dangerous for you.  I can’t believe I’ve been so reckless, I’m sorry.  I’ll go now.

Please!  I want you to stay.  I want to watch the sun rise with you.   Want to know you better.  You don’t have to be lonely.

Alright.  If you want.  There’s a high hill above the bay, glorious view to the east.  Know it?

I do!

Meet me there in two hours.    Be careful They don’t follow you.

I’ll be careful.  I love you.

I love you.   Delete your chat logs.