"Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose ... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming."
| - | J.B.S. Haldane "Possible Worlds" |
There was a dissonant chorus, a wailing wind in the aether captured by something less than Heaven. A broken bottle was set adrift among the clamor. What was the clamor? Or better yet, what was the bottle? Was it full? Or was it empty? Was it mind or body or just raw meat?
A few mental atoms clicked into place. Images formed of one's self and of a faraway world. He remembered his name or part of it. He remembered the dusky, little town in New Mexico. Here and there, his mind penetrated the din and the pain. But for a few poorly formed fragments, splinters of names and places, his memories lagged pitifully. It was abysmally dark. Then, as if by a merciful accident the horrible cacophony faded and disappeared.
Other names came to mind - perplexing names like Cole, Kincaid and Leopold Hardan. He struggled to match these names with faces. These people were connected with his work. What was their secret? It forewarned disaster. Direct confrontation with these memories was painful, yielding an explosion of lines and planes, little more than geometric nonsense.
There was a gray wall that he could not push back. He redirected his feeble effort. This had to be more than a dream. Could it be some altered psychic state? What were the possibilities? He recalled his age and the poor state of his health. There was his frail heart. Perhaps he recovered from surgery at East County General. Or perhaps he had not. Perhaps perdition was his reward.
If only he could see through this mutton broth - a thick, brown soup, bubbling and curling. But if there was broth, if there was some color, brown or not, there must certainly be light and substance - fabric even if finespun, with perhaps some thin thread of hope.
Try as he might, he was unable to locate a source of light. Could he move? Could he maneuver? Lloyd exercised his mind and summoned kinetic energy from a small point of power locked deep inside his Vermis Kinesis.
He was jolted by this fantastic concept. Why did he imagine that he could propel by mind? Perhaps he could not, for it seemed there were needles poised and ready to pierce his skull at the slightest thought of psychic propulsion.
Lloyd had no choice but to persevere. He endured cruel pain as the mist accelerated. It was as if he possessed no solidity, no inertia. No matter, for it seemed he could maneuver in this brown-stained aether. The pain lessened as his apparent speed increased. The cold, stabbing needles retracted and were mysteriously gone.
But where were light and terra firma? To be safe he throttled back, fortunately not an eyelash too soon, for the earth materialized before his astonished eyes. Mind reeled if mind it was. He applied psychic brakes, stopped within a chin's whisker of impact. Without any point of reference, Lloyd had plunged recklessly and rapidly for the hard deck.
Hovering over earth he attempted to reason. It could be true that reason did not count. For reaching out with his mind, Lloyd confirmed an improbable theory. His mental being penetrated the solid ground as if one, the other or both were a mere mirage. But the assumption that either one was solid in the first place was apparently too hasty a call.
He gazed down at the languid remnants of a channel. There was some water, but mostly there was the blackest, foulest mud he had ever seen in his life. It was not even mud. It was a noxious slime, thick and glistening. Green vapors belched from numerous fissures in the mire, beating out a constant blip, blurp, blip, blurp that his brain could hear even if his ears could not.
There were yellowish things breeding and swiggling. This fecund ooze was too repulsive to ponder. In spite of fecund, in spite of repulsive, or perhaps because of it, his mind lapsed to the poet, Dante Aligheri. It seemed that he sampled the poet's final circle, his fetid latrine. This shit hole was enough to gag even Dante himself. Nauseated, Lloyd looked up toward what should have been blue sky, but what was instead an indefinite series of layers, of earth and air indistinguishable. With a little mental focusing he was able to sort and separate the brown bands into earth and air. Objects came into view beneath the horizon.
Stones of all sizes were scattered on a broad, alluvial plain. To his left the plain joined a sprawling basin reaching farther than the eye. Lloyd suspected that an inland sea must lay beyond it. He did not know why he suspected this. In fact, he began to suspect many things. Lloyd began to remember - not memories of a deliberate choice, but the uncontrollable surge from an incomprehensible dream. If a dream it wasn't the usual garden variety, a game of peekaboo from behind a safe curtain. He felt dangerously exposed with no place to hide. Sensing a maculation he snapped back to the basin, still in the open, still dreaming the same dream.
On his right rose purplish, craggy peaks. Between these extremes of chisel and hue sprouted patches of gray vegetation struggling against drought or disease. Once great stands of timber wilted and withered in the final stages of expiration.
He followed the narrowing channel toward the gray forest, away from the festering ooze. Here the flats were hard-baked and suffering. Some of the trees were giants of girth and height. Many were palm-like with massive, protruding scales. And hidden among them were the only living things he recognized, though most were stunted and discolored by a red fungus that advanced on the undersides of yellowing leaves.
It was a surprise, but nevertheless a comforting fact that in this cruel land grew little ginkgo trees - even if they were small, even if they were freckled with rampant rust. Lloyd recalled their distinctive fruit. He recalled that autumn smell upon his shoes, returning thoughts of Dante's aromatic poem. But more importantly, it returned thoughts of home - good and bad. How far? Did it even exist? He could not hope to guess.
He drifted over myriad secrets in the hope of finding answers. The scenery improved a little. Or maybe the flora only grew on him. He hoped not. This place exhibited a strange collection, and if not verdant, it was alive and crawling. Horsetail sprouted from pools of viscous muck and foul, black water. A few large ferns and fern-like trees grew among them, collecting and concentrating a seemingly living fog.
The fact of vegetation as familiar as horsetails made him curious, so he floated nearer. Small craft swooped in and out of these wispy patches. He entered a copse of horsetail and prickly, leafless shrubs. A tiny, dive bomber looped past his ear. Another attacker soared through him, soon to be joined by hundreds of little flying fortresses. Though not exactly B-17s, these insects were impressively gunned and turreted.
Thankfully there were no collisions. Lloyd was less than a vapor, for even vapor can be felt upon the face. Regardless of his surprising lack of substance, he decided not to loiter in their maniacal path. He suspected that he should not take this gift of invulnerability for granted. Lloyd could never be sure if and for how long his unexplained ghostliness would prevail, would seal and protect him. What if reality returned at the wrong time, in the wrong place? Thoughts of the kind would not help, so he moved forward with all the optimism a dreamer could muster.
The insufferable fog gradually burned away. Or did his eyes only adjust? Did they only acclimate to the light of the pale yellow orb? The sun, appearing both too large and too bright, was perched high in a sky rudely discolored as if suspending large quantities of soot and sulfur. The distant peaks spewed ash that painted devilish, undulating bands - red, brown and black from horizon to horizon. This portrait was strange, but not new to his experience. It was a land he had visited before, and in a similar way. It seemed a consequence of perspective, which at times was almost total, as if his mind was a single eye suspended in space with a view at every angle and an angle for every view. Each view was discreet and kaleidoscopic like the hinged faces of their geodesic dome. It was an eye more than either of his that required careful selection of the angle and scene to keep from spinning like bait on a string.
He followed the main channel past or through fallen trees, stumps and stilt roots. Another oasis loomed ahead - one larger and greener than the others. He penetrated a barrier of broad leaves and vines, opening the pages of a storybook. For a moment he experienced the sensation of pressure or touch, the vaguest hint of a lump in his throat and a living, beating heart inside his phantom chest. He entered a fairy land of pools, clubmoss, red mushrooms, dense overgrowth and prickly vines. Bleeding blisters erupted from stalks and the trunks of trees. The creepers collected crawlers of every possible design and appendage. Giant aphids, termites and slugs struggled and smothered in the sticky, amber resins. It was the Land of Nod, a land of snails and snailwort, of toads and toadstools, of bugs and bugbane. It was a land fast asleep. Then to his surprise Nod changed.
The land awoke with a spasm, a sudden, explosive shudder.
A pack of animals, marvels in motion, rushed him head on and pell-mell, splashing mud, flinging pebbles, panting like racing greyhounds. Lloyd managed a fleeting glimpse as several of these racers paused atop small stones to reconnoiter. Their length ranged from 10 to 20 inches. Their torsos were covered with lizard scales. Their actions, however, were anything but lizard-like. Limbs were too long and erect for lizards. And they moved with the speed and grace of ferrets. Their heads were dog-like with just the hint of coarse, gray fur and long, straight whiskers.
These agile creatures were quickly gone - perhaps fifty or more spurred by the worst sort of panic. As there seemed little hope of pursuing them, Lloyd continued his course, more often through than over this improbable land. Towering tree-ferns had fashioned a lush canopy over the darkly sodden trench. Fine dust and droplets sparkled in the brilliant cathedral sunlight. He paused to absorb the mire's strange, soundless peace, trying to reassure himself before drifting (or dreaming) on.
All signs of peace and reassurance ended a hundred yards up the trail. A killing frenzy had occurred at a sharp bottleneck with steep and slippery sides. Twenty or more of the reptiles lay dead or dying. Some appeared desiccated while others bled from dozens of puncture wounds. Their gapping mouths contained bluish black bristles of a disconcertingly familiar hue and texture. Body parts littered the trail. Many did not match the reptiles or anything he had ever seen.
It seemed odd that the only footprints belonged to the fur-collared lizards. Why were there no other prints? Had the attackers swooped down from the trees, then returned on spring heels? Whatever they may have been, the dog-reptiles had to be their better in stealth and speed. Lloyd searched for a plausible answer. He searched the trees and the mires, but found only scavengers - giant scorpions and millipedes.
He approached a hollow dominated by titanic trees crowned with cones, and tree-ferns crowned with massive flowers. Most were giants of two hundred feet or more. A closer look confirmed that although cones were likely to be cones, flowers were not likely to be flowers.
Gargantuan fabrications were nestled high among the longer shoots and green fronds. Their yellowish material appeared alive, fungal, though perhaps of intelligent design. The engineering was a genuine wonder of capilliform complexity. Spheres were joined by great bellows tubes and translucent, lesser tubes that crisscrossed the dense, interior foliage.
There was no obvious sign of habitation.
The appearance of these organic spheres and tubes was unsettling and reminiscent of something better left alone. Exhausted by a kind of sensory overload, Lloyd pivoted, seeking relief, open space and a way out. It would not do to be trapped here. That former hint of real feeling, of a heart and a painful lump returned momentarily, but soon vanished. He left the loamy hollow and reentered the plain, deciding to investigate the pits or slurries ringed with horsetails. Some of these plants were over forty feet tall. As he crossed the baked and cracked earth something clicked. It was a word that he had sought and the word was "calamite". These plants were calamites. But calamites were ancient and long ago extinct.
The calamites dominated the pits - vast ponds of steaming, bubbling blackwater. This however was not their only feature. Dark, elongated boulders were randomly arranged. In the largest of these pools the nearly uniform boulders measured twenty feet or more. Lloyd wondered if they might be the semibuoyant tears of volcanic glass, since several actually seemed to bob and float in the black miasma.
One stone raised its head and all his questions were answered. His eyes contracted with a painful throb. Suddenly all the stones were moving toward him. Lloyd forgot his ghostliness. For an instant his lack of substance was ignored. This was all that panic required. The pang of disequilibrium seemed the one property of his mind not dependent upon its duration for its potency. Nevertheless, the timely quality of logic eventually prevailed to reassure him. If he could not be heard, not be seen, not be felt, he was perfectly safe. He could not be hurt. By all logic he was safe and not really here (or there, wherever there might be).
Lloyd reverted to the scientist again. No matter how difficult, he must remain the true scientist. He headed for the blackwater once again confident in his objectivity, and more importantly, once again reassured of his protective insubstantiality.
The rush toward him, the sudden, mind-blicking surge had nothing to do with him at all. It was driven instead by the bellies of the beasts. Mindless hunger had propelled several of the living boulders out of the water and on to the semidry land. They had abandoned the water to browse on the smaller, more tender rootstocks, calamite stems and shoots. Those that remained behind, frolicked like hippos in a mud wallow. Some were larger than hippos. He moved through the rushes to the brink of one pit, then beyond and over the blackwater, but found it nearly impossible to tell where mud stopped and beast began.
They were living tanks heavily armored from nose shield to tail spur. Steel-platted wolverines came to mind - squat and muscular. The head of these semiaquatic vegetarians was wide and triangular, ending in a razor beak. Heavy brow ridges ran to the snout. Their wide backs were lined with two rows of short spikes. The muscular tail was also spiked, but with four sets, two above and two below. A double-lobed, heart-shaped mace tipped their powerful, high-held tail.
He recalled the trail massacre. Could these plodding dreadnaughts have slaughtered his lithe and limber reptiles? They were powerful enough, no doubt, but obviously not fast enough, smart enough, or even delicate enough for the task. Afterall, there had been no prints, practically no disturbance at all in the rotting river bed. More to the point, these creatures were only clumsy, lumbering herbivores.
Impressive duals flared among the land rovers for the most delectable sprouts. They tried, but were almost incapable of injuring one another. He decided he had seen enough. Lloyd left them to revisit the hollow and the arboreal splendor he had found abhorrent while at the same time oddly compelling.
While recrossing the hard-baked flats, a stream of large, rainbow dragons - a line of a hundred dragonflies daubed and dappled like Costa Rican butterflies passed impassively through him as if he was nothing at all. He was stunned by their beauty, by color he did not know existed. The dragons fluttered toward the parasitic flowers that had infested the titanic trees. He had to return to investigate these floral fungiforms. Why did they tempt him? Was it science? Was it invertibrate science that tempted the Dantian myriapods to the filthy ooze and viny gorse?
Given time, he relocated the distinctive lush foliage, the loam richer and darker in the hollow than anywhere else. While outwardly vibrant and alive, it took root that somehow the opposite was true, though the dense ferns of veinous blades, red and green, both on the ground and in the air, belied these notions. He wandered through the maze of ground ferns while focusing most of his attention upon the trees - huge tree-ferns that he had only read about in natural history books. Their words and pictures did little justice to what he experienced now.
It was not only the trees themselves, though they were impressive enough. It was the maze in the trees, the intricacy of causeways that characterized the higher elevations. These networks were massive, their immeasurable bulk barely supported by staunch trunks. His imagination filled in the blanks, conjured monsters in the great hulks of timber. Each tree was an unwilling host, strangled by a speckled beast, a creature beyond its habitat, a tree-bound gigantopus, a clinging conspiracy of multicolored arms.
There remained no clues to its origin, though from the beginning Lloyd had sensed a living tangle of tentacles coiled among the branches. Its knobs and spines, spirals and frills were breathing, feeding, growing larger, seemingly growing stronger. If there was a way out, this treescape had to be the way. Lloyd summoned strength from his final reserves, but found strength lacking. His oppressive fatigue had returned far worse than before.
Fear fed fear. Logic fled in its wake. His mind had entered the lower corridor where things went bump. Suddenly all things around him were cold, suspect and threatening. His attention was captured by the ferns to his right, then by the ferns to his left. He imagined deadly tiger centipedes lurking behind rustling fronds. This impression of encirclement was too much to bear. The leafy, tentacled elevations seemed his only escape.
With all his strength Lloyd rose to join the fungal clusters. It seemed no accident of fate that he found himself poised before the largest and most complex of the giant blossoms, a tendrillous centrosphere wedged inside a torus richly tinted like a coral reef.
Like a moth drawn to the flame, Lloyd was compelled to enter. Logic had warned him, but logic had taken its seat in the back of his brain. He searched the torus, but a seam evident from the ground had diabolically vanished. He circled, but access seemed always out of reach. Lloyd would have welcomed some feeling for substance, for touch, for some confidence in the common and conventional approach.
Giving up on the conventional, he inserted his ghostly head through the tight, organic weave and peered inside the torus. And though this action was painless, he immediately noticed a queer tickle that tiptoed down his spine. Spinning, Lloyd withdrew his head, somehow hollowed out by the darkness, a void that sucked him out and sapped his strength. In spite of the vapidity, the debilitating darkness, he knew that he must test the torus once more.
He circled once more, had circled probably several times, when he noticed the queerest thing. When it had happened, how it had happened, he could not be sure, but "out" had become "in" or "in" had become "out". It had happened without the slightest transition. Like it or not his wish had been granted. Like it or not he was all the way in.
The light inside the torus was weak as if shunted by sly though powerful forces. He prayed that his eyes would adjust, would find not only light, but some comfort in what the light revealed. He reminded himself to remain calm. He was soon rewarded with a trickle of perception by means unclear.
The walls seemed to thin, to pass the sunlight at his whim. He summoned enough to appraise the situation. The space inside the torus seemed vast, much greater than he would have estimated from circling it. The space of the inner torus had been thickened perhaps a hundred fold, its time thinned out by the reciprocal factor. Would this arcane knowledge help him here?
He thought more about what might help, but this effort defeated him. He found it easier to concentrate on the torus itself, a kind of doughnut shaped receptacle. Though he did not feel as much as a breeze, he was aware of the passage of air inside this manifold of tubes, the flow regulated by beating flaps like aortic valves. A grown man could easily insert himself in the largest of these thick-walled arteries with plenty of room to spare.
He entered the first available branch, large, but pitch black. In spite of his blindness it seemed that he could feel the walls, for when approached they would cause that familiar tickle in the Vermis.
As Lloyd traveled deeper into the tube, bumping its walls with mind not matter, the tickle gradually gave way to a strange source of light, a few orange bulbs cruising in space. As he steered closer, these objects grew clearer, though no better explained. There were dozens, perhaps a hundred or more glowing orbs as he descended deeper into the dark barrel. Each moved because each orb was a living thing. As this dream would have it, each light was a translucent and luminous snail producing luminous, molluscan tracks.
The snails made navigation easier, the sensation of blind steering not painful, but not pleasant either. Lloyd followed the lights which appeared and disappeared which each twist and turn of the tube. Occasionally another man-sized branch would appear, but Lloyd refused these, not that one was any better or worse than next. All tubes were equally claustrophobic. All tubes were equally alive. Both were matters more than the rhythmic contraction of the tubes or their all too convenient size. The maze was a zoological trove of all sorts of creatures feeding off each other and on whatever clung to the walls. Lloyd likened it to a tide pool caught in a moon beam. The glowing snails were probably near the top of the feeding chain. Somewhere in the middle were the flowering barnacles and cysts, the star slugs and porcupine worms. Somewhere near the bottom were thick layers of mucosal bacteria.
He had been bumping into and through them before the snail light had told him so. His radial Vermis had felt them. They had passed through him each time his mind had miscalculated the walls. But these problematica were mere mites in the molasses. There was something else that gnawed on him, that nipped his last frail bud of confidence. He sensed it was close.
At tubular junctures he encountered beating flaps like those he had seen in the torus. Some performed like valves, while others larger and thicker fanned the air with a pump-like action. At times this action was pounding, the tubes in thumping turmoil, the glowsnails nowhere in sight. Mostly, the result was subturbulent, at least for the residents, the apparently acclimated inhabitants of the maze.
His reaction was less than acclimation. One phobia fed another. The beating flaps did not dispell his fear of suffocation or the though of being crushed by a sudden contraction of the tube. He felt too small and too large at the same time. He felt like a bacterium trying to find its way inside a porous lump of coal. But unlike the bacterium at least he could see. But was this really sight? A new fear wiggled its way into his brain.
It grew more and more difficult to accomodate sight without substance. He saw all things clearly but himself. It was a too radical amputation and it was taking its toll on his sanity. He was but a single eye connected to some remote brain. It was preposterous, but the fantastic truth was only dawning. He could have threaded a needle with his mind, with his mind's eye. He was in truth less than nothing, less than a ghost, for even a ghost had once been something, a truth his mind should see or sense even in a dream like this. From the start, the maze and its branches, the Land of Nod itself, the entire locum navigation, had exhibited no size or scale relative to himself. And he had exhibited no size or scale relative to the maze.
But could he be sure of even this? What could be proved in a dream? He was not yet convinced. All of the evidence did not fit this argument. Why should shadows follow him? Why should empty space intercept the molluscan beams of light and cast disturbing shapes upon the walls if he was no more than mind inside the maze?
Fear produced a growing pressure between his would-be ears and inside the hollow of his would-be belly. He thought of home, of Pines' Roost. Would this assist his relocation? The tubes took him nowhere. Each new branch was a useless cul-de-sac. He descended deeper into the despair of the labyrinth. The mental maze of tubes took no apparent notice. He was little more than a harmless fleck, another unimportant morsel of food.
The throbbing walls redoubled the rhythmic, bellows-like contractions of their practical necessities, then went instantly dark as if the hangman's hood had been pulled suddenly over his earthly head. The fatigue of his Vermis Kinesis registered a kind of dull red glow. There was an instant of disorientation as if a piece of time and space had broken loose, soon to be replaced by impossibility.
There rose a heave, followed by a great sigh, then a convulsion in the tube which dilated like a birth canal. The glowsnails and the other busy beasts miraculously vanished inside the folds of the labyrinth's living walls. He was once again blind, but in little time not alone. He could not see them, but he knew they were there. They must have ascended the long shaft like a beating cloud. And though he could not see them, hear them, feel them, his mind could. He did not know how he could do it, but he was convinced that he could describe them. Roaches? No, not exactly roaches. They were much too long for roaches. They flew like birds, not bugs. They thrashed like snakes, not birds. No matter. There was no time to ponder.
Another blast from below dilated the main tube. A whirling, bristling leviathan blew through him. It purged clean his mind and any matter that mattered. There was no reason or reasoning for what the thing could have been. His mind's eye registered a tunneling, elephantine invertebrate, armed with grinders that doubled for revolving, revolting, studded eyes. He had felt the beast like needles in his chest.
He had reached the end. There were no more tubes to try. With little left, Lloyd plunged through an opaque membrane. This left his mind behind for an instant, but his fear if not his reason soon caught up. At first, he thought that he had returned to the torus itself. He had instead returned to a vast chamber, like, but greater, more complex than the torus. A pale, blue light seeped through the floor. He had traversed the labyrinth, suffered its branches, only to reach the centrosphere of the maze.
Surfaces were covered with a dark, coarse fur. Furnishings of an unknown utility were suspended on drab yellow ropes. And although color and detail were slow to impress the eyes, they did eventually impress.
What he saw was quite unprecedented. Nothing ever looked the same the second time. Could more than one chamber occupy the same space at the same time? Objects came and went. What he saw never looked good, not the first, not the second, not the last. He perceived what he supposed could be a vast chemistry lab of translucent tubes and vats filled with all manner of fluids, bubbling and brewing. He also beheld a kind of machine shop of living parts busily repairing and regrowing. He saw animals suspended on fungal ropes, tightly trussed like candied snacks. He recognized his mammal-like reptiles among the many victims, large and small, dead and alive, hanging as would provisions in some fiend's pantry.
Lloyd felt his heart now beating like a drum. The knot was forming again in his throat larger than before. He could feel his tongue against the dry roof of his mouth, the tips of his fingers touching one another, his anal sphincter painfully puckering. Feeling was returning. Matter was returning at the wrong time, in the wrong place. He had dreamed up a reality, a maze filled with life and death. Lloyd decided it was the time to leave.
He attempted a simple lateral maneuver that failed, for he bumped into something spongy, but impenetrable, also invisible from what he could deduce in the meager light. Lloyd tried again, but once again he collided with something unseen and unyielding. He tried and failed many times, though other than the dizzying tug on his Vermis, he should feel nothing of substance. And it did not help that the apparent confines of his space and time shrank with each futile attempt. It also did not help that he was almost certainly watched. Lloyd was convinced now more than ever that something savored him a tasty meal.
He concentrated and gave it all the strength he had, for the first time aiming down and out the bottom of the sphere. This seemed to work, for the dangling ropes disappeared overhead. But upon further scrutiny he decided that he had not moved in the least. Someone or something had worked the ropes to mislead him. Unfortunately, it came to mind that when something goes up, something else comes down, usually a something much larger. He had made the unpardonable mistake of not investigating his entire space.
This belated and horrific realization caused the hair on his neck to burn and bristle. What hit him next was a frigid blast of foul air. Not wanting to look up, he raised his arm slowly above his head until it collided with something solid. His hand now rested upon bristling flesh and hard nodules. Paralyzed by fear, Lloyd could not raise or turn his head. He did move his hand a little, hoping for something the mind could accept. He touched a pebble, round and hard, then another, then many - the necklace - her necklace of a hundred round stones.
This brazen act was his final mistake. Like a predatory bird, his unseen horror descended, ensnared him in powerful limbs covered with coarse, bluish black fur. They were both quickly entwined in the dark, locked in a mortal struggle. They fell from a great height, fell forever through the void, that mindless Grundlespin.
©Copyright by Edward John Darenkamp