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caraigFirst, some fiction. Clicky on the cutty. Then I'll explain what-all has been happening.
The town had no name; or rather more to the point it had no name that I cared to know. In these times you either settled into your home, shoring up against what came at night, or you tried to stay one step ahead of... whatever they were.
I had chosen the latter, but even a vagabond came upon hard times now and then. OIf two others I had been travelling with, one had finally lost it that morning, and the other and I wordlessly parted ways, he going north and I going south. It was better that way.
But that had been in the morning, and now the sun was racing for the horizon in some mad defenestration, as if seeking to take me with it in it's diurnal suicide. The road had taken me into the outskirts of a small town, what had once been the suburbs to a city. The vagabond in me recoiled some, not trusting those that clung so tightly to the old ways that had proved so disastrous, but I forced myself to relax some. Being townsfolk didn't make one a fool, any more than being a vagabond did. For the hundredth time that day I told myself that they had as much chance to live as those who walked the roads. The only difference was that they clung together in the daylight hours, clinging to their humanity in that way. Us vagabonds on the other hand... we weren't better. Though we shunned stability in favor of survival, at least the squatters held on to what they once were.
Old habits die hard, and it took all I could muster to keep from fleeing the town for a safe place. The townsfolk were smart, I could already see them mechanically, sullenly and somberly closing their homes, sealing them against the coming night. Already to the east night was encroaching like a velvet shroud being drawn over the land. I felt my pulse quickening, and my movements quickened. The survival instincts that had been forced upon me were screaming to find a safe place, and quickly.
"Hey!"
I whirled, and I must have looked as haunted as I was beginning to feel, since the man who was looking out at me through the screen door of his small shack gave a start and a half-step back. After a moment, he relaxed a little. "A vagrant, aren't you?" He said the word without accusation. "Nearest safe place is a mile away. You won't make it there, why don't you come in?"
I let out a breath, and nodded, feeling relief. It wasn't that it was something few others would do; in these days, at least you could be reasonably sure that everyone was in the same boat as you. It was that this man had paused in his preparations long enough to notice me. "Thanks," I remembered to say as I went up the three steps; being a vagabond -- "vagrant" is what we were usually called by the townsfolk, the squatters -- meant relying on utter silence as often as possible. I had met some who had almost forgotten how to talk.
He was pleasant enough, fussing busily about the house in making last preparations for sleep. I looked around, setting my pack and bow on the high shelf he offered. It was a good home, a single room with no odd corners or doors. The floor was solid, bare wood; from the brief glance I had, it rested on a solid stone foundation, and there would be no basement.
Once I was satisfied with the way it was made, I found myself a bit more comfortable, and answering his questions, trying to be more verbal than laconic. He was of course curious as to what I had seen in my travels. I told him what I could, sparing him the details of many things, of course. One did not need that sort of thing before sleep, especially now. Besides, he was a good man -- he had taken in a vagabond in the moments before night ruled the land again -- and didn't need those horrors saddling his soul. Middle aged, with a balding head and thick glasses, I guessed him to have once worked in the city before everything changed. I helped him string up a second hammock, and happened to glance outside.
In an earlier time, a less haunted one, it would be any late summer evening, with the sun just setting and a soft wind blowing, with a crescent waning moon starting to peek through the trees over the rise of the hill. But these were not how things were, and the signs were starting to be seen, and that same familiar terror began to gnaw at me as my mind took in those indescribable signs and interpreted them subconsciously.
I turned to look at my host, and he looked at me curiously for a few moments. I have already said that vagabonds do not speak much, and this is one of those cases where another vagrant would look at my expression and understand immediately. To his credit, however, it took him but three seconds and a softly stammered "Wh-what?" after looking at my expression, to realize what was going on. He nodded a little, and managed a smile. "Well. We'd better finish up, then, and turn in, shouldn't we?" Fearlessness where he was clearly afraid; For a moment I found myself in awe of him.
We climbed up the short ladder to the hammocks strung up in the rafters. No beds under which something could lurk, I had spent more than a few nights in one, and I could see the allure of living in a stable town. I actually felt safe here, with a roof over my head in a house that held no surprises. There was no need to fear here, no need to struggle against a tidal wave of fear to reach a safe place in the last few moments of daylight.
I lay in the hammock, and in those moments of felt safety I shivered, and could feel the emotions held at bay welling up, struggling to find the release I had denied them. Fury at what had happened, anger, tears, even the moments of happiness. Feelings I had struggled to bury while on the road, could find release here. I blinked away tears, and rolled over in my hammock so my host would not see me. And in that span I saw the windows... and froze.
Outside was the dark, grassy lawn surrounding the house, as I had seen it when I first entered. But now I was seeing other things, other images. A boy's eye view of sunny days and playing in the streets, fleeting visions of people, laughing, happy, in days gone by. Through another window that I involuntarily flicked my gaze to, more hazy, barely-discernable imagies, playing like some zoetrope that was going a touch too fast on an uneven base.
I stared for a moment, before realizing what was happening and squeezing my eyes shut tightly, rolling onto my back. If my eyes had been open I'd be staring at the rafters but I would not open my eyes for anything at that point. I wondered if it was already too late, for I had encountered this kind of thing before, and I wondered if in the morning I would have lost some remembrance of joy to the memory-thief.
I curled up in the hammock, pulling the thin sheet over my head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. What you can't see, won't hurt you, I repeated to myself, over and over again, a ridiculous mantra that I knew would be insane to follow normally, but it made perfect sense right at that moment.
Beside me, my host shifted in his hammock. "Oh, damn," he murmured. "I forgot to lock the door."
His words cut through any terror I had held about my brief vision of the memory-thief. I did not know if it was better to leave the door unlocked and to avoid risking encounter with whatever else was out there. But if a door was unlocked, it would be opened. This was the way things were.
He must have come to that conclusion as well. Somehow, perhaps for living so long in a safe home, his voice was still jovial. "Well," he said, "here I go." He tried to make it sound joking, but a moment later he added, softer, "Good luck to you."
I tensed as I heard him slip down from the hammock, my breathing quick and rapid, wishing I could close out my hearing the same way I could close my eyes. Already I could hear whispers dancing through the trees not nearly far enough away outside. The laughter, the chatter, from bygone days still rasped against the windows in distant tones, just barely softer than how my own breath sounded to me. Even so it could not be drowned out by the suddenly far-too-loud crack of a dry twig beneath a foot outside the house. I heard my host pause at that, then heard the quiet jingle of keys, a metal-on-metal sound, then the incredibly loud click of the door's bolt sliding home.
He made no other sound.
Sleep eventually claimed me, and terrors were waiting there, as well, but these at least I knew could not harm me but for the memory of their touch. When sunlight finally streamed through the eastern windows, impinging upon my still-closed eyelids, I risked a glance at the clock, and let out a sigh of relief at the hour. It was morning, and that truly was sunlight coming in. I arose from the hammock, wiping the scales from my eyes.
Of my host there was no sign, except a ring of keys on the floor and the door, unlocked.
Another nail hammered into the coffin of my sanity. I wondered how many more it would take. Or if it had already been buried.
I ended up spending most of the morning in the town, explaining what happened and what I knew to the man's neighbor's and the person who styled themselves the local sheriff. In the end, they let me go to travel back on the road. They knew what the world was like, what it had become. I knew that they worried I had something to do with it, but it was far more likely that something else had taken him. I wondered, though, in the coming weeks, if another chance glance at a memory-thief's images would show his memories to me, or if it had been whatever had cracked that twig that had stolen him off. Or if it was something else entirely, something I had never given name to and should be thankful I would know nothing about until it came one night to steal me away from even within a safe place. Better to not know, I reasoned, as I started out on road, warmed mockingly by the early afternoon sun. Better to not know.
Now, that confused bit of writing came from a dream I had last night, and even though like most dreams it's continuing to fade even now, I think I got most of the important bits in there. The world was no longer how it is for us, and the nights were ruled by terrors, and fears, and nightmares. If I had just a bit more skill with writing, I could make something more than just a not-very-good, confusing short story with this.
I've been having more dreams, again, about being in the military again. The last one was more specific than most, being again a marine inspector in the Coast Guard and finding myself in another country to try helping to rebuild their merchant fleet. Well, nothing to be done for it, I imagine; it's likely that this recurring theme in my dreams is present because of my lack of a job, and because being in the military was such a big part of my life.
Anyway, not much else going on, pretty much the usual. Once again my muse slapped me about a bit to write that down, as confusing as it is. I might try to polish it up sometime. Pax.
The town had no name; or rather more to the point it had no name that I cared to know. In these times you either settled into your home, shoring up against what came at night, or you tried to stay one step ahead of... whatever they were.
I had chosen the latter, but even a vagabond came upon hard times now and then. OIf two others I had been travelling with, one had finally lost it that morning, and the other and I wordlessly parted ways, he going north and I going south. It was better that way.
But that had been in the morning, and now the sun was racing for the horizon in some mad defenestration, as if seeking to take me with it in it's diurnal suicide. The road had taken me into the outskirts of a small town, what had once been the suburbs to a city. The vagabond in me recoiled some, not trusting those that clung so tightly to the old ways that had proved so disastrous, but I forced myself to relax some. Being townsfolk didn't make one a fool, any more than being a vagabond did. For the hundredth time that day I told myself that they had as much chance to live as those who walked the roads. The only difference was that they clung together in the daylight hours, clinging to their humanity in that way. Us vagabonds on the other hand... we weren't better. Though we shunned stability in favor of survival, at least the squatters held on to what they once were.
Old habits die hard, and it took all I could muster to keep from fleeing the town for a safe place. The townsfolk were smart, I could already see them mechanically, sullenly and somberly closing their homes, sealing them against the coming night. Already to the east night was encroaching like a velvet shroud being drawn over the land. I felt my pulse quickening, and my movements quickened. The survival instincts that had been forced upon me were screaming to find a safe place, and quickly.
"Hey!"
I whirled, and I must have looked as haunted as I was beginning to feel, since the man who was looking out at me through the screen door of his small shack gave a start and a half-step back. After a moment, he relaxed a little. "A vagrant, aren't you?" He said the word without accusation. "Nearest safe place is a mile away. You won't make it there, why don't you come in?"
I let out a breath, and nodded, feeling relief. It wasn't that it was something few others would do; in these days, at least you could be reasonably sure that everyone was in the same boat as you. It was that this man had paused in his preparations long enough to notice me. "Thanks," I remembered to say as I went up the three steps; being a vagabond -- "vagrant" is what we were usually called by the townsfolk, the squatters -- meant relying on utter silence as often as possible. I had met some who had almost forgotten how to talk.
He was pleasant enough, fussing busily about the house in making last preparations for sleep. I looked around, setting my pack and bow on the high shelf he offered. It was a good home, a single room with no odd corners or doors. The floor was solid, bare wood; from the brief glance I had, it rested on a solid stone foundation, and there would be no basement.
Once I was satisfied with the way it was made, I found myself a bit more comfortable, and answering his questions, trying to be more verbal than laconic. He was of course curious as to what I had seen in my travels. I told him what I could, sparing him the details of many things, of course. One did not need that sort of thing before sleep, especially now. Besides, he was a good man -- he had taken in a vagabond in the moments before night ruled the land again -- and didn't need those horrors saddling his soul. Middle aged, with a balding head and thick glasses, I guessed him to have once worked in the city before everything changed. I helped him string up a second hammock, and happened to glance outside.
In an earlier time, a less haunted one, it would be any late summer evening, with the sun just setting and a soft wind blowing, with a crescent waning moon starting to peek through the trees over the rise of the hill. But these were not how things were, and the signs were starting to be seen, and that same familiar terror began to gnaw at me as my mind took in those indescribable signs and interpreted them subconsciously.
I turned to look at my host, and he looked at me curiously for a few moments. I have already said that vagabonds do not speak much, and this is one of those cases where another vagrant would look at my expression and understand immediately. To his credit, however, it took him but three seconds and a softly stammered "Wh-what?" after looking at my expression, to realize what was going on. He nodded a little, and managed a smile. "Well. We'd better finish up, then, and turn in, shouldn't we?" Fearlessness where he was clearly afraid; For a moment I found myself in awe of him.
We climbed up the short ladder to the hammocks strung up in the rafters. No beds under which something could lurk, I had spent more than a few nights in one, and I could see the allure of living in a stable town. I actually felt safe here, with a roof over my head in a house that held no surprises. There was no need to fear here, no need to struggle against a tidal wave of fear to reach a safe place in the last few moments of daylight.
I lay in the hammock, and in those moments of felt safety I shivered, and could feel the emotions held at bay welling up, struggling to find the release I had denied them. Fury at what had happened, anger, tears, even the moments of happiness. Feelings I had struggled to bury while on the road, could find release here. I blinked away tears, and rolled over in my hammock so my host would not see me. And in that span I saw the windows... and froze.
Outside was the dark, grassy lawn surrounding the house, as I had seen it when I first entered. But now I was seeing other things, other images. A boy's eye view of sunny days and playing in the streets, fleeting visions of people, laughing, happy, in days gone by. Through another window that I involuntarily flicked my gaze to, more hazy, barely-discernable imagies, playing like some zoetrope that was going a touch too fast on an uneven base.
I stared for a moment, before realizing what was happening and squeezing my eyes shut tightly, rolling onto my back. If my eyes had been open I'd be staring at the rafters but I would not open my eyes for anything at that point. I wondered if it was already too late, for I had encountered this kind of thing before, and I wondered if in the morning I would have lost some remembrance of joy to the memory-thief.
I curled up in the hammock, pulling the thin sheet over my head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. What you can't see, won't hurt you, I repeated to myself, over and over again, a ridiculous mantra that I knew would be insane to follow normally, but it made perfect sense right at that moment.
Beside me, my host shifted in his hammock. "Oh, damn," he murmured. "I forgot to lock the door."
His words cut through any terror I had held about my brief vision of the memory-thief. I did not know if it was better to leave the door unlocked and to avoid risking encounter with whatever else was out there. But if a door was unlocked, it would be opened. This was the way things were.
He must have come to that conclusion as well. Somehow, perhaps for living so long in a safe home, his voice was still jovial. "Well," he said, "here I go." He tried to make it sound joking, but a moment later he added, softer, "Good luck to you."
I tensed as I heard him slip down from the hammock, my breathing quick and rapid, wishing I could close out my hearing the same way I could close my eyes. Already I could hear whispers dancing through the trees not nearly far enough away outside. The laughter, the chatter, from bygone days still rasped against the windows in distant tones, just barely softer than how my own breath sounded to me. Even so it could not be drowned out by the suddenly far-too-loud crack of a dry twig beneath a foot outside the house. I heard my host pause at that, then heard the quiet jingle of keys, a metal-on-metal sound, then the incredibly loud click of the door's bolt sliding home.
He made no other sound.
Sleep eventually claimed me, and terrors were waiting there, as well, but these at least I knew could not harm me but for the memory of their touch. When sunlight finally streamed through the eastern windows, impinging upon my still-closed eyelids, I risked a glance at the clock, and let out a sigh of relief at the hour. It was morning, and that truly was sunlight coming in. I arose from the hammock, wiping the scales from my eyes.
Of my host there was no sign, except a ring of keys on the floor and the door, unlocked.
Another nail hammered into the coffin of my sanity. I wondered how many more it would take. Or if it had already been buried.
I ended up spending most of the morning in the town, explaining what happened and what I knew to the man's neighbor's and the person who styled themselves the local sheriff. In the end, they let me go to travel back on the road. They knew what the world was like, what it had become. I knew that they worried I had something to do with it, but it was far more likely that something else had taken him. I wondered, though, in the coming weeks, if another chance glance at a memory-thief's images would show his memories to me, or if it had been whatever had cracked that twig that had stolen him off. Or if it was something else entirely, something I had never given name to and should be thankful I would know nothing about until it came one night to steal me away from even within a safe place. Better to not know, I reasoned, as I started out on road, warmed mockingly by the early afternoon sun. Better to not know.
Now, that confused bit of writing came from a dream I had last night, and even though like most dreams it's continuing to fade even now, I think I got most of the important bits in there. The world was no longer how it is for us, and the nights were ruled by terrors, and fears, and nightmares. If I had just a bit more skill with writing, I could make something more than just a not-very-good, confusing short story with this.
I've been having more dreams, again, about being in the military again. The last one was more specific than most, being again a marine inspector in the Coast Guard and finding myself in another country to try helping to rebuild their merchant fleet. Well, nothing to be done for it, I imagine; it's likely that this recurring theme in my dreams is present because of my lack of a job, and because being in the military was such a big part of my life.
Anyway, not much else going on, pretty much the usual. Once again my muse slapped me about a bit to write that down, as confusing as it is. I might try to polish it up sometime. Pax.
