Vintage Links 002: Warren Ellis; Short Crime Fiction; Washing Pillows; Unproductive Days
Vintage Links 002: Warren Ellis; Short Crime Fiction; Washing Pillows; Unproductive Days
One of my projects for 2019 is clearing the archive of unread links tucked away in the “To Read” folder of my bookmarks bar. At time of writing, there are about 600 of them remaining, and I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanks, and cleared away so I don’t have to deal with it again. The stuff that brings me joy gets posted here, to be shared with others.
I don’t even like hiking, and yet somehow I thought in a moment of pure stupidity that going on a day-long hike with my family in a big scary forest would be a fantastic idea. Who knows, maybe it was wanderlust breaking through the monotony, or maybe it was just the relentless peer pressure from my sister and her husband, but for whatever reason I agreed to leave my warm and cozy apartment behind on a rainy day and go tromp through the woods. Brilliant.
A certain something about the beauty and the strangeness of that place caught my imagination in a way I hadn’t felt for years, and breathing in the rich and biting air of that misty day was enough to bring me back to a time before reality had dampened the wonder of the world around me. That rock over there, didn’t it look a bit like a tiny person? And that tree, oh that tree just around the bend of the path, all covered in moss and bent with unnumbered years, yes it was something straight out of another world entirely. I elbowed Sasha as I walked next to her, pointing out the beautiful old tree with a smile. “Hey, don’t you think that tree over there has loads of fairies in it?”
“What? What are you talking about?” she asked in surprise and no little confusion.
I pointed again, trying to get my ever-practical older sister to break out of her shell just once and see how the hollow of the trunk near the ground was just perfect for a fairy house, or that the ring of clear space around was where spirits could dance the night away. “Oh come on Sash, it’s like those stories mum used to tell us about how the forests have all kinds of spirits living in them. Protectors and stuff like that. Can’t you feel it?”
“Melissa, you’re ridiculous. I can’t believe you still think about those stories, it’s been ages. Now come on we’ve got to speed up, we’re not even halfway to the river yet.”
I rolled my eyes at her stubborn refusal to even think about anything that didn’t mesh with her version of reality, but my mum and I traded a small smile as we passed the tree. It may have been far too many years since mum had tucked us both into bed with stories of fairy abductions and tree spirits, but that didn’t mean I still didn’t cherish them. Even if they were a little bit ridiculous.
And so to my great and pleasant surprise, the hike that I had tried so hard to avoid was turning out to be rather a good time after all. Watching the forest reveal itself to us through the fog and gazing off into the endless wall of trees that stretched in every direction, it was easy to get lost in the history and magic of the place.
Too easy, as it turned out.
I had just stopped to look at an interesting pile of rocks, I swear I did. The little formation happened to catch my eye as I trudged along at the back to avoid slowing any of the more experienced hikers in the group down. It wasn’t even all that interesting at first glance, simply a small heaped up pile of black rocks that could have been the result of any number of natural phenomena or interfering hands over the years. But the stones were arranged just so in a perfect pyramid, with veins of emerald moss tracing delicately over them in perfect latticework, and I couldn’t help but stop for a closer look. I stooped down to peer at it from all angles and fished out my camera from my bag to take a few pictures, all in all spending no more than a couple minutes next to the small curiosity on the side of the trail.
When I stood up again, my family was gone.
Just like that, gone. There was no trace of the on the trail ahead, the long straightaway stretching into the trees empty of anything at all for as far as I could see through the fog. I could have sworn that it had only been a few moments since I looked away and yet here I was alone, completely alone in a forest that I barely knew.
But even still, panic didn’t set in just yet. It was foggy, after all, and I had been lagging behind a little bit to begin with, so they were certainly just a little ways out of sight just down the path. If I sped up a bit I’d catch them eventually, and they were bound to notice sooner or later that I had fallen back and wait for me. It wasn’t like I was lost, and even if I was that wouldn’t be the end of the world either. People went hiking on this trail all the time, sometimes even alone as they made their way to the river that was our destination today. It was perfectly safe out here and I had hours to go before it would even begin to get dark – which I didn’t even need to worry about because I’d be back with my family in a few minutes at most.
That optimism lasted exactly two hours before it had faded into distant memory. Two hours after that I was well into desperate.
I had been walking for God only knew how long, quite possibly in circles and definitely nowhere near my family. I had thought, well it seemed like the right answer to just keep going down the trail after them, but a few minutes later I reached a fork in the trail and everything had gone plummeting sharply downhill. My brilliant plan of choosing the right fork and then doubling back if I didn’t catch up with them turned out to not be nearly as foolproof as I thought it would be, and the following idea to leave the trail and cut through the woods to the other trail was even worse. Not only was my family nowhere in sight but the trail was long gone too, and no matter how I shouted or how carefully I tried to retrace my steps to find the trail, something, anything, I only succeeded in getting myself more and more lost as I went.
And now, after so many hours lost and alone, darkness was falling. It seemed ridiculous, impossible that it was already late enough for the sun to be setting but the simple fact was that the light in the forest was fading and the shadows around me grew longer with every passing moment. The shade from the trees was deepening, going from grey to black to void before my eyes as I stumbled my way through the undergrowth. I blinked my eyes furiously as I watched yet another shadow blossom and spread, willing myself to see past my tiredness or whatever it was that was making me imagine such ridiculous things. Shadows didn’t spread that fast when the sun was just setting, they didn’t move on their own, and they certainly didn’t have legs and arms and faces –
I stopped dead in my tracks. The shadowy figure not two feet in front of me stopped as well. It was small, a few inches shorter than me, distinctly human shaped, and made entirely of darkness. I do not mean that it was wearing dark clothes – it didn’t seem to be wearing any clothes in fact, although I don’t know whether or not it would have even been able to wear them – I mean that the creature standing in front of me in the forest was shadow made solid, darkness given form, the night in a body to call its own. Peering closely in shock and terror, I realized with a sickening drop in my stomach that if I looked hard enough I could see straight through the undeniably real figure in front of me to the trees beyond. It was transparent, and solid, and there. And perhaps worst of all was the fact that when I looked closely enough, I saw the outline of a face in the gloom.
I ran. I am not brave and have never pretended to be, and the sight of two bright eyes meeting mine in a face made of dark was too much for me to take. I turned on my heel and ran, crashing through the undergrowth of the forest without thinking for one second where I was going or if I was getting myself even more hideously lost than I already was. It didn’t matter, none of that, all that mattered was that I was getting myself as far as possible from that horrible, impossible thing I had just met.
But as I stumbled and crashed and tripped my way forwards, my fear only grew. The shadows continued to surround me, and I saw with eyes full of terror and a heart full of dread that they were not the natural patches of darkness I had taken them to be but yet more of the creature I had just seen. They hid behind trees, peering out at me around trunks and branches, crouching behind rocks, flitting at the edges of my vision as I ran and ran and ran. And what was worse was that around the pounding of my heart and my gasps for air I could swear that I heard whispering rippling through the trees from shadow to shadow. Like the wind moving through threes and yet nothing like the wind at all, fragments of words and sounds danced around me as I went. No matter how fast I tried to go or how my lungs burned with the effort through my exhaustion, they were still there. I was surrounded.
At last, I couldn’t take any more. I was too tired from my aimless wandering and the run that I was in no shape for, and even the terror that was still burning hot in me was not enough to keep me moving forward. I started to slow, until finally with feet turning to lead I stumbled one last time over a tree root that sent me sprawling. Laying there face first in the dirt and the leaves of the forest floor, my heart froze as the whispers moved closer, rustling and rippling in the night air until I could feel them close in around me. Fear overcame the exhaustion again and I struggled to stand, the brief resignation to my fate that had flickered through me disappearing as I realized with painful clarity just how much I actually wanted to get out of here in one piece. Never mind that I was surrounded by some sort of shadowy monsters who probably wanted to devour me whole or steal me away like the legends said, I had a life to get back to damn it! I wasn’t going to give it up here and now, not when I had so much left to do with it.
By the time I was back on my feet they were all around again, flitting between trees and peering out at me from all around. One of the shadows, perhaps the one I had seen first although it was difficult to tell one apart from the other, began to move forward from the group towards me. My heart skipped and I stepped back instinctively, trying to keep as much distance between myself and the creature as possible. But it continued moving towards me slowly, and the others followed suit, the circle around me tightening until it became clear that I would soon have nowhere left to go. The whispering increased as well, growing from a mere rustle that could be mistaken for the evening breeze to a swirling whirlwind all around me in words I could not begin to understand. It was all too much, far too much, and at last my resolve weakened and I did the only thing that I could think to do – I shouted.
“Stop! Please! Please don’t…don’t hurt me or take me or…please I’m just lost and trying to find my family –“
Lost?
For the first time, the whispers that had been dancing around me came together into a single word. Not just a word, a question. I couldn’t begin to say how I knew that the creature was asking me a question, or even that it was speaking in the first place since for the life of me I couldn’t see anything recognizable as a facial expression on that face. But I still knew in a way that I can’t explain, and in that moment of confusion and wonder my fear faltered. Because just as I knew that the shadow creature was asking a question, I also knew that it was looking at me without malice. It sounds insane, I know that, but I can think of no other way to explain the way I felt in that instant.
Since my first shout seemed to have stopped the terrifying noises that they were making and kept them from moving any closer to me, I swallowed and willed myself to speak again.
“I got left alone while I was walking and now I’m lost,” I whispered, shaky and uncertain.
Alone?
“Yes, I’m alone. I was walking with my family and I got separated, and now I’m trying to find them again. But I got lost and now it’s getting dark, and all I want is to find them. That’s all.”
Family.
Something about the way it spoke then, the familiar and tender way the word drifted through the evening gloom and curled its way into my ear, something about that one word gave me pause. For the first time I broke my stare from the shadow closest to me and looked at its fellows that surrounded me, no longer looking for an avenue of escape but instead looking at them. They were all around, some hiding and some not, some larger than I and some smaller, and as I looked carefully around me I saw what was perhaps the most surprising thing of all in my strange and ridiculous evening. On the far edges of the circle were tiny shadows that hardly reached up to my knee taking shelter behind some of the larger ones in an all too familiar gesture. One tiny shadow no more than a few feet tall reached up to take the hand of its guardian, and in that moment I understood.
“Do you – do you have families? Do you know what I’m talking about? Can you help me find them again?”
Family!
The word was excited this time, excited and alive and echoing with countless repetitions from the group at large. The eyes of the shadow closest to me seemed to sparkle briefly in the twilight, shining out from the darkness of its face as what I hoped was a smile flitted there as well. And all at once the circle began to move, the furthest members going together as one into the trees towards some unknown destination. They formed a procession of darkness, flowing through the trees in a stream until only the singular one before me was left behind. It turned as well, following the others, causing my heart to leap in sudden panic that I’d said something wrong and that I would be left so very alone in the night once more.
“Hey, wait! Where are you going?”
It turned to look back over its shoulder, eyes still twinkling out from the gloom of its face. Alone. Family. Lost.
And with that final whisper it followed its family into the dark, and I pursued them.
I ran, and this time I followed the shadows into the night. They darted off into the trees and I was fast on their heels, heart pounding with fear and no little excitement as I chased after them. Was I crazy, following after some impossible shadow monsters just because they seemed like they understood me? Probably, but this was the best hope I had right now, and even though I knew how mad it all was I couldn’t help but feel that the shadows wanted to help. The way they had gathered together to watch me, huddling together apart from me just as I’d tried to stay apart from them, the familiar ways in which they had gathered and stood and acted, it had seemed so natural and very nearly welcoming. To tell the truth they had seemed, well, like a community. A family. And now they were helping me get back to mine.
I have no idea how long I ran with the darkness. It could have been minutes or hours, but I felt none of the exhaustion that had gripped me earlier. There was only the rush of the wind through my hair, the blur of trees flashing past, the rustle of whispers and breathless laughter echoing around me as the shadows darted and jumped about me on all sides. For however long we ran together it was as though I had become one of them, fading from the world of the day and into the softness of twilight. My edges, the harsh lines that defined me were softened and blurred, and I could swear that I felt the very essence of myself bleeding out in the night air. I was the wind, and the night, and the trees. I was a shadow, brief and fleeting, and I was the heart of the forest that would live forever.
But all things must end, even the ones that should never have begun in the first place. Bit by bit I saw that my companions were slowing and breaking away from me, until only the first shadow was left in front of me slowing and stopping. I stopped as well, tiredness piercing into me all at once as the breath vanished from my lungs and my muscles screamed their protest. The shadow who had become my companion turned to look at me where I stood doubled over, waiting silently as I wheezed until I finally found the breath to straighten up and ask, “Well, what was that for? Where are we?”
It didn’t answer, merely smiled one last time before vanishing in the blink of an eye as though it had never been. I gasped, suddenly just as afraid as I had been when it appeared before me, and as panic seized me once again I could think of nothing to do but shout into the darkness, “Hey! Hey, where did you go? Come back, please, I don’t want to be here all alone! Come back!”
“Melissa! Melissa is that you?”
It was my dad, my poor old dad beside himself with worry with mum and Sasha and even Christopher staggering behind him out of the trees. I tripped my way forward to throw myself into his arms, falling into the old familiar hug that had comforted me through so much and had never felt quite so wonderful as it did in this moment. I was practically sobbing with tiredness and relief, letting myself fall forward into dad’s chest as he wrapped his arms around me and mum’s arms joined soon after. We stayed like that for I don’t know how long, babbling explanations and apologies and questions now that we were finally reunited. And as we stood, the family unit reunited and brought back together as one, I swear that I heard around the chatter and the laughter a faint whisper on the breeze that brushed through my mind like a gentle caress.
