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by Davide Mana
Despite the sun getting higher, the air in the shadow under the great oaks was not getting any warmer. Alice shuddered once again, wringing the hem of her wet garment, and pondered the best direction to take.
She was lost, and was ready to admit that much, being a level-headed young lady, but in one of the various boys magazines she had perused in her patchy underground carreer as a reader of unladylike literature, she had read about how it was possible to tell the north from the south by observing the growing moss on the bark of the trees.
Therefore, she approached the closest tree and walked around it a pair of times, trying to decide on which side did the moss grow thicker. At the end of the second, counterclockwise round, she stopped and stamped her foot on the soft ground in frustration.
Apparently the writer had been making things easier than they actually were.
Tree trunks being in first approssimation cylinders, it was pretty hard to tell one side from the other.
She stopped in the middle or her third, clockwise circumnavigation, trying to remember something useful about cylinders from her long, tedious math lessons.
"A cylinder is a solid construction having a circle for a base," she began aloud, not sounding as much convinced as she would have liked to be.
"And the circle is the geometrical locus determined by the infinite points equidistant from a singular point called centre."
The wood listened in a silence that was embarassingly hard to expound.
"A circle being made of infinite points," she continued, "a cylinder should have infinite sides, all of them infinitesimal."
Or so it was at least according to her algebra tutor - an unctuous middle-class bore with a passion for photography, chess and wordplay. Not that this was getting her anywhere nearer to the solution of her problem. And integrating here was no use.
And then, even had she been able to tell one particular side from another, would this take her out of the forest?
Most likely not as, in primis, the faintly rusty red and citrine yellow glowing moss covering the corrugated bark of the tree followed an even pattern without showing a major growth in a particular point. She tried some statistics to bypass this, observing first two and then four trees to see if it was possible to get directions, to no avail. Eight cylinder trees she tried too, and at that point Alice was completely lost, the oily pond out of sight and her patience had run dry - and her nightie too - and she did not feel like trying sixteen to get out of this place.
In secundis, she was not sure she remembered correctly if the mossier side was supposed to indicate east or west or what else.
So, after about one abundant hour of her very subjective inner time, despite having walked around quite a bit, Alice still was exactly where she was standing at the start, and being completely lost, she did not know where that was anyway.
She decided to head in a generic direction, hoping to find some signs, a road, or at least a little house of marzipan. Almost as an afterthought, she also decided that writer had probably made up everything to entertain his readers, anyway, just like in Treasure Island.
The forest was deep, dark and scented with strange fragrances, the ground soft and spongy and the trees - growing without her paying heed less and less cylindrical as she got farther from the first one she had observed - were covered with more useless moss and other fungi, some of them waving in the still air of the early afternoon.
She did not waste too much time looking at the plants and flowers, as the place was downright eerie and forbidding, and she had the strong impression someone was following her with malicious intents, and finally promised herself that the first thing she'd do upon returning home would be to take the Grimm's book and put it in the fire. On a pair of occasions, small cunning eyes spied Alice from the darkness under the shrubbery, and in at least one instance she was sure she saw one of those strange rat-badgers watching her from a hole in a tree, chewing a piece of musty bark. This gave her at least a hint about the true nature of the beasts, and "They must be mustelids, after all," she told herself, getting a little satisfaction for having been able to solve that problem at least.
It took her till noon to reach the stone circle.
* * * * *
* * * *
* * * * *
"So there _are_ people in this place!" she exclaimed triumphally, as she got in the overgrown clearing.
"Or at least there were."
The stones were huge, coloured a mottled gray, smooth and sharp-edged, so tall they reached over the treetops, and someone had squared them.
There were twenty-seven of them, forming a rough circle.
"What a number of stones to square!" said Alice, getting closer to the centre. "They'd have found it an easier going had they made them cube."
Which might sound a little presuming on the part of the young woman, but ever since she had visited the site of Stonehenge with her aunt Amelia on an absolutely dripping April day, she had had precious small patience with or comprehension for ancient engineers and druids and other old assorted cultist birds piling rocks out in the country.
Pyramids she could undestand, and even fancied a bit - possibly, in retrospect, because of the drier climate - but stone circuits were not her kind of thing, not at all.
And yet, that was all the country had to offer, as her aunt had said later in a small tea-room, so Alice decided to make the best of it.
The surfaces of the stones facing the inside of the circle were covered with strange engraved symbols, in which the ubiquitous moss had grown, so that they glowed faintly in the shadow.
Not much of the inscriptions was comprehensible: lots of small triangles, or discontinuous lines with dots irregularly spaced over or under them, some runes like the ones she had seen once in a book about the Nibelungs. This place did look a lot like the sort of place a German Nibelung might find appealing, Alice reflected, even if it was a bit large, for a ring.
She was in fact wondering if this place was after all frequented by civilized people, and not just by druids and Nibelungs, when her tummy emitted an extremely unproper gurgling sound, hat seeme dto echo off the surfaces of the stones, reminding her and the world at large that all her breakfast had been a gourd filled with some tickling wine, and it was by now well past lunch hour.
She looked around, vaguely hoping to see some kind of cold buffet hanging around.
Nothing.
Well, the previously seen munching mustelid - she told herself - had if not hing else demonstrated that the fungosities laying about were edible, if you were desperate enough, which was exactly as Alice was feeling right then about the idea of lunch.
So she paused in her march onward and inspected a staircase of toadstools climbing the length of the closest stone. Each individual fungus was large as one of her hands, fat and yellow-pink above and with a green-brown underneath from which, touching it, fell a snowdrift of fine rusty-coloured powder that stuck to her fingers. It smelled like chicken, and tasted - upon a tentative dainty bite - like walnuts. Positively old walnuts.
She chewed a pair, sitting on a chunk of rock protruding from the ground, and then tried to clean her fingers of the dust, by rubbing them on the front of her nightgown and making an uneven job of it. Some of the stuff had gotten under her nails, causing an itchy sensation that was spreading up her fingers to her hands. She tried to clean her hands some more, to no avail.
After much wringing and scratching, she looked at her hands. The itching sensation in her hands was gone, leaving her nails an unpleasant colour purple that did not match at all the citrine and rust stains on her abused nightgown.
When she raised her head with a sigh, the clearing was peopled.
* * * * *
* * * *
* * * * *
Huge, vague shadowy forms walked about, in disciplined groups, moving great blocks of rocks, and squaring them with great difficulty as she had anticipated, without even the use of pencil and paper, let alone the proper tables or an abacus. They had strangely shaped arms, and curious features surmounted by a huge vertical slash filled with teeth.
There were hundreds of them, moving about and building the circle that was already there, while others brought in the clearing groups of equally shadowy men and women, and others still danced in circles and chanted their mute invocations.
It was impossible to understand who was first and who followed, and some of the events, happening in the same place at the same time, superimposed one upon the other, creating great bulbous, ill-defined masses of moving shapes.
The whole without the faintest sound.
A hush, chittering voice spoke behind her. "Oh Father, she's seeing the gugs...."
A second voice, just slightly deeper and older agreed. "Some of these wakeworlders are strong dreamers, and therefore sensible to powerful backlashes like this one."
Alice turned, taking her eyes from the ghostly scene in front of her and facing two mustelids, slick fur glistening and slicked back as if thanks to a liberal application of grease, sitting on their haunches at the base of a monolith and discussing their business in a chirpy voice and in a language she was able, somehow, to understand.
"I do not doubt," continued the larger one, the owner of the deeper voice "that the f'nah fungus is helping her in the focusing process, and yet she appears to be a strong dreamer indeed, if inexperienced. Not a Kuranes Class, but...."
The smaller mustelid listened, keeping its eyes on Alice and waving its tail from side to side in a culinarily inclined way. "Tasty," it observed, sounding vaguely amused.
The larger one coughed, a brief rasping sound that might have been a laugh. "Do you feel lucky?" it asked, but suddenly turned right, straightening its back and pointing its nose up, immediately imitated by its companion.
"Look out!"
They dove for the undergrowth, and were gone.
Alice felt disoriented and vaguely dizzy, and turned again.
The shadow people were dissolving, coalescing into a single mass and then turning first in a nondescript gray mist and finally dissipating completely.
Soon the clearing was empty but for her. Gone were the creatures with the vertical mouth, gone their human slaves and their priests. Gone were the two mustelids, that probably had been the only ones to be real in the whole story. Only the standing stones loomed around her, faint inscriptions glittering in the half light. The sun was going down and a light cold wind was beginning to blow.
Alice suddenly felt very alone.
If only those two nice mustelids would come back, she thought, now that she knew they could talk like proper people, she would have been able to talk with someone - even if that someone had a tail - and feel less abandoned.
A rustling sound came from the bushes in front of her, almost an answer to her hopes.
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