|
|
by Davide Mana
Alice was sitting spread legged on a grassy knoll overlooking the plain, some little lights scattered through it at a distance in the early night darkness. Small villages or isolated houses, she guessed, even if some of those lights were moving as she watched.
Men carrying lanterns?
Running men carrying lanterns, most likely.
Big men.
And running real fast.
She squared her shoulders and looked this way and that. In a radius of many yards around her the moon showed the ground was strewn with bits and pieces, torn-apart book covers and pages, half consumed bones, broken crocketry and candles, just as if a great wind had blown through a library and a natural history museum, picking up and mixing the shattered contents before it deposited them here around her.
Alice felt oddly empty-headed, just as if a lot of things had been there just a few seconds before and now were gone, spilled out of her brainbox into the ground.
The Yellow stranger was still towering above her, his gaze fixed on her sitting form- he was wrapped in mismatched rags of yellow cloth, and seemed much taller than any other man she ever met.
The dizziness passing with each new heartbeat, Alice - sudden conscious of her exposed calves - was about to point out that staring is not polite, but quickly decided to first enquire about the stranger's identity.
"Who are you?", rumbled the voice from inside the pale mask before she was even able to part her lips.
She cleared her throat. "I'm..." she began, but words failed her.
She stood and smoothed the front of her nightgown, passingly noticing that it was not dirty any longer, and that her nails seemed slightly longer than she remembered. Strange images were chasing each other through her hollowed mind, many of them grotesque and disquieting.
"I'm not so sure about it," she finally said, facing the masked apparition. "Apparently the lack of sleep is making me confused, you see. And yet I'm pretty sure I was sure about who I was... who I am, I mean... "
She stopped again, trying to get her bearings.
The stare of the masked man was was making her even more confused.
"Who should you be, then?" the masked figure asked, and she thought she perceived a hint of mockery in his oh so deep voice.
"I'm afraid..." she began.
"There 's no need to be." he said. "Or is there?"
She was not sure.
She shook her head.
She told him.
The man laughed, a sound echoing under the mask and making the grassy plain aven stiller than before. It seemed event the moon tarried for a little while in her course above the clouds.
"You seem pretty confused," he said.
"The fact is that recently all sorts of weird things happened to me, what with talking mustelids that would not talk to me but they do talk, you see, and I somehow knew all along even if, I mean, whoever heard of such a thing? Not event in the Encyclopaedia... " She shrugged, hastening to grasp another fleeting thread "And then strange sneaky dog-faced satyrs that look like old babboons and act as retired dons - not that there's much difference, if you ask me, but there you are - and them ordering me about like a common serving wench and... " she sighed, as her memory gave another spin "And uncanny stone circles covered in foreign writing, Greek or Turkoman for all I know, and after that quite a few things that I should not know but I did know and now I can't remember for the heart of me..."
She shook her head again, hopeless.
"Let's check your neurosinaptical integrity,"the pale masked man said, meaning something only he understood "Repeat 'Read me a lesson, Muse'".
Alice blinked. "I'd feel more at ease reciting 'Ozymandias'" she said with a tentative courtsey.
"Repeat 'Read Me a Lesson, Muse'", he repeated.
Alice shrugged and began.
"Read me a lesson, Muse, and make it quick
Standing
atop of Kadath, mighty strange!
I look up to the stars, and I feel sick
They seem to look me back, - just for a change.
Humanity feels bold;
I have my doubts,
And contemplating space from such plateau
Of any
truth feel humans be without
And passing heartbeat each tells me more
so,
That man feels free and he's just a mishap!
The stone is warm
under my calloused toes
And time is right now for recap,
Reviewing
just once more my various woes
I'm chilled atop the spire of Kadath
Mount
And lonely Dreams is all that's left to count"
Alice stopped and sighed deeply, realizing she had gone through the whole thing without pause for reflection or for breathing.
The metric was all wrong and the words did not fit her memory nor her mood - not completely, at least - but the man in Yellow seemed pleased, as far as she could tell considering his face was hidden and his body motionless.
They stood that way, one in front of the other, as the moon finally hid altogether behind the stars and the landscape plunged in total darkness.
The fast tall men carrying wobbly lanterns in the distance had gone, and silence was absolute.
"Yonder lies the town of Ulthar" the masked man said, pointing.
She was barely able to make out the pale lights of the town, blinking like cat's eyes in the far blackness of the night.
It was a town all right.
Great deal of good it made her, she reflected, knowing the location of Ulthar or any other foolish Welsh village, and turned to ask more on said place to her companion, but was surprised to see that he was gone.
* * * * *
* * * *
* * * * *
The sun was dawning again, and the town of Ulthar did not look any closer. No chimneys smoked in the distance, no siren had sounded on the plain to wake up the labourers, no fragrance of freshly cooked sausages permeated the still air of the plain.
Alice was still walking at leisure in the general direction of this yet unseen outpost of civilization when the dirt in the path in front of her erupted all of a sudden, making a little mound, like a miniature volcano, and the umpteenth weird looking animal came out of the earth, looking around with strangely unintelligent eyes and suddenly stopping in mid motion when he found out it had an audience, if small.
It stood there, its spiralling snout rised up and a stupid embarassed grin on its insectivore toothed mouth, just like someone caught trying to extract a small piece of broccoli from his dentures at an upper class dinner using a pencil.
Alice looked at it, tapping her feet.
"Well?!" she demanded, as her patience with this eccentric county was running short and a lot of things she needed right now, after having been dumped by the yellow gowned guy - her mother was right, men were beastly - starting possibly with a hot bubble bath on to a proper breakfast and a new nightgown, but surely she did not need this topsy-turvy creature looking like a mix between a badger, a lizard and a corckscrew. Not at all.
"What kind of thing would you be, now?", she asked, hard and unblinking.
The creature pulled its left hind leg - and remarkably similar to a lizard leg it was - from the small mound and sat on the moved dirt, looking around and trying to assume an unconspiquous air.
"I don't know", it said at last. "A tove?", it offered, tentatively.
Alice raised one eyebrow. "What is that supposed to be?"
"Ehm, " it began, looking like it would have gladly ran a finger uneasily in its collar, if only it had a collar to run its finger along. "I mean, you know... a tove." he grinned again, trying to look charmingly pathetic by tilting its elongated head this way and that."Let's say, what, a slithy tove?"
"I fear there is not such thing as a tove" she sentenced."Slithy or otherwise".
She was not sure, of course, as she had not been sure about mustelids and so on, but the fauna of this place had impressed her as a pretty voluble and uncertain bunch, and it was time to put things straight; white man's burden and all that other boring things her father was used to ramnmble about with his friends after brandy.
"Not such a..." it cleared its throat "I mean, lady, are you sure about this?"
"Positive."
The creature sighed, and shook its head.
Somehow the situation seemed to bring out the best of it.
"I knew it." it said, bitter. "I mean, just take a look at me... can such things be?"
It snorted in frustration.
"But that's no way to treat an honest guy, I tell you, miss. No such thing indeed... Now what?"
Alice kept a firm gaze upon it.
It slowly retreated back to its hole in the ground, mumbling to himself. "It's easy for them. 'Sorry, old man, no such thing as a tove, I fear'. Supercilious upper class bastards..."
Halfway down it stopped and turned about - doing actually a gyre and a gimble - popping its head up again, and propping it on a forepaw, elbow resting on the dirt mound.
"Now hold on a sec, miss, if I can..." he said, stopping her in her tracks "Just to be on the safe side and all that, you know. No disrespect meant at all, mind you but..." it looked again this way and that, blinking "Just what kind of critter are YOU, now?"
Alice was taken aback.
"Why, I'm a girl!"
Now not only this pathetic little hybrid was holding her from a bubble bath, a proper breakfast and a new nightgown waiting for her in the cheerful Welsh hamlet of Ulthar, but now it was also asking impertinent questions.
But now the thing was making a face.
"Yeah, right... a girl now, that's what you would be, of course!"
It snickered evilly. "Pull the other one, miss. It's got bells on."
"What do you mean?" she bursted with indignation.
"Nice try, really, but I mean, miss, or whatever you are," and here its woice dropped to a conspiratorial sotto voce "I might not be the best read fellow in the wabe, but I've been around quite a bit, and I have seen a few actual, one hundred percent proof, money back guaranteed girls, and they did look none like you." It looked around once more "Belive me," it added knowingly.
Alice was now beside herself - this not being the weirder experience since she had entered this strange realm.
"I assure you dear sir..."
"Oh, it's dear sir, is it now? Sure..." it winked, looking around some more just like it expected a police constable to sprout from the earth and collar him for selling nylon hand-died ties on a corner - and this being the place it was, you can now see that this was not such an out of the world possibility.
"Just file a bit those nails on your hand and feet, and give some proper sense to that big flaxen mane you have, and you'll pass for a girl all right. And while you do, by your leave and all that, I'll keep being a tove. Be seeing you."
And it was gone.
Back to Granpa Theobaldus' Page
