Zeph
from up here the sky is my thoughts
- Pronoun
- he
This is an idea that's been in planning for, oh, three years or so now? This is the second writing of it, because the first time around it was awfully-written and generally terrible. My writing has, I hope, improved since then. Admittedly even this was written a few months ago, in September I think, so I might have got better since then, who knows. Anyway, just posting here to get the usual constructive criticism, and to see if I should continue writing.
It is hard to tell, in ordinary terms, exactly where it all took place. It was somewhere very familiar yet horribly different, somewhere beyond the imagination of ordinary people, beyond the laws of physics, in fact. That was, of course, because in that place there was no such thing as the laws of physics. Or rather, apparently there was no such thing.
It all began one rather curious morning when one of the aforementioned very ordinary people decided he would go for a walk, as all good stories begin. But before the bizarre events of this man’s adventure are explored, a brief excerpt of another man’s strange tale shall be told.
There was a large and rather luxurious house atop a large and rather luxurious green hill. It resembled some kind of oversized Roman villa, with white-washed walls and a roof of neatly-arranged red tiles, down which the sunlight slid like a hot knife through butter. By day the place offered a rather lovely view of the nearby city, and at night it was an optimal place for eager stargazers, who flocked to the house in their dozens simply to stare at the sky bemusedly for hours on end.
The views, however, were not the house’s main attraction.
It was very late in the evening, or rather, very early in the morning. The would-be astronomers had returned to their grubby bachelor flats, and the house was rather empty, save for a single, rather grim-looking man, who was stalking the corridors on the ground floor in a seemingly aimless way, although as is obvious he did of course have an aim, he just didn’t know quite when he should attempt to achieve it.
After a short while of seemingly aimless wandering, the man glanced at a rather elaborate clock on a wall, decided the time was right and purposefully walked down the nearest set of stairs into a dark, dingy basement. The walls were sticky and riddled with tiny creatures with legs that clattered and clicked as they moved, and the ceiling was draped in luminous cobwebs. The place was lit by a single lonely torch balanced rather precariously in the middle of the room, throwing a small pool of light out across the basement, which, to the objects out of its range, at least gave vague outlines.
The man walked briefly through the circle of light, and the orange glare of the flame made his black hair seem a dark copper. He grabbed the torch as he walked past, and thus illuminated his path across the depressing room. Soon he came to a short, shallow set of stairs, and gazed down them with a flat, bored expression.
The small area at the bottom of these steps was thankfully pierced with beams of moonlight from the two thin, slit-like windows on the wall in front of him. Between those two windows there was a door.
It was set into a considerably exquisite but perhaps over-elaborate marble archway, decorated with strange, swirling carvings and indistinct figures. The heavy-looking, decorative metal double doors inside the arch were painted a dull red, inlaid with small plates of purple which kept it sturdy to its hinges. The man raised a hand lazily and the doors swept wide open.
Inside was a swirling, indistinct mass of an indistinct purple, surrounded by crackling bolts of orange energy – some kind of bizarre portal into oblivion. The strange tumult of clashing, warped light began to settle and fade, revealing a perfect, deep blue starry sky, almost identical to the one that could be seen if one looked upwards out of the windows, but not quite the same. In the sky which could be seen through the door, large grey thunderclouds rumbled overhead, and fearsome forks of lightning crashed down through the sky, splitting the air and leaving a smell of burning behind. Some smaller bolts happened to arc across the sky and through the very doorway into which the man was looking, but as if he was surrounded by some protective aura they all missed him and left him relatively undisturbed, screeching abruptly downwards and disappearing into the stone floor.
By the look on his face the man was satisfied by what he could see, and so held his arms out and in the style of a gymnast fell gracefully forwards through the doorway, tumbling through the night sky.
Meanwhile, somewhere quite nearby to the house on the hill (Some would interrupt here and say that the to-be-described somewhere was in fact a very, very, impossibly long way from the house, even going as far as to say it was on another planet, but, technically, they would be horribly incorrect), a young man was on his way to visit his grandparents.
Angus Peppermint was not used to this environment. As his car rolled lazily down a narrow country road, past hills being gradually devoured by cows and sheep and lakes sparkling in the early summer sun, he began to wonder where all the daunting, grey buildings were in this place, where the shouts and cries of criminals and their victims and the screeches and crashes or badly-driven cars were. Of course he didn’t necessarily prefer his home environment – in fact he found it positively revolting most of the time – but the hills and the fields and the clear sky were very unfamiliar and somewhat daunting to him.
One might wonder what exactly why this young man had travelled several hundred miles to visit his grandparents, on his own no less. If one did indeed wonder this, then the answer would be that his grandparents were the only family he had. Angus’s mother had died a few years ago, and his father had simply disappeared when he was very young. He had no memories of his father, other than what his mother had told him: He was a very clever scientist, the head of an elusive, unknown company whose work was apparently top-secret and very, very mysterious. He had never had any siblings, nor had his parents; his grandfather on his father’s side had died before Angus was born, and his grandmother had supposedly died of grief after her son disappeared. So here he was, with just his mother’s parents surviving.
As the small red Ford trundled along a particularly long straight, Angus let go of the steering wheel and picked up the map that was on the passenger’s seat. He unfolded several square metres of noisy, irritatingly disorganised paper and squinted at the map of Scotland until he found the small town he was looking for. He traced the roads from it and eventually his finger came to the last town he had passed through. He retraced the route and found a long, relatively straight road that more or less lead directly to his destination. Also marked on the map was the M77 which ran right past the town he was headed for, but he had deliberately avoided that for the more secluded country roads – in fact, his grandmother had specifically suggested that he do so, to ‘get used to the lowlands, pet’.
He lowered the map and initiated the unnecessarily arduous task of folding it up again, and it was then that he realised that his car was no longer moving. He must have taken his foot off of the accelerator. He looked down at the pedals and saw that, no, his right foot was still firmly pushing down on the slab of metal that should have made the car go forward, but apparently was currently failing to do so. He checked the engine – it was definitely turned on. He tried switching it off and on and off and on, and it make the satisfyingly appropriate revving noises, but did not go anywhere. Then it finally occurred to him he may have ran out of petrol, which, of course, was exactly what had happened.
“Damn it,” he exclaimed, establishing a rather profane verbal entry into this story, “This is ridiculous. That’s utterly ridiculous. That’s stupid.” He banged his fists on the wheel, and the car grunted in a hurt-sounding way. “Stupid, stupid thing,” he muttered to himself, awkwardly pushing the squeaky door open and clambering out of the car.
The first thing that came to Angus was to get the car off of the road on the off-chance that anybody else were to be driving along this utterly secluded road for whatever reason and would consider his stationary vehicle a mild obstacle in their path. It was fortunate, therefore, that the car was facing an approaching curve in the road. He sighed and walked around to the back of the vehicle, throwing all his weight at it and shoving it down the sloping road towards the tall grass ahead. As the slope became steeper it became easier to push it, until, red in the face, he gave one last shove and the car slipped out from his body, rolling the rest of the way itself, leaving Angus to crash, exhausted, onto the road.
“Ouch…” he groaned, face-down in warm gravel, the taste of his own blood in his mouth. He clambered to his feet and felt at his face. It was hot and sticky, covered in cuts and grazes – with dust and dirt rubbed into them, no less – and he had a broken nose. Fantastic.
Still clutching his painful face, he wandered over to the stationary car. He sympathised with it – being stuck where it was, unable to go anywhere. Or perhaps it was just being deliberately annoying; most machinery seemed to have a grudge against him. Either way, there wasn’t much he could do. Surely he could call someone to tow him the rest of the way – but did he look like the sort of person who would have a mobile phone? Well okay, yes he did – he was a rather ordinary young man of 20, probably the sort you’d expect to be in touch with everybody he knew at all times, but the fact is he just didn’t have one for one reason or another.
So here he was, stranded in the Scottish lowlands, about a mile from anywhere helpful with no way of communicating with anyone. Not to mention he had absolutely no idea where he was.
Angus Peppermint was stuck.
Angus Peppermint was annoyed.
Angus Peppermint had a broken nose.
Angus Peppermint decided to stop wallowing in his problems and do something constructive.
He would go for a walk.
He got his small backpack of belongings from the floor of the passenger seat, wiped much of the blood from his face with a large-ish light blue handkerchief, wincing in pain as he did so, left the car where it was, and wandered off up the grassy slope away from the road. He would find a vantage point from which he would be able to see where exactly he was, and from there he would walk the rest of the way. He’d collect the car afterwards.
It took him about half an hour to find a suitably high point. It was a large and rather boring green hill, and, for whatever reason, at the hill’s summit there was a large and rather boring pile of broken, rotting wood, which looked like it may have been part of some sort of shed in the past. Why on earth it was at the top of a hill in the Scottish lowlands, he had no idea.
He stood by the pile of wood and put a hand above his eyes in that ridiculous yet frequently-used attempt to shield ones eyes from the sun, and looked around. For miles and miles, all he could see were endless hills and fields. To his left was the road he had just been on, a mere length of string in the rolling green bumps and lumps that surrounded him, disappearing off into the distance behind yet another hill.
He took a few slow steps forwards, and looked straight ahead towards the horizon. It was getting dark, and the sun, ahead and to the left, was already meeting the earth in an odd exchange that went something like this: “Hello there, land, how do you do? Do you mind if I just pop down here behind you, because, you know, it’s time for the moon’s shift, and I haven’t had a good snooze all day. Is that okay? Oh, that’s kind of you.”
“Well,” he said loudly to himself, “There’s nothing here that gives me any-” he was interrupted by a loud and very peculiar noise that was somewhere between a sucking and whooshing sound, and ended with a loud, echoing pop. The noise, although it did not last for very long, seemed, even after it had finished reverberating, not to simply fade away, but to go somewhere else, somewhere far, far away, to bless others with its utterly bizarre yet completely enthralling curiousness.
It came from behind him.
He turned, very, very slowly, on the spot, until he could see what had happened.
The pile of shattered wood was no longer there. Or rather, it had moved, or fixed itself.
Where the pile had been, there was now a small wooden structure. It had the appearance of some kind of outhouse – a seven-foot high wooden cell, riddled with holes and with a small roof the shape of a triangular prism. It had a thin, handle-less door, and in all there was nothing very interesting about it – apart from the fact that a few moments ago it had been a jumble of rotting planks.
Angus looked around. Had somebody snuck up onto the hill and built the tiny shed in the ten seconds during which he had been looking the other way? No, there was no sign of anyone with him atop the hill, or climbing back down. Perhaps it had always been there, and he had just not noticed it when he first came up here? That couldn’t be right – he was quite sure, definitely sure in fact, that when he had first ascended this hill, there had been nothing except the pile of wood.
So maybe he was seeing things now.
He walked slowly and cautiously over to the wooden building. It was, from what he could see, just about big enough for a single person to fit in.
With a single hand he reached out, and touched his fingers to the door. He barely had time to register the cold, ancient dampness of it before the door flung itself open, knocking him away. He staggered sideways and regained his balance, then when he was sure he was on his feet he went back to the open door.
Everything inside the shack was solid, impenetrable black, completely undisturbed by the sunset. In fact it was like there was some solid wall separating the evening light and the darkness inside – something unnatural. And suddenly everything became very, very cold.
Angus held up his hand again, and, trembling, began to slowly move his palm towards the inside. He was terrified about what he might feel inside it but he was just so curious about it - rather recklessly so, in fact.
His hand reached the darkness.
“Augh!” he cried.
It was colder than anything he had ever felt. It was more than freezing; it was entirely devoid of any sort of heat or warmth. He whipped his hand back – it stung and burned at the same time with the cold, and already it had turned a pale blue, covered in small crystals of ice – the sweat of his apprehension before, frozen where it was.
Whatever was inside the wooden cubicle had never thought of getting central heating, it seemed.
And yet he was still curious as to exactly what it was.
He looked around the hill, and saw a small pebble nearby. He walked quickly over and picked up the stone, took aim, and threw it right at the open doorway.
As soon as the stone passed through the doorway it froze, in both senses of the word – it stopped moving, suspended in the air within the doorframe, and became coated in jagged, sparkling ice.
There were a few moments of utter silence, other than the rather unrealistically loud beating of Angus’ heart. And then there was another sound. A piercing, high-pitched hum, which descended in tone until it became a deep grumble, and then stopped. The darkness inside the hut faded, and the stone dropped to the ground.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” Angus said flatly and anticlimactically, staring with utmost disbelief through the doorway.
Inside, he could see basically the same thing that he’d be able to see if he were to go to the bottom of the hill and look in virtually any direction. He did not see the wooden inside walls of the shack, but instead he saw hills – rocky hills, covered in tough grass, and an evening sky. This certainly could not fit inside a tiny wooden outhouse.
Most bizarrely of all was that even though he could quite clearly feel the setting sun behind him, if he looked through the door he could see the same setting sun straight ahead. Suddenly an idea came to him – was there perhaps a large mirror propped up in the doorway? That would explain what he could see (He chose to ignore the fact that the view through the door showed hills from ground level rather than from on top of one) and why it had been so cold when he had touched it.
Much more briskly and confidently this time he put out his hand and touched it to the space inside the doorframe, expecting to find his hand coming into contact with smooth, cold metal, but, to his horror, his hand went through the doorway. Just as he was about to come up with some boring rationalisation about how the inside of the wooden hut was decorated to resemble the hills outside, a small flying insect buzzed in from the right-hand side of the inside of the hut and landed on his hand. He waved it off vacantly and gawked. Then he told himself that of course there was a hole in the wall. Satisfied, he stepped through the doorway.
He looked around himself, and this time all thought of rationalising the situation was swept away – he was quite definitely standing in a very real range of hills, not dissimilar to the one he had just left. He turned around and saw that the doorway back ‘outside’ was simply that – a floating doorway, a rectangle through which everything was different to what was truly behind it. There was no wooden outhouse, no shack, no indication of any sort of structure which the doorway was built into – it was just there.
Crunch.
He jumped in alarm as suddenly everything through the doorway seemed to be squeezed inwards – his view of it was abruptly bent into a much tighter, narrower perspective, as if somebody had pinched the middle of the horizon and dragged the world out by a few million miles. This crazy transformation only happened through the doorway though – everything else around him, everything behind the door, remained just as it had been before that sudden splintering noise. And then there was the sound of a loud, howling wind which seemed to come from not just the doorway, but everything around him, accompanied by a series of loud bangs, and with each bang, black cracks appeared in the doorway, as if it was indeed a mirror and somebody had scribbled all over it in permanent marker.
The cracks grew more violent and more numerous, and then, with a smash and a sound like breaking glass, the doorway shattered, breaking into dozens of fragments of what appeared to be glass, exploding outwards and breaking still more against the rocks and the ground. Angus ducked and covered his head, and thankfully none of the broken doorway hit him.
He slowly and tentatively straightened up and saw that one of the larger pieces, about the size of a CD, had landed in front of him. It had a sharp-looking jagged edge, and as if it were a mirror, he could see the evening sky inside it, powdered with faint, glowing stars and with a few wispy clouds floating by. He took off his backpack and rummaged inside, taking out his large-ish light blue hanky, which was still covered in faint, orange bloodstains, and wrapping it around his hand. He carefully picked the shard off of the ground and tilted it so he was looking right into it, but what he could see did not change. He didn’t see his face, the hills behind him or even the setting sun – just the evening sky. And then he realised that it was not the same evening sky that was above him right now – as he looked up he noticed that there were neither the same clouds nor the same stars, nor even the same colour in this sky.
Angus Peppermint was very, very confused.
Crash.
What on earth was that?
Crash.
The noise was getting closer…
CRASH.
And closer…
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH… CRASH!
It stopped.
Angus turned around.
Angus screamed.
The immense, reptilian creature standing before him threw back its many-horned head, opened its yellow, catlike eyes wide and screamed. But it did not, as one would expect, let out a loud, rumbling roar which shook the earth – instead it squealed in a girlish, high-pitched voice and turned on the spot, stamping away, flailing its unnaturally long, gorilla-like arms in the air with its muscular, spiked tail between its powerful, stumpy legs.
Angus was utterly bemused. In fact, bemused was not a strong enough word – he was absolutely, positively dumbstruck, confused beyond measure – what the hell had just happened? Had he really just been face-to-foot with some gargantuan dragon? Had it really ran away screaming like a young girl? And had he really, just before it left, caught a glimpse of a large circle of some shiny, plasticky material on its chest – a garish yellow badge, twice as wide as he was tall, printed with gaudy purple lettering spelling the words “Sexy beast”?
The answer to all these questions, of course, was yes.
“Okay,” he told himself, “I am going crazy.”
CRASH.
Oh, crap, it was coming back.
CRASH. CRASH, CRASH, CRASH! CRASH, CRASH, CRASH-CRASH-CRASH-CRASH CRASH!
And it had grown another twenty foot while it was gone.
“NOBODY,” came a terrifying roar from the clouds, “I SAID NOBODY, MAKES MY LITTLE BROTHER’S BIRTHDAY A MISERY!” It raised one of its size 85 feet and stamped it, hard, down onto the ground in front of Angus, catapulting him high into the air. “THAT’S MY JOB!”
One of its huge hands, with three claws the size and shape of small monuments, came swooping down through the air, and as Angus began to fall he landed in the middle of its scaly, blood-red palm. He tried to scramble to his feet, but already it was raising him high into the air, and as it drew him behind its head, Angus caught a proper glimpse of its terrifying, beaked face, with razor-sharp teeth the length of his arm, deep, flaring nostrils caked in dried grey mucus, bulbous orange eyes with slits for pupils, glaring at him with limitless, petrifying rage, and a crown of spikes even larger than its claws. Within moments he had passed this monstrous head, and the beast stood, poised, holding Angus behind its shoulder – and then it threw him.
He had no idea how long he was flying through the air for; he did not have time to concentrate on anything else. His thoughts while he was in the air went something like this:
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Interrupted with the occasional:
“I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE…”
Or:
“WHY MUST I DIE A VIRGIN?”
Before he knew it, he had passed over around half a mile of rolling hills and countryside, and he began to descend. He thought he was already dead, but he was soon to be proven very, very wrong. There was a blur of colour around him as the ground rose up to meet him, and he landed in a huge, stinking pile of soft, squelchy…
He swore loudly, informing everybody within a two-mile radius exactly what it was he had landed in.
He clambered dizzily to his feet and looked down at himself. His legs felt like very watery jelly, and his feet were already sinking into the stuff as if it was some kind of quicksand. Holding his nose and breathing through his mouth, he used all of his strength to drag his feet out of it, then holding up his trousers he tried and failed to run as lightly as possible to the edge of the pile to prevent himself from sinking in again. He stumbled onto relatively dry, non-faecal ground and collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily and shaking with crazy, mirthful relief. He had absolutely no idea how he had survived that aerial journey. It was impossible, surely? How could anyone live through that? Surely the majority of his innards should have been ripped to shreds by the sheer speed of his flight? And what were the chances of him getting such a ‘soft’ landing? This was no mere coincidence, he was sure of it.
However he did not have time to think about that, for again he was being stared down on by another utterly bizarre creature.
This one was much smaller than the last, but it was still about the height and width of the average house, and the length of two. It was a dark plum in colour, with a solemn-looking, long-snouted face, long, curved tusks and large, droopy ears, its body was rounded and fat, and its four thick legs had large, trotter-like feet. It looked like some curious mixture or crossbreed between an elephant and a pig.
Bewildered for the umpteenth time that day, Angus stared around wildly and saw many more of the creatures grazing around the field, eating what Angus would describe as rather small (for their size) helpings of grass and grunting dejectedly at each-other.
“Hoy!” yelled a gruff, angry voice, “Gettaway from me elehogs! You’ll scare ‘em, you!”
Angus scrambled up to his still-trembling feet and looked around for the source of the noise. It came in the form of a short, wrinkly old man wearing dirty, patched dungarees, a mouldy brown bonnet and a very grouchy expression. He looked like the type of farmer who would shoot somebody without a second thought for coming within twenty feet of his fields – and unfortunately, Angus was about twenty feet into this fellow’s field.
“I’m sorry, I-” Angus began, but he didn’t have time to finish. The man placed one of his hands over his heart and drew a circle in the air with his knobbly walking stick, and for a totally unexplained reason, Angus was lifted into the air – again – and thrown backwards into the high wooden fence at the edge of the field with a painful thump.
The man stood there, hands on his hips, glaring at Angus with triumphant contempt. Angus, full of utter rage, looked up at the strong fence, and noted with frustration that there was no feasible way of climbing it. He looked left and right, and saw, a short while away, a door or gate built into it. Refusing to look at the farmer or any of his stupid ‘elehogs’, he marched over to the gate and threw it open, not bothering to close it behind him.
The sun had almost set now, but he could see that he had emerged onto a relatively well-worn dirt track. Surely that meant that in one direction or the other there would be some form of non-hostile civilisation? He took a moment to decide and eventually began to walk along the path downhill, in the same direction that he had been thrown in by that reptilian monster earlier. He wanted to get as far away from whatever-it-was as possible.
As the evening moved on and the sky grew purpler, Angus’s feet began to ache and his sight grew dimmer. Eventually he came across a wide stream that trickled gently in the same downhill direction that he was headed. Laughing gratuitously for the second time that evening, he let himself fall sideways, tumbling down the small slope like it was a soft mattress and splashing into the brook. He washed the rest of the dried blood off of his face, hardly registering the pain that touching his nose caused him, and managed to clean out most of the remaining manure from his clothes and body. When he was satisfied, he splashed around childishly in the stream for a bit, and then, still giggling like a toddler, clambered out and bounced along the road with a newfound optimism.
Soon, a beautiful sight crept over the horizon – a deep blue ocean, stretching for endless miles into the distance, sparkling in the almost-finished sunset. Seabirds screeched happily overhead as they swooped towards and away from the sea, flitting across the sky like glorious white banners, introducing him to the next thing he saw.
There was a dark shadow on the coast, half of it inland and the rest protruding out into the sea. The shapes of what could only be buildings – some tall and elegant, some short and squat – rose up to meet him from a protective wall, and as he began to run towards it, the light truly caught its glistening marble beauty, drab grey becoming beautiful, gracious silver, rough stone walls transforming into perfectly-carved arms, caressing the place in its loving embrace - a shimmering beacon of hope in this dreadful, monster-filled world.
It was a city. Rather a small one, it must be admitted, and even the tallest buildings did not ascend any higher than approximately five floors from what he could see, but regardless, it was the only city, the only civilisation that he had seen since he gone through that accursed doorway, and, by all things holy, if it wasn’t a welcome sight then his name wasn’t Angus Peppermint.
Prologue
It is hard to tell, in ordinary terms, exactly where it all took place. It was somewhere very familiar yet horribly different, somewhere beyond the imagination of ordinary people, beyond the laws of physics, in fact. That was, of course, because in that place there was no such thing as the laws of physics. Or rather, apparently there was no such thing.
It all began one rather curious morning when one of the aforementioned very ordinary people decided he would go for a walk, as all good stories begin. But before the bizarre events of this man’s adventure are explored, a brief excerpt of another man’s strange tale shall be told.
Ξ
There was a large and rather luxurious house atop a large and rather luxurious green hill. It resembled some kind of oversized Roman villa, with white-washed walls and a roof of neatly-arranged red tiles, down which the sunlight slid like a hot knife through butter. By day the place offered a rather lovely view of the nearby city, and at night it was an optimal place for eager stargazers, who flocked to the house in their dozens simply to stare at the sky bemusedly for hours on end.
The views, however, were not the house’s main attraction.
It was very late in the evening, or rather, very early in the morning. The would-be astronomers had returned to their grubby bachelor flats, and the house was rather empty, save for a single, rather grim-looking man, who was stalking the corridors on the ground floor in a seemingly aimless way, although as is obvious he did of course have an aim, he just didn’t know quite when he should attempt to achieve it.
After a short while of seemingly aimless wandering, the man glanced at a rather elaborate clock on a wall, decided the time was right and purposefully walked down the nearest set of stairs into a dark, dingy basement. The walls were sticky and riddled with tiny creatures with legs that clattered and clicked as they moved, and the ceiling was draped in luminous cobwebs. The place was lit by a single lonely torch balanced rather precariously in the middle of the room, throwing a small pool of light out across the basement, which, to the objects out of its range, at least gave vague outlines.
The man walked briefly through the circle of light, and the orange glare of the flame made his black hair seem a dark copper. He grabbed the torch as he walked past, and thus illuminated his path across the depressing room. Soon he came to a short, shallow set of stairs, and gazed down them with a flat, bored expression.
The small area at the bottom of these steps was thankfully pierced with beams of moonlight from the two thin, slit-like windows on the wall in front of him. Between those two windows there was a door.
It was set into a considerably exquisite but perhaps over-elaborate marble archway, decorated with strange, swirling carvings and indistinct figures. The heavy-looking, decorative metal double doors inside the arch were painted a dull red, inlaid with small plates of purple which kept it sturdy to its hinges. The man raised a hand lazily and the doors swept wide open.
Inside was a swirling, indistinct mass of an indistinct purple, surrounded by crackling bolts of orange energy – some kind of bizarre portal into oblivion. The strange tumult of clashing, warped light began to settle and fade, revealing a perfect, deep blue starry sky, almost identical to the one that could be seen if one looked upwards out of the windows, but not quite the same. In the sky which could be seen through the door, large grey thunderclouds rumbled overhead, and fearsome forks of lightning crashed down through the sky, splitting the air and leaving a smell of burning behind. Some smaller bolts happened to arc across the sky and through the very doorway into which the man was looking, but as if he was surrounded by some protective aura they all missed him and left him relatively undisturbed, screeching abruptly downwards and disappearing into the stone floor.
By the look on his face the man was satisfied by what he could see, and so held his arms out and in the style of a gymnast fell gracefully forwards through the doorway, tumbling through the night sky.
Chapter One
Meanwhile, somewhere quite nearby to the house on the hill (Some would interrupt here and say that the to-be-described somewhere was in fact a very, very, impossibly long way from the house, even going as far as to say it was on another planet, but, technically, they would be horribly incorrect), a young man was on his way to visit his grandparents.
Angus Peppermint was not used to this environment. As his car rolled lazily down a narrow country road, past hills being gradually devoured by cows and sheep and lakes sparkling in the early summer sun, he began to wonder where all the daunting, grey buildings were in this place, where the shouts and cries of criminals and their victims and the screeches and crashes or badly-driven cars were. Of course he didn’t necessarily prefer his home environment – in fact he found it positively revolting most of the time – but the hills and the fields and the clear sky were very unfamiliar and somewhat daunting to him.
One might wonder what exactly why this young man had travelled several hundred miles to visit his grandparents, on his own no less. If one did indeed wonder this, then the answer would be that his grandparents were the only family he had. Angus’s mother had died a few years ago, and his father had simply disappeared when he was very young. He had no memories of his father, other than what his mother had told him: He was a very clever scientist, the head of an elusive, unknown company whose work was apparently top-secret and very, very mysterious. He had never had any siblings, nor had his parents; his grandfather on his father’s side had died before Angus was born, and his grandmother had supposedly died of grief after her son disappeared. So here he was, with just his mother’s parents surviving.
As the small red Ford trundled along a particularly long straight, Angus let go of the steering wheel and picked up the map that was on the passenger’s seat. He unfolded several square metres of noisy, irritatingly disorganised paper and squinted at the map of Scotland until he found the small town he was looking for. He traced the roads from it and eventually his finger came to the last town he had passed through. He retraced the route and found a long, relatively straight road that more or less lead directly to his destination. Also marked on the map was the M77 which ran right past the town he was headed for, but he had deliberately avoided that for the more secluded country roads – in fact, his grandmother had specifically suggested that he do so, to ‘get used to the lowlands, pet’.
He lowered the map and initiated the unnecessarily arduous task of folding it up again, and it was then that he realised that his car was no longer moving. He must have taken his foot off of the accelerator. He looked down at the pedals and saw that, no, his right foot was still firmly pushing down on the slab of metal that should have made the car go forward, but apparently was currently failing to do so. He checked the engine – it was definitely turned on. He tried switching it off and on and off and on, and it make the satisfyingly appropriate revving noises, but did not go anywhere. Then it finally occurred to him he may have ran out of petrol, which, of course, was exactly what had happened.
“Damn it,” he exclaimed, establishing a rather profane verbal entry into this story, “This is ridiculous. That’s utterly ridiculous. That’s stupid.” He banged his fists on the wheel, and the car grunted in a hurt-sounding way. “Stupid, stupid thing,” he muttered to himself, awkwardly pushing the squeaky door open and clambering out of the car.
The first thing that came to Angus was to get the car off of the road on the off-chance that anybody else were to be driving along this utterly secluded road for whatever reason and would consider his stationary vehicle a mild obstacle in their path. It was fortunate, therefore, that the car was facing an approaching curve in the road. He sighed and walked around to the back of the vehicle, throwing all his weight at it and shoving it down the sloping road towards the tall grass ahead. As the slope became steeper it became easier to push it, until, red in the face, he gave one last shove and the car slipped out from his body, rolling the rest of the way itself, leaving Angus to crash, exhausted, onto the road.
“Ouch…” he groaned, face-down in warm gravel, the taste of his own blood in his mouth. He clambered to his feet and felt at his face. It was hot and sticky, covered in cuts and grazes – with dust and dirt rubbed into them, no less – and he had a broken nose. Fantastic.
Still clutching his painful face, he wandered over to the stationary car. He sympathised with it – being stuck where it was, unable to go anywhere. Or perhaps it was just being deliberately annoying; most machinery seemed to have a grudge against him. Either way, there wasn’t much he could do. Surely he could call someone to tow him the rest of the way – but did he look like the sort of person who would have a mobile phone? Well okay, yes he did – he was a rather ordinary young man of 20, probably the sort you’d expect to be in touch with everybody he knew at all times, but the fact is he just didn’t have one for one reason or another.
So here he was, stranded in the Scottish lowlands, about a mile from anywhere helpful with no way of communicating with anyone. Not to mention he had absolutely no idea where he was.
Angus Peppermint was stuck.
Angus Peppermint was annoyed.
Angus Peppermint had a broken nose.
Angus Peppermint decided to stop wallowing in his problems and do something constructive.
He would go for a walk.
He got his small backpack of belongings from the floor of the passenger seat, wiped much of the blood from his face with a large-ish light blue handkerchief, wincing in pain as he did so, left the car where it was, and wandered off up the grassy slope away from the road. He would find a vantage point from which he would be able to see where exactly he was, and from there he would walk the rest of the way. He’d collect the car afterwards.
Ξ
It took him about half an hour to find a suitably high point. It was a large and rather boring green hill, and, for whatever reason, at the hill’s summit there was a large and rather boring pile of broken, rotting wood, which looked like it may have been part of some sort of shed in the past. Why on earth it was at the top of a hill in the Scottish lowlands, he had no idea.
He stood by the pile of wood and put a hand above his eyes in that ridiculous yet frequently-used attempt to shield ones eyes from the sun, and looked around. For miles and miles, all he could see were endless hills and fields. To his left was the road he had just been on, a mere length of string in the rolling green bumps and lumps that surrounded him, disappearing off into the distance behind yet another hill.
He took a few slow steps forwards, and looked straight ahead towards the horizon. It was getting dark, and the sun, ahead and to the left, was already meeting the earth in an odd exchange that went something like this: “Hello there, land, how do you do? Do you mind if I just pop down here behind you, because, you know, it’s time for the moon’s shift, and I haven’t had a good snooze all day. Is that okay? Oh, that’s kind of you.”
“Well,” he said loudly to himself, “There’s nothing here that gives me any-” he was interrupted by a loud and very peculiar noise that was somewhere between a sucking and whooshing sound, and ended with a loud, echoing pop. The noise, although it did not last for very long, seemed, even after it had finished reverberating, not to simply fade away, but to go somewhere else, somewhere far, far away, to bless others with its utterly bizarre yet completely enthralling curiousness.
It came from behind him.
He turned, very, very slowly, on the spot, until he could see what had happened.
The pile of shattered wood was no longer there. Or rather, it had moved, or fixed itself.
Where the pile had been, there was now a small wooden structure. It had the appearance of some kind of outhouse – a seven-foot high wooden cell, riddled with holes and with a small roof the shape of a triangular prism. It had a thin, handle-less door, and in all there was nothing very interesting about it – apart from the fact that a few moments ago it had been a jumble of rotting planks.
Angus looked around. Had somebody snuck up onto the hill and built the tiny shed in the ten seconds during which he had been looking the other way? No, there was no sign of anyone with him atop the hill, or climbing back down. Perhaps it had always been there, and he had just not noticed it when he first came up here? That couldn’t be right – he was quite sure, definitely sure in fact, that when he had first ascended this hill, there had been nothing except the pile of wood.
So maybe he was seeing things now.
He walked slowly and cautiously over to the wooden building. It was, from what he could see, just about big enough for a single person to fit in.
With a single hand he reached out, and touched his fingers to the door. He barely had time to register the cold, ancient dampness of it before the door flung itself open, knocking him away. He staggered sideways and regained his balance, then when he was sure he was on his feet he went back to the open door.
Everything inside the shack was solid, impenetrable black, completely undisturbed by the sunset. In fact it was like there was some solid wall separating the evening light and the darkness inside – something unnatural. And suddenly everything became very, very cold.
Angus held up his hand again, and, trembling, began to slowly move his palm towards the inside. He was terrified about what he might feel inside it but he was just so curious about it - rather recklessly so, in fact.
His hand reached the darkness.
“Augh!” he cried.
It was colder than anything he had ever felt. It was more than freezing; it was entirely devoid of any sort of heat or warmth. He whipped his hand back – it stung and burned at the same time with the cold, and already it had turned a pale blue, covered in small crystals of ice – the sweat of his apprehension before, frozen where it was.
Whatever was inside the wooden cubicle had never thought of getting central heating, it seemed.
And yet he was still curious as to exactly what it was.
He looked around the hill, and saw a small pebble nearby. He walked quickly over and picked up the stone, took aim, and threw it right at the open doorway.
As soon as the stone passed through the doorway it froze, in both senses of the word – it stopped moving, suspended in the air within the doorframe, and became coated in jagged, sparkling ice.
There were a few moments of utter silence, other than the rather unrealistically loud beating of Angus’ heart. And then there was another sound. A piercing, high-pitched hum, which descended in tone until it became a deep grumble, and then stopped. The darkness inside the hut faded, and the stone dropped to the ground.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” Angus said flatly and anticlimactically, staring with utmost disbelief through the doorway.
Inside, he could see basically the same thing that he’d be able to see if he were to go to the bottom of the hill and look in virtually any direction. He did not see the wooden inside walls of the shack, but instead he saw hills – rocky hills, covered in tough grass, and an evening sky. This certainly could not fit inside a tiny wooden outhouse.
Most bizarrely of all was that even though he could quite clearly feel the setting sun behind him, if he looked through the door he could see the same setting sun straight ahead. Suddenly an idea came to him – was there perhaps a large mirror propped up in the doorway? That would explain what he could see (He chose to ignore the fact that the view through the door showed hills from ground level rather than from on top of one) and why it had been so cold when he had touched it.
Much more briskly and confidently this time he put out his hand and touched it to the space inside the doorframe, expecting to find his hand coming into contact with smooth, cold metal, but, to his horror, his hand went through the doorway. Just as he was about to come up with some boring rationalisation about how the inside of the wooden hut was decorated to resemble the hills outside, a small flying insect buzzed in from the right-hand side of the inside of the hut and landed on his hand. He waved it off vacantly and gawked. Then he told himself that of course there was a hole in the wall. Satisfied, he stepped through the doorway.
He looked around himself, and this time all thought of rationalising the situation was swept away – he was quite definitely standing in a very real range of hills, not dissimilar to the one he had just left. He turned around and saw that the doorway back ‘outside’ was simply that – a floating doorway, a rectangle through which everything was different to what was truly behind it. There was no wooden outhouse, no shack, no indication of any sort of structure which the doorway was built into – it was just there.
Crunch.
He jumped in alarm as suddenly everything through the doorway seemed to be squeezed inwards – his view of it was abruptly bent into a much tighter, narrower perspective, as if somebody had pinched the middle of the horizon and dragged the world out by a few million miles. This crazy transformation only happened through the doorway though – everything else around him, everything behind the door, remained just as it had been before that sudden splintering noise. And then there was the sound of a loud, howling wind which seemed to come from not just the doorway, but everything around him, accompanied by a series of loud bangs, and with each bang, black cracks appeared in the doorway, as if it was indeed a mirror and somebody had scribbled all over it in permanent marker.
The cracks grew more violent and more numerous, and then, with a smash and a sound like breaking glass, the doorway shattered, breaking into dozens of fragments of what appeared to be glass, exploding outwards and breaking still more against the rocks and the ground. Angus ducked and covered his head, and thankfully none of the broken doorway hit him.
He slowly and tentatively straightened up and saw that one of the larger pieces, about the size of a CD, had landed in front of him. It had a sharp-looking jagged edge, and as if it were a mirror, he could see the evening sky inside it, powdered with faint, glowing stars and with a few wispy clouds floating by. He took off his backpack and rummaged inside, taking out his large-ish light blue hanky, which was still covered in faint, orange bloodstains, and wrapping it around his hand. He carefully picked the shard off of the ground and tilted it so he was looking right into it, but what he could see did not change. He didn’t see his face, the hills behind him or even the setting sun – just the evening sky. And then he realised that it was not the same evening sky that was above him right now – as he looked up he noticed that there were neither the same clouds nor the same stars, nor even the same colour in this sky.
Angus Peppermint was very, very confused.
Chapter Two
Crash.
What on earth was that?
Crash.
The noise was getting closer…
CRASH.
And closer…
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH… CRASH!
It stopped.
Angus turned around.
Angus screamed.
The immense, reptilian creature standing before him threw back its many-horned head, opened its yellow, catlike eyes wide and screamed. But it did not, as one would expect, let out a loud, rumbling roar which shook the earth – instead it squealed in a girlish, high-pitched voice and turned on the spot, stamping away, flailing its unnaturally long, gorilla-like arms in the air with its muscular, spiked tail between its powerful, stumpy legs.
Angus was utterly bemused. In fact, bemused was not a strong enough word – he was absolutely, positively dumbstruck, confused beyond measure – what the hell had just happened? Had he really just been face-to-foot with some gargantuan dragon? Had it really ran away screaming like a young girl? And had he really, just before it left, caught a glimpse of a large circle of some shiny, plasticky material on its chest – a garish yellow badge, twice as wide as he was tall, printed with gaudy purple lettering spelling the words “Sexy beast”?
The answer to all these questions, of course, was yes.
“Okay,” he told himself, “I am going crazy.”
CRASH.
Oh, crap, it was coming back.
CRASH. CRASH, CRASH, CRASH! CRASH, CRASH, CRASH-CRASH-CRASH-CRASH CRASH!
And it had grown another twenty foot while it was gone.
“NOBODY,” came a terrifying roar from the clouds, “I SAID NOBODY, MAKES MY LITTLE BROTHER’S BIRTHDAY A MISERY!” It raised one of its size 85 feet and stamped it, hard, down onto the ground in front of Angus, catapulting him high into the air. “THAT’S MY JOB!”
One of its huge hands, with three claws the size and shape of small monuments, came swooping down through the air, and as Angus began to fall he landed in the middle of its scaly, blood-red palm. He tried to scramble to his feet, but already it was raising him high into the air, and as it drew him behind its head, Angus caught a proper glimpse of its terrifying, beaked face, with razor-sharp teeth the length of his arm, deep, flaring nostrils caked in dried grey mucus, bulbous orange eyes with slits for pupils, glaring at him with limitless, petrifying rage, and a crown of spikes even larger than its claws. Within moments he had passed this monstrous head, and the beast stood, poised, holding Angus behind its shoulder – and then it threw him.
He had no idea how long he was flying through the air for; he did not have time to concentrate on anything else. His thoughts while he was in the air went something like this:
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Interrupted with the occasional:
“I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE I’M GOING TO DIE…”
Or:
“WHY MUST I DIE A VIRGIN?”
Before he knew it, he had passed over around half a mile of rolling hills and countryside, and he began to descend. He thought he was already dead, but he was soon to be proven very, very wrong. There was a blur of colour around him as the ground rose up to meet him, and he landed in a huge, stinking pile of soft, squelchy…
He swore loudly, informing everybody within a two-mile radius exactly what it was he had landed in.
He clambered dizzily to his feet and looked down at himself. His legs felt like very watery jelly, and his feet were already sinking into the stuff as if it was some kind of quicksand. Holding his nose and breathing through his mouth, he used all of his strength to drag his feet out of it, then holding up his trousers he tried and failed to run as lightly as possible to the edge of the pile to prevent himself from sinking in again. He stumbled onto relatively dry, non-faecal ground and collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily and shaking with crazy, mirthful relief. He had absolutely no idea how he had survived that aerial journey. It was impossible, surely? How could anyone live through that? Surely the majority of his innards should have been ripped to shreds by the sheer speed of his flight? And what were the chances of him getting such a ‘soft’ landing? This was no mere coincidence, he was sure of it.
However he did not have time to think about that, for again he was being stared down on by another utterly bizarre creature.
This one was much smaller than the last, but it was still about the height and width of the average house, and the length of two. It was a dark plum in colour, with a solemn-looking, long-snouted face, long, curved tusks and large, droopy ears, its body was rounded and fat, and its four thick legs had large, trotter-like feet. It looked like some curious mixture or crossbreed between an elephant and a pig.
Bewildered for the umpteenth time that day, Angus stared around wildly and saw many more of the creatures grazing around the field, eating what Angus would describe as rather small (for their size) helpings of grass and grunting dejectedly at each-other.
“Hoy!” yelled a gruff, angry voice, “Gettaway from me elehogs! You’ll scare ‘em, you!”
Angus scrambled up to his still-trembling feet and looked around for the source of the noise. It came in the form of a short, wrinkly old man wearing dirty, patched dungarees, a mouldy brown bonnet and a very grouchy expression. He looked like the type of farmer who would shoot somebody without a second thought for coming within twenty feet of his fields – and unfortunately, Angus was about twenty feet into this fellow’s field.
“I’m sorry, I-” Angus began, but he didn’t have time to finish. The man placed one of his hands over his heart and drew a circle in the air with his knobbly walking stick, and for a totally unexplained reason, Angus was lifted into the air – again – and thrown backwards into the high wooden fence at the edge of the field with a painful thump.
The man stood there, hands on his hips, glaring at Angus with triumphant contempt. Angus, full of utter rage, looked up at the strong fence, and noted with frustration that there was no feasible way of climbing it. He looked left and right, and saw, a short while away, a door or gate built into it. Refusing to look at the farmer or any of his stupid ‘elehogs’, he marched over to the gate and threw it open, not bothering to close it behind him.
The sun had almost set now, but he could see that he had emerged onto a relatively well-worn dirt track. Surely that meant that in one direction or the other there would be some form of non-hostile civilisation? He took a moment to decide and eventually began to walk along the path downhill, in the same direction that he had been thrown in by that reptilian monster earlier. He wanted to get as far away from whatever-it-was as possible.
As the evening moved on and the sky grew purpler, Angus’s feet began to ache and his sight grew dimmer. Eventually he came across a wide stream that trickled gently in the same downhill direction that he was headed. Laughing gratuitously for the second time that evening, he let himself fall sideways, tumbling down the small slope like it was a soft mattress and splashing into the brook. He washed the rest of the dried blood off of his face, hardly registering the pain that touching his nose caused him, and managed to clean out most of the remaining manure from his clothes and body. When he was satisfied, he splashed around childishly in the stream for a bit, and then, still giggling like a toddler, clambered out and bounced along the road with a newfound optimism.
Soon, a beautiful sight crept over the horizon – a deep blue ocean, stretching for endless miles into the distance, sparkling in the almost-finished sunset. Seabirds screeched happily overhead as they swooped towards and away from the sea, flitting across the sky like glorious white banners, introducing him to the next thing he saw.
There was a dark shadow on the coast, half of it inland and the rest protruding out into the sea. The shapes of what could only be buildings – some tall and elegant, some short and squat – rose up to meet him from a protective wall, and as he began to run towards it, the light truly caught its glistening marble beauty, drab grey becoming beautiful, gracious silver, rough stone walls transforming into perfectly-carved arms, caressing the place in its loving embrace - a shimmering beacon of hope in this dreadful, monster-filled world.
It was a city. Rather a small one, it must be admitted, and even the tallest buildings did not ascend any higher than approximately five floors from what he could see, but regardless, it was the only city, the only civilisation that he had seen since he gone through that accursed doorway, and, by all things holy, if it wasn’t a welcome sight then his name wasn’t Angus Peppermint.
