Chapter Nineteen
Dream Walking
Malcolm Reed
I have lost all sense of time.
My knees no longer ache. Even the memory of them aching was so long ago it seems never to have happened.
I remember there was something called thirst, but what was that?
Figments pass through my imagination. A tallish, blond bloke with a ruined face, but his smile reveals so much wit, goodwill and charm, that you don't even notice the scarring. An alien with bright blue eyes and an impossible, cruel smile who doesn't terrify me as much as he might have because there is a kind young woman standing behind him. The Nice One.
A tall, muscular man, dark hair, fair skin, bright blue coins for eyes. I want to hide. I want to kill him. I want to feel him inside me, splitting me open like an overripe peach. I want to blot the stain of him from my memory. I want him to disappear from existence, not just now, but from every moment in time. I want to carve his image on my heart so I never have to be parted from him again.
A woman with curves like a winding river, luxurious breasts, luscious lips, and dark, laughing eyes. She's fun in the way that throwing yourself off a great height with only a piece of elastic saving you from smashing into the ground below is fun. I want to fuck her, hard, until we both go blind. I want to fuck her to death – hers or mine, it doesn't matter. Then I'll stab her with my little ivory boot knife in the face and the eyes and the breasts and those luscious, luscious lips, again and again until she turns into a pile of bloody mince. She hurt me, and I want her to suffer for it.
The world goes black. Is black. Always has been, always will be. This is my existence. This is the world. Black and hot and acrid. Why did the dream world seem so real? What are dreams? Where did they come from?
One of my eyelids is peeled back and a shaft of light pierces it. It stings, hurts, my eye waters, but closing it is too much trouble. A tendril of smoke winds lazily up into the light and I reach for it, not knowing whether I want to follow or call it back.
"Yep! Huh-hoo! You ripe now, boy."
I slowly open my other eye and blink. My lids are slightly gummy. My brain identifies a face though my vision cannot focus on it.
I remember this face. This is Grandmother.
But if the world has always been black and hot and acrid, where did the memory come from?
It's too confusing. I'll think about it later.
What did she mean, calling me ripe?
She presses a gourd cup of foul-smelling stuff to my lips and commands, "Drink."
Drink?
Thirst. I remember it now. At least I think I do. Perhaps it's just a figment – or is it a fragment? – of my imagination.
Images shift and spin inside my head, shatter into shards of black glass and slice up my brain.
I'm here for a reason. Can't remember what it was.
Doesn't matter.
I sip. The stuff is impossibly bitter. Painfully so. Tastes like soap.
Alkaloid poisoning! slams through my brain, but the words are foreign to me right now. Thought and reason and sense are foreign to me. I exist in a void.
I try to turn away, but fingers fist in my hair and pull my head back so far my mouth falls open.
The poison pours into me and I swallow it down. Every drop.
Better to drink than to drown in it.
"Be not afraid, Grandson," and old voice croaks at me. "Meditate on your purpose for being here."
Purpose? This isn't my everyday existence? I chose this?
Why would I choose this?
"It will get worse before it gets better, but there is nothing to fear."
A gentle kiss falls on my forehead, a benediction, a blessing.
My world has gone dark again.
"Be not afraid."
Why should I be afraid? This is my world.
Already the light has slipped into oblivion.
Time becomes an illusion. Seconds are decades, minutes are days, years are mere hours. It doesn't matter.
My stomach begins to cramp, and for one lucid moment, I realise that I have been fasting so long that the only thing I have to throw up is Grandmother's potion.
Once that is gone, I dry heave forever, until I fall on my side in a pool of my own vomit. Too exhausted even to close my eyes and die, I lie there, staring at the smouldering fire, my stinging eyes too dry to tear, and the world goes dark around me.
=/\=
I'm walking in the desert, but it's not the desert I've learned to know, teeming with life, with wolfberries and mesquite, cacti and ironwood trees, yucca, agave, hummingbirds, lizards, rattlesnakes and pack rats, steep-sided arroyos where lean, bony cows graze and rabbits hop and migratory geese occasionally swim in the wet-season rivers. This desert is just a sea of sterile dunes rolling away from me in every direction under a baking silver sky that curves down over me to meet the sand in a line of horizon that's just a little pinker than the sand itself, trapping me under a dome of white-hot metal.
I walk and walk and feel no hunger.
The horizon never grows any closer.
I walk and walk and feel no thirst.
The sun never moves. Looking up, I realise there is no sun, just that hot, baking silver sky. The whole sky is the light.
I walk and walk and feel no pain, no fatigue.
The desert never changes. I look down and realise I have no shadow, but I suppose I wouldn't if the light was coming from all directions.
I walk and walk and feel nothing at all.
This is my existence. This is the world. The baking, silver sky and barren, sterile, featureless dunes rolling away in every direction, and me walking, always at the centre of this vastness. Forever.
I walk and walk and turn around. There is nothing behind me. Not even footprints.
I turn around again and…
=/\=
Bloody fucking hell! It's all been a dream!
I want to think that it's sheer rage that finally ratchets up the speed of my even breathing. A lot of it is, but I've never hidden from the truth, and the truth is now that I'm sick with horror and fear.
They lay me out on the butcher's slab, stripping me with emotionless efficiency before spread-eagling me into the quite superfluous restraints. I stare at the ceiling (not that I've any option) while I listen to him prepping.
I won't scream (Yes you will, whispers the fear, they all scream in the end...)
I won't beg (Not that you have a voice anyway, whispers the fear, they've taken that away...)
I won't give in without a fight (But you're paralysed, helpless, whispers the fear, and now it sniggers audibly. He can spread you like a starfish and gut you with a filleting knife, and there's fuck-all you can do about it...)
Vivisection...
I wither in fear, oddly, literally shrinking like a drying leaf, but no matter how small I get, I can't slip my bonds. I can't even move. I am helpless, a pathetic little victim waiting to be abused.
He finally steps over to me and I exert all the control I have over my body and will myself not to release a single breath he could mistake for a whimper. I'll put up my best front as long as I can, but I can't deny that internally, I am writhing in an agony of fear as he waves an artistic scalpel and gives me one of his impossible smiles while he decides precisely where to start carving.
"That's not the way it happened, Mal," a voice interrupts, and my nightmare pauses.
I'd know that voice anywhere, but I can't look around for him, can't even move my eyes in their sockets now. Then the tallish bloke with the ruined face obligingly leans over me and into my field of vision.
Happened? It's happening now!
"This is all just a jumbled up memory mixed with your greatest fears and the worst things you can imagine, buddy," he continues as if he's read my thoughts. "An' you don't have to lie still for it, this time."
I don't?
"Nope! You're in control. Just…decide what you want to do an' make it happen!"
I trust him, inexplicably, unquestioningly, though Lucifer knows why; so I try.
With a single thought, the restraints dissolve. I roll off the bio-bed and stand up. Then the bulkheads dissolve, and the Sickbay is just a bio-bed, an imaging scanner and some other lab and medical equipment sitting on a piece of carpet about six metres square, out in the middle of a barren desert. The bloke with the ruined face is gone, and I am huge. The equipment is like doll's house furniture and the blue-eyed butcher with the impossible smile barely comes halfway to my knee.
He gives a cartoonish start, looks ridiculously this way and that, and tries to scurry off stage right. I reach down and pinch the back of his uniform between my thumb and forefinger. I don't know if he's so shit-scared he's babbling nonsensically or if he's reverted to his native tongue, but it's gibberish to me. I only recognise it as pleading by the tone and the knowledge that pleading for his life would be the reasonable thing to do under the circumstances.
I toss him lightly into the air and catch him on his way down. My hand engulfs his torso and pins his arms while his feet kick frantically from one side of my fist and his head bobbles on the other. I want to crush him. I want to squeeze until shit spews out one end and vomit sprays out the other. Then I'll flick his tiny head off with my thumb like popping the cap off a pill bottle.
"An' just what good would that do?"
The voice in my head is not my own. I look around for the tallish bloke with the ruined face, but I don't see him anywhere.
He'd be dead. Sounds like a pretty good outcome to me, anyway.
"He's dead already, remember?"
There's a panel right behind my feet with an open circuit right behind the vent. The slightest pressure on the panel will close the gap between the contacts – but not quite enough for them to touch. The highly volatile coolant gas is odourless, it irritates the eyes. My foot slams backward, and the circuit arcs.
I…killed him?
I laugh giddily with the realization that if he's dead, there is nothing he can do to me and nothing I cannot do to him. He sobs and gibbers at me, a pathetic, helpless thing in my grasp. I crumple him up like a piece of paper, draw my hand back and throw him away, overarm, putting all my strength and all my weight behind it as if I were a bowler on a cricket pitch trying to get the opposition's last batsman out with the final ball of the match.
His little scream carries back to me, gradually fading for a good ten seconds.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh!"
I look down and see that I've trampled and scattered the lab and medical equipment at my feet. I stamp on them a few more times, twisting my feet with each step, grinding them into the sand until they vanish.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh!"
The blue-eyed butcher with the impossible smile sails past again, still screaming. I must have launched him into orbit, and the thought amuses me immensely.
Then I am alone again in the barren desert with nothing but the endless rolling dunes and the baking silver sky and the light and the heat. I feel better already, and when I set out walking again, there is a new spring in my step.
=/\=
I walk and I walk, and I do not grow tired.
I had great plans for that one, drowning him in piss, breaking his malignant digits into thousands of microscopically thin shards, giving him a taste of his own medicine and slicing him to death. Still, the idea of him in perpetual orbit, screeching his own puny terror with not a single person to listen to him, makes me philosophical. It could certainly have been worse, but at least it made me laugh.
I walk and I walk, and I do not know thirst.
But in the end, all my plans for getting rid of him were unnecessary.
The heat bakes me; I can feel it penetrating the layers of my flesh. It relaxes tense muscles and loosens stiff joints.
All I had to do was cast him away, and I was free of him forever.
I realise I have been smiling for an incredibly long time, and I don't think I could stop it if I wanted to. I'm actually happy. Happy to be free of the shadow the blue-eyed butcher had cast over my life for so long.
Still alone in the wasteland, the barren dunes rolling away in all directions under the baking silver sky to the pink line of the horizon, I walk on. I feel as if I could go on forever. The desert heat could bake my skin to leather, roast my bones inside my flesh and bleach my hair all white, and I'd keep walking, a shockingly spry and nimble mummy. I close my eyes and walk along, smiling and basking contentedly in the heat that bakes down from the sky and rises in waves from kilometre after kilometre of featureless dunes, and…
=/\=
I collide with an obstacle that simply wasn't there before.
I stop short and open my eyes to find myself literally nose to nose with another man.
I leap back, not startled, just too close to see him clearly.
V'Rel!
i am indeed
You pitied me, and I couldn't bear it.
that is so
I killed you.
you did
I'm sorry about that.
you could not have done otherwise, at the time
If I had known then what I know now…
but you didn't
the gift of hindsight lies in seeing the error of our ways that we might do better in the future, not that we might beat ourselves with our own ignorance as with a cudgel
Can you ever forgive me?
i never blamed you
You showed me what I truly was.
no, only what they turned you into
Now there's a thought, and the more I think it, the more I can believe it's true.
You showed me what I could be.
i tried to
You succeeded, but I was too badly damaged then for it to be enough. It took a lot more damage, and a lot of work and a lot of help from a lot of other people; but eventually, I did change, at least a little.
that is good to know
If I didn't know better I'd expect him to smile. Do Vulcans smile? Maybe on the inside? I feel like he is smiling at me now.
I'm still working. Still changing.
you always will be
that is the nature of life
life is change
it is an ongoing process
I'm grateful to you. It all started with you. You showed me what I could be.
I embrace him, close my eyes and hold him tight, and he melts in my arms. When I open my eyes, I no longer see him, but I do not feel bereft.
I do not feel alone.
I have drawn him into me, at least, that part of him that was what I should have been.
Now that he is with me, I feel…no, not 'complete'. That isn't the right word. Perhaps there is no single right word to describe how I feel.
I feel as if I lost something a long time ago, something very important to me, and have since learned to get by without it; and now that I have found it again, I no longer have need of it, but having it back eases my mind, regardless.
=/\=
Alone again in the vast, featureless desert, I walk and I walk, untiring, for what could be forever. I don't know hunger, or thirst, or pain, or weariness. This is my place, where I belong, walking on the endless dunes beneath the baking silver sky, facing always the pale, distant pink horizon.
Perhaps I'm dead. It's difficult to tell, but then how does one really know one is alive? I never questioned that, did I?
Life is change.
Someone wise told me that once. Someone I could have loved.
The desert is vast.
Vast and featureless.
Featureless and unchanging.
So am I dead, or is the desert?
I've been walking forever, yet I'm not hungry or thirsty. I've been walking for as long as I can remember, yet I feel neither pain nor fatigue.
The desert is unchanging.
I must be dead.
This is not what I expected from the afterlife. I never expected any afterlife at all, to be honest, but knowing now that there is one, I'm surprised it's not all hellfire and brimstone and demons stabbing me with pitchforks while the cries of all those I've wronged batter my ears. Certainly more than a few of my victims consoled themselves by prophesying what would be waiting for me when it was my turn to die. It has to be said that if they saw what it actually consists of, most of them would be severely disappointed it's not more exciting.
But I have changed, before I found myself in this desert. So, I was alive.
If I changed before I was dead, could this be my Purgatory?
I occasionally paid attention to those Sunday school classes, so I dredge up the supposition that Purgatory involved suffering – some kind of payback for your sins so you'd be purified enough to enter Heaven. Well, that doesn't seem to fit the bill either. Endless trudging through desert may be boring, but I don't feel as if it comes under the heading of 'suffering', though I suppose there's always a possibility that something more eventful may be waiting further ahead. In the meantime, I just carry on walking, turning ideas over in my head like the pebbles you find on the beach, studying their striations and weathering.
How do I know I'm dead?
Life is change.
I've been walking for as long as I can remember, I don't grow tired or hungry or thirsty. I know no pain.
The desert is unchanging.
I must be…
=/\=
I've been watching my feet kick up the sand as I walk and think and chase my thoughts like a dog chasing its tail, so I don't see the footprints until I've nearly trodden on them: two sets, one coming from my right, the other from my left, converging right in front of me.
This is a change.
The desert has changed.
So am I alive, or only the desert?
A mere apparition would not be able to kick up sand.
I'm still alive!
=/\=
Mostly because there's nothing else to do, I follow the footprints, the only feature marring the endless dunes rolling away and away to the horizon. After an eternity, I see ahead of me – on the crest of one of the dunes far in the distance – a dot, and I increase the length and speed of my stride. I go up and down a hundred more dunes in a matter of moments, though I have yet to break into a run, and finally, as I reach the top of one, I see that I'm gaining ground. The one dot is now two, one a little taller than the other.
I'm no longer walking, though my progress could hardly be described as running, it's too urgent and undignified for that, clambering up one side of the dunes and tumbling down the other; and if I don't land on my feet at the bottom, it matters not a whit, I just turn so I'm facing up the next hill and scramble up on all fours. I could be flying but for the billows of dust and sand I'm raising as I lunge forward, forward, ever forward, faster and faster, untiring, indefatigable. Though it takes me forever, I will catch them up!
Gaining the summit of another dune, I look down and there they are at the bottom of it, some six metres below me. With a monumental leap, I fly out and over them, dust and sand exploding upward as the impact of my landing makes a small crater. I land in a deep crouch and fling myself around, ready to pounce, but they just stagger back, coughing and sneezing and waving their hands at the dust.
Then the dust is gone and the three of us are standing there on the barren plain. Suddenly I know why there was so much panicked haste in my pursuit; I'm so full of grief and rage it feels as if I'll fly asunder if I don't claw it out of me and hurl it at them, venting everything that coursed through me as I lay helpless on that bio-bed with their half-alien bastard growing inside me.
"You hurt me!" The accusation tears itself from my lips on a raw, angry sob. I sound like a five-year-old but the pain is that simple when all the frills and fripperies are torn away; the accusation encompasses everything, what more really needs to be said?
"It was…unavoidable," says the tall bloke with blue coins for eyes. His handsome face is calm and still; no regret, no apology, nothing.
"I'm sorry," the woman with curves like a winding river apologises. I think there's feeling there, if I dare believe the evidence of my eyes; we go back a long way, she and I…
"I loved you!" I hiss, letting every mote of the betrayal I feel come through in my words. Both of them, I loved; both of them, I trusted. Both of them betrayed me.
"I know."
"I loved you too, once, I think." With a little moue of regret she continues, "I can't be sure. No one ever taught me how."
"You used me!" Even now, I feel soiled, and I make no effort to hide it any more. I'm strong enough now to let my true feelings show; and besides, who else is there to see?
"It was necessary."
"I did what I could to make things easier for you."
"Why?" I plead. I have never understood why, and maybe if I did it would make it easier to bear. Why did they take my love and use it against me? It was special, it was ours, it was the one refuge in a world that was unremittingly hostile against all three of us. Why did they have to spoil it?
A faint shrug. "You were convenient."
"So it wouldn't be me."
I shake my head. I suppose it's enough of an explanation for their actions – or at least as much as I'm ever going to get – but to me, the Triad was a spring of cool fresh water in the arid waste that was my life; and though I'd thought they saw it in the same way, when circumstances required it they'd simply destroyed it, and me along with it. "I will never understand," I realise, but it doesn't hurt as much as I might have expected.
"Your understanding was never required."
"Did you ever love me?" As pitiful as the question is, I can't stop myself from asking it. Even though I know the answer already.
"I do not love. Anyone."
"Can you forgive us?"
Better men than me have forgiven me for more and with less reason, but they were better men. And for all that I've changed, the damage can't be undone, the loss can't be made good. Sometimes you simply have to accept that, and get on with living afterwards.
"No. I can't forgive you, but I don't hate you any more." I remember what one of those better men said to me. "You could not have done otherwise, at the time, and now it is too late for you to learn to do better."
"We could try again."
"I don't need you any more. Go away and leave me alone."
They turn from their path and walk away to my right. In moments they are gone, and all I see is the trail of their footprints receding all the way to the horizon. I turn left and resume walking.
=/\=
After all that's happened, I should be exhausted. My heart should be breaking, my bones should be aching. I should be famished, weak with hunger, struggling to put one foot before the other. My skin should sting with windburn and sunburn and the constant scouring of the blowing sand. My lips should be dry and chapped, cracked and bleeding, and my eyes should feel raw and gummy, too dehydrated to tear.
But I feel none of these things. I am numb.
All that pain and anguish. All that shame. All that blind, raging fury. All that fear. All that heartbreak. All that betrayal and hatred and love.
And now I don't need them any more.
=/\=
I walk and I walk, and the pink line of the horizon turns into a dark smudge.
The desert is changing again, but I'm still not certain if it's me or the desert that's alive. It doesn't seem possible that it could be both of us.
I walk and I walk, and the dark smudge takes on the irregular shape of a bare treeline.
If the desert was my purgatory, what am I coming into now? Certainly, I don't deserve heaven. Am I going to Hell for squandering my last chance to forgive? In those Sunday school classes they were big on the fact that you're only forgiven if you yourself forgive your enemies, but I can't find it in me to be fearful or even wish I'd taken the chance when I had it. As for feeling offended by my imminent damnation, I rather doubt that would be appropriate. After all, it's no more or less than I deserve.
I walk and I walk, and now I'm treading damp earth and fine, cool green grass among the trees. On the other side of the treeline is a wall, but it's very old, and here and there it's got broken places where it looks like you can get through, if you're small and determined, and beyond that, an old, stone building. Strange, how the little patch of woods grows right up to the desert with no transition.
I turn to look behind me and the desert is gone.
I turn back around and…
=/\=
There are flowers in front of me. Beautiful white flowers, windflowers in the grass. I don't move. I can't. Suddenly I'm six years old – well, six and a bit, and I'm the littlest boy in my class, which is why I got called Runty; and David Sallis and the other boys – a gang of them, all twice as old as me – have formed a semicircle cutting me off from the school and are closing in. And this time, I know what's coming.
Oh, gods, no! This is my Hell.
Reeds don't cry, Reeds don't cry.
My mantra doesn't fail me, at least not entirely. I can't stop the tears of fear and anticipated pain, but at least I'm not blubbering like a baby.
"I've survived this once, you bastard!" I rail at the sky, for surely, if there is a Hell and this is it, then whoever sent me here must be up there. "Can't you at least think of something more fucking original?"
"Malcolm!"
I wheel around at that sharp voice. It's the tallish blond bloke again. What's he doing here? He was never part of this!
I'm panting as if I've run a mile. I'm so confused and frightened, overwhelmed by the helplessness of a six-year-old boy – the beginning of the agony that made me create the chrysalis from which crawled a monster.
"What do you want from these boys?"
"I want them not to hurt me! Please, don't let them hurt me! Not again!"
He comes and puts a comforting hand on my shoulder, bending down a little to look into my face. He smells of sandalwood and engine oil and makes me feel safe. "They can't hurt you, Malcolm," he says kindly. "They're just boys, an' you've already killed the men. So, what do you want from these boys?"
I stare back at him, confused and doubtful. I killed the men? What does he mean? I'm still just six years old.
"That was a long time ago, Malcolm. You grew up. You became General Reed, Head of Imperial Security, and you found them all and killed them."
"But I'm only six right now!"
"Not if you don't want to be," he tells me easily. "Now, what do you want from them?"
If I am six years old, I shouldn't be in Hell. I can't have done enough Bad Things yet to deserve to go to Hell. If I amin Hell, then this blond bloke with the ruined face must be right and I am a grown-up and David Sallis and his mates can't hurt me any more. None of this makes any sense, but the insanity emboldens me.
"I want them to leave me the bloody hell alone!" I declare, using words I know Mr. Collingwood would be shocked to hear me say.
"Well then, tell them that!" he says enthusiastically. "An' remember, you're General Fuckin' Reed, Head of Imperial Security an' Terror of the Empire! One look from you an' brave men piss themselves! If these boys don't shit their drawers, you're just not tryin'!"
I turn on them, and I am a giant.
"Piss off now, all of you!" I roar.
They must have been in the act of charging me, because they all skid to a halt in unison, their heels digging into the soft earth, eyes popping, mouths open cartoonishly wide in identical screams of abject terror, going absolutely rigid in fear. For a moment, they look like a line of exclamation marks, and then they all fall to the ground, rolling and flopping around, scrambling over each other to get turned over so they can get up and run. Some of them can't even find their feet and just scurry away on all fours like frightened rats. Sallis gets his feet going so fast that, before he can get himself upright to run, he drives his fat, ugly face right into the turf.
I can't help myself. The opportunity is too irresistible.
I bound after them for a step or two, my footsteps echoing round the countryside, trees splintering under my boots.
"Fi, fie, fo, fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman!"
I laugh aloud, revelling in the booming echo that rings through the valley. I've no need to finish the rhyme. If they've any idea at all who 'General Fuckin' Reed' was or is or will be, they'll have no trouble at all imagining what I'll do to them if I catch them, and being ground up in my bread would seem a mercy by comparison.
And then I'm myself again, my normal adult size, and the blond bloke is gone.
A magpie chattering nearby is the first indication I have that I'm completely alone.
=/\=
I walk and I walk, and I do not grow tired.
I have conquered demons today, and I didn't have to kill any of them.
I walk and I walk, and I do not know thirst.
The air is fresh and cool on my skin, and I can smell the hint of snow on the breeze. The walking keeps me warm. It relaxes tense muscles and loosens stiff joints. I feel so good I throw my arms into the air over my head and spin like a child dancing for joy, for the sheer joy of being young and unburdened and able to move freely. To tell the truth, I don't remember ever feeling so light and free, like a dandelion clock floating over a sunny meadow.
I spin and I spin and do not grow dizzy.
I laugh and I spin, whirling like a top. Happy, even though I am alone.
I turn and I turn, and…
=/\=
Ancient oaks give way to virgin pine, the forest primordial soaring hundreds of feet overhead. It seems to occupy a mountain valley, and for some time, I follow a stream downhill toward a crystal clear lake. The stream, no doubt, is fed by glacial meltwater from the snow-capped peaks thousands of metres above the tree line.
I walk and I walk and I come out on a narrow clearing, perhaps a dozen metres wide, and I freeze in my tracks just on the border of the little meadow. Barely ten metres away are the wolves, bigger than any Earth wolf; the tallest is almost the height of a Shetland pony. They sit silently among the trees on the other side of the clearing, ears erect, long silky fur rippling in the light breeze coming off the lake. Their eyes are as blue as the summer sky, and fixed unwaveringly on me.
I do not move. I'm not afraid. I stand still and watch and wait. Locking eyes with the biggest of them, the Alpha, I watch and wait. The rest of the Pack, at least thirty of them all in shades of brown and grey, and a few in black (Dorcha and her now-grown puppies), sit up among the trees, watching him watching me. On the periphery of my vision, I'm aware of the occasional flick of a tail or licking of lips, perhaps someone stands to turn a circle and sit more comfortably or chews a parasite out of his coat, but the centre of my attention never wavers from the Alpha.
He shows his teeth, growls low in this throat. I do not lower my gaze. I do not even blink. I'm not afraid. I have conquered demons today. A small ripple of anticipation moves through the Pack. Is today the day? Will the Alpha be blooded?
He rises and stalks toward me, stiff-legged, hackles up, tail sticking straight out. This is no mere threat display. He has every intention of attacking me if I don't submit.
"Not today, old friend," I say aloud, and I mean it. I'm never going to submit to him again, but I do think of him as a friend, despite how cruelly he broke me years ago. Once I accepted his requirements, the Pack provided for me. They gave me food, shelter, warmth and family. It would have been a good life, though probably a fairly short one; a happy life, if I hadn't then been made to remember I was human.
I place my hands on my hips, my feet shoulder-width apart, and I continue to hold his gaze. I'm perfectly relaxed and completely ready. If he leaps at me, I'll grab him by the throat and slam him onto his back on the ground. Then I'll squeeze his windpipe with one hand while I pull out my little ivory boot knife and shove it up under his ribs until it punctures his heart with the other. There is no doubt in my mind that I will be the victor if he forces a confrontation, for I have conquered demons today and I am no longer afraid.
He closes the distance between us, ten metres – eight – five. He holds his head low to protect his throat, but he holds my gaze all the while. He growls again, not the low warning he used before, but a vicious, bloodthirsty sound. I'm still not the least bit worried. I've conquered demons today. I've already thought through every possible conclusion for this confrontation and I know, whatever he decides to do, I will be the victor.
"I don't want to have to kill you," I say calmly, but project a certain amount of warmth in my voice. With the benefit of hindsight, I can feel genuine gratitude toward him. Whatever horrors my fellow humans may have perpetrated on me, however ostracised I may have been, once I learned to submit, he took me in and treated me as one of his own. We hunted together, shared the kills, shared the cave for shelter; however brutal life among the Pack may have been, I belonged.
Four metres – three – two.
"But if you make me, I will."
At one metre, he freezes in his tracks. Growling and slavering, he trembles with tension.
"If we fight, you will die," I tell him with complete confidence. "I have conquered demons today and I am not afraid of you."
For a moment, the world comes to a stop. Not even the ever-present breeze moves. I am aware of the enormous pressure of dozens of pairs of eyes on us; more than the Pack, if feels as if all of Nature is focusing its attention on us. I am confident and relaxed – relaxed but ready. He is tense, taut, about to snap. This is doubtlessly the most difficult decision of his life.
With the supplicating whimper of a pup, he finally topples stiffly over onto his side and rolls onto his back. His front paws up and his hind legs down and his head tilted back to expose his throat, he throws himself completely to my mercy. Except for the frantically twitching tip of his plumed tail, he holds perfectly still, not even breathing as he waits to see if I will let him live.
This is exactly what I was hoping for, the best possible outcome. I neither rush nor delay my response as I take a knee beside him. First growling low in my throat and sniffing him as his Alpha and then rubbing his belly and chest and telling him what a good boy he is as his Master should do, I dominate him completely and he offers no resistance, even when I run my hand over his throat, up to his chin and back down to his chest. It is only upon hearing my praise that he begins to pant and the tension is broken. We tussle playfully for a moment, and then he turns onto his feet, rises, and licks my face.
When I stand and turn to face the Pack, they are ranged about me in a semicircle four and five rows deep, waiting to be greeted and recognised by their new Master. As I walk among them, patting heads, stroking muzzles, and scratching chins, I am greeted with happy little whimpers yips and soft woofs; and the Alpha follows me as if he has been trained to heel. As I greet each member of the pack, they fall in behind me until, as I come to the last of them, I am surrounded by a roiling mass of fur.
The Alpha stands beside me, looking into the forest, and then he looks up at me and gives a friendly bark.
"Go on, then," I tell him, nodding toward the treeline.
He barks again, looking back over his shoulder to the Pack this time, and then trots off. The rest of them follow him, streaming past me by ones and twos, one of them nuzzling my fingertips every once and a while as they pass. The Alpha stops at the treeline and waits for the last of his Pack to slip silently into the forest and vanish among the trees. Then he focuses his gaze on me, wags his tail, lets his tongue loll in a pant, and throws back his head and howls.
My heart is floating. I laugh aloud and then howl back. The Alpha barks once, and vanishes into the forest.
"Well, sonofabitch!" says a flat Florida drawl behind me.
This time, finally, I recognise him without even seeing him.
"Hello, Trip!" I call cheerfully.
I turn to greet him and...
=/\=
I'm standing on a white, sandy beach. The hiss of the surf and the screams of the gulls tell me the ocean isn't too far behind me. The crisp forest breeze has become balmy. Trip is standing there, grinning at me, tanned and toned, windblown and smiling, and I couldn't possibly be happier than I am to see him. He's wearing black, rubber-soled sandals, black surfer shorts, and a gaudy Hawaiian shirt printed with golden pineapples, magenta hibiscus flowers, and magenta and orange orchids among electric blue, teal, and magenta foliage on a black background. Looking down in dread, I am indescribably relieved to find myself in a much more dignified outfit of white canvas loafers, light-grey linen trousers with a matching jacket, and a cotton shirt so finely woven it feels light as gauze and soft as silk. In my hands, I'm holding a fine straw Panama hat with a little black and grey and red speckled feather in the black band.
"Been a hell of a day, hasn't it?" he says.
"To say the least." I put the hat on my head, gently shaping the brim with my hands.
I follow him up a set of beautifully weathered wooden stairs built into the retaining wall onto a sandy lawn of rough-looking longish grass dotted with a few palm trees and other species I don't recognise.
"So, this is where you grew up?" I inquire as he leads me up onto a white-painted porch with a grey floor attached to a very pretty little light-blue house with white trim and window boxes full of flowers at every visible window and huge glazed ceramic pots full of herbs and flowers tucked in the corners.
"Yep. This is the original homestead. Been in the family, oh, goin' on three hundred an' fifty years," he replies.
We drop into a pair of white wooden armchairs with light blue cushions and enjoy the view. Flowering vines climb up every other post supporting the porch roof and hanging baskets of strawberries swing from hooks in the beam across the front. The longish grass of the lawn sways and bobs in the stiff breeze blowing in off the ocean, and swimmers and surfers frolic on the white, sandy beach down below. Gulls and other seabirds whistle and scream as they wheel overhead, and a pair of starkly pied oystercatchers swoop along the waterline, their shrill piping calls familiar. Brightly coloured triangles skipping across the water mark the sailboarders, and billowy, multi-hued bubbles of silk lift parasailers high into the sky. Meanwhile the larger sails of several pleasure boats glide past in the background. Far in the distance, I see the silver flash of a marlin or some other trophy fish breaching the surface.
Between my chair and Trip's is a low, white wooden table on which there sits a galvanised bucket full of ice and half a dozen bottles of beer. He pulls out one of the bottles, twists off the cap and hands it to me. The skim of meltwater from the ice is immediately overwhelmed by beads of condensation from the humid air of the Florida night.
Once he's opened a bottle for himself, Trip holds it out across the table and says, "I'm proud of you, Malcolm."
He needn't say more than that. I know everything he means by those five words.
I raise my drink and reply. "I couldn't have done it without you, my friend."
It's only beer, and it's somewhat colder than I like, but it could just as easily be ambrosia as it slides down my throat. If I am dead and Heaven exists, this must be it.
We clink our bottles together and sit there, drinking in silence as we watch the sun set in all its glorious shades of golden yellow, fiery orange, blood red, magenta, indigo and violet. As the frolickers come in off the water and the boats drop anchor for the night, the wind dies down and the screams of the gulls and the shouts of the revellers are replaced by the whirr of cicadas and the forlorn clanging of buoy bells. Gradually, the sun disappears from the horizon, and the ocean vanishes into darkness save for the few bow and stern lights bobbing on the water.
"Yep. It sure has been one hell of a day," Trip says lazily beside me.
I smile. I couldn't agree more.
If you have been enjoying this story, please consider leaving a review. Malcolm appears to have confronted all of his demons. Did you have a favorite scene? Is it possible Grandmother's methods have cured him of his episodes?
