There was something beautiful about the night. Though it was no stronger than a stiff breeze, there was a deeper vibrancy to the wind. It seemed to cajole and taunt, as well as whipping inconsistently, flightily, as I passed by.
The light. It was different too. The bland orange street lights cast their tinge on the clay bricks, intermingled with gumnuts and loose gravel I walked over. It seemed to mean something, this tinging of colour. A subjective light? A gaze? I trudged on.
Strictly speaking I didn’t need to be out tonight. The old acquaintance whose gathering I had attended had offered me one of his spare mattresses. My mother had earlier said that it was dangerous to be out so late, walking home alone. Distracted, I checked the time on my phone; five am.
Another guilt. It was too late to be doing this. The theory was that getting home earlier would calm a nagging mother’s nerves, but at five am it would simply wake her needlessly. Leaving my acquaintances house had been inconvenient too, finding my shoes and tiptoeing between discarded liquor bottles. I had joked sarcastically to the last two of my friends I had passed on my way out that I hoped this didn’t make them feel cheap.
I had checked my phone then too, I suddenly remembered; had vaguely realised the same conclusion, and yet left anyway. It was to no-one’s benefit, this leaving of a party both far too early and far too late. No one’s benefit but mine anyway.
I wondered about that as I trudged up the hill toward my house, casting wary glances about me in case a nightmare transcended probability and manifested from the shadows. The gravel beneath my feet became looser, giving way to packed earth and then grass.
I had never been comfortable at sleepovers before, and though I certainly favoured house parties over “town” (one of many nouns that had made inroads into characterisation as a verb), I thought the notion ill suited to someone approaching his twentieth birthday. Arrogant perhaps, but then that might not be the greatest of my vices; certainly they were myriad. I mused that perhaps it was a discomfort with others, a sense of proximity and vulnerability; perhaps it was merely a distaste for sleep and a misplaced sense of power that I would be awake, here, while a city slept all about me. I grinned as a security light switched on automatically as I passed one of the houses.
Surely I felt more comfortable out here in the lamp-lit suburban streets than on a bare mattress at the house of my acquaintance, surrounded on mattresses by those who in my softer moments I thought friends. Even my nagging mother’s warning could not sober that realisation, that I felt safer walking along the orange streets at five am where a drug-addled mugger could do me in with slim chance of evasion.
Certainly I was not a dangerous figure. Tall and broad to be sure, but bespectacled and unmuscled to undermine what inherent value there as in that. I walked on slightly bowed legs and a moderate paunch overhung the belt of my jeans. In my own mind perhaps I was something more, a possibility wrought more by a fiction fuelled-imagination and vanity than realism. In truth it took no more than the vibrancy of the wind and the oddly philosophical light to send my heart ajitter.
A hero I certainly was not.
I crossed the road just after a passing car, musing that I could easily be taken by some malign force without leaving a witness. It did not change my preference. I wondered what it implied about me that this was so, this preference for solitude to muse and reflect, even at the cost of the security of shelter and society. At best I thought myself an introverted, amateur philosopher. At worst I was a borderline sociopath.
There was a faint buzzing, so ephemeral that I could not guess its location. It came from above me, a few dozen feet ahead, and then only a few feet, above me in a tree. A moment later it seemed to emanate from across the street. I looked up past the street lights, guessing the source of this buzzing to be the power lines that arched above them. It seemed explained. As I glanced back down at the ground I grew disconcerted by the dozen or so shadows of varying shade cast by the street lights around me. I had hoped that I might be able to use the shadows around me as an extra safeguard from a late-night stalker.
I walked on.
I had had a plan, as one tends to develop in the endless sojourn that is a student’s summer holiday. It was new, formed around a grim realisation of my personal limits and how I might grow myself as an individual. Of course I had not wanted to set severe limits. With a university timetable to be released soon, there was no point locking myself into a plan I would have to adjust accordingly. The few elements of personal discipline were simple.
As I glanced down at my phone again and read the time as ten past five I realised I had already broken several of those elements. Ten pm had been a self imposed curfew for all of three days, and there was little chance I’d be feeling up to the eight am morning exercise with seven scotch and cokes still churning nicely in my stomach.
I sighed as I considered the final aspect of my new plan; not letting simple setbacks grow to a tantrum and a discarded regime. It was not constructive to long term growth.
I stopped walking.
The buzzing grew more insistent and as it did so I could no longer apply to it a verb so invalid as “buzz”. It was the whisper of rubbing leaves and fibrous wires, the stiff uppercut of a melancholic breeze and the uncaring hum of suburban streetlights all at once, wrapped in a cocoon of a thoroughly mysterious drone. I glanced through the foliage of the trees not interesting enough to name to see the source of this sound, which seemed to contain within it a new note for my musing. Security was, perhaps ironically, completely abandoned as I walked a few feet off the path for a better look.
And then plot, for want of a better term, occurred.
I have heard the term cognitive dissonance used before and although I could not recall the precise definition at that time I was sure it would be well suited to the absurdity that followed. A tear of blue light, more akin to the vibrancy of the wind than the austere orange of the street-lights, shimmered a few feet below the dangling cables of the power lines I could not otherwise make out against the deep shadow of the sky.
And out of this tear, and this is where I could almost hear the diagnoses of future psychologists whispering in my ears, stepped a tiny, humanoid looking figure.
“Oh fuck this,” the target swore as he stared up at Maple from the grassy track.
Yes, it was definitely him, time to get started, “Greetings human, my name is Maple and I mean you no harm.”
“Oh fuck this”.
This was not entirely the opening exchange Maple had envisaged. He shrugged. They seldom were.
“There is no need to be alarmed earthling, I come as the representative from the Kingdom of....hey slow down there.”
The target had continued on his earlier route. Maple swung around to follow him, gliding lower for an easier exchange of verbal communication.
“Please stop so that we can continue the introduction, as I said there is no need to be alarmed.”
“Here’s the thing, I get that this is probably a hallucination, what I don’t get is “why now?” I’ve been drinking, but I don’t drink enough for this kind of shit to happen. I’m mildly eccentric but this kind of,” the target through shrugged in an effort to locate the relevant vocabulary, “...break down wouldn’t be spontaneous.”
He sped up his pace somewhat and his tone shifted markedly, more akin to self-directed muttering than a conversation.
“More likely that this is a tumour pressing on my...well the relevant part of my brain. Damn I wish I did science.”
“Um, excuse me sir, I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m on a bit of a schedule here.” Maple sounded a bit gruffer than he strictly should have, but passivity could engender a lack of respect from his target, which would be unwelcome.
The target turned abruptly, staring up at Maple. “Okay,” he paused, pressing at his temples, closing his eyes and lowering his head in concentration. He opened them again, and seemed thoroughly disappointed to see that Maple was still there. “Okay, you mentioned a Kingdom that you claim to be associated with. You also referred to me as ‘earthling’, and you speak English. You are also clearly not human yourself.”
“Um, yes sir, now as I was saying...”
“No, shut up a second. ‘Earthling’ is very B Science Fiction movie-ish, and determines that you are an interloper. ‘Kingdom’ is a term that carries very specific connotations, and is also mildly anachronistic, so based on my knowledge of fiction I’m going to guess you’re not going to claim to be an intergalactic alien, merely an interdimensional one. That leaves the knowledge of English which...”
Maple decided it was long since past time to regain control of this conversation so he cut across his target in a manner he would thoroughly rebuke in a trainee. “Now look here sir, I am aware that my appearance will have disconcerted you, but I cannot risk exposure. Clearly I must continue our introduction after enough time has elapsed for you to accept my appearance on a conceptual level.”
“Shit no, that’d be worse.” The target closed his eyes again in thought, sighed, and opened them. “Either way, this is the kind of thing that’ll get worse with time, either as a festering of the mind or...or as a reality I don’t understand yet,” He leant back against one of the trees bordering the street. “Ok little dude, hit me with your best self-justification.”
“Um, er thank you sir, and may I say you express yourself most eloquently,” right back on track, Maple congratulated himself. “As I was saying earlier, I come as the representative of the Kingdom of Liluna. As a member of the Vartmenghast Talent Agency...”
“Oh man, obfuscating names aside, ‘Talent Agency’?” For a moment Maple feared his target’s earlier mulishness was returning. “I really...oh screw it, sorry little dude, go on, why are you approaching me?”
“Ahem, well. Vartmenghast Talent Agency acts as an ambassador between dimensions. A facilitator, if you will, enabling individuals with certain skills to reach their potential in dimensions which are in dire needs of the skills they might come to possess?”
“Ok, now dumb it down a little, and make it a whole lot more relevant to me.”
If Maple had not constructed the bio himself, he would have questioned the selection of this particular target. As it was, he was mildly vexed by the constant interruptions. “Ahem. You referred to knowledge of cultural fiction. To express it in such terms, we provide smothered and overweaned heroes to troubled regions in need of them, for a small commission.”
Again he was surprised by his target’s response. Clearly there had been a lapse in his research. The target grinned, and raised the thumb and forefinger of each hand to form a square, framing Maple in an imaginary camera, “and there it is: vanity. Well if you’ll excuse me mister Varmengass, oh no of course, oh entreupreneurial agent of the Varmengass organisation, I have a home to arrive to before my sister awakens and continues to overshadow me both socially and academically. If you wish to follow me, I guess I can’t stop that, but if we really must continue this conversation I’d ask that we do it on my home street, as there’re a couple fewer lights and the neighbours are markedly less likely to call the police on a raving teenager in the middle of the night if they don’t see him.”
Maple was not entirely inexperienced with the target’s type of reaction, though he had expected better behaviour from a target he had chosen himself. “And this option of my being ‘real’ which you earlier allowed?” On the tiny pad he held before him he pulled up a checklist for an unfavourable trait in a target, one he had been reasonably sure he had ruled out.
“Prove it, or if you can’t do that, make a stronger argument for your being real. The english would be a good start, since you seem to be from out of town, your use of my language with at least a cursory awareness of cultural connotations seems a little contrived, too easy a shoe-in with little-enough thought behind it.”
Maple ticked off the checklist for the unfavourable trait. A skeptic. Unfortunate, now that he’d played his hand it was nearly untenable to abandon the operation now. Unfavourable or not, he was still sure the target was valid enough to overcome this trait. He unstrapped a tool from his pack.
“For some, they must merely be shown,” he read off the list of preferred treatments of this trait.
He paused just long enough before his use of the tool to read his target’s response.
My hallucination had unstrapped some kind of wand, proportionally to its small frame it was more of a staff, from its back. Although surprised, I was not overly concerned. After all, I was standing on the side of a road at five thirty in the morning, this hallucination could not harm me without me acting toward that harm.
“For some they must merely be shown,” the little man said, and as the staff lit up with a blue light I saw for the first time that his hair was also blue, though it was deeper than the light of his staff.
I grew disconcerted, sure I was safe if I was standing on the side of the road and this hallucination could not harm me, but how deep did the hallucination run? Maybe I was still on the road and had never finished crossing it. Maybe I was standing in the middle of the road and the growing blue light of the staff was the approaching light of a vehicle. I glanced from side to side for an option, but if I could not trust my senses, then how could I leap out of the way of a danger I could not even see?
A mack truck would be an ignominious way to die.
I lunged at him shouting, “No, wait!”
And then I fell.
One recommendation I have is to mark where you change to Maple's point of view, if that's what you were doing. It's a bit confusing the way it is. But great writing!
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