Woolgathering

by Christina Hambleton

"My my my." Charon's voice was a lilting chuckle in his throat, amused or deprecating— with him it was hard to tell which. "You've certainly been quick to get your bearings."

  Fukamori stood in a conductor's stiff uniform, pulling the starched white gloves off with precision. They were, to all appearances, standing in her apartment. Rather than the devastation that had greeted Charon the night he met her, however, one was faced with an immaculate display. Sheets of music were stacked on her shelves, unmolested, their corners perfectly aligned. All the furniture lie at right angles, modish geometric hangings adorned the walls, and there was black and white décor every place one turned... all that differed from home was that the turbulent blackness licking at the windows.

  Charon and Fukamori were in her new world. The all-consuming void looming outside remained, the apartment drifting above and within it forlornly. The rest of the dimension had yet to be stirred by its new master's ruminations.

  "Of course I've been," she replied stiffly to Charon once she'd lain the gloves carefully aside. "All it takes to fashion this world is a thought. Unhindered— no, unguided by mediums it's easy, almost sacrilegious."

  Charon's lips pursed thoughtfully at her, his pale irises flickering. "I've no doubt you will find a way to mold it however you wish, Miss Fukamori."

  She didn't reply, reached instead for the violin she'd leaned against the side of the leather couch. The woman was lost to her calculations, the layered and refractory tracings of inspiration tessellating in her mind, and the message was clear. This was her world now; she did not desire a guide, and her ferryman's time had expired.

  He bowed as a formality, though he was all but invisible to her, and whisked himself away in a temporal flash.

  Alone, Fukamori let her dark eyes wander to the sole portrait that graced the chambers. Her lip curled in a bitter smirk— it was always such irony to see that white, flyaway hair and spontaneous grin compacted into the orderly symmetry of a frame. She wondered what her old mentor was dreaming up, which of his sloppy musings critics were labeling ingenious this time. Oh, she was grateful for the tutelage he'd extended her, there could be no doubt of that, but at the thought of his wasted potential, the lack of discipline he applied to his craft, his insistence that impact was superior to perfection or form...

  Ah, but it mattered not, she reminded herself, checking her thoughts. She had a world of her own now, and when all its well-oiled cogs had slotted into place, when her delicate machinations slid together in a harmony complex yet measured, that ruinous and immemorial anarchy she'd fled would be but a discarded thorn from her side.

  Rolling her neck, listening to the delicate rhythm of cracking bones as though it were a warm-up, she crossed to the window. There was a balcony outside with a single, silver music-stand upon which she willed the pages of the piece she was composing in the lowest layer of her consciousness. They materialized instantly. She sneered one last time at the writhing darkness. Then, emotionless once more, she set the violin to her chin and cast her gaze to the tidy lines and blotches below, her altar.

  At last, drawing the bow over her violin in a fluid motion, she began to play.

  The first note she struck had a palpable effect on the deep that yawned before her. It was as though all those fibres of nothingness were drawn taunt, stretched in rows like the line of the staff below her, albeit hesitantly, lured by the gentle caress of that first noise in the symphony to come. The eternity paused with bated breath as the bow finished its slow introduction to the strings.

  Then Fukamori's snapped to attention, struck a series of twelve chords in such rapid and peremptory succession that all her universe was stunned and bound before it could protest, and from thence there was no reprieve. The brittle staccato stitching of the rumbling, ominous base interludes was executed with such precision, such cohesion that it was as steel. It was as steel, and so were the regiments it birthed.

  One by one amid the blackness's now linear coils rose musicians in perfect form, filling row after row at an even pace. They didn't join in their conductor's melody, remained poised over their instruments and yet blank sheaves of music as though wax statues, or stalled machines. There were pianists and brass and woodwinds— timpanists and cellists alike. Each was of perfect height and build for their instrument, each was pale with darkest raven hair, and each was in a suit identical to that of the puppeteer above. Dozens of them slotted themselves atom by atom into existence. But even once all her marionettes were in place Fukamori had yet, in her building fury, the increasing fervor of her notes, to reach a conclusion, and as the manic tempo, that wild and all-imposing order of composition, rose the very air grew heady with expectation. The mechanical tendons of the orchestra primed in a ripple.

  Roused by the violent chains the burgeoning pantheon had forged, all existence grew dense and choking for suspense, for awe. Tighter and tighter coiled the binds that tethered it to that scepter grinding over Fukamori's whetstone of a fiddle. Faster and faster surged the heart of the black, fearing something like Genesis.

  Then the entire orchestra surged— whipped or tore or strangled their instruments with their master as she struck the last chord. It reverberated through the black: a threat, a promise.

  For a moment all hung suspended. There was no applause— rather, her kingdom shook, as with terror.

  Fukamori condescended to let the most infinitesimal of smiles grace her features. She bowed, but not low, and, her marionettes returned at ease to their seats. Then she did an about face and returned to her quarters to rest and plan. Verily, she was pleased.

  Tomorrow would be the first day.

  It isn't even the first day, Icarus Toombes marveled in the midst of the void below, staring fixedly at the balcony. As Fukamori had glided out he'd called to her, practically screamed, but she'd been oblivious to his presence, cloaked thickly in her vision. Now he couldn't even muster the strength to stand, but curled in on the tiny golden hourglass clutched to his breast, holding it close as though it were the only raft that could buoy him, keep him afloat in the sea of dread and wonder that this world's new master had inflated in him.

  Before, he could have moved and sent himself into an endless, sombre drift through the void, but now Fukamori had imposed structure upon it, stratified it, and he could no more establish perpetual motion than he could push off the cool, hard ground and soar to her floating pedestal. What if he never reached her? Crippling fears skewered his heart as he stared at the timekeeper Charon had provided him, the grains of sand gliding in beautiful, piercing mockery to the bottom of the glass. He had but a week. Despair nearly swallowed him. But terror was man's first and only defense against the insurmountable, so instead he pinched himself hard and lay in the sympathetic, callously reigned eternity.

  He could try and reach her through her orchestra, he realized, but an involuntary shudder wracked his spine. Those hollow entities chilled him the way a camera, or a security system did— they were cool and impersonal, weighing him in terms that disregarded intent and seized only dissemination, stripping him to the bone, menacing any resistance he might show.

  And from the looks of things, he was most certainly against whatever standard Fukamori bore.

  His thoughts wandered as so oft they did. Trying to avoid the injuries and horrors of the waking world, to make them but lambent quivers in the greater solace of his mind, he contemplated what Fukamori's reasons were for coming. What had driven her to abandon the real world and take the plum— the plunge into madness?

  Rolling on his back, he imagined the stiff yet curdled yellow cushion of his mattress back home, where it all began. He remembered the screaming voices surrounding him yet worlds away, how even the bruises and the stabbing ache of his heart had waxed ephemeral as a dream when he slipped into his cloud-like musings. He remembered how he would take and divide his soul equally among his heroes, his imaginary friends, how together they would conquer every challenge that rose like chaff in his garden of enchantment and prayers, that secret re
alm of his mind.

  The acrid, toxic smoke that filled the lungs of his parent's house, its raging, drunken minotaur... they couldn't reach him in his Never-land. They couldn't tear it from him, his jewel, his Elysium... And when Charon had come, offering to make his dreams real—!

  What irony that at the last they, too, had grown into nightmares.

  He grimaced as the image of a woman's face, wan yet matronly, fluttered behind his eyelids, and he squeezed them tighter, willing it away, banishing the memories to oblivion. His lips formed a prayer— or, rather, a plea for the release of slumber.

  And so the sands of time wore on, swirling in a drizzle to the bottom of Charon's hourglass like a galaxy spinning itself into oblivion, its stars and planets and moons tumbling indiscriminately from the ledge— far, far, from the toils of being. Fukamori ascended to the balcony with her conductor's baton at the same time every afternoon, crisp and embattled. She still seemed beyond hearing him, no matter how loud he might call to her.

  Icarus saw no more of her violin. But in the primordial display that was to come, he missed its haunting melody unbearably. The days were fleeting, their excruciating duration but a brief pain, yet this was only because his heart was racing him through, beating against its cage for sheerest panic.

  The first day Fukamori's movements were gentle, yet ritualistic. Her orchestra responded with a keening tenor that reverberated deep within Icarus's essence, polarized him, caused him to experience joy and suffering at once with a great and terrible fissure between. The very fibers of his being strained and pulled, torn, and a scream rose soundlessly to his lips as he clutched his head and writhed, sure he would die. But in the next moment it was over. He thought he felt a hand on his shoulder, thought he heard a silky whisper, and he didn't care if he was hallucinating because Fukamori's spell released him.

  Panting, heaving, and retching, it was a long time before curiosity could prevail to draw him out of himself. When he did look, he was nearly blinded. The light above him was searing, intense— stark against the darkness below. His eyes burned upon contact. But then, slowly adjusting and learning by degrees not to glance at it directly, he realized what Fukamori had done. She had divided her world into light and dark, with no grey, no twilight between.

  Something in him rebelled against it, decried that it could be as he cringed and trembled at the alien surroundings. The wrongness of it enlivened his soul. He couldn't articulate what it was that disturbed him so, thought he must be going mad, and more than ever he felt homesick.

  It was only as the days progressed that he realized the true sickness of Fukamori's all too solemn farce.

  Oh, he endured a fleeting sensation of hope the next day, when that short figure and her tall shadow began with a jumble of windmilling arms and frenetic tosses of the wrist. The chaotic squall that rose, clamoring, from her marionettes seemed almost a beacon of life against the unforgiving canvas their conductor had laid the day before. But then, as the light gathered itself into orderly pinpricks of refulgence and the solar winds lancing between darted straight and true, connecting the dots, he realized there was a pattern to the thrashing of that powerful firmament Fukamori had wrought. By the time the orchestra had died to a rumbling base and the first, perfectly formed wave of her new oceans crashed over him he was so exhausted he couldn't even curse his luck as he floated there, the notion of drowning himself lighting tantalizingly upon him in his dreams.

  He slept through the third day, through the large and majestic symphony, and he woke, shivering, to dry land beneath him. The world was freezing and bare, with naught but rows of never-ending evergreens under the ministrations of the dimension's first winter. Icarus hated the cold. He felt depression sweep over him, then, and just as he had as a child when it blossomed, an icy rose in his heart, he laid down and slept again. In a way, he had surrendered to whatever fate befell him so long as it was over.

  The fourth day he was ripped violently from his sojourn in the land of dreams by laughter. Delighted, childish, triumphant laughter— lilting and mad, disturbingly girlish.

  Groggy and frightened, like a startled deer, he leapt to his feet, casting about for an explanation, too scared to risk so much as a glance at the dark goddess above. His eyes widened.

  Before him lie herds of beasts. All identical. All marching in lines. All... dead.

  Icarus snapped, then. His breath stuttered and pushed out of him in a frosty mist, but it felt more like steam from the bellows as his chest heaved, as his heart pumped and stoked the fire that kindled suddenly, vibrantly within. Like a Herculean statue, he planted his feet and pointed his gaze toward the heavens, in utter loathing at the woman cackling above.

  "STOP!" he cried. "Stop it, damn it!! You witch, you devil, you God-damned bitch! Stop it!"

  She didn't. She was shaking, holding her sides as her laughter escalated into rocking, fervent, yet mechanical yaks careening over the land, booming through his ears.

  He seized a rock, threw it hard as he could at her, but it fell yards short, and he screamed in frustration.

  "Listen to me, damn it!" he demanded, kicking the nearest tree and cursing as his foot exploded with pain, dancing around in a savage, apoplectic fit. "Why can't you hear me?! Are you deaf?! Don't you dare go back inside! Don't you dare— Damn it!"

  He didn't know how long he spent kicking and swearing and shrieking. His world was a dizzying red haze of pain and rage. It was a long time before the former won, before he collapsed in a ball on the ground, holding himself, digging his nails into his flesh and sobbing. He swam in tears; he could barely make out the hourglass through his murky vision, his time easing heedlessly away, indifferent to his strife.

  "Help me, Charon!" he begged, closing his eyes, trying to imagine the pallid spectre there, chuckling in his desultory fashion and telling him it had all been a huge, cosmic joke to pass the time. But when he opened them the ferryman hadn't materialized, and so he tried again and again and again, bawling like a child until he gagged on his misery and fell quiet, whimpering instead.

  "Charon..." he mewled. "Charon...!"

  It was a long night. Not even sleep would come and deliver him from his own wretchedness.

  Yet, there was something about shedding tears, about the human capacity for grief. There was something purifying about the ardent, harrowing intensity with which man experienced pain, his thoughts shoveling ever more fuel, ever more miseries onto the fire until, at length, it blazed so hot as to burn them away in its white and impassive coils. A numbness, an ire so smoldering as to freeze the soul stole over Icarus, and the edge of his reason waxed so keen and cold as to pierce even the thickest of barriers.

  Icarus Toombes was afraid of Fukamori. Cripplingly so. But that mattered not as, with her haughty glide onto the safe and rational confines of her balcony, he pulled himself calmly to his feet. He knew what today was. It was the day she would connect the heavens and the earth. It was the day of man, but her blasphemies would not be allowed to touch that most blessed of creations. He wouldn't allow it.

  Fukamori began. Her baton flitted like a sparrow's wing, light and subtle as a breeze, and yet he was deaf to the masterfully rendered dissonance of her orchestra as he walked steadily, resolutely toward her stronghold. As the stair to heaven formed step by step with the notes of the cacophony he was there, planting his feet firmly one after another, ascending inch by inch toward Fukamori's most lofty of fantasies. The hourglass danged at his side. Tomorrow was the end. But he couldn't let her madness last that long.

  Fukamori didn't notice him— not even when he joined her, hopping lightly onto the balcony before the last step could form. Each strand of her dark hair adhered perfectly to the tidy bun crowning her. Her features were placid, smooth and consummate in their dispassionate mien. But her blackest pupils— oh, what twisted, sordid life there was to those!

  "Fukamori," he said, firmly. She did not hear, continued conducting as though she, too, were but a puppet on the strings.

&nb
sp; "Fukamori," he repeated, little louder. Still, she did not move.

  "Adamae!" he shouted, seizing her roughly by the shoulders, and at his touch she was jolted, as though by a shock. The silence crashed into them like a physical blow, rocked the apartment alarmingly as she stared in disbelieving fright at him, the whites of her eyes surging to rim her dilated pupils.

  "I— I haven't created man yet," she stammered, confused.

  "No. You haven't," he agreed. "I'm from the real world, Fukamori. Just like you."

  She went pale, shaking her head in denial. "No. No— that's not possible. He said—!"

  "Yes, this is your world," Icarus explained impatiently, some frustration seething through. "But it used to be mine. Charon made a deal with me, and I broke it. Then he made one with you. Now we—."

  "Get out," Fukamori whispered, staring at him as though he were the devil himself.

  "What—?"

  "Get out!" she shrieked half hysterically, panting, still shaking her head. "This is my world! Get out!"

  "I will!" he urged, fearing he was losing her. "But you have to come with me, or—!"

  "You won't take it away from me! It's mine! I won't let you!"

  "You don't understand!" he pleaded, his hope slipping away. "You don't want to stay here. It may be fine now, but soon you'll realize that what you're doing is—!"

  "Get the hell away from here!" she shouted. She was indignant, dangerous as a cornered beast, and he recoiled from her.

  "I— I can't!" he gasped. "I can't unless you agree to leave with me!"

  Everything seemed to click, and Fukamori's features contorted with rage, a fell and unholy temper streaking through her eyes. He collided with the banister just as she surged forth, pushing him frantically with an ultimatum, the first commandment of that dimension's goddess:

  "Then die!"

  Icarus pitched over the edge of the balcony, felt the air rushing futilely to try and buoy him as he hurtled toward the ground. Yet he stared fixedly at Adamae's face as he fell away, and saw only his own, plain features contorted with rage, felt only the pain of his stepmother ages past as he'd torn the pages of his work from her, condemned her with the selfsame words that bound him now. He wrote so few of his dreams on paper. She'd just wanted to share his pain and delight, just wanted to appreciate the delicate tracings of his soul etched into those thin white sheaves of revelation. And with what terror he'd spurned her, with what heartless abandon.

  At the last, he recalled those warm brown eyes splintering with hurt and forgiveness. They faded as the wind howled past and the ground rushed to swallow him.

  "I'm sorry," he croaked.

  Then his world went black.

  III. The Gondola's Tale