61 Fireworks get their properties from composition:
Red: Strontium
Green: Barium chloride
Blue: Copper chloride
Whistling: Potassium benzoate
Whispering ancient secrets: Gold from shipwrecks in the Blind Sea
Shouting our own secrets: We don’t know, please make them stop
62 His trumpet took extraordinary twists and turns. It was not a musical instrument, but a brass labyrinth in which silence could be timelessly lost. The music was not his breath, but the roaring of a shining Minotaur guarding the valves from within. This, of course, was cheating.
63 Countless confessions of love were made during the near-apocalypse. Everyone agreed to ignore ‘les amours finales’, but none were forgotten.
64 The meteorologist didn’t stop, forecasting further and further into the future. Sooner than expected, there was no more weather to report.
65 Metaphysical ailments called for unique medicine. Hospitals hired professional umbrists to examine, diagnose, and treat patients’ shadows. Fluctuation in shape or length was easily treated, but shade syndrome was dire, with shadows burning and scratching humans when touched. Retroptimologists treated diseases and conditions of the reflection with a variety of medicinal mirrors made of exotic metals. Sanguivore tools allowed the doctors to work on the patient, but not his reflection. Spectral tools did the opposite, but were easily lost. The most difficult new specialty conferred the letters VS, for Vox Secundo. It dealt with illness, silence or malice in the patient’s echo. In the worst cases echoes could turn feral, insulting their masters and publicly shouting their secrets. Heterodyne dialysis was required.
66 ‘I can tell there’s something between them,’ she said. ‘I mean, I can only see it by looking between them, like their bodies are some kind of door frame. It’s horrible, all hunched over and drooling. I think it’s watching us. It’s hard to tell, but I’m not getting any closer.’
67 Zombies that muttered ‘brains’ never lasted long. Successful ghouls had more effective phrases.
‘Everybody knows.’
‘You have no secrets.’
‘Fraaaud.’
Survivors stayed far away from their barricaded doors, trying to avoid the harsh words. They never heard their defences break.
CHAPTER 10
Weird
1 There are 21 million cubic feet of molten rock and metal directly below every square foot of Earth. There is literally nothing hiding you from every star, galaxy and sunless planet in the night sky. Cosmically speaking, your back is against the wall.
2 Galaxies were mere tide pools. The empty space between them was a killing field of dark-matter predators and electromagnetic anglerfish.
3 She crept through the clown temple, clutching her seltzer gun. Rubber chickens and balloon animals had been freshly sacrificed on the altar.
4 He made dismantling cults and strangling abominations seem effortless, but she’d never seen anyone have to work so hard just to look happy.
5 She cringed at the cultist’s smile. It had the same crawling, backward wrongness she felt whenever she saw a spider eat a mouse or a bird.
6 His vigil for the return of his master grew tedious. Eventually he just did Internet searches for ‘intractable laughter’ and ‘drooling pitch’.
7 ‘With time,’ she whispered, ‘all languages return to the root tongue used by the elder things of the universe. It is a language of worship.’
8 He found the sanctum of the astronomy cult with its ceiling of 10,000 lenses. Together they burned sacrifices in the light of Polaris.
9 He hesitated to approach. She was armed with a fistful of poems, each one honed to a razor’s edge and lovingly crafted for him alone. There were still parts of his heart left unscarred, and she knew exactly how to reach them. He had to trust her, and nothing was more frightening.
10 Briefly, driving on a dark road, he saw a creature that didn’t belong in his world. The fear lingered. Reality was larger than he’d thought.
11 The first movies did have audio tracks, but the weighty eldritch words in early scripts overwhelmed the fragile medium, rendering it silent.
12 Space itself took human shape and came down to walk among us. That wasn’t nearly so glorious and frightening as what then filled the sky.
13 ‘Enjoy your childhood,’ older generations said. ‘An elder will eventually transfer his mind into your body. So enjoy yourself. Quickly.’
14 The townsfolk would not swim in that lake, and no boat dared to cross it. It was one of the few places where the ocean that surged within the planet reached out to the surface on dry land. By night, the village shook with the songs of jet-black whales that came to see the moon.
15 ‘Excuse me, sir,’ the gentleman said. ‘Last year the Asylum returned you to full mental health. Your bill remains unpaid. I’m the repo man.’
16 The book fascinated her. That was the danger. She slowly starved, unable to look away. She grew new pairs of eyes to absorb the text faster.
17 Rumours said that she was an ocean creature dwelling on land. She chilled her drink with ice-cold pearls, paid shopkeepers with salty gold coins, glared at lighthouses, and wore dresses of a very convincing sea-foam green. He nervously accepted her invitation to walk on the beach.
18 Visiting servants of alien suns were the first to suggest humans wish upon the stars. The practice has yielded their masters valuable intel.
19 Logic said the unearthly things he saw by the road at night were just tricks of shadows and negative space. Yet logic couldn’t protect him.
20 ‘I have purpose for you beyond the physical,’ she said, opening the book. ‘You’re like wire before electricity, used only for its strength.’
21 The massive creature entered Earth’s orbit, looking down on us with unknowable emotions. Its skin glowed to mimic the stars behind it. However, when day came, the beast apparently didn’t know our sky would be blue. We didn’t reveal that we could see it, lest we hurt its feelings.
22 ‘Something old rests here, stirring in the earth,’ she whispered. ‘To aliens we are as lion tamers, our courage and recklessness shocking.’
23 He had been the one to send her into the Singularity to root out the cybercult. Now he just wanted her to be happy with being human again.
24 At first the creatures in the looking glass were an annoyance, but their numbers grew until mirrors showed nothing but their teeth and eyes.
25 A small cadre learned to project their minds into others. The rest of us fled to the wild places, lest we be taken and worn like clothing.
26 With mosquitoes extinct, something else stepped into the vacant niche. Blood is a common resource, and this other thing would see it tapped.
27 Up close, it was clear that the snake’s body was actually a tentacle, devoid of bones but lined with hooks and suction discs. It instinctively wriggled away toward the sea. She could see thousands more along the beach, as though they were assembling into something grander.
28 The forest reclaimed its ancient lands from the city by force. As we fled, it took no spoils of war, but kept children to raise as its own.
29 Smiling, he stood to leave, but couldn’t let go of her hand. She didn’t want him to go. Her tentacle tattoos had coiled around his wrist.
30 Tiny scratches on the inner crystals of the geode were translated as desperate pleas for exoneration and apologies to a subterranean king.
31 For years you have censored your mind. You avoid remembering secrets needlessly, lest they be overheard. You skip over cartoons and cheesy songs to keep your inner child presentably mature.
I get it. Old habits die hard. But they haven’t reached Earth yet. Relax while you can.
32 His reflection, unhappy with his mundane life, found one of its own. It began showing up with scars he didn’t have, and an ever-wilder smile.
33 He’d given blood, but they told him to stay seated. They connected him to books, lanterns,
the soil outside. Yes, he had much left to give.
34 He rode out to face the golf cult in the cart he’d commandeered from their shrine, dragging a club bag and leading their liberated caddies.
35 Bonfires gave us our first clue that something was wrong. The smoke stopped smelling like sweet, charred wood, and reeked instead of the sea. We looked closer, and found that plants worldwide were changing their chemistry to resemble ocean flora. They were preparing for something.
36 We all felt a knocking from outside our reality. Scientists debated whether to open a door, pointing out that at least our guest was polite.
37 Most vacationers weren’t ready for ‘luxury cruises’ beyond Earth. They came back quieter, gently offering tribute to a king we couldn’t see.
38 We finally explored the ocean floor, and with knowledge came fear. Our lighthouses were lit once more, now to warn people away from the sea.
39 The game of tag was invented long ago to train children how to avoid nameless, body-swapping ghosts. Any we met were called simply ‘it’.
40 He arrived at his destination, but the voice of the GPS app kept giving orders. She led him to ancient books, to old prayers. He sang the songs she couldn’t.
41 Laughter is the best medicine.
Hunger is the best spice.
Fire is the best friend.
The sky is the best hiding spot.
We haven’t seen them yet.
42 As humans lived for millennia, even the instincts we thought were hardwired got overwritten. Our fear of the dark became a fear of the night sky and the eyes hiding among the stars. Loneliness was replaced by a creeping panic, felt whenever we were separate from the hive mind.
43 As our technology advanced, existential dread became a hot commodity. People paid for the secrets of physicists and philosophers that could still invoke the innate human fear of extinction. Jumpy colonists returning from deep space promised we wouldn’t need that service for long.
44 Vitamin F: Vital to promoting cross-sensory perception. Deficiency causes an inability to see tem-perature or sense colours through the skin.
Vitamin G: Plentiful in most diets, this protein keeps Earth’s life invisible to stellar behemoths. Deficiency can cause planetary doom.
Vitamin H: Every molecule of it is quantum-entangled to the original on a distant world. Deficiency causes the patient to seek that place.
Vitamin I: Bonds to bad-luck free radicals that would otherwise cause grave misfortune. Deficiency often manifests as unexpected lightning.
Vitamin J: This protein is active but has no clear purpose. Yet, when the portals open, it will show us which to enter. Deficiency fatal.
Vitamin K: Found in leafy greens, it assists in blood clotting and healthy bone construction. Deficiency causes bleeding and calcification.
Vitamin L: Exists across all possible realities. If one of your parallel selves becomes weak, this protein saps the strength of that runt.
Vitamin M: This acid is protective against the intense radiation near the galactic core. Alien civilisations depleted Earth’s entire supply.
Vitamins N & O: Gold and red pigments that allowed a full range of colour in human eyes. Source plants were rare, and nobles ate them into extinction for the prestige of scarlet eyes.
45 The thunderstorm lived on in the memories of those who had lived through it. For years they bore it, baulking at the sun, cherishing every gust of wind, and growling after camera flashes. When the storm would no longer be fractured, they gathered once more. The sky grew dark.
46 A hundred broken gingerbread men lay on the rock-candy altar of the sugar cult. He brandished his insulin, hearing their toothless chants.
47 The first one to wash ashore was a curiosity: a blue-black seashell, big as a house and matching no known creature, its spirals made to guard a thousand tentacles. The next year, the beaches grew dark. We looked closer, and found that more tiny shells outnumbered grains of sand.
48 This has been a test of the Reality Alert System. If this had been a real emergency you would be advised to:
•Reset your compasses to ‘zero’.
•Lock all books and maps in an airtight container.
•Make sure everyone in your household is blindfolded.
•Wait for The Singing to pass.
49 She said she would pull down the moon to prove her love for him. Now the sky was on fire, the satellite crashing because he had doubted her.
50 The building had pull-alarms unlike any he’d seen, striped black and green. He asked when he should use them. He was told, ‘You’ll know.’
51 Society was delighted to find that, unlike most others, he did not worship himself. Those hoping to become his new deity began sending gifts.
52 Shredded Jolly Rogers underfoot, he sang aloud in the lair of the money cult. Its acolytes hated music because wealth could not improve it.
53 Miners didn’t go to deep space for rare elements. Their lonely ships returned to Earth brimming with the creeping fear of the unknown, gathered meticulously in the parts of space where the sun’s light faded to black. That cargo was in short supply on our tamed, automated planet.
54 The Millennial Muses
After the nightmare of postmodernism had passed, recovering artists needed new subjects untethered to things as fickle as history or reality. Thus, nine new muses were invented to embody modern endeavour:
•Oiale, the muse of mechanics, is depicted as having hand-like simian feet and gearwork patterns painted in grease all over her muscled arms.
•Artists usually depict Shoneme, muse of con-artistry, as having a silver tongue. Savvy sculptors know it should really be made of tin.
•Tannhause, muse of science fiction, is depicted as a smiling, extraterrestrial angel, reaching for the sky as her feet trample civilisation.
•Graphene is the only valid statuary medium to depict Palygone, the two-dimensional muse of computer programming, shown covered in pythons.
•Troba, muse of YouTube, is depicted with a voxel sword in one hand and a smartphone in the other, followed by her cats Like and Subscribe.
•Murmure, muse of nuclear physics, is depicted as scarred but beautiful, holding a basket of mushrooms and wearing a flowing gown of lead.
•Statues of Naseti, muse of space travel, should be made of meteoric iron and depict the helmeted figure upside down, arms open to humanity.
•Loje, muse of truth, is meant to be unseen. Overeager artists over the ages sculpted her, ignoring the implied truth that muses aren’t real.
•Insomnia, the cruel and wild muse, is never depicted as calm or serene. Her mad smile makes her plainly identifiable even in pitch darkness.
CHAPTER 11
Other
Song Lyrics
The Time Traveller’s Lullaby
It’s time to rest and stop running for a while.
(Mummy/Daddy) let the sky go dark so the stars could appear.
Out of all of history, and any given day,
There is no sweeter time or place for us to be than here.
Because…
This is the moment (Mummy/Daddy) picked just for you.
The moon is bright, the wind is soft, and it’s time for counting sheep.
We can just lie back and let the night go by.
We’re headed for tomorrow, and we’ll get there in our sleep.
The future is full of amazing things to see,
Of planets full of mystery, and our robotic friends,
But they can wait until you’ve gotten forty winks,
So let the night go slowly, as the universe intends.
Because…
This is the moment (Mummy/Daddy) picked just for you.
What a comfy, stable timeline that you and I have found.
We can just lie back and let the night go by.
We’re headed for tomorrow, and we’ll take the long way round.
You can dream of our days spent in the past,
The sc
enery by Zeppelin, or the mammoths in the snow.
Don’t you fret about making Caesar mad.
It wasn’t really our fault, and he passed on long ago.
That’s why…
This is the moment (Mummy/Daddy) picked just for you.
An instant of tranquillity, in a brief historic hush.
We can just lie back and let the night go by.
We’re headed for tomorrow, but there’s no need to rush.
The Twelve Lost Days of Christmas
Version 1 (2020)
On the twelfth day of Christmas the pine trees gave to me: twelve sea-glass arrows, ancient weapons used by sailors to fight back against foul weather, far too small to actually slay a storm but enough to make it think twice about letting its lightning strike too close to my ship
Eleven morning nails, which will not budge or break unless the sun is shining, long used by rural gravediggers to seal the caskets of the undead by night to buy time until more experienced vampire hunters can be called, or as leverage to strike bargains with the monsters inside
Ten soul-wax candles, each barely larger than a toothpick, whose flames and smoke will be drawn to the nearest living person other than the one who lights them; of little use on Earth but invaluable in deep space, where finding another beating heart in the void can be impossible
Quiet Pine Trees Page 8