Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  Speegle resolved to follow one of the adventitious trails. Choosing at random, parting branches, he pushed through the wild thickets. The heat of the sun was tempered by the foliage, leaving Speegle almost chilled. He felt like an intent animal. But whether predator or prey he could not discern.

  After some distance, he shouldered through a final scrim and found himself on the bank of a tiny shallow stream flowing beneath a latticed canopy of branches. The water’s lively lambent motion over a glittery-pebbled bed surely must have been accompanied by a happy chortling, but of course Speegle could not enjoy any such chatter.

  Where the independent little stream came from and where it was going—both points remained indeterminate.

  A boulder as big as a hassock stood conveniently near the stream to allow Speegle to soak his feet, once he had removed his laceless shoes, the lack of self-harming cords a remnant of his recent hostile accommodations. The flowing stream recalled involuntary suffocating dousings during that same past. But he found, surprisingly, that he could not ascribe to those horrors any more vivid realness than he felt at the moment. Such a benison he had thought would not come to him so soon, if ever.

  Speegle entered a pleasant, fugue-like state, and this relinquishment of his usual thought patterns allowed him to perceive the faces all around him.

  Chance combinations of natural colors and planes, textures and shadows, evoked from the substance of stick and leaf, bark and sky, stone and twig a gallery of spectators.

  The higgledy-piggledy faces spontaneously formed from this limited organic palette seemed generally nonhuman, yet mostly anthropomorphic. Elves and gnomes, imps and fairies, demons and deities, chimeras and were-creatures. Horns, feelers, teeth; jutting chins, beetled brows, a spectrum of eyes. In chaotic ranks they manifested from the natural substrate. As breezes moved among the greenery, the bodiless faces became animated: winking, leering, laughing, conversing amongst themselves. They seemed not to take any cognizance of the human intruder among them.

  Speegle felt he should feel threatened, alarmed, unsettled. It was one thing for one’s idle mind to construe a chance face in the design of a curtain or in floor tiles or a stain, but quite another to see them everywhere. Surely such a hallucination implied a precipitous derangement of his brain, or else an actual supernatural threat. But despite the common bias against such phenomena, he discovered could not summon up an iota of fear or unease. Instead, the crowd of silent revelers, a panoply of partiers, seemed to be having such a splendid time amongst themselves that he felt privileged to be a spectator to their fun.

  A small bird landed on a twig that constituted a kind of forelock across the brow of one roguish face. The effect of the bird perched on the creature’s head caused Speegle to laugh out loud, though of course he did not register his own laughter.

  But then the bird began to sing, and he heard its liquid notes, as of old.

  Speegle shot to his feet, slipped on the wet mossy pebbles and splashed flat into the stream, which cushioned his fall.

  The amphitheater of total silence in which he normally moved reassembled itself around him.

  As he levered himself up, he noticed that a fish was watching him, and he paused, kneeling, the stream purling around his wrists and shins. Hanging motionless against the current by its own finny exertions, the speckled fish regarded Speegle with what appeared an unnatural intelligence. They regarded each other for a timeless moment before the fish darted away.

  Finally completing his arising, Speegle found the vegetal gallery of faces gone. Creation’s pixels had reset themselves.

  He sluiced some water out of his sopping clothes, redonned his dry shoes, and traced his path back to the house.

  Looking like a wizened child imitating the duties of her elders, Marisola awaited him on the back steps, having just emptied a bucket of dirty water into the soil.

  “The windows are clean now. You should change.”

  * * *

  For the three days after the unsettling yet strangely arousing and fulfilling incident in the woods, Speegle remained close by the house. In the basement, hidden under some tumbled rubbish, he had discovered several damp cartons of books, nonfiction and fiction whose unorthodoxy or frivolity might have caused trouble for their owner, who had, nonetheless, obviously been unable to bring himself to completely discard the volumes. He hesitated for a moment before bringing them upstairs, wondering if they had been salted as a trap by Oxbolt. Then, realizing that his sins needed no further circumstantial confirmation for the authorities to regard him as eternally suspect, he lugged the boxes up to the living room.

  Bereft of books for too long—his tablet certainly exhibited no capacity to function as an e-reader—Speegle indulged in an orgy of reading. Occupying one of the recliners, he accepted snacks and meals from Marisola with a fraction of his attention, barely acknowledging her efforts. The stolid old woman in her unchanging verdant gown, empty of autobiography or her own desires, seemed content to wait upon him without thanks. Insofar as he thought of her at all, Speegle began to feel less suspicious of her, to regard her as an innocent in his ongoing surveillance.

  On the fourth day, around noon, Speegle’s pleasant study was interrupted by the opening of the front door and the entrance of Oxbolt. Without attempting to hide his reading matter, Speegle put his book down and got out of the recliner.

  “What a ninny! I knocked and knocked, but there was no response! How could there be, I suddenly realized, when my charge is so grievously handicapped? And thus I presumed to venture in unannounced.”

  Speegle wondered where Marisola was, and why she had not responded to the knocking. I CAN HARDLY REGARD THESE QUARTERS AS MY PRIVATE IMPREGNABLE CASTLE.

  “Ha! Of course not. But still. We need to maintain whatever civilized protocols the circumstances permit.” Oxbolt’s gaze fell on the half-eaten sandwich by Speegle’s chair. “I’m happy to see the bachelor existence agrees with you. Regular meals are so important. And those windows shine like diamonds now! Do you find your domestic skills returning?”

  Confused, Speegle wondered why Oxbolt neglected to mention Marisola’s role in the household. He was about to credit the old woman when he decided, somewhat unaccountably, not to bring her up. I MAKE DO ALL RIGHT. I TRY TO KEEP BUSY.

  “Improving the mind and the body! Mens sana in corpore sano! Wonderful. Productivity on the ascendant! Let’s hope no trouble intervenes to disrupt your idyll.”

  WHAT KIND OF TROUBLE DID YOU HAVE IN MIND?

  Oxbolt adopted a serious mien. “Some of your old acquaintances—agitators and runagates who have ungratefully eluded our ministrations—have apparently gotten wind of your release, and perhaps even a fix on your whereabouts. Scuttlebutt has it that they are intent on conversing with you, to learn just what transpired while you were in our care. They seem to hold you accountable for certain recent reverses they have suffered. Nonsense, of course, but there’s no accounting for the delusions of others. I don’t reckon they will actually penetrate to your refuge, but they just might.”

  AM I TO BE GUARDED AGAINST THEM?

  “Ah, how I wish we had the burly manpower to secure your safety to the high degree it mandates. But our resources are rather strained at the moment. A certain fractiousness obtrudes at various scattered nodes of disrespect, and commands our full attention. Nor do we wish to invite you back to the House and encourage an attack there. So, I fear you will be on your own. To that end, I deliver these helpful tools.”

  Oxbolt withdrew a small nasty automatic pistol from his pocket, along with a blisterpack of two pills, and tendered them to Speegle. “The gun explains itself. These pills are for the emergency demands of auto-termination. I assure you that your old friends will be less gentle with you than our cheerful proctors were.”

  Speegle accepted the gun and pills dubiously. They seemed like a flyswatter issued for defense from a tsunami.

  Oxbolt clapped Speegle heartily on the shoulder. “Hang tough, and all will be well. For
tune favors the brave. Straight and narrow, straight and narrow!”

  Oxbolt’s departure triggered in Speegle a similar desire to flee. But, knowing he could not leave the house for good, he settled on a return trip to the glade and stream where he had had his incident of mass pareidolia. The handily descriptive word had surfaced in his active vocabulary recently, jogged perhaps by his reacquaintance with reading.

  The hidden peaceful sylvan spot remained just as he had first encountered it. The humid air carried the clean scent of the creek. Speegle thought he even saw the same color-flecked fish—or its twin—lurking in the current beneath an overhanging arch of ferns.

  Thinking that perhaps bathing his feet had been essential to his visionary experience, Speegle resumed his place on the rocky seat, with bare feet immersed.

  Seeking to calm and empty his mind, he waited patiently for the flock of antic faces to manifest. But the fractal patchwork of leaves and branches refused to cohere into any congenial crowd.

  Just as Speegle’s patience was on the point of evaporating, someone spoke to him. He heard the familiar woman’s voice through his dead ears, not merely in his memory, just as he had heard the notes of the bird last time. Of this he was sure.

  “Dan, look at me please.”

  Twisting on the rock, wrenching his vision down foreign dimensions, Dan saw a confluence of shadows, sun spatters, foliage and twigs suddenly cohere into a mostly green woman of many tints. Her life-sized figure and visage alternated between two-dimensionality and a larger substantiality.

  Allison, his lost wife.

  “I’ve missed you, Dan.”

  Long disused, Speegle’s voice, he was proud to discover, still resonated with the same familiarity. “I’ve missed you too.”

  “I can’t come to you in the flesh,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Can I touch you now?”

  “No, I fear not. I am only riding this host, like a wave rides the sea.”

  “Where are you really then?”

  “I can’t say. But I believe we will be together soon. I just had to tell you not to despair. Goodbye for now. Until our happy reunion.”

  From the ground, a squirrel leaped through Allison, and her illusory unity discohered back into its component parts, which refused to resemble her any longer, just as the deceptively drawn frame of a box, once visualized as inverted, could no longer be apprehended otherwise, despite immense mental effort. At the same time, Speegle lost access to the symphony of natural sounds he suddenly realized had been in the background of Allison’s speech.

  Wielding a broom like a small warrior with a broadsword, Marisola was beating a carpet hung from a line when Speegle emerged into the small clearing around the house.

  Her fissured face, like parched farmland, expressed disgust. “Someone left a gun in the house. I threw it away down a sewer. We don’t need any such things around.”

  JUST AS WELL.

  The next night, some sensation—not a sound, of course, but some irregular kinetic thumping, like objects slamming the walls and transmitted through the bones of the house—woke Speegle up. He lay in bed in the dark, awaiting a repeat of the sensation. But no encore happened, and he fell back asleep.

  In the morning, Marisola was already hard at work. Kneeling, with water staining the hem of her dress, she scrubbed industriously away with a hard-bristled, wood-backed hand-brush at a large dark stain on the cement of the front stoop.

  “Your breakfast will be a little late this morning. I had some unanticipated chores.”

  Speegle nodded.

  “Don’t go in the back yard just yet. There’s a mess there I have to deal with.”

  I UNDERSTAND. THANK YOU.

  “There is no problem. No problem at all.”

  * * *

  Several nights later, Marisola sat with Speegle in the living room. On the couch, the tiny woman could not manage to bring her feet to touch the floor. Electricity obtained at the house, despite the shattered neighborhood, but frequent brownouts occurred. One such spell was underway at the moment, rendering the lone low-watt bulb available to them more of a candle than a bright token of the dwindling industrial age. Despite the shadows and scant illumination, Speegle found he had no trouble reading the old woman’s lips. Some affinity had arisen between them, almost a wordless conduit between two minds.

  “The crickets are loud tonight. Boards are creaking as the house gives up its daytime heat. Something big as a cat is rustling in the shrubs, and coughing. The drip from the kitchen faucet halts for about fifteen seconds as the water accumulates at the rim of the tap, then plops into a cup I have yet to wash.”

  Speegle’s tablet glowed. THOSE ARE SOME SMALL MIRACLES. THANK YOU FOR SHARING THEM.

  “God finishes all the miracles that He starts.”

  I CANNOT PERSONALLY VOUCH FOR THAT.

  “Experience comes to everyone, whether they desire experience or not.”

  I MUST REMEMBER TO TELL OXBOLT THAT.

  “He’s coming tomorrow.”

  Sweat sprang from Speegle’s brow, and his fingers faltered on the virtual keyboard. HOW DO YOU KNOW? DID HE TELL YOU SO?

  “We don’t communicate.”

  WHAT DOES HE WANT?

  “He is going to take you back to the House. It seems unlikely you will leave those cold premises again.”

  I SEE. I ALWAYS KNEW THIS DAY WOULD COME. WELL, THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP AND FRIENDSHIP.”

  “Good luck.”

  Scooting herself closer to the edge of the couch, Marisola enabled her feet to find the floor. She left for her bedroom.

  Speegle sat up for another hour. His thoughts roiled and raced without producing any discrete imagery or wordage. It seemed as if his skull had been filled with featureless churning porridge whose surface he observed, a helpless disembodied perceiver of his own condition.

  Finally, having no recourse, Speegle went to his own bed. Robotically, he swapped his day clothes for his lime-green pajamas. Sleep came to him with unanticipated ease.

  Speegle awoke while some unmeasured portion of the night still ruled. The happy little stream, along one special segment of which he had visited with Allison, now entered his bedroom straight through one exterior wall, ran across the carpet, and disappeared out the bedroom door. Moonlight appeared to varnish its fluctuant surface. Speegle could smell the water’s signature grace notes.

  Climbing out of bed, he dislodged his tablet from its night-table perch. It hit a rock protruding from the stream and shattered its screen, leaving Speegle voiceless to the larger world.

  When he stepped into the calf-deep water, his pajamas instantly became soaked and clammy in their lower regions. The pebbles of the stream bed massaged his bare soles in a not unpleasant manner. Wading, he followed the creek bed in the direction of the flow, through his bedroom door, striding confidently, until nighted leaves arched over his head.

  Speegle walked easily and effortlessly down the course of the stream. He must have intersected its flow quite some distance away from the suburban zone familiar to him, for nothing on either shore was recognizable, even offsetting the effects of the darkness. But distance did not matter. With each step his heart and spirits grew lighter. By the time the sky hosted the rising sun, he had returned to the specific glade of his earlier revelations, not so far from the bedroom where his journey had begun. He took his accustomed seat on the hassock-sized boulder.

  With a twist of Speegle’s vision, Allison materialized out of the landscape’s components, her presence facilitated by the paraeidolia of his mind. What had been a spot on a leaf became an eye, a twig her finger.

  “Dan, I think it’s almost time for us to reunite. I have so much to tell you.”

  “I have a lot to tell you too.”

  “Why don’t we begin now then?”

  And so Speegle conversed happily with his wife on a number of matters both private and public until Oxbolt arrived, all before the sun had climbed much higher.

  Marisola traile
d quietly a few steps behind Oxbolt, but the man took no notice of the little old woman.

  Allison fell silent at the appearance of the parole officer. Her tenuous reality pulsed into and out of coherence. Speegle thought that the gun in Oxbolt’s grip had frightened her, and he became incensed.

  “You barge in here like a tank! What right do you have to scare anyone?”

  “He talks! And hears too, I suspect! It’s a miracle! All this subsidized leisure and the cushy lodgings we have endowed upon you have effected a cure. And at such an opportune moment. The invigilators will be able to interface with you much more easily over the next several sessions. On that note, I reckon it’s time for us to leave, my friend. Come with me now.”

  Without the necessity of crossing the stream, Marisola had walked around the tableau formed by the two men until she had positioned herself behind the plane of vegetation which hosted Allison. Her green dress perfectly supplemented the jigsaw gaps in Allison’s avatar.

  “I’m going nowhere! Can’t you see my wife is waiting?”

  Oxbolt squinted. “Your wife? She rests anonymously underground, somewhere in a tangled heap of her fellow miscreants. If you see her here, you’re mad.”

  Speegle could not be bothered to refute such a foolish assertion. He said nothing, but stood up and began to walk toward Allison.

  At the same time, from the far side of the thicket that hosted Allison, Marisola began to push through, her compact tough form irresistible.

  Oxbolt shouted. “Stop there, and right this moment! You put too high a price on your existence. Your living self is not invaluable to us you know!”

  Emerging through the vegetation, Marisola became enwrapped in Allison like someone walking into a sheet on a clothesline. Subsumed in Allison, the tiny old woman grew into her new stature, lending Allison’s avatar the human substance she required. But the merged entity remained a green woman of many shades.

  Speegle enfolded his wife in a fervent embrace, her warm substance so welcome in his arms. His bright green pajamas caused him to resemble her as a mate should.

  The crack of the pistol foretold pain, but Speegle felt nothing. If a bullet had intersected his body, it had left no sensations in its wake.