Athan was running as fast as he could through what looked like a charcoal smeared nightmare.
There were flashes of colour, but everything was indistinct.
Where is everyone?
He was too exhausted to yell, but he figured if he moved quickly enough, he might be able to get out.
It reminded him of trying to take off a wet shirt. It was suffocating and claustrophobic, but if he was quick he could be finally free of it.
The smudgy blurs would multiply and every now and then there would be a flash of colour or lights. The blurring began to take the form of a landscape. A desolate place that could have been the bottom of the ocean. It had a white glow and an odd smell, and what looked like leather, everywhere. Suddenly he was in the dark again, running though dense veils of charcoal smudge.
He stopped to catch his breath.
He didn’t know how far he had come, or where his clothes had gone.
All around him was like a liquid black that felt warm and familiar, like it was a someone rather than a someplace.
“Hello!” He called out into the dark.
“Athan! Athan!” came a voice that echoed through the black.
He stopped at the sound and closed his eyes to work out the direction of the sound.
Where is it coming from?
It was coming closer, barreling towards him, and suddenly he could hear the screams, whimpers and the scuffles of feet.
He was standing on the smelly beer-soaked carpet of the dance floor again, completely naked and staring across at Tim and Rob, who looked pale and terrified. Tim was shaking his head slowly with disbelief.
“Where am I?” Athan began as he stepped toward them.
“What the hell happened? Who are you!” Tim shuffled back a few steps.
Athan was scared and confused. “I don’t know…”
“Stay away…” Rob covered his mouth with his hand and recoiled from his friend.
Athan’s clothes had been trampled and kicked around the stinking carpet. He began to grab what items he could and pulled them on while people on the dance floor area shook with panic or just dumbly stared at the naked man shuffling about under the flashing lights.
Some were whimpering and pushing their way through to the stairs.
The atmosphere was thick with fear and disgust.
People were terrified when Athan came close. Some screamed.
He was afraid as well.
Athan pulled on his pants and wiped the tears and sweat from his cheeks.
“I think I need to get home…” he muttered.
“You!” A security guard’s voice boomed from the stairs.
Athan figured it was only a matter of time.
“You, need to get the hell out!” The guard pointed at Athan, who was now semi-naked pulling on his clothes.
“Get away from me!” Athan yelled back.
He was already too shaken and scared to be afraid of the big Samoan guy in a tight black T-shirt.
The man’s face remained the blank mask it always was when he had to throw out another loser drunk from the club. The guard pushed through the throng of panicked people like a rhino, smashing everything out of its way. He marched up to Athan, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him back towards the steps.
Athan panicked, waving his arms and legs about trying to get free of the man’s bear hug.
He needed to get away.
He needed to get home.
Then Athan slipped into nothingness again and his empty clothes fell to the floor. The bouncer was left blinking at everyone around him, his mouth hanging open.
Athan stood in the black, naked again.
This time it felt more calm and nurturing.
He felt safe.
How did I do that?
He knew it must have been him. Athan had wanted to not be in of the arms of the big Samoan so badly that he had ceased to be in his arms, he was somewhere else.
“I must be calm.”
He told himself to relax, to breathe and observe.
Don’t run.
Running was a bad move. It felt like he had been running for hours, but then he found himself back in the club as if only a moment had passed.
Time passed differently while in the dark.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He focused on what he could feel, smell, see and hear.
He stood motionless, listening. Only silence.
Where the hell am I?
Athan looked at his still sweaty body and his bloody hands. The blood was dry. It was dry and crusted around the cuts of his palms, as if they had stopped bleeding hours before.
It’s healing already? But I just did this…
Then the smell came suddenly.
Athan breathed deeply.
It was familiar, yet not. He couldn’t decide if it was even a smell.
The bouncer, Athan could feel him, as if he was still in his big arms, but it was more like a smell. To his left there came another feeling or scent, like freedom, a way out.
He stepped to it, then through it. He passed through the black as if it was a veil of water or like stepping outside into the rain and the light came back and he was free.
“I’m out.” He blinked in the dull light.
He took a breath.
Around him stood monolithic towers like emaciated body parts and the ground was like the wrinkled skin of an old man’s hands; it was soft and fragile, pale and flecked with darker spots like freckles.
“Am I dead? Please tell me! Anyone? Hello?” his voice trailed off and echoed between the poles of bone.
My drawings.
This is what I draw, he thought, all of this, I created this. This is in my head.
Athan bent down to stroke the soft skin on the ground. It was warm and soft under his fingertips.
It felt real.
Everything in dreams is real until you wake up, he decided, as he looked around to find a way out.
Through the fog he could see a tangle or mesh of some kind.
“That way for home,” he whispered.
Why that way?
He could smell it. But how could he even smell? This place was not even real, and dreams don’t have a smell, maybe it was a feeling, or instinct again.
That way.
Keeping track of time was not easy, his feet were sore and he was feeling a bit breathless. The walk was taking a while, half an hour he thought roughly.
The skin on the ground had developed broad ridges and vertebrae-like groves that looked kilometres long.
It felt pleasant to walk on the skin, but it had become less frail and soft and more firm and leathery.
The way out was close, he could feel it.
Home.
After wandering around the base of what looked like a giant elbow, he found a spot that felt…different.
A door maybe, like the one he walked through in the dark that felt like the security guard.
Athan touched the place gingerly with his fingers and they disappeared into the purplish skin, as if it was water.
He stood marveling at how something that looked solid rippled around is fingers. When he withdrew his hand it was dry.
He sat on the ground beside it, too afraid to step through.
He was so unwilling to linger in the dark that he had stepped through into this place, now that there was a doorway he could see, even in the dimming white light, he felt like he could somehow drown or be trapped inside it.
He was scared, naked and alone.
Athan woke suddenly, startled by movement.
He had been leaning against an edifice that was moving in the breezeless air.
Not a tree at all, but it had moved.
He shuffled backward and looked up at the black coral-like web above him. It disappeared into the fog far above.
He was still next to the strange door at the base of the organic structure.
He took a deep breath and clenched his fists.
It was time he
woke up to find out what had happened to his body.
He took another deep breath as he braced himself.
Diving in eyes closed would be the best way to get it over with.
Time to wake up.
Athan jumped through.
***
Lockie lay motionless on his bed, completely dead to the world, passed out after too many drinks and Athan stood naked and breathless in his housemate’s room. I’m home.
Athan was wide eyed, blinking, adjusting to the change.
He had watched himself stepping out of Lockie’s body like a ghost in a horror movie.
He’d stepped right out of Lockie’s sleeping body. Lockie may as well have been a hologram.
What happened to me?
He held out his hands in the dark and examined his wounds.
His cuts had healed, even the blood that was smeared all over his arms was little more than a few brown flakes.
He decided to get to the safety of his own room.
He was quiet as a mouse. The last thing he wanted to do was try and explain himself to Lockie if he woke up.
He slipped out and tread carefully on the old floorboards.
His room was locked, but there was a trick to getting the door open when you didn’t have keys. His keys, of course were gone, along with his wallet and his mobile phone. They were in the pockets of his pants, which he no longer had.
He took the handle and lifted it till the catch was released.
He was lucky they were old locks.
Athan pushed the door open and turned on the light, and there it was, the charcoal scrawling on the walls and the piles of scratchy drawings.
Black smears everywhere, a mess.
Everywhere he looked he saw drawings of the other place.
He had created that dream world himself. He could see it all over the room. He even thought for a moment that his out-of-body experience could have been the result of somebody drugging him. But it was too real. He needed to try and do it again, to prove to himself that it was a product of his imagination somehow.
He grabbed his charcoal-stained work shirt and a pair of boxers and tried to rally the courage to go back into Lockie’s room. But he couldn’t do it, and ended up sitting on his bed staring at the charcoal smeared wall.
Eventually curiosity got the better of him. He wandered quietly up and down the hallway of the house trying to summon the courage to enter Lockie’s room again. He had to see what was happening, he had to know if he was crazy.
He pushed the door carefully.
Lockie was asleep.
He opened it the rest of the way and slipped in, approaching the bed. There was Lockie laying sprawled on his back. He hadn’t moved, not even rolled over. His dark curly hair looked like a cushion under his head. Athan bent down and reached out a shaking hand to touch the sleeping freckled face. Lockie was the only young man he knew that wore fleecy pajamas to bed every night.
Athan felt like an idiot leaning over his sleeping friend.
He was too nervous to touch him, so he climbed awkwardly onto the bed with his feet either side.
Lockie groaned and began to move.
Now or never.
He stepped onto his stomach and closed his eyes, waiting for Lockie to cry out or complain.
Instead there was a feeling like a rush of air in his face and he opened his eyes to find himself standing next to the giant organic structure in the dark again.
Athan was sure that he had lost his mind.
Have I just gone inside Lockie’s body, or mind? Where am I?
He straightened a twisted sleeve then realized he was clothed! He was wearing his shirt…but no boxers.
A shirt and no shorts…
It was the same shirt that he had been wearing at work, and the same shirt he had been wearing when he had blacked out and went crazy and drawn organic images everywhere.
He wondered if there was a link?
Athan stepped back out into Lockie’s room and noticed his boxers laying on the bed next to his sleeping friend.
Umm…better get rid of those before he wakes up.
He grabbed his shorts and ducked out of Lockie’s and into his own room. He needed the dirty work clothes.
The suit jacket, the thin black tie and the black suit pants that were crumpled under some of the drawings.
“Oh, underwear,” he muttered.
He found his undies from the day at work, and the tight black donuts of his socks. He pulled all of his charcoal stained clothes on and tiptoed down the hallway to the back door and the pile of shoes.
His black leather work-shoes were beneath Tim’s runners.
He pulled them on and went back to Lockie’s room. He needed to complete his experiment.
Standing in Lockie’s room he looked around: university textbooks, dirty clothes, DVD covers and some chocolate wrappers. He noticed his reflection in the big mirror over the dressing table. It was a woman’s dressing table, but it had come with the rental house, and the boys all used it to fix their hair.
Athan looked like he was going to a funeral, or a wedding, maybe a job interview. His short brown hair was a mess, so he slicked it back with his fingers to get it to look at least a little presentable. He’d have to clean his clothes later.
He had to see if he could manage this with clothes on.
He was nervous, but it felt right.
He remembered standing on that beer soaked carpet at The Link with everyone screaming and recoiling from him. The look in his friend’s eyes. The fear.
How would he face them again?
He was responsible for throwing the club into turmoil and frightening everyone, including himself.
He pitied the man in the mirror. Things couldn’t be normal for him again if this was real.
Athan Harper fixed his tie and turned to his sleeping friend Lockie.
“Good bye cruel world,” he whispered.
He stepped into Lockie for the last time.
He found himself standing fully clothed next to the scaffold of flesh. Around him a white glow had begun to bring a cold light to the new and strange world that was shrouded in a soft mist. Everywhere, Athan began to see the shapes of the strange landscape become more visible, and he could see that the land went on and on, maybe forever.
“Where am I?” Athan whispered as he placed a hand on the warm leathery skin of the skeletal tree-like thing beside him.
Am I inside a new world? Is this in my mind? And why had he been drawing these extraordinary shapes all his young life?
He wondered if it were some kind of premonition that he had been able to channel the shapes of this world through his hand.
What would happen to all his things and the drawings that lay all over his room next to Lockie’s.
The drawings all over the walls?
There would be questions that he had no answers for.
He couldn’t go back there.
He knew he had to see his family, maybe for the last time.
He couldn’t be just Athan Harper now, he needed to learn more about this place and himself.
This was the beginning of his self imposed exile.
Athan set off across a wide expanse of shifting dunes of skin. It heaved a little like it was breathing. It was comforting and warm and felt like home for some reason. Like he had been there before.
His Mum’s house was where he needed to go, to say good byes and wash his clothes maybe. He could smell the way, or feel it. He couldn’t decide what the sensation was, but he knew he was going in the right direction.
Chapter 1
THE WIND HOWLED.
The freezing cold rock felt comforting to the small boy who hid there. It protected him from the wind and the constantly falling snow. Andy had no idea how he had become lost out in the storm. He wasn’t even dressed to go outside in that kind of weather.
Andy looked down at his cold left hand, and wondered why he couldn’t feel his fingertips.
He had so many
questions.
Had he run away from home again? Was Dad angry with him? Dad was often angry with him; the things he did, the choices he made.
A sound broke his thoughts.
Had his father come to find him? Or was there something else out there in the storm?
Something coming for him?
Andy squinted into the blurring storm, peering as hard as he could with his stinging eyes. He couldn’t make anything out in the swirling grey darkness. He had to squeeze his eyes shut afterward to relieve the sting of the icy wind.
Again a sound, out in the dark.
He squinted harder.
Then Andy put a picture to the sound. It was a clanging or twanging, and only one thing could possibly make that broken music. A guitar, a broken guitar.
He looked around the side of the rock, in search of somewhere else he could hide, or somewhere to run to.
His father had found the broken guitar. His broken guitar. The one Andy had broken.
Andy had found it in his Dad’s study and wanted to impress him by playing a song his Dad would recognize. Like one of those cool Black Sabbath songs or that catchy one about the hotel in California. He brought the guitar to the patio where he could strum away in the fresh air like the musicians in the videos.
It was at that point that Perky, the family cat, decided to spring one of his famous surprise attacks.
He leaped up onto Andy’s chest, then sprang off, nearly knocking Andy to the ground. Andy was only six years old, and Perky was old enough to know better. But for the third time that week he ambushed young Andy. Only this time Andy had been holding Dad’s beloved guitar in his hand. It was the good one that Dad had usually kept in a case high up on the wardrobe.
Andy’s little fingers had let go of the coveted acoustic guitar to fend off the fluffy grey monstrosity that had sprung out of nowhere.
The guitar fell hard against the doorframe, before clattering across the concrete pavers near the barbeque.
Andy stood still, unable to move, while the cat disappeared
The guitar’s body looked battered. There were splinters of wood and a broken string.
The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League Page 2