The Altonevers

by Frederic Merbe

  the Altonevers

  by Frederic Merbe

  text copyright © June 2015 Frederic Merbe

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-9975093-4-2 (eBook)

  Smashwords Edition

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  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  In the split second of blinking when her mind is in the shade of her eyelids, she sees an apple tree alone in a field of light green. Whose ripening red fruit assume any form or figure her imagination conjures them to be as they fall to meet their apple shaped shadows on the ground. In opening her eyes she relapses to a reality of light's reflection rendering living and inanimate things into realism, resurfacing to the experience of being alive in a living mirror. Where do they go when they close their eyes? What do they see when they open them? she wonders, then ponders if what she perceives is real, or if reality is what she perceives it to be.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fellow traveler

  Anna is standing on the edge of a curb immersed in a city's summer night swelter as sweat trickles through her carrot colored pixie cut hair to cover her peach brushed cheeks, and her toes teeter inches over vacant predawn painted streets. She's biting her bottom lip white, a habit of hers when drifting dreamily into wanderlust, often while wondering where next to go. With ears alert as an unnerved hare she sifts through the near silence of sleeping urban sprawl. Her honey brown eyes reach to the horizon like a seasick sailor searching for the sight of safe shores. Seeing sharpness and straight lines soften, shrink and tangle into converging blurs merging into a faint purplish pool on the verge of her perception.

  The red orange morning’s glow morphs into atom sized legions of light and heat, as warriors with wings and sword and spear and chariot ascending to clash with the nights swarm of dark and cold. The scene holds her focus for a almost minute before fading back into a lavender haze slowly unraveling into shadowy canyons shedding the dullness of depth. Separating into lustrous blotches and becoming lucid reflections clothing the flat faces of glass and stone skyscrapers surrounding her. The traffic lights are coming toward her from the depths as growing globes of yellow and red, until a glowing green globe is swaying twelve feet over her head. The traffic lights change with a mechanical click, interrupting her train of thought in tune with the electric hum coming from the aluminum pole beside her.

  She slips back into her shoe gazing stroll along the edge of the curb, passing under a blinking don’t walk sign while watching the laces of her worn white sneakers pace back and forth. Oblivious to everything that's block behind her vanishing into an oblivion so dark it appears as a featureless flat wall of infinite volume. The streetlamps lining the pavement are straightening up and arching backwards. Their light blue bulbs then burst into tiny comets leading semicircular streaks of illuminating vapor that sublimate scars into the facades and sidewalks as they fall and rise. Forming full circles of counterclockwise currents containing flat planes as clear as crystal window panes that are filling with vivid vapor colors of the time of day portrayed by the comet and its tail end encircling the edge of the emerging ellipses. The vanishing violets of predawn emanating from the closest clock match the faint glow soaking the skyscrapers of the urban canyon around her. The next nearest is brimming with the lightening indigo glows proceeding the receding of night into predawn. Through each furthering clock one can see the colors of the sky just passed, collectively appearing as a single spiral of vitreous night and day counting counterclockwise by the hour, stretching down the length of the pavement and reaching deep into the horizon’s depths.

  Feeling a wet chill wash over her body, she stops and lifts her head to see she's submersed in the violet of a vapor clock. That's fleeing from her like water from a pebble, and dispersing through the air. She pauses, awestruck in the face of the unreality enveloping her, of the steam billowing from sewers caps and storm drains and drawn into a sheet of fog sweeping around her feet flowing eastward, toward the lazily lifting sun.

  A rush of headlights instantly fill the streets as streaks of white light with apple sized spheres leaping up like fish from a stream, then bursting like tiny stars into clouds and coalescing into continually smaller shattering spheres reborn at a rate of a hundred generations per city block. A yellow cab bends and stretches like hot wax melting and sinking into the asphalt when a beverage truck overturns taking a corner, exploding like ink in water while throwing bottles of bright sodas into the air to burst as fluid fireworks. The river of cars filling every inch of the street, all collide in an instantaneous blitz of bright color before vanishing entirely in the blink of an eye. The branches of trees are whipping and shattering, then following their loosened leaves and lifting into the air. Postal boxes, parking meters and sewer caps are tearing from the ground, cart wheeling eastward and crashing through walls and windows like cannon balls through the hulls of caravels.

  A drizzle of droplets start splashing from the ground and rising through the air, becoming a rain in reverse that's slowly eroding the city’s surfaces with penny sized pock marks at a time. High above, the heads of the highest skyscrapers are cracking and fracturing into swathes of airborne debris drawn east, toward the morning light. Then crumbling into comets and cascading across the sky to bombard and cannibalizing stubborn upwind structures while amassing into a single mass of vaporizing matter. Stripping flesh from the high rises, leaving skeletons of steel that glow red hot, stretch and squeal into warped wretched shapes dancing to their deaths.

  Reaching an intersection she looks to her right, to the sight of churning chunks of city amassing into a massive wave. The entire east side of the island metropolis is torn from form and drawn into the wake of the ruptured sun rising into the sky. She sprints frantically out of fear through the vitreous hours spiraling down the sidewalk. Crossing the asphalt streets, now flowing like freshwater streams, by skipping across the tops of cars caught in their swelling currents. She comes to a crosswalk with no cars, not breaking stride she gulps a heaving breath and leaps through the air with legs stretched. Feeling as though floating for a second too long, then stomping onto the curb on the other side with resounding force reverberating up her leg and through her empty stomach to ring her head like a bell. She stumbles then stops, doubles over and falls to the ground.

  Everything she can
see is sweeping east and up into single tidal wave of vaporizing matter reaching astronomical heights as the wake of the rising ruptured sun. The city is gradually capsizing in its pursuit of the high star above, miming, though a million time bigger, the bending street light's bulb bursting and spiraling into counterclockwise currents. With her wits about her she stands from kneeling, squinting into the deepest depths of morning's glow now dominating the atmosphere. Seeing a speck of blue violet submersed in its bright vermilion light bobbing toward her. Becoming a bluish dot casting a stretching slender shadow of a person splitting the length of sidewalk to reach her feet.

  The shadow marches for almost a minute though coming no closer, it’s head only wavers back and forth over her worn shoes. She looks away from the raw daylight to cool her watering eyes in the fleeing night's blues behind her. Only then, when looking away is it quiet enough for her to hear the dragging heels of the shadow marching toward her. Giving this a minute of thought, she resigns to not knowing how or why, instead enjoying a moment of rest for her restless senses.

  “Hello!” she shouts into the silence of night. Away from the rushing of asphalt gushing as water, and the deafening roar of matter violently evaporating into a sunlit wave breaking through the stratosphere. Destructions descends high rises rendering them into vertical avalanches of vapor, absolving anything around them in existence from atomic form. Anna looks down to see the shadow now crisply crossing the ground just below her. She turns back toward the sun blurred silhouette of a blue suited man standing only a few yards away, on the other side of the street with the heels of beaten brown shoes barely on the edge of the curb. Though he’s facing her, his face is as featureless as the other side of the moon. Disheveled in dress and demeanor, his shirt is half tucked into his pants, his ill fitting blazer’s missing buttons, and not sitting well over his shoulders. Drowning, no matter where he stands, in the air of a carelessly gambling vagrant, weighing the odds of wagers far greater than for casino chips.

  “Hello!” she shouts, but the blue silhouette doesn’t budge. ‘He can’t hear me,’ she thinks and turns to shout again into the quiet of the night.

  “Ahh,” she yelps.

  “Wonderful isn’t it?” he asks, sitting comfortably atop a salmon painted postal box. His pale face is standing out against his suit, that seamlessly matches the deep blue of fading night.

  “How did you get there, from back there? she asks afraid.

  “Magic,” he says whimsically, through a Midwest accent she can’t quite place or time.

  “Magic?”

  “Yeah magic?” he says, which she reads as sarcasm, though his tone is sincere.

  “Oh,” she says eyeing him suspiciously.

  “No, not really. I ran around you when you looked away,” he says, taking his hands from his pockets. His presence projects a disconcerting gravitas, like the feeling of a speeding truck passing on the highway, especially when he's still and silent, like now.

  “Can I bother you to take a step to the left, the sunlight’s killing me,” he says. Anna takes one step to her right, blocking the sunlight from his face with the shadow of her head, though also hiding it from her eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Ahem,” he clears his throat “Wonderful isn’t it?” he asks again.

  “What is?” she shivers through her teeth, unsure of the unrealism prevailing

  around her, or if she’s speaking to a man or a ghost.

  “Well, everything you see, feel around you, of course, and the melodies.”

  “The melodies!? All I hear is a horrible roar,” she says of the noise that's chilling her to her core with its vacuous howl and crunches louder then thunder.

  “Yeah. The melodies of this Alto's sublimation. That’s what I’m hearing, I’m looking right at it, over there, over your shoulder. You, you’re hearing only the sound of my voice to the sight of silent night,” he says.

  “Well, yeah but I think you know what I mean,” she smiles, liking his animated way of moving when speaking.

  “I guess,” he shrugs “I guess you mean the leaves of trees spilling like ink when leaving their branches. The traffic lights popping like kernels of corn in a kettle” he takes a deep breath, “all the city's glass is molten, moving like heated wax, sweet as honey to the sense of sight. As is most of this Alto by now, bubbling out, bursting at its seams into an upside down hurricane raining from below, up to the ether above. Draining every surface into a sea of swelling amber, splendidly rendering this rendition of a reality into a rolling wake in want of its own destroyer… that sundered sun up there,” he says moving his arms in melody with his mouth, as though the conductor of his words., then pointing up.

  “That's insane,” she says struck by his delight in the destruction of everything she knows, and of what she thinks is possible.

  “Hmm. What? No. You’ve seen the anomalous clocks? right?” He asks.

  “The streetlamp things...yeah, I ran through them. I think. What did you say they were? anomalous clocks, is that a real thing?”

  “Yeah, you just said you ran through them.”

  “Good point,” she says.

  “They're like leaves blowing in a parking lot compared to what's happening all around us,” he says again pointing up.

  “Oh damn.”

  “What?” she asks.

  “I got here late.”

  “Got here late?” She asks already wary of him. His speaking coyly and grandly gesturing hands remind her of the dancing man in the black and white musicals she'd watch as a child on her grandmother’s floor.

  “Yeah, there was a delay on the rail. It’s a nice enough Alto though, was, is, isn’ting, I guess. So what weather did you come for?” he asks.

  “Alto...what in the world is an Alto?” she asks.

  “What in the world is an Alto?” he asks looking as bewildered as she.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Are you nuts lady? this place, anywhere you are, where you are aware, every place that is, that one can be, is an Alto,” he says glaring at her as though only she is mad amidst the mayhem unfolding all around them.

  “Do you smell roasting nuts?” she shouts, then covers her mouth like she cursed.

  “Hahahaha. Yes, I do. It's the smell of this in plain sublimating in slow motion into that wave over there. It’s sweet to the nose. Where did say you were from again?”

  “Where am I from? Here, though I’m not really sure where I am at the moment?” she mumbles.

  “This isn’t the time for that existential stuff. This is all like a street light remember, a finite one. So you’re saying the Alto you’re from is here?” he asks pointing down.

  “Here,” she says insistently.

  “Right here?”

  “Right.”

  “Right, you’re mad, your head has left your skull,” he replies. She sniffles, looking away. Not minding he's made no sense, but instead incensed by his insistence that the reality she knows as home is in fact amassing into the massive wave of vapor ascending through the atmosphere behind her. That she isn’t just imagining it. Turning her head enough for him to glimpse her eyes blaring red in the raw daylight, dripping onto her flustered face. He reads her expression as honest to her words effect. Realizing she isn’t here for a show, but is actually from here, and he just told her, her Alto, everything she knows as real, is in fact vanishing from its existence.

  “From here? that's...odd, real odd, you should’a been swept away with everything else,” he says, rubbing his chin to a sniffle from her.

  “That's odd? just that? nothing else?” she asks.

  “No. Just that. The rest is pretty much what the guy said it would be.”

  “What guy?”

  “Just a guy from the rail stop,” he says as his lighter sparks to light his smoke, and splash his face in a yellowed glow. Showing a boyish alabaster face peppered with pockmarks and the blemishes of scratching chickenpox as a child. Hav
ing half awake sunken slate blue eyes with perpetually staring wizened pupils under pitch black half heartedly greased back hair. His face in her shadow seems to her like seeing the dark side of the moon unmasked, spreads a smile across her otherwise dismayed face.

  “I, ah, don't , I…,” she stammers. “It's everything I know... Why is this happening?”

  “Like I said, it’s a ni…,” he watches her struck still as her mind is boils over with fear and panic. She descends into frantic muttering of broken thoughts leaving when she tries to speak them.

  “Wait! you said you came here,” she sputters.

  “Ahhh, yes, to see the, uh, chaos, choreography of the cosmos and microcosms of this metropolis becoming the um, breeze. Weather chasing, is kind of a hobby,” he says.

  “Okay sure, how did you get here then? you say you’re not from here, is what you said right? so then how?”

  “I took the InterAltos” he says. Her blank stare makes him sure she has no idea what he's talking about.

  “A train. I took the InterAlto of course. You know the amber rails, the plain train?...You really are from around here, huh?” he says, embarrassedly.

  “YES! and what in the world are you talking about?” she shouts a foot from his nose. He sighs, flicking his finished smoke, that she watches float slowly into the featureless depth twenty feet beside her, that has been following her everywhere from where she came. He steps into her line of sight to ease their eyes from straining to see each other. Standing calmly against the shadowless black backdrop behind him, and her against the morning lit scene of the city, collapsing and churning into a sunlit wave ascending higher than the sky. Ignoring the weather he claims he came to experience, to see plain as day that the girl's shaken up, shivering in her pink hoodie while biting her bottom lip white, afraid. Her dilated darting eyes are brimming with a mad glare, as though each are breached dam’s barely holding back a flood of hysteria. She vainly struggles not to appear as she feels, terrified, trying to hide her sniffling and sobs by dodging the stare of his slate blues.