by Iain Scarrow
The stinging nettles lining the path, if you could call it a path, were four feet high, and Mark watched as John headed straight for them. He could feel his own feet sting inside his boots when he saw John’s bare feet trample through them as if they weren’t there.
He followed John, but stopped at the edge where John had created his own pathway though the nettles.
And God knows what beyond.
John was striding further away from him.
Don’t leave me alone out here.
“Isn’t there and easier way into all this?” he called out after John.
John stopped. “Sure, just around the side of that wall there.”
“Then why the hell didn’t…”
John looked at him. At least Mark thought that John was looking at him. It was growing so dark it was hard to tell.
Mark waved his arm down dismissively.
“Forget it, doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll find my own way, even it kills me.”
He kept his hands high above the stingy vegetation and walked around the side of a pile of rubble with bits of wall growing out of it that John had indicated was an easier way, and peered around the edge of what was left of it. He wanted to make sure that no one was waiting around there with an eye up to a gun sight just waiting for Mark’s head to appear like a convenient target.
Step after step he stumbled over hidden boulders. Stubbed his toes God knows how many times, and sent some of the boulders rolling. He even thought he could hear insects scurrying away from him in all directions.
Stuff with lots of legs and stings and glittery black eyes…
… and wings.
Something flew up and brushed against his face.
He screamed and flapped his arms around before losing his balance and taking a nosedive through thickets and briars.
“Shit!”
“Fuck!”
By the time he stopped jumping and scrapping unseen creepy crawlies off of his arms and face, he found John sitting on a moss covered log.
“Got a thing against moths or something?” John asked.
Mark stretched his neck and chin out, hooked a finger into his collar and gave it a shake.
Sure nothing was crawling over him now he said, “I’m a city boy.”
He stumbled over to John. Dried grass crackled under his feet as John ate his cold fries and sipped cold black coffee as if he was on a bar stool in MacDonald’s.
Mark looked at the moss John was sitting on.
What the fuck, why not?
He sat down beside him.
John kept on eating his fries. Mark looked out at nothing but wild green turning into blackness, wondering why the hell he was out there in the dark.
“Homogenous, isotropic, it’s the same here as it is there.”
Mark snapped his head around to John.
“What did you say?” he asked.
John swallowed. “Didn’t say anything,” he said.
(didn’t sound like John either)
“Is this the place where you found that weird plant pod thing?” Mark asked.
“Sort of,” John said.
Mark nodded. “Right.”
He looked down at John’s bare feet.
“Don’t you get sore feet walking around like that without shoes? Infections?”
“Nope,” John said.
“Okay,” Mark said. “This is all getting a bit monosyllabic. You sounded talkative enough on the phone, now it’s like pulling teeth. Care to tell me what’s going on?”
John rolled up the paper bag his fries had come in, and stuffed it into the empty coffee carton.
“I’m shy,” he said placing the stuffed coffee carton on top of the log.
“Yep,” Mark said. “And you picked a great time and place to tell me.”
“It’s talking face to face that gets to me. I always feel like I’m being pulled apart, interrogated.”
Mark took out his pack of cigarettes.
He was already turning back into a nicotine addicted pro.
“Mind if I?” he said around the unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
John shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me,” he said with a shrug, “but it might them.”
Mark’s eyes snapped wide, looked around. Now there were monsters everywhere.
“Who’s they?” he asked taking the unlit cigarette from his mouth.
“The plants,” John said.
“Christ, is that all?”
Mark lit up, breathed deep.
“So, where did you find it, the pod thing?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“I’m out here. I’ll believe anything.”
“Do you have one of those recorder things? I’ve seen reporters with them, talking into them.”
“I have,” Mark said. “I never use it though. I hate the damned thing. I prefer my notebooks, or,” he tapped at the side of his head, “this.”
“I just thought,” John said.
“What?”
“I could tell you the story into that.”
“I’d still be here listening to you recording it, though.”
John looked down, then up again.
“I mean borrow it, so I can talk into it,” he said turning to John, “on my own.”
17
“I need you to listen to something,” Mark said into his cell phone.
He was smoking more than ever, sitting in the dark, at his writing bureau, looking out at the night sky over the rooftops outside his window.
“It’s my night off,” the voice at the other end said.
“Please, Alex.”
“Okay, pick a bar.”
“No bars. My place.”
“Which sounds to me like a no fun zone. I’m a bachelor now, remember? A twice divorced scientist is about as appealing to women as a lab rat. I need some downtime from work, and I need women. Preferably unmarried, and who see beyond how ugly I am after they’ve had more than a few drinks.”
“It’s important.”
“It better be.”
“It’s about the pan scrubber guy.”
“Come again?”
“That fossil thing.”
“The living fossil?”
A little while later there was a knock at the door. Mark opened it. His old friend Alex Monroe stood on the landing with a big rubber grin on his face, and his hands full. “Microwave pizzas for later and a bottle of scotch for now,” he said.
“We think alike,” Mark said inviting Alex in.
Alex made himself comfortable on an armchair as Mark went to make them drinks. Ice clinked in the glass as he handed one to Alex.
“Your hands are shaking,” Alex said.
Mark sat down at the other side of the old coffee table.
He took a slug of whisky from his glass.
“It’s the closest thing I have to valium: Bourbon and Marlborough”
He popped a cigarette into his mouth and tried to light it, but the cigarette bobbed up and down so much the end of it vibrated and the flame from his lighter kept missing it
Alex watched, concerned.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he said “Something happened? Did someone die or something?”
Mark eventually got his cigarette to light, but then dropped the lighter on the coffee table sending it skittering off the other side and onto the floor.
Alex picked the lighter up and put it back on the table as Mark drew smoke in deep.
“Mark?”
Mark leaned forward, ran his fingers through his hair.
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” Alex asked.
Mark sat up, reached behind him and picked up the Dictaphone on his bureau, then placed it on the coffee table between them.
“You have one chance,” he said. “You can leave now and you won’t be any the wiser. But if you stay, it’ll change everything. It will change you forever.”
Alex looked at the Dictaphone.
“No,” Mark said with a nervous laugh. “It’s not a bomb.”
“Well, thank God for that,” Alex smiled leaning back.
“It’s worse,” Mark said pressing play. “Much, much worse.”