Turquoise Traveller

by David Griffin

  Two glowing figures advanced upon him. He froze where he was, his skin crawling from the startling sight of them. Then he attempted to get away by patting the wall and inching backwards in the blackness. Those mannequins without faces, lit as if from neon, were quickly upon him. They dragged him from the safety of the wall and along the tunnel. He could hear them breathing deeply with harsh, rasping inhalations and exhalations. Their grip either side of him was strong. As much as he struggled, he couldn’t be free of them.

  Further along, an area of the sewer glowed blue. The mannequins forced Stave into a wheelbarrow. After taking a handle of the barrow each, they pushed him forward into that blue glare.

  An agent of Tremelon stood over an open sarcophagus. On the sides of the sarcophagus were images of crabs, carved in relief. Along one wall stood blue lanterns on poles, casting the blue light. And along the opposite wall were rows of standing, open caskets, with a grey mannequin in each, their hands clasped together.

  ‘Ashes. To. Dust. Dust. To. Dirt. Dirt. To. Muck. Muck. To. Filth,’ the agent said, adjusting his mask, a series of visages appearing upon it, one after the other. He indicated with one of his crab claw hands and the mannequins tipped Stave unceremoniously from the wheelbarrow onto the floor’s blue bricks.

  ‘Don’t. Stand. Up,’ the agent said in his guttural and staccato voice.

  Rather than be on the floor, Stave did as he was asked, brushing himself down, although his turquoise suit and leather shoes were still immaculate.

  Straight away the two mannequins – who had pushed the wheelbarrow – manhandled him over to the sarcophagus. One pushed him in the back, the other lifted one of his legs, both attempting to tip him into it. As the sarcophagus filled with squirming snakes, the bottom of it gave way and the serpents fell downwards into a dark void.

  ‘Yes, I know what you want me to do,’ Stave cried out, ‘but I’m not going to do it.’

  Trepidation had overtaken him but he knew he must get away. He wheeled around and ran as fast as he was able from the stone sarcophagus and its nightmarish creatures, into the semi-darkness ahead.

  Further on there was a ladder set in the side of the sewer wall. He heard the mannequins clattering after him. Stave went to it and climbed up as quickly as he could. Set in the ceiling was a trapdoor. He was certain it would lead him to another chapter of a nightmare journey. But he had no choice. He pushed on the trapdoor and it opened easily.

  32 : EMPTY STREETS OF DESOLATION

  Stave climbed up and out of the trapdoor onto floorboards of an empty room. The floorboards were made of cardboard. There was no door. However, there was a window without a pane of glass, set in one of the mildew-covered cardboard walls. With suspicion, he looked out of the paneless window to an empty street of a desolate town. Brown tenement buildings were there in rows, some standing three or four stories high. Rooftops in the distance showed light brown chimney stacks, higher buildings poked above the dismal tenements. The steeple of a church and the tops of a museum and other corporate buildings could be seen; all of them made from murky, brown cardboard.

  Chiming of a clock, its bells sounding as if a recording played backwards.

  He climbed through the window, dropping down onto a cardboard pavement.

  The cardboard road was pitted with holes and jagged gashes, and covered with puddles of a blue, tar-like liquid. Human hearts made of stone were scattered upon it, chipped or broken. Now the sound of barking from afar, like coughing but reversed, wild and animal-like. The sky was grey with an endless repetition of stormy clouds slowly drifting like billows of fog. All was sucked of life. An air of deadness and coldness and despair, every building and street seemingly deserted and abandoned. A tenseness hung in the atmosphere like an unseeable mantle, with a formidable grip over the barren environment.

  Despair all around. A cloying atmosphere, seeming to clot my blood even, so sluggish do I feel. Fright overtaking too, though I’m not certain why I should be frightened of empty cardboard tenements.

  Stave walked with suspicion along one of the brown and lifeless pavements, noticing details like cardboard doors, with cardboard door knockers and letterboxes, and cardboard window frames. Some of those were boarded over with more cardboard, others without glass or covering of any kind. Plain brown cardboard lamps lined the pavement. A cardboard bike lay abandoned in the rutted road.

  Why does this town seem familiar? Perhaps I do know it well; maybe it’s another memory deleted from my mind.

  The imposing street was long. The cardboard buildings either side seemed to lean inwards as if about to fall in and crush him.

  One four-storey tenement block had cardboard railings fronting it. Stave could see undefined shapes moving beyond the cardboard window frames. He was transfixed awhile until he tore his sight away to glance up to a direction sign on a cardboard post. It read, “To the Square”. Stave turned in the direction of the arrow, and once through a forbidding and shadowy cardboard alley, came out into the grey light of the municipal square.

  33 : DISCOVERING THE LOST CUTOUTS

  Brown cardboard shops with cardboard offices above, cardboard kiosks and larger buildings, dominated each side of the square. In the centre stood a sizeable cardboard fountain, the water in its base turned to grey sludge. Cardboard street lamps were about it, casting a blue light.

  There were scores of cardboard cutouts of people standing across the square, with crude grey paint for faces and clothes. Some of those cutouts, still articulated at the joints, twitched or flinched as though attempting movement. Others stood, flat, around cardboard steps leading to a plinth. A cardboard statue stood upon the plinth, disfigured with grey paint. A few of the cutouts were attempting to fold themselves into cardboard boxes. Others tried to speak, weird utterances coming from their downturned, painted mouths of ‘te-te-te’, ‘mm-mm-mm’ and ‘zz-zz-zz’. Their mumbles together sounded like a nest of flies or a hive of bees.

  Stave bowed his head with sorrow. These were captured spirits, sucked of life. Emptied souls, those which had been as clear as cut glass, now dulled, shattered and defiled. Beings seemingly beyond help or rescue.

  Once a fine town with fine people…

  On one side of the square stood a tall building, and had it been made of granite blocks, would have been imposing. Nonetheless, even made of cardboard, with its high, fluted columns and massive double doors, it was impressive.

  Above the columns, scrawled in untidy grey paint, were the words “Public Library”. Directly opposite, on the other side of the heart-strewn and cardboard cutout-populated square, stood an identical building, except its words, painted as though in haste on the cardboard beam on top of the pillars, read “Town Hall”.

  Behind, towering above the grim cardboard town, stood a plain-sided grey box – a warehouse, magnificently huge, as tall as a mountain, wreathed with dark grey clouds at its squared-off summit. Blue smoke emitted from its many open windows. The whole of the massive warehouse, forbidding and eerie, quivered and shook now and then as though shivering with cold. Grating, scraping and deep rasping noises from it moved down the lonely cardboard streets as if made by an invisible beast in search of prey.

  Stave felt a load upon him, as though a mighty weight had been placed over his head and shoulders. He must escape its oppressive presence: he ran up the cardboard steps of the library and pushed on one of the cardboard doors.

  34 : RECEPTION TO THE NIGHTMARE

  He entered into an oval reception hall, high and wide, with grand pillars which once had been chiselled marble, and panels on the curving wall. They had all been turned into mottled cardboard. A grey and blue coral-like crust spread over some of the walls like a diseased rash.

  He went up to the cardboard reception desk, a lamp on it projecting a grey pool of light. An agent of Tremelon stood behind the desk. His funereal mask was like that of a young woman with eyes closed, even mouth, and nostrils dilated. Stave was unsure whether or not to trust this abominable person; he walked f
urtively up to him.

  ‘Table. Not. For. One,’ the agent stated in a strangled female voice.

  ‘Don’t take your mask off to open your despicable eyes then I’ll talk to you,’ Stave said. His voice echoed strangely. The agent merely nodded. Stave continued, ‘Where is Tremelon Zandar?’

  ‘You. Won’t. Know,’ the agent said, the eyes on his mask opening slightly before closing again.

  ‘I know? So my hunch is correct; I’m getting nearer.’

  The agent’s guttural, animal-like reply: ‘You’ll. Find. Him. He’ll. Never. Find. You.’

  ‘I’ll never find him, he’ll find me – well, we’ll see.’

  Do we tremble at repellant sights, a turning from them being the only purging? At those words, the agent partly removed his mask by pulling down with a clawed hand, to expose the eyes underneath. Those deep-set eyes flicked open. Metal serpents’ heads looked out from the eye sockets, with their forked tongues flickering.

  Stave’s head and sight whipped away but this was no purgative, the image still fresh in its grim form. He felt an oppressive, ugly pain with energy drawn from his third eye, heart, and solar plexus. He clamped his teeth tightly, his limbs losing strength. The coral-like encrustations about him on the walls gained density, each floret multiplying, filaments of blue spawning at a fast rate and sparking like incarnadine fireflies. The cardboard tiles on the floor began to undulate and Stave felt as sick as if on a rough sea journey. The agent of Tremelon began to remove the rest of the mask and dread gripped Stave’s mind as tightly as if a vice were squeezing his brain.

  My head hurting so much. Please be correct, Cassaldra, let dream logic be simple…

  In slow-motion, the movement painfully difficult to manage, he moved his right hand to the inside pocket of his jacket, taking hold of the mirror and the magnifying glass. He enlarged the mirror while blue smoke emitted out of the metallic serpents’ jaws coming from the agent’s eyes. Stave, still gripped with horror and depletion of energy, lifted the mirror up with the last of his strength.

  Instantly, with a backwards hacking cough of a sound, the serpents retracted to leave empty eye sockets. The agent hurriedly placed back the mask, the face upon it now that of an old man, fine wrinkles about the relaxed mouth and on the forehead, eyelids closed in peaceful rest.

  ‘Don’t. Go. Through,’ the agent said in a guttural voice.

  ‘I shall then,’ Stave answered, recovering his composure. He reduced the mirror in size before putting in back into a pocket. Then he walked across the cardboard floor tiles to the side of the desk, out of the grey spotlight, over to another set of cardboard double doors, and pushed.

  35 : KNOWLEDGE TURNED TO CARDBOARD

  He came into an inner lobby. A cardboard screen ahead of him, reaching from ceiling to floor, made the fourth wall.

  Impressive statues were set in alcoves, both at least fifteen feet height. On the left side, the imposing statue of a man stood, his cloak made of cardboard. And on the right, a carefully rendered sculpture of a woman sat in repose, wearing a cardboard gown. The man pointed to his head while the woman pointed to her heart. Both were defaced with graffiti scrawled in grey paint.

  What entrapment now? What talents needed to escape the conspiring confines of another bad dream, the lobby seemingly innocuous but foreboding all the same? Deeper into the mind of Tremelon as a prisoner, energies depleting.

  The statues either side of him burst into flames.

  Stave pushed the cardboard wall as a way of escape but it felt as solid as if made of bricks and mortar. He turned around again but the door through which he had entered from the reception hall had vanished. In its place, an oil painting hung, showing the cottage with the stark landscape as its background.

  He heard a babble of voices coming from the cardboard screen. They rose to a crescendo of gabbling, then to whispers, and back again to full volume. Interspersing this was orchestra music playing in balanced unison, only to degenerate into a raucous row as if they were all tuning their instruments at the same time, before slowly evolving to melodic music again. The whole creating a sea of sounds, waves of them ebbing and flowing in loudness and quality.

  The cardboard screen split into two and opened slightly.

  ‘Welcome! We are the true oasis in the desert, the refuge from the storm. I’ll be your head waiter,’ said a man from the interior who had wheeled up to him on a skateboard.

  Welcome to more confusion, you mean.

  ‘Your eyes. What’s happened to them?’ Stave asked, taken aback.

  The man had empty sockets where eyes used to be.

  ‘What do you mean, sir? I can see perfectly well. Grey and the blue. Vivid, blood red soon. I’m noticing your aura is dimming – excellent, you are giving up, sir. Good man, bad man, sir.’

  Stave caught sight of the interior behind him, consisting of rows of high bookcases filled with brown books, balconies above with the same.

  ‘Let me show you to your dream table,’ the head waiter continued, ‘before you burn to death. That’s not the death we want now, is it? We want a proper death. Full à la carte, will it be? We have coppered fish steaks in battered wine curds, simple beef custard with semolina tartlets, to name a few. The speciality of the day is liver cakelets in meringue sauce. Especially delicious at celebration time.’ He gave a pleasant, broad smile before handing Stave a menu. ‘You’ll find the wine list on your table, sir. We have all rarities – finely strained, minuet and mortified amongst others. Choose to your delight. A fine suit you are wearing, I must say. Turquoise, isn’t it, so I’ve been told. That’s my favourite colour. Interesting choice. We’ve been expecting you. Your last ever meal, sir?’

  ‘I’m not certain I understand you. Is this your dream or one given you by Tremelon Zandar?’

  ‘No, no, surely, sirness, this is yours. Have you bought your book?’

  ‘My book? What book?’ Stave replied. ‘Please hurry, this fire is getting hotter.’

  ‘You’ve come to the public library dinner service without your book? Tut, tut, sir. We’ll have to check your validity here.’ Then there was the ticking of a clock and the sound of the head waiter’s breathing in and out. He distorted his lips to a vaguely absurd expression, his eyebrows raising and lowering in time to the timepiece. ‘One moment please, while I check with the management who checks the management.’

  He skated away through the gap in the cardboard screen.

  Stave followed, away from the heat of the burning statues, into the large hall with balconies and bookcases.

  As the gentle tinkering of a piano emanated throughout the library, the bookcases creaked, sounding as if from some wooden sea vessel in a gale.

  36 : FEASTERS OF THE DREAM

  Along each aisle of bookcases at floor level, as well as the three balconies, stood rows of tables with turquoise tablecloths over them. Upon each table were cardboard plates and cutlery, and a candelabra holding candles that gave out a greyish light. Diners sat, dressed in their finest clothes, up to ten per table. As Stave entered, they immediately ceased their loud and excited conversations. All turned their heads to him and stood, then clapped their hands enthusiastically. Even the waiters on skateboards, holding lidded trays, came to a standstill and patted their thighs, adding to the applause that began to set up a regular rhythm of its own.

  The cowbells about the diners’ necks rattled all at once. An agent of Tremelon stood at the end of each aisle, and they spoke at the same time.

  ‘Not. Welcome. To. Your. Heaven. Don’t. Dine. And. Live.’

  Now, imagined chinking from wine glasses made of cardboard by the guests.

  The constant rhythmic clapping began to echo in Stave’s head, pounding like a headache. The applause was insistent. On it went, that clapped rhythm, becoming more painful by the second.

  Please stop.

  He took the tiny metronome from a pocket of his turquoise suit pocket and enlarged it to proper size using the magnifying glass. He set the speed to
the beat of the claps then stopped it to adjust the speed to slow before started the metronome again. The clapping slowed to match it. He repeated the process, setting the metronome beat even slower until there was silence from them, other than the occasional single clap, murmur or self-conscious laugh.

  Each one of the innocent diners were in their own bubble of existence. One of them sensed he was feasting in the luxury carriage of a railway train, another on board a romantic yacht, yet another in a palatial palace. They were being fed cardboard. This they did not see: what they saw was fine cuisine, exquisite culinary formulations, and ultimate sensations on the tongue – superlative tastes with wondrous delight to their stomachs.

  The laughter and happy conversations from those on the library floors increased; the hidden orchestra played discordant notes again.

  Their souls being stolen by Tremelon Zandar, I see. They are easily manipulated before being turned into nothing more than cardboard. This place is to judge their reactions and resilience to nightmare. At the moment, they are in a wonderful lucid dream that they believe is their reward. Little do they know what’s in store for them.

  Wake up, he wanted to shout but knew it would be of no use. The diners were too deeply within their dream world which would be turning to nightmare.

  I have to carry on the journey, somehow. I need to save Cassaldra. And stop more souls from being stolen. Have to get out of here.

  ‘It. Is. Time,’ all the agents at the ends of the table said at once.

  Stave experienced a magnetic energy coming from under the first balcony. He staggered backwards into the lobby, resisting it. As he did so, the ground floor and the balconies of the library descended without sound, as if the library was a massive lift. That left a cavernous, dark space within a massive structure, the corners of it far above, lost in deep shadow.