by Gary Fry
“Listen, I’m taking a massive risk here,” she said in a forceful whisper, holding out one hand and showing him the things she held, glittering in moonlight from the window. “I’ve just stolen the keys from the guard, who’s sleeping in the lobby. Come on, I’m going to help you escape.”
9
“Hey, what about me?” asked the man from the next room, and when Daryl, after exiting his own cell, turned to look through the exposed panel in the door opposite, he saw the other prisoner for what he was: just an ordinary guy with the bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker.
“You’ll have to stay here, I’m afraid,” the girl replied, and then instructed Daryl, with a finger over her lips, to remain quiet as possible as they crept back out of this place.
“But I’m not a killer!” the man called again, much louder this time, so that his voice resounded along the lengthy, lamp-lit passageway.
After reaching the end of the corridor, where the guard sat slumped in his seat and snoring in a decidedly undisciplined manner, Daryl glanced back at the out-of-earshot drunk and quietly asked the girl, “Is he guilty of murder?”
“Of course he isn’t! He’s just the local scapegoat, an easy target. His only crime is that he can’t resist a drink now and again.” She hesitated, scowling sadly, but then finished, “Believing that we have the killer under lock and key makes most of us feel secure.”
“But…why do you need to feel secure? What happened here?”
“Ssshh. I’ll try and answer your questions later. But first we have to escape.”
“Escape…from where?”
“The village, stupid,” the girl replied, and started leading him across the darkened lobby, beyond the sleeping guard from whom she’d stolen the prison keys, and then out into the dark where only shadows stirred and unseen creatures rustled among all that strange vegetation.
Just then, Daryl recalled the animal he’d seen in that perimeter strip of woodland earlier, how it had been severed neatly in half, as if by a vicious weapon. Was this the kind of act residents here regarded as murder? Or had the official threesome who’d dealt with him meant something more serious—the death of people, perhaps?
Following the girl across the road and toward a stretch of land occupied only by a small graveyard, Daryl asked another question that had begun to trouble him.
“When you said we must escape, what did you mean? That…you’re coming with me?”
“Too fucking right I am,” the girl snapped back, her voice as thoroughly undisciplined as her body now was. As she crossed the neatly ruled road, she clenched her fists and pumped her arms. “This place is hell on earth, you know—a real drag. And I want to see some life. I want to have some fun.”
Something about this ambition unsettled Daryl, especially as it seemed to involve him helping the girl after they’d fled the village together…but this issue, as significant as it felt, was immediately superseded by a new realization: footsteps resounded in their wake, a whole collection of them, each clipped and speedy like some rigorously drilled military advance.
Someone—no, many someones—was giving chase.
“Quick, follow me,” said the girl, and promptly changed direction, heading through the graveyard’s tall stone entrance before darting between its innumerable headstones.
Daryl followed with docile obedience, raking his glance left and right. Between many of the tombs, he saw more of that unsettlingly symmetrical vegetation, multiple trees, plants and clusters of razor-edged weeds. But then, suppressing implications about all he’d learned and experienced lately, he simply kept his head down and barreled on close to the girl’s heels. He just wanted to be away now, free from this sickeningly weird place.
Nevertheless, the closer he drew to the far side of the graveyard, the more curious he felt himself becoming, to such a degree that by the time they’d reached a perimeter stone wall, both panting with exhaustion, he looked at his impromptu guide and said, “You have to tell me what happened here. I need to know who was murdered. Before we go any farther, can you please explain?”
Even though that clatter of approaching footsteps continued along all the paths behind them, the girl hesitated, her hands gripping Daryl’s arms as raw emotion tore across her tender face. Then she drew a sharp breath and began to tell him what he wanted—no, needed—to know.
“Three young men have disappeared in the last year. I knew all of them personally. But only one body has ever turned up. He was killed, his throat ripped open in a…in a vicious slash. Like the kind a butcher’s blade makes. It was horrible.”
At that moment, Daryl recalled the perfectly straight cut sustained by that oversized animal he’d found on the other side of the village, the one that had severed it into two equal portions. Then he remembered thinking that this terminal wound looked as if it had been caused by a non-bestial entity…and maybe that was true, after all. Perhaps a person had committed this brutal act, but surely it could be nobody living here. He understood why the residents had suspected the local drunk, the only one among them all considered undisciplined. Indeed, who else would resort to such antisocial behavior? This place thrived on orderliness, on a rigorous suppression of pleasure; Daryl had observed this in the bodies of the four people who’d locked him in that prison cell. Each of them had clearly been alarmed by his mounting fears and by how these concerns had been expressed by his autonomous body. Then, in unwitting response, their own frames had become little more than geometric representations, presumably resulting in a more exacting perspective that had made Daryl assume a similar form to the creature he’d observed inside the other room: an insubordinate riot of flesh and bone, an organic travesty dictated by such precision-informed points of view.
All these new insights flooding his startled mind, Daryl glanced up to observe the girl standing beside him, still bathed in glistening moonlight. She looked heartbreakingly human, her face uncommonly pretty yet very real. Her body possessed a bullish comportment that belied its perfect shape and form. She continued holding on to him with a needy hand, and this made him feel uncomfortable…and yet so alive. His girlfriend had always had a similar impact on him, her attractive face and slender body frequently distracting him from his important work. Much less could be achieved once desire was indulged; Daryl knew that well from personal experience and all his research. But he’d uncritically subscribed to this notion for as long as he could remember, reaching way back into his overly disciplined childhood. And now he realized that what truly frightened him were the destabilizing effects of ever yielding to such primal feelings. It wasn’t about being merely distracted at all; it was about getting hurt.
“We have to go,” the girl said, leaping over the perimeter wall into a large, dark field beyond it. Continuing to stare at her, burgeoning passion still writhing inside him, Daryl heard an insidious sound from the graveyard behind, a rapid flurry of faltering footfalls so close they were now scary. The posse of followers had clearly just arrived, all eager to prevent the departure of yet another of their strange breed.
Maybe the two missing young men had simply fled the village. That made psychological sense to Daryl; after all, much research had showed that males possessed far more recklessness than females, a stubborn impetus to overcome restrictions. Then, realizing that he’d always channeled such powerful feelings into his academic pursuits, Daryl turned away from the girl, dreading the imminent sight of the figures now encroaching his way. But only moments later, once he was in full view of the group, moonlight did its timeless work, illuminating his onlookers with unforgiving starkness.
A mathematician would surely be more successful at working out which of the people he’d already met in the village was represented by which complex combination of rudimentary shapes. There were about ten of the figures, and each one boasted only a broad disc for a head, each of which had circles and triangles serving as their facial features, the whole made out of the same kind of weird grayish metal. The necks were little more than vertical bars fa
shioned from the same abstract substance, while the torsos resembled squares attached to symmetrically organized rib cages. The arms and legs were intricately connected oblong pipes, flexing and folding at the rudimentary joints with a master machinist’s precision. Flat feet, bristling with rigid toes, brushed aside clusters of grass, whose blades were green parallelograms poking out from earth so compact it looked perfectly flat, like a horizontal plane ruled on a meticulous draughtsman’s drawing board.
This group of virtual people nodded as, slowly but surely, they edged closer to Daryl. He thought one of the figures—a woman judging by small cones protruding from her boxlike chest—smiled with determination, but the narrow line underscoring a slash of a nose and two oval eyes might also denote a sinister grimace. Few of the others gave much more away in terms of their emotional orientation to this situation, and simply moved forward, their unreal limbs strutting with something like stop-gap animation as their hands reached out like bundles of carefully coordinated rods.
Daryl backed away, feeling the rough wall chafe his spine. Then he turned to see the girl charging across the field. Panicked and bewildered, he quickly climbed over the stone obstacle, dropping to the other side, and then began to run. His sudden resolve was upheld when he heard all those stenciled entities, those basic templates of humanity, step up their collective assault from behind.
He’d got as far as the girl, standing at the heart of the field, when that violent sensation returned, the one he’d experienced after first approaching this bizarre village. He recalled what he’d suffered earlier, as if he’d been pitched up and down while perched on a seesaw, but now, wiser to the phenomenon, he quickly backed away, refusing on this occasion to let it claim dominion over him. Perhaps the girl had already tried pushing through this spectral barrier, this unseen veil concealing her native locale, and had failed to do so, possibly because of some residents’ curse, a quirk of disciplined flesh and bones indoctrinated at birth… Whatever the truth was, as Daryl glanced briefly back to see all those geometric figures clambering the graveyard wall, he felt a warm hand placed on one of his arms again.
“Take me with you,” said the young woman, her voice a beguiling combination of fear and desire. Whatever few traces of her former exacting status remained, she was trying very hard to destroy them. “I want to experience life, in all its exquisite and painful variations. I want to love. I want to be thrilled. I want to be sad. I want to be frightened. I want to be hurt.” She hesitated for a second, but only to draw breath. Then, in a voice that made Daryl tremble with all its irrepressible humanity, she added, “I want what you have—out there in the real world.”
She pointed beyond that invisible curtain of disorienting material. Daryl glanced in that direction at once, his body a confused stew of riotous emotion. But then, still feeling the girl’s hand clamped hotly to one arm, he noticed that a figure had appeared up ahead, stomping across from the far side of the field, clearly headed their way. This newcomer held his attention for quite a long time, and that was possibly why, having just examined all those rudimentary shapes in the other direction, he perceived it to be so bestial. Indeed, the oncoming entity made the drunk Daryl had observed back in the village’s prison look positively tame by comparison.
The thing moving closer appeared hideously monstrous, its flesh thoroughly expanded to become a beast’s bristling hide. Its limbs had lengthened, now terminating in great glistening claws; it roared like a tiger in a tempestuous rage, its face a hideous composite of flaring nostrils and billowing cheeks. It thudded across the grass, its bloated feet ripping up huge chunks of turf, and when it grew close enough to be illuminated by the wan moonlight, its eyes glowed with a predator’s keenness, its mouth salivating with unquenchable appetite.
Daryl grew transfixed and terrified in equal measure…but nonetheless understood what he observed. He’d seen enough today to inform a rapid scientific conclusion, even one generated only in his head.
He gazed quickly away, back at the girl, who’d also begun losing some of her natural human form. In his peripheral vision, he saw all of those angular figures approaching, each of their limbs pumping like precision-made instruments. Then he glanced down at his own body, one arm of which the girl’s newly transformed animal flesh continued to grasp with desperate neediness.
And that was when, perhaps in direct response to his companion’s repeated cry of, “Please take me with you,” Daryl started to assume a geometrical form.
One of his hands had already been altered, and then it flinched back from the girl’s undisciplined intimacy. The physical transformation had now extended beyond his wrist, pledging to turn his whole arm into little more than a lengthy trapezium, its base material abstract and unreal.
Then Daryl, trying to communicate through the tightening slit of his mouth, wanted to say something to the effect of, “But my work is too important…I simply have to spend so much time alone and channel all my passion into research…I’m struggling to understand the human condition, after all…”
But his words came out stillborn, because that was when an awful truth, lying nebulous in his mind and unlike any logical notion he’d ever processed, forced him to pull free of the girl, turning away from those approaching human facsimiles, and then glance again at that hideous creature lumbering beyond the ethereal veil up ahead.
“I can’t give you what you need,” he told the girl, his once-again fleshy mouth allowing his words clear expression. He observed her face fall in abject disappointment, beginning to lose a little of its all-too-brief bestiality and assume the same angular contours of all her emotionless peers. “I can’t change in the way you’d like me to, not so quickly anyway. I’ve…I’ve always been too disciplined.”
And then, snatching his gaze away from the now geometrically reconfigured girl, he flung himself headlong through that spectral gateway, fleeing a place in which he’d survived for as long as it had taken him to learn a stark, fundamental truth about his unnaturally reserved life.
10
The next thing he knew he was being manhandled, held aloft so high he needn’t try moving himself. His surroundings appeared dim and blurred, which suggested that he’d collapsed after passing through the weird gateway separating the village from the rest of the chaotic world. But who was now carrying him?
Seconds or maybe even minutes later, he was dropped onto a surface with the unmistakeably soft feel of a mattress. Then he snatched open his eyes, trying to stabilize so many fractured smears of color around him, in the hope of perceiving solids there. He spotted somebody—a very large somebody, dressed in a voluminous skirt and a baggy blouse made of thick material—headed swiftly away for a doorway, through which they’d both presumably entered, the huge woman hoisting Daryl in a fireman’s lift.
This notion was disturbing—a woman carrying a man violated traditional gender stereotypes—and clashed with all his previous experience, unfailing logic raising an alarm. Nevertheless, there the truth stood, stark and bold. The figure he’d seen in that field, a monster bursting out beyond its own flesh and bone to rampage with inarguable anger, must have hauled him back to her home, only superficially appearing like an ordinary farming woman, helping out a stranger who’d suffered much hardship lately.
Although this interpretation troubled him, Daryl was soon asleep, exhaustion arising from his recent activities tugging him down, down, down…
…where he dreamed about mathematical figures, rudimentary approximations of humanity, lurching toward him and then combining with others, the collective mass of them taking on an unprecedentedly disturbing form. Squares, triangles, circles and many other shapes—all conspired together, quickly assuming the colossal figure of a rudimentary prehistoric animal, its geometrically exact teeth gnashing and precise claws tearing, as it used its giant, symmetrical feet to stomp on puny vehicles and kick over mere houses…
But then Daryl awoke again.
His mind much clearer now, he glanced around to observe the
bedroom in which he’d been left and given a bed to regain strength. It boasted a pleasant if functional décor, the kind he’d always favored in his Leeds flat and which Frederique was forever trying to alter. If his girlfriend had her way, he’d have to buy velveteen curtains and fine striped wallpaper, brass doorknobs and deep cornices… But none of that was his style. He was far from ostentatious, and despite all his latest experiences, he knew there was little point in trying to modify such a hardwired character.
After sitting up, his thoughts loaded with a troubling dissonance, he heard a sound from elsewhere in the building.
He pushed back the duvet and then stood from the bed, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn while visiting that strange village, whose events now seemed like some surreal dream. Then he stepped across to the window and nudged aside the hardwearing curtains hanging there, keeping out a night full of tattered cloud and uncertain moonshine. Across countless hills, he saw nothing more than fields studded by innumerable trees, each as reassuringly crooked as nature always intended. He felt a number of mental knots slacken inside his head, and after backing away from the glass, he decided to head for the doorway out, possibly to avail himself of further facilities here. Maybe the owner of the house possessed a landline telephone on which he could call for assistance with his transportation problem.
Although concussion or even mild delirium prevented his thoughts from achieving full coherence, he continued moving slowly through the house. The landing was little more than a dim passageway leading to a flight of steps covered in what felt like a sticky carpet underfoot. The woman living here must work too hard on her farm to be troubled by housework, and Daryl could certainly understand that. Getting by in life often involved dedication, even if this meant neglecting other people… Daryl found it difficult to figure out why, but he was now certain that the person occupying this sprawling, two-level home did so alone.