by Hall, Andrew
‘Well that’s disappointing,’ she mumbled, folding the bottle top back over and tossing it down in the sand. ‘I wonder what this is,’ she said to the dragon, sitting down by the box. She heard his big eye blink open; glimpsed the white glow off to her left. It just felt good to have something there to talk to, to remind her that she wasn’t alone in the world. Tabitha pulled a belt out of the box and laid it on her lap, made of the same intricate grey metal as the harness on her ship’s saddle. There were two pieces of equipment attached to it, one on either side. She brought the belt around her waist to try it on. Just like the saddle harness the belt closed itself and adjusted to fit her. She admired its design in the sunlight, and her gaze went to the ribbon tied around her wrist. She paused for a moment, and wondered what her mum would make of her now. The thought of her was still raw in her mind; a wound that was never really going to heal. All she could do was carry on and survive. That’s what Mum would have wanted; what everyone would have wanted. Tabitha looked back down at her boxes of toys, trying to take her mind off everyone. The belt was quite beautiful really, she thought, for rubbery metal in murderous grey. She tried the object on the left of her belt, and the sheath gave up its contents readily like a firm grip loosening. It was a black combat knife; a thick handle and a cruel blade made from a single piece of engraved metal. The object on the right of her belt didn’t budge though; a solid block that wouldn’t open or detach despite her struggling. Tabitha sighed with disappointment and sheathed her knife, picking up her water bottle from the sand. The bottle stuck to the belt like a magnet, all very handy and survivalish.
The next case she opened revealed a collection of bright phials full of colourful liquids. She took one from its leathery slot and contemplated trying it, but unlike the water bottle these looked positively toxic. Having serious second thoughts, Tabitha slid the phial back into its holder, closed the case and gently set it aside. The last item in the first box was a tiny silver case with a white spider symbol on it. They must have been seeds. Tabitha felt a cold creeping dread and put the silver case back in the box. She really didn’t want to go opening the lid on those. Disappointed with her finds, she grabbed the black slab of padding to stuff it back into the box. It folded open in her hands as she pulled it from the sand. What was it, a sheet? A tent? Intrigued, she opened it out to see the full size of it.
‘It’s huge!’ she told the dragon, drowned in ribbed scaly cloth. Immediately the fabric shrank and jerked and wrapped itself around her body. Tabitha panicked as she felt it moving, fitting itself to her shape. She struggled against it and fell back in the sand, getting tailored against her will. The real shock came when a hood popped up over her head and sealed itself over her face, and she was looking around at the beach through fabric eye-scales that turned transparent. A respirator hissed in her mask; cool clear air to feed her panicked breaths. Claustrophobic, she felt around for a way to take the mask off. It felt tough, like scaled stretchy leather. She couldn’t get a decent grip on it. She patted her sides frantically, patted the suit, and the hood snapped back down into a round collar. She sighed with relief and looked around her. The dragon hadn’t bothered to look up from its sleep as she’d struggled. Tabitha looked down at her new alien catsuit and stretched out her arms, admiring the matte fabric. It was ribbed and scaled, raven-black. A good fit, like a second skin. She’d never seen material like it; it looked almost living. She pulled the fabric back from her hands and feet, and it shrank to fitted sleeves.
‘Magic flight suits too, why not?’ she said to herself. Feeling a little more impressed with her stash from the first box, Tabitha opened the second and found three sturdy cases inside. Each one had a glowing icon on it, like different plants. She opened them slowly to reveal loose seeds inside, large and alien-looking, but harmless enough for now. She was wary of planting them, but the temptation was overpowering. They could grow into anything for all she knew, good or bad. Or very bad. There was only one way to find out though.
Tabitha carted the box of seed cases across the beach and into the thick forest. She set it down in the clearing by the waterfall, and opened up the lid with a biting curiosity. She took a squishy white seed delicately from the first case and pressed it into the sandy soil, and trickled some water on it from her bottle. She did the same with a red seed and a black seed from the other cases, planting them in a row. She sat herself down to keep an eye on them, and inspected the box for some kind of alien instructions. A few minutes later, nothing had happened. Tabitha sighed and got to her feet. She’d expected some kind of rapid alien growth, like in a horror movie. She opened and closed the box lid a few times, growing impatient. Bored, she turned in a slow circle to watch a bright bird fluttering past. When she walked off she heard a little pop under her foot, like bubble wrap. She raised her sole up and saw a cracked husk in the soil. Another squishy white seed, oozing pearlescent fluid into the dirt.
‘Sorry,’ she said to the tiny white puddle. It must have fallen out of the case when she was planting the first one. But still, she was half expecting something to happen to it now; maybe cracking it open was the trick. A few minutes later though, still nothing. Tabitha left in a huff, traipsing back to the beach with the box in her hands. She’d never had any patience for keeping plants. Her dad had always been green-fingered, but Tabitha had inherited her mum’s short attention span. If only she’d made more time for green growing things when she was little, she said to herself; maybe she would’ve seen more of her dad in their short time together. If only she could have put up with the cobwebbed shed where he used to potter, or the stuffy heat in their little greenhouse where the sour smell of tomato plants clogged the air, maybe she might have known her dad better before he died. But she couldn’t think like that now, she told herself, lying back down beside her ship. There were too many people gone, and too much grief and regret already. There were too many raw memories, and she didn’t want to face them again so soon. They could wait, she told herself coldly. They had to wait, for the sake of her sanity.
Tabitha kept to the shade of the dragon’s wing to keep her pink sunburnt cheeks out of the sun. She tried again with the mystery object on her belt, the unyielding solid block, but still didn’t have any luck trying to move it. With the heat of the sun making her drowsy, and the warmth of the dragon’s dark skin behind her not helping a bit, Tabitha soon headed back off through the trees for a dip by the waterfall.
Dipping her head beneath the cold water in the pool, the tumbling waterfall above sounded like a muffled rush on the surface. She thought about the lake that she’d dropped into that night when she escaped, brown and murky and bitter, falling through the sky from a dragon’s foot. It seemed ridiculous now, just thinking about it. Escaping from the army and a tide of silver spiders; being chased across the hills in the pitch black night, by a dragon that was also a ship. Even better, hijacking a ship just like it after slaying a monster and then jetting off to paradise. Tabitha wished she could look back on it all and laugh at the madness of it, but it wasn’t funny. The syringes and scalpels and death-black terrors in her nightmares, they weren’t funny. Burrowing claws and hollow skins; burning flesh and screaming loved ones. They’d never leave her dreams. All she could do now was throw herself into her new life in the sun, trying to form a friendship with an alien creature just to take her mind off it all. Tabitha switched her thoughts off and stood up from the water, waist-deep. Smoothed her hair back, combing it with her claws, eyes closed against the rushing waterfall. She shook her head to empty out the flashbacks as the cold waterfall smacked down on her shoulders. Then she felt tentacles slide around her knees; resting their rubbery weight on her shoulders and feeling at her face. She opened her eyes, yelled at the thing in front of her and punched it away. It was a fleshy balloon the size of a football, clear as glass, with a mass of black tentacles hanging beneath it. The creature reeled away in shock, bobbing and floating off over the water, hovering away above the ground as quickly as it could. Its tentacles wi
ggled as it fled, dangling from a stump of a body that was frantically puffing jets of air. Cautiously Tabitha stepped out of the water as the creature retreated. She could see its distress.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to understand where the hell it had come from. She pulled her alien catsuit on slowly, so that her movements didn’t spook it any more. Its slender tentacles anchored it to a tree nearby, and the puffing holes on its vase of a body gasped and shut at a panicked pace.
‘I don’t want to hurt you, er, balloon-thing,’ Tabitha said softly. ‘You just shocked me, that’s all.’ She sat down on a rock by the edge of the pool, studying the strange creature with a quiet fascination.
‘You must have come from that seed, then,’ she said, as if she was making conversation with a stranger. It had no eyes to see her, and no ears to hear as far as she could tell. It just looked like someone had upturned a small fleshy goldfish bowl and plonked it down on some octopus limbs, and told it to go floating around for no apparent reason.
‘Guess you were just saying hello,’ Tabitha said gently, stepping a little closer. ‘Do you want some water, Fishbowl? Everything likes water. We all go mad crazy for the water.’ Tabitha cupped her hands together in the pool, and crept towards the creature with dripping fingers.
‘Water?’ she asked it softly, still wary of its gasping gills. The water dripped steadily from her hands while she waited, and slowly drained away. She had to try three more times before the creature was calm enough to show any interest.
‘That’s it,’ she said, stretching her arms out further towards it. Fishbowl waved a tentacle slowly towards the water in her hands. The tentacle tapped delicately at her fingers, and seemed satisfied with the metal skin it found there. It was strange; she could actually feel it tapping on her hands. She thought she’d lost all sensation there, until she felt the current in the dragon’s skin. Now she could feel the tapping tentacle tips as well. Electric fingerprints. She watched a tentacle dip down into the water in her cupped palms, and with a small draining sound it sucked every drop from her hands.
‘Someone’s thirsty,’ she said softly, watching the tentacle play along her fingers. She noticed how the creature drifted and swayed, like it was underwater. It was calming to watch, part plant and part sea creature; surreal and otherworldly. Before long Fishbowl had drifted past her back over the pool, and dipped its tentacles into the water to drink. Tabitha settled down on a rock to watch it, until it rose up and floated off through the trees towards the beach.
She didn’t know how it knew, but when she followed Fishbowl to the shore she found it tapping at the box of seeds from the ship. Obliging, Tabitha carefully opened up the seed cases. She watched Fishbowl dip its tentacles gently into two of them. It plucked three red seeds and three black, and then drifted off back through the trees to the waterfall. To her astonishment the creature found the two seeds she’d planted before and rooted them out from the soil, carrying them away to a better spot.
Following Fishbowl back to the ferny clearing, Tabitha saw it patting different patches of soil close to the pool. Deciding where to plant. She watched closely as it pushed the four red seeds into the ground in a neat row, each about two feet apart. With the greatest care it bent a tentacle towards the seeds and watered each one in turn, and patted the soil down around them with a feather’s touch. Tabitha watched, fascinated. She’d never seen so much gentleness in a creature. The four black seeds, Fishbowl planted all across the pool clearing. It pushed one into the dirt by the rock wall beside the pool, and one in the soil on the other side of the waterfall. The third seed it planted off by the forest to Tabitha’s right. The fourth was pushed into the soil up on the small cliff above, close to the rocky edge where the waterfall started.
‘You’re my gardener, then,’ Tabitha said with a smile, reaching out to Fishbowl as it drifted past. Its tentacles lifted up and gathered around her fingers as it drew close; tapping at her alien hands and pale human arms. Satisfied with Tabitha’s presence, Fishbowl drifted back through the trees towards the beach.
‘Whoa, let’s leave those ones for now,’ Tabitha called to it across the sand, walking back to her collection of toys on the beach. Fishbowl was tapping a tentacle on the silver spider case, but Tabitha promptly brushed its arm aside and closed the lid on the box.
‘Let’s wait and see what grows out of the ones you planted, ok?’ she said, crouching down beside Fishbowl where it hovered. ‘I’d sooner fight eight killer plants than two boxes full. And spiders I could do without, to be honest. I’m on holiday.’
Nothing much happened after that. Fishbowl just hovered there on the beach, content to do nothing. The dragon slept, surprisingly, with the occasional basking session for variety. Tabitha clipped the belt back around her waist with the knife and the water bottle attached, and watched the belt shift a little to fit her. She put the two boxes of equipment back in the dragon’s cockpit with her parka, and had to climb down her lazy ship’s back leg onto the beach when it didn’t bother to lift a wing up for her.
‘I’m going for a hike, ok?’ she told Fishbowl and the dragon, studying the forest ahead. She checked that her strange new water bottle was full enough, and stuck it back to her belt. The knife would be useful, but she wished she could detach whatever the thing was on the right side of her belt. It felt hard and heavy enough to be a gun, but the shape was wrong. At any rate there was just no taking it off. Tabitha gave up on it and looked around instead, smiling at the sight of Fishbowl investigating the tide.
‘I haven’t felt this good in ages, actually,’ she said, stretching her muscles as she wandered past the creature. ‘Maybe it’s the solar power, what do you reckon?’ Fishbowl seemed to be lost in thought, hovering calmly beside the whispering tide. Probably drinking in the sunlight too, Tabitha considered, rather than contemplating its existence.
Tabitha’s walk took her far down the beach until she reached a rocky outcrop, where the strip of white sand came to a finish. She headed off into the forest there, and followed the sound of running water through thick broad leaves until she reached a small river. Probably the same river that ran down into the waterfall pool, far behind her – but where did it start? Tabitha caught glimpses of the green mountain peak through the trees, jutting up at the heart of the island. She decided to go for a climb.
There were no worn paths here on the island; no sign of people whatsoever. Not even any big animals, from the looks of things. Just plenty of frantic bugs and dancing butterflies, flitting between shady bushes and bright tropical flowers. Birds and lizards clung to the trees as she passed by, vivid blue and green in the streaming sunlight.
‘God, it’s hot,’ she told no one, stopping to look out over the sea in the distance. She sipped from her strange black water bottle, and snapped it back to her belt. Licking her lips she got the salty taste of sweat, and she could feel the cool breeze blowing against her damp face. Her alien catsuit seemed to keep the rest of her body cooler though, even letting the breeze through its scales. She was practically an alien now, looking down at her outfit. Strange how much she’d forgotten her old blood hunger, she thought. Like a switch had been flipped off. She could feel the sun feeding her, if she concentrated. She felt her body storing up the light like a living battery; felt her heartcore humming so peacefully that she barely noticed it. All that tension and hunger, all that worry about getting her next fix… the need had just lifted away. All that wanting and desperation was gone.
Tabitha hiked on towards the mountain and slapped at a fly on the back of her neck. The trees all around her were filled with the cheeping and chattering of unfamiliar birds; an occasional whooping call came from deeper in the forest. She’d only heard sounds like this in wildlife documentaries. She could never have imagined actually being somewhere like this; she could never afford it. What stood out most though was how she felt here, surrounded by so many green and growing things. It was a deeper kind of joy tied to her new nature; a primordial satisfaction. As if a
ll was right with the world. There it was again; another split-second vision of current in the plants, coursing bright and golden through every vein in every leaf. Tabitha saw shining liquid sunlight feed the trunks and petals with a cocktail bliss of vitality; a supernature revelation. Then it was gone. She wanted to go with it, whatever the vision was. A solar peace, endlessly connected through the fabric of the world. Bigger than she could ever understand.
As Tabitha came into a grassy clearing at the foot of the mountain all the birds grew silent. A shadow shot past overhead, rippling across the wind-blown grass with the whoosh of giant wings. She looked up, but saw only the dazzling glare of the sun. Before she knew what was happening a crash shook the ground, and a sudden gust staggered her back. Blinking at the flying sandy soil, Tabitha turned back to face the sudden shadow in the clearing. She felt the deep bass of its growl resonate between her ribs.
‘Did you miss me, you big softie?’ she said, smiling. The dragon turned its head away and eyed her sidelong, like a reptile. It made a strange crackling grunt.
‘You thought something had happened to me, didn’t you?’ she said, carefully rubbing a grain of sand from her eye with a rough finger. The dragon laid its head lower, and sniffed at her as she came close and stroked its snout. Tabitha remembered that feeling of joy that had come from the creature when they’d flown around the island. The way it looked at her now seemed like nothing less than companionship. Or at least a mutually beneficial partnership, if nothing else; scratching one another’s backs for an easier life. Stroking its snout though, Tabitha didn’t believe that the creature could be that calculating. It just seemed to have missed her.
‘I’m sure you’ve gotten darker,’ she told it, stroking its snout. ‘You’re getting a tan,’ she said with a smile, looking over the dragon’s scales. They’d been a pale cloud-grey when they arrived on the island; she was sure of it. Definitely not the deep shade of charcoal that they were now. ‘Let’s go for a ride,’ she said, looking up at the mountain.