“Thy Kingdom Come … “

Michael:                A skeptic is someone who recognises that whatever we know is only the way things seem …

Jimbo:                   The desert leeched colour. The sky, once so brilliant, was a cloying mass of shifting cloud. Mists formed spontaneously wherever I looked, manifesting – as if deliberately – to suck vision into narrow avenues. Sound couldn’t be trusted either. Our voices, no matter how loud we shouted were reduced to the size and pitch of mice. What’s more exposed flesh told the brain lies! I had to walk with my sleeves rolled right down over my fists. If not the hairs on my arms leapt to attention. Where my skin touched air I couldn’t shake the sensation that my flesh was being pinched by unseen babies … pleading for me to turn around and leave my friends to this foolhardy rescue mission.

Michael: … but a skeptic is only half way there if he denies that metaphysical forces may be at work in the world. In “The Kingdom”  appearance was as mercurial as dreams …  and your point of view needed to be supple in order to survive. I believe that is why Jim suffered so much more than the rest of us.

Mister Pants:       I liked the pretty colours. They tasted great.

Jimbo: After we found Victor’s first camp we located a dozen more. Each tucked into the border of the Plant Superhighway and showing evidence of wholesale butchery. It seemed our friend had spent time curing meat and fattening himself (and his dogs) up before entering the wilderness … signs of a man clearly comfortable with his place at the top of the food chain.

Hedge: The herd of Doozers gibbered like Frenchmen as we approached. These shaggy, buffalo like beasts occupied a valley which swept away from the desert and divided the Plant Superhighway in a disturbingly perpendicular line. They looked at us blankly as Michael and Jimbo set about slaughtering one of their number. They used short bladed camping knives, and it took an eternity for the baffled beast to gently lower itself to the floor and die. The rest of the herd, now silent, observed with solemn, docile eyes.

Jimbo: We separated three other Doozers from the herd. The plan was to use them to carry our water supplies … and later as food. Their ginger fur was so long we did not need to use ropes to yoke them. Mister Pants and Hedge spent one afternoon plaiting their tails and beards into one long, stylish harness.

Mister Pants: Doozers melancholy merchants of dust. I called them “The Georges” on account that one name was as useful as many.

Jimbo: Under a sky dominated by a swollen moon we at last set out into the desert. “The Georges” were reluctant at first. They’d place a tentative hoof onto the desert floor then backed off slowly shaking their dome shaped skulls. Mister Pants spent awhile cooing and clucking to them … … after which the stupid beasts followed him like new born ducklings to their mother.

Mister Pants: Trust. Mister Victor obviously understood that when he entered “The Kingdom”. Trust in a Moult World that has always looked after us. Trust in a Moult World that was slowly opening up her secrets for us.

Jimbo: Less than an hour into the rubble and desolation I became uneasy. When I glanced back  I had the impression that even our footprints wanted to deceive us. I hate admitting to such irrational paranoia. One thing I hate even more though is the attributing of human qualities to inanimate things, but damn it if I could not shake the feeling that the desert did not welcome us.

That first night we collapsed exhausted into a sloping trench. Under a sky dominated by a swollen moon we pitched a dowdy camp. When sleep came it pinned us to the desert floor.

The next morning I woke and crawled out of the trench. “The Georges” looked at me expectantly as I gazed up the pathway from which we had come. Not only had our footprints vanished but I had this lingering sensation – like something left over from sleep – that there was something malevolent hanging there. It was as if with that thought alone I caused something to coagulate in the air. It was nothing more than this clot on my vision. Yet, the more I appreciated that there was something there the more it became real. I was etching it into existence with eyes and the more my brain made sense of it the more real it seem to become.

Michael: The route between knowing and how things seem is indeed a thwart one.

Jimbo:                   Michael would have you believe I lost it that morning because I don’t have the imagination to cope with stuff outside the evidence of my senses … or some such crap! Well, I reckon I’ve coped with the crazy shit Moult World has thrown at us better than ninety per-cent of you. From Day One I was out there building things with my hands. I got off my arse when the rest of you were off your faces on drink and drugs and made sure you and our children were all safe and fed.

So you reckon Mister Pants is enlightened just because he is insane with “Moult World Shock Syndrome”? And Hedge can deal with weirdness just because of all the drugs he’s taken? And Michael … Michael with his head full of pseudo-mystical, psychobabble arrived here equipped to cope with the thing I saw out there in the mist that morning?

Whatever you think you are wrong: Moult World is not a  fairy tale.

So you need to listen and learn  … even if it turns the tidy explanations you’ve devised  to make sense of your lives,  inside out.

(part 1 of 3)

~ by hedgemonkey on August 10, 2009.