“… On Moult World just as it had been on Earth.”

He licked dust caked lips with a fissured tongue. His body had been dehydrated longer than he cared to recall. A wince or even grimace was enough to crack dry skin. With a deep gasp he dunked his head into the barrel. The rain water jolted his senses and sent invigorated good news to aching limbs and fatigued muscles. Beneath the water level he opened his eyes. He had long grown accustomed to the salinity of sweat stinging his vision. This barrel water soothed tired eyes, and as it did so, he noted that the sunlight from above refracted green through the water. It had been months since he had seen that colour.

A plume of water arced behind him as he whipped his head out of the barrel. His wet matted hair thudding between his scapulas with enough force to leave him slightly winded. He lingered for a moment feeling the breeze cool against his flesh. Then in a violent motion he picked the barrel up and tipped it over himself.

The water crashing against the clay packed road made Lucifer jump. The dog dropped to a submissive posture as V. tossed the barrel aside. It clattered noisily into a wall; V. relishing its echoes as it rolled to a halt. He looked at the dog and instantly regretted the unnecessary display. He owed his life – and sanity – to his two dogs. Water dripping, he crouched down and whispered a gentle apology which Lucifer accepted with a quick lick to the face.

They had stumbled out of the desert into this township only a few hours ago. As always he had been blindfolded; as well as both wrists lashed to metres long lengths of frayed string. The dogs’ had started barking. Their leads going limp in his hands. An excited pitch to their yelps told him that danger was far away and it was safe to remove the blindfold. When he did so he scuffed at the road with his toes to test the truth of the mirage. He growled mistrustful of the doorways and their quaint little door handles that lined the street either side of him. In the desert he had deliberately unlearned his senses to keep the monsters at bay. He had not braved two months in that wasteland – beset by phantoms and nightmares – to end up ensorcelled by an illusion.

But the rain water caught in the deep staved barrels waiting at the corners of each street finally convinced him of the reality of this place. Those first few mouthfuls had turned to sludge in the back of his mouth but had tasted exquisite nonetheless.

He explored the township …  and within an hour knew he could not linger.

So there V. stood at the edge of the street. Fine trickles of ash and dust parting around his ankles as they leaked back into the desert. It was as if that vast desolate place was drawing breath. Each inspiration sucking in countless tiny fragments of the township into its dry, limitless lungs. Soon there would be no evidence of this place left. The desert would claim it. Erase it as assuredly as the tide does writings in the sand.

Lucifer probed at his master’s pocket with an insistent nose. V. smiled and immediately ribbons of blood slid from the edges of his mouth where dry skin could not cope with expression. He glanced down and his gaze was met by two pathetically hopeful expressions. Chuckling, he reached into his pocket then inverted his arm and opened his fist. Lucifer’s and Star’s thin tails beat enthusiastically as they eyed the treats revealed in their master’s palm. One at a time they plucked the dried flesh away and then all delicacy forgotten they wolfed down the meat … oblivious to the fact that that was the last of their master’s supply.

With a deep, heartful sigh V. bent double and threw the cargo bag over his shoulder. Muck encrusted furs draped between its worn leather straps. It took a few moments for him to adjust to its awkward weight. Then he uncoiled two leads and without any fuss found Lucifer and Star at the ends.

Finally he unpacked the blindfold.

It was an old strip of suede he had cut from the back of a walking boot. Two tattered laces served to secure it over his eyes. Weeks of tight wear had moulded it to the contours of his eyes sockets and nose bridge.

The monsters in the desert did not appreciate being seen. He had learned that the hard way. Early on in his search one of the great beasts  had unfurled a tendril that crashed into him like an ooze encrusted steam engine. The blindfold was now hovering a few centimetres from his eyes before he tied it in place. The desert yawned open over its dirty suede edge. At that moment it looked utterly empty between him and that eerily straight horizon … but he knew just how densely populated it was out there! That thought alone was enough to trigger the process that brought the monsters out into the open. Terror told him to tie the blindfold now, but standing there on the border of the town, he guessed he was just beyond the scope of their strange territory.

Perhaps -  he reasoned – he could afford one peek.

His imagination and human senses fell like a mesh over the panorama before him. The combination was a heady mix to the things that lived in that desert. It painted them into being with clumsy strokes of the mind’s eye. V. knew they were not inherently malevolent. Something about the process of being perceived by human senses hurt them.

The things towered into the stratosphere, inexhaustible, like looking up at skyscrapers whilst emersed within their concrete foundations. Only comparisons could come close to translating the creatures into words. Even then those words were clumsy and inaccurate. The monsters swarmed all over the desert like a huge, impassive reef of jellyfish. Individually they were like brain matter that had been uncurled as if intestines. Viewed from this distance they were like nebulous bacteria that defied scale.  They were like these things … but completely unlike anything human vocabulary was built to describe .

Humans had no common ground with these things at all.

V. shrugged and tied the blindfold in place. Immediately banishing the monsters and plunging himself into darkness. Then he groped for the clay with which he plugged his ears: a safety measure less a stray sound wished one of the creatures into creation.

There he stood momentarily in the sensory alienation with which he had crossed the great desert … until two soft tugs of the leads in his hands reassured him that he was not alone.

Led by Star and Lucifer, Victor returned to the desert; a blind man clinging onto the memories of a crumbling town he had happened to chance upon. He needed to make haste. Time would erode his memories just as surely as the wasteland was dissolving the town itself. Time and desert conspiring to rob him of the knowledge and lessons he had learned today.

The knowledge that they were not the first human ‘guests’ invited to live on this planet was indeed something of a surprise. But the lessons that “ leaders, beliefs and War were the only monsters they need fear on “Moult World”  … came as  no revelation at all.

(Part 3 of 3)

~ by hedgemonkey on September 14, 2009.