No cohorts to barter ramshackle memories of yesteryear, my dear. Kattar, you float to your EXIT on the guiding hands of a clean heart, smiles and echo voices drown about you, a void of want for you, taking in the souls still beholden, a manic disco of monotony and dread. Deserved, this respite. Another day, where your city plays its disjuncts and only a star can crash its wheel.
dek ok
A sea of glass.
Kattar perched on the rim of a woodblock, inside a freshly constructed outhouse, unused, timber scented with sawing of not long ago, planks fitted in place neatly, like someone cared, had taken pride in the small building. The door hung open out of sight, him inside sitting in the shadow, his body at rest, for once, perhaps the first time, the air restorative and sweet and fresh, the light ahead made for his eyes, beautiful in every direction, clear. At points in the natural variations of the wood planks, their meeting edges let in a crack of golden light, briefly and steadily, warm about him where it was.
He sat relaxed, out of sync a little, elbow cocked to the side with a twisted hand taking its weight, his body leaning to the other side, in comfort, so he could be before what he could see and rest.
Outside the outhouse a floor of shine made pearlescent silver, and above a sigh of cloud rippled washed colours that shifted imperceptibly. Hazy reflections gleamed in the opaqueness of the sea, the horizon made strange by its far away flatness, no curve here, not even a small one. And on the sea, sitting slightly off centre and to the left of his eye line, far enough away that he couldn’t decipher her features, the Queen of Worms took her comfort in exile, stretched out on a luxuriously upholstered chaise longue.
For a while, for a time, he took a moment and tasted the place. It swooned about him, quietly, like he wasn’t there and didn’t need to be, the extensions severed, quizzes all foolhardy, perceptions amusing but nothing more, quiddity a nonsense rhyme recited elsewhere and he gifted it away with magnanimity. Let someone else give it a try.
The Queen raised her head from her far off resting place and kept her neck tilted to allow herself to precisely meet the outhouse with her gaze. Her poise unfaltering, even in her entrapment, she’d exhibit her majesty without question. Kattar imagined the hoary worms wriggling from her orifices and dropping to scatter. Would the floor eat them up, or would they rot here eventually just like everywhere else? Would they thrive in this place, the rules conducive to seeing them grow to unusual size, perhaps accelerate or inspire anomalous mutations, eventually seeing them outnumber their royal host, and she be the devoured one? Part of him wanted to watch them eat her there and then, but instead he rose from the wooden seat, ready to go to her.
He took a step and hesitated, slowly turning to take a look at the round hole that had soothed his worn arse; that black hole he’d struggled through, up from the tower, swept on his determinations and the weird whims of cretins. Now, with the hole silent and all death held in it, blacker, he turned away from the toilet and placed his foot out onto the beauty of the silver sea.
The glass beneath him nonsensically exhibited the city below, the swirling mistiness scattering the mirrored reflection of the firmament, spires somewhere leagues away down there, shown indistinct and in glimpses, yet the whole cityscape out in plan, obfuscated underneath, silent as if timeless.
The surface of the sea gave a little as he walked it, the silver cushioning him as he skated his feet in firm and unhurried strides. He felt numb and hypersensitive, the clarity of the place designed to fit him. Out in front, in only a short distance to travel, lay the Queen and her worms, and Kattar’s approaching revealed her face dazzled with agonies, her languishing resultant of distress and fatigue rather than bliss.
“Who’s there?” she said, her voice a strained hoarse whisper, decorated with sweetness, projected in a fractured echo from another world, her mouth unmoving and crammed with its host of worms, the voice coming from somewhere within her. “Speak. I can hear you, whoever you are.” She paused and raised her blind head to find him, the caverns of her eye sockets spilling their wormy residents. “Am I wrong? Is there really no one?”
Kattar shuffled his feet across the calm silver and swallowed reflexively and dryly.
“Say who you are, I beg you. Do not make your Queen so nervous.”
“I’m...” He had no answer, everything had escaped him, all of what he was wasn’t enough, not enough to tell her.
“So you don’t want to speak, is that it? Or perhaps you can’t. Tell me what has brought you here, if you can. I’m meant to be alone, your presence tells me the rules have changed.”
Kattar took a breath, quick, deep, steadying, resigning. “I’m looking for the exit.” It was the truth, after all.
“Ah,” she said, a spectral sigh following. “You came all this way, and ended up here, hunting your exit like a prize. How many ways have you betrayed yourself to arrive here?”
He bowed his head, not from shame, but from cluelessness. He’d always been clueless. “I don’t know. More ways than I’ll ever know, most likely.”
“Isn’t that always the way?” she said, the hint of a smile in her hovering voice. “This place, my banishment, is simplicity, you see. It’s where order encases, where empiricism finds its expression and the fullest extent of its revelations, where chaos is real but has sense. The information is the ruler here. That’s why I’ve been sent here. It is my cage, where every particle is a torture and anathema to my nature. I’m complexity, I’m between the lines, I’m the rubbish that makes magic. That devil loves simple things—how he hoodwinks so easily. People want to believe it’s that simple, because it is for a price.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“You do. You do.”
Kattar nodded before he’d realised he’d done so.
“Did you come through a doorway to get here? If you did, then you are like me, and that would also explain why you’ve travelled so far, reached the top of the tower, moved between the walls and bent the cracks open. Is your door still there?”
Kattar turned to peer back along the pathway he’d taken across the sea floor, where he spied the humble outhouse waiting mutely far away. “Yes,” he said, returning to face her. “It’s still there, though I don’t know if there’s a way back through it.”
“Well, this is a conundrum. You see, the thing is with doors, as they work here, is that they are a one in, one out deal. What I mean to say is, for the sake of order, a door allows one passage in, and one out. So, if someone travels through it, and then there’s a return, it will disappear. Neither of us can conjure another door in this place, it’s hard enough from the other side but impossible here. Only one of us can go back.”
“I think I should tell you—your Mr Wayfarer is dead.”
“I know. It wasn’t a surprise. He’s had it coming for a long time. Pushed his luck.”
Kattar stared wide-eyed. The Queen sensed his questioning.
“I do love him,” she said, “Don’t let my cavalier words lead you to think otherwise. I just know him too well, unfortunately. Anyway, whatever chance we had to reconcile evaporated long ago. Unlike you. What are you doing here when that poor girl, your other, is on her way up? It’s her nature, you know—to climb. She won’t stop. And you won’t be there to meet her. You,” she wagged a wizened finger, “will only make sense when you take that descent.”
“Anna?”
“Yes, you fool, of course.”
Kattar laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve never known about Anna.”
“We never know—until we do.” The Queen chuckled. “My Wayfarer is my bond, my tether, my terror, my love. To deny that would be to betray myself.”