A Lost World
“A Lost World” is a short story I wrote specifically for Asimov's Science Fiction. Ordinarily I wouldn't dare submit a work of science fiction to anyone, let alone to a magazine of this stature. Science is not my strong suit. I barely understand the simple physics of my own day-to-day, let alone the complex theories discussed by people who read Asimov's! Furthermore, “A Lost World” isn't really science fiction.
It is, however, as its title implies, a lost world story, which is at least science fiction adjacent.
Whatever it is, I'm fond of the story and certain one or two readers of Asimov's Science Fiction would have enjoyed reading it! Admittedly, all their other readers would have hated it, perhaps even cancelled their subscriptions over it, but nerts to them.
Rejection rolls off me pretty easily. I mostly find it a nuisance because whenever something I've submitted is rejected I have to stop what I'm doing to find somewhere else to send it off to. And I fully expected “A Lost World” to be rejected. What surprised me was how quickly it was rejected! Two weeks! I'd not planned to have to deal with it again for months!
Refusing to let my little treasure be subjected to any more rejection (speedy or otherwise) I decided to post it here, in its entirety. Since the point of this site is to sell one or two copies of my Mrs. Quarterhorse books, there should be at least one complete work of my written fiction here for readers to scrutinise.
And so, please scrutinise the story that Asimov's Science Fiction doesn't want you to know about...
A LOST WORLD
by S. C. Marchere
————
PART 1
Spectral figures are sighted these days with such regularity I have
begun to wonder if humanity isn’t finally seeing itself for what it
really is. My own reflection seems to me at times disturbingly vague.
Two gentlemen at my door, while witnessing for their End Times theology,
looked at me with such discomfiture I expected at any moment for one or
the other to test if his finger wouldn’t pass right through me!
“Do you worry about the direction the world is heading?” they asked.
“I don’t think it’s heading anywhere!”
Nonetheless, I assured them that I would repent my wastrel ways and
politely took their brochure with the apocalyptic (and surprisingly
racy) cover illustration of frenzied idolaters around and atop a golden
calf.
It remained folded in my jacket pocket.
I was, at least, at that moment, heading somewhere. Somewhere, I’d been
promised, where I would see something stupendous.
Stupendous? In our tedious world?
“A lost world!” Sir Dirk corrected.
My expectations were low.
Whenever I found myself a guest at Dirk’s sprawling country house,
despite being surrounded by the great sportsman’s innumerable
trophies——ferocious heads, enormous pelts, and a fully stuffed mountain
gorilla repurposed as a caryatid atop which rested a very small clock——I
invariably migrated to the humblest item in his bloated inventory——a
small and very old pastel of a tyrannosaur rendered in all the colours
of spring, witnessing the theology of his own dominance over a vibrant
prehistoric realm! There he was, our most worthwhile dragon; at least,
there he was as he was imagined to be a century ago, before our
understanding of the era smothered our imaginings of it.
I sighed a familiar sigh, my own unique sigh, a sigh I’d sighed far too
often, a wordless lament for the grey nothingness into which I had been
born!
A sudden gust threw into the room the prevailing fragrance of our
dragonless age——exhaust, in this instance belched from the tractor
tending to the yearly renovations of Dirk’s wasted gardens. When he
inherited the estate (along with his title) he immediately clear-cut the
ancestral forest to better his view of another forest farther away. The
better view for Dirk is the one with more in it; beauty for him is a
simple matter of quantity. However, a few years back he got it in his
head that there was beauty also in rarity. Since then, in a portion of
his estate not blocking his beautiful view, every spring he now plants
the rarest, most exotic and delicate saplings regardless of their
inappropriateness for the soil; every summer he watches them wither; and
every fall he chops them up for kindling.
The shutters rattled and then slammed shut.
In my pastel reverie I had barely noticed the unpleasant waft, and I’d
even tuned out the conversation of my associates until one of the brutes
uttered the loathsome v-word.
“Velociraptors,” I interrupted, “have no place in my prehistoric
tableau. What is a velociraptor but an extinct version of any number of
ordinary-sized beasts in the here-and-now? One might as well be menaced
by a common bear, a tiger, or charged by that clock-hatted gorilla!”
“But your beloved tyrannosaurus is not very much larger than a modern
elephant,” Professor Snide sneered. “A beast by which one might also be
menaced in the here-and-now, whatever that has to do with anything. All
beasts add their own stroke of colour, be they here or then, great or
small. Perhaps you should read my recently published article:
‘Adaptations of a Purely Aesthetic Nature.’”
“I’ll remember to pluck one from the great pile in the trash bin behind
the magazine shop,” I replied.
“Heaven forbid I find more beauty in nature than a single tyrannosaurus
looming over a tropical vista!” Snide laughed while gesturing toward the
pastel.
“Keep your grubby fingers away from it,” I warned.
“Have you never noticed the beauty in a simple snowflake?” Snide
asked.
“Of course I haven’t. And neither have you. If there’s beauty in a
snowflake, there’s beauty in everything. Well, there isn’t. At least,
not by any meaningful definition of the word. Beauty is so rare one
might go their whole life without seeing it.”
My gaze briefly drifted to a divan in the vast room’s farthest corner,
and with it drifted my train of thought.
“I happen to find beauty in a snowflake,” Snide smugly affirmed.
“No, you don’t.”
“Don’t tell me what I find beautiful!”
“You have never once in your life admired a snowflake, Snide. Admit
it!”
“You forget I’m on the boards of directors of several prominent
publications about the natural world,” Snide reminded me for the
umpteenth time. “And have you forgotten my own curated ‘Celebration of
the Solstice’ whose accompanying brochure featured a snowflake
abstraction shot with a microscopic camera?”
The equally odious Mr. Rasp attempted to wedge himself into our dispute
by mentioning that he’d recently dined at Lord So-and-So’s, the
presiding chair of one of Snide’s boards; but since I can only suffer
fools one at a time, I cut him off and continued my tirade without
acknowledging the quality of Rasp’s aristocratic associates nor even his
presence.
“The beauty I find in prehistoria, Snide, is not merely in a single
tyrannosaur looming over a tropical vista. For instance, I am willing to
permit pteranodons.”
“Very good of you.”
“Only in the air, Snide, only to give life to an otherwise empty sky.
My tour of prehistoria begins with a glimpse of three distant, soaring
pteranodons.”
“Hopefully one will crap on your head.”
“Next, the brontosaurs. Ideally, a family——two very large specimens and
three smaller ones trailing behind.”
“You do realise that brontosaurus is no longer——“
“Shut up. Just as the pteranodons make the sky more interesting, so the
brontosaurs the waterways. And like the pteranodons, the brontosaurs
exist only in the periphery——things to be noticed, but not on their own
found beautiful.”
“Perhaps they might try a little mascara?”
“The single tyrannosaur that follows is not beauty in itself, it is
beautiful only looming over, as you put it, the vista, the whole of it,
the whole of everything.
“My heart is all a-flutter,” Snide gushed.
“Three pteranodons in the sky, followed by five brontosaurs in the
water, followed by one tyrannosaur on land. I arrange my tableau
meaningfully. It’s not merely visual aesthetics. Layer upon layer of
meaning, Snide, and more layers still! When I talk of beauty, I don’t
mean the sort that gets your uptown black-turtleneck-and-fine-wine crowd
to thoughtfully rub their well-polished chins, I mean real beauty,
beauty that blinds you, Snide, blows out your eardrums and crushes you
flat; beauty that shakes the firmament of Eternity!”
Off I went, as is my tendency, on a reverie during which all the world
faded around me. The gallery faded, and Snide mercifully faded with it,
Snide and his beautiful snowflakes and his artless art-for-art’s-sake
sensibility.
“To be clear,” I clarified upon returning to the grimy here-and-now,
“the tyrannosaur remains always upright, with his great tail dragging
behind him. He’s a lumbering giant not given to velocity.”
“And his feathers——” Snide began.
Down came the brass handle of my walking stick on Professor Snide’s
deserving head.
In my mind, anyway.
I vowed to one day give the tasteless thug the clubbing that he
deserved. The bald-spot atop his ginger head was so tempting a target I
fairly considered it entrapment.
Our party then migrated to the cluttered sideboard where a lunch had
been laid out among the beastly detritus by Mr. Wince, Sir Dirk’s
long-suffering valet——inherited by Dirk along with the rest of the
estate——who was at the moment suffering the indignity of tending to a
party he considered beneath the class of the family he served. All
except for Snide, that is, whose granduncle had been a baron, or a
baronet, or something else starting with B. While snatching up a simple
biscuit commensurate with my low status, and with my gaze finally
dislodged from the little tyrannosaur pastel, my attention returned to
the divan in the corner. More specifically, to the lady on it. She’d
been there the whole time, never lifting her eyes from her book, never
taking the slightest interest in the discourse of our little party.
I slipped away from my associates, who were too preoccupied quantifying
and qualifying their accomplishments to notice my absence. I’d spoken
too much, I suppose, and they were all glad to hear once again the
sounds of their own voices. I strolled along the gallery’s
higgledy-piggledy periphery, pretending to examine the countless
sporting trophies and blurry photographs of those few beasts whose heads
and pelts had eluded Sir Dirk’s rifle. Eventually I came within
conversation distance of my prey.
I waited twiddling my thumbs for several minutes, hoping for some
feminine acknowledgement of my presence——a fluttered eyelash or a blush,
ideally. After her second page turn without yet having given me the
slightest glance, I decided she must be reading something
extraordinarily interesting. When she shifted in her seat I caught a
glimpse of the book’s cover.
“So, Miss Proserpina,” I broke the silence, “you’re interested in
beetles?”
She looked up with a scowl.
I gestured to the book in her hand.
She turned the book over to read the cover text.
“That’s the publisher. Beetles and Bray.”
She returned to reading.
* * *
“Prepare to be astounded,” Sir Dirk began, while tending to the waxed
points of his moustache. I’d arrived prepared to be nothinged, and
nothing about the maps and charts and photographs pinned and propped up
everywhere in our host’s crowded office suggested I’d be otherwised.
I’d arrived prepared to be nothinged by Sir Dirk, but hoping to be at
least noticed by Proserpina, lady’s maid to Sir Dirk’s daughter, Miss
Ann. Proserpina’s employment consisted mostly of keeping her
spoiled-brat of a lady in social check——informing her, for instance,
that it wasn’t appropriate to scratch her derrière in church, and less
still to hoist her skirt to do it.
“Miss Ann, no!” pleaded a hushed voice in the hall, unlikely heard by
anyone in the room but me. Even an annoyed whisper could not conceal the
music in Proserpina’s voice. What wouldn’t I give to hear her whisper my
name!
I dared a peek back at the open door to Sir Dirk’s office by pretending
to stretch out a kink in my neck. Proserpina was fussing over her lady,
possibly trying to keep her from rifling through the pockets of our
overcoats in the foyer, using the umbrella stand as a spittoon, or, who
knows, eating a candle.
The closest I’d previously come to the lady of my vast imaginings was
during a Christmas visit when I’d arrived via the servant’s entrance to
deliver a gift of chocolate liqueurs, and having been made so
comfortable around the big kitchen stove I couldn’t bring myself to go
upstairs to shiver in the cavernous parlour whose Yule log in the
Carrara marble fireplace barely even warmed the hearth! I was further
warmed by the appearance of Proserpina, the first time I’d seen her
without Ann underfoot. She kept rushing in and out, fetching things for
her lady to gnaw on, presumably——candies, candles, stewing bones; to be
frank, I was barely aware of the items she kept leaving with because in
my thoughts it was me she was fetching, all for herself!
Alas, my fondest memories are all fantasies.
And I’d been fantasising yet again.
The room was empty. The party had evidently moved on without me.
I really do need to keep my reveries in check.
“Prepare to be astounded,” were the last words I recalled from Sir
Dirk, so I examined the cluttered office for something the old sportsman
might have considered astounding. Surely not the blasphemous lithograph
of a tyrannosaur with peacock feathers. He’d long ago not only failed to
astound me with it, he’d nearly provoked me into a duel.
My eyes eventually located a red circle. Thumbnail makers know the
power of the red circle; circle something in red, anything, it doesn’t
matter, and the rabble will assuredly click like a chicken pecking at a
seed. I clicked myself nearer an old floor-plan spread out on the table
adjacent Sir Dirk’s desk to examine the circled portion——the far corner
of some strange labyrinth. The accompanying text was in an
incomprehensible Old English, except for a short scrawl in the same red
ink as the circle, in Dirk’s incomprehensible regular English.
Under the floor-plan was a thick stack of similar floor-plans, none of
which showed anything familiar until I’d finally burrowed down to one
describing the very floor on which I stood. Since Dirk’s country house
had only three storeys above ground, most of these pages must be
diagrams of sub-cellars, meaning his house descended a considerable
distance underground!
My phone buzzed.
A message from Sir Dirk in his usual autocorrected word soup that
seemed to be asking where I’d disappeared to.
Before I could respond with a slurry of my own, a scowling Miss
Proserpina appeared in the doorway, her beetleless book under her
arm.
“He’s in the grey room!” she shouted to someone presumably down the
hall.
“Why do you call this the grey room?” I asked, with a little nervous
chirp.
“Why are you in it?”
“I was brought here by Sir Dirk.”
“Why are you still in it?”
Rather than admit my obliviousness, I tucked my hands behind my back
and strolled out into the hall with feigned nonchalance. Proserpina
trotted on ahead, presumably to lead me to the little party from which I
had become estranged. Such a graceful gait, my Proserpina——the charming
embodiment of feminine irritation.
The only emotion in her I am ever likely to provoke.
After a zigzag stroll down a black velvet corridor clogged with the
bestial overflow of Dirk’s overstuffed gallery I began to discern
conversation between that devoted patron of the taxidermic arts and my
fellow guests——Mr. Rasp, the attorney I’ve already mentioned, Ms.
Sissus, an Online Accumulator of Obsequious Followers, and of course,
Mr. Snide, Professor of Obnoxious Interjections. Rasp was there to
advise on the potential commodification of something, Sissus was there
on Miss Ann’s suggestion, to react to something needing a reaction, and
Snide was there to antagonise me. He was also there to witness the same
something as Rasp and Sissus. Ms. Sissus was presumably to bring the
something to the attention of the Great Unwashed, Snide to bring it to
academia, and me to bring it to——?
I’m not sure, really.
Sir Dirk invited me because he was fond of me, I’d like to think. I
suspect I’m the only one of his plebs who doesn’t view him as a mark——I
neither hit him up for money nor use him to raise my social standing.
Sins, it is worth noting, that Dirk himself commits among his own
betters! But as for me, truly disinterested in such things, I am for him
an easy acquaintance. And I’m not the worst company so long as you don’t
go on about feathered dinosaurs and beautiful snowflakes.
Upon spying the party now returned to the trophy gallery, I thanked my
guide, and was about to rejoin my colleagues when Proserpina grabbed me
by the arm.
Her hand clutching my arm!
Now take the rest of me, quickly!
An electric charge raced through my extremities. I might have gone
flush, I might have gone pale, I might have even briefly died. But I did
see her lips move, and I heard a voice coming from between those lips
telling me to be careful.
“Careful, Miss?”
“There is danger afoot,” she whispered.
“What sort of danger?”
“My lady’s got her eye on you.”
“There he is!” Mr. Rasp shouted from the gallery.
He beckoned me over. Proserpina released my arm with a laugh and
scooted off in the other direction.
* * *
Sir Dirk, without looking up from his careful work cleaning an already
thoroughly-cleaned elephant gun, continued a monologue I’d so far
missed——
“Whether the something we discover on our journey proves to be as it is
presently understood by the best science of our day, or something more
in the style of Knight, Zallinger, and Willis O’Brien, is of no matter,
to me, at least. Whatever it is, it’s on my property, it’s mine, I can
do whatever I like with it.”
Mr. Rasp chewed nervously on his lip, likely considering any number of
laws that stood between his host and the liberties he believed inherent.
But Rasp offered no objections. He dared say nothing to cross the man
into whose aristocratic flesh his nails were dug. Besides, Rasp was
uncertain what our expedition’s something was going to be.
This uncertainty was the one quality we all shared.
An arm slipped suddenly under mine drew from me a little gasp of
ecstasy——a gasp then exhaled in disappointment upon the realisation that
the arm this time belonged not to Proserpina, rather Miss Ann. She
guided me away from my associates. Sir Dirk continued on without pause,
no doubt used to his daughter’s little interferences. Snide shot me a
poisonous stare.
“He’s made me an offer of marriage,” Ann whispered as she led me back
out into the hall.
“Professor Snide?” I asked with surprise.
“You know my brothers are both dead?” Ann ignored me to ask. I nodded.
“Killed by each other’s bullets,” she explained. “They’d been crouched
on opposite sides of a clearing, aiming for the same deer.”
Ann pulled me closer.
“I’m now the sole heir,” she whispered, despite us having wandered well
out of earshot of her father’s party. She peered back as she whispered,
perhaps curious if Snide was showing any signs of jealousy. “The
proposals are coming left and right. Snidey wasn’t the first.”
“Who else has proposed?”
“Mr. Rasp.”
“Never!”
I turned to examine with astonishment the two prospective fiancés now
fawning over Sir Dirk.
“Snidey asked Papa’s permission first,” Ann explained with a snicker,
“but Snidey’s at least got money and something adjacent to a title. Papa
knew I’d never agree, so rather than box the prof’s ears he gave his
blessing so that I might do it for him.”
“You told Snide no?”
“Going to string him along for a while first.”
“But Rasp!” I gasped.
“What a repulsive nothing of a social climber!” Ann laughed. “If he’d
dared ask Papa’s permission to even talk to me, he’d have been answered
with two barrels of buckshot!”
“Are you also stringing Rasp along?”
“Don’t even joke,” Ann groaned.
“I assume you didn’t tell your father he’d proposed.”
“No,” Ann sighed. “That would have made me an accessory to murder and
come Judgement Day I’d like to be able to say that I kept at least one
of the Commandments.”
She led me along a winding route through stacks of unopened shopping
from her most recent spree, leading us eventually to Proserpina crouched
in a little hollow among the boxes, reading.
“She’s writing my steam-engine paper for me,” Ann explained. “A good
arrangement for us both. Gives her something to do, and me, nothing.”
“You prefer nothing?” I asked.
“Yes, all of this nothing,” she replied, with a sweeping gesture across
the mountains of parcels she was unlikely to ever even bother
opening.
* * *
Into the cellar we descended, two by two, down worn stone steps through
successively deeper geological strata, surrounded by colourless trash,
rusty machinery, mountains of burned brick from fallen smokestacks, and
ash blackening the walls, the steps, and the soles of our shoes. Sir
Dirk and his prim valet Mr. Wince led the way with a powerful lamp and
picnic basket, followed by Mr. Rasp and Ms. Sissus——the former counting
sparkles in the ancient rock, and the latter tapping hastily on a phone
slipping below any sort of usable signal. Next came Professor Snide, arm
in arm with his presumably affianced Miss Ann. While Rasp cast the
occasional jealous glare back at Snide, Snide cast as many back at
me.
His displeasure was likely worsened by his lady’s persistent
flatulence.
Snide needn’t have wasted his jealousy. While I was unquestionably his
rival in aesthetic matters, as for Miss Ann, he was welcome to her arm,
to her fortune, to her bodily gasses, and to whatever else of her he
might find tolerable. Such was my feeling in general, but at that
moment, at the back of the line, arm in arm as I found myself with
Proserpina, the very idea that I could be interested in any other lady
was laughable!
May these grimy steps plunge downward through rubbish everlasting if I
might only keep Proserpina on my arm!
A pity, though, that I was forced to attempt courtship in an
ever-deepening tomb below Dirk’s damp manse in a smelly gas cloud. If
only Proserpina were the timid sort of lady, willing to let me play-act
at being her protector from the beasts that lurk in the dark.
“So,” I began, timidly, hoping a better question would come to mind
before my prepared question left my lips, “you’re interested in
steam-engines?”
“Who told you that?”
“I told him you were writing my paper for me,” Ann answered for me,
without looking back.
“What does your paper argue?” I asked.
“Who are you asking?” Proserpina asked.
“All of you be quiet,” Snide interrupted.
“Don’t tell me what to be,” Ann snapped.
“I didn’t mean you, dearest.”
“All doesn’t include me?”
“I meant all of them.” Snide clarified with a backwards gesture.
“Then you should have said both, not all,” Ann huffed, as she exchanged
his arm for mine, dismissing Proserpina to take her vacated place
alongside Snide. Rasp gave Snide a malicious grin.
I gave him a malicious scowl. I’d been robbed!
May these grimy steps reach bottom quickly so I can shake myself
loose!
“I’m thinking of starting a doomsday cult,” Ann explained, “so I’m
studying the Industrial Revolution. You know, dark Satanic mills and all
of that.”
“Be quiet back there!” shouted Sir Dirk.
Our descending line came to a halt.
“Our illustrious host has something to explain before we go any
farther,” Rasp announced.
Ann slumped against my shoulder, which I briefly worried was an
affectionate gesture; but, no, she was very ordinarily slumped.
Collapsing like a disengaged puppet was her usual response to anything
she considered tiresome.
“You needn’t worry about the sulphur fumes,” Dirk began. “I’ve been
assured they are well within safe levels for breathing.”
Sulfur? Perhaps I’d been too quick to blame our foul air on the lady
now very near snoring on my shoulder.
“Still,” Dirk continued, “you should avoid breathing any more than is
absolutely necessary.
“Excellent advice in general,” my half-asleep companion mumbled to
herself; and then to me, “You’re breathing too much. Breathe less.
Didn’t you hear my Papa?”
We remained slouched two-by-two on our respective steps to endure a
history lesson so loaded with vocal typos there was no question Sir Dirk
had copy-pasted it directly into his mouth. “We are descending through
history!” he shouted, with a sudden sweeping gesture that nearly sent
Mr. Wince tumbling off his step into a heap of discarded dirigible
gondolas. Dirk boasted of his ownership of the vast history above and
below us just as he had boasted of his vast view after clear-cutting the
forest. He had commodified time itself! “Admire the view!” he beamed.
“Years, decades, centuries, and, as you will soon discover, aeons—— I
shall tally them up, my friends, stack them and count them like gold
coins!”
* * *
After descending surely another mile through one ash-blackened and
trash-strewn dungeon after another, our party finally reached bottom.
The very bottom of the world, it seemed to me in my admittedly narrow
conception of time and space; we’d in fact reached only the bottom of
our own world, the enlightened world, the machine world, the world of
enlightened machines! Here was where old met new, where antiquity fell
away and modernity began, here in this medieval crypt retrofitted with
the rusted remains of steam-engines, and torture devices repurposed as
factory pistons and gears.
We had to wiggle single file through narrow rows and columns of
calcified machinery, forcing Miss Ann off my arm like the barnacle I had
come to think of her. Not until the labyrinth expanded into the
farthest, deepest corner did I recall the floor-plan I’d examined in Sir
Dirk’s office.
We’d arrived at the red circle.
The great crypt had reached its farthest, deepest corner, and that
corner had been bashed open. Digging tools and the rocks they’d dug were
piled against the walls, along with a few greasy hamburger wrappers and
other remnants of the crew that had worked the tools.
We took turns peering into the hole. A mine-shaft, let’s call it, with
freshly driven posts and lintels, travelling only a few yards.
One by one we entered the shaft.
And then one by one we exited it into what we were promised would be a
lost world!
————
PART 2
Ms. Sissus, despite having been described as an insufferable loudmouth,
had not spoken a word all afternoon. She’d typed at least a million,
however, until the lack of a signal muted her fingertips.
“This is not what I expected,” she finally spoke, while kicking aside
an old crushed soda can. She was a sensible lady. Come to think of it,
it was Snide who had slighted her. Prior to overhearing his derogatory
comments she’d been a stranger to me. She no doubt similarly believed me
an insufferable loudmouth by overhearing the same slanderer.
Or, I am willing to admit, by overhearing me.
“It is exactly what I described,” Sir Dirk replied.
“Perhaps we might soon be visited by three pteranodons,” Snide leaned
over to smirk in my face, “giving life to an otherwise empty sky?”
“For that we’d need a sky,” I replied, to Snide, to Dirk, to no one, as
I gazed up at a stone ceiling a dozen yards overhead.
The cave was as tall and broad as an aircraft hangar, but its depth was
yet unknown. Our lamp set up at the back wall, despite its intensity,
could light no farther than two dozen yards ahead. Two dozen yards of
bare stone and trash far too young for a terrain Dirk had told us was
prehistoric.
“My guess is the rubbish is getting down here through the same fissures
that give this world its air,” Dirk hypothesized while performing a
little step-dance to unstick a candy bar wrapper from the bottom of his
jackboot.
At the entrance to the mine-shaft through which we’d arrived, on a
flat-topped granite slab, Mr. Wince laid out our picnic. I was hungry
only for an explanation.
“Dirk, you bragged of a cavern so lofty that our tallest skyscrapers
would not graze the ceiling.”
“I’m certain it will get more spacious farther on,” my host assured.
“And where is the lush verdure?” I continued. “All I see is bare, flat
stone. We might as well be in a parking lot!”
“Relax, my friend,” Dirk patted me on the shoulder. “The meadow begins
a little beyond the reach of our lamp.”
“Kiss me and I’ll give you a caramel,” Miss Ann suddenly appeared to
whisper in my ear.
Snide’s expression told me he’d overheard.
“They’re not caramels,” Miss Proserpina warned in my other ear.
“They’re molasses candy that will pull out your fillings.”
“This lamp is inappropriate for the lenses I’ve brought,” Ms. Sissus
groused, as she dug through her camera bags. “None of this is what I’d
expected. None of it!”
Mr. Wince announced that our lunch was ready.
Snide brushed past me with unnecessary violence. This gave Rasp a
little oily grin, but upon noticing Ann still hovering near me, he
scowled his eyebrows, thereby repurposing his grin into a truly evil
glare.
Sir Dirk loaded his elephant gun.
I pretended to be aware of nothing, my preferred state of awareness
(for which pretending is rarely necessary) and dug out my pen and sketch
pad.
Miss Ann snatched an egg salad sandwich to take with her on a stroll to
the farthest illuminated edge of the cave, her violet kid-leather
colonial pumps tap-tapping on the stone floor, reverberating away into
the mysterious darkness beyond. For a moment it looked as if Rasp would
follow her, until a furtive glance at Dirk and his gun encouraged him to
remain where he was. As Ann circled back toward us she threatened that
if we didn’t all cheer up she was going to breathe boiled egg into our
faces.
I’d been so distracted by our lack-of-surroundings, so disappointed to
find myself in a mere cave when I’d expected a tropical underground
paradise, that Proserpina’s recent whisper in my ear had barely
registered. But now resigned to the emptiness of our lost world, while
considering which sandwich might best console me, I furtively admired my
lady preparing a shotgun for Miss Ann.
“Papa can plug a giant lizard if he likes,” Ann laughed to Snide who
was beside her holding two cups of tea. “I’m only after fowl.”
Ann slung the shotgun over her shoulder, then took her cup.
Proserpina ensured her own pistol was loaded.
“Ever had a prehistoric drumstick, Snidey?” Ann asked her presumed
fiancé.
“Yours will be the first, dear,” Snide replied.
Mr. Wince slipped quietly up alongside me.
“May I see your pen?” he asked.
I obliged.
He turned it over in his hands, laid it across his fingers to find its
center of balance, then unscrewed the cap and examined the nib. “You’re
an artist?” he casually asked while sniffing the inside of the pen’s
body, for reasons unknown. “Only if pressed to admit it,” I replied,
considering myself now in the company of some sort of pen expert. “I
assumed everyone else would be shooting video or photos, whereas
expeditions of this sort should be documented longhand, in a little
notebook, with accompanying illustrations, don’t you agree?”
“I do agree,” he agreed, while handing me back my pen. “Even the better
sort of people these days are——“
He held his tongue.
I suspect Mr. Wince tolerated me for the same reason as his
master——despite my low social position, I plainly had no interest in
climbing out of it. Like Mr. Wince, I knew my place. In truth, I simply
saw nothing of value above my place! And I suspect both Sir Dirk and Mr.
Wince didn’t worry over my receiving the attentions of Miss Ann because
they rightly discerned that those attentions had no effect on me. Mr.
Wince likely attributed this to my knowing my place. No harm letting him
think it. The invective he now (politely) directed at the presumptuous
Mr. Rasp I would prefer to not have directed at me. If he only knew the
extent of Rasp’s not knowing his place!
Mr. Wince was capable of murder, I was sure of it, in the service of
preserving the social strata.
Ms. Sissus appeared on my other side, fiddling with the lens on her
camera, her sandwich clamped between her teeth like a bookmark. Ann
watched her curiously for a few seconds, perhaps having never before
seen someone who knew what they were doing, and then, curiosity spent,
turned to me.
“Your little notebook will likely be all that remains of our party
after prehistory has finished with us. It’ll be found at the mouth of
the cave, right over there where I’m pointing, still clutched in your
hand——”
“——the bones of your hand,” Proserpina added, having idled up along my
other side. “Only the top half of your skeleton will remain, sprawled in
your final agony, so near the mine-shaft, so near to escaping whatever
it was that had chased you there, whatever it was that had sprung out of
the darkness to bite you in half, leaving your torso clutching a
blood-smeared notebook.”
“I want to be in that notebook,” demanded Miss Ann.
She posed herself melodramatically, staring heavenward at some towering
beast, wide-eyed and ready to scream!
I can hold my own against my own kind but am helpless when ganged up on
by the fair sex. Without the slightest resistance, I posted my pen cap
and began to sketch Miss Ann as she had demanded. Ms. Sissus and Miss
Proserpina watched from either side.
“How do I look?” Ann asked with a belch. “I refuse to be drawn
badly.”
“I’m not a portrait artist, Miss Ann. I’m only sketching your pose.”
“Oh, nerts to that!”
Proserpina grudgingly took up Miss Ann’s pose so that her lady could
return to my side and flop once again against my shoulder.
What an extraordinary opportunity!
An opportunity to gaze upon Proserpina without having to be coy, an
opportunity to admire her with impunity!
My eyes admired, my drawing hand drew, and all the rest of me slipped
into blissful reverie.
“When do we get to the dinosaurs?” Ann grouched.
“Yes, when?” Ms. Sissus demanded. “I’ve got nearly three million
followers expecting something. Nearly three million!”
“I dearly hope our dinosaurs arrive in the correct order,” Snide
snorted in my direction, “and in correct numbers.”
Had I not been so entranced I might have stabbed him with my pen.
“We are unlikely to encounter fauna for at least a hundred yards,” Sir
Dirk explained, his empty teacup rattling in its saucer as he strode out
in front of our party, “after this stone floor gives way to a sort of
lawn.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Ms. Sissus. “Why are we loitering
here wasting the lamp’s battery?”
“Our bodies must first acclimate to the peculiar aura of prehistory,
Ms. Sissus, and,” Sir Dirk added with emphasis, “that aura must likewise
be acclimated with us.
“One does not want to get the temporal bends.”
With an irritated grunt Proserpina abruptly abandoned the pose into
which she had been ordered. Just as abruptly I dropped back into the
dreary here-and-now.
Forced to once again avert my gaze, I now at least had somewhere
suitable to avert it——my drawing. I’d barely given it a glance during my
moment of ecstasy!
What is this?
Mere lines!
Fortunately, Proserpina hadn’t the slightest interest in seeing what
I’d made of her, because what I’d made of her was an empty record of a
gesture that might have been posed by anyone. Anyone! Proserpina was
surely not just anyone! How could my drawing hand have so distorted what
my enraptured eyes had been telling me?
Despite the sketch’s disturbing emptiness, I refused to discard it
among the surrounding rubbish. If nothing else, it was a memento of a
delightful moment, of a fellow ghost in our empty world!
“A phantom drawn by a phantom——”
Suddenly, a guttural yelp deep in the darkness.
Our party fell silent.
Ms. Sissus readied her camera.
Dirk, Ann, and Proserpina readied their guns.
I flipped over a fresh page and readied my pen.
* * *
After a quarter-hour with no repeat of the strange yelp, our party
dismissed it as having been the reverberation of some noise
inadvertently made by one of our own, and let down its collective
guard.
Ms. Sissus was impatient to make something of the afternoon, to get a
picture of anything if not something to share with her nearly three
million followers once reconnected to the surface world. She convinced
Sir Dirk to lend her one of his powerful lamps, the one that had been
held back in case the first failed, to take with her just a little
deeper into the cave, to hopefully find something worth illuminating.
Dirk’s acquiescence came only after the assurance she would not waste
the lamp’s battery. Sissus promised to not even turn it on until she was
well beyond the light cast by our principal lamp at the cave wall.
Her eyes lit up as she imagined how she might frame the start of our
adventure for the delight of her nearly three million followers. She
would walk into Eternity itself, yes, at the head of the party, let
herself be swallowed by darkness, advance forward in space and backward
in time without fear, and then switch on the lamp for only as long as it
took to snap a single selfie. A flash in the dark!
While I didn’t share her enthusiasm, I did at least appreciate the
romance of her imagination, and I briefly wondered if the mysterious
something awaiting us in the dark might truly be something!
Dirk gave her a sniff to ensure she wasn’t wearing too contemporary a
fragrance.
“Acclimation,” he reminded her.
Mr. Rasp was volunteered by Sir Dirk to carry the lamp and battery for
Ms. Sissus. He had been following the exchange between her and Dirk with
disinterest, but upon hearing his name he froze like a frightened
rabbit, his cheeks full of dandelion salad.
After being fitted with the battery-rucksack and satisfactorily sniffed
by Sir Dirk, Rasp followed Ms. Sissus while holding before him the great
lamp, currently off. He had not offered a word of protest, but I suspect
it was because he hadn’t swallowed since hearing his name called, and
was now venturing into the unknown with his cheeks still full.
The rest of the party remained safely back, huddled near the cave
entrance. Mr. Wince smirked a little at the sight of poor Rasp, now very
much learning his place——a sniveling porter for some
flavour-of-the-month social media nincompoop (Wince’s words, not mine;
in view of her bravery I was willing to overlook Sissus’ ongoing abuse
of the phrase nearly three million.) I wonder if Mr. Wince realised that
Miss Ann was one of that nincompoop’s followers?
Because everyone’s eyes were forward, on Sissus and Rasp, nobody
noticed when Miss Ann backed me into the cave wall to offer a bite of
her sandwich. As tolerant as Dirk had thus far shown himself to be of
his daughter’s fiddling with your lowly narrator, I doubted this could
be overlooked; and so I offered not even the slightest peep of protest
lest it provoke my host to shoot a look backwards.
Ann pressed herself still closer to furtively peel back the top slice
of bread to reveal the turkey inside and whisper in my ear, “Shot it
myself.”
“I hadn’t realised sandwiches were in season,” I whispered back.
I dutifully took a bite and then wriggled myself free.
Onward crept Ms. Sissus, her camera at the ready, and her hesitant
pack-mule, Rasp, presumably having finally gulped his cheeks empty,
mewling his disapprobation. Onward they crept into the vast cave, onward
toward the most distant edge of our lamp’s light, and then, with a
bravery well beyond my own, into the darkness itself.
The lamp held by Rasp remained off.
We could now only follow their progress by Rasp’s whimpering and the
steady tapping of his heavy oxfords.
The tapping suddenly stopped.
“Have you reached the lawn?” Sir Dirk shouted.
“It sure feels like it!” Ms. Sissus shouted back. “I’ll take a picture
before we move on. Are you ready, Mr. Rasp?”
“What should I do?” he sniffled.
“Hold the lamp up over your head, pointed forward,” Ms. Sissus
instructed. “I’ll count down from three. At zero, switch the lamp on and
off. I only want one picture from here, a selfie of me stepping out onto
our prehistoric meadow. I intend to call it The First Second. Clever,
don’t you think? Save the battery until we’re farther along. Are you
ready?”
“Y——yes.”
We all eagerly awaited the flash from Rasp’s lamp, for a glimpse of
what lay in the distant gloom. Would it only be more unremarkable
cavern?
“Three, two, one...”
At zero, about fifty yards away, on came the light!
There was Ms. Sissus, facing us, with her camera held far out in front
of her, presumably taking her own picture.
There was Mr. Rasp, facing the other direction, with the lamp held
aloft.
There they both were, tiny things, one facing forward and the other
backward, on a patchy and trashy lawn in the very middle of a burst of
light, more intensely illuminated than they had likely ever been
before.
Or ever would be again!
One might argue the merits of leaving this world as Ms. Sissus and Mr.
Rasp left it——immediately after a moment of profound illumination.
Looming over them, filling the burst of light nearly to its periphery,
an enormous grey feathered beast!
A wild turkey twenty feet tall!
There it was; we all saw it, albeit only for one second, during the
flash of Rasp’s lamp and the click of Sissus’ camera.
And in the darkness to follow, sounds indescribable and mercifully
brief. In only a few seconds our subterranean world was silent once
again.
* * *
I had not set out to tell an old dark house story, yet we have arrived
at that portion of my account which can be described no other way. Our
party was destined to be swallowed by the shadows in successive
bites.
Perhaps I should say pecks.
It sickens me to report——the beast had been, without the slightest
doubt, a tyrannosaur.
A tyrannosaur!
A tyrannosaur not only hideously feathered, but tediously feathered,
feathered not like a proud peacock, but like a turkey, like a common
clucking turkey poised to peck up a couple of seeds in the grass!
As for the pen I’d held at the ready, during the flash of Rasp’s lamp,
it unsurprisingly recorded no more than a scrape down the page from a
hand jerked in terror. (I would soon, however, sketch an image much more
disturbing than of a feathered tyrannosaur merely looming over members
of our party. Perhaps by then I’d sufficiently acclimated myself.)
Sir Dirk and Mr. Wince boldly quit the safety of the mine-shaft into
which we had retreated, to step back out into the cave to face the
monster of the shadows.
Off they went, our sufficiently-acclimated sportsman and his loyal
attendant, to avenge our fallen comrades, and ideally return with a
trophy of rarest rarity! Dirk carried the elephant gun and Mr. Wince the
lamp that had until now been kept alight at the mouth of the cave. Our
only proper light, then, departed with the little hunting party. Dirk
and Wince slowed only once, when they neared the site of Ms. Sissus’ and
Mr. Rasp’s moment of intense illumination. We anticipated gore
corresponding to the terrible yelps and shrieks, but all that remained
was a smashed lamp and part of a rucksack. Dirk and Wince continued
bravely onward while we at the mouth of the cave remained safely inward,
watching their light getting smaller and fainter until it had faded into
darkness.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear.
Eventually, something out of the black——the tiniest little boom. The
elephant gun, certainly, a single shot from very far away.
Only a little boom. Nothing more.
Silence again!
My pen remained ready to sketch, but how does one render a distant boom
in the dark?
* * *
After a half-hour of silence, Miss Ann, dramatically lit by a
flashlight under her chin, ordered Snide to go find her father. He
refused. I couldn’t blame him. I’d have refused had the demand been made
of me. Ann refused his refusal. She demanded afresh, threatening to
never marry Snide unless her father was returned to give her away.
Her fiancé eventually conceded.
I suspect he’d reasoned that since we had no more than ordinary
flashlights remaining among us, he needed tiptoe into the cave only a
short distance to disappear into the shadows. There he could wait in
silence until either Sir Dirk returned, or enough time had elapsed that
he might return alone giving the appearance of having searched to the
farthest corner of our lost world.
A treacherous task, nonetheless.
Poor Snide crept out armed with a flashlight and Proserpina’s pistol.
“I’d hate to have to kill such a beautiful creature,” he’d whispered
before setting out. Suspecting these might be his last words, I chose to
not argue.
Snide had not taken a dozen steps before his flashlight illumined the
great beast in mid-lunge. I wonder how long it had lurked out there in
the dark among our picnic refuse, crouching in silence, waiting to
pounce? Snide hadn’t the chance to scream.
His flashlight slipped from his hand as the great jaws enclosed him,
foot-lighting our associate’s transfiguration into a bulge in a
dinosaur’s throat, gulped down with several upward thrusts of its
massive head.
A single muffled shot from deep in its belly drew from the beast a mere
squawk of indigestion. No gunslinger, our Snide. Far too slow on the
draw.
We watched in silence.
As I watched, I sketched.
* * *
I have in the past often described myself as a ghost adrift in a dead
world, but during moments of sober reflection (which I did experience
from time to time) I would concede that the Snides of the world were
perfectly entitled to find beauty wherever they liked. The world wasn’t
dead, it was merely not to my taste. I might find our times grey and
shriveled, but it was absurd for me to claim they were not alive.
But then I saw the darkest dark illuminated!
Our subterranean expedition ended for me all sober reflection.
Thereafter I was not only a ghost adrift in a dead world, but a ghost
without reveries onto which to cling. My paragon of beauty——the
tyrannosaur triumphant, royally draped in all the vibrant colours of
spring, looming over his tropical paradise——had in reality only yelped
his dominion over a trash-strewn parking lot, an idiot mouth gulping
reflexively whatever drifted past.
Prehistoria had been clear-cut to better a view of nothing!
I should never have drawn the beast.
The emptiness of the image was too much for my admittedly too-delicate
sensibilities.
Nothing, nothing, nothing!
A feathered tyrannosaur clucking among the ash, clucking among iron
boilers, smokestacks, and smashed dirigibles!
All nothing!
* * *
Miss Ann is now Lady of the Dirk country house and its surrounding
wasteland where she hunts quail and wild turkeys for Proserpina to pluck
and me to cook.
Proserpina is still her lady’s maid, strictly speaking, but with her
lady having lost interest in academia, Proserpina is similarly
liberated, and left to spend her days reading novels——an art-form——no, a
sedative perfected, it should be remembered, uncoincidentally concurrent
with all the smoking, choking, woe-provoking machinery of our industrial
times!
Occasionally in the evening around the cosy downstairs stove with our
mugs of cocoa, my ladies have me read Zane Grey to them in my manly
soprano——stories of cattle thieves and other desperate characters with
whom we can easily sympathise. Lady Ann will invariably snuggle up
beside me. I don’t resist. Nor do I persist in my fantasies about
Proserpina. They’d only ever been reveries, after all, the impulse to
make something out of nothing. I’d given up. Nothing had won!
Other than the three of us the mansion is now empty. Although Miss Ann
had effectively run the vast Dirk estate since the death of her mother a
few years earlier (while dumping the actual work on Proserpina, of
course) she’d only done so to suit her father. With him gone and no
longer demanding order, Ann immediately quit her administrative duties.
She fired the entire staff. The half-wasted estate was soon thoroughly
wasted, and the mansion a spider-infested dust bowl; most of Dirk’s
stuffed trophies have been mummified in cobwebs. Proserpina suggests we
open all the windows to let in birds to eat the spiders.
I suspect we will shortly thereafter have to let in cats to eat the
birds.
Ann insisted my sketch of Snide’s final moment be framed and replace
the old dinosaur pastel in the trophy gallery.
“All that colour was wrong for the beast’s grey little kingdom, don’t
you think?”
“If only I could think otherwise,” I sighed.
There he is on the wall before me, tyrannosaur, sketched hastily but
sufficiently to reveal his disgraceful feathers, and his tail not
dragging like a leaden train, rather hoisted behind him, all but fanned
out like a turkey’s.
Ann reminded me that sketches are ideally meant to be studies for
larger works. “Paint for me in thick, dirty oils,” she demanded while
rolling over half-asleep, “our tyrannosaur, ash-smeared, as big as life,
atop a stack of dirty diapers and discarded phones, on a canvas spanning
floor-to-ceiling.”
I set slowly to work.
* * *
Day gives way to night, and night to day. The sun each morning catches
me by surprise, and each evening as it sets I’m certain it will never
bother to rise again.
* * *
“I wonder what it would taste like?”
Who said that?
I awoke from a lost moment during which I’d stood still and stared
while thinking of nothing. Such moments are now common. They’ve replaced
my old reveries.
I was alone in the attic studio with a floor-to-ceiling canvas before
me, barely begun, and my sketch now out of its frame and pinned to the
wall.
Proserpina emerged from behind my tabouret with the cap from a tube of
paint that I had recently lost. I thanked her for finding it, and also
for not just being a voice in my head. Ann then demanded a similar
gratitude. Turns out she’d also been in the studio, asleep on the old
fainting couch where models once posed for painters likely more gifted
than me, and definitely more inspired.
After trudging over to flop against my shoulder and critique my first
few uninspired brushstrokes, with a sigh Ann suggested it was about time
she and I marry, no? “No,” was indeed my answer, when, after I’d been
crammed into Ann’s dead brother’s old tux, the priest deputised to hear
our vows, Proserpina, asked if I took the woman wearing her other dead
brother’s old tux, to be my lawfully wedded wife.
“I hereby pronounce you nobody and no one,” pronounced the most
reverend Miss Proserpina in paisley vestments with matching beret, “you
may now strangle the bride.”
* * *
Night gives way to day, and day to night.
Each night seems a little brighter, each day a little darker. Either
day and night are about to flip polarity or they’ll meet in the middle
and leave us in perpetual twilight.
I pass my nights and days loitering before the floor-to-ceiling canvas,
occasionally adding an indecisive smear of grey.
Proserpina reads. Ann sleeps. The spiders spin their webs. Nothing
onward everlasting, it would seem!
* * *
One night the power goes out and never returns.
* * *
Two familiar gentlemen at our door, while professing their familiar End
Times theology, recognised me and with confusion asked, “What are you
doing here?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea!”
Ours are not the End Times as proclaimed by their lurid pamphlet (two
of which are now folded in my jacket pocket.) The End Times began before
even prehistoria, and ended with a puff of black smoke from the top of a
cylindrical stack of red brick. We’re well past the End Times! We’re in
whatever follows the end. The Nothing Times, I suppose. With Sir Dirk
and his enablers gone, our lost world is empty but for the wind-blown
detritus of those thoroughly ended End Times, detritus which includes me
and my ladies, evidently, and a restless giant turkey clucking around
down there somewhere in the dark. Our world is not dying, but dead, long
dead, and we are indeed ghosts, dreary tenants of an old hotel boarded
up and forgotten. Eventually the faint light of the very last star will
be noticed by our delinquent landlord and snuffed out!
Ann has just awoken on the fainting couch to peer over its velvet
headrest to demand I stop brooding, and focus instead on finishing the
painting. “I’ve had an epiphany,” she yawns. “Drape your big turkey with
spring garlands befitting a golden calf.”
“Are we to be pagans?” Proserpina asks from the rocking chair where
she’d been doing a crossword by flashlight.
“Not for very long,” Ann explains.
I can barely make out her spectral silhouette, but the scrunching of
velvet and the changed altitude of her voice tells me she is sitting up
straight for the first time since crawling out of bed that afternoon.
“We’ll pray to the thing only long enough to regret it,” she continues,
after clicking on her flashlight to find me in the dark. “Then we’ll
destroy it. The painting, that is, our idol——destroy it. To escape our
lingering malaise, we need something monumental to recant beyond
everyday iniquities.”
Ann then sighs a very long sigh, a sigh I recognised, a sigh I’d once
thought was mine alone. “I’m tired of being tired,” she whispers. “I’m
tired of nothing. I don’t want any more of it. I want something.”
I recall with longing the old tyrannosaur pastel in Dirk’s gallery. It
had been something.
Proserpina doesn’t wait for her lady to demand she cast the canvas more
light. She drifts up alongside me to add her light to my own. Ann’s
promptly follows.
All three lights together are able to illuminate the whole ugly beast
from top to bottom. Ann is right. Colour is what it needs. Spring
garlands of only the brightest, most saturated colour.
For a moment I feel just a little hopeful!
But upon digging through the tabouret drawers in search of lively
pigments, I find only more tubes of the same dirty earth-tones——tubes
old and cracked, dried into blocks, and colours with names so
distressing I dare not add them to my palette.
THE END
Please consider visiting S. C. Marchere's Amazon Author Page
USA | UK | Canada | France | Spain | Italy | Japan | Brazil | Mexico | Australia | India | Germany/Netherlands