Author's Note:
Contains profanity and sexual situations.
Tessellation
by
George Potter
(Copyright 2007)
To hell with you, spirit.
I did not return to this place to do battle with spirits. I returned to this place for my own selfish and important reasons. It was you, spirit, who initiated this conflict. It was you, spirit, who laid down the gauntlet.
So be it.
"Are you OK?" she asks.
I swim up out of almost sleep, the night and the situation at hand shimmer into existence around me.
I am in a sleeping bag. I am naked. I am not alone.
Stars burn above me, spread and scattered like gems on jewel cloth. The air is warm but not hot. The breeze is gentle but insistent. Such nights and such situations are the material of wonderful memories for the young. I am not young. I'm not old, but I'm not young.
Sometimes it feels like I was never young.
"OK it was good." she says, and I can feel her smile in the dark. "But it shouldn't have stolen your voice." She kisses me quickly. "It wasn't that good."
"Sorry." I tell her. "I think I dozed off." And dreamed. And was warned.
She snuggles up to me and sighs. "I gotta go home in a minute. Sorry."
I squeeze her back, for politeness sake. I'm not comfortable here. Something is watching.
"Where are we, anyway?" I whisper.
She laughs. "You must have been higher than I thought. We're up near the head of Pond Creek, 'bout three miles from my house." A yawn. "This is where everybody goes."
Everybody is a fool then, I think. This is not a good place. It's not an evil place either, but it's far from good.
Something is watching.
Something that lives here.
Everybody says that my Mother is a witch. I've never agreed with or denied that claim. I simply shrug and let them make up their own mind.
My mother is a straightforward, often severe woman of 65 who prides herself on her civility, her cooking, and the pack of children she managed to raise despite poverty and hell's own aggravation. In daily life, through daily stress, there is nothing whatsoever mystical or magical about my mother. Those are facts.
But my Mother knows things, that is also a fact. Many strange and unusual things. She knows the herbs to pick to brew the tea to kill the fever after the doctors have given up. She knows the place to go to find the perfect stone to sit in the garden to frighten crows. I have seen her reason with cats and command strange dogs to lie down and be quiet.
Many things.
Before I left her home, before I made the return to the place where I was born, she told me this:
"If you go into the mountains -- and knowing you boy, that's where you'll stay -- you will see and hear things. Don't be afraid. If you don't turn and look at them, they can't hurt you."
I nodded, serious. I'd have laughed at anyone else, and dismissed them as silly. But this was Mother.
She knows things.
Her name is Shelly and I watch her dress with eyes now adjusted to starlight.
She is not a particularly pretty girl, but I would not call her plain. She has her own face -- unique and beautiful, not pretty. I approve. Pretty is for flowers and little girls in gingham dresses and black suede shoes. Pretty is for the sentimental. I prefer beauty.
"Stop staring at me because I'm fat." she says, tone battling to sound playful but failing. Too much self consciousness coils behind the words, shattering the glib surface. Real pain lies between them.
She's not fat, but I don't tell her that. It's the stock response, it's expected, and -- like all stock responses -- will burden her with a load of assumptions.
"Skinny women bore me." I say instead.
She laughs.
I'm sitting up now, still naked, sleeping bag puddled around my lap. I watch her pull on a pair of pants with two deft motions and button them. She wears men's clothes. A Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt and Lee jeans, topped with a Harley cap. She manages to look sexy as hell in them, too.
She turns and looks at me. "Get dressed." she commands.
"Why?"
She sighs. "Because I don't have time to pull my clothes back off and attack you. I gotta get home. My nephew will be awake at 7 am sharp, and he'll be jumping on top of my head three minutes later. It's almost 2 am."
I comply, and she walks to her car. I dress quickly, and look around at this apparently popular little hangout. This place that screams danger at me on some low frequency deep in my head.
It's just a big wide spot beside a gravel road, more or less flat. Hemmed in by shrubs and bushes, trees a few hundred feet to the east and west, the road running a winding crooked north/south up the side of the hill.
I hear the car crank but refuse to start. I hear Shelly mutter curses.
Yes. I can feel it. Like a vibration in the air, like a finger pointing at me from the dark.
Something is watching.
Something that lives here.
The starter catches and the car roars into life, load and blaring without a muffler.
"Come on!"
As soon as I turn, facing the car and the headlights that spring into the black, the chill hits me. Imaginary sand skitters down my spine. The hair on the back of my neck stands at painful full attention.
I know, way down on that low frequency, that the watcher just let its face show.
I do not turn and look. I can feel some awful hot breath chuffing from that face, but I do not turn and look. Rigid, electrified, I walk slowly to the car and get in.
We pull out and move down the hill. The watcher stares.
I do not turn and look.
"You're kind of quiet." Shelly says, as soon as we're on our way toward the mouth of the hollow.
"Sorry." I say.
Long seconds drift by, empty save the vibration of the car and the roar of the unmuffled engine.
"Are you embarrassed?"
I'm surprised. "Excuse me?"
"Embarrassed. For fucking a fat chick who stripped down and got into bed with you an hour after she met you."
Sometimes people say things to you that leave you at this mental crux-point. If you're smart enough, it manifests as a sort of scattered graph. You can choose how you want to respond by following the graph.
I do not baby her. I do not reassure her. I do not apologize.
"That's the only kind of women I've ever fucked." I tell her, and it's the truth.
She knows it's the truth, and she laughs. Really laughs. So hard she has to pull over for a minute to recover. The laughter giggles back up again several times in the nice warm silence that it created.
When she drops me off, she's suddenly troubled.
"We're not, like, boyfriend or girlfriend or anything, right? You don't think that..."
"I'm a boy. You're a girl. We're friends. Haven't you ever watched movies? Anything could happen."
I close the door, and place my hand on the window for a moment. She reaches across and touches it goodbye. I can feel a warm spark jump across the barrier of the fake glass.
She pulls out and drives off, toward a still sleeping nephew and responsibilities she didn't create.
I decide I like her a lot.
I go inside and shower. I consider going to bed. But I can still feel the hair on the back of my neck, restless with the remnants of that electric charge. Something dances uneasily along my spine and I know sleep will be delayed, perhaps for a day or two.
I sit down, still naked, at my computer desk. I position the wheeled swivel chair perfectly in the center of the pentagram that no one but myself and Cat (who has not chosen to make an appearance yet) can see.
I close my eyes and hold my breath, until the silky flow of the circles protection crawls up my skin and encases me.
Everyone laughs at my computer, since it has no case and much of it is tacked to the wall. It's the only way it will run, since it builds up far more heat than even the four heavy duty fans placed at strategic points can handle. On cold nights the things it processes can heat my bedroom.
I never turn it off. Power outages have no effect on it, since it operates under its own power. To turn it off, intentionally, would destroy it.
I log on.
The hunt begins.
My father is the greatest mechanic this world has ever seen, and only six people know this fact. Three of them are dead and the other three deserve the sort of trust epic poems are written about.
I once watched my father repair and use an engine my younger brother and myself dug out of the ground: a big block Chevy engine that had waited there patiently for twenty three years. Waited for two children to find and rescue it. Waited for the only hands on the planet capable of giving it life again.
He did this in two days.
Years later, he traded that car for our first computer -- a Commodore Vic 20. On that day, my father found his purpose in life.
When I found out what I could do with the computers my father rigged, I discovered my own.
The night before I left his home, he presented me with this rig.
The hunt is still afoot when Cat -- his hunt at an end -- returns. He enters through one of his secret doors, ignoring the flap I built for him as he does unless we have a guest.
He saunters over to me, to the invisible pentagrams edge, and drops me the morning gift. A large gray jack rabbit, nearly his size. It has been decapitated, but there is no blood.
I don't know what he does with the blood. That's his business.
"Thanks, Cat. Good morning."
He mews, deep and rumbly, like a rusted manhole cover being pried from some burned city street. Milk, he says.
I glance at the clock. It's nearly 10 am. I have learned a lot, in my meandering way, but not enough.
Shift and CTRL down, I tap in:
Exodus Tempus 60. The search locks and holds, the protective circle pauses. One hour.
I snag the rabbit and move to the kitchen, Cat dancing right on the edge of tripping me.
I pour him a milk in his favorite saucer and he sets to it with a will. I do the same to the rabbit, skinning and cleaning it, realizing that I'm starving. I slice a nice portion from it and start it frying with some butter and paprika. I scramble some eggs in a separate pan.
Cat deigns to share breakfast with me, perhaps to show that he does not hunt for sport. That he is a pragmatic killer. Or, maybe, he just likes eggs and paprika.
I don't try to figure cats out. They come to me, of their own will. I have never chosen a cat in my life. Nor have I ever insulted one by naming it. They have their own names. They are not pets to me. They are combination friends and associates. We complement each other and like each other. That is enough.
The only odd thing about Cat is that he is a tom. I've never lived with a tom before. A tom never chose me before now. Always females, usually tiger striped or white. Toms, I've discovered, are very different from the female of their species -- in many ways more sociable, if less affectionate. Not as quick a hunter, but just as skilled and able to take larger game.
It has been almost 10 years since I've bought meat. Why waste money on what a cat will provide willingly and (I suspect) with great joy?
I'm headed back to the computer when someone knocks on the door.
Shelly is smiling at me when I open up, having pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt.
She looks a little embarrassed After a second, I realize why.
She has ditched the guy clothes and... well... dressed up. A nice low cut blouse that shows decent cleavage. A skirt. Hose. Pumps.
Not embarrassed actually. Uncomfortable. And somewhat annoyed.
"Hi." she says. "You don't mind me stopping by, do you?"
"Of course not." I say, despite the fact that I do. I have work to complete, and my one hour holding pattern only has twenty minutes left to run. Missing the mark will result in seven hours work lost, a vicious headache, and a torrential nose bleed.
But I smile as I say it, regardless. I surprise myself by meaning it. I'm happy to see her. She looks cute as a button in her uncomfortable get-up, partially because of her blushing self-awareness.
I realize something as she steps inside and glances around my not exactly impressive home. My morning research is not simply the product of my usual curiosity or due to any danger I sensed for myself.
The danger focuses on her.
"Nice place." she finally judges. "Clean."
"I wasn't raised by wolves. Do you eat rabbit?"
She makes a face. "Ugh, no. That's horrible."
"Deliciously horrible."
She rolls her eyes and sits, obviously reminding herself that she's wearing a skirt.
Cat swaggers up and eyes her.
"Hi kitty." she says.
He narrows his eyes to slits and cocks his head. Then he starts cleaning himself.
Judgment acceptable with provisional reservations.
"Not very friendly."
I laugh. "If he didn't like you he'd raise massive hell." Literally, I don't say.
"You're not one of those weird cat people are you?" she asks, more flirty than inquisitive.
"You have no idea." Something about my eyes catches her. Damn. I'm letting the guard slip a little far, and Cat is staring at me like I'm a fool. The holding pattern is cycling down toward fifteen minutes remaining, and I can feel the 'puter pulsing out waves of warning in the bedroom. In a few minutes even Shelly will sense it.
"Not to be rude, but I haven't been to bed yet." I tell her. Best to stick to true statements. "Even ugly guys like me need beauty sleep. Did you need something?"
She stands up. Smiles. "Not really. I was... going to the store. Just... wanted to see you. I guess." Really, really clumsy lies. Except the last bit. "And you're not ugly." She blushes and forges head. "Want to get together tonight?"
Relief. "Sure. Come by around five."
"OK" She stares at me for a few seconds. Then kisses me, on impulse. A sweet little kiss.
As she leaves she walks with a bounce to her step, unable to hide a happy heart.
I see it for the first time, crackling around her like a storm cloud. The black aura of incoming danger. It coalesces around her, a tightening fist, and sends smoky tendrils out, reaching for me.
Whatever lives at the head of Pond Creek wants me, all right -- but knows better than to try a frontal assault. It's a sneaky bitch. It will try to sneak in through a weak emotional backdoor.
Coward.
When I was eleven years old, I figured out how to log onto the internet -- which was an achievement because we didn't have a modem or a phone, and the internet was a bare few servers stitching together a handful of Universities. I figured this out in a half trance, while attempting to write a Basic program that would function as an alarm clock.
Unnerved, I asked my father to look at it. He passed out. My mother looked at the code and paled.
After that, they let me be at the computer. I met many interesting people. And creatures.
And I figured out many more things.
I slip back into the chair with nine minutes remaining. The room temperature has grown uncomfortable and a steady ache has crept behind my eyes.
Shift and CTRL down:
Resumptis. Cat gives me a final, withering glance and wanders off to sleep.
The hunt continues.
I'm in the Howling, the non-place some call Hell.
It's not. What it really is is the seedbed of reality, the thin layer of existence where nothing becomes something.
"Probably because the universe got bored." my dad opines. My mom always says something about God.
On this side physics begin -- time, space, heat and light. On the other -- nothing.
To me, it's just a big data web.
But I have to be careful. Because on the other side the enemy lives. It has many names.
Nothing, as I said. Scientists call it entropy and 'the heat death of the universe'. Politicians, the human beings most in its thrall, call it Order.
My family, and those like us, call it The Crumbler.
"The first thing you have to understand, son, is that most people are ignorant about the universe. Take the concepts of chaos and order. Chaos is supposed to be bad, Order is supposed to be good. Right?"
I nod. That's what they tell us in school.
"That's a bag of bull." Dad is enjoying this. He likes destroying illusions as much as fiddling with tools. "Think about it: what is the ultimate order?"
I mull it over, but he's being rhetorical.
"Being dead. Being rotted away and gone. Nothing more orderly and quiet and peaceful than that, is there?"
I agree.
"And that's what the Crumbler wants. Not just for us. For everything. For the whole blasted universe."
I'm spiraling in, now pulling data from the minds of the dead. Their souls do not rest here, but their memories are often locked, here -- flash frozen in The Howling by their final agonized fight to live.
I concentrate on the geographic area of Pond Creek. Its history and settlement.
It comes to me, as a revelation - an intuition explosion of visuals and symbols, impossible to describe -- what I'm dealing with.
I didn't think any nature spirits still haunted this world. I now realized why my mother warned me. Because nature spirits, despite the romanticists and neo-pagans, are all in the service of the enemy. As my family and folk like us -- witchfolk, they call us -- exist to combat him.
I know what to do.
"You can't hide from it." my mother tells me as I pack.
"I'm not trying to hide from anything." I tell her, lying. "I just want to go back and see the damn place."
"You can't help what you are."
"And I can't help what I want, either!" I yell. "Maybe I just want a wife and some kids, Mom! Maybe I just want to be left alone and not worry about some fucking ancient war I never asked to fight!"
She laughs at me, pissing me off even more.
"Lord, boy... you think we chose this?"
I continue to pack, angry.
"Nobody gets to choose. We were born as we were and the enemy tries to kill us because it fears us. We no more choose it than water chooses to freeze in the winter."
I come out of trance. The complexity of what I have to do next demands I be fully functional. That means it's going to hurt.
I once tried to explain to my dad how I built hexes and tessellations with the computer.
"A normal computer only knows two things. On and off. But the way you rig 'em makes 'em different."
"Explain it to me." Dad maintained that he had no idea how he did what he did. He worked by instinct and intuition.
"Well... they got on and off. But they also got over and under and toward and away."
"Huh?"
"Six positions. Not two."
He smiled. "A hex."
"Yep."
Lots of things live in The Howling. Imps and daemons and furies and rievings All of them are dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. And all of them are useful if you do.
I need a rieving
(CONT.)
