All entries for Wednesday 31 October 2007

The Passageway

A girl found herself in a passageway. It was very long. So long in fact that she could see neither the end nor the beginning. Therefore she assumed herself to be in the middle, chose a direction, and began to walk. There were no doors or windows in this place. No suits of armour for the girl to pass, or candles to mark her way. Yet is was beautiful and full of light, the walls themselves shimmering with gold. The floor was red flagstone, and the ceiling a painted pale sky with streaks of red and orange cloud. The walls were segmented by pillars and arches, between which there were paintings. Image after image decorated the passage until the walls came together in a neat little point just out of sight.

The pictures were of many wonderful and enchanting things. There were evil sprites and fey creatures clambering over the frames and balancing on the cracks. And kings, and queens, magicians and witches, handsome boys and handsome girls; all who were acting out huge and significant tales the girl did not understand.

At first she paid them no heed, but as the repetition of the passage took its toll, she turned to a picture on her left. It was a wood full of the greatest trees one could imagine. They stretched so high into the sky that the girl lost herself in the feeling of smallness. From the greenery stepped a woman wearing a brown dress of skeleton leaves. The girl in the passage was a little shocked and took a step back.

‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

The woman in the picture looked at the girl in the passage, blinked and smiled a half-smile. She replied, ‘Life would be awfully dull if one was never disturbed.’

The girl walked on, a little perturbed, and soon found herself drawn to a picture of a great and grand hall, filled with a banquet of food. It was the most beautiful food that you could imagine, steaming and sizzling in the paint. At one end of the table sat an old king. He was drowsily staring down the table, and as he saw the girl passing by his wall, he jumped up and called out, ‘Little girl! Come and join me, please! For there is far too much food for me to eat all alone, and my guests were never painted!’

The girl was indeed hungry after walking for some time down the passageway, but try as she might, she could not enter the picture to join the king. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said sadly and walked on. She heard the king’s disheartened reply, ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t truly taste of food at any rate.’

Soon after, she came across a red knight upon his horse, standing defiantly before a cave. Smoke was billowing from the opening and all of a sudden a black dragon issued forth. It flew up into the high reaches of the painting. ‘Please excuse me, fair maiden,’ said the knight, politely nodding at her. He closed his visor and charged the beast. The chase surged through the sky of the ceiling and raced down the passageway, the dragon’s fire making the paint bubble. The girl ran after them as they disappeared ahead, but she soon found the dragon fallen and the knight victorious. The hunt had ended in a painting of two now somewhat alarmed lovers.

Without warning, she came to the end.

So surprised was the girl, that she almost struck her head on the final image in front of her. It was a city so blindingly golden that she could hardly bare to look at it. Towers were spiralling up into a cornflower blue sky, and trees and pools spread out their inky colours. When the girl pressed her nose up against the paint, she could see people. There were little girls dressed in red, sitting on the edges of fountains and giggling in the spray. Little boys dressed in yellow ran through the streets, leaping over walls and flying through the air. Old men dressed in brown were reading piles of leather-bound books on rooftops. And old women dressed in orange played music under the boughs of the ancient trees. The girl took a step back from the picture and sighed in wonder at such a lovely world.

For a time she had been looking so closely at the picture that a stream of light coming from its centre had gone unnoticed. Now she followed it to what seemed to be a painted window in the central tower. She put her eye to it and saw only light, but a slight breeze blew her hair from her face. Her fingers found a crack leading from the hole to the ceiling, and another tracing down to the ground. Placing a hand either side, she pushed the stone wall outwards with all her might. A warm sun wrapped about her, and the girl stepped out into bright air. Before her, a city gleamed happily in welcome.

: 31 Oct 2007 21:36 |  Tags: Prose |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dimensional Hiatus

           At this moment, and every other, a boy and a girl are falling and clutching desperately at each other’s mittened hands so as not to lose one another through endless gaping doorways into swirling dimensions. When last they were fully formed particles, they were standing together outside Harrods, following their fur clad mothers through the doors of honeyed wood and luminous gold. Now they are a million light years away and their mothers have not even noticed their disappearance.

Of course, if everyone who has ever fallen into a dimensional hiatus is everywhere at once, the odds are that you are likely to meet people during your journeying through the void. The boy and the girl watched curiously as an old man floated merrily by waving at them. His beard was wrapped three times around his neck against the surprising cold of the endless universe. Now that they had met, it made it much more unlikely that they would ever meet again.

After an eternity and no time at all, the boy and the girl looked at each other in confusion as they were sucked into a rip in time and space. And they landed in the mud on their bottoms with a bump. The dimension they had quite literally accidentally stumbled across was very dark and quite. The little boy and the little girl got to their feet, and brushed themselves down as best they could, still holding hands for a meager sense of security.

The little boy was reminded of a picture of the Antarctic he has once pondered over in his father’s library. Only it was a though the whole picture had been dropped into a pool of red dye and strung out on the line to dry. The world in front of them dripped with rusty and salty liquid. The ground beneath them was gluey and warm, unlike the clean whiteness of the picture.

Lost for words, they scanned dimension with growing trepidation. They saw what appeared to be an immeasurably large grey mushroom in the distance. The sticky light - whether it was day or night, the pair could not be sure – made it particularly difficult for anything to be made out properly. But as their eyes adjusted, they saw tiny far-off figures swarming around the obese lump. As they watched, the grey skin of the mushroom was pulled away by the creatures to reveal that it was not at all what they had first thought. A dozen miles away from them, the canvas pulled back from the gigantic corpse of a ship jutting into the foggy brown horizon.

How it had got there was seemingly a mystery. There did not seem to be any water around, and unless the ship had navigated the shifted hills of mud during its lifetime, it was a long way from home. Decaying as though it had been under water for centuries, the metal ship seemed to be staining the land for as far as their little eyes could see. The boy and the girl thought that if the swarming creatures were the same size as themselves, the ship would have stood as tall as anything they could have ever imagined. The creatures clambering over the body were as small as barnacles in comparison. But like barnacles, they were slowly, very slowly, eating away at the metal. Perhaps they lived on it. There certainly did not seem to be any other source of nutrition.

‘Could we go home now, please?’ asked the little girl. She, like so many of us in a hopeless situation, wanted someone to tell her that everything was going to turn out for the best and that she would be safely in her bed very soon. The little boy could only squeeze her hand and hope that somewhere in this world there was a dimensional hiatus for them to stumble back into. This was not the dreamscape of castles, indians, spaceships and dragons that he had always wished to have an adventure in. But he supposed it must do.

For now.

The little boy and the little girl set off determinedly towards the metal-eating scurrying black creatures and their dead catch of a mud ship.

: 31 Oct 2007 21:25 |  Tags: Icw Prose |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem