At first it
seemed to be easy. At each multiple-choice junction John just waited until the
lightest blue corridor appeared and then walked in to it. Bit by bit he turned
the corridors paler and paler and clearer and clearer. The darker corridors seemed more cloudy, as
if they had things suspended in them, like little corks floating in a blue
wine. It was only after a while that John realised that the floating things
moved all on their own – they were more like fish than corks, although had no
very obvious shapes. Avoiding the strange swimming things seemed like a
reasonable first rule of thumb.
John wondered what this network of shimmering tunnels was. If it was
gluing together, or at least connecting, two parts of what seemed to be the
normal worlds, what were the normal worlds?. ‘More or less normal’ would be a
better term: worlds with sunlight, trees and buildings. This wasn’t normal in
any sense; it appeared to be threads of one form of reality laced through
another. He was assuming that where the laces were bluer then they were closer
to the other reality, and that the things (were they actually living
creatures?) that swam within the blue matrix, were from that reality. The
Archon had called it the Outer Void and, from what he’d seen of it, that seemed
like an apt enough name.
John still wondered why he’d never heard of any of these places before.
He had never heard the names Belenor, Skiophos, Nux, Helios, or the Outer Void.
He knew enough archaic elven to know what Nux meant – it meant ‘night’. But
that didn’t take him very far. Then he remembered something else. An elven
tutor of his, a long time ago in Kinspit, would often say that a student was so
stupid that he deserved to be banished to the Perikenoma. He was fairly certain
on thinking about it that ‘Perikenoma’ meant the ‘outer void’. He’d taken no
notice of it at the time, but the professor was very old and very exotic. He
might well have come originally from Helios. It was looking increasingly like
an Elven conspiracy. Oh well, now he knew something, and was determined to find
out a lot more.
John turned round and looked behind him. He could see nothing except
the same shimmering walls, floors and ceilings.
He pressed on moving as fast as he could into paler and paler corridors
but as he did he began to distrust himself. Were there still things moving
within the walls? His flesh crawled. He stopped for a second and the ebb of
forces pulled him along as he stared into the edges of the tunnel upon which he
walked. Yes, there seemed to be things even here. What were they? He tried to
look more closely, his face pressed against the walls. They were flat, slightly
rounded things, the size of a saucer, wriggling in the stream of blue. They
look a little like jellyfish, but they had no tentacles, just one surface with
a rough rasp-like structure, and no obvious sensory processes. They clung to
the interface between the worlds, all the while with their raspy surface
contracting and expanding as if scraping reality off the wall. As he watched the creatures move, fascinated
and disgusted, one of them squirmed out of the wall and attached itself to his
face, before he had any time to react. He felt no physical shock, but it was if
someone had very cautiously rubbed a coarse piece of sandpaper against his
mind. He leapt back from the wall, clutching madly at the creature, terrified
and revolted in equal measure.
He instantly wondered what he’d been doing. Why did he have his hand on
his face? In his mind he retraced his steps. Slowly the memories came back. Did
he have something on his face? He reached up again and brushed against
something, like a jelly. What was that? He knew that he had to walk on. As he
walked, by now just slightly confused, he failed to see the drifting organisms
which were now diffusing out of the walls and joining their hive companion on
his face. He grinned, unaccountably, and then moved on.
There were more choices as he surged forward. This seemed so easy, just
follow the bluer way. He paused for a second – no the paler way. He chuckled to
himself, how could he be so silly? Paler, of course. Was that right? Wasn’t
that where he’d seen those jelly things? He was momentarily flustered. Jellies
everywhere – how could one get away? What was the right way then, if everywhere
led to jelly and ice cream? He laughed. That was a silly thing to think. Which
was better, anyway, jelly and ice cream or jelly and custard? Perhaps Laurence
and he could have a tasting one evening. What wine would go well with that?
Red, white, or blue..?
He fell forward. He had no idea where the insidious stream had been
taking him or how long he’d been like this, but now he was in a deep blue
section of the Folds. He felt up to his head. On his left forehead was a sort
of jelly plug, and from it extended a blue cord, stick and slimy, which led
behind him to the tunnel barrier. Through the cord an eager stream of jelly
creatures were pouring into the plug. John gagged and then vomited, the shock
bringing up the stewed tea in his guts.
‘Dhorri’ he screamed,
summoning up a spell entirely by instinct,
and bringing his left hand up to strike the cord. There was a flash of
incandescent cobalt and the cord snapped, whipping back into the wall and
disappearing. John ran on wildly,
clawing at the jellies on his face. It was as if they had fused to him, forming
a malleable but un-removable platform. His mind was tattered. Where was he? He
fell on to the floor and looked down. He stared with vague interest at the
creatures slowly flapping up to him from the depths. These were a little like
the jellies, but an awful lot bigger.
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