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indoglish

May 5th, 2007

story ramblage--animation

This is probably the universe that I'll use for the next NaNo.

This is just playing, and its not on an outline or anything, but opinions are still welcome.

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Marlowe called them shadow babies, and wrinkled his nose in something like distaste when they came crawling out from dark corners. He said they made crying sounds. Like kittens or very small children.

Hale took his word for it, for all that they were invisible to him. Shivers crawled up his spine whenever Marlowe got that narrow eyed, vaguely disgusted look on his face, and it took more control that Hale thought was reasonable to not stare fixedly into the alleys and crevices along with him, trying to see what he was seeing.

"It's possible," he said to Jaybird, over coffee, "the he is just crazy." Entirely possible that Marlowe had nothing at all to do with the weirdness that was slowly creeping over everything, changing everything Hale had thought of as normal and predictable into bewildering strangeness.

"There are still lunatics out there," he said, gesturing broadly, indicating the world outside the coffe-shop's large windows, "And they can't all be, you know, involved."

Jaybird sipped her coffee, and Hale thought she looked like she was trying awfully hard not to roll her eyes. Finally she said, "Maybe you're one of them, Chris."

Hale said, "There's nothing there. He stares at stuff that just isn't there."

"What about Matchstick?" Jaybird said, "Marlowe can't see Matchstick. Maybe that makes you crazy."

"That's different," Hale said, "Matchstick doesn't like him. If she wanted him to, he could see her. I don't think his shadow babies have any particular opinion on anyone."

It wasn't different. Hale knew it wasn't different, except that Matchstick was annoying, but harmless. Maybe even sweet, in a naggy, obnoxious sort of way. The shadow babies weren't, if the the things Hale pictured were at all accurate. The shadow babies, or what Hale imagined of them, were dark and creeping things, spilling, crawling things.

Marlowe had said they couldn't hurt him. Corrected himself and said, "Probably can't hurt you."

"Can they hurt anything?" Jaybird wanted to know, and stirred her cooling coffee with a flimsy stick.

"I don't know." They weren't a good thing, that was for sure. They weren't a sign of things being in a state of health.

"Why aren't there light babies? If Marlowe sees shadow babies, shouldn't you be seeing, I don't know, angels? Or something?"

Hale made a face at her. Flicked coffee at her with the end of his own wooden stirring stick thing, and smirked at the disgusted sound she made as she flung an arm up t shield her face from the droplets. "Dammit!"

"I'm not like him, okay? I'm not even like a reverse him," Hale said, "Christ."

"Oh?" Jaybird wiped coffee-spray off her arm with a paper napkin, then balled it up and threw it across the table at him.

"Cats don't hiss at me when I walk past, for one thing."

It was unfair. The only cat that took any real exception to Marlowe was the grizzled tabby that had claimed Hale's yard as its own, and that old tom took exception to everyone, Hale included. He expected it would one day catch and eat Matchstick, if such a thing were possible. He wondered it it was, if he should be worrying about her.

"And for another thing, I didn't talk to--to flowers and things until recently, okay? This is as weird to me as it is to you. Maybe you're the opposite Marlowe."

Jaybird waved it off. Said, "That’s ridiculous," and Hale thought it wasn't fair that she dismissed so easily the things she was trying to pin on him.

"Maybe he's not even a thing," Jaybird said, "Maybe he's just a guy who sees things."

"That’s what I said," Hale complained.

"You said he was crazy. I don’t think he is. But maybe he's just, you know, tuned in."

Hale liked that. "Maybe I'm just tuned in," he said, and Jaybird gave him a pitying smile.

"No."

No. He knew that, too. If he were just a witness, coincidentally able to seee things others couldn't, Matchstick might still have started talking to him, but the strange man called Priest would never have shown up on his doorstep, looking dusty and anacronistic like a scholar who rartely ventured into the real world, dressed in tweed with glasses sliding down his nose.

People like Priest--things like Priest didn't present themselves to coincidental witnesses. Didn't waste time on lunatics and people who just saw things. Things like Priest had reasons for what they did, and who they chose to involve themselves with, and even if choosing Hale was largely a matter a convinience and coincidence, it still didn't make Hale an uninvolved bystander.

Priest had black holes for eyes, and Priest had smiled when he'd answered the door and introduced himself as All the Light and pushed his old fashioned, round framed glasses up his nose.

"The shadows are crawling," Marlowe had said, when Hale had told him about the visitor, and Priest, told in turn about Marlowe's comment, had nodded soberly and said, "It's because of Ware."

"I'm so confused," Hale said, twisting the cardboard sleeve around and around his paper coffee cup, and Jaybird smiled with only one side of her mouth, an expression that on her was usually wry and amused, but now only looked serious, and maybe troubled.

"They're like grubs coming out of the woodwork. Priest. Marlowe. Me, too, maybe. It'll all fall into place."

"Something's going on, isn't it?" Hale said, knowing that it was. Knowing it was ridicolous to think otherwise, except that he didn't want any of this strangeness to mean anything, and didn't want it to mean anything big. Didn't want to be involced in it.

It was Matchstick's fault, he thought, ridicolously. It was Matchstick who started it all, crawling out from under the kitchen counter to throw a dusty teaspoon at him and berate him for the state of the kitchen and the house in general. An old house, she informed him, and a dignified house, and she'd be damned if she let him let it fall into any further disgrace.

And then the weirdness had begun, with the whispering in the cobwebbed corners, and the voice-like rustling in the bushes, and Marlowe saying "The shadows are crawling."

Whatever place it all fell into, whatever shape it all took, Hale was sure it wouldn't be good. Hale was sure nothing good could come of shadows crawling. There was a darkness in the corners that he was sure had never been there before.

He wanted to blame that Priest creature. He wanted to blame Matchstick, for ever talking to him at all. He wanted to forget the chill that ran up his spine when Marlowe had told him about the shadows. Wanted to forget anything had ever changed from the days he had lived in bored ignorance in what had been his great-aunt's house, living off a tidy inheritance and half-heartedly working odd jobs.

"Marlowe and his goddamn shadow babies," Hale said, "why couldn't he just keep them to himself?"

"It wouldn't change anything," Jaybird said, and smiled, and said, "Chris, the flowers talk to you now," like that made up for anything.

Hale frowned at her and said, "And it makes gardening such a pain."

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rurounibug ; 07:40 PM|2 replies

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