PANEL 1: (Long Shot) A man is running frantically through a forest. It’s a night, the shadows are heavy creating odd shapes in the distance, like monsters lurking. We’re aiming for an overview shot, focusing on fear and despair. No mater where he runs there is no escape; he’s being pursued in all directions.

PANEL 2: Closer view of the man running. He’s middle aged, wearing a sweater over a shirt (think Mr. Rogers). The shadows are more prominent behind him indicating a chase.

PANEL 3: (Close up) He glances over his shoulder, fear dominant on his face.

PANEL 4: He stumbles over a thick root and falls heavily to the ground. The shadows a blackest directly behind him and fades out as any normal shadow would. There is meant to be a visual oddity about the shadow but enough to indicate that there is actually something there. The night sky appears above the shadow to demonstrate that it is a living entity.

-PAGE 2-

PANEL 1: He quickly gets back on his feet and continues to flee.

PANEL 2: As he’s running, there’s a dark shape that’s over taking him. The Background is blurred.

PANEL 3: He finds himself at the base of a huge tree. He pounds on it before considering climbing it…

PANEL 4: (worms eye view) but the first branches seem too high for his reach.

            Sound: Snap!

PANEL 5: Back against the tree, he extends a hand out to defend himself.

-PAGE 3-

PANEL 1: There’s a child standing in silhouette. There’s a moon behind her, a worms’ eye view would probably do the best job on this panel.

PANEL 2: (Extreme Close up) The man is terrified, emphasis on the eyes.

PANEL 3: The child’s shadow takes on a life of its own, filling most of the panel.

PANEL 4: Bird’s eye view as the man curls up in the foetal position.

PANEL 5: (Extreme Close up) The shadow fills the panel all we see are a series of glowing eyes.

            Sound: AAAAHHHHHHHHHH!

At a time long ago, their experimentation led them down different paths, some profitable, others disastrous, and still others, utterly whimsical. Dinosaurs, dodo birds, other birds of which existence and disappearance we have not the first inkling, whales, dolphins, lizards, frogs, alligators and crocodiles, mammals of every stripe, including homosapiens, centaurs, pans (the creature, not the implement), Cyclops, the great sphinx and all manner of oddball animals form a short list of by-products of these experiments. Homosapiens, or humans as we call ourselves, was not necessarily the ultimate goal they had in mind, but what the hell, we’re here and we’ll just have to do.

Have to do what? That’s a long story. The Fish are radically reclusive and monumentally xenophobic, evidently because they are so revoltingly ugly that they can barely abide the sight of each other and so go to great lengths to avoid any contact, physical or otherwise, with any sentient life, including their own kin. They have attained such heights of self-loathing, that eyes – as the story goes – were genetically engineered out of subsequent generations after their spiritual leader, a Fish by the name of Burrrrbel the Irritable, committed suicide immediately after seeing his own reflection. No-one openly questioned the wisdom which drove the powers that be to choose to rid civilization of its collective eyes instead of simply going for the gold and freeing it instead of its bawdy ghastliness. But there were mutterings of discontent, isolated at first, then more widespread and more openly stated, until eventually the resultant outcry forced the aforementioned powers that be to recognize the problem; it was only by sheer luck that their plot to genetically engineer ears out of subsequent generations was discovered in time to have a proper revolt after which eyes made a triumphant return out of genetic exile. The instigators of the revolt were, of course, immediately put to death for having fostered a resurgence in suicides which at one point reached such proportions that the Fish had to add themselves to their own list of endangered species.

Slowly, a new aristocracy emerged out of the remnants of the old, for they were among the very first to be successfully bio-engineered without the ancient racial affliction which had caused them so much grief throughout their history. Indeed, they were beautiful. And vain. The Aesthetically Splendid Fish (as they humbly referred to themselves) loved all manner of mirrors and other reflective surfaces, and, unlike their ugly kinsmen who sought refuge in the darkest recesses they could find for fear of catching a gruesome glimpse of each other, they craved the light of the sun shining above what to them was the limit of their viable atmosphere, the surface of the sea; beyond that, the water was too thin to breathe.

But in the universally giddy euphoria of their sudden re-birth as Pretty Splendid Fish (the eventual middle class), they undertook to conquer the thin water and to rule over its primitive inhabitants who themselves weren’t all that ugly anyway. Some of the more cerebral and less literal-minded Fish wondered where these creatures had come from in the first place because, structurally at the very least, they were very similarly built as the Fish. This posed a number of problems, specifically with evolution which demanded that no two life forms evolving independently could have anything remotely in common unless they shared the same ancestry. If they had paid any attention during their history classes, they would have known immediately that, indeed, they did share such a common ancestry, and that it was their own DNA, suitably modified for life outside water. Nonetheless, there were very few cerebral Fish so that the question was very rarely asked and then only after having spent too much time in the thin water without a proper helmet. 

And so it was that after some deliberation and a few notably unsuccessful attempts at convincing some of the thin air dwellers that life in the depths of the seas was a good one – they kept drowning – it was decided that a call to volunteers was in order. The idea was to genetically modify some of their own with both gills and lungs, thereby allowing these volunteers to act as Fish agents amongst the thin air dwellers. Many such volunteers were found – most against their will – and a suitable land mass was then chosen to serve as their base of operations. Thus, Atlantis was born.

There were good times to be had on Atlantis, specifically if megalomania was one of your stronger traits. There, the modified pretty fish had the almost unheard of privilege – even among the aristocracy – of doing essentially as they pleased without so much as a muffled grunt from the natives who foolishly took them to be their long vacuous gods come to make things right in their little lives, especially where it entailed ridding them of those pesky enemies of theirs whose conniving and yet oddly intriguing plans against them contained such unmentionable ills and toils that no-one in his right mind could even begin to hazard a wild guess as to their nature, and after all, they (the enemies) didn’t believe in gods, at least not the proper ones…

At that point, the Fish took an interest in the natives’ ramblings. If these others didn’t acknowledge them as their aforementioned vacuous gods, then who were, in fact their gods? Investigation and interviews with the unbelieving natives didn’t help enlighten the Fish about the nature of these gods, either. When the question was put to them, the unbelievers invariably allowed blank expressions to occupy their features while their fingers traced odd-looking symbols in the mud of the cell. The meaning of these symbols then became the object of a rather intense investigation, that is until one of the unbelievers, breaking under the strain of his own uncontrollable laughter, explained just prior to his death of acute apoplexy, that his confederates were essentially giving the Fish an obscure version of The Finger along with a dubiously personal opinion on the Fish’s ancestry.

The Fish’s sense of frustration at this point was quite understandable, and lesser gods likely would have done away with the whole mess out of hand and would simply, but utterly, have annihilated the whole impertinent race and anything else that looked like them. True, this is exactly what the Fish would have done were it not for the massive meteor which came crashing through the very center of Atlantis, obliterating it entirely from the face of the world and forcing the Fish – those not extant on Atlantis at the critical moment – to finally look up at the heretofore unnoticed sky.

*****

If anyone noticed the dark circles under Eric’s eyes, nobody saw fit to comment on it.

“So you ready to tuk a bit, eh?”

For a moment, he thought the voice had issued from his dresser which sat dumbly against the wall a few feet away to his left. It had been painted a number of times over its lifetime and the uneven coat it currently wore was of a dark shade of gray, reminiscent of old charcoal. It had no legs to speak of, just stumps, one of which was missing.

“Why do I hear you?” Eric asked.

“You tink maybe it’s da pills doin dat? You know dat cannot be because you flush duh tings down duh terlet.”

That was true enough. If toilets had nerve endings, this one would now be an incoherent blob on the floor.

“Withdrawals, then.”

“You tink so?”

“Just checking. The toilet got them all so withdrawals are for it only, if I ever leave this place.”

“So, wut’s duh problem den, eh?”

“Oh, no problem at all. I just here voices in my head, that’s all.”

“If you wont, you ken see me too, you know.”

If he was in fact flying kites in the attic of his mind, the last thing Eric wanted was to actually see his delusion.

“You gonna need paper and someting to write wit. Aye af a lut to say an you af to tink about it, so s’gonna be good to read it over when ahm nut ‘ere.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Tsa ‘istry lesson. Ah af someting ‘ere dat wuz written by some udder guy. Ah’ll read it, an you write it down. You know, sometimes dare’s gonna be words ah af a ord time saying because day or big wit luts of syll-aaah-bulls. So dun laugh at me, kay?”

Eric smiled to himself.

“Okay,” the voice said. “Laugh a liddle bit if you wont. Ah’ll get my turn too, eh.”

“Now,” the voice said and Eric heard a sound like hands being rubbed together. “Go sit at duh dess an get duh paper pad out from duh drawer. Ah tuk. You write everting ah say ezzackly.”

“Hot in here, isn’t it?”

Another man, this one quite wrinkled over every inch of his skin and almost skeletal in aspect sat across from him. He had elected to drape his towel across his lap. His name was, ah, Frank.

“I think it’s supposed to be hot, ah, Frank.”

“Is it?” Frank said with evident surprise. “Interesting. And why would that be so, Enki, my friend?”

The man had often wondered why Frank had settled on a name like Enki for him rather than the one under which he had been registered, even after many attempts at correcting the error. Eric was, in fact, his name, so it couldn’t have been because Frank hadn’t heard his name correctly, like mistaking Mike for Mark.

“Saunas are supposed to be hot, Frank. They say it’s good to have one of these every once in a while.”

No acknowledgement came from Frank because his mind had evidently wandered to some other matter, for now he traced symbols above his head with his index finger.

Eric looked on for a moment then lost interest. His penis still hadn’t beaded anything but it had acquired a new sheen.

“Aye tuk to you now, kay?”

Eric knew this hadn’t come from Frank who was now intently examining his ephemeral symbols. Nobody else had entered the room.

“Duh guys who come before, day din do too good, eh? But you listen to me. Ahm okay for you.”

“What kind of accent is that?” thought Eric.

“Me, ahm a French-canagiun, you know. Aye like to be ‘ere witchoo an tuk about tings.”

Eric wiped some sweat from his eyes and found that it stung, not unlike soap. He retrieved his towel and wiped them dry, then draped the towel on his head.

“You ‘ear me, you?”

“Get out of my head.”

“No, no, no. You gotta give me duh chance, you know. I show you tings.”

“What kind of tings, things? I can barely understand you.”

“All sorts uh tings. Aye know so much my ‘ed ‘as cracks in it. Juss ass me questions. Aye hanswer. Probly.”

“Did you say something, Enki?” Frank asked, his index still pointed to a spot in the air.

“No. No. I’m just talking to myself.”

“Ah.”

Eric considered. He could resume the dead-end conversation with himself as a French-Canadian, or, well, there was Frank.

“What are you doing with your finger, Frank.”

“Frank?”

Gone again.

Eric heard the impatient tapping of a foot.

“Stop that,” said Eric.

“Aye haf a short fuse, me. Ass me sometting so ah prove to you dat ahm ‘ere an dis iss nut your magination.”

“What…”

“Wait duh sec. Ass me sometting you dunno but datchoo ken look up after, like in a book. Dat make it fair, eh?”

Eric thought about this proposition for a moment.

“Who’s Enki?”

There was a short pause then, “Hokay, lah. Me aye always tell duh trute so aye give you duh hanswer you can check. Henki, eee wuz a gud a long time ago, your time, in duh Sumerian panteon. You check dat out an aye tuk to you later, kay?”

“Ah.”

“Zit a deal or no?”

“If I say no deal, you’re not going away, I guess.”

‘S’only fair, you know. You gave doze udder two duh chance ta prove demselves before you give em duh boot. You give me duh chance too, eh.”

“I’ll check it out. Scoot.”

Monitor stations blinked in empty rooms, recording the day’s progress for further tests in the morning. She couldn’t help but feel watched. Security cameras blinked at her as she wondered by, she knew that the other team would have rerouted their surveillance before giving her the signal to move.

Still, looking up at her reflection she felt that should not be alone, that just behind her, just inches from the camera’s line of vision something was with her. She took a deep breath and moved on.

The lights flickered out.

She had expected this. She had expected something to go wrong. Still it was only the darkness, nothing to be afraid of. Light in hand she pushed forward, navigating the halls now with a renewed urgency.

She nodded to herself and stepped into the next hall, one careful step at a time, listening for any sound that might forewarn her of on coming trouble. Focus’ she reminded herself, she had to listen in more ways than one, her boss had said. This particular target would have a pull, it wouldn’t want to be sealed away, it would want to be freed. All she had to do was destroy it when she found it.

She wondered if the ease of this mission was a result of this so called god. For a moment she felt reassured. in that case she would be immune to anything until the child was located. Unless it could read her mind, in which case wouldn’t she have been destroyed by now.

Then out of no where a loud burst of doors being thrown off their hinges slamming against the nearby wall, echoing down the hall followed by a deep hungry roar. It’s sound echoed in her mind as well as in the halls, which frightened her even more.

She grabbed at her pistol hoping that she had enough sense to use it when she saw the monster. She ran, reading tags as she ran by, hoping that the glimpse would be enough to give her all the information that she needed. “This way,” the voice said.

She pushed through the twin doors, pushing harder then intended causing a burst of sound that she knew would alert the escaped thing in the hall. ‘Stay focused’ she told herself, ‘Its not much further’ or so she hoped.

Another set of doors burst open and she found herself in a control room. A semi circle of computers had been arranged, each monitoring a unique attribute of this area.

She stood transfixed by what she saw. She saw an empty room, similar to cell, with children’s drawing polluting the wall. In the darkness of the cell she couldn’t tell what the drawing was, but she knew this was the one she had come for.

She had ignored the monitor stations as she understood very little about the science involved and terms that they used. She paid attention to visual. The child’s door was open, the hall leading to her room was empty. Her heart raced, she was so close.

Then she felt a small tug on her pants. Startled she jumped and drew her weapon pointing it at the dark haired child. She gestured that she wanted up, carried, perhaps wanting a small bit of comfort and human affection. Over all she seemed oblivious to the weapon.

There was a tree there amongst the dozen or so trees that lined the vacant visitors’ parking lot two stories below, and it wasn’t significant in any way, this tree, other than that it was directly in his line of sight. A paper fluttered to the foot of the tree for a moment before being taken again by the warm noonday breeze that the man couldn’t feel. He might have wished for a window to open, but he didn’t. If a thought had been allowed to be recognized, he would have asked the rhetorical question uttered by all in his state of mind, ‘Why bother?’
 
“This is what you might call a, um, basket case.”
 
“I’ve never encountered such a clear mind. There’s absolutely nothing there at all. Astonishing.”
 
The source of those words was not immediately apparent to the man. He was alone in the room. There was no telecom system. He felt fairly certain that the chair couldn’t, in fact, speak otherwise it surely would have done so some time ago if only to complain about the man’s total disregard of its purpose. So he finally settled on the sole remaining possibility which was that the voices had emanated from his own head. That conclusion didn’t bother him, though he felt sure it was correct. Such things should be acknowledged as entirely natural given the circumstances.
 
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Me.”
 
The man cleared his throat and said, “Go away.”
 
“Let me do this,” the other voice said. “Um, can we talk?”
 
A series of ‘plunks’ resounded into the man’s aural field. He looked up to witness the fresh assault from the seagulls dripping over the eaves of the roof.

“Monday,” he thought.
 
“Hey, um, a thought. He just had a thought, I saw, um, it flitting by just now.”
 
“Get out of my head,” the man said, sighing heavily.
 
“Oh, but you need us,” the first voice said.
 
“Yes, um, you do. We’re here to help, um, nothing else.”
 
The man thought he heard some, some, what was it? Something he hadn’t heard in such a long time. A sound, what was it, oh, really? Yes. He heard giggling.

That was strange to him because he had never indulged in giggles, never in his entire existence. The voices were in his head so it followed that they were simply a fabrication of his own mind, an attempt, if you will, to entertain itself. There was no good reason for him to imagine giggles, of all things.

Laughing at himself, sure, but giggles?
 
“He thinks we’re not real,” the first voice said, indignant.
 
“Well, um, yes. What would one expect, really? We have to, um, prove ourselves.”
 
“Why am I here?”
 
“Huh? What?”
 
“Why am I here?” the man asked again.
 
“You mean, here? Um, in this place?”
 
“Ah. I really am talking to myself. That’s the kind of answer to philosophical questions I would give.”
 
“Whoa bucko. I mean, there you are, basically comatose, and all a sudden you ask questions and actually have a thought or two. You just caught us off guard.”
 
“Um, exactly. Ask us another question. We can always, um, come back to the meaning of life later after, um, we’ve traveled the road some, so to speak.”
 
“Who invented the wheel?”
 
“What kind of question is that? Well, never mind, her name was Burggahg and she had bad feet, hence the need that preceded the invention. Can we get on with

it, please?”
 
“You’re making it up.”
 
“Am not,” the first voice was getting riled up. The gall of this man.
 
“Are too.”
 
“Prove it,” the first voice had a slightly higher pitch, now.
 
“Get out of my head. Now.”
 
“We…”

“Um, you heard the man. You have to go.”
 
“But…”
 
“That’s the, um, rule. You know that.”
 
“You too,” said the man.
 
“Oh, um, durn it.”
 
The man listened. Nothing. He listened some more, intently. Nope. Nothing. Nothing but the rustle of his fingers scratching his leg.
 
The seagulls were coming in for a fresh run, he saw. A whole squadron at least. It was going to be messy.

“This way,” a barely audible whisper came from the darkness.

Aya’s panic melted away, focusing on the direction the sound had come from. The demons neared, crashing through unseen barriers toward her. She ran. 

“Don’t look back,” the voice told her in the same soft tone, “Never look back.”

“Don’t look back! Don’t look back,” Aya repeated while resisting the urge to do just that. Now more than ever she felt as though she might be able to see one of the demons in the flesh. It was an odd mix of horror and excitement, yet somehow she managed to obey the voice.

 In the distance a light flickered on, revealing a small silhouette of a child standing, waiting. Her heart sank to her feet. This innocent child would be devoured by the beasts pursuing her; she felt that there was nothing she could to stop this Fate. “Get away!” she shouted at the child, “Run!” Panic and desperation filled her voice. “Maya please run!”

 Though the name had escaped her own lips, she was shocked that the name had even surfaced. ‘Could it be?’ she wondered secretly wishing to see the child’s face. If it was, would she know who her mother was? Would they have told her? Or was this-

 In her thoughts she had slowed down, the pace of the world was drifting with it. The distance of the child and the light growing further away with every thought. Still the demons pursued her with the same intent as they always had. An attack was made, claws sinking into the soft skin, drawing blood.

 The darkness seemed to grow thicker, swallowing the sounds of the demons hunger, her own feet pounding against stone, and soon all she could hear in her ear was the steady pound of her own heartbeat.

 She focused on the child, ignoring the pain and cool trickling sensation on her leg. She realized too late, that this child was not her lost love. The second she saw the child’s chilling blue eyes the voice spoke again. “You’re living on borrowed time.”

 With that she was engulfed by the living darkness and pulled away from the nightmare. Though she shot straight up when she woke, she felt as though she had been thrown into her bed. It was an odd sensation and not one she cared to repeat.

She cried. She couldn’t shake the emptiness of her stolen child, she couldn’t shake the eerie stillness of those light blue eyes, and the tone… so matter of fact that her time was up. She found her self-wallowing in the things she felt that she could not. She wished that was a stronger woman, so that she could face this coming Mission with the bravery it deserved.

 “Just a little longer,” she could hear the voice still. “It’s okay.”

 Why? Why could she still hear it? “Leave me alone!” she yelled out in rage. Her eyes fell onto the drape that was currently being used as a door. She felt alone and disappointed. Even He would not come to her rescue. He would only come to wake her before the Mission and not a moment sooner.

 She dressed in her combat gear; it would give her some time to gather her wits. Taking a deep breath, she stepped out into the living room. Alexander’s once small corner that he had as a study had now engulfed the whole room. Since the lost of their daughter he had gradually become consumed with his ‘work’. She couldn’t complain really. A lot of his strategies had come through for them and their people. It scared her to think that he knew so much about these demons that had over run the world, when the world itself didn’t seem to know how to handle the demons themselves.

 She ran her fingers through his hair, hoping to pull his attention away from his books and notes. “You should be sleeping,” he told her firmly while jotting down some thought.

 “You could come join me,” she teased.

 He said nothing and continued his work. It had been like this for months now. It felt like he no longer had any interest in her. Feeling alone and dejected she sat down away from him. “Do you think we’ll pull this off?”

 He took a moment to reply, as if the calculations and risks were all somewhere in those old pages. “No matter what, we come back with something. I don’t see this as a loosing situation at all. Of course certain sacrifices have to made… I trust that is understood from all parties involved.”

 It was an odd thought, but still she asked. “You don’t mean like people do you?”

 He opened his mouth to argue but ended up nodding thoughtfully. “I suppose that could be considered a sacrifice given the circumstance. You know that not all of you will return, don’t you?” For the first time in months he seemed genuinely concerned.

 “I know that,” she shrugged, “I know that even I might not-“ she couldn’t finish. Her throat closed up as if some force was stopping her from uttering the words.

 There was an odd look in his grey eyes. Something that echoed the eerie stillness of that voice from her dreams. “Don’t be ridiculous!” He scoffed seconds too late, “You’re very good at what you do. I’ve trained you well.”

 “I’ve never had to fight a demon,” she looked away, “I’m not even sure they exist.”

 “They exist,” he spoke with such haunted finality that she glanced up to read the expression on his face, only to find that he had once more retreated to his books. “It’s time for you to go to rendezvous point. Good luck.”

 She drifted off, feeling separated from herself. This would be their last good bye. If he knew this, would he have brushed her off so easily? Her eyes lingered over his studious form a moment longer, before she uttered, “Good bye.”

If the observer had been less casual and somewhat more inquisitive, he would have noticed a darkish dot slowly moving up Mount Meag’r's eastern slope. If this same observer or another of his group had been well prepared and had remembered to tote along his binoculars just in case he spotted a darkish dot in the distance, he could have resolved this current dot into the figure of an elderly man wearing a full-length robe of some rough and dark material gathered at the waist by something tan and sinewy and carrying a long stick curved at one end, and which the man evidently used as a climbing aid to negotiate the sometimes steep pitch of Mount Meag’r.

The observer, if he had been of the sensitive type, might have caught his breath in alarm at seeing the elderly man suddenly hopping on one leg while at the same time trying to keep his balance for fear of tumbling back and risking a painful and possibly life-threatening descent through stones and jagged boulder edges.

The observer would shortly release his captive breath in relief when he saw the recently imperilled elderly man regain his balance with the help of his staff; dismay would grip the observer as the elderly man raised a fist and uttered some unheard but obviously uncharitable words seemingly directed at the ground before him. Dismay would soon ebb into puzzlement then blossom into embarrassed realization as the elderly man removed a sharp-edged pebble from his sandaled foot and chucked it at the ground he had just rebuked.

Why was this elderly man going up Mount Meag’r instead of fabricating false tales of his youth to an assortment of attention-deficient goats? This was a question which fluttered occasionally through the mind of the elderly man, especially when the going wasn’t altogether pleasing or inspiring. He enjoyed his goats tremendously, especially the strays, because they gave him a credible excuse for wandering about in the desert where he could have some peace and quiet away from the rest of the tribe who were essentially a bunch of irresponsible party animals with nothing in their minds except wrestling with bad tempered pigs who after some modicum of consideration decided that jumping off a tall cliff was an altogether more congenial way of spending an afternoon. This never failed to stun the gathered throng of frustrated wrestlers who nonetheless recovered from their collective shock by making the best of a bad situation by having themselves a lively and raucous time roasting bits of pigs on a spit over a roaring fire, bingeing on recently distilled hooch and running amok in young girls’ tents who unlike the pigs were quite eager to lose some of their beauty sleep in exchange for a vigorous bout of wrestling.

The elderly man looked up Mount Meag’r and judged himself to have made it close to the halfway point on his ascent. He clearly remembered the vision that had come to him in a dream just three nights before while he was in the throes of a fever of some sort which, it was thought by some cynics, resulted from his habit of wandering off in the desert’s noonday sun without the benefit of a broad-rimmed hat on his balding head.

The vision had shown him the Way. He capitalized the word ‘Way’ in his mind because he couldn’t for the life of him make any sense of it. What the vision had shown him was, if taken at face value, utterly and gloriously preposterous. He was given a choice between two seemingly unconnected paths to enlightenment. The first involved soaking his head in a vat of mildewed muskrat testicles spiced with a handful of hair from the tip of a mangy dog’s tail and a pinch of nutmeg, after which he would be required to answer three skill-testing questions while his hair was set on fire. His hair had burnt once or twice before along with most of his clothes and some goats, but the elderly man didn’t quite know what a muskrat might be, or at least hadn’t heard of any lurking about in the countryside and certainly not in the desert, so he opted for the second choice.

‘Take the Righteous Road to the summit of Holy Mount Meag’r’, his vision had instructed, “And there you shall await my messenger who shall bring good news and further instructions which you will be compelled to follow lest you and your people perish in the everlasting and goat-less fire of the Un-Named and Unmentionable.”

The Righteous Road, as it turned out, was not the direct one. If this had been the case, the elderly man could have reached the summit, received his instructions and gone back down to spread the good news twenty times over. Mount Meag’r was, after all, only about three thousand feet from base to summit. Inexplicably however – there was, no doubt, a Divine Reason – the Righteous Road spanned over ninety-five miles of desert inhabited by roving tribes of nude nomads ironically driven entirely mad by heat stroke, steep grassy hills cleaved by spectral valleys that emanated eerie moaning sounds whose source the elderly man didn’t dare speculate upon, and the occasional tree within whose leafy branches hordes of emaciated thieves lurked. The last three thousand feet of the Righteous Road led directly up the eastern, and not surprisingly, more difficult slope of the Mount.

The elderly man looked stonily down toward the base of the Mount and then out to the murky sea. Its waters seemed muddier and somehow gloomier, no doubt because of the thick, pregnant overcast which promised a thorough beating to anyone caught unawares, or at least outdoors when the barrage of hailstones the size of the tribe’s strongest stud’s fist and the thickness of the same man’s head was launched.

Fear entered the elderly man like an unwelcome relative who still refuses to acknowledge your invitation to leave after three weeks of polite hinting. This was especially true when the relative in question was the elderly man’s long deceased uncle who had, on a whim, decided to return for a short flop in his former mud hut which he had bestowed on his nephew for no reason at all other than that nobody else had wanted any part of it. It would not have been so bad once one grew accustomed to having a ghost at the dinner table, but the pig noises emanating from the floor under his sleeping mat at night had been somewhat unsettling in view of the fact that the hut, like any of its ilk, didn’t boast the benefit of a basement, or even a crawl space.

He scampered a short, hopping distance down the Mount to a cave he had noticed earlier but had avoided because of the stench radiating ponderously from within. He leaned his staff against a large boulder, took two deep lungfuls of air, then held the third and plunged inside the dark cave from which, after a moment or two, he emerged clutching to his chest a bag the size of a mature heifer’s teat, and in fact made from the hide of a small black goat. Why animals of all types and description sought this particular cave in order to make of it their final resting place, the elderly man didn’t know, or care particularly, but if a would-be thief came along with notions of taking possession of his belongings and was willing to risk the stinking cave with its various decomposing carcasses, then the idiot was more than welcome to whatever he found in it.

The elderly man grasped his staff and loitered against the large boulder long enough to regurgitate his breakfast, then he descended stiffly to another, but altogether sweeter-scented cave, a hundred yards or so down from the one he had gratefully just vacated.

Once inside, he let himself flop forward to the dirt floor of the cave. He then rolled over onto his back with surprising speed, yelping and clutching at his chest in apparent agony. The elderly man looked through teared eyes at his bag and mistily noticed the blunt roundness of the pretty stone he had found two days ago on the side of the Righteous Road. It had appealed to his sense of proportion and aesthetic correctness in that it was almost perfectly round in an elongated sort of way, and speckled just so, not too much, not too little, with roundish flecks of some orangey-coloured somethings or others which contrasted elegantly with the grey streaks in his beard. He hurled the offending stone across the cave where it ricocheted into a dogleg and made a noise like a water urn would indulge in were it to be dropped from a height above a hard floor.

He heard some shuffling sounds and noticed for the first time that the cave was lit by an unseen fire which created dancing shadows on the uneven walls within the dogleg. Momentarily, the figure of an elderly woman, skeletal and bald except for startled tufts of wild and wiry white hair distributed unevenly here and there on the sides of her head, appeared, first as one of the dancing shadows, then as herself, bent over a cane carved out of a large animal’s leg bone, and dressed in goats’ hides stitched together in so grotesque a manner that the goats seemed still to inhabit the hides. The impression was heightened by a neck ornament fashioned from a pair of goat’s legs bound together at the hooves and forming a ‘V’ from the middle of her withered chest to her wasted shoulders.

The elderly man half-expected to see an actual goat hanging from her back as she turned to inspect the wall from which the stone had ricocheted, but was relieved to see it was only a pair of mildewed rabbit carcasses. She stroked a spot on the wall tentatively, then another and another all the while frowning in concentration. At length, she quit her inspection with the wave of a brittle hand as if dismissing the wall.

The elderly man considered making a quiet but brisk exit in the hopes that she hadn’t noticed him yet, but the irregular pock-pock of hailstones bouncing off the ground, boulders, rock faces and formerly conscious wild animals outside forced him to decide instead that it was time for a bit of initiative on his part.
He rose to his feet, still clutching his aching chest, and said, “I apologize for whatever damage I may have caused through my careless action with the stone. Please, consider the da…”

“Are you hungry?” asked the elderly woman in a voice that the elderly man could not for the life of him reconcile with the lavish state of ferocious disrepair, which spawned it. The voice was lilting and sweet with child-like innocence and failed to display any of the bitterness and despair suggested by the sharply sagging corners of the elderly woman’s lipless mouth. That, plus the unexpected question had the elderly man distinctly off-balance and wondering if maybe he should just simply blow air through his lips and spit goop in his bag.

But, to the elderly man’s bemusement in view of his recent re-acquaintance with his breakfast, he was indeed hungry.

“Um. Yes, I think I am hungry.”

“Good!” said the elderly woman turning to return to the depths of the cave. “So am I, so why don’t you be a good old hunter-gatherer and go kill our supper. Then,” she added from within the dogleg, “We can go up to the black berry bush and see what the hell they want from us this time.”

Finding something to eat was not a difficult chore for the elderly man once the sudden hailstorm abated. The moaning and groaning of mortally wounded animals was a little unnerving, as was the sight of over-crowding at the entrance to the stinking funereal cave, but what eventually disturbed the elderly man the most was seeing the naked figure of the elderly woman upon his return. Let’s be blunt – the elderly man tossed what remained of his breakfast, along with a month’s supply of bile upon the small goat he had brought for lunch.

What disturbed him wasn’t so much that she was naked – though a strong stomach was not something to sneer at – but the elderly man felt he was on firm ethical grounds when he hazarded his belief that one’s digestive system had no right spreading itself over one’s shoulder in the particular way the elderly woman’s stomach, intestines, liver, and other peripheral organs chose to indulge in, at least not when a dinner guest was expected at any moment.

The dancing light of a fire burning in a pit swirled and waltzed lazily with the shadows it created, and seemed somehow to animate the elderly woman as she lay dead, bleeding the last of her blood on a straw mat, sprawled on her back with a hand tucked behind her head which was tilted toward her truant innards. Her expression was one of sleepy-eyed boredom tinged with a trace of resignation and a smidgen of reproach, as if staring at her own stomach dawdling on her shoulder was something she’d had to put up with altogether too often of late.

It occurred to the elderly man – somewhat belatedly – that the odds in favour of these wounds having been self-inflicted were about as good as his fathering a smart pig wrestler. He gingerly lowered the goat to the ground, then backed into some shadows where he dropped to a crouch and listened. He couldn’t hear anything above the din created by the blood rushing in a mad panic through his veins, so, instead, he looked.