It begins

Borrowing the idea that we are just the pawns of the gods to create a situation

“Jenny! Will you get a move on? We’re late!”

It was about the fifth time the boy had shouted and still his sister stood, staring out to sea, completely oblivious. Muttering something about girls and their weird ways, he began to toil up the sloping grassland to the cliff edge. It was too hot, he was too tired and they were going to be late. That meant no more wandering off exploring by themselves and more trailing about through boring gift and curiosity shops with mum and dad.

He was about thirty yards away when something odd struck him. Not only was his sister ignoring him, but he was struggling to keep his jacket on in the gusty inshore wind and her hair wasn’t even moving.

Her jacket hung rigidly down her back and he had to run the last few yards as she slowly began to topple over, like a felled tree. He caught her by the shoulders and they both went down together into the springy grass.

It should have been noisy in the town, but it wasn’t. What should have been a busy, mid summer huddle of stalls, selling only the things that holiday makers buy, was an empty, silent street. Gaudy mugs and tankards knocked one another as they swayed in the breeze, but made no sound. Shop doors, left ajar, closed suddenly in a gust of wind, yet there was no slam. It would have been odd, had there been anyone to witness it. But there wasn’t.

Thirty thousand feet above the hushed scene, a solid, glass-like passenger jet hung motionless in the sky. The frozen face of the pilot stared fixedly from the impossible scene as unaware as his co pilot and just as uncaring. All of the passengers could be seen through the transparent walls of the aircraft, one leaning forward to take a drink from a hostess so near and yet beyond reach. If any of them had chanced to look down, they would have had a clear view, right down through the cloudless sky to the tiny town surrounded by undulating fields, far, far below. If any of them had been able to turn and look at their neighbour, they would have discovered that all the passengers were as transparent as the seats they sat upon. But no one spoke, moved or breathed.

Slightly winded, Barry struggled to get out from underneath his sister, who didn’t seem to be helping.

“Will you get off?” He wheezed, giving one last big push. She slid off and rolled a few feet across the grass, before coming to rest face down.

“Jenny?” He sounded a little worried now. The joke had definitely gone far enough. He went to give her a shake and drew away sharply as his hand touched her shoulder. Then, far more tentatively, he touched her again, lightly. She was hard and smooth, like stone, and cold. He sat back in shock. In a panic, he shook her roughly and she rocked back and forth, but that was all. Barry ran off blindly , expecting to find his parents or just to get away from things that weren’t right.

Over the edge of the cliff, a flock of nesting gulls, perched along the rocks like a bizarre mantle top display, disappeared, shrinking away to nothingness, without even a pop to mark their passing.

THEY looked at each other and slowly began to pack away the rest of the pieces.

Barry headed for town, all the time looking for and hoping to meet someone, anyone with a kindly face and comforting words of reassurance. There was nobody. Not even someone shouting a warning or chasing him, because he had trampled through a good few gardens and knocked over several dustbins in his headlong flight. Strangely, it had taken several such accidents before he had noticed that, although the dustbins fell over in a fairly normal way, scattering various contents haphazardly around, there had been no noise to accompany the event. Once, he had stopped and experimentally kicked one of the bins as hard as he could.

Silence.

He had stared for a while in mute incomprehension and then he had started shouting.

“Mum! Dad! Anyone! Help!” He tried all the things he had read or seen on television; the words people used to attract attention, and then the hero would come running or driving fast, waving a sword or a gun and explaining to everyone what had happened and then, most importantly, fixing it so everyone and everything went back to normal. That was it. In Barry’s mind, in his childhood world, that is what was meant to happen. So he shouted and shouted and he waited and nothing happened. No one came. He shouted until his voice cracked and the words turned to tears and the tears blinded his eyes so that all he could do was sit and sob helplessly, wishing it was happening to anyone else.

THEY never cleaned the floor, rarely even looked at it, so it was a good place to be really. If you had to be somewhere, which surely everything did, then you could choose worse places than the floor. You could also choose better places, like home, but for so many on the floor, home was far away, forgotten or more than likely gone altogether. So they made the best of it and more or less did as they pleased within the confines of their habitat. Mostly, they just existed, because their environment was flat and featureless on the whole, with little to relieve the monotony except the vague possibility of meeting someone new, someone very confused , often scared and occasionally dangerous.

Eventually, Barry had to stop crying because there was nothing left in him. There was only so long that anyone could wait to be rescued, or wait for the nightmare to end, before they had to admit that it was them or nothing. Barry realised that he had to do something. There was shelter to find, food, water, something to defend himself from….from whatever had happened. Somewhere within, these thoughts had come to him as he sat and sobbed on the dusty pavement and finally he had decided to act.

He had taken several deep breaths, counted to fifty slowly to calm himself down and then opened his eyes, vaguely hoping that he had imagined it all but far too pessimistic now to really believe it.

He had a notion that, as he had been crying and rubbing his eyes, then his vision would be impaired and that would explain why it looked like half the town was missing. There was a grey-whiteness on the edges of his vision, like a morning mist. He blinked and his eyes cleared. Then the house opposite him disappeared and the road tipped sideways.

He probably fell. He must have fallen, but he never remembered.

What he remembered was that there was an earthquake, it must have been, because how else could houses vanish and worlds rock so violently? But he didn’t fall through a crack in the ground into a deep dark hole. He just found himself somewhere else. Somewhere flat, white and featureless.

Some of THEM had long sleeves, for no good reason except they liked them. Not just from shoulder to wrist, but ornately so, with flowing lines and great cuffs that would encompass a galaxy in a void surrounded by a shimmer of silk. One of THEM, wearing such a garment, swept the last of the pieces away, but failed to notice that one tiny figure was rolled not into the box, but off the table.

The heap moved. At first glance it was almost certainly what it appeared to be; an assortment of things that would not normally exist in the same place, some recognisable, some not but all obviously junk. But then junk is a state of mind and for some perhaps it is something to do. So it was for the creators of this particular heap. They collected for pleasure, for the sake of it, to make a home and to create something of their own in a world gone insane. They had come here long ago, from a place that was now just a dream after a good day’s collecting. It had been a nightmare, then an adventure and now just an existence. They had started the heap to relieve the boredom and gradually it had become an obsession. Now, not a day passed without a search for something to fill a gap or to begin a new wing. So, the heap moved as they emerged into the open. They slid and rolled down the side of the mound, smoothing their back legs over their wings prior to stretching them, as they always had done and now no longer really knew why.

They could sing with those legs too and often had when young, but now there was no point. Even talking amongst themselves had lost any appeal, so their world was silent and filled by an urgency to find the next piece of treasure.

They bustled briefly around their beloved home and took off for the day’s hunt.

Barry stood up and turned slowly in a full circle. He had to admit that actually the landscape was not featureless. The ground around him was dusty and speckled here and there by indentations. Away in the distance there were unidentifiable landmarks looking a bit like pillars, but at crazy angles, with no reference to give any idea of scale or distance. He could choose absolutely any direction to go in and consequently could not make up his mind. At the moment, he was trying a random approach by closing his eyes whilst revolving and singing ‘ring a ring o’ roses’, opening his eyes instead of falling down and going……that way. He shrugged his shoulders and set off. He had attained a state of mind that no longer cared. In what seemed to be less than a day he had experienced confusion, fear, terror, loneliness, hopelessness, despair and now resignation. Let there be monsters. Let them eat him alive. Who cares? He thought about very little and expected nothing except more unimaginable events to beset him as he trudged towards an unknown horizon. So he did not notice the gentle hum that grew to a buzzing and the buzzing that intensified into a drone and a swishing of air. He didn’t stop walking until what seemed to be a giant locust landed right in front of him. With a swoosh, another landed at his left, more at his right and, he was uncomfortably certain, with a prickle in the hairs on his neck, that others were softly landing behind him.

They looked at each other. At least, Barry assumed he was being looked at. The creatures had such strange eyes, they could have been looking almost everywhere. There was a purple, gem like depth to their eyes that just held him spell bound and perhaps that was the intention, because one of the creatures suddenly darted forward, snatched him up in a pair of its rasping legs and took off into the air. He was too high up to contemplate struggling before he even realised what had happened and the hopelessness into which he had fallen merely intensified as he watched the ground recede. The legs of the creature ended in saw- like pincers, holding Barry painfully and firmly immobile. He struggled experimentally and was rewarded by a squeeze of jaws tight enough to make him cry out. He decided not to try anything else until perhaps there was some point. Getting loose now would have been to fall who knew how far and into what, for from this height Barry could see that the landscape was becoming more cluttered, with many broken and twisted objects, some in piles and some looking as if they were partially buried.

They flew for sometime in a direction Barry could only guess at. Then, Barry realised that the swarm was beginning to descend towards a regular shape in the distance. It looked like a small hill and gradually resolved itself into just that, except it was a hill made out of an interlocking mass of objects. Barry recognised a shoe, just about big enough for a man a thousand feet tall. There were pieces of broken crockery, trees made of glass, bits of metal, some looking like elaborate machinery or weapons. There was a sculpture or two; arms poking out majestically in defiance. All around the hill, more of the giant locust creatures buzzed and darted. Some arrived carrying an object, pushing it into the heap and turning to fly off again. Barry had time to notice one or two more things before the creature landed and poked him deftly into the heap in the space left between two rocking horses and what looked like an elephant’s trunk, without the elephant.

The grass hopper-locust thing shuffled back and forth, rearranging him slightly into his crevice and then turned and took off with what could only have been a shrug of satisfaction.

Barry lay still for a while,as there seemed no particular reason to move. It was nice to relax and actually reasonably comfortable. He had a momentary vision of himself, spending eternity wedged between various bits of rubbish and he would have been quite content with that. The constant humming of his captors was quite relaxing and they seemed uninterested in him now that he was safely in place.

Far away, in another part of this strange world, another group from the heap were searching for trifles to add to their home. From another perspective, their tiny movements took them out from under an unimaginably huge edifice, a great flat plain, supported upon four towering pillars. Neither their imaginations nor their physiology allowed them to see that their path led them towards a figure, standing with one hand leant upon the table and another held to its lips, gently blowing the dust from its palm. The flight of the insects and the drifting dust were, by accident or destiny, converging on a spot high above the floor and there, within the dust cloud, lay a sparkle of light and colour so pure and brilliant that the flying insects could not fail to see it. As one, they turned towards the spiralling ball, attracted as all insects are to light and determined that this would be the crowning glory of their home.

They flew to surround it, then several of them joined in the task of carrying what, to them, was an immense ball of pure beauty.

Satisfied, they turned and headed for home.

XXX(section in which to paste the telling of Barry's rescue from the heap by Bags and others; perhaps the locusts can resist or give chase)

It wore clothes. It had hair and two arms and legs. It had piercing blue eyes and a nose and mouth where you would expect them to be. It had spoken, well grunted anyway and hummed. It had all those things but it was definitely not human. Most definitely not Barry’s father.

“Well you could help me up; that would be a start.” Said the man or woman or whatever .

It was holding out a hand to all intents and purposes normal, but with a look and feel that was strangely like Barrys old denim shorts. For Barry had automatically held out a hand to help up the stranger, out of an ingrained politeness he had almost forgotten. The stranger, once raised, was much taller than Barry and currently preoccupied in a vain attempt to rid itself of at least six months worth of dust. Barry stood awkwardly looking on and having no idea what to do next.

"We can't hang around here; that overgrown insect will be back soon and He doesn't like his little collection disturbed. Follow me." With these words, the stranger set off at a brisk pace. Barry hesitated then found that most of all, at the moment, he did not want to be alone and here was someone who had actually spoken to him.

"Wait for me!" He said and hurried up to be close to his new found ally. "I'm Barry. What's your name?" This was important. Barry needed so much to talk and find out anything and everything about this strange place.

The stranger stopped and looked at Barry. He seemed cross, then he looked more confused and his eyes wandered restlessly. "I have no idea who I am actually. I seem to have forgotten. You can call me Bags if you like. Yes. Bags." He turned and strode on once more.

Barry, hurrying along after him, was too busy keeping up to talk anymore, so they just travelled in silence, covering ground and heading apparently nowhere.

Barry's old world was now all but gone. All that was had been tidied away, to be used again elsewhere and the remainder was the starting point of all worlds. One of Them held it in the palm of his hand. It was a mere speck of dust, but glittering and warm. He held it for a while, just watching it sparkle, then blew it gently away, sending it drifting and swirling on a voyage through Their vast, infinite space.

Bags kept up a breakneck pace for ages and Barry was exhausted when he finally stopped.

"Far enough," said Bags and began to unload his burdens. Barry had thought that some of the things Bags had been carrying were actually part of him. He hadn't realised that one person could carry so much. There were back packs, shoulder packs, under the arms packs, front packs inside other packs and by the end Bags was actually thinner than Barry. Almost a stick in fact. Eventually, Bags stood back and surveyed his luggage.

"I can see why you decided to call yourself Bags anyway," said Barry.

"A sense of humour so soon? Not too much to worry about where you are concerned then. This is what happens now; we put up a tent, we eat and then we talk about you and you learn about this." Bags circled around with his arms stretched out wide. Then he dived into one of his packs and began handing things to Barry and giving instructions. In this way, they soon had a shelter, which somehow made them both feel better, a small fire and hot food which Barry was careful not to look at too closely.

Reviews

[Viv Wade]

Interesting idea! Nicely written, although I was a bit confused at times as to what was happening, but I'm guessing that was your intention. Not sure if it would be suitable for children - maybe a bit too scary? Perhaps it would be better aimed at adult readers. I can't imagine what will happen next!

[chris bevington]

Thanks for the positive response: very reassuring. The confusion was a bit intentional but a re-read tells me maybe it needs a bit of work for the reader too .