Kthaahthikha
04 March, 2006
Have I posted this already?
When Anthers came he was red faced – not tired, just nervous, for his breathing was regular and shallow. He was dressed in a short coat and carrying a shoulder-bag, and he had a smile cut across his glowing cheeks.
‘Waiting long?’
‘A few minutes,’ I replied. ‘And you, did you have an easy trip?’
‘Quite pleasant,’ he replied. ‘Traffic was minimal. Come along, Ms Rosenthal, there is business do be conducted.’
So we left the bookshop – he bought me the book – and headed down the way towards the library by the old council chambers. Two lions sat across from one another at the foot of the steps, lifeless and unrealistic but with a certain charm to them that I had always found akin to that of the vampire.
It was a Saturday. Anthers shattered the library window with a towel-wrapped punch, and we headed into the gloom of the building as the clock on the wall marked the seconds until the police would arrive. There was a door at the back of the cathedral, beyond periodicals and French, that yielded to several powerful kicks from my feet – for Anthers is a rather old man.
The police arrived then. Regretfully, I drew my gun, and threatened to shoot. I don’t know that they were used to it – a man and a woman – but they dashed behind a shelf of Biology and we managed to make it inside. Past a tea-area with a fridge, down a too-long corridor and up a staircase to a window I wasn’t sure of, we found a landing. It was here that Anthers proved himself a man of his word.
‘Here it is,’ he said, taking a small, flat key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and slipped in even as I saw more police marching across the park from the fronting station. Anthers locked the door tightly and I sat down, half-watching him as I watched the door. He rummaged through the filing cabinet and the sideboard and the desk, sensibly ignoring the computer. I could here footsteps below and I still wasn’t sold on Anthers’ reassurance.
‘Ah!’ was all he said as he broke-open a cabinet. He tore it apart with his hands and a metal ruler, working the joins. I watched him, cradling the gun, as the shelves fell to the ground, followed by the door and the side-panelling and the base. A pile of wood sat on the floor, accompanied by several strips of siding leant against the desk.
‘So how does this work?’ I asked. I wasn’t as well-versed as I now am. Anthers has always been one for teaching by example, and he climbed inside the deconstructed cabinet and gestured for me to follow. We were both soon cramped in that three foot by two foot space, as the old man and I tried to drag the pieces of wood back up around us until, after a great deal of work, we had boxed ourselves thoroughly in.
Things being as they are, time and space don’t always play to how we expect them to. Sometimes they do. I tumbled downwards for a while, although it was more of a spiral. If the Earth is round (and I’m still not sold) then there is no flat plane from which to gauge down, but rather a sphere which draws things to its centre. We were headed straight for the centre of that cabinet, like astronauts in the ISS, spiralling around the centre of gravity and finding that, though its circumference was brief, its radius was very large indeed.
Of course there is no air in a vacuum, so I was unable to discuss with Anthers the peculiarity of the sensation. Rather, we simply tumbled, and I was prone to reflecting on whether or not Anthers had sold me out on some kind of murder-suicide – I couldn’t think of a motivation, but anything is possible. Perhaps I reminded him of the girl he was too quick on the draw for during one of those Beltaine sacraments back in ’43. Who’s to say? All there is is to continue as we is, but now I’m engaging in wordplay, and that just isn’t what I’m about.
My name is Rosenthal. You got that, right?
After several centuries we hit. I’m not exaggerating. It took one hell of a long time. Thankfully time had long since ceased to exist, although my perception of it was still barrelling along at a snail’s pace – so even if I was bored stiff my corpse was not stiff as a board.
Our destination on that Saturday afternoon was the international convention of the Order of the Seven Stars, as founded on the slopes of Ararat to prevent something untoward. I’m not certain what, and the Seven Stars sure as hell don’t know, so what they’re guarding against is anyone’s guess. My Uncle – who set me on my current course in life, and was, not coincidentally, one of the only men to ever witness the coronation of a Scout Bagheera and survive – was of the mind that it was the Seven Stars themselves that the order was set to protect the world from, and judging from the cloistered secrecy of their gyrations, one would not find this a jagged little pill to swallow.
So hiding inside of cabinets, at the points where angles and shadows intersect, were the Seven Stars, and it was with my trusty revolver and decaying geriatric that I approached the temple which rose from the mists, enshrouded in eldritch miasma of a bluish, necrotic hue, above a concave spherical landscape from the centre of which we had tumbled, to brush the extents of its stairways and moats with its overreaching tower. The moats of the temple of the Seven Stars consist of a single, perfectly circular pond that encompasses all. My readings speak of it as a gruesome and heinous waterway, and though it flows relentlessly around and around itself one has the feeling that witches might pass just fine over Escher paintings.
So we stood on the steps of the temple, which by now you have guessed is the innermost sphere of the hollow earth. Beyond the dinosaurs, the lost tribes of Israel and the savage UFOnauts, there lies this single dome that is really surprisingly-easy to access – all that is required of one is a cabinet and non-linear thinking.
We entered the temple through the gates. I kept my revolver close, concerned for my safety. Members of the Order of the Seven Stars have been known to shoot on sight. But they were all gathered in the tower chamber, or so Anthers assured me, the base of which was several hundred meters above us and the spire of which we were repeatedly forced to duck. Anthers cautioned me against touching it – apparently I might fall if I did. The surface is boring, what with its ETs and cyber-cabals, but at least down is consistent – or at the very least convex.
A low chanting reached out ears, akin to a Gregorian. But this was no Latin, it was some strange tongue forgotten by all but those permitted access to the hidden, ancient lore. Naturally, I planned to steal this. It has long been my aim to hi-jack the telluric currents and engineer a method of crossing boundaries between this dimension and the next – a plan, if you will, to loop time and space and superimpose an image from a preferable dimension upon this one that will fuse common elements and insert all those differences not present in our own; what I could possibly hope to gain from this could never really be made that apparent, but I suppose that it is my goal to merge a new myself upon myself, to attempt to fuse personalities in a way less difficult and more fun than LSD-induced schizophrenia. My Uncle, whom I believe I’ve mentioned, is of the mind that I’ve already attempted the less-preferable option, and that I am currently making my way through a bizarre cocktail of id and superego, constructing my own existence as I go in a way more than reminiscent of Total Recall. Except that I’m not Austrian.
We made our way up the staircase, a confusing design that from my perspective spiralled to the left as opposed to up. In the third tier the walls were lined with books and I had the distinct impression that the room was constructed at an odd angle, so as to give the impression of being top-side up. I pillaged a few tomes whilst Anthers looked about nervously. He was of the opinion that I was dangerously-close to sacrilege, and he probably would have fled if he weren’t a manifestation of my subconscious mind. It took me a great deal of time and enticing to dredge him up from the pits of my psyche, and a middle-aged man with a brushed moustache has raised more questions about me than any hard-core porn.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘so we’ve got the stuff. Now how do I get out?’
‘Out, Ms Rosenthal?’ Anthers shook his head. ‘It isn’t possible. I thought you knew that. I only know what you know.’
‘True, but you also know what I knew, but then forgot.’
I thought about it for a bit. Overhead and underfoot the Gregorian chanting was growing confusing. I knew they had sensed my presence, and would be coming for me soon to prevent my escape. The existence of secret societies hinges on a secret to protect, and they weren’t ones to know or care about my dimension-conjoining designs.
Of course you’ve probably figured-out what happened nest. As the darkness swarmed around me and footsteps clicked on polished marble, accompanied by the rustle of robes and the whisper of perturbed voices brimming with cold menace, I decided that now was as good a time as any to put Anthers to a second use. Being a figment of my imagination as he was, it was simple enough to imagine him outside on the surface. Of course, being as real as a real person, that’s where he was. And as a part of my mind was on the surface, it stood to reason that I was on the surface, and so I was, and the laws of physics be damned.
Of course, Anthers was dead. I felt bad about it – I really did. But then, he was me, or an element of me, so I didn’t take it too harshly. Suicide’s been decriminalised. I made several attempts with the book to fuse dimensions. I managed to desegment time and disconnect my perception of it, so that the past and the future were all stretched out to either side of me and I was a spectator by the way instead of out there on the field. It didn’t do me a damn lick of good, but it felt cool, and that’s what’s most important, after all.
