“So the academics were all robots?” I asked, half disbelieving and yet a little bit breathless.
“Oh yes. They’d all been automated, you know.”
I wasn’t quite sure if I could believe this. I had gone to that very same university, graduating with honours only two years prior, and while I would be lying if I said the professors had struck me as fully human I had trouble accepting that I had studied under automatons.
Truthfully, the undead’s entire story was exceedingly bizarre - a claim which may not have meant much, given how bizarre the idea of an undead telling a story was in the first place. But I had been up north, and had seen neither a sea of dreams beyond the frigid ice flows, nor a southerly trainline. Additionally, though I had studied the law during my degree, I knew of no laws forbidding the existence of supernatural creatures.
That the university had been annihilated during the stock market crash did not help matters, for it meant I could verify nothing of his tale. All I could do was take him on his word.
The vampire must have noticed my discontent, for he looked at me companionably. “What troubles you? Weight of the tombstone dragging you down?”
“No. I merely find your tale incredible,” I confessed, my tone neither apologetic nor accusatory.
“I said it would be, did I not, when first I began? ‘Dead men tell the best tales, for only we know how hard it is to make your stories true to life.’ Did you think this a mere metaphor? Life looks irrational, silly, lumpish, and a little bit fantastic, and it’s only once you look deep into the appearances that the lumps take on quite a different appearance, and you realise how fantastic it really is.”
I grumbled at this reply, but elected to continue my journey, merely shifting the uncomfortably heavy tombstone on my back.
My journey to acquire the tombstone had been filled with difficulties. I had found John’s place in the columbarium easily enough, but rubbing the urn and chanting “Open sesame!” (the rather confusing instructions from the vampire) failed to produce its occupant. Twice, thrice, four times I rubbed the lamp - err, urn - before I heard a “coming, coming,” and a twisting twirling cloud of ash ascended from out of an urn three holes distant.
It spun about with an ornate flourish before taking the form of a two dimensional human male, with two holes where his eyes should be and a grinning slit of a mouth. The man saw me, then took a step back, whipping a fedora off his head and spinning it about in his hands.
“Well hey howdy,” he drawled. “What can I do you for?”
“Hi,” I said robotically, rather nonplussed. “Joseph sent me - I’m here for a tombstone.”
The ash genie made a melodramatic motion, one hand vanishing into his forehead, the other raised in exaggerated fashion overhead. The obligatory groans and moans dealt with, John whirled about and danced off, around the edge of the columbarium. I hurried to follow, struggling to keep track with his rapid pace.
“So, you’ve been speaking with Joseph?” John said, as he pushed through a wall of branches and briars. I nodded.
“Good on you. I used to study philosophy, you know, back when I was still kicking,” and the ghost danced a cancan to demonstrate. “I took cause with the school of the Pyrrhonists who, as their maestro Sextus Empiricus so sagely observed, ‘opposed to every proposition an equal proposition,’ seeking, through the rejection of theories, rest. And indeed when I got sick I opposed the propositions behind one medicine to the equal propositions of another, taking neither; and I did find rest.”
Having pushed through the carefully matted wall of thorns we found ourselves in an all too snug hollow, the ceiling of trees a mere six feet overhead and much of the floor covered in mounds of sticky, rotting leaves.
“Shoot, I was a brainy fellow, but I don’t half know what he does,” the genie finished. He removed a mat of leaves - evidently woven into a net - revealing dozens of tombstones.
“So, who’s the lucky winner? Gotta get all the details right - one time the old geezers who run this joint checked a suspiciously new grave bearing the name of a ninety year old man, only to find a young woman who’d made the mistake of trying to rob a corpse raven. Hoo boy, you should’ve seen the hullabaloo that was.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I groaned.
***
I heaved the tombstone onto the ground beside the recently dug, and recently filled, grave.
“Now,” said the vampire, as merrily as you please. “While you finish off what needs to be done, how about I continue the story? Where was I - oh, yes. So I had entered the Jungle of Unk and-”
“There you go again,” I snapped, not in the best of moods after my exertions. “Where’d the jungle come from? How’d you get to a jungle - and when, and why? I thought we were in the Northern Wastes.”
“Ah! Yes, yes, that would be correct. So where was I?” The vampire murmured.
“You leapt out the window.”
“Absolument, monsieur! I leapt out the window…”
***
Of course I couldn’t stay in the capital, not after that. This was not an issue of security – what scholar allows Death to interfere in his hunt for truth? No, this was because I had a mystery on my hands. Why had belief in vampires been declared illegal? Why had the staff of the university been replaced – or become – or indeed had always been, and only in dreams did it differ – automatons? And how was I to prove that humans did not exist, if I myself could not be?
Faced with such questions, I determined to go and consult one of the few remaining spirits who yet ventured among the fields of men – namely, the Man in the Moon.
There is only one way to reach the moon from earth, and that is to climb up the thread of moon moth silk that lies to the back of the Most Westerly Point. The Man in the Moon tied it himself, long long ago, for he comes down once a month to seek out the secret groves where scholars hold their disputes, and refresh himself; whence we say that we have a ‘new moon.’
To reach the Most Westerly Point one must pass through the Jungle of Unk, and that is quite a different venture. Yet it was one I knew I had to make, so I purchased a can of soup from a roadside soup can salesman who wasn’t looking too hard and off I went.
It was a difficult journey, and a dangerous one. The Jungle of Unk lay due south, within and beyond the plains of Democratic Vespuccia, which as you know has lately become a land where all is awhirl with chaos, and the people live lives that will prove nasty, brutish, and short.
There were therefore many perils of a decidedly mortal sort; but, worse yet, the journey to the Jungle of Unk required one to step intermittently into the Lands Beyond at certain key moments – through rollicking hills and over haunted treetops – and thus there were perils of a decidedly more than mortal sort. Combined the traveller was in dire straits, for he’d vanish through a path from fairyland to land in a human street brawl; then, some thirty or forty miles later, would have to climb up a wall to reenter fairyland in the midst of a warzone, successfully making his escape only to land in a gryphon’s nest on the other side.
***
“Why not just circumvent the area altogether, and go southwest – say, through the Kingdom of Crescent Peak, or the aristocratic Merry-Go-Whirl Enclaves – then double back about, thereby skipping Democratic Vespuccia altogether? Or, even better, take a boat – or perhaps those underwater tunnels you mentioned earlier – and go straight south with only a little curve?”
The vampire looked at me askance. “Curve southwest? No, I couldn’t possibly: take the wrong route and I’d have risked ending up in the Hollow Groves of Old Twilight, or the Merry-Go-Whirl Enclaves, or even – and I shudder at the name – Zargazool. And then where would I be?”
“In Zargazool.”
“Precisely. No, there are rules – rites – for any journey through fairyland, and only the ignorant and fools fail to respect them. He who would seek the Most Westerly Point must go due south through the plains, switching back and forth through the Lands Beyond at the appointed places. Only then shall he find what he seeks.”
I shrugged, and gave the headstone one final heave, sweeping some loam and leaf mould onto the unsettled dirt in a vain attempt to make the freshly dug grave look a little older.
“If you say so. Still,” and here my voice faltered a little as a slight undercurrent of suspicion wound through it. “I know you reached the moon – you told me as such - so you must have successfully completed the journey.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say completed…”
***
There was something wrong with the wilds beyond the plains that men know. They had always been strange, full of half-formed, half-unreal things that zickered and zacked and glugged as they scuttled over the branches. The trees never quite seemed to figure out where they ought to be growing, or if they ought to be growing at all. Roots spiraled skyward and spinned in loops over the leaves carpeting the ground, and seeds six feet tall erupted out of the earth.
They were strange still, but now they were silent. No more did strange things gleep and snaggle as they whickled like a pianist across the treetops, nor did the trees whisper eerily as they blew back and forth, though there was no breeze. They were silent with the quiet of the depths, and lifeless like the cloudless sky above.
My journey was thus far easier than I had imagined, yet this was by no means a solace. I went cautiously over the limpid leaves, eyeing the stagnant boughs with unease, and paused at each turning in the path, cautiously peering every which way.
My caution was rewarded. It was in the last stage of my journey, as I travelled the Far Leprous Hills, a blasted heath of putrid yellow grass and greenish soil. My heart beat a mad dance, akin to the pounding of horse hooves on the ground, and a shiver ran up my spine. Trusting my instincts I leapt backwards - just in time, for out from in front of the hill there was a burst of stardust, and a pair of many-sided moon demons swirled into being.