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As he emerged from darkness into light, the man’s skin began to shine, not supernaturally, but in a strange iridescent glow caused by firelight and by the reflected light of the fire from the various minerals infused in the cave formations. His skin took on the appearance of green. He was stooped over a walking stick, struggling against something like old age arthritis to make his way toward the party over difficult terrain.
He stumbled over a loose rock, and when he caught himself on his walking stick, he uttered an adenoidal “Hm…”
“Yoda…” Blake said.
“No,” the man said.
“Is your name Nami?” Abe blurted out.
“From The Morose Alpaca?” the man said. “No.” The tone of his skin warmed as he finally arrived in the glow of the fire. He was just a plain humanoid, a man of about fifty years (Blake’s age, and maybe Sano’s depending on how old she really was), balding, with wisps of hair flying around his bald spot. His clothing was bedraggled, but had the appearance of being well-kept. There were no stains of mud or blood or any other refuse on them, but there were sections torn and tied together, worn through in other places with holes, piled on in layers, so that he looked to be wearing long strips of cloth instead of sewn clothing, a creation from the madder parts of Jim Henson’s mind.
He looked tired.
“The mountain feeds me,” he began, answering a question not asked.
“Do you have anywhere to lay this young lady down?” Blake asked, suddenly remembering himself and his burden.
“My, my,” said the man. “A manufacturing marvel! The young lady has the machines in her, does she not.” He looked around. “My large, manly friend,” he said to Blake. “You’re the only one of your party without the machines in you.”
“A bed,” Blake said. “We need a bed for her.”
“She’s fine,” the man said. “She’ll be fine. Is your back hurting?”
“No.”
“Come now.”
“Okay, look,” Blake said, “it will start to hurt soon. Soonish. But I’d like to make sure she’s comfortable.”
“There is a cooldown happening, I should think,” said the man. He waved toward the back of the cave, whence he had come. “It’s…odd…back there, but you’re already familiar with all that. Those are my quarters. They’re nice.”
“Can somebody lead the way?” Blake asked. The man stood still.
Well, Stoic? Are you going to take care of your lady or just stand there gaping like a child in a manga store?
“Oh,” said Abe. “Yeah, let me. Back there somewhere?”
The man gestured vaguely. “Somewhere, yes. Directions are…well, you know. Watch your step. Perhaps it will be below you.”
Perhaps?
Abe nodded and went toward the rear of the cave, which showed signs of reflected lights, but flickering.
“Yes,” said the man, “if you try to shine a light, or bring a torch, it does no good. But back there somewhere is where I live, where I have been living.”
Where the flickering seemed to reflect off solid surfaces was nothing. For several minutes, they made their way in the same general direction, sensing that they were going in a straight line instead of veering off in this direction or that. The stalagmites formed a rough boundary, and they trusted that there were no stalactites into which to whack their faces.
With a sudden scrape of stone against stone, and that sound from all the weight of a mountain, Abe saw an opening ahead of him, soft light streaming up and out of a hole, as it were, perfectly square, lengthening into a golden rectangle, both in area and in light, revealing a staircase which descended into the stone floor and below.
“I have Stone Shape,” the voice of the man floated back. “But I have no control over it, not really. I will it to happen when I want, upon my command, but where it happens…” His voice trailed away. It soothed, nevertheless, and down they went, in some comfort: the warmth of the light took away the dampness of the cave, and they breathed easier.
“We left Sano alone with him,” Blake said.
“Sano can take care of herself.”
“What if he’s dangerous?”
Abe said, “I should think she’s far more dangerous than either of us know.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Hm…,” said Blake. “Ah! Here we go!”
“A stone bower,” said Abe. “It seems the Tree Lords are right: we are lords, and the earth is an unruly servant, and all its elements.”
“Like an angry birch tree?”
Abe stood still, wondering about Lars’s death again, this time with less passion, while he watched him lay Alayna upon a stone slab.
“No need for blankets or mattresses in here,” said the man. Sano was holding one of his arms while he made his way down the stairs. “The slab is heated, and, well, there’s something about the air in here. When you lie down, you lighten. The stone is as a firm bedroll, a little hard to get used to, at first, but then, after a time, you sleep quite well.”
“After a time,” mused Abe. “You’ve been in this timeless realm for a while.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” the man said. He shuffled away from them toward other sections of the stone bower.
“You have a strange manner of moving,” said Abe. “It is as though you are moving at fifteen frames per second.”
“Like an anime, you say?”
“Yes, like the ones my mother watched when I was a baby.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Not herky jerky, freezing and unfreezing, but that I’m passing through time at the minimum rate to fool you into thinking I’m ‘real,’ perhaps.”
“Not even to fool me,” said Abe, “but enough so that my mind fills in the blanks between the stills.”
Sano said, “Those old anime creators really understood their craft as a post-modern art form, tickling the mind into stimulating itself for effect.”
“All your base are revealed to us,” said Blake.
“What?” said Abe.
“It’s an old meme,” said Sano.
With that, Blake did something rather unexpected, at least insofar as the character of Blake was concerned: he began to chant, “All your / all your / all your base are belong to us.”
“In a way,” the old man said while Blake continued to intonate, “we have entered that world. I’m in one instance, and somehow visible to you for the time being…”
“…the time being…” they all said together while Blake continued “…all your base are belong to us…”
“We are visible to you. How do we appear to you?” Abe asked.
Perhaps this is the way out, Stoic. Perhaps if we ask enough ignorant questions we can stumble our way out of this nightmare.
Abe stared at Alayna as she lay, “in cooldown,” as the old man said. Peace was upon her.
Perhaps this is not a nightmare.
The old man said, “As real as life. I’m not surprised that you see me at ten or fifteen frames per second. I’ve been near the thing for …a time… that I’ve begun to oscillate in and out.”
“In and out of where?”
“Dunno.”
“Aw.” Abe’s voice carried with it the child’s disappointment at a dropped piece of candy and the adult’s despair of life itself.
The old man said, “I can feel it.”
“What’s your name, old man?” Sano asked.
“Hm?” said the old man.
“I said, ‘what’s your name?’”
“Oh, I heard you. I suppose it’s a reflex to pretend we didn’t hear when we mean to make a space for time to think. I’ve had all the time in the world to think. My name is…I think my name is Ed. I thought I was dead and in Catholic Purgatory.”
“Catholic? Isn’t there just A Purgatory?” Sano asked.
“Well, I’m Lutheran,” said the old man, Ed.
Blake sighed very loudly. Sano and Abe stared at each other, calculating.
“I thought it was an insurance company,” Abe finally said, holding Sano’s eyes in his. “I mean, that building back home, ‘Lutheran Services,’ right?”
“Well, I thought it was a school alternative,” Sano said, “with that big fat German guy—the statue—banging his fist on a book, and looking to conquer something with his mind, just like a German would.”
“Norwegians,” said Blake, still finishing his sigh. “I mean, yeah, you’re right: the Luther guy is the original Lutheran--definitely German--and he was…mixed…for war and peace, I suppose, but it was the stinkin’ Norwegians who put Lutherans on the map all over. You take a typical small town in Minnesota, for example.”
Here we go, Stoic.
“You’ve got a main corner outside of downtown, say, two blocks from the bank building and the department store—”
Department store?
“And there you’ll have four churches, one Catholic, one Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever, and then you’ll have two Lutheran churches squared off against each other, built to glower at each other, the one about ten years older than the other, and all the same family names inside both of them, and all the leading families being stinkin’ Norgies.”
Sano, laughing, said, “Are you prejudiced against everyone?”
“Everyone equally,” Blake said, “but especially Norgies. Look, Sano, we’re talking about a race of people who couldn’t keep a hockey team in Minnesota. A hockey team. IN MINNESOTA.”
Everyone started laughing, but Blake wasn’t finished.
“Listen, if a Norwegian man ever approaches you purporting brotherly love, all I can say is hire a lawyer, because you’re about to get sued. And God help you if you’re related to him.”
“So, no,” said Ed. “I do not believe in Purgatory.”
“Because, being a Lutheran, you already are in Purgatory.”
“Goodness, Blake,” Sano said, giggling prettily. “One might think you were a Lutheran.”
“Mom is,” said Blake. He smiled. “She is a good woman. But she ain’t no Norgie, and they ain’t none of them at her church.”
“You smiled, Blake!” said Sano. “You are so beautiful a man when you smile!”
Blake’s countenance returned to its set position.
“Yes, well,” Ed said. Blake breathed in, then slowly heaved a long, healthy sigh. The old man gestured. “Welcome to my home.”
Sano gave the old man a hug, kissing him on the top of his head. “You poor soul! You are not dead and in Catholic Purgatory! If you are, then we are. And if we are not, then you are not. And we can make our way back to…off this mountain.”
“How long have you been here?” asked Blake. He caught himself. “Never mind.”
“I know, I know,” Ed said. “A few days?” He gestured to his clothing. “A few more days?”
“How did you get here?” asked Abe.
“Do you remember John Denver?”
“Yes,” said Blake.
Sano said, “Hm…”
Abe said, “Who?”
“He was a famous pop star in the 1970s,” Ed began. “He parlayed his fame into some activism, but being who he was, he bumped into a few muckety-mucks in the government, and—”
Blake’s eyebrows shot up, and he interrupted, saying, “John Denver was born in Roswell, New Mexico.”
The old man nodded.
Abe, after puzzling for a second, said, “Roswell? The space aliens? Area 51?”
“The very same,” Ed said, nodding. “Being who he was, or rather, being born where he was, when he started ‘activisming,’ he got the attention of someone in the Department of the Interior.”
“No…” said Blake, in wonder.
“Yep,” said Ed, nodding. “John Denver had figured out that the whole thing at Roswell was an op to take people’s attention away from the real Area 51. If you look at his last public remarks, you’ll see he was pulling on a thread, and there were some people on the other end of that thread who were pretty uncomfortable, and that’s where I come in.”
“You didn’t,” said Blake.
“I did. I met him in California and forced him up into his own airplane, took him for a ride here, in fact, to confirm his suspicions—”
“Wait, what?” said Blake.
“Hang on, there, mister,” Ed said. “In good order. All in good order. Anyway, I was supposed to dope him up real good, set his plane on a course toward Denver, and then bail, but he turned out to be a feisty one in that tiny cockpit—”
“There’s no way the two of you fit in that little homemade plane,” said Blake.
“Believe what you will,” Ed said. “Look at me. And look at him. We crowded in there okay, especially once I told him I was going to show him the truth—just like in The X-Files. I didn’t smoke, but I talked to him like Smoking Man talked to David Duchovny—say, how much time has actually passed? A year? I feel like it’s been a year.”
The three conscious non-old-men pondered. “A few days,” said Blake, “but I do know that The X-Files finished its run a long time ago. Or maybe yesterday. Does it matter?”
“Oh, I did like that show,” Ed said. “It was so silly, the way Chris Carter imagined the conspiracy, but he was so close. He was so close to the truth that it was absurd, and safe.”
“So anyway,” Blake said, gesturing to Ed.
“Oh, yeah, so anyway, Denver was able to fight me off, the little bastard, and I may or may not have gotten the injection in him, but he threw me out of the cockpit, and I managed to pull the cord on my chute, and, well, here I am, a few days later.”
“1997,” said Blake.
“I know it’s not 1997,” said Abe. “That was…some time…before I was born.”
“Wow…” said Ed. “Wow.” He looked at his clothing. “Well, anyway,” he gestured grandly to his surroundings, indicating the entire mountain in which they were presently dwelling, for the time being. “Welcome to the real Area 51.”
Blake swooned.
image [https://embodimentandexclusion.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/2.15.jpg]
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