#silcrow 08

[silcrow-story]

A Child's Moon IV

08. Oracle! Vocative

In a volatile state of mind, fighting the future, a solitaire sits atop a parking-garage citadel. Watching strangers on the street go about their business hurried, they seem far more frenetic from up relatively high. There's nothing among them to watch for, especially; nothing to wait for, just data and noise, cascading past almost regularly.

We're overhead, looking down at an angle; we can't see anyone's faces from here. We can see the maps, spread out on the cement barrier between the roof and the freefall, as well as the red pen and camera-phone. The observer is silent, and they seem fixated on their work, whatever that might be.

A man by a fountain at the park across the street is counting change; a student outside the tobacconist's shop drops a book from a small stack. A hurried businesswoman checks her watch and speedwalks faster, stops for the light at a busy intersection, looking frustrated. The procession of lives and their passing tangents goes untrammeled, here, for now, under the sun; almost no-one's aware of what lurks here and could, given a shift in circumstance, rear its head and be a real disruption.

The one - besides us - who's been watching all this takes some notes, marks some points on a map. You're probably wondering why we've come out here, hoping this all wraps around at some point. Maybe it will; the watcher packs up their things, darts back into the garage's dank security, there in shadow to appreciate the cool a minute before moving onto their next point of interest.

~

Christopher answers the call - knows, already, who it's almost certain to be. He's not used to Dana's flip-phone, and the quality of the voices transmitted is different. It feels wrong, using it, but the alternative is not answering. The alternative is continuing to put off the inevitable, needful work of bringing Nadia and June back on board.

"This is Christopher," he says. "I can explain." I have to explain, he thinks. I'll have to finish the introduction after all.

"Where the fuck is Dana," says the voice on the other end of the line, "and why do you have her phone?"

"Like I said, I can explain. You probably don't remember much of last night. These areas tend to have that effect on people. Dana's a colleague of mine, and she's gone missing. I don't know where she is, but we might be...we might be able to find her." The last part is almost a lie. Almost, but he's not going to admit it yet. Nothing and no one stays lost forever, he tells himself, and waits for the tinny response to come through.

"So you knew her." says Nadia - or, Christopher assumes as much, anyways. He can't tell their voices apart yet, but June wouldn't have Dana's number. "How do I know you're not lying? How do I know you're not the reason she's missing? What really happened last night!?"

This reaction, he supposes, is to be expected - though he couldn't have known that they'd be ambushed then. The arboretum was usually safe. It's somewhere he and Dana met before. "Look, I can show you the way... this all works. As I understand it, at least. It's like Dana told you last night - we've been investigating. We meant to show you, show you what was going on here, before-" He chokes up a little. "Before she got lost."

Getting lost. It's what they'd taken to calling it, because that's what it had felt like when they'd come close to it. One minute, they'd felt certain they knew where they were; next, they didn't. They'd each come back, once; they'd seen others come back, once, and tried to warn them. Most of the time, the ones they warned didn't believe them, and everyone who got lost a second time stayed lost. Whatever, wherever, whoever was orchestrating all of this learned, and learned quickly, and wouldn't let anyone to cross its path stay free for long.

"Do you still have the notebook?" He asks, hoping the line might lead somewhere productive.

"Yes, but - but you still haven't explained much of anything. You're saying Dana's really missing? That you'd worked together? Why should we believe you?"

"So June's still there?"

"That doesn't matter," Nadia says, and June says, "I'm still here. I'm listening."

"So you have the notebook. I know it's mostly empty, but - but you should give it another look. It might jog your memory. We hope - I hope it will."

~

Dana knew that this might happen - indeed, expected it. That fact does little to make the whole situation feel less desperate, to hold at bay anxiety's encroaching. A fusillade of questions that she'd hitherto evaded come back around to strike her as she walks. She'd answered, in a pragmatic (and, naturally, provisional) way, the biggest question - "Why?" - by saying to herself that she just really had to know. More than that, she knows, she had to feel, to feel this lost again - but that she couldn't consciously admit to.

It's not too cold in the dim wood, but she still hugs herself; her jacket, that's her armor, feels so little now. She strikes the lighter again for some comfort, wonders if anyone else is around here. Or, more to the point, if anyone real is around - she shudders to think what simulacra lurk here past the event horizon of the realm in which she's lost. Trying not to think about where they come from, or what they really are, she trudges on, pretending there's a path she's meant to follow. Her eyes are open - she's alert, but bound to tire soon.

There are things growing here - in fact, nothing really seems dead, at least not in a bone-dry way. Even the leaves and the twigs on the ground are in decay actively, coated with lichens and molds and occasional mushrooms. The spots of colour are few and far between, though; the air's far too soft for it to be dull, per se, but it is grey, and the atmosphere foggy. The lighter was the one spot of truly bright colour; she strikes it again, and admires the flame, as so often she does when there's some flame at hand. It's not much, but it's something. Something someone lost, once, she thinks, and keeps walking.

Then all at once there is a rustling in the leaves, but there's no wind. They simply stir up, as by volition, and swim in the air, rustle against one another symphonically. It's a sound with a lightness belying its potency, a surface current hiding greater movements deeper underneath. When a place so impossibly haunted as this one's disrupted, if only for a moment, its whole being notices. Ripples emerge, radiate, then subside. Dana feels these few ripples, as there moment's there, and she wonders if she's the rock that fell in.

When the trees start to move with their upper boughs, she stops - pauses to watch the display. They fall, but fall slowly - as if through high water, as if against some steady current unseen. The roots pull out slowly, and soil erupts with them like a time-lapse of erosion on dunes. They're headed, all, one way - toward a sharp nexus, some point in the distance. It would seem a shocking sight to see their falling and their rising - to one who'd not beheld such sights some times before. But Dana isn't shocked, she's only watching. This is what she came for, after all, whether or not she's the cause; if anything, the causal loop just makes the scene mean all the more.

She almost wishes she'd something to hold on to, fearful, though slightly, that she too might soon fall away. But she doesn't, and she doesn't, and as the depths of the wood become their edge, a horizon of sorts becomes evident. The point to which all of the trees' peaks are drawn lengthens, to become the line of perspective around which the landscape entire re-orients.

Dana lets her eyes, a censor's, surveil the blooming sky for faults. It's like time's stopped, or slowed a moment - but it hasn't, not this time. There's a faint air of anticipation as she watches the fishbowl unfold before her, eastward. The tree trunks form a sort of vortex - roots hang groundless in mid-air, and boughs entangle as they crash together, all to meet. This is real, she tells herself. This is what's really been happening. We just weren't looking close enough.

~

Nadia's got the phone in one hand, the notebook in the other, sitting on her bed confused - unsteady. As she turns the pages, she remembers, somehow.

It's a haunting feeling, that sudden rush of awareness. Unlike normal recollection, it doesn't have an obvious psychical cue; the notebook is the trigger, but there's no epiphany to unlock what was hitherto withheld; it's as though the door wasn't locked but merely hidden, noticed only now. She remembers the lights, and the lookout, and Dana - the real conversation, unfinished, then, there. She remembers the fifth figure who had arrived in so ominous a fashion - but does not, of course, recall their face.

Christopher's still on the line, and she wants to respond, but she's not quite sure how - or indeed, how to accept that any of this is real. But it is - that much she knows, now. The memories that have rushed back to her like a flood are as real as anything she can recall - the cracking of the twigs beneath her feet, the damp post-rain air, the color of the sky above as twilight dimmed by turns.

And so she says, "What just happened?"

And Christopher says, as though it were a matter of fact, "The notebook's a mnemonic device. That is to say, it's beyond the influence of whatever's causing...all of this. The disappearances, the spatial distortions, the mysterious messages."

Nadia's a bit overwhelmed by this; June is simply listening intently, a rapt, almost excited look in her eyes. She's standing still as Nadia stands up, and paces back and forth - the same carpet-diagonal as ever. The phone's speaker's turned up, and but for that the room is quiet - but for the pacing, the room's still. All the tumult of the past two days is trapped herein; there's a crack in the ceiling. But then again, there's always been a crack in the ceiling.

"So...so you weren't just fucking with us. This wasn't a prank, or...or a scheme, you weren't...you weren't trying to hurt us, or..."

"No." Christopher half-knows it's hard to cope with, remembers when he was first told by his old absent friend and former colleague that his experience wasn't some transient psychiatric glitch, that there was something truly strange afoot here. But he only half-knows, of course, because he'd wanted to believe Dana, and they - they've no reason to believe him. Dana would've seemed more trustworthy, he thinks, and he's probably right; unfortunately, she's indisposed, and I...I'm what we've got.

"So - wait. Why did you contact June in the first place? Why does the notebook have my name in it, and my address? Why did she have to pick it up? Even if you aren't lying about last night...you must know this still doesn't make sense," she says, trying to make it make sense. It remains steadfastly noncompliant.

"Like I said, the notebook's a mnemonic. It's got your name for...for the same reason we initially reached out to you, and June. You've both been lost, once, before. We were...trying to stop it from happening again."

"Lost? I mean...I don't recall having mysteriously vanished lately," she says, realising even as she says it that that might not be true. That at this point, there might be no way of knowing.

"You vanished where you left the notebook," Christopher says, "And not too long ago. A matter of days. The notebook reappeared shortly thereafter - Dana figured out when it would arrive, and I sent June to check it out and bring it to you. We figured it would've been too risky to advise you to go there - not to mention the fact you might not have believed that you'd lost it, or been there at all. These are precautions we've learned to be necessary. You're not the first two we...warned." He very nearly says recruited, but thinks the better of it, and stops there, realizing how quickly, how hurriedly he'd been speaking. He had never been especially good at introductions.

~

Dana's trying to keep pressing east, to little avail, and less by each hour spent at it. The trees don't quite act just like trees around here - they've taken to active obstruction of passage, steering her as might some labyrinth's walls. The space seems remarkably open, despite this - the trunks' impossible tangle only emerges, it seems, by necessity, letting her go so long as she goes the right way.

Eventually she stops - lets the wood right itself - sink to the forest floor, lean in the leaves. She's warm with exertion, but swears it's gone colder, like the protean shape of this space has sapped its entropy. She's not quite exhausted, but feels she needs a new plan - this avenue of exploration seems to only have incensed the restless land.

Letting a hand fall down among the dead and dying things, she breathes, and tries to remember. The foliage then shifts softly beneath her; just as the trees did, some few hours prior. They cede to envelop her hand, first, to the wrist - and then with a start she notes her whole forearm's sinking beneath them, not into loam but into something stranger, and more fluid. She tries to rise to her feet, but finds the ground is pulling at her, drawing her in, and under, and out like a rip-tide. In mere moments she's subsumed completely, and the leaves coalesce above her head as though nothing'd disturbed their rest at all.

In the dark below the forest floor, Dana Delaney finds, to her great relief, that she can yet breathe. It's dark, verging on black, and all deliquescent, despite her still-steady breath feeling to her more like a liquid than any thin air in which she's now suspended. It's dim, and it's hazy, but not quite oppressive - indeed, the space seems vast now, and far from claustrophobic. Still, she's quite sure that she'd rather not be here; there seems to be very little to see, few signs to interpret, no trace of a trail one might follow. Turning to look down, she sees something she hadn't expected to, and she remembers.

She was seventeen, and had a driver's license for the first time, and a high school career that was as steady as it was banal. She'd been on her way home when she noticed something was different - something was wrong. Her acquaintance wasn't there at the park as usual, and he was always there. He had become one of the few constants with which she was entirely comfortable.

When she got to the park later, he still wasn't there, but she rested alone for a while in her blue folding chair, sipping her thermos of coffee and pondering all of the future's uncertainties. The future, unlike the present, had seemed open wide, indefinite - welcoming, comforting, somehow, if dark.

She never saw the man again, but that night, she drove out to the highway, straight ahead, and going nowhere. As she crossed the bridge that crossed the city limits, the stars were all innumerable, the firmament's expanse without end - full of desperate, twitching, dying hope. She drove until she felt she couldn't keep up with her thoughts, the way they shot across her mind intensifying with each passing vehicle and each descending star. She knew that most or many of them are, in fact, long-dead; but that fact didn't faze her as she fantasized their world-ending descent.

And now, again, she's wreathed in near-black, and again driving uncertain into territory beyond which she hasn't knowledge or assurance - only curiosity, and beneath that some faint, weak hope, which hope like her short shallow breath yet shudders, twitches. She floats there, suspended just under leaves and rot, and contemplates her next move forward, now. This is what she went and got lost for; this is the design which she arrayed. It's now just on her to advance, unhindered by doubts and anxieties. We watch from underneath, that looking down she might yet see some camera, cosmic in the yawning aether there. Her face is still, and stern, and deliberate as ever; even without an audience she knows of she's performing what she feels she ought to be - a stoic, that she isn't, and a woman with a plan. I'm that, at least, she thinks, repeatedly - I had a plan before, and I've one now. That in itself should serve to pull me through.

~

June still isn't feeling a flood of last night's real events return to her all at once; she's anxious now. Nadia's still on the phone with this Christopher - saying, in a markedly sudden shift - she believes him, remembers it all, after all. June has the texts she supposedly sent, this morning, to Nadia - detailing it. She's gleaned back that much, anyways, of herself. Still, there's so much that's troubling her - why their memories left to begin with, where Dana has gone, and how the notebook washed up in wax paper, just before dawn those two mornings ago.

She doesn't raise questions yet, eager as she is to do so; rather, she focuses on listening, posing contrast to Nadia's frenetic pace, and to Christopher's tone. He sounds distressed, truly, June thinks. I suppose I can't blame him.

Her lack of overt engagement belies a growing excitement within her - indeed, her curiosity's grown into a compulsive fascination. This, here, is a narrative - and almost a caricature of one, at that, its events so mysterious they seem larger than life. Hoping that she can be more than a bit part, that hope fueled by - among other things - her proximity to the notebook, and the fact - relevant or no - that she was the one to retrieve it, was therefore causal and essential to the sequence's whole going down. She's not really making an effort to hide what she's feeling - no, it's more like this is the way she that she typically reacts to pleasant surprise. There's guilt there, though muted - or perhaps, instead, shame - this, at her knowing that someone's gone missing, and feeling no worry or consternation nonetheless. It's not that she doesn't care about Dana - Dana, a functional stranger, despite their allegedly having met; it's just that she doesn't quite care enough for that angst to win out the quickening, the stirring, that this strange affair seems to bring on. The guilt is still there, at not caring enough, though - sat, stationed upon the seemingly evergreen pile of notions and sentiments she's not yet mustered the wherewithal to try to, in depth, address.

Then, Nadia's handing her the notebook, as if to try reawaken her lost memories. This won't work, June thinks, hurriedly, not knowing why, as the faint sound of Christopher's breathing, compressed, crackles through cell-phone speakers to awkwardly occupy air. Then, he speaks, and she notices.

"June...you're listening, right? I - we - we had to warn you, too. Just like Nadia, just like me, and Dana, and everyone to whom we've reached out so far - you've been lost once before. I think you remember. You were down by the water, by the rail, right?"

June's mind's eye fogs over, then - becomes half-lidded as she remembers, and she does remember. It had been a strange experience, to be sure, but she'd written it off - it sounds like most people do, she thinks, and feels an irrational sting of disappointment in herself. I was no different...I thought I had just been tired, just been seeing things. I wasn't an exception, wasn't like Christopher, or his colleague, or colleagues....

But it doesn't take too long for her to shake the thought, and avoid reminiscing in too much detail. So she just says, with real and irrepressible confidence, "Yes. Yes, I remember. But I...I'm here now. And I won't let it happen again, to me, or - or to Nadia. I want to understand. If there's something here to figure out, some mystery to uncover...I want to be here for it."

The declaration cuts through the breathing on the other end of the line, through Nadia's muted footfalls, and through the buzzing of the light overhead. Christopher, elsewhere, holds Dana's old cell-phone away from his face; Nadia halts in her pacing, and looks at June, quizzical, almost impressed; and the warm yellow overhead light in the room flickers out, and leaves them in a cool facsimile twilight. The blue glow of mid-afternoon through rainclouds is all that illuminates them now, and at that, through the gaps in the blinds.

The camera then zooms in, from where it's positioned, above the vast mirror over the small sink, to focus on June's strikingly focused face. Her glasses, no longer occluded with reflected light, let her eyes shine through - magnified, irises dark but full-saturated, stillness anticipatory hewn into her expression. Maybe the lightbulb's burnt out, or maybe the power's gone out temporarily, or maybe there's something more to it - but for now, at least, June's attitude radiates into her two new acquaintances, lets on them alight a light hope that's, to one, too familiar, and to the other, too new.

~