October 28, 2020.
SPOOKTOBER STORY #17:
Fait Accompli, Chapter Eight.
My goose is fully cooked. Without supplies, I only have my floppy hat and my heater to keep me alive in this inhospitable place, and, importantly, neither of them are water.
For some reason, the queerness of my interaction with Harry has lessened my certainty that this all is a mortality-adjacent induced hallucination. Strange as our talk may have been, it was strange in a way that doesn’t feel like the vaulted anomalous interior of my mind. This makes the loss of my supplies doubly or trebly upsetting, as without them I am certain to reach that stage sooner rather than later.
I now feel eyes all around me, and I know Harry must not be the only one watching me. Friends, I announce, you have stolen my water, please return it so I do not die.
There is no response from the multiformity of unseen watchers. I mean you no harm, I say, and realize immediately how false my words ring, as I am starting to mean them some harm, because they are being impolite as all hell and have stolen that which might maintain my tenuous hold on life.
Friends, I announce again, but have nothing to follow it up with, so I let the word hang in the air like miasma.
Anyway, standing here talking to people who refuse to be seen isn’t doing very much for me, so I take action and start careening away, towards the Tower. At least I can see this damn thing and get my bearings, and maybe someone over there has some water, or better, hard liquor.
My ears are getting a workout. Each time I move, there is the sound of movement, of many feet trying to stay quiet against the sand. I pretend I do not hear it. My surreptitious glances to and fro do not reveal who my pursuants may be, so I decide to whistle a tune to show how calm and untroubled I am purporting to be. I decide to whistle “C’est Magnifique”, which I heard an Oriental gal warble her way through last week at the Tannery. She had an easy, sweet voice that made me smile without trying to. I try to capture some of her flourishes in my whistling, but I am not an accomplished whistler and fail to do anything but confuse the issue.
The image of the Tower slowly starts to consolidate through the heat haze as I approach it through the tent city. It seems taller than it was, the last time I looked, but that could just be distortion. The little ants are still moving all over it, and I’m almost certain now that they’re builders, working feverishly. I try to equate this image of a Tower-nubbin with the grand Tower I saw over the dunes, and can’t come up with anything (atmospheric distortion? I wish I’d listened to the University men’s babbling more sincerely). I redouble my whistling, the part of C’est Magnifique that I remember, and then stop, because it’s not really helping.
And then, from all around me, in thousand part harmony, a vast echo of my whistle. A variegated cacophony, an insane choir of whistles from unseen lips, surrounding me in a sea of C’est Magnifique. I gasp and spin around, pointing my iron uselessly at the tents, at what sounds like hundreds, thousands of Cole Porters, spitting my tune back at me with a cancerous hatred, a blind fury.
I am unable to stop my body from convulsively fleeing, kicking up sand with my borrowed boots, clumsily dashing away from the terrible sound. The sand catches my foot, twists my ankle, and I topple into the sand, my floppy hat falling off my head, trapping against a tent mooring.
There is something wrong with the placement of the hat against the stake. There is something already there, blistering against it, in the same place the hat is trying to settle. I can’t understand what I’m seeing. It seems pinched against itself, and the words that go through my head are: not alive, but dying, and from this crumbles, and then to sand, forever and ever.
The whistlers are getting nearer so I can’t spend a lot of time thinking about this, and clamber to my feet and sprint, as best as I can in the shifting sand. The whistling pierces something soft in my skull and my jaw aches like I just took a truck of a left hook. I want to throw up but now is not the time.
They are right behind me. I can feel their hands grasping at the air behind my neck. I dive.
My body hurls through space. I am disengaged for a moment, and when I look behind me, I see a blur that could be Harry. Harry alone couldn’t have made all that noise… could he?
I hit the ground and the world goes black.