Terra Incognita

The Mists Are Clearing.                                                           

She was pleased with her hair. The nineteen twenties in Europe had been so wonderful for fashion. A shame about nationalism, but then you can’t have everything. The marcel wave lasted longer than the Third Reich when all was said and done, so perhaps there was some justice in the universe after all.

Since her ascendancy, and the ability to reshape and remodel herself – and indeed the spaces around her, no matter what they may consist of – having a really good hairdo had become one of her prerequisites. When you have as much power as you could want, and indeed far more than you could ever really k now what to do with, then your idea of what is the big stuff and what is the little stuff tends to become a matter of perspective. Which is all very well, but perspective relies on having a horizon of some kind with which to form that, and when all you have is the stars and inky black spaces that surround them falling off in all directions around you, then you find the notion of that, in itself, a little hard to get worked up about.

So, then: hairdos. The perfect wave was solid and stiff enough to not fall out of shape, yet would move with the body, waving – as its name and shape suggested – with a natural motion. Oft times, the wave would be set a little too hard, and so become unyielding. Then it seemed to be artificial and false. This was not the desired effect.

Hers was perfect. A paradox in itself as the whole point about the universe, in theory at least, was that it was not perfect. The flaws were what powered it. So how could the wave be perfect? Yet she had made it so, with the powers embodied within the very fact of her ascendency.

Such matters seemed unimportant as her butterfly attention span turned to the crystal ball. It was cold and smooth against her hands. Bloody big lump of crystal, considering she was now the size of a galaxy, but there you go: that was what she could do, so she would bloody well do it. And enjoy it.

Within, the maidens frolicked over a landscape that was glorious in its colour, shape and contour. As glorious as the maidens. They were comely wenches, each shaped in her own image, as she had been in the days when she had walked the streets of Paris and Berlin, acolyte of first Feuillade and then Grosz. She recalled those days with the kind of nostalgia reserved for those who would never have to revisit them. The poverty, the hunger, and the dread fear of a creeping terror that threatened to infect the mass consciousness did not form part of the glorious tapestry of memory.

In truth, it may have been more a threadbare anti-macassar than a tapestry. There were great gaps in her remembrances, and those that remained seemed to grow more indistinct with the passing of… well, could she say time? That was a moot point: with the power she now had as a pan-dimensional entity, could she even be said to inhabit a place in time? She overlapped and oozed into the cracks between the seconds until there was nothing left with which to distinguish one moment from the next. An endless cavalcade with no beginning. The thought of it made her a little dizzy: whether with excitement, nausea, or both was a matter for some conjecture.

She returned her attention to the girls in the valley.

Why, when she had made them, she wondered, had she forgotten their clothes?

’Whistle and I’ll come to you…’

It had been like this for some time now. Fortescue had been admiring her for so long, and it was such a small distance to traverse, really. Yet it seemed that he would never be able to traverse the divide. He wanted to call to her, but found himself struggling to remember her name. Constance? Or was that just her state of being? Ha! He’d have to remember that one and tell Ralph about it later. Ralph would like that one. Anyway, faint never one fair lady and all that…

‘Coo-ee! He-llo?’

It was supposed to be a firm, manly shout that echoed across the water. Didn’t come out that way, though: matter of fact, it was a little bit reedy and hesitant. Not the kind of thing that was inclined to stir a girl’s finer feelings.

So it was that he was a little surprised when she actually turned to him in response. So surprised that for a moment he forgot that it was he who had called to her, and waited expectantly for some pearl of wisdom to drop from her lips. Instead, all he got was that cupid’s bow and the steady, insistent stare. Say something, then, he thought impatiently, before realising that it was really dependent on him to make the next move.

‘I say, it’s a terribly nice day, isn’t it?’

Oh how Ralph would laugh at that one, too: but for all the wrong reasons. Fortescue bit his lip, and then tried again.

‘I say, actually, um… would you be at all interested in dining with a chap later on?’

She said nothing. Once again, he wondered if he had made some kind of awful faux pas. Or perhaps she just wasn’t interested. It was only when she opened her mouth to speak that he realised what the problem was.

She hadn’t been able to understand a bally word he said. A bit of an assumption, perhaps, but not such a great leap of logic: not when you considered that the sounds coming out of her mouth bore little relation to speech as he knew it. Not just a foreign language, but quite simply an alien tongue. Not that it was green and scaly, or anything: he could see, even from here, that it was small pink and beautiful, just as everything else about her was… beautiful, that is. Not necessarily small or pink. Perhaps, but then again…

He tore his mind away from such matters, base as they were rapidly becoming. No, it was simply that the sounds emanating from her (admittedly dainty) maw were more akin to the kinds of sounds he had once heard uttered by a bull elephant sea lion thingy that he had seen at a zoo. A kind of bellowing roar that oscillated around a few notes, with a kind of throaty grunt underlying the actual sound.

What on earth was in possession of the girl? She closed her mouth, as if waiting for a reply. The silence was some relief after the noise of a few seconds before.

Fortescue was lost in a raging sea of indecision: she looked so divine, just standing there gazing at him, and yet… If that was how her voice sounded, then heaven alone knew what her table manners may be like.

‘Is that a yes or a no?’ he asked with some hesitancy.

She opened her mouth again, and another bellow issued forth, this time with an underscored note of melancholy.

‘I see,’ he muttered. Untruthfully: he hadn’t the foggiest what on earth the bloody woman was on about.

But that wasn’t the only problem. As he gazed about, Fortescue realised that he had no idea where the nearest restaurant may be.

 Eric and George.

‘Listen.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then  why did you say –‘

‘No, I mean nothing. As in nothing. Y’know?’

Eric sighed. George was at it again. He was always at it. Of course there was nothing. A nebulous mist in the distance that was just that – nebulous and in the bloody distance – and the uniform. That was the trouble, really. When there was nothing else for you to concentrate on, then the uncomfortableness (was that a word? He doubted it, but didn’t give a bugger) preyed on your mind. The leather jerkin was heavy and hot. He could feel himself sweat horribly underneath it, the liquid pooling in the small of his back, trapped by the tight leather belt round the middle.

And the helmet: leaving aside the kind of juvenile jokes about helmets that George loved so much, and which had become the bane of his life, and still Eric was unhappy about the helmet. It was brass, took ages to polish, and weighed upon his mind. Literally. The spike rested on top of his crown and seemed as though it would fall through his skull, cleaving the bone and sinking nicely into the brain pan, the soft spongy mess absorbing it until it blotted out all thought and feeling.

Mind you, he wouldn’t mind that right now. Especially as George was off on one again.

‘Thing is, you’d think they’d call us back after all this time. I mean, what purpose do we actually serve just standing here, looking at nothing and listening to even less?’

‘Can you have less than nothing?’ Eric asked. He tried to keep the tetchiness out of his voice, to keep it nice and even. He could hear himself, though: failed miserably yet again.

‘You know what I mean,’ George said in an extremely irritable tone. Despite his wish to remain above such things, Eric couldn’t help but smile as he noticed this. Good job this bloody brass monstrosity hid his smirk, he thought.

‘Anyway,’ George continued, only momentarily deflected from his course, ‘we’ve been out here on watch for ages. I can’t remember the last time I saw home. Actually,’ he added in a slightly puzzled manner, ‘I can’t remember home, really…’

Eric felt the smirk wipe from his face. That was a good point, actually: when was the last time they had been… well, anywhere, really? When he thought about it, Eric couldn’t remember polishing the brass helmet (no jokes, George), even though there was a vestigial memory of how tedious it was. Come to that, he had no real notion of why he was here, or what he had been doing before.

There was only the pressure. Building up at the base of his skull, it seemed to spread up his cerebral cortex until it was in a place where it seemed as though it would reverse the earlier notion and explode upwards, sending the spike into orbit.

Thinking: had to stop thinking so much. Blah blah blah helmet. Blah blah blah George. Blah blah bloody blah anything.

‘Tell you what,’ he sniffed, ‘all this nothing is really getting on my tit. I wish something would happen.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ George muttered.

They fell silent, both of them looking out across the wastes, defenders of nothing, just as they had been since what felt like the beginning of time.

Maybe it had been, at that…

Hello world, hello sky, hello flowers, hello unremitting stench of decay, corruption and fear.

My, my, it’s a very odd world out there. And in here. As you will soon find out…

But enough about real life, this is Terra Incognita.