Lightning and thunder. Rain wails down on the ground unmercifully. Torches burn in the night. An angry mob, complete with pitchforks and torches. Ah, tradition.
A man points his finger at a point above his head and yells, "There he is!" The crowd, like a hydra, moves its many heads in unison and looks up. A tower, tall and thin like a finger growing out of the ground, with a single window at the top. Inside, the silhouette of a man is visible, lighted by a table-lamp that swings wildly in the wind. He is seated at a table.
Free of such encumbrances as gravity or even legs, we omniscient, invisible observers are free to swoop up through the window and into the room, to better observe what he does.
As we look down on him from a vantage point at the top of the room's conical ceiling, we see a layer of crumpled-up pieces of paper covering the floor. They rustle like leaves with the wind. The man at the table has another piece of paper in front of him, held down with one hand while the other grasps a pen. It hovers inches above the paper, unable to make contact. After a few minutes of this our would-be writer screams, frustration and anger in his voice, and rips the paper apart. He gets up, grabs piles of paper with both his hands and begins to hurl them out the window.
Below, the mob has reached the foot of the tower. The thrown paper, mulchy with rain, falls on them like so much snow. They aren't bothered. Their hive-mind operates at another level. Focused on the task at hand: breaking down the tower gates. A previously unseen log emerges from the thick of the crowd, held up on each side by a couple of swarthy men.
They charge at the door.
BAM.
Again.
BAM.
And again.
BANG.
The gates crash inward, shattered wood flying everywhere. The men drop their improvised battering ram. They stand at the bottom of a hollow shaft. A narrow staircase hugs the walls, winding up to the very top. It stops in front of a trap-door built into the wooden ceiling of the shaft. The mob shifts into caterpillar mode and begins its trek up to the top.
The writer at the top still rages, wordlessly screaming out his window at the uncaring rain. The first to reach the top begin banging on the trap-door. He scarcely notices. It's only when they finally slam it open, sending a clump of wet papers flying, that he turns around to face the first of the crowd as they climb up into his room.
They are all quiet now. Then one of them steps forward. He looks like a hobo, dressed in rags, a years-worth of beard hanging down to his chest, dripping water onto the floor. He coughs, as if to clear his throat. He opens his mouth, and speaks. His voice booms, louder even than the rain and thunder.
"Your head's like mine, like all our heads, big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there!"*
He steps forward with every sentence and is now right in front of the writer, who trembles. He pokes his finger in the writer's chest and continues.
"But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over."*
The writer has sunk to his knees. He weeps openly, tears run down the sides of his face.
"The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are."*
The writer howls, part-agony, part-grief.
"There, there, we'll soon fix you up."
For a second, the world seems to bend at the edges. The hobo is transformed. He is light-clad, resplendent. He reaches out and touches the writer's head. His essence pours into the writer and he disappears into him.
One by one, the remaining men in the room are transformed. In their stead stand a werewolf, a unicorn, a Viking warrior with a magic hammer. They jump into the writer's head after the hobo.
The crowd below surges forward into the room and the line of people, transforming into wondrous and fantastic creatures and places, leap into the writer.
Mermaids, dragons, elves and fairies.
Brave samurais and knights of yore, riding steeds.
A procession of Lovecraftian creatures of nightmare and horror.
Gaudy and colourful costumed heroes and their similarly costumed foes.
Gaseous djinns and watery sprites.
Talking rabbits, talking mice.
All these creatures flood into the writer's head as he sits on the floor, open-mouthed. Finally the last one enters. The writer blinks. And the world is transformed.
No more tower. No more lightning and thunder. No more rain. Nothing but empty whiteness and the writer at the centre of it all. He raises a pen as large as the universe. He begins to write on the canvas of his imagination.
And so the story begins.
*These lines of the hobo’s speech are quoted from Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. An observant Invisibles fan will notice that the hobo character is actually Tom O'Bedlam himself. ;-)
Notes: This is the first of hopefully many short stories I'm going to post to this blog. I hope everyone who reads it finds it at least mildly enjoyable. Or at least not completely revolting.
Shoutouts to the blog No Fancy Name for the extremely useful post on making expandable blog posts in Blogger without which I would have to resort to using the fairly useless code given in Blogger's Help to implement this nifty function.
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