Serializations of the Hitherby Dragons novels

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– 4 –

Posted by on Dec 7, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 13 | 0 comments

— It’s not his fault.

You have to understand this. It wasn’t Linus’ fault. He wasn’t being heartless.

It had just never even occurred to him that the goat could be an actual problem for anybody. He’s been on the threat list for Agencies and cleaning men and the like his whole life, and he was going to be for the rest of it, and it wouldn’t have mattered whether he was Gandhi, or Cheney, or Tony Hawk. So he’d just assumed that the goat was like he was —

A danger, but hardly a threat.

He’d assumed that this was a fun opportunity. That he could see Jeremiah Clean in operation; sabotage him, if he could; and revel in the fact that, as Jeremiah Clean’s organizational superior, he could have the man’s job if he complained.

Only —

And he realizes this slowly —

There’s more to the situation than a sharpened goat.

I don’t mean to be insensitive to those who have lost loved ones to sharpened goats. I’m not trying to say that that’s not a real problem or a real tragedy. It is. Listen. I know it. I gave to the fund. There’s a fund, right? If there’s a fund I gave to it. But — this is more than just your standard, everyday unusually-sharp-goat situation. It’s more even than an ordinary, everyday outbreak of the sene-goat, this first one, the most deadly sene-goat of all.

Today it is a goat that has cut its way up from Hell to the surface. It has slaughtered the army that guarded the bridge. It has left the centipede bleeding and dying, and the gorgon, that might have got it, was apparently gone.

Behind it have come all the legions of the damned and the Hell megacolony of ants.

The goat is the lamb and the piper: it has opened the seals and the gates.

There are some in that army who are probably just — going home now. Dead souls, who’ve slipped away, and gone back to their husbands, their children, their wives. Their sisters, their brothers. Their fathers, their mothers. Their lovers, their best friends, their work.

There are others who are wrong and cruel and want revenge on the world for their damning.

There are demons —

But mostly, there are ants.

They are a white wave across the city — Hell-bleached and hungry. They are pouring up from the sewers and they are filling the land. And Jeremiah Clean, who could stop them, can’t stop them, because there’s a goat in his way. A goat, and that goat —

It’s too sharp.

Linus turns. He looks up the building behind him. He sees the half-eaten face of a dead man, pressed against the window within. He smells death on the air now. He hears the screaming.

He pales.

He looks at Jeremiah Clean and he says, “I didn’t know.”

The janitor doesn’t seem to hear him, or maybe just — doesn’t seem to care about him. He fights the goat, and it can’t stop him, because his heart is pure; and the goat cuts him, makes him bleed, because its heart is sharp, sharper than pain, sharper than grief, sharper than metal, sharper than life.

Linus stands up.

He goes and he stands beside the cleaning man. The newest mop wavers in his direction, then turns back towards the goat.

“I can help,” says the antichrist, softly.

“That’s kind of you, sir,” says Jeremiah, with icy control in his voice, “but I think I’m all right here.”

“Please let me —”

Linus looks apologetic. The walls have started to bleed.

What can Jeremiah say?

He shrugs. He cannot worry about Linus Evans. Not when Hell has opened up onto the surface, and there are ants, and a sharpened goat.

It takes them one hundred and seventy-two minutes, in all.

– 5 –

Posted by on Dec 7, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 13 | 0 comments

Linus has eaten a chimera. He is stupidly proud of this. He keeps wanting to go and tell Tom. He has eaten a chimera that was damned; or maybe that was made out of ants — he isn’t certain. Are chimeras demons? His stomach can’t tell.

It is intermittently amazing. There are moments when he almost respects him:

The cleaning man who fights beside him.

He didn’t know you even could get a damnation stain out.

There are moments when he remembers how much he hates him. (The cleaning man.) When he tries to let the goat have him, but he can’t. Not while —

It’s just, there’s too many. It’s too much. There’s too many people who need him. He can’t throw up, not with his white hat on, but there’s too many people. He can’t let the janitor die.

Somewhere in there the goat slips away. It cuts down an alley and it’s gone.

Somewhere in there the damned flee or surrender; the demons bend their knee to him, to Linus the antichrist; and all that is left is the ants.

So. Many. Ants.

So many damnable, bloody, unholy ants. They do not stop. They do not stop.

He actually — after a while he actually can’t eat any more of them. He has to burn them with balefire, which they’re mostly immune to. It takes them forever to pop.

He doesn’t know what turns the tide, or when it happens. He’s in a haze by then. He’s wandered off.

Most middle managers will do this, by the way, even if they’re pretty enthusiastic about it when they first pitch in at the janitor’s side. Linus gets tired. He wanders off in the middle. All the holes in his face are now bleeding. He is mumbling and he doesn’t know why.

His white dog appears. It pants. It disappears.

He is covered in blood.

He is hiccupping, and round as a ball, and so very tired, and so very hungry, he is starved.

He has been unconscious. He startles awake and his stomach rumbles. He is already digesting back to size. He looks around wildly.

It is over.

Is it over? He looks around.

It is over.

He is — somehow or other — alive.

He stands up. He staggers back towards his office. He passes a man caught under the rubble of a fallen building. He thinks about ripping the man’s upper body off and eating it, but then he remembers the Doom Team code. Something about not having to be bad, he thinks. He can’t remember exactly.

There was supposed to be an evil kingdom, he thinks.

He looks around. There isn’t an evil kingdom. There’s just most of a ruined city, and — he looks behind him —

A few blocks, already, that are shining, crisp, and clean.

He eats the rubble. He wipes off his mouth. It looks like he’s accidentally eaten the crushed leg of the man he’s rescued. He gives a bit of an apologetic grin.

He’s made it back to the building. His white dog comes. His white dog goes.

He reaches his office. It’s slewed and slanted but still open. He looks out at the city. He is dazed.

Cleanliness is spreading through the ruins like a swarm.

He passes out again. He wakes up. He is so hungry. He eats the paperweight on his desk. He eats his paintings. He eats his paperwork. This is embarrassing because he doesn’t remember now what it had said.

He asks his assistant for a cup of coffee but she cannot bring it because she ran away a long time ago. He is irritated at first but then decides that he would have run away too.

Everything is slanted.

After a while, there’s a knock at his door.

“Ng?” he says.

He staggers over to it. He opens it up. It’s Jeremiah Clean.

“What?” he says. “I’m —”

He tries to remember what he was doing. He thinks he was sitting on his swivel chair and swiveling. “Working,” Linus Evans says.

“You are a threat to workplace hygiene, Mr. Evans,” says Jeremiah.

Linus’ voice cracks: “What?”

There is a mop.

Posted by on Dec 7, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 13 | 0 comments

Scissors

Chapter 14: Meeting Our Protagonist

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

– 1 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

A long time ago, when evaluating the Earth, the space princess assassin Lucy Souvante identified two key threats; two key opponents — two individuals capable of playing rock-paper-scissors at her level. By the time she’d got there, one of their signatures was gone, missing, disassembled and put into boxes; she could not track it down or even identify it.

The other was a goat, crawling its way upwards from under the surfaces of things.

It was no ordinary goat. It was, rather, an extremely sharp goat. In a way, it had started it all.

It has spent millennia sharpening itself.

Even its softest, most gentle of sentiments could slice through a diamond now; its fuzzy underbelly can split atoms, or conceptions, or light; the touch of its teeth can kill empires: they are singularities, and what knows them is never thereafter the same.

Even so —

It used to be kind of a dull goat.

It used to be the kind of goat that would stick around for a fight with Jeremiah Clean, thinking, if it were just sharp enough, it could cut him, and then it could move on to sharpen itself against the continents, the oceans, and the atmosphere, before finally slashing up the screaming fire of the mortal sun.

It isn’t that dull. Not now.

It has become a goat sharp enough to recognize a losing battle when it sees one.

It is sharp enough to see Jeremiah Clean, and be sore afraid.

So it cuts its way down an alley into freedom.

When nobody is looking, it slips the city. It shatters into images. It clip-clops away to the south, to the wastes of Antarctica, where it imagines it will fatten and wait.

It will deal with the janitor when it is a little bit sharper, it thinks, or he a bit duller.

When the world’s just a little less clean.

– 2 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

In boxes in Eldri’s basement, powered down and disassembled, there is a rock-paper-scissors-playing robot named Navvy Jim.

He doesn’t lose. He plays it a lot, well, played, I mean, before the scissors fell, he played it;

And never once Navvy Jim’s lost.

For instance, let’s play him right now!

One-

Two-

Three!

If you played scissors, then the story continues much later — skip to section 3, chapter CLEAN.

If you played paper or rock, read on from here.

– 3 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

If you forgot to play anything, or played something really weird like “hobbit,” then I guess this game doesn’t count. Or you can go back to section 2, if you want, and try your hand at playing again.

It’s totally up to you.

He won’t mind waiting, for clarity. He’s in boxes. He’s disassembled and in boxes. Don’t expect much impatience from Jim.

– 4 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

Paper against paper is a tie. His hand is flat. Navvy Jim’s in boxes.

If you played paper —

Well, you can try it again!

– 5 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

Tom dreams unsettled dreams.

In them he is a lump of a Loggins. In them he is useless, helpless, he is scrabbling at the outside of the great wall of death while the Yama Kings laugh; he is climbing the inside of a sphere, he is digging through a Möbius strip, he is an ant in a chalk circle, forever turning at right angles to the direction that it really wants to go.

He wakes.

He oversees the construction of the space station. He clutches at his head.

“I do not like this,” he says.

He retreats from building the station. He leaves that to others.

“Cobbling is for losers,” says Tom, praying silently that there are no brownies to hear him, in space. “I shall focus on the life support systems, and the mechanism for stomping; and on reclaiming Hell.”

Unfortunately Hell appears to be empty.

He lowers his experimental spiritual bathysphere into the land of damnation. He tries to rescue all the souls there from Hell. He tries to cast down the demons that rule it, but he can’t.

They’re not there.

There’s just a fiery landscape, and the scattered dead ants.

“Well,” says Tom. “That’s inspiring!”

He tugs on a cord. Stephan drags Tom’s bathysphere back up to his dorm room. Tom steps out. He scratches behind his ear puzzledly. He says, “I pray that the world is not hinting that I am Faust.”

He dreams that the wolf is hunting for him. It is sniffing him out.

“I have seen the ending of things,” he whispers to Stephan, in the morning after. “I have seen Gotterdammerung. Fools are we to think of riding that storm. Fool was I to think of guiding it. I thought I was awesome, Stephan. I thought I was a god. But we are only the mindless tools of fate. We are prisoners of our circumstances. That’s all.”

Stephan rumbles, softly, and brings him coffee laced with svart-drink.

It is an ancient remedy for such dream-weirds as these.

Over the course of the day these feelings pass from Tom. Working with his peers in the House of Dreams — it comforts him.

When the energy begins to pass from one of them to the other — when the black lightning of their inspiration and their svart-drink flows — then they are none of them alone.

And when there is no place for him in their working —

When Amber is hard at her hula hoops, and Harold is mucking about with semiotics, and Cheryl is distracted with matters of boots, and svart-elf technology, and origami —

Then he may at least ride up to the observation deck and watch the world spinning below him, and know that he stands in space.

That is where he is standing when he conceives it.

“I will cut her free from the serpent,” Tom says. “I will make her a hat, and it will stand between them.”

The gravity of the world has slipped from him.

There are no obstacles to such unreasonable concepts. Not when one can climb up a bootstrap and stand amidst all this great Tom-wroth emptiness and project one’s hopes and dreams and hungers out onto space.

– 6 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

If you played rock, then Navvy Jim’s eyes must’ve lit up for a moment —

When he was playing against you, back when.

He would have given you a secret smile.

“Paper wraps rock,” the rock-paper-scissors-playing robot would say.

He likes people who throw rock. It means love to him — love given, love known, love received. He’d smile at you and you could tell that he loved us; all we vivid, peculiar residents of the world.

– 7 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

He even loves people who play Dynamite —

But don’t you play Dynamite now.

In my capacity as book judge I won’t approve it. I will just take it as a thumbs up. I will take it as a sign of your approval for this, my marvelous optimismanuscript, which I hope someday somebody shall see.

I can’t let you play actual Dynamite. Dynamite beats rock and paper.

It would break this story and the robot’s heart too.

– 8 –

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

Someone is screaming.

Who is he? He can’t remember. He is someone, who is screaming.

There is a transparent dog that is panting. It is calling him to the paths where only bad dogs go.

Something is missing.

His stomach rumbles. There was a mop. There was a squeegee —

He closes his eyes. He staggers towards the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth. He can’t find it.

“I am Linus Evans,” he says. Wrong.

“Friedman.”

Wrong.

“I am —”

He can’t find it.

He is bleeding heavily. A bomb has gone off in his stomach. It is leaking from his orifices. He is leaking from his orifices.

He cannot really understand why it is he remains alive.

Oh God, he thinks, and at least that thought still hurts him. He clings to that, like a thin film of antichrist atop the emptiness. It hurts him. He is still blasphemous, at least. He is still unholy. Oh, God.

He is empty.

He is somebody’s enemy. He clings to that. He is somebody’s enemy.

He is Mr. Enemy.

He is lost.

Posted by on Dec 10, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 14 | 0 comments

Scissors

Chapter 15: The Saint of Hunger

Posted by on Dec 20, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 15 | 0 comments

– 1 –

Posted by on Dec 20, 2015 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 15 | 0 comments

Fenris licks irritably at a metal sphere. The wolf rolls it along the floor, and then back to where it had been. The wolf counts the sphere. The wolf rubs the sphere with its ear. Finally the wolf sighs and swallows the sphere whole.

It rests its head sulkily on the floor of Mr. Gulley’s basement. It listens to the silence.

There is nobody rattling a jingly toy in preparation for throwing it to Fenris. There is nobody opening delicious canned meat with a can opener, or, even better, cooking bacon.

(The wolf does not limit itself to kosher or halal.)

Fenris heaves a great sigh. It looks left. It looks right. Nobody is noticing its extravagant moping. Nobody is appearing to say, “Why, Fenris, you look bored. Let’s go to the zoo! Or the nuclear power plant! Would you like to eat a nuclear power plant?”

They have always looked so tasty to the wolf!

The wolf attempts to turn on the radio by sheer force of will, having accidentally eaten the remote. The wolf concentrates. Its eyes flare white. The radio cracks and begin to bleed. This isn’t what Fenris wanted at all!

Irritably, Fenris begins to struggle against its chain.