The Salmon of Doubt

It unfolded itself blotchily into place and he felt as if he were tipping over again, but this time he was able to steady himself more quickly. Stupid little lights. Blink blink blink. This new bit of the world—what was it? He peered forward uncertainly into it, letting his mind’s nostril play over it. Those lights were beginning to distract him. He shut his eyes to let him concentrate on his exploration, but when he did, the new world vanished! Again! He wondered for a dizzying moment if there was any connection between these two things, but making logical connections between things was not really one of Desmond’s strengths. He let it pass. As he opened his wrinkly little eyes again, the unearthly new world slowly unfurled itself in his mind. Once more he peered into it.

It was a wilder world than the one he was used to, a world of paths and hills. The paths forked, divided, and deepened into valleys, the ridges reared into high hills. The far distance was completely broken up into massive mountain ranges and dizzying canyons shrouded in shifting mists. He was filled with apprehension. Just as making logical connections between things was not one of Desmond’s strengths, neither was mountaineering.

The flattest, broadest path lay straight ahead of him, but as he turned his attention to it, worrying things began to become apparent. Something nasty lay down that path. Something big and nasty. Something even bigger and nastier, Desmond ventured to think, than Desmond himself. For a moment he blinked again, and annoyingly the whole thing vanished once more. When it reassembled itself in his mind’s nostril a second or two further on, the sense of impending disaster intensified.

Was that thunder?

Desmond didn’t usually mind thunder, scarcely noticed lightning, but this thunder he did mind. There was no uplifting swirl of heavy air dancing, just bad, cracking explosions of blackness. Desmond began to feel very fearful. His enormous bulk began to quake and shudder, and suddenly he began to run. The strange new world shattered and vanished. He ran like a truck. He hurtled through a flurry of small, feeble lights and brought a whole ton of some kind of stuff, he didn’t know what, banging down around him. It crashed noisily and flashed a bit, but Desmond ploughed straight through it. He was out of there, fleeing like a locomotive, smashing through a flimsy door, maybe even a wall, it was all the same to him. He hurtled out into the night air, pounding the ground with hammer blows from his enormous feet.

Things around him scattered from him. Things shouted. Distant, plaintive exclamations of alarm and despondency welled up in his wake, but Desmond didn’t care. He just wanted some night air in his lungs.

Even this night air, stale and acrid as it was, was good. It was cool and rushed over him and into him as he charged. There was hard pavement beneath his feet, then, briefly, bits of fencing around his neck, and then rough, scrubby grass beneath his pounding, churning feet.

He was near the top of a low hill. A real, earthy hill, not some fearsome hallucination rearing up in his mind like the approach of death. Just a hill, surrounded by other low, sloping hills. The sky was clear of clouds, but hazy and murky. Desmond was not interested in stars. You couldn’t get a good whiff off a star, but here you could scarcely even see them, either. He didn’t care, he was just getting up a good heavy speed going down this hill, waking up some sleepy muscles and getting them going. Braaarrrm!

Run! Hurtle! Charge! Crash! Bang! There seemed to be more bits of fencing round his neck again, and suddenly his progress was rather less free than it had been, and he was all encumbered with stuff. He ploughed on heavily. Suddenly he found himself in a sea of scattering creatures squealing as his huge bulk careered through them. The air was full of the sound of cries and bellows and little tinkly crashes.

Bewildering odours danced around him—a surge of burning meat, heady wafts of some kind of woozy-making stuff, big stabs of viciously sweet musk. He was confused and tried to fix on things by sight. He didn’t trust vision very much, it didn’t tell him very much. He could just about tell when things were blinking or lurking or running around. He tried to get a fix on the hollering, scurrying shapes, and then saw a big hazy rectangle of light. That was something. He heaved himself round and charged at it.