Trigger Warning

‘Enough!’ came the voice from beyond the door. ‘My patience is at an end, Balthasar. My cooks shall fry your internal organs tonight.’ There came a loud crunching against the door, as if of something hard and heavy being slammed against it.

Then there was a scream, and then silence.

Luthius Limn’s voice: ‘Is he dead?’

Another voice – Farfal thought it sounded like one of his half brothers – said, ‘I suspect that the door is magically protected and warded.’

‘Then,’ boomed Luthius Limn, decisively, ‘we shall go through the wall.’

Farfal was unfortunate, but not stupid. He lifted down the black lacquer box from the nail upon which his father had hung it. He heard something scuttle and move inside it.

‘My father told me not to move the casement,’ he said to himself. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved violently, pushing the heavy thing almost half an inch. The darkness that pervaded the casement began to change, and it filled with a pearl-grey light.

He hung the box about his neck. ‘It is good enough,’ said Farfal the Unfortunate, and, as something slammed against the wall of the room, he took a strip of cloth and tied the leather bag that contained all the remaining treasures of Balthasar the Canny about his left wrist, and he pushed himself through.

And there was light, so bright that he closed his eyes, and walked through the casement.

Farfal began to fall.

He flailed in the air, eyes tightly closed against the blinding light, felt the wind whip past him.

Something smacked and engulfed him: water, brackish, warm, and Farfal floundered, too surprised to breathe. He surfaced, his head breaking water, and he gulped air. And then he pushed himself through the water, until his hands grasped some kind of plant, and he pulled himself, on hands and feet, out of the green water, and up onto a spongy dry land, trailing and trickling water as he went.

* * *

‘The light,’ said the man at Denny’s. ‘The light was blinding. And the sun was not yet up. But I obtained these’ – he tapped the frame of his sunglasses – ‘and I stay out of the sunlight, so my skin does not burn too badly.’

‘And now?’ I asked.

‘I sell the carvings,’ he said. ‘And I seek another casement.’

‘You want to go back to your own time?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘And all I knew, and everything like me. It’s dead. I will not return to the darkness at the end of time.’

‘What then?’

He scratched at his neck. Through the opening in his shirt I could see a small, black box, hanging about his neck, no bigger than a locket, and inside the box something moved: a beetle, I thought. But there are big beetles in Florida. They are not uncommon.

‘I want to go back to the beginning,’ he said. ‘When it started. I want to stand there in the light of the universe waking to itself, the dawn of everything. If I am going to be blinded, let it be by that. I want to be there when the suns are a-borning. This ancient light is not bright enough for me.’

He took the napkin in his hand then, and reached into the leather bag with it. Taking care to touch it only through the cloth, he pulled out a flute-like instrument, about a foot long, made of green jade or something similar, and placed it on the table in front of me. ‘For the food,’ he said. ‘A thank-you.’

He got up, then, and walked away, and I sat and stared at the green flute for so long a time; eventually I reached out and felt the coldness of it with my fingertips, and then gently, without daring to blow, or to try to make music from the end of time, I touched the mouthpiece to my lips.

‘And Weep, Like Alexander’

The little man hurried into the Fountain and ordered a very large whisky. ‘Because,’ he announced to the pub in general, ‘I deserve it.’

He looked exhausted, sweaty and rumpled, as if he had not slept in several days. He wore a tie, but it was so loose as to be almost undone. He had greying hair that might once have been ginger.

‘I’m sure you do,’ said Brian.

‘I do!’ said the man. He took a sip of the whisky as if to find out whether or not he liked it, then, satisfied, gulped down half the glass. He stood completely still, for a moment, like a statue. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Can you hear it?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘A sort of background whispering white noise that actually becomes whatever song you wish to hear when you sort of half-concentrate upon it?’

I listened. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said the man, extraordinarily pleased with himself. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Only yesterday, everybody in the Fountain was complaining about the Wispamuzak. Professor Mackintosh here was grumbling about having Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” stuck in his head and how it was now following him across London. Today, it’s gone, as if it had never been. None of you can even remember that it existed. And that is all due to me.’

‘I what?’ said Professor Mackintosh. ‘Something about the Queen?’ And then, ‘Do I know you?’