Indescribable: Book Two of the Primordial Page 12

  She could see his point. The truth was that she didn’t know the exact technicalities of it all, but that was part of what she intended to find out. But she knew deep down that as a human he would’ve been a good man. He would have never chosen this. Watching him be so consumed with what he was doing, Meghan knew that she wasn’t going to be able to convince him right then and there to go with her and Valerie to the laboratory, and so she never even bothered to mention the plans to him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FRACTUS – 1795

  THE ONE handed man couldn’t get enough of the tree. Only a month had passed since he had been placed in Fractus, but he was already addicted to the feeling of power that it gave him.

  Every chance he got he was pulling leaves and ripping at the vine. He thought that the Halfords must have been in misery. He couldn’t sleep because of the strong and deep desire to return to the source of his gratification. By then, rationality was slipping further away, and it was the pure and untainted need that was driving him. Everything else that he had once remembered of his previous life had already drifted away into near nothingness. There were now only sporadic and unexpected jolts of memory. The only thing that remained a constant was the dream of the woman in blue. His life in Fractus had become his new reality and it seemed like it had always been that way. By then, it seemed like the only thing he had always known.

  He thought about all the things that the fox had told him over the past several weeks, about how it was obvious that he had always craved that power that the tree gave him, and it was true. It was why he had done all the things that he had done back at home, the things that he could no longer remember; it was the power that it gave him over others. And now the tree gave him that same fulfillment, only this was much more impressive.

  But pretty soon, even that wasn’t enough to fulfill him completely. Through his entire life he had always been a thrill seeker and testing boundaries. It was why he ran around with other men’s women; it was why he frolicked with large felines and eventually lost his hand because of it. And so, just as he had so many times in the past, he began to get curious. What else was out there? Had Stanwood created anything else within Fractus that would have the same effect over him as the tree, or, and this was the big question, was there something that would satisfy him even more?

  Every few days the fox continued to occasionally show up at the house’s doorstep, giving instructions and enforcing rule, but it was after the fox had wandered off one night that the one handed man decided to make his move.

  Before then, he had often wondered where the fox went after leaving him and that night he decided that he would find out. His intentions were to follow the animal to the edge of the woods and watch. The man was quiet and stayed way back in the shadows, careful not to cause any sound or be seen by the fox. From behind one of the bushy camellia trees that stood in front of the house, he observed the rust colored fox as it darted into the thickness of the trees. The man approached the same path quickly and carefully, not wanting to be caught. Cautiously, he entered the darkness of the woods. That night the lanterns along the paths were not lit, but even without the guiding light he could see that the fox was already far ahead of him, moving around the heavy bases of the tree trunks. Keeping a good distance so as not to be heard, the man followed the fox all the way to the other end of the woods. He stayed behind a large oak tree as the fox walked out onto the slab of stone. It was the same stone where the man had found himself on his very first day in Fractus just several weeks earlier.

  What he saw in front of him was strange. It was scary. There was what the man could only describe to someone else as a hole in the sky. From behind the tree, the man leaned closer, and from behind his mask, he saw that there was what looked like a set of rickety, wooden steps that were sporadically moving back and forth within the chasm. It wasn’t a quick movement, just enough to appear here one moment and there the next. It was like they would be in a different location with each blink of the eye. To him, the steps appeared that they led up into a void. The man watched as the fox trotted toward the opening and leapt upward. The mammal followed the steps until he was out of sight, and the hole closed after him as if it had never been there at all, leaving behind the empty, pitch-black sky.

  After the man returned to the house, he couldn’t shake the image of the fox disappearing into the chasm from his mind. It was proof that there was more. There was something outside of what he knew of Fractus and that something, whatever it was, could be traveled to and from. Even though what he had seen had been unusual and frightening, his curiosity once again got the best of him. Before then, he had already seen plenty more in the strange land that had been equally scary and out of the ordinary, so what would a passageway that appeared to lead into nothing change about his circumstances? After that night, he often went to the stone overlook, but never again did he see the opening in the sky.

  “Where do you go when you leave me?” The man asked the fox several nights later as they sat across from one another in the sitting room. It was the first time that they had seen each other since the man had followed the fox through the woods. On that particular night, the fox had arrived to the house with a large satchel of food thrown over his back. Once again, the two of them had been drinking ale and beer.

  “I go home,” the fox answered the question matter-of-factly.

  “OK, I’m not going to beat around the bush,” the man said. “I saw you go into that, that hole that is on the other side of the trees.”

  The fox stood to his feet but remained in the chair for a moment before jumping to the floor. He began to circle in front of the man, obviously expecting a confrontation. “It’s the portal that takes me home.”

  “Can I?” The man asked.

  “Can you go into the portal? No. It only opens for me, the one it was created for.”

  The man stood from his chair. The fox began to growl and pace the floor in front of him. It was evident that he could see exactly where this was headed.

  “Then I take you with me,” the man said and lunged toward the fox. The fox cried out in an uncontrollable whimper of pain and fear as he tumbled across the floor trying to escape the man’s grasp. The man was fast and wrapped the furry mammal in his strong arms. The fox bit at him and even drew blood on one arm, but was no match for the thick, meaty muscle of the man. The man struggled with the fox until he got him across the room and to the door of the cellar. The door was standing open and the man pushed the fox down the descending flight of stairs. The animal thumped along the concrete steps and yelped when his head hit one of the corners midway to the floor. The fall only caused the fox to pause in his determination. Seconds later he jumped back to his feet and began to hustle back up the steps, growling, toward the open door, but just before he reached the threshold that would lead him back out of the cellar, the door was slammed in his face, nearly catching his snout in the process.

  The man knew that the single act of slamming the door on the fox had been momentous. The tables had been turned and now it was he that was in control. The man flung his back against the flat and solid wood of the door. If he played his cards right, he could make it so that he would no longer be under the leadership of the fox. He stood there, laughing, as the fox scratched at the wood on the other side. Unexpectedly, a rare memory blasted through the man’s head. In it, he was slamming the metal cage door against a roaring lion. Through the safety of the vertical bars, and keeping a safe distance, he watched the ferocious animal that weighed hundreds of pounds more than him. With an enormous paw full of large claws, the lion swiped at the man through the bars. The man leaned out of the way and knew that the animal could easily maul him if it had even the slightest chance. But the man stood out of reach, watching his angry captive. In that long forgotten memory, just like he was now with the fox, he was in control of the situation.

  “All you have to do is tell me how I can go to the other side,” the man said through the cellar door. He had his back presse
d against it.

  “Why do you want to go through? You have everything that you need right here.”

  The man didn’t say anything for a moment. He only thought that he could never have enough.

  The more the fox talked, the angrier the man got. Another memory blast came to him. In this one he was standing in an open field of late summer indigo. A musket was held to his shoulder. He could feel the kick of the butt and the loud crack! as the gun fire exploded. Across the width of the field, a red fox went down.

  “I don’t think you really understand the predicament that you are in right now. It’s either show me through or you die,” he shrugged his shoulders. “And just so you know, the last fox that I saw before you I shot and skinned for the hide.”

  “Why?”

  The question caught the man off guard. He had to think of an answer, quick. “Because the fur,” he remembered that after he had skinned the fox he had given the fur to a beautiful woman. Like the memory of the lion and the shooting of the fox, this one was also quick and unexpected. “The fur is - desirable.” He closed his eyes against the heated memory of the payment that he had intended and hoped to receive for the luxurious item.

  “Is that really the reason, or was it simply because you wanted to kill it?”

  Exasperated with the word games, the man walked away from the door and into the next room. From behind a chair, he picked up a thick length of rope that with this very purpose in mind he had tied into what looked like a noose. Back on Earth he had spent some time on the sea and had learned how to make various kinds of knots using his teeth to hold the rope as his lone hand looped and pulled the other end through. It was funny how the small task had come back to him so easily once he had put his mind to it.

  By the time that he returned to the cellar door, the banging and scraping from the other side had stopped. It was eerily quiet. He unlocked the door and eased it open, careful not to let the fox pounce out, attacking him in the process and potentially getting away. To his surprise, the fox was sitting on the topmost step. The animal stood and growled upon seeing the man, but the man moved quickly. In a flash, he had thrown the noose around the fox’s neck and pulled the slipknot tight.

  The fox protested as the man dragged him through the house and across the dirt and grass of the yard. This wasn’t like walking a dog with its tail and tongue wagging excitedly. It was more like dragging a pig to a sure and eventual slaughter. The man pulled the small animal through the woods until they came through the other side of the trees and onto the stone overlook. The man dragged the fox across the slab of stone until there was the beginning of movement in the sky.

  Out of nothing, and because the fox was present, the portal opened up in front of them. It started as a swirling in the black sky and soon there was what the man thought was the same set of dilapidated stairs that he had seen there before.

  After the portal was open completely, the man tied the rope tight and secure to the wide trunk of a tall pine tree. It was where he intended to leave the fox while he went through. If what the fox had said was true, the portal would remain open as long as the animal was there. The man approached the opening and cautiously placed his foot on the bottom step, testing the sturdiness. He thought that it felt stable enough, and he stepped higher. The passageway became narrower the higher he ascended. Pretty soon, it was barely wide enough for him to even move through. The wood and dirt walls were like a grave that he had crawled into.

  Finally, when he began to emerge through the other side of the portal, he was filthy from head to toe. Surprisingly it opened up on the dirt floor of what he knew had to have been the Rimbault family’s cellar. This was another memory that all of a sudden came to him with a jabbing clarity, that of the Rimbaults and what they had done to him.

  After stepping completely out of the portal, the man stood still for a moment, taking in his surroundings. The cellar smelled of dirt and dust. Beyond those two smells there was another. The third was of a damp vacancy that permeated the room.

  Several tall bookshelves lined each of the four walls. Each shelf held books and empty glass jars and canisters. Upon closer inspection, the foggy glass of the jars was so dark that the man wasn’t sure if there was something inside or not. One shelf was devoted entirely to an assortment of old tools whose use had by then been reduced to nothing more than collecting dust. The only light within the four walls was from a single lit candle that was near the center of the room. The tall wax candle sat atop a square, wooden table. An orange flame danced on the candle’s wick. On the tabletop, next to the candle, was a small wooden box. The man reached to pick it up, but when his hand got close, a blindingly red light erupted from the crevices where it had been nailed together, burning the man’s hand in the process. He jerked his hand back. He understood that Stanwood must’ve put a spell on the box so that no one would ever be able to get close.

  As the man’s eyes continued to search the quiet cellar, he saw to his utmost surprise that there was someone else in the room with him. The unexpected sight of the other person startled him. Within dark shadow, the other man was sitting in a high back, wooden chair. He was motionless. His eyes were open, but neither of them were blinking or moving.

  As soon as he saw him, the one handed man knew for a fact that the other man that sat in front of him was none other that Stanwood Rimbault. Stanwood was dressed similar to how the man was now remembering him to be on the night that he had been abducted and brought to this same house. Stanwood’s white hair and beard were luminous in the dark. He wasn’t moving. It was like he was dazed or in a deep trance that he couldn’t get out of.

  Then the man remembered what the fox had said on his first day of being in Fractus. On that day, the man had learned that the fox was a conduit for Stanwood. Remembering this, the man began to understand what he was seeing in front of him now. This room was where Stanwood would go to perform the spell that would give him the ability to send the fox into Fractus and communicate with him. This was the control room. During the process, Stanwood would be comatose and unable to move or utter even a single word.

  The man approached Stanwood. He wondered if Stanwood was able to see from behind his unmoving eyes that his very own creation had come back and was now standing in front of him. Could he see the figure that was wearing the heavy burlap cloak and the stitched together mask of a leopard and a wolf? Would the presence of the other man being in his space unnerve him? Was he afraid of what the man would do, if he had come back to exact murderous revenge?

  The man turned his back to Stanwood and went to one of the shelves on the opposite side of the room. He studied the menagerie of possibilities that were laid out before him. He picked up a set of large, metal ice tongs. He imagined returning to Stanwood, opening the tool and placing the sharp, pointed ends on each side of the man’s neck and slamming them back together again. The sharp points that were used to push into a large block of solid ice would surely pop into Stanwood’s fatty flesh with ease. Not sure if he could do it one handed, the man placed the tongs back onto the shelf. From there, he picked up a short sickle blade that had at some point over the years lost its wooden handle. He studied the length and sharpness of the blade. He slid it over the shelf’s edge where it cut into the wood. Several wood shavings fell to the floor at his feet. It would do the trick, he thought.

  With the sickle in hand, he walked back to Stanwood and stood in front of him for a moment before reaching down and placing the blade in the front of the older man’s neck. As he held the weapon to Stanwood’s throat, he hesitated. He wasn’t positive what killing Stanwood would do to everything that the Rimbaults had created, including him.

  The man removed the potentially deadly weapon from Stanwood’s neck and placed it on the dry dirt of the floor at his feet. Adrenaline was coursing through his body. The prominent veins in his thick neck were thumping with blood. Once again, his eyes turned away from Stanwood and scanned the room, finally landing on a shelf that held an open book. He approac
hed the tome, and what he saw on the page that was in front of him was astounding. It was a hand drawn sketch of a nude male body. The man on the page only had one hand. Off to the side of the page there was the sketch of rope, a mirror, a bat, feathers, avian feet, and a mask that had been made out of leopard and wolf. He knew that what he was seeing was the plan for what he had become.

  He picked up the book from the shelf, propped it on the nub at his right wrist, and fanned through the pages. The book was full of sketches and writings. He stopped on a page that held a rough sketch of what had to have been the portal that he had just traveled through. He flipped the page and there was a spell, the one that was used to create the portal, no doubt.

  It was at that precise moment that something clicked in the man’s head. He immediately saw the enormous potential that the book held for him. He understood then that he had an entire universe that could be his. He could take over; he could become a leader. He could create others like him, an entire nation. He could rule and guide them to do his bidding. From there, the tree would only be the beginning. After all, like the fox had already pointed out, it was that power and dominance over others that the man yearned for. With the help of the book, he could become the master of an entire new creation of people.

  The man looked toward the floor and saw that the portal was wavering. It was collapsing in on itself. He knew that on the other side, in Fractus, the fox must’ve been tugging on the rope, putting himself far away from the overlook, causing the portal to close. The man understood that the fox was toying with him, trying to trap him there in the Rimbault’s cellar. The man held onto the book, rushed to the portal, and pounded down the steps. By the time that he emerged through the other side, the portal was barely even a blip in the sky.