//------------------------------// // Chapter 2 // Story: The Real World // by Hat //------------------------------// Huso felt a chill run through him, seeing himself standing at the other end of the bed. The figure was older, but not taller, and had grey hairs of wisdom. His expression was taut, with many lines, and Huso looked to where his concern was. Beside and a bit behind the old one was another; a younger Huso, by about twenty years. He remembered the awkward haircut he had had upon meeting his wife-to-be. It did not appear strange that the younger one possessed a horse’s muzzle and larger ears, yet he wished to move away. He lay paralysed on the sheets. The older was talking to Huso over the younger, who was bouncing jubilantly to get attention. The words were vague and without structure, but the message was clear and agreeable. Huso raised his ears hoping to hear more. Sticking to this message was of prime importance, but already it had seemed like a life-time listening. Trembling, he lost his concentration. At this moment the younger guest set upon him, climbing onto his bed and grabbing him by the shoulders. The intruder opened its mouth in a gaping smile, like it wanted to swallow him. Finding what little motility he could muster, he twisted his head around and around. He would do anything not to look into that mouth. The air felt dry, and the playground before him was run-down and rusty. There was no sound. The older one patted his shoulder. Turning together to leave, there came a laugh. Huso spun back round. The younger was flying down a slide, the entire playground appearing fresh and colourful. Before Huso could express interest, the older one stepped in. As he spoke, Huso was inclined to agree, and with nostrils flaring came to see the elder’s reason. It had been plainly irresponsible to risk oneself like that. Huso led the charge. He and the older tussled the younger into the back of a car. The older was wearing body armour. Birds were squawking deafeningly. He couldn’t wait to speed off. Shifting the gear and slamming the accelerator brought a wave of adrenaline that consumed him. The ecstasy was marred when he noticed the speedometer. The little needle was jittering at the maximum end of the spectrum; he could go no faster. A tremendous jolt shot through the car. Huso yelped, and blinked a few times. His necktie was strangling him. The road had traffic. His car was scraping the side of the curb. Where were the others? Trying to remember made him realise. He yanked the steering wheel to the side, correcting his course. Yes, now he was fully awake. He’d had worse mornings. The skyscraper blocked the low-hanging sun ahead of him, giving him some relief as he approached. Having been stopped at the traffic lights, he took a few seconds to see what was happening in the park. There were always a lot of runners at this hour. He saw a woman playing with her Dalmatian on the grass. The traffic resumed, Huso quickly pushing on forward anticipating the horn of the car behind him. It did not matter if the car behind actually honked the horn; there had been enough conditioning to react anyway. Making it to a parking spot, he saw Barry’s wife walking the footpath to the building’s entrance. After quickly leaning over the seats to get his party contribution—a bag of his favourite gourmet nuts—he leapt out of the car to catch her before she entered. Hooking her arm in a swoop before the revolving doors, he pulled her out of sight behind a tree. Her green eyes were quizzing him intensely. “There’s no meeting. I’m sorry, Helen, I lied. Would you like to go to a party instead?” She stepped back, gasping. Wondering why he ever thought this ridiculous scheme would work, he closed his eyes and awaited his righteous punishment. “Will you take me inside, Huso?” Huso opened his eyes, furrowing his brows deeply. Was she really up for this? “We’ll have to pretend to be partners as well. Husband and wife. Just for a bit. Are you sure?” She was holding her hand on her blouse, over her heart. “Yes,” she murmured. Good enough. Time to go! --- Three hours in, with the floor struggling to maintain the cheer, Huso smuggled his bowl of nuts to an unpopulated corner of the room. He had managed to do the rounds in greeting everyone, in showing his purpose to the company. Helen had been more than co-operative, routinely impressing his co-workers with her knowledge of wine. It was shaping up to be an easy day. Chatting in the corner, she had even laughed at his joke about the manager’s promotion speech. Alone for the moment, a news commentator’s monotone voice suddenly rang out over the din of festivities. They must be getting desperate if they have turned on the TV. He peeked his head around to see the screen, upon which his house was engulfed in a raging fire. Spilling his nuts, Huso raced down the emergency stairwell to his car and took off. Helen came back to their corner holding two slices of cake. When he arrived home, men from the fire department were plodding through his garden, extinguishing the last bits of flame. The charred frame of his house was still throwing smoke into the air, however the front half, which included the bedroom and entryway, seemed largely unharmed. After receiving advice from a fireman, in which he learned a gas hotplate had apparently been left on, Huso was left to his own devices. They had found no other residents in the house. Covering his mouth with a sleeve to block the choking smoke and stench, he trod hesitantly across his now scorched and spotty lawn. The temperature was rising with every step, an added heat in an already sultry day. Pulling his keys out with his free hand, he thought he may as well enter through the front door. The walls between the bedroom and the rest of the house remained intact, but the timber floorboards, blackening with distance, led into a portal of smouldering ruin; it was as if a horseman of the apocalypse had chosen to charge out of hell from beneath his house. The living room was gone. So was the kitchen. A can of baked beans lay sprawled in an explosion on the bench next to the hotplate. Stepping carefully, his weight was often enough to crush the ashened timber, occasionally leaving a lower-leg dangling through the floor. Where everything should have been deathly still, a soft banging started up. As he looked towards the fridge, a frazzled little pony came tumbling out with an oof! Following it, a box of matches. It rushed back to Huso that this was the thing that he had unboxed the previous day. The blue winged beast looked forlornly at the can of food. Huso almost thought he perceived pain in the creature. And he was half-refusing to deduce what had happened. It turned to him with a frown. “This is the worst home ever,” the animal said. Huso dropped his arm and stepped back into a searing frame. Barely rebalancing, he started coughing violently from the remnant fumes, and staggered through a destroyed corridor. This was impeding his growing desire to yell, to yell at the joker—criminal—who must have put a microphone in, and to scream to the wind what was happening, what had happened—why. Prevented in this simply from lacking oxygen, his breathing slowed and complexion hardened. He grabbed a backpack from his bedroom. Marching back into the kitchen, the animal’s eyes grew wide when it saw him. Even its fur stood up. But it did not matter. Huso had surprise on his side. Having stuffed the thing into his pack and throwing it in the car, he set out for the public library. His personal computer had been fried. Mid-day at the library was as bustling as a library could be; crowded, but slow-moving and hushed. Huso took off his backpack and pushed it under a desk, settling into a terminal. The keyboard was soft from extensive use, causing him to pay attention if what he typed had actually went through. This slight ambiguity made him depress each key with a vengeance. Setting the web browser to private mode, he entered the address for VeryStarCross; the mail-order bride service he had used. Some intense flailing was going on beneath the desk, but it was under control. Reaching the refund page, he began nodding. A year, to ‘ensure true incompatibility’, before any discussions of returns were acceptable. That about met his expectations. Why would it be easy? The next forty minutes Huso spent searching for information on the owners of the business. A phone number, even if it was international, would be better than the generic web form they provided. Enraptured by the screen, and occasionally having to turn his head from it like a good horror novel may effect, he gradually came to understand that these people were not ones to be fooled around with. Eventually, he closed the session out of fear they would notice his researching. He felt cold inside. Idly trying to recover his sanity, his floating gaze caught upon a group of young adults conferencing over a table. But for their age, it appeared as how Huso would imagine a meeting of well-to-do 1930s newspaper editors. He realised he came to this conclusion from the amount of fedoras that were in presence. A respectable looking man began unfurling with great enthusiasm a poster, and Huso sat up from his slouch upon seeing the picture in full. Blue. Wings. Rainbow hair. Others in the group began withdrawing their own collectables. All forms of equines on shirts, mugs, badges, and actual figurines. To Huso, it looked like they would spend their money on just about anything to do with the creatures. And the rainbow-haired one was among the most popular. As the table was growing louder with excitement, Huso put his hand to his chin. If he couldn’t return it… He noticed the struggling under his desk has stopped—no grunting, no vibrations through the carpet. Ducking under, the bag’s zip was open, revealing emptiness. Thrusting his head back up like a meerkat, he spotted his own, very real, equine moving slyly behind the chairs of the table of enthusiasts. Quite involuntarily, Huso’s senses became alert, entering a state which he had developed in childhood. The library was now a network of the criss-crossing visions of patrons, blocked in places by aisles and stands, of sound spheres distorted by dampeners such as objects or other sounds, of the effect of movement through the air which indicated location tactilely, and so on. He did not see this like a superhero; it had simply become necessary to emulate the animal’s movements to guess its chance of being detected, and to retrieve it without attracting attention. Ambling over to the table casually, sporadically leaping forward when nobody was looking, he stopped at the shelf next to it. He put his hand on a book at head-level, pretending to hunt for a specific volume. His eyes tracked his quarry flitting beneath a chair near him, naïve of his attendance. It started climbing up the back of the occupied chair, extending a hoof as if about to pounce from behind. Huso could discern a grin on the animal—before he grabbed it. “Look!” Said someone at the table. Huso and his animal froze, the latter being halfway stuck in a bag. “It’s my favourite artist!” Pointing to a print, the whole table leaned in. The scuffle resumed. It was over in seconds. Letting himself relax, Huso turned around only to be greeted by a boy pointing at him with his mouth agape. Don’t do it, Huso thought. The boy scampered. “Mum! I saw Dashie!” Amidst the cries for silence in the library, Huso hustled towards the exit. The bag was bulging in an oddly geometric way, and upon unzipping it just a bit he saw that it was a book on aeroplanes. The book being relented to his grip, perhaps with the intention of it being something he might want to check out, he put it back on a passing shelf. “Not today, Dashie,” Huso said. Before closing the zip, her glum face sprang into a smile. It stuck in his memory as he walked out of the library. Seeing the harried man leave, a whiskery man in a stained brown coat put a magazine down. Effortfully rising from the couch, he browsed to a particular terminal, pulled out a memory stick, and went home for the day.