Sword And Pony: Red Eye

by lrdr

The Inevitable Foreword

My life took a turn for the peculiar towards the end of 2009, when a pretty, dark skinned girl walked into the library where I was working at the time. This in itself wasn't unusual, of course, given my place of employment was one of the many libraries servicing the tertiary student community (you'll forgive me if I'm not specific, given the events I will soon relate), and because of the time of year most of the girls were sporting a healthy summer glow and were conspicuously underdressed. She, however, was a true head turner, and I was sure I'd never seen her before. I would have remembered.
What was unusual was the way she approached me. Most library patrons dither before asking for help, erroneously believing that the library staff at the front desk have something better to do than help them (as a pet peeve of mine, allow me to set the record straight: if a staff member is at the front desk, then they are there to help you. Staff with other things to do will be out the back. But I am digressing), but she quite simply walked up to me and asked me for help finding a book. I gave her good directions; she told me she'd looked but couldn't find it. I knew this wasn't true, as I had watched her walk in the door and waltz right up to me. But my id (and her smile) was well and truly in control at this point, and such trivialities mean little to one's hindbrain. I told her thickly I'd help her look.
The library was nearly empty; it was the late shift and the holiday period. She led me into the stacks, the dull murmur of conversation deadening as we proceeded further from the stairs. She drew close, and told me she wanted to see me after work. How could I refuse?
Truth be told, I felt rather stupid as I watched her depart. A REAL MAN, naturally, would have ravished her then and there; I had wanted to, of course, but as a naturally rather timid creature I had held back my urges. A familiar regret pierced me; but, inevitably, I found myself perched on the stone wall out the back in the balmy summer evening, waiting for her. The male mind, sadly, works in pornographic channels, and all hope was not lost. Yet.

The encounter was even less thrilling than I could have imagined. She pressed something into my hand, kissed me on my cheek, but otherwise seemed rather wistful. I watched her walk away from me; my mind told me to chase after her, but truth be told, the conviction was no longer there - my heart, and my hips, knew that was a lost cause. It was a good few minutes before I looked at what she had given me.
This is how I found myself in the airport, waiting for a flight to Djakarta, of all places. Her gift to me had been a flight itinerary, in my name, and a brochure for a hotel in the city centre (once again, I ask you to allow me my anonymity). The more sane among you may wonder why I got on that flight. Me too, frankly; I think I had convinced myself I deserved a holiday, and here was one for free. Poor silly boy.
I won't dwell too much on Djakarta itself; I found it hot, crowded, bright, and generally obnoxious, and I spent a lot of time wishing I had been given a ticket to, say, Norway or Mongolia instead. Perhaps someone with less interest in solitude and more in noise and nightlife would enjoy it, but I don't care to speculate.

My 'benefactors', of course, wanted something from me, and after a few lazy days largely spent at the hotel, I received a phone call. I was told to meet this mysterious voice at a certain address; the note of command in his tone was undeniable, and, rather like a man who had been hypnotised, I found myself in a rather dubious area of the city after dark. I'm a soft thing, it must be said, and every time I passed one of the denizens of that area without incident it was hard to suppress a sigh of relief. But despite the fact I was, rather obviously, a lonely quivering tourist, I went unmolested and found myself at the mysterious locality I had been sent to.
I recount this now with some levity - the meeting, on reflection, seemed tailored to pique the interest of one with an affinity for the pulpy stories of the 20th century - but at the time I had felt a palpable menace. The house was, it transpired, an opium den, filled with the cloying scent of that particular drug, and men and women slept restlessly about my feet on filthy mats. I wouldn't have realised the purpose of the place if it hadn't been for the paraphenalia they used to smoke their chosen narcotic, which I dimly recognised from the pages of Tintin and the Blue Lotus, of all places.
One man still stood, straight and steady even as my head reeled from the overwhelming fumes. He was bony and old and dressed traditionally, as these people always are in the canon. Wordlessly, he drew me into a back room; I complied without resistance, numbed by the atmosphere. Nothing seemed quite real, though I do remember his blackened gummy smile as he told me, in thickly accented English, I'd been chosen. For what, I asked, naturally enough. He grinned again - I was growing very well disposed to him now - and pressed a strange old book into my hands. I looked at it, but didn't consider this a satisfactory answer. I asked him what it was, and he told me a book, grinning wider than ever. I thought this was very funny.
Suddenly, though, there was a crash from the front room. A raid, he exclaimed, and bundled me, with appalling strength, out a window I would otherwise have thought too small for egress. I hit the dirt shortly before he did, and the breath was knocked out of me; he dragged me to my feet, and we ran. I was none too fit then and my comfortable numbness had turned to violent nausea, and in the darkness and confusion I had lost my new friend. Weeping, I leaned against a wall and bought up my dinner, turned horrifically acrid in my belly, and gasped for breath, barely aware that I still held the book. Strange hands grasped me from the darkness.

I won't recount those next few days in full, if only because I remember so little of them. If that first night had been dreamlike, those subsequent days had been a nightmare. I was half rested at best, and I knew the terrors of both being hunted and unconditional trust; the heat and claustrophobia of concealment, being passed between hard-eyed 'friends', bizarre measures to hide my features, occasional glimpses of dark figures in the shadows. But I soon found myself at the airport, clean and washed and packed, gazing bewilderedly at my new digital camera, filled with pictures of myself at the beach, dancing, laughing. In a couple I caught glimpses of the girl who had started me on this weird path; when I saw her I thought that I would probably do it all again. My fascination with these pictures gave me a distraction from my cargo, which was fortunate as I'm sure I would have sweated, fidgeted and otherwise seemed suspicious (the Indonesian authorities are rather intolerant of drug traffickers, as you are surely aware, and I wouldn't have wanted to have been interrogated. The story was too strange for truth, whatever the platitude may tell you). I slept gratefully on the plane.
The book was big, heavy, rotten and black with mould, Indonesia not having the best climate for preservation of paper and associated materials; it was a miracle I got it through customs, really. It appeared to be a bound manuscript; the ink, where it was legible, was irregular and stained, written in turgid Victorian prose, apparently with a quill. It opened with a bizarre dedication:

Which then devolved into a poem too cringeworthy to record. This was followed by 'translator's notes' which, while largely unreadable, bandied about terms like 'Equestria' and other horsey vernacular with abandon. This is to say nothing of the contents, which included illustrations of what appeared to be riderless horses in war panoply, among other things. These pictures used an awful lot of red ink.
But it held some odd fascination for me, and I spent long hours poring over it, recording my thoughts in ledgers and attempting to recreate events, based on later pages, that were bitten by mould and decay. It seemed a fairly exciting story, reminiscent of the biographical Icelandic sagas, but very little of it made sense to me at the time. Later, in 2010, I was compelled by my circumstances to put away that weird text, and whatever hold it had over me was broken. I put it aside and out of my mind, as best I was able.

You can all probably guess what event drew me to pick that book up again. Once again, I'll avoid speculation as to how a mass produced toy line and it's attendant merchandising came to reflect what I had found in that strange black book, but there it was; and the whole thing has been very helpful in allowing me to grasp a few things the original translator either took for granted or recorded on a page now illegible (including that great revelation, the nature of the protagonist).
For my part, in addition to recreating parts of the tale when necessary, I have also replaced terms that, in the original, were presumably transliterated Equestrian with their more familiar English variants, as well as occasionally adding my own comments to the reader. Some might hanker for a text that I have not tampered with, but the memories of those paranoiac days I spent in Djakarta compell me to keep the original work itself a closely guarded secret. I will tell you I no longer have it with me, but no more than that; you will have to make do with this history presented under the guise of fiction. Frankly the though of sharing this much gives me chills, and in the corner of my eye I can still, sometimes, see those shadowy figures in pursuit. Of course, when I look, there is nothing there. But, then, it hardly seems right to clasp that secret so closely when I have so many times stated my committment to openness and honesty, and I must trust that the anonymity of the Internet will protect me; after all, who would believe such a strange story?