WOODLAND WITHOUT TREES

(3)
The courting couple knew something about each other, no doubt, but everyone in the vicinity’s houses or high-rises only saw a pair of shadows slipping from a car into the wasteground. And such rudimentary shapes could only tell old-fashioned childhood silhouette-stories, not complex motives of love or desecration.

One would have thought that courting couples – in this day and age – would be able to find plenty of private spaces for their business.  But not Shack and Spyra – if those were indeed their names.  Only a story half-told can keep any secrets from the storyteller of the half that was told.  And there is needed one other storyteller to complete the picture with at least a slightly overlapping picture.

It was deathly quiet.  While the moonlight did not exactly ignite the werewolf in Shack, it did seem able to suppress the vampire in Spyra.  She retracted the passion of her instinct and merely lent herself to the deep kisses that Shack simply wanted to ply.

From the eye’s corner of a combined sense of alertness, they saw the model of the church glowing like a hallowe’en lantern, previously invisible before the onset of moonlight.  The dolls from the doll parish actually moved beyond the powers of mere childhood dolls towards the gaping doors of the church, breathing in light that they felt within themselves as light they actually breathed out.  Only the other storyteller could finish what was meant.  It must have been left half-told, as one storyteller’s quest for another storyteller remained unconsummated.  How dolls walked by their own volition was a mystery intrinsic to the religion towards which they walked in order to celebrate the very same religion that enabled them to walk.

Spyra suddenly lifted her face from Shack’s.  She had heard the whirring of an engine above in the sky plus the hiss of escaping air.  She bared her fangs and matched hiss with hiss.  Shack growled under his breath, as he felt a vent within himself explode from over-filling.

The moon disappeared and so did the first-half storyteller.

(4)
Trapped in his own thingie - into the clearing, the sun having only just got up, strode DF Lewis with tears in his eyes.  The purposefulness of his gait conflicted with the uncertainty of his emotions.  Tears of joy or sadness? Or neither?

The surrounding woodland was filling with birdsong; he did his best not to scare them into too hurried a flight.  But he wondered if bigger things of the air would soon arrive to put paid to the silence that emanated from the other side of the mass twitterings he was so careful not to disrupt with his own noise.  The big things always had even bigger shadows canopying the ground.  He held a doll in his hand. As if it were a device used in voodoo. He had been summoned here to explain the doll, to explain this clearing in the woodland, to explain, most of all, the old woman about to be brought to see him here in the clearing.  But the advantage of knowing about this imminent duty of explanation could now, in turn, explain his own tears.  Tears of frustration.

Over the tops of the trees he saw the distant triple top of a church’s towers, partly Christian, partly not.  The central tower was fatter, more oniony than the two thinner towers or spires that flanked it.  He named the flanking ones as Shack and Spyra.  There was a hidden joke here but one he didn’t quite get.  The middle one he had as yet to name.  The old woman would name it, when she arrived, he vowed.

He was insufficiently omniscient to know that the old woman would definitely never arrive here in the clearing.  Soon, his tears – as he looked towards the doll in his hand – were truly tears that came from real crying.  Or that was how he would describe them later.  He left the option, no doubt, that he could be crying with laughter.  As one does when tickled by something so funny one can’t control the humour of the joke involved, thus allowing it to be subsumed by an actorly pose or by self-conscious fabrications of experimental emotion.

Surprisingly, he was surprised when the old woman was marched into the clearing flanked by two of her friends.  One friend was toothless from over-age and sported sprouts of individually islanded mole-hair on her visible skin.  The other bald from lack of moonlight and stony-faced: decidedly masculine, despite the feminine clothes. 

DF Lewis yearned again for the omniscience that he might be able to command to obtain an understanding of what should have happened next. 
 
A wild-winged interference of dawnsingers lifted silently into the sky from the fast-fading trees ... chased by a huge ground-hugging air-shadow that was suffocating the flight's own mass of smaller shadows. 

He gave the doll to the old woman and ran ... and ran ... scared of not understanding anything... and soon came to a railway-line where workers were banging points with long hammers.

(5)
Our vast dirigible paddled hard through the air, its engine purposely muted for surreptitious reconnoitring.  We were after an escaped storyteller.  We knew he was in the woodland that he had created as camouflage.  We skimmed over one of the woodland’s many clearings and saw railway-workers tapping points with their tuning-hammers.  Could he be among them?  Did they even look as if they believed they existed and were not simply further concoctions of his scheme of camouflage?
 
We decided, after all, that they were genuine railway-workers, belonging to a union that expressly forbade the employment of any casual labour such as rogue storytellers or other recalcitrants.  One of the crew wielding hammers waved to us from the ground as if to confirm our already pretty firm supposition.  We were a common sight in those parts above the expanding woodland, if rarely seen close enough by the high-risers to be considered other than as a dark cloud threatening a storm.  One thing we had established for sure: there was no real-sized church in the vicinity answering any descriptions close to the illustration often given in some quarters as to its likeness. The railway-workers were doll-sized from our vantage-point in the sky, but we were equally convinced they were real-sized people when seen close up. We didn't need to land to prove it.
 
"Wait!" shouted Captain Nemo. "Follow that line to its end!"
 
He pointed at a track that eventually seemed to end in nothing, not even buffers. The rest of us were shaken to our roots, a difficult emotion with which to grapple if one is air-borne.  That was obviously a mock-up of a railtrack.  So if that were fabricated...
 
Someone else in our cabin was filming the scene below us ostensibly for later scrutiny as evidence.  But I suspected this cameraman was just another fictioneer - simply like the rogue storyteller - and was really filming for a cinema film.  The worst fabrication of all, I thought.  I could no longer believe in suspension of disbelief where 'screen fiction' was concerned.  A blight, true, on the fields of entertainment I could enjoy.  But what could I do about it when all I saw were the mechanics of film-making rather than the story itself?
 
So, imagine instead, if you can, what is easy to imagine: the things and people that are really there as opposed to being imaginary.
 
The old woman was held captive along with her friends in an airship hangar, suspected as she was of being Instigator and First Cause, held indefinitely to prevent any further mischief.  Or had she captured herself as a double-bluff?  Or, indeed, had she caused to be captured (along with herself) those Horror creatures Shack and Spyra whom she had originally set loose in the guise of her friends - as a straight truth rather than the more expected triple bluff? And we landed with the hiss of air-brakes alongside the hangar, ready to interrogate her to the very bottom bone of this plot.

(6)
I stare through my kitchen window at the erstwhile Woodland Without Trees.  Nothing but high-rises striating the vocabulary of the view.  I know I must live here in one of the very few actual detached houses left.  I’m taking rearguard action against the compulsory purchase orders.

Those creatures who willy-nilly pee in my garden, they’re becoming commoner in both senses of that word.  I catch them making sneaky ugly faces at me; they shout through the letterbox that they want to ask me a few glib questions but how can you take them seriously as representatives of the authorities after such loose letting, such fluidity and fluency?

Now, some other strangers arrive on this dark whirlygig stormcloud day, as if they have been transported down somehow from a vast silent helicopter ... just to interview the last stalwart of ‘people like me’. 

I have just thought of you. Of you who are my two old friends, flanking me here in the parlour like real bodyguards but now, I fear, more like dolled-out models of yourselves or simply ghosts of yourselves ... or the mocking high-rise spires of genius loci in stale eked-out perspective. 

I indicate to you that it’ll be over my dead body that I’ll let those piss-artists outside inside.  "You’ll surely stand by me," I say to myself, knowing you two ghosts will hear me.  But what can you as ghosts do?  You’ve  lost all your traction as monsters of horror by becoming ghosts, but, if the unimaginable truth were told, you are now not even ghosts, with each of you vanishing into the form of a drogulus, a ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a ghost... ad infinitum, ad absurdum, tapping a silent invisible tuning-fork to test the channels of your non-being.

I des-pair.  I am effectively alone facing a world that turns its mirror against me.