Those Blasted Lands (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 2 It had changed. I knew that as soon as I’d laid eyes on it,
but at first couldn’t tell precisely how. Then, with a chill that was even
colder than the freezing cold in the room, I noticed something. There was a wisp of smoke rising from the candle. It’s a small thing, indeed, and sounds almost ridiculous
when one says it; but it’s difficult to overstate the shock which came over me
as I saw that wisp of smoke where no wisp had been before. And there was
something else; that wisp of smoke was moving. Even as I watched, it
visibly changed, elongating and twisting, slowly, grey against the dark stone
wall. I wanted to stop then. My hand moved to delete the picture,
to return it to the realm of ones and zeroes of which it was constructed. But I
couldn’t; I simply could not make the cursor stop on the little red X that
would free me from it. Each time I brought it close, it would skip away. Did I say "free" me? Yes. I knew then that the picture had
me in its power, and that I was bound to it, in some strange and terrible way
that I couldn’t understand. Even through the haze of fear that clutched me in that
moment, I noticed that other things had changed. Surely the dice had been
differently positioned? And the hourglass...I wasn’t quite certain, but when I’d
seen it before, hadn’t the upper half of the hourglass been full of sand? Now,
about a quarter of it had trickled down to the bottom, and, as I watched, a few
more grains detached themselves and fell, slowly, almost drifting, into the
bottom chamber. When I saw that, such a thrill of fear shivered through me
that I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and gripped the edge of the table with
both hands. How long I stood there like that I don’t know; but, even before I
opened my eyes again, I knew something had happened. It was much warmer, for one thing; very much warmer. And
there was a smell in the air, an indescribable smell, a wild and feral odour
just at the threshold of consciousness. And, faintly, I could hear a moaning
noise, as of the wind blowing across the wastes. Slowly, carefully, I opened my eyes. I was looking down at
my hands, which had been grasping the wooden table on which my laptop stood. Instead
there was now crumbling yellow stone, and next to my fingers was a pair of
ivory dice. Slowly, forcing myself all the way, I raised my head. There
was the candle, smoke still rising, and the leather bound book, the human skull
seeming to stare at me from its empty sockets. The long-stemmed pipe’s bowl was
lined with a charred black residue, and I could feel the warmth from it.
Someone had been here, so recently that the room was still full of his
presence. Automatically, I reached for the book. It wasn’t a big book,
and obviously regularly used; it had the feel of a volume much thumbed through.
The spine was richly inlaid with gold, and it was heavy; far heavier than a book
its size ought to be; and when I opened it, I couldn’t read a word. It was in a
script I’d never encountered before, hooks and lines intermixed with
wedge-shaped characters and strange, almost mathematical symbols. I couldn’t
even tell whether it was meant to be read left to right or the other way round,
or even top to bottom. The pages were thick and leathery, the material yellowed
and tattered at the edges. Something touched my wrist, a cold smooth touch that made me
jerk my hand back in alarm. What I saw was harmless enough, but doubly
disturbing in its strangeness in such a setting: a large snail, crawling slowly
along the shelf, its eye-stalks at full stretch. I couldn’t see a slime trail
leading anywhere; it seemed as though the creature had materialised out of thin
air. Certainly, it hadn’t been there only a few moments before. Stepping away from the shelf, I turned quickly to look
around the room. It was of stone, and hardly large enough to stretch my arms
out. There wasn’t a door that I could see, and no other opening, except high up
on the wall opposite the shelf, where there was small horizontal slot like a
ventilator, through which a ruddy light provided what illumination there was. [ Continue to page 3 ] |