Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which Sights Are Seen.
This time Kitman did not let go of the rope and Noel descended smoothly and gently to the ground.
He stepped back against the nearest tree trunk, folded his arms and developed an apparent interest in our knees. "Okay," he said, "now what?"
Kitman scratched his head. "Well, I deny being a figment of your imagination even if you are asleep."
"Easy to say," I observed.
"No, no, I'm sure I can prove it," said Kitman, drumming his fingers on his cheek. "Mathematics! That might work. As a genius I can work out the answer to a problem faster than Noel can work it out on paper, and when he proves the answers match—"
"What if I'm awake now?" interrupted Noel.
"Er?" said Kitman. "Well, of course you are, but..."
I pulled the book out from under Kitman's arm and handed it back to Noel. "Read the last page," I said. "I love spoilers."
Noel obediently turned to the last page.
"This book was typeset in Wiltshire 12/14, a classic Roman face designed by John David in 1983 as an alternative to Times Roman...ruins everything, doesn't it?"
I leaned over the page and read the words upside down; they were as he said. I looked to Kitman, and wished I had thought to bring my digital camera so I could submit his picture to Webster's for use in conjunction with the word 'nonplussed'.
"Okay," said Kitman after a pause fraught with existential doubt. "If we're going to solve the basic ontological question, we should expedite our investigation of this strange new world. Proceeding systematically, of course." He unzipped a pouch on one of the backpacks (I had lost track of which was whose by this time), produced a very expensive liquid-cooled double-axis neodymium Lodestar 303 compass that he had gotten for his birthday by swiping it from his brother Ken and turned on its digital displays.
"Systematically!" said Noel. "Do you know the Pinkerton method?"
"By rote," said Kitman.
"You are a thingie after my own heart," said Noel admiringly.
There followed a brisk round of rigorous scientific exploration.
While Kitman set about making use of his various merit badges by measuring the pH of the soil, the oxygen content of the air, and the basic charge of the electron (and generally emptying the backpacks all over the ground in the process) I wandered off with Noel to have a look around.
We inspected the mosses, heather and other bracken for a bit while I tried to think of a conversational opening move.
"So," I said, as we passed by a pine tree that was particularly like all the others, "how long have you been a duck?"
"I beg your pardon?" said Noel.
"Don't mind him," said Kitman, "his brain doesn't work properly." His voice was unusually clear and loud despite his being several yards away, due to the abnormal silence of the place. "Williams, how long have you been an ape?"
"Oh," I said, understanding at last. "Looks like you made a monkey out of me, haha."
"What's a monkey?" said Noel.
"I'll tell you later. Do you even have ducks where you come from?"
Noel blinked. "What, personally?"
"No, just in general. I mean, do you even know what I mean by duck?"
"Oh," said Noel. "Well, yes. Distant cousins, several times removed. We call ourselves human beings — homeo saliens saliens, or something like that," he added vaguely. "Evolutionary biology's not really my forte."
"What is?" said Kitman. "Your forte, if I may inquire."
"Me?" said Noel. He placed his hands in his pockets in a transuniversal gesture of existential uncertainty and then flinched. "I," he said, pulling out his business card, "am a student of mystic trash."
"I wondered about that," I said, indicating the card.
"It's my brother's idea of a joke," replied Noel. "Or maybe he's serious, I don't know. By actual occupation I'm a data entry technician with the Internal Revenue Service...well, was, until they got their new optical scanners working..."
"Um," said Kitman carelessly, which is to say not carelessly at all. "Mystic trash?"
Noel turned around, looking up at us defensively while walking backwards. "For the record, I've never had my palm read, I've never bought a wand, and the only pieces of crystal I own are in electronic devices. That kind of stuff doesn't interest me an iota."
"What, uh," said Kitman, "what kind of stuff does?"
"Um...this kind, actually," said Noel, raising his arms to indicate, basically, everything. "Things that aren't, but ought to be. You!"
"Ah," said Kitman, and stood up straighter. "Well. I shall strive to be worthwhile."
He returned to his work and Noel and I poked around the mosses, heather and other bracken a bit more, in the unchanging mid-afternoon light, watching the woods maintain their peculiar contrast between light and shadow — and then Noel stopped me with a raised hand.
"Do you hear that?" he said.
"What?"
"Nothing. A different kind of nothing."
I listened carefully, and he was right. It was no longer strangely silent but strangely quiet. In more distracting circumstances I would have thought what I heard now was the sound of the wind in the trees, or the rushing hiss of a distant river, but between paying more attention than usual and having less to hear I was able to discern that what I was hearing was white noise — not the chaotic sound of nature that audio technicians call pink or brown noise, but the steady hiss of static.
And then something changed again and it was, in fact, the sound of wind in trees and the distant rushing hiss of a river.
Nothing was no longer happening.
"Something started," said Noel.
"What?"
"I think it was the world," he said, and shuddered ecstatically.
It was at this jarring point that I discovered an even more jarring large hole in the ground, and by the time Noel had gotten me back up and brushed off we had both temporarily forgotten his curious insight.
"Interesting," said Noel, getting down on hands and knees — ducks have knees — for a better look at the slot in the ground. "Artificial."
"What is?" said Kitman, who had come running sometime during my cry of "Aaah!"
"This hole," said Noel. "It's worked stone. It looks like a sewer drain but it's facing downhill, and it's got an overhang that would keep rain out."
Kitman joined Noel in the hands and knees department — Kitman has knees — and gave the construction a careful once-over. "Sort of an upper...lip," he said, and Noel backed away from it rather quickly. "Has anyone got a flashlight?"
"Yes," I said. "You."
"Oh, so I do," he said, and plucked his ten-million-candlepower jobbie off its belt loop and shined it into the hole.
We waited until we couldn't stand it any more.
"What do you see?" we flanged.
"Um...nothing," said Kitman, standing up and switching off his light and, not incidentally, taking a few steps away and uphill of the hole. "Solid blackness."
Noel gave a delicate shudder. "Did you notice...?"
"The engravings?" said Kitman. "Yes, yes I did."
"Engravings?" said I.
"On the apron, under the lip," said Kitman.
"Don't call it a lip!" said Noel, and frissoned again.
Kitman said, "Would you like a hug?"
"Okay," said Noel.
"Engravings?" I said.
"Oh, that's better," said Noel.
"Engravings?" I said again.
"Oh, yes," said Kitman, straightening up. "Symbols. Angled lines and curlicues. Words, I'd guess, but nothing I recognize. They looked..." He hesitated.
"Blasphemous?" suggested Noel.
"Well, yeah," said Kitman, "but I was going to say formal. Like on the Stock Exchange building."
"How," I asked, picking a few last bits of moss, heather and/or bracken from my pant legs, "can typography look blasphemous?"
"Clever design, I suppose," said Kitman, taking a few more steps away and looking around carefully. "Have you ever noticed that the logos of old magazines look old themselves, even if they're in a style you've never seen before?"
"No. So what is this?" I said, indicating the hole.
"What are these, you mean," he said, and indicated widely. "One here, one there, another there, and over there, and there — all regularly spaced. I have no idea what they are. They're a bit small for Morlock holes. Unless of course the Morlocks are very small."
"Or just...flat," said Noel.
"Mmm, yes," said Kitman, stepping back to his backpack with all deliberate speed. "Well, I think I'll get a few snapshots and then we can, uh..."
"Get the hell out of here?" I suggested.
"Okay," said Kitman. He pulled my digital camera from his pack. I had wondered where it had gone to.
"— Um," said Noel. "How did you get to here, by the way? I've been meaning to ask."
"Science," said Kitman, raising camera to eye.
"Oh."
"I'm pretty sure," added Kitman. He clicked the button, and the flash failed to make the trees any less black.
Sensing that Noel was underwhelmed by Kitman's explanation, I gave him a quick summary of our adventure thus far. When I was done he looked up at me, cocked his head and said, "That's really weird."
"Isn't it, though?" said Kitman. "By the way, Williams, we are not 'looking for money' as you so tastelessly put it. We are on an open-ended research program that will lead to the big bucks purely as a happy concomitance." He stashed the camera and fastened the velcro on his backpack. As he stood up a sudden thought struck him a glancing blow. "Noel. Did you happen to see anything other than branches while you were up in the tree?"
Noel paused to recollect. "Not a lot. All forest, basically, though there's a big break in the canopy downhill, and a narrower one that way —" he pointed to the left of downhill — "leading down to it. I'd guess it's a path to a river."
"Good!" said Kitman, shouldering his pack. "A destination, or even two. I was afraid we'd just have to wander off at random. Shall we go?"
"Shall we go home?" I said, indicating his vaxillator.
Kitman looked pained. "We packed a lunch, for goodness sake," he said. "No point in eating that at home, is there? And we've only been here, what, half an hour?"
I checked my digital watch. It had stopped. "Um—"
"What?"
It started again. "Nothing," I said.
"Well, give us an hour. It's a whole world!" He steered us pathward. "And Noel — let me know if anything looks familiar to you."
"Gotcha," said Noel.
We proceeded through the forest, and then proceeded a bit more.
After that...eventually we came to the break that we had been looking for, and found that it was a bit more than a path, though less than a road; approximate sidewalk about covered it, though instead of paving blocks it consisted of two-inch cubes of rust-laced granite. Overhead was our first glimpse of the sky, which was conventional blue with rounded nubbins of white clouds barely visible over the trees.
Kitman looked up and down the path. "Has anyone got a preference?"
Noel pointed uphill. "That way. It looks ever so slightly...familiar."
"Like a great-uncle?" I said.
Noel gave me the eyebrow raised and fixed, or would have if he had an eyebrow.
"I told you his brain doesn't work properly," said Kitman.
We headed uphill, after Kitman took a belated vaxillator snapshot on general principles. And in the fullness of time — which is to say, after nothing of interest happened other than a broken shoelace — we emerged into a clearing...and saw what sat in its middle.
"Oh, my," said Noel, raising his hands in the air before him, and then stopping with them halfway to his bill. "It's real, or I'm not."
"Oh, my," said Kathleen, and I stopped walking backward.
She was reacting to something over my shoulder, which I deduced from the way she was staring over my shoulder. Judging by the way she was slowly raising her hand, she was going to lift up her sunglasses to look under them.
She lifted up her sunglasses and peered under them.
Well, I was close.
"Would it be appropriate," she said, "to ask —"
"Mind your false premises," said Kitman.
I turned around.
We had come to the end of the path (or its beginning, as you prefer) and in the clearing before us were fifteen slabs of polished granite that formed a staircase leading up to a disturbing work of architecture.
It was not disturbing in the sense of being a surprise whited sepulchre, or a pile of stones set in impossible non-Euclidean angles loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours, or even a mansion that had OD'd on reality. It looked like a barn.
It tried not to. It had a plantation-style porch with pillars and filigree around the top; it had large bay windows; it had a chimney standing grey and stolid at its back and any number of other insistent design features that did all but spell out the phrase THIS IS A HOUSE NOT A BARN — nonetheless, its architect had clearly spent many happy hours in a hay storage facility and been unable to shake those lofty memories, and so its most striking feature was that it was missing a silo.
In sum, it was the spitting image of Kitman's house.
"The resemblance is truly striking," said Kathleen.
"It's my dream house," said Noel.
"Okay, now things are getting a little odd," said Kitman. "What do you mean, your dream house?"
"I mean," said Noel, "that I've dreamed about this house. Repeatedly. I've stood here before."
"Deja vu?" I said.
Noel shook his head emphatically, although given the bill it was hard to do otherwise. "No. I've been inside. Staircase straight in through the door. Study on the third floor, with a really nice desk. And there are some windows in the back...with..."
We waited.
"Yes?" we said.
"With a very interesting view," he said enigmatically, and said no more, though he looked unusually happy.
"Well, let's see if anyone's home," said Kitman, leading the way up the stairs.
On the door was a large, black, baroque and very heavy knocker.
"I've seen that before, " I said.
"I know," said Kitman. "It's in a box in my basement."
He applied hand to sculpted metal and gave the knocker three sharp raps, which echoed like doom in the shower: thoomp, thoomp, thoomp, and we waited. As a former carrier for the Contamiski Times-Herald I had some experience in this type of waiting, and of course Kitman deferred to me when I announced that no one was home.
"As a naturally law-abiding person, I'm vehemently opposed to breaking and entering," said Kitman. "However," he continued, reaching into his pocket, "if by a staggering coincidence I should happen to have a key to the back door, well, I don't think making use of it counts as breaking..."
He produced the keychain we had found in the basement and left the verandah for the rear of the house. We trailed after him with trepidation.
"Technically, Kitman," I said, as Kitman selected the appropriate key and inserted it into the appropriate hole, "semantically you may be correct. But —"
Click, went the lock. Kitman turned the knob and swung wide the door.
"Noel, would you happen to have a white glove on you?" said Kitman, fingering the top of the dining room table.
"Um, no," said Noel. "Why?"
"Just a thought," said Kitman. "There's no dust on this table. And yet somehow I get the impression that no one's been here for a considerable amount of time."
He cupped his hands to his mouth. "Hello!" he called. "Anyone home?"
There was no answer.
"Right," said Kitman, pulling out the camera again. "Follow me. I'll take the pictures, you leave the footprints."
After blocking the door open with a chair, we walked a circuit of the ground floor, with Kitman pausing every few yards to document our progress. Dining room, auxiliary library, living room, sitting room, bathroom, laundry room and finally kitchen: all were present and substantially identical, with the minor difference that this house was not wired for electricity.
"Gas mantles," said Kitman, taking a picture of a handsome quasi-Gothic fixture next to the kitchen door. He fingered the key that controlled the gas flow. I wonder if they work? And if they do, who's providing the gas?"
"Let's not find out," I said. "Accidentally blowing up a person's house often offends."
"There is that," he said, and led us into the kitchen, where we found an anachronism. The granite-topped table in the middle of the room was normal and expected, along with the cupboards, sink and fireplace, but the spot which in Kitman's kitchen was occupied by the refrigerator was occupied by —
"A refrigerator," said Kitman. "Interesting."
It looked very much like a refrigerator of 1920s vintage, save that on the top, in place of a condenser coil, there was what looked like a giant frosted-glass Tesla globe, the interior of which was gently pulsing with dim streamers of violet light. Also, the rest of it was entirely black.
"Do I dare look inside?" said Kitman, laying a hand on the entirely black handle of the entirely black door.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised," said I.
He pulled the door open a crack. I could feel cold air, or at least I hoped it was air, spilling out onto the floor and over my shoes.
"Yeek!" said Noel, for presumably related reasons.
Kitman opened the door a bit wider and peered inside.
"Good lord!" he said.
"What?" I said. "No, don't tell me."
"This is the largest head I've ever seen," said Kitman.
Noel and I took a few more steps back. Kitman reached into the refrigerator and pulled out what I had to admit was a head.
"Romaine, isn't it?" he said. It was pretty big for a lettuce, I had to admit.
"Very funny, Kitman," I said.
He returned it to its place and continued nosing about.
"Onions, garlic, tomatoes...blue tomatoes, granted, but you can't have everything...vinegar...
"No milk, no cheese, but a big slab of what I'm all too sure is tofu. And...
"...a...
"...big bottle of eyeballs."
"Gyah!" said Noel, and covered his own. I just rolled mine.
"See?" said Kitman, producing a big bottle of eyeballs.
"Gyah!" I said, and joined Noel.
"Funny thing, though," said Kitman, swirling the contents of bottle around, "they're all on a vine, like grapes. Very strange. Preserved in alcohol?" There was an unscrewing noise. "Nope, water." He put the bottle away and closed the door. "It's safe to look."
He stepped over to the sink and washed his hands. "Water pressure's good," he observed nonchalantly.
"Can we go home now?" I said.
"I've still got plenty of shots on the camera," he said, slightly wounded. "But I'll tell you what, we'll go straight to the third floor for a look at that remarkable view and then leave. How does that sound?"
"Not an iota better than 'no'," I said.
"Did you have to use that particular word?" said Noel.
Kitman pointed to the hallway. "Off we go, gentlemen — remember, it's all for science." He ushered us to the stairwell and up we went.
At the landing we found ourselves in front of what would have been, and in fact was, the second-floor bathroom. Kitman took a cursory glance inside. "Just like home, more or less. Does anyone need to —"
"No," we said.
The sun was streaming straight in through the window over the bathtub. "Hmm," said Kitman. "Time appears to be passing. Onward and upward, then."
As soon as Noel saw the third floor window seats, he ran for the one on the right and jumped up onto it. "That's it," he said, leaning up against the window. "That's the view I remember."
From the third floor we had a very good perspective on the mountain below us, and the forest that spread out around us — looking almost ordinary except for the curiously consistent height of the trees — and the other mountains on the horizon...
...and none of those things mattered, because from here the trees no longer limited our view of the clouds.
Which were big, and fluffy, and white...
And hanging like pillars.
Vertically.
