The Never is circular, more or less. At the center is downtown, beyond this a greenbelt and scattered buildings, then the treeline, the river, and the mountains. Apparently there are wolves in the wood. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been beyond the greenbelt. There is something menacing about the mountains. You can’t get too close before the stench of foreign cruelties turns you away. The hermits who carry the bodies in from the river wear masks. They say it frightens away the mountain spirits. They say also that the water hides strange, half human creatures that swim like fish but breath air and have human skin. It could be true.
The morgue is on the outskirts of town. Occasionally it drifts nearer or farther from the river, but it has never left the greenbelt, thankfully. The carriers have complained that it is difficult to find their way back with a fresh body, what with the current changing directions and the morgue shifting. They are a troubling bunch, and usually have nothing decent to say. It comes of spending too much time in the wood, I think.
The bodies float in on the river in the morning. If they are children, they get thrown back for the children’s tribe. They have no morgue and carve their people with sticks and pieces of refuse. Sometimes children have parts attached to them that don’t belong, their carving methods are crude at best. I have a friend in the children’s tribe, Eliot. His left hand is entirely made of scrap metal. He’s a precocious thing. He drags the hand like a heavy stone. I’ve tried to explain to him the delicacy of carving, how his tribe should take more pride in their work. He just looks at his hand and sobs. Still, he’s very calming to be around, most of the time.
I don’t know where the bodies come from. Perhaps they fall from the sky. Noel believes they are left by some higher power, but he’s never given me a reasonable explanation as to why. I’ve heard it said that most of them are drawn from another existence where they didn’t belong. The vampires seem to think that they were put here as fodder. The carriers think the fish-people bore them and threw them out as mutants. Its silly, really, how superstitious people can become. One thing is for certain; They don’t come from the mountains. Nothing lives there.
Noel and I took the day off to watch the mountains shift. He’s convinced that there is something beyond them. If there is, I don’t want to know about it.
“Watch, the tall one, it comes back to the exact same place by nightfall.” He said. “The others settle randomly, but the tall one seems to be some sort of fulcrum. Perhaps it doesn’t move at all, perhaps its everything else that shifts.”
He would notice such a thing. He’ll die considering trivialities. “You know that guy I carved?” I stretched my legs and lay back. We were beyond the morgue, at the very edge of the greenbelt. I watched for wolves.
“What about him?”
“There was something strange about him. He was different.”
Noel wouldn’t look away from that damn tall mountain. I could’ve turned cartwheels with knives between my fingers and a flaming baton in my teeth and he would still have been more interested in a large rock. He’s cleverer than I, but he’s also strange and ultimately only frustrating to be with. He is a puppet of a man. Under his coat he hides the strings.
“How do you mean?” He was only half listening, still looking for a visible creator, I imagine.
“I couldn’t say.”
“It was a beautiful carve. Very elegant.”
“But do you understand that he was different? Wrong somehow?”
For a moment he seemed to look away from the mountain. Still, he did not look at me, more toward nothing at all. The grass tumbled around him. “No. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Nevermind then.” I tucked my hands into the soil and rolled my fingers.
“You see!” He gestured with both hands. “Its coming around again. Look, it will be back in place soon.”
I nodded. “We should leave. The night’s coming.”
Noel beamed. He ran his fingers through his hair and chuckled.
end (4)
mantid dreams
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