The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

to him as long as anything he had ever experienced – he flew in a void. Time, space, and all sensation had like a flower in the night closed, and the bud of all that was, was hidden.

He knew nothing at all.

‘Fitz.’

The voice came to him from within himself.

Who’s there?

He hardly needed to ask. He couldn’t ask anyway. He couldn’t hear a thing. He knew that. But through the bark of the trunks of trees he saw the motley flit, vibrant and elusive.

‘Fitz,’ said the Riddler again, in his ear. ‘Come on.’

I’m dreaming.

Fitz pushed hard on his legs, breaking into a run, leaping between trunks and threading the trees as if he were a shuttle working in the weft. Bars of light, green light, the rich living hue of moss and leaf, of springing stems and the weed that grows on still water, jagged between the tall masts of the trees. He chased it as a parched traveller might run down water in the desert. Above him butterflies and moths beat their noisy wings, scattering like timbrels into a swelling and operatic movement themed with green. He tasted soil in his nose and on his tongue, the sweet, wet flavour of earth that worms and beetles, stirred by vernal rains, put out as vines do flowers. Still the motley eluded him; still he darted, flying in the green air.

‘Fitz,’ said the Riddler again.

He stopped. He was in the wood – the Bellman’s Wood. Away to his left an old stump he knew, the shell of some towering hulk of oak, stood broken and blackened with rot, big breads of fungus tabling from its sides. He had always liked to think of it as a wrecked and capsized boat, the rot its tarred and barnacled hull, the fungus its keel and fins. Behind the Wreck, he knew, lay a clearing, and beyond that the stone outcrop and gully that marked the near boundary of the wood by the cottage and chapel. He had lost the Riddler. All around him the green light seemed to sift in the air, rising and falling between the trees as clouds of syrup swirl in water. All around him the wings of moths like sails batted the breeze.

He looked up. Between the flapping cloths of wings the green sun poured down like syrup, sweet and stifling. In among the streams of light thick as ink he saw the Riddler’s motley, still.

Fitz climbed, hand over hand, feeling the tough knobs of the ancient oaks solid beneath his hands, solid against his feet as the rungs of a ladder. He climbed hundreds of feet, sure with every handhold that it would be his last, that he would reach the Riddler, that he was almost there. Again and again the boughs above receded into the green light, pouring. Around him the air was thick with wings. They rustled in the air as worms might in soil, and flew in ranks rife as angels.

At last he broke free of them as if from the canopy of the wood. Before him the Riddler sat on a sturdy limb. He was smiling.

‘Fitzroy,’ he said.

‘You know my name,’ said Fitz, surprised.

‘I know many things,’ answered the Riddler. He held to the bough with his hands. His feet dangled into the green.

‘Where are we?’

‘We’re in a wood,’ said the Riddler. ‘You climbed this tree yourself.’

‘But how did we get here?’ Fitz felt as if he had to brush the huge canvas wings of angels from his eyes, just to keep the Riddler’s motley from subsiding into the green density. ‘I thought I was in the Sensorium.’

‘This is the Sensorium,’ said the Riddler. ‘Everyone reacts differently to the loss of sensation. Some people go catatonic, collapsing into themselves as if into a deep sleep. Some people find their minds pulse with images, lights and sounds, neither more nor less ordered than a kaleidoscope or a carousel. Others seem to dream. You are doing yet another thing.’

Something was niggling Fitz. He looked at his hands. He half expected to find his right hand at the end of his left arm, or something even more bizarre. But they seemed normal. He held his face.

It was his face.

Then it hit him.

‘You aren’t speaking in riddles,’ he said. ‘You’re making perfect sense.’

‘Yes,’ said the Riddler, ‘I noticed that, too. It’s a new experience for me.’

Fitz sat on the branch next to the Riddler. They perched there together, swinging their legs against the clouds of moths and butterflies, for a few minutes.

‘Well,’ said Fitz. ‘What am I supposed to be learning in the Sensorium?’

‘That’s up to you,’ answered the Riddler.

‘Doesn’t everyone train in the same way?’

‘Hardly,’ said the Riddler. ‘For one thing, no one else talks to me like this.’

‘Why me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did you ask me to come here?’

‘I didn’t,’ said the Riddler.

Fitz almost fell out of his tree. ‘But the writing on the window –’

– ‘was written almost fifty years ago,’ said the Riddler.

Fitz pondered this time for a space.

‘Why then did you expect me?’

‘Because,’ said the Riddler, ‘I remembered the writing on the window.’

‘Whose life am I living?’ asked Fitz.

‘That is a very good question,’ answered the Riddler. Suddenly his face was very close, and Fitz could see in the Riddler’s eyes his own eyes. ‘But it is time for you to leave the Sensorium.’

‘Why?’ asked Fitz. He kicked a cloud of moths with his foot, and their huge canvas wings flapped hard in the green wind, like sails on the sea.

‘It’s not a good idea to stay under for too long,’ said the Riddler.

‘Why?’ Fitz found himself on the ground again, darting through the trees, the Riddler just ahead of him, his motley weaving between the trunks.

‘Because if you spend too much time in the air,’ answered the Riddler – and now he was holding him by the shoulders, hard, and staring deep into his eyes – ‘you might find you can’t come back down.’

As the Riddler stripped off the Collar, Fitz felt his body convulse.