Rule 25

Age Breeds Madness & Read Fine Print

Statement: I’ve yet to figure if these intelligent monsters are speaking English, or if we’re hearing another language and translating it. Though if I use the language my written words turn into as a standard, it is likely they’re not using English at all. This possibility also runs in reverse. It’s possible I can’t read the words because I’m not writing in English. If so, what am I writing in?

There is a third conjecture, someone or something is trying to get us to learn the new material—as one would teach a child by showing the word apple next to the picture. By seeing our words transform into a new language, the gap is being bridged. Again, to what end?

This place looked familiar but different at the same time. I tried to recall where I’d seen all of this before. Eventually it hit me. When we’d first been brought to the world it was as though we’d driven forever and ended up outside a large stadium. Our path had gone on for hours, or days, or an eternity, all around the building. We’d doubled back and gone in circles then been dropped into a length of stores.

Where I’d arrived now, again from a bus, was a lot like that location we’d been duped into traveling to, only run down. Garbage was everywhere. Most of it so old it’d been matted to the floor by rain and dirt, then new layers had formed over the old and once again been matted down by rain and dirt.

I half expected to turn around and see the letters E-X-I-T forming an ominous red warning in the sky. There was nothing. Just another view on the exact same building, with the same stores lined up going the other direction. I could have been staring at a mirror.

On my feet went, slowly but steadily. One hand stayed on the spell book in case a wild vending machine attempted to attack me. It wouldn’t do any good, they moved too fast. Still, being prepared was a decent life practice, even if it would go to waste.

All the stores were closed. Or at least boarded up. I could almost remember seeing a news anchor on television eons ago, standing at the edge of a hurricane. In the background had been sealed up houses and a chaotic mess exactly like what I stared at now. In this strip mall, there were no hurricanes. Even now the sky was calm. The dull gray above seemed distant and exhausted.

Onward down the row I walked, seeking clarity, or at least a sign of some open doorway in which to go. The bus driver had called this a market. It might have been at one point, but no longer. I sighed heavily, pulled out my book and stared at the back page in hopes of finding directions magically in English. My finger pressed the one readable word, Atropos. It could have been a name or a title.

“A Thread For Life,” someone said.

I turned. A tall woman with elongated ears stood in front of a storefront that I could swear had been boarded up. I checked again. She wasn’t an elf, and her ear weren’t pointed, but drawn and high. As if her body had been stretched out like taffy and decided to stay locked at the wrong proportions.

“A Thread For Life.” Even her words felt long. Not slow exactly but they spoke of age and vibrated like an elderly woman’s. “For each life is provided a single woven strand. Or a pair of pants that will last until the end of that life. You have come to buy some”—she paused and waved dismissively at me—“decent attire.”

She didn’t say it like a question. No words were added for confirmation. She simply knew I wanted pants. I chalked it up to magic, smiled in a way that generally unnerved people, and nodded. My eyes darted to the building behind her. Mannequins were visible, wearing different colored clothes. The doorway looked bright and clean. Even the pavement at her doorstep was devoid of clutter.

When I said nothing, she lifted an eyebrow in a high arch and said, “You are in search of serviceable clothes.”

“A more durable pair of pants would be delightful.” I coughed and pushed for a simpler answer. “Correct.”

The unnamed woman switched eyebrows and lifted the other one. “Be wary, little smiling killer. I’ve no desire to take your debts. My store only trades wares for wears. And in trade you offer me ill cared for spider silk, captured and spun out from the nether.”

Once again, she spoke in certainties. It also reminded me of the stewardesses, and sometimes Midge. They used choppy sentences that made sense on their own but occasionally switched between concepts with a disturbing fluidity. Either they weren’t used to speaking English, or I wasn’t hearing them right.

She turned and walked to the doorway, waved, and a click sounded. The doorway opened without either of us pushing. The stretched-out woman walked in and pointed to a clear spot by the counter.

“You’ll put the barrel there and the webbing there. You’ll mangle the webs but that’s hardly your fault. Your current meat suit is hardly one for more refined pursuits. That’s why you’ll switch to something more handsy.”

I couldn’t even begin to question why she knew about my other forms. The barrel went onto the clear spot, and webbing onto some device that reminded me of a scale. I did mangle them, but they were sticky and it was hard to get them off my fingers.

The woman said nothing more of payment. Somehow she’d known exactly what I had, wanted, and worked toward completing the deal. Webbing was loaded onto another wooden object in the background. She wound her fingers through them and turned out threads and fed those into a machine with too many moving parts for me to comprehend.

“Now I explain to you what is happening. This device—” She waved at the whirring machine behind the pristine counter top. “It’s not as good as the spindle my sister used, but such is life. We’ve all suffered setbacks over the centuries. But I keep the final snipping to myself, you see. Just to separate threads and keep the edges neat. Not like my sister’s. When we first picked our tools she mangled it all. Leaving split ends and unfinished lines. A ghastly mess. Not for me. I prefer simple and clean results, as will you.”

She said all this, while continuing to transform webs into usable thread. I wondered why the material didn’t snap and shrugged. Magic was magic and followed no rules but its own. All the while the person, who I assumed must be Atropos, continued to talk.

“Now my other sister. She waxes on for hours about how the weavings aren’t perfect. She takes a piece she really likes and moves the thread here and there until it is simply perfect. Then I’d snip and clip the ends. Every time my youngest sister would complain. That’s why we get rid of her. She is foolish, foolish enough to believe that other woman. What is her name? Cestis. Sounds like zits to me. As useless as a boil but clever enough to fool a fool. Not that that’s worth much. You mortals, always playing fools for each other. Fools in love. Fools in life.”

I wondered if there was a connection between all these inhuman women. Maybe they sought to fill the silence. Midge had yammered on for hours. This woman did as well. Maybe it was me. Something about my face, all three of them, might simply beg to be talked to as if I was a lost puppy. It annoyed me.

“Now. You give me a golden thread. A single golden thread.” She stuck out her hand.

I still had the strand I’d gained from the dead spider overlord. I pulled it from my pocket and vaguely wondered why Callisto hadn’t stolen it when she stabbed me in the gut. My attention drifted, and the stretched-out woman snatched the thread away when I wasn’t looking.

“Gold has value, enough to give a mortal life. Short though. Hardly enough to last past infancy. Well, for a god it’d be even less. For an Adamschild, thirty or forty years, then tragic bus accident, that sort of thing. With a thread it is forty or fifty then a heart attack. But for you. Pants. An equatable trade.”

The stretched-out woman might have been ancient. I couldn’t tell for sure. Her body had the same drag older men had but without wrinkles. She sighed heavily and hung like a puppet with cut strings. “Ah only my sister could understand what I’ve been reduced to. She finds it fitting, but I got rid of her too. Can’t trust her after what we do to our youngest sibling. So, it’s me and the spindle, me and the loom, me and the sheers.”

She went back to work. The last of the spider webbing was turned into threading. She spun the golden bit into the rest, using whatever fancy magic crafters of this world had, until the material reminded me of a cloudy sky with a bit of sun poking through.

“It’s a lot of work, but necessity is the mother of invention! I should know. Invention is an ungrateful bitch. Just like my sisters. I told you about them. Or I will. I’d be sorry for the confusion but I wasn’t or won’t be.” The spindly woman stared across the counter at me. Or just above my shoulder. It was hard to tell. She had clearly gone off her rocker.

For a moment, I felt disconnected. The old disgusting short man who reminded me so much of a biker, had been easier to understand. This woman rambled. Anyone who had shopped here during those first few days might have gone mad. Assuming anyone could afford to trade goods that early in the process.

I’d lost track of what she was saying and resumed focusing on her movements.

“One day you’ll learn to merge a spell or two. That will be for the best. Then you will choose to become another you, naked, or with a fine garment.” She lifted part of her mouth in a grin and wiggled her eyebrows. “You’ll find being given a choice to be grand. Though, when my sisters take notice, they skin me for even suggesting anyone had choices.”

She stepped away from the counter and the workshop rippled. Someone peeled away a layer of illusion and what was left made me sick. The loom behind her took on a form less mechanical and seemed to be a stretched out body, reassembled into a wholly unnatural shape. The object sending a shuttle back and forth might be distorted hands. The pieces holding thread together and closing the weave might have been ribs. They were red and still dripping. Hair strung down from above and a face seemed stretched over the carpet below.

Then the image faded, once again replaced by an illusion of a perfectly fine, but confusing machine. I froze and refused to put much consideration into the backroom. All the while, the woman who might be Atropos continued her work.

Post Note: I have my suspicions on what I’d seen, that she’d killed her sisters—as mentioned—and turned them into a machine to continue this morbid task of making thread. As with some of the more dangerous thoughts in my head, I dare not speak it aloud.

A large rusty pair of scissors slid out from under the counter. Seeing them made my heart skip a beat. They smelled of musk and blood. That might have been the machines. Ever since I’d seen the brief image behind the curtains, I couldn’t turn off the heightened nose of Mister Underwood.

“A snip here. No, I say here!” The woman’s face contorted, and she shook a hand at someone unseen. I closed my eyes and fought a shudder. She might be arguing with the dead body of her repurposed family members. “Here it is, here it shall be.”

She took the pants over to the counter and folded them, they looked like any other pair of jeans I’d stolen from empty houses. A hint of gold could be seen in the seams, but the rest had the same dull gray coloring of spider webs.

“A price paid. A product gained. A Thread for Life. Still, some spinning remains on the loom and I’ll buy it as well.” Her lips flattened to a scowl and in a venomous tone she shouted, “You will be silent!”

She held the last bit of unused thread. A small fleck of gold still lay beneath the gray webbing.

“I will tell you a truth. A single truth as a fair exchange for the remaining bit of thread. A small truth for hardly anything at all. Just enough for a mortal to open their eyes to reality. No more than a God sips with their tea. One that shakes you to your core.”

She was madder than the stewardesses, and no matter her truth, I believed it impossible to disturb me that deeply. There was nothing she could say that would bother me more than what I’d already been through. The line from hell. Knowing most of my family was dead. Doubting my own father. Killing people without remorse in the name of survival. What’s more, I faced those things and simply took note of them.

But she shook me anyway. The loom in the back room moved and the scent of blood increased. Death hung close as Atropos continued to talk.

“This world is a lie,” Atropos said. “But a dream. It is nothing but smoke and mirrors, and souls lost in a hungry darkness.”

Something moved. It reminded me of the vending machines and the way they flashed with bursts of unseen speed. Only this thing, whatever it may be, was shrouded by a haze. If the store’s rear had been a backdrop on a play, this thing rolled in the backstage and loomed over Atropos’s shoulders.

“And you, you’re the son of a liar. A liar called—” I watched in horror as the looming shape behind her became apparent. Machinery from the back room, in all its broken flesh and blood puppetry, had extended itself out and snapped the woman’s neck.

Atropos hadn’t even had time to fight back. It was quick.

“Fuck,” I mumbled, shaken and worried I might be next. My feet slowly backed away. Even as Mister Underwood, whatever that thing was, had frightened me. Toughness did not mean immortality.

Minutes passed. Sounds from the rear room reminding me of machinery whirred to life. Saws carved away at material that couldn’t be wood. The sharp scent of blood filled the room with even more intensity than before. After a minute, Atropos walked back out, looking the same as ever. She nodded to the pants, still sitting on the counter.

“Our business is concluded. Take your goods and leave.”

I was left with more questions than ever. The bell behind me jingled. I stepped back and kept the rear room, Atropos, and the door in sight. As I backed up, she stepped from behind the counter, and I could see bits of the golden thread woven into her feet, it reminded me of seams on a puppet’s feet.

“We meet again, Lance. Hawthorn. Underwood.” Atropos smiled.

Post Note: While I cannot accurately describe the way she smiled, I can say that it filled me with unease. Her words, her feet, the way she proclaimed the future, or perhaps all these things together. There are forces that I want to meet again, to defeat and take prizes from, such as Mister Yuck Yuck, and there are those so far beyond my understanding, that I dare not.

It is here I must add speculation—that perhaps people like Atropos are from the “Greater world” or “older generation” that the demon and bus driver spoke of. If this is true, then we are small fish, racing to grow up, before being throw into a sea filled with hungry sharks.

Then I was out, the door slammed shut, and all lights clicked off.

I swallowed. My throat felt dry and body ached in all the wrong places. The pants pressed firmly against my chest. They’d been picked up, though I couldn’t say when. Perhaps I’d been under a spell the whole time. I shook my new clothing to see if spiders or pieces of bone might fall out, but they seemed harmless. No matter how hard I looked, there was no sign of disgusting webbing.

On they went. They fit comfortably. I peeled off Mister Underwood’s form, and found the pants still fit perfectly.

My body faded. As before, I could feel the difference between being visible and hidden from sight. The change muted my sense of smell but my eyesight sharpened in exchange. I held my spell book under an arm and moved onward. It was time to find the second store. At least with Hephaestus, I felt less afraid. He was a junk dealer selling broken goods. Gruff, disgusting, but not disturbing and prophetic.

His store was a few doors down, if my memory of the last trip to this place held true. I kept my finger on the card this time, sure that pressing it had somehow triggered Atropos’s earlier appearance. The doorway didn’t look too different from the rest of these shabby stores. Only a single light behind dark tinted windows served as a sign that anyone might be home.

I elbowed the door open and stepped into the store and grunted. It would have been easier with Mister Underwood’s strength, but these entryways were narrow. I’d barely gotten my bulk into A Thread For Life.

The inside felt drastically different. Thick air and a haze near the ceiling weighed on me. My eyes drooped, head swam, and armpits hurt. I felt the cool liquid of blood roll down my side and toppled.

“Another deerless beggar? I thought we were done with this nonsense. Yet here I am. When I get my hands on those three I’ll wring their necks and use their wings to line my pillow. Or maybe a fan. I haven’t had a good fan since those damn Greeks.”

Above me stood the gruff store owner. He chewed on something that would probably smell gross. His thick beard had stains and this time I could see how muscled his arms were, to the point of looking short. He bent over and picked up the spell book I’d had by my side this entire time.

I tried to speak but my throat dried up. Instead I bent to the side in a coughing fit. With each jerk, my hip ached more. The pain I’d been free of for so long was back, I couldn’t push it away.

“What, in the name of your Christ, sort of mangled mess have you turned this into?”

The man walked off. With each step his feet sounded heavier. It might have been the pulsing of my loud heartbeat amplifying the noise. Without the book, I had nothing. No spells, no other forms, and no power to survive this world. He’d taken it away.

I lay there as my eyes drifted down. Even my toes, the ones I’d lost during the accident, were gone again. But, at least I had pants.