Chapter 30: Illusions

When the center of the sky began to dim with the approach of evening, Violet found herself turning away from the main avenue in search of somewhere to spend the night. Flanking the center of town were curls of neighborhoods, some that ended in abrupt dead ends, others that linked inevitably to other, bizarrely identical rows of houses. Violet was reluctant to venture too far from the familiarity of the main street, for fear of getting lost.

It was strange to see so many absolutely identical houses, each one two stories, with a short, steeply covered front porch and a tiny, almost decorative front garden. They’d even decayed in similar ways, portions of gabled roofs sagging or fallen in completely, blooms and twists of sunflowers as tall as trees clogging narrow brick chimneys and sprouting from empty windows.

Around those portions still splashed by the reddening light of a setting sun, the air had gone hazy with gently fluttering swarms of mayflies. Their meandering path seemed to be taking them in a grand, zigzagging arc towards the river that formed the northernmost boundary of town and with each beat the translucent panes of their wings flashed purest gold, as though the air was filled with slowly drifting shreds of precious metal.

A few late mayflies bumped against Violet’s cheek, hurrying to catch up with their fellows, and the cat sneezed as one fluttered into its nose. It reminded her a bit of home, when the cat had taken her into the forest and taught her how to make a fire. Again there rose a slow, painful surge of homesickness, and again Violet wrestled it back down.

She was doing fine. Her journey was still on track, and every step she took guided her ever closer to the Glow and thus to salvation. Fortified by those notions, she gripped the straps of her rucksack and marched off down the street, searching for a suitable shelter.

None of the houses seemed particularly amenable, not least because of the instinctive unease she felt at how bizarrely identical they were. Violet had once read a story where a hero, trying to stop the machinations of an evil witch, had been trapped in a recursive hallway. No matter how long he walked he’d always find himself back where he started, passing the same landmarks again and again.

She couldn’t help but entertain tiny thoughts of such a nature, that if she turned back and traced her steps it would lead her not to the main road but rather to more rows of houses, each built exactly the same.

“Hmm.” The cat vocalized quietly, and Violet glanced down to see that her companion’s gaze had gone skyward, to where a few ragged clouds had gathered on the western horizon, seeming to cushion the sun’s inevitable descent. They burned a vivid, nearly translucent red, their wispy structure entirely visible, shot through with broad panes of crimson light.

The sight was arrestingly beautiful, enough that Violet stopped in place to observe it further. The beast, which had dropped well back as soon as they’d left the main street, paused as well, its skeletal face dyed a gentle shade of red.

Above the space where the sun’s dying light shone brightest, Violet could see the subtle beginnings of a different color, shreds and vaguest hints of Glow hanging from the imperfections in the air.

Violet looked lower, to see if perhaps she might notice it dancing along the rooftops, but the scenery around her remained as it had been. She felt faintly disappointed but figured that the Glow’s soothing light would only become brighter as the sun declined.

The street they were on proved to be one that dead ended into yet more houses, seemingly without logic or reason, but its termination proved to be fortuitous, for Violet could see a house that was not quite as ruined as all the others. The walls still stood and there was even a door rather than a sagging hole that once marked one’s presence. A portion of the roof had sloughed off and taken the narrow brick chimney stack with it, but the material had not fallen into the house itself and so Violet figured that the interior was likely not choked with rubble.

She could form a decent enough camp there, beneath the sky even. Perhaps that way she’d get to see the Glow, as she had while sleeping on the rooftop what felt like entire aeons ago.

“That one?” The cat asked, following her gaze.

Violet nodded.

The cat surveyed the house critically, but didn’t seem to find anything objectionable.

“Lead the way.” It said, stepping politely aside, and Violet made her way up to the low garden wall that delineated the property. The front garden itself was very much overgrown, the front wall of the house entirely hidden behind a thatch of intermingled roses and fireweed, clematis and blackberry. Even bathed in evening light and shadowed from the direct influence of the sun, the flowers were vivid and healthy, yet deeply, unavoidably wrong all the same.

Violet tried to take her eyes away, immediately repeating the advice the cat had given her, that the flowers posed no threat on their own, and though she felt no direct fear this time, a sort of strangeness fell over her as she beheld an abdication of traditional form.

Tall stalks of mullein had bloomed with rows of blue and yellow flowers like gemstones, mint and white capped horehound enveloping the ground and overgrowing the garden wall. Their leaves curled into false blooms from which spilled trickles of reddish ichor. It held no scent that Violet could specifically identify, but in the back of her mind she felt something subtle, like the beginnings of an itch that was not strictly physical.

Even regarding these smallest of mutations put Violet in mind of fractals, for they amplified with the flowers and especially the vines to which the blooms were attached. The closer she looked the more repetition she found, flowers with flowers, leaves forming inevitably to petals at the center of which were more leaves. Thorny blackberry vines overflowed with fuzzy, rumpled mint leaves through which morning glories exulted in the evening’s gathering dim. Their stamens were long, almost antenna like, and and at the tip of each spiraled feathery bursts of golden lichen.

Clusters of berries hung here and there, but not of any type that Violet had seen before. Like the melded flowers and hybridized vines that had given them birth, the fruit held true to no one form, strawberries as black as ink and with stamens in place of seeds, seams along each side leaking pale falls of golden pollen. Berries were enfolded with curling swathes of soft, gelatinous flesh that reminded her unpleasantly of what she’d seen in the signal-box. Leaves had grown within the berries and only a few of them held logical form, for others were bisected by jutting thorns and vines that spiraled free like errant lances.

What ground Violet could see through the mint and horehound was littered with fallen berries, some of which had burst open to reveal clots and shapeless spreads of contentedly curled silk, within which Violet could pick up on the barest hints of movement and the sluggish beginnings of what might have been called dreams.

A shimmering veil of ants, carapaces flashing rainbow like a living oil slick, harvested the seeds from a fallen blackberry and when Violet paused to watch she could see that the seeds themselves were velvet soft and could not hold to a single form, for they seemed to know that they were being transported. They quivered with excitement.

She took a step back and shook her head, looking away. Then the cat was patting her leg with one paw, soft but insistent.

“Violet.” It said.

“I know, they’re only….” It took her a moment to recall what exactly the cat had said. “Emblematic.”

The cat shook its head. There was a somewhat discomforted look on its face, and Violet quickly glanced behind her, wondering if perhaps they’d disturbed a demon or….

The only thing behind her was the beast, which had drifted silently closer in the moments Violet had been examining the foliage, and now shot suddenly back upon catching her gaze, its demeanor suddenly very shy.

Violet glanced between the beast and the cat, newly confused.

“What?” She asked.

The cat gave the beast a scathing look.

“I saw what you were doing.” It growled.

The beast said nothing.

“What?” Violet asked, caught between confusion and a rising swell of concern.

“It was…” For a moment the cat didn’t entirely seem certain about what to say. Violet looked to the beast, which met her gaze, albeit obliquely.

f o l l o w i n g ---- It said.

“Imitating.” The cat countered, displeasure staining its voice.

“I don’t…” Violet began to say.

“It was doing everything you were doing.” Her companion continued, gaze still locked on the beast, which had found something else to look at. The folds of its fabric were drawn tightly inwards, like a bundled up curtain. Violet couldn’t help but think that it now looked strangely small.

“I know what it means,” she sighed. “I just don’t…what happened, what’s going on?”

“You cocked your head and so did it. You took a step back and it mimicked your gait. And it wouldn’t stop staring.” The cat said.

Violet looked to the beast, brows furrowed. She couldn’t decide how any of this made her feel. There was an undeniable curl of unease at the thought of the beast so avidly keeping track of which actions she took, but for the most part she just felt confused and a little displeased at the sudden distrustful anger that had flared up.

“Why were you doing that?” She asked, as firmly as she could. The cat had glued itself to her left side and Violet could feel the fur on her companion’s flank beginning to rise, though more from anger than fear.

The beast regarded her for a moment, then clicked its jaws together, as though unsure what to say. When it spoke at last, its voice was halting.

i -- h a v e n t -- s e e n -- a n y o n e -- l i k e -- y o u

i n -- s u c h -- a

l o n g

t i m e

“Like…me?” Violet asked uncertainly.

The beast nodded, the motion vigorous enough that its teeth chattered together. To her side the cat huffed and rolled its eyes. Violet ignored it.

“Do you mean, a human?” She asked.

i t -- r e m -º- . ---- The beast began to say, then shook its head sharply and was pulling suddenly back into the middle of the overgrown street.

Violet exchanged a small, confused glance with the cat, who turned a half circle before sliding off into the shadows. A moment later Violet felt her companion’s weight materialize atop her rucksack, settling between her shoulders.

“I don’t think your friend is playing with a full deck.” The cat said, voice low and decidedly unhappy. Though Violet couldn’t tell for sure, she just about knew the cat’s eyes were laser focused on the beast.

Violet sighed.

“Should we go inside?” She asked, loud enough that the beast could surely hear her, then turned back towards the house before the cat could say anything. An involuntary prickle of unease gathered at the back of her neck as she turned her back to the beast, yet nothing happened and a moment later she heard a swish of fabric well off to her right.

When she looked, the beast was floating gently in place perhaps twenty feet away, and though its gaze was even and direct, Violet still couldn’t pull any easy meaning from its blank, bony face.

She sighed and came to a halt, then attempted to glance back over her shoulder at the cat, only managing to glimpse one black furred shoulder.

“Yes?” The cat asked, dropping into a curious, somewhat contorted sitting position so that it could look her in the eyes.

“I don’t think it’s talked to anyone for ages,” Violet whispered. “It’s…um…it’s like when we were first learning to get along. There were pitfalls.”

The cat blinked, just barely arresting a sudden surge of offense.

“I don’t recall you being so creepy.” It muttered, ears pinned back.

Violet huffed and folded her arms, shooting the cat a look of unfiltered disdain.

“You’re the one who told me to talk to everything and not to dismiss people or animals or—”

The cat whipped its tail in front of her mouth, drowning her words in fur.

“Talk to everyone,” the cat emphasized even as Violet grabbed its tail, forcing it away from her face. “Not make friends or attach significance to. In an ideal world no one person should ever have to depend on anyone else but for momentary convenience or entertainment.”

“You don’t believe that,” Violet shot back, maintaining a tight grip on the cat’s restlessly twitching tail. “We’re friends. You’ve saved my life.”

“Let go of my tail.” The cat said quietly.

Violet did so and let her companion recover its trapped appendage. Finally, the cat sighed, a small hiss of feline breath warming the side of her neck.

“Right….” The cat muttered to itself, then stood back up, balanced primly atop Violet’s rucksack. “You’re going to need to explain some etiquette to that shambling bedsheet over there if it’s really gonna tag along. Other than that, let’s agree not to argue anymore for tonight. It’s not very fun.”

The cat’s words were stern but there was a grudging sort of acceptance and perhaps just the barest hint of an apology as well. Violet reached up, somewhat awkwardly, and laid a hand on the cat’s shoulder.

“No more arguing.” She agreed, and looked to the beast, which seemed to have been quietly awaiting an outcome.

Violet took a deep breath and placed her hands on her hips, trying to appear stern but well meaning, like her mother often was when explaining the undying importance of some freshly broken rule or another.

“Um…you,” she addressed the beast only a little uncertainly, still not at all sure what to call it. “If you’re gonna come with us, you need to do some things, okay?”

At this the beast straightened up a little, regarding her with an avidness that was almost intimidating. It nodded enthusiastically, teeth rattling.

“You need to be polite,” Violet decided, figuring that this was probably the most important part of etiquette as an entire, nebulous whole. “And to be polite you need to respect other people. Before you do anything to someone, you need to ask. Like…when you first met us, you asked for food instead of just taking it. And you said please. You need to do that for a lot of other stuff too.”

o t h e r . .. . ---- The beast said thoughtfully, but didn’t seem particularly put off by the idea of these new rules and strictures. Its gaze was still very direct, almost eager. Violet couldn’t erase the image of the actual beast, whatever it was, grinning from behind the artificial smile of its animated skull.

“Like…if you wanted to imitate me,” she said. “You should ask. And tell me why.”

The beast ducked its head shyly and said nothing.

“And you should also, um, I guess try to get along with the cat. I think you could be friends.”

The cat scoffed, not even bothering to hide its contempt for the idea, then slipped down from Violet’s rucksack and trotted around to her front, eyeing the house’s half rotten front door.

“The night is catching us,” it said, clearly eager to leave the conversation behind. “We should set camp.”

Violet nodded, figuring she could always tell the beast more etiquette rules later…provided she could remember any.

The cat was the first one into the house, slipping neatly through a narrow gap where the front doorjamb had crumbled away. It took only a few moments to declare the house free of all malign presences and the beast moved ahead to get the door for Violet, which involved pushing it off of its moldering hinges.

The door just about disintegrated upon hitting the floor and Violet gingerly picked her way over its splintered remains, stepping directly into what had once been a living room. This was the part of the house the roof had fallen away from and Violet could see straight up into the sky, where smooth veils of reddish evening light dueled for prominence with an ever intensifying Glow.

Violet could see patches and hints of past individuality and civilization along the length of the living room itself, but the space had been very much worn down by time and the elements. The floor, which looked to have once been tile, had been overgrown by soft pads of verdant moss. A soft formless lump sat towards the back of the room and Violet guessed that it had probably once been a couch. Yet more hybridized flowers spiraled crazily off from it at bizarre angles, numb to the sunlight above.

Where the chimney stack terminated was a small brick hearth completely filled in with a curious, glass fronted box. Within it, Violet could see a cozy little pile of logs neatly arrayed atop a metal grate. This put her in mind of starting a fire, which she had gone the last few nights without, but when she tried to pull the box open, it refused to budge. There was a seam along the front, where the metal rimmed glass plate was held in place, yet there did not seem to be any visible mechanism to make it swing open.

“Come on….” She muttered aloud, shuffling to one side in order to get a better vantage point. Was there a button or some sort of hidden catch?

From behind her, the cat padded softly up.

“Well?” It asked.

“There’s firewood already laid out,” Violet said, tapping the grimy glass impatiently. “I just…it won’t open.” She rattled the front of the fireplace once more but only succeeded in dislodging a small shower of dust.

The cat chuckled to itself.

“I’m sure you’ll get it.” It said breezily, then was off again, patrolling along the outer edges of the room, one eye cocked surreptitiously back to keep track of her progress.

Annoyed, Violet found her fire poker and wedged the point into the narrow seam that held the front of the curious fireplace closed, then wrenched back as hard as she could. She expected the whole thing to pop instantly open, perhaps with a satisfying crack like that of a freshly opened can, yet nothing of the sort happened. Metal groaned and creased, the whole frame of the fireplace shivering. For a moment it seemed that the front was about to give way, then it shivered and the thick glass pane abruptly exploded, showering the fronts of Violet’s legs with shards. She danced back with a yelp, her poker clattering to the floor, tiny pieces of glass skittering across mossy tile.

The cat laughed at this and made its way casually back over, unafraid of the broken glass, which had somehow fallen apart into blunt little crumbs, not a sharp edge to be seen.

“That…” Violet shook her head and carefully crouched, not particularly wanting to kneel on the glass, no matter how dull it was. Peering into the fireplace’s gloomy interior, she retrieved her poker and went to shift the wood inside towards the back. It wasn’t exactly good that she’d broken the front, but the fireplace could still be used. She’d add some fresher wood, then…

The tip of her poker clacked impotently against the nearest log, which refused to budge. She poked it again, harder this time, yet only succeeded in chipping off a piece of knobby brown bark. The material beneath was distinctly honeycomb patterned and resembled plaster more than wood.

For a moment Violet could only stare, utterly baffled. Perhaps the wood had petrified, in the same way a fossil did when buried and forgotten about for a long time. But Violet knew that wasn’t right, for the cat was beginning to laugh again.

“It’s electric.” Her companion said, not bothering to hide its amusement.

Violet stared at the faux firewood where it rested neatly upon the grate. Now that she was looking closer it hardly seemed convincing at all, distinctly plasticky and almost exaggerated in its presentation of what wood was like.

“I don’t…why?” She asked, feeling faintly helpless in her confusion.

“Before you is human civilization in its entirety,” the cat said, dipping once more into grandiosity. “In the old days electrical current would have run through this whole device. These carefully modeled logs would have glowed and performed all kinds of tricks for the humans. And when they tired of the fake fire crackling upon fake logs, they would have turned it off and left the whole array intact for next time. No need to actually gather wood or build a fire or clear the ash away afterwards….”

Violet sat in silence for a moment, trying to imagine this, then stood straight and began to examine the metal box once more.

“What are you doing?” The cat asked.

“Maybe there’s a crank somewhere. I could wind it up.” She said distractedly.

“It’s not like your lantern.”

“Oh.” Violet sat back, quietly disappointed, staring at the dark, thoroughly artificial interior of the fireplace.

“Fortunately,” the cat said after a moment. “You still have your thumbs. And your spark lighter.”

That was true. Still, Violet couldn’t help but frown.

“You knew it was fake.” She said.

“I did.” The cat admitted.

“Why’d you let me break it?”

At this the cat flashed her a not entirely benevolent grin.

“It spoils the illusion.” Her companion said vaguely, then stepped away.

The beast, which had been observing passively from where it was tucked into a corner next to the front door, slipped silently up one wall and out of the house. Again Violet had to fight back an involuntary shiver at the weirdness of its motion.

When the beast returned a few moments later it was very carefully carrying a moss speckled brick in its jaws. Violet, caught momentarily off guard, could only stare until she put together what was happening.

“Oh,” she said, and nodded quickly, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. “Thank you.”

The beast settled back, its fabric puffing up slightly, then let the brick drop to the floor with a thump. From its place next to Violet, the cat twitched its whiskers, not entirely pleased.

“What’s your friend supposed to be doing now?” It asked, faintly discomforted.

“Ring,” Violet said, then cleared her throat and endeavored to be more communicative. “It’s bringing stuff for a fire ring.”

The cat sniffed.

“Great, now you’re talking like each other.” It muttered, then seemed to realize its tone, for it straightened up and then evaporated into unspace, returning a few moments later with a small bundle of dry twigs in its mouth. The cat laid them down next to the brick, its motions fussy and overly precise.

The beast didn’t appear to notice, eyeless gaze pinned to Violet. She shuffled in place, made uncomfortable by the sudden competition that had sprung up between her companions.

“I’ll…set up camp, then.” She said, and knelt to do just that.