Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which Darkness Falls.
"Those are clouds, aren't they?" said Kitman.
"As opposed to what?" said I.
"Well, if you crossed a sheep with a jellyfish...oh, never mind," said Kitman, and started taking pictures.
"That's my sky," said Noel, with an air of gleeful possession. "It gets better at sunset. When the moon rises."
"It does, does it?" said Kitman, lifting his finger off the button. "Why?"
"If I tell you," said Noel, "you'll have to kill me for spoiling the surprise."
Kitman gave me a bemused look. "I'm giddy with anticipation," he said. "Which fascinates me because although I've heard that phrase used any number of times, occasionally even by myself, this is the first time I've ever known what it actually means."
He turned away from the window. "Come on," he said. "Let's have a look at the study."
After Noel and I tore ourselves from the view as though it were visual velcro, we followed him.
The study differed from the one in Kitman's house; the walls to the sides of the door had been modified with floor to ceiling stained-glass windows to allow the last of the day to enter from the rear of the house, and when we entered the room it was bathed in wine-red sun.
There was an ornate clock on the wall, of the miniature grandfather clock design, stopped at two-thirty-five; this was mounted above a small set of bookshelves.
To our rear in the corners were a pair of overstuffed armchairs of the type that demand you sink into them with a cigar and a snifter of brandy and wait for the encroaching cold of night to send you off to bed.
"There's brandy and cigars in that little cupboard on the left," said Noel conversationally. Kitman and I swiveled our heads at him.
"Well, there is," he said defensively. He turned to the cherrywood cupboard and swung open one of its doors to reveal a rack of bottles, along with a humidor of cigars that explained the faint exotic smell that hung in the air.
"—Okay," said Kitman. "Not my choice of vices, particularly combined with theft, but you're clearly correct." Noel closed the door again and Kitman turned his attention to the remainder of the room.
Shortly after he did, he emitted a faint whine, and I knew immediately what it signified; Kitman was pining.
As it happened, what he was pining for was made of oak.
Under the windows was a desk that would have been monstrous had it not been so handsome, and which could have been more epic only had it been hewn of living granite. Its top consisted of multiple sections of thick glass on hinges that allowed them to swing up and down. Underneath the glass was a single large sheet of paper that was fed from a roll mounted on the left-hand wall, passing under a metal clasp on the way. A secondary desktop was mounted at the right on an armature that allowed it to swing out of the way; this contained pens, books, a coffee mug and assorted bits and bobs. Under all this was a selection of drawers of various sizes and shapes, all covered in carvings in elaborate abstract patterns.
"I want this desk," said Kitman, in tones of barely suppressed drool.
"You could never get it out the door," I said. It fit the width of the room exactly, and was too large to have gone through the windows or been taken up the stairwell, even though the stairwell was itself inexplicably wide. "It must have been built in place."
"You're thinking three-dimensionally," said Kitman. "But no matter. Let us see what we can see."
We squinted at the paper under the dust-free glass. It was covered with notes and doodles, in handwriting that I shortly recognized as identical to that on the papers we'd found in the basement. The ink, however, was familiar in a different way, and I turned back to the contents of the secondary desktop.
"Kitman," I said, holding up one of the pens. "Bic Biros!"
"Fascinating," said Kitman.
"The moon is inconstant," said Noel, who had remained focused on the writing. "It varies according to the deepest desire."
Kitman leaned over Noel's shoulder. "Even more fascinating. What's that bit over there on the far right, Williams?"
I focused on the bit over on the far right.
"A recipe for sachertorte," I said.
"Oh," said Kitman. "— Hello, is this a map?"
I joined them to have a better look. It was more of a sketch, really; at bottom left was the house, sitting at the top of its small mountain, surrounded by the forest. Downward — which was to say, up and to the right — past the forest, was a ribbon- shaped figure that could have been a ravine or a river but either way had a bridge over it (or so we gathered from the notation "bridge"); beyond that was more forest, and a collection of geometrical figures labeled "city of Sand". This was on the edge of what looked like a sea, was labeled "Sea", and had some lines jutting out from the presumed shore that were labeled "Piers". A circled X with the scrawled notation "To the Beyond" lay just offshore.
The map had DO THIS PROPERLY IDIOT scrawled across it.
"I wonder if he did?" said Kitman. "I suppose it would be past the realms of acceptable taste to go through the desk drawers, much as I'd like to..."
"Yes," I said, and quite firmly too.
"There might be a diary," he said hopefully.
"No," I said.
"Oh, all right," he said, and turned away from temptation. "But I'll get a picture of the map anyway." He had to use the flash, as the light of day had begun to leak away.
"Come see the sunset," called Noel, who had quietly slipped outside.
We joined him at the window seat.
"This will be good," he said. "Wait for the moonrise."
The last of the sun vanished with a flicker of green, leaving a sky textured with blue and violet. Darkness flowed up the mountainside toward the house.
"Moonrise?" said Kitman. "You won't see much if it's rising from the west."
"Bets?" said Noel. He worked the latch on the window, and opened it outward for a better view.
What was left of the sunlight continued to fail, and stars emerged as blue sky deepened to violet, and violet to black; the distant mountains faded into outlines of indigo blocking the stars.
And finally darkness rolled in completely, and there was nothing to see but countless bright stars and the blackness of the mountains...but as our eyes adjusted to the scene, we perceived that the sky was not so dark as it appeared. It remained textured, almost like the surface of an oil painting, and this unfamiliar graininess persistent and intensified as the moon did indeed creep up over the jagged horizon in the form of a strangely translucent watery globe —
and I caught my breath when I realized what this pale orb, glowing from within, had revealed: other mountains, new mountains, standing huge, dim and violet in the far distance behind the moon.
Silence comes in any number of flavors; the particular one obtaining at this moment was the sound, essentially, of Kitman freezing on the trigger, and it lasted a good long while.
Eventually it changed, despite the fact that he continued to not take a picture, into a more prosaic silence wind through the distant trees, our own breathing, and a small comfortable sigh from Noel.
Peculiar small noises of the night crept in, the almost-nothings at the threshold of hearing that might be artifacts of the blood pulsing through the inner workings of your ears, or the faint creaks of cooling wood, or your imagination; the sound of time, passing.
And then the silence was broken.
I had unconsciously been expecting it to be broken by Kitman saying something about stalactites and stalagmites, but I was horribly wrong.
Echoing up from the trees came a cry: a more-than-animal noise, something like a wolf's howl but more like the squeal of an insane dolphin, and so carefully uttered that I knew intuitively that it was a word.
"Voon..."
Not a word I knew, but I understood something of it: a word, a name, an expression of hungry despair. And when it sounded again, it sounded again noticeably closer...
I stepped away from the window. Everyone stepped away from the window. Some of us stepped all the way off the window seat and onto the floor, and then stepped back up again as quickly as possible.
"Voon..."
It was a sound not repeated but answered.
"Williams," said Kitman, through a dry throat, "do you see something moving down there in the back yard? or rather, several somethings?"
I looked down into the back yard, and saw nothing in the pale moonlight...
...but what I heard was the undeniable, definite, definitive sound, from two stories below, of the back door we had propped open being closed — deliberately, firmly — and latched from the inside.
"I think," said Kitman,"it may be time to go."
I leaned in close to Kitman's ear. "Will the vaxillator work on you know who?"
"We're about to find out," he whispered. I heard a rattle and click, and Kitman's ten million candlepower flashlight flared to life. "Hold this for me, would you?" he said.
Unfortunately, both Noel and I reached for it, and knocked it to the floor. It rolled away and ended up pointing toward the stairwell.
"Somebody get that, would you?" said Kitman.
No one got it.
"Splendid," said Kitman. "— You know, Williams, this plastic lid is very hard to open with sweaty fingers.
("Voon...?")
"And it's very hard to see the buttons without a backlight."
Faint noises came from the stairwell, as of something ascending the stairs...several somethings, somethings small and light-weight — somethings, I became certain, without legs.
"Do you smell ammonia?" said Noel.
"Sweaty fingers also impede pressing the buttons," remarked Kitman.
"Voon," said something from the second-floor landing — twenty feet away, thirty? The flashlight illuminated the half-height wall at the top of the stairs as brightly as day, but that just left the actual stairs as a pool of blackness. I squinted, but saw nothing. Nothing! Silence again, heartpounding silence —
"Voon," said something from the open window directly behind me, and I felt the lightest possible touch upon my ankle.
