The Itinerant Storyteller
The rain fell hard, as though it were trying to beat the ground into submission. Rivers flowed down the street, illuminated by a single dim yellow streetlamp as they passed house after house, all closed up against the oncoming storm. Then there was a clatter of a door; the pounding of urgent footsteps; both muffled and dimmed by the constant drumming of water hitting the floor. A solitary figure dashed into the street, flashing through the pool of sickly light in an instant. Behind him an urgent cry:
“Glen! Glen! Come back!! Stop!”
Glen didn’t stop.
He ran on, slipping on the worn flagstones of an age-old pavement, hair glistening and dark in the downpour. His eyes flickered from side to side, taking in the old brick terraces on either side, the gardenless prisons he was trying to escape from. His heart pounded with the effort of running from the terror behind him. His lungs burned with the sweet air away from Them. Two more people sped through the streetlamp’s glow.
“Glen! You need to take your tablets! This isn’t you!”
Glen didn’t stop.
The junction at the end of the street was pretty small, two roads intersecting at right angles and then carrying on their way, each corner with a small business struggling to exist. Right now they were closed. It was almost midnight. Glen didn’t pause as he ran past the shop on the corner. He didn’t pause as he flew over the kerb and onto the road. The cries behind him became distressingly urgent.
There was a sudden blare of horns, a glare of headlights. Glen’s head turned just in time to catch sight of a roaring behemoth charging towards him, its eyes blazing like the sun, the rain bouncing off its red, shimmering face. He screamed.
Then he stopped.
— — —
“Well. That was quite the accident you had, Mr Kingston.”
Glen’s eyes flickered open. The ceiling was a strangely off colour, a sort of green mixed with khaki that simultaneously nauseated him and put him in mind of an antiseptic. Or was that the smell of antiseptic? He couldn’t decide. He was lying on a bed, head slightly raised on two huge pillows, arms resting on top of the blanket. He wasn’t sure, but the strange scratchy texture of his clothes told him he was wearing a hospital gown. He’d had enough of those to last him a lifetime. Cautiously he looked to the end of the bed and took in the man that was speaking to him.
He sat on a large, round chair in the corner, his left hand holding open a book, vintage brown boots resting on a briefcase that was lying on a low coffee table. A blue shirt, faded jeans and gentle smile all rested on the man like they had always been a part of him. Behind him the same nauseating green covered the walls, acting as a backdrop for a plain white plastic conduit that ran around the room and seemed to be providing power to various medical-looking instruments. One large window filled the space to Glen’s right and the light from the sun outside glinted off the man’s small, square glasses. Glen’s voice wavered as he spoke.
“You’re not a… a doctor?”
“Doctor? No.”
The man’s smile widened to a grin, and then he closed his book one-handedly, snapping the pages together with a well-practiced flick.
“After what just happened you should probably have been seeing a mortician. You kinda picked a fight with a van and lost.”
Glen swallowed and stared around the room. He was clearly in a hospital but somehow everything felt too neat. Too clean. Something was wrong.
“Am I dead?” He asked nervously.
The man said nothing for a brief second, then laughed quietly.
“Dead? Now if you were dead it’d be a damn sight harder for me to be having this conversation with you, wouldn’t it?” The man gestured at the room with his free hand, keeping his right hand firmly on the handle of his briefcase. Something about the gesture bothered Glen. Something that wasn’t quite right.
“This isn’t the afterlife. It’s just life, same as it ever was.” He leaned forward. “Only now you’re seeing more than you used to. And that worries certain people.”
How did the man know about Them? Glen shot out of bed, almost knocking the neatly folded blanket at the end onto the floor. He immediately backed into a corner and crouched, hands raised in a claw-like gesture, ready to gouge at anyone who came near.
“You can’t take me back!” he screamed. “I know what I am, but You can’t take me back!”
“Whoa!” the man exclaimed, rising slowly to his feet with his palm outstretched, the briefcase falling to his side. “Who said anything about taking you back anywhere? I’m pretty invested in you being free, as a matter of fact!”
Glen started to rise, the shoulders of his denim jacket falling back into their natural position, when the door suddenly burst open. A huge figure whose shoulders almost brushed the door-frame barged into the room and for an instant an arctic wind blew, making the fur lining his collar flutter. His ears were pointed, rising almost above the top of his head. Even through the thick trench coat he wore Glen could see muscles bulging, muscles that were clearly needed to hold aloft the great battle axes the behemoth held in each hand. His gleaming green eyes locked with Glen’s. He smirked and took a step forward.
The man’s sword flashed past the behemoth’s face, his brown cloth robes flowing beautifully past as he turned the air between Glen and the door into a blur of steel. The behemoth backed up half a step, using one axe to block the innumerable strikes aimed at him and the other to try to hit the whirling dervish in front of him.
As steel clashed on steel something else clashed in Glen’s mind. He’d been under the blanket in a hospital gown, but now the blanket was neatly folded and he was standing in the corner of the room wearing a denim jacket and cargo pants. That wasn’t right.
The behemoth roared, bringing both axes down in a wide sweep. The man threw himself backwards, sprawling back across the floor as he brought his laser pistol round to bear on the enraged, fur-clad berserker now striding across the room. Glen’s eye twitched.
There was a single loud zapping noise and the smell of burning hair, and the behemoth, a stunned look on his face, fell neatly back onto the hospital bed. The man stood and clipped his pager back onto the belt under his white doctor’s coat, turning to face Glen with an appraising look
“Don’t look down.” he commanded. “Look at my eyes.”
Glen stared wide eyed at the man, whose deep blue eyes seemed to be windows into some kind of unknowable, dark void.
“My name is Abel” he said, staring searchingly at Glen. “What colour are my shoes?”
“What? What is hap..”
“What colour are my shoes?” Abel’s face hardened. “Don’t look down!”
Glen blinked and swallowed, transfixed by the storm in Abel’s eyes.
“Brown.” he gulped.
Abel’s face instantly crinkled back into a soft smile, his irises shallowing to the gentle blue of a lake in summer.
“You’ll do nicely.” he chortled, turning his head to the sky. “Odin? Get us both out of here”
“Seriously, what the..” Glen started, only to be interrupted again as the door banged open and an emergency crash team burst through the door. Abel stepped neatly around the bed to grab Glen by the shoulder, rattling off a list of medical jargon that didn’t seem to make any sense. The crash team immediately set to work, slicing the hospital gown off the huge old man lying in the bed and charging some strange electrical equipment that was sat innocuously in the corner of the room. Abel’s grip on Glen’s shoulder tightened.
“Any second now we’ll be superfluous. Just hold on tight and try not to vomit, OK?”
“For the last time, what is..”
There was a twisting sensation, as though the whole world was moving in every direction at once, and Glen doubled over, his head throbbing. Just before the hospital floor dwindled into an antiseptic point Glen noticed Abel’s shoes. They were black leather.
