A Man sat in a garden examining his toe. There seemed to be a hole in it. Not directly on his foot of course, ha ha, now that couldn’t really be now could it, on his only pair of black socks. He wondered for the first time in a very long time, where he might get hold of some sewing needle and thread. The darn thing had to be darned. They didn’t make socks like these anymore.
He kept on musing on that thread for quite a bit, quite oblivious to his surrounding, which to any other person, might be worthy of abandoning self-centered pursuits of thinking and devoting a fresh and blank mind to his surroundings to be filled by the lushness of it. Because the nature of the garden was just so. It was lush. But not lush in an overwhelming and really pretentious way. It would never pass off as a carefully landscaped grounds of a manor house. It would always remind you of a garden which one could see when you turned around the corner from a game keepers rambling and almost tumbledown cottage. It was over grown to say the least. And some creepers and bushes seemed to have gone quite utterly mad. They had no sense of direction; and didn’t care a wit about it, either. They just ran, helter skelter, whichever way it pleased them, playing chase with the sun, running amok among old bricks and maybe some forgotten wells. There were hollows and shades, and there was a constant taste of damp and wetness, though refreshing, in the air. You could probably see the fields behind the last bush if you strained and if you looked harder still, you might be able to see the purple hills against a blue sky, if the sun was out, but grey if it rained. If the man looked about himself, he might quite possibly mistake himself to be sitting in a water colour painting if some Victorian’s fantasy of a perfect rural life. And he might even be assailed by the thoughts that reverberates themselves through one’s head, which would convince him, this place was Life itself.
Examining the sock turning out to be quite fruitless, the man turned his attention to his surroundings, but did not make a religious experience of it. His behavior made it look more like a shopping expedition for vegetables. He inspected the wares of the garden quite thoroughly and very curiously, laughing over a beetle, whistling his approval over some ferns, frowning most interestedly over some other curious rock. But he did occasional look at his most tattered time piece that he wore on a gold fob chain on his waistcoat, that betrayed that he might be waiting for something or someone.
After a good while, he seemed to be satisfied with whatever he had crammed into his little dusty black bag slung over his side, and he sat down contently under a tree, on a lone bench that seemed to be made of marble, and exquisitely crafted, and very very out of place. He didn’t make a fuss about it, and hence proved he never found anything unusual about a marble bench to appear out of nowhere.
He shook out the contents of his bag beside him, and a curious assortment of objects clattered on to the bench. Yet when he put down the bag, it seemed to be just as full as when he had opened it.
The objects on the marble glinted in sunlight. There was a tube made of what looked like brass, a compass, or something that had its shape, a piece of parchment which looked laminated, and a pipe, carved out of striated wood. And beneath it all was a black leather journal, quite dog eared, and probably chewed by the same dog too. It was battered and as dusty as everything about the man, and the bag it came out of.
He checked his pocket watch for the last time, and put it away with a tsk-ing sound of finality, and picked up the metal tube. He held it up horizontally to the sunlight for a brief moment with the palm of both hands, perhaps like an offering to the powers above, but the brief second that he did this in, looked like he was checking it for its weight or perhaps to assure himself that it was still working. Then resting it on one hand only he carefully ran his forefinger along its spine. For a moment, nothing happened. Then suddenly a fine, almost invisible joint appeared along the length on which his finger had traced. The object that resembled a tube before, albeit a shiny one, now appeared to be a cleverly crafted box. He opened the box and some images sprung up right above it, floating transparently in the air. It would seem bewildering to others, but the man seemed t o understand exactly what it did. He touched a symbol here and there and more appeared in response to his motions. And it all combined to mean something. The man thoughtfully considered what he was seeing, and seemed to do some fast calculations. Satisfied, he shut the box with a snap, and the box turned back into a gleaming tube with a pulse of light erasing the fine line of its joints, from end to end. The box went back into his bag.
He next picked up the laminated parchment, and nodded in agreement with what he saw. This parchment was a list. It listed all the things he had to do. The most distinguishing element of this list was that it updated itself. He was satisfied with what he saw, because what he had seen in the box corresponded with the latest items on his list, and the confirmation was all he was looking for. It went back into his bag too.
He considered the compass-like thing, and decided that he didn’t need that presently so that went back again, and all that remained was the black diary and the pipe.
Disappointingly, he didn’t do anything with the pipe at all. He just lit it with the tip of his fingers and exhaled a cloud of sickly sweet smelling smoke, before picking up the little black diary and starting to flip through it.
He paused for a second, looking up, almost as if noticing the disgusted expression of the fauna around him, gave a short chuckle.
“Aw, hell. I went ‘an lit up this piece of shit, didn’t I? I’m sorry I had to bother you.” And he hauled himself from the bench and marched into the horizon, with the strains of his low voice disappearing as if it never was there, saying, “ I guess the time’s come for me to get down and writing something down in that damn book again.”
* * * * *
Cybele looked out of the gigantic French windows of her drawing room out into the garden, seeing but not seeing. Her eyes glanced over the trees and the shadows and the neatly maintained flowering shrubs of daffodils, yet not taking in any detail. They passed over the gate that led onto the streets, and over a man standing under a tree beside the gate, in the shadows, looking pointedly at where she stood, smoking a pipe.
There was a man inside the gate. Smoking a pipe.
She looked again but he wasn’t there anymore. The human mind in her body dismissed it as imagination, but the core of her, not human at all, knew it was no mistake.
There was a man standing beside the gate smoking a pipe. And he had gotten past the enchantments that shrouded the peripheries of the house. The very enchantments which even the warring factions, and more so, Zephyrus, hadn’t been able to cross.
She cautiously walked out towards the gate to the very spot where he had been standing. Yet there was nothing there. The very fabric of time and magic that the enchantments used remained untouched, with not a single iota of ripple in it.
She stiffened suddenly, as she felt an invisible gust of wind brush her long hair like a caress. And she turned to see glinting eyes that kept melting into the shadows deepened by the smoke coming from a pipe.
A sickeningly sweet scent of tobacco surrounded her as she stared at a man, in a dusty over coat and a cowboy hat not even inches from her face. And she had not felt a thing.
He smiled, and slightly sharp incisors gleamed at her.
“Cybele, I believe.” His voice echoed something so vast that she thought she was witnessing Time. The immortal Cybele was in control of the human, and yet she found that she had lost the power to speak for a moment.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“Some one you’d want to listen to, now, for your benefit. A friend. For now at least.” He chuckled.
She lost her momentary paralysis, and she closed the distance between them and twined her arms around his neck and moved closer.
“A friend, you say?” she whispered in his ears, dripping with everything males of any world or realm found irresistible. “ Now why would I do that…. there’s so much better things to do…” she said against his mouth. She felt him smile.
And with a gleam of triumph in her eyes she kissed him, letting the skin on her lips turn to fire and the palms she held his face with burn with raw power. She felt his smile grow larger, and moved into his mouth, in a full open mouthed kiss. After a minute she lost all thoughts of what she was doing, and for the first time in eternity got drawn into the kiss itself, so that she forgot all else. Only the shadow’s mouth mattered and the feel of his lips, and the colours she saw with her eyes closed, which could not be seen again with eyes open.
And suddenly she was pushed away, and she saw herself standing two feet away from the man, and her hands were now firmly gripped in his, like manacles of flesh and blood. She couldn’t feel her hands, not only her human ones; all power that she had seemed to be clamped off. She felt worse than a shell. She then felt the first rush of apprehension, which she suspected could turn into clawing terror if he stepped away from her.
For whatever reasons, he didn’t want her to be afraid.
“As much as I liked that kiss, I gotta ask, are you always such a slut?”
She gasped. He shouldn’t be standing there. Yet he was, and she was the one who couldn’t move.
“Lets get down to business, shall we? Don’t have much time you know. Or do I? doesn’t matter, does it? You, my pretty, have the talent and the capacity to be a free agent in this war, Coming Soon, as they say in the flicks, don’t they? I know you’re considering it. But then you are also aware that you have this very female tendency to lose your head and get involved in the dirt because it gives you temporary fixes. My advice is quit being a junkie, and some effort in keeping your head unchained from either side. Its gonna do you good. Lots of dog- sorry, bitch biscuits to be earned, ‘ya follow?”
She didn’t even have the power to be enraged by what he said. And maybe because of her powers being tamped down, she listened to what he said. As she cocked her head for him to continue, she was annoyed to find that he just grinned, and let her go.
“That’s it?!” she exclaimed, as he walked away, down the path. “ That was all this drama was for?”
He paused, mid stride and half turned. “ Well, yeah.” He sounded amused. “ You honestly didn’t expect me to tell you everything did you? A little drama never hurt anyone.”
And he suddenly wasn’t there anymore, except for laughter in her ears, that which drawled:
“Besides, you started it.”
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