Remy & Ana: Episode Three
Episode 2: The Sasquatch of Kind As he was dying from a gunshot wound, the bald sasquatch's last thoughts began to surge out at everyone. "Why did you do that? How could you interfere with an honorable dual between men? What human did this?"
"It was me," Remy thought calmly to the dying king. "I did it because I realized it was my right to do so." (Lucky looked at his brother in horror. He could only make out a faint silhouette in the shadow beneath the trees, and it stood eerily still.) "You betrayed Grieve, who had kept his promise to you and believed you to be dead. How can you go back on your word, and banish him? That makes no sense."
"Are you nuts!" Lucky whispered.
Bally put up his head and whistled in a loud, low, whale-like moan that washed over miles of countryside. Then he said: "You are... You are--No, it can't be! Thank you!"
Then he died. All of the sasquatch flooded into the meadow silently, the nude corpse of Bally soon disappearing. The hair of the quickly moving crowd was colorless in the moonlight.
"Why did you do that?" Lucky said.
"I... I don't know," Remy said. He looked at the inscrutable ground. "I don't--I just don't know what came over me. It was like I--I don't know."
Lucky came up close to him and said, "Remy," as if about to tell him something very important. Then he instead slapped him hard in the side of the head so that it went into the tree beside him. Meanwhile, grief and elation swept through the minds of those around them and were soon vanishing with the sasquatch themselves. Grieve approached the humans alone.
"Remy," he said. "I am now the king of Kind. This is because of your acts. And although I do not understand what has happened here today, I am still grateful to you. There is something about you, something that is mysterious and strange. The people of Kind have also taken to you, and welcome you into our city. I will assist you in retrieving your wife from the evil Raven King Von Neumann."
"I thank you very kindly, Your Highness. And excuse me for asking. But did you just call Von Neumann the Raven King?"
"Yes. This is the name by which we know him."
"Uh-huh," Remy said.
The forest was silent and empty. Grieve now turned and guided Lucky and Remy deeper into the woods. Their thoughts turned sleepy and idle from the long day as they moved swiftly back. They came to a black hole piercing from a small dark outcrop where the trees ended, and they entered it. They walked for a ways underground down a pitch black corridor, and the floor gradually smoothed out into a level path. Torch lights began to appear far up ahead. Quiet watery whistles indicated the presence of sasquatch parents putting their children to sleep. Grieve turned down a side hall and then brought the two humans into a small candle-lit chamber with smooth, rounded granite walls. There was no door, and a circular open vent shaft imported a mixture of cool and warm air from some distant place via the floor. It then reappeared in the ceiling, traveling up to other chambers above. There were two beds made of neatly groomed and stacked fir limbs, and woolen blue blankets were also provided.
"You will sleep here," said King Grieve. "And in the morning I and my troops will go with you to Vancouver Island." The humans were soon deep in sleep and enveloped in the idle dreams and late-night thoughts of Kind.
* * *
They were awoken early by the soldiers in a nearby barrack. The soldiers' psychic energy prodded and muscled all of the civilians in the neighboring district. Being underground, the brothers were disoriented amidst the bustle of exercise and focused procedures. Remy immediately became alert, standing out of bed. For a moment he expected to be attacked but found that there was no one around him. Human came in. "Good morning," he said. "I hope the barracks didn't alarm you."
"What time is it?" said Remy.
"I do not know your time. It is well before sunrise. You are being summoned to the central hall for breakfast now. You must hurry." Human would not give them time to bathe or change.
"What the hell?" said Remy. "Can we at least, you know, go to the bathroom?"
Human silently rushed them to a wide corridor. It was separated into four lanes by three long straight canals, each wholly enclosed with a plastic-like transparent substance. The humid air enclosed in the canals slowly dribbled into small pools on the floor from small round openings. Lucky, looking through one of the misty portholes, discovered a marsh dense with flora. The muddy water idly flowed from one end of the long chamber to the other. Two or three sasquatch off in the distance squatted above open portholes in the marshy canals. Human left the two humans alone there. Once relieved, they were taken to quickly wash their hands and faces in an artificial waterfall separated from this chamber.
Human then immediately set the men on top of two large saddled mammals without giving them time to step back and dry their hands. Their steeds resembled boars or tapirs, but they were large, pale, and blind, with tremendous mole-like noses. Their squat legs conveyed the humans through Kind at a fast clip. The humans watched an array of vistas pass them from their woven saddles, the cool artificial wind blowing in their hair. Some chambers were filled with merchant stalls overloaded with fruits, vegetables, tubers and mushrooms from all over North America. Then they opened up into vast underground expanses, like tertiary and quaternary levels of land. One vast chamber was lit with bioluminescent fungi covering the broad flat floor and high ceiling. The shape of the room, though all glowing and sparkling, was forest-like, occasionally opening into flat rectangular plazas. The "trees" were limestone columns that had apparently formed from ancient clusters of stalactites and stalagmites. Originally, however, they were only artificial metal beams. Small predatory worms living along the ceiling produced stars by means of small electric discharges inside of their transparent bodies. Occasionally, one of the stars would blink out and then slowly spark back up again like a phosphorescent lamp. Along the floor were tents beside open fires and a winding creek glimmering gold from the flames. In one place a camp on a high steppe could be seen from over a mile distant. The column of smoke from its fire spread out over the land and then turned into a wisp being pulled quietly into a black maw high above.
This chamber was joined via an unlit descending tunnel to an even larger expanse of countryside, with only a few wide towering columns of limestone. Its tremendous pale ceiling looked like a long elliptical sky. It was lined with white plaster, and its shadowy dome looked as if pierced with bullet holes. With its traces of fog, fragrant fields, and subdued lighting, the chamber had the feeling of a world enclosed inside of a room. This, Human revealed without words, was in a sense true. The chamber had at one time been a natural pocket within the earth that had formed when an aquifer dried up several million years prior. This new chamber was completely enclosed from the rest of the earth for some time. The sasquatch then expanded it and re-purposed it to extend the Kindish farmland.
The crops received their sunlight by hand-operated light canals, which fell from above and then danced in slowly turning zig-zags over the floor. Bright beams of sunlight were projected through mirrors and large glass lenses from deep light wells bored down from a wilderness area far above. Up close, the mirror behind the lens was about fifteen feet across and made of a polished aluminum-like metal. It was mounted in a device very similar to a gyroscope in its workings, this in turn mounted in the tunnel wall. Along the mirror's circumference were handles operated by two sasquatch wearing reflective overalls. This was their job from sunset to sundown. When one canal stopped working, another one soon lit up a few yards away. Other mirror-farmers were busily adjusting and remounting mirrors all over the floor in order to broadcast as much light across as many crops as possible throughout the day. Their movements had all been carefully choreographed for centuries. Some were even trained in the art of psycho-luminescence, and would pace up and down, handling and nourishing the plants with low-level sun-like light emanating from their bodies. Many of these psycho-luminescent farmers wore arrays of mirrors along their sides to further disburse the light. All were constantly busy attending to the plants. The most common crop was a dense eggplant-colored grass grown in patties. The humans also saw rows of a small lettuce with curly leaves of a dark purple color. Large bunches of small leafy heads grew from the center.
They ascended a series of winding untended tunnels full of switchbacks and trickling strands of water. This shortly led to an upward slanting road with sasquatch milling along beside small herds of pack moles. The humans had entered the core of the city, moving along a wide crowded thoroughfare that spiraled through a grid of streets toward the city center. It seemed they had been in a forest of trees before, and now they were in a quietly moving forest of giants. Along the ceilings were small crystals emitting brilliant light, sometimes alternating with what appeared to be pale luminous orbs of energy that floated in the air.
Without talking or turning his head, Human showed Lucky and Remy several dozen mental maps and images. Kind's incomprehensible infrastructure included a matrix of empty chambers extending to a half a mile above it. These had been abandoned by the sasquatch for millennia, so no one knew what dwelt inside of them. Their sole purpose was to redistribute underground pressure and water flows away from the ceilings of Kind. The city itself was full of wide corridors with subtly tapered walls. Thousands of sasquatch were out on foot, their mass of consciousness overwhelming the two foreigners. Their thoughts were like a stream full of billions of shape shifting fish. It was difficult to discern one train of thought for long. The moles navigated them quickly through the crowds. Openings everywhere indicated homes, buffeting them with the smells of open fires, boiling fungi, cured salmon, burning spruce, and arboreal herbs.
Human guided them to one of the eight gates of the palace. It had tremendous crystal doors, each around a hundred feet high and fifty feet wide. There they were led down a silent hall, its two walls angled to meet each other high above. A sasquatch guard was posted every thirty feet, absolutely silent, along each wall. At the end of the hall another enormous crystal door opened as they came near, this one triangular in shape.
"Welcome," said the king in a distant echo. He was not yet visible amid the grandeur of his breakfast hall. Thousands of sasquatch gathered, some wearing wreaths around their necks and arms. There were several hundred chandeliers hanging from the vaulted white ceilings and lit with oil lamps. One of these chandeliers was the size of a small bedroom. There was a table in the center of the hall that was about a quarter mile in length and fifteen feet across. It was covered in a single silken white tablecloth. Among the hundreds of waiters were those who emerged from passages in the middle of the table, setting out and pulling in trays. A choir stood in a large enclave off to the side, whistling in complex gentle harmonies that permeated the chamber. Their vocals even lilted over the gentle collective clamber of food being eaten without the noise of chat.
"Please come and sit beside me, humans," the king said, sitting on a small distant throne at the head of the crowded hall.
The humans rode their moles all the way to the far end where the moles were finally carted off by two servants. The humans suddenly felt as though they had dressed for the wrong occasion, but the sasquatch around them all began reassuring them in a friendly non-verbal manner while still engaged in their own conversations. The men set their bags aside on the floor. Remy sat to the right of Grieve, and Lucky to the left. Beside Remy was Human, and beside him was his wife, also named Human. Both were bedecked in deep green and brilliant red wreaths. The wreaths each had two tails that also wrapped along the length of the arms. Beside Lucky sat the courtesans Winter Squash and Kale, who each wore multiple wreaths of the same colors. The wreaths were made out of a thick fiber resembling bark. Also spun into the fiber was dark green foliage, and parts of the bark had been died using berries. The fiber was woven into a plant-like tube, but both the plant used and the plant being depicted were completely foreign to the humans.
They were served a variety of fish, game, steamed tubers and berries. The sasquatch also made a blackberry jam that was served over a fermented and baked cereal. They ate in a formal human style using stone plates, carved wooden forks, and stone knives. There were incredible amounts of food because this breakfast was a celebration of King Grieve. His courtiers, courtesans, knights, mistresses, concubines, servants, and many other subjects were all present, enjoying the kingdom's wealth.
"Right now," Grieve said, "My men are preparing to leave into battle."
"Your highness," said Human, "I will bring dynamite and natural gas. I will use these to flush out the Raven King's nest. Their guns are useless against ours. In my reckoning, sir, we will hardly need the army at all."
"You are a wise general," Grieve replied somberly.
"Thank you, sir." He hurriedly finished the yogurt and syrup that was served as a desert and went off to join the troops.
"Your Highness," Remy said after a minute. "How long does it take to get to Vancouver Island from here?"
"We will take the Sasquatch Highway. This will take us to the water by tonight."
"Where is that?"
"It is underground." The king took a large mouthful of cured fish. "Then we will cross the water, which will likely take another day."
"I thank you kindly for helping us in this matter, sir."
"We have wanted to stop the Nazis from invading the mainland since the end of your war. They are the main reason that Kind even has an army. Besides this, it is a small favor for a friend, Remy." Remy marveled as the king ate and talked at the same time, and the king quickly became intrigued.
"Please," he said. "Why is this so strange to you?"
"Well," Remy explained, "since humans talk using our mouths, we talk differently if we're eating or trying to chew. So we don't talk and eat at the same time."
After he mentioned this, there was a mental commotion from the end of the hall. "What is happening?" The king shouted mentally.
"There is a human disguised as a sasquatch!" Two guards approached quickly, holding the man. The head of his disguise had already been removed.
"Remove your costume!" Grieve commanded.
Standing beside Grieve as he sat on his throne, the man removed his costume. He used a zipper on the interior of its chest. He soon only wore boxers, an undershirt, suspenders, a holstered gun, a wallet, and socks. Grieve examined the wallet's contents while one of the guards dismantled the man's gun. Human, without moving, began probing the man's mind silently.
"Ah, he is from the Central Intelligence Agency," Grieve declared. "We will eat him."
"You will what!" Lucky yelled out loud.
Realizing he had broken the lilting calm that filled the chamber, he bent down his head. Over the next few seconds, he broke out in goosebumps and began to feel queasy. He gradually sensed that his mind was being overloaded, but he could not understand why, and his whole body tensed up. All of the thousands of sasquatch in the hall were bearing down on him psychically.
To be continued.
Mystery 13.3
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