The Start of Something Dark

"You should not go wandering off the path if you are not ready to step out of the world you think you know best. Stay to the path, Birdie. You hear me? Stay to the path."

Birdie began, "The world I think--?"

But the stranger, the friend, the whatever-he-was had begun to shimmer and dissolve before her eyes: opaque, then translucent, then rippling air, then all of him gone for a moment except his smile and eyes hanging suspended before her. Finally the golden-eyed man (Goldeye, she thought, that's his name isn't it?) was gone, and Birdie was alone in the center of the garden.

Stay to the path. But which path? The flagstones, or the lily pads? The known, comfortable, indeed stolid? or wobbling uncertainty?

The first pad seemed to flutter the instant before she set her right foot upon it. By the time she reached the fifth pad, though, her footsteps were more sure. When she reached the tenth she considered how strangely solid these broad leaves felt; she wondered why the water was no longer shimmering around their edges.

But she did not look back.

So it was that she missed the gathering of the dark gray mist, now closing up behind her. She missed the garden's disappearance. She failed to notice that the water was already far below her feet, and that she was ascending ever higher with each confident footstep.

****

In the center of an otherwise darkened warehouse in an ugly part of an ugly city was a pool of light. In that pool of light was a small table, and around that table sat three men and an empty chair. The only sound for a few moments was the snap... snap... of cards being dealt and then laid down, face up.

Finally, one of the men -- the skinny, dark-haired one, known for obvious reasons as Weasel -- broke the silence. He threw his remaining three cards on the table; one skittered across the surface, off the table's edge, and landed face-up in the empty chair. Jack of Hearts.

"Shit," said Weasel. "How much longer we gotta stay here playing cards? I don't even know the goddam rules of this game for crissake. I'm bored. Can't we at least call out for sandwiches---"

"Shut up." This came from the man on Weasel's left, the greaser: Max. "You don't know the rules of the game? Forget the game. you don't know the rules of nothin', pally, and that's why we're here in the first place."

To Weasel's right, the third man, heavyset -- no, fat -- looked up from the cards in his hand. "'Call out for sandwiches,' he says," said the fat man (whose name was Dundee) in a constricted and phlegmy voice. "Don't suppose you actually tried getting a signal in here recently?"

Weasel got up from his chair, walked around the table, retrieved the Jack of Hearts, and sat down right there. Leaning forward, he scooped up all the cards on the table and shoved them into something like an orderly rectangle. He riffled the edge of the deck with his thumb. "Okay," he said, "so we're stuck here, until he gets back and unblocks us. But Jesus do we have to play the same stupid goddam game the whole time?"

Before Max or Dundee could stop him, Weasel held up the deck flexed between thumb and fingers and shot it into the air. Cards whirred crazily in the light, face up and face down and face up and left to right, raining down in a blizzard of white and black and red.

From off in the darkness came a voice: "Untidy. Very untidy. I think someone...

The Clocks

Then she was through the opening, which closed behind her like a drape. Before her sat her Grandmother and her sister Maggie. Birdie stood in her Grandmother's sitting room watching and listening to her sister telling familiar fibs. Grandmother rocked in her chair, frantically writing down all Maggie was saying in her battered leather notebook. Her pencil scratching on coarse paper.

The room looked smaller, grey, sticky with grime, unpolished. It smelt stuffy - of old boiled cabbage. Birdie shook her head because the ticking was getting louder, tapping on her eardrum. Then Birdie noticed the clocks stuffed on the shelves, all shapes and sizes, some ornate, some digitally flashing.

"Phone her boss," hissed Maggie, "he's not a normal boss."

Maggie looked straight at Birdie, but didn't see her. Birdie recoiled, she had forgotten how alike in appearance she and Maggie were. It was like looking in a mirror. Maggie - her toxic twin.

"Are they at her apartment now?" Asked Grandmother.

"Yes, they are waiting. Silly Birdie, she's taken the wrong path. Again."

Maggie began to laugh and crossed her fingers behind her back as her Grandmother continued to write notes in scratchy graphite.

The clock closest to Birdie's head began to chime; another, the other side of the room, replied. Time to.....

Careful -- or Careless -- Footsteps

"And we have got to close that thing before any of those troublesome not-friends slip through behind us."

The Stranger, Birdie's new "friend" -- if friend he was -- gestured upwards at the hole. Birdie thought she saw a hand reaching through the hole but it suddenly (perhaps sensing what was about to happen) pulled back. Like an iris, the hole winked out, plunging them both temporarily into darkness. Then there was a sound like a grilled-cheese sandwich being bitten into, an odor like that of new mint being crushed underfoot, and a sort of whirring sensation. When the natural light returned, Birdie and The Stranger stood in a garden which Birdie thought she knew, vaguely. Was it from a story...?

But the garden wasn't the main attraction. Nearly all Birdie's attention was drawn to The Stranger -- her savior or her abductor.

He stood well over six feet tall -- it couldn't have been seven, could it? -- and his height was accentuated both by the dark broad-brimmed hat and the... the cloak, she decided (fighting her intuition): it had be a cloak after all. His face was long, his hair ebony, his eyes, yes, warm and kindly.

But his mouth looked warm and kindly not at all. The thin lips bespoke cruelty, and the way one corner turned up and one down seemed to taunt her: whether he turned out friend or foe could, in her mind, well depend upon which way he faced when she decided.

It was time to test his "friendship" with something a little more substantial than a sudden miraculous escape from a subway platform.

"So you're my friend," she said. "And you've 'saved' me. Now that I've been saved from a threat I did not feel or recognize, then as my friend I assume you will let me now go?"

Both ends of that strange mouth twitched. "But of course. There's the path." He gestured, and Birdie saw a line of flagstones leading from the spot where they stood. But then he said, "...and there's another path," gestured again, and there was a pond on the other side of the garden, across the surface of which floated a line of sturdy-looking lily pads.

Birdie looked once more at those eyes. Not good enough, friend, she thought. She turned and set out directly between the flagstones and the pond, straight through a bed of periwinkle, in the direction of what looked like it might be an opening through a hedge around the garden.

Over her shoulder, she heard The Stranger's voice. "You are a very difficult girl." She approached the hedge, pushed the opening apart further. "...or a very foolish one," she heard him add. And then, although she couldn't be sure, as she stepped through the opening she thought she heard him say, "...or perhaps not a girl at all."

But that wouldn't make any sense, of course.

Then she was through the opening, which closed behind her like a drape. Before her...

Hole

As the train picked up speed in the tunnel, the sound reached a deafening, roaring crescendo. Birdie felt stunned, paralyzed. She couldn’t think straight; it was as if she had been captured and carried away by a lucid dream, a nightmare. Strange images darted through her mind like exotic, nameless fish.
Suddenly the train braked, and with an ear-spitting hiss, slid into a brightly lit station.
“No time to explain. Just follow me; I am your only hope. I’ll tell you everything soon, I promise.” She looked closely into his eyes for the first time. No pupils, no iris, nothing, just an empty blackness. Depthless black spheres that seemed to be looking in all directions at once. Or nowhere.
He took her forcibly by the arm and with a jolting blur of movement she found herself suddenly standing on the platform. She was shaking, yet held tightly around her abductor for support. The people around them stepped back, confused, scared. Had these two people just dropped out of thin air? Goddamned terrorists, someone mumbled. Before anything else was said they were moving again.
“This way,” he said. Exiting the station, they were now running down what appeared to be a service ally. It was dirty, scattered with garbage and homeless trash. The stench of decaying urine was overwhelming. Other than a haven for bums it looked as if this tunnel had been abandoned for years, perhaps decades. The floor began to angle downwards. They were descending. The tunnel twisted and turned, a lone light bulb here or there dimly illuminating their way. Suddenly he stopped and went down on his knee. Birdie, exhausted, tried to catch her breath.
‘What?’ she heard herself say. The strangler, ignoring her, hooked his fingers into some sort of metal loop buried in the floor. He was trying to lift a circular hatch of stone or metal, Birdie couldn’t see clearly what it was in the dismal half-light. They heard footfalls from the direction they had just come. Someone was running down the tunnel towards them.
“Too late,” he said, finally pulling back the hatch. Birdie felt a mounting panic. Something terrible was going to happen. She quickly looked into the abysmal hole in front of her. He couldn’t possibly mean that they should go down there. There was no ladder, no walls, nothing, just an inky blackness. The man grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up as effortlessly as if she were a doll.
‘I’ll find you,’ he said and then dropped her down the hole.

Wings

As the train lurched out of the station, he whispered 'Down, lie down.' The metal of the roof was hard and cold against Birdie's cheek. She closed her eyes. She was shaking with fear, but as usual the moment she switched off from the real world other images flooded in. The noise of the shuddering train, the screech of metal on metal, the rush of the air faded away. As his coat covered her, shielding her from the tunnels above, she felt something warm, familiar. An image of a pillow fight when she was a girl flooded in. She had been at her grandmother's house in Connecticut. Old down pillows burst open. She remembered throwing armfuls into the air, laughing and dancing with her sister. 'Feathers?' she thought. Just as the last carriage disappeared into the blackness, three men raced onto the platform.
'Shit, we missed her.' The skinny dark haired guy balled his fist, kicked hard at the vending machine on the platform. Eyes narrowed in a sallow pock marked face. 'We'll find you. The time's come.'
'Do you th-th think she knows?' His friend with the greased back hair sidled up, flinching as he span round.
'She has no idea.' He flicked the collar of the little guy's jacket.
The third man ran a long, pointed thumbnail slowly across his lower lip. 'He's here. He's been here. I can feel it.' The other two stopped scrapping.
'W- w- what do you want us to do?'
'Go back to her apartment. Wait there.'
'Where are you going?' The skinny one raised his chin, sniffing the air. 'You're right, I can smell him. He was here.'
'I'll call you if I need you.' The man undid his black floor length coat, glanced round as he tossed it over to the little one. They were alone apart from an old tramp lying comatose on the platform. 'Make sure he sees nothing ...' The man shrugged, rolled his shoulders like someone getting up from a hard day at the desk. Then one, two dark wings unfurled. Black, glossy feathers flashed in the sodium light as he stepped off the platform.
'Man, I w- w- wish I could do that,' the little guy said as they watched him fly into the darkness of the tunnel ...