I won the decider on the coin toss and so Bill took the right hand track. I will never know what may have happened if we had taken a left but tempting Akla with a sinistre turn was playing with the wrong kind of symbols. We rumbled on in silence watching the waves of fog roll over the front of Bill’s old Cadillac and the trees shuffle past in the darkness.
My feeling of contact hasn’t dissipated. It’s not something you can describe easily, but if you have dealt with Elementals a lot as I have there is an intuition you develop. It’s not a physical feeling as such, it’s more like an anticipation. The sort of anticipation you have when you walk towards a cheering crowd, or a drunk on the street. An expectation the world is forming around them not you, that they are shaping the next few minutes of your life.
Bill gets it now as well. Being held to the ground by an archetype possessed truck driver wielding a machete in the Holland Tunnel will have that effect on people. The anticipation builds as another fork off the logging lane appears in the Cadillac’s headlights.
Go right again?
For navigational and spiritual safety.
The right hand fork didn’t look safer, if anything it looked more rugged in the headlights. A surface like a clay country, ruts for ravines, churned clay for mountains, but if we did one more right we should be heading roughly back towards the road. Bill understands the other reason only too well.
Why don’t we just turn back. Please? For little old me. Stella, your pal.
Sorry Stella, I can’t. Not on this road, I have nowhere to turn and I really don’t want to lose a tyre in a ditch in this country.
We settled into silence again until…
Barty?
There was another fork in the road. It was a T junction. One direction led back towards the first lane we had turned down, the left led to who the hell knows where.
You said the landscape was losing its reality.
It’s forming something. There is intention here.
I open the door to the car and get out. The silence is filled with the hissing, only louder this time. When I look back Bill’s car is further away than I thought it should be, a chrome and blue hunk of that Detroit dream that had faded over time.
I open my mouth to clear the tinnitus but the hissing persists. The air tastes of fog and wet earth and pine and salt. And maybe something else. I call back to Bill, my voice muted by the fog, as if I were in church.
Turn her off Bill. Lights and engine.
You sure?
No. But do it.
And just like that I am in a different world. The mass of the trees towering over my head suddenly feel oppressive, the cold of the fog sucking at my body, the gap between the dark trees falling into darker canyons of night. I step off the road and between the trees and the hissing in my head turns into a roar. I take another step and the roar is like the surf of an angry sea curling up a stone beach, the rattle like the stones stirred in the foam.
The fog enfolds me in white, opens a path in front of me, the fibre carpet of dead pine needles, the scales of tree bark revealed and then veiled. I step on a dry twig and it snaps soundlessly under my heel. Isolation made physical. I imagine Pauli the physicist and Jung the psychiatrist leaning forwards, sharing knowing glances.
I walk until Bill’s car is a small cabin on a slight rise glimpsed through the columns of pine. Stella has begged him to turn a light on, so there it sits, two windows glowing yellow, a blurred trace of dark movement within. The fog has turned grey in the lack of light and I have my hands in front of me. Further still and Bill’s car is lost behind the rise as I drop deeper into Akla.
Something touches my shoulder. The faintest of contacts, and there is movement. Something is rocking beside my shoulder. I can barely see it. I put out my hand and touch a twig. It bounces away and as it does another strikes my knuckle. My hand startles itself away, having a momentary life of its own. The thing is twirling in the air now. I can grasp its structure. A cage of stout twigs shaped like a pyramid. And inside the cage something crouches. Something lies.
I reach above the gently spinning cage and grasp twine, harsh, wet from the fog. Run my hand down the twine to capture the cage. No, not a pyramid, a tetrahedron made up of stout twigs bound at each junction with more harsh twine. And lying in the cage is the small corpse of a bird, skull and bone and feathers, a shedding of life.
It was a small bird, in a small cage. A wren or a finch, one wing bent beneath its body, the other draping from the cage. The cage was sized so that the bird would have felt trapped, not just understood that it was trapped. No doubt it would have panicked, threshed its wings, chipped out its distress.
I tug on the rope and the cage comes apart in my hand, the remains of the bird and the old frail twigs falling to the ground. A single twig hangs from the twine in reproach. I feel as though I have committed an act of sacrilege. I ask the bird for forgiveness. For understanding. Then I step on.
I lost count of the cages. Some were larger, some smaller. When the fog cleared I looked up to see more hanging from higher branches. Each one filled with remains.
If there is a birds’ vision of hell on earth I was walking through it. But that was not the most disturbing sight. In the ground there lay a few larger cages. Cages the size of children. And in some of these there lay remains.
If you want to read about Tink and Barty from the very beginning Series 1 starts here…
Tink
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5 APRIL 2025
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