Dogleg Hinterland 6

Heat haze led to heatgaze, that was what she was thinking. How far behind her Regrew felt now. You couldn’t back-track out of Cerebellum,the way the city fathers had designed it was so that all travellers were forced into going forward. Hindsight was not something they condoned — superstition had seeped into the architecture. This desert they called The Desert Of The Singing Sands, it was rumoured to give tongues to many wandering souls.

A man dressed in black and white appeared at the edge of her vision. He was wearing a top hat and fanning playing cards. He threw one at her and it felt like it bit into her like a blade. One for sorrow.

He sat there. Headdress made from the skin of a wolf. A ghost of a bonfire before him. He had a mouth-organ that he was blowing through; an old tune that she half remembered.

‘You?’

‘You recognise me? I was not sure my aspect would be the same.’

‘You look older, and there’s the wolf headdress.’

‘It’s who I’ve been running with of late, under the moonlight.’

‘You’re still alive?’

‘After a fashion. There are many gates into other worlds, and not all of them mean leaving the place. I exist in the hinterland; The Dogleg Hinterland.’

‘It’s the place of the wolf?’

‘For now. But there are Cuckoos abroad.’

‘The Nest?’

‘You know of The Nest already?’

‘Doesn’t everyone know of them?’

‘They didn’t used to know. Not when I walked in the skin of a man.’

‘Things change.’

‘Why no tears for me, Madrigal?’

‘The sorrow sits in me like a stone, father. How old do you think the grief is? You recognise me only because the magpie brought you here and told me it would be to speak to me. How does an emissary of The Nest summon someone from The Pack?’

‘You saw him — he manipulates the cards. They are shuffling everything.’

‘Are you Heatgaze, or are you here?’

‘I’m maybe a little of both. Things here were never one thing or the other, Madrigal. That is true of everything here; hinges in the meaning.’

‘Father, what is your name? I do not remember.’

‘I am Rondeau.’

‘Was there anything else you wished to say to me. You have been following me, as I walk, towards a spring. It is a spring in both senses: it is a source of water and it is coiled potential. Do you know of water that it can both flow around and it can pound it’s way through? It can split a stone. There is something you must learn here.’

‘I am just travelling home to get dream-spice for the trade I just made.’

‘That is one truth, Madrigal; another is that you are on a journey towards something and not just someplace.’

‘How do you know this? Are you dead and a wolf and my father and something else?’

‘You are starting to understand. The skin you wear is a signifier — a communication to those around you, and you can change it.’

‘I keep dreaming I am a wolf and wondering if I am a bird, but neither seems true.’

‘Madrigal, if you were ever taught that you are one thing or the other, if the binding lie of the binary stained your soul, then perhaps that is why I am here. This world woke into its superpositional state earlier than most.
‘The Whispergate Sentinel that first told the story of the worlds beyond the walls learned it when it stared into a mirror and punctured the surface.
‘Many of us learned it when the wings of the first emissaries of The Nest fluttered in our skies and stirred the clouds to storm, birthing The Whether Front …’

‘I am not sure you’re my father.’

‘I am what I need to be. The singer or the song being sung. How do you hear me? How do you see me? Look forward and see the water as it awakes.’

A spring in the desert. Here amidst the singing sands, suddenly she heard many voices. A vital mirror; a charm of magpies; the liquid throated wolves of mother moon; her own grief rising up from the heart of a shattered stone. She stood frozen. Her father next to her.

A golden eagle stood before her. It spread its arms in a gesture that said behold all of this. Nested tables. Matryoshka. Reality stacked within the hollow notion of reality.

‘Where do we lay our eggs, young Madrigal? In the fertile soil of young minds. We pollute the water of this place, and we are swallowed daily. This lone wolf, his pack — they are nothing to us. But you? You are something different. We are hungry for difference. We will meet you soon.’

The water spattered onto the thirsty sand, it splashed her and splashed through the ghostly form of her father. Where she had been awake, she suddenly crashed into the depths of sleep. An oasis sprang up around her. The world dreaming as her Heatgaze vision disappeared, and her father returned to the moon.