The Etiquette of Queueing

Imagine, if you will, a void of dark and knotted wood, into which a man steps, quietly, dislodging some ancient membrane and alerting the powers that be.

A flash of sensory ailment exhors him from his undergrowth, and a second stretches to eternity as his fall is broken by layers and layers of the furthest corners of the universe.

This is the story of the Bad Vibe, and all who were affected by it and the time in which its cat was skilfully spayed once too often for Good Fletchers.

A traveller in a far-off land, Good Fletchers ran for his life as wave after wave of the oncoming embodiments of his worst nightmares bit and tore at the root of his veins. Trying not to let the world be torn from its bloody backdrop, he bore on as his legs drank the last of his consciousness and vision subsided to the muddy greys of painful memory.

He found himself in Queueing, with nothing to spend and nowhere to go. Many a man did pass, and pass they all did without a second frippery or a third half-eyed wink at the glance of his shoes. The angle of their hats said as much to him as Mother ever did, and this was his life and it was as much anyone else's who laid claim to it as he lay like a drunken yarn in the corner of the square.

He didn't last himself much yet longer, though, before a seventh deacon came to and offered him an audience with the Etiquette of Queueing. Revered as the land and twice as articulate, the Etiquette stood long in wait and garnered robes to bide the time as a myriad matted kings came and went and bowed before him.

Sewn was he who would not tip his hat and pay his thoughts and tuppence and all again. But neither was he heard, or seen, for verily he did not exist.

Good Fletchers found himself before the Etiquette before long, soaked and sodden and without gloves. Rainfall was both a blessing and a downtrodden shirkaday here, where hills were steep and all minded their own dog pens.

But the Etiquette removed his mask for no man, and as Good Fletchers stared into those unmoving eyes he felt unmoved to look away, as all had done before him. What could there be there that he couldn't call upon from memory to be despatched by some greater demon from his past? And as he looked at the Etiquette he saw through the mask of sheets and old, and light glinted off ancient scratches in the eyes.

For truly, this was not a man.

They say the city wasn't real, but this is a story in which everybody dies, so who can say for sure, without pain of death and fear of pain and all that go hand in hand with the quarrelsome nature of the heart? Good Fletchers couldn't. And those who knew him say it cost him so much more than his life.

Queueing was a large part of any man's life in this seventh spectrum, but Good Fletchers stood and stared and muscles pulled his eyes into pools of dark and on and then some.

The nearby ones who never moved flickered and fell, featureless, to the cold hard diligence of the sweep-keeper's ancient brush strokes. Who knows what chaos is contained in a moment of perfect silence? Good Fletchers did, as still he stood and stared and web after web smouldered and slunk from the Etiquette's faded legacy.

For this was not a man.

A tug on the strings of causality was all that was there when the mask fell and shattered and the fetid clothes crumbled into a distant foregone temperance. Colour fell back and that which was half sight, half sound tunneled into the furthest chasms of an epilogue three feet nearer.

The eyes were still there, poised on sticks and held to the floor in a delicate mess of rusted levers. Green glass echoed in Good Fletchers' mind and his head spun and occupied all of time, and he saw, as from a distant oil-tone halflight, his own likeness set in the stone of years to come.

The Etiquette was gifted with the sensitivity of a century's neglect. Good Fletchers stood as still as ever, but even the cracking of the shoe, the merest scratching of a pin, was set to alert the Etiquette to all that had transpired. And then what? A thousand deaths? More. Locks and levers and serrated consequences winked at him from the darkness. A thousand deaths at once.

Poised, they stood, man and Etiquette, locked in a stellar frosted stalemate of tens of tens and more beneath. It would be the last limits of a wooden frame, the final impatience of the insects, or it would be water and boredom and all that drives men and keeps them sane.

But that ship had sailed, and sailed well, and port and aft and stacked to moonsail by the hideous twilight of the soul. This man had seen too many strive to cling to sanity to warrant another last ditch in the dark; another stab in the faceless night-time of all he had known.

Suns and moons and an ever bloated lexicon of rocky shperes came and went and shaped the land, and as ever the the fetchers and the keepers in the foothills wandered and slept and kept the dog pens in the sodden scrub and came and went and happened from the mist.

And the seventh deacon from ages past mourned for no man, and waited solemnly in his filthy den of red and purple, for his mind was ripe with cellular plans and floods of curiosity, and crossed paths in the night.

It was a specific night, too, with a tensile bluish sidelight and a halfway backdrop and a stinging sweetness in the air. Thorny spirited vegetation was sparse and downtrodden, but there it was, and watching, and witness to affairs.

A sad brown direction prodded forth an erstwhile cloak, and a weathered cane and few visible feet, and a rugged, hazy darkness and a flick and a spit and the suggestion of sharpened secrets in the folds.

Opposite was an uncertain brightness, glowing hesitantly, three feet from the ground, crossways, downside, which all but fled. Henceforth came an albatross, a specimen, cold and legged, ruddy fur, crystallised, a mammal -- who could say? It was a choice not yet made, shifting in the glow, heady and cold and practising fingers for a sunny afterthought.

It was a slow meeting, but a meeting it was, and they met, and talked, and the underside of democracy gave a tremor and turned in its sleep.

All stood before the cloak, and the secrets edged subtly closer to the light. And by turn each shifting form tired and cracked and spun off into the distance, walking then running, then pulled and driven and netted to a million glancing blows off the edges of possibility. And all that remained was a rain and a dog pen and all on off or none.

The seventh deacon smiled without moving his features and waited by the door, a foregone conclusion on his mind and a cowhorse turning peacefully over the fire.

For Good Fletchers had already won, and the Etiquette gave out and crashed to the floor and the hidden evils in the stone were nothing more than dust and acidic smells that stung the tongue and watered the eyes in that sweet dance of victory.

But no true victory was this, as Good Fletchers had had time enough to think, and his thoughts and those of the seventh deacon were not dissimilar or free of salty aftertaste. Four out of five times, the red moon rose no more, but by any other name would smell fear into the hearts of a myriad cubic doppelgangers.

And as Good Fletchers approached the house he doubled his tracks as Father bade him do, and as he opened the door he whispered his thanks to the seventh deacon as the cowhorse horn pierced his heart and freed his soul at last from the dire oppression of a world with no more surprises.

For he who can outstare a wooden contraption of a century's reckoning and watch it fall to pieces to dust to unwashed rhinestone treachery, was too far beyond any lesser kind of help, and to help he took the remains in a bag, and watched the civilisation collapse. And save for the deacon, and the fetchers, and the dog pens in the mist, this truly was a story where everybody died.

But Good Fletchers had the last laugh, for he died in comfort, warm and homeward, one death at a time.