A SLIMY STORY
Alan was ankle deep in something he’d’ve preferred to have avoided. But Alan, when he realised that -- to reach Rhona -- he needed to negotiate various spillages she’d left iin her wake, decided to remove his sock and shoe with the aim of hopping towards her known whereabouts.
This wasn’t an alien land. Nor was it home. It was a cross between two worlds: the first being the sane environment of Earth where he’d been brought up and become accustomed to its logical causes and effects, the world of his earliest memories and subsequent education by similar creatures to him; and a second world, one with unpredictable motives (the motives of the environment itself, of its inhabitants, even of visitors to that world as they became gradually subsumed by the cultures infesting it). These two environments had merged in Alan’s mind and he had ceased to be aware of exactly which world he now inhabited. Was he at home or was he visiting? Rhona was common to both worlds so her presence here proved nothing.
Common sense told him that he currently inhabited the second world, the alien one, but it had gradually and imperceptibly gathered to itself characteristics of his home world, a world which he loosely called Earth. For example, he was treading over floorboards, listening to birdsong, and the wailing of wind in a chimney. Yet the floorbards were covered with a colourless slime about two inches thick. Even measurements were measured out by Alan in terrestrial terms. The substance that held his footprints intact was a gooey one, more akin to glue than slime, but slime was the nearest he could reach it with his newly restricted vocabulary. On Earth he had been a wordy soul, even been a writer of some literary note, but now, he found himself searching for the correct words for any situation. Call it slime, then. Though, back home, or fully back home, he would have called it something else. Carpet pile perhaps. Or dust. Or even rat droppings. But here, in his present predicament of place, time and perceived ownership of mind, it had to be slime. He did not even question it. The word was sacrosanct.
He could now discern Rhona at the far end of the hall. Except it may not have been a hall at all, since there was a four poster bed somewhere along its length. She was recognisable as Rhona, since he clung on to a snapshot of her from Earth. He kept glancing at it and comparing the features of the beautiful woman there frozen with the more fluid version at the end of the hall. However, this method of identification and attempted self-assurance on Alan’s part did not allow comparison of Rhona’s respective voices. On Earth, he recalled it quite lilting and pleasant to hear, unlike some other women he had once known back home. Yet, here, he heard only slimy gutturals emerging from her mouth. Words formed in the throat or much lower and then set loose by the mouth, without any intervention of the mouth’s vocal implements.
“Alan, go away. I can’t… I am not the person you once knew. I am dangerous…”
Alan was not diverted by this perhaps autonomous disguise of her true personality. He knew it was Rhona, despite the slimy vowels and, incredibly, even slimier hard consonants of her speech.
He decided to respond vocally himself. He hadn’t attempted this before here in this hybrid world of known and unknown forces of nature. Not only did he have to dig deep for the correct words, he needed also to dig even deeper for a voice that would carry them towards Rhona. He noticed that she now lolled on the bed, beckoning him with the crook of a little finger. Fear was the most natural emotion for Alan to feel in these circumstances. But, unaccountably, he sensed a quite uncharacteristic courage building up in his loins, together with a passion and desire for the body he recalled to be Rhona’s. But first the speech, the one he owed her, to fulfil their mutual pretensions towards dialogue or conversation.
“Rhona … I love you … I always loved you … nothing can come between us … nothing or nobody.”
There he’d said it. He sighed with relief … except the sigh was more a phlegmy wheeze than a waft of expended air. The toes of his hopping foot were now webbed with the consistency he’d once called slime. Seemed ages ago now. He needed to use his other foot to prevent unbalancing. An unblanced mind – as his surely was – needed at least the countervailing force of a firm physical stance. He placed the other foot – still shod – to the floor or ground. The sole of the shoe immediately dissolved into the same substance upon which it trod. As did the sock. But the flesh of his foot stood firm. That gave him more courage of conviction. He gave a sudden sideways look at the window in the hall. Through it he could see trees similar to those he’d seen all his life growing on Earth. And in Earth. As if life was a twofold process, outer and inner, and this applied to everything, even stone and wood.
By now – amid a further turmoil of ungrounded thoughts – Alan had reached the side of the bed, where the curtains had been pulled fully round. Rhona’s voice – still unpredictable and unrecognisable from his previous experience of hearing it – managed to thread its way through the curtains, but not without becoming tangled in further slimy appendages of tangible, visible quality. A voice that Alan could see negotiating its acoustic path towards his ears.
“We are not here at all. So go away, Alan, and nobody will know or see any difference. “
Alan scrratched his head – but felt only the slime that he assumed to be his own brain.
“Why not go away yourself, then?” Alan managed to say - despite the touch of his fingers to his own brain having managed adversely to affect the mind’s powers of thought as well as of speech. “Nobody would notice any difference.” These last words he managed to emit were more like birdsong than human vocalisation. He smiled. As he pulled the curtains of the bed aside.
And then one heard only slime gurgling, at the grinding interface of two worlds emerging through the deep throats and chimneys of untenable reality into the possibility of carnal, if not cranial, congress.
A single photograph floated to the floor.
Or through the floor.
