Contraband

A lone van travelled west. Its driver wiped the sweat from his brow and turned up the AC - it was already at the maximum setting - so in desperation he kicked it. He anxiously leant forward and looked at the stars flitting between the swooping branches of the forest canopy. They started to vibrate, coming loose. The saturation of the sky developed like a photo and the sphere of the night began to turn purple, then a few minutes later, pink. The stars did not fade however, in fact they became brighter. The man’s hair stood upright, even though he felt as though he was burning alive. His eyes were hot coals hollowing out his skull and when he swallowed nervously, he swallowed razor blades. His skin was sensitive to the touch and he started to become conscious of the feeling of his clothes resting on his arms and sticking to his back. They rasped against him and dug their fibres down into the miniscule cracks of his pores. The driver felt heavy, impossibly heavy, as if his body was being pulled down to the earth by massive chains descending kilometres. A white glow appeared from his feet and it felt like he was an ant under a cosmic magnifying glass. The stars were unstuck now, drifting like fireflies. But they had not yet descended. When they did, when the stars came down to greet him, when their fiery kisses lit his skin with biting fierceness, he’d stop moving; stop searching and running and slump down on a rock like some half-remembered corpse in some half real reality. But not yet. They had not yet descended. He couldn’t stop now, even if it destroyed him, incinerated him to ash and threw him into the sun. Even if his body was removed, never existed in the first place, even if the atoms that made him and the particles that made them were scrubbed from the fabric of space he wouldn’t stop now. Not whilst he still had a goal, not whilst he still had his mind, not whilst he still had his soul - whatever that may have meant for something like him. The weight was nigh unbearable but it had to be beared, he had to be certain, the chains pulled downwards harder, and his heartbeat transformed into a deep rhythmic laugh. Ha-Ha… Ha-Ha… Ha-Ha 

The van was running low on fuel. Not now, please not now. Blue sirens flashed in the shadows between the trees when the van began to slow, wheezing and coughing to a slow death. Finally, overcome by the friction of its axles, and of its tires, and its weight, the vehicle stopped. As the sun began to spill across the land, its light sewed threads of gold and pink through the forest and the clouds were coloured a beautiful red. The driver got out in a cold sweat. He picked up a rucksack and grabbed a yellow folder filled with documents. On its label read in a stiff black font, “C.A.V.E”. He ran into the forest, towards a house that sat like the keep of a castle in the distance on a hill. He wasn’t a young man, or a fit one, but his heart would have to keep up with him If he was to access the computer at the house in time. His legs burned, his lungs felt like they would explode and the detritus of the forest slipped down his shirt. The shadows descended as the sun rose but the stars did not go away, they stayed fixed now, at a constant, impossibly close distance. In front of the trees, as if they were an illusion, or hallucination. Still, the man kept on climbing and running further deep into the forest.

In some parts, light did not penetrate the thicket and the tangled individual shadows disappeared gleefully into their crowded darkness. Here a cold wind blew across his back and chilled the lake of sweat that had formed on it. In a few instances, the wind carried on its current the faint shouts and barks of the authorities behind. Across his path lay the fallen carcass of a tree. Its base was upon a rock high to his left and splintered. The trunk was shattered and smouldering along its length. As if lightning had recently struck it. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief and horror. That’s impossible! There hadn’t been a storm recently, not in six weeks! He hurried along its length, its exterior was polished in intense heat near where it was split and rough where the bark had peeled away. White hot arms of flame reached out of the crack in the trunk and charred whatever they touched to soot. Eventually he found an area around the middle of the trunk, where the ground fell away into a small groove that the man could pass through. He threw his backpack through first. Then, crawled on his side, desperate not to damage the precious data drive in his trouser pocket. Out of the leaf litter crawled an ivory centipede, speckled with broken down vegetation and mud, snaking and scuttling along his leg. Its antennas worked like a water diviner’s rods, and it stopped searching the moment it reached his thigh. He tried to shake it but it was intent on piercing through the cloth of his trousers with two sharp claw-like mandibles. As he got up on the other side of the tree trunk, he slapped the centipede away. He had to steady himself, because the ground seemed to move beneath his feet. Then he noticed the grass he stood in lean towards him, and a vine attempted to work its spindly fingers around his ankle, dragging him downwards. Frightened, he ripped the vine off and ran to more rocky ground. I can’t be right, I can’t be right. He prayed. He knew that if anyone heard his thoughts however, then his fears would be true. He marched forwards, the house did not look so distant now but the police were gaining on him, and so were the stars. Both had closed in and it began to look like his opportunities for escape were dimming. The forest path was criss crossed with holly, brambles and broken and dry twigs, textured with ashy lichen. Paths which animals had mapped weaved in and out of shrubs and knotty roots, and the roof of his mouth tasted foul and sour with the earthy air.

He carried on climbing and running, the shouts of the police were louder now and almost constant. He could hear also, the snarling and snapping of the police dogs, straining against their leash. Their flashlights searched shakily and shot through the tree trunks like javelins of light. “She’s loose!” a voice hollered. The approaching noise of explosive panting and the rustling of leaves quickly became imminent. He sprinted, panicked until he came into a clearing, twenty metres in radius, with a small cliff on the opposite side of it. He was trapped with no way out, and froze, unable to adapt to the new situation. Out of a bush a German Shepherd lept. It grabbed hold of his arm, ripping and holding it unyieldingly between its jaws. He screamed in pain as its teeth sank into his flesh. His sleeve became torn, and wet as the gnashing jaws tore at him. Blue figures emerged out of the forest. Wearing masks of grim faces, dead eyes and deep conviction. “Give yourself up” one cried “And we’ll call off the dog!”. “Save your arm for god’s sake!” another shouted. He struggled a bit more against the animal and it pulled him down to the ground. The police ran over to him, pinning him to the ground and pulling the dog back. He couldn’t feel where their knees were pushing against his back and shoulders, but he could feel the chains, thick as the ones used to anchor ships, bruising him and pulling him through the Earth. His eyes teared up in pain and he felt like air was being forced out of his lungs. His wrists rubbed painfully against the handcuffs. One officer ripped his backpack away from him, with another searching his pockets. The one with the backpack, looked through the folder, thoroughly unimpressed by the unintelligible tables of numbers and diagrams, the other pocketing the data drive. “Accountancy fraud?” A voice asked. “Probably.” a deeper one replied, “Lets get him back to the station, before he hurts himself.” the voice chuckled. He closed his eyes in resignation. It was all correct, wasn’t it? He thought. The lie protects itself. The lie self-preserves. He knew he had committed no crime, and that must have been the reason for his pursuit by the authorities.

Suddenly, it felt like the chains were lifted off of him, and his handcuffs no longer restrained him. He staggered up. The police officers were frozen, at the instant of his eyes closing. His knees buckled and his stomach went into free fall, plummeting down. Ahead of him in the centre of the clearing, stood what looked to be a stag. Its antlers were symmetrical, fractal and impossible. They conjoined into oblivion, like one of those optical illusions where the elephant has both six and no legs. Light splashed around it, flooding through the gap in the trees like a spotlight. It was so brightly focused on the stag that he could make out each stroke of the animal’s musculature. On the ends of its antlers, which sprouted from the gaps between their roots, the stars began to settle. Stars blinking like fireflies drifted without tremor or shake and rested on the six main branches of the animal’s horns. More stars began to move toward the stag, a greater number than had previously been circling him. More and more accelerated past him, burning him if they touched his skin. The more stars that stuck to the stag’s antlers the more the stag seemed to attract. Like a planet pulling in smaller asteroids and growing ever larger, the steady flow of lights turned into a torrent. They flew by him, from all directions, his left, his right, even swerving around his neck and cruising just under his jaw, forming a kind of tunnel vision. As the speed of the stars increased, so did the light, becoming brighter and brighter, and whiter too. Stars brushed his fingertips and set them alight with sensation, mostly heat but not just that. On each of his fingers he felt every sensation he’d felt in his life, every prick and burn, every soft thing he brushed or petted. He felt the touch of every paper he’d ever held, the bumps on the ‘f’ and ‘j’ keys on his keyboard and the hair of his daughter. But he didn’t only feel physical sensation. Somehow he, on his fingertips, brushed against joy, regret, terror and safety. He felt every atom of sadness and of memory and watched them speed away past the reach of his fingers. As each emotion fled from his touch he became aware of himself no longer feeling them. He stared at the stag, the only thing in view. Clear amongst the depthless light like a statue printed on paper. He no longer felt afraid, in fact he no longer felt anything. He didn’t even recognise his own being as a fact, more an observation. He was a passive observer now, with a mind incapable of doing anything but watch, like a camera unable to stop recording. He watched as stars passed through his arms and legs and chest as if they weren't there. He saw the unfathomably large number of atoms in each star as they passed him, he saw the gaps in the between the atoms, and the birth of photons and their waves. He saw the stag. His mind was receding from reality, and it warped him as he left. He saw dimensions shift and clarify. If upon viewing a two dimensional shape in the third dimension helped clarify its form, then viewing the world from the fourth dimension clarified its geometry too. He ascended up uncountable dimensions, becoming aware of the liquidity of time, and passing through all eighteen variations of it. Then, after he had seen everything of everywhen, the worst cruelty. He saw all of these dimensions collapse, his perspective shifted and suddenly all of space became undone. He saw the gaps between space, and saw the illusion falter. He saw cause and effect drift away from each other, he saw every memory of every passed down joy, every moment in time unlike any other before, every inciting moment and trivial triumph, he saw it all. All unraveled, their meanings set on fire and mixed into entropy. All indistinguishable, all contained within the stag. 

The stag receded too, a little after the man, receding past dimensions and past memory, into the space between realities, to a place that can not be described or seen by any mind.

A convoy of cars travels east. Back to the police station. Their drivers are wrought with anxiety and confusion. Not one officer in the convoy knows why they were in the forest or who they were called out to search for. They ask themselves and try to figure out how such a thing could happen. In the passenger seat of one of the cars lies a yellow folder, filled with blank documents, and with a label with no writing on it. When the police try to plug in the data drive, they find all the files on it corrupted beyond recovery. They decide it best to discard both pieces of evidence. Evidence for a case that didn’t exist. 

They will never know what happened in the forest, though they will speculate. They will make an unspoken agreement to forget this happened, and never bring it up, hoping it to be a dream of some kind. Why fret over something so fantastical? After all, the world was real and present and beautiful, and the dawn looked so beautiful between the trees.