continuing...
I move forward, trying to stay to the center of the narrow way. Suddenly metal flashes in the air as the arm comes out and across in a desperate slash. I cannot fall back toward the window of illness so dive to the pavement and immediately roll onto my back to catch the blade driven toward my side. It is a madman that attacks me, his tongue lolling in his head and his eyes bulging as if to escape. His madness gives him strength, but his hunger makes him weak; we are at a stalemate, he pulling downward with a levering arm and I pushing upward against his hand with both arms. A whimper escapes his lip as he realizes that I will not be easy prey, and he cannot move his second arm to help the first because he is fully extended, face pressed against the window's bars. My arm quavers, and he almost laughs, but I use a burst of strength to push his arm farther upward, and his lips quickly move from mirth to anger and he pushes back with a grunt. I breathe heavily from fear, and he pants like an animal, and I do not know how long it must last.
Suddenly, a rat creeps down the alleyway in my wake. The knife-thruster lets out a long, low whine and his eyes desperately move back and forth between it and my arms holding his knife from his first-choice dinner. As if they had been communicating, the plague victim throws himself against the bars, slobbering and reaching for the rat. The sudden movement causes the rat to leap toward me, and at the same moment, my attacker turns his wrist and pulls the knife hard to the side, cutting across my forearm and stabbing straight down to pin the rat by its hindquarters. I quickly roll out of reach beyond the windows as he bites into the tough back of the rat. I close my eyes and turn away, and hear the crunching of rat bones and slobbery moans from behind me. I stand and walk away.
Almost immediately, I find the building I am looking for. It is a hellish bar whose sign you can never really make out, though you can tell it is dirty and in disrepair. It is much less crowded today, in fact there are only three patrons, two that have fallen in drunken stupors and will not move for several hours yet and a third who seems to prefer his private shadows as much as I prefer him to keep to them. The bartender is washing glasses in water that seems no cleaner than the floor, but I do not comment. He grins as he recognizes me; I made quite a stir the last time I was here. I had come for information, which he had known and told me that night. To get it, I had to best a demon at pool. This demon was known for swindling people, taking their souls when they had nothing left to gamble with for his own pleasure. In a way, it was nice for the unfortunates to escape their self-made torments in favor of this creature's amusement, but they quickly discovered that variety can be worse than monotony in timeless places.
I had come to play this demon at pool, and I had nothing to bet except myself. It was a game that everyone knew well, and I was mocked by the many patrons of the bar that night. I knew that the pool cue would little help me, and so I chose from randomly. This nonchalance was interpreted by the mob as hopelessness, and they laughed the harder, but my opponent frowned. He knew then that something was different, but he did not know what. I should describe him. He was tall, looked like a man but had small horns sprouting from his forhead, like a billy goat. He wore a white suit faded with time and use, with black well-polished shoes, and a pristine white fedora. He had what one might call a charming smile with soft eyes of an indistinguishable color, but I thought he looked like a wolf. His smile implied no one's pleasure but his own.
The game was hard. It was not normal pool or even billiards. It felt almost like 9-ball, in which the balls must be pocketed in order, but the game ended with the 8. I say this because I seemed to be watching myself play the game from a very hazy perspective. I missed often, and the wolf pocketed things not to win but to mock me, knowing I could not possibly win. The reason is because the physics were wrong. It was as if the pockets would repel and attract particular balls so that they never moved in a straight line. If I hit a ball toward a pocket that repelled it, the ball would arc away. If I hit a ball past a pocket that attracted it, it would alter course to harmlessly hit a wall. I could not have made more than a couple of balls as the game approached its end and all that was left was the cue ball and the eight ball. The wolf casually shot and missed intentionally, watching my face the whole time. He wanted to see the crushing defeat in my eyes, the hopelessness of the final shot. The cue ball was all the way across the table from the eight ball, though the eight was only four or five inches from the corner pocket. I sighted down my cue straight toward the eight and the wolf began to laugh. He could smell victory and it was sweet, but he did not know that it would be mine.
As he laughed louder and harder, and I stared and focused more and more upon the line between the cue ball and the eight ball, I began to see a curvature to the air between them. Slowly, slowly, my cue began to turn, pivoting around the cue ball, forcing me to take three steps to my right, until I was pointed at about a forty degree angle away from the eight ball. Suddenly the wolf gave a start and stopped laughing, staring hard at my face with a serious expression. His seriousness spread and silence filled the room. With nothing to distract me, I could see the magnetic field that affected those two balls as though a beam of light were bending around a piece of glass and I was perpendicular to the glass. It seemed like an eternity passed as I calculated with my eyes without lifting my arm or my head. Then I brought my arm back and began a slow swing to make sure that the cue was moving the right way, aimed at the proper point on the cue ball to give it the proper spin around this glassy wall of light. Then I carried through, my cue hit the ball perfectly and the demon gave a roar, shaking the lines and making them quaver, but it was too late. The ball moved in an impossible arc to strike the side of the eight and knock it toward the pocket, narrowly missing the rim and sinking into the leather depths.
The room burst into howls of surprise and outrage and mockery that the great demon should have lost to me. He turned to me with a fierce scowl and, saying nothing of the game that he should have won if he had not toyed with me, said, "What would you have, then, in this, your moment of victory?" I replied, "I would have information of where I must go and what I must do, and I would have any tools necessary for that task." to be continued....
I move forward, trying to stay to the center of the narrow way. Suddenly metal flashes in the air as the arm comes out and across in a desperate slash. I cannot fall back toward the window of illness so dive to the pavement and immediately roll onto my back to catch the blade driven toward my side. It is a madman that attacks me, his tongue lolling in his head and his eyes bulging as if to escape. His madness gives him strength, but his hunger makes him weak; we are at a stalemate, he pulling downward with a levering arm and I pushing upward against his hand with both arms. A whimper escapes his lip as he realizes that I will not be easy prey, and he cannot move his second arm to help the first because he is fully extended, face pressed against the window's bars. My arm quavers, and he almost laughs, but I use a burst of strength to push his arm farther upward, and his lips quickly move from mirth to anger and he pushes back with a grunt. I breathe heavily from fear, and he pants like an animal, and I do not know how long it must last.
Suddenly, a rat creeps down the alleyway in my wake. The knife-thruster lets out a long, low whine and his eyes desperately move back and forth between it and my arms holding his knife from his first-choice dinner. As if they had been communicating, the plague victim throws himself against the bars, slobbering and reaching for the rat. The sudden movement causes the rat to leap toward me, and at the same moment, my attacker turns his wrist and pulls the knife hard to the side, cutting across my forearm and stabbing straight down to pin the rat by its hindquarters. I quickly roll out of reach beyond the windows as he bites into the tough back of the rat. I close my eyes and turn away, and hear the crunching of rat bones and slobbery moans from behind me. I stand and walk away.
Almost immediately, I find the building I am looking for. It is a hellish bar whose sign you can never really make out, though you can tell it is dirty and in disrepair. It is much less crowded today, in fact there are only three patrons, two that have fallen in drunken stupors and will not move for several hours yet and a third who seems to prefer his private shadows as much as I prefer him to keep to them. The bartender is washing glasses in water that seems no cleaner than the floor, but I do not comment. He grins as he recognizes me; I made quite a stir the last time I was here. I had come for information, which he had known and told me that night. To get it, I had to best a demon at pool. This demon was known for swindling people, taking their souls when they had nothing left to gamble with for his own pleasure. In a way, it was nice for the unfortunates to escape their self-made torments in favor of this creature's amusement, but they quickly discovered that variety can be worse than monotony in timeless places.
I had come to play this demon at pool, and I had nothing to bet except myself. It was a game that everyone knew well, and I was mocked by the many patrons of the bar that night. I knew that the pool cue would little help me, and so I chose from randomly. This nonchalance was interpreted by the mob as hopelessness, and they laughed the harder, but my opponent frowned. He knew then that something was different, but he did not know what. I should describe him. He was tall, looked like a man but had small horns sprouting from his forhead, like a billy goat. He wore a white suit faded with time and use, with black well-polished shoes, and a pristine white fedora. He had what one might call a charming smile with soft eyes of an indistinguishable color, but I thought he looked like a wolf. His smile implied no one's pleasure but his own.
The game was hard. It was not normal pool or even billiards. It felt almost like 9-ball, in which the balls must be pocketed in order, but the game ended with the 8. I say this because I seemed to be watching myself play the game from a very hazy perspective. I missed often, and the wolf pocketed things not to win but to mock me, knowing I could not possibly win. The reason is because the physics were wrong. It was as if the pockets would repel and attract particular balls so that they never moved in a straight line. If I hit a ball toward a pocket that repelled it, the ball would arc away. If I hit a ball past a pocket that attracted it, it would alter course to harmlessly hit a wall. I could not have made more than a couple of balls as the game approached its end and all that was left was the cue ball and the eight ball. The wolf casually shot and missed intentionally, watching my face the whole time. He wanted to see the crushing defeat in my eyes, the hopelessness of the final shot. The cue ball was all the way across the table from the eight ball, though the eight was only four or five inches from the corner pocket. I sighted down my cue straight toward the eight and the wolf began to laugh. He could smell victory and it was sweet, but he did not know that it would be mine.
As he laughed louder and harder, and I stared and focused more and more upon the line between the cue ball and the eight ball, I began to see a curvature to the air between them. Slowly, slowly, my cue began to turn, pivoting around the cue ball, forcing me to take three steps to my right, until I was pointed at about a forty degree angle away from the eight ball. Suddenly the wolf gave a start and stopped laughing, staring hard at my face with a serious expression. His seriousness spread and silence filled the room. With nothing to distract me, I could see the magnetic field that affected those two balls as though a beam of light were bending around a piece of glass and I was perpendicular to the glass. It seemed like an eternity passed as I calculated with my eyes without lifting my arm or my head. Then I brought my arm back and began a slow swing to make sure that the cue was moving the right way, aimed at the proper point on the cue ball to give it the proper spin around this glassy wall of light. Then I carried through, my cue hit the ball perfectly and the demon gave a roar, shaking the lines and making them quaver, but it was too late. The ball moved in an impossible arc to strike the side of the eight and knock it toward the pocket, narrowly missing the rim and sinking into the leather depths.
The room burst into howls of surprise and outrage and mockery that the great demon should have lost to me. He turned to me with a fierce scowl and, saying nothing of the game that he should have won if he had not toyed with me, said, "What would you have, then, in this, your moment of victory?" I replied, "I would have information of where I must go and what I must do, and I would have any tools necessary for that task." to be continued....
posted by Seventh_guest at
9:09 PM
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