Thunder and Silence

Hello. I have decided, as much to keep in the habit of putting things up here as anything, to share with you a short piece of fiction. If I ever get the time and the idea this might become the opening of something longer; as is I think it's rather good as a piece for its own sake. This started off when the opening sentence came to me in the pub and was written in two spurts of activity across the next few days. It goes thusly:

Thunder and Silence

Thunder crashed around the valley, its echoes shaking the misted glass of the old house. Well-maintained, despite its age, the red bricks of those stoic walls were the only sign of human artistry for a hundred miles around. No broad, flagstoned highways scarred the silent, sylvan, surrounds; indeed no paths at all save the winding, scarce-seen tracks along which wolves stalked the nervous deer. This was a primeval land. No booted foot had dared pick its way through the uninviting undergrowth for three hundred years; not since a grey-robed man had willed a house into existence at the bend of the stampeding river in that sly-shadowed valley.

                Watching the river through the stinging hail, from the warmer side of the lead-fixed panes was a man whose beard now matched the grey of his robe. Lines that had been formed by several lifetimes of studious scowling were being deepened as the man watched the raucous play of the storm-gods with irritated disdain.

                “Go blow yourselves out somewhere else,” he told them in the kind but firm tones of a harassed parent. “Some of us are trying to work.”

There was a pause while the bruise-coloured cloudbank digested this. The next crash, an unobserved observer could imagine, sounded angry and defiant, like a child refusing to accept it was bedtime. A blue-white streak of blistering light flung itself from the petulant sky towards the man and his window. The observer might have thought a lightning bolt would not have been able to look taken aback; they would have been wrong. This one, unused as it was to being stopped by an unseen barrier, managed it quite well.

“Stop that.”

 The words, though calmly said, filled the entire valley. The cloudbank flinched then rumbled sullenly.

“I mean it. Right now.”

The wind suddenly ceased, dropping its hastily-snatched cargo of forest-floor detritus. In the now-thunderless calm the tiny percussive sound of the last few hailstones completing their fall could be heard. The robed man drew breath for another reprimand. The clouds parted instantly and obsequiously, letting a shaft of warm sunlight fall onto the window and the man it framed. He suspiciously regarded the sky for one long moment, harrumphed and returned to the leather armchair and battered scroll he had abandoned.

                He was so engrossed in the arcane spider-scrawl in front of him as to be rendered almost-uninteresting, so the unseen witness might now take this opportunity to leave the wild-haired scholar to his reading and nose about the room, leafing through the draws in search of a spare cigarette. It was cluttered. Books and papers lay where they’d been discarded, half-obscuring the esoteric apparatus that occupied all of the many tables, desks and workbenches. One of the benches was conspicuously free from the academic snowdrifts. It held the studious man’s current project. On this bench, stood under the room’s large sky-light, sat a stone. In the light from the globe hovering a few inches from the ceiling it seemed to have sheen about it. First red, then green, then the blue of deep sunlit waters could be seen from its apparently perfect surface. About the size of a child’s skull, it was held by heavy, black iron vices that were themselves screwed to the work-surface. If stones could escape, someone had ensured this particular one would struggle to do so. If asked what it was, the man would, depending on his mood, answer either “None of your concern,” or “Something fascinatingly dangerous.” If he answered with the latter, he would then indicate the scorch marks along one wall.

                A gnat, bored with aimless flitting, settled itself on the stone. It burst into flame. The smell of a tiny life extinguished without care filled the room and failed to break the man’s concentration. With enough exposure and apathy, people can get used to anything. The light from the globe wasn’t the clearest ever seen, so an observer might have missed the stone’s adding of half a millimetre to its circumference.

                “Jumped-up, new-age rubbish!”

                A scroll, written a hundred years before the birth of the oldest person in the world outside this room, landed in the grate under the undusted mantelpiece where it crumpled despondently. The paper became even more dejected when the robed man felt the evening’s chill and ignited it with a small, precise gesture. The little ember was fed on thought and mild irritation directed down that gesture until a respectable blaze at in the grate, denying all association with the barely-warm little squirt that had recently occupied the space.

                The bewhiskered man turned his attention and his chair towards the workbench. The stone stood still. He frowned. The stone did nothing. He glowered. The stone, if anything, became slightly less animated.

                “Right, you. That’s enough of this brooding-in-the-corner-threatening-the-whole-of-existence business.”

                Two ancient consciousnesses reached decisions, gathered their insurmountable wills and focussed on their opponents. One took a couple of goes to roll up his voluminous sleeves; the other wished it had sleeves to roll up.

                The air in the room took on a dense and pressing aspect, thickening enough to delay the glow from the ceiling-globe and trap the heat from the fire. Sound could not move through that immobile mass. Time was held in place by the full force of millennia of mental mass meeting at high speed. It strained against the steel-clad thoughts blocking its path. The immense wills used the energies of supernovas to force their opponent one proton back.

                The old man felt like one for the first time in centuries; he could no longer spare the energy to maintain his physical strength. The thought that had been sent into the world to create the fire rushed along the psychic highways to defend its native home; the force that had created the house abandoned its colony of mortar to fight for the capital of flesh and bone; the bricks themselves melted to dust then to unbound force to rally the broad-cuffed commander. All reported for duty and promptly charged from synaptic gates to scream their battle cries at the massed opposing legions. An enemy rank fell. Then another. The whole barbarian horde was in full rout! The marshalled thought of three hundred years and more charged across the space and threw its weight at the red-streaked black of the hostile citadel.

                The stone cracked.

                Sleeves fell back to wrists. Now-white hair hung limply down.

                The ancient Sage of the River’s Bend fell backwards and dust settled on his barely rising chest.

                Thunder crashed around the valley and it started to rain.

                                                                                                                                                 

One hopes you're well,
   yrs,
      ADWoodward