The Wandering World

by B C Woodruff

  “Anywhere?” “Seems that way.” “You’ve brought us this far, Creat. Where do you think we should go next?”

  He considered this for a moment. “It’s called... Mezopo. It was built on the southern pole. Hidden away. That’s where the others will be.” He seemed so sure and yet so uncertain. It was in these silent moments that Mirdova found herself following the stretches of flesh along his body to where they blended into the metal shell. Occasionally, she’d notice the small openings where gears whirred and the buzz of electricity kept her companion moving. Kept him alive. He couldn’t travel if it rained, though that wasn’t much of a problem these days. It rained, what, two, perhaps three times a season? Hardly enough to keep the cisterns full. Water was like gold. It was life. Here stood a man whose Achilles heel was the very thing that women and men now fought to the death to claim for their own. Here stood a Creature that, far more than he was man or machine, was a living mystery.

  How had his sleepless mind survived all these years? Why was he so driven to follow the feeling – and that’s all it was, intuition carved from the walls of a dream – that there was something waiting for him out there, something better than the rusted kingdoms of a dying world that they’d slowly explored over a dirty decade?

  He repeated again, questioning it: “That’s where the others will be?”

  “Others?” “We used to call them survivors.” He put a hand up. “I don’t know why I said we, but isn’t that exciting? Maybe there are others like me out there. Maybe they have a way to make me whole again.”

  She snorted. “Survivors? Kinda rude to call ‘em that, isn’t it? What are we if we aren’t survivors? And what were these people surviving?” She spat. “The hell with them! We made it pretty far without whatever those fancy Mezopo people have.”

  There was that pause again. Gears and cogs, churning around in a mostly-bloodless shell. His noseless face scared others. His disjointed personality had been used against them more than once in their travels. But on days like this, when the man behind the steel mask and synthetic voice truly woke up... well, she liked that. She liked to whisper it to herself from time to time as they walked: ‘He is human.’

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked her. Already, the scraps of memory that had so invigorated him when they walked through the barrier were fading, as though the dull machine mind was somehow stronger than his afterthought of a brain – for when the Man awakened, the Machine was never far behind.

  “We’ll find our paradise, won’t we old friend?” He smiled, but less than before. “I’d rather not answer that.” He reached out, thought better of it, and stared off into the distance.

  “No. I take that back. We’re definitely going to find it. Wherever it is. Whatever it is.”

  Mirdova regarded him with a wink and a tap on the back. He had regained so much since they first met. It didn’t always come to the surface like it was now, but it was in there, somewhere.

  “This is the right path to be on,” Mirdova mouthed to herself, slowly giving it voice. “Because he is human. Because I am human.” Not for the first time, she knew this was where she wanted to be: with him.

  It was always exciting. It was sometimes frightening, but always tinged with intrigue and the unknown. It was everything that life back in the Slumwards could never be. This was the world. It was mostly empty for all they knew. It was incredibly lonely at times, soul-crushing in light of what things should have been.

  But! She didn’t miss having a place to call home anymore. Wherever they went, somehow, became home.

  And if they didn’t find what they were looking for at this Mezopo pole-thing, well, they were always welcome back in Dolataria. It was fun there. It was beautiful. And, because of them, it was now a safe place to be. Mirdova gripped the sacred blade they had given her to commemorate the timely death of the Geo- phage. The two of them put down an overgrown worm, and they’d wanted to make her queen. Imagine that! Her? A queen. Pfft, it wasn’t even a question worth entertaining.

  Still... Even if she rejected the regency... She could live there and be pretty happy. Right? A few hundred people in one place, without thirst or hunger? She’d never get over the joyous absurdity of that thought.

  The two wanderers walked down to the airship. It would need work before it would fly. Patches here and there. But they had time. They had all the time in the world.

  ***

  The sun was bright. It was always bright, but today, it seemed a touch more.

  A warm breeze swept over them and out and away. Far away. To places they would visit someday. It touched on people and stories that would bring the Creature, and Mirdova, closer to who they really were and wanted to be.

  ***

  Time passed. With a push of a button the enormous craft took flight with the two sitting at the helm.

  The Creature asked again, “Where to?” Mirdova gave him a hug and a light peck on the cheek. “Let’s go find out!”

  WHAT WERE WE EXPECTING?

  “I just don’t understand why people talk about opening Pandora’s Box like it’s a bad thing,” Adeline remarked to her sister, who was busy reeling an old rope in the window with a squeaky winch.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. Please, can we not have this conversation now?” She considered this and added: “Especially not right now?”

  “Well, like Nanna says, it’s either now or never, right?” “It’s just”– Laurel remembered where she was, bringing her voice down to a conspiratorial whisper – “It’s just like you to make me do your homework the day it’s due! Trust me. I was the one who mentioned it.”

  “Were you?” Adeline scratched her head. “I could swear...” “ Oh, come on! That first chat we had, I mentioned that even with everything else they get wrong about Pandora’s Box, most people don’t realize that it was actually a pithos.” She used her free hand to outline a shape while the other hand labored to bring up the rest of the rope. “ The idea that it’s a box is only a few hundred years old. Doesn’t this ring a bell?”

  “Right! That sounds... sorta familiar. Pithos...” Adeline scrolled through her mind for an answer, immediately relented, and reached for her iPhone for answers. “Ugh. You’re so useless sometimes. It’s just a big jar.” Laurel spun around in the office chair, letting her hair loose from its clip and transforming, momentarily, into a blurry hair-tornado. “What- ever! It doesn’t matter. We both agree. It’s weird.”

  “Yeah,” Adeline said. As the older of the two, she didn’t like to play the sidekick, but here she was.

  “And it’s also weird that the Greeks said the Bo – I’m sorry, the Jar, was left filled with hope. ‘Is something like True Hope denied us for want of a pithos?’”

  Adeline sighed, mouthing the rest of the words as they had been written in the ledger. Memorization came easy to her, as her grades and careful diction showed. Her capacity for original thought was more difficult to gauge.

  Laurel frowned at her sister’s attempts to contribute, but couldn’t deny the quote from the ledger was germane to their quest. “See, that wasn’t so hard. Now put your phone away and let’s get a move on so we can find out if that’s true or not.”

  Laurel hopped off the chair and landed on her bare feet. The muffled sounds of the struggling (albeit tightly bound) security guard in the corner were starting to get on her nerves. She looked at the screens, each cycling through a series of static cameras monitoring the museum.

  “Okay,” Adeline said, giving her sister an encompassing hug, “but Mum and Dad are going to be so mad when they find out.”

  “Shhh.” Laurel smiled. “They’ll be glad. Come on, it’s time.” She picked up the old ledger from the counter. Its worn leather cover had bled away most of the stain, and the embossed gold leaf monogram had long since faded. It had once belonged to the man down the way, in the old house by the smelly creek.

  He gave it to Laurel during one of her morning jogs. It was a new habit that she was developing for when she finally buil
t up the courage to go out for the cross country team, and finally break into her sister’s traditional athletic territory. Anything to bridge the year between them, and the social gulf that always felt wider. It was only a few days later that same week, on her normal morning jog, that she stopped and spotted the ambulance carrying out a black, human-shaped bag and realized that its significance had grown immeasurably.

  Whatever secrets that handwritten book contained belonged to her now.

  They hadn’t been terribly close, the old man and her. Laurel wasn’t really close to anyone, save for her sister. It was a product of being ahead of the curve, as her parents said. She was just too bright for her own good, and in their small town, not much could be done to accommodate her advanced intellect and thirst for knowledge.

  It got her in trouble. Despite their differences, the man had somehow helped her develop better coping mechanisms than resorting to what her mother despondently called Laurel’s smarty-pants tantrums.

  The man had been smart too. And kind. And he had listened to the questions that kept her awake, and responded with stories that saturated her active imagination with possibilities of what lay beyond the hills and trees – he had given her insight into the world, and for that she would be eternally grateful.

  A friendship had budded, nurtured by those times he would wave her over as she was going by. He was often seated during these exchanges, body bent and twisted by time but smiling and rocking back and forth against the wind in his old chair. He affected a bow-tie and occasionally fiddled with the pipe otherwise perched on the corner of his weather-tested table beside a small pile of tobacco and cloves.

  He wouldn’t smoke when she was around, but not long after their customary meeting, she would smell the blended aroma following her down the path into the forest’s edge.

  It was the same every time: she would be running down the laneway, counting her steps and keeping a record of her time clocked away in her mind, and he would greet her with a gentle nod and offer tea and biscuits.

  She rarely refused him. All in exchange for a few minutes spent listening to him chat about what and who he used to be – and it wasn’t difficult either, because, for her, it was always fun to hear his stories. He’d go on about the Great War and how charismatic the leaders had been back then.

  Her parents knew him, and after her jogs would ask her about the old man.

  Her father, a native to the town, had grown up and become so accustomed to seeing the man that he scarcely paid him any mind at all. Truthfully, that had become more difficult in the recent years, as the man took to sitting outside his home more frequently since his wife passed. Attempting, poorly, to strike up a conversation with each and every person that traveled along the path.

  At first, it was interesting, but once you came to realize that the stories were always the same, and that he seldom if ever had any intention of reciprocating with a thoughtful ear in return, well, that route became less popular.

  Laurel and Adeline’s father wondered if the man knew this fact – that he had become a reason to detour around the block.

  It was hard to imagine a mind, especially one so sharp and aware as his, that wouldn’t have realized. It was sad, too, because there was a time the man was a paragon of health and sociability, respected by the community, even including her father. That said, her father was quick to admit that the man had always been degrees in favour of odd.

  Her mother, a few years younger, was less critical. She’d babysat the old man’s kids when she was just a teenager and found the family, well – yes, a little eccentric, but certainly not dangerous.

  Adeline couldn’t be bothered to form an opinion either way. At fifteen, she had far better things to do than talk about people with the gall to live offline, which made her consistent support for Laurel’s adventure all the more puzzling. Laurel wondered if she just liked to practice sneaking out, but her presence made this easier... and more fun.

  Now that the old man’s brood had left town, both parents could appreciate that the man was a little lonely. In this they approved their daughter’s interaction with him – so long as it was done outside his house. Not that they suspected ulterior motives or that his eccentricity had curdled into something dangerous, but... well, a parent hears things about neighbours on the news here and there, and a little caution never hurt anyone.

  Only once had Laurel broken that promise. Three weeks ago, on the day that she received his ledger – the one that had led her here with her older sister in tow, into the dark, mould-mottled museum with its tall ceilings and ornate doorways – it hadn’t been particularly cold. This seemed strange to Laurel as she considered the event in hindsight.

  ‘Aren’t grand adventures meant to start with some ominous force of nature?’ She imagined the old man’s weary skepticism about the proper accompaniment to a quest even as they crept down the stairs and out the backdoor of their Victorian-era home, stepping cautiously around the spots in the old flooring that they knew would creak and alert their parent-captors of their curfew-break- ing plans.

  But then, only a few steps away, when they were sure they weren’t going to be heard, there was a distant sound that she took for thunder, and that alone was enough to sharpen her eyes and quicken her heart in anticipation of the adventures to come.

  All of this, begun from that ledger. Laurel’s need to investigate manifested when she had reached about a third of the way through the convoluted collection of notes and academic writing, when her eyes fell on a particular page, festooned with pencil sketches repeatedly encircled with deep red ink and the words: “It’s here! I can’t believe I’ve finally found it! And they don’t even know what they have... It has to be...”

  The old man’s (for who else’s could it be?) joyous, frantic scribblings trailed off where the pages were faded by wear – and, if Laurel’s suspicions were correct, by water.

  After drafting Adeline into the investigation, the two excitable girls combed Wikipedia pages for Pandora’s B... Jar, and came to the same (okay, maybe the investigation was heavily biased towards Laurel) conclusion of what had to be done.

  After the portentous crackle of thunder, the two were forced to wander the grove separating the east and west sides of town to find the unlit back door of the museum. They’d done some reconnaissance the week before, and found it was left unlocked while the security guard was on duty.

  Speaking of whom: Fidger Winks, the town drunk, and only acting security guard at the Gladewood Museum, had already passed out from his traditional ten-thirty gin. It made restraining him an easy enough task – and with her first field test, Adeline proved an able student of knot tying. Before settling down, Fidger surprised the pair a few times with muffled complaints and thrashing movements that were, in all likelihood, unrelated to being tied up and more due to a deteriorating frame and thinning airways.

  He wasn’t supposed to smoke inside the museum, but had realized long ago that its miasmic aroma and general muskiness was more than enough cover for his favorite cigarettes. By the time his would-be quarry had made their way from the back door to his small office, he’d already let one of his carcinogenic companions burn down to its filter. It was still in his hand, readying itself to bite at his fingers with embered fire. It wouldn’t have made much of an impact, they noticed, displaying their best yuck faces at the other blisters, burns, and calluses on his hands and arms. It must have been a remarkably common occurrence – some force must be looking out for him if that was the case.

  Laurel and Adeline were definitely good girls at heart (even if they were trespassing) and so, without a moment’s hesitation, they removed the red-tipped saboteur before it could damage him any further.

  Now, preparing to carry out the instructions in the book, the two were stretching and tracing their path on the map near the door. It was going to be a good sprint to the classics section on the other side of the small-town museum because in just a few minutes’ time, the alarm was going to...

  �
��You ready?” Laurel asked, and her sister nodded. She pressed the manual reset for the alarm system. It wasn’t as though it was hard to figure out. The sequence was spelled out right there with all the information carefully listed for even the most gin-soaked mind to comprehend. It meant they had minutes before it came back online to complete their task. Until that time, however, the security system was as disabled as Fidger himself.

  This plan was deliberate and technical, and it had not been their own.

  The old man had run through it a number of times. Pages that followed the sketches were filled with aged photographs captioned words that were lost when he died. It let the imagination of the young women wander, though. Had the old man with the laneway house been an Indiana Jones of sorts? Travelling the world and purchasing, retrieving, or otherwise collecting artefacts from places others were unable or unwilling to explore?

  It didn’t matter. They were the heroes now. Rushing out the door and tapping their soft shoes on the cold tile as they continued on towards their destination.

  “Faster! FASTER!” Laurel whispered then shouted, hoping her sister would grace them with her legendary speed, knowing that they had so little time to complete their task.

  They made their way through static snapshots of history – passing by preserved bog-mummies, death masks, old books, scrolls, and images of famous dig sites, each accompanied by a plaque that explained, at length, what each piece depicted and why they were significant. A reconstruction of a large prehistoric sloth stood above them, its cold eyes peering over the displays like a silent (and sleepy) guardian. Murals, some dating from Mesopotamian times, rested on shelves that were rotting at their bases. The Gladewood Museum’s endowment, once the pride of the city, had seen better days – and if something weren’t done soon, these treasures would soon collapse and shatter into dust.

  At the entrance to the ancient Greek exhibit sat an exact replica of the Rosetta Stone. Next to it, hidden under a white sheet coated in dust, was the old man of the laneway’s last discovery. A treasure that was but two feet in height placed so close to the edge of the entryway that it had been presumed to be a table by some ill- informed curator, intern, or volunteer. (Adeline thought it might have been Fidger, in a late-night display of decorative flair.) Atop the sand-worn cube, a few shiny cards were placed in a basket with the note: “PLEASE LEAVE YOUR TICKETS HERE SO THEY CAN BE REUSED.”