by Luke Kondor
When I was introduced to the chief I could tell right away that he despised me. I could tell in the way he looked at me. Like he could’ve gutted me right there.
The whole place smelled of shit and I could sense that they hated me, and for some reason I already loved the scruffy bastards. I couldn’t tell you why or how, but I knew there was something special about this little community.
They told me about the recent attacks on the tribe, which had taken place just a few years prior, one hundred members strong. They explained that people in clothing like mine came and attacked them. They brought disease and weapons. They told me that their family members grew sick and died within days. They told me that their friends and relatives were beaten by the pale men and the survivors forced to move.
You didn’t have to tell Maruko twice. He could smell the evil in the air. He’d spoken to the spirits and they had told him to jump ship. So they walked and walked, for many miles.
And here’s where it gets interesting. They spoke of a hole in the air. Like someone had taken a knife and sliced through the very fabric of the forest. And they stepped through it. The courageous little rats went and did it. They wandered into our dimension like a man might walk into a restaurant — curious and hungry.
I’m currently staying with them, offering bits of food and advice in exchange for the freedom to ask questions, study them and their culture. They’re simpletons really, lost in space and time. I saw one of them holding a leaf closely and inspecting it. He said it was the wrong colour. One can only imagine what strange dimension they came from. I saw another of them describe an animal I can’t even comprehend. They spoke of something almost dog-like, but it sounded peculiar. It sounded furless and like it had a long hairless tail. Maybe some sort of large rat?
Anyway, I daren’t keep the head of The Family from his experiments for much longer.
I’ll report as soon as I know more,
Looking forward to your reply,
Yours sincerely,
Dr Raul Centeno
Luna Gajos
Fifty-three. Fifty-four. Fifty-five. Fifty-six.
Luna ticked off the frozen food as she went. Counting through each and every pastry, pasty and sandwich, and then moved onto the soft drinks and then the crisps. She remembered a time when the food they served looked tasty to her, but after seeing stacks upon stacks of the stuff it made her sick. Doubly so after seeing, no, smelling the mouldy stuff. The ones that found themselves hidden behind cupboards or beneath ovens.
No, the mouldy ones weren’t the worst. The worst were the ones that arrived wrong. A chicken and mushroom bake with a beak inside. A beef sandwich with a tumour. A baby mouse baked into the bread. Customers complained. It was rare, but it happened.
Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. That was the soda cans counted. Onto the next.
Her mind was dulling to the numbers bouncing around in her head. It was a daily job for her. Her staff should’ve been doing it, but they got it wrong so frequently she’d taken on the responsibility. That was the one thing that she couldn’t be angry at her staff for. They were terrible, but at least they were consistent.
As she counted the bottles of ginger ale, she could see Blaise and Gina on the sandwich station dashing dollops of mayonnaise and butter onto wraps and the bread. Adding the meats, the salads, and wrapping them up in packaging, ready to be scoffed by the thousands of commuters who passed through King’s Cross station every day. There would be no leftovers. There never was.
Blaise and Gina were both born and bred in London. Both in their early twenties. Both musicians, or artists, or something or other. It was difficult to say what art they were involved with. All of the twenty-somethings had some sort of art they aspired to do for a living. They always claimed they weren’t going to end up like Luna.
“Ten years in the same place?” they’d say. “I’d kill myself.”
“I could never commit to something like baked goods for my life. My dreams have to be bigger. You know what I mean?”
Luna did know what they meant. She used to care what they meant. She’d stopped caring a few years back. There was no point in caring.
“Can you hurry it up, guys,” she said from the walk-in fridge. “We got a whole lot more to prep and it’s coming on ten o’ clock now.”
“Sure thing,” Blaise said, without turning his head. Luna thought she heard him laugh.
“What did you say?” she asked.
Blaise and Gina both stopped and turned.
“Sure thing,” Blaise said, a note or two higher.
“No, after that,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.” Blaise shook his head and his hairnet swayed. Gina’s rat face, as pale and blank as ever, remained unmoving.
A moment passed before Luna said “Okay” and they went back to their sandwiches and she went back to her counting. Blaise and Gina. Luna laughed at the idea of the two of them being famous artists. They were young and hopeful and delusional. They were a perfect sandwich. Full of meat, salad and sauce. Give it a while and watch the meat go bad, the salad go stale and the sauce go sour.
A hand tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and turned around to see little Mika. Quiet little Mika, the youngest one in the workplace. Just here Wednesdays and Thursdays. With a face as white as milk and hair as dark as chocolate. She was pure innocence.
“There’s a complaint,” Mika said, a couple of decibels above silence. “About the standards.”
“The standards?”
“The tea. The customer said it wasn’t made properly.” Mika’s cheeks reddened and her eyes watered.
“And did you offer to make him a new cup of tea?”
“Yes, but he wants to speak to a manager,” she said, a single tear now running down her cheek.
Luna balanced her pen on a cola bottle, put her clipboard down, and stood.
“Come on then,” she said, as she placed a hand on Mika’s shoulder.
As she followed Mika through the kitchen she overheard Blaise say something about his number of followers on Twitter.
When out in the restaurant she saw the place was already filling up. The business rush was already over but now it was all about the tourists, the travellers, and the tradesmen finding food on their way to and from jobs.
The complainer looked like a tradesmen to her. Even in his suit, he couldn’t fool her. Maybe a tradesmen on his way to an interview. She smelled the white spirits on his skin, reaching up to her nose.
“I think this tea could be a whole lot better,” the man said. “I think with a bit of positive thinking it could be the best in the station.”
The man took a step towards Luna. His voice was full of ‘I’m-better-than-you’. He smiled but Luna hardly noticed. She was too busy looking at the dried crusty patch of blood on the side of his head.
The Hibinoki Tribe Part 2
A Letter From The Archives
Dr Raul Centeno
Dear Mr Whit,
It was fantastic to hear that your experiments are going so well. Mind you, it’s a shame about your butler. One can only hope there was somewhere for that train to go to and it didn’t get stuck on the way.
Also to hear that little Grant is taking to his studies so well. I couldn’t have imagined any less. He will be an apt Family Head when your days have passed.
I must admit, I’m writing this letter in far lower spirits than my last.
As you know I’ve been living with the Hibinoki tribe for several months now, and they’ve come to accept me as one of their own. They’ve seen that I wasn’t there to hurt them and have put me through several tests. The last of which involved a piece of wood to be worn on my genitalia at all times. I’ll be honest, I preferred my underpants. This thing itches like fire and has given me a couple of blisters.
One night, the chief called me to his hut and asked me there and then “Do you want to join the tribe?”
I said “Yes, of course” and they asked me
if I was sure.
Once I’d convinced them of my intentions they passed me the pipe to celebrate. Obviously, I was just telling them what they wanted to hear. I needed to find a way to spend more time with this lost tribe. I needed more time to learn from them.
You see, something I noticed early on was their constant smoking. They have this strange little blue mix of plants and herbs that they smoke around the fire. Mostly at night-time, but I’ve seen them smoking in the day too. In fact, as each day passed I noticed them smoking more and more. Naturally I joined in. It was a tribe activity, and as a new tribesman I had to show them that I belonged. I shoved that pipe in my gob as much as I could. I was going to damn well prove my supposed commitment to them.
There’d been several nights where we smoked all through the night, all the way through to the morning sun. The buzz that the mix gives you is strange. All the usual pep, blurred vision and lightheadedness, but it comes with quite the violent cough and the occasional burst of fever.
Along with the ever more frequent smoking habits, I’d noticed that tribe had lost the will to hunt and to forage. Every day it seemed like there was less food to share and this last couple of days I swear we’ve all lived on smoke and berries alone.
I had a curious conversation with Marukin, the chief’s son, a couple of days ago. I asked him how he felt that one day he would become the chief of the tribe. He gave me the same steely glare he’d given me on the first day when he grabbed my scrotum. Like the past three months meant nothing for a second. I tried to pry and get some more information out of him, but he patted me on the back and said that none of them would get chance to live out the lives that they’d always envisioned.
The way that Marukin looked at me, with his hand on my back, with eyes that peered into my soul, I feared for my safety for the first time since I’d arrived. I felt like he might pull out his knife and gut me there and then.
But only an hour ago, before I wrote this, did I fully understand. Marukin would never get to be chief. His children would never get to see adulthood.
You see, a short while ago I went to speak to the chief about the lack of food. I explained that the smoking could be hurting us. I told him of the blood the tribesmen had been coughing up. I’d been finding blood in my stool, in my urine. I’ve never felt so sick in my life.
I explained to the old food that the smoking could be making us ill, lethargic. He sat me down and said to me, “You, Dr Centeno, are one of us now. You told me that you wanted to be a Hibinoki and you gave me your word that you wanted this with all your heart.”
The little chief was looking pale and frail and his stomach was beginning to distend. I could see the ring of his belly button protruding.
He went on to tell me that they knew that they were in the wrong dimension. They knew because the spirits of the land had told them so. The spirits were angry at them. They weren’t supposed to be there. And knowing that they weren’t able to get back to where they belonged, they decided to do the only thing they could do.
It was the smoking. You see, it was the mix they’d been smoking. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was in it, but the mixture that they’ve concocted was never designed to be recreational. It was functional. It had been developed with the pure intention of killing. They’d been slowly committing suicide for the past few months, and, unknowingly, I’d been doing it too.
As far as I can tell the process is too far gone now. Marukin’s first-born child passed away a week ago. His mother had been blowing the smoke from her own mouth into his. Like a mother bird to its chicks. The poor little thing didn’t even cry. It just took fewer and fewer breaths until it stopped taking any at all. I find that’s the most incorrigible thing about death. It isn’t the gore or the violence, but the giving up. Decades ago I was in Africa, and we witnessed a colleague of ours be tackled to the floor by a lioness. Within minutes the family of lions were all around him, gnawing on him, tearing him apart. It wasn’t the blood or the guts that made me feel queasy that day. It was seeing whatever fight that was in the man quickly vanish as he succumbed to his certain fate. He gave up.
I’ve just heard that a couple more of the tribesmen have passed. I feel that more will soon follow.
I started writing this, expecting that I myself might find out more about the Hibinoki tribe and about the place where they came from, but instead I feel like I’ve just figured more out about you and the Family. I’ve always harboured beliefs that in the future we might find ways to travel through dimensions the same way you commute to work, or visit your parents, by bus, or car, or even boat. I thought we could find ways to intertwine the dimensions, bridge them together, and exponentially develop our technologies and our cultures, but I know now that this can’t be done. A hole in the space-time continuum only brings death.
This particular hole has caused my own. As I write this I feel myself growing weaker. I won’t see the morning and I will not hear back from you, I’m sure, but I hope you stay safe, and that The Family lives long and flies straight.
Goodbye,
Raul.
Moomamu The Thinker
Since Moomamu had awoken as an organic living and breathing human, he’d realised that life was messy. From his old Thinking spot in the stars, it seemed like an odd little curiosity to him. Little beacons of consciousness lighting up across the universe and flickering out just as fast. But when you were standing so close to life that you could smell it, feel it, touch it, it became something else. Something far filthier.
Yes, it was easy to say you knew what life was all about from a distance, but Moomamu was now very much in the midst of it all. And he was currently being held upside-down by a thirty-foot-tall Babosian that had more arms and legs than Moomamu would care to count. Next to him, also upside-down, was a man who’d recently expressed interest in opening up Moomamu’s head to find a way back home. Moomamu had made his mind up about life — he wasn’t convinced.
The Babosi looked a lot like the humans from Earth. They had a length of torso which held them all together. They were pale and pinkish in complexion. But that was where the similarities ended. You wouldn’t mix the two up.
There was too much flesh for their innards: the saggy hairless skin folded over itself in ripples and waves. Along the shoulder lines were two primary arms, longer and thicker than the rest. These primary arms ended in hands with fingers so long they could wrap around a human body twice over. Then, below the primary arms was an array of non-uniform vestigial limbs shooting out of the Babosians’ sides. The more secondary arms a Babosian had, the higher their authority. They didn’t have heads per se but had two eyestalks poking out of the tops of their torsos on each side of their mouths. Babosians would switch genders several times throughout their long lifespans and had both a number of penises and their own vaginas. They were even able to impregnate themselves, but this was frowned upon.
The Babosi that had found them weren’t part of the main party. They’d splintered off to come and see what Richard’s hollering was all about. There were three of them, each looking at the humans they’d found with odd curiosity. The Babosi hadn’t left their home planet yet and had yet to meet any alien life forms.
“Greetings,” Moomamu said. “We are humans from the planet Earth and we are here to observe your beautiful ritual.”
“Er yes, good sirs, or madams, I think you’ll find that we can be extremely useful. You may have many questions for us,” Richard said.
The Babosi’s eyestalks rotated and they looked at each other.
“SLACHI TOTH *CLAP* SAOSK WISK KE SOS *CLAP CLAP* SOSH *CLAP*”
They spoke through a combination of words and the slapping and clicking of their secondary limbs against their torsos. Their language was difficult to understand. They used their mouths for words and their arms for punctuation. It was as visual a language as it was an auditory one.
“What are they saying?” Richard asked.
Moomamu saw fear in Richard’s face that he’d not
seen before. Here was a human with no reference for anything like this. Being captured by a trio of Babosi. It was mostly unheard of on Earth.
“They’re asking each other what to do with us.”
“TOSH *CLAP CLICK* SO EXCUPO *CLICK CLACK SLAP* SUOSO?”
Some more clicking. Moomamu watched and listened. He didn’t understand.
“Erm… yes, giant Babosian sex perverts. We are here to observe and watch and learn,” Moomamu said. “We are not here to participate.”
The smallest of them looked at Moomamu. His eyeballs undulated to Moomamu’s words. “Well … I’m not. I don’t know about him. He probably showed up expressly to participate.”
He pointed to Richard and the six eyeballs followed his finger to Richard.
“I didn’t show up for that. You brought us here,” Richard said, his face flustered as the blood rushed to his head. “I don’t want to participate either.” Richard shook his head as if to say “no” but when he clapped his hands together the Babosians replied.
“SKSOSK SHSO SO TO XESCO *CLAP*”
“Yes, that’s correct.” Richard clapped his hands again. He smiled. He thought he was getting somewhere. “I want to go home.”
“SHOCKZEO.”
The largest Babosian started to bounce with excitement as the other two pointed to a hole in the floor whilst keeping one of their eyes on Richard. It was some sort of natural spring. Full of a dark wine-like liquid. The fruity smell. The overpowering one was coming from that hole. That, or one of the many holes that lined the floor.
“Good sir, it sounds like they’re going to let us go,” Richard laughed. “I think they’re going to let us go.”
“No, they’re not,” Moomamu said. He felt a little sorry for Richard. No animal, living or dead, deserved what was about to happen to them. “They’re going to include us.”
