Some were whimpering and pushing their way through to the stairs.
The atmosphere was thick with fear and disgust.
People were terrified when Athan came close. Some screamed.
He was afraid as well.
Athan pulled on his pants and wiped the tears and sweat from his cheeks.
“I think I need to get home…” he muttered.
“You!” A security guard’s voice boomed from the stairs.
Athan figured it was only a matter of time.
“You, need to get the hell out!” The guard pointed at Athan, who was now semi-naked pulling on his clothes.
“Get away from me!” Athan yelled back.
He was already too shaken and scared to be afraid of the big Samoan guy in a tight black T-shirt.
The man’s face remained the blank mask it always was when he had to throw out another loser drunk from the club. The guard pushed through the throng of panicked people like a rhino, smashing everything out of its way. He marched up to Athan, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him back towards the steps.
Athan panicked, waving his arms and legs about trying to get free of the man’s bear hug.
He needed to get away.
He needed to get home.
Then Athan slipped into nothingness again and his empty clothes fell to the floor. The bouncer was left blinking at everyone around him, his mouth hanging open.
Athan stood in the black, naked again.
This time it felt more calm and nurturing.
He felt safe.
How did I do that?
He knew it must have been him. Athan had wanted to not be in of the arms of the big Samoan so badly that he had ceased to be in his arms, he was somewhere else.
“I must be calm.”
He told himself to relax, to breathe and observe.
Don’t run.
Running was a bad move. It felt like he had been running for hours, but then he found himself back in the club as if only a moment had passed.
Time passed differently while in the dark.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He focused on what he could feel, smell, see and hear.
He stood motionless, listening. Only silence.
Where the hell am I?
Athan looked at his still sweaty body and his bloody hands. The blood was dry. It was dry and crusted around the cuts of his palms, as if they had stopped bleeding hours before.
It’s healing already? But I just did this…
Then the smell came suddenly.
Athan breathed deeply.
It was familiar, yet not. He couldn’t decide if it was even a smell.
The bouncer, Athan could feel him, as if he was still in his big arms, but it was more like a smell. To his left there came another feeling or scent, like freedom, a way out.
He stepped to it, then through it. He passed through the black as if it was a veil of water or like stepping outside into the rain and the light came back and he was free.
“I’m out.” He blinked in the dull light.
He took a breath.
Around him stood monolithic towers like emaciated body parts and the ground was like the wrinkled skin of an old man’s hands; it was soft and fragile, pale and flecked with darker spots like freckles.
“Am I dead? Please tell me! Anyone? Hello?” his voice trailed off and echoed between the poles of bone.
My drawings.
This is what I draw, he thought, all of this, I created this. This is in my head.
Athan bent down to stroke the soft skin on the ground. It was warm and soft under his fingertips.
It felt real.
Everything in dreams is real until you wake up, he decided, as he looked around to find a way out.
Through the fog he could see a tangle or mesh of some kind.
“That way for home,” he whispered.
Why that way?
He could smell it. But how could he even smell? This place was not even real, and dreams don’t have a smell, maybe it was a feeling, or instinct again.
That way.
Keeping track of time was not easy, his feet were sore and he was feeling a bit breathless. The walk was taking a while, half an hour he thought roughly.
The skin on the ground had developed broad ridges and vertebrae-like groves that looked kilometres long.
It felt pleasant to walk on the skin, but it had become less frail and soft and more firm and leathery.
The way out was close, he could feel it.
Home.
After wandering around the base of what looked like a giant elbow, he found a spot that felt…different.
A door maybe, like the one he walked through in the dark that felt like the security guard.
Athan touched the place gingerly with his fingers and they disappeared into the purplish skin, as if it was water.
He stood marveling at how something that looked solid rippled around is fingers. When he withdrew his hand it was dry.
He sat on the ground beside it, too afraid to step through.
He was so unwilling to linger in the dark that he had stepped through into this place, now that there was a doorway he could see, even in the dimming white light, he felt like he could somehow drown or be trapped inside it.
He was scared, naked and alone.
Athan woke suddenly, startled by movement.
He had been leaning against an edifice that was moving in the breezeless air.
Not a tree at all, but it had moved.
He shuffled backward and looked up at the black coral-like web above him. It disappeared into the fog far above.
He was still next to the strange door at the base of the organic structure.
He took a deep breath and clenched his fists.
It was time he woke up to find out what had happened to his body.
He took another deep breath as he braced himself.
Diving in eyes closed would be the best way to get it over with.
Time to wake up.
Athan jumped through.
***
Lockie lay motionless on his bed, completely dead to the world, passed out after too many drinks and Athan stood naked and breathless in his housemate’s room. I’m home.
Athan was wide eyed, blinking, adjusting to the change.
He had watched himself stepping out of Lockie’s body like a ghost in a horror movie.
He’d stepped right out of Lockie’s sleeping body. Lockie may as well have been a hologram.
What happened to me?
He held out his hands in the dark and examined his wounds.
His cuts had healed, even the blood that was smeared all over his arms was little more than a few brown flakes.
He decided to get to the safety of his own room.
He was quiet as a mouse. The last thing he wanted to do was try and explain himself to Lockie if he woke up.
He slipped out and tread carefully on the old floorboards.
His room was locked, but there was a trick to getting the door open when you didn’t have keys. His keys, of course were gone, along with his wallet and his mobile phone. They were in the pockets of his pants, which he no longer had.
He took the handle and lifted it till the catch was released.
He was lucky they were old locks.
Athan pushed the door open and turned on the light, and there it was, the charcoal scrawling on the walls and the piles of scratchy drawings.
Black smears everywhere, a mess.
Everywhere he looked he saw drawings of the other place.
He had created that dream world himself. He could see it all over the room. He even thought for a moment that his out-of-body experience could have been the result of somebody drugging him. But it was too real. He needed to try and do it again, to prove to himself that it was a product of his imagination somehow.
He grabbed his charcoal-stained work shirt and a pair of boxers and tried to rally the courage to go back into Lockie’s ro
om. But he couldn’t do it, and ended up sitting on his bed staring at the charcoal smeared wall.
Eventually curiosity got the better of him. He wandered quietly up and down the hallway of the house trying to summon the courage to enter Lockie’s room again. He had to see what was happening, he had to know if he was crazy.
He pushed the door carefully.
Lockie was asleep.
He opened it the rest of the way and slipped in, approaching the bed. There was Lockie laying sprawled on his back. He hadn’t moved, not even rolled over. His dark curly hair looked like a cushion under his head. Athan bent down and reached out a shaking hand to touch the sleeping freckled face. Lockie was the only young man he knew that wore fleecy pajamas to bed every night.
Athan felt like an idiot leaning over his sleeping friend.
He was too nervous to touch him, so he climbed awkwardly onto the bed with his feet either side.
Lockie groaned and began to move.
Now or never.
He stepped onto his stomach and closed his eyes, waiting for Lockie to cry out or complain.
Instead there was a feeling like a rush of air in his face and he opened his eyes to find himself standing next to the giant organic structure in the dark again.
Athan was sure that he had lost his mind.
Have I just gone inside Lockie’s body, or mind? Where am I?
He straightened a twisted sleeve then realized he was clothed! He was wearing his shirt…but no boxers.
A shirt and no shorts…
It was the same shirt that he had been wearing at work, and the same shirt he had been wearing when he had blacked out and went crazy and drawn organic images everywhere.
He wondered if there was a link?
Athan stepped back out into Lockie’s room and noticed his boxers laying on the bed next to his sleeping friend.
Umm…better get rid of those before he wakes up.
He grabbed his shorts and ducked out of Lockie’s and into his own room. He needed the dirty work clothes.
The suit jacket, the thin black tie and the black suit pants that were crumpled under some of the drawings.
“Oh, underwear,” he muttered.
He found his undies from the day at work, and the tight black donuts of his socks. He pulled all of his charcoal stained clothes on and tiptoed down the hallway to the back door and the pile of shoes.
His black leather work-shoes were beneath Tim’s runners.
He pulled them on and went back to Lockie’s room. He needed to complete his experiment.
Standing in Lockie’s room he looked around: university textbooks, dirty clothes, DVD covers and some chocolate wrappers. He noticed his reflection in the big mirror over the dressing table. It was a woman’s dressing table, but it had come with the rental house, and the boys all used it to fix their hair.
Athan looked like he was going to a funeral, or a wedding, maybe a job interview. His short brown hair was a mess, so he slicked it back with his fingers to get it to look at least a little presentable. He’d have to clean his clothes later.
He had to see if he could manage this with clothes on.
He was nervous, but it felt right.
He remembered standing on that beer soaked carpet at The Link with everyone screaming and recoiling from him. The look in his friend’s eyes. The fear.
How would he face them again?
He was responsible for throwing the club into turmoil and frightening everyone, including himself.
He pitied the man in the mirror. Things couldn’t be normal for him again if this was real.
Athan Harper fixed his tie and turned to his sleeping friend Lockie.
“Good bye cruel world,” he whispered.
He stepped into Lockie for the last time.
He found himself standing fully clothed next to the scaffold of flesh. Around him a white glow had begun to bring a cold light to the new and strange world that was shrouded in a soft mist. Everywhere, Athan began to see the shapes of the strange landscape become more visible, and he could see that the land went on and on, maybe forever.
“Where am I?” Athan whispered as he placed a hand on the warm leathery skin of the skeletal tree-like thing beside him.
Am I inside a new world? Is this in my mind? And why had he been drawing these extraordinary shapes all his young life?
He wondered if it were some kind of premonition that he had been able to channel the shapes of this world through his hand.
What would happen to all his things and the drawings that lay all over his room next to Lockie’s.
The drawings all over the walls?
There would be questions that he had no answers for.
He couldn’t go back there.
He knew he had to see his family, maybe for the last time.
He couldn’t be just Athan Harper now, he needed to learn more about this place and himself.
This was the beginning of his self imposed exile.
Athan set off across a wide expanse of shifting dunes of skin. It heaved a little like it was breathing. It was comforting and warm and felt like home for some reason. Like he had been there before.
His Mum’s house was where he needed to go, to say good byes and wash his clothes maybe. He could smell the way, or feel it. He couldn’t decide what the sensation was, but he knew he was going in the right direction.
Acknowledgements
After writing The League, I discovered that I had created my own dimension and it was populated by a whole range of interesting characters that I could develop further. One of my favourites, of course, was Cynthia Abell AKA Deadfall.
In the beginning, she was a facet of myself as a struggling art student. The exhibition where she makes her first appearance was based on many of the exhibition openings I used to go to fairly regularly. The scene was complete with many of the art world stereotypes I’d encountered making cameos in one form or another. It was an odd and colourful range of people that would frequent those events and many of them I remember vividly.
What I really found interesting about her character was the fact that she was a beautiful woman who had become anti-social and self-deprecating due to the darkness and guilt she carried with her. I had seen this in a few people I have met over the years, but obviously not quite to the same degree. Cynthia carries a heavy burden, yet she keeps a level head and does what needs to be done. I admired her character (even though I made her up). In the sequel to The League, Gemini Rising, Cynthia plays a large part in the story. I found that, having written Deadfall first, I felt more in touch with who she was and the role she would play. I have written Deadfall as an unofficial prequel to the whole Post-Human series and it felt good to set some foundations for who she is and where she has come from. No doubt there are readers out there that are curious about the origin of characters in The League, so may not be the only prequel story. I have been considering a background for Brad Lewis and Mirage, but this is the first and I’m glad a cool character has a history of her own.
When I wrote this book I had an idea of who I wanted Deadfall to be and where she would come from and none of that would be possible without my own history and where I’ve come from. Getting to where I am now has been an interesting and sometimes difficult journey. I’m glad, though, that I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m able to reflect on my own experiences to create the experiences of others. It’s not easy trying to write a story based on a character that is dissimilar to yourself, so the more you live and the more opportunities you take, the more likely it is that you can create believable fictional lives. Henry Rollins says that ‘knowledge without mileage, is bullshit’ and I’d have to agree. Knowledge without mileage doesn’t give you much to write about. You have to live your own story a little before you can write one.
I would like to thank my Dad, Gareth, for reading and editing. I would like to also thank Ben Langdon, fellow writer for Kalamity Press for his continuous feedback and support. Lastly, I would like to than
k my lovely wife Donna for reading, editing and generally enduring my continuous babble, my social awkwardness and my nonstop excitement about everything that I learn and discover. She has been there with me for the most exciting times and the most stressful moments. We have worked together and travelled together and she has tolerated my odd myriad of interests and collections without saying anything other than ‘we need a bigger house’. I’d also like to thank all my friends and family for inspiring me and supporting my exploits as an author.
There are many more books to come, because I love writing and I’m sure I will only get better at it. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this book and I hope you will continue to follow Kalamity Press and read some of the books we will release in the future.
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