Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Fiction
vr 3.00
2008-02-16
"Kit/Kat" by Abraxas | 2000-04-07
Chapter One
What they saw of the river was a parallel strip with a gentle ‘S’-curve at the exact center of the field of view. Its currents stretched from one end of the horizon to the other - and at its extremes faded into dense mists and cloudy vapors that totally obscured their sights even on-high. Its waters were blue - very clearly blue - and calm with only the rarest wave here and there glimmering and shinning amid the bright sunlight of the noon sky. WileyKat and WileyKit steered their hover-boards lower and lower and lower still until they skimmed the unsettled surface of the untamed river and felt the cool spray of the foamy crests.
On either side of them the jungles of Third Earth spread out in ever-growing entangled abundance. The nearer layers of vegetation could be distinguished effortlessly, but of what lay further beyond remained darkened, shadowy oblivion. The canopy was vague and unclear; the treetops blended into one, complete mass of green that broke apart with the random sway of animals, whose habitat it was, jumped and leapt branch to branch. The great, wide earth everywhere was fertile and decorated by luscious bundles of grassy flowers, velvety moss and craggy underbrush.
Although the hover-boards produced a low murmur and the river was itself quite noisy, the two could hear well the sounds that diffused throughout the arboreal environs.
The greenery ended abruptly with the spread of a yellowed plain of gray rock. Dead and brown-dried plants hung off the sides of the stony edifices like delicate spider webs, like fingers of death frail and thin. Cold winds careened across the land strong enough to fan the eerie vines out in the air but not strong enough to dislodge the crumpled networks from the pitted, eroded faces of the monoliths to which the roots and leaves had adhered through the ages. The flatland was also adorned by numerous chimneys that vented vast subterranean caverns the Thunder Twins often explored.
Off in the distance, all around and all over the northern horizon, the bare, wintered peaks of the forbidden mountains loomed unfathomably high into the gloomy, gray skies. No longer the bright blue of morning, no longer the sunny sapphire of noon, the heavens now amassed dense, wispy clouds that interlocked into bizarre formations.
WileyKat was tired though his heart raced. He sat with his hover-board under the shade of one of the taller monoliths. The rock’s vines hung limp across the rim of an extended ledge as much as a weeping willow envelopes the space beneath its branches. The brittle, yellow grass of the immediate vicinity had been patted flat, firm and soft. He saw his sister walk through the waist-high vegetation that trembled violently in the wind. She had mischief on her mind but his attention was elsewhere.
A dark shadow passed through the fields.
Beneath a large, loose boulder was a portal, an opening leading into a cavern. He inserted his hands - his whole arms - and felt about the passage’s interior. Along its interior he discovered the rough suggestion of a rung ladder. For some reason, for no reason, he stuck through his whole head and peered into tunnel’s incredible length noticing at its very terminus the hint of a red aura, a warm, red aura.
He lifted his head - his hover-board was gone, his sister was missing. The sky alternated with momentary flashes of light and dark - shadows formed across the landscape as clouds passed before the sun. The wind ruffling the scenery produced an eerie music and uplifted an aroma of unknown, woodsy nature.
The mysterious, unknown specter moved away - not closer but further into the forest.
WileyKat studied the portal again and decided to explore it. Silently, dispassionately, he climbed in on his hands and knees. At first his fingers and toes could find and fit neatly into the rungs of that ancient, imbedded ladder but after a while - after he was deep, so deep into the passage he could not see its upper extreme - he could not hold himself up any longer. Suddenly he felt imponderably heavy, his movements slow and sluggish. Suddenly, too, he was overwhelmed by a familiar sensation in the pit of his stomach just before he actually slipped and fell.
The vertical tunnel only appeared to be deeper than it really was. After the briefest of moments he landed on his back in a small chamber. Its jagged proportions were aglow with a vivid red. It was lit not by fire, not by fixture, but by an unseen source that was totally and completely - almost, indeed, deliberately - inhuman. The ghostly aura - the chamber, too - throbbed as if he were not inside a cavern but instead inside the phosphoric abdomen of a demonic firefly.
The wind howled - it echoed through the tunnel.
WileyKat looked around. There was a way out, a side passage but he dared not - no - for behind its misshapen, jagged outline was nothing but absolute blackness so intense he had mistaken it for another wall of rock. And then there were the sounds of a presence approaching: the breathing, the treading.
He stepped back over the rocky floor, back over the chamber’s red aura, back - until it appeared at last.
“What are you?” He tried to hide his face under his hands. He tried to cover his eyes - to go blind if only, if just only never to see that thing again.
The figure emerged from the murky currents of the incomprehensible void.
He averted his eyes but was overpowered by the urge to see - to see if it vanished like the illusionary fragment of disturbed imagination he wished it was all along. But it was still there and worse; it was not one figure but two: two man-like beings, one front and one behind, standing back-to-back and deformed as their bodies twisted and spiraled about each other. It had four arms, four legs and walked in the slowest, most peculiar manner. The face of the man-thing he saw was green and hairless: its brow buried by deep, folded wrinkles, its eyes obscured under saggy masses of flesh, its nose a pair of tiny holes, its mouth a slit of two thin lips and its chin abnormally pressed into its head.
“No! Stay back, stay back, you’re horrid!” WileyKat shouted as he stumbled about the cavern. He crouched into an upright, fetal position and sobbed: “What are you?”
“I am evil,” the man-figure whose visage he studied answered. The superficial lips barely parted, barely moved as the guttural voice spoke. “I am formless.”
He gazed across the chamber - the thing’s shape changed: the men-like figures transformed. The first was his duplicate and the second was his sister’s copy. The new images were not intertwined as the old ones were, yet they continued to act in eerie unison.
“I am good,” the WileyKit-figure replied, too, as the macabre pair circled to let him see.
While his mirror image was flawless, hers was not: the face bruised and battered, the eyes shrunken and shriveled, the nose caked with blood and broken aside and the jaw smashed and shattered sagged with rows of missing, broken teeth. The neck was split open with bloody, moist internal structures visible through the wide tear. The left hand was missing the thumb.
“I’ve lost my mind. I’ve lost my mind. I’ve lost my mind.”
* * * * * * * * * *
WileyKit wailed, her voice muffled by sobs and tears: “WileyKat, wake up! Wake up! Wake up, WileyKat! Oh, by Jagga, wake up!”
“What? What is it?” he asked, startled. “WileyKit?” He stood, wrapping his hands around his head: his eyes and temples throbbed. “What is it, Kit?”
She grasped his forearms tightly; he looked at her features nervously: her bruised face, her blood-soaked hands, her clothes, ripped and torn.
Confused, he shook his head and asked: “What happened? Did you have an accident?” Casually he looked at the flattened turf - the hover-board he had slept next to, or that he thought he had slept next to, was missing. “WileyKit.”
She tugged his forearms and by her motion smeared his fur and uniform with the grimy, oily leethe. She led him, his mind groggy and disoriented, across the weathered, wilted overgrowth. She dragged him, his sore, tired body, away from the monoliths, through the waist-high, yellow grass, to the sheltered fringe between the dead plain and the living forestry.
The wreckage of the hover-board lay amid the silky foliage.
“I had an accident,” she confessed.
“But you’re not bleeding - I mean - that’s not your blood, right?” he asked, desperately. “I mean - you’re OK?”
“Look.” She pointed to a mysterious object below the largest section of the wreckage.
WileyKat removed the bulk of the metal shrapnel and uncovered it - horrified by what he saw he turned to the side and threw up.
“I couldn’t stop. It - I, I was coming down too fast. I couldn’t stop. I crashed into him. I sliced him in half.”
WileyKit draped her arms about his shoulders and together they rocked gently back and forth.
“How could I have been so reckless? How could I have been so foolish?”
“It’s not your fault, Kat, I did it.”
“No - if the others ever know, if they ever suspect.” He inspected the scene below while the wind blew and howled above. “We need to hide the body.” She stared at him silently, wild-eyed. “Help me drag it,” he continued, indicating with frenzied gesticulations the smoky vents surrounding the stony monoliths. “Dump it into one of those holes. We’ll dump it and cover it. And no one - even Liono - will ever find out.”
The twins sunk the hover-board within the shallows of the nearby riverbank letting the currents wipe the blood away. They dragged the body into the fields: she could not look at it so she took it by the arms; he took it by the legs. The mangled, butchered remains had not been cut as neatly in two as WileyKit thought - though its innards were exposed, its ribs and spine were intact. WileyKat studied the features that were too damaged by the impact to permit its identification beyond that it was a male Amazonian.
He saw, too, that the left hand was missing the thumb but he thought little of it.
The chimneys would not accommodate the body - it simply would not go through. Panicked but determined, he clawed at the rim with his hands until the hole was just wide enough that the upper torso fit. He stood atop the corpse and jumped up and down, each bounce pushing it further and further into the tubular passage.
A strange sound - a tear, rip - followed.
“What was that, Kat?” she asked as she stood against the bleak stonework of the lifeless plain. Her eyes welled; her lips snarled.
“The body must have broken apart,” he answered.
With one, last heave the body fell through entirely - but now there was a new problem. The hole was too large to be plugged with the nearby stones. But he got an idea and with his sister’s help they slid the monolith toward the chimney. They did not have a good hold on the stonework and a slab slipped off the side.
“WileyKit? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine, fine.”
And it was odd for she had been standing in the slab’s trajectory - it should have hit her but by some force, by some magic, now she was safe next to him.
“You moved out of the way so fast.”
But she did not respond - her eyes had a strange, faraway look, indeed, for the first time he realized she never ever really looked at him.
* * * * * * * * * *
WileyKat sulked at the edge between the land and the water, the broken parts of his hover-board lay submerged by his feet. He wondered: why had she used his hover-board when she had one of her own?
Suddenly he was distracted by the sounds of splashing and giggling. She had stripped - her clothes clung onto the blunt ends of the tree stumps - and had dipped into the currents of the river. Her hair was wet and sagged, conforming to the contour of her head. Her ears were visible as they poked through the matted fur. Her eyes - dead, so utterly dead - sparkled with unnatural moisture. Her face was painted by a devilish smile that retained the faintest hint of childhood innocence.
WileyKit approached the shore and gradually the rest of her body emerged into view.
He caught sight of her round, shapely breasts - she had sprouted them a long while ago but lately they had not enlarged. How long before they were ripe and supple like Cheetara’s chest? he asked quietly under his baited, panted breath. He stared at her furry, flat stomach and chuckled at her tiny, inner bellybutton - and then at the last moment she turned and submerged, disappearing into the river to rejoin the pantheon of tempting nymphs, no doubt, he thought.
He wanted to go to her, but he feared she would not understand, she would not take it the right way. He cursed at his body. Would it always get in his way?
She resurfaced between his legs and fell upon his arms - he reclined into the sun-baked mud of the riverbank, hugging her shoulder and kissing her cheek.
“It’ll be all right, Kit.”
“What do we do now?”
He looked into her eyes - his hands, his fingers, exploring her wet mane as she pressed their bodies yet closer, yet deeper into each other.
“Get on your hover-board and go back to Cat’s Lair. Tell the others I was in an accident but that I’m all right. Tell them my vehicle broke but that I’m OK - and that I’m coming home on foot. That will be the end of it. But if they ask what happened, I’ll say - I’ll say - I crashed into a tree.”
“My sweet brother, you are so good to me,” she said, biting her lip.
“Don’t be sad,” he said, kissing the moist trail of a tear that crossed her cheek. “Don’t be sad - I love you.”
WileyKat lost it - he was so, so very intimately close and yet he lost it. Yet, too, he was happy. WileyKit ran her hands across his chest and stomach and he got it back - and she knew it and he knew she knew it. He was nervous but she laughed, teased his fur and kissed his lips - they parted one, last time.
END OF CHAPTER
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