Ain't Talkin'

Flip-switch. Static. Deaf sound and then a slap in the face of absence of everything. Walking into a hole was less like traipsing across the shorelines of the white. It was stepping into the foundation void of all things.

The hole was not an obvious thing. The indian guarded a vague ripple in the landscape. A tear in the substance of things that was non-existent unless seen at an angle, from a perfect perspective, at a certain height, when the light was just right.

The gatekeeper knew it was there, the walker knew it was there. Any average passerby would have merely sensed unease and a general discomfort with their surroundings. Markus claimed to have experience with the white, but whether that had been a bold-faced lie or a push to seem more reliable was the case, but also neither here-nor-there.

The young man in foggy glasses and a buttoned shirt did what folks sometimes did when they passed into the ether for the first time. The lack of any sensory stimuli was a shock to the system, and he stood silent for several seconds before he started to panic.

“I-, Oh my. Oh, the-. . .oh, fuck, what is? Shit, shit, shit.”

“Relax. We crossed over to the ether. Ain’t nothing worth yammering about.” Roche entered the void a step behind the kid with the horse in tow along her reins. Somehow, somewhere previous, the horse had seen this white before. Lucky was either stupid, afraid of absolutely nothing, or had done this before. She shook her mane and nickered, and kept walking behind her rider like nothing had happened. Good horse.

“But, where-”

“Save it, kid. You’ve never done this before, have you?” Roche eyed Alex Markus up and down, keenly aware that his coat and hair were falling strangely around him, governed only by the semblance of physics that Roche had forgotten during his first forty years wandering nothing. Once you stopped believing in rules the rules stopped believing in you.

Markus on the other hand, had clothing and hair that fell naturally, like he had never stepped off of Terra 1.

“I! Shit. I done this. I’ve been here, not here. I’ve been through the white, just never. . .oh, fuck.”

“Save it. If you’ve had any experience with this shit you’ve been doing it peripherally. Along the fringes. You’ve never dove in. Why did you lie?”

“Lie?”

“You said you had plenty of knowledge and experience. I thought you knew what this was. And now I’ve even got Johnny Redskin telling me that you’re lying to me.”

“How?”

“Speaks Without Words? You’re talking a lot but not saying anything. And now we’ve got a long walk through nothingness and if you don’t start telling me the fucking truth then I’m gonna leave you to wander the white until you go blind, deaf and mad. Try spending an eternity in a world where you can’t physically die and without any stimulation to any senses your mind retreats to the only anchor of realism left and that’s itself. You’ll drive yourself to a gibbering, drooling, mad fool before seven days pass and you’ll be stuck here forever.”

“Fuck me.”

“If you were prettier I might do it just to add insult to injury you simple fuck. Now talk.” To add whatever measure of ‘fuck you’ to the conversation, Roche drew his revolver slowly and rested the end of the barrel on Markus’ lips.

Lucky blew out her breath. Good horse.