Pins (7)

 

After several minutes of retching he sank to his knees, shaking. A smattering of snowflakes quivered within the dark hollow. The pines, their branches splayed in skeletal dance, were spray-haired white. The valley rose steeply to the flanking summit, and beyond that clouds of snow moved in dense striations. Within the flurry the shapes of distant spires and domes floated, ghostly and white, as if there were great castles in the sky.

Emmett watched them and thought: we ain't gettin' through these mountains.

He clutched his stomach and tottered back to the tent. He looked at Abigail's small figure curled up beneath the layers of blankets. He swallowed, felt dizzy, and grabbed the backpack from behind his own makeshift pillow. Abigail did not stir. She must have been exhausted. 

It was too much. It was too much for her, and too much for him. They should have rode to the nearest town, turned themselves in, and over to whatever fate awaited them. The cloth-faced riders were the first folk on the scene, though, back at the railroad. Perhaps they would have needed to high-tail it, one way or another.

He pulled the blankets back from Abigail's face so she could breath properly. Her face twitched, but she did not wake. He took the backpack out of the tent, walked a short distance down to the stream and the whitebark, and sat down on the grass. 

Flakes settled on his shoulders. He lifted the cloth bag from the backpack, and removed the wooden box inside it. He set the leather notebook down on the grass, and ran his fingers over the pile of black pins in the box. 

Tapered ends. Tiny spherical tips. They felt a little bit metallic. He forgot the pain in his wounds, and his throbbing head, for a while. He noticed, for the first time, that several of the pins appeared to be of slightly different lengths. He shuffled them all to the base of the box, compared, and lifted out one of the larger ones. 

The stream gurgled beneath him. He turned the pin over in his hands. He reached for the leather notebook on the ground, and as he did so he felt an odd pulling sensation. 

He stopped and frowned. He transferred the larger pin into his right hand, and lowered it towards the snow-tinged grass. The branches of the whitebarks creaked. He felt it again, stronger: an undeniable tug, a magnetic pull. 

The pin appeared to be attracted to the floor of the saddle. His shoulder stung and he winced. Impulsively, and with some anger, he stabbed the slender pin into the soft earth. He felt a static crackle in his hand, panicked, and pulled it out again. 

In the split second between impact and removal, he saw the spherical tip of the pin flower and expand into a wide, phantasmal umbrella shape, populated by shimmering, intricately woven grey lines. This luminous canopy folded and collapsed as soon as Emmett tugged the pin free from the ground. An afterglow of its shape lingered in the night air for several seconds, before itself disintegrating in the surrounding snow.

Emmett dropped the pin and scrabbled back up the slope, away from the stream. His right hand tingled. He sat watching his splayed palm for a while, flexing his fingers and checking for residual effects. 

He looked back at the space above the ground. The flakes, denser now, swirled around it. The weird shape flared in his mind's eye. The pain and sickness returned afresh. He felt entirely removed from reality. He clutched his stomach as another bout of nausea hit him, and crawled over to the backpack and the wooden box. 

The tent flapped above him. He clasped the leather notebook, rolled onto his side, and flicked through it. It was hard to read in the dark. He peered close and tried to decipher the strange diagrams, symbols, and words. He thumbed his hat back and turned the pages. There was some consistency in the layout of the diagrams; they were shapes, marked by points at each corner.

He lingered on the marked points. He wondered if they were supposed to represent the pins. The pin had seemed to want to be in the ground. 

Emmett coughed and rummaged in his pockets. The fire they'd lit earlier: matches. He pulled the box out and struck one, moving it close to the faded pages as he turned them. Some of the shapes seemed extremely complex, but others were simple: squares and rectangles. 

The blocky text surrounding the shapes scared him. There were strings of angular symbols that looked simultaneously ancient and otherworldly. Each shape had accompanying hieroglyphs running along their lengths and widths. 

On the top right-hand corner of each page, there were separate collections of symbols, featuring  recurring images that varied in frequency as he flicked through. Several of these separate symbols looked vaguely familiar - one resembled a crescent moon; another the sun, and another an angular hourglass-shape. 

His eyes were drawn to a symbol that resembled the outline of a closed loop. Within the loop, various lined marks were etched, as if cutting it off at certain points. 

The match singed his fingertips, and he shook it out and dropped it. He gritted his teeth and rode out a throbbing surge in his shoulder. Snow bloomed like a swirling field of mariposa, and he wobbled and cursed. 

He moved to scoop up the wooden box and repack it, but curiosity and self-justification niggled through the hurt and the cold. A square. A simple square. He knew damn well what that was. There was something weird and powerful here. It just needed sussing out.

He glanced again at the page, but flakes wet the yellowed paper. He knew it wasn't the time to try and decipher things beyond the basic shape. The symbols around the shapes appeared to be related to distance, anyhow. He knelt and unclipped the box. Snowy gusts stung his cheeks, and a heaviness came over him. He felt that if he should die now, here in this lonely valley, it would be as if in an alien world. Everything he knew had crumbled and changed around him.

He fumbled through the pins, bypassing the longer ones, for fear of the strange umbrella cloud. He selected four smaller ones; they jangled in his palm. The wind shrieked and lapsed into a low, gathering chant. He separated a little pin from the group, held it by its spherical tip, and plunged it into the earth. 

There was a vague tingle in his fingers as he pulled away, but there was no repeat of the previous static fizz, and he felt both relieved and emboldened. 

He pulled himself up the slope, measuring out an arbitrary distance based on an interpretation of the square shape in the notebook. He passed a line of bare whitebarks, their skinny branches jutting out, as if someone had speared the trunks. 

He knelt and drove a second pin into the ground. His fingertips shivered at the point of impact, and his breath quickened. Snow obscured his vision as he turned to pace out the next unit of distance. He moved, stooped, and punctured the earth with the third pin. The crackle, this time, felt potent.

For a brief moment he felt utterly absurd, as if he had completely lost his mind. He'd stolen from a group of unhinged, knife-wielding killers. Dragged his nine-year-old sister on a suicidal journey through perilous mountains. Got himself cut up real good. Now he was jamming metal sticks into the ground. He flailed around, peering through the whirling snow-screen. He had completely lost track of the perimeter of his imagined square. He sniffed and burst into tears.

Daddy, he mumbled. His head dropped and he sunk down, grasping at fresh snow. He opened his palm, and sank the last pin into the ground. A charged pulse shot up his arm, and he rolled backwards in shock. Crystalline dots wavered in his vision. He rubbed his eyes and tried to control his sobs. Wind howled. It was so cold. He sat up and looked round. 

A fuzzy black thread trailed from the pin embedded in the ground nearest him. It flickered and wavered, suspended above the snow-covered grass. 

Emmett struggled to his feet. The gossamer strand cut through the snow, surrounding him in an ill-defined square. The pins. The four pins were connected by the black trail. His hands clenched and he stepped forward cautiously. He could hear the thread crackling through the wind. Further up the hill, the tent flapped, and he thought of Abigail.

He stepped towards the black thread again, and heard a soft whump sound. Everything around him was drained of colour for a split second.

Emmett flinched, lifted his hands to his head instinctively, and dropped to his knees. He knelt, shaking, for a beat. Then he was aware of a complete silence. The shrieking wind had disappeared; as had the lapping of the water below, and the creak of the whitebark. The absence of noise was unsettling, and he heard his own breath above the heavy still. He lowered his hands, stood slowly, and turned.

He could see the vague outlines of the pins and their threads spoking above the ground. The strands seemed iridescent against the grey world he was standing in. They trembled. Certain sections fizzed, as if an unseen energy was coursing through them.

He was aware that there had been some kind of event. He had felt it physically. He wondered if his eyesight had been affected - the dip of the saddle now came to him ash-grey, frosty and lifeless. 

It was difficult to discern features. The snow, so pervasive mere seconds ago, had been reduced to a sooty dusting. The stream below was a hazy twist. He turned and stepped up the hillside, moving impulsively towards the tent. The sensation of walking was briefly akin to swimming, or as if passing through some waxy screen. 

He tried to adapt and push forward, and as he did so detail leafed from the greyness around him. The overhang and the cliffs rose vertiginous above. Amongst the darkness there were velvety patches, and as he approached the border of the pin-square he had constructed, he saw the thread shimmer. He looked up and caught a brief image of an infinitely complex nexus of interweaving strands, bodied forth from the sparkling lines on the ground. 

This glossy spiderweb arced over him, and as he took another step it was lost from sight. He could see the distant dot of the tent but it was remote, much further away than he remembered, and then he hit a wall. He could not see it, but he felt it blocking his path. He lifted his hands and traced them over the impenetrable grey mist before him. The overhang, the trees, and the tent beyond seemed to recede even further, and he felt panic rising.

His breath lifted above the quiet. He banged fruitlessly against the hidden barrier and then turned again and passed slowly down the slope, like a ghost traversing a dead, ashen world. 

Pull them out, he thought. Pull them out of the ground. 

The definition of the square was hard to determine in the greyness and the swirling dark flakes. Detail muddied and clarified in unpredictable intervals and arrangements. He tried to trace the nearest thread to its corner. As he walked he realised his shoulder no longer hurt. Nothing hurt. His breath came crisp, cold and unbroken by heaves or coughs. The thought that he was dead struck him, and he tried to run, tried to find the damn pins, but the waxy envelope around resisted and checked his progress.

In time he hit upon the thread trembling above the ground, but as he tried to approach it, it abruptly appeared further away. He felt that he had adapted to the slow progress of walking within the shape, but the ground was now crusted with thick white roots. They snaked over one another like bloated maggots, and hindered his movement further. 

Soon, without realising it, he had made his way to the bank of the stream. He turned full circle, confused. The threads flickered through the mist, glossy and distant. His mind was full of images of Abigail, awake, alone, and scared in the tent. The hill above him was crawling with white roots. He looked out over the slip of stream, and it seemed like there were strange shapes on the mountainsides beyond. 

White shapes. Buildings. Great white obelisks. The strangest buildings he had ever seen. He strained, and could not fathom how he had not observed them before. They were weathered and ruined, primeval relics of a silent world. He tripped back over a root, cursed, and reminded himself that he had caused an event: he had messed with these things, these pins.

He pulled himself onto his knees, and before him was a vertex: two dark threads came together. He crawled forward. The pin was there, wedged into the ground at an angle. Through the mist and ash-flakes he caught a hint again of the huge, rippling web unspooling above him. He laid his hand on the pin and took a last look around. The mountain panorama, grey and foreboding. The ancient white obelisks.

He peered. It looked like there were lights within the strange buildings. Dull lights, stippling the peaks. He felt an sudden desire to stay. He shook it off and tugged the pin out of the earth.

The grey world around him shattered and foamed, and he slipped out of consciousness.
 

 

https://www.abctales.com/story/stephen-thom/pins-8