Under the Green Sun of Slormor

by Bertil Falk

Chapter 8: Consolation Island in the Lake of Blood

part 2 of 2

She took my hand, leading me to the red water. Then she said. “But it’s not blood, even though it is red and viscous.”

I saw my face and hers reflected in the red lustre. And we both looked happy. Why is not easy to say, and I don’t know if, deep down, I was happy just because I looked happy reflected in the red mirror.

Then we walked out. Like a just-polished floor on a bay by Evert Taube, this water of redness received our feet, and we walked with light steps across the slow groundswell towards Consolation Island.

Every step was easy, and even though I saw that the surface of water yielded under our feet, there was there a surface tension that carried us as we walked along like too big water fleas towards the island waiting for us in speckled colors.

As though hypnotized by Parvrin’s calm, the stillness of the surface of the water, and the warm beauty of the island, I took my somnambulistic steps, the one step at a time. Then the enchantment burst like a bubble.

The mobile phone around my neck began to play “For he’s a jolly good fellow”.

At the other end, I heard a too well known voice. “Don’t forget the time of the baptism!”

Forget something that had already happened?

“Dear mom...”

“I just wanted to remind you. I’ll see you then!”

Click!

We were halfway across the lake when that happened. Parvrin regarded me with a certain surprise and asked, “What was that?”

“Oh, it was only my mother, who was reminding me not to forget to come to the baptism of my grandchild, a baptism that has already taken place.”

A temporal anomaly, a spatial anachronism, a space-time paradox in the midst of everything else!

“Well, what do you know?” I said.

“What do I know?” Parvrin said, unable to understand.

“Can’t we walk faster?” I asked, and sped up.

As we approached the island, I saw pitch-dark tree trunks entwined with tremendous snow-white, tabloid-shaped chameleonic leaves that changed from one moment to the next, gigantic accumulations like lily of the valley, and superb cowslippery trees. An orgy of changing colors. At a rapid pace, we covered the last distance, walked up on the brown sand, and rushed into the hot jungle that enclosed us with a cannonade of all the colors of the rainbow.

We arrived at a huge glade and there was a plinth erected like an altar, and on it was a stone round like a ball. Around the glade was an amphitheatre built with seats filled with beings, which were all reminiscent of the other inhabitants of Slormor. I guessed that they were the Invaders, and I realized that this could be a big moment for them. Whether they were going to sacrifice us or welcome us, I had no idea.

For a second, the old woman came to my mind’s eye. She, who like a withered Egyptian vulture, with her partly blind, hazy and red eyes turned inwards, scratched at a memory that had long since moved to the back of my mind.

She, who with an unobtrusive, croaking voice told me that only she or he, who beyond the heavy city and beyond the dead spot of Slormor was capable of lifting the enchanted stone and put it back on its pedestal, could find a way out of this man-eating Venus fly-trap. But was the stone on the pedestal?

I rushed forward to lift it.

Intense enthusiasm broke out, an exultant chatter, and I understood what they cried, “The savior is come! Long live the savior of Slormor! Long live the savior’s companion!”

A wave of warmth spread over my face, but the euphoria I experienced soon ran into a sense of shame as I realized that they were cheering Parvrin. Parvrin was the savior. I was only the companion of the savior! Parvrin’s eyes shone like a black mere in the depths of a forest on a brilliant day in early summer.

She lifted the stone and threw it away!

Blushing, I entered the depression where the stone had been, but I was not teleported back to my own world.

At that moment, a man came out of empty nothingness. He suddenly appeared in front of us, and Parvrin gave a cry. I could not tell whether it was of fear or of happiness. Perhaps it was happiness mangled with terror.

“Deradivel!” she exclaimed.

Her gur! What was this? Soon my question would be answered.

“How disobedient you are permitted to be,” Deradivel said.

He was a tall gentleman with the characteristic sloping shoulders, necks, arms or whatever. The eyes sitting deeply embedded into the eye-sockets were like a pair of knots; his hair crackle-gray; the pale mouth small. He was dressed in a dark tunic.

“I had to!” Parvrin said. “I could not abandon this man from another world.”

Now he seemed to see me. He raised his eyes and looked at my face, and his knots met my eyes. The sight of me did not leave him unaffected. He took a step back and lowered his reef knots, as if hit by a blow.

“A human being!” he said. “A man!”

“It seems as if you’ve stumbled upon my kind before,” I said.

He shook his head. “No, but my grandparents once met a human in the city, one who called itself Gaudi. But that was very, very long ago. He came here now and then. Come with me.”

It was me he was talking to.

I followed him, and he guided me to another glade, where we sat down on a pair of mossy, downfallen tree trunks.

“You’ve slipped into Slormor by a chance,” he said. “I understand that you want to go home.”

I nodded.

“An old woman said that I would find the gateway if I went to the Invaders.”

Deradivel laughed.

“And you swallowed that old wives’ tales,” he said. “The Invaders belong to the world of legends. Parvrin believes in them, most people do, but believe me. They don’t exist. And Slormor...”

He hesitated. “Slormor is doomed to perish, as you’ve seen. One cannot save a dying world. Temporarily, one might prolong its life; but, like everything, it has to die at last. Great parts of Slormor already lie dormant, as you must have found during your search for a gateway home. There are oases, which you also must have seen. Like this place and the places where the Hoverers, the Belyrs and the Aldravers live. But the city, where Parvrin and I live, is, as you know, a twisted grimace of its former glory.”

“There are no Invaders,” I murmured, “but we sensed them. Both Parvrin and I.”

“That kind of sensation is normal here on Slormor. It is about movements, vibrations that have nothing at all to do with Invaders. But people are superstitious and believe that the sensations are Invaders touching us.”

I regarded him with skepticism. “Parvrin superstitious?” I exclaimed.

“She is, like all others; but you caused her to mature.”

“I?”

“Of course. Thanks to your arrival you’ve triggered her mental ability and activated her intellectual potential, which is proven by the fact that she decided to guide you to the land of the non-existent Invaders. That made her grow, mature.”

I looked at him carefully. He was probably telling the truth. His knots were deeply sunken into his skull. His thick, ash-colored hair framed his face; his skin was rough and looked decayed. When he spoke with his slim mouth, his pale lips hardly moved. In his tunic, he reminded me of a scriptural prophet.

“Is Parvrin their savior?”

The small mouth was twisted into a smile. “I said that. I let them believe it, but there is no salvation. As long as they hope, they will not fall into hopelessness. Our world is doomed. That’s the truth and can’t be changed.”

I did not know what to believe. “Why do you tell me this?”

“Perhaps because you shall have it with you, when you go back to your world.”

“I can return?” I exclaimed.

“You shall return! You MUST! You’re an anomaly and don’t belong here. You distort our existence, speed up our extinction. You must go! I’ll see to it that you find your way back.”

“But if it’s so... why haven’t you...?” Before I even thought the thought to its end, I asked him the question. “If it’s possible to get away from here, why have you not emigrated to our world?”

“We can’t get through. It’s too late. It should have been done long ago. It was also done.... but it’s forgotten.”

“How come you know, if it’s forgotten?”

“I belong to the selected carriers of knowledge. Once, very long ago, long before our necks or shoulders sloped into our arms, Adaram and Evrydan emigrated to your world. They were exiled from Slormor because they had committed a bad crime. We don’t know what crime it was, but they were expelled to your world. It happened about one thousand million times your world’s three hundred and sixty-five solar cycles ago. You’re one of their billions of billions of billions of descendants.”

What was he talking about? Cro-Magnon? Adaram and Evrydan? Again, I did not know what to believe. Ask and Embla! That takes some swallowing! Adam and Eve! Exiled from the Garden of Slormor. Had I returned to the origin of mankind? What would Darwin say? And how do you in such a case explain all the discoveries in the Rift Valley in Kenya?

That evening they threw a party for us. The people were not Invaders, as I had thought, we had thought, or they had deluded me into believing. But I was preoccupied with thoughts and absent-mindedly followed all the extraordinary movements and significant sounds when the beings danced. Beings? Humans? What were they? What was I? Were we really descendants of the same race?

I stepped aside without watching my step, tripped, and stood in my study in Malmö!

Dazed, I staggered into my bathroom. In the mirror I saw an unusually weather-beaten face, damned unshaved. I was dressed in a pair of filthy, rosy trousers, a pair of flaming red, unpolished shoes and a dirty jacket of some satin-like cloth. As I stood there, the foreign clothes faded away and I stood naked and stared. Just stared.

Proceed to Chapter 9...