Kevin's Watch

Mallory rolled his eye repeatedly wondering when the computer would shut its face but it just kept spewing out information so Mallory, disgusted, walked out of the room and proceeded up the staircase to the next floor.

When he got to the top of the tower, Mallory discovered his own bedroom, and he felt himself slipping back, back, and so he cried, "no, don't end this way, it's crappy ..." and the night air was clear but tinged with the scent of an approaching winter storm.

So Mallory ripped the tapestry off the wall of his room and hurled it out of the window and into the merciless torrent that now raged against the castle walls.

As he did, the corner of the tapestry snagged itself on his loosened belt buckle, and he stumbled...then he fell...into the raging night.

Mallory plummeted downward as the tapestry's grasp on his belt buckle was as unbreakable as the love a mother has for her child.

With a splash like the calving of icebergs, Mallory fell into the moat, which seethed with alligators like Aunt Erma's best teakettle on Christmas night.

"This sucks", he thought.

Mallory struggled mightily like a man who wanted to live and not die and stuff but then he won his freedom from the tangle of the tapestry just in time to avoid becoming a snack for the hungry alligators that were descending upon him like snowflakes repelling down from the dry scalp of an unseen winter storm.

He wasn't sure which would be worse; eaten by alligators or crushed under the weight of a heavy metaphor.

It was then, when Mallory was working out how to best thwart an alligator attack with a wet curtain, when Mick Axbrewder arrived, bruised and bloody, leaping from the back of a white horse (which was not his, but had been, until very recently, ridden by an innocent and pure maiden) as it charged headlong into the moat, while swinging a glinty steel sword (ditto), and crying "Damn you, Ginny!"

astonishment stole his voice; not sure what was more disconcerting; fighting alligators in a moat that resisted the freezing winter weather, with only a wet curtain while the castle the moat protected transversed the airless void of space, or having aid arrive on a white horse swinging a sword in just the nick of time.

Thankfully the moat itself was surrounded by Southerland Castle's navigation shielding and provided life support for Mallory and the alligators. However there was no protection for Mallory against the weightlessness of his predicament which had no physicality but still felt like an invisible barbell had slipped from his grip and was resting upon his neck, forcing Mallory to metaphorically face the unpleasant reality of his uncertain and mutable future.

"Yeah," sighed Mick, "I know, I know ... hallucination," and then he vanished, not as if he had never existed, but as if his existence had been so tenuous and so incompletely incorporated that it quickly lost coherence and faded without having left any tangible evidence of ever actually having been, like a badly told joke which lives on for a moment as an awkward, empty silence, and then is forgotten when someone changes the subject, except that he was the joke, and dammit he thought he was funny.

Mallory, who owned but had not read any of the "Man Who" mystery novels, watched in horror as his apparent savior disappeared like a faery willow o' the wisp that had been silently commanded to return to the nether regions of the elusive and intangible inter-dimensional states of existence leaving poor Mallory to his grim and incomprehensible fate.

The alligators swam remorselessly closer, chomping and drooling, their eyes reflecting starlight.

After a tremendous struggle Mallory finally freed himself and climbed out of the moat just as the ravenous Alligators converged and began chomping and thrashing wildly at anything and nothing like angry clothes pins deprived of argyle socks.

Mallory stood by the moat, shivering as he watched the reptiles slowly slip back under the water, leaving only the eyes protruding from the dank waters, cold sentries awaiting another chance at some luckless intruder.

Then Mallory looked up at the stars and suddenly felt insignificant like a speck of dust cast out into a massive, black room filled with nothingness and occluded by an atmosphere beset with persistent absence, emptiness, oblivion and salty potato chips.

Then he remembered that the black room wasn't really filled with nothingness, because it contained a speck of dust, and that the speck was him, the only speck in the whole room, which made him very significant indeed, so he shook off his morbid mood, made a rope by shredding the curtain, and began to scale the walls of the castle, like a speck of dust scaling a castle.

Mallory then read the last post and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and...give me a second to catch my breath...and laughed and laughed and laughed like a drunken sea-lion awash in a sea of fart jokes and nitrous oxide.