[Original Novel] Pariah of the Little People, Part 17

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“What’s this for?” I said, pointing to the tray. “Paper goes there. Here, take bow.” She handed me the bow, made from obsidian like the rest. The far end bore a sliding brass fitting into which she stuck a quill pen. “This is a joke, right? Am I meant to write something with the bow at the same time as I’m playing? Who designed this thing?”

She glared. “Babulya.” I gulped, and shut my dumb trap. But why give me this? An unwelcome distraction. All I could think about, all I wanted to think about, was how to free Tyler. I’d concocted all sorts of rescue schemes in my head since Saturday. Pipe dreams, most of them, and I knew it. Still, I could hardly do nothing.

I recalled his Dad laying into him. Sending him sprawling to the forest floor in a blubbering heap. Murderous rage welled up within me. Just then I felt a painful prick on my finger, yelped, and nearly dropped the violin. “Careful, fool!” Katerinka harshly admonished. “No, not ready I fear. Not yet.” She snatched it from me and inspected the underside.

In a few places, thorns had emerged from holes in the vines comprising the instrument’s body. I stared at her inquisitively. “You have feeling just now, da? Bad feeling, to hurt someone.” By now it no longer surprised me that she could seemingly read my mind. But the real explanation turned out to be simultaneously stranger and more mundane.

“I told you boy, is no regular violin. Is the Secret of Storms. Forged by Babulya with same magic she use to create little ones and Tyrants. As the little ones do, it peers into your heart. If you harbor evil there, it will see, and refuse to allow holdings of by you.”

I winced. Isn’t it enough that I’m an open book to everybody else? Even an inanimate object can see right through me...though I now wondered just how inanimate it could possibly be. “No foolings of it are possible. For to hold it, your heart must be clean and clear as a glacier. As a crystal fountain.” I assured her I got the idea, then asked why it was so important I learn to play violin in the first place.

“You don’t listen! No learnings require. Just as it see into your heart, your heart can see out through it. Whatever you feel when you hold it comes out as music, and is written in most nakedly honest, beautiful words upon the sheet.” That made some sense of the tray and quill, but it didn’t really explain why any of it was necessary, so I pressed her for more.

“No troubling yourself. For now, is enough that you know, so you can prepare. A time will come when you will hold the Secret of Storms and play the song only you can. Your last, most important favor to Babulya. Until then, clean your heart. Only if it is spotless can you do what you’re needed for.”

Cryptic and worrying like a lot of stuff she says. Must be a witch thing. However she tried to impress upon me the importance of the strange instrument, those thoughts were crowded out by pained memories of Tyler, cowering before his father in the woods. I smiled faintly, imagining that if I were to hand the Secret of Storms to Tyler’s dad, he’d bleed out.

How happy and free I’d been until then. Playing, exploring, confiding. Until the bull entered the china shop. There’s no permanent escape, is there? Monster world has a powerful gravitational field. If you don’t quite achieve escape velocity, you’ll just fall back into it.

No. It won’t suck me back in that easily. All I have to do is wait it out. Tyler can’t be grounded forever! Soon he’ll return to school and, with him by my side, I’ll be invincible. These poor unprepared fools don’t yet know what an explosive eagle is capable of when it joins forces with a retribution salamander.

That sustaining hope got me through the next week. And the next. Every time it began to fade, I doubled down on it. Everything will be right with the world when he returns. He’ll be back any day now, I kept telling myself. I suppose because I couldn’t conscion the possibility that he wouldn’t.

No, he’ll come back. He has to. How could he enter my life and teach me so much only to then vanish from it forever? There’s just no way it can end like this. Such thoughts consumed my mind day after day. If anybody noticed how despondent I’d become, they didn’t say anything. Except for the occasional “monkey boy”, of course.

I distracted myself with the search for the little white houses. Now that I knew what to look for, they were everywhere. I assumed they were homes before. One by one, I rattled them a bit so everyone inside would come out, then squashed ‘em flat. Once, the little fellow wearing the decorative costume and tall hat shouted angrily and shook his fist at me. I flicked his hat off.

As expected, they kept rebuilding them. But I just kept knocking them down. All those little factories for the mass production of maniacs. No wonder they were at each others’ throats. Even after this, they fell back and defended bizarre compounds in remote parts of the field. Fenced in, with row after row of bunkhouses.

There I found they’d confined every member of their population with black hair. No clear reason why, but the fence posts all bore the same symbol atop them as the little white houses. Something to do with the tall hat men.

Of course I immediately tore down the fence and led the black haired little ones back to civilization. The sewer pipe for the blue tunics, the woods next to the playground for the white. I puzzled over it as I did so. What is it about black hair that made them all want to go live in those isolated, fenced in little towns? Or had they been sent there?

The fences, too, were rebuilt several times until I’d destroyed them enough that they just gave up on it. Every time it was the ones with tall hats that organized it, and more than once led the charge against me. Even in swarms of a hundred or so they’re not hard to get away from when they’re on foot. And each time I returned, the tall hat men commanded smaller and smaller mobs.

For a while, those with black hair lived in tents and shanty towns on the edge of their former territory. But these too grew smaller with time as their occupants were gradually reintegrated. Something about those fence towns still gives me chills. Like I prevented something terrible, but only by the width of a hair.

All the while, at every opportunity, Heather invited me to spend time with her. To sit with her at lunch, to hang out in the hall between classes, she even frequently waited at the edge of the field for me. Mystified as to why I wanted to be alone there, but content enough with it not to pry.

It was much needed salve for the wounds inflicted by Tyler’s absence. The more we hung out, the more convinced I became that I’d misjudged her. “You know sometimes when girls are mean to you, it’s because they like you, right?” she once asked. In fact I didn’t. I thought back to the trio of girls who pantsed me at my old school, and their list of boys I snatched.

She sure asked me about Katerinka a lot. I regretted not knowing enough to answer most of her questions. But I kept the fact that Katerinka’s the granddaughter of a witch, and a witch herself, under my hat. Not the sort of news that would go over well in a place like this.

“I dunno. She just follows me around. Tried to give me a violin, then took it back. I don’t know why, or what’s up with her.” Heather then asked if I thought Kat was pretty. I shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. Kind of.” Heather scowled, but bounced back in an instant when she saw I’d noticed.

“I don’t think she’s right for you.” I shot her a curious look. Right for me how? I nonetheless assured Heather I’d do my best to spend less time around Katerinka. I’d always found that girl disagreeably short tempered anyhow.

“Good” Heather cooed, placing her hand over mine. My heart began pounding. Her hand felt so slender and warm, each little fingernail perfectly painted. Did I dare take hold of it? Cautiously, I turned my hand over and wrapped my fingers around hers. She frowned, then withdrew her hand. “...After you’ve gotten rid of Kat” she stipulated. “Oh...of course” I mumbled, face now red as a beet. “Anything you want.”

By this time, Mom’s baby bump had become outrageously pronounced. Though still worried about Tyler, the fact that I had a little brother on the way and possibly a beautiful new girlfriend made the anxiety a bit easier to bear. But with Tyler’s disappearance in the back of my mind, I couldn’t fully enjoy anything.

Even trips out to the field couldn’t restore my mood. That swirling, explosive delight simply to exist that I’d felt in the quarry...with Tyler. Now rapidly fading away, as do the details of a dream soon after waking from it. The little ones were hard at work building new little white houses. Why? I thought I’d broken that habit. This time they’d constructed it from stones. It was still not much of a challenge to topple.

They must be pretty pissed at me. Not so much as to hide, rather forming crowds around my feet and shaking their fists in protest. What for? Couldn’t they see I was helping them? I spotted a dozen or so in the center of the settlement they’d slowly expanded since the crash, tying rope to the statue of me, struggling to pull it over.

On a subsequent trip, I discovered their settlement mostly empty. Following a trail of stragglers I soon found they’d repurposed the shelter within the cracks of the wall next to the playground as someplace they could gather, listen to the men in the tall hats, sing, clap and so forth.

Hopeless. The mania seemed to have embedded itself inextricably in their little heads. All I could do was continue tearing down those troubling fenced in compounds they kept building. Tyler must’ve made some other change besides simply wrecking the little white houses. But what? If he were here, he’d know what to do.

I winced and shielded my face as a pebble bounced off it. Scanning the wall for any sign of the source, I noticed a pair of the little ones manning a catapult they fashioned. So that’s how it is, I thought. Why do they defend it so? They were fine without it before.

All it seems to accomplish is to spread like wildfire and create artificial categories of little people who become needlessly hostile to one another. Then they wage war. Which makes life miserable, so they turn to the men in the tall hats and their little white houses for relief.

From the outside I could see it as a self-reinforcing cycle, and only meant to do them a favor by disrupting it. Yet however badly I want to help, it clearly isn’t appreciated. What good can I do by forcing my will on them?

Having only recently been welcomed back, I hardly wanted to alienate them again. It came to a head one day while I was toppling their latest, strongest structure of that sort. Something happened which provoked serious self-reflection.

As I rattled the building, not everybody came out. I saw one woman peer out through the open doorway, then duck back inside. However I shook the building, she wouldn’t leave it. So I tore off the roof. That was apparently her cue to finally flee, carrying armloads of books. Big, thick dusty books and various artworks I could guess the nature of.

But the look her face! Her wide, tearful eyes! As she ran, she tripped on herself. The books and paintings tumbled out of her arms and scattered before her. Now filthy from the mud, she turned over and gazed up at me with an expression of undisguised horror.

It pierced my blackened heart. I could handle being ignored. Maybe even hated, if I thought they were just being stubborn. But I cannot survive the way that particular little one looked at me. I do not abide that they should ever cower before me in fear, and decided that so long as even one of them looks upon me as a monster, I am. I may as well have put a Tyrant in place to do my dirty work.

So, for a time I just sat and watched them operate. How they would bring in new people, recondition them, send them out to spread it to as many more as they could. There seemed to be some pattern to it. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but felt a strong sense that I’ve seen something like this before.

There were no visible connections between the little guys, yet they’d begun to behave in concert, like small parts of a larger organism. When observing the territory of the little people who’d taken up a symbol resembling a lightning bolt through a bird of prey, I felt a particular energy. An ebb and flow to how life proceeds, wholly different from the feeling I got in some other groups’ territory. They dress differently, they work at a different pace, it’s like something I cannot see is acting on them.

“Egregore, Babulya called it.” I scanned the field and soon spotted Katerinka perched on a log, cross legged, reading her own big dusty book. Today she wore a strange black dress that seemed to me to have entirely too many buttons. She continued before I could so much as make a quizzical grunt.

“When many people work together towards same goal, same ideas in mind, is very much like they join into singular being for however long it last. The others in class would call this the “Holy Spirit”. All that is needed is glue to stick them together. Some mechanism which motivates them to join group, to stay in group entire life for fear of leave it, and to go try to recruit others.

Long time ago, little single celled creatures did this, becoming multi-cellular. Forfeiting their autonomy for benefits that come from working as larger, more organized creature. No doubt, is frightening if you are on outside of it looking in. Most of all because they really only treat their fellow insiders any better than the average person. But such groups can achieve things which you, as an individual, could never hope to.”

I thought back to when they were simpler. To when all they needed was the crone, then me, to guide their way. They’d gotten along alright...with some prodding. But they were helpless to defend themselves against the Tyrants.

I’ve already seen such determination in them to hold onto this despite my every effort to take it away. Perhaps I can use it to make them stronger? I won’t be around forever, after all. By the time I’m an old man they must be completely sufficient unto themselves, not just for material provisions but also self defense.

I hate that it makes them warlike. But until the last Tyrant is killed, maybe that’s how they have to be. The main problem, which as yet I could think of no solution to, is that their newfound will to dominate is focused mainly on other tribes of Homunculi. Even small differences in their rituals, buildings, hats and so on provoke murderous purges.

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