Third and Fifth

I am innocent, and will defend this claim until the day I die. I am, in fact, a victim in this situation - because the circumstances that led me to murder my wife and child were entirely beyond my control. Of course, I understand that this explanation would never hold up in a court of law, and is, indeed, beyond the understanding of most people. I suppose that the simplest way of putting it would be to say that my actions were not my own.

It happened very quickly. It was as if I could see into the future, and in this future - quite soon in fact - these people were going to die. No, not just die, they were going to be murdered, by me, right now. It was fate – predetermined, inescapable fate. It was truth, and there was a terrible beauty in the simplicity of this truth. It was destiny, it was the only possible course of action, everything that had ever happened in all of history was the cause and this was the inevitable effect. I was a video recording of myself, a puppet pulling on my own strings. I was able to do whatever I wanted - at the same time I was only capable of murder. I was free, free to do exactly one thing.

There was a gun in my hand – I have never owned a gun but that didn’t seem strange at the time - what mattered was that it was in my hand. Click, click, perfect aim at point blank range and it was done.

Afterwards the sensation ceased abruptly, and I staggered and cried - not for my family - but for the incredible sense of certainty and purpose that had just left me. I no longer knew what to do, and horrible questions plagued my mind. I did not want to be arrested, as would surely happen if I stood here any longer, so I ran. I threw the gun into a drain, caught trains and buses, hitch hiked and drove for as long as I could. Everything failed me in the end. There were no more roads. I had reached the end, I was at the very brink, I could, possibly, have found the end of the world. These considerations were immaterial however - I had to keep running.

                                                                                                ***

What happened was this: I had come to a small town, and it was by considerable fortune that in this town - bleak, on the fringe of a hostile desert and decrepit in every imaginable way - I chanced upon a group of criminals who were also on the run, and were quite happy to run with me, figuring their chances of survival better than if they were to attempt to cross the desert alone. Upon meeting them I assumed, for some reason, that they were four in number, but they were a trio and seemed oddly inseparable, parts of some whole. They too were murderers, but aside from their crime the only similar thing about them was that, when pressed for details about it, they would fall silent.

Their names were curious. They were not brothers, and so were presumably given different and normal enough names upon birth, but referred to each other and themselves exclusively by numbers. These numbers did not designate any sort of hierarchy, and indeed didn’t seem to be regarded as numbers but merely words which they had appropriated. ‘First’, as he was called, was a strange-looking, wiry man who, through the jerky acrobatics of his actions and sudden, rapid speech, gave the appearance of being somewhat unhinged. He was a man constantly on the edge of some giant mental cliff, liable to jump just to see what would happen. He wore tight fitting trousers tucked into a pair of thick black boots, a white linen shirt under a black vest, a long coat and a permanent, lopsided and unnerving smile.

‘So!’ he said, ‘You’re him!’

Not quite knowing how to respond to this unfamiliar accusation, I said:

‘Yes, I’m me.’

He was delighted with this response, laughing manically, slapping his knee and gesturing to his friends, urging them to join in the hysterics.

‘I like him!’

Having passed this judgement and still giggling to himself, he got up and left, leaving me with the other two. They were, relatively, more normal than First. Second I had met when I tried to book a room in the hotel; we had got to talking and after I expressed a need to cross the desert, he had leaned in conspiratorially and said, ‘So do we!’

 From then on we had naturally discussed our reasons for crossing, found comfort in their similarity and resolved to talk in further detail later, at which point he gave me instructions to find his group’s room. After a few trips around the town to see what supplies I could gather (which proved not entirely unsuccessful but rather disappointing), I found the appropriate room, knocked, and was introduced to First. Another man, whom I assumed was called Third (but whose name I later found out was Fourth) was sitting on the sofa.

‘Ignore First, he’s a lunatic,’ said Second, brushing dirt off his slightly shabby suit. ‘Never says anything that makes sense. Good man to have around in a fight, though. Quick with a knife.’
He said all this matter-of-factly, as if it was already obvious to me and he was only stating it for the benefit of some imaginary, mentally deficient bystander. This was his preferred mode of speech.’ Anyway, seeing as he likes you, we needn’t consult him’ - he gestured at Fourth – ‘because two out of three is a majority and he’s unlikely to say anything anyway.’

I had noticed this during the conversation – Fourth didn’t utter a sound or even seem to be paying attention. He stared at the wall across from the sofa with an unfocused intensity that suggested he was either lost in thought or thinking nothing at all. I wondered how he was going to fare on the journey; he must have weighed at least two hundred kilos.

‘We set out first thing in the morning,’ said Second, ’Do you have a room?’

It had not occurred to me to conclude the business of booking one.

‘Never mind, we have a spare bed, since the, um... embarking of... um... we have a spare bed!’

For the first time I heard his voice become tinged with emotion, and to avoid the great distress that this person’s departure obviously caused him I thanked him for his generosity and did not ask why the bed had been recently vacated. We talked of small details for an hour or so more, while night crept up and suddenly fell upon the town. I resolved to go to bed early, and was dreaming of the ocean minutes later.

I was woken late that night by the door slamming - First had returned. I lay in my bed, trying to return to my dream, and overheard the following conversation:

‘Stupid, stupid, this town, it’s shit, all of it shit, nothing here - nothing!’

‘Calm down. Did you at least get the supplies?’

‘Yeah, yeah I got the supplies... Third had better not show up or he’ll go very hungry. Serves him right, the bastard motherfucker, I’ll fucking kill him!’

‘Calm down! Stop shouting, you’ll arouse suspicion. You didn’t allow for the possibility that Third might come to his senses?’

‘No, listen to me, I’m telling you that guy’s done for, snapped completely, jumped off the edge, know what I mean? He betrayed us!’

‘I still think that, considering that Third has done things like this before, it would have been more pragmatic to pack at least the basics for him.’

‘Done things like this before? He’s not coming. Third’s not coming and you know that, we both know that.’

‘We can’t be so certain! If he does show up, are we to deny him the very-’

At this point, I heard a voice that I couldn’t recognise, and so assumed must be Fourth’s. It was a very simple, quiet voice, so much so that I couldn’t actually make out the words being said. Second stopped speaking the instant he heard it.

‘Well,’ said First, ‘the issue is now settled!’

And indeed it did appear to be - for the three quickly went to bed - but settled in whose favour I could not determine.

                                                                                                ***

We four murderers, laden with huge packs, set out that morning to cross the desert. After half an hour, I could just make out some of the taller buildings in the down. After a full hour, we couldn’t see anything. Nothing except the red-brown, hard dirt of the desert in every direction, set against a cloudless sky. Red-brown and blue. The only two colours in the world.

And the silence! The crunch of boots, the occasional murmur of wind, both somehow added to the silence rather than creating noise. They highlighted it, demonstrated by contrast that for miles and miles in every direction there was nothing to make sound, nothing at all. We didn’t talk, frightened of shattering the silence which seemed much more real than anything we could ever say. The heat was oppressive. I wondered how First could stand it with his long coat, but he showed no signs of discomfort. Neither did Fourth, whose stubby little legs seemed to be effortlessly capable of propelling his massive bulk across the ground at the same pace as the rest of us.

I felt my mind beginning to wander. I thought of what was across the desert – we had of course seen maps, but what really existed on the other side of this vast wasteland? More society, civilisation, just another place to run and hide in? But then - why were we bothering to cross? No, there had to be something else. Something not on any map. Things had to be different.

‘Fuck!’

It was First.’ Someone say something!’

‘Things will be different across the desert,’ I muttered unconsciously.

‘What? Speak up!’ he barked.

‘Why?’ said Second, ‘You assume that any of us have something to say.’

‘I just don’t like all this fucking none-talking, it’s freaking me out. Fuck!’

They quickly started arguing and the atmosphere lost its solemn, religious feel. We trekked on, and I quickly settled into a rhythm. Left foot, right foot, left foot and so on, roughly every half hour I drank from the water bottle, the buzz of First and Second’s argument somewhere to my left, Fourth on my right, eyes to the horizon. No room for thinking.

At about midday, we stopped to rest, and it was here that Second presented me with his puzzle. As we sat in a rough circle, chewing slightly hard bread and stretching, Second said he had something to show me. He reached into his bag, and Fourth’s eyes narrowed. He produced a little triangular pyramid, four sides of hard, red plastic. He balanced it on the back of his hand, displayed it to me and then flicked it into the air, where it separated into pieces which he caught and handed to me. Fourth was breathing heavily now, staring at Second and the pieces with what looked like horror.

‘The challenge,’ Second said, ‘is to re-assemble the pyramid.’

I looked at the pieces. There were five of them -red, plastic, slightly sharp at the edges, all cut into some kind of prism. Unremarkable in every way. I moved them around, tried combining them in various ways and found I could make all sorts of shapes, but the pyramid eluded me.

‘Clever,’ I said, ‘What’s the trick?’

‘No trick, just a sort of... mental leap. Keep it; see if you can work it out.’

At this, Fourth abruptly got to his feet, let out a blood-curdling scream – the only noise I had heard him make all day – and stormed off with his pack in the direction we had come. I watched him go, wondering what about the little plastic puzzle could have offended him so much.

‘Temperamental bastard, can’t take a joke, doesn’t get it, ruining everyone’s day...’ chattered First to himself.

‘Where’s he going?’ I asked.

‘Who knows! Who fucking cares!’

Second answered instead:

‘He’s upset, so he’s going to follow us a way behind, probably for the rest of the day. He’ll get over it.’

‘But why? What’s he upset about?’

‘Oh, that’s just him. Come on, we should get moving.’

Second was correct; for the rest of the day Fourth refused to come closer than about half a kilometre. We could see him quite clearly in the distance, the only vertical object in any direction, round silhouette still shifting along. The day passed in a haze of sweat and blistering arguments between First and Second.

We made camp as the sun began to fall. In the desert the sun seemed to be hanging at the same point in the sky all day, until suddenly beginning its descent at about five o’clock. An hour later a thin moon hung in the black sky and illuminated nothing but itself. Fourth carried a tent specially made to accommodate, as the label said, ‘larger gentlemen’, which we could see him pitch behind us. First carried the rest of the tents, of which there were for some reason four. Second assembled all of them rapidly, distributed some food, and he and First went to sleep. I stood for a moment, puzzled by the presence of this unnecessary tent, but decided that I was too tired to care. It didn’t seem important - perhaps it was simply some sort of miscalculation on the part of Second, whom I could imagine upon finding the excess tent would be the sort to conclude that its assemblage was absolutely necessary. I chewed the food in silence - hard strips of beef jerky which felt like they turned to dust once I tore them off - and washed it down with a mouthful of precious water. The stars seemed different, but I couldn’t be sure of that. The stars had never interested me. The darkness was oppressive and I went into my tent, wondering what tomorrow would bring.

There was a gun in my sleeping bag. This was confusing; I had never packed a gun. It was, I noticed, the same gun that I had used to murder my family. Reasonably sure as I was that I had thrown that object away, I could not deny that it was here in my hands, miles and miles from the dark street where I had tossed it into a drain. It seemed a prudent place to keep it, in the sleeping bag, so I resolved to leave it there. Questions seemed superfluous; the gun was in my sleeping bag. Feeling tired, I lay down and was jolted into alertness by a sharp pain in my side. Second’s puzzle was still in my pocket, pointed corners digging into my hip. Rolling onto my stomach, I dug it out and resolved to solve the thing before I went to sleep.

The five pieces of plastic could, as I had observed at lunch, be combined into an endless variety of shapes except for a pyramid. This was confusing and also intriguing. The thought of sleep slowly vanished from my head. I could make shapes that would require more than five pieces. I could make a sphere. I could make a cube, a hexagonal prism, a crescent, all in different sizes. I could not make a pyramid. My hands seemed to be moving faster and faster, twisting the pieces and I was fascinated by the way that they moved. The pieces seemed, in the dim light of a torch I had strung from the ceiling of my tent, almost fluid, and if I looked at them the right way they seemed to pass through each other. I could not make a pyramid.

I stopped when I finally dropped a piece and realized that the sun had come up. I had spent the entire night trying to solve the puzzle, and had succeeded only in frustrating myself. This was bad – I needed my strength for the long walk. But I realised that I didn’t feel very tired, and thought that maybe I could make it.

***

When I emerged from my tent, the sun was blazing in the sky and Second and First had vanished. Their tents had been packed up and there was nothing in the flat landscape that could have hidden them. They were gone. I could see Fourth in the distance, his pack already on his back, lumbering towards me.

‘Where the hell are the others?’ I shouted as soon as he was within earshot, but he just looked at me and kept walking. ‘Where have Second and First gone?’

He looked at me sadly, and motioned for me to start walking. I must have questioned him for half an hour, demanding to know where the others were, and how and why they had disappeared, but all he did was stare. ‘Say something!’ I finally screamed. He started walking away. There was no point in this, I decided. Maybe he didn’t know either. Why he refused to speak, though, was entirely beyond me. Having nothing better to do and worried that if I tried to find my way back I might get lost – Fourth carried a compass but I did not - I packed up my tent and followed him, finding walking difficult without the buzz of argument to drown out my thoughts.

Bits and pieces of paranoia began to creep into my head like parasites – how long had we been walking? The water tasted strange. Had Fourth killed Second and First? Maybe he poisoned my water while I slept. But I would have noticed. I was up all night with the puzzle. Why didn’t I feel tired? Why was Fourth so horrified by the puzzle...

‘Why did the puzzle offend you so much yesterday?’ I asked, but he just glared at me and kept as silent as ever. Indeed, that whole day, he only spoke two sentences to me, to devastating effect. It was just after we had stopped for lunch, and I was resting on my pack and chewing the same hard strips of jerky that seemed to be all the town had in stock. Fourth was looking up at the sky, and again I found it hard to tell whether he was in deep contemplation or simply an idiot; he spoke so little that it probably didn’t matter. Apropos of nothing, he said:

‘There are no birds in the sky.’

This was patently true – the desert was entirely devoid of all forms of life except for ourselves. The obviousness of the statement confused me though, and when I asked him why he chose to point this out he said ‘because... there are no birds in the sky. It is true.’

Something in the honest tone of his voice made me, paradoxically, suspicious. The paranoia building in my mind all day spilled over and I began to think that this man was somehow, with his inane statements, trying to trick me into some kind of logical corner. It was vital that I prove him wrong.

‘But you cannot be sure of that,’ I said, somewhat desperately. He raised an eyebrow. ‘I mean, that requires such a thing as objective truth. Your statement mandates that truth is separate from perception, that reality is an objective fact, but this is something of which you cannot be sure. There may, from my perspective, be many birds in the sky, and I may be just as convinced of this as you are in thinking that there are none. Does that make it any less true?’ He pondered this for a few seconds, staring off into the distance, and then looked back at me.

‘There are no birds in the sky.’

Defeated.

My face felt hot with frustration, and neither Fourth nor I spoke for the rest of the day. Silently we made camp our as shadows grew long and silently we ate our dinner. Fourth seemed his usual quiet, mysterious self, but I was incredibly humiliated by our conversation and could not stand to look at him. I turned to look out at the desert instead, and as I watched the rapid sunset, I noticed that the landscape appeared, by some small optical illusion, ever so slightly to curve and warp around the sinking disc and I was inexplicably reminded of a mouth. I watched the horizon swallow the sun, and when I turned around was very surprised to see First standing behind me, also watching the sunset. He was still for once, a peaceful expression on his face giving it solemnity that I had not seen before and would never see after.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said, his voice full of passion instead of mania. ‘The moment, the exact moment, the precise instant when the sun just vanishes, and a few fast fading rays of light are all you have to tell that it was ever there in the first place. It just seems so important during the day, so big like it’ll last forever, and then, in one moment, in a kind of explosion of purple and yellow and red, it just... disappears.’

‘Where,’ I said ‘have you been? And where is Fourth?’

The lopsided grin returned, all the stillness left him and he bent, twisted and danced as he chanted:

‘Can’t ask questions, can’t ask questions, and besides, you already know the answer!’

‘No, I’m serious-’

‘I’ll bet you are!’

‘Tell me where you have been!’

‘I’ll tell you a joke instead. It’s a good joke. It goes like this: once upon a time, there was a family of people, and these people were stricken by the most unfortunate luck of being middle class. Dorothy – that was the mother of the household – one day decided that she’d had enough of being middle class and so decided to divorce her husband and try to marry into a better life. Unfortunately, custody of the family’s only child David was a highly contentious issue and resulted in both parties spending massive amounts of money in protracted legal battles that spanned several years, and in fact this custody battle only ended when Dorothy ran out of money, having spent it all on lawyers, and was consequently forced into destitution!’

He looked at me expectantly.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What has that got to do with anything? Where the hell are the others?’ I was getting angry now. I wanted to understand what was going on, and why neither Fourth nor First were willing to tell me.

First howled with rage. ‘You don’t get it, do you? Nobody fucking gets it! It’s irony! It’s ironic because her quest for a better life led her to ruin! You idiot! You moron!’

His anger had a terrible danger to it, a confusing intensity. I made a mistake.

‘Come on, it’s only a joke.’

In an instant a knife was at my throat and First had pressed his face uncomfortably close to mine, staring into my eyes as he spat ‘Only? Only a joke? I’ll gut you. I’ll string you up by your own fucking intestines. Only?’

Looking into his eyes made me afraid. First was a shell of a person, a quirky robot running on rage and madness. Long ago, maybe, he had equalled the sum of his parts but now the parts were gone and there was no the sum to add up. There was no being saved, there was no reasoning; in his eyes was nothing at all. ‘Only?’ he kept repeating.

The man was a lunatic. My first thoughts went to the gun in my sleeping bag; ideal, but not within reach. Not unless I could somehow convince him to let me climb into my sleeping bag, which I probably could not... How long I been standing here, knife against my throat, listening to him ramble? It was impossible to be sure. The very sunset seemed to hinge on whatever I did next.

‘I need to sleep,’ I said, figuring my chances of survival to be slim regardless, and not knowing what else to say. Surprisingly, he seemed to understand – my insane, desperate entreaty resonated with his insane, twisted mind.

‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘O.K., you can do that - yes, yes you need to sleep, because then it will be better when I kill you in the morning. You’ll be less tired, you’ll squirm better. Yes, yes I will kill you in the morning. Get in your tent, then.’

Not taking my eyes off him for an instant, I crawled backwards into my tent and frantically began to search through my sleeping bag for the gun, but it was nowhere to be found. Somehow it had vanished - perhaps stolen by First, perhaps, I wondered, it had never existed at all. A disturbing thought, but irrelevant: there was no gun, and First was going to kill me in the morning. I could see his dim silhouette through my tent, fading with the light.

‘Um... Goodnight then!’ I called out.

‘Sleep well, motherfucker!’ he called back, and uneasily I did as he suggested. Perhaps he would have disappeared by the morning, perhaps he would kill me in my sleep. It did not matter – I had no other options.

I awoke with a start. Die, I was going to die, the madman was going to kill me... but I was not already dead, and so maybe he was not going to kill me. Maybe he was going to wait till I emerged from my tent... maybe he had, like his companions before him, vanished. I cautiously lifted the flap of my tent, and was more relieved than surprised to see Second packing up his tent and stretching.

‘Well, who did you expect?’ he said, upon noticing me.

‘Where’ve you been?’ I said automatically, though I didn’t really care.

‘Oh, nowhere important. Come on, pack up your stuff, the sun’s high and we’ve a long walk ahead of us.’

***

We talked, Second and I. Though he would change the subject whenever I asked him where his friends were, or where he had been, or how they had disappeared so bizarrely, I found conversation with him to be agreeable and interesting. The talk largely concerned science and philosophy, though it seemed he had an opinion on everything – he hated Chinese food, for instance, and was prepared to offer all sorts of arguments as to why everyone else should.

He explained to me a theory of his: that, from the dawn of time, and indeed directly as a cause of time’s existence, all action had been predetermined.

‘Think about it,’ he said excitedly, ‘Everything, right down to a sub-atomic level, reacts in a certain and specific way to certain and specific stimuli. Everything, in the entire history of the universe, is a continuous chain of cause-and-effect, and so theoretically one could predict with perfect accuracy everything that will ever happen in the universe, if one was capable of understanding and comprehending everything – and I mean everything, right down to a sub-atomic level, as I said – that was happening right now.’

‘And supposing that you did understand everything as it is now, could you then actually do something that you did not predict?’ I asked.

‘No! No that’s the beauty of it! Your gaining understanding would also be predetermined. Your actions are still predetermined, because there is no other way that you can actually act, down to your very thoughts! You wouldn’t be able to change anything; all that would happen is that you would become painfully aware that you could not change anything. You would still be a puppet, just able to see the strings!’ he concluded, in an uncharacteristically lyrical manner. We kept walking, talking of grandiose ideas and what they meant in the context of the universe, talking of nothing at all, until we saw the house in the desert.

We saw the house from a long way off. A small glint on the horizon, directly in our path, turned out to be an old, crumbling house which blinded us with the light reflecting off its white painted concrete walls. An ugly thing, it looked like it belonged in the poorer, more dangerous section of some sprawling urban city, surrounded by similar ugly things in similar states of disrepair; not all alone in the middle of a desert. Indeed, it looked somehow like it had been transported from that place – tiny bits of grass and what looked like pavement surrounded the edge of the walls. Suddenly these grew and shot across the ground, building trees, pathways, buildings, and I was in a street in front of my house with a gun in my hand and an urge to move and a sense of purpose and wife and a child and a job and car and friends and property - then I was in the desert again and had never seen the house before.

The house had no door, only a few windows on each side, slightly too high up the wall to be conveniently climbed through. Second and I walked carefully around it, looking for some entrance, but there was none; there was no way to enter the house. ‘Curious!’ said Second. I nodded and did not tell him of my hallucination; he would think me insane, and besides I couldn’t remember it anyway. But, then again, he and his companions were the ones who could seemingly vanish at will. Did that make me crazy, or them? There was no way to be sure. It crossed my mind that I might find out later. More important was that there was for some reason a solitary suburban house in the middle of the desert and it had no door.

‘It’s going to be quite impossible to enter the house without going through one of these windows,’ said Second, matter of fact as ever. ‘Help me through. Get it open, will you?’

The window was painted shut, so I took off one of my boots, tied it to my shoelaces and threw it through the glass. After repeating this a few more times to clear the remaining shards, I helped Second climb through the window and he in turn pulled me through after him. We had climbed through into a kitchen and were standing in the sink; First and Fourth were sitting at a table with cards in their hands, looking at us with mild amusement.

‘How the hell did you get in here?’ I asked, adding: ‘where have you been? What is this house doing here?’ and a flurry of other questions but, as ever, they ignored me. Second was not at all surprised to see them and, taking a seat at the table, started talking about water.

‘Answer me!’ I shouted, but no-one did.

‘Get out of the sink,’ said First, ‘and sit down. This is an important conversation. Highly pertinent to your survival!’

I climbed out of the sink and sat down.

‘Now!’ he continued, ‘we have only four days water left, if we continue drinking it at our current rate, and it’ll take us longer than that to get to somewhere where we can find more. I suggest we draw straws and then kill someone, it’s the only way.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Second, ‘we just need to be conservative with the amount that we drink. It’s important to keep hydrated in this heat, and killing someone is out of the question – don’t look so disappointed – because that would be unethical. We will cross the desert in four days.’

‘You seem so sure,’ I said, not really knowing why. I watched some dust particles fall through the air. Looking up, I noticed that the ceiling was full of holes and that there was some kind of attic in the roof.

‘Of course we will. We don’t have enough water; we have to cross it in four days.’

‘We could,’ I said, again not knowing why, but too tired and confused to care, ‘search this house for supplies.’

Second commended me on the soundness and practicality of this proposal, and we split up to comb the house for anything that might come in useful for our journey. There was not much house to comb; a kitchen, a living room, a small bathroom and a bedroom did not take long to thoroughly work over, and nothing of use was found. Remembering the holes in the ceiling, I found the pull-down ladder that led to the attic, and it was here that I first saw Third. He had been watching us through the holes in the ceiling, and as I ascended the ladder I saw him start and quickly spin around, although he did not seem afraid. With my body half way into the attic, I took him in. I think he was old, though he may have been very young; perhaps it would be better to say that his age did not matter. His aura of wisdom and gentleness gave off an impression of age but did not necessarily imply it, and I found myself respecting him as one would a wise old grandfather but looking at him as one might a child. I asked him, quietly, who he was – although I already knew the answer. He smiled, told me he was Third, and then all hell broke loose. I was yanked down the ladder and collapsed on top of First, who stopped screaming ‘Fuck! He’s fucking here!’ just long enough to call me a motherfucker, and then suddenly I was being rushed into the kitchen.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Second.

‘It’s Third! He’s in the fucking roof, he’s watching us, man!’

Seconds eyes widened and he whispered something to himself that might have been a prayer. I wondered what about the gentle looking man terrified them all so; even Fourth, who normally had no readable expression, looked concerned. First was positively shaking.

‘We’ve got to get out of here right now,’ he said, the urgency in his voice leaving no room for argument. He started climbing through the window, Second followed him and Fourth gestured for me to go before he did. Somehow, by the time I had picked myself up from the drop, he had worked his way through and was hanging on to the sill, waiting for me to move. He dropped down with an impact that made the ground vibrate slightly and we started walking immediately. The house took a long time to disappear from view.

‘Who was that?’ I asked.

‘That,’ said Second, ‘is what insanity looks like. That man is dangerous. He’ll destroy you – not just physically, but down to your very essence, your “soul”, as it were.’

‘He’ll really mess you up!’ spat First, jittery and unable to keep from turning around every ten seconds. I looked back as well. Third had not come after us.

That night the gun was in my sleeping bag again. This was, after a strange day, not so surprising. I looked it over properly; it had three bullets, but room for six. I resolved to keep it in my pockets, in case I should need it.

***

I awoke to the sound of screaming, and climbing out of my tent found no one outside. As before when First and Second had disappeared, I made a careful scan of the horizon, but it seemed that this time I was truly alone.

‘You don’t know why, do you?’

The voice of First, somewhere behind me, continued: ‘You’re just trying to justify it to yourself with all of that bullshit…’ I wheeled around, and saw Second standing where First’s voice had come from.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘You’re very much entitled to justify it to yourself, everyone has that right, and I imagine that one would go insane if it were impossible to lie to oneself.’

 I rubbed my eyes, still groggy from sleep and when I took my hands away Second was gone. So was my tent; I was alone in the blistering heat. Suddenly First said, ‘This is not your desert!’ as he clapped me on the back with such force that I fell to ground, or would have fallen had Fourth not caught me around the arm. He pulled me to my feet and said:

‘Walk. Run. It is all the same.’

‘Whose desert is it?’ I cried, but Fourth just raised an eyebrow and vanished as I blinked.

‘And of course if one totally convinces oneself of a lie, then, from the perspective of that person, the lie is an objective truth,’ babbled Second where Fourth had just stood, ‘but of course, this proves that objectivity is in fact relative and therefore not objective at all.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘You, my friend, you believe your own lies.’

‘Who are you people?’ I asked desperately.

‘Whoever you think we are, I suppose. It’s all the same to you. You could believe anything. For you there is no truth, you don’t know what truth is. But then there can be no lies either. There can only… be.’

There can only be. His words echoed through my brain with terrible purpose and I suddenly wanted to curl up on the ground and cry. He started to laugh, which I had never heard him do before, and Second’s laugh was somehow more terrifyingly manic than everything that First had ever done or said. It buffeted me, physically hurt me, and then suddenly it was Fourth laughing, and First, and then Second again, and then all of them at once, from every direction. They were everywhere. Their laughter echoed around my brain, split my neurons in two, drove me insane all in an instant. Their laughter was everything wrong with the world, wrong with me, their laughter was perfect judgement, their laughter was cruel sadism. They were everywhere -

Nowhere. The noise stopped and I realised that I was lying on the ground with my hands over my ears. I picked myself up and looked around. Alone, again.

‘Come on,’ said First behind me, ‘time waits for no man!’

‘You!’ I screamed, ‘what the hell was that!’

‘Sorry? You’ll have to speak up, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Why did you... the laughter... whose desert is it?’

‘… Fucking weirdo.’

The others were there as well.

‘This is the first conversation we’ve had all morning,’ said Second, looking at me strangely. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, no I’m... fine, I’m fine.’ I said. They started walking and I fell in beside them. Fourth raised an eyebrow. No one spoke.

***

That day, a statue of a man appeared on the horizon. At first I assumed it was about twice the height of a real man and that we would pass it in an hour, but as we walked the object got larger instead of closer and I realised that it was very far away indeed. It looked like it was made from the desert itself, and there was something unsettling about the way it didn’t quite resemble a human. It was slightly too long, the spine was bent just a fraction too far back, the head a little too angular. This intensified as we got closer to it, though we walked for hours and still it seemed just on the horizon. Soon it was more than unsettling, it was terrifying and I could not stand to look at it for fear of crying out loud at this creature, this misshapen thing that seemed to be lifted directly from my nightmares, although I never had nightmares. The others did not seem to notice it, or if they did they made no comment. It was colossal. Had we been on the other side of it, it would have blocked out the sun for miles, and I dreaded the moment that we had to walk in its shadow for I was sure that it would be a long, cold walk.

Hours we walked, and still the thing seemed no closer. I wondered if it was real or some figment of my imagination brought on by the blistering heat. After a while, I realised that we had walked almost the span of a full day but the sun was still high and we had not even stopped for lunch. I put this to the others, but they assured me we would stop soon and that it had not been long. Still we walked. And walked. My feet ached and my mouth was dry - I had drank my day’s supply of water

‘We should hurry up, it’ll be night soon,’ said Second, and then we were at its feet.

I like to think that it was closer than I thought, that my eyes had been playing tricks on me and that surely there was no way that we could have moved what I thought was dozens of miles in the time it took me to turn my head to look at Second, but had we really been close to it I would have seen the carvings.

My god, the carvings. They covered the statue completely, climbing from the underside of the foot hundreds of feet up the body and probably covering the head as well. I say probably because my eyes couldn’t make them out at that distance and for this I was thankful, because they were horrifying. They depicted every act of violence, anger and fear imaginable – and not just the ones that I had committed. They were not detailed, but represented perfectly every sick and disgusting thing that a human had ever done to another living thing. They became more vivid as I looked at them, the intensity of the terror they made me feel sharpened. At first they had appeared as carved onto the statue, but I began to see the statue as being made of the carvings, that all of this horror had slithered together to form the larger structure for some unknown, unholy reason. They were moving. Crawling. They writhed. Twisted. They were looking at me --

I staggered, and almost fell against the thing’s toe, which was taller than I was, but as I neared the statue I was filled with nausea, fell to my hands and knees and began to vomit onto the ground. The others looked at me strangely.

‘Can’t you... can’t you see it?’ I asked them desperately, but the looks on their faces told me they could not. Was it real, then? Was it just something I had imagined? Why couldn’t they see it? The sun was finally beginning to set, Second had been right; It would be dark soon. The statues shadow was shifting as the sun fell, rotating around and soon it would engulf us. I wondered if the others would notice. Probably not.

I turned around to face the statue but found the statue had already turned around to face me. It had changed, altered, moved while my back was turned, the gigantic figure twisting and bending so that it could look at me with a vaguely familiar face. It had extended a hand, the fingers bigger than my whole body almost within reach, the flat palm beckoning me to come closer. The peaceful expression on its face made me forget the carvings and realise that I could trust the statue, it meant me no harm, all I had to do was touch it, all I had to do was trust the statue, and I could trust the statue. I lifted up my arm and stretched out my hand but my fingertips couldn’t quite reach. I had to touch it. I looked into its eyes and realised that it was encouraging me, I could almost hear it whisper into my ear, urging me to get up and make contact. I leaned forward, stretched as far as I could, felt the tip of my index finger brush against the cold rock, and then I was in shadow and could not feel anything. The statue crumbled away into dust, and by the time it had gone it was night and I was numb. My brain felt like it had burned out, my index finger was cold.

The others set up camp. ‘You want to fucking watch yourself in the sun,’ said First, ‘You’ll get heatstroke and fucking die and that’d be a major bummer ‘cause we’d have to carry your pack all the way across this fucking place. Drink more water, you selfish dick.’

I sat on the ground and played with Second’s puzzle. Touch the statue, touch the statue, touch the statue, the words rattled through my brain while my fingers moved the pieces around automatically. I slept deeply that night and dreamed of rain.

When I awoke there was a heavy wind and a towering wall in our path. There was no sign of the statue.

‘Shit,’ said First, ‘a dust storm.’

It looked solid. Impenetrable. A massive barrier between us and our destination but Second assured me that as long as we tied ourselves together, we would be able to pass through the storm in relative safety. He handed out goggles and masks, and we walked on. At noon we tied ourselves together, about four feet of rope between each of us. Second explained that it would be pointless to try and move in the storm as we’d most likely end up walking in circles, so we sat and waited for the storm to move around us. We did not have to wait long; about twenty minutes after we were tied together the first flecks of dust began to fling themselves through the air. Another twenty minutes and I could not see Second or Fourth, who were tied next to me. I could feel their weight, though, pulling every now and then on the rope, checking to make sure we were all still there. It was dark in the storm, for the dust was blocking out the light, and I could not tell whether I had my eyes open or closed. The dust stang against my face, the wind howled, I felt the rope tug against me: tug, tug... nothing. The rope went slack, in both directions. Frantically, I grasped at it, and to my horror it offered no resistance. They had gone. There was nothing at the ends of the rope, I was alone and blind.

I was possibly going to die, it occurred to me. Then again, why not? I was in the dust storm... I was at a party, and there was someone who wanted to introduce me to a girl - and she was a pretty girl - and I felt embarrassed but they were so insistent.

I was alone in a dust storm. I was alone in a cave, looking down at my withered body, desperately hungry but having no teeth with which to eat.

My companions had abandoned me. Sitting in the hospital waiting room, I wondered if it would be a girl or a boy, but realised I didn’t care so much.

I was trying to cross a desert with three other murderers, but the desert was not the same. Far off in the distance I heard a roaring sound, and the sky was turning grey. The flood came quickly and soon it was up to my neck. As far as the eye could see, dust turned to water and I began to drown.

I was in a desert, climbing up a mountain to reach a cave because I had to get away.

I was alone in the dust storm, but Third was beside me, and I could see him clearly. He didn’t seem to mind the dust; he wore no mask or goggles. The wind didn’t affect him either: his long hair staying perfectly still. He was holding something out to me. I looked down at his hands, and saw that it was Seconds puzzle. He held the five pieces together, and with a single twist they formed a pyramid.

‘You see? It’s simple,’ he said, but I did not see and did not think it was simple.

‘Show me again,’ I asked, but he smiled and turned to dust, swept away by the wind.

‘Show me again!’ I screamed, but no one heard me.

I was alone in the dust storm, but the dust storm was over and I was not alone. The others were tied to the rope, wiping the dust off themselves and removing their masks wearily. I untied myself quickly.

‘Well,’ said Second, ‘I think that was a relatively simple ordeal.’

‘How do you solve the puzzle?’ I asked, digging it out of my pocket and shoving into his hands. ‘Tell me!’

‘What? It’s just a puzzle...’ said Second, confused.

‘I don’t care. I have to know how it’s done. Tell me how it’s done!’

‘Well, if you insist,’ said Second, moving the pieces around in his hands, ‘look, you just put these together like... no, hang on, it’s like this... you have to look at it a certain way... you know, I can’t really remember how it’s done, actually.’

I tried the others, but they too could not solve the puzzle. Fourth wouldn’t even touch it. First just fiddled the pieces about with his lanky fingers and asked me what the big deal was. I was desperate. Why wasn’t it easy? How had Third done it with such skill?

‘Useless, you’re all useless!’ I screamed.

‘Woah, calm the fuck down--’ shouted First.

‘Who’s Third?’ I shouted back at him. Everyone went very quiet.

‘Well...’ said Second, ‘he’s this... man, I suppose.’

‘Used to be our friend, but then he lost it completely’ said First.

‘He’s not like us, you understand.’

‘Total lunatic!’

‘Not to say he’s fundamentally bad..’

‘He’s got it in for you, actually.’

‘I used to be Third’ said Fourth.

And with those words, I was once again reborn. I was repurposed, repossessed and I knew what I had to do. Fate, inescapable destiny – these things became visible to me, but though they were visible they were no less unavoidable. I was going to kill my companions. I was going to pull the gun out of my pocket – like this ­– and shoot all three of them in the face – like that. It was, to me, relatively straightforward and simple, like following a set of instructions. I shot Second, then First, and finally Fourth. None of them moved to save themselves; indeed none of them even reacted at all. They just stood there in a rough semi-circle around me and died one by one and then I was done and no longer knew what to do.

The first thing I noticed was the blood, my god, the blood. I had not anticipated that they would stain so much of the ground with their sticky, crimson blood. It flowed from their bodies in far greater volume than it had any right to, threatening to soak through my boots and I shifted uneasily as the ground turned red to the horizon.

Walking over to check the bodies, I discovered that they had no wounds. My companions, whom I had just shot in the face, displayed no signs of having been shot in the face. This was unsettling. Had I missed? But then why all this blood? And despite the lack of wounds, they were unmistakably dead. They were not breathing. Their skin had turned pale. A gunshot at that range should have taken off about half their head... I threw my pack on the ground and ran. I had to get away. I had to escape the fact that I’d just killed three people. Even though it was out here in the desert, someone would know what I’d done. I ran, and when I turned back there were no bodies but only Third, standing in the middle of a pool of blood, looking at me sadly. He dissolved in the waves of heat, and then there was only blood and I started running again, and would keep running for as long as I could, but, as with everything, I couldn’t last forever and I had to stop running eventually. My feet were blistered and refused to carry me any further. After crawling for miles my knees gave way as well and I had to stop.

Away, had to get away, get out of here, out of there, them, they...

Third...

I had run for a long time and it was night when I was forced to halt. I had come to like that; it meant that I could not see anything but the moon. I had been, in the back of my mind, running towards the moon, and I couldn’t help but feel that if I had just managed to hang on a little longer I might have made it. It was night when I collapsed onto the ground completely, and when I dragged myself up moments later, the sun was high in the sky and I could see everything but the moon. Which was nothing. Nothing but red dirt and blue in every direction, just as it always had been. There was never sunrise in the desert, just night and then day. It hardly bothered me anymore. I was, at that moment, given to more practical considerations such as being hungry and weak. I been moving for sixteen hours

I began to laugh. It was funny to me, lying there with my back to the sun, covered in dirt and sweat, that I had left the food, left everything, with the bodies of my murdered companions.

‘Nothing else for it!’ I muttered to myself, giggling. I had to go back. Otherwise I would starve, and I wanted to live. I don’t know why. It was not as if I had anything to live for - but I suppose then that being alive was all I had left. I rolled onto my back and sat up, facing the way I had come. There, between my splayed legs, was Second’s puzzle. It might have fallen out of my pocket, I suppose, but I was reasonably sure that thrown it to the ground and had certainly not taken the time to pick it up when I ran from the bodies. Second’s puzzle was lying on the ground in front of me, and I understood. There were five plastic pieces to it; but a pyramid could only be assembled with four. The fifth piece was lying next to it, useless. I picked up the pyramid. It was so obvious. The four pieces fitted together perfectly from all angles to form nothing but the same four sided pyramid. The last piece just made the puzzle impossible to solve.

‘So they lied...’ I muttered. Third had never told me how to solve the puzzle. Maybe Fourth knew, and that’s why it had offended him so much. First probably didn’t care. Second was certainly in on it from the very start. I could see how it worked: the useless piece concealed in his hand while he displays the pyramid, he throws it in the air and catches with the hand holding the extra part. I hand all five parts to the fool who thinks that they are all necessary; he asked me what the trick was...

I asked me what the trick was...

The food wasn’t important anymore. There was still a desert to cross, and though my feet were blistered, they didn’t seem to hurt too badly. Standing up proved remarkably easy. My destination was a long way off, but perhaps it was not so long after all - perhaps I could get there in the end.

I threw the useless piece away.

‘Things will be different across the desert,’ I muttered, and began to walk.

A Wednesday evening some time ago, our man Dango is but seven years old. Thin black creatures are stalking around the house. Dango finds out that no-one else can see them the hard way:

“Mum! There they are! LOOK!”

“Nothing’s there, dear. It’s just your imagination.”

Dango became convinced that his thoughts could manifest physically, and tried to perform a full frontal lobotomy on himself with a pen knife in order to stop himself from thinking. It didn’t work, but everyone thought that he was ‘kind of weird’ afterwards. Lobotomy was still a hip new thing in that time and was touted as curing all insanities of the mind. Dango’s father, an old fashioned man, disagreed.

“Total rubbish… they’d be better off as opium addicts. They’re like the walking dead.”

Dango, at age seven, had an extremely active imagination, and figured that figurative death was a far better fate than being pursued by the endless monsters he was capable of dreaming up. Luckily, he did not know the correct surgical procedure for self-lobotomisation, and succeeded only in jabbing himself in the eye, which hurt ‘like a bitch’. His parents were shocked that he knew such language, and blamed it on the school he was attending. They moved him to a boarding school far away, so that they didn’t have to deal with it.

The thin creatures, unfortunately, were not something that Dango dreamed up. They are still there – they are everywhere, as a matter of fact – if you know how to look. If you tilt your head in the right way at the right time. Some are tiny. Others are nine feet tall. They are evil and weird. They may be part of a vast organization that secretly controls the universe, they may simply be a type of undiscovered animal and a perfectly natural phenomenon. They could be both. A fourth explanation? Also possible. Only Dango knows, and he won’t tell you because you won’t ask, and you won’t ask because you don’t think to question anything but your own sanity when you accidently tilt your head in the right way, at the right time, and catch a glimpse of the slim limbs that move like breaking glass and the face that is almost as surprised to see you as you are to see it. Dread. Waking up from a dream, the nameless, shapeless terror that haunted you is still there, only now it is more real than ever. The television is showing the back of the chair you are sitting in now, with someone in it. You move slightly, and the person sitting in your chair on the television does the same. You turn around, slowly. There is a man with a camera behind you. His eyes are massive, his pupils huge. The television turns to static, and as he stares at you, he begins to open his mouth and smile.

You blink. It is gone. You are sane. Dango’s lips are sealed.

Let me reiterate: Dango plays bass guitar and has always done so. Remember this, because it’s fucking important. Dango is a bass guitarist. He will not hold with other varieties of guitar. Acoustic in particular is absolutely intolerable. Dango is the only man who can serenade a beautiful woman on the bass alone.  He performs a solo act in certain nightclubs, attracting a small but devoted fanbase. He becomes an underground legend after his death, which is always a much anticipated event.

Why was it necessary to feel weakness, he had asked himself. The man was a few sticks and leaves covering a deep pit with spikes at the bottom. Put a foot wrong, put a hole in his carefully arranged disguise and he would fuck you up. The man is capable and talented. He knows you've said it all before and will say it all again.

To the pills, then, because Dango can't talk about this to anyone else. That's not allowed any more. It's not my fault, it's not my fault, he mutters, as he crushes up five milligrams of oxycodone and hopes for oblivion. What else can he do? Dango's gone too far. The idea that this information might be something he can cope with - without any kind of chemical aid or friend to confide in - scares the shit out of him, because what then has happened to his soul? Look; already he's debating whether to snort the powder or just leave it there on the table. He must snort the powder. If he doesn't then he is no longer human. Isn't that what he's always wanted, though?

It was always important, as someone who was weak, to become someone who was strong - but Dango forgot that the relationship between those who can cope and those who can't is symbiotic and the roles are impossible to reverse. It is necessary, he begins to realise, to keep writing. Because as long as Dango is writing he is using a coping mechanism and can thus delay the terrible moment when he must stand up alone - then go insane or die.

Why did he even look in the first place? The same reason he used to cut himself. To feel, to inoculate. To become Stronger Than, able to Cope With. Dango's spent his whole life dying and now that he's nearly dead he realises it wasn't worth it. What's the point of a hedonistic philosophy if you can't feel? It built on him, the horror, the horror, stacked quickly up Dango's spine and spread through his gut until he was certain he would vomit... but he didn't vomit. It ebbed away at a reasonable pace, while he was running around and crushing up the pill, and now he's not sure what to do, the rush of dread has worn off. He goes back and takes another hit but a tolerance has built up and by now he's fairly certain it will be unnecessary to snort the powdered oxycodone. Great. Fantastic. A lifetime goal has been achieved. Dango is ready, and strong, and able and willing. He can do anything.

Just like he always wanted, Dango's heart has turned to stone.