A Journal From Who Knows Where

Seeds of Destruction

I didn't see Scarlet for a long time after that. It was a little disappointing. Despite her irregular and inconsistent behavior, I had grown used to her company. After all, she was the only living person I had come across.

The door to the castle was still ajar. It was a tight fit but I squeezed through. The doors were immensely heavy, too heavy for any man to have moved them. Once inside, I observed a clockwork mechanism used to open them.

I almost chocked on all the dust in the air. It was absolutely everywhere. A small amount of sunlight came through an ornate window. It illuminated all the little dust particles as they floated past, and made the whole place feel like something out of a dream.

I was in a foyer of some kind. The interior had been decorated for royalty. Expensive furniture, valuable fixtures on the walls, and an immaculate fireplace all contributed to emanate a strange beauty. Once again, I thought about how the deteriorated nature that time had brought increased the beauty.

It didn't take me long to find the bottle that I knew would be there. It sat on a round table in the middle of the room. The light from the window was directly fixated on it, giving the impression of a kind of natural security system. When I picked up the bottle, there was a perfect circle, a clean spot in the middle of the dust.

I scanned the room for Scarlet but it was useless. I would only ever be able to see her when she wanted me to. In many ways, she was like the ocean that thrashed beneath the castle. You couldn't control either of them. You could only let the waves take their natural course.

Pulling the cork out of the bottle, once again the scene before me dissolved, and replaced by a new one. Every inch of the place was made brand new. A roaring fire burned brightly in the fireplace. The furniture was untouched and the fixtures on the wall glinted in the light from the fire.

The man in the suit was there. He wasn't difficult to recognize. Apart from the overpriced suit, he also had his hair parted just a little too perfectly. He had that kind of smile that just makes you cringe because it seems like he knows all your dirty, little secrets.

There was another man there as well. Over a set of loose fitting pajamas, he wore a magnificent maroon robe. He wore a pair of wire frame glasses and had a kind face. He sat in an armchair with an elaborately decorated cane leaning on the arm.

Both men were drinking out of scotch glasses. They spoke in thick English accents, though they differed from each other slightly. I listened as they conversed in their proper, overdeveloped vocabularies.

Very early in the conversation I learned their names.  The name of the man in the suit was Alan Slickman. The name of the man in the robe was Charles Redwood. Slickman had sent the workers home for the night. They would be back in the morning to begin construction of the upper levels. Not much time had passed since the last memory it seemed.

Slickman's attitude towards the local inhabitants was rather obvious. He viewed them as lesser beings, like insects. Redwood, on the other hand, saw the whole affair as a mutually beneficial business venture. The townspeople were a bit simple perhaps but he was striving for a healthy business relationship with them.

About halfway through the conversation, Slickman brought up the young, scrawny worker I had seen. The boy seemed to have some radical, scientific ideas that interested both men. For Redwood, it meant accomplishing new things. For Slickman, it meant power. 

Though I could look at Slickman, see the way his eyes glinted at the mere mention of power, I doubt that Redwood could. They were clearly good friends. They probably had been for years. Once upon a time, Slickman may have been as decent as anyone else. But it is the nature of humans to have their nature corrupted.

In Slickman's conversation with the boy, they had talked about some dark power that lie at the bottom of the ocean. Despite being ridiculed by the town, the boy spent nearly all of his time studying its theoretical applications. Levitation, flight, preservation of memories. Whatever was at the bottom of the ocean made it all possible. You could even draw out a memory from many years ago, so distorted by time that it was only a half remembered dream, and make it new again.

At last, I was finally being given a bit of an explanation. I had enough of the pieces now that I had a pretty good idea of all that had happened, even the bits I hadn't seen yet. From that moment on, just about everything was expected and rather predictable. Absolutely everything was as I expected it, until I opened that last bottle.