The Path From Neptune

It isn’t easy to immerse yourself in normal life when you’ve been abducted and deposited with all the ceremony of a cockroach’s coronation onto the surface of the icy moon of Triton. In no exaggerated sense, it’s a little like getting on a bus and finding that the seats are occupied by sentient yet intelligent liquids with the aesthetics of poorly mixed custard but the keen and introspective minds of the kind of people that describe pure mathematics as ‘elegant’.

Though perhaps I should go back a little, to last summer, when the fateful events that have plagued me these past few months commenced.

It all started when I visited my doctor, complaining of some kind of mental anguish caused by unceasing boredom. Bless the open door policy of the National Health Service. Whether you’re a soul in need of comfort and hypnotic drugs, or a superbug with a penchant for the smooth-tiled floor of a well-tended ward, all are welcome. Except of course that the latter don’t pay taxes, the thieving supergits.

But you see, the problem with boredom and banality carried to its furthest extreme is that it is always viewed as a benign thing and thus underestimated. Nothing, I grant you, could be further from the truth. While in small doses it may be no more than a minor irritant, something that prolonges time and blends your once-focussed thoughts into a kind of weak and unwholesome mixture (like Cup-A-Soup dissolved in an overly large mug), in large doses it can be utterly fatal. The brain, numbed of all rational activity, turns inwards, like an errant toenail with the personality of Stalin, and starts to feed upon itself. It mines its own gelatinous folds for signs of insecurity and devours these until any fermenting creativity or logic that once may have nested there is obliterated. It probably causes people to burn things and kill people, I kid you not. The number of horrors committed falsely in the name of some trumped-up cause or other, but whose blame could squarely be laid at boredom’s door, does not bear thinking about.

But I digress, some habits die hard. The doctor was a well-meaning, angelic type, and possessed these magical receipts that could be used in exchange for drugs. My local alchemist, Boots, furnished me with the goods, and it was at some point in the ensuing week that the abduction took place.

I had known for a long while that the gaping hole in my bedroom ceiling should be fixed. I’d stare up at it at night and wonder what kind of terrors might crawl through there. The hole had the girth of an alligator, so naturally it was towards this kind of predator that my mind was tuned. It didn’t elude me though, that a shark, radioactive six-foot caterpillar, or even some kind of mutated leg plastercast brought to life using only willpower, a vast quantity of electricity and the adoring strokes of a decadent Venetian, could have also easily fitted through that gap and smothered me in my sleep. In the event, it was none of these conventional predators, but instead a kind of long, metal club-ended pole. At first I wondered what kind of maniac would be trying to infiltrate our flat with a golf club. A solid sandstone tenement demands nothing less than a cannon, or perhaps an incendiary explosive, as any primary school child could tell you. After a few swipes of the golf club, which I feebly batted away with my outstretched palm (violence is not my strong point at 3am), it finally clouted me on the head.

In the rising vapours of the freezing moon, shapes were difficult to make out. The first sensation is of the intensely cold surface as you lie there, like a deep-chilled pumice stone being nudged into the small of your back by an over-affectionate cat. My glasses had gone, as they always do at the first sign of distress. I only buy cowardly glasses that shatter at the first sign of trouble, because I would rather be buried with them off, frankly. Why a monument to mal-sight should be welded to me like some face-hugging alien in my final hours is beyond me. I’d rather not see the combine harvester advancing towards me as I’m trapped in the quicksand if there is absolutely nothing I can do to save myself. Still, as the vapour shifted, it revealed the faces of my abductors.

Face is not quite the word, a person can have a face, a dog can have a face, even a clock can have a face, but using the word face here is to stretch the word’s meaning to the most tenuous threads of its extremities. The beings were more like semi-transparent shafts of light, with half-solid, half-vaporous tentacle forms writhing to their sides, melding with the omnisicent vapour of the moon. If peace could have a visual form, it would be encapsulated in the strange beauty staring down at me, and yet, over the coming months, I would soon find that this deceptive beauty shielded a wrath of unspeakable viciousness.

They were only capable of making one noise, a kind of ghastly squeal on the moment of death, which in itself was a ceremony visited upon them one-by-one as and when the community felt that the usefulness of that being had evaporated. It was strangely democratic yet utterly arbitrary and despicable at once. That squeal was the pent up release of all the gathered knowledge and emotion of a short life half-lived, not one of the squeals ever sounded like the dull exhalation of air that one felt would have embodied the dying gasp of a full and unregretted existence.

For the rest of the time, though, for I would not witness my first enforced death for many weeks, they communicated by their normal form – a kind of gestured telepathy (of the kind seen in enraged motorists, hurling lip-readable abuse from behind their warrior-mobile’s windows). The shafts of light would move into impossible shapes, semaphore-like, and at first it was this that was easiest to decipher. Then, it was possible to perceive of a kind of subconscious signal, one that led deeper meaning to the contrivances of the tentacles. Before long, I had grown luminescent tentacles of my own, though mine were far clumsier and unable to whisk the atmospheric vapour into the ornamental swirls and vortices that I witnessed from the others. The telepathy grew stronger too, though this had to be used with caution, as even your deepest thoughts could be unwittingly communicated, and once or twice this aroused the rage of my captors, their tentacles spinning helicopter-like. Often, they would choose to incarcerate me in a hemispherical rock cave, sculpted to perfection by one of the beings, the rounded dome resembling the smooth convex whiteness of an exposed skull. In these times, I would still be unable to think freely, and my leaking thoughts might earn me further torture. The guardians enjoyed flailing with their tentacles, and this would lend a slight burning sensation to the skin, that made it feel strangely crisp and smelling of prawns.

The landscape on Triton is nothing like the astronomy books would lead you to believe (whatever that is, I dropped my love of astronomy when regrettably young, and no one had thought to send a probe to this enchanting place at that point). No, it had more the landscape of Arizona, only without that red-auburn desert glow. The rock mushroomed into spectacular gravity-defying structures, and on some of these lofty plateaus, the beings would gather and thrust their tentacles toward the great god Neptune. Still no noise would be omitted, except of course from the victims of the executions whose wails would richochet off the statuesque rockforms.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the experience was that these beings took almost no interest in me. I believe I was simply a companion, one to be tortured for amusement, yes, but certainly not a kind of artefact to be learned from as in other abductions. If I were to reflect, I would surmise that in that state of banality my status was little more than that of a domestic pet. I’d reason that my abduction had been engineered so that their species may have a plaything to make them feel their superiority (as though that had not already been demonstrated by their four light-hours flight to Earth). Indeed in the advanced state of their communication, their ability to transcend space, their ability to intimate thoughts so directly to the core of an alien brain, and in their gargantuan architecture, those same semaphoric tentacles able to sear rocks into molten form in a feat of sheer wizardry, they were truly awe-inspiring. Their scale of ambition was humbling, and left the similar kind of disappointment of oneself as that felt for your own generation when reading about the exploits of the Victorians.

In fact, to them, I was probably more modest even than a furred domestic pet. Possibly more like a snowshaker – shake him and see him rattle, sear him with your tentacle and watch his nostrils flare at the pungent seafood smell. I befriended one, ogre-shaped mass, whose light had clearly dimmed over time, and who yet his peers had not yet decided to sacrifice. His tentacles transcribed the words Angil-Twan (his name) in the air, and with my still embryonic tentacles, I spent a good four hours describing my name to him. I was more than content to ‘listen’ however. The reason for my abduction was never spelt out to me, yet he told of the great plagues, famines, wars, that existed when the beings, he called them the Lyntoc (I am reminded though, of H.G. Wells’s assertion that the beasts he encountered on our own moon were a mixture of Mooncalfs and Selenites, but how did he know of their names? But please, no more enquiries), existed in their solid state.

In turns out that these Lyntoc had once been more scaly versions of themselves, far from the lofty glowing, dancing shapes they now resembled. In fact, the creatures described were more like armadillos, shuffling along, calamitously waging war on each other for merely eyeing each other up wrong. One side-effect of being so low to the ground was that there was little variation in head height, and outbreaks of skirmishes that could soon lengthen into bloody battles could be occasioned by even the most innocent meetings of eyes. In time, they evolved, though instead of gaining a more upright posture, like man, they started to court more with the gaseous state. In time, they abandoned the conflicts and sorrow of the solid world, choosing instead to court with light, vapour and excesses of temperature. Their stewardship of the solid world despite their gaseous forms had elevated them above their surroundings, and they were at last in a relative if imperfect peace. But for the whole execution business that is, though I wasn’t brave enough to pull them up on that, and with my mastery of tentacular discussion, it would have taken the best part of a fortnight by which time even the impossibly patient Angil-Twan would have flail-seared me to death and had me thrust upon the jagged spike of the traitor’s mountain as a warning to all aliens who attempt such tomfoolery.

To cut a fairly rambling account short, they finally got bored themselves. There is only so much fun you can have with a snow-shaker after all. No matter how gothic the incarcerated castle, or how lifelike the snow - and even if that falling snow strikes the sunlight as beautifully as the dandruff from an unkempt street-urchin’s head as he is shaken in some kind of industrial oscillating device for the separating of paint, at some point, you get bored of it and have to dash it with anguish against a wall and then sit on your bed with your knees tucked up against your face, rocking gently yet somehow violently while sobbing and whispering doleful gibberish about the futility of it all and of the fallacy of having snow rise from the ground and adorn an upside down castle in any case, while the glass-sharded palm of your hand trickles blood lazily onto the duvet like some half-hearted volcano’s lacklustre attempt to bury a hamlet in lava.

In the end, I went out as I came in, with a swift blow of a golf club to the head. Awaking in my bed, I threw away my pills – for no alchemy could touch the insanity of Triton, and quickly gained my senses.

Then I moved back to London, but that’s a whole different story. Life appears to have reached a more normal equilibrium now, though the grim spectre of banality with all her destructive potency stands guard at a nearby corner that I hope never to reach. I still often open jars of seafood sauce at the supermarket to gain a heady whiff of that aroma that takes me back to those strangely alluring yet torturous days. But I still miss my tentacles.