Boxtown

Boxtown

Fisher Thompson

This book is work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Dartos Polemius

Copyright © 2018 by Fisher Thompson

Published by M.H. Dartos at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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All rights reserved.

*****

I drifted off into a fitful sleep and continued a terrifying and vivid dream, a night terror that seemed to appear more and more frequently:

A sense of untold horror pervaded. An evil older than time itself had taken hold long ago. Had seized control. Children circled in the dark trash strewn street. Now they were coming for me. Gathering around me. Sealing all exits. By the glimmering light I saw them all of them. Creatures barely human. Still I recognized them. In the fading light they moved and shuffled about, tilting add odd angles, all heading in one direction, destination unseen yet infinitely knowing. A young boy came toward me. Blood dripping from his eyes, down his face. He falls backward and is fully transformed. Crawls toward me like a crab on the ground, arms bent back at impossible angles.

A windmill in the foreground spun its creaking blades. I ran away from it. From them. Determined to escape. At any cost. But each exit. Each road. Each path. Returned me to the place I had begun. In their midst. In their grasp. Trapped in their terror. Religion doesn't know how to convey the anatomy of horror. It seeks discipline through fear. They don't understand the true nature of creation. No one's ever believed it enough to make it real. Always looking for the con. Even now I'm trying to rationalize. This work makes you mad. When people begin to lose the difference between fantasy and reality, the door to the other side swings wide open. Making it easier for them to come through. They have always been here. Always watching. Always lurking, that creeping, slouching, hideous monster that invades our childhood dreams. But these are no dreams. Not in the way science terms them. That which those self appointed rational thinkers call fantasy. They are not dreams but glimpses of a steadily simmering future. The thin veil rips. Grows wider.

The creatures of the other side start to come over. Exploding into our so called real world shriek by shriek. Slice by slice. Black as the deepest pits of hell. Flashing lights and booming sound signal their entry. This is reality. Reality is just what we tell each other it is. But it's a flip flop. A turnaround. When all that you've known as sanity is shown to be insanity, you find yourself alone in the belief that it is otherwise. I know what I am. I know what is real. This is no fiction. My world lies beyond that passage. They can't be held back any longer. The end draws terrifyingly near. Staring into the illimitable world of the unknown. The stygian blood pit, an enormous carrion white pit. Churned with the unhallowed bones of centuries. Hanging onto the frail edge of reality. Clutching the crumbling edge of sanity. Madness has come to claim me.

The city is almost completely deserted now. More and more people are becoming infected. People are distorting. Mutating. Their bodies turning into hideous creatures.

Cannibalism runs amok. Mass violence and killings everywhere. Senseless, unprovoked violence. A rampant swarm of unfocused rage sweeping through every town. Every city. Expressing itself through mass mutilations and dismembering. The streets run red with blood.

*****

It was a time of terror as a creeping Black Death surged through the land. It was then I had to depart Sung Wu and follow a different path. This would remain so.

Have sex on the plain or die, she says, giggling in her girlish way.

I smile.

This was among the many things she would often say, things that had far greater and far different meaning than I would at first assume. I was to learn the error of my ways in this regard.

Assume nothing at all.

Nothing at all with Sung Wu.

In a world of misery there is the moon; the moon and Sung Wu. Between these poles do we gyrate, awaiting our calling. That distant insistent calling that draws us home. It is this calling that courses through my veins strangling my bones. The sweet intoxication of Sung Wu.

More siren than swan. The alpha and the omega.

I point out that this is a Judeo-Christian trope. She mocks me and giggles in her girlish fashion.

In shallow holes moles make fools of dragons, she says.

It is only the truth she speaks, her words, not mine. Learn it, live it, or die.

When she entered my world the sky went from dull yellow to brilliant azure hues. Thus she lifted me from the sludge of entrenched gloom. A necessary antidote, she says. Prescribed and applied on command. On whose command she would not disclose. Her mystery exceeds her reach.

A mysterious compound interaction. Surprise her defining property.

The stone. The stone. That crazy stone. It is this alone that fixates her attentions to distraction. In the north quarter, she said. The north quarter. On the way home she came across it. Found it. As if plopped from the sky for her alone. Her polymer pet. Her moonstone. And oh she is mesmerized. Hypnotized by its bicolor persuasion. Crystal blue persuasion. Gold flecked and delightful. She looks within its opaque depths and sees her future. Clear as barium fluoride . So she says.

It makes her feel electrified. Her words not mine.

I do my best to avoid all things electrifying. Remain still and silent. Silent and still.

New Khotan is the place where all past beginnings begin again. A place where the Khotanese people can reach ascendancy as is their destiny. According to legend, the foundation of Khotan occurred when Kushtana, said to be a son of the Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka, settled there in the early 3rd century BCE.

The kingdom became one of the major centers of Buddhism, and is primarily associated with the Mahayana branch.

An early account of the city states it had fourteen large and many small Buddhist monasteries. Many foreign languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Tibetan, were used in cultural exchange.

Khotan was the first place outside of China to begin cultivating silk. The story is that a Chinese princess brought silkworm eggs in her hairdo when she was sent to marry the Khotanese king, probably taking place in the first half of the 1st century CE.

It came under Muslim control in the first decade of the 11th century. The 11th century Turkish scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari, included a verse describing the Muslim conquest of Khotan:

Like river torrents

We flooded their cities

We destroyed their monasteries

And shat on the statues of the Buddha.

Ancient Khotan failed to reach its destiny. The latest, greatest version in the cultural hierarchy, New Khotan, means to reset the clock and begin again, putting all past mistakes right.

Within the cultural structures of New Khotan, the citizens are issued modest apartments called tiles. Today I venture from my tile to the inner city. The place of employment. The place of my duty. A place much the same as others. We, the people of this once great land are born to a place. A place which We must possess. A place taken with pride or humility. The choice is open. But clearly weighted toward the side of humility. Without which one cannot long survive.

Reading The History of a Free People, it is recounted how we were once, eons before the catastrophic End of Oil wars, a free and benevolent people. But the wars brought a vicious change in the status quo. A tragic erasure of half the world population. Mother Earth curing her indigestion by projectile vomiting. Though the more pernicious festered and grew. Like a biophage. And today, in the year 2113, we have fallen off the edge into a perilous new world. Life has taken a cold, hard, left.

The best times are always in the past.

The toil of each day is monotonous and endurable. The kind of rudimentary toil that allows one to linger on the imponderables. Imponderable only when life is racing past. Imponderable only by involvement in meaningless tasks. Yet caution must be taken as thought can lead one astray.

The Black Guards, men with black armbands, lead the way. Draw the line. We are constantly assured our purpose is good. Our purpose is grand. Our purpose fulfills a role preordained. With this divine purpose firmly inculcated our day begins. As each one does. Up before dawn. To the mill. To the factory. To our place within this megalopolis. This megalopolis known as Boxtown. The name taken up by the people of this great land as one of simplicity. One of simplicity spoken simply. Though not the official name. That name which you would find on a map or tourist brochure is a name far more complex than a simple people could get their minds and mouth work around; Chunbokstun Xuansiung.

When I was thirteen my father sent me off to school with the warning not to join any Chinese student organizations and to keep my opinions to myself. Black Guard student-spies sometimes infiltrated these organizations. I grew up with the understanding that political discussions and open speech were dangerous activities. I also learned that pain obliterates the comforts of faith and hope.

At one time China’s Communist Party had considered science-fiction to be subversive, but in New Khotan it is now everywhere.

The official name of this megalopolis is we are told drawn from sacred texts. Sacred texts brought forward into our time at great expense. Great loss of life. Brought through ancient lineage for which we should bow and quiver in supplication. It is said he was greater than all who preceded. The blood of ancient emperors did course through his veins. So it has been said. And so we have been told. But the people could not, would not the rulers declared, repeat this sacred name for which we should shiver with pride. In their presence we bow sputter and choke as we intone the long and glorious name of our great city-state. Chunbokstun Xuansiung. Amongst ourselves we show our pride. Bowing and smiling. Intoning the name Boxtown. This we do in barely audible whispers. We who decline to give a name for fear of reprisals. Fear our prime motivation.

Li Chu Yang. Report to Master Phun, 109, thunders the monotone words through the imperial com system. No amount of blending into the machinery makes one a machine. Though hope springs eternal on all sides. To hear one's name blasting through the soundscape bodes of ill portent. Perhaps my whispers have been more than less.

I shuffle off to my despair.

The high leaders have exhorted paramilitary troops to be especially vigilant. The command runs through the ranks. Imperative is the message. As section lead it is yours to assure order and production. We have noticed a slackening in your section. This is unacceptable. Insects do not nest in a busy door-hinge. This month's work must be done especially well. This is crucial. Is this clear? Master Phun drills imperial eyes into mine.

To the rhetorical question one heeds the instruction. Bowing and nodding are the only answer. I heed my instruction and am sent back to the machines. The droning insistent machines. Cold comfort. Cruel reckoning.

100 Fallen in Qingbang town

By the crush of morning another sweeping. Another trickling blackness. The slow drip of steady decline. A culling. So it comes again to a row of tiles in Qingbang town. From a distance one sees first a glimmer, then a blotch, then a slow and steady horizontal spreading as the tar black races through the tile structure. A monolithic tile structure of dominoes. The Great Wall in miniature. Clear glass dominoes now gone coal tar black with the creeping death.

So I am told.

It is always this way.

Through rice paper walls I hear the screams and wails and prophetic gnashing of teeth as I wake from fitful slumber. Perhaps one day I may witness the catastrophe in action as others have. For the time peace is mine. For the time it is the pervasive though slanted media that brings me the news. That and the trammeling terrified howls of huddled masses. Why? Why? shriek a thousand voices in shock and awe. For a query such as this no sufficient answer exists. The Party Daily arrives as ordered, our daily measure of governmental bread.

The cruel compression of headlines chill sufficiently peaceful bones:

65 Run Black in Ganzii

Body Count Rises in Xiungshan Prefecture

The whole city is stable and troops are in normal state as usual. The troops protect us. This we are told. This we must believe. Trudge and tread our sure certainty. Shuffle and sway our steady mantra.

Two little dogs sat by the fire

Over a fender of coal dust;

Said one little dog to the other little dog,

If you don't talk, why, I must. —

It is our way to be the first one of two little dogs. Fitting in both manner and stature a silent poem such as this speaks volumes. Master calls these words to live by. Better silent and still than noisy and killed. Sung Wu says the master is none to her but bombastic buffoon.

Be the silent little dog, she says. In your silence and in your stead I will rage explosive!

These words rattle through my bones and shake my soul to the root. So much passion. So much anger. So much resolve. Words of a romantic revolutionary. I shudder as she speaks.

Fear not. Fear not. The pale yellow morning brings drizzling salvation.

Her words icy puzzle pieces, jagged, ragged, and treacherous, slice my fingers as