The Blackberry Walk

Chapter 11 The river route was pleasant. The glooping mercury had become by this point a pleasing sound to the ears, like a peaceful summer’s walk. Along this riverbank, there were some signs of life. None were to be found in the river itself, but in and around the river perched on the bismuth trees were these small nests of iron wool, similar to the bushels I saw earlier. Resting on a smaller tree, one such nest was in reach. I stood up upon my toes to just about peer over the top of the nest and saw three blue eggs. The material of these eggs, I couldn’t possibly tell: but their colour was magnetic, almost glowing. Pretty as they were, I decided to let the eggs be, and not risk meeting an angry sharp-beaked mother. Heavens knows what sought of damage such a creature could inflict. On my walk I saw a few more fauna. One fat beaver-looking creature and what I could only assume to be his wife walked in-front of me, trundling along the riverbank. They both looked somewhat rusted, their steel not what it once was. These beavers looked quite sweet, and, as I was admiring them, a thought popped into my head: I crouched down to their level, and said, “Hello” with as polite a smile as I could manage for Mr. Beaver. Mr. Beaver took one look at me, and I one look at him, eye to eye; I saw his iris dilate then constrict like a steamer basket; and then with a sudden bound, him and his wife were off, dashing deeper into the forest. Alas, these beasts were not sentient and could not talk. It wasn’t too farfetched a thing to attempt, I reckon - seeing these mechanical beasts move and walk, why couldn’t they be programmed with a little conversation? Here, very little is farfetched. Signs, signs, and more signs: signs galore. The first sign was but a vanguard for the army of signs I now saw. Each sign a sick of rebar with a metal panel welded onto it, each sign with words written in a mercury ink. The content of the signs is what interested me though. Sign after sign pointed to Miss Böhme’s house - I suppose she was the only inhabitant of this place worth signposting. Even still, the number of signs were unnecessary. I saw signs tall and small walking down the riverbank, until I came upon one of the smallest signs I’d seen so far which broke tradition and read, “This way to Pluto.” I didn’t recall Pluto on the train’s journey, perhaps it was only reachable by a branch line? Either way, this sign only pointed to Pluto insofar as Liverpool Street points to Liverpool. Chortling at the strange sign, I ignored the route for Pluto. I looked instead up and admired the tree beside me. This tree wasn’t bismuth-y in colour but instead more copper-y. Some kind of copper alloy perhaps? The tree had proper branches too and looked more traditionally ‘tree-like’; and upon its boughs hung fruit. These fruit were pear-shaped and shone like electrum. Radiant and beautiful. I picked one and slipped the incredibly heavy pear into my jacket pocket - it would be a great ornament for the mantle piece, I thought. I turned back from the tree and caught a glance of the sign for Pluto I had seen before. “This way to Miss Böhme’s House”, it now read. Refreshing my eyes, blinking as if I was drilling the F5 key on my browser, I took double, triple, and quadruple takes of the sign. It now most absolutely certainly read “Miss Böhme’s House,” and no longer in any way read “Pluto;” and neither had I hallucinated it as reading Pluto earlier: my senses wouldn’t deceive me so, not when the sign was so humorous an anomaly. I stared at the sign, deeply this time, staring close to the mercury lettering; and I could almost make out the quicksilver ink quivering ever so slightly. Something was off. I winced at the sign trying to figure out what it was hiding. Then, bunching my hand within my coat so as to cover my skin and not get shocked once more, I gave the sign a bit of a nudge. No response. Then a slightly firmer bump. Then a kick to the rebar base. The mercury lettering, which was before smooth on the surface, was now spiking and jagged, as if it had been startled like a cat with its hair stuck on end. I recoiled from the sign. Though it was a sign stuck in the ground, there was an animal warmth to the reaction of it being hit, a reaction which left my stomach like cauliflower. I continued my route down the riverbank, but the density of these signs only got thicker and thicker. It was as if the signs watched me. What I struggled to decide, as I gingerly stepped onwards, was whether this animal presence in the signs was real or a trick of my mind. Could it be that the force of the kick sent sonorous energy into the mercury which through the vibrations led to it undergoing some kind of phase transition? Pure cope. There’s no way that could’ve been the case; the sign felt pain, that much I could tell. Not to sound too solipsistic, but how is one to know whether or not it felt pain? Feeling the pain of other creatures could be just how we perceive the action - if we empathise and relate to the pain the creature experiences, we mirror that and feel it too. I’d like to think empathy is more than that, and the apperception of a soul in another is more than that, but it’s hard to say. It isn’t as if there is a sight organ and a sound organ there is a soul organ! Well, at least not one easily found. These were the thoughts spiraling around my grey matter, somehow distracting myself from the core issue that the sign consciously changed its text. My mind’s gears span, but I decided to keep on journeying across the riverbank, now deep in thought. I saw one sign which read “This way to Miss Böhme’s House,” then another reading “Miss Böhme’s House this way”. My eyes were now firmly fixed on the signs waiting for the slightest hiccough. They’ll have to blunder again somewhere. Then, in the corner of my eye, the sun glinted off a far off sign’s mercury, and that sign caught my attention. I turned my head to find this smaller-looking sign, and caught it just as it was about to change. And before it read a variation on the typical phrase, I saw what it wrote clearly: “Please don’t hurt us.” Chapter 12 My nerves were electric. That static shock I’d felt earlier first arriving on the planet was but an electric shock pen when compared to this. “They’re living,” I spoke aloud, before covering my mouth. What if they could hear me? I looked to my right, and saw a larger - and I suppose elder - sign, reading, “IT KNOWS,” in large bold typeface. There was then a sparkling effect as sunlight dashed off all the mercury shifting on the surrounding signs, each one mimicking the elder’s line, “IT KNOWS.” This was plenty enough for me. My stomach was now cauliflower cheese. I reached into my pocket for the map, delicately unfolded it trying not to breathe too loudly, and took stock of my options. If I went around this cave-looking thing on the map, this might be the shortest route? Returning to the recommended path now would mean retracing all my steps back down this river, there wasn’t a path cutting across. And off-roading a route almost certainly seemed ill-advised: I haven’t the foggiest what metal monstrosities are lurking in the deeper parts of the forest. The smartest choice, it seemed, was to just hold my breath, suck up my nerves, and march on through this protest of signposts, to march onwards past this cave, and arrive into the safety of my host. Scanning my eyes, I surveyed the signs ahead of me. They appeared to be becoming less sparse as the path continued, which I didn’t like the look of; that said, it wasn’t as if ahead they looked so dense I’d have difficulty avoiding contact with them. And then, with a nod to myself, an order from my head to my gut, I set off en route. The terrain, which thusfar had been rather flat, began to become a little sloped downwards. The decline was by no means steep, but with the slickness of the metal-paneled floor it became a little hard to stay steady on my feat. One step after another I made my way down the river front, doing my best not to pay attention to the slogans of the signs. No longer were they attempting to direct me, nor did they any longer put that frightful slogan of “It Knows”: what they wrote for me instead was a mixture of cruel insults and taunts. One read, “You’re a weak man, why don’t you remove yourself from the gene pool.” Another, “Stop pretending to be smarter than you are, you’ll never amount to much.” Upon first sight, the words stung a little; but in short time I realised how pathetic it all was. Am I really to be bullied by signs? What stock should I place in the comments of signs? Ignoring their negativity was the best strategy, much like an internet troll. But one sign did unduly attract my attention. The sign stood across the river at the base of the hillside in the corner of my sight. It wasn’t a particularly large sign, nor one catching the glare of the sun; but my gaze, like a hand unthinkingly reaching to scratch an open wound, locked on to this sign and read it. “You will always live in the shadow of your older brother.” A tear formed in each eye. I buried my head in my hands and wept. Was this a cold read, some kind of lucky punt by the signs? Or could they read me, and tug upon any insecurity they wished? I took a few deep breaths and I composed myself. This strange land shan’t best me. I looked up from my hands, and found through my soupy vision, blurred by a concoction of tears and the harsh sun’s mirage, that all of the signs before me, after me, and all around me, now read some variant on the same message. Like a silent chantry of my own inner demons. I consolidated my courage and continued on, taking extra care to keep my gaze at eye level and not be distracted by any of the content written below. It was further ahead when I heard a faint gurgling sound in the distance. I walked onwards, only mildly alarmed by the noise, but the noise became louder, louder, and louder still. The prototype which the map’s cave-like symbol pointed to now came into view, and the sight was marvelous: an arch cut into what was a modest, craggy hill, the aperture phasing out into a dark nothingness; and that cave had been cut by the river of quicksilver, the river flowing into the cave, and off into the void. According to the map it didn’t exit the other side, and only slid downwards. It was out from this cave that came the gurgling sound heard before, now tremendously loud, and this sound was harmonised with same gloopy crashing of a waterfall I heard earlier. I say harmonised, it was quite a cacophony really. The gurgling sounded rather evil and not like any natural process. As I got closer still I came to know what exactly was being gurgled. Ever since a trip to the fumaroles of Solfratara near Naples as a boy, I’ve been acutely aware of what this smell was that emanated from this cave: sulphur. Now, sulphur is generally safe, but when inhaled in too great a quantity can be harmful. So I opted to hold my breath as best I could and ran on my way around this great vomitorium to the underworld. Here also the signs were at their greatest density yet. So many signs there were, that I struggled to traverse past them, bumping into their flat faces and rebar stalks with each step. A kind of curiosity then took me over, and I glanced down to hear what the signs were saying. Each sign was of a like mind. “Just kill yourself,” one wrote. “Jump into the pit,” “Pit, pit, pit,” “There’s no use, just jump in,” that was a common theme. I read the sea of hate, and began to chuckle with my mouth closed. But the chuckling grew, and as I began to properly laugh, I could no longer keep the breath in my lungs; and I began to laugh harder and harder into what became a true belly laugh as I ran trying to navigate myself around the signs. “What is this place?” I guffawed to myself, a tear in my eye, “What is this place?” I ran a little further until only the faint smell of sulphur lodged in my nostrils remained, and I walked on, the gurgling now only a faint rumble in the distance. It wasn’t long now, only another half-K until I reached the house. The remainder of the walk felt so light. The signs gone, I began to appreciate the beauty and wonder of my surroundings a little more, the blue copper sulphate crystals dangling off brass trees like pendants shimmering beneath the sun, the cobalt pink beehives sitting in the hollows of tree-trunks, and the brick-red ferrous squirrel-like critters darting in and out of the iron wool bushels: it was all so beautiful! So immensely, unfathomably beautiful, a scene no man could dream. Here I had arrived. A cabin constructed from straight copper logs with an iron wool head. A small amount of steam rising up from a central chimney. A rebar fenced area holding some electric sheep. Nestled within the forest trees, I had finally arrived at the much prophesied Miss Böhme’s House. I walked up to the front door, and there was a signpost outside the house confirming the occupant. Thankfully the sign post was engraved brass. I knocked on the front door three times with a sense of trepidation. It had felt like forever since I had last seen a human.