***
Yuri clutched a handful of warm orange sand. It ran through his fingers like mercury. As he looked about he found he was partly submerged in the powdery granules. They supported him like the caressing touch of the apparition that had snatched him away. He tried to rise in search for some place to hide but kept losing his balance. Then he gave up and looked at his bewildering surroundings. It didn’t take him long to realise that this was no place on Earth, or any planet near it. The red daylight sky, streaked with the faint rainbow remains of long dead of stars, told him that it wasn’t even his own galaxy.
Yuri suddenly clutched his throat, and only then realised that he was breathing the familiar oxygen mixture humans couldn’t do without, and wondered how long such an arrangement could last in these exotic surroundings. He was sure the purple trunked trees with branches like chandeliers and flowers like carnivorous birds couldn’t have been nurtured to maturity on such a thin mixture. Had he fallen anywhere else, Yuri would probably have been smashed to pieces on the jagged rock outcrops or glazed marble sheets that surrounded the pool of orange sand if something hadn’t broken his fall and saved him from suffocation.
Not knowing what he should be hiding from or how to avoid it, Yuri pulled himself from the bed of sand for the cover of the trees. They looked dangerous enough in themselves, though their perfumed thoughts were strictly for the wind and companion trees. He could see no other signs of life, like the animals or insects that should have been necessary to fertilise the abundant vegetation that clung to every nook, cranny, and cliff face. This didn’t make him feel any easier. Perhaps this was a world where the vegetation browsed off the animals. From the look of some of the plants, they only lacked knives and forks.
Yuri struggled past twisted trunks and stems until he came to the edge of a high bank that fell sharply into the fast-flowing waters of a wide stream. He turned to push his way back through the vegetation only to find it had closed up to block his way. A long deep sigh resonated about him and he recognised the pervading perfume. Yuri would have toppled into the gushing water below if a wide dry path hadn’t risen out of it and caught him before he fell. Not knowing what had caused the freak tremor, but glad enough to be able to scramble away from the voice to the other side, Yuri fled as fast as the undergrowth would let him.
He at last reached an open space. Beyond it was a cluster of rocks. They were fused with vitrified minerals in a bizarre fashion that confused his limited comprehension of geology. Yuri ran his fingers over the glassy surfaces in wonderment as they collected the light of the yellow sun and radiated fluorescently. They lit the skin on his bare arms where the nettles had stung him, and the angry irritation disappeared. Though this did offer some relief at the height of the traumatic experience, it didn’t last long. A strange whispering surrounded him.
Yuri bounded onto the rocks to try and escape it. To his horror, they suddenly became smooth and he slithered back down to the sandy ground. Frantically he ran for the cover of the trees. Before he could reach them, the ground conspired with the rocks to rise into the sky and make a well from which he couldn’t escape.
Yuri tried desperately to claw his way out of the trap even though he realised it was no use.
The astronomer slumped down in the centre of the well and looked up at the sky, the last thing he expected to see before the walls caved in and swallowed him like a gnat. He had quite forgotten his urge to make contact with the sensuous entity, and wasn’t very enthusiastic about its way of making contact with him.
The soft whispering sigh echoed again about him. ‘Creature,’ it said, as it seeped into his thoughts, ‘what are you?’
Whatever this intelligence was, Yuri sensed that it was too large even for his much maligned intellect to comprehend, and he crushed himself against the sand as though it could see him from the top of the well.
‘What creature are you?’ the voice persisted.
‘Leave me alone!’ Yuri protested, though whether with his tongue or mind he had no idea.
‘What is the matter?’
‘Let me out of here,’ Yuri pleaded.
No sooner had he said the words than the walls began to shrink. He again found himself in the clearing with the trees on one side and the restored outcrop of rock on the other.
‘You should not be alarmed,’ the voice went on.
Yuri was bewildered. ‘Is there any rational reason for that statement?’
The voice hesitated as though logic were something quite foreign to it. ‘I am Moosevan,’ it eventually replied.
If Yuri’s hair didn’t stand on end quite naturally already, it would certainly have done so at that. As Diana had refused to believe his zany fears, he had assumed her voice to be equally ridiculous. It didn’t improve his equilibrium to discover that they were both right.
‘What is Moosevan?’ he asked gingerly, something at the back of his mind telling him that he would be better off not knowing.
‘I am Moosevan,’ the voice repeated as though that were the answer.
‘Yes... but what are you?’ Yuri insisted, looking frantically about to see if the being was hiding behind some outcrop or tree.
‘I am old...’ Moosevan tried to rationalise. ‘I am...’ but that wasn’t the most dominant thought in her mind. ‘Your touch pleases me,’
‘How old?’
‘Half as old as this galaxy,’ was the unusual reply.
Yuri looked up again at the sky scattered with the debris of so many stars and knew that was very old. Normally he wouldn’t have sniffed at a show of affection coming from a mature woman. One ninety thousand million years old was in his view taking things too far.
Yuri gulped. ‘That is very old. What do you look like?’ He suspected that something so old was bound to be going off by now.
‘I am here,’ Moosevan insisted, wondering whether other creatures with eyes were able to see.
‘I can’t see you. Where am I supposed to look?’
Moosevan gave a deep sigh. ‘What are you called?’ Her tone was languorous, as though the knowledge of his name could only heighten her contentment.
He didn’t see any point in withholding it as she seemed to be in total command of everything else. ‘Yuri.’ He still thought he might try to dodge her attentions and rose in readiness to make another dash for what he thought to be freedom. ‘Why won’t you show yourself? Have you something to hide or do you think the sight of you would alarm me?’
‘I would not alarm you, Yuri. Why should I alarm you?’
‘I do not know,’ said Yuri, ‘but you have done very well so far.’
Without warning, he made a successful sprint to the top of the rock outcrop and over the other side.
Knowing he couldn’t escape her, Moosevan let him go.
Congratulating himself on his ability to move so rapidly for someone fast approaching fifty, Yuri bounded over boulders and fought his way through bushes before stopping to wonder where in this world he was going. He had no idea of where he was, apart from it being in a dying galaxy on the edge of the Universe, or how he had got there, apart from it being through a children’s fairy ring that was harbouring more than mushrooms.
He sat down on the warm sand to rest.
It wasn’t long before the voice of Moosevan caught up with him. ‘Are you tired, Yuri?’
‘I am thinking.’
‘What are you thinking, Yuri? Tell me?’
‘I am thinking that, as you do not want to show yourself to me, I should have nothing to do with you.’ His hand sank into the soft sand and strange perfumed sensations filled his body.
As the caress of the creature engulfed him he could hear Moosevan say, ‘I am here, Yuri... I am here.’
This time Yuri didn’t want to get up and run. The fear of this exotic entity left him, and a comforting reassurance had replaced it. Dancing ribbons of mist flickered round his body and mesmerised him into near sleep.
‘I like your touch,’ whispered Moosevan. ‘You a
re not like anything I have felt before.’
Slowly Yuri sank to the soft sand where he lay gazing up at the sky of supernovae remnants through a sparkling haze. Wondering why he should have been so panic-stricken, he let the waves of sensation flow over him like the undulations of a silken sea.
Perhaps Moosevan was like the sea, fluid and reshaping. Perhaps she was like the sand he lay on, soft, warm and yielding. As he listened to her voice gently lulling him to sleep, Yuri cast his agile mind over all the things she could have been. Was she a phantom that lived in the magenta trees or like the vitreous substances permeated into the rocks? No, she couldn’t have been just those because her voice was everywhere, even beneath him.
Yuri’s eyelids suddenly snapped open in horror.
He cast Moosevan’s caresses aside and leapt to his feet. Of course she was everywhere and he couldn’t escape her.
She was the planet!
This was too much for even his broad mind to take. He bolted to the first gap he could see and ran until his legs could run no more. Reason at last told him that he couldn’t escape.
There was a stretch of water ahead, and had he managed to stagger to it, he would have seen it reach up in solid waves to break his fall. He chose instead to have his fall broken by the more unyielding pebbles Moosevan had not thought to adjust.
Yuri hadn’t been lying there long before his attention was taken by two pairs of boots containing large, splay, three-toed feet. This was something new. It may have had a considerable degree of nastiness about it, but it was still different.
Carefully Yuri raised his head to find himself looking up at two flat-headed green faces that peered back at him through polarised visors.