Sample Chapter
GREAN MAN
by Nichespur
(Brian Sandersfeld)
5/10/01
What happens when a rather mundane modern man
gets the chance to meet the Godness of old once again?
Chapter 1
The country was the color of an Irish lullaby. It was filled with greens, and blues, and
browny reds, haunted by angel mist and speckled with dew and fairy dust, which was left
glittering here and there by the magic that had so recently occurred as the light of dawn
had touched the cool mornings air. It felt – like it was filled with leprechauns and sprites,
though the emerald isle was more then an entire continent behind the sunrise that now
blessed Mr. Peter Templar’s ever-wandering eyes.
Mr. Templar was on a
photo trip. One of his favorite pastimes: just meandering down country roads in the wee
hours of the morning, looking for any excuse to stop the car and get out to snap another
memory of all the glorious wonders that he so often found in life. It was also his business
to do so, his pleasure, because he was a "Professional Photographer"
specializing in extraordinary landscapes, sold mainly in calendars and to some magazines
if they liked. Of course, it wasn’t a "good enough" job that he could
afford to do it all the time – just on weekends, vacations, and some holidays when his
wife and two kids didn’t require his presence at their social affairs.
That
seemed to happen a lot now days – Them not requiring his presence. So he tried to find
some sense of presence some where else in life. Somewhere other then the office, where
he had to spend the rest of his time, juggling numbers just to appease the taxman.
He was also a computerized accountant you see. Lead programmer actually,
at a moderately sized local accounting firm. A high tech bean counter of sorts, who used
computer programs to try to bring some semblance of order into other peoples often
tragically overly-complex, and mismanaged lives.
That was a "
good enough" job he thought this morning, as he ground his old deep blue 1955
Willis Jeep’s gears, while shifting down to climb a hill that would carry him even deeper
into this wonderland. It gave his wife and kids everything they apparently needed him to
have. Like a house, 3 cars, 2 different kinds of computerized game machines - with 24
plus games, 4 cable connected TV’s each with 588 satellite channels, the fastest internet
service possible for a home computer, and various other modern appliances that now
seemed to rule their lives.
He, on the other hand, only needed a couple of
good old film cameras and lenses, some processing fees (because his wife said "
they" couldn’t afford to have environmentally unsafe darkroom in his own
home), and these field trips to be relatively happy with his life.
"
Relatively…" he thought while turning through another mountainous curve.
"Though it might be nice to have some actual ‘relatives’ out here to join
him!" But no… that too, it seemed, was an unreasonable expectation for him to
have these days – even though he actually considered it only a hope.
"Something to be shared", he mused, slowing down to watch a doe and
her two brand new dusky red, white speckled fawns dance out of the forest shadows and
across the road in front of him. "But no – the kids didn’t want to "
hafta" get up this early. Besides, ‘I-Magu-Zelda the Great Goddess of the
universe’ was on TV this morning – which obviously couldn’t be missed!
Because…" he then supposed, it was just so much more important then he or his
silly little road trips ever could be to either his wife and/or kids.
He pulled
off the road, grabbed his camera and his rusack, and stepped cautiously out of the car.
Even the air smelled enchantingly green now, like he was actually stepping into the very
fairytales that his wise old Irish grandmother used to tell him about as a kid. She was
such a simple minded human being – not stupid mind you, just composed of some sort of
other sense of understanding that allowed her to always seem to be at peace with herself
and her place in this sometimes harsh and often confusing modern world.
He had always admired her for that.
"Boy that was a
long time ago." He laughed quietly to himself, taking another moment to
remember the love and wisdoms that old woman had contributed to his life, before he
bent gently down, to scoop up a handful of road dust, and just as easily let it drop to test
the movement of that blue/green air. He was testing it to see if it was rising up and out of
the valley like he expected on any other perfectly fine clear spring day. It was, so he
started to quietly, very quietly, stalk the deer downhill, relatively assured that it wouldn’t
be his scent that gave him away first. He used all his other best tracking tricks too,
learned in boy scouts, TV, and by reading a whole lot of books on American Indians.
They were his "I-Magu-Zelda" he suddenly thought – His
hero’s, back when he was a kid. That also was a long time ago, he realized, as he
carefully walked heel round to toe, making hardly a sound, yet moving quicker, and with
a great deal more stability, then he would have had he’d tiptoed. And he had to do that
because he knew deer were both skittish and fast. He also knew that they seemed to have
the capacity to read your moods – To know when the lion was out hunting or not – so he
tried to silently adjust his own attitudes away from the excitement of the hunt, and more
on them just being there for him because he really wanted to catch a good shot of them in
the mornings light. He could at least share that much of his experiences here today with
his kids. He could contribute his images to their lives, and even hope that maybe,
someday, they would be inspired enough by them to do something else – something else
besides watching some form of God damned TV tube for the rest of their lives, or just
fighting amongst themselves like most the rest of the world always seemed to be these
days.
There was a loud snap of a twig off to his right, and he instinctively
hunched half down, camera up, and froze. Hardly breathing, as he scanned the brilliant
vista before him for any hint of movement. He would have to make some serious
lighting adjustments in any shot he got here, because he was standing in tall, hip deep,
green green grass, at the edge of a dark rim of blue/black forest and looking into the
mornings light across a misty lemon/lime green field of shimmering ferns and horsetails.
"A perfect fairytale setting." he thought, "Though a little
contrasty", as he slowly pulled his old fashioned film camera up to his eye and
began focusing, searching through his viewfinder for a subject and the best alignment for
his polarizer.
The light hid the outlines of most everything in a golden
haze. So he stepped his lens down a few F-stops, and continued focusing. Zooming in and
out as he did so, just in case the animal was moving at the edge of this forest glen.
Nothing moved, so he lowered his camera down a bit and looked over its
edge. The field was empty, but he could just make out something in the blanched out
darkness of the trees across the glen. "That’s another light adjustment,"
he thought, so he stepped his f-stops up a couple of ticks and slowed his shutter speed
down one, and then started focusing again on that something.
He zoomed in
real tight and thought it might be a doe looking straight at him. He focused some more,
slipped his polarizer ring around a bit, and was amazed – both by the way this simple
miracle of mans technology cut the haze, and the fact that it allowed him to quite literally
see through all that haze, and find a wryly smiling young girl, in a long white dress, with
a ring of white daisies in her hair.
She was quite literally laughing at him.
He blinked surprised, and tried to find her with his own disbelieving eyes,
but he couldn’t really see her through the glare of the brilliant mornings light – just a
light blotch in the woods. So he brought his camera up again, and sure enough, there she
was, standing about 130 feet away from him, smiling and quite happily holding two
pieces of a recently broken stick in her hands, which she made quite sure he noticed this
time, by holding them out in front of her, as a humorous offering.
He
snapped the picture, but in that same instant she was gone.
Still somewhat
amazed on almost every level of his consciousness, he mentally noted that she would
probably be just a blur in a fuzzy, and to dark picture, as he cried out into the wildness,
trying to be polite. "Hey! Um…I’m sorry! Didn’t mean to intrude!"
"No intrusion felt" tee-heed in the air about him like the
very breath of the fairy sprites he had been thinking about earlier, but he couldn’t quite
make out its location. The pleasant clarity of her bell like laughter made him smile inside
though, and he stepped out into the sunlit glen and quite happily just listened.
He could hear her giggling as she ran downhill, still further from his car and the road.
His next thought was to turn back, because the sun was starting to get a
little high, and he might be trespassing – and yet the sound – the sound of her lingering
giggles egged him on. In fact, they enchanted him with memories of his own childhood,
and spending many similar days running wild through the wondrous woods surrounding
his families home back in Minnesota. And he found himself taking another step
downhill.
"Hey?" he said again still not knowing what he
was doing as he started to follow the sound, "Hey…wait up!"
"No wait – follow." Tee-heed the air about him again, and
so he did. He started running, almost childishly stumbling down the hill through sun
kissed horsetails and daisies. Running and jumping just like a kid again, over a few fallen
fence posts and far past a couple of long dead oaks and rock outcroppings that he hadn’t
seen before from the road. He even took a running swat at a couple of bee hives hanging
in the trees above him, and quickly regretted having done so. Not because of the bees
mind you, for they were far beyond his reach. But because his rusack was banging and
bumping uncomfortably on his back as he did so, and his middle aged hipbones, and
kneecaps complained miserably as he landed. His chest was screaming at him too, as he
discovered he had a sudden shortness of breath, and finally had to slow down and stop, as
he whined once again, somewhat like a disgruntled tenderfoot he remembered, who could
never quite keep up in his own mind, "Hey…Hey wait up!"
But no sound came back this time. Nothing except the cool dark sounds of
a large empty forest which now stood so starkly silent before him. It was a perfect picture
of the mysteries of an ancient forest – complete with a sublime blue ground fog that still
hung around some of the darker fern filled furrows. There were big mossy monolithic
rocks, and all the many varied scents of blue green pine, moist earth, and musky red
aging wood which now swirled about his head – but he failed to take the picture, because
he felt "called" by its heady silence once again. It was almost as if he
was expected here, somehow, and so he just forgot about the camera in his own hands,
while he tried to fathom the very nature of this feeling and was suddenly chilled by the
cool forest breath and the shear depth of it that now lay so wantonly before him.
"There should have been a road out there?" He balked
knowledgably, while trying to clear his own head. He had traveled many winding roads
getting up to his parking spot. Many winding roads that should have crossed his downhill
path by now, he surmised, as he turned to look back from where he had
come.
"It would be a long hard climb back to the car." he
added to the stack of memories, conclusions, and confusions which were now building up
in his mind - Confusions, which caused him to chide himself for his own foolishness.
Saying almost out loud, "What was he thinking?" as he tried to regain
some semblance of adult composer.
"You out chasing wood
nymphs now Peter?" he laughed quite maturely to himself, wiping his now
copiously sweating brow, while mentally trying to still his frantically pounding heart.
Then he laughed again, at the shear pleasure of hearing it pulsing in his head, while other
solemn thoughts reminded him of how his wife, and so many other important people in
his life had expressed similar concerns about his need to go on these little field
trips.
"You really aren’t a kid any more Peter." They all
quite rationally concluded at the same time, and he shook his head to free himself of
those thoughts, as he turned around and started heading back up the
hill.
"Don’t stop" plead the same little girls voice in the
woods.
"Don’t stop and don’t condemn…or look for only the
negative in your present situation" she said, and he spun about looking very
intently into the dark woods before him. Looking long and hard for the speaker, whom he
was now afraid, was also reading his mind.
He found nothing, and hissed
quietly to himself, "This is nonsense."
"Is it?"
said a bit more mature feminine voice that now seemed to come from his left, and he
spun about to face it.
"Compared to what?" it asked again,
only this time from behind, and he spun around again now more then a little worried that
he had fallen into some kind of trap.
"Ha ha ha…" laughed a
voice deep in the forest with much more elder overtones, "He stands at he edge of
paradise and fears!"
"All right! Who the hell are you
people?" he exclaimed, now both frighten and quite resolved to leave, "
I’m sorry if I intruded into your little games here…I was just trying to take some
pictures! You know beautiful pictures? I’ll go now if you don’t mind?"
"Don’t go?" plead the young girls voice again, and he felt
himself almost feeling sorry for her, perhaps even genuinely
worried.
" Nope sorry…" he responded resolutely, firmly
shaking his head again in a quite reasonable and rational affirmation of that sane
decision. He took a step up hill and then added, almost as an after thought, which then
seemed to fill his entire head with very human concerns as he asked, "You need
help… little girl?"
"No help. Just follow! Come see! All
friends here."
"Who are you!" he asked
exasperated.
"Seek and ye shall find." Said one
voice.
"Ask and it shall be granted you" said the elderly other, and he screamed. He screamed louder then he knew he had the capacity to do so – or any urgent need too.
He screamed, "I want out of here!"
And so it was.
He was suddenly standing back up on the road by his Jeep.
The sun had risen high enough to be dispensing the beginnings of
the seasons first heat wave through the trees, though the cold sweat that now clung to his
entire body was quite obviously caused by a whole lot more then that.
Cautiously, he walked back to the edge of the road and looked into the depths of the forest. It seemed just a forest once again. A simple forest…filled with your standard sounds of mid mornings birdcalls and the intermittent heat caused creaking’s of many cold tree limbs, waking up. But he now knew… He knew there was something else in there. Something he didn’t really want to deal with as he quickly scrambled back into his Jeep, jockeyed it around on the limited space left in the road, and quite thankfully just drove away.
End chapter 1
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