Chapter 1 - The Marble Box
Time melted on…
Train track dust covered the formerly-ivory marble as it nestled in a field of tassels. Instead of a giant sea pearl, somehow mislaid far inland, the round train car took the aspect of a decaying hedgeapple. Packed mud painted the surface of the curved windows. The marble had landed such that its door, hidden behind the dirt varnish, faced skyward. It cracked slowly open with a squeal of tight metal and a parting of clumped earth, letting the light of day in on a dark and humid interior.
Passengers pushed through the door hatch; among them, Honeydew and Mr. Grey. They clawed at the metal brim, heaved themselves out, and stood swaying atop the muddy ball. The sun which looked on the scene shone with staggering brightness. The passengers’ first movements were unsure and dizzy. Mr. Grey and Honeydew managed only a few tottering footsteps before they slipped. One by one the passengers tumbled from the muddy marble.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew landed in the field of tall, soft chicktails; which are approximately like cattail plants, with the expected adjustments. When they stood, the fuzzy-tasseled grass came up to their waist. They swayed confusedly in the plants. Gradually the muscles in their legs woke. Their eyes blinked to accommodate the day, and its glare seemed far from harsh. Rather, the sun’s rays seemed to drop in syrupy folds of gold over the clearing. The air gathered heat from its creamy shine, and this air touched Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s skin like a sticky, pollenous stoveglow.
“Perhaps we got… got off track at a sharp rise.” Mr. Grey took a deep breath partway through the thought. Not from being winded; the openness of the air felt strange and unfamiliar in his smog-conditioned lungs.
“Of course we’d derail on my first trip,” said Honeydew. She chopped a sharp hand through the tops of a few chicktails and ground a heel in the soil. “Do you see where we came off?”
Mr. Grey did not see. The field in which they’d fallen carpeted the bottom of a canyon. A very rectangular canyon, with high, rough, stony cliffs on all four sides. The train marbles lay scattered across the field like regular-sized toy marbles discarded by a child. Mr. Grey thought the spheroid cars must have disconnected from each other after dropping over the cliff edge, though on further consideration, he hadn’t noticed any coupling between the cars back at the Starharbor station. He saw no tracks running through the chicktail field, nor dangling over the edges of the high cliff. He heard no shrill conductor’s whistle, no cry raised by any search party. He heard only the rustling of the field and the complaining of their fellow passengers.
Mr. Grey pulled his hands out of the field and scratched dryly at his knuckles. He glanced at the lucid sky. “I think we’re a few tocks shy of noon.” Mr. Grey still felt disoriented. He’d wildly guessed the time based on the sun’s place alone - without conferring with his pocket ticker.
Honeydew said, “If this is Wine Medo, it’s disappointing.” She sheared the tops off another swathe of chicktails and scowled sunward.
“It is a bit itchy.” Mr. Grey scratched the backs of his hands again. “Perhaps we’ve reached a rest stop?” He pointed across the field, where variously dizzy and variously dressed passengers had emerged from the other marbles. These others flocked toward one wall of the rectangular canyon.
Against the wall a long, bowing table of extremely natural-looking artificial wood stood, rising just above the waist high grass. A grand buffet sprawled across its top, seemingly set for the passengers. Silver bowls and cups glinted in the light of sun and overflowed with foods of varying texture and bright shine: lumpy butterscotch piles, and tangles of lipstick-twine, and liquid denim dripping from a plaster carafe. A barrel - again, of that same artificial wood, which Mr. Grey would almost have thought real, if a mundane barrel made of real wood weren’t such an absurd thought - towered next to the buffet, spigot-ready.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew stood too far from the table to see the specific dishes served, but the supply looked ample for the crowd of passengers gathering towards it. Mr. Grey said, “If everyone else is gathering…?”
“It’s rude to leave us stranded,” said Honeydew, with another halfhearted swat. “With no signs or directions.”
“If there’s a meal set out, this must be part of the trip. Maybe we change marbles? Anyway, I think we should go meet at the table with everyone else.”
Honeydew still wore a sour expression. After a moment she clicked in place of a sigh. “I’d risk a bite of anything right now.”
The two of them made narrow furrows through the chicktails as they set out for the buffet. Honeydew’s shoulders shed their aggressive hunch, and she let her hands drag through the fronds. Mr. Grey kept his dry ones clasped before his chest, rubbing and itching. His eyes made a last pass over the edge of the cliff. They saw no watchtowers, no signposts, not even the twisted ends of a set of marble tracks to hint at how they’d arrived in this canyon.
He turned to Honeydew. Even the fabric sunflowers of her robe seemed to bloom under the glowing lamp in the sky — a light so often hidden from view back in Starharbor. Mr. Grey said, “Do you recall falling asleep on the train?”
Honeydew tensed again. “I didn’t sleep. I saw all the mountains and all the strange fork-plants as we rolled.”
“Oh, I did too. But it felt like something forced my eyes shut. You didn’t have that?”
“It got dark after a while. Probably the mud.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Mr. Grey felt the effect had been more than simple darkness. It had felt like being forced into sleep. Honeydew seemed annoyed by the topic, however, so he dropped it.
Another thought came to Mr. Grey; perhaps their visa documents outlined this exact stop, and somehow he’d overlooked it in his previous readings. He pulled out and leafed through the novel sized, legal parchmentwork — he could find no section listing stops or stations between the Odormoats.
Honeydew tugged Mr. Grey’s sleeve. He looked up, and she pointed at the crowd gathering around the table. She said, “Whatever they’ve dealt us, I don’t think it’s beans.”
The passengers who’d made it to the table were walking back and forth along its length, touching none of the dishes, scratching their heads.
Mr. Grey scratched his own head. “Do you think it’s bread?” He wanted the question to come off as incredulous, but made the mistake of using his usual tone, pitch, and cadence.
Before Honeydew could answer the two heard a screech of wrenching metal. Both spun. Honeydew leapt into a 180-degree turn and crouched in the grass. Mr. Grey rotated the same amount, in the manner of a Lazy Susan.
The screeching metal noise came from one of the train marbles; not their own. An enormous hand - attached to a hairy, proportionally-enormous arm - had reached over the cliff edge and crumpled the marble into a compressed ball of metal. The hand, with a casual effort, chucked the crushed marble from the boxy canyon.
Mr. Grey and honeydew watched the hand for a few tocks in stupefied silence. Every other passenger did the same. Awe, terror, and confusion held every traveler momentarily still. Mr. Grey didn’t think there had been anyone inside the marble, but he wasn’t 100-percent positive.
A matching hand and arm - the left set, presuming the behemoth had the standard issue pair - descended on one of the passengers the moment after. It plucked the screaming fellow and sent him soaring in another direction, out of the canyon.
This signaled the passengers to panic and scramble, which they did immediately.
Mr. Grey ducked in the grass beside Honeydew. Overhead, an enormous arm droned through the air. It briefly cooled their quarter of the field in a wide shadow. The hand, however, rushed past, swooping to collect an unfortunate older woman. She added her screams to the alarmed score filling the clearing.
Then, with no playing-out, the old woman’s part part in the performance ended. The hand chucked her. She shrank into the cloudless sky, past the edge of the cliffs. Mr. Grey expected she, like the others thrown before her, ceased existing shortly after. That was the logical assumption.
The number of still-existing passengers had, by then, shrunk to a sparse dozen. Every one of them ran from the giant, plunging hands, or crouched among the chicktails like Mr. Grey and Honeydew, or hid under the buffet. Some terrified persons even sought shelter in the metal marbles. The scattered balls too disappeared from the clearing, one-by-one, toss-by-toss. The hands crushed each like balled parchment and chucked them with a weighty whoosh. Oddly the colossal fingers made a courteous and gentle shake of each ball, and plucked the desperate passengers out before crushing. But these shaken ones then succeeded the marbles in flight.
Another passenger went screaming over the cliffs. Mr. Grey spoke in a hushed monotone. “I don’t think we’ll last long in open grass.” He nodded his head left. One of the hands raked through the grass. The fingers left behind wide furrows of tilled earth.
Honeydew looked up at him; she’d been busy scrabbling on her hands among the roots and dirt. “I can’t find anything! Not a rock or a stick in sight.”
“Those fellows under the table look safest.”
“It’s a long run. Got anything sharp?”
Mr. Grey was about to say that sharp things were weapons, and that he didn’t go in for those, when he remembered the quill and pencil. He withdrew both from the pockets of his robes and held them out for Honeydew to pick from. She clicked at him skeptically, shrugged, and took both.
Mr. Grey said, “I think there’s dining utensils stuck in the food.” He saw tiny handles, jutting from piles of motley meal on the distant table; like insect antennae, which - for all he knew - they might be.
Honeydew stalked ahead. She squeezed Mr. Grey’s quill and pen in her fists. Mr. Grey crouched close behind and watched her prowl resolvedly through the grass. He didn’t doubt her ability to inflict pain with those tools of pencil pushery, even against hands that cast shadows deeper than huge bat clouds. One of those hands scraped the ground ahead, and another swooped from just behind, and both Mr. Grey and Honeydew dropped flat in the fronds. Even without touching him, the hand-stirred air fluttered Mr. Grey’s robes and hair. The hand left behind a film of palm sweat on the chicktails.
After that, Mr. Grey set realistic expectations on the might of the pencil and quill.
The pair raised themselves slowly to a crouch after the hand had passed. Mr. Grey itched his nose and cheeks where the reed stalks had brushed. The plunging hands tilled and swiped nearby. Two more running passengers were harvested together and thrown together. Their screams cracked and dwindled, like mortar shots without the concluding boom. The passengers’ numbers dropped to a half-dozen in the open. Stealth, rather than flight, had become the favored plan of survival.
Honeydew moved again, low and quiet and angry. Mr. Grey followed. Another marble was plucked and crushed. Mr. Grey concealed his whisper under the screeching distortion of metal. “Has anyone tried communicating? With the, well, the hands? We might try and get…”
The thought withered before its bloom. Honeydew turned her glaring oil-bright eyes on him. She jerked the pencil to her lips in a gesture of silence, and stabbed with the quill in the direction of the left hand.
Another passenger was yelling. “Please! Mercy!” But before you could say ‘Terms and Conditions’, off he went over the cliff. Mr. Grey saw the improbability of reason with the giant hands.
When Honeydew started forward again, Mr. Grey followed quietly.
For a time they crouched and crawled in tense secrecy. They held their breaths whenever a hand swept the grass in a close rustling wave. They winced whenever a survivor vanished in an artillery yell. Mr. Grey’s own grey hands, and his grey face, itched horribly.
Another metal crunch broke their pace. They turned and saw their own marble - full of their own luggage - compressed and chucked. Mr. Grey went stiff. He didn’t quite stand, but his grey head rose from the mustardy chicktail sea. He forgot the fetching hands for a moment. His mind tangled itself with considering the forms he’d fill out for ‘lost and/or damaged goods’. Honeydew’s reaction was worse. She howled.
Both noticed the shadow of one giant arm rushing in behind. Too late. The fingers closed about Mr. Grey’s stiff robe. He was lifted; first to his feet, then off the soil. He didn’t yell - it wasn’t his style - but the grey disks in his eyes spread wide.
Honeydew jumped to action. In the suddenness of the moment she forgot the two sharp tools in her hands. She fell back on her instinctual form of combat. With a leap, she jabbed a shoulder into the thumb of the hand holding Mr. Grey.
The hand dropped Mr. Grey. The wooly grass seemed to pull him back into its itchy, soft folds. A terrific rush of air shook the fronds and their robes, as the hand flew backwards.
Over the edge of the cliff rushed a mountain of head and shoulders. Above them loomed a forest of thick coniferous hair and beard, two bonfire eyes, and a cave-mouth.
The giant - which is what it was - brought its shouldered thumb to its cave mouth. It sucked at a painful welt left by Honeydew’s hard shoulder.
The canyon echoed with hissing - like steam billowing from a dragon engine, or the blow of a whale - as the giant sucked its sore thumb. Every remaining passenger, including Honeydew and Mr. Grey, stared in jaw-slackened awe at the mountainous face. Mr. Grey had seen the word machines used in giant letter-composition back in the Change of Address Office. But it’s one thing to see the enlarged object designed for a larger creature’s use, and another to behold the creature in all its magnitude. The metal bars of a gorilla enclosure are impressive and girthy in their own right, but the gorilla’s the real crowd-pleaser.
The air whistled by the thumb and through the cavern mouth. Then the giant set its palm down flat, crushing the grass. It exhaled in a gale breath that smelled like a river.
“That won’t do little poker.” The giant’s voice crashed upon the passengers. Mr. Grey thought it carried all the sounds of a collapsing building: crushing stone, cracking timber, splintering glass.
Honeydew winced against the breath and the thunder words. She set balled fists against her ears. She was first to collect her senses. She yelled back at the giant, though the tremor in her voice and the inequality of volume took the legs from beneath her words. “Back off your hands then!”
A look of surprise landscaped across the giant’s broad face. Its eyebrows lifted like hills in a quake. Its jaw dropped open like a rockslide. It said, “You are making speech!” The words flattened the chicktails.
“Why shouldn’t we?” Honeydew set her fists on her hips and stood tall, as though facing a normal sized person.
Mr. Grey added, “It seems like you’d have noticed our shouting before now.”
The giant looked confusedly between the two. It brought one hand up and stroked its beard of trees. “Your accent is odd… I do not gather it all, but there is meaning.”
“What did you think of us then?” asked Mr. Grey.
The giant seemed to understand this question with ease. “I knew you had sound, but thought your species distinct. You have longer furs.” The giant took another bellows breath, then added, “And often just scream.”
“Who could conjure why!” Honeydew snapped angrily.
Mr. Grey said, “People probably scream because you’re so large. And keep throwing them.”
The giant seemed confused again. He bobbed his heavy head up and down with a rumbling motion, repeating Mr. Grey’s words with peculiar rhythm as he tried sensing the meaning. His expression suddenly soured. The giant said, “Now that is just rude.”
“Us, rude!” yelled Honeydew.
She tried to go on, but the giant drowned her voice in its bellow. “I have a one-hill diet. And no veins of ore.”
Mr. Grey said, “We weren’t alluding to your weight, sir. But I think you can see that we’re much smaller creatures than yourself.”
The giant’s face showed a gloomy country as it deciphered these words. Its bonfire eyes burned low and ruddy, and the mountainous skin of its cheeks took on a drooping, craggy texture. After figuring out what Mr. Grey meant, it said, “You called me ‘so large’. Those words mean the same as fat. But come, I’m busy.”
The mountain face withdrew, past the edge of the cliffs. The hands swooped in to grab Honeydew and Mr. Grey. Honeydew readied her shoulders for another jab. Mr. Grey called to the retreating face. “Just a moment, please,” The mountain rushed back in and glowered over him. It blocked out the sun and plunging half the field in cold shadow. Mr. Grey went on, “Please sir, we’d appreciate not getting thrown. Could you give us a pass?”
“A curse on accents,” mumbled the giant loudly, after deciphering the words. “And why should I not throw you? You’re disembarking.” Before Mr. Grey could respond, the giant added, “I have lunch waiting. A pleasant hill with fresh gorse.”
“You’re throwing us to non-existence. We don’t want to ‘disembark’ like that.”
”…Not existing how? I am only sorting you. You land where you must,” he paused. “You land in a lake. Of course I don’t splatter you.”
Mr. Grey scratched at his collar. “Why do you throw different passengers in different directions?”
”…Of course I sort you,” the giant said with a gusty, impatient huff. “You don’t travel in a herd.”
“We thought the marbles took us all to the same city.”
The other passengers - still crouching beneath the table or among the chicktails - nodded their agreement. Honeydew stood tall next to Mr. Grey. She said, “What are you sorting by?”
They’d evidently overwhelmed the giant with too many words too quickly. He looked at them for a long time, a blank stillness in the bonfires of his eyes. Finally he said, “There’s many factors.”
“And what about our luggage,” she shouted before he could continue.
“It flies where you will find it.”
Mr. Grey rubbed his hands. Honeydew whirled upon him. “What’s the odds on you holding still? Just for a moment?”
Mr. Grey dropped his hands. Instantly they itched worse than ever. “Sorry, I’m not sure what’s wrong…”
The giant said, “It’s probably allergies. I should sort you soon.”
The hands closed once more. Mr. Grey quickly said, “It’s not bad. Besides, I brought odor cologne.”
The giant looked confused, so Mr. Grey showed him the Odormoat cologne provided for the vacation. The giant said, “It’s a touching allergy. Scents won’t defend you. Are you ready now?” The giant tapped a finger on the ground. Massive tremors rippled through the earth, making the field grass shake and the canyon walls rumble.
“Another moment, please. If this is all regular, we’ll go the same way. Right?” Mr. Grey motioned to himself and Honeydew.
”…You are unlike each other. Of course you wouldn’t.”
Honeydew said, “Oh yes we will! I’m his guest on the visa.”
“If you don’t mind, sir,” added Mr. Grey, “We’d like to go the same way.”
Surprise altered the terrain of the giant’s face once he comprehended. He said, “I’ve never sorted wrongly,” After a pause of gale-force cave breathing, he added, “but if you wish it…”
“We insist on it,” said Honeydew.
“Will you go quietly now?”
The question echoed throughout the canyon box. Honeydew and Mr. Grey looked at each other. Mr. Grey said, “I’m not sure any amount of jabbing would stave him for long. He’ll grab us eventually. One way or another.”
Honeydew shuffled her shoulders. “I’ve a mind to chance it anyway.”
“We’d probably just anger him. He already seems impatient…”
“Fine. But this layover can’t be the norm.”
Mr. Grey craned his neck to address the giant. It had taken to breathing forcibly through its nose to show its displeasure at waiting. The heavy, river-scented breath blasted rhythmically over their bodies. Mr. Grey said, “Sir, I think we’re ready.”
The giant wasted no time. He swung his great hands, grabbed the two of them, and chucked them into the sky. Neither screamed. The grabs had knocked the breath from both.
Whether by having forgotten its promise while the two were debating, or whether by muscle memory, the giant did not send them to the same place. Mr. Grey and Honeydew flew from the canyon field, by different routes, to different places.