Woefully Unbalanced

This is for L.C. Schäfer's "Quote Me Baby (Let's Talk About Death, Bay-bee)" Challenge - for which the prompt was the following quote.

Sometimes dead is better.

- Stephen King (Pet Semetary)

The last time that the passenger on the back seat of the coach, Richard, Special Attaché to the Duchy of Cornwall, unexpectedly disappeared, it was 600 years ago, in the middle of a fascinating conversation about the lifecycle of Xestobium rufovillosum, the deathwatch beetle. The conversation he was having, with counterparts at a state function, was all but finished when he sneezed and his body lost concentration for long enough for his entire being to slip out of the visible spectrum.

It was deeply embarrassing to the diplomatic authorities; the sort of thing that never happened without consequence in 15th Century England. The consequence being that, diplomatic immunity notwithstanding, anybody left behind would be sure to face persecution, prosecution or execution, either for the lapse in etiquette or the heinous crime of not being normal enough for contemporary tastes. Disappearance left nowhere for the authorities to go.

Sometimes, dead is better. Undead is just untidy by another name.

Richard had the same problem after the Viking invasions, when his sudden apparent death at the hands of a lapse in attention, caused by an unexpected moment of sphincter relaxation, grew into fairly ornate and intricate stories about teeny-tiny people and supernatural doodahs. He didn’t like folklore, it annoyed him to hear of all his exploits misinterpreted, guzzled up in ghost stories or, sometimes, giving rise to entire religious orders. 

Considering this, it might have occurred to him that 600 years of experience would have made everyone familiar with the realities of paranormal or preternatural acts by the twenty-first century. If it had, he was wrong about that.

Moreover, he hoped that humanity had recognised and even partially understood that what was previously regarded as uncanny was just ‘normal’ in a different register. He was very wrong about that.

Impossible things not limited to, but like, the secret sound of vanilla slices, the buttery taste of the sky, the catalytic sneeze-wipe of visibility, and the overpowering scent of Tuesdays; none of them were the warped beliefs of a feeble mind, but just evidence of the Wantonly Ineffable. 

He knew that humanity had a terrible relationship with the Wantonly Ineffable. On the one hand, they were desperate for it to be so, on the other hand, it scared the willies out of them. And the argument was as well-balanced as the long arm of the ducking stool that extended over a deep river. That was as good a summary of the human condition as there was. Woefully unbalanced.

That was the whole problem, right there, and why he had been asked to sort it out. Again. The last time he had been called upon like this was during the Renaissance, when linear perspective reorganised the world around a single human viewpoint and caused far more trouble than anyone had expected. A new way of listening was as potentially problematic as the Renaissance’s new way of seeing. A new understanding of sound - divorced from its limited, human perception, and shown instead to be part of a much broader truth was coming and it really was going to cause an awful lot of trouble. He could smell it.

All that said, he was merely a part-time, occasional spectator of the human condition. Like the deathwatch beetle, he was a special kind of being that could wait it out for a long time; in his case, it took him 600 years to complete his lifecycle. So, he was due to return to his post anyway, but the first order of business had now turned into a diplomatic duty he was to perform in the far south west.

He materialised in the gents toilets at Victoria Coach Station and wondered whether he had got his maths wrong, because a line of half a dozen human men appeared to be leaking into a trough. As weird as that was, the coach station itself seemed like Hell and, by the look of purgatorial angst on the faces of all present it obviously felt like that to the humans there, as well. So many people wanted to be somewhere else and here was a human-built system for gathering them all in one place; a place which was the wrongest place of all. The shit-stained aura of bad vibes stretched as far as the Thames, which couldn’t help but resent the unfortunate smell. And it wasn’t even Tuesday.

He found a coach and installed himself into the back seat while the vehicle’s captain was occupied with a difficult passenger. It was Richard’s understanding that the coach was going where he was and, to save a very long telluric transfer, he was riding the bus for a lift to a node that was around halfway there.

His mission, as Special Attaché, was legal. He was there to represent the one stakeholder (the word had always made him shiver since his brief posting in 15th century Transylvania) nobody had thought about: the land. Nobody had asked the land itself what it thought, mostly because it had a habit of just lying there and not saying very much. It raised so little fuss, you could be forgiven for thinking that the earth actually enjoyed being trodden on like a doormat. It did not. Everyone was wrong about that.

He arrived in the formerly Cornish village of Trepanning almost immediately. It was an isolated village - in fact, so isolated, its exact centre lay on its own inexact outskirts. It had once been a prosperous little town, but an accident with an early particle accelerator loosely based on a pasty oven had folded spacetime and a couple of extra dimensions into something resembling an origami swan. The residents remained blissfully unaware except for the fact that curtains would always fall open because everything was suddenly downhill, and the entire Parish Council was eaten by a 24 foot long Titan moth - also known as the Behemoth.

He was happy there for a while. In fact, Richard enjoyed a personal side effect of Trepanning's mangled dimensions in that the long lifespan he usually enjoyed had been converted into a relative isolation from his own body.

However, it was a very difficult place to escape. Due to Council budget cuts, almost all of the leylines had been dismantled and the only way out was via the Stargate the town's engineers has managed to fashion from a disused laundrette tumble dryer which harnessed the quantum properties of socks missing from the 'normal' world. He had come to that point of the year when the balance was tipping. He had worked it all out, but in all the dimensional confusion, the time dilation of his body and the jumbled memory of a National Express coach toilet and a landscape seeded with the field furniture of a Bronze Age death cult, he couldn't remember whether he was dead, alive, or undead. Or, for that matter, which of those was better.