Romance / Book One, Daggerlashes. Part One, A Sorry Existence. (Analysis)
Part One
A SORRY EXISTENCE
I
Polecat
I T W A S T O W A R D S evening on a warm Spring day when a certain young Polecat had taken to the streets to perambulate and free his thoughts. He was wearing his green shoes, a sign that today the poet was inside of him.
Although it has no direct bearing on the tale we have to tell, we must nevertheless shed some light on how Polecat had come to live in the city of London. This tale is very much one of fate and destiny, and the importance of both will become clear to you, reader.
All men, it seems, have, at some point in their lives, had a great yearning for the adventure and chaos of that big city. By chatting to any adolescent male you will discern that their young lives are preoccupied with unfulfilled days. Polecat was such a male. He was originally from Cambridge. The son of a respected professor of philosophy and theology, and the product of a well-off family. His father, being fluent in the many tongues of human nature, had brought up his son to be a good, amiable fellow of society, and owing to the fact his mother had been absent, his father had raised him alone. Polecat had been taught by him the importance of knowledge, and that, above all else, knowledge was key. Much of his childhood was spent in the pursuit of this, and in learning. He had never enrolled in school, and received personal tuition from his father, or his father’s peers. His Sundays were likewise spent gaining the thirst for knowledge. He would attend church with his father for the communion with God, as, after all, who is the more knowledgeable than He? This activity was something that had had a profound impact on the young Polecat. The memory of a Cambridge Sunday morning, splendid in all seasons, and stepping into the grand, yet deliciously quaint St Mary’s Church, which, at its rear, looms over the market square like a general over his troops, parallel to the majestic King’s College, where one can stand in awe of its towering chapel. The memory of this and of the services held at Christmas in the chapel itself, of the great Anglican choral tradition, marvellously represented by Alexander’s poem, and unrivalled anywhere in the world, had left a sweetly everlasting seal on his senses, which was evident on the young man’s countenance. The imprint of such scenes on his youthful eyes had instilled a pleasant remembrance that bestowed his face from time to time with a refreshing vigour. Yet in spite of this childhood, awash as it was with a quiet fondness, Polecat had always been lonely, and hopelessly foreign to other children. Naturally, owing to his pedigree, his intellect surpassed that of the other children’s, much to the obvious delight of his father, but, as is always the case, with enlightenment came alienation. Polecat slowly matured into a painfully socially inept young man, even more so without a maternal figure at his aid. He grew up bereft of childishness, of laughter, frolic and the bliss of innocent ignorance. With the sturdy command of knowledge possessed by his father, and with his own intelligent mind inside his young head, Polecat aged, as all geniuses are bound to, condemned to a life of solitude. His precocious nature granted him an unabated brilliance on subjects of refinement, taste, literature, art and music, yet for all the wisdom he held for said subjects, he was tenfold less involved in matters of social exchange and etiquette. The years passed on and Polecat wandered through life without so much as a friendly acquaintance. The nearest he had for friendship were the inappropriate relationships he shared with the greying, bespectacled, miserly professors, and, of course, his father. This had given Polecat an unusual view of the world. He had developed into a boy, not having attended school, not having had any friends or maternal nurturing, and trapped inside the stifling halls of Cambridge University, of which he had never even ventured from. He was hopelessly ignorant to the world, and everything it contained.
It was when Polecat was approaching that uncertain age of fifteen when his father had suddenly passed. Brain haemorrhage was the verdict for death, and to say Polecat was devastated would not do justice for the emptiness he felt. His fingers trembled with grief. His brow, corrupted by sorrowful thinking, became depressed, and encroached upon his eyes, that likewise bore the mark of sadness, dulled with an awful complexity brought on by mournful thoughts. He was suddenly alone. Even lonelier than he had been previously. The presence of his father, had, until then, staved off the threat of isolation if ever he were to pass away, and any thoughts thereof, but he was then confronted with a debilitating solitude. He would sit himself in strange attitudes, his body a statue reflecting his state of mind, of angst and smothered in the restless awkwardness of emotional torment. Heaven knows what the poor young boy was suffering. To the outsider these were ordinary symptoms of bereavement, and, eventually, he would transcend them, but Polecat was far from being ordinary. As it has been told, he was an unusual young man, and his mind was an anomaly amongst the regular citizens of society. Time itself gave up on Polecat, and not even this was an obstacle in the way of his train of thought. He sat, statuesque, in his psychological squalor, refuting the sun, food, and letting his body and mind to ruin. Surely this, one would have thought, if he carried on, would damage him irrevocably, but still Polecat sat posed and meditative, almost petrified by his grief. Days turned to weeks, and of course no one worried for Polecat, for nobody knew him, and Polecat worried for no one in return, for he knew nobody either. When his father had died, the professors of whom he occasionally acquainted had slowly drifted from his life. He was only fourteen. It would have been another four years until he would, as his father expected of him, have enrolled into the university. Four years! Indeed he was able enough to enroll then, and like his father, was a philosophical soul, and expected this to be his academic vocation, but to wait four years, and without the discipline, excellence and obedience of his father’s teaching in the meantime, what was he to have done within this period? He was too young to work, yet too impatient to wait, and knew that the university would never have fathomed enrolling a minor. There was only one conclusion he drew from this predicament, and that was to leave.
All the time Polecat had been sitting in this unsettlingly silent, reflective manner, he had been juxtaposing all the thoughts we have discussed just now. The solidity and rigidness of his form contrasted heavily to the tumultuous ideas whisking around his mind. He had never before expounded upon such weighty thinking, and recalled that not even the most intense philosophical debates he had before undertaken were comparable to the state in which he then existed. A week and three days he sat, closeted and staring into nothingness. He had explored the least visited and unknown chambers of his mind, and had discovered things, personal things, he had never known existed, and, like all great pioneers, he made good use of what he found, and emerged a better person. The death of his father, no matter if it had reduced him to absolute psychological destitution, had, paradoxically, managed to further enlighten his already, as he comprehended it, enlightened soul. His continued state of silence, stillness and fasting had been a deeply spiritual experience for him, and, like all great thinkers, he was able to combat sleep, restlessness and hunger with pure meditation. No matter how painful that week had been for him, both intrinsically and physically, he had transcended his former self, emerged with a renewed optimism and was no longer unhappy.
II
How he changed
P O L E C A T had awakened from his transitory phase of motionlessness. We have acknowledged the fact that he was then a transformed man, indeed it was scarcely a transformation, it was a transfiguration, and it must now be told of how Polecat had come to the decision of moving his entire life to London.
There is something for everyone in that city. Eternal yet evanescent. Ancient yet modern. Cosmopolitan, yet without abandoning its tradition – its character inescapable. London is satisfactorily a living – thriving, contradiction. The magnetic city had appealed to Polecat. Polecat, the young man who, prior to his transcendence, dared not say boo to a goose, venture from the confines of his home and the quaintness of that collegiate city, nor even exchange pleasantries with another human being. The enormity of his change was undeniable. So why London? Why had this young man, for it is easy to forget the youth of Polecat, become so enamoured with the notion of a new life there? The fact of the matter is, that underneath his facade of reservation and social naivety, there was a heart, a young, childlike heart, that refused to the follow the suit of that other organ, the brain. Whereas his brain grew with everything his father’s knowledge had presented to it, his heart had refused to abandon the things it is supposed to absorb, for the sake of intellectualism. An intellectualism that had never necessarily propelled Polecat forward, only regressed him, and imprisoned him into perpetual loneliness. His heart was a symbol, an organ that beat with everything refreshing to the soul. A symbol that proved to liberate him from the entrapment of his rational, utilitarian mind. It became evident that even Polecat, essentially, a spontaneity-stunted, unromantic child, was subject to the boyish craving of adventure like any other boy. It was as if Polecat’s heart had finally, after years of being entombed inside his oppressive chest, broken free from the constraints, defeated the brain, reformed the mind and set him on the path to glory. Polecat had learned to listen to his heart instead of his head.
As we have said, Polecat had awoken from his meditation, and, after much contemplation, had decided to go to London on the command of his heart. Now, before his death, his father had written a will and had left everything in his name to Polecat, and of course when his father did die, Polecat had been contacted by various authorities concerning the welfare of the young teenager, and, using his cunning, Polecat had somehow managed to fool them into believing he was living with a certain Dr Twazin, a professor and former mentor to Polecat. He had likewise fooled the few concerned professors, including Twazin, into believing he’d shortly be living as an orphan in a London refuge, and had said his unemotional goodbyes to them, and everything else that might trouble him was dealt with. Alas, that was all that was needed. There was no one else who should be concerned for Polecat, owing to his confined, secretive life, and he was free to do whatever he wanted. The familiar cliche sprung to his mind: “the world is your oyster”.
Polecat had collected his possessions together, mostly the bare essentials needed for comfort and survival, and had made a plan to get to London. He first set his mind on the notion of catching a train, but, having found a timetable in his father’s old belongings, could not fathom how it worked, such was Polecat’s naivety and ignorance towards even the most basic of principles. He could arrange his mind into understanding the most complex of theoretical philosophical conjunctions, yet failed in understanding the simpleness of a train schedule. Such are the things we take for granted in life. Having tried and failed to work his head around the idea of catching a train, it became more and more intolerable to him to perform this activity, hence the formulation of a new plan – hitchhiking, and so, possessions firmly in hand, Polecat prepared himself to leave a place he had never even ventured from, forever. Head held high, and heart held higher, he stepped out of his front door and took to the streets of Cambridge, with feet and toes hungrily looking forward to the future. Yet he turned and gazed back at his home. There are few experiences the average man can comprehend that could compare to the emotion felt by Polecat in this moment. Having lived for seemingly innumerable years in that home, that, for an age, was his safety net, those four walls represented much more than a mere living space. They were more. They were an extension of the body of Polecat itself. If our skin marks the outermost limits of our being, then Polecat was no human but an entity, a spirit at one with the physiognomy of his home. He had experienced a whole menagerie of feelings and emotions in there, from his own birth to the death of his father. He had always had his home, more a friend to him than anything, and always with extended arms, open for healing. He looked upon the house as if seeing a coffin descending into the pit of which it is to be interred, and mourned. He felt as if he were throwing away a significant part of his person, and it was more painful than he ever could have imagined, but, eventually, with one final fixed, loving gaze he turned from the house with moistened eyes, and fleeted on to begin the rest of his life.
III
Coming to the road
N O W to commit oneself to the act of hitchhiking is not something most of us are accustomed to. There are special precautions one must undertake when considering this potentially dangerous pursuit, especially if, like Polecat, you are a minor, and the reader must understand that if, like Polecat, you have scarcely interacted with the world around you like a proper human being ought to, then these precautions slowly manifest themselves into problems, and these problems into worries, and, if you’re like Polecat, acute worries. This was the reason for his lengthy deliberations. He had considered, studied, weighed, and done everything within his power to evaluate the situation from every conceivable angle. He even had a momentary lapse in resolve when suddenly, in a shameful act of cowardice, his feet had pulled him backwards over the steps he had already taken, towards his former home, but, Polecat, with conflicting emotions, regained his resolve, and, refusing to view that extension of his again, and run the risk of complete backtracking, managed to overpower his feet, as his heart, growing stronger with every new piece of air it inhaled, once again took control of the situation and calmed the nerves within, and so, with a cool head, and feet firmly in place, Polecat walked with a view to hitching a ride. He navigated his way around Cambridge with a passive air, which might be expected, after all, Polecat only ever came into the city to attend church, which was in relatively close proximity to his home, and that was always with his father. As is the way, when someone else is there to direct and find the paths for you, your mind ceases to care of where you are going as long as someone else is in control, and then, when suddenly confronted with the route of which you should be familiar, you’re positively stumped, and so it was this predicament in which Polecat found himself, trampling unknowingly through a city, that, although it had been his home for more than a decade, was hopelessly foreign to him. Likewise its inhabitants were equally as foreign, almost xenophobic to this young man. They couldn’t comprehend him. There was an unequivocal strangeness about him. The way he walked, perceived himself and, overall, his mannerisms, granted him a unique peculiarity. Doubtless it was his past that was to be held responsible for this. The torment of a prolonged loneliness coupled with a sensitive, thoughtful mind had brought out this strangeness upon his disposition. He was as erratic and awkward as anyone unaccustomed to society and its apparent graces would be. Yet nonetheless, with eyes downcast and fixed intently upon their purpose, he was largely able to ignore the many faces baffled by him, and so he continued to wander those medieval streets of Cambridge, and in a short space of time came to realise that he was growing with every cobbled stone he stepped on, and mustered the courage to lift his thumb from his pocket, and position it skyward.
IV
Polecat by the road, and what became of him there
N O sooner had Polecat upturned his thumb, when a gaggle of young drivers sped past in their despicable motors, tiled up as they were with cheap ‘enhancements’, spoilers, exhausts and the like. They had repeatedly pipped at Polecat during this, tauntingly, and had thrown various paraphernalia at the poor boy, knocking his confidence to a low, and shattering his already temperamental fragility. However, at length, a driver had indicated they were stopping for him. He had been fortunate enough in that no traffic police had encountered him, this strange-looking young man standing by the side of a busy road, looking almost bedraggled and weighed down by the possessions of his world hefted upon his weak, underdeveloped shoulders. The heat of the day was evident on Polecat’s glowing face, and the griminess of exhaustion was his crown. His flowing dark hair, much of it plastered to his face in sweat, was a beacon to his shabby, outward raiment, and he would no doubt have gotten into any vehicle soon, than endure much more loitering by the road. The driver pulled up to the hard shoulder, and in that moment of it leaving the road and commencing this act, Polecat had had his latest flood of conflicting emotions. Turmoil, dread, hope, excitement. A complete assemblage of both old and new feelings, which, were it not for the iron-like focus of his heart, would have overwhelmed him, and turned him into a convulsive mess. The sensation of adrenaline rushing and coursing throughout the network of his body, was scarce a sensation he could remember. Indeed to the normal man alone, hitchhiking can invoke a frightening lack of control, and so one need only imagine how Polecat was feeling. His fluctuating bouts of fight or flight reactions had given an unsightly, sickly sallow grade to his complexion, reinforcing the destitution of his desperate situation. The driver alighted from the car, and Polecat became quickly disheartened at the prospect he was set to undertake. Out stepped a woman, wonderfully slender, and the epitome of femininity and grace. Her bright, cascading hair flowed upon her shoulders, lighted by the sunshine, which lent an air of divinity to her saintly presence, as if she were bathed in some preternatural glow. Polecat choked. Remember, reader, Polecat had grown up without a mother, for she had died during his birth. Moreover, he’d developed with scarcely any female or maternal guidance and aid by his side. Women, especially the beautiful ones, were an alien species to the poor boy. This supernatural, angelic woman glided towards Polecat, every step echoing in elegance. The surrounding ambiance of passing cars, twittering birds and the general din of the outside was shut off to Polecat’s senses. All of them were concentrated on this one woman, pacing over to him as graceful as her beauty granted, when suddenly, gathering his wits, Polecat started, and with a renewed vigour, hastily composed himself, and, like a startled deer, vanished into the roadside shrubbery.
So it appears Polecat chose to flight, and, being unaccustomed to the female of our species, had turned into the bush in order to temporarily hide from his fears. He was unable to determine whether it was the notion of hitchhiking, itself a frightening prospect, or whether it was the, literally, breathtaking appearance of that woman, who had, ironically, scared him so much as to make him flee. In his excitement and eagerness to rid himself from the gaze of that woman, he had stumbled a little, down the small mound on which the road lay across. He landed on his front, his mouth subjected to the cloud of dust worked up by his collision with the ground, and was shortly followed by his bag, colliding, not with the ground, as Polecat had done, but onto Polecat’s back, taking the wind straight out of him, and so, downtrodden, and beaten by what his brief new existence had afforded him, Polecat at length lifted himself from the ground and sat himself to pose, as was his nature, in meditation. He pondered over his future, and what he should do next. He certainly did not find the prospect of returning home an attractive one, nor a healthy one. Getting a train to London seemed an impossible and far-off feat. So what else, walk? Preposterous and out of the question. His lonely situation of course afforded him no comrades on which to rely. Polecat had begun thinking that he was, quite possibly, the loneliest person on the face of the planet, after all, it was quite feasible. Yet, after much critical deliberation, Polecat eventually came to the decision to again try hitchhiking. He made a pact, granting himself the promise of following through with this plan, and so, once again, he collected his belongings and set off with the view to hitching a ride.
V
Polecat finds a jewel
I T was approaching evening when Polecat regained his spot by the road. A Saturday evening, and so he needed to be careful to elude any of the increased numbers of traffic police that may have been skirting around. He waited, and waited. Infinite amounts of vehicles seemed to pass by. Could they even see him? This is what Polecat wondered, and so, fearing the drivers were ignorant to his presence, he moved himself closer the road, being sure to distance himself from the shrubbery, of which he may have blended with. The prolonged waiting and tediousness of the scene began to exasperate him. There is something extremely unnerving about countless numbers of motor vehicles racing by you on a busy road, a place where pedestrians are unwelcome, and where the drivers behind their wheels, in apparent comfort and safety, will eye you with suspicion and obvious scorn. Inevitably you are relegated to inferiority, conscientiousness and, literally, to the sidelines. Needless to say, this unsettled young Polecat terribly, he began to wish, whenever a car passed, that it would stop for him, regardless of the person inside, such was the tiresome aspect he found himself in. Hours turned into more hours, and his continued inactivity began to poison his tumultuous and vulnerable mind, transforming him into a state of restless madness one commonly experiences whilst waiting an eternity. Polecat, it seemed, could endure unfathomably long periods of introspection and meditation, yet he could hardly handle a few hours by the side of a road, and, as is always the case when waiting and anticipating something, his bladder grew weak and his legs quivered under the strain of needing to relieve himself. Naturally, he came to a point when he could bear this strain no longer, and simply had to relieve himself. Coming back to the road, he discerned that the twilight was slowly maneuvering itself into the black of night, and he noticed, for the first time, the moon. It seemed to stare at him, that great, omnipotent, spherical mystery that hangs in the sky, more mysterious and romantic than its antithesis, the sun, and closer to anything we could consider a god. The clouds were also out this night, pacing and strutting across the blackness of the sky, and after a day of crystal-clear blue, they seemed the spirits of the dead come out to parade the night, look down upon the mortals and dance around the moon. Likewise they seemed a blanket to the moon, which it would use to avert its eyes, as if embarrassed for Polecat’s lamentable situation, and unable to watch. Polecat had been standing since the height of the day, and continued to do so, in the manner he did, until the pinnacle of the night. His aspect of uprightness slowly descended into one of stooping and slouching. He had done well to fight the temptation of laziness and sloven, yet, soon enough, his stooping descended into sitting, and, as we shall see, this aspect became malformed into a semi-horizontal, slumbering attitude. The already countless number of vehicles that had teasingly gone by was quickly added to by an even more hopelessly countless number. Heaps and heaps of them sped onwards. A percentage of them, to some extent, acknowledged Polecat. Some of the drivers gave fixed, confused glances. Some gave worried, troubled glances. Many were afforded, by Polecat’s sorry situation, a moment’s amusement, as if this sight were the most comical spectacle a man could hope to witness, but the majority were completely unaware he was even there. Polecat had long since ceased interest in the whole charade. The vehicles became but transient lights which beckoned towards him in an unimpressive, yet hypnotic manner. His mind, with that introversion common to him, had wandered off elsewhere, to revert into itself, unable to bear the monotony of what was occurring ahead of Polecat’s eyes. With each pair of lights coming to him, a piece of his consciousness disappeared, succumbed to drowsiness, and every next pair had an added haze, as if to improve on the last. Polecat’s peripheral senses became gradually weakened. The whole atmosphere of the road was intoxicating. The fumes, the fogged lights, the giddy, unusual warmth of the night, and the incessant drone of the passing vehicles, all combined to send Polecat into a catatonic phase of unconsciousness. Polecat had not merely fallen asleep, as to indicate fatigue, he had become drunk by his location on the road, and from the uncharacteristic nature of the elements. So there he lay, unaware, like anyone who has ever been manipulated in a similar manner will be familiar with, he had lapsed into unconsciousness.
The giddy, uncharacteristic warmth of the night which we have presently discussed, had, by the early morning, turned into a bitingly sharp cold. A wind, which before had been non-existent, had begun sometime after midnight, and now blew with a ferocious intent. The wind had obviously been handed down from the north, and was now tearing through all and sundry. All physical establishments. Nothing was an obstacle to the wind’s fierce scorn as it ripped across the land. It was this that had jarred Polecat from his period of comatose incapacity, and he awoke to find himself in extreme discomfort. Not only did every muscle and fibre of his being ache with a pain unlike any before experienced (his waiting by the road had been surprisingly tiresome, coupled with his slumber on the concrete, of course), but the scything pangs of the wind were now cutting into him. It was as if each wave of wind were an invisible volley of soldiers’ bayonets, each charged with a deathly iciness, and intent on killing in the most painful way imaginable. Had one been in the vicinity of the battlefields of Waterloo or the Somme in this moment, their romantic predispositions would have compelled them to gasp that they could swear the spirits of the violent dead were invoked, and prepared to exact a horrible, raging revenge upon the world. The darkened clouds scurried, and the moon hid out of sight. The sky, usually the clouds’ playground, was now itself a battleground, infiltrated by the piercing winds which chased the clouds to and fro. The clouds, far from being the dead spirits of which we mentioned in the previous paragraph, had been reduced to a mockery of their formerly grandiose vision, with the moon and the stars unwilling to rescue them from the grip of the wind. How hardy those Highlanders must be to endure such torrents! Indeed the wind Polecat was suffering through, was worthy of those one can feel in Scotland, so often are they tinged with an Arctic howl.
Polecat could scarce allow the wind much more access to his body. He was dressed, not for a night of exposure, but for a day he had comprehended to be unseasonably warm, and, while he was sensible in doing so, and had made reservations for all climatic outcomes he could think of, bringing along his raincoat and hat, he had never expected the weather to turn into such a detestable violence, almost Siberian in its torrid insistence. He groped, in a pathetic manner, to find his bag. All around him was pitch blackness, and one of the road’s lighting posts, the one nearest to Polecat, had, during the storm, failed, and further smothered the place into darkness. The shrubbery, where Polecat had his earlier altercation, seemed to have grown larger, and loomed beside him as a whale to a shrimp, reinforcing the vulnerability of his situation. It suddenly dawned upon Polecat that he had failed to find his bag. He negotiated with different reasons as to why this was so. He decided it could not have slid down the embankment, as the metal ballast would have prevented it from doing so, and, strong as the wind was, its strength would not have extended to picking it up, and throwing it elsewhere. This too, was out of the question. So, after pondering other potentials for the whereabouts of his possessions, his heart, usually oxen-like with its renovation of character, sank when he decided on his next thought. His bag had somehow fell into the road, been hit by a vehicle, and carried for miles and miles, whereupon it might have been torn apart by the intensity of a car’s tyres. However, he questioned this. Would the bag have not burst open by the sheer force and weight of the vehicle that struck it, and its contents divulged upon the concrete? and so he dismissed it, finding no trace for the possibility of this occurrence. Regardless, his latest thought overshadowed the last – his bag had been stolen by some knave, stripped for its value and shared amongst scoundrels, and so, with the frozen knives of the wind still drafting their way through to, and picking their way at Polecat’s scorched skin, he sank, despairingly, onto his knees. His whole aspect became compressed, his luck being dealt a new, heavy blow. Fortune, it seemed, had been spying on Polecat ever since he had left his home, and had taken great delight, firstly, by turning the weather into a microclimate of harshness, all directed to the epicentre of Polecat, and, secondly, by hypnotising him into an intoxicated lull, and, while he was unconscious, snatching his bag. However, lifting his face from the despondence of his clasped hands, he caught sight of something that, for a moment, made him forget his troubles, and seemed to make the wind’s velocity die somewhat. A glint had occurred for not more than half a second, then, just as quickly as it had appeared to his eyes, disappeared. Polecat discerned that this object was something shiny, and that he would need to re-align his eyesight in order to gain the synchronicity of the thing he’d seen. Managing to perform this, he was able to locate the object, which, to his surprise, was a dark stone. A solid, rectangular, black stone, fatter than it was thin. It gleamed in the drab luminescence of the roadside with a profound brightness, which made Polecat half-wince when in view of it. Yet, when his eyes were fully focused, and viewed the object with their utmost attention, they soon became entranced. He gazed at this precious stone with a childish enamour, and with tongue drooping dumbly from his mouth. It seemed to him an other-worldly object, and he looked on to it as a greedy rich woman looks upon a diamond. His eyes flared with an unfavourable vividness, and his brow reached into his hairline in amazement. He could see something in the stone no other person would have seen, and seemed to listen to it, as if it were talking to him, it commanding a strangely alien respect. All his senses were centred on it, and the wind no longer played a part in troubling him. Such was the enigma of the stone, as to manage warding off an evil as mighty as that cold wind. Stroking the stone with a certain coy tenderness, that alike mixed a terrified reluctance with a juvenile inquisitiveness, he suddenly awoke from his reverie to the sound of an oncoming car. The shock of this awakening startled him into action, and, regathering his wits, he stuffed the stone into his pocket and presently felt the need to hide. He spotted a road sign, and crouched, in the manner of a wrongdoer, behind it. It hid his frame well, and the car passed on with ease.
Why then, had Polecat felt the urge to hide from a car, having before spent hours in vain, hoping that one would stop for him? This answer, as well as any others related to the stone, was only answerable by Polecat. In fact, it was likely even he was unable to fathom one. For some insurmountable reason, he was extremely protective of this stone, and, as a wallaby-mother to the joey inside her pouch, took care it was safe, and firmly held in his pocket. The item bestowed upon him by the fates, confused him as much as it enthralled him, and brought out a profoundly disgusting look upon his countenance, one of dark secrecy and greed. His walk turned, as if corrupted, into a discreet creep, and his shoulders hunched, weighed down by an unknowable force. He had started to resemble a young crook, one of malice, conniving and premeditation, as if to know all the evil in the world and be content with it, and so, suddenly thrown back into the face of reality, Polecat’s mind, with its prodigious, metaphysical nature somewhat deteriorated after the discovery of the stone, reverted back to its previous state of alertness, with Polecat’s belongings still being missing. He could feel a burgeoning of confidence brewing inside himself. The stone had manifested a new strength in Polecat, and seemed to give a more mature, angular look to his face. It was as if he had lived through his teenage years in an instant, and was now approaching the early stages of manhood. However, if his face had aged substantially in this short time, his frame had not followed suit, and retained its pubescence. His limbs were as long and gawky as they had always been, and clung to his narrow body with that ungainly and awkward relaxation common to most lanky young men. His hands were still disproportionate, almost skeletal in their emaciate aspect. Polecat’s loping, frail authority, was, as always, evident, yet you could scarce notice his apparent feebleness if you were to peer beyond his eyes, and into that mind of his. He had never felt so confident, with a fresh installment of arrogance, a state rarely considered by him, flooding his brain, thoughts anew darted amongst unexplored chambers, releasing trapped energies and reimbursing them with an excitable zeal. He bounded along the road looking for his bag, his eyes burning with an unnerving inebriation, and with his mouth gaping, as if the tongue were ready to leap forth. His long limbs moved sporadically, and, with a mechanical nervousness, all of a sudden would jump. Polecat was barely able to control himself, such was the stone’s allure, and manipulation over him. Indeed it was as if the stone had conquered his fragile, temperamental mind, and its annexation had brought forth a new control – the power of the stone. Polecat did, eventually, succeed in locating his bag. It had been blown several metres into the roadside verge, and completely covered by grass and other debris left in the aftermath of the storm, which, incidentally, was still raging, yet failed in concerning Polecat any longer, owing to the the stone’s transformation of him. His finding of the bag not only relieved him, it gifted to him a sense of absolute euphoria. After awakening from his state of unconsciousness, fortune, it seemed, had stolen from him and left him battered by luck, but then, fortune or fate, Polecat was unable to decide which, had bestowed upon him that precious finding of the stone, and, minutes later, that vital discovery of his possessions, transferring him from absolute poverty of mind, into a wealthy euphoria, Polecat, it could be said, was in Nirvana. However, as we shall presently see, fortune or fate are as susceptible to change as anything, and can be wonderfully generous, yet wickedly evil.
As you are aware, reader, Polecat had retrieved his belongings, and had then turned euphoric, which, one can easily tell, is, in part, down to the stone’s magical nature, and the especial pall it smothered him in. Indeed Polecat was absolutely sure the stone had directly lead him into this finding, and that his discovery of it was an act of divine intervention, providential in the manner it had occurred, and that something, fate or fortune, perhaps even God himself, had bestowed this special, prophetic object upon him, and that, finally, life was leading upward. Polecat began thinking he would hold the night’s events in high esteem, and they would be the origin of a path to greatness and happiness. Yet, florid as his thoughts were in this moment, a car was chasing up the road, north of Polecat’s location.
How can one know, whether or not this event concerning the stone, was a positive or a negative one? Polecat had suddenly become happier than he had ever been in his life, his brain was more energetic than it had been even in his periods of most exulted excitement. The unfavourable disposition it had granted him, and the cloud of the manner of the vagabond it had enshrouded him in? Mere side affects! Perhaps he would transcend them? However, perhaps not, you need not be reminded of the car tearing its way south toward Polecat’s position, a position that was not so static. Polecat had been weaving about the place, after all, it was hours into the morning, and not a soul was about, the wind had drowned away the voices and the din of far-off places, even the places closest to Polecat’s ears, and this had granted him a warm security and the present urge to do a dance, as if to celebrate his emergence of character, and the gift a kind of Providence had presented to him. He danced on the verge, kicking up grass, dirt and dust. He stood on the metal ballast, as if his latest transcendence of character had entitled him a king, ready to declare his voice on the world, with the mound his castle, and the ballast his throne. He carried on with his dancing, besotted by what life had now afforded him, and stupefied by nothing it threw at him. Heaven knows how long he continued in that feverish manner, but, with bag on shoulder, legs quavering here and there in their sodden, over-joyous state, he alighted into the road at the moment the car was coming.
You needn’t have your intelligence belittled by having to read what occurred thereafter. Fortune and fate, it again seemed, although this time with teamwork, had dealt Polecat a fresh new blow. A serious blow. The ultimate blow, and there he lay, as still and limp as woodwork. It’s curious how silence, above all else, can bring darkness to one’s soul, and chill it to the core. This was the driver’s feeling at that moment, in that black void of a morning, and so, he removed himself from his car, for it indeed was a he, and a he slightly tippled with wine, who had done this to Polecat. He tip-toed over to the lifelessness of his body, with a conflicting gait, one that signified solid reluctance and a feverish impatience. He stared into the face of Polecat, horrid looking in that darkness. The moon, managing to show itself for this latest spectacle, had appeared from beneath the clouds, which were now settling with the dying of the wind, and highlighted Polecat’s face with a horrific white pallor, bathing it in a morbid pale one can only see on the countenance of the newly dead. This distressed the tippled driver immensely, and with an overbearing feeling of guilt, he went about the business of stowing away the body, erratically, and fraught with forgetfulness, a state so often the mark of intense nervousness, as one’s mind is in ten places at once, with guilt the overriding judge, deliberating over the heated arguments of a troubled mind. He collected Polecat’s bag, and, without hesitation, threw it into the back of the car, then, mechanically, he managed to lift the light form of the limp Polecat, and carried the body into the car with arms straining and his back leaning achingly. He laid him out onto the back seat, or rather, thrust him, for he cared not for the preservation of this still body, only for the removal of it from other peoples’ eyes. The moonlight through the windows had granted an even uglier colour, or lack of colour, to the cold skin of Polecat, for it was now drenched with a grim, light blue, as if his life were draining away with every passing second, and his every drop of blood were freezing as each minute of the morning progressed. It was now approaching sunrise. The wind had left, the sky was relaxed and the birds seemed happy enough to start their singing. The beauty of this scene did not fit into the event described. The driver’s phone had rung inexplicably throughout, as if Satan himself, the ultimate trickster, were on the other end, but, with his fragile mind, the driver hadn’t thought of turning it off, as more troubling concerns preoccupied him at that moment. He had taken more than enough time to survey the scene for any potential evidence that would show in a police investigation, if there were to be any investigation at all, for who would report him missing? There were no witnesses, regardless, any potential witnesses would be unaware of the situation. The gaggle of drivers, the angelic woman, and all the other hundreds of drivers who had driven past, giving their respective glances. Blood, debris – anything that might be of interest to the police – was nowhere to be found. The road was comparatively older than most other roads are nowadays, and, strange as it is in our modern day society, there were no surveillance cameras or speed cameras in the vicinity that might have caught this happening on film. There were skid marks, but how often are these found on a main road? The driver, although he did, and pathetically tried to rid them with the soles of his shoes, need not worry about them, and, having become mildly content with the scene, and somewhat calmer since the stowing of the body, he got into his car, soberly, and drove off at a steady pace, the redness of the dawn watching him as he did so, nature being the only witness in this sorry case, and, although she holds the secrets of the earth in her soil, her trees and her mountains, and although she is louder than anything manufactured by the hands of men, she will not open her mouth to anyone, not even for the unfortunate, beaten Polecat, and so, the man drove off, leaving the serenity of that road forever, for he never did return to that fateful place, and, eventually, more cars, including those of the police, passed by without a single iota of suspicion, and as we shall see later on, the man’s wheels took him to London.
We now know how Polecat had come to the city of London, and that life, Providence, fortune and fate had all assembled and made a parliament of themselves, focused upon battering the poor, vulnerable Polecat with misery and hardship furthermore to what he had already lived through, and, for the moment, this is the end of his tale.
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