"Summerhill" Chapter One Teaser
"Summerhill" Chapter One
by K.M. Hirosaki ([email protected])
Teaser Chapter (4th June 2011)
_(Note: this is a teaser chapter from an in-progress, unfinished, unedited draft of my upcoming novel "Summerhill," shared here to let folks get a look at what's coming. The final product is liable to be quite different, but I thought folks might like to get a taste of what's in store. [Also, you can find info on Chapter Two, which comes before this, over at_ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2261297/ .)
[One]
[Oblivion]
Summerhill lived in the World of the Pale Gray Sky.
The World of the Pale Gray Sky was a quiet place, mainly because Summerhill was the only person who lived there. This didn't strike him as weird, though-not until he started coming up with questions. But the dog lived there for quite some time before he got around to that.
In the World of the Pale Gray Sky, there were no storms, and there was no rain; the sky was simply always gray, the same dull, uniform color in all directions. The gray did not come from clouds; the gray simply was. Sometimes there were clouds, or what looked like they might have been clouds, but Summerhill never paid those much heed, since there was, after all, no rain, nor storms, nor any weather at all to speak of.
There was no sun, either, and so there was no night and no day, no way to demarcate the passage of time, and so Summerhill never bothered to do so.
The backdrop of that sky was broken only by tall, angular buildings that stabbed upwards, spearing the faintly swirled gray in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Many of the buildings were a drab green; others were steel blue or slate blue; more rarely were they hues of yellow or red. Some had windows; some did not.
Nobody lived in those innumerable buildings, though. Nobody ever went into them, and nobody ever came out. Nobody wandered the endless streets between them. Nobody except for a lone dog named Summerhill. The whole world was one unending city, all for him.
Summerhill himself was far more colorful than anything else in his world. The rich hues of his fur stood out against the backdrop wherever he went. Even the clothes he wore all had the same washed-out, drab look to them, as if the world itself was reluctant to allow too much color into it, but try as it might, it couldn't leach the color out of him.
One thing the dog had noticed, whenever he stopped to look in mirrors and in windows, was that the gray of his eyes matched the gray of the sky exactly. He'd forget this on occasion, and whenever reminded of it, he would ponder the similarity only briefly before dismissing it as coincidence.
Summerhill could also make the plants grow. He would do this from time to time, in order to add a tiny splash of color to the world around him. Flowers would sprout from underneath the grayish-green grass of the city's deserted parks or blossom on trees or grow up from in between the cracks in the pavement whenever he willed them to. These flowers didn't thrive in his world of no sunlight, though, and they always eventually faded and turned the same pale gray as the sky, the same pale gray as his eyes.
Plants didn't make for particularly good company, besides, and the lack of anyone to provide friendship or companionship had come to wear at him more and more as time continued to drift on by. After a time, it dawned on Summerhill that it was a little silly that he'd have a place like this all to himself. He could have all the time in the world (and near as he could tell, he did) and even then he'd probably still never get to see it all, and so what was the point of it?
For as long as he could remember, he was the only person who had ever lived in the World of the Pale Gray Sky. It seemed obvious that other people must have lived there at some point, though, since there were all those towering buildings that struck up into the sky in all directions, and someone must have built those. Right?
The question was largely academic, but before Summerhill could spend much time pondering the ramifications of it, the blue light appeared.
By itself, the blue light might not have been remarkable, except for the fact that it marked, for the first time in Summerhill's memory, the one time anything had happened in the World of the Pale Gray Sky. That in and of itself was way more interesting than any academic or theoretical quandaries that he could mull over.
All it was, at least to the unaided eye, was a beam of blue light that had streaked across the sky. Bright blue of this sort wasn't a color that existed in the World of the Pale Gray Sky, and so it had to have come from someplace else. It had almost looked like a meteor, like some kind of shooting star, except it had been clearly visible against the constant dull gray and not a backdrop of night. It also moved in two directions at once, which Summerhill assumed was unusual for a shooting star. It had been just a brief flash, which made Summerhill feel quite lucky that he'd been looking right at it when it happened.
Not too long after he saw the light (he couldn't say exactly how long, since there was no way to keep track of time), Summerhill came across the first of the notes.
The note was affixed to a wall just around the corner from a tobacconist's shop (where there was no actual tobacconist to run it). It was in plain view of the street, but what caught Summerhill's attention was the writing, which itself was the same hue of glowing blue as the light that had shot across the sky not long before. (Had it been a day? Summerhill was starting to want to think of time in more distinct terms, but didn't quite know how to yet.)
When Summerhill pulled the note off of the wall, the writing continued to glow. It appeared to be penned by hand, and it said:
"This world doesn't make sense, Summerhill, and you know it."
That some other someone in this lifeless city would leave him a note was terribly exciting. It was so striking and remarkable that it took him nearly a full minute before he stopped to give thought to what the note actually said.
It was an interesting point. There were certainly some things about the world that didn't make sense, but surely, not everything had to make sense, right? The world at least had its own internal logic that it abided by. That was something, wasn't it?
Sitting down on a bench at a bus stop where no bus ever came, Summerhill scratched his head and he took some more time to think. Now that he'd been prompted to question reality, he may as well put in the effort to do a thorough job of it. After all, this was the first time he'd been prompted by an outside source to do anything, and so wasting the opportunity would be rude.
Hadn't he already begun to question it, though? When he'd seen the blue light, for instance, he'd been surprised that it had been visible against something other than a dark night sky.
But there was no dark night sky here, and there never had been. So how did he know what a dark night sky even was? How did he know the light reminded him of a shooting star if there were none of those in the World of the Pale Gray Sky either?
With new questions to ponder, Summerhill went to one of the many empty parks in the city. He sat himself down on the grass, and he made flowers grow all over, so that they could keep him silent yet colorful company as he lost himself in thought.
He came to no conclusion as to how he could possibly know these things if they weren't part of the reality he'd always been a part of. Eventually, he grew tired from his aimless theorizing, and he curled up on the flower-speckled grass to sleep for a time.
The next day (since he'd slept, he decided that he would consider it to be a new day), Summerhill explored the barren city some more, keeping an eye out for any new notes or any odd-colored lights in the sky. After the events of the previous day, the true extent of the desolation Summerhill was subject to was terrifyingly apparent. No longer was it silly to think he had an entire city to himself; now it was chilling to wonder what had happened to the previous residents, if there had indeed been any, or to wonder why an entire city should exist only to house him.
There was nothing back at the tobacconist's shop, but Summerhill did find another note later that same day, stuck to the wide glass doors of an office building. This one was written in the same hand, and it too glowed that mysterious blue. It read:
"Reality as you know it is a labyrinth, Summerhill, one from which you must escape as soon as possible."
Just yesterday, Summerhill had been reluctant to even accept that anything was amiss about the minor inconsistencies he'd noticed about the world from time to time. Now reality itself was something he needed to escape? Whoever was leaving him these messages sure wasn't giving his mind a lot of time to adjust to things. That was pretty inconsiderate.
Besides, how was he supposed to escape the world? Wasn't "the world," by very definition, something that encompassed everything? How was it even possible to just escape from that?
Whoever was leaving Summerhill these notes knew who he was and where to find him. By extension, that should mean that, if Summerhill left a note of his own, this individual would find it. Pulling open the door to the office building, the dog went inside and went to the desk in the lobby. It didn't take him long to find a piece of paper and a pen with which to write.
Sitting at the desk, he wrote a note of his own: "How am I supposed to do what you're asking?"
Once he'd finished writing the note, Summerhill stared at it. The handwriting was identical to that of the other notes he'd found. The letters didn't glow, but the penmanship was still otherwise exactly the same.
The simplest explanation was that he'd left the other notes for himself. He didn't remember doing so, but it was easier to believe that than to believe that someone else-someone he'd never seen or met-had the exact same handwriting. His tail wagged at the thought, and he felt that whoever had left him the notes would be proud of his deductive reasoning skills for coming to that conclusion. Of course, that someone might well have been himself, but surely it wasn't too grave a sin to be proud of oneself.
Summerhill went outside and affixed the note to the big glass door where he'd found the one addressed to him. That was the logical place to leave it, after all-well, as logical a place as any. It was hard to know how much logic played into this. If he actually was the one leaving the notes, it probably helped to leave the response somewhere he already knew it was. Probably.
Now that he had to wait for things to happen, Summerhill was painfully aware of how boring and oppressive the World of the Pale Gray Sky really was. Before, he'd been able to while away a lackadaisical eternity, ignorant of the idea that there might be something for him to do. This new knowledge changed everything. All the various flaws and inconsistencies of this drab-colored reality were so obvious now. He wanted to know how he knew what a shooting star was and how he knew how to read and write and what any of it meant, but in the meantime, he had to just wait, and waiting in this place had become boring to the point of agony.
So Summerhill had no choice but to pace around the empty city. At first, he was reluctant to go more than a few blocks from the office building where he'd left the note, but then he remembered that the first two notes had been left places where he'd stumbled across them anyway, so he let himself venture further afield, because different-looking empty buildings were still slightly less boring than the same-looking empty buildings over and over.
After plenty of pacing and wandering and napping and resting, there was still no new note. Maybe Summerhill had left the first two for himself in his sleep? He couldn't just force himself to sleep when he wasn't tired, though, so he had to find other ways to kill time.
He visited bookstores, reading novels by writers who may never have existed; he explored open-air markets, trying strange fruits and meats that were fresh despite the stalls never being manned; he took elevators to the tops of the tallest skyscrapers and looked out over the city, which really did stretch out in every direction as far as his eyes could see.
But it wasn't enough. It was just killing time. It wasn't entertaining or fun, and soon enough, it all became just as boring as wandering the empty streets was. Days turned into weeks, and still there was no note, no follow-up or reply. Summerhill checked the office building every morning as soon as he woke up, but there was never anything there except for his own note that still hung there, with no wind or rain to knock it loose and carry it off forever into the distance.
Finally, one night, Summerhill dreamt about what other things must be like. He dreamt of cities teeming with people, of worlds both bright and dark, of placid pastoral vistas and of bizarre and twisted alien landscapes. He dreamt of a sweet, innocent young girl and of a sexy and amorous older woman. He dreamt of lavish galas and of intimate candlelit dinners for two. He dreamt of all these things that he knew were real and yet which did not exist and had never existed in the World of the Pale Gray Sky.
When he awoke, there was another note waiting for him, right in front of his long muzzle, stuck to the cold pavement where he'd curled up to sleep. The glowing blue letters pulsed in silence as the canine's eyes slowly adjusted and focused.
"You're ready to get out of there now, Summerhill. Just keep going and don't look back."
Emboldened with this new sense of purpose, Summerhill got to his feet, dusted himself off, and stared down along road ahead of him. Just keep going. That was all he needed to do. He was going to leave this place, and he was going to find the things he was looking for. It was as simple as that.
So Summerhill walked down the street. He followed it in a straight line, making his way between the endless buildings. He walked further than he'd ever walked before, and made his way into neighborhoods he'd never seen, but he did not stop to take any of it in. He didn't stop for anything-not to eat, not to sleep, not to rest his weary paws. He just kept going. Just keep going and don't look back.
And eventually, the endless city did come to an end. The paved street turned into a dirt path that cut through a field of dry grass that appeared to stretch out beyond the horizon, just like the buildings once had. Undaunted, Summerhill kept walking, and didn't even stop to bid farewell to the city that had been his home for so long. Nobody had ever been out this far, he knew. He was still underneath that same boring gray sky, though, and so he couldn't stop.
With the city itself long behind him, he came across a signpost jutting up from the ground next to the road. The sign itself was blank, but another of the strange blue notes was stuck to it, the glow of the letters visible from some distance. Only for something like this would he stop. The note read:
"Find Katherine. Make sure you stick with her and everything will be fine."
As Summerhill walked along and got more excited by the prospect of leaving forever, his joy caused flowers to spring up in the grass, lining the dirt path like landing lights demarcating a runway. He walked faster, ignoring his exhaustion, holding on to the images he'd seen in his dream to spur himself on, step after step, breath after breath, until, at long last, he'd gotten so far from the World of the Pale Gray Sky that he ended up quite literally in the middle of nowhere.