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The Treehouse
Myron Epimetheus
Among the tongues strangely loosened this night is a tongue whose muttering of the metered syllables of an arcane and long forgotten language shifts in cadence until its tones keep curious time with other murmured words. Tonight the dead find voice, and tonight their speaking is one. Even as his mutterings slide into the rhythm of the great and numberless chorus of the dead the little man writes with a feverish intensity, his pen tracing out sequences of complex characters upon the white squares provided by those little napkins which are so useful for the writing down of things. He mutters in time with the murmuring of the dead, but unlike the other voices that comprise this great whispering chorus his words are recorded in the furious motion imparted by lifeless fingers to the scraping of an ink bearing quill against the surface white beverage napkins.
The little man mutters and a penetrating light burns within the sunken sockets from which living eyes once looked outward. He reads what his hands are writing and his mutterings grow faint, for what he reads chills him who is never warm with a biting cold not of temperature but of fear. His voice falls suddenly out of step with the lifeless chorus and there is a dry and brittle sound to his speaking, “So that is the secret of the dead......” His body stiffens and the little man falls both still and silent, as still and silent as the grave. The light within his eye sockets dims to a pair of faintly glowing dots. And when after long minutes of silent thought he at last finds his voice again it is to enter once more the somber cadences of the numberless dead and to whisper but a single word, “Doom.”
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