Warlord of Erberos

Warlord of Erberos

D.A. Madigan

Copyright D.A. Madigan 2012

Published at Smashwords

Editor’s Foreword

I am not the author of the journal you are about to read, although you will not believe me. In fact, even as I sit down to type this, I realize, with something of a mental groan, that due to the rather derivative seeming ‘style’ of my friend Richard Burroughs’ narrative, this foreword, in which I explain that in fact this manuscript is a true tale of true events, and not fictional at all despite how it may seem, will very much seem to be in the ‘tradition’ of the otherworldly melodramatic heroic fantasy that, again, it will seem I have deliberately set out to write a pastiche of.

Having realized this, I understand you will never credit what I am about to explain. Nonetheless, I must tell you: I did not write this, and the man who did write it assures me (and I believe him) that it is not fiction, however incredible and unbelievable the adventures detailed herein may seem to any hypothetical reader.

There are many reasons why I believe my friend Richard Burroughs when he assures me that this fantastical and utterly unlikely tale is true: first, while Richard has a fairly dry sense of humor, I think it stops well short of concocting an 80,000 word manuscript as a joke. Second, Richard gives me his solemn oath that every word of this is true, and I have never known Richard to break even a casually given assurance as to when and where he will meet someone for lunch, much less such a seriously undertaken promise. Third, some little of it I know myself to be factual, because I witnessed the very beginning, and the very end with my own eyes.

You see, I was actually at the Port Orange Independent Adjustments Agency in St. Petersburg, Florida, on July 7, 1997, when Richard Burroughs first disappeared from the office under remarkable circumstances, and then, a few moments later, reappeared again, in an even more extraordinary fashion.

As to that, you need not merely take my word for it. Both The St. Petersburg Times for July 8, 1997, and the Tampa Tribune of July 9, 1997 (the Tribune was a day behind on that particular story) ran short feature articles on the ‘inexplicable events’ that occurred that day in that office complex. The ‘shining yellow disc’ that first appeared far out over the Gulf of Mexico, and that approached the Port Orange offices so quickly it seemed to have almost instantaneously apported itself, was seen by several eyewitnesses, most of whose accounts can be found in the official reports filed by various investigative agencies, including the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department. And for those who prefer to have their proofs in an electronic format, an episode of ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ broadcast on March 11, 1998 also highlighted the events, adding Richard’s current status (his whereabouts are officially unknown, although I’m sure I know ‘where’ he is) at the end of the presentation. All of these sources can be checked fairly easily by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, I’m sure; some members of my hypothetical audience may even now be remembering reading or hearing about these events on television.

For myself, I can only say that I was using the photocopier, less than ten feet away from Richard and the adjuster he was speaking to at the time, a delightful and beautiful young woman named Corinne Beattie. I unfortunately had my back turned to Corinne’s desk at the exact moment Richard vanished, because the photocopier had chosen that second to jam again, which was nothing new for that machine, believe me. I was aware of a bright yellow flash filling the room, like… well, like the flare from an old fashioned flash bulb, but a rich golden color, instead of a glaring white. I looked over my shoulder to ask Richard what he was doing, and at that exact second, Corinne screamed… and Corinne served two years as a police officer in Orlando before moving to St. Petersburg and becoming an insurance adjuster, and in my experience, she’s one of the coolest and most unflappable people I’ve ever met.

Most media personnel and the Sheriff’s Deputies who investigated the event seem to assume that the yellow flash must have blinded everyone in the room for a minute, at which point, Richard (who unlike everyone else, wasn’t blinded, apparently) left, in order to play a bizarre practical joke on the rest of us, which required him to quickly change into an utterly outlandish costume and then somehow trigger a second flash several minutes later, after which, he slipped back in and threw himself on the ground with a thump, pretending to have fallen into the room from somewhere above floor level. Oh, yes, and he also somehow contrived, in that few minutes in which he had to change from his slacks, shirt, tie, and work boots into a bizarre leather harness with X-shaped chest straps that were studded with knobs of some silvery metal, elaborate thigh high boots in dark, shiny leather, and several other even more bizarre accoutrements, to shave his scalp, and grow a short, well trimmed beard!

(Skeptical investigators, of course, say he had the shaved scalp and beard all along, we’re either just ‘forgetting’ it because we so want to believe in Richard’s account, or we’re actually going along with the gag.)

Whatever the case may be, it didn’t get much attention after the immediate stories ran in the papers, and I doubt ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ would have picked it up if Richard hadn’t vanished again somewhat later in such a determinedly mysterious and unexplainable fashion… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once Richard’s first accounts were largely discounted as a joke, or hysteria, I didn’t see him for several weeks. There was nothing unusual in this; Richard wasn’t a permanent employee of Port Orange, he worked as a freelance engineering consultant for several insurance companies, independent adjusters, and local architectural firms, and made an excellent living at it, too. Months would go by in between seeing him, and then he’d be constantly in and out of the office for a few weeks at a time working on some specific assignment. But Richard and I had hit it off from our first meeting, and we’d pursued a casual but warm friendship outside the office, sharing the occasional meal, loaning each other books and periodicals, exchanging email, watching the occasional rented movie together with a few other acquaintances over… that sort of thing. I cannot say I grew to know Richard all that well, nor he me, in the year or so I knew him, but I liked him quite a lot… he was good company, both intelligent and articulate, had a pronounced but wickedly dry (and occasionally quite morbid) sense of humor, and was well versed on a very wide range of subjects, including all manner of athletics, various forms of literature (he liked an eclectic mixture of authors, ranging from John D. MacDonald to Thomas Carlyle), astronomy, marine zoology, genealogy, and anthropology, simply to name a few. His physical condition was excellent but he was one of the few enthusiastically athletic people I have ever met who was in no way elitist about it. In addition, Richard was soft spoken and almost unfailingly courteous (although, when politeness became somewhat strained, Richard was perfectly capable of being plain spoken to the point of outright rudeness). He was both honest and truthful, and had an enormous amount of natural dignity and integrity.

The last time I saw Richard was on July 23, 1997. He came over to my small, one story, wood framed rental house on North A Street unannounced, something he rarely did, since his natural politeness nearly always led him to call first to make sure a visit would be welcome. He almost didn’t catch me, as I’d been just about to go see a movie playing at a nearby cineplex. But here was Richard, with an obviously somewhat heavy shoulder bag on, looking unusually agitated… or perhaps excited is a better word.

I think I’ve figured out how to do it, was the first thing he said, when I let him in. But it could go wrong… it could go wrong a lot of different ways. He unzipped the shoulder bag and took out a small stack of spiral notebooks, at least half a dozen, from what I could see (as it turns out, there were 8). Look, Darren, you’re the closest thing to a real writer I know. I’ve put it all down here… everything that happened when I was gone, that time I just disappeared… you know. He looked uncharacteristically awkward. I guess I really don’t expect anyone to believe it, but I promise you solemnly, every word is true. He dropped the notebooks on the end table next to his chair. Read them when you want. They’re probably terribly written, but I’ve done my best.

Richard, I asked him, rather bemused, what are you talking about? You filled… what… six notebooks with what happened to you while you were out of the office for five minutes? Are you feeling all right?

He actually chuckled at that. Look, Darren, he told me, I know it’s a completely unbelievable story. Here… tell you what, just read the first notebook, or at least some of it. There’s some stuff I want to tell someone before I… well, before I try what I’m going to try… and I wanted to leave some record behind in case it works, no matter how crazy it seems to everyone else. He tossed me a notebook with a red cover. Just read this, or as much as you can stand, and then we can talk, and I’ll try to explain what I think I’ve figured out.

His aim had been unerring; the notebook had flipped through the air and landed neatly on my lap, face up. I glanced down. Lettered on a rectangle of paper taped efficiently to the cover, in an economical block style, was An Earthman Abroad: My Adventures on Erberos, by Richard Thomas Burroughs, M.Sc. Eng.

Richard, I said, quite amused now, what in the world…

Just read, he said. And then we can talk a bit, if you like. He looked at his watch. I have a few hours, still…

So I flipped back the cover, and began to read.

Within three sentences, I had completely forgotten everything but the narrative. I suspect you will, as well. However, I shall return with an Editor’s Afterword and a few more details of the strange story of Richard Burroughs, M.Sc, Eng and Warlord of Erberos, inasmuch as I know it, and can guess at it, at the conclusion of Richard’s own narrative.

- Darren Madigan

Florida, January, 2002

Chapter 1. Hunted By Unknown Enemies On An Alien World

There was hot, bright, golden, roaring silence all around me; a non-visual, non-auditory impact of pure, indescribable sensation so intense it was both agonizing and ecstatic at the same time. A crashing cacophony of screaming, shrieking, whispering, whimpering, babbling voices swept me along through a torrent of cascading visual images, all of them as clear and coldly, precisely projected as individual and unique chips of ice, none of which I had time to grasp the meaning of before I was whirled onward like a snowflake in a maelstrom. I was hot and cold, rough and smooth, sweet and sour, still and hurtling head over heels, all at once. It was over in an imperceivable nanosecond of an instant and it went on forever.

And abruptly, I found myself falling through empty, sunlit air.

I fell for a good long distance, and realized this was occurring, as I had probably a second or more to understand that whatever strange, indescribably hallucinogenic place I had been in, I was now someplace far more real... and really falling, very fast, through empty atmosphere. Fear has always come slowly to me (I claim no credit for this, since I have often thought it merely reflects a lack of quick intellect and easy imagination in myself), so I did not panic, but merely opened my eyes and flicked a glance around me.

Hazy blue, strangely featured sky dotted with light grey Brillo pad wisps of cloud, high up; a flickering, sizzling, silvery white coin of sun; a hilly, sweeping, vista of white-flecked bluish green... all of it tumbling around me in a lazy manner, as the tossing, pale-chipped, roaring, turquoise field far below seemed to abruptly come lurching towards me...

It was water rushing towards me, or rather, I towards it… a great deal of water, and if I was falling for just over a second then I was headed for it from a good five stories up, my relentless engineer’s brain calculated almost instantly.

Strange though it will seem, the varied experiences and adventures of my life previous to this had actually prepared me somewhat for the completely outrageous situation I now found myself in. When I was 17 years old, the summer after I graduated from high school, before I entered the military, I spent four months with my father in Mexico, and while I was there, I befriended a group of young chicos about my age whose favorite hobby was diving from the precipitous cliffs around Acapulco into the deep blue Gulf of Mexico. A few months practice cannot match a level of skill inculcated from near infancy, but I did pick up the basics of the art. And although it must have been more than twenty years since I had jumped off a five or six story cliff aiming towards the deep, brilliant blue of the Gulf below, I found the experiences suddenly rushing back to me.

So it was that, in the little over a second I had, I managed to near-instantaneously straighten myself out from a tumbling five story plunge into the precise body posture necessary to slice into the water like a blade, perfectly arched, so that the cold, dense, dark depths cradled and cosseted my arched, streamlined body, instead of bruising and breaking them.

Without consciously willing it, I flicked my tongue out to probe the water I had just come hurtling into from above, and got an immediate taste of brackish brine. So, I was somewhere in a large ocean, then. At least I knew that much, if little to nothing else!

Salt water meant at least the potential of large aquatic predators not at all fussy about what manner of thrashing protein they ingested, so I went still. Water this cold, with a sky that bright and sunny, this late in the summer (I did not stop and wonder, at that second, how I possibly knew what time of the year it was, although I did) meant I would now be somewhere in some non-tropical, yet still sub-polar, ocean. How in the name of God I'd managed to drop from fifty feet up into... the North Atlantic? (instinctively, that assessment felt wrong somehow)... completely out of sight of land (I am naturally gifted with nearly photographic memory, and I had seen no shadow of solid earth on any horizon in that brief second I'd fallen and looked around before impact) was something I'd have to think about later. Right now, I had to get back to the surface, and I had to swim in a powerful, reassuring manner that would not signal 'easy prey' for a radius of twenty miles through the water around me.

Even as I concluded all of this, I somehow knew my assumptions were wildly wrong… yet I had nothing else to proceed from.

Just as I absolutely ‘knew’, somehow, that my assumptions about where I must have fallen on Earth were not correct, so, too, did I similarly absolutely ‘know’ which way the surface was. So, naturally, I cupped my hand around my mouth and puffed out a tiny bit of breath, feeling which way the bubbles surged off to. The direction the bubbles immediately swirled off to confirmed my instincts, which heartened me… I am not naturally a man for lengthy analysis; if I could not depend on my immediate, intuitive reactions, I would find myself in difficulties indeed!

I struck off swimming in that direction and within a second or so, felt the water start to warm and lighten simultaneously and quite abruptly, as if I'd swum up and out of a dark, cold layer of water lying perhaps thirty feet beneath the ocean's surface. The water I now thrashed through was pale, luminescent green shading up to very light, golden-green at the surface, where it was struck by the rays of the sun, and quite warm. I tried to think of any body of water on Earth where there was such a dark, cold layer lying only thirty feet beneath the surface and couldn't... and yet, it seemed familiar to me... and ominous.

Normally my lack of expertise on any subject outside my experience would not trouble me, since the world is far too vast and filled with facts for any one man or woman to fully master, and wisdom lies in accepting one’s own limitations… yet this bothered me. I seemed to feel instinctively that I should know where I was... yet I didn't.

I broke the surface and looked around, treading water easily and breathing deeply but without noticeable panic or haste. Water doesn't seem blue when you're in it, of course, unless it has been chemically purified. I was floating on and in a vast, green, rolling liquid prairie, with, as I'd already noted, no sign of land in any direction... a truly depressing and frightening prospect. Yet I was neither depressed, nor frightened. In my youth I had been an accomplished athlete who, in all modesty, won at least my share of titles and trophies in my high school and college sporting careers, and I’ve always felt at home in the water, so being confident in my ability to keep myself afloat was natural… even at the age of 41, I’ve striven greatly to maintain my physical condition and the skills of my earlier years (the fact that my brief sojourn into cliff diving still remained with me two decades later having just been undeniably demonstrated in the most melodramatic way imaginable). But the unknown is a terror to any human being, and the open sea is one of the most hazardous environments known to man… and here I was truly immersed in and surrounded by both… so why was I so calm?

In most books I've read - and I'm an avid reader, especially of fantastic adventure fiction - a protagonist suddenly thrust into such a bizarre situation generally, at some point, wonders if they're either dreaming, or have lost their mind. I'd always thought, when reading such passages, that they were fairly unbelievable, since I've never had any trouble telling a dream from reality (I dream in color, but rarely coherently, and my kinaesthetic sense is nearly always dulled or non-existent) and I'd always figured if you'd gone crazy, you'd implicitly believe in your delusions no matter how obviously deranged they might be. But now, suddenly, I had to wonder. Moments ago...

Moments ago I'd been in the small private insurance adjuster's office where I sometimes did freelance work as a specialized field investigator and consultant, speaking desultorily with an adjuster named Corinne, for whom I had just completed a lengthy and tedious report on metal fatigue and whether or not natural causes could safely be assigned as the reason for the collapse of an insured beach house. Corinne’s small cubicle was fortunately placed next to a window with an excellent vantage on the Gulf of Mexico, and I’d been admiring the view over her shoulder as she bent over the thick report I’d laboriously typed out on my old fashioned Smith-Corona the night before… or, to be perfectly honest, I’d actually been admiring the view down the front of her scoop necked blouse as she did so… when abruptly I noted a strange twinkle in the distant sky, as if the sun were shining off some sort of golden aircraft too distant to be made out in detail.

I suppose I gasped in shock as that twinkle abruptly seemed to rush forward into my field of vision, swelling to become a great glittering golden disc filling most of Corinne’s window. I remember Corinne’s head coming up, her eyes wide, and her voice saying Richard, what…

...and then I was falling, and now I was here. Wherever in the hell here might be.

With a moment to take stock, I did so. I was still dressed the way I had been at work; one of my few pairs of decent slacks (black), a button up denim shirt, a loosely knotted tie, an expensive leather belt with a solid gold buckle that had been a gift from a lady friend several years before, and black crepe soled, heavy duty field boots over good wool socks. When one falls into deep water while clothed, the first thing to do is get rid of heavy footgear, but for the moment I decided my swimming skills were strong enough to let me retain my boots… in an unknown situation, good shoes can be a vital survival tool.

I rolled up to float on my back and carefully checked my pockets... yes, I still had my wallet, some change, my heavy bunch of keys (most of them were to apartments, houses, desk drawers, offices, motor vehicles, and sundry other locks I hadn't used in years; I'm one of those people who only cleans his key ring off once every millennium or so) and, in my left front pocket where I habitually placed it every morning after getting dressed, the flat piece of black volcanic glass that had had no business whatsoever being in the deserts of Kuwait, and that had saved my life one very dark night a decade previous by causing me to trip and sprawl headlong in the sand, at the exact instant that a single bullet, almost certainly fired by an Iraqi sniper concealed somewhere several hundred yards away in the distant erg, split the air where my chest should have been.

I admit, I was relieved to find my ‘lucky’ rock had not been lost through whatever mysterious course of events had brought me to this strange destination. I try to be a rational man, yet can any human being raised on Earth in the 20th Century claim to be fully free of all superstition?

It was then, floating on my back in the rolling swells of an unknown ocean, having completed an inventory of the resources available to me, that I finally allowed myself to relax, inasmuch as I could, and gaze around me at my immediate surroundings…

…and I was immediately struck by a sense of awe and wonder!

I have already related the peculiar layer of cold and darkness that began some thirty feet beneath the surface of that otherwise clear, green, and sparkling sea. It did not occur to me at the time, but later I reflected on the oddness of the fact that I had seen no sea-life swimming in the clear, warm, upper strata of the ocean… but for now, all such thoughts were driven from my head by the spectacle I saw before me, filling the sky above me and towards the distant horizon.

Three great planetary discs hung above me, all clearly visible in the brilliant tropical sunlight, two to one side of the bright coin sized spark that was the sun, the third on the other side of it… and not merely on the distant