The chubby little boy with tousled red hair crept deeper into the woods beyond the north-end of the canal.  Dressed in dark denim jeans, a green sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of a popular video game, and brown canvas sneakers, he hopped across a small ravine that ran diagonally from under the treeline to a sharply-defined stone depression where he and his father sometimes launched his model rockets. He was crouched low, nearly a quarter kilometer from his comfortable home's crisply manicured backyard, and moved amongst the waist-high weeds and brambles with the skill of an experienced hunter thrice his age.  This was not his first twilight trip into the gloomy and forbidding acreage beyond the fence of his family's property and, despite his young years and apparent physical softness, the boy traversed the uneven, plant-cluttered terrain with unusual confidence.  The dimming light of approaching nightfall did not bother him in the least.

A wind scented with the stain of oil and machinery blew in fitful puffs up the canal, following a serpentine path north skirting the borders of East Oxfordshire, scattering small flocks of sparrows as evening approached. It was the end of yet another in a series of uneventful days in the canal-side suburbs: hypnotically uninspired and repetitive, predictably safe. 

For the most part, people always felt safe in the historic, white-collar suburban community of Jericho, north of the Oxford city center in Oxfordshire County, south east England.  So far as anyone knew, there was no reason for them to feel otherwise.  And that was just the way those who knew better wanted things.

It just wouldn’t do for people to remember to be frightened of the dark.

Truth be known, the red-haired boy liked the darkness.  It suited his moods.  It fed his quietly furious mania.  It was his armor.  It kept him invisible.  It kept him from the sight of the stern and dour, wheelchair-bound old woman who lived directly across the street from his family's two story brick Victorian.  The old woman's name was Meredith McCrae Chapel and the boy had heard she'd been the victim of a hit and run accident years ago that had stolen the use of her legs from her.  The little boy's name was Oliver Titus Wander and he was a fifth grade student at Oxford's prestigious St. Barnabas Primary School.

Other than that, though, to most people, Oliver Wander was a mystery, a cipher.  He wasn’t much like other children, though, to his credit, he did his best to appear to be like them.  He didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself.  But he was undeniably different, an old soul in a young body, cynical beyond his years.  He wasn’t much predisposed towards smiling.  He didn’t often play with other children and on the odd occasions he did interact with youngsters his own age, the games he played were far more complex than those typically centered around running and jumping and chasing balls.  The games Oliver Wander played were often centered around the different applications of power and discipline over the other children with whom he was engaged.  He didn’t play so much as direct.  He commanded others and put them through their paces.

 Some of the other children’s parents thought he was creepy.

 Elderly Meredith Chapel thought he was evil.

 Oliver Titus Wander and Meredith McCrae Chapel were enemies, each constantly watching the movements of the other, suspicious of one another's motivations and agendas, mistrustful of what they each knew lay beneath the facade of one another's public persona.

 The old woman frequently received mysterious exotic visitors at her grand three-storied 17th century, multi-gabled Normandy mansion.  They arrived in stark, official-looking sedans and tinted-windowed limousines.  It was said the old woman was the retired Head Librarian of the Oxford Central Library over by the Westgate Shopping Center and that, in her youth, she'd once been the Reference Research Curator at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library.  Oliver Wander knew that to be a partial fiction, though.  The old lady had worked for the Directorate of Military Intelligence, MI10, under the aegis of GCHQ, better known as the Government Communications Headquarters.  She had been in the highly secretive "Anomalous Sciences Investigative Chapter".

 The red haired boy knew that because his father, a mathematics professor at Oxford, had once been a member of MI16, the Directorate of Military Intelligence and he'd attended an OUSS, Oxford University Scientific Society, gathering at the Main Lecture Hall of the Bodleian Library.

 Oliver Wander knew a lot of things far beyond the scope of what the average primary school fifth grader should know. 

 He and Meredith Chapel were not who or what they appeared to be.  And only they seemed to know that about one another.

 Moreover, neither of them belonged on this Earth or in this Reality.

 They were from a place that could only be best described by the unsuspecting general population as "elsewhere".

 Panting as he determinedly crested a grassy hillock overlooking a tree-enclosed curve in the canal, the chubby boy drew himself up to his full height of four feet and eight inches and strode over to a small trapezoidal floor of rock where a white will-o'-the wisp light, the circumference of an average dinner plate, floated, bouncing slightly in the evening air.

 A hollow musical sound, soft, vaguely resembling a human voice wordlessly singing scales of the middle register, issued from within the floating spot of light.

 Something about it, that sound, offered the impression it was pleased to be in the boy’s presence.

 Oliver Titus Wander drew in a deep breath and regarded the light with an expression far more mature than his years.  He looked at it the way a cynical and tired old soldier would look at an office clerk who’d brought him new marching orders too soon after a difficult mission.

 “Before you demand something from me, at least have the decency to please tell me that someone I hate has died today…,” he said.

                   *     *     *     *     *

  She resided in a beautiful home, protected from the harsh realities of modern life within the comfortable, nurturing and tastefully decorated walls of a roomy half-timbered, Ecclesiastical-design Normandy grand villa.  Though she was well on in years and awkwardly impeded by limited physical mobility, she still had her independence and was not forced to rely overmuch on the kindness of others.  She cared for herself, fed herself, and was even able to manage tending the less complex edges of her vast garden alone.  The people with whom she was forced to interact, came and went with mannerly good humor: taking her to and from the train station when she wanted to travel, taking her to her doctor's appointments, to the local library, bringing her the bulk of her groceries, helping her with the body of her house cleaning and laundry.  Things for others of her age and relative infirmity were far worse, by and large, and by most measure she should have been happy in her autumnal years.

 She wasn't.   Not one tiny bit.

 Meredith McCrae Chapel watched the deepening gloom of twilight gather, swallowing daylight, like the arrival of a relentless tide of stormclouds washing over the skyline of Jericho.  The day's end served only to feed the dark flames of the dread that burned within her.  She knew that beyond the town's rooftops and spires and garden hedges, the Bad Things were gathering to run amok in the night.   The Bad Things...   She knew all about those.

 After all, she was one of them.

 Two mornings past she'd awakened with a jolt, startled and alarmed, knowing instinctively that something in her world was catastrophically wrong --  and knowing that it somehow involved her.  And if it, this dire premonition of gradually mounting growing horror, presupposed to involve her, then it was likely it also involved that awful boy, Oliver Titus Wander.

 And that meant it involved The Withered Land.

 She wasn’t ready for that. 

 Meredith Chapel did not want to once again become embroiled in the drama and terror of her life beyond the boundaries of this life.  She wasn’t ready to once more take on the responsibilities of someone who lived in two worlds, those being this one, her normal waking, three-dimensional world, and the alter-dimensional world beyond the veil of accepted Realities. 

 She cursed the day fourteen years past when her late husband, Professor Martin Justice Wakefield-Chapel, one of Great Britain’s leading experts in neurocognitive dream modeling and metaconscious networking, arrived home from his laboratory and offices at Oxford to announce his breakthrough in “quantum transreality recognition in humans”.  He’d excitedly explained how three volunteer human subjects had, while fully immersed in artificially-induced dream states, “crossed over” into an alternate alien reality, leaving their physical human bodies in a near-death comatose state while their brain activity went wild as they explored a place beyond our known universe.  And what proof had they presented that they’d ventured into another dimension while in these fugue-like states?

 The clothing on their bodies had changed, the actual matter rearranged and transmogrified, into alien, militaristic garments unlike any the University’s meticulous historical researchers could identify in known human history.  Dark leather armor with bronze alloy buckles and fittings, iron bandoliers with razor-keen knives, holstered scabbards holding sharp-edged short swords…  The dreamers had somehow become outfitted in the garb of neo-barbaric warriors.

 She’d had no choice but to report her husband and his experiments to the officials in MI10’s Anomalous Sciences Investigative Chapter.  The Directorate of Military Intelligence could not allow some random minor academician to run free telling all who would listen about such a breakthrough.  Moreover, she herself could not allow it, regardless the depth of her love for Martin.

 Meredith McCrae Chapel was completely dedicated to protecting her adoptive homeworld from the sinister threat posed by the alien Reality in which she had been born.

 Meredith Chapel, formerly Meredith Kelly-McCrae of High Wyckham in Buckinghamshire, England, was actually from The Withered Land.  So, too was her nemesis, young Oliver Wander.  She had been born a princess and her true name was Nygeia.

 Her parents had been a parasitic, mutated hybridized monstrosity called “The Pahrayah”, the sibling children who’d been heirs to the ancient demon-throne of a vast continent, had been fused into one hermaphroditic being, a tyrannical psychopath with all the authoritative powers befitting an emperor.  And she had killed them.

 Such was the way of her life.

 She could not let Professor Martin Wakefield-Chapel bask in the glory of his discovery.  She betrayed him.  Years later, she’d been informed by an anonymous agent of the Anomalous Sciences Investigative Chapter that he had finally died, broken and alone, haunted and mystified by her betrayal, a prisoner hidden away from the world in a high-tech, maximum security underground apartment in a secret facility somewhere outside south London.

 Such was the way of her life.

 So as the last light of day bled out across the horizon above Jericho, lonely Meredith Chapel examined the signs and portents haunting her latest grim reveries and fretted.

 She knew she would have to go back there, to that place, back to the Withered Land.

 Sobbing silently, she allowed herself the luxury of a single tear to fall from each of her aging eyes.

                   *           *           *

 “Christ, I don’t want to see this…!  I knew this man!”

   Someone with a very authoritative voice told the speaker to shut the hell up.

 A trio of armed men, dressed in military-style fatigues and wearing body armor, were clustered around a man fallen on the scuffed linoleum floor.  The light from fluorescent bulbs, dangling precariously from their overhead ceiling housings, streamed unflatteringly through thin layers of cloudy smoke riding the stuffy air.  Another man in military garb was kneeling next to the fallen man, cradling the man’s head.

 The fallen man’s clothing was in ruins, little more than ragged strands of soiled cloth, and most his flesh was missing.

 The soldier gently wiped the blood off from the man’s split and swollen lips while the man coughed and struggled to speak.   The small unit had tried to get the man to remain quiet, but he waved away their careful ministrations with gruff impatience.  He coughed and blood bubbled from somewhere back in is throat, collecting in scarlet foam at the corners of his mouth as his voice, deep and sonorous, strong despite the grievous fragility of his broken and ruined body, told them things.   He wheezed and spoke of ugly things, impossible things, things that sparked dreams in the dark places in their souls.

 It was like a fairy tale for psychopaths, a story where the ending of "Happily Ever After" was eclipsed by the piercing wail of an endless scream that echoed throughout infinity.

 That sound, that scream, was the key that opened the door to someplace horrible.

 A Withered Land.

 That was how he had described it, the skinless man, the castaway sailor on the seas of space whom they’d rescued.  It was almost poetic.  Words of beauty and grace flowing past the trembling, fleshless lips of a man made of exposed bloody meat.  That was the phrase he had used.

 “… withered…”

 And the skinless man had been there.

 The man’s eyes rolled in his head as he saw how they regarded him, as he saw the compassion and fear they tried to mask as they delicately lifted him from the floor and placed him onto a wheeled gurney.  He knew he frightened them.   If he were in their place he’d be frightened too.   They were confounded as to how to administer to his condition –-- they were distressed he was still conscious and in obvious agony.  They tried not to touch the naked, twitching muscle and ligaments that glistened under fluorescent light in the ruined remains of the vast laboratory.   Without the protective covering of his robes of flesh, he had apparently lost his membership in the Brotherhood of Humanity.   He had become meat.   He was a reminder of their fragility, proof of their innate weaknesses in the face of a greater power.   He was evidence of their smallness.

 He laughed convulsively and blood spattered into the air over his quaking chin.

 “I frighten you.  Here, in this place, on this world, I am broken, a thing to be pitied.  But there, where sunshine does not nourish and where the dark of night is weaker than the darkness of shadows, there I am beautiful!”

 He died after that.  A new group of men, dressed in protective white bodysuits, wearing air recycler masks under the visors on their faces, wrapped him in a leak-proof zippered bag, black, ninety-six inches long and thirty-six inches wide, constructed with two layers of 3-mil polyethylene film laminated to a scrim reinforcement material.   They adhered a yellow, palm-sized “biohazard” sticker to the body bag and wheeled him out from the laboratory.

 One of the men in the white biohazard suits turned to another and said, “Prepare the usual condolence letter for his family and submit the recommendation for distinguished services to his commanding officers.  And then strike Captain Patterson’s name from the mission roster for the ranks of the platoon.  No one can know he was ever involved here, inside United States borders and we can’t have anything linking him to the Institute.”

 “And then?” the other man asked.

 “Tell OUTLAND to give the Broken Mirror unit the go-ahead.  We need eyes on the ground at the target zone.” 

 BEYOND THE DARK, A DEAD INFINITY

The Universe as the human mind imagines it was not just one unimaginably vast vista of stars, galaxies and planets.  It had another component, as well, as much a part of its physical face as the nebulae and black holes and icy cold darkness.

 Time.

 When traveling through the cosmos, Time was as much a fixture as distance.   In fact, at some level, Time and distance were one and the same as an entity or a craft traversed the Void.

 But Time and distance were not, in actuality, distinct dimensions as they were generally perceived by the human mind.  Time and distance weren’t a linear stream passing one moment through to the next, Past then Present then Future.  That was a concept of Orderliness that didn’t really exist.

 Reality, as a unifying concept, was nothing like that.

 Time was a force, a factor that intersected the underpinnings of all the planes of Reality, because “space” itself was not just one universe, it was a Multiverse, a Meta-Reality.  And as such there were many planes of Reality, coexisting simultaneously, but, contrary to the popular theories where Realities were stacked like plates one atop the other into Infinity, yet one never bleeding one into the next, the Multiverse was actually more like a living organism, composed of different collections of star systems, worlds, working like cells in a larger body.  The cells fed, replicated, migrated, and mutated.  So, too, did the planetary bodies and star systems within the region of space containing the Withered Land.  A world known to its inhabitants as “Teshiwahur”, a word in their alien language meaning “Kingdom of Dust”, which was five times the size of planet Earth, it was a dynamic, ever-changing system of symbiotic relationships creating a living, breathing, working whole: an organismal Bioverse on a celestial level, a physical expression of a Monster Group of mathematic theory.

 But some of the cells within the celestial Bioverse were diseased.  Some mutated without rhyme, reason, or restraint.  Those cells were a life form unto themselves: independent and yet subservient to the greater whole, but developing its own set of rules and behaviors.  Like the Withered Land.  It worked at cross purposes with the rest of the Bioverse.  It felt.  It thought.  It brooded.  It was a place where only the Insane, the Damned, and the Lost would dare tread.

 The Life it fostered, on every level, was an abomination.

 Everything there was driven by fury and hatred, eternally angry, murderous, ravenous.

 There were people there, on Teshiwahur, a strange breed, damaged and dysfunctional from constant exposure to an environment of dead light and whispering winds and moaning waters, where promises were never made and needs were never met and miracles couldn’t be imagined. Farmers, merchants, soldiers, priests, thieves, killers and madmen roamed the shifting gloom-enshrouded landscape, dwelling in the crumbling ruins of once great cities, toiling in bitter servitude to murderous warlords in cluttered outland villes, hiding in cavernous abandoned mountain caves by the ink-black sea, and following mad prophets in huge caravans across gritty asphalt dunes seeking to convert more souls to the worship of newly-created Gods Without Names.  Under a tumultuous, cloud-dappled sky which occasionally cloaked its two suns, one a Red Giant and the other a Blue Dwarf, both stars forever locked in a deadly gravitational embrace that would eventually destroy them both, the populace waited for Time to wind down and free them of the curse of their lives.

 Dead things did not truly die in the Withered Land and living things envied them their tattered, flesh-stripped spoilt immortality.  

 They were a fearful people in a place where Fear was bred a thing alive, rolling across the landscape like vast and fruitful field of diseased wheat...  

 It was the worst of God's creations and it was eternally God's shame --- the inflamed wound on the face of Creation that would not stop bleeding pus.

 By comparison, Hell was a vacation resort.

 Tellingly, the planet had become known to a few select Earth humans in the arena of covert technical sciences as "Brimstone".

 No living being should ever come to such a place.  Ever.