Remember Gary Dirin? There are certainly plenty of stories to remember, but without a doubt the best of them is the Pulp Cereal story that Sean was writing. It’s unfinished, but I still feel its some of the best work he’s ever done, and while it’s reminiscent of Tolkien or even Lovecraft at times, the subject is fiercely original. Refresh your memory here in the Space Ninja archives.
(gary dirin hasn’t forgotten you. have you forgotten him?)
With the ripples of the walls subsiding and the scotch… or was it whiskey? With courage working its way through my body, I turned to Gary and forced a feeble smile. He laughed again, and pushed another button, and I saw the wall in front of us slide upwards, and I could see, across the vast cavern, a massive doorway open up in the far wall. Dark figures scurried about and peered our way across the bridge, which I realized was the section of walkway that I had seen far below, for the bridge widened at the far end and curved to either side, joining the walkway.
Gary laughed, and pressed another button, and the pod lurched and then I knew that we were floating on air. The pod bobbed back and forth a little, responding to Gary’s taps of the control sticks. One seemed to control the rotation of the pod, while the other controlled it’s movement: by the use of both levers and a foot pedal, Gary floated us around the room while still facing the open doorway.
And then the water rippled from impact, for a blue beam of light had shot out from across the void and struck the pod, knocking it back against the wall, where it slid out of the way. The beam hit the wall, which hissed and boiled like frying bacon, and then ceased.
Wasting no time, Gary reoriented the pod and hurtled us straight across the bridge and into the opening on the far side. Well, perhaps towards the opening would be more accurate, for the many dark figures carried what looked like some kind of weapon, and the blue beams that shot out of them held us fairly well in place. After some moments of swearing, Gary let off on the controls, and the pod sank to the ground, some halfway across the bridge.
Gary crossed himself, then pressed the central button again; as the water shimmered and the pod became opaque once more, he pulled from his belt two automatic pistols, checked that they were loaded, turned to me, and grinned. I took the rifle, checked that it had six bullets in it, swallowed, and stood at his side facing the door. I had seen, just before the water started to run back down the walls, that we were surrounded by the dark figures. Then we heard the outer door swing out, and as the handle of the inner hatch twisted to open, Gary whispered to me to keep moving lest they dare to use their weapons on living targets…
The hatch swung inward with a lurch, and in a moment Gary had fired off five shots through the opening and hurled himself outward. I heard more gunshots and him yelling and blue light flashed, and then more of the black clad figures were trying to claw their way inside, and so I swung my rifle and knocked them away, stepped forward into the doorway, and took aim. In the brief glimpses that I was able to get, I could discern only that they were wrapped from head to toe in various black cloth: not a patch of skin anywhere to be seen.
I fired my rifle and two of them fell, another shot took three standing together. I felled more than a dozen men before my gun was empty, and the few remaining I clubbed with the rifle. A slight glow ahead of me caught my eye, and I leapt for the floor as a blue beam of light tracked my movement. No blood had come out of the dark figures when I shot them, but when the beam hit the bridge it hissed and melted, and the bodies burst into flame.
The beam cut off suddenly, and I ran forward and clocked it’s wielder with my rifle, knocking him over the side of the bridge. I turned around and saw only still figures between myself and the pod, and towards the clock, Gary stood amid a pile of bodies. He strode forward to my side, kicking a dead man off the bridge so he had room to stand. His guns he returned to his belt, and with his free hands he pointed to either side along the walkway.
The dark figures were running in terror. The stumbled over each other in their clamor to escape us, and I could hear them screaming in some ancient tongue. Gary spoke then, and this is mostly what he said: “They are the old ones: the first men of this world. They have lived long away from Earth, and rarely fought their own battles even in olden times, preferring to let us fight among ourself while they remained hidden. They existed before the druids, before Egypt, before even the first stones laid in Atlantis or Shamballah. They have hidden their existence and locked away their secrets, and set such terrible traps againts those who dared what we now attempt… Even the might of Old Rome, which moved mountains on the Emperor’s whim, preferred to think them a legend. But that was long ago, and they have largely moved on, leaving slight and ancient defenses against those who dare to believe in legends.”
I began to argue that the slight defenses he spoke of had killed two of us already, but I fell silent, for what I now saw terrified me. The yellow lights that emanated from the many openings began to move out into the vast chamber. And as they cleared the doorways, I could see they were the glowing eyes of dark figures. But the dark shapes that moved towards us now didn’t move at all like men. They did not walk, they slinked like shadows. They fell across the bridge and advanced upon us, and as they approached, I could see they had no substance. The glow of their eyes pierced the soul and chilled the heart. As they grew nearer, the few remaining sounds of the fleeing old ones, even the rumble of the clock behind us, faded and fell silent. These were not the dark clad men who had attacked us before, these were something far more terrible.
I awoke to a loud bang, or more of a quick series of bangs, like all the rifles at a military funeral going off not quite in unison. The great cog I had pitched my tent on shook a little, I smelt a little smoke, and then there was silence. Well, as close as it gets inside a massive clockwork device. I admit, it was surprisingly quiet inside, compared to what you might expect: the finest swiss craftsman could not make a clock this quiet, and yet the entire complex made barely more noise than the grandfather clock that stood in the hallway in my childhood and ticked and tocked it’s way through the night.
What made it even more odd was that there had been a great deal of noise outside the clock, when we had been on the walkway I had barely been able to hear anything but grinding and ticking and whirring. Yet here, inside the contraption, I could sleep soundly until Gary Dirin’s penchant for dynamite woke me.
Well, in any case, I was awake, so I got up and took down my tent, as it were: merely the long rifle, propped up on one end by my pack and the other by Gary Dirin’s pack, with my blanket draped over the whole affair. The cog/floor was slightly warm to the touch, so it made a surprisingly pleasant place to sleep; the tent was merely to ward away the ever present light that came from who knows where but filled the clock with a yellowish glow, that made sleep impossible. Gary had brought his dark glasses: I hadn’t suspected there would be any need for mine.
I rolled the blanket, took up my pack, and lugging Gary’s pack behind me, I ducked into the corridor as the doorway came around, or rather, as I came around, and headed down to find out what Gary was up to. As I had suspected, he had been up to trying to blast open a certain vault-like door, and as I had told him the night before, it hadn’t worked. He wouldn’t admit to it, of course, despite the blacked metal around the hatch and despite the way his left front pocket didn’t hang quite so heavily as before. You have never seen such a comical sight as Gary Dirin, the greatest man I had ever known, sheepishly denying that he had dome something foolish.
I saw little use for getting upset: the dynamite made me more than a little nervous and I was rather glad to be rid of it. And I hadn’t been entirely sure that the door wouldn’t have been blasted clean open: in fact, I had somewhat hoped it would, so as to save us some time and trouble. But it did not, and now we knew, and that was that. So I clapped Gary on the back, thanked him for the wake-up call, handed him his pack, and prepared myself some breakfast.
The door remained stuck fast afterward, much to my dismay. And so we took out the map Gary had pried from the wall the night before, unrolled it, and reviewed again our other route. To our left, a massive chain of sorts ran clanking down out of the ceiling and into the floor. Each link was a large bucket, large enough to hold several men when upright. But the chain was running down, the buckets were tipped over now, and to ride along, we would have to jump up inside one and cling to the bottom, which was the top now, and hold on until, according to the map, it ran to the floor of the vast chamber, into what we assumed was another underground lake, turned around, filled with water, and came back up, to cool the device while it did whatever it was it did.
This, then, was the plan. Except we had no idea of the route other than a simple pictograph on a very thin metal map. What we did know was that while we were holding on to the possibly quite smooth interior of the buckets, we would traverse some distance outside of the clock, where an untold number of our assailants may still be waiting. And then we would be dunked into a lake for who knows how long before we came back up, at which point we would return back into the device, somewhere on the other side of this door, but somewhere safe, we could only hope.
All the faith we had to go on was a passage in Gary’s book, which he had now revealed was not his own work, which described doing exactly this thing in order to reach the “stellar network,” as it was called in the book. This, Gary told me, was our halfway mark, and once past it, the going would be somewhat easier, while at the same time, somewhat harder.
I had some fears as to how this plan would carry out, but I hadn’t come this far to wimp out, and the prospect of working our way back to the top, and trying to fight our way out, without anything to show for it, didn’t exactly appeal to me. I had but one more of the mysterious black bullets, and my rifle gave me little comfort against the terrors we had already faced.
So Gary and I fastened our things securely, stood by the chain, and waited. Time enough to get in sync with the chain’s speed, time to watch and see inside to see that several bars ran around the outside of the buckets that would provide good grips, presuming they held fast long enough to take us down. And then Gary leaped and I leapt after, and we grabbed at the bars and managed to get a good grip, just as the bucket passed neatly through the hole in the floor and down through the machine.
I must admit, the journey down was disappointing. I saw nothing of the factory, if it was a factory, for we passed through a pipe most of the way, punctured occasionally by rooms like the one we had just left, and then we came out the bottom and Gary and I clung as high as we could inside the bucket, for we could see that several dark figures were stationed on the lower rungs of the walkway. But they only patrolled a short ways down, and then we were past them, and heading steadily towards a vast dome at the bottom, which I hadn’t seen before because of the clock being in the way.
And then we entered the dome and went into another dark tunnel and the track curved to one side, and we came out the bottom of what I presumed was another factory of some kind from all the noise. We were nearly horizontal now, and I could see a vast lake below us. Then the bucket hit the bottom, water flowed up around us, we dunked under completely, I panicked, the bucket lurched fully upright, and we came back out and were going up again. And Gary Dirin and I poked our heads out the top of the water just in time to enter another dark tube.
The trip back up was a little more interesting, as we could see that a great many dark figures patrolled the upper reaches of the walkways, and a great many yellow lights shone forth from the walls. But we were not spotted, as far as I could see, and very quickly we came back into the device itself, and the chain ran up a tunnel, and popped out in the center of a large reservoir. We went up a little ways, then suddenly the chain lurched and we turned horizontal, and Gary and I were poured out of the bucket, along with the water, into the pool.
And that was the end of that. We swam to the edge and pulled ourselves out, and looked to one side and saw the same door we had been stuck behind just a few minutes before. I confessed to Gary that I was rather unimpressed with the trip, to which he responded with laughter. What had I expected, he asked, gigantic spinning blades, or perhaps to be dropped with the water directly onto red hot metal, to be boiled away? Cooling systems, as he was quite happy to explain, don’t work like that, the mix of hot and cold is bad for the metal. The parts that get quite hot would be kept immersed in water: this metal, I presume, would not rust, so running it through a constantly fresh supply of cold water would keep its temperature below danger levels. I’m not sure where the water went: perhaps it ran down inside of pipes in the walkway and came then into the dome at the bottom, I could not tell you.
In any case, we were safe and could now make our way through the other side of the factory, and from there, to some seriously dangerous business. Gary seemed to know the way, so I followed him and before long we came to a large sphere, that looked to be of totally different construction than the rest of the complex. Where the gears and cogs were made of smooth seamless metal, unpolished but untextured, and with little or no apparent mechanical workings, this pod, as it were, seemed almost hand made. Rough iron, with visible rivets, double built hinges on the single hatchway, large domed projections evenly spaced about the upper and lower domes. Stepping through the hatchway, it was clear that the pod was about a foot thick, and with the door sealed tight, Gary sealed tight a second hatch on the inside, this one without even the tiny window of the outer hatch.
He told me that the pod would be our transportation for the time being, and that it’s workings were quite unusual. After consulting his book, he pressed a button on the pedestal in the center of the pod, and water began to flow out of the floor grating. Except, it did not pool and rise and fill the pod, as I expected it to. Rather, it quickly covered the floor, and then spread up the walls, and all the way up and around us until it covered the entire interior of the pod, exept for the control pedestal, Gary, and myself.
And then he pushed forward one of the large levers on the pedestal, and the water rippled and slowly the walls seemed to grow transparent: after a minute or so, it seemed as though Gary and I stood in midair in the center of a larger chamber. I reached forwards into the air, and touched the pod wall where I knew it to be, but the only sign of it was the rippling of the air around us, in a circle spreading out until it met itself on the far side of the pod and all the water rippled around us. Gary laughed, and I took a drink.
( apologies for the delay. I got stuck: I knew where i want to go after this bit, but I hadn’t quite figured out how to get there from here. I was hanging out with miles and scott last night and miles made a joke suggestion which I realized was perfect. )
I sincerely wanted to feel bad about the loss of the Spanish brothers, but I was travelling with a man of extraordinary presence. A man of such warmth, such kindness, such wisdom and wit! You are lucky if ever you meet such a man, let alone befriend him. As I had known Gary for some years now, and had only just met Domingo and his brother, it wasn’t long before my heart ached barely at all. They had been good people, but they were gone, and Gary was not, and all other men pale when compared to Gary Dirin.
But even Gary Dirin pales somewhat when confronted with some of the wonders of the Old World. The demon, as it were, must have lived, such as it does, quite nearby, for after merely an hours walking, the stone tunnel shifted smoothly and seamlessly into a metal passage. I didn’t even notice but for the sudden clank of the rifle which served as my walking stick. The metal of the passageway was not shiny or dull or rusted, nor did it gleam or glint in the odd light, nor did it reflect much of it. It seemed more like stone than metal, but it definately clanked against the butt of the rifle, where the stone of the tunnel simply clacked.
Gary Dirin laughed and hurried his pace, and before long, we had walked some ways down in a tight spiral and came suddenly out onto a walkway. Or rather, the passage we had been walking along became suddenly a catwalk. Instead of a smooth cylinder, it was a smoothly cut half tube, about a man’s height across, with a bar running on either side at waist height. What was odd, besides the sudden change, was that the railing had no supporting struts, nor did the walkway appear to be suspended from the ceiling in any way. They simply continued on in a much broader curve off to our right, where some ways off it met up with a stone wall, or a ceiling rather, that sloped downwards, out and away from us.
Gary Dirin stepped out onto the catwalk and looked to his right, laughed and hurried ahead. Seeing no danger, I stepped forwards and was immediately struck by the noise: the passageway had been silent, but here in the open there was a steady grinding and whirring, as of a giant clock’s gears ticking away. It was so loud that I wondered how it was we hadn’t heard it before: it seemed as though it should have echoed up the tunnels… But I wished not to dwell on the tunnels, and so I followed the catwalk with my eyes, spotted Gary Dirin now paused and looking far below us, and looked in that direction to see what was there.
After a moment, I was able to make sense of things. At first, it appeared to be a gigantic ball of the same brownish grey metal as the catwalk, but it was a rippling like a rough sea. Then I was able to make out the details as I caught onto the pattern of movement, and I realized that what I was looking at WAS a gigantic clockwork machine of some sort. The outer layer was a giant mass of gears and wheels and pistons, all moving and pounding and grinding. There were no struts or axles, but between the gaps I could see further layers of machinery underneath the outer shell. Yellow light poured forth from within the construct.
The scale was impossible to tell, except for one thing. The cave we were in, if it was a cave for it appeared to be perfectly spherical, was vast. And the catwalk upon which I stood curved in a steady line around and around and around and down the cave wall, creating a segmented outer layer, before it finally curved back into the cave at the halfway point and went straight in the side of the clockwork mass, right into the center of a massive gear. The entire device, from that perspective, appeared no bigger than my thumb, and the walkway a single hair.
Another walkway led out the other side and then spiraled down the bottom half of the cave, and so, wondering if our path led us to the monstrous machine or simply through it, I hurried down the catwalk to Gary and asked him. But before he could reply the wall opened up and a harsh yellow light shone out upon us. Rough hands reached out to grab me, and I barely got a glimpse of the dark clad figure that wielded them before Gary landed a blow which knocked him back behind the light source, which seemed to bob and weave in the air just inside the doorway.
Now, Gary Dirin was a great bear of a man, and his massive greatcoat and heavy pack seemed as though they would have encumbered ten men to slow action. But quick as a rocket, Gary took a red stick from his coat, struck a match across his cheek, lit the fuse on what I realized was a stick of dynamite, and tossed the stick into the room, all this with his right hand. In the meantime his left hand was busily retrieving the collapsable fishing rod which I realized he had stowed in one of his many pockets after I retreived the rifle, and hooking it to his belt.
Once the dynamite was hissing inside the chamber and his other hand was free, he hooked the fishing line to itself around the railing, grabbed me about the waist, and tossed the both of us over the edge and down into the vast chamber. All this happened in the span of time it took our attacker to regain his footing and lunge for us again, but it was too late, and down down we plummeted, the line reeling out above us.
I saw Gary preparing a second stick of dynamite, and two things happened then. First, the dynamite above us went off, and sent the dark figure over the railing and down past us, where I watched him smash into the clockwork mass and disappear inside it, presumably to his death. Second, the line ran out and we stopped falling with an awful lurch.
It had been the longest fishing line available for sale, intended for deep sea fishing boats, but still we had barely fallen a third of the way to the clockwork device. As I watched Gary fish for another match, and he asked me to draw the hunting knife I had procured for the journey, I realized with some dread what his plan for the moment was. Still, this was Gary Dirin, and so I trusted him, more or less.
It is worth noting at this point that on many occasions, especially late and drunken ones in pubs of ill repute, Gary Dirin had put forth for us his theory that most of life’s problems could be solved with dynamite. Now, I had known Gary for quite some time, and although this was only the third occasion on which I had seen him see fit to test this theory, I knew well that the left front pocket of his greatcoat almost always contained seven sticks of dynamite, which is all it would hold comfortably. And although he never smoked, he invariably had a box of matches on his person, which he used mostly to light our pipes, as we never remembered the important things.
In any event, he had a fair amount of experience with explosives, and he often spoke fondly of his years as blast-master for the Russian railroads… I trusted that he knew what he was doing. So, clinging tightly to his pack, after he had lit the fuse and dropped the stick of dynamite and counted to three, I took my knife to the taut line and it snapped and we dropped. Gary rolled over so that he was below me, and then time seemed to slow down… I have been told that your life flashes before your eyes in the moment before you die, but I’m not dead yet, so I can’t complain that mine did not. I was simply scared out of my wits by the fall, this time without a line to catch us.
And then the dynamite went off, and as he had intended, the blast caught us perfectly and slowed our descent enough that we landed only slightly harshly on one of the massive gears of the clock. And we both sat up and took drinks from our flasks and laughed deeply as we had on many occasions, and tried to forget the horrible peril we had just endured.
It was the sudden appearance of thousands of openings in the cavern wall, and dark shapes silhoetted in the yellow doorways, that prompted us to slip down the stairway recessed into the gear and take shelter inside the clockwork device.
Legend tells us of Gary Dirin, a man who was considered even in King Arthur’s time to be a myth. Over time, the stories have been changed and exaggerated in the telling, but this much they seem to hold in common:
Of course, with modern historical methods, we can dispense with many of the obviously fictional details, such as his ability to fly, or that he could not be harmed by any weapon of this world. It seems clear that many of his so-called “magical” abilities were really martial arts skills learned on a trip to the East, which explains the gap in his history from his 20s to his 30s. Indeed, Gary Dirin appears to have been a trained ninja of the highest order. To the mostly untrained and clumsy swordsmen of ancient Scotland, his abilities would have seemed magical, and the grace with which he carried them out would no doubt account for reports of his unearthly speed. Training in pressure points would account for stories that he could kill with a touch, and ninja stealth explains his ability to “disappear in broad daylight.”
Of his untimely death, little is recorded, and what details there are, seem to conflict with one another. Most historians dismiss the story of Gary Dirin as folklore, and point to the fact that his death fits nicely into the archetype of the “once and future king,” much like Arthur and Charlemaign. But how to explain the commonly held belief even today among the Scotish natives that Gary Dirin ascended into the heavens, promising to return one day and reward those who remain faithful to him, and drive out the descendants of the 7 hills (an obvious reference to Rome)? Most people in Scotland dismiss King Arthur as a children’s tale, but any attempt to debunk Gary Dirin is met with a cold shoulder and an invitation to leave. People seem to see Gary Dirin less as a historical figure, and more as a personal friend, away on business. And how to explain the fact that the Catholic Church in Scotland maintains an ancient piece of armor which bears an uncanny resemblance to a modern three-piece suit, and a katana which carbon dating cannot place? And what of the faint impressions of what appears to be the letters “GD” carved into a rock at Stonehenge… not on the side of one of the uprights, but on the TOP of one of the lintels? And though many dismiss it as a sheer coincidence or a trick of the light, one cannot deny the fact that when the sun is setting, the shadows cast from the hills in the region of Fundengrough look from the air to be a handsome face, winking at the viewer.
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