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(diaryland) November 03, 2009 - 7:49 p.m.

Gripping melodrama Balwyn Fountain, next installment.

Chapter the Third

Because I could, I slept again. I slept all night and slept until the start of The View again. At this point, I had finally begun to get hungry. Things seemed less scary in the daytime, with a whole day�s perspective on the Atmospheric Skull thing. I still kept my sunglasses on, though. They were normal people�s sunglasses, so they took up most of my face. I have a small face.

I threw the metaphorically protective blanket that had been pretending to be a tent on the couch and climbed over the chairs. The View was going on about easy dinner party thingomebobs you could make to keep people�s tummies from grumbling while you faffed about in the kitchen preparing the real stuff. Whoopi Goldberg was starting to get really worked up about what cream cheese was the right cream cheese to use as I left the room. It was time to go to the kitchen.

I happened to glance to the left towards the now foreboding seeming front door as I made my way across the hall, generally doubting there was actually anything in the pantry. What I just managed to see out of the frosted glass sidelights all the way down at the front door was eminently worrying.

It was more worrying than the Atmospheric Skull, in my opinion. Maybe your opinion would be different.

What I glimpsed made me a lot less hungry than I was before. There was a lot of flowy looking stuff in my front yard, and it was red. It resembled what would come out of a mythical giant�s neck artery if it had just gotten its head cut off and it was in my yard, presuming mythical giants had blood closely resembling our own.

I put the sunglasses on slightly more firmly and tiptoed towards the front door. I had no idea where I�d left the badminton racquet last night, but I figured the torrent of blood in my front yard would just fly on through it anyway.

I did the safety chain thing with my front door and opened it a crack.

Yep, blood. Or, hey, wait a sec. Not actually blood. Just reams and reams of blood red cloth being thrown in my general direction, and every general direction, for that matter. It was piling up on the ground, and it must have been going for a while, because it was nearly a metre deep in some places. The cloth looked like fine silk.

My first thought was that the lady across the road was behind it. I looked around through the torrents of red cloth, over the top of my sunglasses, but nobody was there. The only sound that was coming from this weird event was the swooshing of silk on silk.

I looked up. It was all coming out the top of the fountain, somehow.

I�d forgotten how to turn the fountain off. I don�t know why I thought it would help, but it seemed like the best idea at the time.

I waded through the ever-increasing torrents of red silk, and made it to the fountain. My fountain was pretty big; it was about two metres tall and it had naked guys carved all over it, pretending to hold up all the higher tiers. I climbed onto the base of the fountain, fumbling around, trying to find the little black box that made it go, turning my head to the side so that the facefuls of silk slid off. Thank God this was silk, and not woollens. I could have died quite quickly in woollens.

I found the switch, and flicked it on. Nothing happened. By nothing happened, I mean that shitloads of red silk were still invading my front yard. I switched it off. Same outcome.

I jumped off the fountain and got tangled. This near-silent, swooshing silk nightmare was getting too real. I began to get buried in the hundreds of thousands of folds. Where was the stupid made-up lady from across the road when you needed her, anyway?

In a panic, just as my hugely sunglassed face was about to disappear into the swooshing folds for good, I screamed, �Stop!�

And, it stopped. I wish I�d thought of that before. Then the Atmospheric Skull presumably could have been cleaned up much earlier. Maybe. Were there any rules to this?

I could hardly breathe under all that fabric. It probably took about half an hour of huffing and puffing and incredibly slow freestyle to get back onto unfabricked land.

I stood on the porch, out of breath, baffled. The fountain looked innocent again.

�Start!� I yelled, just to see what would happen.

Nothing happened; not even an echo. The shitloads of fabric in my yard deadened my yell so it didn�t sound right. It made me sound like I was in a recording studio.

The street beyond my property went about its business being a street. My truck was still there, wedged in the gate. So, nearly everything was still normal.

I adjusted my sunglases, estimated the volume of red silk lying around in my front yard, and went inside and put it up for auction on eBay.

�Unknown quantity of red silk of unknown origin. Could be tonnes. Local pickup only.�

I couldn�t think of anything else to write.

I already had one star in my eBay account, as I�d previously sold a cache of microfibre bicycles that fell off the back of my truck one day a couple of months ago. I�d figured it was ethically OK since Biff�s truck company paid him insurance for the incident and everything. The lot of 500 had gone for about sixty bucks, as far as I can remember. I suppose nobody is really all that interested in a large tangle of microfibre bikes. Or maybe it had been the fault of my under enthusiastic product description that one time.

�Tangle of 500 microfibre bikes. Local pickup only.� I hadn�t included a photograph.

Things were looking slightly more promising with this lot. Someone put a bid on the fabric within about five minutes. So, I was at least going to get the start price of two bucks. This was the best I could make out of a bad situation. Technically, I guess I should have included the time it took to wade out of the pile of cloth as consideration in my starting price, but I was feeling generous.

I did have the vague thought that I could sell the fountain too, since the skull came out of it and the cloth came out of it, as far as I could tell, and I didn�t like these things. But I was afraid. What would happen if the lucky bidder attached a hook to the fountain, pulled it out of the ground, lifted the thing onto their ute, and started a new life together in a lovely garden somewhere and I was left with a gaping mouth to hell in the front yard? Nosiree. I would prefer the free fabric and macabre cloud formations over that any day.

Stupid fucking fountain. I was too scared to say that aloud.

After that, I set to eating. I opened the pantry up and settled for cashews dipped in vegemite. Salty, but it did the trick.

Then, predictably, I fell asleep in front of the telly again.

I had a dream that I was lying on a hot road out in the country. It was like an identikit of all the roads I had travelled on in the last year. The sky was searing blue, and the air was wiggling. A truck drove straight over the top of me. Then another one, and another one.

I woke up, and realised that a thunderstorm had descended upon my suburb.

Shit, I thought. I hoped the haunted red silk of unknown tonnage was colourfast.

As I wandered down the hallway, the thunder rolled in, closer. It was a sheet lightning storm. Shards of light invaded the hallway via the sidelights around the front door every five seconds or so, and it sounded like the thunder was being choked in a bucket of water.

I opened the front door in a particularly spectacular peal of lightning � it lit up the front yard with a bluish glow.

The sea of red silk had gone. My front yard was exactly as it was normally, except more bluish and thundery.

The first thing I thought was that I was going to get in big trouble with the faceless eBay team for false advertising or false auctioning or something. I�d heard of people getting banned because they were trying to sell Elvis� urine samples but then someone who bought one of them DNA tested it and it turned out that it was only from Princess Margaret. I didn�t want that kind of trouble, but I figured that I could explain the truth; at least partially. I�d omit the potential magical fountain seemingly spontaneously generating the cloth bit.

The next thing that crossed my mind was the fact that the bitch from across the road probably took it all just to be a bitch and used it for new curtains she wasn�t even going to use, or sent it to the council along with a letter of complaint to try and get me driven out of the leafy suburb, or worse. From what I could tell of my brief encounter with her, anything could be going through that crazy woman�s mind at any time.

And then it occurred to me that she couldn�t have gotten into my yard to steal the mass of fabric because my truck was completely blocking the way in. And then it also occurred to me that she probably couldn�t have gotten into my yard the first time because my truck had been in exactly the same spot since I�d gotten home. And then it occurred to me that I had never seen that lady before, and she was wearing amounts of make-up that no sane person would ever dare to wear in real life, including drag queen shows maybe.

I looked at the fountain. I could have sworn that one of the Parian marble naked guys holding it up had turned around a bit, was smiling shyly, and just as the storm passed over my house and illuminated every nook of my domain, gave me a wink.

Clearly, the events of the past year had caught up to me. I had, in fact, gone completely and utterly insane.

I decided to not acknowledge any winking Atlantes on my fountain. I went inside, and thought of a nice e-mail I could write to the person who had already bid on the imaginary fabric. As I began to compose my electronic apologetic epistle to silkfreak_1002, a small advertisement happened to catch my eye at the side of my �compose message� box, and it just so happened to reflect my exact state of mind as so many of those google ads are want to do. It said -

ACEPHALUS

Feeling like you lost your head you own?
Support group for Wheel of Fortune
Extreme of good and bad in your life?
More than others? You got win and lost at same time?
Join this new group. Talk and feel less extreme.
Meet those feeling similar or same.

Hold by Dr. A. Rajagopalachari
Electronic mails to: dra�[email protected]

$12.00 per session
Private health care fund forgot price for session but less

It also had a google maps thing that looked like it was held under an overpass at Gardenvale train station. I figured that would be OK to get to. It was also probably a good idea to finally exorcise my demons in a group setting before I became lots more insane and it was too late. Maybe I would actually also hold real conversations with people.

So I wrote an expression of interest. I immediately got an e-mail back.

�Good. Comming [sic] tomorrow at 7:30 evening. Cool?�

I wrote back, �Cool.�

I went back out into the hallway and looked out into my front yard through the sidelights. The storm had moved on. Outside was just black, flat darkness. I wondered if anything was lurking out there, in the shade. If it was, I figured, remembering that I had diagnosed myself as clinically insane about ten minutes ago, it was all just pretendies.

I kept my sunglasses on all that night and all the next day too.

I forgot to mention. Things were still going to get worse.




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