(diaryland) November 19, 2009 - 9:37 a.m.

I think that the chapter after this one is going to be bloody hard to write. And then the rest of my novel should write itself. I hope. But I'm scared of writing Chapter the Fifteenth.

Chapter the Fourteenth

After a lengthy, daydreamy toilet break, I ate a biscuit that was lying around on the kitchen bench (couldn�t tell if it was sweet or salty; maybe neither) and resumed my mission. I went back out into the yard and searched for the elusive fingers of Vaughn Bourbon. Vaughn was tall. His fingers were supposed to be long. The day wore on, the shadows went away and the sun made my skin go all pink. I wished I could have just tanned for once in my life. My driver�s side arm seemed to be the only thing that felt like going brown on my entire body. Maybe it had just gotten the hang of it from all that trucking.

After a parched search, I could only come across two fingers. They were lying near each other on the grass near the driveway. I was stumped about the other eight. Maybe some magpies had found them and were chowing down on them right now. I know I would. If I were a magpie, that is.

Maybe some of them had launched themselves vertically at great speeds out of the fountain and had landed on the roof. I sure as hell wasn�t getting up there. Vaughn would just have to live without them.

The shadows reappeared and wended their way across the yard. The day was drawing to a close. As usual, I had tried to do one thing and it took all day not to do it properly. At least when I was driving my truck, it was very easy to point it in one direction and get from A to B. So, when I was trucking around, delivering experimental bicycles to the nation, I was doing one thing per day but it was a big thing. And I could listen to the radio. Out here, it was just me and the scary fountain, weird tentative silence, and the statue that gained strength when I slept. That�s not conducive to a get-things-done kind of working environment.

It was getting too dark to search anymore. I went inside and wrote Vaughn an e-mail.

hey. got two fingers & the ear. hope that�s cool with you cos i can�t find more. could be anywhere, really. should i send them back in now?

By midnight, I hadn�t received a reply.

I was like a zombie by now; so tired I could barely even swallow. I could barely even breathe. I thought, I gotta get some sleep here. I mean, sure it�s one thing accidentally getting a guy caught in your fountain, but it�s another thing to spend your time waiting for his e-mails all day and all night just in case he needs a favour, or he�s not quite ready to get his ear back right now. I had to let my droopy eyes close completely within about five minutes. There was no choice.

So I made do with two fingers and a slightly flattened ear and went back outside. I was going to go to bed in five minutes. Fuck brushing my teeth, I thought as I stood on the porch. Too hard. Throw fingers into fountain, bed. Nothing in between.

The feeling of ions in the air was stronger than the night before. I could just about smell lightning it the air, but the stars were out and it was completely cloudless. Over the last couple of nights, the moon was starting to become halved and the garden was less generous in its midnight visuals than it had been in the last few days. The fountain was in shadow.

I didn�t like this. The fountain in shadow was a very different thing to a moonlit fountain. The fountain in shadow could do anything. A moonlit fountain could still do anything but at least I�d know about it sooner. I�d never seen the fountain look so scary.

I decided not to risk it. I felt like it wanted to trick me. I felt like the statue knew what I was about to do. I didn�t know whether it approved. It had told me to stop checking my e-mails. It had told me not to worry about Vaughn.

I went inside and grabbed the torch near the sleeping bag and went outside again. I shone it on the fountain. The light was so weak, but everything looked dimly OK, but I still didn�t trust it. I ran down the driveway and into the back yard. The back porch had a sensor light on it. I�d never known that. I�d never bothered to go out there at night.

It was like a jungle. Shiny, big leafed plants threatened from all sides, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted the long grabby thing that stuck out of the pool.

I went over to the pool and just as I fished the long-handled leaf tongs I caught my reflection in the muck. The things I had been trying to cope with for the last year had finally manifested themselves on my face in the last week. My hair hadn�t seen a hairbrush in yonks. My eyes looked sad. The brown, leafy reflection broke up, then disappeared. I ran back down the driveway.

I took one of the fingers out of my pocket and put it in the end of the tongs thing. That was a hard job in itself. Then, shakily, I reached out with it and attempted to aim it right into the top of the fountain in order to feed it in. It was all wobbly. I had two metres of this long grabby thing to control. Just to get it to reach above my head was a herculean effort, let alone get it anywhere near the fountain with my posture in ready-to-flee-if-I-start-to-get-sucked-in-too kind of pose.

When I had it there, ten centimetres above the tip of the fountain, shaky, I let go. Nothing happened. Well, gravity happened. The finger landed in the top tier. That was where the water was supposed to collect itself and then tinkle down to the next level, and then stream down the statues� bodies into the pond below, to be sucked up through the bottom, only to return again.

I wished my Biff�s Fleet hat would return again. I wished that Vaughn Bourbon would return again. I wished everything returned again.

Something did happen, though. The finger slowly rose from the top tier like a sunrise. It turned on its end with careful dignity, stood there for about four seconds, and then the fountain ate it. Good.

Then a different finger rose from the garden bed, and both thumbs from a flowering bulb area near the letterbox. I�d thought I�d looked pretty thoroughly over there. They all rose like ghosts, directed themselves to the fountain, waited in line politely, and disappeared in the same way. It was kind of beautiful to watch, considering the subject matter.

No other fingers came to join the mass exodus. Maybe they had really been eaten by magpies. Maybe Vaughn in his ruptured state couldn�t count the exact number of fingers he�d lost very well.

Suddenly, I realised something was tugging the deep pocket of my denim skirt. I looked down. It was an ear shape and a finger shape, trying to get out.

At this point, I freaked out slightly. I grabbed the extremities out of my pocket and threw them at the fountain like a girl, yelling, �Yeurrrgghhh!� which was my revolted or panicked exclamation of choice for such situations. While I watched the ear spin around and get sucked into the fountain like a leaf down a drain, the finger did not fare quite as well. It hit a statue with a beard and shattered into about seven bits, sending out clouds of dust where it had splintered.

It made an attempt at reconstruction on the fly, didn�t do a very good job, and disappeared as well.

Fingers don�t do that. They don�t shatter. Not fingers that had parted ways with their owners only last night. There was something wrong with these fingers and this ear. But I was so caught up in the spectacle that I didn�t think twice about it. I could have run inside and warned Vaughn by e-mail. I could have said, �Hey, your fingers are really brittle, FYI.� Even if he hadn�t read it, I could have said, yeah, at least I tried. But, of course, I did no such thing. No such thing even occurred to me. All I did was watch the little dust clouds melt away.

The air thickened up. Swirls of impossible, invisible chemical reactions filled the atmosphere in my front yard.

I decided to wait for one minute.

A tiny thing shot out of the fountain and landed on the grass in front of me nearly silently; just a tiny, microscopic thud. I bent down, creaking in exhaustion and turned on the torch. There was no way I was going to pick whatever it was up. I had no idea where it had been.

It was a little toy soldier. A plastic one. It was some kind of infantry guy, lunging, with a large gun. It was bright red.

Then another plastic figure whizzed out of the fountain and landed in a gentle arc. This one was bright blue. And another. Bright green. They came out like light rain and nestled themselves in the grass. A couple of them started to hit me but it didn�t hurt or anything. It was just mildly annoying.

I was absolutely knackered. If this was all, I didn�t feel like being continually rained on by colourful plastic soldiers, so I dragged myself to bed. Not my normal bed; the sleeping bag near the TV, but the king size bed in the cavernous main bedroom next to the front door. I couldn�t be fucked going down the hall. Too bloody hard. And it was way too hot that night for a sleeping bag anyway.

I didn�t check my computer. I didn�t wait for a thankyou note from Vaughn.

I left the door open, slumped on the bed without moving the covers, barely making a dint in its vast silkiness, and blasted off to sleep. A dead kind of sleep. I was wrecked. I can�t stress that enough. If I�d been awake, I would have heard the tiny thuds of rainbow soldiers landing in my yard for some time. But I wasn�t. I was dreaming of nothing, snoring and in a sweaty foetus position.

Little did I know that I was not to get very much sleep after all that night. Little did I know that this was going to be the best night of my short life.