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Chapter one.
It was nearing 4:00 and things were winding down at the Fun Zone amusement park. In some places, rides literally wound their cables on and off their spools, placing cars in their respective cages for the night, plastic eyes and animal skins greasy from two many visitors and too few washcloths. In others, employees counted cash drawers, smoked cigarettes and loosened comically tight clothing and exaggerated bowties. There were even a few tired clowns smoking Pyramid cigarettes, shuffling their unfortunately large shoes in the dying heat of another day standing in the hateful swelter of the south Texas shoreline.
Of course, they weren’t closed yet, and a few stray families swirled with candy stained children, some of them screaming, some crying, others beginning to fall asleep where they stood. Watchful mothers kept a hawk’s eye on the slow trickle of current and future alcoholics moving in and out of the Fun Zone, some of them employees, some of them lonely employers and others that could only be described in one apt word: bums. Enter the matchstick man.
The matchstick man did not look like a match. Or a stick for that matter. Sitting on his green public park bench, fingers poking through its cracked diamonds of mold colored plastic, he looked rather like a boulder-perched completely out of place and somehow socially invisible. The matchstick man was old. His gray hair poked out of the collar of his gray coat like a cauliflower drowning in pre-ground pepper, completing the roundness of his mountain of clothes that had begun around his midriff nearly 35,000 years ago.
Most people who noticed him (a rare occurrence) would have thought him to be of african origin. While this wasn’t technically untrue, the matchstick man’s true ethnicity would have been completely alien to those who chose to talk to him, let alone pay his face more than a cursory glance. His skin was rather dark, but his features were unlike anything any of the amusement park workers exhibited with or without makeup. His head was massive (despite his unimpressive stature) supporting wide features which all seemed to lead to a truly, profoundly, mountainous nose. His chin did not exist. It never had. Perhaps most noticeably, his constantly furled eyebrows protruded, shadowing his large and discerning eyes in a ledge of flesh that distracted from his massive, nearly pitch black irises.
His ridgeline of hairy eyebrows had been furled even more than usual on this day. While perched on his bench like a lost boulder, occasionally feeding pigeons and less occasionally scaring children, he had been making a decision. It was an immense decision. A decision of great importance. A decision that would risk his life and possibly those of others. He was almost out of matches. He was slowly coming to terms with the reality that he would need to acquire more. stroking the matchbook in the right pocket of his grubby coat while making eye contact with a pigeon, he decided he had better stand up.
The matchstick man rose from his bench with surprising grace, and began to hurriedly pace into the Fun Zone. He made multiple turns, passing tired workers and crunching popcorn under his nearly nonexistent shoes. He moved with surprising speed, pausing every now and then to make sure he was moving unobserved. When he reached his destination, he took one final glace behind his shoulder before slipping through the green-painted door of a run down shed next to Hanks Hall of Mirrors.
Once inside, he shut the door tight, throwing it’s pitiful deadbolt before wadding up his jacket to absorb the light streaming through the splintered door jam. He squatted on the plywood floor and looked into the deep, all-encompassing blackness of the tool shed. He breathed in the musty air. He listened to its creaks and groans. He silenced himself from the inside out. In one hand he held a white matchbook, empty save for two pitch black matchsticks. The matches were black. the kind of black that drinks light, The kind of black that, even in full sun at the equator, would still be a void of form and color. It was not the blackness of night or the blackness of the deepest cave because even those have warmth, even they emit some form of energy. Even through the white paper, the matchstick man could feel the leeching cold of those thin, black cylinders. They drank energy. Despite their size, the matches the strange man carried felt large. even from feet away one could feel it, the raising of the hairs on your neck, the feeling of being watched in an old house, the momentary disorientation of stepping off a boat onto still land and knowing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something isn’t right.
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Interlude
One of the most important things a person can learn is the certainty that you will never know everything. Few people understand this. Even fewer still are rightfully terrified of the implications of this truth. There is an incredible amount of completely, or rather, seemingly improbable things occurring right this moment. Imagine the amount of things you know. The amount of things you have seen, all the individual words, the memories, shapes, colors and feelings. If you counted them, the number would likely be incredibly large. And rightfully so! The human mind is an incredible piece of machinery. Now imagine the amount of things you have never seen, the amount of things that have been skillfully and completely hidden from you and those that you simply cannot understand. I assure you the number is infinite.
The truth is incredibly strange. Did you know there was a species of large bipedal dinosaur that developed complex language and rudimentary tool use?. They built small wood villages, made stone tools and even mastered fire. And they were covered head to toe in soft pink feathers. Imagine that! They were telling stories around the campfire, laughing, building families and living full lives under the alien skies of seventy million years ago, bright pink. And that is the truth. It happened.
The matchstick man is one of those truths. One of those secrets that no one will ever know because it was so deftly woven, so deeply folded into the corners of our worldly experience that seemingly, it could cease to exist and no one would even notice.
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The Matchstick man was squatting. He was holding a match. Most matches must be struck upon a strip of a certain chemical, or if they’re really fancy, some form of friction sufficient to cause combustion. But this is no ordinary match. The matches the matchstick man carries are not meant for starting fires, but they are meant for burning. Specifically, they burn holes in space and time. Holes that take you where and when you want to go. To strike a Black Match all one need do is think of a place and a time to be there. On the dirt floor of the toolshed, The matchstick man did exactly that.
A ripple of light expanded, waving and vibrating like a bubble of air rising and growing as it finds its way to the surface of the sea. The portal leaked white light onto the dirty walls. The matchstick man grabbed his coat and took one final look behind him, then disappeared into the beyond.
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The Wave Rail Costco shopping center is a disturbing place. It lies on the inside edge of the wave rail, which is a hollow, communal, egg-shaped spaceship the size of a small moon. Being a bulk grocery and department store on an interstellar spaceship, the people who inhabit it’s premises are both in need of supplies and have little else to do with their time on their month-long journey between star systems. The actual building is a simple gray warehouse built on one of the few level sections of the interior hull. It’s a standard Costco. They sell cheap electronics and lawn chairs, they have shrimp scampi sample booths and Kirkland brand jeans. Deep in a shaded corner of the olive oil section, a bubble of light expands and oscillates, throwing a gentle white glow onto the concrete floor and plastic food packaging.
The matchstick man gingerly stepped out of his portal, Space and time swirling in instability about his shoulders. The aisle was empty. The footsteps of bored families and retirees echoed in the shallow distance, furling his copious eyebrows but permitting him to continue on. The portal behind him slowly shut, replacing the bent light beams it had shouldered aside in strange silence as the Matchstick man rehearsed his next move.
He had been here before, at a different time when the store was in its final, crumbling days. and once again, long, long ago when the wave rail was home to the grand bazaar, the greatest market known to galactic civilization. But, in this slice of time, Costco is still selling hot dogs and blue jeans. And more to the point, it still sat above a complex of ancient storage tunnels where he could find one of the few known distributors of Black Matches.
The tunnels are hard to find. The last time the Matchstick man found the entrance, it was under the optometrist’s office and buried in feet of rubble and cheap glasses. This time, the optometrist was presumably still up and running and thus much harder to break into. Unfortunately, having little time and no money, the matchstick man could not afford to make an appointment. He could not be sneaky. He would have to make a dramatic entrance.
Striding quickly through the aisles, the matchstick man found his way to the gardening center and looked for the heaviest axe he could find. He attracted stares of all kinds, but continued hefting his potential weapons and testing their balance, families passed by with hefty shopping carts. Finally, he found just what he was looking for. The axe had an orange and black rubberized handle and a name printed in large block letters with a large number somewhere at the end. He thought it was a number, but he wasn’t sure. The Matchstick man couldn’t read.
Hefting his axe over his shoulder, the Matchstick man strode out into the open plain of costco’s clothing section, past trail mix and candy bar sample stations, past the books and through the mostly empty jewelry section. Though short and round, he moved fast, and picked up speed as he rounded the corner to the optometrists office. His feet began to skip, then sputter, then rumble into action as he broke into a run, his whole unlikely form barreling at a large office window in an expression of pure commitment, axe raised above his head. He unleashed a powerful scream. The window didn’t stand a chance.
Glass crashed onto the shoe-streaked linoleum of the office floor, clattering and tinkling in concert with the heavy thump of a small, sturdy man slamming to the ground in the middle of an eye doctor appointment. Rolling to a stop, the Matchstick man thrust himself to his feet with a huff and turned to see a woman in a white lab coat staring in shock with a clipboard in her hand. An old man sat in an examination chair next to her, clutching his chest and making choking noises. They had no idea what was going on. The matchstick man stared back at the woman for a moment before asking a question:
“where is the trap door?” he said calmly. The woman continued to stare. After a few moments, the matchstick man remembered that he never learned the language for this time period, and furthermore, wasn’t likely to get anything out of the doctor because she probably didn’t know about the secret trapdoor. That’s why it was a secret.
“Excuse me” he said and brushed past her to the closet door, which he promptly chopped open with his axe. Once inside, he proceeded to throw cardboard boxes of eyeglasses, frames and contact lenses onto the glass strewn floor. The doctor left the room. The old man coughed a little, but it was hard to hear over all the shelf chopping and box kicking he was doing. Once he found the floor, he chopped at the linoleum until it peeled away to reveal the grey-black hull material of the Wave Rail. A man holding a weapon was yelling at him through the broken window. Peeling further, he found exactly what he was looking for: a shallow indent with a pull-ring. He lifted the ring and tugged upwards, lifting a hatch from the ground just big enough to slip through. The man with the weapon began to yell louder. Looking around at the small disaster he created, he furled his thick brow once more and hopped down into the hatch and closed it just in time to hear a loud bang as the man with the weapon decided to shoot at him. Landing with a grunt on the tunnel floor, the matchstick man thought briefly I’m getting too old for this.
The wave rail storage tunnels were originally designed as a transport system for moving about the ship, but over the thousands of years of its operation they slowly became prized real-estate as things in the inner decks got crowded and built over. Whole sections of the tunnels were commandeered and shut off, others filled with trash and waste of all kinds. Few were preserved and fewer still were accessible. This tunnel was special, as it not only remained unclaimed, but also unaltered since the construction of the mighty ship. It’s walls were mostly smooth, with the exception of signs and access panels carved in bass relief into the ancient, dark, stone-like walls of the hull. It was black and humid. The Matchstick man took a moment to appreciate the quiet and briefly wondered how things were going above him. Probably bad he thought. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He was on a mission.
Coursing through the dark tunnels, the Matchstick man felt the panels, carvings which had no discernable meaning to him, looking for a sign. After few minutes of roaming around, he found it: a small incision the size and shape of a Black Match. Behind him, he heard the thump of boots hitting the hard floor, hushed voices echoing over the sound of radio transmissions. He didn’t have long.
From his pocket, he pulled out his final match and plucked it from its white booklet. Carefully, he inserted it into the key slot and snapped it into place. The footsteps were getting louder. The panel on the wall rippled, what little ambient light there was bent softly, then violently as a hole made of light expanded in the wall. The voices were just around the corner. The matchstick man looked backwards and stepped through the doorway as a black boot began to round the corner. The light rippled, a shout started and abruptly ceased, and the wall closed quickly behind him.
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The Black Match is a mysterious thing. The kind of thing that is gifted and received in myths. It is the stuff of legend. The few who even know of its existence doubt the power of its abilities. They have been found in a variety of contexts, have been claimed as an invention by a variety of civilizations and have been used for purposes both benevolent and nefarious. Not even the matchstick man knows where they come from, despite being quite talented at finding them. The people who built the wave rail knew of the existence of the Black Match but rarely used them, fearing the consequences of their actions. The matchstick man understood this fear, he used his matches sparingly and only to accomplish the most important work. There are terrible and evil forces in the universe. He is not one of them.
The room was bright white and glowing. The matchstick man remembered this. In the center of the room there was a small table. He remembered this as well. On the table there was a small slot. The empty matchbook was still in his hand. He closed it sentimentally and briefly hesitated before sliding it into the slot. It fell for a moment, then immediately returned through the slot into his waiting hand. It was now full of matches. He opened it and counted them. There were 23, one more than the last time and two more than the time before. Something clicked in the matchstick man’s head and for a moment his brow unfurled. Of course he thought. In this moment of reverie he failed to hear the soft step of another person entering the room. It took him a moment to notice her.
For the first time that day, the matchstick man was surprised. Looking up from his matchbook he took a startled step backwards, his eyebrows raising to reveal the bright whites of his seldom seen eyes. They stood there, staring at each other.
“who are you?” he asked after a moment. The woman in front of him looked confused, then an understanding crossed her face.
“we haven’t met yet, but I was told you had a plan for me” she said. She was serious looking, short with buzzed hair and an ugly scar on her cheek. She wore a black cloak and an object, something long and thin, across her back. Looking closer, the matchstick man could see a redness around her eyes. She had recently been crying.
“yes” the matchstick man said slowly “of course”. He looked back down at the matchbook in his hands and noticed an extra match. 24. There were 24 matches.
“of course” he said again. He looked up and saw the white light of the room glowing in her dark eyes. There were tears in them. They looked at each other for a moment. And a comfortable, but strange silence began to spread.
“are you okay?” the Matchstick man finally asked, with clear apprehension.
“no” replied Una Killmaster.
So it begins. He thought.
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