A skull. A skull with horns, and green fire where the eyes should be.
The name wouldn't come, and neither would anything it did. His memory only handed him a ten-year-old reaching for the remote.
Ray pushed at it for a while longer and got nothing but a headache. Whatever that thing was, his ten-year-old self had decided not to look, and eight years later he was paying for it.
"Okay. Later." He said it to get himself moving.
The shadows in the gully had gotten long. He looked at them, then at the sky, and thought about craters wide enough to park a forklift in. Night was coming, and the last one had taught him what walked around out here after dark. He needed walls, and a door if he was lucky.
Finn and Jake had gone down the gully toward the west. Ray picked up the sword and went east.
He had reasons, and he went over them as he walked to make sure they still held. If those two found him, there would be questions, and he didn't have one answer that didn't sound insane. He needed a story first: where he was from, how he got here, why he was dressed like this. Until he had one, he was staying out of everybody's way.
He tried a few on the way down. Amnesia was the classic, and he dropped it fast; he was a terrible actor, and one careless sentence about pizza would blow it.
"A village far away" needed a village, and a name for it, and every name he came up with sounded like a fast food chain. The truth never even got a turn. By the time he reached the bottom of the ridge, he had two bad lies and no good one.
The ridge ran down into a shallow valley with a stream at the bottom, and he followed the water because that had worked yesterday. The cramps had faded to a dull knot, and his tongue was his own again. His heels were another matter. Both blisters had opened somewhere along the way, and he was walking on the sides of his feet like a man crossing hot sand.
The stream led him into a patch of woods. It was darker under the trees, which he didn't like, but the trunks grew close together and nothing the size of last night's visitor was going to fit between them. He kept the water on his left and kept going.
He stopped once to drink and to wash two days of dirt off his face, and he caught his reflection before the water broke it up. There was mud to his elbows, a root scratch across one cheek, and hair standing in every direction. He looked like something a cat had dragged out of a mall, which was accurate. He got up and walked on until the light turned orange.
He almost walked past the cabin.
It sat back from the stream in a clearing the woods had half taken back, small and square, with a stone chimney and moss on the roof. The porch had lost a step. There was no smoke and no light, and the grass in front of the door stood knee-high.
Ray stopped at the edge of the clearing and watched it until the sky had gone from orange to purple. Nothing moved in there.
"Hello?" His voice cracked from a day of barely using it. He tried again, louder. "Anybody home?"
Nobody was. He climbed the porch, stepped over the gap, and stopped in front of the door.
Someone had scratched a letter into the wood at eye level. It was a capital M, as tall as his hand, cut deep and a little crooked, like a kid had done it with something too big for his hand. The edges had gone grey with weather.
'M for what?' He ran his thumb along the groove and went through the little he remembered of the show. Nothing in there answered to it.
He knocked anyway, because it felt wrong not to. Then he pushed, and the door swung in on one dry hinge.
It was one room. There was enough light left in the window to see a bed against the far wall, a table with a single chair, a fireplace full of old ash, and a shelf with a few things on it. Dust lay over all of it, thick and even, and his sneakers left prints as he walked in.
"Sorry about the floor." He left the door open behind him for the light.
Whoever had lived here had lived alone. There was one chair, and one mug on the shelf next to one plate and one spoon.
The rest of the shelf held a candle burned down to a stub and a coil of thick metal wire that might have been a guitar string, if guitars came that heavy. Ray looked at the one chair and moved on to the table.
A wooden bowl sat on it with four apples inside, and that was where things stopped making sense.
The apples were grey. It was the pale, flat grey of a photocopy, from stem to bottom. He picked one up expecting it to collapse into mush, and it was firm. The skin was smooth, and it even smelled faintly like an apple. There was just no color in it, as if somebody had reached in and taken it out.
'What the hell. Apples go brown, and then they go to soup. They don't do this.' He turned it over twice and set it back in the bowl, leaning on the table with his other hand.
The blanket on the bed was the second thing. It was a checkered blanket, the picnic kind, and every one of those he had ever seen was red and something. This one was black and white. The white squares looked wrong up close, too clean for a cabin this dirty.
A grey apple and a blanket with the red missing. He stood between the two and couldn't make them add up to anything.
"Bleach? Sun?" Neither one picked a single color and left the rest alone. He gave it up there; he was too tired for mysteries that didn't have teeth.
He wasn't too tired for food, and the bowl had reminded him how long it had been. There was still a little light outside, so he went back out and walked around the cabin, and behind it he found what used to be a garden.
It had been a big one. The fence had fallen over and the weeds had moved in, but the rows were still there under them if he squinted. He didn't know the first thing about gardens. He did know what the top of a carrot looked like, thanks to a cartoon rabbit, and there was a whole row of those.
The first one came up with a fat orange root and a clump of dirt. Ray stared at it.
"Oh, thank God. Something orange that doesn't scream." He had pulled five more before he finished the sentence.
The rest took some trial and error. There were vines with squash on them, which he had no idea how to eat without a stove. There were potatoes where the carrot row ended, and he bit into one raw before he remembered why nobody did that. At the back stood an apple tree, and the apples on it were red.
He stopped under it with his arms full of carrots. Red apples on the tree, grey ones in the bowl, a blanket with the red gone. 'Somebody here really hates red.'
He washed everything in the stream and ate on the porch with his feet in the water. Dinner was six carrots and three apples off the tree, down to the cores. He left the grey ones in their bowl. He was hungry, but he had already eaten one thing that screamed today, and he had limits.
He couldn't have cooked any of it anyway. The fireplace was cold, and he had never started a fire without a lighter in his life.
He did try. He took two sticks from the old woodpile by the chimney and rubbed them together the way every cartoon had taught him, until his arms burned. All he got was warm palms and a splinter. 'Goddamn cartoons.' He sucked the splinter out and went back to the carrots. It was raw vegetables in the dark, and it was still the best meal he could remember.
He thought about saving two of the carrots for the morning. Then he thought about a bag of chips in a locker a thousand years away, and he ate them both.
It was full dark by the time he went back inside. The door had a wooden bar that dropped across it, and he dropped it. He shook the blanket out the window until the dust stopped coming, then sat down on the bed, which creaked and held. The moon was up, and it put a pale square of light across the floor.
A roof, a door that locked, food out back and water out front. After two days out there, it felt like a hotel.
"Right. I live here now." He told the room. "Squatter's rights. Look it up."
The rest could wait for the morning. He still needed a story and a way to make fire, and something for his feet before they fell off.
He leaned the sword against the wall by the bed and started on his sneakers. They had been on his feet since the loading dock. The laces were stiff with dried mud, and the socks had stuck to both heels; he peeled the first one off with his teeth clenched and sat there breathing through it.
He was halfway through the second lace when he looked up at the table.
There was an envelope on it.
It lay next to the bowl of apples, square and white, right in the moonlight. There was no dust on it. It was sitting on top of a handprint in the dust, and the handprint was his, from when he had leaned on the table to put the apple back.
Ray didn't move. He listened to the woods and to the stream. The bar was still across the door, and the window was small enough that anything bigger than a cat would have to squeeze through it, loudly.
"...Hello?" It came out as a whisper, and nothing answered.
He got up with one sneaker on and the sword held out in front of him. He checked under the bed with the tip of the blade and found more dust. He looked up the chimney, which was a black hole that told him nothing. In a cabin with one room, that was every hiding place there was.
So he went to the table. The envelope had two words on the front, in neat black handwriting.
Ray Stuart.
Nobody in this world knew that name. He hadn't said it out loud since he got here, and even at the warehouse it had only ever been "Stuart".
He turned it over. The back was sealed with a drop of wax, and the wax was still soft under his thumb.
His hands weren't steady when he opened it. There was a single sheet inside, folded once. He carried it to the window and read it by the moon.
Ray Stuart,
You looked bored, so I moved you. You're welcome.
You seem to like thunder, so I gave you a fun power to go with it.
Figuring it out is half the fun, so I'm not telling you what it is.
I won't be checking in. Try not to die in the first week.
P.S. That house already has an owner.