Clarence Cornish was frustrated. He was breathing hard. He was unnaccustomed to breathing hard. He was unnaccustomed to the act of running. He was unnaccustomed to the hot breath of a monster chasing him down a dark passageway in the midst of a crumbling pile of stoney castleness on the side of a crag gleaming under the Two Moons of Narabar. It was this lack of familiarity, this lack of custom, that was making him so frustrated.
Clarence Cornish worked in a local cafe. He was a baker. Because of this he took great pride in being a strange person, a person outside the norms, a person who lurked on the edge of society, above the curve, in the realms of dream and fantasy. Here was a man whose every day was reversed, who dwelt in darkness. But despite this oddness he was still a creature of custom. Each of his “mornings” he woke around nine thirty PM. He showered, he brushed his teeth, he checked his email, he had breakfast. Then he got in his car and drove to work. From eleven to seven he baked bagels, muffins, pastries, breads, alone in the darkened shop until six AM, when a hapless college student showed up to make the coffee and get the till out of the safe, working a summer job. Then at seven Clarence would walk outside into the sunshine, go home, have dinner, unwind, do all the things that every other single man of thirty-two or so might do, and then fall asleep in the mid-afternoon. To Clarence, this was life on the edge of society.
His idea of living on the edge did not include monsters or castles. The closest thing to a sword he’d ever held was a bread knife. And the only wizard he knew was his nephew, who helped him out with his computer when it crashed.
As he wheezed his way down the corridor, his aching feet splashing his sneakers through filthy pools of algae and who knows what else, the utter incongruity of his situation drove him to mutter an obscenity, something he almost never did, being a Christian. He would have kept the word out of his very consciousness under any other circumstance, burying it in some reach of his personality unknown even to him. But with a dragon or whatever on his back he didn’t have the willpower to expend on subduing obscenities. He was vaguely aware of the word, rising up inside of him, an explosize exclamation expressive of the very frustration that was eating away at his concentration. The word burned its way along his neural pathways and made its way into his vocal chords. He knew it was coming and he let it.
“Oh, shi–”
The floor fell out beneath him. Even his effort to curse the very existence that he found himself wrapped up in was frustrated by happenstance. And he had no time for cursing now. He struggled to bring his senses under control and make some designation of up or down, but he was tumbling through space in darkness, nothing around him, the walls seeming to have dropped away. He had just time to think that perhaps it would all be over soon, that perhaps this was a dream and he would soon wake up, or that perhaps there was a pool of acid or a bed of sharp spikes at the bottom of the pit that would end it all just as quickly, when he plunged deep into icy water and found himself struggling for air.
He hit the water something like head first, perhaps on his left shoulder. By good fortune he was holding his breath, braced for impact, but by bad fortune he had very little air left in his tired lungs and the collision with the water nearly drove it out of him. His orientation meant he was looking up from the utter darkness of the water towards the murky dimness of the corridor from which he had fallen. This relative brightness allowed some animal portion of his brain to finally catch on (“Up’s up there!”) and cue his body to start clawing towards the surface.
He broke through to the air with a splash and immediately began sucking great gulps of it in. He paddled in the water frantically, trying to keep his head up. After a moment his wild thrashings pushed him close enough to the wall that he could grab on, and he steadied himself against the rotting, slippery stones, breathing hard and trying to see.
He heard a commotion from up above, a skittered of claws on damp stone. But the beast that had been chasing him had faster reflexes than he did, and it stopped before toppling after him into the pit, for which he was grateful. He could hear it shuffling around the edge, peering down and grumbling to itself, upset about the loss of fresh meat, before it wandered back to its lair to lie in wait for the next befuddled baker to wander by.
All immediate danger passed, clinging in relative security to the crumbling wall of a God-forsaken water-filled pit, Clarence finally had a moment to reflect more fully on his situation. His building frustration had not been washed away by the plunge into an uplanned bath. In fact it had been sharpened by the chilly water and the scent of decay and the mold on the walls and he finally let it loose, screaming every obscenity that he knew (there were three) and punching the water with his free hand, kicking his legs at the murky depths below.
He quickly ran out of energy even for existential frustration, and subsided into a dull muttering with an occassional splash. Several moments of this calmed him, as did the coldness of the water, calmed him in fact to the point of alarm, for his uncle had had hypothermia once and had nearly died, and Clarence was well aware of the danger. The thought of that beloved uncle, a man whose middle name was adventure, a man who often went for an overnight hike on the weekend, lighted a small fire within Clarence’s shivering heart. That small fire warmed him a little, moved his limbs to sudden action, and spoke these words to him in a small, whispery voice: Are you going to let yourself succumb to hypothermia in the middle of a fantasy kingdom? At least get yourself devoured by a dragon or turned into a frog or something. Don’t die in a moldy hole. Come on, Clarence. Get us out of here. I’m a fire. I want to dry out.
Egged on by the voice of the fire stoked by the fuel of his frustration, streaming with stagnant water and shivering with cold, trapped at the bottom of a pit in the bowels of a fortress of danger, Clarence Cornish straightened as best he could under the circumstances and said with force to the empty darkness: “By the name of my uncle, Spurgeon Adventure Cornish, I shall not lie down and die of hypothermia! I’m going to get out of this hole and I’m going to make somebody explain to me what the heck is going on! Thus say I, Clarence!”
The words seemed oddly fitting at the time.