Before we start, this story was inspired by three objects generated by a random-object-generating program I wrote. The objects were: shaking brick ship, symbolic collection of tricks, and ancient rock flower. I decided to write a story incorporating those objects in that order. This is the result.

The main characters, Marho and Stemnid, owe their names to a similar random process. Quite simply they are random syllables strung together. So, if you're wondering where they come from, that's where.

On with the show.

Turtles

by Darren Izzard

The brick ship was shaking.

In the children's playground, Marho struggled to keep his balance on the sculpture. He had climbed up there to watch the earthquake ripple the grass and concrete that surrounded him, but with each tremor it became harder for him to remain standing. Suddenly, a large shock cracked the ceramic craft amidships on a seam of mortar. Marho pulled himself together and leapt onto the ground, keeping himself flat. The playground's walls collapsed, surrounding him in noise and dust, and the air itself seemed to distort and rent as the trees in the nearby park rattled their branches.

Marho kept shaking on the ground for a good five minutes after the quake died away. He slowly opened his eyes, which smarted with dust. Getting up, he noticed a few small cuts on his hands caused by his dive onto the concrete, but they didn't really interest him. As if by magic, he had been transported into the site of a disaster. He looked around at the playground - a flat, miserable place. It was depressing, even to him, and he decided to visit his friend Stemnid, who lived only a couple of streets away.

Stemnid's house had been largely untouched by the quake, but all the same he had been temporarily shocked almost into silence. As he took Marho through the house into his room, Stemnid broke into speech. “This earthquake is remarkable, you know.”

“Why's that?” asked Marho.

“My grandmother only found her artefact this morning.”

That cryptic statement confused Marho, but, knowing how peculiar Stemnid's grandmother was, he didn't push any further.

Stemnid's bedroom was a very strange place. Like the rest of the house, it bore the smell of the more exotic kinds of vegetarian cooking, which, to the untrained nose, were extremely unpleasant and quite nauseating. Stemnid thought himself something of a magician, and kept a symbolic collection of tricks on display on the room's furniture. He tried to capture Marho's interest with one of them - a strange affair involving double-sided playing cards - but Marho only wanted to talk about the earthquake. They sat cross-legged on the carpet, and Marho wasted no time in bringing up the subject.

“Where do they come from?” was his first question.

“Oh, I think the scientists say it's some sort of rocks rubbing against each other deep in the Earth. But my grandmother told me the truth.”

“What did she say?”

“There is a large turtle under the crust of the Earth which sometimes gets an itch on its back and has to scratch it on the underside of the mountains.”

“What mountains? There aren't any mountains around here.”

Stemnid was slightly taken aback, and had to think for a second. “Maybe there are, you know, under the streets. You only have to look at how they've all creased up now to see that there must be something big and solid underneath.”

“I suppose.”

Stemnid had this strange trait of beginning his lectures with a conjecture, and then treating it as if it were truth. From this point he would add speculation upon guesswork and build up a surreal thought-world of his own. A world which he believed. He thought he knew it was real.

“Of course,” he went on, “by big and solid I mean rock. It can't be metal or all the electrical cables under the ground would short out. Unless they're being kept apart by turtles, or suchlike. Yes, I think there must be turtles under the ground. Lots of them. Not because my grandmother says so, but because I know they're there. I can hear them in the night. They scratch around under the ground and nudge the floor up and down.”

“But you're not on the ground floor,” protested Marho.

“The air can transmit such vibrations. The air between the floor on the ground and the floor in my room is almost solid at night. Don't you know anything?”

Marho shrugged and pulled a face which Stemnid didn't see. He stared at the floor, as if waiting for it to move. Stemnid was willing it to do so. “If it moves now, that would be proof,” he noted.

It didn't move.

“But it's not night yet,” said Marho.

“It's night as far as the house is concerned whenever we're not present. That's a fact that even the stupidest people know. Houses are made of bricks and aren't intelligent. They don't know anything but that which we tell them.”

“I suppose.”

“Anyway the floor moved earlier, didn't it? What you call an earthquake, my grandmother already told me was a turtle. Now I've worked out that many turtles are moving under the house all the time, I've proved it by logic. Logic, you see? Yes. I'm going to be a real scientist one day; a real one, applying real logic. And I'll be a philosopher. They'll see I'm right.”

Marho wondered why he had come here.

“I make discoveries and I prove them. Here it comes again!”

The floor had begun to shake again, albeit less severely.

“More turtles! They are on the move.”

The walls vibrated softly and the books rattled on their shelves.

“...They must have fleas under their shells.”

A ball belonging to one of Stemnid's tricks rolled off his bedside table and crashed onto the floor.

“...Perhaps the police should be informed.”

Marho wasn't paying any attention to Stemnid. As the aftershock died away, he stood up and walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” demanded Stemnid.

“I want to see the cracks in the road again.”

“You won't see any turtles, you know. They are deeper than that.”

Marho sighed and left the room. He wandered down the stairs and out of the house. Stemnid rushed after him. “Have you seen my grandmother's artefact?”

Marho gazed into the gaps in the tarmac. “No.”

“Do you want to?”

“Depends, I suppose.”

“On what?”

“What is it?”

“It is a piece of rock. Come and see.”

Marho knelt on the ground and studied the lightning-like formations in it.

“Come and see. You must see it now if you want to understand why it is so important.”

“Why's it important?”

“You must come with me to understand.”

For want of something better to do, Marho got up and re-entered the house, and followed Stemnid down into the basement. Stemnid flicked on the dim light, and an array of boxes, tools, discarded household items and the like that are usually found in such places.

“Where's this rock then?” asked Marho.

“Wait,” said Stemnid, as he ran over to a box in a less-well-lit corner. He opened it, and, with a great strain, took out a stone ornament. It was nearly a foot across, and was only just within the bounds of what Stemnid could carry. As Stemnid approached Marho and placed the object on a nearby table, Marho could make out more details. It was a flower made of rock, very worn in appearance.

“It is ancient,” explained Stemnid. “It's not so much important to us as it is to the turtles.”

“The turtles?”

“Yes, it is what they crave and desire.”

Marho was getting somewhat confused. “What are you talking about?”

“The big turtle is energized by the flowers. There are only a few of these, and my grandmother has summoned one to the surface. I now predict that there is a new flower for every turtle.”

“That's really stupid,” spat Marho.

“It's not. You're stupid, and you fail to appreciate logic.” Stemnid glared at Marho. “Feel the stone.”

Marho was sufficiently puzzled by this to go ahead and touch the stone flower. It felt smooth, like silk, like the petals of any living organic flower. He bent down and smelled it, and was rewarded with an odour which made his mind almost lift out of his body. Stemnid smiled at Marho's obvious reaction to the flower. “Pick it up,” he said. “Pick it up and feel its turtle energy. Feel what they feel.”

Marho grappled with the flower and picked it up with some difficulty. Holding it in his arms, he could feel vibrations and pulses of energy flowing through his body, across his spine, up his neck and into his brain. He felt invigorated, excited, joyous, but soon this dissipated into a violent itching. He wanted to scratch, but felt his arms and hands glued to the stone.

Suddenly, the ground began to shudder again as another aftershock rippled across the building. A noise outside the basement door caused Stemnid to run for it and try to push it open. Something had fallen across it, and it was blocked on the outside. Marho struggled to walk to the door, still gripping the weighty rock flower. With a deep booming thunder, the basement floor cracked open and dust filled the room. The noise and shaking was like the inside of a lightning bolt as it shot electricity into the ground.

Marho was panicking, but never thought to let go of the flower. Stemnid, on the other hand, was quite calm, and approached the new vent in the floor boldly through the clouds of dust. He stared into its depths, meeting the form of an inconceivably huge animal. The electric light in the basement glinted against its massive eyeballs as it rose out of the ground. Stemnid smiled and nodded slowly as the creature's reptilian head smashed up through the floor and stared full in the face of the terrified Marho, still clutching the stone as if it were some bizarre teddy-bear.

The scrape and clatter of objects being shifted behind the basement door brought Stemnid to his senses. “I’m in here,” he called.

“Oh, Stemnid, we’d been so worried about you,” came the reply from outside. “Hang on a second.”

The door opened and Stemnid saw the familiar sight of his grandmother. “Oh, look at the mess,” she exclaimed. “Whatever were you doing in here? You could have been killed!”

She took Stemnid by the hand and led him out of the basement, locking the door behind them, for the room was now empty.