The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

“Hold still, you son of a bitch! Hold still!”

He plunged after it for what seemed like miles. Dimly, out of the corner of his eye, he could see shapes in the clouds, things standing as motionless and quietly as if they were carved from bone. Twice he distinguished a figure; one wore a crown, the other had a horse’s head.

Suddenly, he was confronted by one of the objects. He stopped since it seemed impossible for some reason to go around it. The butterfly hung for a moment above the top of the thing, then settled down upon it. Its green eyes glowed, and its front legs shook the antennae mockingly.

Moving forward slowly, Rohrig saw that it was Frigate who was blocking his path.

“Don’t you dare touch it!” Rohrig whispered fiercely. “It’s mine!”

Frigate’s face was as expressionless as a knight’s visor. It always looked deadpan when Rohrig was in one of his many furies and chewing out everybody in sight. That had made Rohrig even more angry, and now it rocketed him to the point of utter madness.

“Out of the way, Frigate! Step aside or get knocked down!”

The butterfly, startled by the outburst, flew off into the fog.

“I can’t,” Frigate said.

“Why not?” Rohrig thundered as he hopped up and down in frustration.

Frigate pointed downward. He was standing on a large red square. Adjoining it were other squares, some red, some black.

“I got misplaced. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. It’s against the rules to put me on a red square. But then, who cares about rules? Besides the pieces, I mean.”

“Can I help you?” Rohrig said.

“How could you do that? You can’t help yourself.”

Frigate pointed over Rohrig’s shoulder.

“It’s going to catch you now. While you’ve been chasing the butterfly, it’s been chasing you.”

Rohrig suddenly felt utterly terrified. There was something after him, something which would do something horrible to him.

Desperately, he tried to move forward, to go over or around Frigate. But the red square held him as it held Frigate.

“Trapped!”

He could still see the butterfly, a dot, a dust mote, gone. Forever.

The fog had thickened. Frigate was only a blur.

“I make my own rules!” Rohrig shouted.

A whisper came from the mists before him. “Quiet! It’ll hear you!”

He awoke briefly. His hutmate stirred.

“What’s wrong, Bob?”

“I’m drowning in a surf of uncease.”

“What?”

“Surcease.”

He sank bank into the primal ocean down to where drowned gods leaned in the ooze at crazy angles, staring with fish-cold eyes under barnacled crowns.

Neither he nor Frigate knew that he could have answered one of the questions in the letter. Rohrig had awakened on Resurrection Day in the far north. His neighbors were prehistoric Scandinavians, Patagonian Indians, Ice Age Mongolians, and late-twentieth-cen­tury Siberians. Rohrig was quick at learning new languages and was soon fluent in a dozen, though he never mastered the pronunciation and he murdered the syntax. As he always did, he made himself at home, and he was soon friends with many. For a while, he even set himself up as a sort of shaman. Shamans, however, must take themselves seriously if they would succeed, and Rohrig was only serious about his sculpturing. Also, he began to tire of the cold. He was a sun worshipper; his happiest days had been in Mexico where he was the first mate on a small coastal ship transporting frozen shrimp from Yucatan to Brownsville, Texas. He had been briefly involved in gun-smuggling there but had quit it before spending a few days in a Mexican jail. He had also quit Mexico. The authorities could not prove his guilt, but they suggested that he leave the country.

He was just about to take a dugout down-River for a warm climate when along came Agatha Croomes. Agatha was a black woman, born 1713, died 1783, a freed slave, a backwoods Baptist preacher, a holy roller, four times married, mother of ten children, and a pipe smoker. She had been resurrected a hundred thousand grailstones away, but here she was. A vision had come to her, a vision in which God told her to come to His dwelling at the North Pole, where He would hand her the keys to kingdom come, to glory and salvation forever, to understanding of time and eternity, space and infinity, creation and destruction, death and life. She would also be the one to cast the devil into the pit, lock him up, and throw the key away.