The Many Lives of Mortimer Matthews

Meet Mortimer. Mortimer is a twenty-one-year-old male. He was born in England on the fifth of April, 1994, and is one hundred and eighty centimetres tall. He has perfect eyesight, blue eyes, and fair hair.

This is how Mortimer died.

As he was cycling home from the library one day, his chain caught and the bicycle fell over. The first car broke his arm. The second car smashed his legs. The third car spread the contents of his cranium all over the Tarmac. In short, it was all rather sudden and unexpected. Don't feel too sad for Mortimer, though; he only felt the first two impacts.

The oddest thing, the policemen later said, was that they never found the body. They found the mangled bike. They found the smears of blood and assorted brain matter. They found his backpack full of library books. But no body.

Elsewhere, Mortimer woke up.

Given the circumstances, it was understandable that Mortimer was a little confused as to his surroundings. Certainly, the leafy trees and bushy shrubs around him were a stark contrast to the concrete and metal which made up the area he had been travelling through.

Mortimer picked himself off the ground. He was standing in a forest, and although there was plenty of sunlight filtering through the canopy overhead he could sense a definite feeling of unease in the atmosphere. It was almost as if the wooded are possessed a certain eldritch quality. An arcane feel. A point of thaumaturgic saturation.

Look, it was a magical forest, okay? I don't really see how I can get the point across any simpler. Of course, Mortimer simply ignored the mildly annoyed voice echoing through the air because he couldn't hear it. Frankly, there wasn't a single being in that universe who could hear it.

He inspected himself for injuries, and found none. This was surprising, as Mortimer distinctly remembered the feeling of having three limbs broken by a pair of oncoming cars. Of course, the fact that he had stood up without howling in pain should have tipped him off in the first place. He was wearing the same blue and white T-shirt and shorts that he had on before the car(s) got him, though not so much to his surprise as to his interest he was missing his backpack and helmet.

"Where's my helmet?"

That's right, kids. Your helmet should always be your number one concern when you're a cyclist.

Mortimer rapidly came to the realisation that standing around akin to one who has lost their gorm (or a citrus fruit, or whichever simile you care to insert) was not the best course of action if survival was to be his chief goal. Indeed, he knew that dehydration was a major problem for those lost in the woods. He picked a direction and began walking.

The first thing that he came to realise was that there exists in nature a mysterious and deadly life-form known as a bramble patch, the sole purpose of which is to entangle and ensnare and generally annoy any bipedal would-be forest-goers. The second thing that he came to realise was that there similarly lurked a most vile of organisms called the low-hanging tree branch. A little-known fact: the low-hanging tree branch has developed a co-existential relationship with the bramble patch. When a being's lower appendages come into contact with the bramble patch, it learns both not to do so again and that it must in future observe its footsteps closely. And that, my friends, is when the low-hanging tree branch strikes, lurking quite viciously out of the victim's sight before positioning itself such that it causes a painful rap to the noggin.

Clutching his head, and cursing the day that tree branches ever gained the ability to communicate with bramble patches, Mortimer trudged onward.

He soon came across a beautiful glade of azure flowers growing by a clear pond. Mortimer suddenly felt himself gripped by a terrible thirst, and seemed drawn by some invisible and entrancing fishing rod towards the pond. He walked through the flowers, giggling slightly when their petals tickled and tingled upon his skin. He knelt down and drank deeply.

The water held a particular sweetness to its taste, unlike any glass of the stuff he had had before. Flavour aside, Mortimer found that his thirst was quenched as quickly as it had come over him. Looking back at the beautiful flowers, a wonderful feeling grew inside him. An urge to frolic! To play! To sing!

To stomp on the flowers! Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!

Mortimer looked at his feet. Crushed stems and mangled leaves poked out from underneath his trainers, and they appeared to release a visible perfume into the air. The very essence of smell, if you will. Inhaling deeply, Mortimer wondered why he had ever tried to destroy the wonderful flowers. Why, he should be playing in them! He should have freed himself from the shackles of worry and the manacles of clothing itself and rolled around to his heart's content. All right, maybe it wasn't to that extent, but he did feel rather guilty. After all, surely someone else could have enjoyed those marvellous flowers?

A chirping dragged his eyes upwards, towards the circle of sky revealed by the clearing. The sky was tinged with orange and red. That was odd. A few minutes ago the sun had been directly overhead, indicating that it was about noon. But now it seemed like-

"Holy toast!"

Needless to say, Mortimer was surprised.

"What in the name of God almighty just happened to the sun?"

Now, the sun does not appear to move that quickly through the sky. Mortimer was used to seeing it move gradually, starting at one end of the horizon and finishing at the other. The sun was most definitely not meant to get from halfway to three quarters of the way in five minutes and then dive behind cover like an agoraphobic being chased by a golf course. And... was that supposed to be the moon? It was far too large, far too shiny, and (most importantly) not meant to pogo up from beneath the horizon.

This was most definitely no English forest.

Subject: Mortimer Matthews

Cause(s) of death:

-Crushed by car