Nemonymous Night Part 11

I took the hands of Susan and Amy as we proceeded to descend from the Core, our first job done. Stub of pencil: Beth and Greg may have had to be the next couple 'sacrificed', when the time came, even though, when compared to Hataz and Tho, they were rather too long in the tooth to be called young lovers! Edith and the rather gender-indeterminate Clare, even more so.

As we reached the lower slopes of Corepeak, I even wondered if what we had just seen was the real earth's Core. Or was there a core within a core? Or even a series of 'Russian Doll' cores? Bizarre thoughts, maybe. Stub of pencil: Mere untrammelled corespeak.

The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond Beth's control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.

At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan's pretty face, prettier than her own, though when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.

Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circ.u.mstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or a bus-driver or a radio phone-in counsellor? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.

Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn't now place him as a grown-up. The big ear seemed out of place. She dreamed of him mixing some foreign substances or murky mythologies into a huge tin bath. Amy was a similar dream portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought tooth-and-nail over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn't really differentiate one portrait from another.

Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so. She feared he was now dead. The portrait dream showed him alive, however.

The various Cores were not 'Russian Doll' within each other, as it turned out-but, rather, side-by-side cores in different geographies of lateral time. The strobe theory of history was now debunked and many scholars questioned its validity as a basis for much of what had happened and what was about to happen.

Let me baldly state that my credentials are impeccable and I can't be blamed for any misinformation as to what level of narration I actually work within. I am-to myself at least-all-knowing. If others know more than me, then, self-evidently, I do not know them.

Beth and Greg-whilst Mike and his party were still present in the vicinity of the one known Core-took advantage of their historic potential and eventually entered a rent in the Coreskin themselves... disguised as young lovers. Consequently, they are now-like Sudra and Nemo/Dognahnyi-as good as dead within the known transpirals. Greg and Mike did not say much to each other in advance of this event, because alter-nemos are notoriously anti-social among themselves. Beth did say goodbye to Susan with a hug, however.

Edith and Clare prepared themselves for a similar 'sacrifice'. They continued to absorb much fine literature on the a.s.sumption that whatever their brains carried outside the Core would be carried within it, too. This was 'sacrifice', not 'self-sacrifice', after all. Perhaps they depended on some form of osmosis.

The pair-of-young-lovers permutations of 'sacrifice' among the residual members were still undecided. Mike argued the case for himself and Amy being one pair, whilst Susan would bring up the rear accompanied by Arthur. We may never know the outcome of that, although we could guess. I simply don't know.

Meantime, man-city further stirred downward, the fly in fate's ointment. Clockwork without clockwork was the easiest and clearest way to explain its method of propulsion, now that Ogdon was no longer available to wind it up.

Ogdon was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.

He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus's usual allotted white-lined s.p.a.ce alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. Never eat yellow snow, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.

Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could add to the maimed and the dead.

Later he would indeed be found dead in a state of Rigor Mortis or Shyfryngs... leaning at his body's slope upon the large still-turning clockwork-key in his back.

It was not exactly a TV interview. It was more Candid Camera. The four remaining Drillmates were left de-briefing the whole affair in advance of what they expected to be a grand climax, the exact nature of which was still unclear. The interpolations of any interviewer are left untranscribed.

SCENE: A disused Agra Askan grocery, lit inexplicably with arc-lights. A painting of The Archer from the old days is on the wall near some droopy turnips on shelves, looking remarkably like Thatcher.

Mike: It was wonderful to see the peacefully happy look on those youngsters' faces as they slipped through the coreskin. It made everything seem worthwhile.

Susan: I have a funny feeling, that it's not all over. Surely, Sudra is coming back. That was a dream-that part-wasn't it? I was told it was a dream.

Mike: Who by? No, that was not a dream, I'm sorry to say. Nothing is a dream when underground. Although, I suspect the zoo was not all it was cracked up to be when we were told it was dreamless. We should have guessed. The zoo is not underground. (Mike nods to the unseen interviewer.) Amy: Since my change, I've taken nothing for granted. I don't even take myself for granted. At times, I think the city itself is coming after us-a suicide-bomb strapped to its waist, ready to blow the Megazanthus and its coreskin to smithereens.

Mike: A suicide-bomb? That must be the covered-market, then?

Amy: Yes, one must a.s.sume so. And I once dreamed I operated a car bomb near the bridge. It was terrible.

Arthur: We must get back to the Drill. I know Nemo had many muskets stowed in a cabin somewhere. I heard him tell that to one of the businessmen when he thought I was too far away to hear what was being said.

Susan: Surely muskets will be like flea-bites on an elephant when the city arrives!

Mike: There's no telling. Sometimes things are more symbolic than physical. I learnt at least that during my tour of narrative duty.

Amy: (smiling) You mean you know things? I'm sure I don't, even though I've been programmed to know everything.

Mike: I don't think any of us even approach knowing anything.

Amy: But you know you were meant to be a hawler, if everything had gone to plan?

Mike: Hasn't everything gone to plan, then? I don't even know what a Horla is, after all this time. Something to do with time and memory and dragging things from deep inside one?

Amy: A hawler is many things. It also means dragging things from inside other people as well as from yourself.

Mike (Remembering the incident with Captain Nemo): Well, I think I'm beginning to understand. It's like loving rare beef... as a sort of symbol. Hmmm.

Susan: Don't forget the birds. That angel in the core reminded me of a huge diseased bird. Despite the good it was doing to its nestlings.

Arthur: But there's no doing good simply for the sake of doing good. At the end of the day, the whole thing is being driven by the milking of Angel Wine from the Core, and selling it up the line. (Nodding to the interviewer) ...Yes, I know that's unproven, but it makes common sense.

The interviewer then left the grocery, someone who had been hidden by the TV cameras rather than revealed. Even as he left, his cape concealed his real configuration as truth or fiction. The four Drillmates' conversation continued after the arc-lights were switched off, but we have no means to continue our surveillance of what they said.

Mike questioned himself. He realised he was a hawler-had always realised this perhaps-but now he knew it wasn't because he had previously been a hawler, but because he was about to become one. Self-identification by an as yet unproved antic.i.p.ation was a dream-fixing he needed to address. It all seemed a very unsteady grounding for a vocation or a raison-d'etre. Mike remembered his step-daughter Sudra as she began to practise walking in her carpet coat. She took delight to tease him with her imputed beautiful body hidden beneath the dumpy beige covering and the ungainly yellow clod-hoppers on her feet-clogs, in fact, that were on all their feet.

Now Sudra was gone. All of them were now on the point of going, also. One thing that had been established: the earlier belief in 'carpet apes' in attendance upon the Angel Megazanthus was wide of the mark. The whole setting of the Core had turned out to be more angelic, more spiritual than any of the surviving visitors had ever hoped. Either the scurrying apes that catered for the ablutions of the Angel had never existed in the first place or-if they had once existed albeit in a mere state of nemonymity-they had since grown into Agra Askans (like Lilliputian Yahoos into giant Brobdignagians). If the latter version, any history books in Agra Aska had been expunged of such evidence. A textual exegesis or, if not, perhaps the strobe theory of history was a true one, after all. As it turned out, the primary-source evidence pointed to the Angel effectively caring for its own ablutions as well as for the ablutions of its wing-wrapped nestlings within the Coreskin, as part of the incubatory process involved in the constant o.r.g.a.s.m of angevinisation. It even nursed its own wounds of disease as they intermittently grew scabs and subsequently ruptured with blurts of depressurised pus. A self-sufficient moto perpetuo state of parthenogenesis. A recurrent dream of mutual self-healing made real by retrospective hawling.

Today, as they sat by the Balsam River on their last day together, Mike was trying to persuade Susan that he should enter the Coreskin paired with Amy as 'young lovers' rather than with his wife (i.e. Susan herself) of many years' standing: Mike: Who would go in with Arthur, if not you? Amy is his sister, after all. That would not be right, I'm sure you would agree, Susan, love. I think we lose all consciousness once we're in there, anyway, and so you won't know it's not me that you're paired with. I love you, I have always loved you, Susan, but now is the time to crystallise our love at the precise moment of separating. Our love would be diminished by continuing to conduct it as just a tawdry echo within the Core under the surveillance of the Angel...

Susan: (Tears in her eyes) It's meant to be more than just an echo. Did you actually say echo? It's supposed to be more than just s.e.x. It's a culmination of all we've been together. (She has a musket on her lap and she fiddles absentmindedly with its trigger.) Mike: But it's a bit of a cheat, anyway, Suse. We're meant to be young lovers when we go in and we're-what are we?-fifty or so? It's not as if we're taking the whole thing seriously. It's just for show. Amy will need my protection once inside...

Susan: I thought you said we lose consciousness of who we are...

Mike: I know, but we remain who we are even if we don't continue to know who we are. (Mike's own eyes are suddenly gla.s.sy with tears, as he pretends to watch a Riverboat moor in the distance.) Susan: I don't understand, Mike, I really don't understand. If we don't know what we know when in there, it won't matter if Amy and Arthur go in together paired as brother and sister, will it? They won't know that they're sister and brother. I would really be happier going in with you, even if I don't know it's you afterwards. I'd feel safer. More able to return the love given to me by whatever you turn out to be within the Core.

Mike: I think I really must... go in with Amy. And we ought to go in soon, before... you know... (Looking at the musket on his own lap).

Susan reaches out to give Mike a kiss, but he turns his head away. But, eventually, he cannot help himself-as he and Susan hug farewell... forever.

Amy looked at her brother's ear-and laughed. He may not even be able to get into the Core at all with such a wide obstacle as an appendage. She kissed him farewell. A little prematurely, as it turned out.

They both now looked at the long queues of Agra Askans leading up to the Core-and they couldn't understand why they themselves were in a shorter queue, so short it was just the two of them. Perhaps they were in a more important queue, albeit one leading to a different part of the Core. They wondered if they were doing something wrong or had been misdirected. They couldn't see Mike or Susan. They expected the older couple to have been in the queue already. Amy wasn't sure why but she already knew she wasn't the Amy she thought herself to be-even before entering the Core. Otherwise she wouldn't have earlier consented to going in with an older man like Mike, leaving Susan with no choice but the mixed blessing of Arthur and his big ear. Earthur, she called him, as a joke.

The other queues were now tailing off in a different direction with much ruckus, like the contents of a zoo on holiday release.

In the days before the sudden jolt had stolen the light from Beth's cabin in the Drill, Greg and a few other nebulous businessmen were entertained by Captain Nemo in the corporate lounge, a select area on board that boasted viewing-windows close to the leading-edge of the bit-tip-allowing vistas when the storms of the Drill's off-detritus didn't obscure them with the moving rubble of confusions or lies. A bit like this book where I've invited you to stand at its own viewing-windows in its select, very select, Corporate Lounge of plot and counterplot.

The proceedings were a combination of a scientific lecture upon what they were seeing through the windows and pure holiday entertainment, all laced with c.o.c.ktails. But that was the past. If any of these characters still existed, they didn't even stir like ghosts in the calm latency of spiritual birth-pangs let alone in full-blooded existence as ghosts proper.

Dream Sickness: is this being sick of dreams or sick with dreams? Perhaps, both, but one can only be certain about the existence of the former state. And as I approach the end of the book, I am quite aware that I am sick of dreams, as you are, no doubt, also sick of dreams as well as lies, ghosts and so forth... having endured, although voluntarily, such rituals of pa.s.sage from surface to core.

My own worst dream or nightmare is quite mild. I worked hard to gain the qualifications for University entrance-much to the pride of my working-cla.s.s parents whose son was beginning to embark on something quite beyond their understanding or ambition. Such humility prevailed in those days-forty years ago. People like me simply didn't go to University. Once there, I ended up doing reasonably well, despite going through a potentially bad middle period during the three-year course when I began to sleep long into the mornings, skipped lectures/seminars/tutorials-and only managed (with the help of my then future wife) to salvage the situation by the skin of my teeth. Upon this bare survival of academic growth I managed to consolidate my studies towards the endgame of Final Exams. In my worst nightmare, by contrast, I do not manage to salvage the situation: a long-term recurring dream where I didn't bother to look at the various noticeboards to establish what essays I should be writing for the course seminars etc.-whilst everybody in authority seemed to remain silent, failing to alert me to my missing gaps. I sat back and occasionally wondered how easy it was to keep up at University, together with experiencing a nagging doubt that things were slipping away from me. A recurring dream, a recurring denial, but I always woke up-to realise that I eventually did get a good University Degree and the dream was quite false, perhaps not a real dream at all, but merely me dreaming a dream, although what this 'dream' left with me was a feeling that it had been very nearly correct in its interpretation of a past reality, hawled forward for me to suffer unduly by a process of Proustian logistics.

This book is in honour of that recurring dream, in the hope that it gratefully remains a dream, and that, as a dream configuring new dreams, doesn't mutate into a worse dream, perhaps forever, to become a dream threaded with the surfaces of reality.

Amy's doll was an ugly one. It buried itself in the garden amid the discarded remains of her brother's latest 'experiment'. This memory was in complete denial of the fact that inanimate objects could not even be imagined to be capable of carrying out this act on their own.

The beings who chased themselves and each other through the Italian Villa (which once belonged to the famous writer Lope de Calderon)-to the sound of a clockwork helicopter-were involved in an eager game of creative hide-and-seek, where hiding was tantamount to a complete revelation of concealment by even outshining the shiniest scatter-orange cushions upon a Proustian verandah.

The mud-bath was empty of finely-sieved loess-empty even of crude mud-revealing a frighteningly naked middle-aged lady lolling in its emptiness... looking up into the Agra Askan half-sky and expecting her Matinee Idol to arrive from its wide-screen scree.

Vacuums strobed. Carpet-bombs flowed in a sootstorm or blitz upon the unsuspecting pinnacles of the Straddling Cathedral-an advance guard for man-city itself. The Core rose above itself, flinching in half-defence, half-attack towards the half-sky's scree-as the last few pairs of young-lovers boarded its ark of exquisition. That was the Core itself. The odd tread of strangers. The final Happy Hour. Half price Angevin in plastic mugs.

Crippled kites still managed to fly erratically upon tenuous tethers across the flank of the Core, often blindly crashing into its shimmering yellow-white surface, finally stuck like thinning long-pigs within its dull beige under-surface, becoming miscoloured broken needles in search of empty st.i.tches.

The Power to Imagine is the first Act of Creation.

Mike pointed his musket into the yellowing scree of the half-sky-as if he simply knew the approach of downward doom. His bullets crackled pathetically-weakening, strobe by strobe, into a shuddering shadow that ma.s.sively man-stained the lightning-lit roof that arched physically between inner horizons.

Photo-negative Sunne Stead possessed a swivelling pair of deep penetration-eyelights of darkness.

The River ran with spillage or simply seepage from the straining Core, white-ribboning its surface currents-whilst redness ribboned along any competing under-surfaces.

Mike had just handed Amy in towards the inner sanctum of the Core where Angel Megazanthus lifted its welcoming wing to each sacrifice to which it, in turn, sacrificed itself. Mike was still holding her hand, while still brandishing the musket with his other hand, ready to embark himself upon the encroaching Drill-hallucination that the Core was fast becoming, complete with internal spinning bit-tip nipples or sousipedes instead of feathers.

The shapes of Susan hand-in-hand with the now one-eared Arthur are already dissolving towards the translucent folds they pa.s.s between... out of reach of Amy whose hand Susan also held before fingers could no longer cling between the two expressions of farewell. Indeed, they had been trying to enter as a foursome, not as a pair of pairs, after firing off more pathetic musket-shots into the increasingly man-stained half-sky of scree. But the Core sorts pair from pair whatever the pitiful plans of prior pairing. It simply seems to know.

Mike cracks one last musket-shot helplessly into upper Agra Aska-while entering the Core himself, watching Amy's wattled back vanish by thinning-out into a realm he cannot seem to reach... it is as if, effectively, he is entering the Core alone. Amy is no more. She has never been. Or she has joined Sudra elsewhere in nothingness. Susan and Arthur were already in the wings. Mike, in two minds, tried to escape the Core. He knew he could not have entered it alone. A pig's breakfast of an entry. But he had entered alone. And thus he, too, never was-and became his own alter-nemo. And a ghost of a ghost hardly exists as much as even a ghost proper.

And the ma.s.sive man-stain emerging like tangibly multi-dimensional dry-rot through the scree sky faded, too. Its job done.

The Angel Bird crew long, crew loud in final anger. It tussled into existence through its own skin, becoming a crude bifurcated core itself, moving in exquisite hope and joy through the solid clouds towards Heaven-but its matted hide was infested with crawling human-life in every interstice of its creatinous body, so weighed down by human vermin filling vacuums of uncleanliness that it eventually didn't rise towards its just rewards in Heaven but toppled into the thick white ocean of Hawling-h.e.l.l (a core within a core within how many other cores it is impossible to determine) where stains spread like islands of rancid top-flat grease, before it was engulfed completely with a belch like a tufted two-legged cathedral of pain.

The book was its own suicide bomb.

The lift systems were too complicated to understand. They went up and down the vestigial service-shafts of the book, unattended and in vague orders of priority for ciphers to embark and disembark in the precise matching rhythms that allowed all the gaps to be filled at all possible permutations of history.

A ceiling of time and s.p.a.ce, st.i.tched with neat insect-ranks of long-pig right through a stick of holiday-rock, became a woven fire-wall or fire-floor of meaning via textures of text unfathomable to man, bird and beast alike.

It is difficult to imagine the world being better or worse than it actually is. However, without humanity to stain its pages, who knows what will then become imaginable or even real? There is a theory-to which I subscribe-that humanity "strobes" in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the 'alight' stage to forget the previous 'switched-off' one... time and time again. Ma.s.s consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse... or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.

The Drill's corporate lounge is empty and silent, except for the odd eerie shaking of the wall maps as its relentless path-through the ribbons of reality that is Inner Earth-continues towards the Core.

The jolt has finally finished, if one can actually imagine a jolt (by definition) that endures for more than just a few seconds. The rearward cabin is empty-as can be seen when the light slowly wells back into it. The window still simply shows the pa.s.sing crazy-paved slabs of earth. A tortoisesh.e.l.l hairbrush falls to the carpet, and becomes a yellow pig lung.

The city pub was empty. Merely that. The optics of the shorts gleamed as time threatened to begin another diurnal round with unforgiving dawnlight. The city started to thrum, but thrummed with what?

The top flat still retained its open curtain policy on silent runners. The empty Dry Dock could be seen, even in the dark. A tall tower-block in the distance winked like a gigantically based but underwhelming lighthouse light. A computer screen in the room blinked blankly in curious yellow. An empty veil fluttered on the carpet like a b.u.t.terfly.

The covered market was at rest, its bomb simply being a pair of clogs with spurs and silver toecaps, the spurs still slightly jingle-jangling as if someone had just taken them off in a pique of feminine tantrum.

The city zoo echoed with utter silence. And a large human ear in the insect enclosure was still pitifully trying to bury itself.

Apocryphal Coda.

My first glimpse was the hill where stood the Canterbury Oak, if standing and growing could be reconciled. That was not the tree's real name; nothing bore its real name in my book. Nothing bore its real name, I dare suggest, in Klaxon City itself. If Klaxon City called itself Klaxon City, then it lied.

I had crossed the Inner Plains from a life I preferred to forget so, having tried to forget it, there would be a certain counter-productiveness in rehearsing a re-living of it merely to fill in the wavy area of my past with childish colouring.

I knew beyond the hill would be Klaxon City; the Canterbury Oak was responsible for this name, a name given as a means towards an easy fantasy: a convenient digestibility of facts that make up any fantasy, even if, for me, this particular fantasy was not a fantasy at all.

Klaxon City, therefore. A city full of noise, a noise like klaxons or sirens. So a name like Klaxon City makes things straightforward. I shall not bother with its real name, a name which means nothing or, if it means anything, is lost in some mire of esoteric history or legend. The Canterbury Oak, too, is named thus because it is similar to a tree I once saw in Canterbury. A bottom-heavy tree with warped bark, almost a diseased bark, I guess, with a girth-shall I say of a million miles in circ.u.mference? I may as well. I should never be able to convey the impression of its irregular wrinkled girth (that lower end of its bole that met the earth) by any claim to know its measurements or any standard of measurement common to all who would like to know its measurements. Scales are quite out of the question. The trunk-as it tapered towards the top where spa.r.s.e branches started to claw at the sky-had a wind-chewed roughness (I knew it was rough even from the distance I saw it but remained unsure of the wind), growing like a giant serpent whereby all its inner wooden fat had sapped towards its rooted tail, leaving it so dissimilar in bulk when bottom was compared to top. The branches were images of its relentless pain that had once been conveyed by its own internal sirens.

Now, with its sirens quiet for at least a generation, I was soon to learn that the citizens, having long been inured to its ancient noise (now dead or deaf to itself), needed to customise their own background of audible pain: thus building a city-wide tannoy-system to act as temporary coverage of such sirens. So, given the Oak's recent bouts of cyclic silence, their own homegrown versions of siren-sound in the city seemed to take sway, as if the Oak had decided to remain silent now more often, in face of such unrivalled clamour. However, the citizens themselves-perhaps because they had grown irritated by mock sirens as opposed to the real thing-had started to hire surrept.i.tious ear-m.u.f.fs to a.s.suage the skewering edges of sound. Some even trod a highly secret route of sound-proofing their houses. Once seen, however, the difficulty of such a task would become apparent.

Meanwhile, I crossed the brow of another hill as I completed my trek-from across the Inner Plains with just a portable tent and meagre rations-which started when an untold past had ceased unfolding and ending as I approached an as yet unknown future. I witnessed the scattered pylons of Klaxon City bearing their tethered skycraft. I knew to expect these. However, I had not been forearmed with any knowledge concerning the vastness of the city-occupying a s.p.a.ce within a cavity of truth that housed a whole dynasty, not just one tranche of civilisation. However, that as yet unappreciated fact abandoned my mind when I suddenly became appalled by what hit me with the force of a tangible soundwave-the tannoy-system kicking in with a hair-trigger difference between silence (on one side of the brow) and cacophony (on the other).

Greg lived with Beth in London, but they also had a beach hut at Clacton on the coast about 90 minutes' train-ride from Liverpool Street station. They were an ordinary couple, unmarried and childless. Yet n.o.body made that judgement of ordinariness about them, because n.o.body knew enough about them to warrant such a view. Greg thought he was ordinary. He worked in Waste Management as a lorry-driver. Beth thought she wasn't ordinary at all. She was indeed ordinary, if in that thought alone. Both were malleable, but one of them fought against being malleable, and each thought the other to be the one fighting that particular fight. One of them was right.