Nemonymous Night
Authors: D. F. Lewis
Nemonymous Night
Lewis, D. F.
Chomu Press (2011)
The carpet was quite ordinary. In Man City an ocean liner is mysteriously stranded in Dry Dock. The children are missing and a search party has been sent out. The inhabitants of the city have taken to drinking Angel Wine, or dreaming that they do. Meat and poultry are merging in disquieting ways. Only at the zoo can the citizens be sure that dreams are not reality. It will take Mike, the Hawler, to heal the city of its dream sickness. But first he must learn what a Hawler is. Perhaps the carpet was not quite so ordinary, after all.From D. F. Lewis, a novel like the spiralling pattern of a magic carpet.
Nemonymous Night
Nemonymous Night
D. F. Lewis
Chômu Press
Nemonymous Night
by D. F. Lewis
Published by Chômu Press, MMXI
Nemonymous Night
copyright © D. F. Lewis 2010
The right of D. F. Lewis to be identified as Author of this
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published in June 2011 by Chômu Press.
by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved by the author.
First Kindle Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press
Cover illustration by Heather Horsley
E-mail:
[email protected]
Internet:
chomupress.com
“There is certainly a spiralling ominous weirdness here, a sense of shifting scales such as reveal to us the bizarre denizens of the world beneath a microscope, so much a part of our mundane existence but usually invisible to us (not to mention the possibly more bizarre world we would see through a macroscope), but the psychedelia of
Nemonymous Night
perhaps owes less to the sixties than it does to the lucid and lyrical ostranenie of writers such as Denton Welch. There is an understanding here of the piquant craft of strangeness that is the basis of all lasting fiction. The inside-out logic is Carrollian. The word-play, dare I say it, is Jungian; it is the wordplay of dreams.”
Quentin S. Crisp
“In a top front room of one of those grander houses, a young woman woke to find herself standing in the middle of a carpet. She often woke like this, and was not surprised; but she asked herself to what room the carpet belonged
this
time.”
–From ‘I Hear You Say So’, by Elizabeth Bowen (1945)
“I saw Elvis at the mall last night. He was eating pizza with DF Lewis. Can’t think why they’d ordered anchovies.”
–Karl Edward Wagner: 'The View from Carcosa' (Deathrealm)
Contents
“
You are not your name, not your body, not your various actions—not even your soul or self. Just dig and see, haul back what you find. And try not laugh or cry when, from the core of reality, you reveal the true nature of ‘you’.”
Lope de Vega (loose translation)
Prelude
This book is like a child clumsily finding its feet upon a carpet: a space and a foundation that seem to be its whole world. The book starts out to navigate this world, to become practised at walking, to become schooled, loved and loving, finally prepared for death.
Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.
Each page will therefore eventually grow up into another later page of the book. This process is the story. This is the truth of its fiction. The growing-up of a book in difficult times.
These words are not a pretentious authorial introduction to the book. They do not even represent the book’s own intrinsic prologue. They are part of the growing-up process. They are part of the plot.
Nemonymous Navigation
The carpet was quite ordinary. Nobody around was an expert on the manufacture of carpets, so all that could be said about it was some reference to ordinariness. Even the stains were ordinary. Years of wine and grime. Years of mishandled vacuuming. The careless knees of toddlers as they scorched their model cars through the rough of tufts. The odd tread of strangers.
The pattern was non-existent since the carpet possessed a plain beige colour—originally with nothing to recommend it except its unpretentiousness. Yet, despite these various negatives, the items of furniture that pressed its pedestals, castors and broad-beam bases into the pile were rather pleasant in an antique fashion—but whether these represented genuine antiques was anybody’s guess. They were rather down-market sticks of furniture in spite of the dusting by a previous owner who rather enjoyed the varnished or polished gleam of knotted wood more than the clean lines of a carpet’s cleanliness.
The carpet itself had no mind of its own—obviously.
Nothing could be inferred about its soul. If it had thoughts, it kept them to itself. There is a theory that inanimate objects feel themselves to be so real that nobody—even with the wildest imagination—can imagine them as
imaginary
. And if anything is deemed unimagined or unimaginary or unimaginable then it is incapable of existing in fiction, fantasy or dream—but merely in real life. And it is true that many actual things yearn to be imagined rather than to exist for real... simply for the pleasure of being fantasised about. This carpet was no exception.
It must feel trapped not only by the webbed stitching of its underlay, by its carpet tacks keeping it tight to the skirting-boards and by the downward press of the mock antique bric-a-brac and furniture, but also by the knowledge of its essential reality as a floor-covering, with no possibility of weird elaboration or of weaving into the character of something unreal... thus to make it worthy of imagining or dreaming about. For example, that day, there were deep misunderstood mumbles in large areas of the carpet’s jurisdiction—come down to it together with the pad of two spread-soled solid feet and the prod of two sharp feet as they moved about amid the lugubrious talking that belonged to the feet’s owners—or so the carpet would have assumed given the carpet’s ability to have such assumptions.
*
“How are you today?”
The man who spoke was Mike. Deceptively heavily-built. Physically distracted, but he strode through the room as if he owned it. A lorry driver’s face.
The woman followed him about, as far as she could follow someone in such a small room. In contrast to Mike, she appeared as if owned or, rather, controlled by the room while—with rather more panache than the situation demanded—she kept adjusting ornaments... also brushing dust into a pan: a secondary pursuit. Given name Amy. More a girl than a woman but with a woman’s manners. She said very little. Only direct questions could stir her into response.
“Not so bad.”
She had a pretty face, but when she spoke—even lightly, thoughtlessly—there was a frown that appeared and a deep divot within the frown’s area. Hair a fashionable matted brown, so very her it would only be noticed if it suddenly wasn’t there. Apron failed to hide her sexuality and high-heels seemed out of kilter with the dustpan.
Mike was definitely older: more in his mid-forties, compared to her mid-twenties. His own greying hair and stubbly beard were far more noticeable as distinguishable features—compared to the straight ‘herness’ of Amy’s hair. Suit a bit bedraggled. Shoes solid brown with laces—the type men had worn for years, in and out of offices. The fact he was pacing about the room exposed his nervousness despite the aura of confidence and command that Amy only saw. Or only Amy saw.
Mike was a hawler, although he would have spelt it differently had he known the word at all. At this stage, it was unclear what a hawler was—or what a hawler did. But Mike knew he was one and probably knew what one was and what one did, even if he didn’t know the name itself. Not a transporter of heavy goods along the roads, as that was a haulier. In the old days, a hauler (sic) was involved in moving coal from the coalface, coal that had already been worked by others: a lifetime of chip chip chip, only for the hauler to haul it off. An art in itself and one fraught with many logistical problems. Today, however, there were no coal-mines and therefore haulers had died out—or needed to diversify. Some claimed that butchering was now within a hawler’s brief, even if they only dreamed of the word hawler and later forgot it. A brief for beef, and it is true that Mike loved to consume steak—there being a saying, almost a proverb, that everyone knew but failed to understand whilst otherwise consciously understanding it to the hilt—that Mike, and others like him, “were so voracious they ate beef till it was raw”.
In many ways, when perspectives were collected at the end of the day, this did not mean anything and gave no clue as to the nature of hawling.
*
Mike had left the house. Amy was upstairs making the bed. He wanted to visit the pub but doubted if anyone he knew would be there and he hated drinking alone. The park was second best: a good place for thinking. Susan was on his mind and Susan may indeed be in the park with her two children, one of which was bewitched... or so Susan once told Mike. Mike had usually steered clear of married women especially if they had children, but life was never simple. The bewitched child was a case for a hawler... a nameless child who often dreamed most of the night. While most people dreamed throughout the hours of sleep, very few among them actually remembered all the dreams that had disturbed the felt equilibrium of their rest. But Susan’s bewitched child remembered every single detail of what followed her and of what she followed, sometimes the same thing, follower and followed. The child was nameless and so were the inhabitants of her dreams. One day she’d have proper names for them. Proper nouns.
Susan had a name for her bewitched child but she did not tell Mike because if a hawler’s magic was to work, he must not, in any circumstances, know the name of the child whom he was attempting to hawl. The child must remain nemonymous—which was a word for a sort of cross between anonymity (only wholly real things could be anonymous) and a subliminal or aspirational state of non-existence.
Much was inexplicable, yet it would become explicable when put into practice and seen for what it was. Mike suspected that this child in question (Susan’s bewitched offspring) was named either Sudra or Sundra because he thought he had heard Susan calling the child by a similar name but, naturally, he tried to put the fact out of his mind, so that his hawling would be more effective when the time came. He even put the fact of his ability to
compos mentis
around these parts to reconcile any differences.