Authors: D. F. Lewis
Ogdon sighed. Despite the coin tossing, he was still undecided which of the two parties to follow. Either one of the audit trails could hold the crucial clue as to the rest of it. He prepared himself for dreaming about the huge man-made flying-craft down south. Next, he made a stab at dreaming of the dark striated horizon of the bleak north, its coal-towers and clanking works, all stitched skyward with the gigantic webby wings of real and living flying-craft.
First, he needed somehow to resolve the zoo visit. The much earlier clue as to Mike’s “lorry-driver face” and his voracious approach to beefsteak were red herrings of the first water. Beth’s husband was the lorry-driver (in waste management), after all. There was some confusion that Ogdon would never be able to resolve. Real people (as opposed to fictional ones) had real idiosyncracies and paradoxes that could never be conveyed by a dream or even by the near-photographic description of realities (because each description was imperfect by the nature of words): realities that were simply and inexorably realities, and nothing else. If people were such realities, then there was no way of imagining those realities—and this was because realities (by being real) were unimaginable. They kept avoiding Ogdon’s flawed ‘camera obscura’ of a mind. And this applied to real things as well as to real people.
In the zoo, there had been a cage they all peered into with some trepidation. This scene had been left unreported, for whatever reason, but as things panned out, it gradually grew into view from a single atom of dread in one of the witnesses’ minds. Poultry combined with beef in some complex miscegenation. In this cage was a truly massive pulsing amorphousness with feathers tufting in all directions from each suppurating pore. He first saw it as black but, in retrospect, he knew it was white. He wondered if further hindsight might make it later look red like skinned meat. But, no. It was unutterably white. No amount of retrospection could change that, he knew. A noticeboard attached to the cage had identification: “Infinite Cuckoo”. That was when they all decided unanimously to leave the zoo grounds by the exit turnstile. They’d pay anything to leave, even if it were more than the normal ticket price of a few p.
Well, in further hindsight, the creature wasn’t infinite at all, Ogdon thought. It couldn’t be contained in a cage if it were. Unless it was a
bit
of an infinity. The implications were too wild to deal with today.
And he returned to his desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up his screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation with which he would need to come to terms... eventually.
*
There was a liar among them.
But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they are lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. I have told lies in dreams, for example, and the character I felt myself to be from within the dream knew full well that he was telling lies, i.e. that
I
was telling lies—yet all this as seen from outside the dream after waking was yet another lie in a way, an untruth, a falsehood, because I could hardly then remember the details of the dream and I am now making up what happened in the dream just for an exercise in fancification... making conversation as it were... stringing words together to create an interesting scenario which I can later work up as a story for the dinner party I was later due to attend in real life.
Someone stared across at me over the table, winking in tune with the candles, as if she knew that I knew that she knew she was telling lies. Her face was a cutting one when she was interrupted or gainsaid. I could tell she had once been very pretty, but now her character intervened and made the face carry the ingredients of an underface like a bird pecking for worms. I recognised her from the dream in which the lies had started their concertina domino-rally from unreality into reality—crossing some bridge that linked untruth with truth.
“What
is
a liar?” she suddenly and unexpectedly asked, thus causing such a non-sequitur to become an intrinsic constituent or continuation of the prandial conversation that was already taking place before she again so skilfully interrupted it.
“A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses—and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.
I know that I am not a liar. I am perhaps
the
liar. I am in control of a dream in which everyone else is a participant within that dream’s ambit—an ambit I’ve allowed the dream to have. The liar is the one who makes what he does absolutely true. This the knack that I now settle down with as a comforting prop, while sleep overwhelms the dream with its own brand of seeping darkness. It doesn’t matter that I drown in death, because I am certain in my own way that I shall survive it by lying about its aftermath. After life. After death.
She lifts her skirt as she leaves the dinner table and wonders who had been due to sit in the chair opposite her partaking of bird soup ladled from a huge chipped tureen. A dinner guest who hadn’t turned up—as the host had explained—because he had died suddenly that very afternoon.
*
Greg returned from the dinner party and stared at himself staring back at himself from the chipped wardrobe mirror. Wondering, extrapolating, brainstorming, lying—and none of it made the context obvious. The woman opposite at the dinner party he rather fancied, despite her aggressive nature. Beth was her name—introduced by the host in such a way as Greg suspected match-making. Another lie in the making.
Back in his flat, the face in the mirror began to talk. Greg’s face—showing not a mixed race, but a mixed class. The barely sprouting fuzz on his upper lip belied his youth, but the eyes spoke a working-class directness and a raw but instinctively astute naivety together with mechanical awareness... whilst the moving lines of his lips forming the speaking mouth indicated a more academic or professional or at least clerical/administrative slant. The face spoke and he could not stop it speaking.
Pinnochio’s nose grew longer when he told lies. Yet we have no easy way to judge lies in real life. There is a question whether a single lie, once told, creates other lies in its wake, then radiating, spawning more lies, new and different lies living off each other—like a butterfly theory of chaos—moving round the world like a disease till everyone tells lies, Russian Doll lies, until they return to the original liar himself who accepts them as truths—because he started them in the first place and he has persuaded himself, by being in denial, indeed has simply forgotten that he lied in the first place and that he had started the lies moving round the world. Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies…
Greg smiled as he realised that the face in the mirror had come to a halt... frozen like a sepia photograph of one of his Victorian ancestors... gradually growing yellowy, staining the surface with feathery fibres between the beige-ridden silver backing of the mirror and the front glass itself: spraying apricotty ice follicles across. He imagined, not a nose growing longer with each lie, but a small white feather beginning to sprout from every pore of the skin. One feather per lie. The originally bendy bone of each feather’s spindle fused with the bones beneath the skin, all their flossy sprigs striving but failing to be animal fur. Everyone’s blood is normally red, whatever the skin colour, yet the thickening plume-spindle bones of the werebird’s new covering turned its blood into an utterly pure white consistency dripping to his flat’s carpet…
*
The sun literally seemed to scream at the holiday party as they arrived in the tour coach at the edge of the Left Foot Plateau to the south of the city. Its rays gradually spread along the then empty horizon like orange marmalade—the bottom arc of its orb dripping something like thick liquid to the point on the horizon whence it had just fully risen. The holiday-makers were due to go from viewing one arc to another. They were to board an ark as it were and become participants in the latest Jules Verne expedition that had been advertised as going to the centre of the earth. Booked as a holiday, many now indeed saw this as a useful escape route from the unsaid dangers that had begun to beset the city.
Greg turned to look at his wife Beth and shrugged. They were in two minds about this whole trip because, clandestinely, they were not real holiday-makers or, even, escapees from a world that no longer welcomed them but, instead, they had a mission to find the Angevin children who had vanished from the city under the cover of rumours. Indeed, Greg and Beth both knew that other people (including Beth’s sister) were trying different apertures to enter the earth further north in the Head Region of the city. There was more hanging on these events than just a jamboree or self-indulgent adventuring or, even, conscientious objection to what was going on in the city.
The horizon and, indeed, the upper sky, were now filling with huge kites upon slanting rope-tethers to the hands of as yet invisible kite-carers on the ground. The individual kites were—as a promotional vision for the Jules Verne Holiday Company—shaped like some of the craft the Company had used for previous jaunts and some, even, models of proposed future ones.
Lightening up, Greg laughed as he spotted one of the kites was a flying carpet prancing higher and higher from yet one more slanting tether. He was older and hopefully wiser than before with his bum-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.
Beth remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching the centre of the earth from a different terrestrial angle. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling—yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at her husband. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie.
“Hey, some of those kites haven’t got people flying them!” suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.
Beth was more interested in viewing the craft that was due to take them to the centre of the earth. That was a far more important priority at the moment. At first, she was mistaken as to the correct craft in question, as she spotted a long queue of would-be holiday-makers near a large landcraft which multi-resembled a cross between various forms of transport (that was the only way she could describe it). She thought she and Greg must be on the wrong side of the platform as it were, in the wrong queue, because their own queue was much shorter, indeed depleted to just the two of them being led by an inscrutable Jules Verne official whose face they had not yet seen—but it was not long before they rounded a deceptive dune to witness the first sight of their own potential craft.
It was awe-inspiring. Strangely, from the distance at which they first viewed it, the craft struck them as simply more than gigantic. It was literally bigger than a mountain and, surely, would become clogged in the earth’s throat, at such a size. Tilted at an angle, it was a wildly proportioned Drill… with a bit at its tip, pointing at the earth and tantalisingly only a few inches from the beachy surface. Even more strangely than before, the nearer they approached the Drill, the smaller it became, but still reasonably massive judging by mere human proportions. Beth could now actually pick out the pilot in the cockpit behind the bit-tip. He was dressed in a period costume with frills, ruffs and a feathered peaked cap. He smiled at Beth as he gave the Drill’s ignition a quick trial grinding roar... and she watched the bit-tip spin, splinters of orange sun spraying in all directions from its sharp bright torque.
The most amazing item on the craft, however, which Greg was the first to notice, was an outlandishly protrusive set of slender rotor-blades or vanes upon the back of the Drill like that on the back of a helicopter. Insect-like. He could not imagine how the Drill could be able to dig its way through the earth with that as part of its propulsion system. He originally imagined the Drill sliding through the earth like a knife through butter, but that thought now went straight out of the window.
But the matter was soon forgotten when they were abruptly introduced to the Drill’s ‘Captain Nemo’—who appeared just as suddenly on a ladder that dangled from the boarding-hatch in the side of the Drill. He was a tall figure with a certain resemblance, as Greg recalled the people he had known in the city, to Ogdon or, even, Ogdon’s sidekick Crazy Lope. The Captain was not however in any way related to these two people, as both he and Beth soon instinctively gathered.
“I’ll take you in and show you the wallmaps in a minute,” he crooned with a nut-brown voice.
Beth was entranced. Greg sceptical.
“Wall maps?”
“Yes, charts and so forth of our route.”
Greg shrugged. Surely there was only one route to the centre of the earth. As the crow flew. A straight line. A slanting tether.
“I have books on board to keep us amused during the long journey,” the Captain continued.
“Books!” interjected Beth. “I hate books. Ever since I gave one as a present—one I valued as if I’d written it myself—inscribed it lovingly to the recipient—and then I found myself eventually buying it back because I saw the same copy being sold on e-Bay!”
The Captain shrugged as if this was a silly reason to hate books. With only one backward glance at the shadow of the vertical sun above them amid the increasingly crowded sky, Greg and Beth excitedly followed the Captain on board the Drill. The name on its side had escaped them: “The Hawler”.