Nemonymous Night (19 page)

*

History, however, often needs to rear its head.

The helicopter hovered about the Drill as it sat ready upon the plateau of Left Foot. The helicopter, it seemed, spent hours hanging from the white ceiling that was the sunless sky. It was reconnoitring or spying for forces that remain mysterious until this very day. At points, one could even just discern the goggled pilot sitting stiffly in his bulb. He must have imagined the climbing race then going on between the attics and oubliettes of that very Drill’s interior until two as then unknown protagonists reached the top cabin at the Drill’s tailfin. He also watched many workers scaling the sides of the Drill filling the gills with vast barrels of a creamy lubrication. And then the helicopter ratcheted into a sleeker beast than a helicopter and soared even higher—to view the whole city ‘body’ striding like a pseudo-Dickensian imagining into some geographical future towards a point of the compass that was not actually any of the normal ones.

*

Today, I have been dreaming about floating above the sparkling sea in the early morning, upside down in a helicopter or balloon (more likely the latter as there seemed to be no noise) where the scintillating waves’ expanse between four identical wall-to-wall horizons was a ceiling or watery underside of some far firmer roof beyond it. I woke as soon as I approached land with the appearance through fresh mist of an ungainly pleasure pier.

*

We soon left far behind the hedgy tunnel entrance (now our only known exit to the above world, although an impractical one)—then followed the hawling-system for a while, running its pulley-rope through our hands as a sort of guide and confidence-booster in the increasing darkness.

I could hear Amy and Sudra bickering over trivialities. Yet this was a strange comfort as it brought worldly concerns to a very unworldly situation.

If there is such a thing as global warming, then it’s not inside outwards, it’s outside inward, as the ‘atmosphere’ became colder and colder—until, just for a nonce, we were slightly warmed by a clearing of the darkness and a sudden thrilling vista of the Core: it was like a sun in the roof, a roof that was, in hindsight, below us as a floor. But then the spherical light vanished just as quickly, with the re-onset of darkness. I knew we would catch glimpses of this from time to time on the journey, the disc-light growing bigger each time, but equally less warm.

How we survived and conducted ablutions (a euphemism for many things) and provided ourselves with comestibles I cannot now recall. Not recalling such things actually gives more credence to the events than recalling them clearly. It simply proves that whatever we did, we did successfully, because I am here now to tell you about the important matters: the journey and its eventual repercussions for us and the rest of the world. That’s why I cannot recall what Amy and Sudra were bickering about. Meanwhile, Arthur kept his own counsel, although his mixing skills did come in handy (and this I do recall with relative clarity) with the preparation of comestibles from waste material.

Meanwhile, I have to admit I’d lost sight of Susan.

*

There was a glimpse of a figure of a caped man disappearing into the black backdrop of a huge liner in Dry Dock, as if he had nearly been caught spying on my dreams. The cranes on the liner and its gantries reminded me more of an old-fashioned coal mine where chains hauled up and down the man lifts. I heard the distant clanging of heavy-duty engineering—and I wondered, perhaps for the first time, how the liner had been transported here (so far from the river or the sea) and for what reason. This area had, I knew, been the site of a Dry Dock for several generations. Dreams are often too late to throw any light on more important matters that have already arisen.

*

Beth Dognahnyi came into the pub together with her husband but at the moment there was just one solitary pub regular talking about a dream he had had the previous night. He was talking to himself, in truth, but Beth pretended to listen so as to enable him to believe that he was not just talking to himself, although he was.

“I was dreaming I was part of a crowd coming into the pub—a special rough cider was being offered at cheap price from a wooden cask. It was white cider. I wasn’t me in the dream but someone else. Good job as I don’t usually like cider and even though it was just a dream, I could really feel the bits of real apple with my tongue… You don’t expect roads with uncut verges, edges with hedges—and pavements with long weeds—in the city.”

It seemed he was remembering two separate dreams at once.

*

If children suddenly realise they exist, they ask themselves where their past childhood has gone. Were they brother and sister, they wonder, or completely unrelated and, thus, perhaps, childhood sweethearts incubating a future marriage when they would tell their own children of their erstwhile romance resulting in their children’s own subsequent existence as children. But, for all they knew at this crosspoint of time, they may have common parentage, and they hugged in the cold darkness—in the vicinity of the open-walled market—one hug as childhood sweethearts, the next hug as siblings, believing they gambled on one hug being true, choosing, as it were, between a belief in God and a non-belief in God. Both equally comforting.

The late night bus passed in the distance, leaving a heavy silence. Although the darkness was cold, these two children were not cold at all. They had a carpet over them like a hard blanket. Their arms through rough-cut holes in its stiff weave. And the sound of rattly pulleys from the Dry Dock kept them company.

*

“Yes?” said Edith and Clare almost together.

Beth at last mustered the words to her mouth: “I’ve just realised... we haven’t seen my husband or the Captain for weeks.”

They had been allowed off the Drill for a short break, whilst the stay at Klaxon City delayed the holiday for a time.

The other two had not heard exactly what Beth had said, as they were still preoccupied with the loathsome insects they had discovered beneath a stone.

It was almost midday by Corelight, a lightsource that the inhabitants seemed to call the Sunne (spelt out in their noticeboards and shop-window cards).

As the three women entered a derelict building for increased shelter from the klaxon, they were surprised to find its carpet covered in stones and lumps of larger rubble. A painting on the wall was the only decoration, depicting a ship in a storm; Clare, as she peered closer at it, saw that the ship was called ‘The ReynBouwe’ and was evidently sinking. She spelt out its name for the benefit of the others.

“Who’s the painter?” queried Beth, half-heartedly. She thought that the ship’s name was strange... strangely familiar.

“Can’t make out the signature.”

Edith was decked out in a soft-horn hat and heavily made up with turquoise under-eyes, a Proustian parasol hanging from her limp arm.

“What a mess!” said Clare, turning to view the despicable floor. Beth was admiring the marigold-window, in the wall opposite to the painting, which cast slanting lines of light through the dusty air.

“Edith, come here, though,” urged Clare, who was now turning over stones in the corner furthest from the window. Clare, like Edith, seemed in her mid-fifties and, although not as smartly dressed, was more attractive than her. Her hair was fastened with a butterfly clip, but wayward wisps seeped out like smoke.

The stone she had turned revealed a wriggling knot of unrecognisable insects buzzing somewhat at the disturbance.

“Ugh!” Edith flinched off, waving her parasol like a sword. Beth turned from the window—a little white flake clinging to her lip like a remnant of food—and stared uncomfortably at her two companions. She needed to speak but evidently she was finding it difficult to make her mouth formulate the words; she just made embarrassing sucking noises.

Today was Sunne-Stead. A ceremony for which the Drill had delayed its journey.

Many had gathered on the quays to view, through optic-scopes, the temporary fixity of the city’s light source. The various craft had moored to their turret-pylons for the duration, well out of the way; the Holy Stone had been cleared of tourists to allow the scientists to set out their telescopes and sextants at its topmost tower. Their other contraptions hung like intricate scaffolding from each cornerstone and gave the three women, who viewed the scene from their room, an impression of a clock-house that had been turned inside out. They adjusted their ear-muffs as the klaxon wailed on.

They had indeed intended to view Sunne-Stead from the marigold-window. The moment came and went. The Sunne, rising from West to East, shuddered to a halt, poised in the white hell of the ‘sky’ for what seemed almost a minute and, then, returned East to West.

The three women held hands in serenity for interminable hours, drawing as much spiritual significance as was possible into their communion. It was a frozen tableau, a mistress-piece and, as the heat gradually went out of the day, as ‘dusk’ met ‘dawn’ in the same quarter of the ‘sky’, their alabaster skin crumbled to the floor; and, if darkness came then the room would echo with the initial clumps of falling stones followed by the increasing clatter and final crescendo of collapsing masonry.

The black roof-sky was a Queen Catherine Wheel of the Inner Earth’s traffic, dodging in and out of the aperture-speckled wastes.

One man in particular climbed the tow-path of the city’s central turret-pylon from which several craft dangled like dead horses, He found the one he had been seeking—‘The Reyn-Bouwe’—the name was painted in all-weather gloss on its side. He inserted his limbs into the contour-seat and launched himself towards the inner circles of earth. Pulling and pushing at various levers and gloating over just as many dials, he found himself spinning like a dying fly towards an under-sky where the Sunne was about to lift its cool rim. But, as a result of his not being able to control the machine, the fuel burst and flew up into his face... like being sick on a funfair ride. The over-sky had turned turtle below him and he was diving, nose down, towards the last zenith, desperately struggling with the release harness in his seat. Fumbling for the mercy-ejection device, he lurched between what he believed to be two Sunnes in violent love with each other. He was surely dead.

The last fragment crumbled to the floor; and the marigold-window had been shattered by a shooting star-crag... or at least a crumb of one.

It was almost Midnight, almost Moon, and a slick of slime slowly slewed across the surface of the painting from a cake of wrigglers nesting in its frame.

From Stone to Sunne and back again, there were other lives and lovers dodging death and damnation, but in the utter solid darkness of Inner Earth, who knows whether there is a vast wide face between the two giant imaginary eyelights. And where’s the mouth... or beak... for eating... for breathing... for speaking …for kissing? Megazanthus Rampant.

*

I took Susan’s hands. We had found each other yet again, destined, perhaps, to find each other time and time again. Each a romantic epiphany, but equally horrifically real in the implication of
needing
to find each other time and time again. All thought of my step-daughter’s charms abandoned my mind when, within the darkness, I could no longer reconcile Sudra’s ugly sharp tongue with the beautiful body that I knew she wielded beneath the carpet coat. I belonged to her mother. I was Susan’s. And Susan was mine. My wonderful mine.

We had all encountered—on our downward trek—some increasingly common oases of light where the Core dispersed the Inner Earth’s darkness like the sun above ground often would disperse stormclouds—or even like such normal sun would take advantage of a riven nightsky to reveal an untimely evidence of its reflected antipodal earth-warming presence.

I tried to drag logic from the illogic of my mind, tried to explain something to Susan that I couldn’t really explain to myself properly—as we followed the others across the ground-housed landscape of Inner Earth.

*

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the tunnel:

Sudra
: I suppose we ought to make it up.

Amy
: It wasn’t me who got so touchy about a pair of shoes!

Sudra
: I know, but with it all changing—and my step-dad so ‘funny’ with me... I now need someone in this darkness to hold my hand and
mean
it.

Amy
: OK, Suds. I’ve not been myself these days. I’m sorry, too. I feel something creeping around me.

Sudra
: What do you mean?

Amy
: A sort of... another me. Another me I don’t want me to be. As if removing a veil inside my head. I can’t put it into words, Suds.

Sudra
: I think I know, Ame. What’s it trying to make you do? Making you imagine we’re walking in a tunnel heading for the centre of the earth or something? (Laughs.)

Amy
: Well, surely it
is
a sort of nightmare. But it can’t be, can it? You’re there. I can feel you in the darkness like in the old days before things started going strange. And Arthur he’s still my brother, but on the other hand he’s changed, I reckon. I know he has always been a bit queer, since a baby... but him now mixing up things from nothing in his ear!

Sudra
: Has he always had such a big left ear? (Laughs.) Its lower gutter seems to contain all manner of substances!

Amy
: Well, it’s always been bigger than his right, with a flap that allows storage at the bottom. The doctors said it was a birth aberration and, short of serious surgery, they thought he would need to live with it. It wasn’t so noticeable then.

Sudra
: It’s huge now! Still, would we be able to survive without him?

Amy
: By the way, did you watch the latest light period when the Earth’s Core came out like a sun?

Sudra
: It was longer than usual. Yes. It was more stripey, with dark and light together, sort of.

Amy
: I thought the shape of the uncleared dark bits that formed together around the Core looked like a giant black bird, its wings stretched as if there were things trying to tear it apart.