Nemonymous Night (20 page)

Sudra
: I see what you mean. Imagination can play all sorts of tricks.

Amy
:
Or
it really was what I saw.

Both girls had a bout of the
shyfryngs
as they settled in each other’s arms to sleep; now silent as both suspected—without telling the other—that their conversation was being earwigged.

*

Near to the open-walled market or underground station, there was a tall building, access to which was by lift—indeed a very complex lift system which Greg often used before he was made redundant from his job in that building. He used to entertain business clients and had to help them negotiate the lift system—changing on specific floors for different lift shafts of higher reach. Some shafts were more palatial and business-orientated than others, some so narrow they could only be used for brooms or very thin utility workers. The highest shaft reached the open air area, leafed over like a wood. From there, once, Greg was sure he could see the distant sea through the unusually clear sky into which the wood penetrated. He imagined a finer, less definable surface barely above the sea but otherwise imitating its waves and swells—a double skin in perfect unison, but the lower one liquid, the upper spectral. Perhaps the second one was the ghost of a giant flying carpet taking invisible human vessels towards Arabian Adventure or towards the darker motives of suicide rather than seaside. And then the same building in duplicate appeared from the clouds and speared
itself
about two-thirds of the way up. The ultimate suicide by architecture. But that is deja-vu history of sorts and only has bearing on itself. History of history. History hugging the same history, without reality to come between their embrace. His story. My story. Nostory.

*

The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.

*

In these hard, awkward days in your distant future when a Horla cannot even get a decent drink, my plight brings tears of a pink cast to my eyes and a faint quiver of the upper lip upon my toothsome fangs.

*

It was known by the Megazanthus that any dream sickness affecting the rest of Reality did not affect the Core. Anywhere else on or in the earth that claimed such a distinction would necessarily be a perpetrator of an inanimate lie

The Coreseekers who approached the Core via drilling, burial-by-another-party, exploratory pot-holing, self-interment-by-shame or simply merciful immolation knew similarly that, there at the Core, they would be free of deceiving dreams... and what they would see—as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure within the Core—were
real
animals and creatures, one of which was the Megazanthus itself, the ‘zookeeper’ who also occupied a cage of its own to disguise not only its identity but its capacity for infinity.

Only when the Coreseekers were asleep, at the Core’s very own core, did they know they would be deliberately exposing themselves to dreams—unlike in any surrounding Reality where sleep was not a prerequisite for dreams.

The entrance to the Core was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in the less desirable parts of Outer and Inner Earth. There was a turnstile—just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most Cores in any planet would need. The turnstile was unimpeded and the Coreseekers emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen, though their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages. Why an empty enclosure was the first display often mystified Coreseekers, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth.

The empty enclosure at the start of the tour—it was discovered—was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping Coreseekers. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, their own vestigial ghosts bawling in disappointment.

The Coreseekers tried to pacify their own ghosts by pointing to the corridors of cages where the Coregrounds proper, apparently, would start—or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the beaked plankton that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for such creatures. They wanted to see
big
things at the Core. Like the Megazanthus itself.

Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most Coreseekers, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages—the silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of Megazanthus-imitators, many just small apes. Further on, however, kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited creatures could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other—and even uncomfortably close towards the Coreseekers themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.

The remarkable fact—despite the circumstances—none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was not a dream... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.

*

Greg, stopping over at Klaxon City, looked up into the ‘sky’. There was something lovely about an overhead expanse that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from his mind. He had dreamed of the Core as a zoo, where the Corekeeper was in one of the cages.

A good hawler, he guessed, could plumb heights as well as depths for substance, sustenance and reassurance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, Klaxon’s ‘sky’ (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphonously from inner horizon to inner horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were others of a more name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew this for a while till he realised he was not a hawler at all. Because
I
was the hawler, here in the tunnel much nearer the Core than Klaxon City! I laughed. But Susan didn’t wake. I always kept my laughter to myself.

*

The woman soon saw the man standing at the open bedroom window watching a huge black vulture-moth slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give him a hug from behind. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his buttocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. All they could hear was the incessant klaxon that no longer warned them as all warnings should, but now simply thrummed at levels of the hearing to which thresholds of sound had accustomed themselves.

He turned round—forcing her also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he’d heard a shuffle or a whisper—but there was nobody there. He picked up the freshly delivered Daily Klaxon from the table—as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary—and read the main headline:

MUD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS

Unaccountably, he thought of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Then of some other history nearer to home, a World War that affected England like a dream once slept through... despite all the evidence that it had been all too real.

*

I have forgotten how I described myself earlier: and I now try to find the essential Mikeness of me.

“I ought to try looking
under
the earth,” I said to myself.

Whatever the case, I would try more than anything now to shake off those encroachments of doctored repetition that were from Ogdon’s original wordings in his novel and, thus, give more rope to my own words and concepts. Otherwise, there would be some danger of his novel becoming the victorious prevailing reality: a fact which would be a vast disappointment to us all, as my own novel was the only novel that contained a happy ending.

Hawling
, after all, is dragging positive from negative and crystallising it. A novel is shorthand for a novelty trying to find its permanent fixture or berth as a well-established truth. And my scatter-brained extrapolations from all manner of different truths and fictions were—and still are—trying desperately to fit their novel jigsaws of shard into the ultimate picture of probability and, from probability, learning to summon the sinews of certainty... carving the perfect dimensions (inner and outer) of the sphere where we can live forever happy and content, having defeated those who wanted to smash it to smithereens even before it was formed.

There, the definition of hawling... at last!

Yet, meanwhile, I had to face one problem. It was Ogdon who first created Mike as a character and, therefore, by syllogism, myself! It was like trying to unclog the throat of my existence from the choking flying-threads in the air I involuntarily breathed to maintain that existence in the first place.

*

The children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets—of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Some in little better than makeshift carpets fashioned into coats. Most tried to discover each other’s names.

In the distance, one of the other children heard the thrum of traffic—as if the city had started to re-ignite—and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.

Things were evidently coming back to life after the strobe systems of reality had jolted out of kilter for a short few moments.

“But nobody will ever find it again. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.

The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play—seeking the Second World War bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore—having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it—and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.

*

The city of Klaxon had gathered to bid farewell to the Drill on its renewal of burrowing towards the earth’s Core. Greg shaded his eyes from the Corelight, like a salute, as he gazed towards a deceptive hill, a hill that had grown from two vast encroaching earthworks shifting together towards the variable cavity-space that housed Klaxon—shifting together during the Drill’s stopover. A huge Canterbury Oak seemed to be standing proud upon this hill above the city turrets and ‘Parisian’ quarters, bellowing out its wild, tortured wailing within the echoing hollow that was Klaxon. The multi-tannoy system that was used to imitate its wailing had been switched off, whilst the real thing reclaimed its ability to fill the city with its siren.

There would be no fireworks to mark the Drill’s departure because no fires and resultant smoke were allowed in Klaxon. For obvious reasons.

Beth and the two dowagers boarded in advance of the businessmen class’s own ceremonial boarding—especially as the women had further to go. Right up to the top for the rear cabin, where the Captain—it has to be said—had arranged for some redecorating by Klaxon workers—so as to make the journey more comfortable and easier on the eye. Adjustments had also been made to the huge insectoid vanes on the Drill’s outside so as to help improve the views from the rear cabin’s windows once en route via renewed intra-uterine burrowing.

Beth recalled the vision of two huge eyes in the Klaxon ‘sky’ and she shuddered, having now forgotten whether the ceremony of Sunne Stead had been a dream or real life. She had forgotten, too, self-evidently, that there were no such things as unrecognised dreams within Inner Earth. So it must have been real. Clare and Edith were too preoccupied with their next choice of books from the Drill’s library to care either way.

Greg took one last backward look at Klaxon, wondering if he would ever be able to relive his adventures there. They would make a small book all by themselves.

He also recalled the multi-manhandling of the mighty Drill from its pylon-turret’s pinion, with some difficulty, by the Klaxon workforce. But, eventually, the Drill was pitched upon the banks of the river near Klaxon’s own Notre Dame Cathedral, the bit-tip once more poised over burrowable terrain. He imagined that the bit-tip’s whirring and eventual screeching as it met the under-surface would out-noise even the city’s wailing sirens. Meanwhile, the Canterbury Oak, with gigantic bole, but sparse branches aloft, was still etched against the wan Corelight. Now silent. Hence the renewed man-made sirens opening up their avant-garde threnody à la Ligeti or Penderecki.