Nemonymous Night (23 page)

He returned with the cups of coffee and placed them upon the small table between Tho and himself.

“Are you feeling any better?”

He bit his tongue, without knowing why

“All depends from what standard you are judging ‘better’. I’ve never felt better, Hataz. It’s as if I’ve never really been myself before. I was once a girl living in a dream. Now, I’m awake and I can see myself for what I am. No illusions. Just a dead-end girl who’ll never be ‘better’ than average. You see, I was in that dream, too—eventually. Not one of the creatures slithering on their backsides. I was a finned figure that emerged from the shadows, soon after the body you once inhabited had disappeared. We didn’t recognise each other, since we were both somewhat different than in real life. Then, I saw myself in bed, peering through the skin of the dream, from the outside of the dream, yes, peering at me in the dream.”

“Tho, it was just a nightmare. You shouldn’t take it so seriously. Everybody has at least one godawful dream in their lives—one that sticks with them.”

He smiled. Was he on the point of ditching her?

“No, I told you, Hataz, I was not dreaming. I was awake. I was that girl in the bed. Fully conscious. Knowing exactly what I was seeing. And then you put one of your hands through the skin.”

She screamed. A short sharp laugh that she had intended to come out as a full-blooded scream.

“Then your whole arm poked through,” she continued, “reaching out for me with fingers that were webbed with some backward evolution. It was as if each fingernail were a tiny spinning drill. I screamed in real life, then—dreading that a dream without a dreamer could actually hurt more than just mentally.”

Hataz sipped his coffee, sorry that he could not hear one of those droning aeroplanes. It must have been the fog that had cut them off from the sound of the thrumming traffic down below, interspersed with the odd clatter of overhead vanes or a fitful bomb-blast in another quarter of the city. He decided to let her have her head. No further point in interrupting or even commenting at natural breaks.

“Hataz, believe me, when I tell you, I was scared. So rotten scared, I closed my eyes, to blot out the dream.”

“I bet you still saw the dream, though.”

This time Hataz bit his tongue with the full foreknowledge of so doing. He had contravened his own rules of engagement.

“No, it was black inside my head. Not even a glimmer showing through the eyelids. The dream was not throwing out any light of its own. My bedroom was indeed as dark as it should have been, with the lamp off. That seemed to prove beyond all shadow of doubt it was a dream I’d been watching, not a dream I’d been dreaming. This must all sound so incredibly crazy to you—but when I felt the kiss upon my cheek and the strange words in my ear...”

“You became a Sleeping Beauty reversed, never to wake again!”

Hataz laughed at his own non sequitur. Humouring Tho had got him nowhere, so mockery had to be his next ploy. She reddened and simply stared through him into space. Having finished his coffee, he got up to look outside through the window. Not a glint. Not even a hint of anything beyond his gaze. Silence met silence through the glass. Eventually, with his neck aching, he turned back to face out Tho. It was about time she came to the point. And if she didn’t, he would. At least one of them would have to cut the other from his or her life. But the vibes were all wrong. What he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.

Nobody.

The Nobody who was ever the essence of loneliness.

The milky coffee he’d prepared for Tho was untouched, left stirlessly to a look of barely lukewarm and growing a meniscus skin.

Near to bursting with a passion he had never previously experienced, Hataz headed for the kitchen. He sought the bread knife or, preferably, something slightly more surgical than culinary—simply to lance the boil that his whole body had become. Playing hide-and-seek didn’t allow the hidden one to squat, thumb-plugged, inside the searcher, did it?

Hataz returned with emptiness in his grasp, planted his face in the grail of his own webbed fingers, shaking with the
shyfryngs
. He later sipped the piping hot coffee to the sound of droning skycraft. Eventually, he heard a needle enter the deepest groove of all—and to the silence of Zann’s zany zithers playing ‘Nethermost Blight’, he felt abysmally sad for someone he’d never find because it was himself. Azathoth’s eyes poured out their sorrow. A thick cuckoo-spit bubbling from the centre of Infinity.

*

‘Backward girl’ doesn’t mean backward in the sense of having a few slates loose on her dolls-house, but backward in an inverted
Remembrance of Things Past
or
In Search of Lost Time
way, the girl’s past already bewitched by the future she had yet to live. Hawling is another word for such a process, a process that was just about to begin that day many years ago when Sudra’s Mum asked her this question:

“Sudra, what do you want for Christmas?”

Her mother Susan stared as the small girl played with her single toy—a log lorry that she moved across the carpet between the legs of the armchair. She pretended that the darkness under the seat was a secluded area where the driver could get out and stretch his legs. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the driver in the cab was firmly glued to his own seat, with his plastic legs and face all the same colour as the rest of him.

Whilst Sudra was imagining the procedure she had set in motion under the armchair, she looked up at Susan. Her father (Susan’s husband) was away long-term at the present time—and this fact lightened Sudra’s heart somewhat but she wasn’t old enough to gauge exactly the magnitude of the relief that this same absence also afforded Susan’s own spirits. Uncle Mike was due to visit before Christmas—and Sudra ever enjoyed his visits, if only because it put a smile on Susan’s face. And Christmas was a time for smiles. Even smiles of disguise.

Sudra trundled the log lorry from under the seat’s shadow—and parked it between two frayed lines in the carpet’s growth of pattern. She undid the mighty hawsers that kept the logs in place and proceeded, gradually, to reposition the load close to the roaring coal fire in the grate. Sudra basked in the pink heat. She felt that teasing the logs with the proximity of fire was rather a funny joke and she laughed before answering her Mum’s original question.

“Can I have a real doll, please... or a pet dog… Or some new shoes?”

Susan smiled. Not the broad Uncle Mike-induced sort of smile, but a smile nevertheless. Sudra guessed that Susan guessed that Uncle Mike was, in fact, at that very moment, shopping for just such a doll to lighten Sudra’s Christmas morning. Far more fun to play with on that special day than clothes—even new shoes. Sudra, however, deep down felt that she deserved clothes as well as a doll, as well as a dog. Her clothes, for example, were more threadbare than the carpet. And her only pet was one she herself imagined.

“If it’s a doll, Mummy, can I have new shoes, too?”

“You have enough shoes, Sudra!” Susan frowned. Susan’s own shoes were little more than moccasins made from remnant squares of flooring—even more worn than the ill-tufted patches where Sudra kneeled as she listened to a crack or splinter in some quirk of coaldust subsidence around a larger chunk... as the December wind moaned in the chimney.

“I only have one pair, one ugly pair,” piped up the plaintive face by the fire.

“Your Dad may get you some new shoes.”

“Where is Dad?”

“He’s visiting someone on business.”

Sudra wasn’t sure what the word ‘business’ meant.

“Is he going to the centre of the earth, again, for us?”

Susan laughed, despite herself—as she realised that Sudra hadn’t forgotten some of the white lies her husband used to tell them as an excuse for his regular absences. She also had her own armoury of excuses that she issued on his behalf, like “He’s off with Bunting hunting for rabbitskin” or “He’s carving stars for the night sky” or “He’s singing songs with Bobby Shaftoe and Little Tommy Tucker” or, indeed, “He’s on a journey to the centre of the earth, he really is.”

“How do you get to the centre of the earth, Mummy?”

“Well, you
can
dig straight down but also you could choose to go overland.”

Susan spoke the customary words as this was a well-rehearsed home-made Nursery Rhyme in the form of conversation. Customary words—whatever the words—often give young children comfort.

“Overland, Mummy?”

“Yes, overland to the centre of the earth.”

This part always broadened the smile on Sudra’s face. And the next bit of the exchange always brought the broadest smile of all.

“How can you go overland to the centre of the earth, Mummy?”

“By tricking, my dear... by tricking the Above and the Below and the Across.”

Sudra’s smile soon turned into a full-blooded laugh but, quickly, both the laugh and then the smile faded as she returned her attention to the log lorry—reloading the logs from in front of the fire. A coal spat and then settled as a flame bloomed then doused itself.

A loose thread in a garment or carpet or quilt is traditionally known as a ‘roving’—and as Sudra decided spontaneously to scorch her log lorry’s wheels fast across the carpet away from the fire, one of its back wheels got tangled in one such roving. She imagined her imaginary dog that moment snaffling into the living-room with a tangle of meat in its long teeth (it often ate disused meat till it was raw) and forthwith snaffling out of the room again. Dogs were meant to be affectionate, loyal... but all this imaginary version did was suck meat off bones, then it ground the bones…

Sudra looked at the roving in the carpet. The carpet was her version of ‘overland’—but here was a snag. She tried to lower her face so that she could bite out the roving thinking for one instinctive moment that her own teeth were the imaginary dog’s teeth. She found a sinewy roving of meat between two of her own teeth, which made her wince at the gums’ pang when she removed it with a yank.

Yes, a doll for Christmas would be lovely. Uncle Mike was probably buying it at this very moment. Travelling overland to fetch for her a doll from the very centre of the earth.

“Stop dreaming, Sudra,” said Susan, as she stroked her daughter’s hair. The girl was now sound asleep coiled in front of the fire, log lorry forgotten. Uncle Mike would eventually arrive at the door and Sudra would skip fast to greet him, before Susan had a chance for her own pre-emptive cuddle and kiss.

Uncle Mike, if it turned out to be Uncle Mike, would not say what was in the package he put beneath the Christmas Tree. He did not tell them it was a real cabbagepatch doll with long doggy teeth and its own new shoes. But, of course, he would not arrive till nearer Christmas itself.

He had been roving overland for days, he would eventually claim, but now, by the warmth of their coal fire, he had reached the true centre of his world, here with Susan and Sudra.

*

The Drill broke through a fossil-bank close to Agra Aska, cartwheeling free from rubble-traction into the relatively clear space of a huge cavity close to the Core itself.

The city was laid out like a map, until Captain Nemo released the Drill’s parachutes, which worked jerkily in the unusual air consistency of Inner Earth. The map turned turtle but eventually approached more steadily, and Greg could see at last the famous Balsam River and its mighty Straddling Cathedral, whilst the Drill’s bit-tip intermittently scribbled over it like a biro nib in the soft putty-like effulgence of the Corelight.

*

Pinnochio’s nose grew longer when he told lies. Longer wooden teeth, too. 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—roving 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…

*

As the Drill landed with a hefty banking towards the Straddling Cathedral, Greg laughed upon spotting a kite being flown by an Agra Askan citizen, a kite identical to a flying carpet... prancing higher and higher from its slanting tether. Greg 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 Dognahnyi remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching Agra Aska from a different terrestrial angle, i.e via the hawling-tunnels of man-city. 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 Greg. 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.

Agra Aska was indeed now alive with kites. Beth and Greg had left the ill-tilted Drill. Captain Nemo, the businessmen and the dowagers were nowhere to be seen. Probably still preening themselves prior to disembarking. Beth and Greg had made reunion soon after the Drill’s crash-landing by parachute. Beth was still wondering where Greg had been for the whole journey but didn’t question why she hadn’t questioned this before now. She however did complain about the dowagers and their over-eager book recommendations and the dreary yellow wallpaper in their rearward cabin. Beth and Greg knew perhaps that they were a template for love (albeit a forged or fabricated one) so they needed to act up their affection for each other at all times now that they had arrived in Agra Aska—and they wondered if their mission in Agra Aska was indeed a predetermined one for stamping this very template upon a younger couple who even at that moment were being touched by a bout of the
shyfryngs
at the well-demarcated edge of an enormous Coremoon—a vast glowing pale yellow ‘half-sky’ that even at this moment reared its arc through a mountain cutaway towards the south end of Agra Aska.