Nemonymous Night (25 page)

*

The intense primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous suicide-bombs were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one’s eye. The wide shiny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices or slashes or sheets of black fire—accentuating how bright the daylight’s backdrop of sky had become.

Dognahnyi turned from his window and, after sweeping his curtains together upon their silent runners, he felt relieved that his room had become relatively subdued: protected against the outside’s sharp relief: now a room with an atmosphere more fitting for the conference he was conducting with John Ogdon—sitting, as Ogdon was, in full feminine regalia, beneath the painting of the man with the salacious swan.

Dognahnyi
: Celebration, but celebration for what, Hilda? Tell me that.

Ogdon
: That the man-city is at last united?

D
: (barking) Excuse the cough. It’s my way of laughing. Well, the city is certainly stirring.

Even as he spoke, the building trembled, moving the waxen blooms of flame to and fro in their holders.

O
: Man-city is something we’ve lived with. We thought the Ancient Father built it that way in the shape of a figure, but have you noticed?

D
: I know what you’re going to say. Something about me being a Barker?

O
: Sort of. The man-city is gradually burying itself like that legend of watery Venice. You recall? Rubens painted it. But what I was going to say is that few have ever noticed (and I think
I
failed to notice it till recently) that our city, our man-city, is all there is. There is nothing beyond the airport arms.

D
: Or beyond its other extremities? No geography except itself. You would have thought with helicopters we could have sussed that out before now. Doh!

O
: You can feel it in the feet. We are sinking. The city is sinking. It wants to join some cosmic battle within Inner Earth.

D
: That’s a bit romantic. By the way, is your—what do you call it?—your alter-nemo on board the Drill? That Drill they called ‘The Hawler’?

O
: Yes, disguised as a shy businessman. Even the Captain’s been kept in the dark about that.

D
: Are there such things as shy businessman?

O
: (Laughs, then barks in mockery of the other.)

D
: Well, what about the other party? My beyoootiful recruit got rid of the bewitched Sudra. That creature—if she hadn’t fallen—would certainly have queered our pitch. There would have been confusion galore of alter-nemo and alter-alter-nemo otherwise! Yet, I’m unsure if the shriving is complete. We need full penitence of all party-goers before we can set in motion the plan for widening (by strength of love) the sluice-gates of
Angevin
towards the huge mouth that yearns for the white slimy flow down its twitching throat.

O
: That’s a strange way to describe shortening the supply-line!! (Barks loudly).

D
: There’s only one possible fly in the ointment.

O
: The Megazanthus?

D
: Hmmm. The Megazanthus is a loose cannon, true. We don’t know whether it yet has its own alter-nemos. Like Godspanker or Azathoth. No, Og, what I was really referring to is the
simple
need for an unhappy ending. That should clinch everything. The ultimate paradox. It’s not easy to bring off such a required tension, a tension from the tension of identical opposites... especially with Mike Wassisname working in another direction completely. So, yes, without our own version of tension, the whole
Angevin
mine will spectacularly implode and,
even
with the help of man-city, we’ll all end up in Queer Street!

O
: I’m working on it, Dog.
I
am providing the ending.
Not
Mike Smartarse!

*

Amy, once she had finished carpet-sweeping, turned over the vacuum and emptied what it contained. Not only flies fell out but hairs from a cabbage.

Amy was now hoovering the carpet of our Quarantine Quarters in Agra Aska. The Askan authorities had decided—a bit late in the day—that both visiting parties should be held together
in camera
, to ensure no leakage of disease or, indeed, of dream from the surface. Hataz and Tho, the emblematic pair of young lovers from Agra Aska (and young lovers
in actual fact
) were also necessarily quarantined in the same room as us—bearing in mind that they had already come into skin-to-skin contact with the dowagers, Edith and Clare.

The room was an ornate one—and windowless—decidedly stuffy compared to the startlingly panoramic vistas that had first met us in Agra Aska. The room was eerie, too, in a nice atmospheric way, but an atmosphere soon to turn jaundiced, when anything haunting the room turned out to be more insidious than it was cosy, as any hauntings of that room were soon to do in all connotations of that thought. Yet, none of us (the room’s inhabitants) had suspected what fear truly was until the hauntings of that room made themselves plain... making themselves plain, but not without losing their dubiously inherent quality of mysterious eeriness.

Still, none of us would yet know true fear until the later endgame was upon us, an endgame which hung above us like a slowly eroding cliff or impending cutaway of Inner Earth. That would diminish the Quarantine room’s hauntings to a handleable perspective, by comparison.

As we were earlier trooped—in Indian file—within the portals of the room’s entrance, many of us gave a wistful look at the crippled Drill squatting like a giant’s disused toy upon one of the Straddling Cathedral’s craggy towers. Many Agra Askan sightseers were staring moon-eyed up at it, shaking their heads. The members of my own pot-holing party gave versions of their own shriven glances at the Drill, equally as bemused by its sight as the locals were.

But, once inside the room, the wide-screen sights of Agra Aska themselves diminished to a fast-receding full-stop in the same way as an ancient TV would once disperse its black-and-white picture... upon someone switching the set off.

Captain Nemo seemed strangely diminished, too, outside the jurisdiction of his Drill. He slouched into a corner seat and sat there staring mindlessly at whatever transpired.

There had been no mutual welcoming between the two parties when we all started to interact within the room. Our meeting up in such strange circumstances was taken for granted and we started conversations as if we were finishing them.

Edith had initially been tearstruck by the sight of her two offspring, Amy and Arthur. They had been lost as small children and, despite much searching by the authorities, never found... eventually assumed to have wandered off into the Northern coalfields of the city’s Head region, from where few ever returned. She hugged them, made a low-breathing comment into her son’s ever-fattening earlobe cavity—and then withdrew, taking matters for granted, as the others seemed to do. This was part of the beginning of the room’s hauntings: i.e. low-key reactions to high-key events.

Amy had grown into a fine physical woman, but Edith left unsaid her own suspicions of what or whom actually lived inside her head. Amy meanwhile cleaned the carpet with an automatic sweeping motion—a tangled tussle of an affair, as the carpet was mostly long-shanked with what looked like human hair. Some patches had been crew-cut which made the sweeping easier.

She later started polishing one of the paintings. One had a gilded frame but not much to speak of within its margins. A haunting of an image that was as faded as the flock wallpaper around it. However, the aura of the room’s general ornateness maintained itself despite the tawdriness of individual furnishings.

Clare retained a hands-on affection for Edith. Neither Amy or Arthur recognised Clare from childhood days as their headteacher.

“What’s your name?” asked Clare, suddenly turning to one of the two young Agra Askans in love with each other.

“Tho,” replied the girl.

“Hataz,” replied the boy, simultaneously, even though he hadn’t been addressed.

“Quaint names,” said Clare, almost for Clare’s own ears, if not Edith’s.

The two lovers seemed just as subdued as the rest of us. Perhaps we knew the exact nature of the room’s hauntings before such hauntings made themselves plain.

Greg and I were seen talking in a desultory fashion. We knew we were mutual alter-nemos—and when such individuals met, they often had empty conversations, and this was no exception. A shadowy businessman from the Drill’s Corporate Lounge took no heed of what we said, because he knew he would learn nothing new by so doing. The other businessmen were busy disappearing into their own shadows, by sidling towards corners of the room that were not any of the more usual four corners of the standard cube-space that the room apparently was. Human-coning was another expression which brought back memories to some of them, but not to others.

Susan was the least subdued. She now found Beth rather unsatisfactory as a sister, the latter having lost much of her grit. Susan had always depended on Beth’s get-up-and-go when they were younger and here, suddenly, Susan was (uncharacteristically) the only one in the room with any vestige of creative impulse. Even I felt jaded. What was more, Beth hardly reacted to the news of Sudra’s death. To Susan, it felt like pummelling a large slime punchball that was too heavy to swing.

The hauntings perhaps were that there were no hauntings in the room. Meanwhile, one of the gilt-framed paintings started to emit a whiney pathetic klaxon, of which nobody, including me, showed awareness.

The two dowagers—in undercurrents of recitation—spoke aloud parrot-learnt excerpts from Marcel Proust’s
Du Côté De Chez Swann
—and there was also much promise of them sharing their literary passions with the others, should there be periods during the Quarantine when there would be time for all of us to kill.

As to food, there were ‘cold numbers’ in bowls, numerical shapes of indeterminate flaccid cooked-meats in an unwarmed reconstituted form.

Once Amy had finished the housework, we all started looking for beds.

*

Ogdon spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn’t his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke:

“Help me, I’m Greg.
Please
don’t let me be Mike. I know it’s easy to confuse us but I’m the one who’s on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I’m desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I
am
Greg.”

Ogdon’s own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.

“I’m Greg,” continued the face opposite. “Help me, I’m Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike.”

It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his glass across the bar and it smashed itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror’s contents.

But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice:

“I’m Greg. Please don’t let me be Mike.”

And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

*

In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts many would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times. The hedge itself had almost
helped
their descent of passage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected—but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance.

Being inside that Quarantine room was worse than any hedge-shriving—but we were eventually evicted one by one, having proved our ‘purity’ through dream-detector games and obstacle courses controlled by klaxon or tannoy. We also had to kill the ‘mole’, before the last one could emerge from the room. And this was by a daily vote. Hardly a game. More life and death, I’d say. I was sure the ‘mole’ was Amy—for obvious reasons. But, by some quirk of semi-alliances or double-bluffs, it turned out to be Captain Nemo who was the ‘mole’—Captain Nemo (aka Dognahnyi, according to Beth) whose blood was eventually on all our hands. In fact, he and I were the last ones quarantined in the room whilst all outside surveillance had been withdrawn (we’d been assured)—so it’s just between him and me what actually happened.

Nemo’s blood may have been
metaphorically
on the others’ hands, but I had his blood—literally. But I’m not admitting to that. I quickly draw a veil of denial over such matters. I effectively retract my own overblown omniscience on that score. I even clip the wings of my omnipotence simply to avoid a Horla’s shame. And I trust Ogdon turns a blind eye, too—wherever Ogdon now is, if he exists at all. It’s probably just him against me, now. Ogdon against ‘Mike’. Or possibly just me. Endgame impends.

*

In the covered market area of man-city, Ogdon remained alone amongst those known to the authorities by actual name. The rest of the citizens were at best nameless or, more likely, nemonymous. Ghosts, if they exist at all, don’t exist as such: but float in inexplicably verifiable shades of non-existence barely beyond the threshold of sound or feeling. Other than Ogdon, any residual souls left in man-city—who felt the vague sinking feeling that often accompanies the beginnings of anxiety, later fear and finally terror—were such ghosts bordering on lies or dreams.

And the stirrings of clockwork driving will-powered machinations beneath the Dry Dock and covered market gave the impression that the city’s airport arms were beginning to whirr, almost spin, like sluggish propellers. And huge angel-shaped wings of earth flew upward in mountainous slab-cascades on each flank of the body politic or body civil, as the city’s cantilevered sous-centipedes of diggers started to delve a far more awesome shaft than a million Drills (in the shape of ‘The Hawler’) could or would ever have been able to excavate so as to make room for their communal passage downward toward Inner Earth.