Nemonymous Night (26 page)

Ogdon sat in his deserted pub—surrounded by smashed glasses and toppled barstools. His teary face was in his hands. He couldn’t actually believe what he was doing. Yet, relentlessly, automatically, he was man-handling a huge key in the pub floor, ensuring the massive tessellations of clockwork remained taut, on a hair-trigger of sprung power—to drive the city ever downward. It seemed appropriate that a pub turned out to be the powerhouse, not only of drunken small talk or wild boozy brainstorming, but also of the more momentous or eschatological concerns of mankind—put into ratchetting motion by this morally-neutral hawling process of unbelievably gigantic proportions. Yet Ogdon sobbed, as he began to stroke the ape in his lap.

Endgame rampant.

*

As we emerged into Agra Aska, the relief from claustrophobia was tangible.

The sky was still halved by a scimitar of Corelight, like an overripe sun that had bloated beyond its capacity to shine through clouds like a yellowmanker custard.

A vast winged angel-icon on splints floated overhead and we guessed this was just a tethered kite-symbol or a free-agent balloon-emblem that pre-figured the real angel-thing itself—when the doors of the Core eventually opened to reveal the Megazanthus swagged in its mucus strands of rancid cream. But like telling lies, guessing was only one minor stage further along the spectrum of truth.

Amy put her hands over her ears. I couldn’t understand how the silent image we all watched could have caused such a reaction. Perhaps she heard something that we didn’t. A metaphorical Sunne Stead within her own brain? Or, as she told me later, the sound of a robotic machine cranking into ignition but so well-oiled it tip-toed, just as she tip-toed herself in the shoes she had managed to salvage from Sudra’s stowaway mini-wardrobe that Sudra herself had secretly carried all the time, as it turned out, during her rite of passage with us through Inner Earth.

Beth slouched to a distant seat by the Balsam River to watch the trading-barges in their resplendent flag finery and drape-carpets. She remained confused by the incriminating nature of Captain Nemo’s identity as the ‘mole’ or ‘burrower’. Yet, confusion
was
at least a stage further on the truth spectrum most of us had not even approached!

Edith, Clare, Greg & Arthur were taking holiday snapshots (with the help of Tho and Hataz) of the Straddling Cathedral. They took each other in smiling poses. Arthur even stretched his ear to its fullest extent, as he stood saying ‘cheese’ in front of a statue of a former Agran by the name of Chesterton III.

But where was Amy now?

Endgame not quite so rampant, after all... yet.

*

I had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed myself—by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the man-city Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner—to believe that Mike was my real name.

In our eventual hotel room in Agra Aska, on one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which I lifted to show Greg (my alter-nemo)—as a demonstration of Nemonymous Navigation leading to Nemonymous Night then Nemonymous Numinousness (Numinosity)—including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went with the
Angevin
trade.

On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens’
Massacre of the Innocents
. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist—depicting an unknown youth (not dissimilar to Hataz) who had a large white swan sitting on his lap... a foundling fondling the long neck as the swan itself acted rather salaciously.

The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a silent runner, mis-implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, I could hear some of our Agra Askan fans chanting. Since the shenanigans in Quarantine House, we’d literally become hotel-bound celebrities, a fact which was more than most of us could bear, even though, paradoxically, we’d been trying all our lives to seek out such celebrity for ourselves!

Amy did a spot of cleaning now and again to keep her hand in. She yearned after the state of her prior ordinariness more than any of us.

Eventually, there came the day when we all made our first close encounter with the Core itself. Or what we had before loosely named the Core, later-labelled as... well we’ve not reached that point yet.

I say all of us, but we left Greg behind as ceremonial rearguard. He said goodbye to Hataz and Tho because, as part of the first encounter with the Core, we were due to deal with their carefully-nurtured symbolic young love and—not so much ‘sacrifice’ them but rather tender them to the ‘caring arms’ of the Core itself, a ceremony only such initiated celebrities as us could carry out every generation or so. Human Coning to the Nth degree. We’d been given a very instructive and well-crafted black-skinned book entitled
The Nemonicon
about it all—much to the delight of Edith and Clare. The prose was Proust perfect.

The Core was at the top of a peak within a neighbouring lightly-valed cavity to that of Agra Aska itself, and you could see the Core (from Agra Aska) as almost a rounded half-sky of beige- or yellow-coloured light, but then the nearer you approached the more it became the whole-sky and an unknown colour... by contrast, however, strangely diminished (yet still relatively huge) when we were right up close to it at the highest point of the peak. The veiling effect of proto-incidence, perhaps. Or so our book hinted.

I was the first gingerly to touch the shimmering skin of the Core. I saw within a giant sleeping form of an angel, breathing in tune with some strobe rhythm that was relative to the reality of the ‘angel’ rather than our own reality. It was half bird, half beast, I guess. Its mane was an underlay or weave of feathers vestigially carpeted by patches of yellow fur and an archipelago of raw underskins or red meat. Yet this vision of its nature was unclear through the Coreskin. Its vast furled wings were lifted from time to time—in its evidently dreamful slumber—to reveal millions (I say millions, but there may have been more or there may have been less) of naked human beings in eternal carnal embrace (I guess eternal, judging by the book’s further hints). An interwoven slobbery population of white, brown and black limbs and torsos of flesh, but their heads (and thus identities) mercifully hidden by the nesting techniques of the ‘angel’.
Stub of pencil: The produce of this Arthurian mix of human substances within the Core was dependent on the incubation/chemical process of the ‘angel’ itself.

We all kissed Hataz and Tho farewell before passing them through a breach in the Coreskin.

And distantly we heard the voices of Agra Askans in a chorus of: “Wonderful, Counsellor!”

It was awe-inspiring.

Before leaving the site of our first encounter with the Core, I looked down towards the lower nipples of the Core sac, where the Letting Agents (again mentioned in the book) were siphoning unrefined wads of
Angevin
cream into wide-mouthed pipes—and onward, via arcane hawling procedures based on creative gravity, I guess, to the earth’s surface. Except, as I wasn’t to know at that stage, there was nobody then on the surface. The game was surely up, even before we knew about it. But confusion often brings the most unexpected clarity. I did not cross bridges before I came to them whilst I kept my own cards close to my chest. The others seemed to be quite out of their depth.

I took the hands of Susan and Amy as we proceeded to descend from the Core, our first job done.
Stub of pencil: Beth and Greg may have had to be the next couple ‘sacrificed’, when the time came, even though, when compared to Hataz and Tho, they were rather too long in the tooth to be called young lovers! Edith and the rather gender-indeterminate Clare, even more so.

As we reached the lower slopes of Corepeak, I even wondered if what we had just seen was the
real
earth’s Core. Or was there a core within a core? Or even a series of ‘Russian Doll’ cores? Bizarre thoughts, maybe.
Stub of pencil: Mere untrammelled corespeak.

*

The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond Beth’s control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.

At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan’s pretty face, prettier than her own, though when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.

Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circumstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or a bus-driver or a radio phone-in counsellor? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.

Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn’t now place him as a grown-up. The big ear seemed out of place. She dreamed of him mixing some foreign substances or murky mythologies into a huge tin bath. Amy was a similar dream portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought tooth-and-nail over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn’t really differentiate one portrait from another.

Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so. She feared he was now dead. The portrait dream showed him alive, however.

*

The various Cores were not ‘Russian Doll’ within each other, as it turned out—but, rather, side-by-side cores in different geographies of lateral time. The strobe theory of history was now debunked and many scholars questioned its validity as a basis for much of what had happened and what was about to happen.

Let me baldly state that my credentials are impeccable and I can’t be blamed for any misinformation as to what level of narration I actually work within. I am—to myself at least—all-knowing. If others know more than me, then, self-evidently, I do not know them.

Beth and Greg—whilst Mike and his party were still present in the vicinity of the one
known
Core—took advantage of their historic potential and eventually entered a rent in the Coreskin themselves... disguised as young lovers. Consequently, they are now—like Sudra and Nemo/Dognahnyi—as good as dead within the known transpirals. Greg and Mike did not say much to each other in advance of this event, because alter-nemos are notoriously anti-social among themselves. Beth did say goodbye to Susan with a hug, however.

Edith and Clare prepared themselves for a similar ‘sacrifice’. They continued to absorb much fine literature on the assumption that whatever their brains carried outside the Core would be carried within it, too. This was ‘sacrifice’, not ‘self-sacrifice’, after all. Perhaps they depended on some form of osmosis.

The pair-of-young-lovers permutations of ‘sacrifice’ among the residual members were still undecided. Mike argued the case for himself and Amy being one pair, whilst Susan would bring up the rear accompanied by Arthur. We may never know the outcome of that, although we could guess. I simply don’t know.

*

Meantime, man-city further stirred downward, the fly in fate’s ointment. Clockwork without clockwork was the easiest and clearest way to explain its method of propulsion, now that Ogdon was no longer available to wind it up.

*

Ogdon was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.

He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus’s usual allotted white-lined space alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand.
Never eat yellow snow
, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.

Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could add to the maimed and the dead.

Later he would indeed be found dead in a state of
Rigor Mortis
or
Shyfryngs
… leaning at his body’s slope upon the large still-turning clockwork-key in his back.

*

It was not exactly a TV interview. It was more Candid Camera. The four remaining Drillmates were left de-briefing the whole affair in advance of what they expected to be a grand climax, the exact nature of which was still unclear. The interpolations of any interviewer are left untranscribed.

SCENE: A disused Agra Askan grocery, lit inexplicably with arc-lights. A painting of The Archer from the old days is on the wall near some droopy turnips on shelves, looking remarkably like Thatcher.

Mike
: It was wonderful to see the peacefully happy look on those youngsters’ faces as they slipped through the coreskin. It made everything seem worthwhile.