One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (6 page)

Then, as I rested briefly, humming on the Sudafed and musing upon my Mission, my medicated eyes found themselves drawn to that brightly painted farmyard’s sole unpainted wall. A great drystone wall it was, eight-feet-square, surmounted by a roof comprised of one vast table stone. I struggled to my feet and studied closer, and I recognised now that its geological fabric was animated and shifting. And as I focused further upon that vast table stone, so my head began slowly to rotate. But really, as the pace of the rotations began to pick up speed, it was not my head entirely but my face that was spinning now. Moreover, my face was slowly pushing into the rock. Holy shit! And picking up speed. Holy Shit! Now at last I crumbled, my face suddenly a clockwise propeller crumbling through the rock, crumbling the Me right out of me, crumbling the rock itself, driving Me – whatever Me was – faster and faster through the firmament, through the rock, ever forwards always forwards propelled by my spinning propeller face. And with that propeller face, I drilled deep through the Rock of Ages further and further into the past at such a dreadful bate that I span out of Consciousness into Time itself.

As out into the microfolds of the Universe I was thrust, the brutally hostile incursions of cosmic winds proved immediately catastrophic to my puny physical Being, which collapsed then was dragged along in my Life’s Slipstream, a child’s deflated party balloon snared on the back of a jumbo jet. Too soon, my sagging physical Being – buffeted and brutalized by 1,000º temperature changes – resembled nothing more than laundry, great heaving armfuls of putrid laundry. Less than that even, I was a brown splash of chewing tobacco spat out by some not-arsed soldier into the path of an oncoming tank. Scattered across Time, I was by now merely Contents. Fragmented as aerosol spray, I’d become my own Diaspora. Until all was dreamed and fleshiness ‘seemed’ and I hung Between in a great bog of Me, a helpless Merman trapped within a runny, waterproof bag of himself. But somehow
somehow
, diminished though I was to the nth degree, yet still I was Salad With Attitude …

And then I heard smiling, the loudest of smiling. And I wondered how smiling could even be heard. But I even heard grinning, though I couldn’t explain it. In darkness, in blackness, an audience grinning, delighted to see me. And then I hung down and I knew again what
down
was. My body supported by persons unknown that I knew and I trusted, I coughed then I farted and belched. And then, from out-of-focus, great swathes of bright faces emerged all delighted, delighted to see me. Whoaaarrr!
And then it began. From atop my stone podium – still supported on either side by officers of my trusty Select – my Royal Piss exploded into a hollowed stone pail as the gathered throng of Noble aristocrats gasped appropriately and pronounced their satisfaction at my extensive waterworks. Right then, however, I couldn’t even manage a weak wave, so – eyes still shut tight – I extended my tongue beyond my lips as evidence of my return at last, and shrieking cheering ecstatic choruses of ‘Beyond, Beyond, Beyond’ started up across the cavern. No thanks are in order, for I am merely the Vessel through which all of you may experience richness in your own lives. And me still hanging up comfortably, propped in between the two tallest Select guards in my father’s retinue, I stared down intensely at the expectant faces of those chosen few, knowing that before nightfall my Royal Piss – its every last scintillating drop – would have been quaffed down into their bellies. For Magic. Steeped in ephedra since my royal childhood, brimming always in its manical glory, suffice it to say that I knew from my instant calculations that this single pail of Royal Piss would guarantee intense Visions for at least nointeen of my favourites. How blissful it was to be home, here where at all times they keep nine full pots of ephedra boiling in the eternal fires on the slopes next to Odin’s Sitch. How blissful to know that my father held the best ephedra supplies from here to the sea. How essential to steep in the sweetness of ephedra’s other worlds. How charming to sleep on fresh heads of ephedra. How giddying to wear ephedra bracelets. Oh, ephedra my Phaedra.

The next morning at daybreak, I was eventually awakened from my slumber by an endless succession of olive-skinned men whose dangerous job it was to heat the stone bath on the far side of my cavern by pitching into its waters red-hot rocks
from a huge fire at the cave’s entrance. Across the hillside on the steep slopes of Mam Tor, a line of women at the mouth of Odin’s Sitch were also preparing my bath by scooping up those sacred waters into their great leather bags, then commencing the long trek down into the valley and up the other side to my cavern. This tiresome job always takes the people most of the day. But my return here, however, is always the greatest cause for celebration. For here in the Land of Ashop I am royal heir to Old Tüpp’s ephedra fields, some say the greatest ephedra fields in all of N. Europe. And one day I too shall be coronated Old Tüpp of Ashop, and have my own contraption that reduces my height and lends to me the air of a Ruler. But for now, it is enough that I am Old Tüpp’s chosen son and heir. I am the sacred stranger known as Bjond – ‘the fair one from the far lands’ – the Far Reigner who appeared mysteriously one day in the boughs of the Great Tree. Or so it is said. But Old Tüpp is himself a Far Reigner of sorts. Not olive-skinned but done up day-to-day with ochre clay, and not at all short without his contraption. None but myself and the king’s own guards have witnessed this secret. Old Tüpp is one of the Old Ones, however, and he is therefore unimpeachable. He knows Longitude and the directions of things. He finds things through that knowledge that others know not. All of the Old Ones hold knowledge that none others hold. That is how they have remained supreme for so long. But there are Newcomers now who have made false claims, most divisively, that a person can live without ephedra. These are often the same people who claim for food all the respect and importance that ephedra once enjoyed. They are more than wrong; they will be the downfall of Ashop. So now, when I salute the Sun with my great horn of ephedra, I am also declaring its potency and the illegitimacy
of food alone. No one can or would wish to live only by food. It is not natural.

And with that, I took my fingers and ran them around the edges of the excavated stone bath, scraping up the ephedra paste from the encrusted tidemark, moulding it with both hands into the shape of a patty, then cramming it into my mouth with furious gusto. ‘Score,’ I exclaimed in the vernacular, chewing and chewing then swallowing it down with warm ephedrine wine. Then I repeated the exercise with a similarly ecstatic verve and slid into my soft bed of feathers and ephedra heads. Score. Score. Score. But suddenly, a furious sneezing attack and the crossing of my eyes denoted a serious error. Is this a heart attack? Then a coughing, and a-spluttering, then more coughing and a furious furious s-s-s-s-s-shaking …

… Father, Bjond was returning once again to his Other World.

Sobbing and hiccupping, then gulping and rubbing the tears from her eyes and nose, the inconsolable Anna brandished the accelerating Buick like one possessed as we surged then galumphed, surged then galumphed across the desolation of Macomér Industrial Estate, trying simultaneously both to make a dash for it
and
to avoid the gypsy children whose playground was our middle-of-the-road. And as she drove, Anna wailed at me, wailed at herself, at anyone who might catch her words on the air.

I hated to admit it. But I was feeling Bountiful. I was feeling great. Poor Anna. For her to have endured nursing me as a corpse was too much to bear even thinking about. But although that rancid experience of hers did call into question somewhat the quality of her current compliments to me, darn it if I wasn’t now
brimming over with all the joys of spring. Indeed, I felt suffused with an incandescent glow, the like of which I had not experienced in a mighty age. And as Anna turned the Buick right out of the industrial estate and we headed up the hill towards Macomér town in the now darkening skies of the evening, I no longer felt utter terror at the very idea of returning to the place of my kidnap. At least for now, those deafening otherworldly shocks emanating from the Great Being, his seismic broadsides that had forced me to seek refuge at Puttu Oes, had died down considerably. Moreover, even as we began to ascend the ever-steepening mile-long incline into that grand medieval capital, I had sussed that the proximity to each other of both Being and Doorway could hardly be coincidence, especially in this Birori Valley wherein so much misadventure had occurred. I twisted my neck around sharply to the right and stared back down the hill across the industrial estate to the deserted farm of Puttu Oes, the ribbon of headlights that now glowed down along the 131 providing context and allowing me at all times to trace precisely my correct path back to its True Doorway. And even as we became every minute more drawn into the tight main streets of uptown Macomér, my new knowledge of that great cosmic ‘re-fuelling station’ just down the valley summoned within me a huge sigh of relief.

Navigating expertly up the clockwise arcing incline of the town’s wide main street, Anna suddenly pointed up to the green neon hotel sign ‘Su Talleri’, and our land-yacht slithered to a halt. She began as matter-of-factly as she could muster.

But as I paced my tiny hotel room that night naked from the heat, dousing myself from the water cooler and cursing the lack of ventilation, nevertheless I was, or so I believed, the heartiest Time Traveller in the whole N. Hemisphere. For such was the proliferation of marvellous magic upon this mysterious island that I had, in one admittedly insane day, stumbled upon a precise route back to the homeland of my Ancestors: to my father, to my noble people and to my destiny. And although my time ‘back home’ had been far too brief to enjoy – and was already partly evaporating from my present memory – now was not the time for such enjoyment. No, now was the time only for Truth.

Currently replete with ephedra for the foreseeable future, or so I imagined from the current swing in my step, one recurring event in my hotel room nevertheless disturbed and tormented my senses. It was the sound of the trains going over the points that crossed the main street barely 200 metres away. For I had experienced that exact sound whilst being held hostage chained to a wall during the kidnap sixteen years previously. But so similar was the rumble of those trains from my Su Talleri bedroom
that I knew our prison
must
lurk extremely close by. And despite my earlier Pavlovian nodding in response to Anna’s emphatic assertion that I must remain in my room, each successive train that clicked and clattered across those Macomér points only urged me more and more to slip outside this house briefly and discover precisely wherein we had all been incarcerated.

And so, at midnight, I slipped the Yale lock of Su Talleri’s side entrance on to its latch. Heading to my right, I walked just 100 metres up the side road away from the main drag to the end of the street. But as I turned that immediate left I recoiled in horror and stopped dead. What? Right there before me, in all of its squared-off 1930s moderne grandiosity, stood the Fascist Cheese Factory of our nightmares, viewed now in brutal profile, crouched and stewing in its own shadows, its continued local infamy apparent by the sheer accretion of youthfully sprayed Pronouncements Diabolical and its crumbling façade still surmounted with those enormous and uniquely Art Deco concrete capital letters:
L. DALMASSO, PRODUZIONE ESPORTAZIONE FORMAGGI
. Great hunks of the factory’s walls lay as rubble around the base of the building, the second ‘g’ of ‘FORMAGGI’ target-practised to the floor in a hail of bullets, hefty slabs of cornering dragged right across to the opposite side of the street. Ultimate in its attitude, however, was the presence of two bent crowbars cast down idly upon the factory’s front delivery platform, two fabulous implements each more than a metre in length, and each tossed away as though nothing more important than a teatime break had curtailed the high jinks of the demolition engineers. More sprayèd spew from some local Black Metal kids decorated the iron grilles of the barred front windows, whilst the featureless ribbed industrial pull-down metal doorway was scribbled upon conscientiously
top-to-bottom and signed simply with the name of the in famous torturess ‘Madame Bathory’.

I ventured slowly past the cheese factory frontage, awed by its sudden proximity. Oh, my fucking fuck! Nervously I slipped down the narrow alley that led to the rear of the building. Halfway along, I kneeled down at the low windows and peered into the utter blackness. Having no flashlight available, I simply pointed the camera of my mobile phone at the window glass and pressed. Whoa. Immediately, the camera’s flash illuminated the whole of that creepy underworld, the rows and rows of tables, the stacks of wooden pallets, and those inhuman white wooden stalls in which we’d been incarcerated, chained. Now, even without the benefit of the flash, I remained compelled and still kneeling, staring into the blackness of those windows. I stared and still I stared. Then at last, I stood up and continued my way down that dark alley to the rear of the factory, where its foundations terminate in that spectacular ravine along which Brent and I had made our naked escapes sixteen years previously. But as I again traced with my eyes the path of dear Brent Garrett’s near-spectral escape route, it was for Dean Garrett that my heart now raced. Poor surviving Dean. Brent’s suicide after the kidnap had been instant, unequivocal, final. Dean on the other hand had become sensitive, New Age, mystical, fatalistic … Dean the Survivor they called him, more as a convenient mantra than as any real truth. Even I’d sniggered at his crop of slight, sensitive 10″ singles released throughout the ’90s under the name Forest Of Dean. But now, from the sheer edge of the ravine, I suddenly unleashed into the black night a full-blooded wail for Dean the Survivor. For what is this tragedy that names him ‘Survivor’, but still sees him dead before the age of thirty?