Authors: Jeff Noon
“Nobody did anything?”
“Sibyl… what could they do? It’s not a crime to take a pollen mask off.”
“It should be.”
“We found him at seven o’clock. Somebody rang in. Unknown caller. What could we do, Sibyl? He was asking for it.”
“Sure thing.”
“Jones!”
“You let him get caught.”
“We did not. He chose to get caught. He headed straight for Bottletown. He knew where the street-dogs were living. Who knew more than Clegg? Nobody. We think he waited for a pack to take him. You know how much they hate him. They got him down on the ground. They sneezed into his nostrils. We think he wanted to die.”
“He’s not dead yet,” I answered, turning to Zero’s bed.
He was just lying there, breathing in second-hand air.
“Skinner did a lung pump, Sibyl,” Dove said. “They’ve tried everything.”
I looked over to where the doctor and the vet were standing. And Skinner there as well, his robotic grimace playing on me. “You did fuck all, Dove,” I said. “You let this happen.”
“Officer Jones…”
I was about to tell Dove all the bad things, but then a small sound from the bed made me bend down low over Zero.
“Smokey…” His low growl.
“That’s me,” I answered. “Smokey’s here.”
But his voice and his bark and his fur and his eyes, they had all drifted off into nothingness.
No! Please, no…
He collapsed in my arms.
And then I was going deep, Shadow-searching. Desperate and swimming, down into Zero’s final thoughts, through layers of fur and bone, molecules and genes, hoping for consolation.
Searching…
Shadow-falling.
… Floating inside a dog’s body… down here… this far down… Zero is all dog… total dog… a world of growling fur… a meadow of fur… I am stepping through the meadow… up ahead, a dog is digging the ground up… his front paws working like blades… I come up close to him, calling his name… Zero looks up at me…
“Smokey? What are you doing here?”
“I thought you’d like to talk, Zero.”
Zero goes back to his digging, ignoring me… no trace of the human in him now… just the old voice inside the body of a dog… “Where is it? I buried it here, somewhere…
”
He gives up on the hole… moves to the side… starts digging again…
“What have you got to tell me, Zero?”
“Where is it? Where?”
“What’re you after, Zero?”
“My bone. I buried it here… years ago… where is it? I can’t find it any more.”
“Zero?”
“Leave me alone. Let me find it.”
“You’re dying, Zero.”
He gives up on the latest hole… moves over… starts again… digging… and then stops… he looks up at me… “What’s that, Smokey?
”
How can I do this to him? My eyes are blurred
.
“You’re dying, Zero. I’m doing a Shadow-search. These are your last moments…”
“My… last… my last moments?” His eyes are darting from me, to the meadow of fur, to the places he has already dug, to the places he will dig, and then back to me. “That’s not true. I’m looking for my buried bone. Where is it?” He starts digging again. “Let me find it.”
“Who did this?”
He looks up at me
.
“We haven’t got much time, Zero.”
“That’s not my name,” he answers.
“Okay. Zulu.”
He barks a laugh at me, and then his voice drifts into emptiness. His eyes locked on to mine. I could see that old Zero magic in there, hidden behind deep layers of dog
.
“Is it really all over, Smokey?”
“Very nearly.”
“That’s sad, I guess.”
“You want to tell me who attacked you?”
“The pack was filled with cop-hatred. But it wasn’t their fault.”
“Go on.”
“It was my fault. I wanted it to happen. Now, where was that bone I buried? It’s around here somewhere.” His eyes stretched out over the meadow of fur. “Oh well, I guess I’ll never find it now…”
“I guess not, Z. Clegg. Why did you do it? You wanna tell me?”
“It was for you, Jones. And for Dove and Belinda, and the whole damn crew of Manchester. I thought I was on a good ride back there. Thought I had the answer…”
“What happened?”
“It was something that Dove had said, about having to die to visit the Heaven Feather. So I just took off the mask, headed over to Bottletown, where I knew a good dealer. No names, okay? He was one of my pigeons. He sold me a copy of Juniper Suction. I paid a fortune for it. I came out of the house, stuck the feather in my mouth, dog-throat deep. Nearby a pack of boy-canines were tormenting my cop-car. I went over to them, pretended to arrest them, put up some struggle. You know me, Jones, I wanted to die in action.”
“It didn’t work?”
“It worked enough for me to know that Juniper Suction doesn’t want me there. I couldn’t even kill myself, not properly. Shit, I’m sorry, Sib. I’m sorry…”
“It’s okay, Zulu. Really. I’ll get you back, I promise…”
“I feel tired, all of a sudden. I feel like I want to lie down in the meadow for a while. That okay with you, Smokey?”
“No, it’s not.” I made a deep search of his soul, found the bone resting deep under layers, and the exact place where he’d buried it. “The bone’s over there, Clegg.” I pointed, and Clegg started to dig in that place, and he came up with a big, juicy bone in his paws, and he was smiling again.
“I’ve found it, Smokey! I’ve found the bone!”
“Well done, Clegg. You want to eat it now?”
He clamps his jaws around the bone, breaking it open for the jelly within with his sharpened teeth. He sucks deep of the marrow, it smears across his lips. I see the glint coming back to his eyes. I tell him I’m going back to the surface now, but I’ll be waiting for him up there
.
“Smokey, I love you,” he says.
He kisses me then, bone-jelly smeared all over my lips, and it sends shivers through me
.
“If I ever get out of here alive, Smokey, I’ll maybe be wanting to marry you.”
Of course I ran from the feeling.
Shadow-rising.
Leaving the dogman to wander
.
But still, after leaving that field of buried bones and finding myself back in the hospital ward, I can’t help carrying the message back with me. Was that a message of love from Zero?
What was the world coming to?
I told the doctors to keep the mask on Clegg, and to keep a good eye on him. He remained in his coma and Dove wanted to know what was happening. I told him that Dogcop Zulu Clegg was fighting for his life.
Then I walked out of that ward, down corridors into dark skies, praying for the good bones of Zero, and all who give up their life for a dream. The dream of others. The good dream of maybe giving up your everything for the sake of friends and strangers.
Oh shit. I think Clegg asked me to marry him back there in the Shadow.
The night air was graphed with pollen, each grain following a secret road through the city. The drifting lines were blurred by the tears in my eyes. Zero Clegg, you stupid man. Why did you leave it so late?
The cop station. Saturday. Midnight. A lone cop punching the security code on the door that leads to the morgue. As always he feels a new lease of blood coming into his penis, as he senses the rich emanation coming from the bodies stored in there. He tries hard not to want it. He’d taken his solitary pleasure there last night and that had been an overwhelming experience, followed by a severe bout of physical guilt. And now the cab-riding Shadowbitch calling herself Belinda had worked her way into the map. She had found out about Columbus. She had told the secret to Gumbo YaYa, and that hippy bastard was broadcasting it to the whole of the city. And this cop has been so careful. Covering his traces. Oh shit, what is he going to do? Especially when his new mistress finds out. There were no secrets to be kept from the girl of flowers. If only he hadn’t made this deal. Still, the need was strong, and the blood was flowing towards his penis already.
The morgue door slides open with a whisper of breath.
The cop steps into the room.
Robo-Skinner is working on the body of a new fever victim. His camera eyes whirl up at the sound of the door opening. “Chief Kracker, what are you doing here?”
“I… I was just…” Kracker doesn’t know what to say. Skinner’s presence is an irritant to his lust-driven system.
“Yes?” Skinner asks.
“I was following up some clues about the fever.”
“Same here. This boy is the latest to go down.” Skinner pushes a scalpel through firm flesh. “There are some fascinating anomalies.”
“Aren’t there just?”
“Look at this, Kracker. The pollen grains are growing in his testicles. Come closer, take a look.”
Kracker comes close to the slab. He picks up a scalpel from the steel tray.
“The pollen is fusing with his sperm,” Skinner says. “It’s like some new—”
Kracker jabs the scalpel into Skinner’s plastic stomach. Lenses whir like crazy, like a camera dying from lack of light.
“Kracker? What are you…” Skinner’s voice slows to a metallic drawl.
Kracker moves the blade back and forth until wires and robo-juice are spilling out into the open. He cuts through the undergrowth until he reaches deep enough to sever Skinner’s nerve centre.
“I never did like you, Skinner,” says Kracker. “Fucking bunch of plastic.”
Skinner falls to the floor beside the slab, a tumble of flesh and equipment.
Kracker wipes the scalpel clean on his trousers and then lets his eyes move over to the locked cabinet, number 257, the one that contains his mistress. He feels an almighty urge to join his lust to hers, to make the same pleasure as last night. Every night it is the same: the guilt, the pain, and then the giving in to sick desire.
Already Skinner is forgotten.
Pollen is drifting through the rotten air of the morgue.
The cop sneezes then, and curses the god he had bargained with. Columbus had promised him immunity. All the time his watery eyes are gazing towards the cabinet. He can feel the heat coming from the soil in there. For one last sad time he spits denial at the urge, and then puts his hand on the cabinet door, punching the security combination that only he knows. Fat bees are buzzing around the morgue, eager for what this cop can reveal. This is nothing to do with me, he says to himself, as he watches the cabinet slide open. He sneezes one more time. This is just nature calling. How can I deny nature her blessing?
Petals opening.
Kracker looks down at the young girl who is sleeping there in a bed of soil…
Petals opening. Her name is Persephone. Her body is buried underneath layers of dark earth. Only her face is visible, breaking through the top soil. Flowers are growing out of her mouth, her nostrils; every soft curve of her naked flesh is a garden. She is planted in rich soil but really her body is everywhere amongst the vegetation of Manchester. She is the elegant arrangement of roses in Sibyl Jones’s Victoria Park garden. She is the succulent orchid that Belinda has brought back from her home world. She is journeying through the lichen that clings to the walls of Gumbo YaYa’s secret palace. She is at home in the flowers that cling to Coyote’s gravestone, which are fed by death even whilst they make some trembling attempt at life. Her whole consciousness is at one with the greenery of the city; she has made for herself a map of flowers, and she is every street, every root, every road and every branch of this tangled map. Really, she should be at her happiest now. She is free from her mother and her husband. Persephone is adrift from the tug of the feathery seasons at last. So far she has travelled from her own world, to Manchester, to Alexandra Park, and from there to this dark, wet home. And from this nurtured darkness she has established herself and burst like a floral fire through all the ways of the green. But this new world only fills her with the floral blues. At the edges of her map of leaves she can feel a disease gaining hold. A rottenness at the outskirts like the mildew is setting in. This world is turning against her. No, not the world, nature is turning. Ordinary nature fighting back. Reality. She is dying here, slowly dying by degrees. Now her darkened world is opening. Now she feels the gaze of her lover upon her flesh. Persephone lets her petals open to this visitor. She puts on a good show of petals.
The way the heat comes to her body, the way she caresses her own petals, fingers sticky with sap. The way the petals are ruby red, glistening with dew. The precise way in which the petals interlock, six in number. Child Persephone lets one of them float free from the flower head. She sends it through the air towards her mouth. The petal rests on her long purple tongue for a second. Then her sweet, wet mouth closes over it. She can feel her lover watching her.
A young girl eating the petals of a shining flower.
She feels like the sun is sliding down, inside her throat. Her fingers are reaching down between her legs to where the lips are parted below her soft belly, like petals, and the dew has formed on them. The way her lips are wet with seed, and the way her lover gazes at the wetness there.
Petals opening and closing…
Now Persephone’s slippery tongue is licking at a thick juicy stamen. Specks of gold drifting in the air of the morgue. Her long tongue comes up, the tip coated with pollen, and keeps rising until it dabs at the spot between her eyes, and then away.
Eyes of green flowers.
The tongue leaves a stain of yellow on her forehead which, like the eating of pomegranate seeds, is the sign of marriage. Her husband, John Barleycorn, had given her pomegranate seeds to swallow, nine in number. “These seeds bind you to me,” he had said. “Once and forever.” He had spoken to her in a dark English, and he could be very angry with her sometimes, if she didn’t follow the rules closely enough. But still, despite the anger and the fear, she felt that she loved her husband more than her mother, which was only proper.
She is only eleven years old now, lying in Kracker’s bed of soil, but sometimes she feels that she is ancient, an old woman growing older, a willing participant in many lives, many cycles. Planted as she is in the earth of Manchester, tuning into all the flowers of the city, gathering messages of love from all the petals and buds, her legs break through the top soil, so they can stretch apart. Her lips are ready for the insects again. Both lips, the upper and the lower, smeared with nectar. The bees are crawling all over her body, sick and slow-paced from the scent. Now they are lapping their tongues into her crevices, and gathering pollen on their limbs from her vulva of petals. They tickle. They tickle and play, sucking. Feeding. She is dizzy from their wanderings, over her skin, over her sex. Persephone is drifting through the feelings, making a meal of the gathering; nectar for pollen, pollen for nectar. All of these sweet exchanges, wet with a young girl’s juices.