Klaxon City - Finale

            The babies crying did not upset Mike but he was slightly perturbed that some had handcuffs on. 

            They had been left in rusty prams which looked as if they hadn't been pushed anywhere for centuries.  The wheels were splayed, the springs choked with corrosion and the harnesses spitting bullet-hard pellets from the hanging rattles with every gust of the wind.  There must have been at least a hundred prams, turned in all cock-eyed directions, the inhabitants wailing fit for a thousand prams.  Mike knew it was a baby's lot in life to cry, but this was taking things too far. 

            ****



The view through the cockpit window – as the vast Circular-Saw penetrated the cavity-walls of Inner Earth – was not so much a panorama of the reality beyond the window but of a moment of strobe-history that the pilot who peered through the window was undergoing as he instinctively tussled with the controls.

            His dream of strobe-history showed twin Earths that were on a collision course – through the wide vista of his vision. Instead of creating a huge explosion, they blended or merged in the same way that, once upon a time, the legendary man-city, having begun to bury itself beyond its own foundations, eventually encountered another city with initial splintering ricochets of architecture and hard core but then blended with it – thus making two places the same place but different.

            The pilot of the Saw quickly regathered his present moment uncorrupted by any dream of strobe-history just in time to address the situation of a Drill making towards him aggressively from the left of North Monday.

            ****



            Mike turned to Susan who had fallen asleep next to him in the bed – before the dream of prams had started.  "Let's get out of this one and quick," he mouthed so that she could lip-read, since he knew she was deaf in dreams, if not in real life.  In many ways, she looked prettier than when she was awake.  He wondered if she misunderstood, since her answer was a smile and a tug on his hand towards one of the prams.  She was evidently feeling broody.  And the baby she eventually chose possessed a head that was as wrinkled as an old man's with one huge ear.  Its wrists were far too thin for it to keep the handcuffs on.  But Mike knew fresh-born babies were often ugly and deformed, only later to grow into normal human beings. 

            Suddenly, Mike felt himself within the boiled beetroot skull of the baby – looking up at two strangers who were mooning down at him and cooing silently.  The woman offered him her bare breast to suckle – and he dozed into a dream within a dream, or a dream's dream where a prevailing truth and reality seemed to return... 

            Mike as an old man recalled the boy he used to be, clambering over the corrugated roofs, in search of what was known in the games as "Angevin trove".  Most of the other boys who chased giant butterflies and shy bumblebees with him along the topmost garden walls had all since died.  However, now an old man, he did live with someone most of the time, a dowager lady called Edith: a tea-drinking, untalkative individual, in wide skirts.  But as much as the old man prattled on about the residue of his past life, Edith merely nodded and sipped and stared.  The stares were as blank as the turned down TV – where images flickered and pursued each other across the screen, from the past to the future, via the never never of the present. 

            The old man used to scale the roofs of the ancient home town, questing for wild Angevin (a myth generated by boy talk) and also seeking a maiden called Sudra who had spoken to him in his dreams, saying she lived behind the huge chimneystack – from whichever way you approached it.  The other boys would humour Mike and say that they had actually seen her themselves, with feathers growing down her back and untamed legs like shaped cream-butter – the face with a complexion born of flames.  She was for Mike to discover, one endless summer's day towards the end of his boyhood.  He would have to surprise her, as she played hide and seek around the stack. 

            Creeping along the roof, legs astride the ridge-peak, he held out his Box Brownie camera like a gift.  He developed it at night, but all he could see on the print was a blur like a bird-winged slug with soot smuts for eyes.  Now an old man, he smiled as he stared at ‘Big Brother’ on the TV, his eyes smarting and clouded with expended time.  The screen always bore the same blur, inching bigger with the days, but he really loved the endless protagonisms in which the mysterious Sudra featured.  Each sip of his tea had no more volume than a teardrop.  His companion would soon have nobody to whom to listen, as he was about to go up on the roof, by first standing precariously in his wheelchair – which was looking more and more like a baby's pram of giant proportions...

            There were not a hundred prams.  Perhaps there were not two hundred.  Whatever the count, Mike knew he was in one of them and he began to search each one methodically.  Susan was not so painstaking, sitting on a nearby bank of wasteground and knitting jingle-jangly bootees.  Eventually, he found a pram with a baby so small, its whole body was on the pillow.  It squeaked like a tiny bird.  He leaned against the pushbar, but the rust was hard and fast along the axle and the pram sounded like an old man choking upon quickly hardening phlegm.  Mike looked at his own hands – covered in  brown stains, freshly off the encrusted pushbar.  He winced, as chemicals stung a small sore.

            "Come here!" he waved to Susan.  And she waved back... 

              The new dream was a tapestry, woven and woven about with other dreams, none of which promised an end of the senseless seamless pattern.  He dreamed of ‘little nervous people’ who spent their lives looking for their own identities and alter-nemos.

            He also dreamed of wondering why he was cursed with a giant's body, possessing a mind as powerful as the muscles it controlled.  He lived in a derelict cavé, beyond some dunes and didn't want to meet anybody.  And, despite the accusations, he did not wield sorcery by choice, nor siren-swords by any dint of blood thirst.  He was merely a self and nothing could take that away. 

            His first memory was of seeking his mother's body, which had crawled away from its produce rather than die in sight of the one she had just borne.  He failed – as he still failed. 

            There were thick-skinned bird-selves said to live over the hills.  He had read, among the books that he had found about him, of many creatures, monstrous and delightful alike, including such as himself.  But those that angered him more than any other were ones with egos far too big for their bodies, nauseating little irks whose skins would sooner burst like over-ripe plums than try to keep their minds within bounds. 

            At last, his own temper cracked.  He unscabbarded his broadest siren-sword.  He scavenged for sorcerous spells in dusty corners of his home, finding a clutch of them, clucking, rooted in the night soil under his clapped-out truckle bed.  He donned the skins of beasts of prey that had come to his clearing in the forest to die of old age and, with a final glance at the place that had been his home for a lifetime, he strode off towards what the books called Sea. 

            The dunes changed colours with the days.  His heart changed too.  And he dropped the siren-sword in an unmarked spot, for fear that he might eventually use it.  He kept spells about him in every pocket, since he began to fear for his own safety rather than for that of those he threatened.  At long last, he emerged from the forests and knew he would never return to his home, for the journey had taken the rest of his life. 

            The roar of Sea, the tang of fucus, the scream of diseased gull – he knelt, head resting on the sand in pain and, strangely, relief.  After many hours, he looked up and, in the yellow twilight which lay across the cream-topped waves like a sumptuous carpet, he saw the distant rigging of schooners on angevin-trove trails.  From his pockets he took the embodied spells he'd toted.  Their skins were, by now, thickening, faces growing to a point, bird-elfin voices becoming squeaky and cruel.  Suddenly more fearful, he crawled towards the sea where he could tell the smelly fish about the rest of his life...

            The wasteland where the countless prams had been abandoned, Mike could see sloped down to a pitiful sea.  Scrawny waves plopped in and out  – where some of the babies that had escaped were now playing.  One near toddler was spanking a sandcastle into shape, whilst another in horrendous diapers was spiking it with flags made from cotton buds.  A third, far too old to be called a baby, was rolling about with a life-sized dolly.  Mike took Susan’s hand, and pointed towards these examples of parental creation, as if to say, there but for the grace of Megazanthus...

            In another dream, one that, although he had dreamed it several times before, took on a reality that belied its credentials as a dream, Mike was a collector of trapped metal piece puzzles – not so much to solve them but to admire their gleaming workmanship and intricacy. 

            He enjoyed the delightful rattly chunkiness when shaking a puzzle's box-container and relished its sensuous twining of cold steel limbs.  Some puzzles were easy, merely slipping off each other as soon as look at them.  Others were of middling difficulty: a minimum of choice manipulations brought the various bars, flanges, stanchions, roundels, spokes, rings and hinges into optimum interface, whereupon they readily fell apart almost upon a sheen of oil, like spent lovers.  However, those few of an Angel's perversity remained ever-enlocked in eternal embraces of misalignment, as if they were acrimonious ex-lovers who could not disentangle their various body parts for love or money. 

            There was one puzzle in particular which took pride of place in his collection, one that had defeated all Mike’s friends.  He could almost watch himself as a different person when, one day, determination lay in the set of his mouth, teeth grinding with the jaw motion of stunted cattle, eyeballs pierced with pinpricks of light as he ruminatively turned over the reluctant trinket with a knitting-needle under the desk lamp.  He suddenly saw a way through.  Now bringing his fingers themselves into play, he lovingly eased one pinion into an unusually acute relationship with a ragged tab of metal-flashing which he'd suspected was never intended to be there.  This manoeuvre served cleanly to sheer off the unwanted growth; a file could never have been contorted into such a crevice.  Therefore, it was fortunate that this near-accidental quirk of prestidigitation had slickly taken it off with the run of the grain. 

            But with other possibilities dawning, his mind zoomed through too many labyrinths of rivet tolerance, rogue alloys and median scapement.  And with concentration gradually deserting him, he threw the recalcitrant piece across the room like a space tool or sound torch – a random act that inadvertently caused four iron curds to be abruptly released from their conundrum of interdependence.  They separated with a silver severing sigh of consummation, but at the same time dubbing him a cheat. 

            One curd was a sparkling bird-spider on splayed legs.  Another was the key to the unknown convoluted trip-tumblers of a lock.  The third was an Angel crucifix with the blurred outline of a girl's body bulging from its spokes.  The fourth was a simple circle, a wedding lock, an eternity ring, or whatever. 

            At the time, he could only think in roundabouts.  He could not plumb the feeling of despair that came over him as he stared at the falsely solved puzzle...

                        Which of the babies would grow into Mike?  The brat, with the huge dolly, spat a wad of filth at Mike from its back gums.  That was surely not Mike.  Such a creature couldn't solve puzzles even if it were given the answers first.  Susan had disappeared, wheeling off one of the prams with a groaning squeal.  She'd evidently chosen a baby, without his help. Surrogates were not even part of the game, nor was the icy spermevin now trickling down his cheek in tearful humiliation.  This was not a dream, but a life seen in retrospect, sideways rather than from either end of the telescope of birth and death. 

            As the sun dipped into the sea, spreading itself like gory paint along the horizon, the prams became large beetles on their backs, unable to right themselves, their feeble feelers flickering wildly.  In the distance, a helicopter banked, its clacking vanes ill-timed and it nearly hit the tops of some nearby trees.  Without any reason, Mike now knew this wasteland by the sea was the crèche used by those single parents who worked for the Angel Megazanthus during the current world recession.  All human sorrows were nurtured within Inner Earth like black jewels, even to the extent of cabling subliminal TV programmes to all our waking homes.  The workers would soon be returning from Inner Earth to collect their infants – after having had a hard day down the hawling-shafts, wringing with huge mangles the blood-gutted nappies fresh from bird-demons' backsides, stirring the great tureens of shining white pus, stoking the fires into enormous weirs of irreversible torture... 

            And as the working mothers lugubriously waded from the spent seas to retrieve their young from the rust-corroded prams, Mike scuttled into a long chimney of sleep – but, with the mysterious Sudra now having removed her many-layered skirts, he eventually spotted a tiny prick of light at the other end of dream's telescope, through which it would be possible to climb if only he could crack the angel-devilish lock-puzzles of the tiny hand-cuffs he wore himself. 

            ****



"It'll come with the music," thought Amy, her hands hovering above the piano-keys, as if she were to shake some fingers like drying clothes in the wind.  Yet she settled at last to negotiate the onset of noise – whilst for moments of mindless panic she confused the notes she was due to wring from silence.

            The rehearsal had somehow overlapped into the performance proper ... much in same way as when old memories became more immediate than those about to be newly strained from the impulse of now. 

            She could indeed empathise fully with the child she had once been: that girl in the tiny frock, a frock which Uncle Mike had bought for her – he who might have been the man who was currently beaming up at her from the concert audience, given the right age. 

            As Amy's first public performance approached, that erstwhile child, with barely a sign she was female except for the tiny frock she wore, is who she is.  Who she was.  Now the semi-fledged woman with fingers outstretched, poised for the greatest, if not most memorable, moment of her life...

            The keys rang out like cathedral bells, rather than piano notes.  A twisted Quasimodo of a carillon that woke Oblomov as well as an ancient Klaxon City to an ancient war.  A little girl squats in a puddle of dry mud – watching distant church pinnacles and pylons conspire.

            This will be history.  This is when.

            Her parents are worried she is already an orphan.  The war foreshadows black stains across the stone flags of Paternoster Square, stuck with blood glue, bonefish bonding.  Lengthening bread queues snaking across the old newsreels like celluloid poison.  The air raids extending their range from dark into day; the girl's brother Arthur still sending letters dated months ago.

            "You can stay outside – but directly you hear the sirens, you know where to go..." warns her parents.

            Tiny Amy nods.  And she idly squats in the city square.  Most of her friends have grown out of mindlessness.  Or grown into it.  Whichever the case, Amy was different.  Her doll sits beside her, already a quarter limbless.  The doll's called Sudra, but never replies.  Perhaps the doll's name isn't Sudra at all.

            "Amy!"

            A man calls to her from across the empty square.  She knows it's her Uncle Mike, so she pointedly ignores his summon.

            The older Amy remembered even as a child she had strange urges for something her body couldn't comprehend.  Unblotted from her adult mind, the urges' echoes were knelled forth by the music she now played, amid the ondes martenot and the modern percussion.  They became mistuned tarnishes, mistimed harmonics of image.  The hall's ancient acoustics ranged from tickling nostril hairs to vibrating the eyeballs, via a stomach's thunder chamber.  The sounds of the piano concerto were intended to convey a war machine.  Avant garde.  Ultra-modern.  Jaggedly loud.  Yet Amy's ears were the last organs to be penetrated by the furore, that hubbub which was created around her solo audit trail of the piano.  Created by the orchestra's accompaniment.  And the sirens.  Whistles.  Drumrolls of doom.  The wurlitzer's bellows.

            In the old days – before Amy was even a child, even before the alternate strobe-wars – keyboards and silent flicks were pitmates ... cueing and mis-queuing and pursuing the monochrome marionettes, those dumbsters squashed to the vertical square ghost like flat people dying to act out their insectoid fictions – painfully unsticking as they waded through films of aspic.

            The war waif is no doubt prone to some regressive echoes of the future – performing a would-be woman's self – when she is tempted to leave the ancient Paternoster Square in Klaxon along with that Uncle Mike with the sneaky snakey fingers ... perhaps knowing instinctively that, one day, she will need to have been  early-primed to carry forward a performing artist's soul: thus to spice up the biography or get the tongues wagging or make her sensitive to the abuse of existence or ease her ability to convey human passions or masquerade as a pinch-fingered lustling with two raw-puckered mouths.  Whatever the case, upon that day of war, the Square's siren failed to work...

            The man in the audience, the one who looked like her Uncle Mike, smiled as the piano concerto reached its violent climax.  Yet when the soloist raised empty eyes to accept her due ovation, he felt her gazing directly upon him.  Why him?  Who was he?  Why did he feel a stranger to himself?  Nevertheless, he brought his palms together with loud painful smacks.  Feather-spiked hands slapping together didn't sound that odd, however, amid the seamless applause.  Tomorrow the concert hall, which doubled as a cinema, was to show a Greta Garbo silent.  Full of the motion of white-patched shadows: including a face and body and name that had been peeled from a different square of ghosts.

            Amy’s tiny girl hands – those prayer-held amputees of a siren's failure – are suddenly unable to fend off the rebirth of future's solid memory.

            "It's come with the music," thought Amy as she was wheeled backstage by the conductor.  She drooled a spittly wad of angevin-cream, having found deep within her something she'd never really lost.  The only music that a performer with stumps could play properly was that requiring bold raucous dabbing at random multiples of keys, an Avant Garde piece being a gift sent by an Angel for crippled souls or for those with blurred thinking, dull hearing, blank looks, corrupted tongues and dumb sex.

           

            ****



My custom was to explore secondhand bookshops at the slightest opportunity.   It needed guile to shake off Beth and the children – but, one day in Parismony, I had a rare success in subterfuge.  We were about to traipse around a toy museum and, without giving them a chance to reply, I told them that I would be back in half an hour to conduct them onwards to the various amusements in the ‘Klaxon City’ amusement arcade that needed coins in the slots.

            I had indeed spotted a wondrous curiosity shop on the approach to the toy museum, hidden to the view of my wife and children (and of most other visitors, too).  But my expert tunnel vision having picked it out down a Sunnemo-less alley, I was convinced by my instinct that it would purvey a veritable trove of dusty books.  And I was not mistaken.  However, it proved not very different from what I imagined the toy museum to be, since in every corner there seemed to reside many ancient jacks-in-the-box, china dolls, jingle-jangly shoes, pop-up nursery rhyme books and colourful whips and spinning-tops – but here they were for sale rather than show.  If I had known, I could have killed two birds with one stone by bringing my family here.

            The books themselves were a dream.  First editions galore with lightly pencilled prices on the fly-leaves, some even within the range of my purse.  Others, of course, not.  Many were Victorian, but mostly hardbacks (with original dust-wrappers) from the twenties, thirties and forties, children's dreams and adults' fancies.

            I was surprised to discover an old stamp album: full of colourful squares, oblongs and triangles (and even one large colourful trapezium of a stamp from Agraska), carefully affixed with sticky paper hinges.  I imagined a child (now grown into an adult more long in the tooth even than myself) meticulously wielding tweezers, positioning his prize specimens at the optimum angle and sitting back sighing with pride.  This boy would have eschewed even birdsong or playtime in the sunshine for such a close-ordered activity.

            My surprise was generated by the fact that such an article was stacked with the secondhand books, bulging as it was with well-hung stamps.  Some of the stamps looked "rare", but many must have been gathered together from a lucky-dip selection which children used to obtain by sending off a coupon from the Tiger or Lion or Eagle comics.  The stamps used to come "on approval".  But there were some examples of stamps in this album that I had not been able to even dream about when I was that age.

            I covetted that album more than anything I could recall covetting before.  I held a whole childhood between my fingers.  But there was no price pencilled, presumably because the fly-leaf was covered with a highly stylised map of the surface world.  So, that was where Saar was.  And Andorra, San Marino, British Honduras, Monaco and St Helena.  Nobody ever seemed surprised that most of these small places had outlandishly large postage stamps.  I looked round for the shop counter, fully expecting a wizened old man to be stationed behind it – one with pipe, toothbrush moustache and eyes bleary from poring over small print.  But this was a day full of surprises – since a girl of surpassing beauty smiled at me from behind the counter, appearing as cool as her flowingly diaphonous dress of white…

            I collected my family who were impatiently kicking their heels outside the museum.  Apparently, it was a natural history exhibition.  Why I had originally thought it was a toy museum, I could not now fathom.  What was abundantly clear, my wife and children had been bored and decidedly crotchety at my lengthy absence from their party.  I blamed it on having been cut short and the nearest convenience a fair step away.  And it had not been a particular pleasure, I assured them, standing next to all those sweaty individuals and the many ‘nervous little people’ who followed us around in Parismony.  But my family soon oozed forgiveness when I changed my remaining ten bob note for 120 pennies at the ‘Klaxon City’ arcade.  The old wizened fellow who sat behind the towers of copper quarter p coins in the change booth actually winked at me.  He looked decidedly unhinged.

            As I tried my luck on the fortune-wheel, which was supposed to give some inkling into one's future love life and luck, I suddenly wondered why stamp collections always used to be conducted by short-arse boys who did not have many friends with whom to go scrumping apples or building dens.  I could not possibly imagine those unattainable angelic girls of my lonely childhood abandoning their china dolls and dressing-up hampers for such close-ordered activities as mounting stamps.

            The fortune-wheel did not record any romance in store for me.  In fact, the bad luck it indicated seemed to start with me somehow losing the stamp album soon afterwards.  Like the beautiful ghost who sold it to me, it must have slipped through my fingers. 

            ****





For an indeterminate period, Greg, Beth and their two children, Arthur and Amy, toured the streets of Parismony (later discovered, when checking with the railway station noticeboard, to be a typo for Parsimon(y)) but instead of relaxing during this interlude in their train journey they were beset with an antipodal angst which involved thoughts that they may not get back to the station before the train left  for Sunnemo.  This was an undercurrent that made all their activities fraught with an anxiety, yet an anxiety that soon grew tentacles (giving new worries leg room) including one significant nagging doubt that they had already travelled to Sunnemo before and finished their lives there during a dream  – but now the anxiety became more relevant because they feared that that was no dream and the real dream was this their seemingly endless temporary stay-over in Parismony.  If the latter is a dream, why worry.  Dreams can’t hurt you.  Or so the parents told the children.

            Other factors lengthening the tentacles of angst included the so-called ‘nervous little people’ that seems to plague them at ever turning of the city.  They were seeking identities and, if this were a dream after all, then identities could be stolen and used elsewhere.  So one solution of an angst had soon created a new angst!  These creatures – of human persuasion – nevertheless chirruped like chickflicks on continuous strobe.  One or two even sported beaks instead of lips.

            Another tentacle of angst: Sunnemo was looming closer and if it grew even closer as a dull light source or even a surrogate nemo-moon, then there would be no need to return to the train to reach their destination at all!  Greg decided to shrug off the angst and ensure he and his family at least pretended to themselves that they were enjoying their stay-over.  Pleased, too, to see that Sudra’s Shoes Inc. had a branch here as well as in Klaxon.

           

            ****



Edith sat in the Proustian arbour, holding the stalk of a flower pressed between the backs of her hands, the red bloom of involuted petals held at eye-level.

            She posed for both painting and photograph, unsure as yet which of them would do her full justice.  She held the angles of her body at their optimum level whilst masking the ugly birthmark on her forehead with the bloom.

            The painter was standing by an easel at the far end of the inner garden, the long brush held aloft, his artistic thought processes apparently taking their time to percolate, and the palette upon his other arm mounted with wormcasts of corruptive colour, all chosen for Edith's complexion.

            Further over to the side, where the neatly manicured topiary began, there was a tall tripod bearing an instrument with a retractable snout and a black cape flowing from its rear and the legs of a man curved over from under the cape and a bulb to squeeze and a flash like lightning and...

            ...Arthur, as a small boy, shut the pop-up book with a crack.  He twiddled with his left ear absent-mindedly.

            The front of the board covers was decorated with the only abstract image in the whole volume and, with the dying light of the nursery fire, he discerned a pattern more suitable for carpets than murals.

            The book had been left with him as a peace offering by his parents who had departed in a horse-drawn carriage for an evening at the opera.  He had heard the clatter of hooves disappearing into the echoey Klaxon distance, leaving him alone in the house – or worse than alone, since the only other person left behind under the same roof was the family's ancient nanny.  She sat in the corner by the fitful log fire, knitting-needles clicking, her asthmatic lungs rasping.  He watched the sometimes insect-like, sometimes bird-like silhouette moving only very slightly in unfaithful rhythm to her deft stitching.  

            He wanted to be a dare-devil.  He wanted to stir her into realising that it was too dark in the nursery, since she could have blindly knitted on forever – and that her little charge was in danger of being snatched by the Angel Megazanthus who, to the boy's certain knowledge, lurked up the chimney.

            So he broke wind. And a distant siren fortuitously boosted the noise.

            She jolted in her wicker chair. Her neck creaked, turning a stern gaze upon him. 

            "Ptcha!  There are places for such noises."

            "I know, Nanny Edith, but my tummy-ache – and the fire's going out – and I'm worried sick about the darkness."

            "I know what will sluice out your belly, young man, a good dose..."

            At that moment, soot billowed from the chimney, as silently as an army's secret striking of camp at the dead of night.  It caught his eyes, so he heard no more of her mad ramblings.  She did however absent-mindedly brighten up the end of a candlewick.

            He returned to the pop-up book to bury himself in its pages, whilst yearning to hear the hooves which bore his parents homeward from the Klaxon opera.  He kept at least one ear pricked, despite the utter dread of what he expected to hear with it.  Nanna's bones cracked loudly as she lifted herself from the wicker-claws of the chair to attend to the fire, perhaps entice a few more flames from the glowing ruby embers...

            ...and Edith, elsewhere, elsewhen, had by now lowered the glowing bloom and positioned it between the points of her bosom.

            That part of the face bearing the stain of the birthmark lacked features and, possibly, substance, too.

            It was as if one could look straight through her head at the point which oriental mystics had once believed to be the site of man's invisible Third Eye or, at least, an optical illusion of one.  And through it, could be seen the blacker eye approaching from behind.

            The hair of the painter's brush was known intuitively to be manufactured from a dictator's moustache.  He had dipped it in a generous mix of strange paints.  It formed a colour but at the same time not any colour under the Zodiac.

            The tripod camera had lifted the photographer's legs into the air like wings and was in the violent process of flapping around the garden, a huge insect bird of a creature, clicking insanely.  Nowhere to go, it could not bring itself to halt the wild careering – until it became entangled in the ivy trellises of the arbour.  There it flinched for a few seconds, with fitful bursts of fire from its black beak and the squeezings of purple venom for a naughty boy's tummy, until it died...

            ...like the fire in the grate.

            Nanna Edith had by now lit the oil lamp hanging above the boy's cot.  He could vaguely see the remains of a dead entity woven in and out of the wire fireguard.  In disgust, he threw the book towards the fire and, despite falling short, it proceeded to pop and crack.  He made his way to the cot to crawl between the covers.  And, then, while he dozed, he imagined he heard hooves clopping on distant cobbles.

            As Nanna bent down to give him a little peck on his petally cheek, he heard her churning, phlegm-clogged breath and saw straight through her head – and through this head he saw a bloated spider-bird glistening in the crook of the ceiling.  The little boy squeezed his eyes tight, praying for sleep; even nightmares would be preferable to such reality...

            ...and the man into whom Arthur was eventually to grow woke with a start.  It was freezing in the garret and he had a job to do.  Not before fulsomely farting, he quickly dressed in darkness, picked up his heavy-duty paintbrushes and departed into the shivering Klaxon square, to await the arrival of the bosses with the ladders.  He stamped his feet to rid himself of pins and needles.  He felt along his hardening top lip – yes, coming on nicely.  Even rind-growth was, in itself, a would-be entity.

            The Sunnemo dawn, when it painstakingly arrived, was colourless and cold.  The hooves of the decorators on the cobbles could just be heard. 

            The man's ambition was to paint on palace walls in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch, whilst a thousand Popes screamed inside.

            And nurseries exploded within him as the brain bloomed red.  A bogus waking fetched the thud of his parents' hooves clopping up the stairs.  He prayed they couldn’t have fruited each other with him in the first place.  The real frighteners, however, would come when the little boy stopped dreaming.

            ****





Though I never lived during that kingdom of war – the one that blitzed London – I could easily imagine the colourlessness (or, rather, variegated brown) in every wet afternoon, prefiguring the contrast of night's man-made lightning.  Séances were being held amid the chintz of every blitz-free sitting-room; tears being shed in every outhouse; tender hands held, over and over again, in every beach hut and every park. 

            Well, for every every, amen.  I shook my shoulders – not a shrug as such; more of a shudder.  I tramped the back-end streets, wondering if I had been transported in time to those very afternoons when shapes in fragile freedom from the night's shelters (the Underground included) became the slowly nudging together of lightly-fleshed ghosts in the hope that something worthwhile or tangible would emerge by this serendipity of touch.  Ghosts, I guessed, were to be everybody, even you and me.

            This was to have been a poem.  But it felt like prose fiction, with all the trappings of a plot, albeit missing a beginning, a middle or an end, if not all three.  I could have gutted this fiction of its protagonists, but then nobody would have been there to report its waywardness.

            I met Sudra in a park where courting couples were more colourless than most, if less tearful.  She was someone with whom I assumed an immediate mutuality.  She smiled, wiping away her tears with a burnt hankie.  Collateral damage, she said, from last night's bombs.  I didn't take umbrage at her false modernity.  I knew she joked; this was then, not now. 

            A fleeting image of an evening when Sudra and I did walk under a fleet of doodlebugs – and suddenly a thing like a plum-pudding bursting with a fiery sauce came down and a lot of glass fell out of the windows on to us.

            "Good job we were not there": my first ever set of words to Sudra upon meeting in the park.  My second: "Ghosts were simply the future."

            "Ghosts will forever be the past," were my sweet Sudra's last.

            But truth told no rhymes.

            ****



Crazy Lope’s head was camera, or it seemed like it to him; he saw everything as if framed for a motion picture.  As a film, he had been given an adult certificate, when he reached a relatively young age, but now, with the years piling up on top of each other, even that was not sufficient to cover the scenes he sought out.

            One day, Lope discovered a backstreet of his home town he had not previously explored in which there was a tall disused warehouse with a faintly glowing signboard on the vestigial gantries.  He could just peer through the misted up lens and see the letters spelling out SUDRA’S SHOES INC. He tried to pan round but his feet were rooted to the crumbling pavement and his neck had stiffened: he felt a movement on his shoulders as if a creature had lodged there, squinting through a slot in the back of his head.  Whatever it was, claws were penetrating his overcoat and, finally, his flesh ... fastening on to the blade bones like steel.  He tried to shake off.  It was all well and good to imagine being a camera but here he was actually being used as one by some frightful inhabitant of the night.

            His eyeballs revolved in the sockets, and warehouse sign flickered out of freeze frame, scrolling like an old-fashioned black & white TV of the fifties.  He desperately needed vertical hold: but that was the least of his worries: before long, he found himself going into cinemascope and edges of the scene he had previously not been able to view encroached and fluttered in from the sides: things like wriggling hairs and, then, insect feelers which often used to blemish projections upon the flea-pit screens of the sixties; the technicolor oozed back, and a blood-red haze gave the whole vista a dream-like quality; like speech bubbles in comic strips, this was a token of dissolving ready-reckoner reality, a symbol of beliefs being suspended.

            The whole vistavision screen was now acrawl with translucent bird-wings beating faster than the strobe of the frames.  He could no longer make any assumptions about his own sanity.  He turned his eyes downwards as far as they would go without detaching the optic nerve, to see his cylindrical nose extending forth from his face: zooming in on the entrance of the warehouse: where he saw a camera filming him filming it: but surely it couldn’t be a real one, because it seemed to grow wonky and misshapen the more he stared back at it.  However, he was pleased on discovering eventually that it was a female camera: but, as their noses came together across the street in some primitive ritual of a kiss, all he could see was the utter emptiness of his own backscreen soul.

            That’s when the thing on his back extricated itself from Crazy Lope's  bones and scuttled off somewhere, abandoning the tickertape of the film to flap uselessly ... as it reeled off the spool and tangled up the inside of his skull.  Since it left no other room in there, his brain slithered out of the ear like a white worm in search of a bird.

            ****

 

 “Well, your dollship, how are you this morning?”

            Sudra sat up, her cream-laced nightie cascading either side of her shoulders. Last night’s rouge was smudged below the eye-line.  Your dollship, as Sudra had been familiarly called since a child, was now older than she had ever dreamed possible becoming.  All would have pointed to a foreshortened future.

            The arrival in her bedroom – a figure relatively recently appointed to the domestic staff ten years before – quickly dragged the heavy pleated yellow window-curtain apart, allowing Sunnemo to form dust-beams across the ornate gilt of the imported church furniture.

            Upon a detached altar sat a particularly fine example of Sudra’s tiny companions (one of above average size) – its eyes staring solidly ahead, since only a sloping of its body could have shut them.  Upon wooden box-pews – transposed here from a derelict chapel to below the wide bedroom window – squatted a row of older items: children’s toy-babies of stuffed cloth, wood, india-rubber, many dolls’ prams &c.  In addition to these, each resting prettified heads on floor-scattered hassocks, there were examples of the jointed wooden dolls which were a marvel of cheapness, hand-made by the peasantry of Middle Europe.  Some wire puppets hung from the ceiling like mobiles to counter boredom (or create comfort during tooth-ague).

            Sudra often recalled, I suppose, her cruises along the River Danube, journeys conducted with careful preparation, bearing in mind her delicate condition – even in her prime years.  The willowy islands (so beloved of Algernon Blackwood).  The churches with bulb-topped spires.  The stylised townships.  The trinket shops.  Emporiums – of sweet dolls and even sweeter dollops.  The former for the mantelpiece (or the playpen), the latter for the less salubrious purposes of the soulless flesh.  She smiled a false smile as she recalled her own in-joke on such journeys – mainly spent alone (other than servants, of course), sometimes with her Uncle Mike who was often more than just a friend and thus willing to participate in such jaunts.

            She smiled ... then she didn’t.

            She noticed that Arthur, the early-stirrer, was taking too much upon himself.  Endearments and diminutives were barely dared to be spoken by any residual close relatives (among which even Uncle Mike was not counted), let alone by fire-brands recently raised to the position of boudoir-verger ... like this Arthur who continued to prepare for Sudra’s morning ablutions: filling the font with tepid water from the jug he had lugged here from the stone kitchen; feather-dusting the tops of the dolls as a part of the same ritual; remembering to stir the banked-up fire into life by means of poker and, more importantly, a well-trained mind-over-matter.  Arthur was nothing if not determined to please.

            “Is your dollship ready for her wash down?” he asked, with an ill-disguised smirk.

            “I beg you not be over-familiar,” she said as one of her mottled legs flopped from the side of the bed, released, as it were, from its own erstwhile dream.  She slid her feet into jingle-jangly shoes and pulled a toy pram nearer so that she could board it.

            “It’s a term of utter respect,” he said, swinging his arm round the room to point out, one by one, the valued subjects that shared the spiritual aura of Sudra’s chamber.

            Arthur went out of sight at that point, because, naturally, the wash down would be conducted in private, despite her disabilities.  The sanctity of the moment was for Sudra alone.

            Sudra alone was Sudra with her Danubian dolls which, I claim, was just another version of Sudra alone.  But we can not allow ourselves to pry – even if we could do so – into the personal duties which each morning naturally brought forth from the unrinsed mouth of entropy.

            Arthur, meanwhile, sat in the stone kitchen chatting the time of day with another servant, one by the name of Amy, a pretty girl.

            “Her dollship’s not in a good mood this morning,” he said with a flash of what he assumed to be his second from best asset: his eyes.

            “I dreamed about her last night,” said Amy.

            Arthur took her hand.  They shared a relationship which allowed simple touching.  Nothing more.  Even in an era with loosened corsets, as this was, servants customarily maintained the dignity of their parents.  A love long won was a love long had.  Sudden passions between strangers were little better than self-abuse ... upon each other.

            “Not another dream?  I wish I could patrol your sleep, Amy, to keep anything untoward from your mind.”

            She formed a false smile at his overt jest, knowing, in her heart, however, that he was being deadly serious.

            “Yes, her damned dolls came to life,” she continued, “and they complained they had not been made properly.”

            Arthur nodded.  He had heard recurrent tales about such a dream.  A doll in particular – the one sitting upon the ornamental altar – often proceeded to bad-mouth Sudra about how its joints were too stiff.  Only stick-puppets should suffer this way, it maintained.  As if to demonstrate, the doll in question showed how sitting stock still belied its own fantastical nature of being able to move.  The way Amy told the dream, there was an element of simply gossip, in the same fashion as all the servants chatted of this and that: viz. who was pregnant and what, indeed, they were pregnant with; legends of past and future; Viennese ring-roads on which Sudra and her Uncle Mike became lost seeking museums housing Hieronymous Bosch paintings;  the half-siblings who fought over the use of the best servants in the house; the Abbey at Melk where Sudra was the first woman allowed to meet members of the arcane Brothership; salacious things to which many a blind eye was turned; evil matters which were so evil nobody even dared notice not noticing...  They prattled, words falling over words, until retiring to their own crackly pillows or truckle-beds and their own insular dreams.

            Despite their closeness as near-siblings, Arthur loved Amy.  Not only for her good looks, but also for something more, like a comradeship against the odds.  They were the only two within a mere arm’s length jurisdiction vis à vis the mistress Sudra.  Give and take.  Arthur and Amy gave, Sudra took.  Except where orders were concerned!  The other servants merely remained distant nervous little people, as far as Sudra was concerned.  So distant, she often misjudged their sizes.

            Sudra sensed that two of her servants – the only two she really saw close-up – were conducting a surreptitious romance.  She predicted only a sad ending.  After all, servants, by nature, tended, by the law of averages, to such endings.  Her staccato thoughts were punctuated like the steps of her dolls which she dreamed they made around her bedside when she slept.  Only an omniscient surveyor of these matters – and surely omniscience is as unlikely to exist as Jung’s collective unconscious – could possibly judge that Amy and Sudra shared the same dreams: a fact that would have shocked one of them more than the other and a dose of omniscience is not required to know which one!

            As Sudra completed her daily tasks, she ensured that each little job of which she was capable was carried out thoroughly.  Uncle Mike was due to visit today and he would, I guess, scold her in front of the servants should any detail be left uncrossed.  She slowly garbed herself in her daytime gown – differing from the dressing version only by its lack of tasselled cord – followed by the slipping of feet into satin slippers.  The head-scarf was tied into position with difficulty, but necessary to keep the church dust at bay.  She tried to avoid the staring eyes of the altar doll, since she was not ready for its inspection – nor, probably, was it ready to inspect her, she thought.  Nevertheless, it seemed to encapsulate – even from the corner of her eye – the soul of Middle Europe and the transfiguration of race and creed, politics and anti-Semitism, Anschluss and Ottoman/Austro-Hungarian angst that had threaded her family history like a river of psychosis and blood.  The flickering stills of scrawny individuals, stick-puppets if simply by virtue of the bones poking through the flesh, moved nearer to the wire fences, trying to clamber them, but their joints failed at the last moment ... only to be caught in the cross-fire of dust beams.

            The morning wore on, Sunnemo dipped from sight.  She whiled away some time re-dusting the doll pates ranged on pew and hassock.  It had been a soul-wrenching few years for Sudra: not that she was alone in her boredom.  It seemed to be the modern condition: people no longer seemed fulfilled.  Aeons of TV had sunk without trace into dry river-beds of consciousness.  Books were large-print and formulaic.  Social interaction was self-motivated – and fundamentally ears were closed on things people didn’t otherwise want to hear.  Eyes, ever open, unblinking, eager not to miss an ounce of life, but essentially once that ounce had been weighed it silted into loss and loess.

            She heard Amy and Arthur weave their subtle endearments, sweet nothings which she imagined she imagined, but seemed real enough:

            “Why does Sudra thinks she imagines us?”

            “Well, she needs something to replace what most of us once had.  A faith in something larger.  When that awful man she calls Uncle was brought back with her from holiday abroad suggested making her bedroom into a church, she thought it would fill an aching gap...”

            “But it didn’t, of course.”

Arthur touched Amy’s arm again.  The touch was cold, but the erotic thrill was greater than that of a kiss or, even (or especially) of closer-quartered manoeuvres of love.  Often the case that a forbidden contact – however slight and otherwise innocent – created man’s primal urge more efficiently than the hardest pornography and/or gratuitous violence.  Not surprising, thought Sudra, as she locked eyes with the altar doll, awaiting Mike’s arrival.

            “Can I touch you again, Amy?”

“As long as the other servants don’t see.”

            “Most are still asleep.  They’re not woken ‘til after noon.”

            The stone font had towering curved walls that glistened from the morning’s ablutions.  Once a kitchen, now a font.  The stone needed changing, as its basin was worn almost through by the rubbing of babies’ heads during baptism.  They could not see over the lip of the horizon where the dusty sunnemo-beams had earlier set.

            They heard the hassocks’ straw crackle.  Wooden box-prams creak as new woken souls rode each riparian moment.  Sudra noticeably breathed, as she reached out for the altar.  The imposing doll thereon had regained its soul.  The eyes spoke to her, still unblinking.  She sloped it down so that they could close and relieve her of boredom.  But joints creaked to a halt in mid-backward pike...

            The window curtain swung closed like a confessional, to reveal the Angel of darkness as darkness often revealed its own kind by enveloping it in deeper dark, as it painfully stalked from behind his absolution-proof voice-grille – a  fence of wire puppets that lay love-entangled across his erstwhile hidden share of Sudra’s bedroom.  A Father.  Or Master.  Or Camp Commander.  Or Megazanthus. Not really an uncle, after all. 

            Bones now poked through cassock and hassock alike.  She covered her eyes that no amount of folding hinge-like had managed to close.  Sudra prayed to be alone.

            “Well, how’s your dollship this morning?”

            A kiss ... as, in a moment of Eucharistic Angst or Anschluss, a bready dollop passed between their crimson lips.

            ****





The dining-room, unsteadily illuminated by the demure candleflames in which pretty Sudra took such daredevil delight, was quieter this evening because one of the usual partakers around the long glistening oval table had been put to rest that very morning.… after a long illness, true, but one that had not prevented the deceased from dining with the others until the very end. So, the movement of the carriage clock had it all its own way, deepening the silence by punctuating it.

                        Around the table tonight, there were still the same number of places laid. Two ancient dowager ladies, whose sister’s funeral they had all attended today, spooned their soup with only the slightest of tinkles. Father and mother sat at each end of the oval, both formally dressed for dinner, as had been their wont the length of their marriage. His heavy moustache showed signs of soup droplets flickering in the light. Her floral choker moved in and out with the neck muscles – her large brooch of a golden angel looking more like an exotic insect in the rarefied glow. Sudra sat opposite the two dowagers. She was at that awkward age when she was too old to be put to bed early after a nursery supper alone with her Nanny (who was still an inhabi­tant of the house) but, equally, too young to have a full-bodied frock or the attention of the others towards her attempts at sophisticated conversation. She, too, ate quietly, realising that, of all meals, this was the one where she was to be best behaved. Eating not only quietly, but uncharacteristically slowly. She almost felt herself to be a lady for the very first time –  her face seemed a source of light greater than the candles. Nobody noticed her “coming-out”, not even Sudra’s mother, for she was caught up in her own ditherings, picking at her food in the same way as at her conscience.

                        With the scene set, there is nothing much to add. Photographs are like that, albeit this one owning an uncanny element of slow motion or potential strobing. No sound effects, other than perhaps a hint of a knock at the dining-room door. The two dowagers would perk up, eyes bowling...believing this to be their late sister. (But Sudra knew, in her own mind, that it was the aged Nanny come for her scraps).

            ****



As he threaded the bright-lit quarters of the humming monstrosity, Captain Nemo viewed his fellow crewmen sleeping.  Being a barrack-room philosopher, he speculated upon the nature of the journey.  He, for one, would not be able to doze off so easily, especially with all the ceiling-globes still burning – fearing that sleep would thus bring spotlit monsters of nightmare.

            He had just been back to one of his cabins or cabinets where he had re-grouped – decking himself in gentleman’s tweeds, burnishing is freshly shaved jowls and manicuring his sharp points.  The wardrobes had been chockfull of swinging regalia and the aroma of rhino-gomenol.  But he ended up with a mood-piece that Phineas Fogg may have worn.

            Of the sleeping crew, Greg snored loudest.  Earlier in the "day", Greg had teased the others with tales of salt-mines and pepper-mills, to which they were en route for more than a lifetime of labour amid the thirsty, sneezy realms of a yet undiscovered planet on the sinister side of Inner earth.  Nemo forgot where the quote marks began and ended: some of the words were Greg's, but most were Nemo's own retrospective attempts at creating a private joke world.

            Despite the apparent modernity of the Drillcraft's interior (the glistening clinical walls, the bulbless lights, the interminable smooth under-drive of its hidden power factors, the interconnecting cabins), it was furnished with squashy three-piece suites and four-poster beds dredged from old-fashioned history.  Here, the off-duty crew lolled about, blowing invisible speech bubbles in their sleep. Nemo creased his brows and stared into each pair of stark-staring eyes to see if he could read their dreams.

            His first subject slouched in a wide-winged armchair with grease marks where the head had missed the antimacassar.  This was the pilot sporting his epaulettes less grandiosely in his sleep than he did when awake and alert.  The dreams capered across the eyeballs like Saturday Morning Pictures.  Nemo became annoyed as each dream came to a false ending and blended into the next one.  He abandoned Flash Gordon in a predicament worse than death only to find himself following the eye-line of the Rocket Man into the chimney tunnels of pre-cataclysm Earth, where critters lurked...

            But these were the critters Nemo had feared so much in his own dreams.  So, he side-stepped to the next upholstered recliner where Greg himself snoozed.  Nemo stared into staring eyes.  Once upon a time, Nemo and Greg had played the Eyeball game for real (when boys in a mutually synchronised schoolyard) – but a sleeper has an unfair advantage over blinks.  Herein, Nemo lost himself in a black and white movie from the now legendary Hollywood days.  But this was a Film Noir, with only meagre light to place the protagonists into relief.  Robert Mitchum's eyes were not only drooping characteristically, but closed, as he zombied around the incomprehensible plot.  The film's undergrunts came faintly through Nemo's mouth, but the lips did not move.  More sound than soundness.

            The next sleeper was a woman.  Her eye-lined dreams were rosier, more pastel, more romantic.  As half a sun set into the whites, her lips made tentative kissing motions. Nemo knew this woman as Greg’s wife Beth.  Somehow the old days had been forgiven and forgotten when the couple used to leave messages written on yellow 'post-its' stuck all over the refrigerator door for each other.  Greg even loved her, loved her as much as he used to hate her when she emerged from the kitchen every Sunday, roast aloft on the spiked silver platter, as if she hoped it was his head, mouth propped open by a tongue swollen into a large fruit gland... 

            From the far end of the cabin, Nemo blew kisses back at Beth, whose eyes flickered gradually shut with the imminence of her stirring.  He dodged from the cabin, before she was fully aware of his presence.  He could not expect friendly small talk, with waking up in the morning being such a pain these days.  However, even her evening endearments for Greg seemed laced with sarcasm – perhaps for old time's sake.

            In the next cabin, Crazy Lope was already awake, which was not surprising.  He had been suffering a bout of long cough which had recently turned into a bark.

            "How are you this morning, Lope?"

            "A trifle dicky," Lope replied.

            "Have you tried sucking out the phlegm yourself?"

            "It's getting my lips to the mouthpiece that's difficult."

            Nemo felt asleep himself on hearing that conversation.  He pinched Lope's arm, evoking an effeminate squeal.  He asked Lope to pinch his own arm ... but no squeal at all.  Nemo cursed.  Lope was probably the only one awake.

            Nemo, despite the doubts, wandered into the third cabin.  This was as dark as a black pepper-mine or derelict hawling-tunnel.  He could hear the pretentious snores of the inhabitants.  These were the very critters which the crew were transporting to the outskirts of known Inner Earth, bordering on the untenable universe, to labour in the Angevin lands.  Trying to dodge the extraneous limbs – whiplashing from between the gaps in their crates to snarl and snag his path through the cabin – he eventually reached the fourth cabin where those on heavy duty were propped up at the engine-computer control consoles.  The dual read-out screens stared into the eyeballs of their respective human parasites, hypnotising fingers in some semblance of basic logic across the keyboards.

            Nemo rested his hand on Edith's shoulder.  He fancied her, but he did not stop for her to respond.  Despite the armholes of her tunic revealing enticing swells of mature breast, he forged on towards the cockpit where he was supposed to be officiating.  But he had one more cabin to negotiate – the one he dreaded most.  It was a long, narrow room fitted like the utility-style parlours of the nineteen fifties.  His dead parents sat opposite a dim, flickering screen that, unlike those in the previous cabin, bore only blurred images and shadowy figures moving like inhabitants of an ancient B movie, ill-preserved on corroded acetate.  The man and woman looked up together, in clockwork motion.  They smiled at the one they considered to be their son.

            "Sit down for a while, it's not Christmas every year," said his mother.

            "No, Mum, you're not here for me to sit next to."  He could not stop himself from feeling sorry for her.  How could you blame her for being a hologram?

            "I'm not a hologram, my dear," she said, as if she had read his thoughts.

            "Have some consideration for your mother," chipped in his father.  "She got up at an unearthly hour today to get the Christmas roast on."

            Nemo left the cabin, tears streaking his face as the good-to-honest, rain-sodden earth once did in his urchin days of catapults, cap-guns, marbles and conkers.  His mother had given the game away, for nobody surely would have heard of holograms in the nineteen fifties.  She had always been only one belt-notch away from premature senility even when she was really alive.  He cast a glance back at his father who returned a knowing look – pitiful in the extreme.  Nemo's searching for himself in the mine of youthful memories was like delving into a bag of Smiths Crisps to find the crinkly blue tourniquet of salt.

            In the cockpit, he was astonished to find the whole Drill on automatic free-wheel.  The craft was cruising the urban universes of Inner Earth, before traversing the more dangerous outspaces that, he knew, bloomed with many overlapping black-hole bubbles.  His so-called co-pilot of a female persuasion roosted in the lead seat, a bright red coxcomb staircasing her longback neck, her lips already hardening into a puckered kiss that became more like a beak than anything else.  Her eyeballs had slewed to the midpoint cheekbones and Nemo assumed that all they were seeing were the compartmented blurs of inner space – or yet another episode of Twin Peaks.  Nemo took hold of the joystick and plunged it into a manual gear.  The Drill lurched and spun on its centre of gravity for endless seconds of pure terror, it bit-tip whirring uselessly.  Nemo could hear the screams of the other crew-members in the lower bellies where he had just completed a one man's rite of passage.  He stuffed the single earphone into the one large grooved-out ear that sprouted on the side of his head – but, deep within the tinnitus of the craft's communication system, he could still hear the stifled screams of the crew.

            Before he thought about dying himself, he spotted a yellow 'post-it' on the cockpit window.  He plucked it off like an idle feather off an even idler portion of dead poultry.

            "Don't forget you may be an alien, too, Nemo," it said in recognisable manuscript.  He smiled – how could he have possibly been fooled by all those implanted memories into thinking himself to be a human being?  He was not really fooled by the sticker, either.  As he heard the backward-buzzing of an ancient aeroplane  as it took off from one of the airport arms in man-city, his mouth's last speech-bubble stated he was not even an alien, but a machine. 

            But Nemo was none of these things, not even a hologram.  Just a buzzing.  More sound than soundness.

            ****





The Saw circled: seeing the nightmare of identities and words blurring upon Inner Earth’s texture of vexed text. 



Angevin angevin sudra sunnemo agraska sunnemo mike amy arthur alter-nemo off-detritus man-city parsimon klaxon siren-yellow angevin core hawling hawling hawling horla susan sudra hilda ogdon edith clare amy dognahnyi lope lope godspanker ogdon nemo sunnemo balsam clacton klaxon london weirdmonger blake swift dylan thomas mike jules verne proust sunnemo nemo-moon lovecraft hataz tho azathoth king in yellow angevin. 



And gradually, as Greg and Beth (and their two children) concluded their stressful stay-over tour holiday of Parismony, not only their own human shape of deep and realisable characterisation emerged from the shuttling semantics, phonetics, graphology of that very italic list but also they saw – within the circular silhouettes of these laconic words – the emerging spectre of the halting-station and its still steaming burnished train of ratcheted carriages ready to take them on to Earth’s Core via the customised hawling-tunnels. The antipodal angst.



If only one had looked properly at any form emerging from traditional childish scribble, one would see the Angel Megazanthus also beginning slowly to glide from the adumbration or limning of meanings even if the very words ‘Angel Megazanthus’ were not overtly included as part of that once pencil-annotated list.  They were, as words, however, contained in previous and later syntactical blocks of vellumed vexture.   

            ****



           



            Birds filled the air with one song. The picnic-table was erected in the forest-clearing and the members of the family gathered to share the foodstuffs that one among them had given such love to prepare. The leaves on the trees were gummed together, as if a painter had smeared them rather than having picked each one out with his brush.

            The family had travelled to the remote spot in their reliable motor and, later, upon their own legs – led by the father along paths only he, it seemed, could plumb. The mother dropped choice words of feminine intuition and recrimination. The two children laughed and whined, according to the pendulum of their moods, the boy with gruff asides, the girl with reflex giggles. Only yesterday had they planned this outing – from the very initial concept to such details as picking picnicky menus and requisite items of weather-gear. There had not been much argument – yet one of them at least had severe doubts as to the eventual repercussions. The premonition of tragedy was not to be budged – although there was no logical reason, and hence, eventually, no action taken, except a simple statement about the uncertainty of the otherwise reliable motor that would bear the brunt of the trip, bar unexpected failure of tyre, windscreen or engine-part. With such thoughts on her mind, the mother had tugged the hamper from beneath the bed, vowing not to appear negative. The hamper had been put away so long in the past, she had, of course, forgotten what was already stored in it – something that needed to be removed before stacking it up with Marmite sandwiches, Corona bottles, cardboard plates and plastic cutlery.

            The mother was able to keep secrets, yet, somehow, they were often squeezed out by some force other than her own. Members of the family often read secrets in her face or inferred secrets from the various ways she tried to hide such secrets or, even, sensed secrets via a spiritual medium which none of them could explain, assuming they were aware of it in the first place. On the day of the picnic. the two children simply knew that she had discovered something secret in the hamper – something indefinable, perhaps, yet substantial to her. The father was so hung up negotiating the motor, which kept missing, he failed to realise that his wife was trying to withhold a secret. Looking in the rearview mirror to see what was following did not help him to unravel any mystery at all – it merely created a new mystery, since a rare make of vehicle had been on their tail from the very outset of the trip. All emotions remained gridlocked, ‘til they parked the motor in a lay-by. The other vehicle did not stop but continued towards the next town along.

            The family. like most families, was constituted of rare breeds of individuals. Father was Mike, the only Mike on the surface of the world – since any person thinks of him-or-herself to be unique. Mother Susan. Son Arthur. Daughter Amy. Derek thought the world centred on Mike. Susan on Susan. Arthur Arthur. Amy Amy. And with the world thus centred, the family unit became a secondary, if important, preoccupation. The walk through the forest was a mutual affair which, despite the back­biting that besets families of that ilk, evoked, in turn, their best points. Mike handed Susan over deadfalls – watched out for unexpected puddly areas – strengthened the children’s spirits with a badinage fit only, in truth, for a stood-down comedian. Susan, meanwhile, dabbed Amy’s too-pretty-to-be-true face with an aromatic kleen-wipe – smiled almost too often for comfort – diverted the children’s attention from anything behind the trees which might have been following the family. Arthur whistled, more carefree than his mother could give him credit for – while Amy typically had her mind elsewhere. Like most children, they were ahead of themselves, always round the next corner of the forest, anticipation being preferable to the actual enjoyment of each passing moment.

            “How much further?” Arthur’s voice piped in exasperation. For his age, he had done more than his fair share of grappling with the hamper-handles. Whilst Mike lugged the folding-table on his back, as an artist would his easel, and concurrently hefted one side of the hamper, there was always a task for one of the other three in balancing the opposite side horizontally. Susan carried, in her arms, like babies, the picnic’s extraneous items. Amy, being a smallish girl, had few duties, but she did show concern for the yellow balloons, already half-inflated, which would eventually be attached to each corner of the collapsible table – mainly for decoration, yet with a smidgen of something more important, an aspect intrinsic to their family tradition. Mike’s own father had instigated such a routine, when Mike was a child. But that was too long ago for any reconciliation of such rigmarole with practicality.

            “I’m fed up,” announced Amy, voice cracked with dry tears. It was currently her turn to lever the hamper – and the contents slopped in her direction.

            “Nearly, there,” replied her mother, without worrying whether she told an untruth or not. Fibs or white lies were preferable to arguments – surely a pragmatic law of any family. She hardly expected punishment for these manoeuvres here on Earth, but alone, later, perhaps, in Heaven above. Although her mind was bereft of guilt, she felt a guilt of guiltlessness, a guilt that often gnaws away at such good souls. Yet why should she be the perfect mother – which of course she wasn’t (having married Mike).

            “No, we’re not nearly there,” maintained Arthur. His face was smudged with a cross between green and dirt.

            “Here we are,” claimed Mike, who at least had the evidence working solidly on his behalf, for at that very moment, they had emerged into the clearing. Game, set and match.

            Arthur’s face had been smeared clean by yet another aromatic kleen-wipe. Susan smiled – a frozen smile, yet truly meant. Her greatest pleasure in life was witnessing the smiles of others – and the other three were indeed smiling. And so, also, smiled the tiny figure behind the trees – except its smile was judgmental: a smile that reached deeper than the lips. The fuzzy-haired legs had toddled in close pursuit. It knew, somewhere deeper even than the smile, that it was not a human: simply a creature more faun-like than infantile: yet one that wanted some share in the people’s homely hamper.

            The trees released the sun-sight’s shafting beams – through the imaginary stained glass windows of an even more imaginary cathedral. No member of the family blew the secret to the other three, although most of them were aware of it. Indeed, the child-sized creature now balanced precariously on the picnic-table, its shaggy legs bowed backwards, with an ugly beauty more in touch with soft-heartedness. than the logic of beholding eyes.

            Mike smiled in the direction of the creature on the table, as did the other three. Susan’s frail voice showed she was really only talking to herself: “There’s not enough food. I’m afraid.” Yet, she had packed enough. The hamper should have been more than ample for a family of four.

            The creature’s own parents were shadowed by trunks, like a courting couple caught in an embarrassing cuddle. They were more indistinguishable than their young one and, if this were an imaginary painting, they would have remained entirely unnoticed by a careless visitor to the even more imaginary Gallery.

            Arthur had the inadvertent misfortune to be the first to bite into the creature – its calf muscle, as it happened. Arthur’s mouth was full of a furry substance – and he could not spit out the tufts that felt like feathers on the tongue. He gagged and Amy sucked her cheeks. Susan’s smile melted.

            On the journey home, Mike recalled the secret of the creature. Its smile was the last remnant of its existence – until Amy’s own teethful of mouth stumbled upon it. The motor had failed at the first stir of the ignition, but eventually coughed into a stubborn kangaroo-like motion. There was nothing in the rearview mirror the whole way home. Mike, Susan and Arthur (and the balloons) had been needed together to tote the hamper back to the motor and, later, upstairs to its stowage under the bed. Foundlings played hide-and-seek with changelings for the rest of eternity, but never finding humanity in its glory-hole. And Arthur did not, of course, possess enough tears for eyes to pipe when the secret, about his sister Sudra never having existed, was finally blown. Unadopted birds filled the air with one song.  And who was Amy?

            ****



The room was as quiet as a mouseful of pins. Sudra had been invited to sit awhile… mainly because nobody was ready to receive her. The doorkeeper had released barely sufficient information, but she understood that the delay was likely to be minimal. Old enough not to take matters at face value, she feared the worst … a wait of at least a day or so, or even longer, much longer. The world had become a slow place. The new millennium had taken longer to arrive than the customary turns of century in the past. Yet, how did she know that? She hadn’t been there, had she? She shrugged … and prepared to wait. Her watch ran too quick and she had placed it in her bag, rather than allow it to mislead her. In the good old days, she would have been able to take advantage of such diversions as a magazine-rack, a television set or, even, full-blooded books. Now, of course, endemic slow motion was not conducive to entertainment … since it showed up all the seams and otherwise concealed boredoms. Even exciting plots dragged and drooped … which brought Sudra back to Sudra. She had a lifetime to ponder those distant eras of high romance and adventure when she had been, if not exactly fast and loose, certainly a trifle impetuous. Before that, her childhood had been full of endless summers…yet, paradoxically, childhood had fast fizzled out just as if Einstein had never been born.

                        Sudra’s Jornal - day one. The most amazing fact is that, even though I am not yet old enough to write, here I am actually writing a journal, yet I don’t believe any of it happened this way…not that I can easily forget events that happened today…more that a new­born baby girl such as I has no more than a single event to record in a journal, even if she could remember it and, more incredibly, write about it…and, surely, one’s suspicions are aroused when the journal also purports to describe its very act of execution by a baby who is able to write. Whatever the case, merely let me say that I was born today. Being born, let me also tell you, dear journal, is not a messy nor a painful act from the baby’s point of view. Anyone who tells you different is simply rumour-mongering, reaping the chaff of hearsay and prospecting loose logic.

                        Sudra’s day one thousand. Diaries are a bit of a fad at the best of times. Still, having come to another round number of days, a millennium in fact, I have considered it high time for another entry. At least, this proves I still exist. But what sort of person am I? A baby who can write, well, I must be a pretty strange two year old, mustn’t I? And an even stranger adult yet to come, no doubt. But I must pull myself together. I have a serious part of my journal to write today … it being merely coincidence that it fell on the thousandth day of my life … and the figures of speech must be sufficiently elegant and, yes, weighty, to match the occasion’s importance. What occasion? Well, dear journal, you seem to be full of curiosity. In fact, your personality is decidedly … how shall I put it? … human, isn’t it? However, to satisfy your foibles, let a tiny toddler girl like me confirm that today marks the very first clear day of my future grown-up memory. And what is it that I shall remember so clearly from today? A meadow crammed with prams, some empty, some full. A see-saw on the hillside, bathed in the shafting sunset, and a man who purports to be called “uncle” pushing me up and down from his end of the contraption. I hooted with delight as I felt the thinning tug of Inner Earth’s gravity at each thrust into the empurpling heavens. “Sudra, hold tight!” he shouted in cascades of echo, brimming with transitory joy. Yet despite the clarity of memory, various questions will remain. What had we been doing up to this point? Indeed, what did we do afterwards, how did we get home to my blurred parents, whether I slept in a cot or a grown-up bed with no sides … and was I fed a Angevin cheese supper to account for the dreams I know I am going to have tonight but, like many dreams in this current glut of dream sickness, since forgotten? Well, I shall never remember even though I happen to write this entry between supper and bedtime, so very tired from playing in the hills with “uncle,” my head spinning round and round until the great flouncing tides of sleep sweep in and expunge a toddler’s excited confusions about a very special day...

                        Sudra’s day two thousand. The time has arrived to get on with the rest of my life. After the three dates above, dear journal, I know, I have forsaken you for yet another thousand days, or is it nine hundred and ninety-nine? It is unclear when millennia are supposed to begin and end … yet does it matter? The unquestionable fact is that I am five years old … but my ability to write English on your pages has not significantly improved, if at all. However, emotional responses to my own thoughts have matured apace and I can even begin to comprehend the predicament in which I find myself an Angel: not exactly one of those infant prodigies … since they retain a foothold in childhood … their brains merely holding a lot more room than most for intelligence, logic or artistry … whilst this Angel’s brain, yes, my brain, does not even belong to me! How can I explain it better? Simply let the words speak for themselves. I’ve nothing to add. So, turning to the rudiments of my life, the one called “uncle” has vanished … under a cloud, as it were. I don’t understand why, but my parents (far less blurred than my previous entry) tell me a lot simply by their inclination to say nothing about him. I have a recurring dream where “uncle” appears, slopping up what looks like buckets of blood, lugging them between bedrooms and the top floor … where the landing light is always out. But who has ever heard of dreaming in real colour? My common sense tells me it is impossible. Not much else to record at this point in time. I wish I could go to school like other kids where I might get some things out of my system naturally … using plasticene … playing team games … and with teachers far more human than my parents seem to be, and than you, dear journal, come to think of it. I shall give you another rest and, by implication, you, too, dear Sudra, dear Angel.

                        Sudra’s day ten thousand. When I re-read the childish pencilled handwriting in the first few pages of this exercise-book, I am amazed at my own duplicity … and, yes, ashamed. I admit it … I come clean, dear journal, O such mockery of a dear dear sweet journal … the fact of the matter is that I have pretended … yes, pretended … a twenty-seven year old shelf-sitter who wishes she was someone other than that Angel called Sudra, even if it is to be a precocious five year old whom she never was, never will be … I’ve bitten the stub of pencil to the lead, clumsily fisted it … a mock pram-squatter etching out the scrawls and scribbles of an ancient language ... like a cave-dweller. But what can I expect? Hieroglyphics were always meant to outline the raw emotions of last races as they tried to find themselves, weren’t they? Don’t bother to answer. The Angel won’t mind.

                        Sudra’s day ten thousand and one.  “The Angel won’t mind.” The number of times I’ve heard that said. I’m not exactly trodden on, more squelched to pulp under jingle-jangly hob-nailed shoes. One day I’ll stand up for myself. The last fellow who dated me ended up exchanging me for a blonde. The fellow before that raped me, even before I’d met him. He said he raped me in a dream…one of his dreams, that is, not mine. I’ve yet to meet the fellow who rapes me in my own dreams … assuming he’s a real person in the first place. Anyway, for the time being, I’ve given up real men altogether. Life’s more controllable in dreams, you see … marginally. So, I’m taking the extraordinary step or writing this journal on consecutive days for one simple reason. I saw “uncle” this morning … as clear as clear can be. He’d grown older in the last twenty odd years, of course, but, striding from shop to shop, his whole demeanour was basically unaltered. I watched him from behind a corner … if corners have behinds, which I’m sure they don’t. It would make more sense if space were two-dimensional. Time adds the vital third ingredient, giving edges their behinds … and me the room to manoeuvre. I followed him from edge to edge, wondering whether I should accost him. After all, if it weren’t for him, I might have been a normal human being … not one full of complexes and fears and all that emotional shit. I might have actually grown up properly. But he disappeared into a crowd and, as I write this out, I blame that very crowd for his camouflage. People are their own conspiracies and take scant account of mere individuals like me. And people (yes, you!) who happen to read this journal in the future, behind the corner of time which is my death … well, they should be ashamed of their mass carelessness. Most men resemble my “uncle” in the best of times … surely, the crowd didn’t have to go the whole hog of uniformity. Still, I’ve written it down … got it off my chest … made a clean breast of it, as it were.

                        Sudra’s day ten thousand and sixty-six. Today seemed as good as any to resume these entries. There are a helluva lot of blank pages to go … as here’s trusting to long enough life to fill ‘em! Perhaps I’ll have to up the rate of entry. The room is quieter than a mouseful of pins. That’s a strange expression for me to have written. I don’t know where it came from … some book I read somewhere, I suppose. The doorkeeper told me I wouldn’t have long to wait. I’ll believe that when I see it. These days people have to wait for the delays themselves to start! It’s at times like this one begins to ponder the past … all of those endless sunnemo- summers of childhood … the crazy romances … and the various misadventures which began as something far more important before they fizzled out. There’s nothing in this room to help me pass the time … only a few still paintings on the wall … and the uninteresting furniture. So, it’s useful to have my journal book with me, whiling away the hours by telling the hours …until night comes.

                        Sudra’s epilogue. The room ran with rat-birds, all pinning hopes on vultures’ dreams. They do not teach anybody anything these days, the solitary man thought. He shuffled sheaves of hieroglyphics in the hope of them falling into a shape of sense. Sluggish time dragged like tides of sleep on shingle: Einstein in prison, like Galileo. The man pulled the past apart, word by word. Then he lugged pails back and forth across the landing, for slopping out. Later, he sat on the cold floor, rocking back and forth, back and forth, to the rhythm of ancient childhood games, dreaming of a pig-tailed girl called “Angel” above him in the empurpling heavens. Eventually, the doorkeeper turned off the man’s light, to mimic day-fall.

            ****



           

Stub of pencil: Most memories are false, but when I am faced with the only true memory, which is death, I have then no need for it.”

            ****



She had her back to Mike – and dressed by darkness or, rather, in darkness.  Yet he knew who she was: the Horla who had haunted his dreams.  But not only in his dreams but also in waking life, causing both to be infiltrated by each other: dream masquerading as waking life and vice versa: all shades and permutations of real and unreal reality, to such an extent that even Mike had to doubt his own existence – which, he guessed, would end up his only way out. 

            She slowly turned towards him. 

            Yet her front was no different from her back, except he discerned a slit-smile of darker darkness where he would have positioned  her mouth, given a free hand.  Yes, her mouth, with two lip-hooks that must have been so blindingly white their night-spawned negative would have caused blackness to seem dark red.  Then, as his eyes became accustomed to waking, they locked with hers: and he wondered whether they were tinged, as hers were, with a self-lit spirit of spiteful playfulness. 

            "You knew I would come in person, one day." 

            The voice of seething honey-bees moved the black mouth – with lips that began to sharpen like beaks as Mike further tutored his pupils in wakefulness.  He nodded: a ludicrous action in the circumstances, until it dawned on his full consciousness that his sub-conscious must have known that she could see in the dark. 

            "Come nearer." 

            She tried to mimic Mike' voice: she knew it was unseemly for a lady to make all the running, hence this strangely transparent ploy. 

            He shook his head: to clear it of waking-induced inhibitions or, perhaps, as a sign that, whatever the two of them had done during dreams, he would not now countenance a heavy-handed dalliance nor, even, grant an inconsequentially light petting of their various sensitive zones.   Whatever the case, he did not dare dwell on the true nature of the creature.  And, in a saner world, the most acceptable outcome was that he haunted himself. 

            Yet, as the creature's two beak fangs moved away from its eyes by the space of a feasible torso, Mike experienced the real relativity of sanity.  He told the night-shaped formlessness that he not only doubted his own and the creature's existence but also that of a third party (me?) who colluded in their existence.  Such doubt lasted until, empurpled enough to outdo the darkest darkness, my single-hooked chimney-mouth, one not unaccustomed to the moon-slow rhythm of blood-flow, yawned awake – then sucked them both up. 

            ****



My wife Beth and I have been married happily for as long as my receding memory stretches. Although being overbearingly carpet proud, she actually forgot to empty the vacuum.

            Now, in the quiet evening of our years, she has taken to strange doings. They are obviously harder to explain than merely to describe, so I shall only attempt the latter in the hope of finding a key to the mystery in the fullness of time.

            Recently, with us both fast asleep following the customary early nights, she has woken up and extended her housework through the small hours, only to tell me in the mornings that daylight can only reveal the normal jobs. At night, she maintains, different dust emerges, slops and moulds gone unnoticed during standard waking hours.

            “But, my dear, you’re being absurd. I’ve heard of housewives spending all their days making everything spick and span, but disturbing your valuable beauty sleep...!”

            “You think I’m mad, I know, Greg.”

            “No, of course I don’t. But there’s not nearly enough to be done in this house to keep you busy, anyway. It’s only a two-up-two-down, after all. There’s no need at all to get up in the dark when all godfearing people are asleep.”

            Then she would repeat her claims about the night being more suitable for seeking out the otherwise unseen corners where real dirt worth its salt collected . . . not your mealy-mouthed daytime muck which masqueraded as encrusted food or merely as motes stirred by sunbeams.

            So, I have decided to see for myself.

            Often, she has been up and about without me having even broken the rhythm of my snores. Tonight, though, I tried to prop up my eyelids with the matchsticks of will-power, listening to her breaths becoming heavier and with longer gaps between. I heard the church clock striking ten which was more often than not the hour that acted as alarm for the Angel Megazanthus to spread its wings upon us both.

            I pinched my lips between the teeth, almost to the gums … also attached a length of thread between one of her big toes and one of mine. She tossed fitfully, making the job harder than it would otherwise have been. Eventually, we were tethered in dreams…

            It was no dream, however, when she awoke within the death-lull that night creates between both margins of nothing. My toe almost parted company with the bone which held it out like a stringless puppet. I followed her on the tips of my feet, wincing away the anguish in them.

            Firstly, she proceeded to the broom cupboard under the stairs, whilst I remained on the landing looking down at her black felt house-cap. Several jointed broom-handles came out like giant spider-legs kicking.

            Abruptly, I had the crazy notion that she must always spend the small hours crazily hoping to earn pin-money as a chimney-sweep in the neighbouring back-to-backs. That would explain everything, except the craziness itself.

            Before I returned desultorily to our bed, she had bustled into the front parlour, cooing with delight at the layers of minced shadow she was expected to sweep up.

            I now lie cross-limbed, unmercifully awake. I can discern the still dented pillow next my own, for there is a dimness thrown by the street light feebly flashing outside the bedroom window in makeshift pleas for repair.

            Almost without thinking, I lift up my own pillow and retrieve the old toothbrush I keep under there for lost fairies. I poke this into one of my ears and out the other, thus scattering dust in the air like dirty Angevin powder.

            There is nothing I would not do for my dear wife, in these her days of crazy old age. In this way, I at least keep my own brain bright as a button while I leaf through the album of memories of our honeymoon in Parismony.

            ****





            Stub of pencil: Life is a cross of pleasure piers in surrounding black seas...

            One man dreamed that he had been many people – without the aid of reincarnation. And as his greatest love was music, he wondered if it were not that very music which collected and delivered him upon its ebb and flow of sound. Yet how could it? How could he be other than who he was? His friends and relations did not need to wonder with the same degree of perturbation, since they were entirely oblivious of the need to wonder. He was the person they knew as Megazanthus and they would have considered any doubts as they would have done dreams. Their unshakeable certainty helped to give certainty to the Megazanthus about whom they were so certain, but there was a certain something that nagged at the back of his mind, urging him towards an equal certainly regarding his own uncertainty: a fiction of a person who lived in the mind and, at a push, in the music: a ghost who only failed to haunt people by haunting them. But did it matter? Certainty might have meant something different, give or take an odd dip in the uncertain tides of certainty. Even the name could be changed as easily as he could change for dinner, names simply being convenient coastal barriers against the waves of confusion. Names indeed, were merely words by another name: bricks in the sea-wall: the sound-bites of muzzled reality: music’s muskets against Inner Earth’s own cacophonous snipers gradually sniping away at him.

            So, although he harboured doubts that doubt gave him the right to exist, he thankfully retained the need to wonder – and Wonder, he knew without wondering, was not doubt, nor certainty. Nor something in between. Nor even was it dream.

            Even if fire were fantasy, a dragon would sniff at it. And the nameless hunter knew there was no smoke without a dragon or one of its smouldering cousin dinosaurs being in the proximity along with its clouded breath. Dinosaurs had once roamed the surface of the Earth, as birds had once flown its skies. He had climbed through the stacks all day, in search of arrow-bait for the narrow belly-quivers of his wig-wammed kinfolk who lived back a valley or two ... beyond the spreading swamp that resembled an age-curdled Inner Sea back-paddling between each bristled stack. Now, he could discern the smoke that puffed fitfully as from a tribal fire, rising beyond the roughest-hewn stack he had ever seen: as tall as was tenable without teetering upon the brink of toppling: buzzful of spindly-legged creep-creatures and insects crawling with bird-wings. The pests were known to thrive on the horny backs of dragons – so here, he thought, was likely to be the toughest hide for his arrows to pierce. Slightly-lighter-than-air arrows were the only ammunition for his crossbow purposes: feather driven by birdsoul once the initial thrust had gone.

            He aimed at the tell-tale smuts of smoke. And rescuing his feet from the sucking terrain so as to give more purchase for his stance, he tugged at the hair-trigger, with a minimal force to create the tantalising music of his own taut gut. The shimmering arc of aura was more piecemeal than direct in its path towards the smoking stack.

            He smiled. The twanging music was sweet. And his purchase was beyond a belief. He whistled as he witnessed the huge beast lumbering from behind the stack. Its pesky parasites were invisible to the naked eye, bar the faint sounds that stung the air with flecks that fought the floaters upon the hunter’s retina. Such irritants, however, were as nothing to the faster-than-light venom that had spurred the beast into view. Its bray was blessed with the horse­power of a hundred thousand ancient drill engines. The fire gushed from between the hinged saw-jaws of ribbed gristle – and floated more ferociously than the flick of its wide whip tail which, in its frenzy, inadvertently demolished the towering stack with the fulminations of buzzings turned to volcanic roar.

            Never was seen a dragon like it. The remains of its death would probably feed the hunter’s broompole-boned kin back home for centuries of feasts – and floor over sections of the swamp with flesh harder than sheets of living human bone. The dragon’s nostrils burned on high octane angevin-snot. The danger was that the beast had been budged at all ... and it would take a hundred thousand ancient Red Indians like Crazy Lope to put it out of its misery, give or take a few finger-yodelling braves who loved warpaint more than war.

            Nor had the dragon literally ever seen a man. So the man was left only to hunt out his own hallucination of himself, one that had been induced by puffing pipes of peace in some distant past of flowers, bees, fish and birds: before the world was swamped and saddled with a spare second slippery chance to start. And it he were not nameless, Megazanthus would have known a lot more about himself.

            Megazanthus could hear the waves surge, even from the forest clearing which the expensive map told her (for now he was female) was still a mile from the lake. She was holidaying in such nettly terrain, in an attempt to remove the unsightly stains of a messy love affair from her otherwise clean canvas of existence. The Canterbury Oaks that men had secreted about their person were over-rated, in any event, she thought.

            It was relatively smooth underfoot, as she pressed fir-cones into the ground with her new shoes. Unaccountably, she thought about the truffles the cones would meet in the pig-proof paradises below. Human coning. She wished she had a companion on this hike. A talkative partner of her own sex would at least make the story easier to tell later. Who would otherwise believe the existence of White Cream Lake? Solely with her say-so, it would become a fictitious expanse of white water. She did not ever talk to herself. Her speech was all inside. The forest of Canterbury Oaks would not have benefit of her backchat. The world was one without dialogue. Hence, the lonely holidays, the spinsterly flat back home, the lover who possibly never existed – even if she did recall his telephone number.

            There is a great delight treading upon poison berries that have fallen to city pavements, with each generous squelch of sole on the separate scatterings of swollen red seeds. In the country, the berries are more often hidden within the soft mulch of the track. But, today, as she neared White Cream Lake, berries were inches deep, literally belching underfoot.

            As she stumbled through the trees towards the shifting lake’s edge, she saw a dragon-powered craft which was to take her to the opposite bank, without the necessity of clambering through the margins of overgrowth. There was a figure already on the other side, no more than the size of a doll. She waved in unison with this figure. At last – a sounding-board.

            Having launched the craft upon the heaving face of silvery dusk’s reflection, she paddled sluggishly across. The figure appeared to have far too much lipstick smeared over its face, as if it had pigged itself upon Inner Earth’s currant harvest. And a bulb-ended object which syphoned the steaming menses..

            The lake was echo-chamber for silent music. Little need to wonder. Reincarnation has no body with which to clothe the soul. A hunter of names. A circle of uncertainties enclosing the only certainty. Emptiness. A pipe dream.

            ****



           

           

The 11.09 train for Sunnemo eventually careered (as from a blowpipe version of the deadly sound-torch) through and out of the final tunnel into the empty light of Earth’s most inward terminus: a train with many names on board, if not the people attached to the names. Absent or present, however, all of them managed to scream in sheer terror while each name was peeled from their skin along with the feathers themselves … and the pomegranate rind of the Core was penetrated by the final steaming thrust of forward rocket-motion from the front of the Hawler-train’s spinning saw-drill. 

Hataz and Tho yearned between the tears with which their eyes stared each other out before the Core’s final implosion sucked them towards a nostalgic state of birdsong and childhood where they’d first fallen in love: he amid the self-mixed messy delights of his moated city and she wearing, for the first time, her beautifully new overland shoes.  Tricking the Above, the Below and the Across. 

I cried more than most – as even these young lovers had become nervous little people.

Azathoth, the real name of the Angel, smiled. Then laughed.

            ****


FIN