Klaxon City (part one)

A novel that is a sequel to THE HAWLER.
(Please read THE HAWLER first).

My first glimpse was the hill where stood the Canterbury Oak, if standing or growing could be reconciled. That was not the tree’s real name; nothing bore its real name in my book. Nothing bore its real name, I dare suggest, in Klaxon City itself. If Klaxon City called itself Klaxon City, then it lied.

I had crossed the Inner Plains from a life I preferred to forget so, having tried to forget it, there would be a certain counter-productiveness in rehearsing a re-living of it merely to fill in the wavy area of my past with childish colouring.

I knew beyond the hill would be Klaxon City; the Canterbury Oak was responsible for this name, a name given as a means towards an easy fantasy: a convenient digestibility of facts that make up any fantasy, even if, for me, this particular fantasy was not a fantasy at all.

Klaxon City, therefore. A city full of noise, a noise like klaxons or sirens. So a name like Klaxon City makes things straightforward. I shall not bother with its real name, a name which means nothing or, if it means anything, is lost in some mire of esoteric history or legend. The Canterbury Oak, too, is named thus because it is similar to a tree I once saw in Canterbury. A bottom-heavy tree with warped bark, almost a diseased bark, I guess, with a girth – shall I say of a million miles in circumference? I may as well. I should never be able to convey the impression of its irregular wrinkled girth (that lower end of its bole that met the earth) by any claim to know its measurements or any standard of measurement common to all who would like to know its measurements. Scales are quite out of the question. The trunk – as it tapered towards the top where sparse branches started to claw at the sky – had a wind-chewed roughness (I knew it was rough even from the distance I saw it but remained unsure of the wind), growing like a giant serpent whereby all its inner wooden fat had sapped towards its rooted tail, leaving it so dissimilar in bulk when bottom was compared to top. The branches were images of its relentless pain that had once been conveyed by its own internal sirens.

Now, with its sirens quiet for at least a generation, I was soon to learn that the citizens, having long been inured to its ancient noise (now dead or deaf to itself), needed to customise their own background of audible pain: thus building a city-wide tannoy-system to act as temporary coverage of such sirens. So, given the Oak’s recent bouts of cyclic silence, their own homegrown versions of siren-sound in the city seemed to take sway, as if the Oak had decided to remain silent now more often, in face of such unrivalled clamour. However, the citizens themselves – perhaps because they had grown irritated by mock sirens as opposed to the real thing – had started to hire surreptitious ear-muffs to assuage the skewered edges of sound. Some even trod a highly secret route of sound-proofing their houses. Once seen, however, the difficulty of such a task would become apparent.

Meanwhile, I crossed the brow of another hill as I completed my trek – from across the Inner Plains with just a portable tent and meagre rations – starting when an untold past had ceased unfolding and ending as I approached an as yet unknown future. I witnessed the scattered pylons of Klaxon City bearing their tethered skycraft. I knew to expect these. However, I had not been forearmed with any knowledge concerning the vastness of the city – occupying a space within a cavity of truth that housed a whole dynasty, not just one tranche of civilisation. However, that as yet unappreciated fact abandoned my mind when I suddenly became appalled by what hit me with the force of a tangible soundwave – the tannoy-system kicking in with a hair-trigger difference between silence (on one side of the brow) and cacophony (on the other).

(KLAXON CITY continued here: part two)

===============