Nemonymous Night (part four)

A bus doesn’t touch the Earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing to float, two passengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

“We’re trapped on this bus.”

“You can get off at the next stop. It’s not like a plane.”

“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it. To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape – until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meet in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox – that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”

“Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.

****
Captain Nemo himself took the controls himself as the Drill docked at Klaxon City. Their first stop-over on their journey to the Core via Inner Earth itself.

Just before this manoeuvre, the leading windows in the Corporate Lounge had sufficiently cleared to afford a view of another inner sea lit lugubriously by a now unprotected Core ‘sun’. Their naked eyes had now been able to grow acclimatised to its combination of brightly icy scatter-orange and the contrastively wan effulgence actually given off from it (increasingly wan the nearer they approached it). The city of Klaxon was a vast collection of arabesque turrets peppering an out-of-place complex similar to a fin de siècle Paris on the banks of the Seine. And as the Drill burrowed nearer in a circling motion not unlike that of planes stacking up over an airport, Greg (invited into the cockpit itself) watched Nemo grapple with the joystick which was on a hair-trigger relationship with the Drill’s vanes, vanes that were currently working overload on vast amounts of mixed off-detritus. Greg feared that Beth and the two dowagers would be seeing even less than before from their rearward cabins. But that didn’t worry him for long as he grew fascinated with the docking pinion (on one of the turrets) that seemed to snatch the Drill in the same manner as old-fashioned catch-nets on the ancient railways collected letters and parcels without the train stopping.

A jolt – and then, even through the sides of the Drill, the relentless sound of a multi-tannoy system on permanent klaxon that gave the city its name. Greg could hardly imagine living a whole life in such a place with that noise echoing in your ears all over the city. Always with you. Accompanying work, love and play.

“Much like living trapped within one’s own body and its everpresent frightful tinnitus of antipodal angst,” said Nemo, as if having read Greg’s mind.

Greg shrugged. He wasn’t sure what Nemo was driving at.

****
I lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined me awake. I got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in my room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. It was very close to the ground without even space for ratruns or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.

I wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.

I found myself delving into the wood of the floor as if I had found an opening in human flesh – a natural vent, rather than one I had forced open with my fingers.

That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to me until I discovered myself delivering them … through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And I felt its thoughts as if they were my own thoughts.

All this had been in Ogdon’s novel, too. I could not shake it off sufficiently to warrant excluding it in my competing novel. I sensed Ogdon was intent on an unhappy ending for the world by means of the ‘truths’ he hoped to sculpt from his own version of those “synchronised shards of random fiction and truth”. By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us. You can’t destroy evils without having first set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.

****
Tears came to my eyes as I looked back at the various paths I could have picked on … chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so I could make the turning towards the goal I had once set myself.

In the distance, I heard the lonely sound of a helicopter – vanes clacking lugubriously – followed by the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty.

I returned to my sleep.

****
Many of the vehicles had been abandoned with no regard for the white lines that marked out the allotted spaces in the carpark. The snow that had covered the area had subsequently melted, thus giving an excuse for careless parking.

A shapely woman in a scanty frock approached the barrier, whereupon the ticket-dispenser machine thought she was a thing on wheels and handed her a reminder of the date and time printed on a stiff hard-to-lose card. She forthwith flicked it away into the darkness, as if participating in one of those ancient school-playground cigarette-card games – the blind-man's buff version.

She remembered that she sought a car (one with its headlights switched on) and a registration-plate matching the letters and numbers tattooed on her left breast – a combination she'd meticulously memorised the night before. If she ever turned into a nameless corpse, Dognahnyi would be in no doubt that it was her. The whereabouts of such a corpse would indicate the successful outcome of her mission – or not.

Yet none of the cars were alight. They simply squatted there like extinct baby-pods of prehistoric monster berserkers. She wandered in and out, unworried as to the floweriness of her own thoughts' language. She had been brainwashed only to take the illogical for granted. Amid the haywire aisles of scattered metal, she peered through the windows to ascertain the nature of any occupants and, if there were any, whether they were still alive and communicado. Not that she really wanted anything but an empty car. But the confusion derived from her training that she had received from Dognahnyi to seek that for which she did not seek, in the hope that such obliquity would lead her – by accident – to the thing she actually sought without knowing she sought it. Angel Wine. Angevin. At this stage, her goal was unclear. As was the precise nature of the terror (dream terror or otherwise) she was obliged now to perpetrate.

The sky had just started to activate sprinkler-systems of disabled snow, which seeped as sleet into her skimpy clothes, giving her the shyfryngs...

The headlights came on suddenly. Not merely one or, even, two. All the cars broke their vows of silence and erupted into a life which, if the very beginning of the world had been witnessed, this would appear to be its obverse at the very end of time. An abrupt awakening as a prelude to death. She was caught in the cross-glares, eyes blinking, heart thumping, her mind full with memories of those shafts of twirling lateral light stirring the war-stricken night of her youth.

Having used confusion as a subterfuge for clarity, she could hardly recall how she had clambered into one of the cars and driven it from the car park. Even without the all-important card, the barrier had lifted of its own accord, knowing that, if it had not, it would have been smashed to smithereens. Even stones did bleed in certain phases of the cold blue moon.

She steered quickly through the slanting icicles of rain, her high-heeled feet playing the engine like a bass organ. She knew the bomb in the boot may also have had a life of its own, its short fuse matched to her own feminine one.

The streets through which she drove were completely unfamiliar but, at the same time, she knew exactly when to take certain turnings. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she thought she could discern the dark shape of someone sitting in the backseat. Yet, darkness, when it saw fit, could take whatever fumbling form it wanted.

Ah, there was a bridge near the covered market: a mock-gothic affair which the street lighting moulded from almost nothing, so as to allow the river (or was it a railway track because the city didn’t usually boast a real river?) to be traversed as the crow (a very special crow) would drive. Was she mad? Or already steeped to the gills in Angel Wine? She felt an embodiment of someone else's dream. She felt calm, as she was certain that she had been warned about the encroachment of such madness. Madness was what made the job so dangerous. She would need to compare notes.

Driving to a halt at the brink of the bridge, she turned to see who may have been backseat-driving. But nobody there, only a pile of what appeared to be unwanted rubble from a building site. Or a dream Drill’s off-detritus.

She left the car and walked round to the rear where she could see tyre-tracks in the snow leading up to the back-wheels. The sleet had in fact resumed its snow disguise after settling. The marks were more akin to skids, as if she'd screeched to a halt and, on returning to the front, she saw why: the inky cut was just out of sight beyond the gaze of the headlights. The bridge was a cartilaginously cantilevered mass of pulsing flesh, ribbed further with engorged veins, parts fluted with perfectly linear tumours, other areas haphazardly sown with knobbly cancers beyond even the manufacture of crazy modern sculptors in clay or any other medium, and the pinions and stanchions upholstered with scarlet haunches of clumsily sawn meat – all being wrapped by snow and, conversely, dyeing it.

Snow? Or was it dry-powdered Angevin, she suddenly wondered. But wondering did not absolve her inbuilt duty.

Tentatively, she first-footed upon the near edge of slimy gristle. It moved under her, as if hurt by her stilletoes. She shuffled forward, testing all the time, because the snow made nonsense of the structure's hidden strengths – like walking on a hammock, but with underlays of breathing, if not burping, animal-fat. Birdbodies were also embedded in the hardened surface of grease.

Halfway across, she looked back at the car, which immediately doused its lights as it trundled engineless in her wake. Amy was thus left invisible to anybody keeping watch. They could only guess whether she had reached the other side, before the boot blew up...

****
I woke from a dream. This had been a real dream. Others had not been dreams. They had been visions thrust upon me by some narrative trickery with which a mad Ogdon was trying to force me down byways that my destiny had no right to encompass.

I knew a real dream from a false dream. The former often contained words I’d never use, words I didn’t understand. Or was it the other way? Distinction was clear, if not the terms of the distinction.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part thirty)

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