Nemonymous Night (part seven)

It was known by the Megazanthus that any dream sickness affecting the rest of Reality did not affect the Core. Anywhere else on or in the Earth that claimed such a distinction would necessarily be a perpetrator of an inanimate lie.

The Coreseekers who approached the Core via drilling, burial-by-another-party, exploratory pot-holing, self-interment-by-shame or simply merciful immolation knew similarly that, there at the Core, they would be free of deceiving dreams … and what they would see – as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure within the Core – were real animals and creatures, one of which was the Megazanthus itself, the ‘zookeeper’ who also occupied a cage of its own to disguise not only its identity but its capacity for infinity.

Only when the Coreseekers were asleep, at the Core’s very own core, did they know they would be deliberately exposing themselves to dreams – unlike in any surrounding Reality where sleep was not a prerequisite for dreams.

The entrance to the Core was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in the less desirable parts of Outer and Inner Earth. There was a turnstile – just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most Cores in any planet would need. The turnstile was unimpeded and the Coreseekers emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen but their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages. Why an empty enclosure was the first display often mystified Coreseekers, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth.

The empty enclosure at the start of the tour – it was discovered – was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping Coreseekers. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, their own vestigial ghosts bawling in disappointment.

The Coreseekers tried to pacify their own ghosts by pointing to the corridors of cages where the Coregrounds proper, apparently, would start – or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the beaked plankton that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for such creatures. They wanted to see big things at the Core. Like the Megazanthus itself.

Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most Coreseekers, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages – a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of Megazanthus-imitators, many just small apes. Further on, however, kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited creatures could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other – and even uncomfortably close towards the Coreseekers themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.

The remarkable fact – despite the circumstances – none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was not a dream ... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.

****
Greg, stopping over at Klaxon City, looked up into the ‘sky’. There was something lovely about an overhead expanse that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from his mind. He had dreamed of the Core as a zoo, where the Corekeeper was in one of the cages.

A good hawler, he guessed, could plumb heights as well as depths for substance, sustenance and reassurance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, Klaxon's 'sky' (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphonously from inner horizon to inner horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were others of a more name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew this for a while till he realised he was not a hawler at all. Because I was the hawler, here in the tunnel much nearer the Core than Klaxon City! I laughed. But Susan didn’t wake. I always kept my laughter to myself.

****
The woman soon saw the man standing at the open bedroom window watching a huge black vulture-moth slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give him a hug from behind. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his buttocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. All they could hear was the incessant klaxon that no longer warned them as all warnings should but now simply thrummed at levels of the hearing to which thresholds of sound had accustomed themselves.

He turned round – forcing her also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he’d heard a shuffle or a whisper – but there was nobody there. He picked up the freshly delivered Daily Klaxon from the table – as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary – and read the main headline:

MUD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS

Unaccountably, he thought of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Then of some other history nearer to home, a World War that affected England like a dream once slept through … despite all the evidence that it had been all too real.

****
She had been only a little girl. The war was in the process of being historically positioned for its allocated length of time - sufficient to take it from the day it started to the day it ended. It gave her blitzkrieg instead of nightmares: skyfuls of flak piss-sparking like God's migraine.

She had not been evacuated from the city, because nobody important enough was aware of her existence. There existed a small coterie of other similarly placed children who squatted in the corner of the otherwise empty schoolyard, exchanging shrapnel as their predecessors used to exchange marbles or prize conkers.

Her parents chose to ignore her. She slept in the backdorm and was not even invited into the Andersen shelter when air-raid sirens started their interminable thrumming across the city and the bombers droned in upon her ear-drums. She crept further down under the duckdown, trying to blot out the insidious rumble of dark shapes which she imagined to be in the even darker sky.

Somewhere inside her, she remained confident that there would be no direct hit upon the house, but a doubt niggled; hence the fear, hence the encroaching terror. Even when prototypes of unmanned Doodlebugs abruptly regained the volition to cut their engines at the point when they potentially sounded at their loudest, the splintering explosion always finished up streets away toward the covered-market area of the city.

One of the other kids who lurked by day in the school playground was a strange whimsical boy called Arthur. He possessed an over-grown ear on one side of his face. She could not usually bear to look at him, as he rotor-bladed cigarette cards into the street from between the spear-like railings. One ear was quite normal, whilst the other sported a lobe like a pink duffle-coat hood. The larger ear's curlicue innards seemed biologically untenable and extraneous holes formed in the fleshy labyrinth at every opportunity of rupture. She imagined, when Arthur became older and consigned to the trenches of another war, he'd be able to stub out his cigarette ends in that ear-lobe ... only to scoop them out later and make them into the longest joint in the world, to outlast the sleepless night - with only its red glistening tip comforting the other restlessly fearful souls who would bivouac close by.

As the regressive cycles of war turned into huge wastelands of spent history, she and Arthur were eventually the only two left unevacuated in the playground. And so, eventually, she began to acknowledge Arthur, although his strange ear still bothered her with its bizarre ugliness. She even grew to care for him like an older sister would. And, as the summer became endless, they took to staying in the playground come the night and cuddling each other while the sky lit up with one false dawn after another ... and they pored over the depictions of car-makes upon the sweet-cigarette cards.

During the sporadic attacks, Arhur heard the rumblings of the bombers louder and deeper than she did, since one of his ears was, after all, tantamount to a radar dish.

One night, before the summer finally ended, the blitz was brighter than normal, often illuminating the barely discernible roof of the covered market and empty Dry Dock, and lasting well past daybreak. Such prolonging brought about the first air-raid to take place in the cold light of the sun. Like daylight fireworks. So, the two children could now see the dark shapes for what they really were: angels in splints, one of which looked heavy with child, soaring against the sun as if trying to obtain retribution, as any night creature would.

Soon enough, the angel’s belly yawned open.

****
Arthur wept as he heard, by means of his inner ear, the girl’s barely discernible whispering from the toilet across the other side of the playground - that she really loved him and would do so forever and ever. Then, there were left no kids at all to exchange shrapnel or flick sweet-cigarette cards. There was only a flap of smouldering ear-flesh spiked upon a railing. And other small joints of butchered meat scattered randomly between the white-painted netball lines of the playground. Luckily, Arthur and the girl were always too young to realise that they'd probably never grow up to be grown-ups. And the girl’s mother would never know that her daughter had even gone missing under the onset of history. The mother did, however, try to re-incarnate her daughter from her innards. But she had already dreamed a forgotten dream that a doctor had put an ear to her stomach and said it would be a boy.

Just some of the accidents of fate that interpenetrate history, looming a layer of woven time that we all walk upon from one room of our lives to the next.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part thirty-three)

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