Nemonymous Night (part six)

I took Susan’s hands. We had found each other yet again, destined, perhaps, to find each other time and time again. Each a romantic epiphany, but equally horrifically real in the implication of needing to find each other time and time again. All thought of my step-daughter’s charms abandoned my mind when, within the darkness, I could no longer reconcile Sudra’s ugly sharp tongue with the beautiful body that I knew she wielded beneath the carpet coat. I belonged to her mother. I was Susan’s. And Susan was mine. My wonderful mine.

We had all encountered - on our downward trek - some increasingly common oases of light where the Core dispersed the Inner Earth’s darkness like the sun above ground often would disperse stormclouds – or even like such normal sun would take advantage of a riven nightsky to reveal an untimely evidence of its reflected antipodal earth-warming presence.

I tried to drag logic from the illogic of my mind, tried to explain something to Susan that I couldn’t really explain to myself properly – as we followed the others across the ground-housed landscape of Inner Earth.

****
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the tunnel:

Sudra: I suppose we ought to make it up.

Amy: It wasn’t me who got so touchy about a pair of shoes!

Sudra: I know, but with it all changing – and my step-Dad so ‘funny’ with me … I now need someone in this darkness to hold my hand and mean it.

Amy: OK, Suds. I’ve not been myself these days, I’m sorry, too. I feel something creeping around me.

Sudra: What do you mean?

Amy: A sort of … another me. Another me I don’t want me to be. As if removing a veil inside my head. I can’t put it into words, Suds.

Sudra: I think I know, Ame. What’s it trying to make you do? Making you imagine we’re walking in a tunnel heading for the centre of the earth or something? (Laughs)

Amy: Well, surely it is a sort of nightmare. But it can’t be, can it? You’re there. I can feel you in the darkness like in the old days before things started going strange. And Arthur he’s still my brother, but on the other hand he's changed, I reckon. I know he has always been a bit queer, since a baby, but mixing up things from nothing in his ear!

Sudra: Has he always had such a big left ear? (Laughs) Its lower gutter seems to contain all manner of substances!

Amy: Well, it’s always been bigger than his right, with a flap that allows storage at the bottom. The doctors said it was a birth aberration and, short of serious surgery, they thought he would need to live with it. It wasn’t so noticeable then.

Sudra: It’s huge now! Still, would we be able to survive without him?

Amy: By the way, did you watch the latest light period when the Core came out?

Sudra: It was longer than usual. Yes. It was more stripey, with dark and light together, sort of.

Amy: I thought the shape of the uncleared dark bits that formed together around the Core looked like a giant black bird, its wings stretched as if there were things trying to tear it apart.

Sudra: I see what you mean, Imagination can play all sorts of tricks.

Amy: Or it really was what I saw.

Both girls had a bout of the shyfryngs as they settled in each other’s arms to sleep; now silent as both suspected – without telling the other – that their conversation was being earwigged.

****
Near to the open-walled market or underground station, there was a tall building, access to which was by lift – indeed a very complex lift system which Greg often used before he was made redundant from his job in that building. He used to entertain business clients and had to help them negotiate the lift system – changing on specific floors for different lift shafts of higher reach. Some shafts were more palatial and business-orientated than others, some so narrow they could only be used for brooms or very thin utility workers. The highest shaft reached the open air area, leafed over like a wood. From there, once, Greg was sure he could see the distant sea through the unusually clear sky into which the wood penetrated. He imagined a finer, less definable surface barely above the sea but otherwise imitating its waves and swells – a double skin in perfect unison, but the lower one liquid, the upper spectral. Perhaps the second one was the ghost of a giant flying carpet taking invisible human vessels towards Arabian Adventure or towards the darker motives of suicide than seaside. And then the same building in duplicate appeared from the clouds and speared itself about two-thirds of the way up. The ultimate suicide by architecture. But that is deja-vu history of sorts and only has bearing on itself. History of history. History hugging the same history, without reality to come between their embrace. His story. My story. Nostory.

****
The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.

****
In these hard, awkward days in your distant future when a Horla cannot even get a decent drink, my plight brings tears of a pink cast to my eyes and a faint quiver of the upper lip upon my toothsome fangs.

It's the Black Drought that did it. I cannot bring myself to syphon up just any blood unless I know where my subjects have been. Creatures from the ancient past, such as yourselves, are no use to the likes of me. Too much of the bad blood, if you see what I mean.

My suffering is becoming so piquant, I'm having to find other means of sustaining my undead soul ... this soul which is the Way Station of the mutated veinwork of my carnal body. Only in Horlas can the logic of Nature really be seen for what it is; only on being born an Undead, can one truly follow the uncharted mazes of God's work.

Anyway, enough of philosophy – back to my urgent theme, the plight of my kind in your unreachable future where a dream sickness prevails, a dream sickness from which you cannot free your restful wings of sleep. A lack of sleep, a lack of 'blackness' draining, depleting, disfiguring your waking life it seems forever. A Black Drought that you suffer as utter sleeplessness - because of wall-to-wall dream interruption.

You may well ask: why is the wasting away of a Horla deprived of its external blood sources not as bad as that of you unfortunate victims of the Black Drought that I've just described?

Well, we Horlas know full well why.

Ours is an infinite wasting-away whilst yours is finite.

Let me lay it on the line: in periods of cyclic Cosmic Menopause, we can, at least, like a parthenogenetic camel, as it were, survive upon recycled blood. Perhaps I should give you a lesson in the biology of the Undead. Blood in, blood out. That's our catchphrase. Most food that you used to consume turned dark brown on exit. On the other hand, blood that we imbibe stays bright red, as pure as the day it was pumped by the young supple hearts whence it came. But, until these post-Drought days, it has always been deemed crudely cheating and almost unchristian amongst we Nosferatu Fraternity to recycle blood. But when needs must...

****
I'm in terrible trouble. Æons have now gone by. And still no supply of fresh blood. What I have left is growing pinker and pinker like paraffin the more I use it.

As even the tiniest moments of time pass, I am sure my bowels are growing their own teeth or beaks between the various byways of the intestines. Even the most unlikely inner and outer orifices of my body seem to be cutting a molar or two. It may be in my mind, but my innards are so desperate they are moving about like separate creatures within my body, searching for the nooks and crannies where real blood – my original birthright when I was a mortal like you – is secretly stored.

Am I to experience a real death for the first time? I feel my own bifurcating bones suckling gently upon the slowly emptying sump within my innermost reaches, the last refuge and sanctuary for my own blood from the thirsting beaks within me, beaks that now have jaws.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part thirty-two)

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