The Hawler (part fourteen)

The sun literally seemed to scream at the holiday party as they arrived in the tour coach at the edge of the Left Foot Plateau to the south of the city. Its rays gradually spread along the then empty horizon like orange marmalade – the bottom arc of its orb dripping something like thick liquid to the point on the horizon whence it had just fully risen. The holiday makers were due to go from viewing one arc to another. They were to board an ark as it were and become participants in the latest Jules Verne expedition that had been advertised as going to the centre of the earth. Booked as a holiday, many now indeed saw this as useful escape route from the unsaid dangers that had begun to beset the city.

Greg turned to look at his wife Beth and shrugged. They were in two minds about this whole trip because, clandestinely, they were not real holiday makers or, even, escapees from a world that no longer welcomed them but, instead, they had a mission to find the Angevin children who had vanished from the city under the cover of rumours. Indeed, Greg and Beth both knew that other people (including Beth’s sister) were trying different apertures to enter the earth further north in the Head Region of the city. There was more hanging on these events than just a jamboree or self-indulgent adventuring or, even, conscientious objection to what was going on in the city.

The horizon and, indeed, the upper sky, were now filling with huge kites upon slanting rope-tethers to the hands of as yet invisible kite-carers on the ground. The individual kites were – as a promotional vision for the Jules Verne Holiday Company – shaped like some of the craft the Company had used for previous jaunts and some, even, models of proposed future ones.

Lightening up, Greg laughed as he spotted one of the kites was a flying carpet prancing higher and higher from yet one more slanting tether. He was older and hopefully wiser than before with his bum-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.

Beth remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching the centre of the earth from a different terrestrial angle. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling – yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at her husband. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie.

“Hey, some of those kites haven’t got people flying them!” suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.

Beth was more interested in viewing the craft that was due to take them to the centre of the earth. That was a far more important priority at the moment. At first, she was mistaken as to the correct craft in question, as she spotted a long queue of would-be holiday makers near a large landcraft which multi-resembled a cross between various forms of transport (that was the only way she could describe it). She thought she and Greg must be on the wrong side of the platform as it were, in the wrong queue, because their own queue was much shorter, indeed depleted to just the two of them being led by an inscrutable Jules Verne official whose face they had not yet seen – but it was not long before they rounded a deceptive dune to witness the first sight of their own potential craft.

It was awe-inspiring. Strangely, from the distance at which they first viewed it, the craft struck them as simply more than gigantic. It was literally bigger than a mountain and, surely, would become clogged in the earth’s throat, at such a size. Tilted at an angle, it was a wildly proportioned Drill …with a bit at its tip, pointing at the earth and tantalisingly only a few inches from the beachy surface. Even more strangely than before, the nearer they approached the Drill, the smaller it became, but still reasonably massive judging by mere human proportions. Beth could now actually pick out the pilot in the cockpit behind the bit-tip. He was dressed in a period costume with frills, ruffs and a feathered peaked cap. He smiled at Beth as he gave the Drill’s ignition a quick trial grinding roar … and she watched the bit-tip spin, splinters of orange sun spraying in all directions from its sharp bright torque.

The most amazing item on the craft, however, which Greg was the first to notice, was an outlandishly protrusive set of slender rotor-blades or vanes upon the back of the Drill like that on the back of a helicopter. Insect-like. He could not imagine how the Drill could be able to dig its way through the earth with that as part of its propulsion system. He originally imagined the Drill sliding through the earth like a knife through butter, but that thought now went straight out of the window.

But the matter was soon forgotten when they were abruptly introduced to the Drill’s ‘Captain Nemo’ – who appeared just as suddenly on a ladder that dangled from the boarding-hatch in the side of the Drill. He was a tall figure with a certain resemblance, as Greg recalled the people he had known in the city, to Ogdon or, even, Ogdon’s sidekick Crazy Lope. The Captain was not however in any way related to these two people, as both he and Beth soon instinctively gathered.

“I’ll take you in and show you the wallmaps in a minute,” he crooned with a nut-brown voice.

Beth was entranced. Greg sceptical.

“Wall maps?”

“Yes, charts and so forth of our route.”

Greg shrugged. Surely there was only one route to the centre of the earth. As the crow flied. A straight line. A slanting tether.

“I have books on board to keep us amused during the long journey,” the Captain continued.

“Books!” interjected Beth. “I hate books. Ever since I gave one as a present – one I valued as if I’d written it myself – inscribed it lovingly to the recipient – and then I found myself eventually buying it back because I saw the same copy being sold on e-bay!”

The Captain shrugged as if this was a silly reason to hate books. With only one backward glance at the shadow of the vertical sun above them amid the increasingly crowded sky, Greg and Beth excitedly followed the Captain on board the Drill. The name on its side had escaped them: “The Hawler”.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part fifteen)

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