The Hawler (part ten)

Beth was beautiful but she often seemed bitter … or strident … transferring furrows to the face that seemed out of place there. Her personality had changed the character of her face. Her sister Susan was less physically attractive, yet her nature was calmer, more amenable – not necessarily kinder or smarter than Beth, but less prone to have mind rage at the slightest setback. Patience was something Beth deeply lacked and her non-descript husband took the brunt of her short temper – to the extent of having any of his own personality stripped from him, like a gossamer upperskin peeling off and jettisoned: left just to cling on, for dear life, to the cast shadow in his wake.

When Beth’s nephew and niece disappeared, Beth initially failed to react sufficiently: but as soon as she did take initiative on her sister’s behalf, Susan stopped being simply bemused at losing two children she somehow hadn’t realised she had. Beth had at first retained her habits, however – arriving in Ogdon’s pub rather late and with cool nonchalance – yet later her inbuilt stridency took inevitable sway and she felt there was nothing to do but burn the candle at both ends, tussling insistently, if not violently, with the Authorities, whilst chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?”

“Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid – unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.

The dream sickness – like a ‘flu pandemic – caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered … but, unlike a ‘flu pandemic, the dream sickness was inspired by an inference regarding an infernal mass-hysteria linked to a mass-suicide syndrome rather than by any individual’s pain or conscious disability.

Many parents set up search parties – because Arthur and Amy were not the only ones believed to have inexplicably gone missing. Some search parties overlapped with other search parties. There were petty rivalries, even bitter disputes between them, believing their own children were being sought by other parties and vice versa.

Meanwhile, wells were dug all over the city towards the Northern coalfields. Separate queues were set up at these wells to reflect the medicine queues further south, as if some unknown synchronicity was sought to provide an explanation factor linking two imponderables and hopefully make them ponderable. Some children who hadn’t yet run away from home played sandcastles around the wells – damming and river-construction games mocked-up from various substances abandoned by gardeners in allotment sheds previously rifled by unknown hands and given to the children. Weighing bucket against bucket was a common daily reality even though it sounds more like something they should have dreamed about … being tantamount to a waking sickness, assuming anyone could get their heads around such a concept.

****
Much further south, towards the holiday ‘feet’ of the city-shape, other queues formed near ranks of parked silver craft that had been earmarked and then advertised as vehicles for tours beyond the city toward the sea in pursuit of adventures of which Jules Verne would have been proud.

Crazy Lope and John Ogdon had booked for an undersea tour, but then decided against it. This would have been under the tutelage of a rather outlandishly garbed and dramatic Captain Nemo (or so it was blurbed in the brochure), cashing in on a vogue for such old-fashioned fantasy trips. Booking avoided queues but cost a lot more. Greg said he wanted to accompany them, but currently there wasn’t a vacancy, unless a late cancellation arose. At that stage Crazy Lope and Ogdon had not yet cancelled. Greg wondered if he really shouldn’t accompany Beth, Susan & Co. in search of Arthur and Amy. A holiday seemed a bit of a cop-out compared to participating in a pukka search party. Mike himself kept his own counsel.

Long ago, Mike (or others on his behalf) believed he was a hawler but, along with a generally increasing number of inscrutable dreams, that concept had vanished into some forgotten sump of tribal consciousness. The only thing known about a hawler was that there was no fact to know about a hawler. A hawler being a wide-faced creature that sat at the centre of the Earth was an earlier description – but whoever or whatever created that description had since disappeared and thus become unaccountable for it.

****
Greg, meanwhile, remembered the zoo visit with some clarity. His face was a bit effeminate – and one could easily imagine him performing a drag act as a hobby. A Danny La Rue manqué. He was a loner but people in the office where he worked thought he was a rather pleasant individual and they believed many of the stories he told about his non-existent life. His suits were immaculate. His jokes tasteful. His visits to the loo kept to the minimum as he hated mirrors. The zoo, too. Rather good at his administrative job, a whizz with the keyboard and could build websites at a flick of his wrist – or so it seemed. A pity he had such awful, guilt-ridden dreams about a daughter he’d never had. Nobody knew about this, of course.

He missed Mike. Mike had once worked in the same office, but with the domestic problems that later beset him, he had left and moved to the other side of the city with his wife and children. They seemed somehow distinct from the Mike and Susan with whom Greg had since become re-acquainted on the screen … in the era of televised search parties pre-occupying the ‘Big Brother’ reality-show mentalities of the gullible public. And Amy – one of the children – was later found grown-up and vacuuming carpets without even knowing Mike was her father. But that’s an earlier story since abandoned. For whatever reason. Or a later one yet to be told. Nobody was quite sure.

****
Crazy Lope was Ogdon’s alter ego. And vice versa. The fact that one set of relationships between them could overlap another yet opposite set continued to make it possible that they remained separate people, despite the evidence otherwise. Writing fiction was his first love – often about a vampire called a Horla after a French writer’s story of the same name – but this had soon fallen by the wayside. Nobody could earn money from writing such rarified fiction – so he proceeded to put it on an antipodal back-burner whilst deciding to open a pub (his second love).

Ogdon gave himself an evening off from time to time, as pub life was generally very hard. But he spent most of this free time behind the other side of his bar, talking to regulars, if not to himself. Conversations on either side of the bar did differ, but it was all basically the same: ‘pub talk’: loosened tongues amid boozy brainstorming.

Ogdon: It’s like fixing a painting with a special cold varnish, so it doesn’t fade, or even change. Paintings can change, you know.

Crazy Lope: Change?

O: Yes – fixing dreams is one thing, like making sure we remember them a few hours after we wake up. But far harder is to fix reality itself – stopping it slipping or sliding into dream. That’s the fixing I’m talking about.

CL: I didn’t know you knew about such things. I’ve often had dreams which get confused and, sooner or later, lost forever. Does that happen to real things, too, then? I suppose you might be right.

O: Dream sickness – heard about that? Well, I’ve got a cure for it in a fixing-device … or a fixing-person, a new job that I think we need to fill. Government’s not going to do anything about it.

CL: Dream sickness, yes, but nobody admits to it existing. Nobody actually says those words in public.

O: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!

CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.

O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?

CL: Yup. Don’t like holidays myself. They seem like a chore half the time. I just enjoy staying in my flat and mouldering away. (Laughs)

O: Well, I know someone who went on one of those trips. They do exist, I’m sure, based on what he says.

CL: Who’s that?

O: That friend of Mike from his office. Greg, is it? He comes in here often on his own now – Mike’s gone north.

CL: Has he?

O: Yes, like all those others. Anyway, that trip Greg told me about – it was a submarine run by someone acting as Captain Nemo. But not an ordinary submarine, as Nautilus sort of was, as I understand it. This submarine had huge vanes on top like a helicopter – and it churned down through the sea-water scattering fish and so forth in a great big stirpool!

CL: Sounds decidedly ungreen!

O: To say the least – but apparently the vanes were a protective system as much as they were propulsion. Deep down where Nemo took all the passengers down and taught all those trippers about really deep things, quite beyond you and I. And green is the thing, indeed, in many ways, dark green, right down there … emerald scenes, with emerald beasts of the under-sea. Frondy. So Greg said.

CL: I thought it was all blue, the sea.

O: So did I. But at the deepest – down there – are giant green squid that have civil wars, it seems. Tribes of the same breed wrestling in mounds of black mud. Absolutely mad.

CL: Black as well as green?

O: Apparently so. Nemo called these squid vermin “ancient kings of besmirched sperm-banks.” Greg got that from a line of old poetry.

CL: Whales? Sharks? They’re in that same poem, I think.

O: Well, mutant versions, apparently. I didn’t understand most of it. Greg seemed to know all about it, but he’d actually seen all these things. Seeing is believing, isn’t it?

CL: Not so sure. Probably brings us back to your ‘fixing’ idea. Fictioning, similar, I dunno. You need a kiln for baking reality! (Laughs).

Others who were listening laughed, too, as Ogdon bought another round of drinks, thus squandering his pub profits. Crazy Lope spat into his drink for luck.

O: By the way, I had a funny dream last night. I knew it was a dream, without having to fix any true waking life that came before and after.

CL: Oh yeh?

O: One part of the dream wasn’t so clear – it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it – and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.

CL: Like Tardis? (Laughs)

O: Maybe, but it had a Lounge bar as well as a Public one. I went into the Public and started chatting with someone, though I can’t remember who that was. I seemed to know this person, however. I owed him money, it seemed.

CL: A him then?

O: Yes, I’m sure it was man. Anyway, I repaid with loose change. (Laughs). A series of one p and half p coins. It couldn’t have been much or I would have used notes. Probably. Anyway, as I say, to the point, one of the coins was a quarter p! Smaller even than a half p – so tiny you could hardly handle it. I then knew it must be a dream, as everyone knows that a quarter p coin doesn’t exist in England and never did exist.

CL: Exactly. Half p coins don’t exist now, but they once did. But never a quarter p. You’re right.

O: Ah well, there are some truths to life one cannot doubt!

All laughed and nodded as more drinks were purchased. A few of the regulars wore flat caps and they decided to have a game of darts. The pub talk was evidently fizzling out for a while amid much merriment, yet mingled with worried private asides and surreptitious glances.

****
If there were horror lurking somewhere – nobody would ever know for sure. Yet, at the depth, this horror was aware of itself and, even without a mirror, it knew it had slobbery gums and long teeth and a face wider than its head. Not absurdly dreamlike but monstrously, nightmarishly real – just waiting for its time to come.

(continued as part eleven)

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