The Hawler (part twenty-three)

Dognahnyi (an early worm in any conversation): Have you managed to fix your dreams yet?

Recruit (still veiled, speaking Welsh-prettily, if semi-nasally): Fixed them, yes – or so I thought – but last night someone told me or I dreamed that someone told me that they had a dream recently of a foreign body torpedoing itself into their tower office-block. You know the one – the block round the corner from here with a roof garden and a complicated lift system that books on architecture often write about.

D: Yes, I know the one you mean. Where our man once worked when he was still a ‘sleeping’ hawler. I presume the torpedo thing came from the dream terrorists.

R: I suppose so – but it wasn’t the classic jet-liner attack – it was a replica of the tower-block itself coming in at an abrupt angle and sticking itself like a pig about two-thirds of the way up.

D: Hmmm…that’s interesting. I think if you have dreams or dreams of dreams like that, we can certainly use your skills for furthering the hawling process everywhere.

R (smiling beneath the veil): Thank you.

D (walking over to the curtains on silent runners making as if to open them): Out there are many situations that need fixing.

R: I know.

D: Such as that tower block – as you’ve just suggested – being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.

R: I believe you.

At that point, she slowly removed her veil.

****
Mike sat upon a ledge in the downward tunnel – just beyond the point where the hedge petered out together with a tapering into horizontality of a new tunnel – or a perceived horizontality at this perspective of the underground’s in-built sextant and its effect on the brain’s balance.

The hedge itself had tended to prevent dangerous free-fall but, equally, had not hindered their nude scaling-down to this point in the earth’s interior.

Mike was pleased that it was now slightly more ‘civilised’ at this juncture of his party’s journey. The stick-like ‘hares’ or decoys were indeed now fully absorbed into the Amyness and Arthurness of two among them. The group had grown somewhat, but the main constituents were still the main constituents.

Furthermore, there was now a service tunnel parallel with their own tunnel of concourse – and this service tunnel was complete with pulleys and ropes, passing clanking buckets to the surface from the Core itself. He readily assumed all was part and parcel of some quite complicated hawling-process which he was due to oversee, once his training was complete. And, surprisingly (but, in hindsight, not surprisingly), there were warm clothes waiting for them at this crossover point in the tunnel systems. Indeed, this must be an official root-exchange, whereby Mike now realised that all other approaches or ‘attacks’ towards the centre (such as the many Drill companies he had heard about) were quite unofficial or simply subterfuges.

He had heard earlier rumours that the immediate surrounding area of the Core was populated by a set of creatures known as Carpet Apes who tended to the necessary ablutions of the Megazanthus (one of the names of which Mike was aware had been given to the Corekeeper) – and that the marginal ‘land’ around the Core itself was the legendary Agra Aska … but the facts were still uncertain even if the non-facts were now clearer.

However, the Carpet Apes (so-called) were probably a false assumption or, at best, an unfixed dream. He looked down at the coat with which he (and the others) had been supplied: a stiffish, ankle-length carpetty thing with simple arm apertures. At first it was uncomfortable to walk about in but one soon grew accustomed to its combination of warmth and bodily support. He had not yet questioned the fact that the nearer the Core they travelled, the colder it was becoming, despite history saying such a process should mean that you were approaching a molten heat centre.

He looked at the others – Susan, Sudra, Amy, Arthur etc. – in their carpet coats and he somehow knew whence the legend of the Carpet Apes must have derived – and he laughed at the antics of the others. One of them was doing a puppet-like jig in his or her stiffened coat and it was terribly funny. Apeish. Mike felt cheered.

Yet Mike questioned himself. He realised he was a hawler – always realised this perhaps – but now he knew it wasn’t because he had previously been a hawler, but because he was about to become one. Self-identification by an as yet unproved anticipation was a dream-fixing he needed to address. It all seemed a very unsteady grounding for a vocation or a raison-d’etre. Mike shrugged and peered at his step-daughter Sudra as she now began to practise walking in her carpet coat. She took delight to tease him with her imputed beautiful body hidden beneath the dumpy beige covering and the ungainly yellow clod-hoppers on her feet – clogs, in fact, that were on all their feet. The thin effulgence of the previous hedge tunnel had given Mike few glimpses of her nudity…

He shook his head to himself. He should not be having such thoughts about a step-daughter, should he? He was a hawler, he knew. Yet a flawed hawler. He suddenly stopped laughing. Later: Stub of pencil writes: Amy complains that readers have lost sight of who she is!

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty-four)

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