Nemonymous Night (35 page)

Arthur could also see—through the gap between two of the four tower-blocks—the square where a fountain played at its middle amongst four cast-iron benches where both residents and strangers could sit, given clement weather. Today, it was deserted, and the fountain frozen into the shape of the creature that had once been its free-flowing water-sculpture.

The teacher could wait. Arthur picked up the abandoned watering-can and peered inside. Nothing except a residue of some mossy paste that had been one of his now forgotten experiments from before the time he had managed to forge a memory of the past. Any past. Children only knew the future as and when it was crystallised as a memorable past—and today Arthur, for the first time, realised he had a past he could remember. Amy, by contrast, was still lost in a fog with which stunted growth did besmirch the infant mind even if it was on the point of emerging as a butterfly of Amyness from the dank turnip-egg embedded in the mulch of creation where she had wallowed, disguised as a human baby. Arthur laughed. No such thoughts had gone through his mind.

Yet nagging at him were further thoughts. Amy had left the watering-can because it was evidently not important to her. She still had the flowerpot as she left for the meeting with their schoolteacher. There was evidently something about the flowerpot or what was in the flowerpot or what haunted the flowerpot or a combination of all these things which had caused Amy not to leave it in his possession. And he took a last glance at his moated island of now bubbling earth-erosion, and followed in the wake of his sister, even if that brought forward the dreaded repercussions of the schoolteacher’s visit. The flowerpot had become magnified in his new-found memory and would remain embedded there forever, even when he gradually became an old man with many more memories to harbour than just this single one about his sister’s haunted flowerpot. A haunted memory, if indeed not a haunted flowerpot.

There was now a caped figure sitting on one of the square’s benches, busy writing, oblivious of the weather-proof fountain that cracked like bones in a steady wintry wind. Arthur knew that was himself—a visitant from the future to seal or mint or rubber-stamp the memory that this sight would eventually become. A second memory to join that of the haunted flowerpot. This was a day rich with memories—because, a child’s memories once begun and once adept in the art of storing themselves, multiply with a feeding frenzy.

That day’s meeting with the schoolteacher would be a third memory that was destined to last for as long as memories remained. Including Amy’s reaction to many confused instructions and recriminations regarding the shoes that belonged to a friend of hers. Thankfully, the meeting did not concern Arthur at all. For once.

Later, he returned to the garden—the family’s own allotted plot amongst many other fenced subsections of agriculture or flower-display—and found his latest island of earth had subsided into a stinking compost of known and unknown colours. Despite the frozen weather, it gave off a warm steamy putrescence which was almost pleasant to his untutored nostrils. He could also still hear the relentlessly mild buzz of whatever lifeforms had evolved deeper down below his mis-mechanisation of stones, earth-deposits and man-made chemicals. Now more like gabbled talk than sirens. He poked a finger in and felt a large soft fleshiness that created the loudest screech imaginable.

He ran and ran, if only to escape the memory. Thankfully, he succeeded. The screech simply became the echo of a dream he no longer believed as a real dream let alone as waking reality itself.

His sister Amy squatted on the backstep of the lift shaft—tears streaming down her face—flowerpot clasped to her chest, as if she had kept it as a receptacle for any vomit she was about to let rip from the bottom of her lungs.

Arthur shrugged. Sisters. Strange creatures. Sisters were of that same group of creatures he would never understand, a group that also harboured his mother as well as schoolteacher. He looked into the square to see if that man was still there. He assumed it had been a man. It had the shape of a man, despite the concealing cape. Shapes could be imagined as well as seen for real.

He turned back to his sister. She had gone—leaving the flowerpot on the step. With his Davy Crockett hat’s fur tail swinging, he went over. He needed some more swill for his moat.

*

The Weirdmonger—upon his now legendary rite of passage through Klaxon’s peripheral mudparks—came across a dreamcatcher hanging in the sky. Feathers and netting upon a singular swinging frame of irregular shape—or, rather, of both regular and irregular shape. A collapsible frame when not in use, the Weirdmonger guessed. He wondered from where it was thus suspended swinging in the siren-breezes that played fitfully around it at this distance from the city proper. He looked into the cavity’s half-sky and only the light of Sunnemo gave any clue: itself. But the same light glared into his eyes—thus making it difficult to ascertain the dreamcatcher’s root.

He touched it tentatively and watched it swing more vigorously. Dreams flocked around it like moths or mosquitos into the netting, some stuck there as burrs would on fly-paper. One dream caught Weirdmonger in the eye: and he saw (ahead of time) his arrival in a war-ravaged city, his close scrutiny of Sudra’s shoe museum where the smoke from the chimney was like a huge stilleto-wedge rather than a plume or umbrella-shape, and the hasty departure of ‘The Hawler’ flopping from its pylon towards the gravity-logging of its pull only for the Drill’s bit-tip to grind uselessly against the beach terrain which was apparently harder within Inner Earth than it had been on the surface.

Captain Nemo had to alight himself to sharpen the bit-tip whilst it was still spinning. And away the Drill went, faces mooning at the portholes near its back set of vanes. The Weirdmonger knew—from the dreamcatcher—that the faces’ names were Greg, Beth, Edith and Clare. The Captain was left stranded as the Drill proceeded to push on into the under-surface without him. Fears for his passengers blackened his face. Nemo and Dognahnyi parted company at that moment of violent alter-nemo dispute... a symbiosis in reverse decorated with a flare of more mosquito dreams caught by feathers. With Nemo’s head yanked apart by a pair of its four limbs, the creature emerged from the red-sea gap in the skull with a smirk and a wave towards the Weirdmonger’s future in the city. It was Weirdmonger himself (aka Dognahnyi).

The dreamcatcher had saved him the rest of his journey across the mudparks, so stub-of-pencil now needs to return that way itself so as to erase the relevant bit from the vexed texture of text with a renewed head of rubber, if not steam.

The Weirdmonger scratched his head. Identity was a very strange burden to bear. To take his mind off the momentary discursiveness, he wondered how Sudra’s museum was allowed to smoke in a smokeless zone. Fire was not allowed within Inner Earth—for obvious reasons. And, shrugging, he went towards a cavé to give the locals a piece of his mind.

*

As well as Klaxon and Agraska, there is another known or tenable conclave within Inner Earth to which the name most often offered as label is Whofage. The derivations, even aptnesses, of these names are unknown whilst, paradoxically, the names have readily fallen into usage without any question of demur. Their real names remain unknown, whilst that named name of Klaxon still resonates, however, with an actual meaning that effectively entailed the tannoy siren-system to be created, not vice versa, i.e. character from proffered name, a phenomenon which is, when fully considered in the light of cause-and-effect rather than synchronicity, not surprising.

Whofage, in fact, was once named Synchronicity by some historic Inner Earth travellers during the days of Jules Verne, a fact now forgotten amidst repercussions of Klaxon’s war spreading by strength of the battle echoes and air-alerts firstly ricocheting from chamber to chamber on a tight regional basis, then cavity to cavity between city-margins. Whofage (now named
against
the normal channels of sane semantics) was a place where Synchronicity began to be deemed as evil, thus giving Synchronicity a bad name at the same time as giving Randomness a haphazard boost by the strength of the craziness of war itself. Whofage seemed random enough (more random than using the name Randomness itself), and this even seemed eminently logical to the top brainwrights of Whofage’s Inner City Council who were concerned to prolong the unpredictabilities of war (imported, by echo, from Klaxon) amid their various pragmatic uses of its collateral damage and bad karma... i.e. politics.

It is an unrecorded fact that THE HAWLER (with its index-number of H5N1 now visible for the first time from the direction of any observers) stayed over at Whofage on route between Klaxon and, eventually, one hoped, the Megazanthine Core near Agraska. Greg and the others alighted simply to stretch their legs and to discuss the disappearance of the Drill’s Captain. Should they return to Klaxon to rescue him or forge on without him, both options impossible to carry out without his presence in the first place? They had crash-landed in Whofage having traversed random cavities in a rather spin-easy fashion of free-fall that did not entail any drilling whatsoever or any off-detritus clearance by the rubble-vanes. Even now, the Drill squatted on the craggy sides of Whofage’s cathedral, having demolished half of the Gothic architecture in the process—making it look more like a bridge than Notre Dame. A bridge from and to nowhere. And over nothing.

Greg had put such problems towards the back of his mind—as he wandered the back-streets of Whofage looking for souvenirs. There were feathery models of the Angel Megazanthus in many of the antique shops, but, at that stage, none of the party recognised these knick-knacks for what they were. They assumed they were dreamcatchers or frames of varying complexity or simplicity. The Core, to Greg and his party, was still a mystery and no rumours as to the Core’s incubatory nature had back-tracked along the sound-veins from Agraska to shed any light on this mystery. Echo-filters, unlike some other filters, were never two-way. Beth did buy one ‘dreamcatcher’ to hang in her cabin in the Drill.

Another excursion—one not programmed in their original holiday itinerary—was to watch larger models of ‘Megazanthus’ dreamcatchers actually working. The party sat in a row of canvas deck-chairs—hired for the purpose to them from the rather business-like brainwrights of Whofage—at the edge of a cracked meadow. And they listened to a commentary from the city’s own tannoy-system describing the various aspects of the air-show. One craft that slowly took off—by the use of a rather slow-motion lifting by spluttering fireworks—was a gigantic kite or glider that seemed a cross between a crop-sprayer and horizontal radio-transmitter. Bearing in mind its motive power, it was rather difficult to control at ground level and it soon diverted from its original advertised course towards a random one that entailed much collateral damage in the city itself.

*

Whofage, unlike the other conclaves within the cavities of Inner Earth, was prone to funnel forces—which, on the surface, were commonly recognised as whirlwinds or tornados. Often, Whofagers would glimpse a sparely nourished coil of discoloured sky, then slowly but ineluctably deepening and spinning into wilder, larger shadows of shape (whilst simultaneously trying to hone its integrity as a funnel)—finally, not spinning away into nothing as tornados manage to do on the earth’s surface, but spinning into the under-ground, maintaining its force-fed maelstroms (now of rubble as well as of black-clouded air-space) as it wreaked further courses of crazy-paving via many under-surfaces, even via otherwise impacted areas of solid earth.

Before Greg and his party had managed to salvage the Drill from its open-plan sectioning of Whofage’s cathedral, one such funnel-force had managed to accomplish this feat quite freakishly, almost balancing the Drill’s form within the inner meshments of its visibly darkening torque until landing it lightly near the cracked meadow where the party were already watching an air show. All seemed highly appropriate, if essentially accidental—in keeping with Whofage’s reputation for the syncromesh of randomness.

Also, with some panache, Captain Nemo arrived hotfoot from Klaxon—or someone remarkably carrying off this persona with skilful replication—claiming that he had utilised a number of short-cut back-doubles intrinsic to the hawling-shaft system of Inner Earth, comprising mostly rat-runs privy only to Drill captains. Nevertheless, it had been quite a journey. The other members of the Drill’s party welcomed him with mixed feelings. Soon after, all of them left for Agraska in a quickly repaired Drill and for what was already to have transpired there
vis a vis
Mount Core (or Sunnemo) and the Angel Megazanthus. (Beyond the scope of this Apocryphal Coda).

*

Scene: Sudra’s Shoe Shop in Klaxon City. Sudra is sitting in one of the stockrooms, surrounded by shoeboxes from ceiling to floor, having just received a surprise visit from Amy clutching a rather large flowerpot. They embrace and are now in close conversation.

Sudra
: The last time I saw you was when you were holding me from falling in the hawling-shaft…

Amy
: Yes, I’m delighted to see you survived.

S
: I didn’t! At least for a while. Until I woke up here in charge of this shop. Placed into business by some benefactor who stays unknown, even today. I still felt it was me that was me, but I suspect sometimes that I woke up as someone else. At first it was disconcerting…

A
: Very! But you learn to live with yourself eventually as I did. I still have memories of a childhood, my brother Arthur and all that—and Mum—and Miss Clare our teacher. But then, I’m not sure I’m the same person who grew out of that child.

S
: When I last saw you we were both hanging on to dear life, or at least I was! It was my life hanging in the balance, after all. I looked up into your eyes and I saw something or someone behind them which wasn’t quite right. And then you let go!

A
: No, you let go! I felt your hands ungrip around mine. I wasn’t perhaps completely myself, true, but I wanted to save you—I really did. I had been recruited by Dognahnyi for something but I’m sure it wasn’t to kill you. It was to do with the Angevin traffic…