The Truth Spinner

by Rhys Hughes

Harris smiled. “That’s good to know. For a start, I want to hear nothing at all about the time you travelled with the mad inventor Karl Mondaugen to the planet known as the Counter Earth (or Antichthon) that spins on the other side of the sun and met Lohengrin Smirka, the Duke of Laxhumbug, and taught him to play the ocarina.”

  Castor nodded. “Very well. I won’t breathe a word about that. It would be a shame to do so anyway, as I promised Mondaugen to keep it a secret, and if the exploit became common knowledge it would necessitate a total rethink of the layout of the solar system; and intellectual overhauls of that scale are often messy and expensive. I think the inventor has scrapped the little craft that carried us there; it was badly damaged by regular knocking against the sides of the sun pipe over a period of several perilous months. I won’t explain what a sun pipe is; nor will I specify that it’s one hundred and eighty-six million miles long…”

  “You’d better not!” growled Paddy and Harris.

  Castor sipped his pint and said, “I have no intention of doing so. What do you think I am: a pledge-breaker? I can’t recall exactly how I bumped into Mondaugen on that occasion, maybe I just met him in the street, but he was excited and took me to see his latest project, a submersible that he claimed could open up new trade routes with the bizarre mirror version of Earth that exists, as you pointed out, on the other side of the sun, at what I believe is often called Lagrange Point 3, where the opposing gravitational forces exerted by the Earth and the sun are cancelled out. I laughed in his face! ‘There is no liquid in outer space! What you require is a spacecraft, not a midget submarine!’ I told him.”

  “That’s precisely along the lines of what we don’t wish to hear,” Harris said, nodding in the fashion of a sage.

  “Keep going the opposite of that,” added Paddy.

  Castor took another sip of beer. “Very well. Then I won’t admit that he shrugged in the gale of my laugh and said with twinkling eyes, ‘No need to leave our atmosphere to reach the world of Antichthon, for I’ve found a better route: through the service ducts!’ I was astonished to hear this, and naturally I asked for more details…”

  “Service ducks?” frowned Harris.

  “Ducts,” corrected Castor.

  “Please don’t continue, if you would,” said Paddy.

  Castor wiped his lips. “He informed me with a straight face that Earth and Antichthon were connected and that this connection was necessary to prevent the planets eventually colliding; for though they occupy a stance diametrically opposite each other, like duellists skirting a bonfire, the tiny variations in the combined gravitation of all the other planets over time would nudge us out of perfect alignment and this effect would continue and the errors tend to increase rather than decrease. As we are at the same distance from the sun, and on the same plane, a collision is inevitable and the destruction of both bodies assured. But a pipe runs from the centre of our planet to the centre of the other and works as an axle, preventing any such disastrous shift of alignment.”

  Harris and Paddy exchanged glances and for a moment it seemed they were imagining themselves to be the two globes in question, but who was Earth and who Antichthon wasn’t at all obvious; plus they weren’t sitting directly opposite each other, so the analogy was patently inaccurate from the beginning. Nonetheless they stretched out a rigid arm each and joined them over the golden pint of beer standing in the middle of the table; and thus was the cosmic pipe mimicked.

  Castor watched this performance with approval. He said, “Mondaugen was convinced the pipe was full of water and wide enough to easily admit his submersible. He told me the pipe’s function as an axle was secondary and its primary purpose was to cool the sun and prevent that blazing body from overheating or exploding, which is logically why it’s called the sun pipe. The oceans of the two worlds are constantly exchanged through this pipe, which passes directly through the heart of the sun, and so this is the true explanation of mysterious whirlpools and missing ships and strange vessels appearing from nowhere, for it’s a huge interplanetary circulatory system. Makes a lot of sense really.”

  “Especially if you’re daft,” Harris conceded.

  Castor reached for the pint in the centre of the table; nobody else had claimed it, so he speculated it was time to make it his own. “Excuse me while I displace your sun,” he said.

  “That was standing there when we came in,” warned Paddy.

  “It might be flat,” added Harris.

  “Too late,” lisped Castor as he took a slurp. “Now then, where was I? Ah yes, I was just keeping my mouth shut about how Mondaugen offered to take me along the sun pipe in his vehicle all the way to Antichthon for a look around. He had some crazy idea that everything, or some things at least, would be reversed there; I don’t mean that black would be white, or crisps would be sweets, or anything along those lines; but customs, music and geography might be the inverse of what we’re familiar with on Earth. I was won over by this possibility, so I agreed to accompany him. In the basement of his house he had dug a well, or maybe there had always been a well there, and the submersible was bobbing about on the top. He aided me to climb inside and followed.”

  “And closed the hatch with a clang?” asked Paddy.

  “With a hiss,” corrected Castor.

  “A sibilant hiss?” wondered Harris.

  Castor shook his head. “A clanging hiss,” he said. He drained half the anonymous pint and continued, “Straight down we went and it grew hot inside the capsule. There were plenty of supplies in the lockers, but heat tends to reduce my appetite. I made do with a cake. At long last we came to the bottom of the well and entered a horizontal tube. This was the sun pipe. I noted that other conduits of varying diameters opened into it from sundry directions; it was an amazing plumbing job. I brushed crumbs off my fingers. Although the sun pipe was a single tube it was divided into a pair of immensely strong currents travelling in opposite directions. Why they didn’t collide and blend I’ll never know; probably it had something to do with eddy physics or vortices.”

  “Eddy physics?” Harris was intrigued.

  “The lifework of Eddy Dalderbash, a colleague of Oliver Heaviside, who discovered why toast always falls jam side down. Those neglected scientists of yore! What fellows they were!” Castor sighed. “Anyhow, I didn’t question Mondaugen on the phenomenon; I merely assumed this arrangement maximised the efficiency of the heat exchange mechanism and I was right about that, of course.”

  “Were you boiled inside?” queried Paddy.

  “Yes I was. Boiled to death!” said Castor. He frowned and examined himself. “Wait a moment, I’m not a cadaver! Clearly I’m mistaken and I was boiled alive instead! So I didn’t expire; neither did Mondaugen. Well, it’s an easy enough mistake to make.”

  “I’ve never died either,” empathised Harris.

  “Nor me!” cried Paddy in innocent delight. “We ought to start a club strictly for people who are alive!”

  “That’s a bit elitist,” sniffed Castor.

  Paddy and Harris shuffled their feet under the table for a minute or so, stung by the rebuke. Then Castor continued with his tale: “The days and the weeks got together and turned into months; I never thought we would ever reach the end of the sun pipe. Because the sides of the pipe are solid and opaque, I saw nothing of outer space; and even when we passed right through the middle of the sun, the illumination inside the capsule was no brighter than before. It was quite boring, to tell the truth! When we finally reached the end of the conduit I was ready to turn back for home. But we didn’t do that. Up a well we went, surfacing in a basement that was rather similar, but not identical, to Mondaugen’s cellar on Earth. So we were in the Antichthon version of his house!”

  “Was everything back to front?” asked Paddy.

  “Yes it was. For instance, we mounted the stairs to the living room and saw that the sofa was where the armchairs should be; and in the fruit bowl I noticed how bananas all curved in the wrong direction. We lurched out into the street
s of Porthcawl – I mean Lwachtrop – on the Counter Earth, and gazed in wonder at our environs…”

  “Wait a moment! You took us to Lwachtrop in a flying lighthouse and it certainly wasn’t on the far side of our sun. It was a town on a planet in the constellation Gemini,” said Paddy.

  Castor nodded vigorously. “Precisely! And that’s why Mondaugen and myself didn’t stay there long, but travelled to a nation called Laxhumbug, where, as you’ve already pointed out, I taught the Grand Duke who ruled that country to play the ocarina. It wasn’t my ocarina, by the way, but one belonging to Lohengrin Smirka himself. He was getting ready to repel an invasion by Noelopan Fleshtogether, the Emperor of Frunce, and ocarina melodies were a balm for his soul—”

  “I’m so glad you decided not to tell us this,” said Harris.

  “Any of it,” added Paddy.

  Castor shrugged off their gratitude. “Think nothing of it. I’m a man of my word. On Antichthon I wasn’t a man of my word; which over there is the same thing. We came back the same way, through the sun pipe, after a dozen adventures in the service of the Grand Duke, who not only became an ocarina virtuoso but also learned the mbira, which is the thumb piano, in case you didn’t know. Playing them simultaneously is extremely tricky but feasible; I don’t rightly know why anyone would want to play them at the same time, but it can be done.”

  “I can whistle and hum at the same time,” admitted Paddy.

  “He sounds like a theremin,” said Harris.

  “I often feel I’m levitating when I do,” added Paddy.

  “Like a gyroscope,” said Harris.

  “That’s not untrue,” declared Paddy.

  “He’s willing to demonstrate his skill,” said Harris.

  “Yes I am,” confirmed Paddy.

  Castor chose his words carefully. “I have been good enough to take to heart your resistance to hear a story about the time I visited Antichthon in the company of the mad inventor Mondaugen; because I am a considerate soul, I treated your request with respect and I held my tongue. In return I would prefer to decline your offer.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” said Harris.

  “Thank goodness!” cried Castor.

  “Why don’t you tell us a story then?” demanded Paddy.

  Castor tugged his nose and frowned.

  “I suppose I can do that. Have you heard of a competition for dogs in debt? It’s called Bankcrufts and—”

  “Not that one!” shrieked Harris and Paddy.

  “Very well,” said Castor. “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Lladloh and met the Peachy Poo in person and was turned into a human arrow and fired around the world?”

  * * * *

  It’s surely the strangest village in Wales, though the competition is strong, and you won’t locate it on any map for that reason, though exactly who is responsible for removing all references to it is still a mystery. Lladloh is a place where destiny goes to retire. Some years ago the traditional position of mayor was abolished by an usurper; her name’s Lowri Constantine, the first Peachy Poo, and she still rules there. But there have been significant changes. The old way of doing utterly odd things has been replaced by a new way of doing utterly odd things.

  That was her work and it can be both fairly and unfairly said that she’s a revolutionary. Her most prominent skill is archery and she often shoots arrows into the hides of disobedient citizens from the window of her tall house, the former residence of the mayor. She’s not really a tyrant but it’s safer to act as if she is likely to have you done away with on the slightest pretext. The citizens tend to tiptoe up and down the streets; most of them appear never to leave the nameless tavern, though that’s surely an illusion, for they would run out of conversation.

  I was travelling in those parts for the first time last summer and down came the rain in ceaseless sheets of monsoon force, muddying all ruts on the forsaken roads, turning to mush the gnarled sheep on the anguished hills, carving meaningless scripts into the soft under parts of the toppled megaliths. But why was I tramping that desolate region of my overblown prose? I think I was on a bird watching expedition; or maybe I was going to an obscure clown festival; or maybe it had something to do with rugby in extremis. I simply don’t remember.

  That’s one of the things that travellers never forget about that tract of dismalness in the western quarter of Wales: it seems to induce amnesia. I wonder how they manage to recall this fact? Interesting topic for endless philosophising some other time! I walked with my staff making complex ripples in the puddles each instant the point came down. At last the thick drops of sky resentment eased their intensity somewhat and I reached a stone bridge, which led me over an unpleasant hump that jarred my spine into a village of frowning buildings.

  This was Lladloh. I knew of it from hearsay. I had even told stories of some of its most famous characters, such as Dennistoun Homunculus, the hideous bard of the village, a poet who wrote verses that cause the soul to curl up in a foetal position inside your ribcage. Most unpleasant! And the gravedigger Pumpkin Hewin’, who by his own admission was a man who liked to call a spade a shovel and a crow a raven, and sometimes a spoon a ladle, nobody knew why. Neifion Napcyn too, a fishmonger who caught cooked trout in the crater of a volcano.

  Yes, I had told tales about these characters, and more. The name of the volcano, by the way, is Mount Yandro and it’s the only active, and secret, volcano in Wales. And there were the squonks, of course, not an imported breed from the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania, where they can be found posing for photographs, but the lesser known Welsh kind; a squonk won’t bother crying its eyes out here because the rain dilutes the melancholy of the teardrops, watering them down to something that isn’t joy but a closer analogue of it than any squonk can bear.

  Am I rambling? I stopped rambling for real when I reached the village square and debated which way to go next. A new arrival in such a place must always enter the tavern first, that’s a natural law of wandering, and this village had a renowned drinking hole, so my first impulse took me to the doorway of that establishment. But something went wrong. I think the spray thrown into the air by the rain confused my eyesight or judgment or luck; and I entered the wrong building. I turned the handle and the heavy door swung open with only a minor creak.

  It wasn’t entirely dark within; the walls glowed with phosphorescent slime and I was able to see my way without too much difficulty, but my initial reaction was one of disappointment. I was expecting a very quaint tavern interior with ploughshares on stone walls and solid chariot wheels for tables; the authentic touches that heritage societies fail to grasp when they fund sundry attempts at reconstruction. I had been looking forward to the genuine experience and instead found a peculiar maze of corridors and rooms all prepared in chaotic style.

  There was absolutely no rhyme, reason or irony in the furnishings or colours. This lack of aesthetic unity created unease in my heart, but there seemed no reason to leave yet, so I pressed on. The main corridor led me to a low room full of high chairs that scraped the ceiling; beyond this was a very high room, but extremely narrow, even more constricted than the thinnest legal wardrobe; then another corridor took me to a flight of steps which I ascended. My nostrils twitched but no beer could I smell. Where were the patrons, their cribbage and scowls?

  Nowhere. That was the truth of it. Couldn’t see any evidence of human occupation at all, not even a spilled jar of pickles. I called out, “Hello!” in the tone of a bluff surveyor, but response came there none. I sighed. Into another room I roamed. It was free of slime and therefore darker than the others, but the window was open; I felt the breeze and heard the rain. My eyes discerned only a blur near the window, and my ears heard nothing at this stage, but one of my other senses, I don’t know which, informed me I wasn’t alone. Thank you, secret sense!

  Despite the futility of the gesture, I bowed deeply and said, “A pint of your darkest stout, if you please!” For I still believed I was in the tavern and as
sumed the blur was a barman.

  “I don’t please,” came the crisp response.

  It was a female voice, sweet and deadly at the same time. My eyes had started to adjust to the murk and slowly the Peachy Poo herself came into focus, though at that time I didn’t know it was she. Slightly disgruntled, I cleared my throat. “Cider will do.”

  “No, it won’t. Not even to the smallest degree.”

  “Well, what about mead?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Pale ale? Barley wine?”

  “Nope. Neither.”

  “Don’t you serve any drinks in this sad pub?” I blurted, and her giggle chilled the sobriety in my veins.

  “I’m not a barmaid.”

  “Won’t you summon one for me?”

  “Impossible. Never.”

  “But why? What’s wrong with you?”

  “I think you have entered the wrong building. This isn’t a pub but my private residence. That’s why.”

  I was distraught to hear this; for I might have stumbled on her in the nude; and in fact she might have been in the nude too! I blushed deeply and thankfully my blushes were concealed by the gloom. “I beg pardon for my outrageous error, madam!”

  She laughed again. “Think nothing of it. In fact I’m glad you turned up unexpectedly; you can help me with a little experiment. If you don’t know already, I am Lowri Constantine, the finest archer in the human world and I have just invented a new game.”

  “A game that involves arrows, I suppose?”

  She took a step closer and emerged from the darkest shadows and now I saw her long auburn curls, big aquamarine eyes and ironic grin and they were enchanting as well as perilous.

  “That’s correct. Life in Lladloh can be boring at times, because of the ceaseless rain, so I invent fresh amusements to keep me entertained. This morning I woke up with a question in my nice head. Might it be feasible to shoot seven arrows into each of the seven seas from the highest room of this building? I decided to try!”

  “But the surface of the planet is curved.”