Calabash

by Christopher Fowler

  The citadel’s electrical wiring was primitive, and came apart easily. We tore lengths of wire from the machines, braiding their ends together, but it was difficult to tell how much we would need for the drop. When every available exposed section of cable had been hacked free and used, we climbed back to the platform beneath the opening in the roof, and I was lifted out onto the parapet. I tied one end of the cable behind my thighs while Menavino knotted the other end around a wooden post.

  ‘Remember,’ warned Trebunculus, ‘your imagination constructed Calabash subject to the laws of physics. That means you can fall to your death here.’

  ‘We’ll play out the cable as quickly as we can,’ said the Semanticor, who had woken up and was starting to take an interest. ‘They’ll be able to spot you from below, and some of them are armed with crossbows. They’re very good shots. I taught many of them when they were children.’

  ‘Oh, great.’ I braced my legs against the curved wall. ‘Well, wish me luck.’ I pushed off from the side, but there was a cry from above and I dropped much faster than anyone had allowed for, slipping and catching against the stone as I fell.

  ‘You’ve put on weight,’ yelled Trebunculus, hauling back on the cable.

  At about thirty feet above the ground, my descent was painfully halted. I looked up and saw Trebunculus indicating that we had run out of wiring. I twisted helplessly on the side of the citadel as a drunken crowd slowly gathered beneath me. I looked down through my legs and calculated my chances. Pushing off from the side of the wall, I began to swing back and forth.

  ‘Don’t do that, we won’t be able to hold you!’ someone shouted from the roof.

  Two members of the General’s militia fired their crossbows, but now I was a moving target. Their arrows zinged and bounced against my shifting feet. At the peak of my swing to the left, I slipped from my wire noose and fell down onto—and through—the stretched linen awning of the stall I had spotted, demolishing it. People screamed and fell back from my path as I clambered to my feet.

  More militiamen were moving in my direction. Without daring to look back, I broke free through the crowd and began running for the gates of the city. I knew that if I failed now it would spell the end of not one, but two worlds.

  Chapter 38

  Custodian of the Empire

  As I began running, I doubted my ability to do anything that would save Calabash. I was not brave, or strong. My heroes were figures from history, artists, thinkers, not fictional swordsmen or jet pilots. As if to prove the point, my legs gave way as I ran forwards and I fell flat on my face in the middle of the old market square. When I tried to rise, my jellified thighs refused to support my weight. The tension of the last few hours had caught up with me. At the corner of the square I could see a troop of pin-striped militia shoving their way through drugged-up beggars and drunks. There was a high ululating cry as one of them raised the alarm, and their slender crossbows rose up to shoulder height.

  It was only the burst of adrenalin that came from seeing so many weapons pointed in my direction that brought me scrambling to my feet. One thing I’ve always been able to do is outdistance my enemies. I felt sure that my only chance was to stay in the chaotic backstreets; I knew that as soon as I reached the open country surrounding the harbour, I would present a clear target.

  The appearance of the city had changed so drastically that I barely recognised its topography. I ran through the reeking, bellowing mob, recalling only that the palace was built on raised ground, so that it made sense to keep moving to lower levels. Aware that my brown leather jacket stood out against the robes and djellabahs, I thought of yanking a linen sheet from a merchant’s display and dragging it around my chest, but knew that doing so would impede my escape.

  A crossbow arrow cleaved the air above my head and smacked against the wall of a fried-nut stall, and I had an idea. With a wild shout I charged at the stall, causing the merchants to jump back, and I upset the table on which stood their copper bowls of boiling palm-oil. People screamed and fell over themselves, scalded as the round-bottomed vats rolled over. The oil washed across the narrow street, creating a smoking slick that separated me from my pursuers.

  I arrived back at the unguarded city entrance and galloped through it, out onto the surrounding road, then into the grasslands, staying near the edge of the great wood, running over the dead untilled earth until I thought my heart would burst. By the time I reached my old village, I saw that my pursuers had fallen back, and that I was beyond the range of their crossbows.

  There was only a short stretch left before the harbour, but it was exposed. Keeping low to the ground and moving quickly, I ran behind the hanging nets that had hardened in the heat from lack of use, and arrived at the water’s edge, dropping into the little ketch from the harbour wall, still wondering how I would manage to make the crossing now that I knew some of the truth about Calabash.

  The afternoon sun was shining between the bronze shields of the statues, blinding me. The searing sunlight stabbed my eyes. I lost my balance and slipped, cracking my head on the side of the boat. The world retreated in a flash of pain.

  I felt the temperature tumbling, and when I lowered my hands I found myself on the fishing platform once more, sinking in the freezing green water. My limbs were so cold that at first they refused to move. I wondered how long I had been unconscious. I had been able to travel back because my mind—and my imagination—had ceased to function.

  If I slipped and fell in now, I was sure to drown. I leaned forwards as far as I dared, but still could not reach the nearest post. I threw myself forwards, knowing that all was lost if I missed. My hands connected with the top of the post. My palms were slashed on the sharp barnacles that had grown in clusters over it, but I managed to haul myself across, then began wading back over the weed-covered grille.

  —

  I sat hunched beside the electric fire in my bedroom and pulled the eiderdown tightly around my sore chest. I had been coughing for hours. Prolonged immersion into cold water was not, I recognised bitterly, to be recommended for someone prone to pneumonia.

  I tried to analyse my new knowledge and apply it, but something was still missing. I had let everyone down by allowing Calabash to collapse. Was this what our own land would do, without the inspiration of a phantom world to guide it, facing invasion from an invisible, impossible army? Even if I could come up with a plan, how could the future of both worlds ever be assured? I had the pieces of the puzzle before me, but I couldn’t fit them into a recognisable picture.

  Perhaps people no longer felt they needed the freedom of an unfettered imagination. Even if she had bothered to read my notebooks before consigning them to the flames, my mother would not have believed a word I’d written in them. Her refusal to count dreams as anything but wasted time bothered me. It seemed that there was no room left in our practical new world for speculation, and yet without it, surely we would stumble and fall?

  No matter how I looked at the problem, I couldn’t see how to proceed. All I knew was that I had to act at once. So I did what I always do when I’m trying to think things through: I took a walk around the second-hand bookshops that cluttered the backstreets of Cole Bay. The town was the colour of a stagnant pond. It was raining again, and most of the shops were deserted. I was wandering among damp stacks of encyclopedias, listening to the rain falling on the roof, when a thought occurred to me.

  ‘Have you ever heard of a science fiction writer called Simon Jonathan Saunders?’ I asked the shop-owner.

  ‘The name rings a bell,’ he replied, ‘let’s see.’ He pulled down a paperback encyclopedia of science fiction and began to check through it unhurriedly. ‘Here we are. S. J. Saunders. A collection of short stories, Past Futures, that’s his first published work, 1953. Two volumes published in the mid-fifties, Beyond the Solar Seas and Mind in Flight, both out of print now.’

  ‘Did he write anything else?’

  ‘Oh, yes. According to this, he’s still in print. Here, ta
ke a look.’

  I checked the entry.

  Best remembered for the Arcadia novels, a linked set of books published from 1959 until his death, featuring the adventures of a young space cadet in a far-off mystical land. Although initially based on his studies of archaeological sites in ancient Greece, Saunders increasingly drew on his own imagination until undergoing a severe mental breakdown. A sufferer from recurrent childhood illness, he committed suicide in 1970. He is regarded by many fans as the last of the great science fiction fabulists, before the next era of ‘hard’ SF. His final novel, Arcadia Endures, was published posthumously by Crabtree Press.

  I must have been staring at him, because the bookseller gave me a really strange look.

  ‘Have you ever seen any of his stuff come through here?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. All of these books were put out by small publishing houses. I don’t suppose the print-runs would have been very high.’

  I visited every second-hand bookshop in the area that afternoon, but nobody had ever seen copies of Saunders’s work. I decided to call the custodian of Lee Hill Grammar School again. This time, I explained that I was writing a piece about the novels of their former star pupil. Sometimes, I knew, authors sent copies of their published works back to their old school libraries as gifts. Had this been the case with Saunders?

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ the custodian told me, ‘he might have done. It’s probably best if you speak to the chief librarian.’

  So I rang the school.

  ‘There’s nothing by him on any of the shelves,’ the librarian told me, after placing me on hold while she checked. ‘I’ve been here for many years, and I don’t remember seeing anything.’ I was about to thank her and replace the receiver when she added, ‘It might have been a private gift to his teacher. Old boys sometimes prefer to do that, in which case we wouldn’t have a record of it.’

  I asked if she remembered who his English teacher had been. ‘Oh, yes. That would’ve been Miss Hill, she took all the A-stream English pupils.’

  ‘Ruth Hill?’ I asked, holding my breath.

  ‘That’s right. She taught here for many years. Lee Hill School was named after her grandfather.’

  ‘I have some special books for you,’ Miss Ruth had told me in the hospital. ‘By an old pupil of mine.’ But Miss Ruth had died. So what had happened to her library?

  Calabash. Arcadia. Xanadu. Middle Earth. Wonderland. Call it whatever you like, the mythical subconscious, the wellspring of all imagination, existing through all time and space, wherever there were human beings. Surviving from one generation to the next, and in turn feeding the need for freedom of thought. A collective mental ecosystem growing ever more fragile with each decade, already at the point of collapse by the time I tapped into it. And now almost gone forever.

  I followed the idea in my head.

  Calabash, the common link between all peoples and nations, the shared need for invention, for inspiration, for harmony and peace, for respect, for resolve, for spiritual succour. A part of our brains as basic as numeracy or the ability to recognise one another. It was the most logical thing in the world to translate this concept into an image of a place, a special land that would bear similar markings wherever it appeared. Why should we not carry the hopes and dreams of our ancestors within us? Organisms were drawn together. Animals grew in families and ran in packs. It would have been more unnatural to believe the opposite, that we were born separate from one another and stayed that way until death.

  We were not meant to stay separate from one another. I was sure of that now.

  Suddenly, whether Calabash existed in the physical sense became irrelevant. The fact was, it existed within me, within all of us, and was about to die unless something was done. I should have asked Miss Ruth about the books. She had intended them for me. Now it was too late, and she was gone.

  Chapter 39

  Containing the Imagination

  I ran along the esplanade, watching the lowering sky. The stormy weather that had been threatened for the weekend broke overhead, heavy thunderclouds rolling towards the shoreline. The sea had turned to an opaque, glaucous shade that darkened at the horizon. I asked myself for the strength to believe what I had learned. My head was aching, my brain filled with figures from history: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle developing ethical systems of philosophy; Archimedes inventing mathematical solutions; Ptolemy and Copernicus mapping the heavens; Chaucer and Shakespeare developing the language of the emotions; Donne, Shelley and Yeats giving form to feelings; Michelangelo shaping Western art. And the little kingdom of Calabash acting as a source of solace and inspiration through time, providing centuries of use as a haven for those who sought to advance the sum total of their lives, until visitors became fewer, until the land was barely remembered and hardly seen anymore, to die from sheer neglect when the world that had used it no longer needed to feed its dreams.

  And of course I failed to realise, even now, that I had got the whole thing slightly wrong. Growing up is, I suppose, a series of missteps and corrections.

  I knew that Calabash had survived through the darkest times, through the loss of all hope, through wars, plagues, death and starvation. But suppose it had now passed beyond a sustainable point? Whether I was mad or sane, I was sure I had to return and try to save the scraps that were left. I would never be able to forgive myself if I let it die forever. But what could I do? How could I stop its tumbledown destruction from spilling over into this world, my reality? The odds against me were inconceivable. In the eyes of Calabash I was part of the problem; I had gained access to the kingdom, only to become the cause of its final decline.

  I kept coming back to Miss Ruth’s books, and her link with the boy who had last renewed Calabash. I decided to go back to her apartment.

  At first I couldn’t find the right front door because it had been freshly painted. The young Scottish woman who answered my knock explained that she had just bought the place. She had been redirecting Miss Hill’s mail to a relative in Surrey. No, she had no idea what had happened to the fixtures and fittings. Wait, though, the books had been left to a school, she remembered that because they had promised to send a van to collect them, but it had failed to turn up, and she had lost a day’s pay waiting in the flat for it to arrive. She had finally arranged for the collection herself.

  Miss Ruth had wanted me to go back to my studies. I knew then what she had done with the books given to her by her favourite pupil. She had left them to my school library, her last happy home of employment.

  I felt sure that if I failed to act at this very moment, something extraordinary would be lost forever. To an outsider I know I must have seemed like some kind of paranoiac, fantasising that the fate of mankind’s humanity hung on my ability to rescue it from oblivion. A single human being with the power to change the fate of the entire world, wasn’t that the ultimate psychotic delusion?

  I headed back to my old school. Keeping out of sight as much as I could, I crossed the quadrangle. Luckily it was still raining, classes were in session and there were few teachers about. The library was tucked away at the rear of the building, and was usually empty at this hour. I checked through the window; the place looked dead. A woman I had never seen before was seated in the back room, absorbed in a ledger, and did not look up when I entered. I headed for the small science fiction section—they were the kind of books the school did not approve of—and found Simon Saunders’s Arcadia novels there, an orderly set of six hardbacks that had not been stamped out to anyone since their arrival. Keeping an eye on the woman, I slipped them into my shoulder bag and made for the door, just as old Beardwood the headmaster entered. His eyes widened theatrically when he saw me.

  ‘Mr Goodwin? What the devil are you doing here? You’re not a pupil of this school any more.’

  ‘I came to see a friend, sir,’ I answered.

  ‘Which friend? I see no friend. You appear to be quite friendless. And you’re not supposed to be in here.’ Hearing
his booming voice, the woman in the back room looked up. The book bag weighed heavily on my shoulder. ‘What have you got in there?’

  ‘Where?’ I looked wildly about.

  ‘There, boy, the bulging great loot sack on your shoulder.’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ I knew I didn’t have to call him ‘sir’ any more, it just came out through force of habit.

  ‘Let’s have a look at “nothing”, shall we? Let’s see what “nothing” looks like.’ He tapped the bag with a bony forefinger. In his black cloak he reminded me of the Lord Chancellor. I was sunk. I started to slide the bag from my shoulder.

  ‘Come on, boy, I don’t have all day. Let’s see if “nothing” takes some kind of corporeal form.’ He smirked from the shadows, reaching towards me, and began to pull open the top of the bag. Behind him I could see that a crowd was gathering. Several of the kids who used to be in my class were there. Schoolkids can sense a fight brewing from a quarter of a mile away, and be there to goad the weaker opponent in seconds.

  I had no idea how the books would help me, but I knew that if he took them away now, I would never get a chance to see them again. I pulled the bag up and swung it away from him, catching him off guard and off balance. He was forced to seize the edge of the table to stop himself from falling on top of me. He threw out a bony hand, grabbed at my collar and missed. Something snapped inside me; I saw my clenched fist travelling towards him before I was aware of making the decision to hit him. I caught him very hard, right on the nose. A great excited yell went up, and I realised they were cheering me, all the kids who I thought hated me. They screamed and yelled and punched the air and stamped their feet. The noise they made would stay with me forever.

  And with Beardwood clutching his bloodied nose behind me, I ran for the library exit.

  Out into the corridor, through one set of double doors, then another, and out into the rain. I dashed across the quadrangle with the headmaster now in pursuit. A group of teachers were spread out across the concrete path ahead. I heard Beardwood call out to them to stop me, but they just looked back at him in puzzlement. I cut onto the wet grass, fighting to keep my balance, threw myself over the low railings and ran off into the trees.