Nemonymous Night

by Lewis, D. F.

  In the zoo, there had been a cage they all peered into with some trepidation. This scene had been left unreported, for whatever reason, but as things panned out, it gradually grew into view from a single atom of dread in one of the witnesses’ minds. Poultry combined with beef in some complex miscegenation. In this cage was a truly massive pulsing amorphousness with feathers tufting in all directions from each suppurating pore. He first saw it as black but, in retrospect, he knew it was white. He wondered if further hindsight might make it later look red like skinned meat. But, no. It was unutterably white. No amount of retrospection could change that, he knew. A noticeboard attached to the cage had identification: “Infinite Cuckoo”. That was when they all decided unanimously to leave the zoo grounds by the exit turnstile. They’d pay anything to leave, even if it were more than the normal ticket price of a few p.

  Well, in further hindsight, the creature wasn’t infinite at all, Ogdon thought. It couldn’t be contained in a cage if it were. Unless it was a bit of an infinity. The implications were too wild to deal with today.

  And he returned to his desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up his screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation with which he would need to come to terms... eventually.

  *

  There was a liar among them.

  But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they are lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. I have told lies in dreams, for example, and the character I felt myself to be from within the dream knew full well that he was telling lies, i.e. that I was telling lies—yet all this as seen from outside the dream after waking was yet another lie in a way, an untruth, a falsehood, because I could hardly then remember the details of the dream and I am now making up what happened in the dream just for an exercise in fancification... making conversation as it were... stringing words together to create an interesting scenario which I can later work up as a story for the dinner party I was later due to attend in real life.

  Someone stared across at me over the table, winking in tune with the candles, as if she knew that I knew that she knew she was telling lies. Her face was a cutting one when she was interrupted or gainsaid. I could tell she had once been very pretty, but now her character intervened and made the face carry the ingredients of an underface like a bird pecking for worms. I recognised her from the dream in which the lies had started their concertina domino-rally from unreality into reality—crossing some bridge that linked untruth with truth.

  “What is a liar?” she suddenly and unexpectedly asked, thus causing such a non-sequitur to become an intrinsic constituent or continuation of the prandial conversation that was already taking place before she again so skilfully interrupted it.

  “A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses—and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.

  I know that I am not a liar. I am perhaps the liar. I am in control of a dream in which everyone else is a participant within that dream’s ambit—an ambit I’ve allowed the dream to have. The liar is the one who makes what he does absolutely true. This the knack that I now settle down with as a comforting prop, while sleep overwhelms the dream with its own brand of seeping darkness. It doesn’t matter that I drown in death, because I am certain in my own way that I shall survive it by lying about its aftermath. After life. After death.

  She lifts her skirt as she leaves the dinner table and wonders who had been due to sit in the chair opposite her partaking of bird soup ladled from a huge chipped tureen. A dinner guest who hadn’t turned up—as the host had explained—because he had died suddenly that very afternoon.

  *

  Greg returned from the dinner party and stared at himself staring back at himself from the chipped wardrobe mirror. Wondering, extrapolating, brainstorming, lying—and none of it made the context obvious. The woman opposite at the dinner party he rather fancied, despite her aggressive nature. Beth was her name—introduced by the host in such a way as Greg suspected match-making. Another lie in the making.

  Back in his flat, the face in the mirror began to talk. Greg’s face—showing not a mixed race, but a mixed class. The barely sprouting fuzz on his upper lip belied his youth, but the eyes spoke a working-class directness and a raw but instinctively astute naivety together with mechanical awareness... whilst the moving lines of his lips forming the speaking mouth indicated a more academic or professional or at least clerical/administrative slant. The face spoke and he could not stop it speaking.

  Pinnochio’s nose grew longer when he told lies. Yet we have no easy way to judge lies in real life. There is a question whether a single lie, once told, creates other lies in its wake, then radiating, spawning more lies, new and different lies living off each other—like a butterfly theory of chaos—moving round the world like a disease till everyone tells lies, Russian Doll lies, until they return to the original liar himself who accepts them as truths—because he started them in the first place and he has persuaded himself, by being in denial, indeed has simply forgotten that he lied in the first place and that he had started the lies moving round the world. Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies…

  Greg smiled as he realised that the face in the mirror had come to a halt... frozen like a sepia photograph of one of his Victorian ancestors... gradually growing yellowy, staining the surface with feathery fibres between the beige-ridden silver backing of the mirror and the front glass itself: spraying apricotty ice follicles across. He imagined, not a nose growing longer with each lie, but a small white feather beginning to sprout from every pore of the skin. One feather per lie. The originally bendy bone of each feather’s spindle fused with the bones beneath the skin, all their flossy sprigs striving but failing to be animal fur. Everyone’s blood is normally red, whatever the skin colour, yet the thickening plume-spindle bones of the werebird’s new covering turned its blood into an utterly pure white consistency dripping to his flat’s carpet…

  *

  The sun literally seemed to scream at the holiday party as they arrived in the tour coach at the edge of the Left Foot Plateau to the south of the city. Its rays gradually spread along the then empty horizon like orange marmalade—the bottom arc of its orb dripping something like thick liquid to the point on the horizon whence it had just fully risen. The holiday-makers were due to go from viewing one arc to another. They were to board an ark as it were and become participants in the latest Jules Verne expedition that had been advertised as going to the centre of the earth. Booked as a holiday, many now indeed saw this as a useful escape route from the unsaid dangers that had begun to beset the city.

  Greg turned to look at his wife Beth and shrugged. They were in two minds about this whole trip because, clandestinely, they were not real holiday-makers or, even, escapees from a world that no longer welcomed them but, instead, they had a mission to find the Angevin children who had vanished from the city under the cover of rumours. Indeed, Greg and Beth both knew that other people (including Beth’s sister) were trying different apertures to enter the earth further north in the Head Region of the city. There was more hanging on these events than just a jamboree or self-indulgent adventuring or, even, conscientious objection to what was going on in the city.

  The horizon and, indeed, the upper sky, were now filling with huge kites upon slanting rope-tethers to the hands of as yet invisible kite-carers on the ground. The individual kites were—as a promotional vision for the Jules Verne Holiday Company—shaped like some of the craft the Company had used for previous jaunts and some, even, models of proposed future ones.

 
Lightening up, Greg laughed as he spotted one of the kites was a flying carpet prancing higher and higher from yet one more slanting tether. He was older and hopefully wiser than before with his bum-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.

  Beth remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching the centre of the earth from a different terrestrial angle. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling—yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at her husband. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie.

  “Hey, some of those kites haven’t got people flying them!” suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.

  Beth was more interested in viewing the craft that was due to take them to the centre of the earth. That was a far more important priority at the moment. At first, she was mistaken as to the correct craft in question, as she spotted a long queue of would-be holiday-makers near a large landcraft which multi-resembled a cross between various forms of transport (that was the only way she could describe it). She thought she and Greg must be on the wrong side of the platform as it were, in the wrong queue, because their own queue was much shorter, indeed depleted to just the two of them being led by an inscrutable Jules Verne official whose face they had not yet seen—but it was not long before they rounded a deceptive dune to witness the first sight of their own potential craft.

  It was awe-inspiring. Strangely, from the distance at which they first viewed it, the craft struck them as simply more than gigantic. It was literally bigger than a mountain and, surely, would become clogged in the earth’s throat, at such a size. Tilted at an angle, it was a wildly proportioned Drill… with a bit at its tip, pointing at the earth and tantalisingly only a few inches from the beachy surface. Even more strangely than before, the nearer they approached the Drill, the smaller it became, but still reasonably massive judging by mere human proportions. Beth could now actually pick out the pilot in the cockpit behind the bit-tip. He was dressed in a period costume with frills, ruffs and a feathered peaked cap. He smiled at Beth as he gave the Drill’s ignition a quick trial grinding roar... and she watched the bit-tip spin, splinters of orange sun spraying in all directions from its sharp bright torque.

  The most amazing item on the craft, however, which Greg was the first to notice, was an outlandishly protrusive set of slender rotor-blades or vanes upon the back of the Drill like that on the back of a helicopter. Insect-like. He could not imagine how the Drill could be able to dig its way through the earth with that as part of its propulsion system. He originally imagined the Drill sliding through the earth like a knife through butter, but that thought now went straight out of the window.

  But the matter was soon forgotten when they were abruptly introduced to the Drill’s ‘Captain Nemo’—who appeared just as suddenly on a ladder that dangled from the boarding-hatch in the side of the Drill. He was a tall figure with a certain resemblance, as Greg recalled the people he had known in the city, to Ogdon or, even, Ogdon’s sidekick Crazy Lope. The Captain was not however in any way related to these two people, as both he and Beth soon instinctively gathered.

  “I’ll take you in and show you the wallmaps in a minute,” he crooned with a nut-brown voice.

  Beth was entranced. Greg sceptical.

  “Wall maps?”

  “Yes, charts and so forth of our route.”

  Greg shrugged. Surely there was only one route to the centre of the earth. As the crow flew. A straight line. A slanting tether.

  “I have books on board to keep us amused during the long journey,” the Captain continued.

  “Books!” interjected Beth. “I hate books. Ever since I gave one as a present—one I valued as if I’d written it myself—inscribed it lovingly to the recipient—and then I found myself eventually buying it back because I saw the same copy being sold on e-Bay!”

  The Captain shrugged as if this was a silly reason to hate books. With only one backward glance at the shadow of the vertical sun above them amid the increasingly crowded sky, Greg and Beth excitedly followed the Captain on board the Drill. The name on its side had escaped them: “The Hawler”.

  *

  Mike was a solid figure of a man. Not at all like Greg with Greg’s slight figure despite the years that had thickened his facial growth. Not wide so much as bushy. But that was Greg, and attention must perforce spotlight Mike again for a while. And Mike was still doubtful about his own beginnings—barely remembering even the shadowy figures who had been his parents in the Fifties. He had compassion, however, having long forgotten the earlier years as a child when he played pretend games in the garden and up the bullace tree—sometimes masquerading as Davy Crockett in a long-tailed fur hat, sometimes as an even more distant memory: the creature he inscrutably called a hawler (although the spelling was doubtful). All that concerned him now were naturally the concerns of today—his middle years—as he and the party with which he had joined were trekking northward to what was loosely named the city’s Head Region.

  Until recently, he had been working in the city centre’s covered-market, living a frugal existence—together with Susan, a pretty woman who, unlike her sister Beth, had failed to gather frown-lines during her middle years. When she and Mike had decided to live together, she already had a daughter called Sudra who was now herself growing into a pretty woman with pig-tails, a style that was too young for her. Sudra laughed often. Yet she had an aura of malevolence or, at best, bewitchment about her. She, too, was in Mike’s party, together with her two similarly aged friends Amy and Arthur, friends of doubtful relationship with each other, with nobody questioning this because there were some lines drawn beneath which it was impolitic to delve. Amy worked as a domestic cleaner, Arthur a double-decker driver—both salt-of-the-earth citizens who would never have dreamed of travelling north... unless times were extraordinary.

  How extraordinary the times had become only hindsight could know. The identities of Amy and Arthur—it was believed—had been stolen by lostlings or foundlings or changelings who had escaped with much of their victims’ past cloying to them. These were apparent children masquerading as the children Amy and Arthur had once been in earlier perhaps less extraordinary times. This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.

  The five of them trekked because public transport had long since departed, having been earmarked for some important matters ordinary citizens like them were not considered suitable enough to know about. As he strode along, Arthur imagined the stuff underfoot—the party having finally left the pavemented area of the city streets—to be residue of his childhood ‘experiment’ games with household substances. This was probably his own version of a retributive past coming back to haunt him. Amy smiled as if she could read Arthur’s thoughts. Arthur, however, soon became preoccupied by what evidently preoccupied Mike... and what gradually preoccupied all five of them.

  The sky was slowly, surely and imperceptibly becoming more of a roof than a proper sky—as if they had entered a much larger version of the city’s open-sided covered-market—which, incidentally, Arthur now recalled was where Sudra’s stepfather worked as a waste manager. Having a roof—one might have thought—would have afforded protection from the weather, but they all still felt a soaking drizzle as though rain had been replaced by some variety of sprinkler-system.

  Nobody mentioned the colour. Indeed, could darkness be any colour other than black or, at best, grey
? A monochrome of darkness, gathering in around them more like mist than darkness proper. Yet, they could still see the even darker shapes hunching upon the distant terrain towards which they hiked. Nobody mentioned the colour, as it did not come up in conversation, bearing in mind the preoccupation caused by the difficulties underfoot.

  “Hey! Look—are they volcanoes?”

  Mike pointed at the rough cone-shapes each with an odd flame-like plume fitfully being spat by what he assumed to be some of earth’s many apertures.

  Sudra quaintly described them as “Redoubts”—but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. “Redoubts” in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word “Côté” was written on one broken brick wall that they were now passing—almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces... all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.

  Yet, what was that?