Nemonymous Night

by Lewis, D. F.

  John Ogdon, now increasingly at a loose end as a result of his pub lacking customers for ordinary alcohol, also spent some time in the zoo for its dream qualities, but also masquerading, as an excuse for his presence, in the shape of the zoo-keeper, i.e. the Authorities’ last redoubt against civil unrest amid their pretence it was still a proper zoo where law-abiding citizens could spend a relaxing afternoon as well as learn about Natural History or Zoological Biodiversity.

  Ogdon had now ‘come out’ (to the surprise of every onlooker) as a cross-dresser, strutting as he now did amongst the cages and enclosures in high-heels and a beige frock. The children called him ‘Hilda’.

  Crazy Lope was now rarely seen, except, in Ogdon’s absence, when it suited him to turn up in his cape and scare the children with his antics. It was believed that a few dark myths such as those depicted in old Nursery Rhymes were a vital factor in a child’s upbringing, and Crazy Lope was pleased to fulfil such a role. All light and brightness make Jack a dull soul, as the saying goes.

  One day, a clutch of these residual children (now much thinner because of various imposed dietary factors combined with the ill-sustenance that general scavenging in the city enforced) turned up at the zoo for a desultory kickaround. The first enclosure was, as ever, empty. The cages and enclosures further into the real meat of the zoo were still no doubt at least partially inhabited by exhibits because they were fed by certain nightly manoeuvres of metabolism and airfly—but very few grown-ups went to check and any such remaining exhibits had inevitably become hearsay, as the children said they didn’t know or deliberately didn’t say anything at all. It was rumoured that the zoo’s many birds had died, claws-up on the cage floors... except for one giant creamy-white poultry-thing that gradually bloated as if its claw-ends had rooted themselves into the ground (via the riven cage-floor) like a massive feathered plant-thing feeding off some unfathomable nourishment. It deeply chirped, but eventually it was mostly silent, still pulsing with some form of dubious existence.

  The children—for whatever reason—usually played football around the outside of the ‘empty’ enclosure which had once been assumed (at least in one of the interpretations) to exhibit barely visible insect-life. On the day in question, one child took his eye momentarily off the ball and pointed excitedly at the scrubby soil in the enclosure.

  “What are those?”

  The others peered over the enclosure’s barrier and gasped. Scattered all over the ground, within the enclosure, were what seemed to be hundreds of discarded toys. Clockwork ones, some budging slightly as if they had been insufficiently wound up. At a closer scrutiny, some were actually trying to burrow into the ground, making a very bad job of covering themselves for dignity’s sake—showing, perhaps, that they thought themselves to be little better than catmuck.

  As Ogdon later determined (on his tour of duty as zoo-keeper), the contraptions had indeed been a multitude of mini-Drills complete with gossamer vanes on their backs, each attempting—with some difficulty—to penetrate the hardened zoo floor. Meanwhile, in real time, the children were about to climb over the barrier to double-check the nature of what they still thought to be toys, toys with what one of them described as ‘cockpits’, but another child interrupted with a shout:

  “It’s Lope! Scram!”

  Crazy himself turned into the zoo, intent upon becoming the children’s routine nightmare of the day.

  They scattered and vanished into all corners of the zoo, before gathering together instinctively like a flock of migratory birds, only to escape screaming with fright (or joy) by means of the now untenanted exit turnstile.

  *

  Later, Ogdon, still in full female regalia, was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.

  He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus’s usual allotted white-lined space alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. Never eat yellow snow, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.

  Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could aid the maimed and the dead.

  *

  The real ‘Beth’s husband’ was now late-labelled Dognahnyi: perhaps one denemonisation too far, but he was still interviewing the new recruit (following the revelation) in his pent-house, the log fire glistening off the Rubens like neutered indoor-fireworks.

  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 from the perspective of the in-built sextant in this underground world 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 o
fficial 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 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!

  *

  In the days before the sudden jolt had stolen the light from Beth’s cabin in the Drill, Greg and a few other nebulous businessmen were entertained by Captain Nemo in the corporate lounge, a select area on board that boasted viewing-windows close to the leading-edge of the bit-tip. The proceedings were a combination of a scientific lecture upon what they were seeing and pure holiday entertainment, all laced with cocktails.

  *

  Meanwhile, over the years, many had debated why the city needed two airports instead of one... now both derelict sites on the left and right arms of the city proper. This hadn’t come up in general conversations or newspaper reports for quite a while but one must be seen to address this issue nevertheless, even if it’s just for the sake of chasing some noumenon.

  These airports were always benighted even in their respective hey-days. One theory was that they only served each other, i.e. short-haul flights between them taking place for their own sake, because it was easier to travel across the city by other means, even if one wanted to travel across the city at all. These airflights were later assumed to be merely acting as cover for their real flights—beneath the ground, with the main runways leading steeply down tunnels into the earth from each airport.

  That extrapolation, however, was often taken too far and was nipped in the bud before it could actually take off. However, in even more recent days of the Angevin conspiracies, there was a renewal of its hypothetical undercurrents regarding the internal workings of the earth. More, perhaps, of that, in due course. What one has to take into account, meanwhile, is that nobody at all has been in control of hypotheses for a long time now, and any crazy brainstorming has indeed eventually become the norm—with even written documents (where one should normally have inferred a responsible writer of such documents or, at least, an editorial chief/steering-committee) being considered just as bad as pub talk. Equally, the inverse may be true, i.e. when something is written down it lends credence even to pub talk. It depends on one’s point of view.

  The optimum, the fail-safe assumption, is to believe nobody is in control.

  As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many documents since discovered have touched on ash clouds, dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us. Allied to the dreams etc. were ghosts (it has to be said), and many people actually began to believe in ghosts, to the extent that each person necessarily had to have his or her own ghost—implying that there were two of everyone. But, no. Not the person and that person’s ghost as the pair in question, but two ghosts, each a ghost of the other (with no real person involved at all). Symbiotic haunting seems a good term for this.

  Which brings us straight back to the question of why there were two airports in the city, where even just one airport would have been redundant. So, with further extrapolation, not only did people or living creatures become tangled up in this two-ghost hypothesis but supposed inanimate things, too, such as aeroplanes, helicopters, other craft. In fact, all things under the sun, not just means of transport, but even buildings, household artefacts etc. were subject to this hypothesis.

  Such a supposition would pre-suppose much inadvisable loose-thinking, of course. However, it would serve to explain the eerie sightings (during the days even when people were more down-to-earth) of ghostly craft skimming across the city from airport to airport, complete with scary droning just upon the hearing threshold. Simply to call them ‘scary’, however, doesn’t necessarily make them scary. You had to experience them to know how really scary they were.

  As a boy, I used to wander around the Left Hand airport, the one that by then had become a disused golf-course. It was always dark there, it seemed, but I loved the den I built beneath a hedge where I and my friends played Cowboys and Indians or Doctors and Nurses. The Cowboys and Indians, Doctors and Nurses were delightfully, if sometimes chillingly, real—or, at least, seemed real because they were some of the ghosts that appeared to be attracted to the area as if it were a spectral magnet.

  The slots in the turfy ground which had been passed off by the Authorities as stretched-mouth golf-holes gave some substance to the theory that history is bunk. But also gave substance to the possibility that under-flights took place from this erstwhile airport. At least, for me, they did.

  I often saw with my own eyes grey shapes skimming above my head, leaving for the other side of the city. But I also saw similar shapes entering the ground as if taking advantage of inverse vents.

  Those days are now long over. I’m not sure even if I exist any more, let alone the two of us that were once the ‘me’ I can now only vaguely recall, if at all.

  *

  The Drill’s corporate lounge windows—like the other windows where Beth, Edith and Clare had been left to have their mud baths and generally to while away the journey in feminine yellow-wallpapered cabins—revealed at first only just the same boring panoplies of passing slabs of earth, glistening with the suppurations of oil from the Drill’s gills. However, eventually, at the leading-edge of the Drill, where the lounge windows were situated, the vista became clearer as if the vanes were now managing better in clearing the forward (downward) thrust’s waste further back towards the tail-fins.

  There is no description that can do justice to what wonderful, awe-inspiring and sometimes scary sights they saw—but the inference is that the words of the Captain conjured more than he actually said.

  Captain Nemo: Now what do you think of that?

  Greg: Wo
w!

  CN: Follow my finger—there are some of the things that exist down here. They are not what they seem—they are modelled on aircraft you’ve seen before, but these are their equivalents, better to call them earthcraft. They are crewed by some who’ve never been to the surface.

  G: It’s just like a real sky. There’s even a sun.

  CN: That’s the Core itself, of course. You must have guessed that. But there’s no real heat coming from it—as some have believed for centuries. That’s simply its colour you can see, not a symptom of a heat source. Scatter-orange I call it. And that, my friend, is the brightest scatter-orange you are ever likely to see. That’s why I made you wear those glasses. They’ve got a tint that makes the scatter-orange just about bearable. Makes it look more yellow or even beige, than orange doesn’t it?

  G: Well, it looks just like the real sun when you use smoked glass to look at an eclipse coming up.

  CN: Yup yup. The glasses also protect you from its jagged iciness, although that iciness is in fact an optical illusion, but one can’t be too careful.

  G: The earthcraft seem to be wheeling around each other—oh, look, I’m sure they’re using the blazing Corelight as a means of cover… sort of hiding from each other…

  CN: Yup yup. Not exactly friendly with each other, it has to be said. They sometimes fight or feint a fight more like and we have to be careful ourselves but up to now they’ve left us alone on each trip. But that won’t last forever, I fear.

  G: It’s all gone again. Back to the slabs.

  CN: That often happens when our vanes get clogged up with our off-detritus. We’ll probably see more later. You haven’t seen half of it yet! (Laughs.)

  Greg sipped at his cocktail thoughtfully. This was turning out to be a wonderful holiday. But, like all holidays, it had its moments of stress, no doubt.

  *

  Dognahnyi gasped when he saw who was behind the veil.