by Lewis, D. F.
Well, I can’t delay the incident’s telling, however long I dwell on trivialities to avoid addressing its terrible vision or loss. Sudra slipped in a momentary mess of darkness that smeared her vision, if not the vision of us others. We could see she was blinded by a mixture of darkness and a scalding flash of Corelight that was a freakish occurrence within her eyes alone: a combination far worse than the confusion of pure darkness itself. She hung over a mini-cutaway (one that was as nothing to some of the much bigger cutaways we had already experienced in our journey, but sufficient to waylay Sudra’s steps). Amy rushed to her assistance, grabbing her wrists: and then for an eternity of anguish, there Sudra hung. I, too, rushed, from a nearby tunnel where I was silver-plating pulley-hooks. A goodly task for an evening’s Corelight. But I mustn’t delay. I was there soon enough to see Amy kissing Sudra’s brow—as if in abandonment. Surrendering to an inevitable. Tears streamed down both girls’ faces in pangs of lost love and despair. I grabbed Amy’s ankles in an attempt to tug Sudra, via Amy, from the reaching abyss. I then managed to claw my way up Amy’s legs and hugged her thighs within her carpet coat, tears now streaming down my own face.
“We should have gone overland.”
These were Sudra’s words as Amy finally let go. And echoing through the abyss: Sudra’s screams of “New shoes, new shoes, new shoes, new shoes…” until even these strident sirens of hope faded into silence.
*
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, simply 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.
*
I cannot now remember to what Sudra once referred when using the word “Redoubts”, but it does cause me to wonder yet again who let go of whom on the edge of death’s cutaway when Sudra plummetted to her own abrupt cutaway. Who saw what in whose eyes? They both held each other’s wrists. Did Amy let go... or did Sudra let go when she looked into Amy’s eyes—flimsily disguised by tears of fateful surrender—only to see someone other than Amy behind those same eyes?
Amy was distraught. I could hardly comfort her, as she wailed and wailed into the sleep period. Susan, surprisingly, for a bereaved mother, was quite calm, as if she had been released from a burden of bewitchment—as if what Amy had carried behind her eyes had been passed off to Sudra in that critical moment of broken wrist-links. Or Sudra’s own shadow—which I had never noticed—was a stronger shadow than even Amy’s shadow. Indeed, once that Amy had recovered from the initial shock, she seemed to enter a new strobe period, without the necessity of us others having to strobe in tune with her own strobes. She became distant, detached, finally re-attached, but calmer. I felt as if a suicide bomb must have exploded inside Amy’s head and she had survived it by simple virtue of being strobed-out of existence at the instantaneous moment the bomb ignited itself.
It is difficult to dwell on the repercussions of Sudra’s death. Indeed, I can’t recall Arthur’s reaction in any way whatsoever, but it did inevitably mean Amy spending more time with him in alternations of sibling rivalry and sibling bonding. Susan was stoic and—if I say so myself—so was I. And we now need to address the circumstances of our arrival in Agra Aska. “Ever look to the future”, my Dad always said when he was alive. I always replied, in boyish pique, to his great astonishment, that such a tenet was a veiled threat, because futures often blighted pasts. That’s perhaps why I was destined to become mixed up with ‘hawling’, but then of course that word had not yet channelled its way down the generations to me in that period of my childhood (as it was later to do).
Agra Aska is now not at all what it was like in the distant strobe-era spoken of elsewhere, when John Bello and Joan Turner became young lovers to the backdrop of Ervin’s shriving—and of the political war-machinations that surrounded David Binns, Dictor Wilson, Robert Orwell, Chesterton and The Archer-Vicar. Today Agra Aska is blander, albeit still maintaining the now famous Straddling Cathedral and the Balsam River trading business. It substantially thrives on the Angevin cream that it mines from the Core—an export hawling business that will play a large part in the future of our campaign. So, yes, this is a mining city that has settled within its own strobe-history as near to the earth’s Core as it is possible for any civilisation to be positioned in such a city-shaped formation, i.e. in the manner of the more distant cities of Whofage, Klaxon and London—but, despite this infrastructure, still maintaining a conveniently short direct two-way filter to the Corecombs of the Megazanthus itself. By the way, I’ve just mentioned London and this city (established at sea level directly above the man-shaped man-city whence I and my party derived) is rumoured to harbour the domed cathedral of St Paul’s that was the original template for Agra Aska’s straddling version which, in its turn, is a vast structure that possesses the ornate and iconographised religious thoroughfare (aisle?) along the roofed bridge between two Babelline towers. The Balsam River torrents below this ‘bridge’, its relentless current leading to the tributaries of Abrundy and Tiddle.
The under-surface or floor-division between London and its strobe-twin city beneath it (i.e. man-city with Dry Dock and covered market) is a mere lightweight ceiling or carpet... or, rather, mere symbols of these things, in gossamer arcades of nothingness, barely differentiating between the two cavities or air-spaces that harboured each city. However, I assure you, the sea ‘unlevels’ do also help to maintain this division.
Having said that, I am minded to give my own personal impressions of Agra Aska as we emerged from the last earthen cutaway and viewed the ‘half-sky’ Coremoon settling above its silver pinnacles. We all heard a distant lonely flute. And a dog yapping. I hate dogs. Sudra would have been delighted. We knew it was a city, and indeed Arthur, with his over-extended left ear, could hear more than us—as city-life surely thrummed beneath us. Oh, by the way, I also spotted the ‘shipwrecked’ Drill lodged on a crag escarpment that bloated unnaturally from one of the Cathedral’s Babelline towers. But more of that later.
What I wanted to say, really, was that, for me, Agra Aska is the sea. It’s strobing in and out of existence so fast, beyond the scope of flickering eyelids, that it appears to be a swaying creature of waves. Even the buildings are waves and the river just another channel of current, criss-crossing other such channels at the culmination of forces that make me believe in a ghost of a pier which I watch shimmer more slowly in and out of existence. Of course, all this might have been just my imagination.
*
Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were dowager twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls—the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls—otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city—but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn’t grow. Brick is more prone to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south—but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imaginati
on, because everything using the gaps had widened.
*
When the dowagers eventually disembarked at Agra Aska—faced with an undignified long-skirted clamber down one of the Babelline towers of the Straddling Cathedral—they certainly felt suspicious they hadn’t actually travelled anywhere but had been confidence-tricked by means of a ‘U Turn’ within Inner Earth or some sleight of compass prestidigitation regarding the tricking of the Above, the Below and the Across. The compensation, however, was that Agra Aska represented an oblique, if opaque, home from home—where all gaps went missing. Indeed, the whole of Agra Aska seemed to have landed within a blind spot so that they had to keep turning their heads to avoid not seeing it at all: and in the process saw only the legs of Clare (if you were Edith) or of Edith (if you were Clare) rather than any breathtaking views of their new home city that the descent of disembarkation would otherwise have entailed. It was rather like going into a bare room with bare floorboards, then imagining that if you took up the floorboards nail by nail you’d discover a carpet laid neatly underneath them.
What they did particularly notice was the temperature, the feel of the air, the Aska Agran ambiance. It was not as cold as they feared from what they had been told of the increasing cold the further Coreward one travelled. The legends circulating among the surface cities represented the other extreme, i.e. that the Core was red hot. Captain Nemo had indeed explained to them when they first signed up for the holiday that an effective blend of two legends prevailed. One legend that it was molten Angevin. The other that it was frozen Angevin. With the benefit of mixed myths, therefore, one could survive anything. He had laughed leaving the dowagers to fathom out what he had just explained. But it all seemed to make sense now. The Core itself could be seen spreading with a creamy consistency (outward from their fast diminishing blind spots) across half the sky, here more moon-like than sun-like, the quirk of refraction making it more yellow than white, followed by a blend of both colours when proto-incidence kicked in later during the natural diurnal process of Agra Askan sky systems.
Edith and Clare were the only Drill travellers who enjoyed an official welcoming party. A young couple, hand in hand—an emblem or living symbol of the love and affection that depicted the Agran Askan optimum ideal of existence, an ideal celebrating the beneficial hindsight effect of the curatively legendary times when the original young lovers in this city had had to endure one hellishly onerous quest as well as the religious shriving of their private parts in the process. Edith and Clare had arrived—partly in ignorance but partly knowing they would be using their trained counselling skills to further this ideal, and Mike (who had often acted as a radio phone-in agony uncle on the surface) would be supplementing their skills with his own special skills wrung from a mixture of hawling experience mingled with a semi-conscious self-condemnation for his own wicked thoughts and desires. The mixing of myths was the optimum, good and evil alike, used in the war against evil. The dowagers wondered if Mike’s stony path to his own Road to Damascus (or Road to Agra Aska!) had by now reached culmination. They could not yet see any sign of him or his party—expecting them, as they did, to appear duly shriven by the underfoot dangers of Inner Earth’s deepest pot-holing together with the hair-carpets on their backs. But they remained confident that they would soon arrive and bolster the dowagers’ own efforts to gather themselves to the tasks in hand. Any Angevin smuggling could be left to the others. That was merely a by-product of the mock-holiday, one the dowagers could safely ignore—although they wouldn’t decline any of the profits once they returned to the surface!
The young Agra Askan lovers (now called Hataz and Tho) led them by the hands towards the Core, lit from behind by a now wildly yellow innersky exploding into a balloon shape not dissimilar to the Augusthog icon or flying-pig kite glimpsed before in their travels. Followed by the quickly fading ghost of the Megazanthus itself with wings stretched between two infinitely distant horizons. The ladies would need their own brainwrights, to be sure, as they continued to fathom the real reasons for this their increasingly complex presence in an increasingly complex Agra Aska—all lies and dreams forgotten... at least forever.
*
The intense primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous suicide-bombs were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one’s eye. The wide shiny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices or slashes or sheets of black fire—accentuating how bright the daylight’s backdrop of sky had become.
Dognahnyi turned from his window and, after sweeping his curtains together upon their silent runners, he felt relieved that his room had become relatively subdued: protected against the outside’s sharp relief: now a room with an atmosphere more fitting for the conference he was conducting with John Ogdon—sitting, as Ogdon was, in full feminine regalia, beneath the painting of the man with the salacious swan.
Dognahnyi: Celebration, but celebration for what, Hilda? Tell me that.
Ogdon: That the man-city is at last united?
D: (barking) Excuse the cough. It’s my way of laughing. Well, the city is certainly stirring.
Even as he spoke, the building trembled, moving the waxen blooms of flame to and fro in their holders.
O: Man-city is something we’ve lived with. We thought the Ancient Father built it that way in the shape of a figure, but have you noticed?
D: I know what you’re going to say. Something about me being a Barker?
O: Sort of. The man-city is gradually burying itself like that legend of watery Venice. You recall? Rubens painted it. But what I was going to say is that few have ever noticed (and I think I failed to notice it till recently) that our city, our man-city, is all there is. There is nothing beyond the airport arms.
D: Or beyond its other extremities? No geography except itself. You would have thought with helicopters we could have sussed that out before now. Doh!
O: You can feel it in the feet. We are sinking. The city is sinking. It wants to join some cosmic battle within Inner Earth.
D: That’s a bit romantic. By the way, is your—what do you call it?—your alter-nemo on board the Drill? That Drill they called ‘The Hawler’?
O: Yes, disguised as a shy businessman. Even the Captain’s been kept in the dark about that.
D: Are there such things as shy businessman?
O: (Laughs, then barks in mockery of the other.)
D: Well, what about the other party? My beyoootiful recruit got rid of the bewitched Sudra. That creature—if she hadn’t fallen—would certainly have queered our pitch. There would have been confusion galore of alter-nemo and alter-alter-nemo otherwise! Yet, I’m unsure if the shriving is complete. We need full penitence of all party-goers before we can set in motion the plan for widening (by strength of love) the sluice-gates of Angevin towards the huge mouth that yearns for the white slimy flow down its twitching throat.
O: That’s a strange way to describe shortening the supply-line!! (Barks loudly).
D: There’s only one possible fly in the ointment.
O: The Megazanthus?
D: Hmmm. The Megazanthus is a loose cannon, true. We don’t know whether it yet has its own alter-nemos. Like Godspanker or Azathoth. No, Og, what I was really referring to is the simple need for an unhappy ending. That should clinch everything. The ultimate paradox. It’s not easy to bring off such a required tension, a tension from the tension of identical opposites... especially with Mike Wassisname working in another direction completely. So, yes, without our own version of tension, the whole Angevin mine will spectacularly implode and, even with the help of man-city, we’ll all end up in Queer Street!
O: I’m working on it, Dog. I am providing the ending. Not Mike Smartarse!
*
Amy, once she had finished carpet-sweeping, turned over the vacuum and emptied what it contained. Not only flies fell ou
t but hairs from a cabbage.
Amy was now hoovering the carpet of our Quarantine Quarters in Agra Aska. The Askan authorities had decided—a bit late in the day—that both visiting parties should be held together in camera, to ensure no leakage of disease or, indeed, of dream from the surface. Hataz and Tho, the emblematic pair of young lovers from Agra Aska (and young lovers in actual fact) were also necessarily quarantined in the same room as us—bearing in mind that they had already come into skin-to-skin contact with the dowagers, Edith and Clare.
The room was an ornate one—and windowless—decidedly stuffy compared to the startlingly panoramic vistas that had first met us in Agra Aska. The room was eerie, too, in a nice atmospheric way, but an atmosphere soon to turn jaundiced, when anything haunting the room turned out to be more insidious than it was cosy, as any hauntings of that room were soon to do in all connotations of that thought. Yet, none of us (the room’s inhabitants) had suspected what fear truly was until the hauntings of that room made themselves plain... making themselves plain, but not without losing their dubiously inherent quality of mysterious eeriness.
Still, none of us would yet know true fear until the later endgame was upon us, an endgame which hung above us like a slowly eroding cliff or impending cutaway of Inner Earth. That would diminish the Quarantine room’s hauntings to a handleable perspective, by comparison.
As we were earlier trooped—in Indian file—within the portals of the room’s entrance, many of us gave a wistful look at the crippled Drill squatting like a giant’s disused toy upon one of the Straddling Cathedral’s craggy towers. Many Agra Askan sightseers were staring moon-eyed up at it, shaking their heads. The members of my own pot-holing party gave versions of their own shriven glances at the Drill, equally as bemused by its sight as the locals were.
But, once inside the room, the wide-screen sights of Agra Aska themselves diminished to a fast-receding full-stop in the same way as an ancient TV would once disperse its black-and-white picture... upon someone switching the set off.