by Lewis, D. F.
Captain Nemo seemed strangely diminished, too, outside the jurisdiction of his Drill. He slouched into a corner seat and sat there staring mindlessly at whatever transpired.
There had been no mutual welcoming between the two parties when we all started to interact within the room. Our meeting up in such strange circumstances was taken for granted and we started conversations as if we were finishing them.
Edith had initially been tearstruck by the sight of her two offspring, Amy and Arthur. They had been lost as small children and, despite much searching by the authorities, never found... eventually assumed to have wandered off into the Northern coalfields of the city’s Head region, from where few ever returned. She hugged them, made a low-breathing comment into her son’s ever-fattening earlobe cavity—and then withdrew, taking matters for granted, as the others seemed to do. This was part of the beginning of the room’s hauntings: i.e. low-key reactions to high-key events.
Amy had grown into a fine physical woman, but Edith left unsaid her own suspicions of what or whom actually lived inside her head. Amy meanwhile cleaned the carpet with an automatic sweeping motion—a tangled tussle of an affair, as the carpet was mostly long-shanked with what looked like human hair. Some patches had been crew-cut which made the sweeping easier.
She later started polishing one of the paintings. One had a gilded frame but not much to speak of within its margins. A haunting of an image that was as faded as the flock wallpaper around it. However, the aura of the room’s general ornateness maintained itself despite the tawdriness of individual furnishings.
Clare retained a hands-on affection for Edith. Neither Amy or Arthur recognised Clare from childhood days as their headteacher.
“What’s your name?” asked Clare, suddenly turning to one of the two young Agra Askans in love with each other.
“Tho,” replied the girl.
“Hataz,” replied the boy, simultaneously, even though he hadn’t been addressed.
“Quaint names,” said Clare, almost for Clare’s own ears, if not Edith’s.
The two lovers seemed just as subdued as the rest of us. Perhaps we knew the exact nature of the room’s hauntings before such hauntings made themselves plain.
Greg and I were seen talking in a desultory fashion. We knew we were mutual alter-nemos—and when such individuals met, they often had empty conversations, and this was no exception. A shadowy businessman from the Drill’s Corporate Lounge took no heed of what we said, because he knew he would learn nothing new by so doing. The other businessmen were busy disappearing into their own shadows, by sidling towards corners of the room that were not any of the more usual four corners of the standard cube-space that the room apparently was. Human-coning was another expression which brought back memories to some of them, but not to others.
Susan was the least subdued. She now found Beth rather unsatisfactory as a sister, the latter having lost much of her grit. Susan had always depended on Beth’s get-up-and-go when they were younger and here, suddenly, Susan was (uncharacteristically) the only one in the room with any vestige of creative impulse. Even I felt jaded. What was more, Beth hardly reacted to the news of Sudra’s death. To Susan, it felt like pummelling a large slime punchball that was too heavy to swing.
The hauntings perhaps were that there were no hauntings in the room. Meanwhile, one of the gilt-framed paintings started to emit a whiney pathetic klaxon, of which nobody, including me, showed awareness.
The two dowagers—in undercurrents of recitation—spoke aloud parrot-learnt excerpts from Marcel Proust’s Du Côté De Chez Swann—and there was also much promise of them sharing their literary passions with the others, should there be periods during the Quarantine when there would be time for all of us to kill.
As to food, there were ‘cold numbers’ in bowls, numerical shapes of indeterminate flaccid cooked-meats in an unwarmed reconstituted form.
Once Amy had finished the housework, we all started looking for beds.
*
Ogdon spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn’t his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke:
“Help me, I’m Greg. Please don’t let me be Mike. I know it’s easy to confuse us but I’m the one who’s on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I’m desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I am Greg.”
Ogdon’s own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.
“I’m Greg,” continued the face opposite. “Help me, I’m Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike.”
It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his glass across the bar and it smashed itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror’s contents.
But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice:
“I’m Greg. Please don’t let me be Mike.”
And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.
*
In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts many would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times. The hedge itself had almost helped their descent of passage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected—but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance.
Being inside that Quarantine room was worse than any hedge-shriving—but we were eventually evicted one by one, having proved our ‘purity’ through dream-detector games and obstacle courses controlled by klaxon or tannoy. We also had to kill the ‘mole’, before the last one could emerge from the room. And this was by a daily vote. Hardly a game. More life and death, I’d say. I was sure the ‘mole’ was Amy—for obvious reasons. But, by some quirk of semi-alliances or double-bluffs, it turned out to be Captain Nemo who was the ‘mole’—Captain Nemo (aka Dognahnyi, according to Beth) whose blood was eventually on all our hands. In fact, he and I were the last ones quarantined in the room whilst all outside surveillance had been withdrawn (we’d been assured)—so it’s just between him and me what actually happened.
Nemo’s blood may have been metaphorically on the others’ hands, but I had his blood—literally. But I’m not admitting to that. I quickly draw a veil of denial over such matters. I effectively retract my own overblown omniscience on that score. I even clip the wings of my omnipotence simply to avoid a Horla’s shame. And I trust Ogdon turns a blind eye, too—wherever Ogdon now is, if he exists at all. It’s probably just him against me, now. Ogdon against ‘Mike’. Or possibly just me. Endgame impends.
*
In the covered market area of man-city, Ogdon remained alone amongst those known to the authorities by actual name. The rest of the citizens were at best nameless or, more likely, nemonymous. Ghosts, if they exist at all, don’t exist as such: but float in inexplicably verifiable shades of non-existence barely beyond the threshold of sound or feeling. Other than Ogdon, any residual souls left in man-city—who felt the vague sinking feeling that often accompanies the beginnings of anxiety, later fear and finally terror—were such ghosts bordering on lies or dreams.
And the stirrings of clockwork driving will-powered machinations beneath the Dry Dock and covered market gave the impression that the city’s airport arms were beginning to whirr, almost spin, like sluggish propellers. And huge angel-shaped wings of earth flew upward in mountainous slab-cascades on each flank of the body politic or body civil, as the city’s cantilevered sous-centipedes of diggers started to delve a far more awesome shaft than a million Drills (in the shape of ‘The Hawler’) could or would ever have been able to excavate so as to make room for their communal passage downward toward Inner Earth.
Ogdon sat in his deserted pub—surrounded by smashed glasses and toppled barstools. His teary face was in his ha
nds. He couldn’t actually believe what he was doing. Yet, relentlessly, automatically, he was man-handling a huge key in the pub floor, ensuring the massive tessellations of clockwork remained taut, on a hair-trigger of sprung power—to drive the city ever downward. It seemed appropriate that a pub turned out to be the powerhouse, not only of drunken small talk or wild boozy brainstorming, but also of the more momentous or eschatological concerns of mankind—put into ratchetting motion by this morally-neutral hawling process of unbelievably gigantic proportions. Yet Ogdon sobbed, as he began to stroke the ape in his lap.
Endgame rampant.
*
As we emerged into Agra Aska, the relief from claustrophobia was tangible.
The sky was still halved by a scimitar of Corelight, like an overripe sun that had bloated beyond its capacity to shine through clouds like a yellowmanker custard.
A vast winged angel-icon on splints floated overhead and we guessed this was just a tethered kite-symbol or a free-agent balloon-emblem that pre-figured the real angel-thing itself—when the doors of the Core eventually opened to reveal the Megazanthus swagged in its mucus strands of rancid cream. But like telling lies, guessing was only one minor stage further along the spectrum of truth.
Amy put her hands over her ears. I couldn’t understand how the silent image we all watched could have caused such a reaction. Perhaps she heard something that we didn’t. A metaphorical Sunne Stead within her own brain? Or, as she told me later, the sound of a robotic machine cranking into ignition but so well-oiled it tip-toed, just as she tip-toed herself in the shoes she had managed to salvage from Sudra’s stowaway mini-wardrobe that Sudra herself had secretly carried all the time, as it turned out, during her rite of passage with us through Inner Earth.
Beth slouched to a distant seat by the Balsam River to watch the trading-barges in their resplendent flag finery and drape-carpets. She remained confused by the incriminating nature of Captain Nemo’s identity as the ‘mole’ or ‘burrower’. Yet, confusion was at least a stage further on the truth spectrum most of us had not even approached!
Edith, Clare, Greg & Arthur were taking holiday snapshots (with the help of Tho and Hataz) of the Straddling Cathedral. They took each other in smiling poses. Arthur even stretched his ear to its fullest extent, as he stood saying ‘cheese’ in front of a statue of a former Agran by the name of Chesterton III.
But where was Amy now?
Endgame not quite so rampant, after all... yet.
*
I had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed myself—by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the man-city Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner—to believe that Mike was my real name.
In our eventual hotel room in Agra Aska, on one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which I lifted to show Greg (my alter-nemo)—as a demonstration of Nemonymous Navigation leading to Nemonymous Night then Nemonymous Numinousness (Numinosity)—including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went with the Angevin trade.
On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist—depicting an unknown youth (not dissimilar to Hataz) who had a large white swan sitting on his lap... a foundling fondling the long neck as the swan itself acted rather salaciously.
The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a silent runner, mis-implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, I could hear some of our Agra Askan fans chanting. Since the shenanigans in Quarantine House, we’d literally become hotel-bound celebrities, a fact which was more than most of us could bear, even though, paradoxically, we’d been trying all our lives to seek out such celebrity for ourselves!
Amy did a spot of cleaning now and again to keep her hand in. She yearned after the state of her prior ordinariness more than any of us.
Eventually, there came the day when we all made our first close encounter with the Core itself. Or what we had before loosely named the Core, later-labelled as... well we’ve not reached that point yet.
I say all of us, but we left Greg behind as ceremonial rearguard. He said goodbye to Hataz and Tho because, as part of the first encounter with the Core, we were due to deal with their carefully-nurtured symbolic young love and—not so much ‘sacrifice’ them but rather tender them to the ‘caring arms’ of the Core itself, a ceremony only such initiated celebrities as us could carry out every generation or so. Human Coning to the Nth degree. We’d been given a very instructive and well-crafted black-skinned book entitled The Nemonicon about it all—much to the delight of Edith and Clare. The prose was Proust perfect.
The Core was at the top of a peak within a neighbouring lightly-valed cavity to that of Agra Aska itself, and you could see the Core (from Agra Aska) as almost a rounded half-sky of beige- or yellow-coloured light, but then the nearer you approached the more it became the whole-sky and an unknown colour... by contrast, however, strangely diminished (yet still relatively huge) when we were right up close to it at the highest point of the peak. The veiling effect of proto-incidence, perhaps. Or so our book hinted.
I was the first gingerly to touch the shimmering skin of the Core. I saw within a giant sleeping form of an angel, breathing in tune with some strobe rhythm that was relative to the reality of the ‘angel’ rather than our own reality. It was half bird, half beast, I guess. Its mane was an underlay or weave of feathers vestigially carpeted by patches of yellow fur and an archipelago of raw underskins or red meat. Yet this vision of its nature was unclear through the Coreskin. Its vast furled wings were lifted from time to time—in its evidently dreamful slumber—to reveal millions (I say millions, but there may have been more or there may have been less) of naked human beings in eternal carnal embrace (I guess eternal, judging by the book’s further hints). An interwoven slobbery population of white, brown and black limbs and torsos of flesh, but their heads (and thus identities) mercifully hidden by the nesting techniques of the ‘angel’. Stub of pencil: The produce of this Arthurian mix of human substances within the Core was dependent on the incubation/chemical process of the ‘angel’ itself.
We all kissed Hataz and Tho farewell before passing them through a breach in the Coreskin.
And distantly we heard the voices of Agra Askans in a chorus of: “Wonderful, Counsellor!”
It was awe-inspiring.
Before leaving the site of our first encounter with the Core, I looked down towards the lower nipples of the Core sac, where the Letting Agents (again mentioned in the book) were siphoning unrefined wads of Angevin cream into wide-mouthed pipes—and onward, via arcane hawling procedures based on creative gravity, I guess, to the earth’s surface. Except, as I wasn’t to know at that stage, there was nobody then on the surface. The game was surely up, even before we knew about it. But confusion often brings the most unexpected clarity. I did not cross bridges before I came to them whilst I kept my own cards close to my chest. The others seemed to be quite out of their depth.
I took the hands of Susan and Amy as we proceeded to descend from the Core, our first job done. Stub of pencil: Beth and Greg may have had to be the next couple ‘sacrificed’, when the time came, even though, when compared to Hataz and Tho, they were rather too long in the tooth to be called young lovers! Edith and the rather gender-indeterminate Clare, even more so.
As we reached the lower slopes of Corepeak, I even wondered if what we had just seen was the real earth’s Core. Or was there a core within a core? Or even a series of ‘Russian Doll’ cores? Bizarre thoughts, maybe. Stub of pencil: Mere untrammelled corespeak.
*
The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond Beth’s control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.
; At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan’s pretty face, prettier than her own, though when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.
Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circumstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or a bus-driver or a radio phone-in counsellor? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.
Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn’t now place him as a grown-up. The big ear seemed out of place. She dreamed of him mixing some foreign substances or murky mythologies into a huge tin bath. Amy was a similar dream portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought tooth-and-nail over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn’t really differentiate one portrait from another.
Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so. She feared he was now dead. The portrait dream showed him alive, however.
*
The various Cores were not ‘Russian Doll’ within each other, as it turned out—but, rather, side-by-side cores in different geographies of lateral time. The strobe theory of history was now debunked and many scholars questioned its validity as a basis for much of what had happened and what was about to happen.
Let me baldly state that my credentials are impeccable and I can’t be blamed for any misinformation as to what level of narration I actually work within. I am—to myself at least—all-knowing. If others know more than me, then, self-evidently, I do not know them.