Pollen

by Jeff Noon

  Barleycorn was now kneeling down into a patch of street-flowers. He plucked a crimson specimen free from the ragged pavement-bouquet and then came back up to face me, holding the flower aloft. ‘Of course I didn’t pause to consider the Dodos,’ he said. ‘The non-dreamers. Take a look at this future-flower.’

  I saw a flower that was being eaten away at the roots by a viral worm of great appetite; the worm’s name was Black Dodo. I realised then that the Dodo insect in my stomach—once upon a time, my curse—could now be my saviour.

  ‘I am scared of you, Sibyl,’ Barleycorn whispered with sad breath, as though confirming my thoughts, ‘and all of your closed-up kind. I never believed that so few could have such an effect upon the dream. I imagined the real world opening up to me quite easily, but then I got word of your struggle, and Belinda’s struggle. And then my sweet wife became ill from your world. I had to call her back home. That’s fine, no problem, her job is completed; the seed is planted and Columbus is still making a way through for the pollen, but the dream cannot yet make a life in reality, not truly. Not completely. Maybe one day…’ He sighed then, again, and again, and breathily. ‘It saddens me, you know? This whole thing…do you really believe I wanted to cause you harm? No, I wanted us to work together. The dream and the real. As you can witness all around you now, a new world, a good and fruitful world is to be made out of the joining. This is my vision, Sibyl. What can I do? You Dodos are like the sting of a wasp. Moments of blindness in the stories. I would have to kill you all to make my vision complete. I would have to kill the dreamless ones.’

  And whilst he was saying this to me, I leached a tiny portion of my Shadow into my internal Dodo beetle. There a small part of my soul now rested, hopefully cut off from Barleycorn’s province. Now I was further split; in the Shadow and the Dodo I now lived.

  ‘I think your story is very sad, Sir John,’ I said with my Shadow whilst, at the same time, with my Dodo-self I told him that his precious wife was nothing more than a cheap, nasty, murderous slut.

  ‘Truly, truly sad,’ Barleycorn answered my Shadow. ‘Just a sad story told by a sad human one day, far ago, in the face of death. But still, a glimpse has been given. We may yet find paradise.’

  So the Dodo-barrier seemed to be holding. I tried again to insult his wife from the folds of my stomach beetle. Nothing. No response to my bile.

  ‘Whatever can you hold against paradise?’ he asked, instead.

  ‘The fact that people must die for its birth.’ Knowing inside that now I had a dark place of my own that Barleycorn could never reach.

  ‘But the human race invented this concept,’ he snarled. ‘Your history is grave-pitted with the bodies of those who gave their lives for the greater good. Nearly all of your stories are based upon this moment of sacrifice…and yet how you complain when the stories themselves want to employ the same narrative. Why, you yourself, Sibyl…didn’t you make the same story of death for life out of your love for your children? Really, it’s all too much to bear. The injustice of it all. But come quickly, there is much I want to show you…’

  Barleycorn threw down the diseased flower and set off along the newly fecund Claremont Road until eventually we reached Broadfield Road. This was the road in which Belinda had paused in her flight from myself and Zero Clegg after the Vurtball match. Maybe Barleycorn had planned for me a trip through the real-world story as pictured in the dream. I was now containing most of my thoughts with the Dodo beetle, which was my secret haven within this dreamland. Barleycorn was now ringing the bell on one of the flower-wrapped houses in Broadfield. ‘I do hope he’s in,’ he said. ‘In this house lives one Octave Dodgson, the eighth cousin, eight times removed, of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, one of your finer creators. I’m presuming you know of his talent?’

  ‘I know of it,’ I answered through the Shadow.

  The door was opened by a white rabbit fully the same size as myself, who led us through to a living room where a young man was sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions. I can only presume this was Octave Dodgson himself, twenty-seven and three-quarters old. He was heavily enraptured by the smoky kiss of the bubbling drugs that he sucked, with expert embouchure, through the mouthpiece of a raspberry-jam-stained hookah pipe. He made no comment as Barleycorn led me to the foot of a flight of stairs.

  We ascended together to the landing where three different doors waited. From behind one of them came a sad song called The Walrus and the Carpenter. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, sung in a young girl’s voice but one so heavy with pain that the notes seemed to crack in the air. Barleycorn gently knocked upon the bedroom door and then opened it wide when the singing stopped. He stepped into the room and my Shadowy shape followed him through. The trapped air smelt of decay and sick breath.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’ Sad, brittle voice…

  A young girl of sickly pale aspect, of lank blond hair and vomit-stained pinafore dress, of seven and a half years; she was lying on the bed playing feebly with a wind-up tortoise that had long since wound down. ‘Barleycorn, what do you want now?’ she whispered with cracked breath.

  ‘I have brought a real person to see you,’ Barleycorn answered. ‘Her name is Sibyl Jones, and most desiring she is to converse with you.’

  ‘Is that you, Alice?’ I asked.

  Alice could only cough and whimper. I’m sure she said something like Do-Do-Dodgson but there was a noise behind me then and when I turned to look, the white rabbit was standing on the threshold. He walked past me to the side of the bed, where, taking out a watch from his waistcoat-pocket, he picked up Alice’s wrist and started to count out aloud her pulse-rate. ‘How is she?’ Barleycorn asked.

  ‘Barely here at all, really,’ the white rabbit answered. ‘I’ll say she’s got a few days left…’ The rabbit looked very sad to be saying this, and Barleycorn was equally worried.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ I asked.

  ‘Alice is dying,’ John Barleycorn answered.

  ‘Alice in Wonderland? But surely…’

  ‘This is what happens when the dream withers.’

  ‘You told me that the dream couldn’t die.’

  ‘A dream undreamt is a dying fantasy and nobody, it seems, these days, wants to dream about dear, sweet Alice. So you see, Sibyl Jones, this is a two-way mirror; the only way I can keep Alice alive is by transporting her to reality through the new map. Do you see now? You call the fever a disease, whereas, in reality, the fever is a salvation.’

  Alice laughed, rather rudely, and then said, ‘The way is corkscrewed.’

  ‘The way is certainly troubled, dear Alice,’ Barleycorn agreed, ‘but can you not see now,’ and with this he turned to face me once again, ‘just how desperate my situation is, Sibyl?’

  I myself, in my body of smoke, was at a loss as to how to respond. I saw before me a beloved imaginary companion of my early years dying for the lack of a dreaming pathway, and the potential of this loss made me consider the times in my youth when I had been desperate for the dream to come into my body.

  Barleycorn came up close to me, put his hands upon my shoulders, spoke to me very softly: ‘You have shown great fortitude, Sibyl, for a human girl.’ Now his hands were stroking at my shadowy breasts, trailing down to my stomach, and all the time his warm breath was close to my neck. ‘You have excited a sad old boy in his weariness, but now, I’m afraid, the party draws to a close.’ And the soft words were lulling, lulling. ‘You must give yourself up to my caress…’

  ‘You can’t harm me,’ I said, sleepily. ‘I’m a Dodo in the Vurt. All pain is illusory.’

  ‘Your daughter, also…must finally die.’ Lulling, lulling…‘It’s very simple. All Dodos must die. For the dream to live.’

  ‘You can’t touch me, Sir John. I’m a…’

  His fingers played gently at my belly of smoke and then plunged through into the pit of the stomach where they closed around the black beetle of my Dodoness. He plucked the wriggling insect free from the stomach and brought
it back through the Shadow-skin into the light. ‘Is this your protection, my dear?’ He waved the beetle in front of my face, laughing at me. ‘I do believe, Sibyl…that you can now dream the infinite dream. Your daughter also.’

  ‘No…’

  ‘And therefore you are both open to my desire. Which is to bring death to you.’

  ‘Leave her alone!’ I was pleading for my daughter’s life, of course, all of which had no effect upon Barleycorn. He stepped away from my body, holding the black insect by the tip of one leg, as though it could damage his dream-flesh. Part of myself still rested within the amputated beetle, and I gathered some small hope from the fact until the bad dreams started, as Barleycorn invaded my newly opened Shadow with his evil imaginings.

  Dreams…I was dreaming dreams…real dreams…

  I was swallowed by pain and blood and knives of thorn. I was riding a blond-carpeted horse through a thick patch of sharpened fog-pianos. I was falling into octopuses, invaded by umbrellas, skewered by trouser-glue, stretched to the edge of my skin’s clock by stinging bicycles and the weather of fish.

  So this is what it’s like to dream. Barleycorn was killing me with strange fables, the very worst of all nightmares, and my Shadow started to shrivel from the intrusion. I wanted no more of it, and in the distance somewhere, somewhere distant, I could feel my Belinda protesting the same.

  I was dwindling. Going out. Darkening. Dying…

  You can’t do this, Barleycorn, I called over what little remained of my Shadow. To which dismissal he merely laughed and waved the Dodo beetle some more to taunt me for my weakness. And to my small and fading Shadow I pledged then to harm the dream-master, if I could. I sent out a sliver of tight smoke that still rested in the beetle; a sliver of smoke that wrapped itself around Barleycorn’s arm and then made a darting move to pluck the beetle from his grasp.

  All the while the bad dreams were gathering in my soul, threatening to drag me under into a moth-coloured sea of chicken-magnets and the laughter of lobsterized Tuesdays.

  I had the black beetle free now. My tendril of smoke curled around Barleycorn’s body until it reached Alice on her sickbed. With no time for thinking I plunged my smoke deep into Alice’s mouth, carrying the Dodo insect with me. She struggled a little. Just a little, almost like she was welcoming the end of her story.

  Barleycorn gasped, and it was lovely to hear. A gasp from a dream.

  The white rabbit cursed the very same story that had brought him this close to danger. He vanished through the doorway saying only this well-remembered saying: ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’

  Barleycorn closed on me. ‘What are you doing?’ His voice was edged with doubt.

  ‘What does it look like?’ I answered. ‘I’m killing Alice in Wonderland, no less.’ I shoved the beetle deeper, against Alice’s weak protests, down through the tightness of her throat muscles until it was lodged in her stomach. ‘Isn’t this how you killed Coyote? Now your dear, sweet Alice will feel the same choking breath. With this Mooner’s darkness inside of her, this dream will die. Isn’t that what you want?’

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Barleycorn swore, trying to get a grip of my Shadow with his fingers. My Shadow was stronger than dream-flesh now, aided by the Dodoness, and his fingers clutched around a mere trembling mist. All of his evil dreams were flittering inside my head like lost birds, scared by sudden weakness, failing to nest…

  ‘All of this is unreal,’ I said to him. ‘This isn’t Wonderland, and this isn’t Alice. This world is just the dregs of your pathetic mind scrambling for sustenance.’

  ‘No…Don’t kill her.’

  ‘Take me back, Barleycorn. Show me who she really is.’

  Barleycorn waved his hands through the air and in half of a dreaming second we were back in the dining room. Rain was still falling. Barleycorn was back in his chair and I was sucked deep back into Belinda’s body. Coyote was still enraptured with the meat in his mouth and Jewel was playing fisherman’s knots with a rice-worm. Persephone was flattened on the table under my daughter’s grasp. This girl of the flowers had played the part of Alice in Barleycorn’s imagined Wonderland. Belinda had the girl by the throat with one hand, from the other hand streamed a river of Shadow-smoke that poured into Persephone’s mouth.

  Unbeknownst insect, pressed deep into the body of Persephone.

  ‘Please…’ John Barleycorn’s voice; the first ever pleading.

  ‘For the sake of your wife, Barleycorn.’

  ‘Please…don’t undream my love. She will die with that black creature…’

  ‘For the sake of my child,’ I said, quite coldly. ‘For the sake of Coyote’s child. For the sake of my city and my friends. For Zero Clegg and for Karletta the puppygirl, and for the remembrance of Tom Dove. I came here to battle against you, John Barleycorn, but now I realise…I have come here to ask you to save us.’

  A lifetime passing. And then, eventually…

  ‘Do you know the saddest thing, Sibyl?’ In a blue voice, tinged with sorrow, Barleycorn was now resigned to the passing moment.

  ‘Tell me the saddest thing,’ I answered.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m alive or not.’

  ‘I think that you are.’

  ‘Of all the creatures around this table, you are the most alive. You have proved that fact. Sometimes it gets so difficult…’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘To be only told.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘To be a trail of smoke in the mind only.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘So this is human life, at its best? I wonder…’

  I pushed the beetle even deeper into Persephone’s stomach. She struggled weakly against the planting. ‘I could kill your wife with this Dodo,’ I said to Barleycorn. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  Barleycorn came up to attack my Belinda’s body, but Coyote and the Jewel were now released from the trance. Barleycorn had grown weak from the battle; with too much confusion and too many stories to recollect, the dream-master was now letting loose his prisoners. Coyote easily took a hold of the Barleycorn’s body, squeezing him between giant paws.

  ‘Please…be gentle,’ Barleycorn pleaded from his capture. ‘What else can I offer?’

  Persephone fell into slumber under the influence of the Dodo beetle.

  ‘A cure for Jewel?’ I said.

  ‘And for all the fellow sufferers, no doubt, you little worm?’

  ‘You could do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t insult me.’ His eyes blazing. ‘I know when a story is complete. Please…give me that insect. I am tired, very tired of the waiting, and the dream grows cold around me. Let my wife go free.’

  ‘You’ll let me return? You’ll stop the fever?’

  ‘You would have to face Columbus. The King of Cabs won’t be keen to give up his new map.’

  ‘We’ll do what is necessary.’

  ‘It would mean keeping my wife from the real world.’

  ‘She can’t survive there, anyway, Barleycorn. You know that now.’

  ‘I know that now. The Dodos are too strong.’ He gazed longingly at Persephone. ‘Of course, her mother will be very angry. Demeter…well, she wouldn’t like her sweet Persephone to stay rooted in the mere dream. Demeter is very powerful, but also very stupid; she has a rather limited vision, I’m afraid. She likes the idea of her daughter making flowers in reality, despite the fact that reality will damage her daughter. That was the latest deal we made, you see. One-third of the year in Vurt, two-thirds in reality. You would have to fight Demeter as well as Columbus. You would have to persuade them both. Be prepared…there is only one way through the wood, and you have already taken it. I made your incoming trip rather easy, but returning…I wouldn’t relish that battle myself. Without my help you would be stranded. Perhaps a deal can be struck?’

  ‘Where is this Demeter?’ I asked him. Persephone had fallen quite still under the Dodo’s lingering presence.

  ‘You make up the storie
s…and yet you don’t know the stories,’ Barleycorn continued. ‘Demeter is everywhere, in all things green and cultivated; she lives in the dream and the dreamer. The Vurt and the real, both provide her with nourishment. She is stronger than I am. She is the Goddess of Corn. Why, even your dim-witted Christians still make hay for her, every harvest; tiny models they fashion. Quite, quite pathetic.’

  ‘You would really cure Jewel?’

  ‘There’s only one way that can happen. In reality he will die in two days’ time.’

  ‘Please, not that.’

  ‘You would have to lose him, anyway. He has eaten, Coyote also. They are mine now. Really, my good woman, I do believe that we have reached stalemate in the game. In order for Jewel to survive, it would mean him staying here with me. Only in the dream could I cure such an advanced fever-case. And that would involve exchange rates.’

  ‘Anything.’ I pulled the black beetle of my Unbeknownst world free from Persephone’s body. She stirred a little, and then more than a little. ‘I will always reside within this insect, this virus,’ I said. ‘And you will never reach me there. Never. And whenever I need to fight against you, this beetle will always be willing to close you down.’