by Tim Kindberg
“Why is this a ‘we’ all of a sudden? It’s me who needs to go through — in — under — oh whatever it is. Then perhaps I’ll be able to understand what has happened.”
“Or you’ll just forget again. We would be stronger together.”
“What’s in it for you?”
Deobia looked unsteady again.
“Are you all right?” Akimbe took a step towards him.
“Yes. It’s nothing. I told you, I’m looking for something as well. Perhaps I’ll find whatever it is there. What have we got to lose?”
****
The chamber gave Akimbe a peculiar feeling. No one was there, unless they were hiding. And yet he couldn’t help feeling there was an awareness — he didn’t know how else to put it — as though all the pieces of furniture lying randomly around were conscious of what took place there. The boy and the taller youth stood around the carpet like people waiting for something to happen that might never come.
“Well, what do we do?” said Deobia after waiting for Akimbe to make a move.
“We lie on the carpet, I think, like Chemchi’s shadow. The carpet will pull us in, you’ll see. You go there.” Akimbe pointed to a spot next to Chemchi’s shadow. “And I’ll go the other side of her.”
“Why?”
“That way, maybe we’ll both arrive close to where she arrived.”
“Why not go on top of her shadow, then?”
“I don’t know why but the thought gives me the creeps. Supposing we get mixed up? But then again there is a jumble of shadows on top of shadows — of people and rats and mice and who knows what else. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson by now. Sent word around.” It was a joke but neither of them laughed. “And speaking of creatures, where is Ibtissam?”
In answer to his question, the cat who had been following him around stared back at him, her eyes lit by the candles, when he spun round to look. She was sitting still on her haunches like a plaster figure atop a bookcase with no books. She knew by now to stay away from the carpet. She showed her fangs and let out a cry.
“Do you want to go first?” said Deobia.
“We’ll go together. I’m just going to have to trust you, I suppose, to come in with me.” He had Chemchi’s torch and his mother’s bracelet. “Come.”
He knelt beside Chemchi’s shadow and motioned to Deobia to do the same on the other side of her. The threads reached out for them at once.
“One, two, three … lie down.” The carpet weaved itself over, stitching its blackness until their forms died away, flattened to shadows. Ibtissam swished her tail, watching the gold tracery begin its slow sewing around them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
LIKE WHEN YOU’VE hit your funny bone, only all over his body, Akimbe felt the tiny tentacles of the carpet suck and grip at him. “What have I got to lose? What have I got to lose? What have I got to lose?” His own voice echoed back to him in a loop. It wasn’t black, as he had imagined, far from it: a searing white light blinded him as much with his eyes closed as open. He felt stupid. Idiotic. He was putting himself at risk. For Chemchi, someone he had known for only a matter of days, launching himself into this sickening clinging and pulling of the threads. Entering who knew what world with Deobia, someone he had met only that day. “You must be mad. You must be mad. You must be mad.” His voice looped on. He blundered into everything he did, following his nose. Why couldn’t he think things through, be systematic like Chemchi? “Nothing to lose. Nothing to lose. Nothing to lose.” His voice was sharp and clear but outside himself and not, as he first thought, inside his panicking mind. “Idiot. Stupid. Akimbe idiot. Stupid.”
And Deobia’s voice was also there, somewhere to his left. But it was muffled, strangled in the rushing of the threads. Tears streamed from Akimbe’s eyes in the blinding whiteness. But something was changing. The carpet’s threads were leaving the front of his body. His nose became freed although it was numb from their tugging and clawing. Then his cheeks became free. His eyes. His knees and shoulders. His feet. He was emerging. It should have been downwards, the way he faced when he lay on the carpet. But it was the other way up. He could feel his limbs beginning to kick and wiggle as though they had a life of their own. And he was on his back. Gravity was pulling at him. The white light was softening, yellowing, moving to the centre of his vision, becoming … the sun. Yes, he was looking upwards. And two faces had appeared, looking down at him as he thrashed his limbs around like a new-born baby.
One of the two, a woman, spoke. “Look! Two of them!”
“Two more to induct,” said the other, a man. He didn’t look happy about the prospect.
“That’s three in just a few days. We should give thanks.” Said the woman. “There, there.” Akimbe’s legs and arms had a life of their own, swinging wildly as though he were an insect on his back. He was out in the open, in what appeared to be a desert, lying on the sand. He looked to his left and there was Deobia. Who was still.
“What’s wrong with that one? He’s not moving.” They had turned their attention to Deobia, who was wearing his goggles over his eyes. “Search me,” said the man.
“Deobia!” Akimbe had trouble knowing how loud his voice was. He thought he might be shouting. “Deobia! Are you all right?”
Deobia stirred, raised his goggles into their usual position on his hair, and propped himself up on his elbows to looked at the man and woman.
“Oh my!” said the woman. “He’s not a new one!”
“He’s not a new one either.” Deobia spoke to her calmly as though nothing strange were happening at all. “He’s been through before. Help me.”
Deobia held Akimbe’s right arm and leg, the man his other leg and the woman his other arm. His movements had little force, like a baby. His limbs gradually stopped. They released him finally, and he was able to move them.
The woman stroked his forehead. “There, there,” she said. “It’s all right now.”
“You’re too soft,” said the man. “They’re trouble, I can tell.” He turned to the boy and the youth. “If you’re not new ones, how come you’ve passed through our gates?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Akimbe. He raised himself in the shifting sand. His legs felt as though they belonged to someone else. He turned to Deobia. “What in the name of my family is going on? What was all that about ‘new ones’? Your legs weren’t kicking around. Does that mean you’ve had lots of practice at this?” Deobia just looked at the ground.
“Stop bickering,” said the man. “We don’t want you here if you’re going to cause trouble. You’ve no business going through the gates, either of you. However you managed it.”
“Which gates?” said Akimbe. “You know all this, don’t you.”
“Look behind you,” said Deobia.
And there were gates, made of ironwork, huge and elaborate, standing by themselves in the middle of the hulking sand dunes all around them. They were like the relic of a building that had sunk without trace.
“I can see something through them.” Akimbe walked up.
“Don’t touch!” the man and the woman and Deobia all shouted in unison.
Peering through a gap he tried to focus his eyes. There was something beyond the iron bars. No desert sand. No sky. Just a random arrangement of bright patches swirling and floating slowly in a scratchy darkness, as he’d seen in the gap between the curtains when they left the chamber, Akimbe thought: like what he saw when he looked at a bright light and closed his eyes. Yes, that was it. He closed his eyes. Opened them again. It was exactly the same beyond the gates. Only it was real. He wanted to put his hand through to try and touch the lights but the tracery of ironwork was too dense. He walked around the side of the gate. Every step took much effort because of the sand giving beneath his feet. There he saw only desert. He went further to look back from the other side. He saw the man and the woman and Deobia, and the dunes behind them. When he walked back round to the
m and looked through the gates again, there were the splotchy lights. He closed his eyes again. Exactly the same lights, complete with the after-image of the sun above. But these were hanging beyond the gates, as if tempting him to reach through to them.
“Deobia, in the name of everything that’s sacred, tell me what’s going on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
DEOBIA STOOD TALL in his long robe. His hair, even with the goggles pressed to it, added at least six inches to his frame. The look he returned was placid and alien. Knowing but not seeing. It frightened Akimbe. A hot dry wind blew steadily against his face. Dunes towered around them, with smaller dunes amongst them, formed by an absent wind. Deobia looked strangely as though he belonged here. They were in a silent wilderness. The hot sand burned at his sandalled feet.
“In my experience, Akimbe, the sacred counts for nothing. I can’t really explain. I’ve tried to explain it to myself many times, believe me. It’s like a combination of what people call heaven and hell. Everything is stuck in a narrow slice of time like a moment after death or before birth.”
“You lied to me. You’ve been here before. But you could remember it from the other side, from Marrakech, couldn’t you. Why should I listen to anything you say? I’m not dead. Look,” He tore at his sleeve and shook his arm about. “So it’s not hell. And we grow in wombs, from nothing. There’s no before.”
“No conception? We already existed. We were somewhere, if only an idea..”
“No, we become. After our parents. From nothing. We were nowhere.”
Deobia’s calm infuriated Akimbe. “All right, all right,” Deobia said. “Whatever you choose to believe. This place is an anomaly. Everything’s got mixed up. It’s as though a circuit has broken, or there was a bug in software. Except that this is a bug in reality.”
Akimbe looked blank. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What is a circuit? Software? Of course there are bugs in the ground, in reality. Talk sense, will you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, either,” said the man. “I just know that you’re here and you have to be processed.”
“We’re not going to be processed,” said Deobia. “We’ve been processed. We’re not new ones, remember?”
“But you’ve come through the gates, haven’t you?”
“Did we?” said Akimbe.
“Yes,” the man said. “We watched you.”
“You walked right on through, closed them behind you, lay on the ground on your backs. Just like they all do.” Said the woman. “You looked like a nice pair of boys.”
“So, as I was saying,” the man was getting more and more irritated. “You’ve come through the gates but there’s no paperwork for you. We need to do the paperwork. To say who you are.” His tone was one he’d use to explain things to a simple child.
“We are new ones,” said Deobia. ”
“You’ve just agreed you’re not new ones!”
“We are and we aren’t. We’ve come through the gates haven’t we? So, on that basis we’re new ones, right?”
“Yes, but…”
“But we’ve been here before.”
“Yes, you’ve been here before. But …”
“So we’re not new ones. Do you really have a form for our situation?”
“I don’t care about forms for your situation, I care only about the form.”
“And what will you say on the form?” asked Akimbe.
“Name. Date. Time. Place.”
“‘Place’? How many such places are there?” said Akimbe.
“Just the one, as far as we know.” The man looked at the woman.
“As far as we know,” she agreed.
“So what’s the point of recording it?” said Akimbe.
“I just do as I’m told,” said the man. “And I write down ‘by the gates’”.
“Very well,” said Akimbe, “and what about the name. What will you write for us?”
“Why I’ll give you names. Everyone has to have a name. Here,” he opened a ledger and showed its handwritten contents to Akimbe. On the left were female names, on the right, male. A neat line was drawn through the first names on each side, to show they had been used. More male names had been used up than females.
“So, you’ll be Arkenthal753, and him…” he nodded towards Deobia, “he’s Orethon4976.”
“No, I’m Akimbe and he’s Deobia. We already have names. We are already people.”
“You are now. You think you are. But you won’t be. You won’t be you, I mean.”
“What do you mean? How could I not be I?”
“Don’t ask me. But that’s what happens here. You could wake up tomorrow couldn’t you and everything would look familiar, nothing strange, and yet you were different. And how would you know?”
“The people around me would know.”
“Only if they knew you. Here, nobody will know you.”
“You talk of ‘here’ and ‘people’. There’s nothing here but sand and the gates. What people?”
The man was too concerned about his ledger of names to answer. “Anyway, look what you’ve done. I’ve crossed out your names now. I’ve wasted them.”
“It doesn’t matter, give them to someone else or use others, there are plenty more in your book.”
“Plenty more!” he looked at the woman. “Did you hear that? Plenty more! And what does this boy think I’m gong to do when I run out of names, eh? I’ve got just six pages left, look.” He counted out the pages for Akimbe.
“So make up some more names. In another book.”
The man snorted in disbelief. “How could I? I can’t just go and make up new names, what would they be?”
“May I look at the female names?” Deobia said. “What about this last one, ‘Erewhon9’, the last one through?”
“My goodness me, she was trouble too. Kept saying she already had a name. Chem … Chem-something. Right bunch of trouble these new ones,” he looked at the woman who supplied her agreement with a vigorous nodding, “These new ones. I’ll tell you. They’re not what they used to be. World’s going to the dogs.”
Akimbe said, “Where did she go?”
“We processed her. Like we always do. Come along with me,” said the man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THEY FOLLOWED THE man and woman, trudging with difficulty up the side of a dune that seemed to rise forever. And at the top an extraordinary sight met them. There was a place stuck in the desert nearby. It looked like an old city, but as though someone had taken a knife, cut away all but the heart, and dropped it in the dunes. It was a fragment, cleanly cut out, without any attempt to make sense of the buildings. They just began abruptly, in the middle of rooms and courtyards, and everything else beyond that was desert. Small dunes had shored up against it. And Akimbe saw that, dotted in the desert much further away, were other places — no, fragments of places — as though they had been planted in the same way. They were scattered around as far as he could see. And each had a sun above it — at least, a burning orange disc that could have been a sun. Except they came and went like broken fluorescent lamps. Only the sun directly above them, above the fragment nearby, was constant.
Akimbe spoke to Deobia under his breath. “What on earth is that?”
“You understand as much of this as I do.” Deobia’s voice was sounding further away every time he spoke.
“But you’re not acting surprised by any of it. You pretended you hadn’t been here before but it’s obvious that you have. And unlike me you remember it, don’t you.”
“It didn’t seem relevant to tell you.”
“You’re at home here. You didn’t land on your back struggling like a baby, like somebody just born here the way I did. No, you lay there calmly like someone who belonged here. These people,” he pointed at the man and the woman, “why, you were positively bored by their nonsense and you just stood there and let me make a fool of myself asking them questions and hearing their silly answers. How c
ome you can remember all this but I can’t?”
“Just because it’s familiar, it doesn’t mean I understand it. How could anyone understand how the buildings ahead of us just start in the middle, all chopped out of something bigger? And there are stranger things inside, believe me. Anyway, now that you’re back, isn’t any of it familiar to you, as well?”
“Not at all. It makes my skin crawl. Are we going to be safe here?”
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“You’ll see.”
The man and woman led them to a door right on the edge of the city fragment. They stepped from the sand onto the tiled floor of a large room that had been halved diagonally, the other half being the desert they had come from. At first sight, it looked as though someone had demolished everything beyond the fragment, and then very neatly cleaned the debris away. But the edges weren’t broken and jagged, as you would expect if the remainder had been destroyed. They were smooth but blurry at the same time. Akimbe couldn’t hold his eyes upon the edge. It was as though the edge was visually slippery. His eyes slid off it whenever he tried to see what was there.
Through the door was an entire room. It was mercifully cool inside. The man went to sit behind a desk at one end of it. The woman stood beside him, looking lovingly at Akimbe and Deobia. The room was otherwise completely empty. The man produced two sheets of paper.
“Now, let’s see, Arkenthal753 and Orethon4976. What are you missing?”
Akimbe looked at Deobia. “Missing?”
“Yes, new ones are always missing something. Thinking of something that isn’t already here. Ridiculous! Now, look, I don’t want any more of your nonsense. You came through the gates. Are you going to deny that now? Your friend here,” he nodded at Deobia, “your friend here … there’s something a bit funny about him but you were on your back, legs and arms waving in the air, just like you’re supposed to be.”
The woman, who seemed to have been waiting for this moment, suddenly opened her arms, strode round to Akimbe and hugged him with her head on his shoulder.