Subvision

by Andrew McEwan

  ‘Lucky we got here in time,’ one mutant said, wringing blood from the hem of his robe.

  Another poked among the carnage. ‘Have you seen the eyes?’ he said. ‘Where's an eye? Ah, got one. Watch.’ He gently pressed the point of his reddened blade into the eye which obligingly popped life a golf ball in a fire. The mutants laughed, high on lust and victory.

  ‘And the intestines,’ another added. ‘They make great bungy ropes. My old man used to tell me how he jumped off over the furnace with one tied to his ankle.’

  She arched her back and groaned...

  ‘Hey, Scherzo!’ A grinning face wafted before him. ‘Hey, you can get up now, it's over. We saved your life again!’

  ‘Leave him alone; you'll never reach him in that limbo.’

  The lights extinguished.

  ‘Fucking witches.’

  ‘Mind your language.’

  ‘Ugh?’

  ‘There are ladies present.’

  The curtains drawn.

  ‘Best not to hang around here too long.’

  ‘Right, there'll be more where this came from.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  The imperfect blackness, the darkness flawed.

  ‘Do we carry him?’

  ‘Suppose we'll have to.’

  ‘No, he'll walk. Somebody get behind and push.’

  The fabulous deformed.

  68

  Staples' hideout was a fifth floor attic on Westgate Road. I knew this from sources, namely starlings, who arranged themselves on ledges and windowsills and so had a natural empathy, in all but cuisine, with fat cats. The starlings in winter assembled in defoliated trees, lending them, sunk in graveyards, sweating souls, the silhouettes of summer leaves.

  At grave risk myself I clambered up a cast-iron drainpipe once painted green and peered through the gritty dormer window. Inside was a mattress stuffed with feathers (which the starlings hadn't mentioned, having little sympathy for ducks) and a candle. The orange was nowhere visible, not to be seen, but on advice from the aviators I climbed to the roof proper, discovering there a forest of chimneys, skylight lakes, slate mountainsides. Weeds grew in ragged profusion under the early spring sunshine and the traffic sounds were muted. Straddling an old tyre I inadvertently stepped on something that crunched with the volume of plastic cups. I grimaced, expecting I'd betrayed my existence. I cautiously raised by runner beans, and there, smashed on the bubbled felt, was a Sugarpuff. From the crunch it made I guessed the cat to be nearby; it was that fresh, this cereal bauble since defunct. I had no wish to speak with Staples, not being able, in all conscience, to put words in his mouth. No, I merely wished to eavesdrop on his thoughts.

  Dozing, car sounds transmuted into bumble-bees. Austin Pearce had brought with him to Formalhaut cardboard boxes full of paperback novels, plastic bin liners full of old postcards, imitation leather suitcases full of 45's. There was nowhere to plug the record player in. He could run it off the ship's battery and did for a while, but was understandably nervous of draining its vital power, as he had no spare and the only way of charging the battery was to blast round the solar system two or three times, which used precious fuel. Staples, disguised as a pot plant on the villa's cluttered balcony, observed the newcomer in his dilemma. The orange, who'd made a discreet tour of Pearce's belongings to ascertain their various fixed functions, saw himself as the obvious solution, but had decided to wait and watch before interrupting. After all, it was disconcerting to find objects of a single purpose attached to your favourite hillside. The idea of such permanence Stapes had still to digest. But, regardless of non-axial/orbital rotation, Staples had plenty of time.

  On the rooftop the cat yawned, a bar of Galaxy in one paw and chocolate stains on his T-shirt.

  A starling lit on his furred shoulder and stuck its curious beak in his ear. I'd asked the bird this favour, interested to learn what went on in that transmogrified skull.

  The starling glanced in my direction, puzzled. I gestured to the bird and it swooped across the tiles to land on my upraised knee.

  ‘Well?’

  The starling shuffled uncomfortably. I wasn't going to like what it had to report.

  I stared at the bird impatiently.

  We had a problem here. It lifted its speckled wings. There was a monkey in there, it told me, eating peanuts.

  69

  Scherzo Trepan's mind poked its metaphorical head round the figurative jamb at the instigation of strong coffee.

  ‘Three sugars,’ the grinning said. ‘Drink.’

  The pounding in his ears was external. Grateful for that, he sipped the restorative brew. ‘Don't tell me...’ he began, losing track.

  The grinning grinned. ‘You didn't ask.’

  They were alone in a cramped room of machinery. Aluminium ducts and copper wires intertwined, passing through four walls, ceiling and floor. A single muggy oil lamp hung from the door handle. The grinning scraped his three feet.

  ‘Wow,’ said Scherzo; ‘that was something.’

  ‘That was Hell,’ qualified his companion. ‘Ever read Dante?’

  ‘The Inferno? Never.’

  ‘The Divine Comedy,’ whispered the mutant. ‘It has a happy ending - in Heaven, that is.’

  ‘I didn't know.’ Scherzo was perplexed.

  The grinning nodded sternly. ‘Trash,’ he said. ‘More coffee?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  A Thermos was produced. ‘Archie got a fright, peering in your skull while you were out.’

  ‘Hmm?’ He drank, the pounding machinery familiar. ‘This is a pumping station.’

  ‘And you've been in one before,’ stated his host. ‘I know; that much Archie was able to tell me before the vacuum between your ears threatened to suck him in.’

  Scherzo licked his teeth.

  ‘You don't exist,’ the mutant explained. ‘At least not when you're unconscious. Sleeping, say. It's my guess you slip off somewhere. Perhaps a double life?’

  Scherzo inflated his cheeks. ‘I don't follow.’

  ‘You wouldn't.’

  Scherzo drained the moulded plastic cup. His gums were sore. ‘What else did Archie find out?’

  ‘Only that you're a seasoned traveller, whether you know it or not. Archie finds it easier when you're half awake, drowsy at best, like when we pulled you from the storm drain that first time. But you talk in your sleep.’

  ‘I do? What about?’

  ‘Oh, all kinds of things. Nonsense, mostly: monsters, jungles, spaceships, penguins. All kinds of things.’

  Scherzo didn't know what to think. Did he dream in words? ‘I never knew that,’ he said quietly. ‘No-one ever told me.’

  ‘What's to tell? We all do it.’

  ‘Yeah, but it's strange; like having someone else inside you trying to get out. Makes you wonder who you're betrayed.’

  The grinning rolled his eyes. Scherzo had to look away. The door cracked along its imperfect seam, disturbing the lamp, shifting patterns of light (yellow) and shade (brown). A blistered hand held a folded piece of paper which the grinning mutant accepted. Reading, his rubber lips moved.

  Scherzo asked what was in the note.

  The mutant showed him, but he couldn't decipher the symbols.

  ‘Time to go, Scherzo.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  A contorted expression of surprise. ‘I thought you were in charge?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘So the note says.’

  Scherzo tugged on his chin. The machinery hummed.

  Scherzo opened the door and stepped outside.

  But he wasn't outside. There were no trees, no birds, no clouds and no sky; instead, a soot-walled corridor, a mesh catwalk, ductwork and electrical insulation. There was no sign of the mutants. The grinning emerged with the lamp, uncowled. Scherzo wondered who or what he was supposed to be in charge of. Faintly, in the metal distance, could be heard mechanical sobs and la
mentations. Echoes rippled through uprights, pushed along by blurred fans, mixed with burnt odours from the furnace. He failed to recognize the corridor. The pumping station was one of many, a number for which Scherzo had no total. His memory of the incinerator plant was patchy. And the incinerator plant, he felt sure, had grown.

  Or maybe it was always larger than he'd realized. Was it even possible to appreciate such dimensions?

  ‘This way,’ he asserted, walking.

  The resistance extinguished the lamp and followed close behind, happy enough with the weak undersea light provided by the caged bulbs of the grimy ceiling. He kept one eye on Scherzo while the other roamed freely, checking their surroundings. A few brothers had volunteered to go on ahead; striplings mostly, young and hot-headed, brought up on stories of luminous vampires and water-shy malignant spirits. The witches had been their first kill. Drunk now on the ease of that victory they were eager for more, impossible to restrain, bug-eyed and desperate to confront bigger prey, to pare those same down to pocket size that they might keep them to impress their girlfriends, part of the age old route of finding one's way into one's belle's knickers. The grinning knew better, having ventured closer to the edge than any living. He comprehended the luminosity as few others did. You weren't required to be brave. You needed no thirsty sword or axe forged by dwarfs in the crystal-lined bowels of mountains. No white-bearded sorcerer was of any practical use in a tight corner. No, you just had to be sufficiently crazy or stupid in the first instance to even attempt such a perilous undertaking; and in the second, lucky enough to escape with just your trousers on fire, your skin unflayed and your wits no less intact. To that end, accompanying Scherzo Trepan seemed like a reasonable bet. Anyway, it was a family obligation. His grandfather's grandfather, so his grandfather said, had once succeeded in tying together the scorching shoelaces of Satan, stealing one of his horns when the father of lies fell flat on his face. The grinning carried that horn with him now. There were holes bored in its hollow length and a silver mouthpiece attached. To sound that horn in Lucifer's ear, he was told, was to deafen the goat fiend and lay him vulnerable.

  Vulnerable to what, this mutant was at a loss to add. Neither had his father's father known, as his grandfather's father, the son of that great hero, had been deaf himself, and his father had omitted the detail from his death scroll. Such mysteries were part and parcel of legend. Another was how the horn contrived to remain in the family's possession, for it was borne away with each son at the time of his choosing and presumably lost with that son, the eldest, in the pit. Yet somehow it was always found under the pillow of the adventurer's heir; a sure sign of the father's failure, that this latest quest for vanquishment had come to an end in presumably grisly circumstances, that it was now up to the succeeding generation to make vulnerable the polluter of liberty and progenitor of injustice, the loathsome Eater Of Souls.

  Successive defeats, however, bred rumour. It was suggested by some, this legend, to be a gross untruth, that not one of his forebears had ever journeyed to the deeper levels. More likely, they argued, these so called heroes had left for the surface to perform as extras in film and television dramas, having first stashed the horn, an obvious fake, under their son's pillow, that their fame and their family's status might endure. This argument was substantiated with vague photographs and old movie posters washed down the sewers. But the grinning would not be swayed by such detractors. He had the utmost faith in the perspicacity and truthfulness of his illustrious ancestors and was not about to be convinced otherwise. No amount of spurious information would keep him from his weird. And so he marched in three-time, fingering the unnatural instrument stuffed through his belt, confident, despite the burgeoning heat, of a successful conclusion to this latest outing and the eternal gratitude of his brothers.

  Scherzo halted at a stair and peered down. The grinning joined him and saw that it wound down forever. To every side of them bar one rose a wall. The stair did not climb above this level, making Scherzo's first decision since being - on the strength of a piece of paper, source unknown - put in charge of the resistance - presently numbering two, himself included - simple.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  The grinning said nothing.

  The mad man, for surely he was, our Scherzo, who wasn't at home when the mind-reader last knocked, shrugged. The mesh of the catwalk waffled the soles of his feet; a welcome change then, to mount a stair whose steps were merely pimpled and hatched.

  It was an attractive red glow into which they descended. An indeterminable mist billowed up the well. Scherzo was undecided whether the gentle air-stream bore the scents of spring or the pungent odour of machine oil. The grinning's sandals rapped a strange tune, whereas his bulging mouth was silent.

  Scherzo set aside his thoughts and wandered.

  Once, as a child, before Annie's death or Wilson's arrival, he had been taken with the uncontrollable urge to fly. For weeks, every day after school, he'd searched the streets, the fields, the park, the woods for feathers, collecting thousands of bright and dull plumes, varied in pattern and size. Then during the Easter holiday, Scherzo had sat for hours in his wardrobe painstakingly gluing the feathers to his small white body, until he was completely covered, head to foot in variegated aerial fronds. Around four o'clock he sneaked out the back door hidden under a blanket, two holes cut for his eyes. He pushed his bike along the rubbish-strewn side passage (windscreen, pallets, traffic cones) and rode off up the road, careful not to get any ankle feathers caught in the chain. He headed in the direction of the water tower from whose giddy heights it was possible on a day like this to see clear across the city to the shimmering blue line of the ocean. He planned to circle Grey's monument, take in the football ground, weave between the five bridges, buzz the Co-op and land back in his garden in time for Blue Peter and jam sandwiches. And if he was especially good and remembered to say please and thank-you and not put his knife in his mouth his mother might let him stay up to watch the Goodies while she did the ironing. Perfect. Absolutely. The wind was ideal, Scherzo reckoned. The sky hung invitingly. He climbed outside the railing and perched on the concrete ledge, his heart thumping in his chest, reverberating through the cast-iron painted green over grey over blue over green, etc. Far below his bike resembled an insect, the blanket with the holes cut in a moth the insect had captured in its spokes and crossbar. Pigeons alighted. Clouds shaped into crocodiles and lizards. It grew cooler and the first drops of rain speckled his eyelids. Scherzo braced himself, toes curled, lips moistened, arms outstretched. He made a few trial wafts, flapped his second-hand wings, not noticing the displaced feathers, the loosening of his flour and water adhesive. This was it, the culmination of weeks of studious research and development, the actualization of his fondest desire. Scherzo Trepan took a last deep breath and prepared to fly.

  But didn't.

  Neither did he fall.

  ‘Chicken,’ said a voice behind. ‘Want a push?’

  Scherzo was frozen, glue dripping, feathers leaving him behind on the ledge as they fluttered blithely away.

  ‘Come on, kid, let's go home,’ Annie said, ruffling his slicked-down hair. ‘I've got some new rocks to show you. Stories, too. I fell asleep in the woods and had the strangest dream.’

  Annie smuggled her little brother upstairs on their return, running the bath and fetching his clothes. She even let him have the extra sandwich, although in cutting the orange cake she had made the largest slice her own.

  Now, tramping the endless steps, Scherzo was painfully aware of just how much he missed her. He'd come to rely on his sister and her colour-laden tales, the way she would always have some ready excuse for him or could be relied on without prompting to produce a convincing alibi. Annie had forged his sick notes and clipped his toenails, made sure he said his prayers. But her later mistrust of Wilson Hives had marked a division between them.

  And then she'd died.

  And then there was only Scherzo and Wils
on, Wilson banging on the window and Scherzo working underground.

  And then there was Scherzo out of his mind, whether in or out of his head, in the river, on his way to hospital, watching television as aliens landed, plants grew, as rain fell and crops thrived, as deserts turned lush and green, people fat, governments itchy...

  And what else? Scherzo's was a fragile existence, depending as it did on the verifiable craziness of others.

  He might go at any time, the doctors told him. He didn't believe them. Night or day, at any hour, they added dourly, these self-styled experts, already plotting his post-mortem, exercising their purple crayons. He was ill, dying.

  But survived.

  He could see no end to this spiral stair, either.

  ‘Stop a while,’ suggested the mutant. ‘Think about it.’

  Scherzo thought.

  ‘Something's amiss. I'm sure of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The mutant shut his eyes and gazed inside his head a while, looking for inspiration, sought and found an idea, captured it.

  Scherzo, meditating with equal vigour, was none the wiser.

  The grinning leaned over the rail, indicating Scherzo to do likewise. Rummaging in his loose robe he located and removed the Thermos. ‘What do you suppose will happen if I drop this?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Scherzo answered. ‘It'll vanish,’ he added, unsure. The thickening red illumination transformed his companion's nose into a plump strawberry.

  The flask was dropped. It didn't fly. It bounced and broke internally on the unseen floor.

  The expedition leader, Scherzo Trepan, frowned contemptuously at the blushing plastic cylinder, the Thermos having clattered, spun and slowed a scant two feet below his blunted toes.

  The grinning's grin was enlarged. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘Knew what?’ Scherzo wasn't happy; he felt left behind.

  ‘The stair doesn't wind on forever, it just appears to.’ This new grin stretched from ears to ears.

  ‘You mean it's an illusion?’

  ‘No,’ the mutant replied; ‘it just appears to be, inasmuch as the steps are actually here.’

  Scherzo folded his arms impatiently.

  ‘The stair's turning like a corkscrew,’ clarified the mutant resistance fighter. ‘As we walk down it turns in the opposite direction. Slowly at first, till we near the bottom, thereafter matching our pace exactly, while the red light deepens and the mist obscures the view above. Quite clever really.’