Nemonymous Night Part 3

CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea's got legs, after all.

O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that's organising trips based on Jules Verne?

CL: Yup. Don't like holidays myself. They seem like a ch.o.r.e half the time. I just enjoy staying in my flat and mouldering away. (Laughs) O: Well, I know someone who went on one of those trips. They do exist, I'm sure, based on what he says.

CL: Who's that?

O: That friend of Mike from his office. Greg, is it? He comes in here often on his own now-Mike's gone north.

CL: Has he?

O: Yes, like all those others. Anyway, that trip Greg told me about-it was a submarine run by someone acting as Captain Nemo. But not an ordinary submarine, that Nautilus sort of was, as I understand it. This submarine had huge vanes on top like a helicopter-and it churned down through the sea-water scattering fish and so forth in a great big stirpool!

CL: Sounds decidedly ungreen!

O: To say the least-but apparently the vanes were a protective system as much as they were propulsion. Deep down where Nemo took all the pa.s.sengers and taught all those trippers about really deep things, quite beyond you and I. And green is the thing, indeed, in many ways, dark green, right down there... emerald scenes, with emerald beasts of the under-sea. Frondy. So Greg said.

CL: I thought it was all blue, the sea.

O: So did I. But at the deepest-down there-are giant green squid that have civil wars, it seems. Tribes of the same breed wrestling in mounds of black mud. Absolutely mad.

CL: Black as well as green?

O: Apparently so. Nemo called these squid vermin "ancient kings of besmirched sperm-banks." Greg remembered that as a line of old poetry.

CL: Whales? Sharks? They're in that same poem, I think.

O: Well, mutant versions, apparently. I didn't understand most of it. Greg seemed to know all about it, but he'd actually seen all these things. Seeing is believing, isn't it?

CL: Not so sure. Probably brings us back to your 'fixing' idea. Fictioning, similar, I dunno. You need a kiln for baking reality! (Laughs.) Others who were listening laughed, too, as Ogdon bought another round of drinks, thus squandering his pub profits. Crazy Lope spat into his drink for luck.

O: By the way, I had a funny dream last night. I knew it was a dream, without having to fix any true waking life that came before and after.

CL: Oh yeh?

O: One part of the dream wasn't so clear-it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it-and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.

CL: Like Tardis? (Laughs.) O: Maybe, but it had a Lounge bar as well as a Public one. I went into the Public and started chatting with someone, though I can't remember who that was. I seemed to know this person, however. I owed him money, it seemed.

CL: A him then?

O: Yes, I'm sure it was a man. Anyway, I repaid with loose change. (Laughs.) A series of one p and half p coins. It couldn't have been much or I would have used notes. Probably. Anyway, as I say, to the point, one of the coins was a quarter p! Smaller even than a half p-so tiny you could hardly handle it. I then knew it must be a dream, as everyone knows that a quarter p coin doesn't exist in England and never did exist.

CL: Exactly. Half p coins don't exist now, but they once did. But never a quarter p. You're right.

O: Ah well, there are some truths to life one cannot doubt!

All laughed and nodded as more drinks were purchased. A few of the regulars wore flat caps and they decided to have a game of darts. The pub talk was evidently fizzling out for a while amid much merriment, yet mingled with worried private asides and surrept.i.tious glances.

If there were horror lurking somewhere-n.o.body would ever know for sure. Yet, deep down, this horror was aware of itself and, even without a mirror, it knew it had s...o...b..ry gums and long teeth and a face wider than its head. Not absurdly dreamlike but monstrously, nightmarishly real-just waiting for its time to come.

Beth's husband may not even have known his own name. He was nemonymous. Some of his friends recognised him and called him by a name they thought he was named. He was a working-cla.s.s lad recently grown into manhood-slight fuzz on his upper lip-with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming Beth's husband. Beth could easily have hen-pecked him to death because she was a strong, impatient character who paid no heed to her own original beauty and feared no spoiling of that beauty with any hard-nosed actions. In fact her face had become more pointy and as if scorched by a cold cutting East wind-whilst all the time it was her personality that had given the features this unwelcome cast. Her husband eventually became her right-hand man who defended her and somehow complemented her with the backdrop of his near-absence accentuating her presence. Not that he was a pushover. He had pub-going pals and a career in waste management, driving one of the firm's largest lorries through the city and using his slippery guile to prevent the Authorities discovering what sort of waste he was transporting to the coalfields. It is reckoned that his intrinsic nemonymity helped with both aspects of logistics and surrept.i.tiousness by making him able to drive skilfully under all radars, metaphorical or otherwise-and to dodge between the speed cameras... thus arriving in a timely fas.h.i.+on and in successful completion of the job. The envy of his colleagues. Thus, he was promoted-almost to Board level, but he still preferred to go AWOL and drive the lorries.

He met Arthur after Arthur grew up from being a child. They shared pints in The Third Floor-and not surprising since they both negotiated the city traffic in their own ways, one with a double-decker bus, the other with an articulated juggernaut. Arthur had a partner he called Amy and Beth's husband a wife he called Beth-but neither woman met each other so they never knew who the other one really was. This was strange as the two men were close friends and often talked about the old days that many had forgotten-and this forgetting was perhaps because either the dream sickness still prevailed but hiding its own history of pandemic or the dream sickness had abated allowing real memories to subsist instead.

Beth's husband, however, had secret vices. He didn't even recognise them himself, if that is the same thing as secrecy. He wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England-a hobby and a method of saving money. He had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which he leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread-knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with his hard-padded fingers: as if tidying a rhythm of growing patterns of thick surface-veined underlay: except this underlay was a surface-but surfaces were meant to be 'on top' as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. He wanted one of his special carpets to be beige-coloured to match some future required necessity of appearance, one that fitted in with a retrospective destiny. There were mounds of these vexed textures of surface: each a fire-wall-or, rather, fire-floor-as if he were readying them to serve as an insulation device that even time couldn't penetrate. A cover for the hawler. Only Beth's husband knew how important his task was-masquerading as a rather effeminate hobby for one of such hard-bitten working-cla.s.s background (or underground). Foregrounds were not even considered.

Edith Cole and Mr Clare controlled him from afar. But n.o.body now knew who they were or who they had once been.

Arthur, Amy and the other children had eventually reached the edge of the Northern Coalfields in search of the entrance to the vertical tunnel that would take them to...

It would take them nowhere. They knew this at heart, it is certain. The quest was for a quest, originally-yet now the quest had become this downward pit that led nowhere. An end in itself. The means to that end were just a subterfuge that contained their end like an insulation case around a live wire. "A fugue for a darkening city." Beyond the end, they knew there were no further ends. Otherwise they would have given up in sheer terror. Or they hoped so. It beggared belief to believe otherwise.

They were not old enough, thankfully, to realise they were too young to understand.

I stared at the screen wondering where I fitted into the schematic movements of the symphony. Not that I could hear any music at all. Silence.

The screen showed a clouded yellow surface, yet mottled with-if it were real-stains or signs of wear. Not yellow so much, I guess. Maybe beige. Not a uniform surface. Again, if it were real, it would bear perceptible b.u.mps or lumps in its fibre. Fibre? Or weave. Or web. Or net.

It is as if I had created this site with a number of codes: codes that began with and ended with . I went to shut it down because I felt myself threatened by it, as if it were sucking me into it like a fly.

Now, I know deep down who I was. Or I was in the process of creating who I was. I was about to enter the intermittent and unsmooth flow of action. The yellowy web, hopefully, was to be the firewall or firefloor to protect me (or anyone else following me) from the dire horror that was a lurker on or within the threads of my discursive being.

Mike, Susan and Beth had reached the edge of the city's Northern Coalfields at West Wednesday. They were not far behind the children. As they entered each suburb, they heard talk of the children's prior pa.s.sage through its streets, lifting manhole covers, peering into drainage/heating shafts, breaking into derelict houses to test the cellar floors and so forth.

Crazy Lope/Ogdon and Greg-calling themselves the Two and Half Musketeers-had reached the Left Foot of the city down south and were currently queuing up to buy tickets for the latest Jules Verne holiday-of-a-lifetime. Journey to the Centre of the Earth-The Enjoyable Way. Greg was to test it out for subsequent entertainment of his firm's clients. CL/O merely felt like a holiday.

Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide who I'd follow. I knew that Arthur and Amy would, at least, survive what was indeed to happen because it has already been reliably recorded that Arthur grew up to drive a bus and Amy to clean flats. As to the others-and myself-any survival was yet merely hearsay.

The coin dropped on its milled edge within a gutter's drainage slot.

Ogdon stared at the screen in his flat. He had started typing up his things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. "I am curious-yellow," he whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. He scribbled in his bright red Silvine 'memo book'. He was more a dreamer than a pub landlord, but he needed a proper job to bring in the beef-and why not combine that with his second love (drinking and indulging in pub talk)? Dreaming never brought in much money, even when one could turn the dreams into words. He actually wore a long cape when he was the dreamer-and called himself Crazy Lope. He wore non-descript clothes when working behind the bar, as differentiation. These days, Ogdon hardly worked in his own pub, for various reasons, and had got in a loc.u.m as a manager.

He spent much of most nights exploring (wandering)-mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city-areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, he imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fas.h.i.+oned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy. It was all good meat for his dreaming (he saw fiction as miraculously feeding the mult.i.tude) and these airports were much more efficacious in this regard than the large city-centre area of the covered market-now divorced from its secondary role as an Underground station. And more efficacious than the now disused Dry Dock where gargantuan s.h.i.+ps and liners used to arrive for riveting.

The western airport area-now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course-reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research. This one was in a place called Hawler-where was it?-in Kurdistan? Whether the city airports were connected with this middle eastern one in some way was uncertain, yet Ogdon believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface of the earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body... invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes' owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.

Ogdon reviewed his own dreams. The fiction could wait, as he shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of his yellow screen.

He was quite aware that there was not enough detail, not enough provenance and not even enough providence in whatever had by-pa.s.sed his mind. He recalled the city-centre zoo visit with some pleasure, but weighed down with equal displeasure bordering on dread. Had justice been done to this zoo? Mike was still not filled out as the real person he was. Some of the others had given a good shot at it and even gave a pa.s.sing impression of having deep feelings and understandable impulses or intuitive intentions: mixed intentions, some logical, others paradoxical. All of them were like this, except, perhaps, for Beth's husband. Ogdon at first thought Beth's husband was the wild card. Little did Ogdon know, however, that he should keep a beadier eye on one of the children. A bewitched child. Yet n.o.body seemed to have put a finger on this. Give them time for nailing down.

Ogdon sighed. Despite the coin tossing, he was still undecided which of the two parties to follow. Either one of the audit trails could hold the crucial clue as to the rest of it. He prepared himself for dreaming about the huge man-made flying-craft down south. Next, he made a stab at dreaming of the dark striated horizon of the bleak north, its coal-towers and clanking works, all st.i.tched skyward with the gigantic webby wings of real and living flying-craft.

First, he needed somehow to resolve the zoo visit. The much earlier clue as to Mike's "lorry-driver face" and his voracious approach to beefsteak were red herrings of the first water. Beth's husband was the lorry-driver (in waste management), after all. There was some confusion that Ogdon would never be able to resolve. Real people (as opposed to fictional ones) had real idiosyncracies and paradoxes that could never be conveyed by a dream or even by the near-photographic description of realities (because each description was imperfect by the nature of words): realities that were simply and inexorably realities, and nothing else. If people were such realities, then there was no way of imagining those realities-and this was because realities (by being real) were unimaginable. They kept avoiding Ogdon's flawed 'camera obscura' of a mind. And this applied to real things as well as to real people.

In the zoo, there had been a cage they all peered into with some trepidation. This scene had been left unreported, for whatever reason, but as things panned out, it gradually grew into view from a single atom of dread in one of the witnesses' minds. Poultry combined with beef in some complex miscegenation. In this cage was a truly ma.s.sive pulsing amorphousness with feathers tufting in all directions from each suppurating pore. He first saw it as black but, in retrospect, he knew it was white. He wondered if further hindsight might make it later look red like skinned meat. But, no. It was unutterably white. No amount of retrospection could change that, he knew. A noticeboard attached to the cage had identification: "Infinite Cuckoo". That was when they all decided unanimously to leave the zoo grounds by the exit turnstile. They'd pay anything to leave, even if it were more than the normal ticket price of a few p.

Well, in further hindsight, the creature wasn't infinite at all, Ogdon thought. It couldn't be contained in a cage if it were. Unless it was a bit of an infinity. The implications were too wild to deal with today.

And he returned to his desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up his screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation with which he would need to come to terms... eventually.

There was a liar among them.

But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they are lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. I have told lies in dreams, for example, and the character I felt myself to be from within the dream knew full well that he was telling lies, i.e. that I was telling lies-yet all this as seen from outside the dream after waking was yet another lie in a way, an untruth, a falsehood, because I could hardly then remember the details of the dream and I am now making up what happened in the dream just for an exercise in fancification... making conversation as it were... stringing words together to create an interesting scenario which I can later work up as a story for the dinner party I was later due to attend in real life.

Someone stared across at me over the table, winking in tune with the candles, as if she knew that I knew that she knew she was telling lies. Her face was a cutting one when she was interrupted or gainsaid. I could tell she had once been very pretty, but now her character intervened and made the face carry the ingredients of an underface like a bird pecking for worms. I recognised her from the dream in which the lies had started their concertina domino-rally from unreality into reality-crossing some bridge that linked untruth with truth.

"What is a liar?" she suddenly and unexpectedly asked, thus causing such a non-sequitur to become an intrinsic const.i.tuent or continuation of the prandial conversation that was already taking place before she again so skilfully interrupted it.

"A liar?" I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses-and using questions as answers, I'd realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.

I know that I am not a liar. I am perhaps the liar. I am in control of a dream in which everyone else is a partic.i.p.ant within that dream's ambit-an ambit I've allowed the dream to have. The liar is the one who makes what he does absolutely true. This the knack that I now settle down with as a comforting prop, while sleep overwhelms the dream with its own brand of seeping darkness. It doesn't matter that I drown in death, because I am certain in my own way that I shall survive it by lying about its aftermath. After life. After death.

She lifts her skirt as she leaves the dinner table and wonders who had been due to sit in the chair opposite her partaking of bird soup ladled from a huge chipped tureen. A dinner guest who hadn't turned up-as the host had explained-because he had died suddenly that very afternoon.

Greg returned from the dinner party and stared at himself staring back at himself from the chipped wardrobe mirror. Wondering, extrapolating, brainstorming, lying-and none of it made the context obvious. The woman opposite at the dinner party he rather fancied, despite her aggressive nature. Beth was her name-introduced by the host in such a way as Greg suspected match-making. Another lie in the making.

Back in his flat, the face in the mirror began to talk. Greg's face-showing not a mixed race, but a mixed cla.s.s. The barely sprouting fuzz on his upper lip belied his youth, but the eyes spoke a working-cla.s.s directness and a raw but instinctively astute naivety together with mechanical awareness... whilst the moving lines of his lips forming the speaking mouth indicated a more academic or professional or at least clerical/administrative slant. The face spoke and he could not stop it speaking.

Pinnochio's nose grew longer when he told lies. Yet we have no easy way to judge lies in real life. There is a question whether a single lie, once told, creates other lies in its wake, then radiating, sp.a.w.ning more lies, new and different lies living off each other-like a b.u.t.terfly theory of chaos-moving round the world like a disease till everyone tells lies, Russian Doll lies, until they return to the original liar himself who accepts them as truths-because he started them in the first place and he has persuaded himself, by being in denial, indeed has simply forgotten that he lied in the first place and that he had started the lies moving round the world. Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies...

Greg smiled as he realised that the face in the mirror had come to a halt... frozen like a sepia photograph of one of his Victorian ancestors... gradually growing yellowy, staining the surface with feathery fibres between the beige-ridden silver backing of the mirror and the front gla.s.s itself: spraying apricotty ice follicles across. He imagined, not a nose growing longer with each lie, but a small white feather beginning to sprout from every pore of the skin. One feather per lie. The originally bendy bone of each feather's spindle fused with the bones beneath the skin, all their flossy sprigs striving but failing to be animal fur. Everyone's blood is normally red, whatever the skin colour, yet the thickening plume-spindle bones of the werebird's new covering turned its blood into an utterly pure white consistency dripping to his flat's carpet...

The sun literally seemed to scream at the holiday party as they arrived in the tour coach at the edge of the Left Foot Plateau to the south of the city. Its rays gradually spread along the then empty horizon like orange marmalade-the bottom arc of its...o...b..dripping something like thick liquid to the point on the horizon whence it had just fully risen. The holiday-makers were due to go from viewing one arc to another. They were to board an ark as it were and become partic.i.p.ants in the latest Jules Verne expedition that had been advertised as going to the centre of the earth. Booked as a holiday, many now indeed saw this as a useful escape route from the unsaid dangers that had begun to beset the city.

Greg turned to look at his wife Beth and shrugged. They were in two minds about this whole trip because, clandestinely, they were not real holiday-makers or, even, escapees from a world that no longer welcomed them but, instead, they had a mission to find the Angevin children who had vanished from the city under the cover of rumours. Indeed, Greg and Beth both knew that other people (including Beth's sister) were trying different apertures to enter the earth further north in the Head Region of the city. There was more hanging on these events than just a jamboree or self-indulgent adventuring or, even, conscientious objection to what was going on in the city.

The horizon and, indeed, the upper sky, were now filling with huge kites upon slanting rope-tethers to the hands of as yet invisible kite-carers on the ground. The individual kites were-as a promotional vision for the Jules Verne Holiday Company-shaped like some of the craft the Company had used for previous jaunts and some, even, models of proposed future ones.

Lightening up, Greg laughed as he spotted one of the kites was a flying carpet prancing higher and higher from yet one more slanting tether. He was older and hopefully wiser than before with his b.u.m-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.

Beth remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching the centre of the earth from a different terrestrial angle. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling-yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at her husband. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie.

"Hey, some of those kites haven't got people flying them!" suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.

Beth was more interested in viewing the craft that was due to take them to the centre of the earth. That was a far more important priority at the moment. At first, she was mistaken as to the correct craft in question, as she spotted a long queue of would-be holiday-makers near a large landcraft which multi-resembled a cross between various forms of transport (that was the only way she could describe it). She thought she and Greg must be on the wrong side of the platform as it were, in the wrong queue, because their own queue was much shorter, indeed depleted to just the two of them being led by an inscrutable Jules Verne official whose face they had not yet seen-but it was not long before they rounded a deceptive dune to witness the first sight of their own potential craft.

It was awe-inspiring. Strangely, from the distance at which they first viewed it, the craft struck them as simply more than gigantic. It was literally bigger than a mountain and, surely, would become clogged in the earth's throat, at such a size. Tilted at an angle, it was a wildly proportioned Drill... with a bit at its tip, pointing at the earth and tantalisingly only a few inches from the beachy surface. Even more strangely than before, the nearer they approached the Drill, the smaller it became, but still reasonably ma.s.sive judging by mere human proportions. Beth could now actually pick out the pilot in the c.o.c.kpit behind the bit-tip. He was dressed in a period costume with frills, ruffs and a feathered peaked cap. He smiled at Beth as he gave the Drill's ignition a quick trial grinding roar... and she watched the bit-tip spin, splinters of orange sun spraying in all directions from its sharp bright torque.

The most amazing item on the craft, however, which Greg was the first to notice, was an outlandishly protrusive set of slender rotor-blades or vanes upon the back of the Drill like that on the back of a helicopter. Insect-like. He could not imagine how the Drill could be able to dig its way through the earth with that as part of its propulsion system. He originally imagined the Drill sliding through the earth like a knife through b.u.t.ter, but that thought now went straight out of the window.

But the matter was soon forgotten when they were abruptly introduced to the Drill's 'Captain Nemo'-who appeared just as suddenly on a ladder that dangled from the boarding-hatch in the side of the Drill. He was a tall figure with a certain resemblance, as Greg recalled the people he had known in the city, to Ogdon or, even, Ogdon's sidekick Crazy Lope. The Captain was not however in any way related to these two people, as both he and Beth soon instinctively gathered.

"I'll take you in and show you the wallmaps in a minute," he crooned with a nut-brown voice.

Beth was entranced. Greg sceptical.

"Wall maps?"

"Yes, charts and so forth of our route."

Greg shrugged. Surely there was only one route to the centre of the earth. As the crow flew. A straight line. A slanting tether.

"I have books on board to keep us amused during the long journey," the Captain continued.

"Books!" interjected Beth. "I hate books. Ever since I gave one as a present-one I valued as if I'd written it myself-inscribed it lovingly to the recipient-and then I found myself eventually buying it back because I saw the same copy being sold on e-Bay!"

The Captain shrugged as if this was a silly reason to hate books. With only one backward glance at the shadow of the vertical sun above them amid the increasingly crowded sky, Greg and Beth excitedly followed the Captain on board the Drill. The name on its side had escaped them: "The Hawler".

Mike was a solid figure of a man. Not at all like Greg with Greg's slight figure despite the years that had thickened his facial growth. Not wide so much as bushy. But that was Greg, and attention must perforce spotlight Mike again for a while. And Mike was still doubtful about his own beginnings-barely remembering even the shadowy figures who had been his parents in the Fifties. He had compa.s.sion, however, having long forgotten the earlier years as a child when he played pretend games in the garden and up the bullace tree-sometimes masquerading as Davy Crockett in a long-tailed fur hat, sometimes as an even more distant memory: the creature he inscrutably called a hawler (although the spelling was doubtful). All that concerned him now were naturally the concerns of today-his middle years-as he and the party with which he had joined were trekking northward to what was loosely named the city's Head Region.

Until recently, he had been working in the city centre's covered-market, living a frugal existence-together with Susan, a pretty woman who, unlike her sister Beth, had failed to gather frown-lines during her middle years. When she and Mike had decided to live together, she already had a daughter called Sudra who was now herself growing into a pretty woman with pig-tails, a style that was too young for her. Sudra laughed often. Yet she had an aura of malevolence or, at best, bewitchment about her. She, too, was in Mike's party, together with her two similarly aged friends Amy and Arthur, friends of doubtful relations.h.i.+p with each other, with n.o.body questioning this because there were some lines drawn beneath which it was impolitic to delve. Amy worked as a domestic cleaner, Arthur a double-decker driver-both salt-of-the-earth citizens who would never have dreamed of travelling north... unless times were extraordinary.

How extraordinary the times had become only hindsight could know. The ident.i.ties of Amy and Arthur-it was believed-had been stolen by lostlings or foundlings or changelings who had escaped with much of their victims' past cloying to them. These were apparent children masquerading as the children Amy and Arthur had once been in earlier perhaps less extraordinary times. This belief in such stolen ident.i.ties opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they're not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.

The five of them trekked because public transport had long since departed, having been earmarked for some important matters ordinary citizens like them were not considered suitable enough to know about. As he strode along, Arthur imagined the stuff underfoot-the party having finally left the pavemented area of the city streets-to be residue of his childhood 'experiment' games with household substances. This was probably his own version of a retributive past coming back to haunt him. Amy smiled as if she could read Arthur's thoughts. Arthur, however, soon became preoccupied by what evidently preoccupied Mike... and what gradually preoccupied all five of them.

The sky was slowly, surely and imperceptibly becoming more of a roof than a proper sky-as if they had entered a much larger version of the city's open-sided covered-market-which, incidentally, Arthur now recalled was where Sudra's stepfather worked as a waste manager. Having a roof-one might have thought-would have afforded protection from the weather, but they all still felt a soaking drizzle as though rain had been replaced by some variety of sprinkler-system.

n.o.body mentioned the colour. Indeed, could darkness be any colour other than black or, at best, grey? A monochrome of darkness, gathering in around them more like mist than darkness proper. Yet, they could still see the even darker shapes hunching upon the distant terrain towards which they hiked. n.o.body mentioned the colour, as it did not come up in conversation, bearing in mind the preoccupation caused by the difficulties underfoot.

"Hey! Look-are they volcanoes?"

Mike pointed at the rough cone-shapes each with an odd flame-like plume fitfully being spat by what he a.s.sumed to be some of earth's many apertures.

Sudra quaintly described them as "Redoubts"-but n.o.body seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, 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 "Cote" was written on one broken brick wall that they were now pa.s.sing-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 fas.h.i.+onable 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.

Yet, what was that?