Greg: Windows of the soul.

Greg-in-the-mirror: That's a bit trite! More a two-way filter than a window, I'd say.

Greg: What next?

Greg-in-the-mirror: The whole body needs to be done eventually. A nip and tuck to bring back the sleek English lorry-driver that you truly were. Get rid of all the irrelevancies of flesh and ident.i.ty. Bring in the washing to untense the washing-line of your true being.

Greg: As each minute pa.s.ses, I feel the real Greg is becoming me again.

Greg-in-the-mirror: Or vice versa.

Greg: But who are you?

Greg-in-the-mirror: Just a reflective sounding-board. Don't worry about me. I have no axe to grind.

Greg: (Turning away from the mirror) I hope so. I really hope so. I'm no longer Mike. No longer the false I that I never wanted to be in the first place, despite the sense of security being an I made me feel.

Greg-in-the-mirror: (From behind Greg) A false sense of security. But, thinking about it, you are still not talking like a lorry-driver, are you. Argghh! (Gla.s.s crazes over as if in a psychological road crash.) When Greg had finished the sound-shaving process, he relaxed back into the newly undisguised welters of Chamber Music, waiting for the doctor to return following a set period of mind-confinement... to test whether any of the process had actually 'taken' and Greg was satisfied with the plug of his own recovered Gregness.

Shattered mirror: Do you know what the first sign of madness is? Being told you have hairs growing in the palm of your hand... and then looking for them!

Greg stared at his smooth inner-hand and saw a tiny hard knot in one pore which he feared might pre-figure the future tenacity of a feather.

Beth had been going through a feminine version of this process in a neighbouring Chamber but the facts are far more inaccessible since the various methods were privy only to the women themselves and to their beauty-sleep mentors. It is to be hoped, however, that she had removed any restricting characteristics concerned with any mutual ident.i.ty-envy between her and her sister Susan.

A low-key end to what was a crucial soundfest.

When Greg and Beth emerged from their respective chambers of re-a.s.serted ident.i.ty, they immediately fell into each other's arms, with a renewed love surging through their veins-not so much reminding them of their old love as it once was but showing them the potential of their new love as a cathartic transformation of their old love... as a crystallised plug of wisdom to replace the angst that used to fill the growing hole of disappointment gradually and ineluctably encroaching upon them in recent years, to blot out what was once possible between them by revealing what was now possible again in the enhanced wonders of sheer togetherness and love for each other as well as for life itself.

The sirens had momentarily ceased their wailing, whilst the citizens were singing a Bach Cantata. Not stage-managed so much as the natural spontaneity of a flashmob.

Many gazed up into Klaxon's undersky, shading their eyes from a newly radiant Sunnemo, in fact two Sunnemos as one had emerged from a blindspot to become each other's ghost and symbolic of the love between Greg and Beth. Within the glowing skin of the master Sunnemo could be glimpsed the silhouette of the Angel Megazanthus itself slowly and repeatedly folding and unfolding its wraparound wings, a vast king in yellow, or a nesting mother-bird, or a token of a horror vision now made divine.

A scattering of hot-powdered Angevin fell from the two cores like Christmas snow.

Bach's Cantata draws to an end and the sirens resume, as Greg and Beth, hand in hand, continue their adventures of self-discovery within Inner Earth. He would need to visit Klaxon's cleansing chambers regularly for the Gregness of Greg to prevail. And to tussle with the Tenacity of Feathers.

Beth stared up at Sunnemo-and she wondered whether the Angel Megazanthus within its eggskin owned a sensory capacity equivalent to her own selfhood. Beth was the salt of the earth, full of natural Ess.e.x feistiness. She was so deeply in tune with things that she didn't understand she was in tune with, even her wondering about this fact took place without it touching the sides of her own selfhood's intellect (or lack of). A process that could only be addressed by the arts of fiction or fantasising. Imagining imagination that could not exist without multiple imaginations plugging in socket to socket. A power of imagination (a strength to dream) that could only be possible following contact with the Flew. Flown the next nest. Brain with new wings. Mind with old ones. Beth Flew. Greg Flew. All flocking together towards or from the Klaxon chambers as a positive migratory force of flight.

So, in short, did the Angel Megazanthus have its own 'consciousness'? Or did it manoeuvre its wings as part of some parthenogenetic spontaneity... or of a mysteriously insidious instinct of twitching or tweaking parts of itself to prove to any observers (such as Beth and Greg) that there was indeed a real creature lurking within its shape: pulling its own strings from within itself. Beth thought about one of her friends from school. Rachel Mildeyes (as she was known to peers and teachers alike). Everyone loved Rachel. She had a self-creative gloss that girls like Beth could never aspire to. Nevertheless, Beth was one of Rachel's best friends... sharing those secret feminine moments that remain an enigma to most men.

Beth wondered if everyone's special friend-someone they recall with deep affection (remarkably without appreciating quite how deep)-populated the shape that was Angel Megazanthus. She imagined Rachel looking down upon her now-in Klaxon-as she and Greg wandered aimlessly from chamber to chamber, yet learning c.u.mulatively the lessons of imagination whilst living within imagination's creation (fiction, fantasy or dream) as real people. Most fictions contained fictional characters... or once real people-now ceased to be real people (if retaining their real names)-fictionalised as fiction characters. Yet, strangely, Beth and Greg retained their hard-won, hard-worn ident.i.ties as real minds and bodies while living and dreaming-unfictionalised-within a full-blooded fiction. A fiction shot through with reminders of itself via fluctuating volumes (from silent to strident) of Klaxon's noise.

Stub of Pencil: Rachel Mildeyes peered through a slit in Sunneskin, feeling her huge wrinkled, webby wings on the outside of her body (joined to her but not strictly hers to use) lift slowly like imperfect flaps of her own skin merging (like shuffling cards with cards) into the sinewy membranes (half-cooked, but de-blooded, meat and/or poultry) of Sunne's last underlayer of surface skin. She felt herself to be a core but also a core's innards-but could a core have anything within it without the innards becoming a new core?

Beth laughed at the whimsy of such imaginings in the air about Rachel spotting her from aloft. It was bad enough living within imaginings without adding to them with one's own imaginings!

Greg asked why Beth was laughing-giving her a peck on the cheek in honour of their lately rediscovered love of and for each other-and as he did so, they happened to pa.s.s a lobe or dune near to new chambers about to be on their list of visits whilst here in Klaxon-to learn about preparations for war and other hand-to-hand conspiracies.

"Nothing really. Just an old schoolfriend. She was funny and I just remembered an old joke we had together."

"Rachel, you mean? You've even forgotten to send her Christmas cards in recent years. Life by-pa.s.ses friendships sometimes."

Rachel shrugged, reading 'time' for 'life' in what he had just said. Greg smiled. Indeed, meanwhile, Klaxon was soon to be at war with itself-a fact that had been lost sight of, one that needed addressing because, as visitors, they owed it to themselves to get their loyalties sorted out like coloured threads in the eventual textured pattern of carpet pre-destined for their feet to walk. Captain Nemo had not briefed them about these dangerous inter-tribal machinations before leaving the now pyloned earthcraft. And here was Beth talking about an old schoolfriend! "Women!" he thought-and laughed at and against his own instincts.

Beth: Now we've rediscovered our love for each other, I get the feeling that they're splitting us up again by forcing us to be on different sides in a war.

Greg: I didn't understand all this about a war, until someone mentioned it in a cave the other day... off the cuff almost. Klaxon seemed so peaceful when we first arrived.

Beth: (Laughs) Peaceful!

Greg: Well, you know what I mean. Citizens at peace with each other, at least, if not with this flipping racket of air signals! (Laughs, too.) Edith: The war was second thoughts, I gather. Things were getting too boring... and tension is required for anything creative to work properly. Even Proust realised that as he created friction as well as fiction between levels of time.

Clare: And of s.e.xual acceptability. Between levels of it, that is. Grinding levels sparking off further frictions... and spinning.

Greg: How do you ladies cope with seeing everything as if it's in a book? It's enough for me to get my head round reality! Isn't this place bizarre enough already without fictionalising it? This war, for example. I hear it's where a person becomes a Flew person and those who are not Flew are still themselves-and they open veins in their bodies to see if they can merge the meats between them-coming together in hugs that blend as genuinely as hugs of love always tried to be.

Beth: Or s.e.x. Not love. Yet, it's a war. That's what I don't understand. It's not a love-in.

Edith: A love-between?

Clare: That's a better expression-a love-between, but the meats weren't meant to merge, because some people have become poultry-some even giant insects-leaving some other people as genuine human meat. And when they try this love-blending business, the meats reject each other. Like transplants in the old days.

Beth: Captain Nemo always spoke about something called Human Coning when we were all getting here on the earthcraft. Perhaps that was a misprint-I mean a misp.r.o.nouncement for what you're talking about. War because the cones or clones don't 'take'. I'm talking beyond myself, now. But do you know what I mean?

Clare: I think so. It is only possible to understand rarefications like that if you fictionalise them-which brings us back to where we started.

Edith: So, what are we saying? As in Proust we need really long sentences to manage the concepts properly-whilst conversation is inevitably staccato. Like this.

Greg: All I know-is that the citizens are in two warring groups-yet simultaneously paired off as love-partners between each group. And they want us to nail our colours to one mast or the other. In fact, Crazy Lope and Go'spank are already involved. Up to their necks.

Beth: Not only warring, Greg, but viciously warring. The combatants are tooth and nail. Almost tearing each other apart-sinew by sinew. Both s.e.xes, each s.e.x with a different s.e.x, or both the same s.e.x together. It does not seem to matter to birds or insects. I could never tell their genders, in any event.

Edith: Proust hinted at all this in Swann's Way.

Clare: Needs careful exegesis, though, Edith.

Beth: Do they have any weapons-others than their bodies, I mean?

Greg: I saw a skirmish outside one of the Lethal Chambers. The sirens sort of joined in, increasing their pitch-as a cover for the weapons. Or to imitate the weapons, perhaps.

Beth: Old-fashioned muskets.

Edith: More than just muskets. The muskets, if they are muskets, had mouths-when they were popping. Muskets that were insect-like whatever the meat they grew from.

Greg: I'm sure there is more to the shape of the words themselves, if not to their meanings. Mask, Masque, Mosque, Mosquito, Musketeers, Mousquetaires. I seem to have lived with these horrible words every night when I dream. In fact, I've not really thought about all this before outside of a dream.

Beth: Old-fashioned dreams. There are no such thing as old-fashioned dreams any more. Fictionalised dreams are-well, I'm beginning to think that fictionalised things are actually more real-more tenable-than non-fictionalised things.

Greg: Hmmm. I always preferred reading non-fiction because I thought it was real.

Beth: We are alone. This is frightening. True horror.

Edith: Don't worry, Beth. We are all in this together. We have been from the start. We visited you in your flat all those years ago, when Arthur and Amy were playing in the garden.

Clare: That's when we knew we had to protect you and each other.

Beth: But now we have to fight a war. n.o.body warned us about that, when we signed up for the trip.

Greg: We could get back to the Drillcraft. And persuade Nemo to leave early for Agraska. Which pylon? I've forgotten.

Edith: (Turning to Clare) Sunnemo is a place in Sweden-Hawler is a place in Kurdistan. The surface is alive with places like that. Proust lived on the surface once. Many poets flew in his wake. Fin de Siecle.

Clare: Yes, Dumas' Black Tulip, too. Characters without depth. Silhouettes. I think to use the word 'cardboard' about fiction characters is demeaning.

Edith: Indeed.

Sunnemo released its demonised shafts of rainlight along the Inner Earth gutters surrounding the City of Klaxon. The sirens whined out their customary warning to earthcraft sailors-as the war was about to enter a cyclic moment of intensest victory or defeat. Consequently, the Canterbury Oak became as silent as the deadened or unwound stridency of buried toys-as it no longer needed to summon up the soundchecks that, given a slightly altered scenario, would indicate the impending challenge-and-response already in full bitter sway before the chance to record it was given.

I stood again beneath the very gravity-logged Oak, from where I had first viewed Klaxon all those clockwork ratchet-clicks ago. The ear shape of the City had, by now, become a ma.s.s of new dunes or lobes, some inflamed as with a disease from further inward to where even Inner Earth itself failed to reach. Millions of citizens in various stages of Name Flew were currently in individual hand-to-hand combat, comprising two armies both with their lethal plugs in the pylons... and, by dint of the power vacuum provided by the resonating echoes, it was difficult to judge which inter-combatant belonged to which army of ready-opened body-gaps bearded with feathered veins.

All the catacombed or labyrinthine out-buildings had retained their vulnerable chimneystacks despite the sideways weapon-like sound-torch gravities gushing along every channel of combat between shuffling individuals of volitional war-strength-and the organic structures built into or around these chimney-flues were remarkably still intact but many now had growths of c.o.xcomb or wattle. From each roof, they crew long, they crew wildly at the fast denemonising of Sunnemo into Mount Core. Its Megazanthine flames like wings half-lit the embracing sky around me.

Edith and Clare had resorted to the same building where-cutaway or not-they had, together with Beth, originally watched Klaxon's ritual of Sunne Stead all those years before-watched it via the transparent offices of the building's marigold-window (since repaired).

The room itself had since been cleared of any rubble or off-detritus, although the oil-painting-depicting the 'Reyn-Bouwe' earthfly-still decked the wall, its frame now cleaned of its infestation by an insect-nest.

The war was clearly visible to the two dowagers-as they smoothed off the mist from the marigold's gla.s.s. Being battened down in here had been the only option left them short of joining in the war itself by means of their own lady-bodies. A sight of the warring millions seen from the Canterbury Oak's hilltop was one thing-but viewing the same millions from amongst them was quite another. The hand-to-hand battles were literally a few inches from the dowagers' window vantage-point, with the depth of combat beyond that only a guess. A guess or a dream.

"Look, Clare!" screamed Edith-uncharacteristically because being bookish she normally avoided any necessity of resort to hysteria.

She pointed at the room's empty fireplace where its chimney-flue was in the process of dangling down a pair of large bird-legs accompanied by the growth of groping as well as squawking.

Clare quickly thrust large amounts of scrunched-up newspaper into the grate and lit them with a Swan Vesta, causing the legs temporarily to withdraw upwards from the tall thin flames-while she looked round for more solid fuel.

Greg and Beth had meanwhile taken refuge in a Lethal Chamber-this being the only means of protection from the ricochet damage created by the warring millions. This was a collateral or lateral irony because, normally, such places were intended to deal out death to those who found themselves there via various stages of imperviousness to sound-torch surgery.

As described in The Yellow Book, those Lethal Chambers were not to be lightly entered-but, luckily, Greg and Beth happened to be together when the war first ignited and they had the combined nous to take the path of least resistance (albeit the most unlikely for safety) where the interior of this particular Lethal Chamber, by dint of a lateral irony (an expression that bears repeating), turned out to afford a relative immunity.

Unlike Edith and Clare, they could not view the war by sight since these chambers did not boast such vantage-points as marigold-windows. However, despite the blast of renewed klaxoning by tannoy of air alerts, they could also hear the rushing frictions of combatant bodies as they barely crossed the outside like a freak weather-storm.

To hear but not see was frightening.

Greg: I love you.

Beth: I know. You've always loved me. Most women complain that men don't tell them enough times that they love them. And it does need to be said once. But more than once-I wonder why they need to say it more than once, as if each time they have to say it, is because they feel themselves to have become a different person.

Greg: I am desperate to remain myself this time. Now that I've finally reached who I am. (He is visibly weeping.) Beth: (reaching out to him) I know. I know, Greg. I know it's you now. Hold on to that.

They listened to things climbing on top of the chamber, just above the roof of their heads. The chamber's resident patients gurgled lightly in their sleep praying within their dreams for homelier hospices to host them than this one. Greg and Beth looked at them-knowing that such patients were safer in here than Greg and Beth themselves, by some further ratchet of lateral irony regarding ruffled feathers.

Sudra's sure that tiny people were involved. How can big ones have threaded through the pigeon flap? Or the trail of crumbs which she discovers along their erstwhile route almost indicates fairy story characters, if not actual fairies. Whatever the case, the perpetrators are definitely not animals. Whilst animals are tiny enough and, at a push, may be capable of creating random music, they do not have the aesthetic nous of real folk. Indeed, although the music Sudra heard admittedly possessed an atonal quality, it was underlaid with a nagging harmony which, surely, excluded full-blooded haphazardness. Yes, she thinks, only real people can wield the refinement of soul sufficient to strum the air so hauntingly. By the widest stretch of the imagination, crude animal instinct fails even as a spare spear-carrier. On the other hand, the truth stares Sudra in the top of her head, if not the face. Angels, as is commonly the case, disguise themselves as ceilings, albeit, in Sudra's chamber, crumbly ones.

Crazy Lope and Go'spank were ensconced in Sudra's Shoe Shop during the course of the war which-by some accounts-lasted at least two decades of bitter in- and out-fighting. Other accounts gave a shorter period, by virtue of a time angle not dissimilar to Proust's method of self-dissection with 'selves' sometimes overlapping but then becoming separate people with thus longer to live. Yet other accounts put the war as stretching even further into the future, where memories piled up to become tail-to-tail history books.

It is clear from other accounts that Greg and Beth eventually reached Agra Aska on an earthfly (disguised as a drill)-one called 'The Hawler'-in company with Captain Nemo (aka Doghnahnyi), the pair of dowagers plus the nameless shadowy businessmen from the earthfly's corporate lounge... there, as a select number of accounts attest, to meet up with Mike, Susan, Amy, Arthur and two Agraskans called Tho and Hataz.

Sudra had been left in Klaxon to set up a shoe shop as a business venture, since her alter-nemo had died in the hawling-shafts further towards the surface. And that business spread-in time-beyond both ends of its actual start and finish, because she failed keeping her own accounts in order. Sudra enjoyed selling shoes and the war meant plenty of unshod people, even soldiers who were served ill by the authorities regarding their need for these basic essentials. As such, there was no demarcation between civilians and military, even to the extent of there being a common uniform for everyone-even the same uniform for both sides in the war.

There was a third side in the war but the const.i.tuents of its army were invisible, if not completely non-existent (non-existence being a stage further towards disbelief than invisibility or nudity). Wars are difficult to conduct from three different angles of attack, especially without benefit of conspiracies, side-treaties, bluffs, feints and counterfeints-and so this third force of partic.i.p.ants was kept shadowy on purpose (merely being referred to as Ogdonites in mysterious underbreaths).

The two main 'known' armies were simply known as Them or Us, depending on which side you were on or thought you were on.

Sudra had, by now, developed into a most beautiful woman and much of the remainder of our time in Klaxon will be concerned with her story, with little, if any, reflected taint from her earlier self or rumoured childhood as Mike's step-daughter or her nightly dreams of a wicked blood-father who made her eat flesh-infested cabbages in the hope of keeping Name Flew at bay (or that was the excuse).

The war was her backdrop. Equally, Sudra's story was the reason for the war because without her own story as its backdrop it would have lacked the forefront to give itself reflected point or focus.

The Weirdmonger, careless of the plots, meandered through park after park of scorched earth. He trod down tannoys to rid himself of their sirens-but not on purpose-simply making a bee-line for the shop that he knew was just beyond the last park of all. So he trod on concrete and sward just as readily as dune or lobe. Not even eschewing the mudpatches that prevailed in every single park. Dispersing children in their play. Elbowing bikes into untidy skids. Brusquely brushing aside attendant mothers and trainee nannies, as their prams escaped down some unlikely slopes towards where the war was still prevailing.

Each park merged with the next; some children's playgrounds seemed to straddle two parks at once, with railings cross-sectioning ride from ride and, in some cases, splitting single rides in half. Boating-lakes, too, had paddle-boats that couldn't land on certain banks, whilst others, of a different livery, could ply any part of the lake and put off on any towpath. The Weirdmonger could not fathom any of the rules and customs as he negotiated various rights of way and weaved between interlocking and overlapping mazes of bye-law and respective Klaxon-reclaimed or war-scorched jurisdiction. The further he travelled, the more he noticed the parks becoming shabbier and ill-kempt, railings battered down by winds and left unmended, pools allowed to seep at the edges, mud encroaching flower-beds and rockeries alike-even walkways sticky with a substance somewhat more akin to congealed cuckoo-spit than common-or-garden soil deposits. Or that was what the Weirdmonger wondered about in his crazy fashion, with or without the help of onlookers.

As the shop's curved runnel or lobe (as his destination) grew taller upon the edge of his sight, he was finding his rite of pa.s.sage through the parks more and more problematic. The natural onset of war-scorched areas was slowly impinging upon the parks. There was one children's slide, for example, the silver sluice of which was inches deep with a texture of varying degrees of brownness and burnt yellow. Only a few individuals-of youthful persuasion-could be seen making merry... twirling on over-oily roundabouts and croaking swings, releasing fitful ochreous spillages from their central hubs or hinges. One boy with precocious chin hair called foul messages from the top of the slide. The Weirdmonger shrugged, as if to claim fellow-feeling with any who were left by parents to play in this G.o.dawful park... not like the neatly manicured bowling-greens and shiny primary colours of children's rides boasted by the earlier paths and parks he'd crossed... crossed in dream with a good measure of foreboding.

He knew that the shop towards which he travelled on foot housed not only itself but also the one he was destined to love. The Weirdmonger had endured his own fair share of past times... and he predicted that there would also be many wax figures of historical humanity in the shop, depicting ancient customs or educational themes. Tableaux of timely remembrance. One word from him and such fabrications would take on new tones, if not a life of their own. The words the Weirdmonger spoke flew from his mouth with the garb of essential truth, words like b.u.t.terfly-birds and poisonous insects, words like flowers in free flow and historical primary sources, words like dragon-scales forming, eventually, into real dragons. Dragons with wings even bigger than the flames their mouths spewed.

He laughed. There was the shop. Sudra's shop. That'd bring the Weirdmonger's pretensions down a peg or two. He felt as if he were a child again, entering his first museum, harness held tightly by leather leads as he toddled in front of his mother on tenter hooks.