Sudra woke on her shelf in the hedgy tunnel and smiled.

It is common knowledge, of course, that Beth's husband had in truth remained in the city-within a safe-house-whilst Greg was currently in the Drill masquerading either knowingly or unknowingly (it mattered little which of these) as Beth's husband... thus providing Beth's husband in the safe-house with an alias or, even, an alter-nemo (a more subtle form of alter-ego). Notes to be clarified, scratched the stub of the pencil as it wrote out various repercussions regarding this knowledge.

Beth's husband, in this way, was rather proud to have become Beth's real husband, there having been a rather complex arrangement between various parties-including Beth herself-for this situation to prevail. Beth had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed herself-by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the City Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner-to believe that Greg was her real husband. Meanwhile, her really real husband-as yet nameless-arranged various factions back in the city to deal with the transport and distribution of the Angevin substance and its offcuts.

The only source for the raw materials that made up Angevin was the cream substance found to be cached at the earth's Core. As with all scarce resources cherished by certain factions of humanity, there was both a cost and a danger in harvesting it. Or mining it, if that's a better word.

(1) The logistics of travelling to the earth's Core, (2) grappling with the 'Corekeeper' whose name needed to be fixed and thus neutered for prevention of its impeding the necessary work in the broadly difficult mechanics of the harvesting process itself (details of which will have to be left to kick in later, so that the full implications can hit home in full relevancy), (3) the harvest process itself, and (4) the hawling of the 'cream', i.e. transporting it back to the earth's surface where most of humanity lived and where it could be refined in the 'Dry Dock' facility (a mobile industrial complex that was used to fool the other wings of the City Authorities). Meanwhile, barrels of the stuff are in impenetrable containers stockpiled within the covered market (the underground part of it for obvious reasons) and the purest form of it (worth millions of pounds) is now held, by all accounts, in certain enclosed areas of the city zoo.

All these mechanics (some unspoken)-including the inevitable 'hawling' process which was more difficult than the earlier harvest process-aren't necessarily listed out as logically as it seems. Most of it is a mere summary of Beth's husband rehearsing the whole tangled process from beginning to end... rehearsing it in a rather fragmentary conversation that he was conducting with a new Angevin recruit who sat with Beth's husband in his flat housed at the top of the safe-house.

The recruit was evidently female behind a veil which she twitched from time to time giving her co-conversationalist tantalisingly s.e.xy glimpses of her inscrutable face.

"Regarding point (3), has anyone got any nearer nailing the Corekeeper's real name?"

Her voice was lilting in a rather Welsh fashion. Her shoes intermittently were scrunching the carpet, rumpling it up towards the table where various official papers sat, papers instrumental to the conference that was still proceeding between the two of them.

On one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which Beth's husband would later lift to show to the female recruit as part of revealing the Nemonymous Navigation intrinsic to the whole master plan for the contraband and its later distribution-including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went before it.

On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens' Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist-depicting a naked man with a beard who had a large white swan sitting on his lap... and he was fondling the long neck in a rather salacious fashion.

The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a Twin Peaks trademarked silent runner, implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, a night bus could be heard faintly droning past. Helicopters weren't allowed over any part of the city these days.

The flat otherwise was quite neat, as if a cleaner and/or decorator had worked quite hard to spruce it up, but it still showed indelible signs of previous seediness.

Beth's husband had evidently taken quite a time to answer the recruit's latest question but, after a while, he pulled a paper from the table. The other as yet untouched papers were neatly stacked-in tune with the rest of the flat-bearing some form of ranked typescript. The paper he had actually picked up, however, was torn along one edge and bore handwriting. He pa.s.sed it to the recruit.

"That's the latest guesses. I can't dignify them with any other word!"

She sniffed the paper, finding it to waft a faint aroma of stale beer. It was a mere list of smudged names.

Corekeeper (Coretaker): Infinite Cuckoo, G.o.dspanker, Dognahnyi, Megazanthus, Weirdmonger...?

The sixth name was illegible and Beth's husband shook his head when the recruit asked about it.

"Well, we know it's not Dognahnyi," he said, "because that's already there in the list. Indeed I know it's not Dognahnyi at all, because..."

But then he decided to decline specifying his reason for it not being Dognahnyi.

"Are we any nearer nailing it?"

He shook his head at the deja vu question, then continued: "A more pressing matter is that there are various factions at this very moment travelling towards the Core, some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial... some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing..."

"What for? Isn't such confusion self-defeating... dangerous?"

Beth's husband shook his head and said: "If it weren't for the-what shall we call it?-confusion, where would we be? We'd be just like that rabbit frozen in the open by the headlights of an oncoming car."

The recruit nodded and briefly slipped aside the lower half of her veil to reveal the pique of a smile.

Beth was more impatient than her sister Susan-so she was eager for the Drill to reach its destination and their holiday proper to begin. She had been told to bring all manner of things in her luggage, including respectable swimwear and a high factor suncream. So her expectations were quite sufficiently filled with excitement. But, all in all, she didn't really know what to expect.

The mention of Susan in her mind reminded her for a moment that Susan had faded from her life in recent times. In fact, Susan had faded from many lives including anyone who was interested in her fate, along with her husband-what was his name?-Mike? Beth could hardly visualise them-and the excitement of each moment prevented memories from filling the less than momentary gaps between those very moments. But they were all later symphonically saved by the portrait dreams (more of which later in this movement).

The actual logistics of the Drill's journey itself, the means as it were to its ends, she would need to leave to her husband Greg to describe or rationalise or reconcile or extrapolate upon. All she herself could recall was that the Drill's first penetration of the earth's crusty rind was carried out with a tremendous amount of vibrating, as the helicopter-like vanes on its back took the strain of the task of industrially churning the excess waste from the downward path's terrestrial backflow... in fact those very vanes created that rubbly backflow, as the Captain had called it when warning them about it before the journey started. A wonderful invention this Drill, she a.s.sumed, but she failed to appreciate the scale and the complexity and exactly how the various interconnecting devices worked as a synergy of 'human coning', as the Captain called it.

Thoughts of the Captain again reminded Beth of Greg. She hadn't seen her husband for several days and she a.s.sumed he must indeed be with the Captain, in the secure c.o.c.kpit ambit of the lower Drill... being shown better views (better than her own views) via windows nearer the bit-tip. All she could see through her own cabin window or the library windows was the pa.s.sing sameness of crazy-paved slabs of lubricated earth-lubricated by a creamy oil that the Drill exuded from several 'pores' or 'gills' along its hull to ease the drag of friction or the danger of gouging by rogue rocks. After the initial teeth-grinding vibration, the Drill's journey so far had been relatively smooth, give or take the odd crunchy jolt.

Thoughts of Greg had in turn reminded her intermittently to connect herself to the 'lie-fixer'-although she didn't call it that. It was more like the need for beauty sleep or sunbed treatment. It was a contraption that looked indeed more like a sunbed than a science-fictional synapse adaptor with throbbing electronics (which it effectively was). She simply needed to lie on it and be reminded... literally.

It was a rather refreshing and feminine activity to have to do. Far better than those mud baths she took regularly for her complexion. The mud, actually, on board the Drill, derived from loess.

In the Drill's ornately leather-bound book-lined library, Beth often met up with the dowager ladies, Edith and Clare. It was akin to the coffee-mornings which Beth used to conduct in the City-when Greg was out at work. The turning over of gossip and the planting of metaphorical daggers. Edith and Clare were however more intellectually inclined than any of the previous members of Beth's hen parties. There was cla.s.sical music going all day in the library at least as an undercurrent of sound-such as Philip Gla.s.s's Akhnaten or Wagner's Parsifal. The two ladies often knew the exact name of the music being played and details of the composers. They were also very well read, trying to get Beth into reading Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time. Beth, however, soon gave up-without even finishing the first volume: Swann's Way. The sentences were far too long for her and too florid-and nothing much happened to the characters (whom she couldn't really visualise in any event) and what was all that about dunking a pet.i.t madeleine cake in a cup of tea?

Beth accidentally picked up a fantasy book ent.i.tled Crazy Lope & G.o.dspanker by someone or other, but the first sentence put her off: "The carpet was quite ordinary." Surely, there were better ways to start a book, she thought. In any event, she didn't like Fantasy or Science Fiction-and certainly not Horror. The blurb on the back cover mentioned it was an 'alternate world' fiction treating of the rabbit plague in Fifties England where the rabbit's disease-myxomatosis-mutated and spread into a human-to-human disease, thus wiping out the population. Dreary stuff, she thought, slapping the book back on the table, next to Proust.

Edith finally found some cla.s.sics for Beth such as the Brontes and Jane Austen, until Beth did manage to find some pleasure in this middle-of-the-road literature, even without fully understanding all the social undercurrents of the historical settings. She did however have a good laugh at the t.i.tle Wuthering Heights. She thought of the Drill as wuthering depths! d.i.c.kens and Shakespeare could probably wait for the return journey, suggested Clare. If there is a return journey, thought Edith.

The two ladies were very touchy-feely and Beth finally decided that they were not her type of people, but beggars couldn't be choosers in such confined s.p.a.ces. Like coach trips on the earth's surface, one tried to mix with the other pa.s.sengers to help the time pa.s.s much more pleasantly. Polite standards and talking terms needed to be manicured.

All three of them shared the loess treatment in the form of white mud baths-to tone up their otherwise scrawny bodies. Beth cringed however one day when she spotted Edith eating a bit of it as she wallowed in it.

At night, after several weeks of these dreary waking hours between her bouts of sleep, Beth dreamed. She knew they were dreams because she was now so far underground, they couldn't be anything but dreams. She slept in the cabin meant for her and Greg, but by now she had almost forgotten she had come on holiday with Greg. There was not even any intercom to the c.o.c.kpit, where she a.s.sumed, if she a.s.sumed anything at all, Greg was being guested by so-called Captain Nemo-hobn.o.bbing as men of the world tended to do.

The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond her control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.

At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan's pretty face, prettier than her own, but when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.

Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circ.u.mstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or even a bus-driver? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.

Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn't now place him as a grown-up. She dreamed of him-much thinner-mixing some foreign substance into her bath of loess treatment. Amy was a similar portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn't really differentiate one portrait from another.

Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so.

Beth woke from the Ogdon portrait with a start. The Drill had just jolted so violently all the light had been sucked from the cabin.

All those children who had earlier left the city along with Amy and Arthur-or along with the foreshortened versions of Amy and Arthur as they subsequently turned out to be-were evidently seeking apertures in the earth but carrying out this search without any known conscious reason for so doing.

They had, however, in hindsight, been 'lie-fixed' to seek apes for breeding-and these apes were said to live in caves. But that begs the question, how deep can a cave become before it loses its ident.i.ty as a cave? Even Plato's Cave was above sea-level. Surely, the deeper a cave becomes the more it approximates a pot-hole. In its turn, the deeper a pot-hole becomes the more it approximates a terrestrial oubliette or unhawlable cache-especially as there is no access from the surface to reach such an oubliette or cache.

On the other hand, the children themselves were, perhaps, apes in the making, having been force-fed some mutant form of Angevin to reverse the evolutionary process. History apparently was full of Angevin Apes and they played a large part at the Battle of Agincourt, but exegesis of primary sources (such as excision of any knowledge of the infections brought back to England by Henry The Fifth and his cohorts) has ensured that vital components of the need for apes today and what part they played throughout Toynbeean history are now largely forgotten.

Some children, as already hinted, did, however, remain in the city, either variably untouched by the 'lie-fixer' or simply too lame to travel far-and these children now ran wild, because many of their previous external authorisers as well as their own self-discipline were so badly dissipated by every attempt to corrupt all levels of society in age, wealth, creed and sanity.

These children often made visits to the now semi-derelict zoo, believing that its reputation remained as a rare area of surface land where dream-clarification and dream-justification were easiest to accomplish, as well as being a reputed seat for zoological learning, with or without implications to any history (alternate or not)... although the latter was not important to the children, even if they had understood it.

John Ogdon, now increasingly at a loose end as a result of his pub lacking customers for ordinary alcohol, also spent some time in the zoo for its dream qualities, but also masquerading, as an excuse for his presence, in the shape of the zoo-keeper, i.e. the Authorities' last redoubt against civil unrest amid their pretence it was still a proper zoo where law-abiding citizens could spend a relaxing afternoon as well as learn about Natural History or Zoological Biodiversity.

Ogdon had now 'come out' (to the surprise of every onlooker) as a cross-dresser, strutting as he now did amongst the cages and enclosures in high-heels and a beige frock. The children called him 'Hilda'.

Crazy Lope was now rarely seen, except, in Ogdon's absence, when it suited him to turn up in his cape and scare the children with his antics. It was believed that a few dark myths such as those depicted in old Nursery Rhymes were a vital factor in a child's upbringing, and Crazy Lope was pleased to fulfil such a role. All light and brightness make Jack a dull soul, as the saying goes.

One day, a clutch of these residual children (now much thinner because of various imposed dietary factors combined with the ill-sustenance that general scavenging in the city enforced) turned up at the zoo for a desultory kickaround. The first enclosure was, as ever, empty. The cages and enclosures further into the real meat of the zoo were still no doubt at least partially inhabited by exhibits because they were fed by certain nightly manoeuvres of metabolism and airfly-but very few grown-ups went to check and any such remaining exhibits had inevitably become hearsay, as the children said they didn't know or deliberately didn't say anything at all. It was rumoured that the zoo's many birds had died, claws-up on the cage floors... except for one giant creamy-white poultry-thing that gradually bloated as if its claw-ends had rooted themselves into the ground (via the riven cage-floor) like a ma.s.sive feathered plant-thing feeding off some unfathomable nourishment. It deeply chirped, but eventually it was mostly silent, still pulsing with some form of dubious existence.

The children-for whatever reason-usually played football around the outside of the 'empty' enclosure which had once been a.s.sumed (at least in one of the interpretations) to exhibit barely visible insect-life. On the day in question, one child took his eye momentarily off the ball and pointed excitedly at the scrubby soil in the enclosure.

"What are those?"

The others peered over the enclosure's barrier and gasped. Scattered all over the ground, within the enclosure, were what seemed to be hundreds of discarded toys. Clockwork ones, some budging slightly as if they had been insufficiently wound up. At a closer scrutiny, some were actually trying to burrow into the ground, making a very bad job of covering themselves for dignity's sake-showing, perhaps, that they thought themselves to be little better than catmuck.

As Ogdon later determined (on his tour of duty as zoo-keeper), the contraptions had indeed been a mult.i.tude of mini-Drills complete with gossamer vanes on their backs, each attempting-with some difficulty-to penetrate the hardened zoo floor. Meanwhile, in real time, the children were about to climb over the barrier to double-check the nature of what they still thought to be toys, toys with what one of them described as 'c.o.c.kpits', but another child interrupted with a shout: "It's Lope! Scram!"

Crazy himself turned into the zoo, intent upon becoming the children's routine nightmare of the day.

They scattered and vanished into all corners of the zoo, before gathering together instinctively like a flock of migratory birds, only to escape screaming with fright (or joy) by means of the now untenanted exit turnstile.

Later, Ogdon, still in full female regalia, was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.

He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus's usual allotted white-lined s.p.a.ce alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. Never eat yellow snow, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.

Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could aid the maimed and the dead.

The real 'Beth's husband' was now late-labelled Dognahnyi: perhaps one denemonisation too far, but he was still interviewing the new recruit (following the revelation) in his pent-house, the log fire glistening off the Rubens like neutered indoor-fireworks.

Dognahnyi (an early worm in any conversation): Have you managed to fix your dreams yet?

Recruit (still veiled, speaking Welsh-prettily, if semi-nasally): Fixed them, yes-or so I thought-but last night someone told me or I dreamed that someone told me that they had a dream recently of a foreign body torpedoing itself into their tower office-block. You know the one-the block round the corner from here with a roof garden and a complicated lift system that books on architecture often write about.

D: Yes, I know the one you mean. Where our man once worked when he was still a 'sleeping' hawler. I presume the torpedo thing came from the dream terrorists.

R: I suppose so-but it wasn't the cla.s.sic jet-liner attack-it was a replica of the tower-block itself coming in at an abrupt angle and sticking itself like a pig about two-thirds of the way up.

D: Hmmm...that's interesting. I think if you have dreams or dreams of dreams like that, we can certainly use your skills for furthering the hawling process everywhere.

R (smiling beneath the veil): Thank you.

D (walking over to the curtains on silent runners making as if to open them): Out there are many situations that need fixing.

R: I know.

D: Such as that tower block-as you've just suggested-being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.

R: I believe you.

At that point, she slowly removed her veil.

Mike sat upon a ledge in the downward tunnel-just beyond the point where the hedge petered out together with a tapering into horizontality of a new tunnel-or a perceived horizontality from the perspective of the in-built s.e.xtant in this underground world and its effect on the brain's balance.

The hedge itself had tended to prevent dangerous free-fall but, equally, had not hindered their nude scaling-down to this point in the earth's interior.

Mike was pleased that it was now slightly more 'civilised' at this juncture of his party's journey. The stick-like 'hares' or decoys were indeed now fully absorbed into the Amyness and Arthurness of two among them. The group had grown somewhat, but the main const.i.tuents were still the main const.i.tuents.

Furthermore, there was now a service tunnel parallel with their own tunnel of concourse-and this service tunnel was complete with pulleys and ropes, pa.s.sing clanking buckets to the surface from the Core itself. He readily a.s.sumed all was part and parcel of some quite complicated hawling-process which he was due to oversee, once his training was complete. And, surprisingly (but, in hindsight, not surprisingly), there were warm clothes waiting for them at this crossover point in the tunnel systems. Indeed, this must be an official root-exchange, whereby Mike now realised that all other approaches or 'attacks' towards the centre (such as the many Drill companies he had heard about) were quite unofficial or simply subterfuges.

He had heard earlier rumours that the immediate surrounding area of the Core was populated by a set of creatures known as Carpet Apes who tended to the necessary ablutions of the Megazanthus (one of the names which Mike was aware had been given to the Corekeeper)-and that the marginal 'land' around the Core itself was the legendary Agra Aska... but the facts were still uncertain even if the non-facts were now clearer.

However, the Carpet Apes (so-called) were probably a false a.s.sumption or, at best, an unfixed dream. He looked down at the coat with which he (and the others) had been supplied: a stiffish, ankle-length carpetty thing with simple arm apertures. At first it was uncomfortable to walk about in but one soon grew accustomed to its combination of warmth and bodily support. He had not yet questioned the fact that the nearer the Core they travelled, the colder it was becoming, despite history saying such a process should mean that you were approaching a molten heat centre.

He looked at the others-Susan, Sudra, Amy, Arthur etc.-in their carpet coats and he somehow knew whence the legend of the Carpet Apes must have derived-and he laughed at the antics of the others. One of them was doing a puppet-like jig in his or her stiffened coat and it was terribly funny. Apeish. Mike felt cheered.

Yet Mike questioned himself. He realised he was a hawler-always realised this perhaps-but now he knew it wasn't because he had previously been a hawler, but because he was about to become one. Self-identification by an as yet unproved antic.i.p.ation was a dream-fixing he needed to address. It all seemed a very unsteady grounding for a vocation or a raison-d'etre. Mike shrugged and peered at his step-daughter Sudra as she now began to practise walking in her carpet coat. She took delight to tease him with her imputed beautiful body hidden beneath the dumpy beige covering and the ungainly yellow clod-hoppers on her feet-clogs, in fact, that were on all their feet. The thin effulgence of the previous hedge tunnel had given Mike few glimpses of her nudity...

He shook his head to himself. He should not be having such thoughts about a step-daughter, should he? He was a hawler, he knew. Yet a flawed hawler. He suddenly stopped laughing. Later: Stub of pencil writes: Amy complains that readers have lost sight of who she is!

In the days before the sudden jolt had stolen the light from Beth's cabin in the Drill, Greg and a few other nebulous businessmen were entertained by Captain Nemo in the corporate lounge, a select area on board that boasted viewing-windows close to the leading-edge of the bit-tip. The proceedings were a combination of a scientific lecture upon what they were seeing and pure holiday entertainment, all laced with c.o.c.ktails.

Meanwhile, over the years, many had debated why the city needed two airports instead of one... now both derelict sites on the left and right arms of the city proper. This hadn't come up in general conversations or newspaper reports for quite a while but one must be seen to address this issue nevertheless, even if it's just for the sake of chasing some noumenon.

These airports were always benighted even in their respective hey-days. One theory was that they only served each other, i.e. short-haul flights between them taking place for their own sake, because it was easier to travel across the city by other means, even if one wanted to travel across the city at all. These airflights were later a.s.sumed to be merely acting as cover for their real flights-beneath the ground, with the main runways leading steeply down tunnels into the earth from each airport.

That extrapolation, however, was often taken too far and was nipped in the bud before it could actually take off. However, in even more recent days of the Angevin conspiracies, there was a renewal of its hypothetical undercurrents regarding the internal workings of the earth. More, perhaps, of that, in due course. What one has to take into account, meanwhile, is that n.o.body at all has been in control of hypotheses for a long time now, and any crazy brainstorming has indeed eventually become the norm-with even written doc.u.ments (where one should normally have inferred a responsible writer of such doc.u.ments or, at least, an editorial chief/steering-committee) being considered just as bad as pub talk. Equally, the inverse may be true, i.e. when something is written down it lends credence even to pub talk. It depends on one's point of view.

The optimum, the fail-safe a.s.sumption, is to believe n.o.body is in control.

As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many doc.u.ments since discovered have touched on ash clouds, dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us. Allied to the dreams etc. were ghosts (it has to be said), and many people actually began to believe in ghosts, to the extent that each person necessarily had to have his or her own ghost-implying that there were two of everyone. But, no. Not the person and that person's ghost as the pair in question, but two ghosts, each a ghost of the other (with no real person involved at all). Symbiotic haunting seems a good term for this.

Which brings us straight back to the question of why there were two airports in the city, where even just one airport would have been redundant. So, with further extrapolation, not only did people or living creatures become tangled up in this two-ghost hypothesis but supposed inanimate things, too, such as aeroplanes, helicopters, other craft. In fact, all things under the sun, not just means of transport, but even buildings, household artefacts etc. were subject to this hypothesis.

Such a supposition would pre-suppose much inadvisable loose-thinking, of course. However, it would serve to explain the eerie sightings (during the days even when people were more down-to-earth) of ghostly craft skimming across the city from airport to airport, complete with scary droning just upon the hearing threshold. Simply to call them 'scary', however, doesn't necessarily make them scary. You had to experience them to know how really scary they were.

As a boy, I used to wander around the Left Hand airport, the one that by then had become a disused golf-course. It was always dark there, it seemed, but I loved the den I built beneath a hedge where I and my friends played Cowboys and Indians or Doctors and Nurses. The Cowboys and Indians, Doctors and Nurses were delightfully, if sometimes chillingly, real-or, at least, seemed real because they were some of the ghosts that appeared to be attracted to the area as if it were a spectral magnet.