The last fragment crumbled to the floor; and the marigold-window had been shattered by a shooting star-crag... or at least a crumb of one.

It was almost Midnight, almost Moon, and a slick of slime slowly slewed across the surface of the painting from a cake of wrigglers nesting in its frame.

From Stone to Sunne and back again, there were other lives and lovers dodging death and d.a.m.nation, but in the utter solid darkness of Inner Earth, who knows whether there is a vast wide face between the two giant imaginary eyelights. And where's the mouth... or beak... for eating... for breathing... for speaking ...for kissing? Megazanthus Rampant.

I took Susan's hands. We had found each other yet again, destined, perhaps, to find each other time and time again. Each a romantic epiphany, but equally horrifically real in the implication of needing to find each other time and time again. All thought of my step-daughter's charms abandoned my mind when, within the darkness, I could no longer reconcile Sudra's ugly sharp tongue with the beautiful body that I knew she wielded beneath the carpet coat. I belonged to her mother. I was Susan's. And Susan was mine. My wonderful mine.

We had all encountered-on our downward trek-some increasingly common oases of light where the Core dispersed the Inner Earth's darkness like the sun above ground often would disperse stormclouds-or even like such normal sun would take advantage of a riven nightsky to reveal an untimely evidence of its reflected antipodal earth-warming presence.

I tried to drag logic from the illogic of my mind, tried to explain something to Susan that I couldn't really explain to myself properly-as we followed the others across the ground-housed landscape of Inner Earth.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the tunnel: Sudra: I suppose we ought to make it up.

Amy: It wasn't me who got so touchy about a pair of shoes!

Sudra: I know, but with it all changing-and my step-dad so 'funny' with me... I now need someone in this darkness to hold my hand and mean it.

Amy: OK, Suds. I've not been myself these days. I'm sorry, too. I feel something creeping around me.

Sudra: What do you mean?

Amy: A sort of... another me. Another me I don't want me to be. As if removing a veil inside my head. I can't put it into words, Suds.

Sudra: I think I know, Ame. What's it trying to make you do? Making you imagine we're walking in a tunnel heading for the centre of the earth or something? (Laughs.) Amy: Well, surely it is a sort of nightmare. But it can't be, can it? You're there. I can feel you in the darkness like in the old days before things started going strange. And Arthur he's still my brother, but on the other hand he's changed, I reckon. I know he has always been a bit queer, since a baby... but him now mixing up things from nothing in his ear!

Sudra: Has he always had such a big left ear? (Laughs.) Its lower gutter seems to contain all manner of substances!

Amy: Well, it's always been bigger than his right, with a flap that allows storage at the bottom. The doctors said it was a birth aberration and, short of serious surgery, they thought he would need to live with it. It wasn't so noticeable then.

Sudra: It's huge now! Still, would we be able to survive without him?

Amy: By the way, did you watch the latest light period when the Earth's Core came out like a sun?

Sudra: It was longer than usual. Yes. It was more stripey, with dark and light together, sort of.

Amy: I thought the shape of the uncleared dark bits that formed together around the Core looked like a giant black bird, its wings stretched as if there were things trying to tear it apart.

Sudra: I see what you mean. Imagination can play all sorts of tricks.

Amy: Or it really was what I saw.

Both girls had a bout of the shyfryngs as they settled in each other's arms to sleep; now silent as both suspected-without telling the other-that their conversation was being earwigged.

Near to the open-walled market or underground station, there was a tall building, access to which was by lift-indeed a very complex lift system which Greg often used before he was made redundant from his job in that building. He used to entertain business clients and had to help them negotiate the lift system-changing on specific floors for different lift shafts of higher reach. Some shafts were more palatial and business-orientated than others, some so narrow they could only be used for brooms or very thin utility workers. The highest shaft reached the open air area, leafed over like a wood. From there, once, Greg was sure he could see the distant sea through the unusually clear sky into which the wood penetrated. He imagined a finer, less definable surface barely above the sea but otherwise imitating its waves and swells-a double skin in perfect unison, but the lower one liquid, the upper spectral. Perhaps the second one was the ghost of a giant flying carpet taking invisible human vessels towards Arabian Adventure or towards the darker motives of suicide rather than seaside. And then the same building in duplicate appeared from the clouds and speared itself about two-thirds of the way up. The ultimate suicide by architecture. But that is deja-vu history of sorts and only has bearing on itself. History of history. History hugging the same history, without reality to come between their embrace. His story. My story. Nostory.

The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.

In these hard, awkward days in your distant future when a Horla cannot even get a decent drink, my plight brings tears of a pink cast to my eyes and a faint quiver of the upper lip upon my toothsome fangs.

It was known by the Megazanthus that any dream sickness affecting the rest of Reality did not affect the Core. Anywhere else on or in the earth that claimed such a distinction would necessarily be a perpetrator of an inanimate lie The Coreseekers who approached the Core via drilling, burial-by-another-party, exploratory pot-holing, self-interment-by-shame or simply merciful immolation knew similarly that, there at the Core, they would be free of deceiving dreams... and what they would see-as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure within the Core-were real animals and creatures, one of which was the Megazanthus itself, the 'zookeeper' who also occupied a cage of its own to disguise not only its ident.i.ty but its capacity for infinity.

Only when the Coreseekers were asleep, at the Core's very own core, did they know they would be deliberately exposing themselves to dreams-unlike in any surrounding Reality where sleep was not a prerequisite for dreams.

The entrance to the Core was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in the less desirable parts of Outer and Inner Earth. There was a turnstile-just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most Cores in any planet would need. The turnstile was unimpeded and the Coreseekers emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen, though their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages. Why an empty enclosure was the first display often mystified Coreseekers, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth.

The empty enclosure at the start of the tour-it was discovered-was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping Coreseekers. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, their own vestigial ghosts bawling in disappointment.

The Coreseekers tried to pacify their own ghosts by pointing to the corridors of cages where the Coregrounds proper, apparently, would start-or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. n.o.body, it was clear, took account of the beaked plankton that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. n.o.body realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for such creatures. They wanted to see big things at the Core. Like the Megazanthus itself.

Soon after by-pa.s.sing the first enclosure, most Coreseekers, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages-the silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of Megazanthus-imitators, many just small apes. Further on, however, kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited creatures could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other-and even uncomfortably close towards the Coreseekers themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.

The remarkable fact-despite the circ.u.mstances-none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have a.s.sumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was not a dream... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.

Greg, stopping over at Klaxon City, looked up into the 'sky'. There was something lovely about an overhead expanse that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from his mind. He had dreamed of the Core as a zoo, where the Corekeeper was in one of the cages.

A good hawler, he guessed, could plumb heights as well as depths for substance, sustenance and rea.s.surance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, Klaxon's 'sky' (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphonously from inner horizon to inner horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were others of a more name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew this for a while till he realised he was not a hawler at all. Because I was the hawler, here in the tunnel much nearer the Core than Klaxon City! I laughed. But Susan didn't wake. I always kept my laughter to myself.

The woman soon saw the man standing at the open bedroom window watching a huge black vulture-moth slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give him a hug from behind. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his b.u.t.tocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. All they could hear was the incessant klaxon that no longer warned them as all warnings should, but now simply thrummed at levels of the hearing to which thresholds of sound had accustomed themselves.

He turned round-forcing her also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he'd heard a shuffle or a whisper-but there was n.o.body there. He picked up the freshly delivered Daily Klaxon from the table-as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary-and read the main headline: MUD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS.

Unaccountably, he thought of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Then of some other history nearer to home, a World War that affected England like a dream once slept through... despite all the evidence that it had been all too real.

I have forgotten how I described myself earlier: and I now try to find the essential Mikeness of me.

"I ought to try looking under the earth," I said to myself.

Whatever the case, I would try more than anything now to shake off those encroachments of doctored repet.i.tion that were from Ogdon's original wordings in his novel and, thus, give more rope to my own words and concepts. Otherwise, there would be some danger of his novel becoming the victorious prevailing reality: a fact which would be a vast disappointment to us all, as my own novel was the only novel that contained a happy ending.

Hawling, after all, is dragging positive from negative and crystallising it. A novel is shorthand for a novelty trying to find its permanent fixture or berth as a well-established truth. And my scatter-brained extrapolations from all manner of different truths and fictions were-and still are-trying desperately to fit their novel jigsaws of shard into the ultimate picture of probability and, from probability, learning to summon the sinews of certainty... carving the perfect dimensions (inner and outer) of the sphere where we can live forever happy and content, having defeated those who wanted to smash it to smithereens even before it was formed.

There, the definition of hawling... at last!

Yet, meanwhile, I had to face one problem. It was Ogdon who first created Mike as a character and, therefore, by syllogism, myself! It was like trying to unclog the throat of my existence from the choking flying-threads in the air I involuntarily breathed to maintain that existence in the first place.

The children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets-of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Some in little better than makeshift carpets fashioned into coats. Most tried to discover each other's names.

In the distance, one of the other children heard the thrum of traffic-as if the city had started to re-ignite-and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.

Things were evidently coming back to life after the strobe systems of reality had jolted out of kilter for a short few moments.

"But n.o.body will ever find it again. It's only a way to make us hope," said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures a.s.suming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.

The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play-seeking the Second World War bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (G.o.d)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore-having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children's ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it-and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.

The city of Klaxon had gathered to bid farewell to the Drill on its renewal of burrowing towards the earth's Core. Greg shaded his eyes from the Corelight, like a salute, as he gazed towards a deceptive hill, a hill that had grown from two vast encroaching earthworks shifting together towards the variable cavity-s.p.a.ce that housed Klaxon-shifting together during the Drill's stopover. A huge Canterbury Oak seemed to be standing proud upon this hill above the city turrets and 'Parisian' quarters, bellowing out its wild, tortured wailing within the echoing hollow that was Klaxon. The multi-tannoy system that was used to imitate its wailing had been switched off, whilst the real thing reclaimed its ability to fill the city with its siren.

There would be no fireworks to mark the Drill's departure because no fires and resultant smoke were allowed in Klaxon. For obvious reasons.

Beth and the two dowagers boarded in advance of the businessmen cla.s.s's own ceremonial boarding-especially as the women had further to go. Right up to the top for the rear cabin, where the Captain-it has to be said-had arranged for some redecorating by Klaxon workers-so as to make the journey more comfortable and easier on the eye. Adjustments had also been made to the huge insectoid vanes on the Drill's outside so as to help improve the views from the rear cabin's windows once en route via renewed intra-uterine burrowing.

Beth recalled the vision of two huge eyes in the Klaxon 'sky' and she shuddered, having now forgotten whether the ceremony of Sunne Stead had been a dream or real life. She had forgotten, too, self-evidently, that there were no such things as unrecognised dreams within Inner Earth. So it must have been real. Clare and Edith were too preoccupied with their next choice of books from the Drill's library to care either way.

Greg took one last backward look at Klaxon, wondering if he would ever be able to relive his adventures there. They would make a small book all by themselves.

He also recalled the multi-manhandling of the mighty Drill from its pylon-turret's pinion, with some difficulty, by the Klaxon workforce. But, eventually, the Drill was pitched upon the banks of the river near Klaxon's own Notre Dame Cathedral, the bit-tip once more poised over burrowable terrain. He imagined that the bit-tip's whirring and eventual screeching as it met the under-surface would out-noise even the city's wailing sirens. Meanwhile, the Canterbury Oak, with gigantic bole, but spa.r.s.e branches aloft, was still etched against the wan Corelight. Now silent. Hence the renewed man-made sirens opening up their avant-garde threnody a la Ligeti or Penderecki.

The other businessmen whom Greg had hardly examined during the first part of the journey were still nebulous figures or an undercurrent of company rather than specific hard-drawn faces of mutual communication-but they were no doubt due to share the Corporate Lounge's facilities with him again. Hogging c.o.c.ktails and anchovy munches and canapes. This time he thought he recognised one of them. At first a waft of Ogdon's smell. But, without the cape, Crazy Lope looked quite different. He didn't seem to be out of place. So in place, therefore, so basically unnoticeable that, in the end, Greg didn't notice him at all.

He just day-dreamed of their overground City following them on, digging with its airport arms.

Dognahnyi had returned to his pent-flat and stared at a flatter day that welcomed him back from a short unexpected strobe-holiday: stared, too, upon an even flatter threadbare carpet, which he had not bothered to replace for years, despite being otherwise surrounded by hi-tech equipment together with what he boasted to be an original Rubens on the wall opposite to the other wall where glowed the closed drapes-on-silent-runners.

Amy, the new recruit to his level of narration, had also disappeared with the initial abrupt reality strobe-out, but, unlike Dognahnyi, she had not returned here to continue the interview. Perhaps she thought she had already pa.s.sed the necessary tests, before being strobed out. However, he feared she might have been caught up in last night's explosion in the Moorish quarter of the city-near the Bridge. However, it was more likely (he hoped) that she had already joined her alter-nemo in the tunnel's level of narration, i.e. two levels below Dognahnyi's own.

He laughed. The day was suddenly becoming less flat. He knew there were two main narrative levels below his head-lease narration-i.e. John Ogdon (aka 'Hilda') and myself (Mike). Both in intense rivalry to produce the 'truth' of the event-conspiracies, dream sicknesses, contaminations etc., although Dognahnyi sensed the narrator he knew as Mike was too sentimental for such machinations since Mike had already admitted he was intent on a happy ending. Little did Dognahnyi actually know, however. He was not the head-lease narrator at all. There was one level above him which pulled all the strings, including his.

However, Dognahnyi actually suspected that he might not be in complete control. He would not have been strobed out (albeit momentarily) if he were in complete control. But this suspicion was little more than sub-conscious, a synaptic undercurrent that hardly vibrated his thought cortices. However, the suspicion was subtly symbolised by his own tingle of fantastical belief that the city around him was also underground to other cities-just like Klaxon and Whof.a.ge and Agra Aska were, in turn, underground to his own city. The sky in Dognahnyi's city was indeed filled with stars, yes, but these were perhaps pinp.r.i.c.k apertures to a further upper world where people were as yet preparing to travel to explore Dognahnyi's city in Drills and pot-holing expeditions. He loved fantasising. The real City itself, the one around him with covered market, Dry Dock, derelict zoo etc., was perhaps itself a living creature preparing to lift its airport arms and follow its own corpuscles' flightpaths to the essential Core of things. But then fantasising was a thing you could take to the Nth degree and still allow the brain to survive to deal with more down-to-earth concerns such as his imminent supper...

...and such as the contaminations. Dream spam. Riots in real life between dreamers from different nightmares. Dream terrorism-where no cause was too slight to warrant dream-suicide in its pursuance. Day-dream junk of confused waking. Contaminations where animal meat and bird meat welded together, even dead bits of each shuffling together in various fridges: yearning to weave threads of sinew together into the weft and woof of new palpitating substances. Dognahnyi even speculated on giant insects. If you cut them up, would their 'meat' be meat as he understood the term? There was a theory that insects when blown up out of proportion were the instigators of meat-off-the-insect-bone that resembled an interpenetrative mixture of poultry and beef, interleaved with yellow insect fat.

He returned to making his supper. Fantasy, even the dream-concerns of narrative level, must take a backseat to survival, he thought, as the blue flame bloomed from his cooker-hob beneath the frying-pan.

As he cooked, he speculated on his own definition of 'hawling', viz. dragging truths through various levels of competing narrations towards crystallisation.

In the past, Sudra skipped across the gra.s.s neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.

I pointed into the sky, drawing attention-for Susan's benefit as well as Sudra's-where I saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a Black & Decker drill the size of a real lorry-but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus... followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada... until I realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys... soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter's... until that shock became real as I watched one of them accidentally clip another-with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even my feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky-more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet-and I prayed that they would not crash anywhere near our own house... a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened our lives which were far more valuable than property.

"The walls were red," one of the children said, a girl with bushy blonde hair, meaning to say they were read like a book. Or perhaps she did. The Yellow Book, however, blended into the wallpaper and remained unread.

I nodded. I did not wish to approach her, because, these days, touching was not allowed, even by teachers. I pointed to a huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock-not unlike the famous t.i.tanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit-which had long since become a fixture on the city's skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance-presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed-was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who-despite the frantic searching by the Authorities-were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper...

I suspected that there was more to this trade in Angel Wine than met the eye. The girl looked as if her veins were full of it. Bulging all over like raised contours on a wall-map of a soft Antartica.

Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but n.o.body listened then and n.o.body listened now, especially as he wasn't there... but someone or something was still there with the same speech on tape-loop. Or, rather, was it a flesh-corrupted ghost... or was it a spirit-diluted body? The voice sounded like his own, despite the lack of mouth muscles or any possible throat/chest resonation. But the voice was clear, nevertheless.

Voice reflection: "There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga-and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills-and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like 'Angerfin' on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing...."

Tapeworm-loop: Want another drink, Craze?

Susan: My sister Beth is beautiful but she often seems bitter... or loud. I'm right ugly by comparison-but perhaps calmer. I don't go into rages, like Beth does with Greg. Still, she's still getting over Dog. That was a relationship and a half, if ever there was one! Anyway, when we thought the children had disappeared, Beth was a tower of strength. Just shows you. I hope she's enjoying her weekend break with those Jules Verne tour holidays. I hope she and Greg are managing to patch things up. I have dreams myself. I could do with my own break. Mike is a blighter sometimes-he just leaves me alone-and when we sleep at night, I hear him snoring peacefully whilst I return to those dim dream-caverns that I can't escape-where I dream he's staring at Amy and Sudra cuddling each other. Dreams don't make it untrue, I say. Just because I sense his nature by means of dreams, doesn't mean I can't function properly when I finally wake up. There are words I don't understand that keep coming into my dreams. Jules Verne things-like Musketeers. Mistaken, perhaps, who knows? I was never one in waking life to know anything at all about such things. Who wrote what and whether I love music beyond the normal run-of-the-mill, but the dream thinks I love listening to quite strange things-because the caverns echo with opera and that noisy philharmonic stuff. I'm sure I'm at least dreaming that. I just love me old television, back home. Back home? Big Brother, Coronation Street, Neighbours-that's what I really enjoy. I can't be doing with anything like these nightmares that I can't get out of. Mosquitos, more like-not Musketeers at all. And Minizanthi (I don't know if that's spelt correctly but it doesn't matter as I'm saying these words not writing them down), things that peer round boulders, real ghosts in unreal dreams, with wide faces, having a break from hauling on the bucket-pulleys, their faces all smeared with white as if they've been naughtily at the cream cakes from my old Mum's larder. I love Mike. I wish he could see that. I try to make him love me in the dream. Because I know there is no real hope when I wake up. We both seem to be covered in a stiff coat, just with armholes, and I try to share his armholes with mine, taking his mind off the two girls. Amy's been a bit strange lately. She's been insufferable since she made it up with Sudra. I don't think I can trust Amy any more. Sudra has always been a worry to me, ever since her real Dad was so nasty to her. Flies, more like-not mosquitos. He stuffed her mouth to keep her quiet. I called the police, but he was little more than a cabbage when they came to take him away. I bet not many women have got their husbands put away. Most women put themselves away, I guess. I wish Sudra would not be so... innocent. But we're all in strange times down here. All bets are off, as they say. Just recently we had a whole long period of light from that shining thing in the dream. Arthur's ear is now growing again. No wonder he walks lopsided. But now it's near to darkness as darkness can be without being truly dark. I give Mike a kiss. He kisses me back. And at last we s.n.a.t.c.h some sleep, together for once, rather than him sleeping and me waking, or vice versa. And we're back in what I can only call real life-just for a short while at least. The sun is shining. The traffic has started up in the city. And I get up to switch on the TV. But before I can do that, I wake up again (or return to sleep?), and I'm here. I kiss Mike as he snores. He smiles in his sleep. Only his smile is there. Arthur's earwigging us, no doubt, hoping we may give a clue as to why we're all here and not at home in front of the TV. He never talks to his sister any more. Amy's real strange, you see, as if it isn't her any more. But she loved Sudra before, and she still loves Sudra, so I guess there is some thread of truth somewhere between the first Amy and the second one. People never stand still. They are always changing. I need something myself. I need Mike to come to me at the window where I look out at the city and the sun, then for him to put his arms round me... This coat is so difficult to wear. I can't even get it off, even if I tried. I need something more than all this. I need... I thought that there were some places where it was clear if you was dreaming or not dreaming. I'm not sure I believe that any more. But perhaps I'm mixed up and I'll soon wake up again and be less mixed up...

A waft of musky Angevin in its raw state interrupts her reverie... and eventually, having thought about it first, Susan snores peacefully for once, with no dreaming. That begs the question, however, where exactly are you when you are asleep and not dreaming? I listen to her snores which keep me awake.

Beth: My Susan's soft! I always knew she was softer than me. Twin sisters come in pairs of 'hard' and 'soft', generally, and I was always the hard one, Edith. No, Clare, stop shaking your head... Oh, I see it's the Drill shaking it! But nothing to see out there at all except d.a.m.n rubble-storms, so you may as well listen to me as stare out there, ladies. And put your sn.o.bby books away. They're full of words I don't understand, and I'm pretty sure you don't understand them either. Edith, stop staring at that photo of your kids. They're grown up now and can look after themselves, I'm sure. Amy included. She wanted to be someone different. Now she has the chance. Not many of us get that chance in life. Big Eared Arthur once drove a Big Bus. Isn't that an old Music Hall song? He can now drive a whole world to its centre given the chance, I reckon. Private Planet, Vehicle Earth, Private Person takes the World on holiday. See, I've still got some gumption, even words that I don't understand I still use for some reason, despite being put away by men into this yellow cabin. Greg's as bad as Dog, I reckon. Greg and that Captain are hand in glove to keep us quiet up here in this top flat berth, while they see the Corelight rise above the new cities of Inner Earth through their own windows cleared by the vanes... They little realise, at the end of the day, that the Core is just like another Full Moon above the earth, casting silken curtains of light across the black waves of night's chilly sea (what poem, did that come from?). Men! They think they're heroes at every glimpse of a new adventure. I suspect the Core is really little more than a cake, baked hard like a lump of solid carpet, a misshapen lump of tufts to gag upon. Eating that cake opens a whole vista of lost time, they say. Let them eat cake. Hope it chokes them! Susan, you ask? Well, she always used to look after wounded birds she found in our garden. In fact, I think Our Father up in Heaven meant for her to stumble on every poor creature under the sun so that she could exercise her nursing skills as a potential earth mother. I remember her once sitting in the parlour, a lump of feather-filled blood on her lap and she cooed at this lump expecting it to coo back at her. And it did. She brought it back to life. But I say-what's the point of bringing such shipwrecks of nature back to life once they've been left high and dry on a crag by an egg vandal who broke its sh.e.l.l and left the innards to wilt stinkily in the salt winds? But Susan always rescued them. Even as a child. I scolded her for being so b.l.o.o.d.y soft. Therefore, how, dear Edith, have I allowed myself to be relegated to a backseat in this Drill? How, dear Clare, are we all so cowed by a world slipping by within men's hands? If everything is to have a happy ending, then we need to tell someone that it is we instinctive women (soft and hard alike) who must win-who must reach out to the Core where there are no dreams at all, no confusions of truth and lie, we women who must reach out to the Core where (when we are within it) we'll know what is true and what is false-finally and clearly and undeniably. We are just biding our time, Ladies. Don't let submission fool you. Submission is for Susan, not me. And even Susan, I reckon will be waking up to her strengths the nearer she gets to the centre of things.

I may not even have known my own name. I was nemonymous. Some of my friends recognised me and called me by a name they thought I was named. I was a working-cla.s.s lad grown into manhood with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming nemonymous. I worked as a radio phone-in 'agony uncle'. Although that may not have been me at all. I met Arthur after he noticed his ear was getting even bigger. I tried to ignore it by staring at his other ear. We shared pints in Ogdon's pub-and then he worked behind the bar mixing c.o.c.ktails. He simply loved mixing things... sometimes mixing allotments of time together with events to make plots.

I had secret vices. I didn't even recognise them myself, if that is the same thing as secrecy. I wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England-a hobby and a method of saving money. I had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which I leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread-knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with my 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. Arthur admired them when I brought samples into the pub. He was still not old enough, thankfully, to realise he was 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. I was the head-lease narrator, the one from where they all had their essence and being.