Except they had escaped!

They were soon to reach the Core where truths would shine out and dreams dissipate. I shuddered. I was losing control. Mike and his party were, I suddenly discovered, on the point of reaching some mountain cutaway within the largest cavity that Inner Earth possessed-and Corelight would skim through like real sunshine to reveal the sorrows of mankind, but also illuminating a way to heal them. Mike would gain all the credit. Not me!

I punched away at the keys (having failed to shut down the screen) to prevent his party from ever reaching that Core or its Nirvana. Meanwhile, with my eye momentarily off the ball, I saw from the corner of my head that 'The Hawler', the lubricated Drill that threaded the rubble-storms, equally nearing the same Core, was about to crash-land on the outskirts of the Core itself-near Agra Aska-where they would rescue young love from the dreaded shyfryngs... and using the powerhouse of this love, they, too, i.e. Captain Nemo and his party, would reach Nirvana-without me!

I was aghast and I re-punched the keys, creating codes and tags for a new site of my dominion and power. A new blog city. It would be a battle of wills. And I was sure to win. I was determined to seek the information I needed, information that someone was hiding from me. I was the head-lease narrator. How could anyone be hiding anything from me?

Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide which party I'd follow. The coin dropped on its milled edge within a hole in my carpet.

Later, I stared at the screen in my flat. I had started typing up my things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. "I am curious-yellow," I whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. I scribbled in my bright red Silvine 'Nemo Book'. I spent much of most nights exploring (wandering)-mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city-areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, I imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy.

I believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface of the earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body... invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes' owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.

I reviewed my own dreams. The fiction could wait, as I shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of my yellow screen and turned to the Nemo Book with a long stub of pencil grasped like I used to grab it as a child: in the fist like a dagger.

Notes: Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream. These viruses are similar to birds with revolving beaks like drillbits, each a little pesky explorer. They multiply by ease of dreams being soaked into the birds' lubrication-pores. Filters can and do work both ways. Each 'bird' burrows from, say, my dream into, say, your dream. It takes a bit of me to you, and a bit of you to me-mixing reality and dream, as well as you and me. Then extrapolate that at a geometric progression. Each 'bird' (or dream virus) has its own consciousness but that also multiplies as its mutation increases, not changing its Drill's body so much, but changing the clouded specifics of its mind, each specific mind becoming a human mind that thinks it has got a human body-plus interaction with other 'human beings' of their own kind as if it is real life on the surface of our world, but really they are self-imagined figments within the bird's c.o.c.kpit as it lays waste the skins of dream throughout a ma.s.s Jungian consciousness. I know it is difficult to grasp these concepts. I have faced the situation in my own mind that I myself may be one such dream virus (or, at best, a harmless dream spam): and I'm easing the skins to open up to the manifold plankton of dream-interst.i.tialists. Birds of Plague riding their luck as they multi-dream-'multi-' because there are a lot of them in themselves but also 'multi-' because each Drillbit carrier has more than one mind (and often several) within its very c.o.c.kpit, minds believing they are real human beings and not interactors in a fabricated drama or fiction. There are also human minds who have fallen off their own perch and 'walk' independently (or so they think) within Plato's Cave. But that's too deep for a notebook. But whilst we are on intellectual matters, I do now realise that La Vida Es Sueno was written by Pedro Calderon De La Barca, not by Lope de Vega. Meanwhile, the interaction of civil riots and religious troubles and suicide bombs (bombs that explode without fear for their own c.o.c.kpits of self-a.s.sumed multi-mind) and global warmings/global warnings feed off each other back and forth. That list of possible Corekeepers: Megazanthus, G.o.dspanker, Dognahnyi, Weirdmonger, Etepsed-Egnis, Azathoth. Dreams leak, books leak...

I tore up the page I had been scribbling on. And I returned to my desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up my screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation with which I would need to come to terms... eventually.

He called her Tho, as a gratuitously eccentric shortening for Thora. He was Hataz. Always had been. In full.

Hataz was more oriental than he looked. He and Tho were not necessarily a match made in Heaven, yet fair enough for two lonely strangers who both admitted they needed somebody. Their single attempt at love-making proper had been a clumsy exercise, neither of the partic.i.p.ants earning flying colours for their efforts. They didn't really get near enough to each other. They were probably scared of the final penetration: a fact left unsaid.

After that, by tacit mutual consent, they never indulged in a blatantly physical approach again. Going to the only cinema left open in the city, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in derelict parks... these activities were surely sufficient for people like them, because (as Tho thought) "spirit rode the flesh like aura".

They also played childish games unchildishly in Hataz's place, such as Ludo and Draughts-and, even, despite the size of the flat, hide-and-seek.

Inevitably, affairs of innocent convenience wind down and, today, Tho was bluntly determined to cut Hataz from her life before she became too enmeshed-not because the relationship was particularly claustrophobic, but simply because she was scared of a dream.

"A dream you've dreamed?" asked Hataz, genuinely puzzled at the sudden mention of dreaming. They had just returned from a concert in one of the riot areas of the city near the old Dry Dock-where a little known jazz combo called Erich Zann had given a desultory performance on vibes, flute and zither in an obscure unlabelled nightclub. Now, she had chosen this moment in Hataz's flat to make a prepared statement, one she had seemingly rehea.r.s.ed in front of her wardrobe mirror.

"It's not a dream I've really dreamed, as such-it's strange, I can't explain it."

Hataz had started the evening hating the music. Now he was more generally confused than irritated-an uncommon feeling with him. Usually confident about life in general (if not with girls in the shape of Tho), tonight's disorientation was difficult to fathom. He had already felt vague indications of being unbalanced on previous dates, but nothing quite like now. Surely she was not going a roundabout way to ditching him. His pride, as far as the opposite s.e.x was concerned, seemed fragile enough, already. For one peculiar moment, he felt these thoughts were not his, but Tho's. Osmosis? A twinning of auras?

"It was the edge of a dream, Hataz. I could see the dream in my bedroom, as if it had a transparent cover. Not really a bubble nor a balloon. Just a shapeless watery skin. Inside were all the nightmares I knew should have been in my sleep. I was awake, watching an independent dream that n.o.body was dreaming. There were glowing things that walked about. One of them I later saw was you, Hataz. Or someone who looked like you."

Tho coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural, but Hataz was fully aware that she was reciting something she had learned parrot fashion. It almost felt as if he were dreaming. And the recital was silent.

"One looked like me? What are you trying to say?"

He had the uncanny sense that he was also reciting something, learned without his having remembered learning it.

"It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever."

There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz's flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from a forgotten airport.

In many ways, she didn't need to say the words. Hataz's new-found faith in the phenomenon of osmosis was nurtured by the silence, as she sprayed further implications and he allowed his inferences to burgeon. But, then, of course, her words would spill out autonomously, more visible than audible.

"I could see the host body's neck tightening," she continued, "bursting at the seams, as you tried to clamber out, except the seams were knotted veins rather than rows of st.i.tches. Other creatures gathered at your feet-things I couldn't recognise, let alone describe. Some just a ma.s.s of wriggling tentacles. Others with more head than body. Tails and teeth. All chanting bits from an invented religion. To describe things in a dream makes remembering them more easy. The words and the names of the things seemed the most natural parts although, afterwards, they were the strangest. G.o.d knows how they were spelt. A good job, perhaps, that one can't remember every dream. But this dream was different, being one I was viewing from the bed, whilst still awake. It was growing in size, too. The dream's wobbly skin getting nearer and nearer, as it filled with more and more nightmares. Can't you see, Hataz, how I've been worried? I didn't know how to tell you. Nor if I should tell you at all."

"Do you want a drink?" Hataz asked, thinking that a psychologist would probably call this a nervous breakdown. She needed humouring, not scolding. He still couldn't shake off, however, the suspicion of a sting in the tail. Tho wanted to chuck him. That was b.l.o.o.d.y obvious, if nothing else was. In the meantime, though, she needed help.

"A drink? Yes, why not? A coffee, perhaps. Make it with milk if you've got plenty."

She heard him pottering about in the kitchen, as men did. Hataz imagined her hearing him-the c.h.i.n.k of cups easing the silence more efficiently than the earlier exchange of words had done. Words were not really sounds, when they meant so much. Meanings were there whether one said them out loud or not. She shook her head. Or so Hataz inferred. How could she be thinking such thoughts? Thoughts were words injected straight into the vein. Surely she had intended to tell him of his host body in the dream with its skull splitting, tilting sideways from his own skull which was inside it. Bone within bone. The brain slid down his face like porridge, hair brylcreemed with blood. It was strange she could describe things better aloud, than describing them silently to herself. Osmosis was telling him too much of what she thought.

He returned with the cups of coffee and placed them upon the small table between Tho and himself.

"Are you feeling any better?"

He bit his tongue, without knowing why "All depends from what standard you are judging 'better'. I've never felt better, Hataz. It's as if I've never really been myself before. I was once a girl living in a dream. Now, I'm awake and I can see myself for what I am. No illusions. Just a dead-end girl who'll never be 'better' than average. You see, I was in that dream, too-eventually. Not one of the creatures slithering on their backsides. I was a finned figure that emerged from the shadows, soon after the body you once inhabited had disappeared. We didn't recognise each other, since we were both somewhat different than in real life. Then, I saw myself in bed, peering through the skin of the dream, from the outside of the dream, yes, peering at me in the dream."

"Tho, it was just a nightmare. You shouldn't take it so seriously. Everybody has at least one G.o.dawful dream in their lives-one that sticks with them."

He smiled. Was he on the point of ditching her?

"No, I told you, Hataz, I was not dreaming. I was awake. I was that girl in the bed. Fully conscious. Knowing exactly what I was seeing. And then you put one of your hands through the skin."

She screamed. A short sharp laugh that she had intended to come out as a full-blooded scream.

"Then your whole arm poked through," she continued, "reaching out for me with fingers that were webbed with some backward evolution. It was as if each fingernail were a tiny spinning drill. I screamed in real life, then-dreading that a dream without a dreamer could actually hurt more than just mentally."

Hataz sipped his coffee, sorry that he could not hear one of those droning aeroplanes. It must have been the fog that had cut them off from the sound of the thrumming traffic down below, interspersed with the odd clatter of overhead vanes or a fitful bomb-blast in another quarter of the city. He decided to let her have her head. No further point in interrupting or even commenting at natural breaks.

"Hataz, believe me, when I tell you, I was scared. So rotten scared, I closed my eyes, to blot out the dream."

"I bet you still saw the dream, though."

This time Hataz bit his tongue with the full foreknowledge of so doing. He had contravened his own rules of engagement.

"No, it was black inside my head. Not even a glimmer showing through the eyelids. The dream was not throwing out any light of its own. My bedroom was indeed as dark as it should have been, with the lamp off. That seemed to prove beyond all shadow of doubt it was a dream I'd been watching, not a dream I'd been dreaming. This must all sound so incredibly crazy to you-but when I felt the kiss upon my cheek and the strange words in my ear..."

"You became a Sleeping Beauty reversed, never to wake again!"

Hataz laughed at his own non sequitur. Humouring Tho had got him nowhere, so mockery had to be his next ploy. She reddened and simply stared through him into s.p.a.ce. Having finished his coffee, he got up to look outside through the window. Not a glint. Not even a hint of anything beyond his gaze. Silence met silence through the gla.s.s. Eventually, with his neck aching, he turned back to face out Tho. It was about time she came to the point. And if she didn't, he would. At least one of them would have to cut the other from his or her life. But the vibes were all wrong. What he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.

n.o.body.

The n.o.body who was ever the essence of loneliness.

The milky coffee he'd prepared for Tho was untouched, left stirlessly to a look of barely lukewarm and growing a meniscus skin.

Near to bursting with a pa.s.sion he had never previously experienced, Hataz headed for the kitchen. He sought the bread knife or, preferably, something slightly more surgical than culinary-simply to lance the boil that his whole body had become. Playing hide-and-seek didn't allow the hidden one to squat, thumb-plugged, inside the searcher, did it?

Hataz returned with emptiness in his grasp, planted his face in the grail of his own webbed fingers, shaking with the shyfryngs. He later sipped the piping hot coffee to the sound of droning skycraft. Eventually, he heard a needle enter the deepest groove of all-and to the silence of Zann's zany zithers playing 'Nethermost Blight', he felt abysmally sad for someone he'd never find because it was himself. Azathoth's eyes poured out their sorrow. A thick cuckoo-spit bubbling from the centre of Infinity.

'Backward girl' doesn't mean backward in the sense of having a few slates loose on her dolls-house, but backward in an inverted Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time way, the girl's past already bewitched by the future she had yet to live. Hawling is another word for such a process, a process that was just about to begin that day many years ago when Sudra's Mum asked her this question: "Sudra, what do you want for Christmas?"

Her mother Susan stared as the small girl played with her single toy-a log lorry that she moved across the carpet between the legs of the armchair. She pretended that the darkness under the seat was a secluded area where the driver could get out and stretch his legs. It didn't seem to matter to her that the driver in the cab was firmly glued to his own seat, with his plastic legs and face all the same colour as the rest of him.

Whilst Sudra was imagining the procedure she had set in motion under the armchair, she looked up at Susan. Her father (Susan's husband) was away long-term at the present time-and this fact lightened Sudra's heart somewhat but she wasn't old enough to gauge exactly the magnitude of the relief that this same absence also afforded Susan's own spirits. Uncle Mike was due to visit before Christmas-and Sudra ever enjoyed his visits, if only because it put a smile on Susan's face. And Christmas was a time for smiles. Even smiles of disguise.

Sudra trundled the log lorry from under the seat's shadow-and parked it between two frayed lines in the carpet's growth of pattern. She undid the mighty hawsers that kept the logs in place and proceeded, gradually, to reposition the load close to the roaring coal fire in the grate. Sudra basked in the pink heat. She felt that teasing the logs with the proximity of fire was rather a funny joke and she laughed before answering her Mum's original question.

"Can I have a real doll, please... or a pet dog... Or some new shoes?"

Susan smiled. Not the broad Uncle Mike-induced sort of smile, but a smile nevertheless. Sudra guessed that Susan guessed that Uncle Mike was, in fact, at that very moment, shopping for just such a doll to lighten Sudra's Christmas morning. Far more fun to play with on that special day than clothes-even new shoes. Sudra, however, deep down felt that she deserved clothes as well as a doll, as well as a dog. Her clothes, for example, were more threadbare than the carpet. And her only pet was one she herself imagined.

"If it's a doll, Mummy, can I have new shoes, too?"

"You have enough shoes, Sudra!" Susan frowned. Susan's own shoes were little more than moccasins made from remnant squares of flooring-even more worn than the ill-tufted patches where Sudra kneeled as she listened to a crack or splinter in some quirk of coaldust subsidence around a larger chunk... as the December wind moaned in the chimney.

"I only have one pair, one ugly pair," piped up the plaintive face by the fire.

"Your Dad may get you some new shoes."

"Where is Dad?"

"He's visiting someone on business."

Sudra wasn't sure what the word 'business' meant.

"Is he going to the centre of the earth, again, for us?"

Susan laughed, despite herself-as she realised that Sudra hadn't forgotten some of the white lies her husband used to tell them as an excuse for his regular absences. She also had her own armoury of excuses that she issued on his behalf, like "He's off with Bunting hunting for rabbitskin" or "He's carving stars for the night sky" or "He's singing songs with Bobby Shaftoe and Little Tommy Tucker" or, indeed, "He's on a journey to the centre of the earth, he really is."

"How do you get to the centre of the earth, Mummy?"

"Well, you can dig straight down but also you could choose to go overland."

Susan spoke the customary words as this was a well-rehea.r.s.ed home-made Nursery Rhyme in the form of conversation. Customary words-whatever the words-often give young children comfort.

"Overland, Mummy?"

"Yes, overland to the centre of the earth."

This part always broadened the smile on Sudra's face. And the next bit of the exchange always brought the broadest smile of all.

"How can you go overland to the centre of the earth, Mummy?"

"By tricking, my dear... by tricking the Above and the Below and the Across."

Sudra's smile soon turned into a full-blooded laugh but, quickly, both the laugh and then the smile faded as she returned her attention to the log lorry-reloading the logs from in front of the fire. A coal spat and then settled as a flame bloomed then doused itself.

A loose thread in a garment or carpet or quilt is traditionally known as a 'roving'-and as Sudra decided spontaneously to scorch her log lorry's wheels fast across the carpet away from the fire, one of its back wheels got tangled in one such roving. She imagined her imaginary dog that moment snaffling into the living-room with a tangle of meat in its long teeth (it often ate disused meat till it was raw) and forthwith snaffling out of the room again. Dogs were meant to be affectionate, loyal... but all this imaginary version did was suck meat off bones, then it ground the bones...

Sudra looked at the roving in the carpet. The carpet was her version of 'overland'-but here was a snag. She tried to lower her face so that she could bite out the roving thinking for one instinctive moment that her own teeth were the imaginary dog's teeth. She found a sinewy roving of meat between two of her own teeth, which made her wince at the gums' pang when she removed it with a yank.

Yes, a doll for Christmas would be lovely. Uncle Mike was probably buying it at this very moment. Travelling overland to fetch for her a doll from the very centre of the earth.

"Stop dreaming, Sudra," said Susan, as she stroked her daughter's hair. The girl was now sound asleep coiled in front of the fire, log lorry forgotten. Uncle Mike would eventually arrive at the door and Sudra would skip fast to greet him, before Susan had a chance for her own pre-emptive cuddle and kiss.

Uncle Mike, if it turned out to be Uncle Mike, would not say what was in the package he put beneath the Christmas Tree. He did not tell them it was a real cabbagepatch doll with long doggy teeth and its own new shoes. But, of course, he would not arrive till nearer Christmas itself.

He had been roving overland for days, he would eventually claim, but now, by the warmth of their coal fire, he had reached the true centre of his world, here with Susan and Sudra.

The Drill broke through a fossil-bank close to Agra Aska, cartwheeling free from rubble-traction into the relatively clear s.p.a.ce of a huge cavity close to the Core itself.

The city was laid out like a map, until Captain Nemo released the Drill's parachutes, which worked jerkily in the unusual air consistency of Inner Earth. The map turned turtle but eventually approached more steadily, and Greg could see at last the famous Balsam River and its mighty Straddling Cathedral, whilst the Drill's bit-tip intermittently scribbled over it like a biro nib in the soft putty-like effulgence of the Corelight.

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

As the Drill landed with a hefty banking towards the Straddling Cathedral, Greg laughed upon spotting a kite being flown by an Agra Askan citizen, a kite identical to a flying carpet... prancing higher and higher from its slanting tether. Greg was older and hopefully wiser than before with his b.u.m-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.

Beth Dognahnyi remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching Agra Aska from a different terrestrial angle, i.e via the hawling-tunnels of man-city. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling-yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at Greg. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie "Hey, some of those kites haven't got people flying them!" suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.

Agra Aska was indeed now alive with kites. Beth and Greg had left the ill-tilted Drill. Captain Nemo, the businessmen and the dowagers were nowhere to be seen. Probably still preening themselves prior to disembarking. Beth and Greg had made reunion soon after the Drill's crash-landing by parachute. Beth was still wondering where Greg had been for the whole journey but didn't question why she hadn't questioned this before now. She however did complain about the dowagers and their over-eager book recommendations and the dreary yellow wallpaper in their rearward cabin. Beth and Greg knew perhaps that they were a template for love (albeit a forged or fabricated one) so they needed to act up their affection for each other at all times now that they had arrived in Agra Aska-and they wondered if their mission in Agra Aska was indeed a predetermined one for stamping this very template upon a younger couple who even at that moment were being touched by a bout of the shyfryngs at the well-demarcated edge of an enormous Coremoon-a vast glowing pale yellow 'half-sky' that even at this moment reared its arc through a mountain cutaway towards the south end of Agra Aska.

By now, in this renewed light, the bustle of barges upon the Balsam River was beginning a noisy trade of richly woven carpets and Angevin spices. Yet there was far more description to be endured before Beth and Greg would be able to do full justice to their vantage point, viz. the interlocking sights and clandestine intricacies and heady implications of such a place as Agra Aska and its near neighbour: the Megazanthine Core.

As our tunnelling party approached-at last-the mountain cutaway of South Agra Aska, I am sad to report a death. I am devastated-to the extent that I am not sure I am still the Mike I think I am or the Mike I think I have always been.

The whole incident has taken a lot out of me. But rest a.s.sured there is a consistency of viewpoint, a conviction that what I am reporting is the unvarnished truth, however poignant or indeed tragic for me (or for Mike if he is still me) that it happened to be. It is difficult to be certain about anything after such a long downward trek, interspersed with hawl training that was imposed on us by the intermittent appearance of service-tunnels alongside our main journey shaft. Both the girls, Amy and Sudra, were very game. They took all in their stride, despite the unfashionable carpet-coats and yellow clogs that any other young modern misses would no doubt spurn. Arthur has been a bit morose, weighed down to starboard as he is by a vast elephant ear. He has however acted as provender source, and there are no complaints on that score. Susan has been a real dream. I still love her.

Well, I can't delay the incident's telling, however long I dwell on trivialities to avoid addressing its terrible vision or loss. Sudra slipped in a momentary mess of darkness that smeared her vision, if not the vision of us others. We could see she was blinded by a mixture of darkness and a scalding flash of Corelight that was a freakish occurrence within her eyes alone: a combination far worse than the confusion of pure darkness itself. She hung over a mini-cutaway (one that was as nothing to some of the much bigger cutaways we had already experienced in our journey, but sufficient to waylay Sudra's steps). Amy rushed to her a.s.sistance, grabbing her wrists: and then for an eternity of anguish, there Sudra hung. I, too, rushed, from a nearby tunnel where I was silver-plating pulley-hooks. A goodly task for an evening's Corelight. But I mustn't delay. I was there soon enough to see Amy kissing Sudra's brow-as if in abandonment. Surrendering to an inevitable. Tears streamed down both girls' faces in pangs of lost love and despair. I grabbed Amy's ankles in an attempt to tug Sudra, via Amy, from the reaching abyss. I then managed to claw my way up Amy's legs and hugged her thighs within her carpet coat, tears now streaming down my own face.

"We should have gone overland."

These were Sudra's words as Amy finally let go. And echoing through the abyss: Sudra's screams of "New shoes, new shoes, new shoes, new shoes..." until even these strident sirens of hope faded into silence.