Authors: D. F. Lewis
*
The children arrived at the Dry Dock—but the ship had been moved back to the sea during the night. Each pair circled the area where it had stood for months between stanchions, breezeblocks, gantries and giant chocks. This was where they suspected the hole they sought would be found—a service tunnel bled from the ship’s hull for off-loading unfiltered substances: leading into the intricacies of the earth’s valves. Not that they possessed those words to describe it. They merely had dreamed them, beamed from elsewhere, during the returning onset of the dream sickness (a sickness that most people, even children, had forgotten).
One child thought of the maps that had been on board—in the maproom. A wall of maps overlapping each other. This child then told his other half about it: “They were wall-sized maps on hardboard, one on top of the other, hinged at the top where the ship’s horizontal false ceiling ended in meeting the vertical—and you needed to lift one map to see the one underneath, lifting them again and again until you reached the wall itself. Some of the maps are blank, some very complicated with lots of wavy lines…” He tried to take a breath as he took a long run at describing everything that went through his mind. He had the word-power and the enthusiasm to match it. His listener was in awe.
Other children, with similar memories, could hardly describe them. “The walls were red,” one of them said (a girl with bushy blonde hair), meaning to say they were read like a book.
“There was a map of a railway,” answered another precocious child who held the hand of an older child with fuzz on his top lip, the latter not seeming quite so ‘with it’ as the younger one.
“On the wall?”
“Sort of
under
the wall. You had to lift the top wall up to see under it—and the first map under it was of a railway, not a map of rivers, roads or mountains—only tracks crawling all over it like centipedes.”
“Funny map to have on board a ship!”
“Yes, but most people these days think about trains, rather than boats, planes or cars.”
“Do they? What about helicopters? Do you count them as planes?”
Children crowded in to listen, whilst others searched the distraught area where the ship had once been stationed—still trying to locate the hole to the centre of the earth—and beyond.
“Some people remember the times when grown-ups used to travel to work.”
“Commuting,” chimed in a bright spark from the back of the crowd.
“Yes, something like that—but they say you remember the open platforms in the countryside and the platforms you used but now a bit changed, mixing up the direction or if you had changed to the right platform for the next train—going back in the same direction as you came, while you are mixed up because most of the other passengers are collecting themselves on the opposite platform to the one you are on—and you’ve forgotten whether you were travelling to work or travelling back home having already been to work…”
The chatter soon dissolved as the kids departed in dribs and drabs, having given up any chance of locating the pit entrance hereabouts. The chatter thus faded into the distance and, simultaneously, became more like chatter fitting for children to chat.
*
During their lunch-break from the office, Greg and Mike visited Ogdon’s pub on the third floor of the New Trocadero. Mike was disturbed to catch Susan and Ogdon canoodling behind the bar when he and Greg arrived—but Susan quickly rectified herself with some careless excuse. Sympathies for all parties have been meticulously crafted by the implied omniscience of someone who stands behind all the characters. If only he or she were more up front with this task instead of keeping everything between the lines. And given these sympathies, one can try to imagine the sorrow in Mike’s heart at this sign of seedy affection between Susan and Ogdon, plus the shame he felt at his colleague Greg also witnessing the tawdry scene and the further shame felt, indeed, by Susan herself. She quickly changed the subject, whilst serving Greg and Mike their lunchtime booze.
“The ship’s gone, then.”
Mike nodded. The huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock—not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit—had long 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…
“Nobody seemed to notice,” said Greg. “It’s not as if the sea is close by, but they must have re-cut the river to the sea overnight, too! Amazing what they can do.”
“I heard the groaning of sheet metal throughout the night, but I couldn’t wake up properly—to check,” announced Ogdon.
Meanwhile Susan’s sister Beth and Beth’s husband had entered the pub. A childless couple, but they had great sympathy with those who had lost children overnight.
Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened.
“I went to his room—and he said he would show me his if I showed him mine. So I escaped back down the stairs, helter skelter. A long way from his flat to the ground. Heh heh! The sea, you say? It’s not far to the coast from here, really. I once went…” He spat into his drink before he continued, oblivious that nobody was listening to his series of conversational non-sequiturs. “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….”
Nobody paid any attention to Crazy Lope’s failure of communication, a failure even with himself. He didn’t fill up the whole screen.
Greg and Mike soon left the pub, intent on returning to the office where the computers continued to work throughout their lunchbreak, like huge sensory calculators with amputated keys. Each man felt the other was a website, a blog city, a click on the right point bringing everything up in various stages of construction. Either that or they were slightly merry from imbibing on empty stomachs.
*
Beth was beautiful but she often seemed bitter... or strident... transferring furrows to the face that seemed out of place there. Her personality had changed the character of her face. Her sister Susan was less physically attractive, yet her nature was calmer, more amenable—not necessarily kinder or smarter than Beth, but less prone to have mind rage at the slightest setback. Patience was something Beth deeply lacked and her non-descript husband took the brunt of her short temper—to the extent of having any of his own personality stripped from him, like a gossamer upperskin peeling off and jettisoned: left just to cling on, for dear life, to the cast shadow in his wake.
When Beth’s nephew and niece disappeared, Beth initially failed to react sufficiently: but as soon as she did take initiative on her sister’s behalf, Susan stopped being simply bemused at losing two children she somehow hadn’t realised she had. Beth had at first retained her habits, however—arriving in Ogdon’s pub rather late and with cool nonchalance—yet later her inbuilt stridency took inevitable sway and she felt there was nothing to do but burn the candle at both ends, tussling insistently, if not violently, with the Authorities, whilst chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?”
“Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid—unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.
The dream sickness—like a ‘flu pandemic—caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered... but, unlike a ‘flu pandemic, the dream sickness was inspired by an inference regarding an infernal mass-hysteria linked to a mass-suicide syndrome rather than to any individual’s pain or conscious disability.
Many parents set up search parties—because Arthur and Amy were not the only ones believed to have inexplicably gone missing. Some search parties overlapped with other search parties. There were petty rivalries, even bitter disputes between them, believing their own children were being sought by other parties and vice versa.
Meanwhile, wells were dug all over the city towards the Northern coalfields. Separate queues were set up at these wells to reflect the medicine queues further south, as if some unknown synchronicity was sought to provide an explanation factor linking two imponderables and hopefully making them ponderable. Some children who hadn’t yet run away from home played sandcastles around the wells—damming and river-construction games mocked-up from various substances abandoned by gardeners in allotment sheds previously rifled by unknown hands and given to the children. Weighing bucket against bucket was a common daily reality even though it sounds more like something they should have dreamed about... being tantamount to a
waking
sickness, assuming anyone could get their heads around such a concept.
*
Much further south, towards the holiday ‘feet’ of the city-shape, other queues formed near ranks of parked silver craft that had been earmarked and then advertised as vehicles for tours beyond the city toward the sea in pursuit of adventures of which Jules Verne would have been proud.
Crazy Lope and John Ogdon had booked for an undersea tour, but then decided against it. This would have been under the tutelage of a rather outlandishly garbed and dramatic Captain Nemo (or so it was blurbed in the brochure), cashing in on a vogue for such old-fashioned fantasy trips. Booking avoided queues but cost a lot more. Greg said he wanted to accompany them, but currently there wasn’t a vacancy, unless a late cancellation arose. At that stage Crazy Lope and Ogdon had not yet cancelled. Greg wondered if he really shouldn’t accompany Beth, Susan & Co. in search of Arthur and Amy. A holiday seemed a bit of a cop-out compared to participating in a pukka search party. Mike himself kept his own counsel.
Long ago, Mike (or others on his behalf) believed he was a hawler but, with a generally increasing number of inscrutable dreams, that concept had vanished into some forgotten sump of tribal consciousness. The only thing known about a hawler was that there was no fact to know about a hawler. A hawler being a wide-faced creature that sat at the centre of the earth was an earlier description—but whoever or whatever created that description had since disappeared and thus become unaccountable for it.
*
Greg, meanwhile, remembered the zoo visit with some clarity. His face was a bit effeminate—and one could easily imagine him performing a drag act as a hobby. A Danny La Rue manqué. He was a loner but people in the office where he worked thought he was a rather pleasant individual and they believed many of the stories he told about his non-existent life. His suits were immaculate. His jokes tasteful. His visits to the loo kept to the minimum as he hated mirrors. The zoo, too. Rather good at his administrative job, a whizz with the keyboard and could build websites at a flick of his wrist—or so it seemed. A pity he had such awful, guilt-ridden dreams about a daughter he’d never had. Nobody knew about this, of course.
He missed Mike. Mike had once worked in the same office, but with the domestic problems that later beset him, he had left and moved to the other side of the city with his wife and children. They seemed somehow distinct from the Mike and Susan with whom Greg had since become re-acquainted on the screen... in the era of televised search parties pre-occupying the ‘Big Brother’ reality-show mentalities of the gullible public. And Amy—one of the children—was later found grown-up and vacuuming carpets without even knowing Mike was her father. But that’s an earlier story since abandoned for whatever reason. Or a later one yet to be told. Nobody was quite sure.
*
Crazy Lope was Ogdon’s alter ego. And vice versa. The fact that one set of relationships between them could overlap another yet opposite set continued to make it possible that they remained separate people, despite the evidence otherwise. Writing fiction was his first love—often about a vampire called a Horla after a French writer’s story of the same name—but this had soon fallen by the wayside. Nobody could earn money from writing such rarefied fiction—so he proceeded to put it on an antipodal back-burner whilst deciding to open a pub (his second love).
Ogdon gave himself an evening off from time to time, as pub life was generally very hard. But he spent most of this free time behind the other side of his bar, talking to regulars, if not to himself. Conversations on either side of the bar did differ, but it was all basically the same: ‘pub talk’: loosened tongues amid boozy brainstorming.
Ogdon
: It’s like fixing a painting with a special cold varnish, so it doesn’t fade, or even change. Paintings can change, you know.
Crazy Lope
: Change?
O
: Yes—fixing dreams is one thing, like making sure we remember them a few hours after we wake up. But far harder is to fix reality itself—stopping it slipping or sliding into dream. That’s the fixing I’m talking about.
CL
: I didn’t know you knew about such things. I’ve often had dreams which get confused and, sooner or later, lost forever. Does that happen to real things, too, then? I suppose you might be right.