The phone rang.
Disgruntled, Pearce answered it in the hope of securing information, a clue to those phenomena by which he was bound to this lethargic continuum.
What he obtained from the anonymous caller was a lot of ear-splitting static and a bus route number.
Not much to go on, admittedly, but a beginning.
62
The world was upside-down, north was south and west east. He stood in a clearing, armour blazing, and gazed up at the sun. Down his left arm trickled dew spilled from cups of purple and white blooms. Jewels of pure water slid gracefully over the burnished silver of pauldron and vambrace. His right arm was coated from shoulder to wrist in rime. The clearing broadened, lush with grass till it met vertical stone.
Cast in every direction, the wanderer's shadow formed a circle round him. No curve or side of him was unlit, yet he stood in a pool of darkness.
He carried no weapon and spoke no word. Lowering his eyes he approached the cliff and began hammering with clenched metal fists upon the unyielding wall.
63
Nine inches from Scherzo's twitching nose the sandwich in its clear plastic bag brought him to a sudden and unexpected halt. The bag with the sandwich in it sat in a puddle of light so vivid he had to squint at the complex of shapes from an acute angle until his eyes adjusted to the unaccustomed. Nothing else was remotely visible, just the sandwich, the plastic bag whose interior shone with delicious condensation, and a disc of slick concrete two hand breadths across. The light came from a point far overhead, the merest pin-hole at the top of an invisible shaft. His stomach rumbled. When had he eaten last? What year? It took a considerable effort to pull back the hand that, unknown to Scherzo, had reached for the plastic. Teeth gritted, he sat cross-legged, contemplating the sandwich and whether or not in represented a legitimate meal. He dare not take the risk, he thought. Who had placed it there if not the Devil? For what purpose? It had to be a trap. He leaned forward, face nearly touching the alluring package. Sniffed. The bread was thick cut and liberally centred, the filling beef and salad. He could make out slices of tomato and cheese and pepper and onion. It was with a solemn reluctance that he passed.
The darkness closed, a perfect black. The image of the sandwich floated through his mind, almost as if it were still before his eyes. Scherzo was tempted to turn back. But he held fast.
A short time later he came upon a second puddle of light as smoothly beguiling as the first. Again the light had its source high above and again he squinted against its brightness. He approached with due caution, but there was no hostile movement. Magnificently illuminated was a swan-necked decanter of spangled vermilion wine and a matching bowl of plump fruit. Apple, orange, banana, pear, grape. Ripe. Juicy. Scherzo's throat could barely stand the onslaught. His mouth was dry and his tongue swollen. The wine blazed and the fruit gleamed. He could almost taste them. Tiny rainbows danced on the sparkling rim of a glass, begging his lips to join. The skins of apple, pear and grape implored his roughened teeth to slice them, to swim in their succulence. The orange and banana looked as if they would peel themselves, he had only to take them up.
Scherzo declined the offer. He carefully rounded this luscious obstacle and padded on his way, every organ of his body complaining, joining a grumbling symphony, every muscle of his frame that bit heavier, threatening an overtime ban. But he remained unflinching in the face of these enticements.
Pushing all thoughts of sustenance from his writhing brain, which had shrunk through dehydration and rattled in a tuneless cranium, Scherzo increased his speed in an effort to leave food and drink behind, beyond imperfect memory. He proceeded in a straight line, or so he imagined, as his blindness was absolute once more.
But then came the first hints of a weakening: stray photons exploded into his consciousness; a vague grey area intruded on the peripheries; and far off, in the subjective centre, glowed a further light, stronger than the others, radiating a starry corona of inducement. He couldn't ignore it. There was no way round. On drawing closer he shaded his eyes. A pot of gold kindled the pungent air, spreading the beam from above in countless fans of harmonious luminosity. Even the slime on the walls looked good. The shimmering gold improved everything it touched. Scherzo found himself next to it and the pot came up to his knees, as wide as a bathtub and overflowing with radiant doubloons. That it was a bribe was obvious. But one so generous? He had no wish to plunge his fingers into all that precious metal. So, eyes half shut, averted to combat the hypnotic glare of its millions, Scherzo Trepan braced himself against the concave brickwork and pushed with his naked feet the pot that promised so much, the sky and the earth, but could deliver neither, as he learned from its false bottom and profusion of steam. The promise was empty, illusory. The coins tipped into the silent water, damming the stream for less than a second as the spurious wealth quickly reverted, shooting violent gases. The pot collapsed like a paper tyre-iron, its contents dissolving like aspirin, welcome relief for Scherzo's equally tawdry headache.
He was jubilant. Jumping up and down on the spot he whooped and screamed at the dark he'd succeeded in diluting. Hunger vanished from his innards and thirst melted from his gums as if he'd sucked to oblivion a whole pound of toffees. He shouted defiance till his feet hurt and his head grazed the ceiling, the flood of relief a flood of adrenaline as he stretched his arms and rubbed his belly and continued on his way, accompanied by the fading chorus of his echo.
Nothing though could have prepared him for what came next, for it was aimed at his neither his head nor his heart, but at his insidious loins.
64
Blinder cut a fresh twig, loosened its green bark and fashioned a whistle, piped his way through the increasingly contorted wood. He kept a scalpel along with sundry needles and other surgical implements in a pouch sewn from a gumtree leaf in the lining of his moss-woven jacket that was paired, seamlessly camouflaged, with a kilt the tartan of banyan and eucalyptus. He hadn't forgone his profession, simply adapted it to present needs. His feet were hard and bare, their toes curling into earth if he remained standing in one place for long. His ankles knotty, his knees runed, his lips layered in cork, Blinder crashed through the tangled, thorned, florid undergrowth with the authority of a bear.
From the ground the castle was invisible; but he had no further need of sun to guide him. Since Dreep's riparian disappearance Blinder had given himself over completely to the strange tugging of his bones, the very thing - a crazy desire to be buried alive, to shelter birds and befriend worms - he had fled to the Arctic to escape. Yet there was no escaping the truth, the fate etched in his palms, and the closer he came to the castle the stronger and more certain were his feelings for a genealogy less human than arboreal. Blinder was ebony, sturdy mahogany, thousand-year cedar, the fabled black oak.
He emerged from a stand of alder, the ground softening underfoot. If Blinder followed anything he followed the river. Here the land flattened and water pooled, becoming stagnant insect-hung factories of fetid mud. He passed close to a line of stilted mangroves, dragged himself hand over hand along lacy vines where his body sank as he waded. He never once glanced over his shoulder. He already knew what lay behind; Poorman, whispering between the admixture of trees like a fog. The surgeon cared little. He was interested solely in reaching his goal. True, he had a score to settle with the commandant, but that could wait. Everything had its time, its appointed hour. Distance alone separated them.
He took to the branches when the ground became impassable, swinging on creepers like his boyhood hero, Tarzan. The growing swamp exuded a sticky mist, a noxious cloud that made his head spin. But his grip was sure and he avoided falling, making it to firmer ground within sight of the towering edifice.
There was a clearing, an aisle of sweet blades leading up to the rock, its sudden eruption from the torn earth like a fist through glass.
Blinder stood before the vertical face, eyes rising to it, flesh stiffening the while. He felt a sharp pain in h
is groin, the bunch of it hanging like ripe forest fruit. The wall seemed impossible to climb. At the second stab he dropped to his knees, crying out. Fingers dug into his thighs. The grey-black stone loomed over him, dispassionate. Blinder raised his kilt. Between his legs was a fresh inflorescence scar. His genitals lay in the grass. He toppled, Woodtoe, the ligneous man of the north, the fast wasting tegument of his body to leak nutrients into the soil, aiding his ascent from seed up the precipice, there to conquer the battlements and dust leaves in the halls.
65
It was raining at the bus stop. The street was quiet. Austin pivoted impatiently on his toes, the dampness eating into him, the advancing night gloomy, the bus yet to show its flat nose round the suggested bend in the road. He stood with hands in pockets beneath the leaky shelter roof, corrugated iron and scratched Perspex rattling at each brief gust of wind, that same wind whipping the backs of his legs. Pearce was ignorant of the bus time-table. Not that such knowledge would make any difference. He was, however, beginning to sense ripples and trace their effects, tiny aberrations in the terse fabric of established reality as perceived at any one time, he estimated, by 93% of humanity. A host of unsolicited permutations were muscling in, like a number of people in the same suit of clothes. Disaster threatened. He flicked rain off his nose. Lights illuminated the crystal downpour and he stuck out an arm.
This was it, the bus.
Austin boarded, only mildly surprised at the lack of a driver. The pneumatically operated doors hissed shut and the bus rumbled off. He grabbed a buffed rail, steadied himself, advanced between empty seats. Peering out the rear window rewarded him with a view of endless spangled water. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and invited him to sit down.
Pearce sat.
‘Not too warm, is it?’
‘Quite,’ said the yonder person, gazing at the figure with difficulty, its head with a hole like a chimney. ‘And you are?’
‘Mike,’ Mike answered. ‘It's nice to have somebody other than the conductor to talk to.’
The conductor? The way Mike spoke of the conductor spawned an array of half-legendary thoughts. ‘I don't mean to be rude,’ Austin inquired, ‘but are you...’
‘Alive? No, no - dead as a doornail. Blew my brains out. That was after I killed Art. See...’
‘Art?’
‘Yes. Arthur Mulligan, my sister's boyfriend and my chief rival.’ He gave a I-can-laugh-about-it-now chortle. ‘Poor Art haunts a phone box!’
Austin struggled to assemble the pieces. The man with the hole in his head fidgeted constantly, as if waiting for Pearce to ask him to explain, eager to indulge his rusted conversation.
The double-decker made for an odd confessional. It drove through the night and the rain without stopping, with barely a turn, the city malformed beyond pearly windows.
Mike was a child, a simple-minded child, his loves as his hates, tragically uncomplicated. At a sign from Austin, his elfin guest, a gesture of wrist, Mike spoke in engine tones, exhaust vibrations, seat thrums and drink's can rolls, his spirit diffused throughout this cumbersome vehicle. The bus was part of him, part of the rain, a phantom world unto itself. Pearce's attention was assured by the name Renata Shelmerdine. As he listened, focused on the ghost of brother Mike, he became more and more aware of a familial element to his (the universe's) predicament. The broadening picture to which Mike contributed (and ghosts cannot lie) seemed increasingly to embrace a finite number of individuals. But every number was finite; he needed to trace the leaves back to the twigs back to the boughs, and narrow those individuals down, boughs to trunk, trunk composed of rings, cylinders if you took the long view, slow telescopic shafts. And beyond the trunk lay the roots, each tendril and ganglion about which the world became the anti-world, perfectly mirrored, wherein lay the danger, as events reversed might grow equally complex.
Austin silenced Mike, joining lips and finger. Rising, he pressed the bell once.
‘I have to go now, Mike.’
The ghost shrugged. ‘That's okay.’
‘Thanks for the story. I'm sorry you had an unhappy life. Better luck next time, eh?’ He walked down the aisle and stood by the doors.
Mike looked away, distracted.
The bus stopped. The passenger stepped to the wet pavement. The bus rumbled from the curb, Mike waving.
Austin Pearce, late for every appointment, early for those that remained, tapped his chin as he made his way back to the hotel.
66
In Poorman's eyes the world was monochromatic and flat. He could press the palm of his pale hand against the screen. The screen was the ground he walked on, the sky above his head, the muted jungle to every side. He travelled in a hollow onion of clear ice. The ice insulated him from the burgeoning heat without, dampening that extreme to a tolerable sweat. It had taken Poorman several days and nights to accommodate himself thus. The black and white trees blurred together in a graduation of silvers and greys, smeared in places like action in an old photograph. The birds flapping in the bright canopy cast exaggerated shadows, themselves magical crows and ravens. Swarming insects registered on Poorman's sphere as interference. He would pass through their avid congregations adjusting his aerial.
Dreep taking to the river puzzled him. Saliva had collected in his mouth as he watched the collegiate newshound undress. It was the birth of a skinny, wingless moth. A bleached bug had killed Shin. The commandant's stained and yellow buddy had been murdered by a pupa. He would have liked to have avenged the cheroot smoker, but his quarry lay elsewhere. He was powerless in that respect.
The castle rose above Poorman, alabaster and charcoal, a complex of shades, steel and iron mimicking stone. It hunched on the earth amid the trees it dwarfed, as if sleeping, tantalizingly erect, a berg of weather-pocked granite, a spaceship, an alien transport the greater part of which was sunk below, concealed from casual inquiry. Poorman viewed the mass with suspicion. The image it presented somehow struck him as false, a sham of ink and chalk sketched on the upright wall of the world. Standing at its wide base he placed the flats of his hands against the cliff, palms as rock, sheer and hard, the proximity making of his globular screen a window. He pushed with all his strength, convinced he had the power to move it, positive that if he were to apply sufficient force, enough to overcome the mountain's inertia, he would be able to exploit his advantage, eventually driving the castle and its foundations over the lip of the obtainable horizon, to give to the void this gift.
Gritting his teeth, he felt it give. Listening to the cracking, the straining, Poorman was sure it had budged - sudden, a fraction, with a jolt. His frozen breath beat a drum roll. His frozen heels were anchored, fixed as he moved into the mass, concentrating the whole of his muscular frame. No sweat trickled far down his hoary brow. Arms locked, knees clicked, the actions of cog and sprocket, tensioning his spine, flexed like a piston. The rock stared at Poorman through his window, who held its placid gaze. If either should blink, or relax for a moment, the balance might tip. There was no way of stopping, no way of letting go.
He could feel the mountain tremble. Dust loosened from between strata danced like iron filings near a magnet and the light probing ever deeper revealed the pressures building within.
Just a little more, he told himself, pushing, shoulders proud, buckled tight.
And then a break...
67
She reclined, pink, white, red and vacant, golden eyes varnished to a high gloss, lips parted in supplication, tugging at Scherzo whose head lolled disconcertingly, whose conscious mind had its doors slammed shut. Breasts silken, nipples erect, thighs smooth, firm, belly flat, contoured, legs sinuous, long, feet and hands tools of arousal, stimulation, cunt moist and perfumed and Scherzo intoxicated.
Slim hips gesticulated. Scherzo knew, at the back of his congested skull, he was in trouble. He could not remove his eyes from this vision.
She lifted soft curls of dark hair behind ears sculpted from
mother-of-pearl. Her cheek bones, the structure of her nose, the shape of her brow, the line and set of her chin, the delicate curve of her neck, the slope of her ribcage and the rhythm of her breathing; all took their toll.
She arched her back and groaned...
Her sisters, copper and sorrel, loosened his cock, impossibly hot and painfully tumescent, slipping it from the confines of his filthy trousers. It was they who guided him forward as she swung feet to floor, legs apart, taking him first in the mouth, from which steam rose, coiling his pubic beard into springs, the sisters joining her on the chaise longue on the very edge of which she perched, their tongues entwined, labia spread with fingers, glistening from tooth to toe as Scherzo wished to die.
She brought him to his knees. Leaning back among her siblings' bronzed limbs and coiling torsos her eyes fell closed and her scent was amplified. His penis throbbed, and copper and sorrel, a hand to each of his sweaty buttocks, wearing triumphal smiles, manoeuvred the dumb prick, his swollen ruby head into that perfect noose of dreams, only for the rope to be cut, the scaffolding torn down, the chaise longue kicked away, the sisters attacked as ugliness transpired in the shape of mutants, cloaked and berserk, quick with fists and blades, hacking with a maniacal glee the graceful flesh and modestly flushed throats of these succulent Sirens, slicing their gleaming bodies and severing their matchless digits that had groped and probed, bruising and rending and tearing till all that remained of the beauteous threesome was a pile of distended beef, lamb, pork, veal, liver, heart and kidney. This a butcher's shop window.