Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  “There may be a musical instrument in the Collection Room. It is not really a collection, but there are many things from the past. I have only glanced in there.”

  “May we look?” I ask. “It seems I can do no more dreamreading today.”

  We walk past the stacks of skulls to another hallway, arriving at frosted glass doors like those at the Library entrance. She enters, finds the light switch, and a dim illumination filters down over a confined space. The floor is cluttered with trunks and valises, piles of suitcases large and small. Too many to count, all are covered with dust. Among them are odd objects, either lying open or in fitted cases. Why are these things here?

  I kneel to open one of these cases. A cloud of white dust flies up. Inside sits a curious machine, with rows of round keys on its slanted face. It is apparently well used, the black paint flaked in places on its iron frame.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “No,” she says, standing over me. “Is it a musical instrument?”

  “No, this does not make music. It makes words. I think they called it a typewriter.”

  I close the case on the ancient mechanism, moving now to the wicker basket next to it. I raise the lid and find a complete set of knives and forks, cups, plates, and yellowed napkins neatly packed.

  A large leather portmanteau contains an old suit, shirts, neckties, socks, and undergarments. Between layers of clothing are a set of toiletries, the shaving brush caked with dirty soap, and a liquor flask devoid of odor.

  Each piece of luggage I open reveals a similar tawdry inventory. Clothes and some few sundry items, all seem to have been packed for a sudden journey. Yet each wants for identifying detail, each impresses as somehow unremarkable, lacking in particularity. The clothes are neither quality tailored items, nor tattered hand-me-downs. They show differences in period, season, and gender, varying in their cut according to age, yet nothing is especially striking. They even smell alike. It is as if someone has painstakingly removed any indication of individuality. Only person-less dregs remain.

  After examining five or six suitcases, I relinquish the effort. If any musical instruments are to be found in the Town, they will not be here.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “The dust scratches my eyes.”

  “Are you disappointed not to find a musical instrument?”

  “We can try looking somewhere else,” I say.

  I bid her good-night and climb the Western Hill alone. The winter wind whips between the trees, driving at my back. I look behind me to find the moon hovering half-obscured over the Clocktower, the heavens boiling thick with cloud matter. In the less than lunar light, the River recedes black as tar.

  I remember seeing a warm scarf among the clothes in the Collection Room. It has more than a few moth holes, but wrapped around several times, it will stave off the cold. I must ask whether those suitcases have owners, and whether I might have use of the contents. Standing in the wind with no scarf, I shiver; my ears sting as if slashed.

  I shall visit the Gatekeeper tomorrow. I also must see after my shadow.

  I turn away to the Town, and resume my steps up the frozen incline toward the Official Residences.

  23

  Holes, Leeches, Tower

  IT’S not an earthquake,” the girl shuddered. “It’s much worse than that.”

  “Like what?”

  She didn’t answer, only swallowed her breath and shook her head in distress.

  “No time for explanations now. Run! That’s the only thing that can save us. You might rip your stitches, but it’s better than dying.”

  Tethered by nylon rope, we ran full speed straight ahead. The light in her hand swung violently, tracing a jagged seismographic pattern between the walls. My knapsack bounced on my back. I’d have liked to dump it, but there was no time. There was no way to slacken my pace; I was on a leash.

  The rumble grew louder the farther we got. We seemed to be heading directly into its source. What started as an underground tremor was now a grating, hissing, bubbling, rasping—I don’t know what else.

  I cringed as we ran—my body wanted to go the other way—but she was leading and I was following. Fortunately, there were no turns or obstacles. The trough was flat as a bowling alley. No boreholes or rocks to worry about.

  Then came a series of sharp creaks and cracks, like boulders scraping together with tremendous force. All was relentless noise; suddenly silence. A second of nothing at all. Then everywhere was filled with a weird hissing, as if thousands of old men were sucking air between their teeth. A reedy whistling echoing through the darkness like the humming of thousands of subterranean insects triggered by the same stimulus. The sound did not wish us well.

  At the same time, I got the uncanny feeling that the sound was beckoning us, a beast lying in wait for its prey. Whatever horror was out there, it knew we were coming. Whatever it was, I had no idea. We’d left my imagination a long way back.

  We kept running—for how long? My sense of time was paralyzed. I ran and ran but felt no fatigue, my gut wound allocated to a far corner of my consciousness. My elbows felt stiff, but that was my only body sensation. I was hardly aware I was running. My legs flew and bounded. A dense mass of air was pushing me from behind.

  I was poetry in motion when she screamed out a warning, which I didn’t hear. I smashed into her, knocking her to the ground. I continued my forward motion, falling in an arc over her. I didn’t even hear myself hit. An instant after my head slammed into the hard rock slab, the thought occurred to me: it was as if I were sound-removed. Or was evolution creeping up on me?

  Next—or more accurately, overlapping with this—I was blinded with pain in my frontal lobe. The darkness exploded before my eyes. I was sure I had a concussion. Had I fractured my skull? Maybe I was brain-dead, and this was a vestigial lizard-tail of pain firing away in my cortex.

  That all passed in an instant. I was alive. I was alive and breathing. And breathing, I felt pain. I felt tears on my cheeks, streaming into the corner of my mouth and down onto the rock slab.

  I thought I would pass out, but I fastened the pain to the darkness. I’d been doing something. Yes, I was running. I was running from something. I fell. In the cut ends of my memory, I labored to get to my knees.

  As awareness spliced together, I noted the nylon rope. I was a piece of laundry blown off the line by gale winds. I had developed a habit of transposing my circumstances into all sorts of convenient analogues.

  The next thing I realized was that my body was missing from the waist down. I reassessed the situation. My lower half was there, just unable to feel anything. I shut my eyes and concentrated. Trying to resurrect sensations below the belt reminded me of trying to get an erection. The effort of forcing energy into a vacuum.

  So here I was, thinking about my friendly librarian with the gastric dilation and the whole bedroom fiasco. That’s where everything began going wrong, it now struck me. Still, getting a penis to erect itself is not the sole purpose of life. That much I understood when I read Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma years ago.

  My lower half seemed to be stuck in some halfway strait. Or cantilevered out over empty space or … dangling off the edge of the rock slab. It was only my upper half that prevented me from falling. That’s why my hands were clinging to the rope so desperately.

  I opened my eyes into bright light. The chubby girl was shining her flashlight in my face. I gripped the rope and struggled to drag my lower half up onto solid rock.

  “Hurry up!” yelled the girl, “or we’ll both be killed!”

  My body was dead heavy, the ground slippery with blood. My wound had probably split open. I dropped the rope and arm-pressed myself up, agonizing. My belt caught on the edge of the rock slab, while the nylon rope wanted to pull me forward.

  “Don’t yank!” I shouted at the approaching light. “I’ll manage myself. Don’t touch the rope.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “All right enough.”

&n
bsp; Belt still caught on the rock edge, I squeezed out all of my strength to throw one foot up.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you,” she said. “I was trying to hold on to the rocks so the two of us wouldn’t fall over the edge.”

  “That I don’t mind,” I said. “But why didn’t you tell me about this hole?”

  “There wasn’t time. That’s why I yelled for you to stop.”

  “I couldn’t hear.”

  “Let’s not argue. We’re almost there. We’ve got to get out of here. If we don’t, we’ll get the blood sucked out of us.”

  “Blood?”

  She shined her flashlight into the hole. It was perfectly round, about a meter in diameter. Then she panned the light, revealing rows of identical holes as far as the eye could see. We were walking on a honeycomb.

  Except that the ground appeared to be like shifting sand. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me after the blow to my head. But my hands, when held under the light, showed no particular sign of trembling. Which meant the ground really was moving.

  “Leeches!” she squealed. “Zillions of leeches are crawling up from the holes. If we hang around here, they’ll suck us dry.”

  “Uggh.” I felt sick. “Is this what’s supposed to be worse than an earthquake?”

  “No. The leeches are only the beginning. The real incredible part comes later.”

  Still leashed together, we ventured out onto the viscous surface, squashing leeches with every step. It made me squirm involuntarily.

  “Don’t slip. If you fall into a hole, that’ll be the end of you.”

  She clung to my elbow. I held on to the tail of her jacket. For anyone not accustomed to this sort of thing, stepping on thirty-centimeter-wide sections of slick rock crawling with leeches in the dark is an experience likely to be memorable. The squashed leeches made a thick layer of sticky, gelatinous mush.

  Leeches must have gotten on me when I stumbled. I could feel a couple sucking on my neck and ears. I tried not to make too much of this because I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Also, my hands were occupied. To be exact, I had a flashlight in my left hand and her in my right. I couldn’t just stop to yank the damn things off.

  Each time I shined my flashlight on the ground, I saw a sickening ooze of leeches. They just kept coming.

  “I’ll bet the INKlings used to throw their sacrificial victims into these holes.”

  “You’re very smart,” she said.

  “Aren’t I, though,” I answered.

  “The leeches, Grandfather says, are acolytes of those fish. So the INKlings make offerings to the leeches too. Fresh meat, warm blood, humans dragged under from the surface world.”

  Gasping noises seemed to be rushing up from the dark holes. Twisting whips of air, like feelers from below, completely enveloped us in a bristling night forest.

  “The water is almost here,” she announced. “The leeches were only the beginning. Once they disappear, we get the water. It gushes up from the holes. We’ve got to reach the altar before the water rises.”

  “You knew all this? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t know, okay? It’s not like the water rises every day. It only happens once or twice a month. How was I to know today would be one of those days?”

  There was no end to the holes. My shoes were so sticky with leech innards, I couldn’t walk straight. Funny thing.

  “Just a little more,” she assured me. “Just a little more and we’ll be safe.”

  It was too much trouble to speak. I nodded instead, which was less than meaningless in total darkness.

  “Can you hear me? You okay?” she called out.

  “I feel like puking, but I’m fine.”

  I’m not such a wimp usually, but a sundae of leeches, all squashed and sticky on top of darkness and fatigue and lack of sleep was testing the limits of my cool. Gastric juices backed up, acid sweet, into my throat.

  I didn’t dare look at my watch. Thoughts of the sky intruded. Morning, trees, hot coffee, newspaper,… I wanted light, any light, real light.

  “Once we get out of this spot, you can throw up all you want. Hang in there.” She gripped my elbow.

  “Not me. You won’t see me throwing up. I only feel like it,” I gurgled inside my mouth.

  “It happens to everyone. I know it’s horrible, but it’s got to end sometime. Trust me,” she said with irrepressible optimism.

  No, these holes could go on forever. And I would never get to read that morning edition. The fresh ink coming off on your fingers. Thick with all the advertising inserts. The Prime Minister’s wake-up time, stock market reports, whole family suicides, chawan-mushi recipes, the length of skirts, record album reviews, real estate,…

  The only thing was, I didn’t subscribe to a newspaper. I’d given up on newspapers three years ago. Why? I felt disconnected. Converting numbers in my brain was my only connection to the world. Most of my free time I chose to spend alone, reading old novels, watching old Hollywood movies on video, drinking. I had no need for a newspaper.

  Even so, deprived of light in this netherworld, I found myself longing for the morning edition. To sit down in a sunny spot and lap it up like a cat at its dish of milk, first page to last, to read every word of print.

  “There’s the altar,” she said abruptly. “Another ten meters.”

  At that moment, as if to underscore her words, the air wheezing out of the holes stopped, cut off by a single giant razor stroke. No forewarning, no aftertones, all that noise pressure, gone. And with it the entire aural space, and my equilibrium.

  Total silence. Once the sound was severed, that was it. Both she and I froze in position, straining our ears for … what? I swallowed, but it sounded as raucous as a needle striking the edge of a turntable.

  “The water’s receded?” I asked hopefully.

  “The water’s about to spew,” she said. “All that noise was the air being forced out of the water table. It’s all out now. The action comes after this.”

  She took my hand as we crossed the last few holes. At last we were over the worst part. The leeches seemed to have fled in the opposite direction. Even if we drowned now, it beat a slow slimy death in a leech pit.

  I reached up to peel the sucker off my neck, but she stopped me.

  “Don’t! You’ll tear your skin. A few leeches never hurt anyone,” she said. “Anyway, we have to climb the tower quick. Didn’t they ever teach you about leeches in school?”

  “No,” I admitted. That’s me, dumb as the anchor under a buoy.

  A little farther on, she shined her light up at the “tower” that rose before us. It was a smooth, featureless cylinder that loomed like a lighthouse, seeming to narrow from base to top. I couldn’t tell its height, but it was very tall. Without a word, she started up the “steps.” I, of course, had to be pulled along.

  Seen from a slight distance in limited light, this tower had appeared to be a noble monument constructed over centuries, but close up, you realized it was a natural rock formation. And a rather crude stalagmite at that. Even the winding steps chiseled into this deceptive pylon were not quite stairs. Uneven and irregular, barely wide enough for one foot, sometimes missing entire footholds. We scrambled and fell and plastered ourselves against the rock face.

  After thirty-six steps—I’m a habitual step counter—we were met by the sound of a loud slap, as if a huge cut of roast beef had been flung against a stone wall. Followed by a tentative half beat of quiet. The something was coming.

  It came. Torrents of water, gushing up from those hundreds of leech-infested holes. Tons of water, sluicing through darkness. In the next instant, I am a child in a movie theater, watching a newsreel of the inauguration of a dam. The floodgates are open, a massive column of water leaps from the screen. The governor, wearing a helmet, has done the honors and pushed the button. Billowing clouds of spray, a deafening roar.

  “What are you doing down there?” she barked.

  “How high
do you think the water will rise?” I blinked awake and shouted up.

  “High,” was her pointed reply. “The only sure thing is the water won’t reach the top.”

  “How many more steps?”

  “Lots.” Another nice answer.

  We kept climbing. Her flashlight swung about wildly by its shoulder strap. I gave up counting the steps after two hundred. The sound of the angry torrent slowed to a hungry maelstrom to a racy gurgle. No doubt about it, the water level was rising. At any moment now, the water would be licking my heels.

  “Couldn’t we swim?” I asked her. “We could float up. It’s got to be easier than this.”

  “No,” she ruled. “There’s a whirlpool under the surface. If you get caught in the undertow, you’re not going to do a whole lot of swimming.”

  Which meant this way was the only way. Plodding up these miserable steps, not knowing when the water was going to get to us. I was sick of it.

  Back to the newsreel, arcs of water shooting across the screen, spillway emptying into the big bowl below. Dozens of camera angles: up, down, head on, this side, that side, long, medium, zoom in close-up on the tumbling waters. An enormous shadow of the arching water is cast against the concrete expanse. I stare, and the shadow gradually becomes my shadow. I sit there, transfixed. I know it’s my shadow flickering on the curve of the dam, but I don’t know how to react as a member of the audience. I’m a ten-year-old boy, wide-eyed and afraid to act. Should I get my shadow back from the screen? Should I rush into the projection room and steal the film? I do nothing.

  My shadow stays on screen, a figure in the distance, unsteady through the shimmering heat. The shadow cannot speak, knows no sign language, is helpless, like me. The shadow knows I am sitting here, watching. The shadow is trying to tell me something.

  No one in the audience realizes that the shadow is really my shadow. My older brother, sitting next to me, doesn’t notice either. If he had, he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to box my ears. He’s that kind of brother.

  Nor do I let on that it’s my shadow. No one would believe me anyway.