At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur's hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large ship in Dry Dock. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl's keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it despite its plastic and mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips. Amy had rescued it one day when she found it in the garden trying to bury itself in the ground, i.e. soil which Arthur had just loosened as part of one of his 'mixing' projects, when looking for new ingredients below the surface of top earth.

Hawling is not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the b.u.t.tons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashes and results in the lift-doors sliding aside... new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there is more to hawling than that-it's running a butcher's shop, listening to the carca.s.ses crack as you lay in bed at night. I was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth's soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on... and eventually extinguish with a dying wink... which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from my mine.

I watch Susan and Sudra running through an unkempt, s.h.a.ggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. I glimpse a figure in a cape watching them.

I woke in a cold sweat. I put one foot outside the bed to ensure at least the bedroom floor was still there. n.o.body snored beside me, mercifully, it seemed, because anyone sleeping next to me would have been infected by the same dreams that had just beset me... or were still besetting me.

My body was the most mysterious thing about me. I could easily fathom my own mind-but my body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that I-my mind-walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to me, obviously, because, if it had, I would certainly have considered myself mad. Bad enough even to skirt such touchy subjects amid the other thoughts, let alone delving into them.

One nemonymous creature of applause-with the merged thought that each member of the audience in the concert hall remained (to themselves at least) single ent.i.ties-sounded from the radio after Brahms' Double Concerto drew to its close. And I dozed off again.

At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.

And to my reasonable knowledge, I am a hawler, but at earlier stages I myself didn't realise this at all. I so wish I had. Things might have turned out differently. However, still not knowing for certain whether I am a force for good or a force for evil makes me draw back from fully exercising the creative strength I know I possess. I even deign to compete with that Ogdon person-who, one day, started writing his own novel in a city's fountain square between four apartment blocks one of which, as it happened, housed the young Amy. As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in the right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.

Meanwhile, I need to introduce Greg. My alter-nemo. This is a more nebulous form of alter-ego. The late John Fowles invented the 'nemo' in contradistinction to the 'ego' or 'id' in his book The Aristos. But such information inevitably interrupts the narrative flow. And narrative flow is the reason we are all here. One ambition that we all share, both as writer and reader.

Greg was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. His wife was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Greg surveyed the dips and dunes-almost feeling them with his golf mind-as he took stance for his first tee shot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, a.s.sessing the relief map between him and the hole... and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his club head for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line, currency crisis and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.

Arthur-despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc.-became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other pa.s.sengers a.s.suming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie girl who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, i.e. fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn't otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver's sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surrept.i.tiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of rat runs and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his 'brainwright': an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.

It had been a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company's inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver-despite all his driving doc.u.ments being forgeries.

Arthur believed, in his childish fashion, that all meat was going off, but not simply growing mouldy, but literally going off (eloping?) with other meats from different animals, fishes and fowls, mixing, blending, into new concoctions of meat with arcane bone maps-all because of global warming and the banking bubble.

These were big things. Global things. Symbolised by Arthur knowing instinctively that he could control big things just with the flick of his finger. Like the bus.

Amy, before she had met Sudra, had lived with Arthur-and their neighbours must have a.s.sumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister.

Still, then, the horrors hadn't yet started. Various strange words start to build up-as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did Amy and Arthur know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself. And worse still was having already lived through half of it via the creative medium of someone other than myself. Fixed for the wrong fiction, cross-grained against the truth, forming a diseased Canterbury Oak in my head. Or so it felt.

The area of the city where the covered market found itself was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. It had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not strictly open-air or covered. On some days-when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom-it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these 'walls' looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. I dreaded going near that place, in case I was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn't belong to the city at all.

Susan worked in Ogdon's pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub-unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life-would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn't quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile worked there-a real place she couldn't avoid as she needed the money.

I lived in a top floor flat in the city centre. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling that yet more dreamers dreamed of the covered/open-air market. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that you really did need to visit me there (although this was a dream and you weren't really visiting me at all).

My carpet was much older than any building that ever contained it; I didn't know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.

When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn't matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.

I could not shake off another dream. A dream of a hawler but, this time, in its misshapen form as Guy de Maupa.s.sant's Horla (or vampire).

A bus doesn't touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing to float, two pa.s.sengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

"We're trapped on this bus."

"You can get off at the next stop. It's not like a plane."

"Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can't get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it.

"To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it's all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare.

"I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape-until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life's problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It's relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable.

"Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can't really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes.

"A paradox-that I hate being trapped in my body but I'd give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can't face the outright blankness..."

"Yes, a paradox," answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.

Captain Nemo took the controls himself as the Drill docked at Klaxon City. Their first stop-over on their journey to the Core via Inner Earth itself.

Just before this manoeuvre, the leading windows in the Corporate Lounge had sufficiently cleared to afford a view of another inner sea lit lugubriously by a now unprotected Core 'sun'. Their naked eyes had now been able to grow acclimatised to its combination of brightly icy scatter-orange and the contrastively wan effulgence actually given off from it (increasingly wan the nearer they approached it). The city of Klaxon was a vast collection of arabesque turrets peppering an out-of-place complex similar to a fin de siecle Paris on the banks of the Seine. And as the Drill burrowed nearer in a circling motion not unlike that of planes stacking up over an airport, Greg (invited into the c.o.c.kpit itself) watched Nemo grapple with the joystick which was on a hair-trigger relationship with the Drill's vanes, vanes that were currently working overload on vast amounts of mixed off-detritus. Greg feared that Beth and the two dowagers would be seeing even less than before from their rearward cabins. But that didn't worry him for long while he grew fascinated with the docking pinion (on one of the turrets) that seemed to s.n.a.t.c.h the Drill in the same manner as old-fashioned catch-nets on the ancient railways collected letters and parcels without the train stopping.

A jolt-and then, even through the sides of the Drill, the relentless sound of a multi-tannoy system on permanent klaxon that gave the city its name. Greg could hardly imagine living a whole life in such a place with that noise echoing in your ears all over the city. Always with you. Accompanying work, love and play.

"Much like living trapped within one's own body and its everpresent frightful tinnitus of antipodal angst," said Nemo, as if having read Greg's mind.

Greg shrugged. He wasn't sure what Nemo was driving at.

I lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined me awake. I got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in my room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. It was very close to the ground without even s.p.a.ce for rat runs or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.

I wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.

I found myself delving into the wood of the floor as if I had found an opening in human flesh-a natural vent, rather than one I had forced open with my fingers.

That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to me until I discovered myself delivering them... through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And I felt its thoughts as if they were my own thoughts.

All this had been in Ogdon's novel, too. I could not shake it off sufficiently to warrant excluding it in my competing novel. I sensed Ogdon was intent on an unhappy ending for the world by means of the 'truths' he hoped to sculpt from his own version of those "synchronised shards of random fiction and truth". By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us. You can't destroy evils without having set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.

Tears came to my eyes as I looked back at the various paths I could have picked on... chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so I could make the turning towards the goal I had once set myself.

In the distance, I heard the lonely sound of a helicopter-vanes clacking lugubriously-followed by the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it pa.s.sed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty.

I returned to my sleep.

I woke from a dream. This had been a real dream. A dream that I had once published a series of fiction magazines called 'Nemonymous'. Now simply a dream that could not be believed. Other dreams had not even been dreams. They had been visions thrust upon me by some narrative trickery with which a mad Ogdon was trying to force me down byways that my destiny had no right to encompa.s.s.

I knew a real dream from a false dream. The former often contained words I'd never use, words I didn't understand. Or was it the other way? Distinction was clear, if not the terms of the distinction.

The ceiling was quite ordinary, plain white, with a central rose whence the electric flex dangled towards its own pendant lampshade and dull yellow-glowing bulb. In ancient days, before ceilings were invented, they would have had strange beliefs about ceilings, no doubt. That they were ghosts in disguise would have been the strongest and strangest. Some even believe that today. Sheets of whitened surfaces marching through the city at the dead of night, like frozen wafers or thin slabs of Angevin. Much like Charles d.i.c.kens' walking coffins in A Tale of Two Cities. Far more believable, I believe, than the spontaneous combustion of Krook in Bleak House. Floors paradoxically seemed far more dependable. If not the ground itself.

John Ogdon was dreaming of over-flying his own pub in a helicopter, except the roof was hidden by the large overhanging buildings in the same street. Either warehouses or tall covered markets, the dream didn't allow him to remember. He did remember, however, another dream when he was at a family dinner, believing himself to be one of the adults, so that it was quite a surprise to find himself placed with the children on a lower table adjacent to the main table. He dreamed, too, of Klaxon City where the inhabitants spent their whole lives in ear-m.u.f.fs, dodging around the backstreets eager to find sound-proof specialist clinics where they could remove their m.u.f.fs and clean out their ears once in a while. They all looked dogged but cowed. Come morning, the dull yellow Core in their sky would bring no relief from the klaxon. At least there was never any wind, in fact not much weather at all. He then dreamed of his alter-nemo Crazy Lope, a tiny figure negotiating the rat runs and back doubles... hardly a time to be idly wandering, Ogdon thought, as his dream helicopter banked and disappeared further into the dark horizon of his sleep. I'll leave him to his dreams. They are now redundant, as are the rest of his machinations with the pen. He only wanted unhappiness for us all. I at least seek a happy ending. Not just a quest for a quest, as he did.

History, however, often needs to rear its head.

The helicopter hovered about the Drill as it sat ready upon the plateau of Left Foot. The helicopter, it seemed, spent hours hanging from the white ceiling that was the sunless sky. It was reconnoitring or spying for forces that remain mysterious until this very day. At points, one could even just discern the goggled pilot sitting stiffly in his bulb. He must have imagined the climbing race then going on between the attics and oubliettes of that very Drill's interior until two as then unknown protagonists reached the top cabin at the Drill's tailfin. He also watched many workers scaling the sides of the Drill filling the gills with vast barrels of a creamy lubrication. And then the helicopter ratcheted into a sleeker beast than a helicopter and soared even higher-to view the whole city 'body' striding like a pseudo-d.i.c.kensian imagining into some geographical future towards a point of the compa.s.s that was not actually any of the normal ones.

Today, I have been dreaming about floating above the sparkling sea in the early morning, upside down in a helicopter or balloon (more likely the latter as there seemed to be no noise) where the scintillating waves' expanse between four identical wall-to-wall horizons was a ceiling or watery underside of some far firmer roof beyond it. I woke as soon as I approached land with the appearance through fresh mist of an ungainly pleasure pier.

We soon left far behind the hedgy tunnel entrance (now our only known exit to the above world, although an impractical one)-then followed the hawling-system for a while, running its pulley-rope through our hands as a sort of guide and confidence-booster in the increasing darkness.

I could hear Amy and Sudra bickering over trivialities. Yet this was a strange comfort as it brought worldly concerns to a very unworldly situation.

If there is such a thing as global warming, then it's not inside outwards, it's outside inward, as the 'atmosphere' became colder and colder-until, just for a nonce, we were slightly warmed by a clearing of the darkness and a sudden thrilling vista of the Core: it was like a sun in the roof, a roof that was, in hindsight, below us as a floor. But then the spherical light vanished just as quickly, with the re-onset of darkness. I knew we would catch glimpses of this from time to time on the journey, the disc-light growing bigger each time, but equally less warm.

How we survived and conducted ablutions (a euphemism for many things) and provided ourselves with comestibles I cannot now recall. Not recalling such things actually gives more credence to the events than recalling them clearly. It simply proves that whatever we did, we did successfully, because I am here now to tell you about the important matters: the journey and its eventual repercussions for us and the rest of the world. That's why I cannot recall what Amy and Sudra were bickering about. Meanwhile, Arthur kept his own counsel, although his mixing skills did come in handy (and this I do recall with relative clarity) with the preparation of comestibles from waste material.

Meanwhile, I have to admit I'd lost sight of Susan.

There was a glimpse of a figure of a caped man disappearing into the black backdrop of a huge liner in Dry Dock, as if he had nearly been caught spying on my dreams. The cranes on the liner and its gantries reminded me more of an old-fashioned coal mine where chains hauled up and down the man lifts. I heard the distant clanging of heavy-duty engineering-and I wondered, perhaps for the first time, how the liner had been transported here (so far from the river or the sea) and for what reason. This area had, I knew, been the site of a Dry Dock for several generations. Dreams are often too late to throw any light on more important matters that have already arisen.

Beth Dognahnyi came into the pub together with her husband but at the moment there was just one solitary pub regular talking about a dream he had had the previous night. He was talking to himself, in truth, but Beth pretended to listen so as to enable him to believe that he was not just talking to himself, although he was.

"I was dreaming I was part of a crowd coming into the pub-a special rough cider was being offered at cheap price from a wooden cask. It was white cider. I wasn't me in the dream but someone else. Good job as I don't usually like cider and even though it was just a dream, I could really feel the bits of real apple with my tongue... You don't expect roads with uncut verges, edges with hedges-and pavements with long weeds-in the city."

It seemed he was remembering two separate dreams at once.

If children suddenly realise they exist, they ask themselves where their past childhood has gone. Were they brother and sister, they wonder, or completely unrelated and, thus, perhaps, childhood sweethearts incubating a future marriage when they would tell their own children of their erstwhile romance resulting in their children's own subsequent existence as children. But, for all they knew at this crosspoint of time, they may have common parentage, and they hugged in the cold darkness-in the vicinity of the open-walled market-one hug as childhood sweethearts, the next hug as siblings, believing they gambled on one hug being true, choosing, as it were, between a belief in G.o.d and a non-belief in G.o.d. Both equally comforting.

The late night bus pa.s.sed in the distance, leaving a heavy silence. Although the darkness was cold, these two children were not cold at all. They had a carpet over them like a hard blanket. Their arms through rough-cut holes in its stiff weave. And the sound of rattly pulleys from the Dry Dock kept them company.

"Yes?" said Edith and Clare almost together.

Beth at last mustered the words to her mouth: "I've just realised... we haven't seen my husband or the Captain for weeks."

They had been allowed off the Drill for a short break, whilst the stay at Klaxon City delayed the holiday for a time.

The other two had not heard exactly what Beth had said, as they were still preoccupied with the loathsome insects they had discovered beneath a stone.

It was almost midday by Corelight, a lightsource that the inhabitants seemed to call the Sunne (spelt out in their noticeboards and shop-window cards).

As the three women entered a derelict building for increased shelter from the klaxon, they were surprised to find its carpet covered in stones and lumps of larger rubble. A painting on the wall was the only decoration, depicting a ship in a storm; Clare, as she peered closer at it, saw that the ship was called 'The ReynBouwe' and was evidently sinking. She spelt out its name for the benefit of the others.

"Who's the painter?" queried Beth, half-heartedly. She thought that the ship's name was strange... strangely familiar.

"Can't make out the signature."

Edith was decked out in a soft-horn hat and heavily made up with turquoise under-eyes, a Proustian parasol hanging from her limp arm.

"What a mess!" said Clare, turning to view the despicable floor. Beth was admiring the marigold-window, in the wall opposite to the painting, which cast slanting lines of light through the dusty air.

"Edith, come here, though," urged Clare, who was now turning over stones in the corner furthest from the window. Clare, like Edith, seemed in her mid-fifties and, although not as smartly dressed, was more attractive than her. Her hair was fastened with a b.u.t.terfly clip, but wayward wisps seeped out like smoke.

The stone she had turned revealed a wriggling knot of unrecognisable insects buzzing somewhat at the disturbance.

"Ugh!" Edith flinched off, waving her parasol like a sword. Beth turned from the window-a little white flake clinging to her lip like a remnant of food-and stared uncomfortably at her two companions. She needed to speak but evidently she was finding it difficult to make her mouth formulate the words; she just made embarra.s.sing sucking noises.

Today was Sunne-Stead. A ceremony for which the Drill had delayed its journey.

Many had gathered on the quays to view, through optic-scopes, the temporary fixity of the city's light source. The various craft had moored to their turret-pylons for the duration, well out of the way; the Holy Stone had been cleared of tourists to allow the scientists to set out their telescopes and s.e.xtants at its topmost tower. Their other contraptions hung like intricate scaffolding from each cornerstone and gave the three women, who viewed the scene from their room, an impression of a clock-house that had been turned inside out. They adjusted their ear-m.u.f.fs as the klaxon wailed on.

They had indeed intended to view Sunne-Stead from the marigold-window. The moment came and went. The Sunne, rising from West to East, shuddered to a halt, poised in the white h.e.l.l of the 'sky' for what seemed almost a minute and, then, returned East to West.

The three women held hands in serenity for interminable hours, drawing as much spiritual significance as was possible into their communion. It was a frozen tableau, a mistress-piece and, as the heat gradually went out of the day, as 'dusk' met 'dawn' in the same quarter of the 'sky', their alabaster skin crumbled to the floor; and, if darkness came then the room would echo with the initial clumps of falling stones followed by the increasing clatter and final crescendo of collapsing masonry.

The black roof-sky was a Queen Catherine Wheel of the Inner Earth's traffic, dodging in and out of the aperture-speckled wastes.

One man in particular climbed the tow-path of the city's central turret-pylon from which several craft dangled like dead horses, He found the one he had been seeking-'The Reyn-Bouwe'-the name was painted in all-weather gloss on its side. He inserted his limbs into the contour-seat and launched himself towards the inner circles of earth. Pulling and pushing at various levers and gloating over just as many dials, he found himself spinning like a dying fly towards an under-sky where the Sunne was about to lift its cool rim. But, as a result of his not being able to control the machine, the fuel burst and flew up into his face... like being sick on a funfair ride. The over-sky had turned turtle below him and he was diving, nose down, towards the last zenith, desperately struggling with the release harness in his seat. Fumbling for the mercy-ejection device, he lurched between what he believed to be two Sunnes in violent love with each other. He was surely dead.