Chapter 8.
They emerged into a long, dim and musty hotel corridor. The look of
relief on Freddie's face reassured Mark that they were still in the
Overnight, and had not been transported to its adjoining hostelry in
some unfathomable elsewhere. The corridor was instantly familiar to
Mark, but he was uncertain whether to account this as tentative
recollection of a previous stay, or the stirring of some primordial
collective memory. It felt like the maddening, purgatorial corridor
that everyone had wandered hopelessly though at some point, lost in
the eternities of a bad dream brought about by winter fever or some
catastrophic sleeping posture. The wallpaper was an undeviating
pattern of horizontal bars, blue and gold, with a slender white line
traversing the centre of each. The numbered doors were plain dark
timber with handles that resembled pouting, puzzled faces, and the
lights that receded into the distance encased everything in a
brownish half-light, which might have served to fossilze insects for
long aeons beyond the extinction of their kind. The drabness and age
of the furnishings embodied the precise meaning of the term seedy,
their bare funtionality and
aparent disdain for aesthetic comfort suggesting a place to whom its
occupants were an objectified and anonymous afterthought.
After every five rooms, the corridor terminated and branched out at
either side into identical iterations of itself. A song was playing
in the dimness, seemingly piped into the corridors from the ceiling.
The volume of the music wafted in and out with such subtle
insinuation that Mark found it impossible to catch the precise
instants where it faded out and back again. Rather, there was a
haunted air of music moth-eaten with silence, and silence pregnant
with the ghost of subliminal melodies. The song was a quaint
romantic ballad, a synonym, it seemed to Mark, for memory and the
past:
We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll met again
Some sunny day
Perhaps it was merely the discussion he had just had with Freddie in
the elevator, but the song made Mark think about the War – or, not
the War itself precisely, but a great war as subsequent generations
might have experienced it, as something almost cheap or kitsch in
comparison to the actual experience. It occurred to him that this
was the nature of all his memories – not of things themselves, with
all their immediacy and intensity, but rather in their lingering
after-effects, wherein they had been reduced to cliché and comedy,
to the distant lightness and mustiness of old sitcoms endlessly
replayed on television. In contrast, a borrowed memory, Freddie's
recollection of the idylic hayday of Sheldrake's Summer Camp, rose
unbidden and lucid in his mind as though it were his own. His
thoughts drifted back to the woman in the photograph, her hair
unkempt in the sea breeze. He pictured himself following her through
the endless corridors of the Overnight, inacting the unrequited
desire which is the undoing of every idyll.
Keep smiling through
just like you always do
Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds
Far away
Freddie took a left turn, and they started down a fresh corridor.
'Freddie', Mark asked, 'have I ever stayed here before? Do you
remember me?' Freddie was looking with harried concentration at the
door numbers as they passed. 'Well, sir, all due respect, that would
be for you to know and me to ponder. There's so many what passes
through 'ere, day in day out, that you could 'ave been 'ere only
yesterday, and I wouldn't know you from Adam's sleeve.' They paused
at an alcove in the corriodor, marked at either side by tall plants
whose sharp, brittle leaves gleamed like leather lapels in the brown
light. The alcove had a low table with a couple of chairs, and in
the small, curving space between the table and jutting leaves, an
elderly couple danced slowly to the alterations of music and silence
that ebbed through the corridors.
So will you please say hello
To the folks that I know
Tell them I won't be long
They
were both, Mark guessed, in their mid-70s or older, if age had any
meaning in Intermundia. The man was slender and tall, the woman
small and stout. Their eyes were shut tightly and their expressions
serene, as though each clung to a soft dream that would remain secure
so long as their arms were entwined, and their mutual mood in total
surrender to the slow sway of the song. The scene affected Mark in a
peculiar way which he could not initially pin down. Then it struck
him: the couple must have been flying out in the morning. As such,
they were not old, but young, immeasurably young. They would soon
cast off their bodies of reified memory, and with their bodies all
the dense and delicate threads of memory from which their identities
were woven, and somehow, those threads would then rejoin the vast
network of their prior incarnations, and the slumbering and
infinitesimal conglomerate would return to the world of matter and
life, summoned by human passions and blind molecular necessities to
form a zygote and then an embryo, travelling from the dance of their
frail and spent bodies in the corridor of the Overnight back once
again into the maelstrom of pure being and beginning. In precisely
the same way that the familiar world was haunted by the proximity of
death, Intermudia was haunted by birth. The airplanes would soon
begin their ascents, their gleaming flight paths related in some
obscure fashion to encounters between living people, to innumerable
moments of frenzy and boredom and love and violence, the points of
intersection between the world of living finitude and the etiolated
eternity
of Intermundia's runways and terminals.
A cigarette smouldered in an ashtray on the table, and its curling
plumes gathered thickly in the light of the alcove. Freddie
shrugged. 'More bleedin' action that I'll see tonight.' They
contined down the corridor.
They'll be happy to know
That as you saw me go
I was singing this song
Freddie paused in the middle of the corridor, at the door of room
36. Mark thought at first that it must be his room, but Freddie had
a peculiar expression on his face, like a startled animal listening
for predators. He motioned Mark to be quiet by touching his lip, and
then leaned close to the door, pressing his ear to listen. Mark
followed suit, and the two men faced one-another, Mark's eyes
widening in puzzlement and Freddie's narrowing in concentration.
They maintained this absurd posture for some time, and Mark perceived
a scratching sound behind the door. Freddie looked through the
keyhole, and then cocked his head to indicate that they should
continue on.
'What was that about?' Mark whispered. Freddie flashed him a cagey,
sombre look. 'There's somefing not quite right about that room.
Unoccupied, sir, or so they say. Never been a sinner in it as long
as I've been here. So I asked Digsby how come we never let Room 36,
and 'e looked right peculiar and put out to be discussing it. He
told me a fishy yarn, sir, to the effect that guests were never 'appy
in Room 36 – that there was somefing about that particular room
that lead them to 'ave what you might call troubles in the mental
faculty. And this one visitor, 'e said, was so perturbed by Room 36
that he set himself on fire, if you can credit it. Well, enough is
enough, Digsby said, and shut up the room for good, or so 'e says.
But Teddy Bilk 'as been in the Overnight from day one, and 'e reckons
that Room 36 'as always been empty, and that old Digsby spins a
different gruesome yarn every time anybody asks about it. If you
were to ask me, I'd say that Room 36 is most definitely occupied, by
somebody who prefers to remain cogito ergo sum, as the French
say.'
We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day
They had been walking for some time, and Mark was becoming
increasingly disorientated by the sprawling scope of the corridors.
'Do you know where we're going?' he asked. 'I do indeed sir. We are
heading for the front of the house.' He held up the key and shook
it. 'Which means that you have snagged for yourself one of the most
desirable rooms in our modest little hotel. You will have, sir,
adjacent to your bedroom, a coveted balcony with stunning views of
the terminal and runways. Well, perhaps not the most breath-taking
vista admittedly' – his voice lowered – 'but the other rooms are
all so pokey I wouldn't put a knacker's sick nag in them, being
honest with you, sir.' They turned a corner, and arrived in an
atrium which faced a single wall of rooms. 'Here we are,' Freddie
said, gesturing to room 17. He unlocked the door and they went
inside.
Freddie turned on the light, and Mark took stock of the room. It
resembled an indigents bed-sit more than a hotel room. On the wall
to the right, a single bed and a locker had been wedged into an
alcove. On the left, immediately inside the door there was a
bathroom and a small cooking area which consisted of a microwave oven
and a box-shaped electical grill, both filmed with grease. Mark sat
on the bed. The sheets looked filthy, and carried the smell of old
flesh and disinfectant characteristic of hospitals and rest homes.
'Have these been cleaned?' he asked. Freddie looked sheepish.
'Yes, sir, cleaned every day. But they're so bleedin' old, it
doesn't make much odds, know what I mean?'
'Well, what about replacing them? Getting some fresh ones?'
'I recommend you take that up with old Digsby, sir. I just run
around and get shouted at, begging your pardon.'
The waiter stood awkwardly for a moment, and then looked around the
room with a mournful and sympathetic expression. “I wouldn't
fancy it myself, sir, but it's only a temporary situation. In no time whatsoever, you will be leaving this madhouse, sir. Going up there.”
He raised his arm and pointed skywards. Then he nodded, and
darted out of the room, leaving Mark suddenly and poignantly alone,
as he had felt previously when Eddie and Giacomo left him to his
meeting with Renton. His mind quite lucid and wakeful, he decided to
take a careful itinerary of the room and its contents.
Positioned on the counter, there was a cookery book called THE NEW
MAGIC OF MICROWAVE by Cyril Smythe. The book's subhead read:
“Television's Famed “Confirmed Bachelor” Cyril Smythe
Demystifies the Microwave Miracle!” Smythe is pictured standing by
a microwave oven and small selection of unappealing dishes. He is a
tall, portly man in middle-age, well dressed in a grey suit, with
thick, carefully combed locks, sad, frightened green eyes and an
expression of catatonic depression. Incongruously, he wears a Mexican
sombrero. He is also pictured on the back cover, now seated at the
dinner table. He has lost the sombrero, but a multi-coloured party
horn hangs limply from the side of his mouth, as though positioned
there without his cognisance. His dinning companion is an
unconvincing inflatable similacra of a young woman. The text,
bearing an only incidental relation to the subject of microwave
cooking, reads: “The ultimate nature of life is the anguish of a
goal which can neither be attained nor repudiated. The mythiopoetic
iconography of hell as eternally frustrated satiation is merely this
essential realization abstracted to a notional after-life. Includes
Pictures, Party-Icebreakers, and Cyril's Patented Dry Anecdotes and
Howlers Overhead on Public Transport.” Despite it's obvious
utility, Mark found the book rather dispiriting overall.
There
was a bulky tube television in the right hand corner of the room, and
in a tray beneath it a selection of television listing magazines,
puzzle digests and tattered war comics. For each day of his stay,
the contents of the tray would morph into a new selection of
periodicals, responding to the shifting demographics and memory
complexes of each round of new arrivals: pamphlets advocating the
extension of equal rights to inanimate objects, or sinisterly avowing
the innate superiority of one or other of the root vegetables;
almanacs haunted by sullen and inscrutable vegetation deities and zodiacal processions of gibbering monstrosities; pornographic dioramas
that depicted anatomically impossible conjoinings and the worship of
abstract and elusive fetish objects; lifestyle magazines show-casing
an aspirational leisure society in which suburban residents were transformed into coolly distant potted plants, watered by automatons,
and lulled into quiescence by a daily television
broadcast in which guided meditations are whispered over atomic
weapons testing footage; in time he grew bored with the fecund
imagination of Intermundia's garbled memory circuits, as he did with
the daily alterations in the patterns of his bed-sheets and curtains.
The
balcony, as Freddie had promised, was at least more agreeable than
the squalid bedroom. He stumbled about in the darkness at first,
until he found a lamp. The little conservatory was sparsely but
pleasantly furnished, with a table and two wicker chairs in the
centre, and a writing desk to the right. The desk had a typewriter
and some fresh sheets of paper, and in the drawers beneath the
folding board, he found pages which he took to be the discarded
memories of previous occupations. One of them begins -
- I
hide under the table in my grandmothers house, watching the legs of
my grandmother, my uncle and my father moving about on the dark,
muddy stone of the kitchen floor – I can smell the earth from the
floor – a neighbours dog comes into the kitchen and approaches me
cautiously under the table, the sad, imploring saintly eyes of dogs –
at night the three of us sleep by an open fire, and the shadows of
the ornaments dance against the wall in the fire light – a
porcelain dog, a Russian doll, a smooth glass paper weight –
dancing in the fire light while we talk ourselves along the dimming
path to our dreams -
Above
the desk, he regarded the painting which he first noticed hours
earlier from the terminal below. From a distance, it resembled an
abstract geometrical mosaic, but closer inspection reveals that it
depicts a block of elegant red-brick terraced apartments. The
apartments are lit by a kind of magical blue evening twilight,
suggesting an antique, sun-baked Eastern city of the painter's
imagination. A winding stairwell runs between the terraces, and
the apartments are small and cosy, with balconies decorated by tall,
slender and carefully trimmed plants. On one of the balconies, a
young woman stands between the plants, apparently waiting for
something. There is an expression of ecstatic expectation in her
searching eyes and parted lips. Three terraces below, we see a young
man ascending the stairwell, his gait suggesting keen and fleet
determination. It is for this questing youth, we imagine, that the
maiden on the balcony waits, and to her he goes with such ardour.
However, the painting tells us that he will never reach her, for two
terraces above the balcony where the maiden waits, the youth begins
his ascent again, and three terraces above that, waits the maiden
once more, a reoccurring pattern which we must assume persists beyond
the margin and the frame of the painting. In the stairwell along the
border of the painting, it is the maiden who ascends, and we must
assume that, were the image to continue beyong the border, it would
be the youth who waited on the balcony, with searching eyes and
parted lips, in eternally frustrated expectation of the maiden's
arrival.
The painting struck an indelible cord with him. He know instantly
that he had seen it many times before, with a far greater certainty
than any of the other shadowy forms and dull chimings that resided
in the fog of his memory. It was in fact, more than a memory. He
felt that the painting was in some sense his personal possession or
creation. Intermundia, Renton had told him, was constructed from the
memories of the people that passed through it. He wondered if, in
the midst of that communal composite, here and there, there might be
objects that belonged to the memory of a single individual, like the
face of a conqueror or a vanquished saint, carved into heedless
mottled stone.
Mark
took a seat at the low table, and looked out at the terminal below.
It was still night, and Intermundia's moonless and starless sky shrouded everything in its undiluted void. The runways, however,
were paths of gleaming light that drew to one-another until they met
at the illuminated yet barely perceptible line of the horizon.
Airplanes were being fuelled for the day's first flights, and tiny,
skittish figures moved about them, while their engines, dimmed by
distance, howled in the wide, frozen expanses below.
Beneath
his resting palm on the table, there lay a book. Inspecting it, he
found it to be a book for children, with beautiful illustrations and elaborate dioramas. It was called The Adventures of a Boy
and a Girl, Along the Old Winding Road.
Like the painting, it seemed to hold a vivid and poignant place in
his otherwise dormant memory. He turned to the first page, and
started to read. During the full course of his stay in Intermundia,
he would read a few pages of the book every night before he went to
sleep; but, because he was always drowsy when he started, he could
never be certain how much of what he remembered the next day was
actually contained in the book itself, and how much his waning
attention and the stirring errancy of his imagination had
interpolated into its contents. Everybody has two minds, that which
is burdened by the chains of the day, and that adrift in the freedoms
of the night. The book would become a palimpsest of his two contrary
selves, with no clear borderline where the one left off, and the
other began.
The Adventures of a Boy and Girl, Along the Old Winding Road.
Chapter 1.
This is a story of the very old times, when the land was different
from how it is today. This is a story of when there were no cities,
or even large towns. Much of the countryside was covered by deep
woodland, and people lived in little cottages, keeping poultry and livestock, and gathering wood to heat their modest little homes.
None of them, however, would venture far into those woods, for they
were fearful places that had their own ancient orders, and their own
powers and principalities. It was a simple, hard and satisfying
life, in which one had simply to feed oneself, warm oneself, and then
watch the twilight gather around the dense canopy of the woods, and
dream a little of the mysteries that stirred each night to thread
anew its primordial and untrodden paths.
Outside of the woodland in the centre of the country, there were
great plains and valleys of verdant meadows and squat hills and tall
mountains that loomed grey and brown in the sunlight. And the people
who lived there were farmers and traders and tradespeople, and they
lived in little villages and hamlets, and regarded the woodlanders as
wild, unsophisticated and eerie creatures. Now those peoples were
not the first who had ever lived in that land. Another tribe had
lived there long, long ago, but nobody really knew a thing about
them, because they had left no records or relics after them, but for
one thing. That thing was a long, winding road, which the people,
either for clarity of expression or lack of imagination, called the
Old Winding Road.
Now that great stone-paved Road made its way through the whole of
the land, and nobody knew where it began, or where it ended. One
story says that the builders built their Road all the way to the
ocean, and then continued building it, until such time as they were
submerged beneath the water, whereupon they drowned with paving
stones in hand, and that was why they were never seen in the land
today. Such stories are amusing but cannot be credited.
A
change was slowly coming to the land in the time this story was told,
as always it must. Men were beginning to dream once again of
progress and ease, and at night their sleep saw visions which they
barely understood, of vast, bustling cities, and great storehouses of
food that had not to be hunted, tended or slaughtered. The King was
dreaming of roads that might link all of his kingdom, and taxes and
tributes that could be collected thereupon. But Hush! we
are still in the olden times yet.
Now
in the woods in those times there lived a very fearsome old witch.
She was in fact the last of the true witches, and thus she had great
power, and thus she was as old as the oldest, most gnarled oak tree.
And the people who lived in the forest feared her greatly, and with
just cause, for people had been cursed by that witch for no greater
injury than merely chancing upon her in the woods, and those people
lost their hair, and the colour in their cheeks, and their appetites,
and the power of speech, and eventually they would crawl off into a
lake or an old tarn, and become a kind of muddy algae which was
sometimes heard to cry at night. Such was the power of the witches
curse, and such was the severity of her pique and caprice.
As the end of an age was coming upon the land, however, the witch
had grown very old indeed, and her malefic powers were waning. All
of the old powers of the land were waning, and all them knew dimly
that soon they would be only tales such as this one, told when storms
whistle in the hearth. Nothing, however, was so determined as that
horrible old hag, and while the other creatures of the forest would
wind their way mournfully yet ungrudgingly into the mist of tales and
legends, she had a plan to prolong her existence and the vitality of
her powers. She knew of a ritual – the most abominable of all
forbidden spells – by which her powers might be renewed, and extend
their reign into the coming age.
One night, the wife of a woodcutter sat by the fireside, cradling
her newborn daughter in her arms, and cooing little lullabys while
her lips brushed the infants forehead, and never in all the world was
there such love, peace and felicity. The witch observed this scene
from the window, and her face, like a leaden sky split asunder by lightning, was racked with bitter envy, for great power compels all
things, except love. And the witch put a glamour on that young
mother, such that she fell into a kind of trance, and when she
emerged from that slumber, all she cradled in her arms was a bunch of
old twigs and roots.
In another house not far from the woodcutters, a farmer and his wife
lay upon a soft rug on the floor of their cottage, sporting and
playing with their new-born son, and never in all the world was their
such giddy and innocent joy. But the witch put a glamour on that
young couple, and when they awoke from their trance, they played and
sported with a little goat with a piebald coat.
And so the witch wound her way back into the deep woods, with the
boy and the girl cradled in the folds of her immemorial rags, and as
the sound of keening grief erupted through the clearing she had just
departed, the witch threw back her head and cackled with joy, for
there was none on earth that took measured pride in their goodness,
as that witch reveled ecstatically in her undiluted evil. With great
haste and fell purpose did she stride through those ancient groves,
and the woods, which feared her waning powers still, drew themselves
aside to make her path more easy: branches twisted away and wrapped
about their trunks, like people hugging their shoulders; mosses
rallied their strengh, and raised and rolled stones and boulders out
of the way; clumps of nettles withdrew their sting, and proffered
timid and soothing balsams instead; in such manner did all the
varigated woodland show deference to that horrible creature, while
inwardly mourning and weeping the fate of the poor babes she carried
in her rags.
In no time at all, the witch arrives back to her cottage, whose
aspect is just as fearful and disturbing as that of its occupant.
Imagine a large two-storey cottage with a porch in a woodland scene,
and no doubt you picture something quaint and homely. But now
imagine that the structure is built upon a fairy mound, and that
every plank of timber is painted pitch black; now, conjure turrets,
the largest over the front door, which are as black, as sharply
pointed and malefic in appearance as the hat which popular superstition falsely ascribes to the witch; picture further that the
other turrets are adorned with evil-looking weather vanes, the right
surmounted by the figurine of a grotesque and bilious fish, the left
by that grim reaper whose harvest never falls fallow; now for your
homely porch, envision that it is illuminated by tapers that burn
in the concavity of two human skulls; and in those dancing flames,
add the grim spectre of a forest of wind-chimes, the bones of various
animals, that hang like stalactites, and whistle a mournful and foreboding tune in the night-time breeze. Now you have pictured the domicile of that hateful creature.
The
witch laid her stolen babes upon the porch, and regarded their
tearful and frightened little faces with indifference. “These two
will be a handful,” she thought, “until they have come of age.”
And she made a great cry which was neither human nor bestial,
neither divine nor demonic, but an unhallowed mixture of all things
which can make utterance; and to that cry came three creatures of the
forest: the raven, the fox and the owl. The witch regarded the three
animals, crestfallen to have come under her spell, and thus she
spake: “These two brutes will make ample slaves when they have
grown up out of imbecility, but I fear a long time will they remain
thus incapacitated and cretinous, and needful of care and attention.
Such care they will not receive from me, for I am no mother, but the
very chill spite of barrenness itself! I charge you three to feed and
nurture these whelps, until such time as they can make amends for
themselves. Then, and only then, you will be free to go about your
business, and pray you do not hear my summons again!”
Thus it was that the boy and the girl were nurtured in their infancy
by the raven, the fox and the owl, and this is how it was done. The
raven went about the woods gathering food, and perched on the
shoulder of the infants, he would drop it into their mouths. Milk he
stole from the goat, who was never clever enough to fathom his
sleights and diversions, and the magpie watched the raven closely at
this activity, and this is how the magpie became a thief. The fox
played with the children, so that they learned the power of their
limbs and the joy of the world, but the fox was a proud creature, and
much was it to his chagrin to be a minder of human children, and this
is why the fox is red. Nevertheless, the fox developed a great
fondness for the boy and girl despite himself, and this is why the
fox approaches the world of humans both with fear and a longing for
kinship. Finally, the owl lulled the children to sleep with the
sonorous echo of his strange twilight calls, and the hypnotic
intensity of his ancient and wise gaze. This is why the eyes of
babies today sometimes assume the wisdom and serenity of all the ages
when they are nodding off, because the owl once sang them to sleep.
So in time the boy and girl grew to be robust little children, and
the raven, the fox and the owl returned to the forest and their
erstwhile ways. The witch took full possession of her stolen charges,
and set them to work on all the menial tasks in the upkeep of the
cottage: milking the goats, tending to the chickens, gathering
firewood and various fauna for her spells, cooking, cleaning, and
otherwise attending to her whims and the assaults of her evil temper.
The witch was thus free to begin her preparations for the abominable
ritual by which she hoped to renew her powers. And those poor
children, from the instant that their minds had gained lucidity, knew
of no other life but that of constant, grinding toil. Of love and
kindness, they had no inkling, save for that which they showed each
other; for long vanished into the mists of memory were their parents
and the warm cottages from which they had been stolen, and gone too,
into the inchoate realm of dreams and half-reflections, went those
days when the raven had fed them, when they had sported with the
giddy fox, and when they had drifted into sleep's warm embrace under
the watchful gaze of the owl.
And so the boy and girl developed the closest bond betwixt
one-another that ever was in all the world; and ever fearful of the
witch's ungovernable temper, they developed a wordless way of
speaking, a whole world of opposition to that world in which they
found themselves, which they conveyed with their eyes and their
expressions alone; and it chanced occasionally, that either the boy
or the girl were about some chore outside the cottage, and they might
see the raven alight upon the tallest branch, or catch for an instant
the fleet and wily fox gambolling between the tree-trucks; or
sometimes at night, when the cottage shook with the witch's baleful,
wheezing snore, the two of them might hear the owl's call echo
through the woods like the world's first riddle, and then their eyes
would share the knowledge, certain though utterly inarticulate, of
something truer and sweeter than that with which they had to contend.
Morning had come to Intermundia while Mark read. The first planes
were beginning their ascents into a sky slowly shedding its twilight
textures and assuming the petroleum haze and electric blue of busy
day. The vast, endless dance of gleaming fuselages was renewing
itself out into the limits of visibility. One again, the litany of
birth and death was translated into this aspirational languge of
speed and motion, this old dream of flight and freedom. New arrivals
were emerging from the terminal with stricken faces, gazing across at
the Intermundia Overnight, and into the impossible sky. Mark closed
the book, and closed his eyes. His mind ranged for a time over the
course of the day he had just experienced, which, in a sense, was the
whole of his existence. Those thoughts were like the last fitful
flickerings of a candle, and they went out in an instant,
surrendering to a sudden exhalation of the air.
End of Book 1.