Once: astral travel, energy paths, ley lines, Santa and his reindeer flying over the world on wind superhighways, riding the veins, nerves, chakras, inner body of the Chinese maps which weren’t Chinese but were much older. Once: a nose for magnetism and direction, human homing pigeons, feeling. Now: any fool with a cell phone. Everyone telepathic with headphones. You engage with a computer, you’re engaging with something man-made, that something like you built to trap you. But engage with nature and you mess with something built by something bigger than you, you can be deeply altered.
Don wanting all that for himself.
Don would say: that knowledge is dangerous, it destroyed things once, you can’t risk it in the wrong hands. Maybe he’s right. And maybe it’s good, after disaster, for the survivors to say: let’s reset from here, build it twice, forget the past.
But you can’t build good on a lie.
Things always getting wiped out. The bad deal we’re at the sharp end of. Meteorites smashing in, other natural forces banging bits of land together, causing mountains, forcing up gold, splitting to make oceans or craters, wiping out the weather, killing everything. Life on the planet was so fragile no matter what we liked thinking, whole cultures razed in one second, not one trace left. Who really needs that kind of knowledge? Don would say.
Near total obliteration, the slow picking-up-the-pieces, our wrong world built on top. Scattered fragments remaining, the survivors locking away their knowledge in islands or high up on mountains away from fault lines, doing their chanting.
Indian Ocean cowry shells in Yorkshire Stone Age graves. Babylonian star observation records going back three hundred thousand years. Orbs and sceptres: they always knew the earth was round and that you could strike it. The Great Pyramid in Giza, with a latitude in metres that’s exactly the same as the speed of light in metres. Massive terma, secret messages from the past, cooked up by old sages to survive disaster, metres are an ancient measurement proportioned to Earth’s dimensions, no matter what they tell you. See what they knew then: direct transmission blasting whatever current story, the lies.
No phones down there, that I could see, no way for me to check. I’d have to take on trust, this secret petrifying history of a world and its destruction that Don had told him, that Don had burnt into him, that he was burning into me in our rank hole, about the old knowledge and what it had done.
Had Alan ever said anything about a number, got me to store it? What was all that about terma, buried messages from the past Alan taught us to locate? Had Alan mentioned apples? Any immortal apple orchards in Scritch? Apples in old stories were code, did I know? For terma, metal, other treasure. Him and me, caught in Don’s terma quest, buried in the world.
Don chasing apples of knowledge to bite into as per the Garden of Eden and we all knew how well that had panned out. Britain was the land of apples, Hera’s immortal apple orchard in Anglesey, once called Mona, after Manannan Mac Lir, the Celtic sea god, who also gave his name to the Isles of Manhattan and Man. Avalon: land of apples and Apollo, who ruled Britain once under many names, as Don did today. Apollo visited Avalon every nineteen years, which is the exact amount of time it takes for sun and moon rotations to match up, as he was sure I didn’t know but that Don did and had taught him. That kind of knowledge, about rotations, had been cut off from dumdums by Don and the Dons. But rotation was important: governed plant growth, weather, Ice Ages, tides of water and melted rock seas, ran your inner ebb and flow.
He held his hands over me and told me some people and animals could feel for metal ore underground, sense vertical rivers, and those people were called dowsers and could find metal as well as water and dowsing worked and dowsers were employed right now by Don and every mining and oil company in the world. He told me you could dowse over a paper map as well as over land but not via computer screens with their other energies, and you could dowse over bodies and sense sickness and lies. He said dowsers were an ancient caste trained from birth to maximise their natural talents and that castes were a left-over from the deep past when people were bred like dogs and other animals, mated deliberately to enhance useful natural attributes by masters of nature with long-term plans.
He told me that pub names meant things: The King’s Head, The Royal Oak, The Red Lion, that everything meant something, if you could read, even the placement and type of trees on the land, and from the way dumdums talked you’d have thought they knew everything but they knew nothing and it was petrifying knowing more, being on the other side.
Dogs on the scent, like the so-called Normans, Romans, Celts, Napoleon and Alexander in Egypt, the Chinese, the Mongols, the so-called Phoenicians, Rosetta Stones, crusading knights not after Jerusalem or Constantinople or Baghdad but after the knowledge stored there, scraps of ancient scattered power they found bits of, taught them how to build cathedrals, the maps lodged there, ways to America, Bolivian silver, ancient copper mines of Michigan, locations of Welsh dragons, goo knowledge, the treasure in the hills. The Arab library in Toledo that the popes got their hands on. Why did I think Iraq got invaded? The library of knowledge saved from the Mongols that Don rediscovered under the sand in Iraq, had to get his hands on. Don on the scent, snuffling it up.
Don’s machines, crunching every library and codex, squeezing the juice, building the model. His Doomsday book, Project Knowledge, Project Jigsaw, knowing more than anyone in the past eight thousand years. There was an event once, they caused it. We live in its scattered embers. Him and me had to stop Don lighting the flames again. Would I help? WHAT U FIND IN DRAWER?
How ever long of me shitted up next to him listening to this? Or drifting off into the space of my childhood, back in time to Scritch and Alan and Zita and Corpse Dogs, the trees and grey skies and gone houses, low light in the Fall. He talked or we slept. He could sleep with his eyes open, he said, shorn and scabby. I was no better, what bits of me I could see from the vents when it was light. It started to rain, for days, making our hole vile and muddy. Don’s weaponised weather, trying to flush us out, he said. We were safe, though, he said, giggling madly in our burrow, in our damp forest hunting lodge taking time out from the world.
We got ill and shat and ate berries, leaves, acorns, mushrooms, fungus. He dressed his wounds with leaves and talked. I did bad poos next to him and cried and tried to work out if Flora was dead. I screamed at him and tried to get out and he trapped me and shut me up in different ways and told me it would be OK and about Irish boats having the same sails as Egyptian dhows, and Phoenician monuments in Malaysia and Brazil.
WHAT U FIND IN DRAWER?
He ate soil and chewed tree roots and told me to eat soil and chew tree roots and leaves and sorts of things dumdums were told not to eat: flowers, weeds, plants, bugs, mould, if you knew the right sorts, blackberry bushes and nettles scattered everywhere on purpose in the old days as emergency food. Tree roots were good for me, contained all the minerals, were natural medicine that would make me better, replenish minerals lost by tears and tummy troubles. Tree roots were nature’s metal detectors, they sucked up what was underground. If you cut tree roots open you could see what the land below contained and then dig if there was good stuff, that’s how they used to do it. Trees were labs for converting minerals into leaves, nuts, fruit to feed and heal. Trees were our earliest friends, even before dogs, providers of food, wood, shelter, metal, lookouts. No wonder they worshipped trees, the bridge between earth and air. Don’s vast blunting that meant we’d forgotten that: autocorrect, driverless cars.
Did I know why bunches of trees growing up from land humps were called ‘copses’? Cos they grew out of corpses, once, he said. He said when people used to die they’d have trees planted over their graves, so the tree roots would feast on their rotting bodies, make fruits from their minerals to be eaten by family, would be their life after death. Now there were other ways for life after death: cryopalaces and worse. He shivered. If we died here maybe a tree would grow out of us both. He held my hand.
Our spira
l castle, where Sleeping Beauty goes to wait for her prince to re-life her. Crystal castles, Snow White with her apple, where kings get buried and come alive again in the old stories. The islands of the dead: Skomer and the rest off the west coast. Caldey. Glastonbury, Silbury Hill, Burrow Mump, on the line? Spiral in and spiral out. Have you ever been to Spiral Castle? It means: have you died and been reborn?
‘I’m not the same person you grew up with. So much has changed.’
Right.
So much talk but not about our past, Scritchwood, New York, the rest. No flagged words to help them find us. He said. ‘And it’s dead to me. I was a different person then.’
A different person with a stump and head hole. The old scar under his eye that was maybe the same but no joyride scar on his shoulder: I felt for it with my hand.
‘That,’ he said, without me saying anything. ‘Grafts, plastic surgery. You have to be just like Don. Don wants his Donlings perfect.’
Except for his eye scar and stump. But the stump had come after, his punishment, when he’d turned against Don, his righteous rise-up once he’d clocked pyramid lies. He said.
He told me about the school in the desert where they sent him for training, the school for Dons. He told me about his top empty life as Don Junior going everywhere, having everything, peeping into everyone, always missing me, islands in the mid-Atlantic not marked on dumdum maps. He’d killed people, he told me, he didn’t want to talk about it. Got blooded, you had to. Death was part of life, for most people. You couldn’t rule if you didn’t know.
He told me about running away and living wild in forests by himself for months at a time, all those useful teenage summers in wildernesses living off leaves, the yoga and breathing, shutting yourself down, passing days in suspended torpor. ‘There’s so much about bodies that dumdums don’t know.’
He’d escaped and lived wild but how come he’d ducked Don’s passport control and got to coated England?
How come teenage yoga summers in wildernesses when we’d grown up in Scritchwood together?
His accent was more American but he’d lived there for years now.
He had a hole in his head and no back scar and was circumcised now, I’d seen it.
He said Alan was out there, calling me from afar.
Four white sheets.
Were they dead?
He told me to be suspicious of potted plants which they could hook up to sensors and use to measure emotion: fear, trust, treachery and other hormones in nearby humans. Like the chilli plant in his car, how often he’d washed it down. He told me they were cutting out the knowledge of how your inner plants relate to outer plants—your inner plants being your organs, your lungs and heart etcetera. He said organs are individual plants inside our bodies, that lungs grew like creepers on walls, that cancer is mould on those vines, that you have to change the soil to get rid of the mould. But the soil now in dumdum bodies was trash from Don the realm gardener laying lines in our connected plastic bodies, children and the unborn rewired from scratch by the fake milk, fobbing us off, controlled.
He told me not to say the word ‘Don’, to use codewords, that Don was a black toad squatting over earth, the ‘black turtle’ and to listen out for those phrases from anyone else. He told me not to call Don ‘black toad’ or ‘black turtle’ but instead call him ‘black T’ or ‘BLT’ or ‘bacon sarnie’ or ‘Sammy sandwich’ or other silly names he made up so they were ours alone.
Flora, Poppy, the baby, Rhodri. ‘Alan,’ I said sometimes and he shushed me. No Alan, not even down here: a flagged word for hacked worms. Even though he’d said it and much more in our cars.
But he hadn’t realised then that Don had already flicked the switch.
He said.
CAREFUL, he pinched into my hand.
We lay in silence and he pinched lots of things slowly, getting me better at it: favourite music and TV shows. Helicopters overhead, he said, endless rain. What I’d lodged in my memory, could I remember it? The Hello Kitty purse and the broken horseshoe. My phone going dead an age ago. His coffees. The old woman’s pink nail.
All those eyes but they never seemed to find us, except maybe they had found us. ‘Nanocams’, but not everywhere. Yet. He said. Maybe it didn’t matter, being watched. He’d done terrible things, to me, skinned me alive. He’d killed people, he said.
Who knew what pressure he’d been under if one inch of this was true?
All that wacky history, petering out. Sucking tree roots, getting changed by their minerals.
WHAT U FIND IN DRAWER?
He had a stump and a hole in his head and no scar or foreskin but he knew everything, most things, just not immediately.
He knew ancient wipe-outs, black obsidian but not that Jenny 2 was also the broken house.
Teenage summers in wilderness camps but maybe I’d misheard him. Teenage Pacific tours. My kidnapper and shaver but maybe he’d saved me. Four bodies. Tal’s purse. Red warns.
I was dying in a hole in the ground under a forest next to him having to listen to this, maybe with the keys out of this.
Maybe with Alan waiting for me.
What do you feel?
‘OK.’
21
I said Barrow-in-Furness, I didn’t tell him the street name: 226 Vengeance Street.
He didn’t like that it was Barrow and that I wouldn’t say more. He looked deep into me in our dim hole, his hands cupping my face.
‘The sarnie rules Barrow directly,’ he said after a long while. ‘He grows machines there. In plain view. Maybe that’s why it’s Barrow: their own turf, won’t think to look there.’
Barrow wasn’t far. He knew the way: about twenty miles south and west, on the west coast of Jenny 2, on the sea, a place of natural defences facing the ball of fire that was the Isle of Man on the Chinese Map he called the Neijing Tu and said was a map of the human body.
‘Any Scritches about Barrow? That I’ve forgotten?’
None that I remembered.
Him and his head.
It wouldn’t work but it would only work if we were together in full trust. No time for doubt. We’d have to be each other.
He did a test. When the sun set he crawled up and stood outside in the open for a long time while I stayed buried.
Nothing happened.
He came back in and woke me, it was still dark.
NO TALK.
NO PINCH.
TRUST.
I crawled out with him, naked, muddy, unsteady things newly hatched from the earth into the trees and big cold air. We stared at each other. I didn’t care about being naked. We’d got past all that now. He stretched and looked at the black sky. I shivered. Naked, barefoot, freezing, ill, deranged in a dark forest. We looked for poos and mud and smeared them on. The walk would warm us. You could heat yourself from inside.
The forest rustled and hooted. He limped cos he’d gouged half his calf out in the lake and then put poo over it. I tottered about shivering.
He took my hand with his stump hand and we slipped low, naked and freezing through the black forest by night, our eyes already tuned to the dark. We cut and stubbed our bare feet, walking on wet leaves when we could, keeping close to evergreens and bare boughs cloaked with ivy, heading down next to a stream, nature’s paths. Creatures made noises, things crackled, there were thorns and blackness, trees sucked up minerals from cooled goo, bare branches leant in to tell us things. We moved fast, to keep warm. After a while we hit the lake and squatted in tall reeds along the shore looking for something. Looking for a boat, he whispered, belonging to slack people, holiday people who left their boats out over winter, crossed their fingers. He loved slack people, he said.
I hated the idea of boats and the lake again. What did we know about boats?
At its south point the lake turned into a river which would take us out to sea and round the coast to Barrow, he said.
Did it? How did he know that? Trying to remember from the old mouldy atlas and the Chinese map.
Water was best, he said. Or else walking miles through forests, stealing cars, public transport? Naked us, tired and weak. The water would take us, minimum effort, the tides in our favour, he’d make sure of that, work it out with sun and moon and stars like he’d been taught. He knew about water and boats now, he said. Wild dark water, you can’t tag it, yet. We’d stick to the shore as much as we could, steal clothes from somewhere, knit them from reeds, whatever, travel in the dark flow. He had a good picture of the river and coastline in his mind, he knew this part of England pretty well anyway.
‘How come?’
‘Because.’ This part of England seemed remote but was important to the sandwich, strategically.
‘Why? Metal?’
‘Lots of things.’
The water was cold. We found a wooden boat upside down in the reeds with a big hole in the bottom and then a bit further down a blue plastic canoe with no hole. No oar, though, so we went back to the wooden boat and hurt our hands prising off planks to use as oars till we found something better: ‘there’ll be useful crap in the banks, always is.’
We sailed down the dark glittering lake using planks and his hands, me in front, him behind. The rowing warmed me, stopped the shivering. My feet went numb. As the water narrowed we glimpsed a dark shape he said was a house. He lodged me and the boat in reeds and went off for quite a long time, came back jolly with two coats, scarves, wellies, woolly hats and a lifejacket from a slack boating shed he’d broken into. We dressed, wrapped scarves round our thighs, sailed on using our planks. The water became a thin river, we slipped down past reeds and thick whispering trees. We rowed and sometimes rested, let the black water carry us. I shivered in stolen clothes at the helm flowing through the world.
The water was high because of the rain, he said. After about an hour we came to a low bridge we had to duck under. Then the water fell fast away down a frothing weir. He laughed then skimmed us sideways easily down white rushing water in the dark while I clutched the sides.
TWICE Page 14
