by Heide Goody
* * *
Ap Shallas slammed a writing hand down on the desk. “Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?” said Prudence.
Ap Shallas glanced at the writing she was still producing to read what Prudence had said. “Stop trying to complicate things.”
“I’m not complicating things.”
“You are and you know it, young girl. And you’re wrong anyway.”
“Wrong how?”
Ap Shallas continued to write.
* * *
Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas could have explained to the impudent girl—
* * *
—“Hey!” said Prudence—
* * *
—how the Bloody Big Book made use of recursive and self-referential systems to encapsulate the sum totality of all things without unnecessary repetition. Just as the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet can be used repeatedly to describe all things, so certain pieces of text could be used time and again to reference those many events that were utterly identical.
* * *
“That sounds like nonsense,” said Prudence.
“That shows how little you understand,” said Ap Shallas as she wrote. “The recording of an infinite universe might require an infinite book but that doesn’t mean—”
“Flibble,” said Prudence.
“Pardon?” said ap Shallas.
“Flappy poppy wapple babble,” said Prudence and looked at the page where the words were being written.
* * *
“Quiddy biddy ungle faff-a-taff-a wap,” said the kaatbari and laughed as the words came out on the page.
“Oh, I see,” said ap Shallas. “Very juvenile.”
“Bum,” said Prudence.
“Yes—”
“Bum bum.”
“Stop it, now,” said ap Shallas, mildly surprised to feel a very human anger she had not known in aeons. “I have better things to—”
“Bum bum bum bum bum bum. Squitty squitty poo poo.”
With great effort, ap Shallas—
* * *
The writing machine woman pushed her papers aside and addressed the spot where she took Prudence to be.
“This is all you have left to offer the world, is it?” She snapped in a violent tone that jolted Prudence. “Clowning about as the world falls into darkness? And don’t think I can’t tell you’re up there, Crippen Ai!” she yelled at the rafters. She looked back to Prudence’s approximate location. “He probably decided to inflict you on me because I stopped him stealing the throne of Hath-No. He’s a sore and spiteful loser.”
Prudence looked up. Crippen Ai continued his agonised tremors in the dark but there was now a note of embarrassment in his twitches.
“Your sole purpose was to herald the end of the world,” ap Shallas said to Prudence, “and you have done that. Back in your own time, the August Handmaidens of Prein have come to take ownership of you, but only as a trophy, a plaything. And if they knew what you were, half the humans would gladly hand you over. You are a spent thing of only fading ornamental value. If I were to wax poetic, I would say you are an exploded firework, the discarded wrapping paper. You are an empty Christmas stocking. And for that—” She paused and swallowed with difficulty as though true emotional sentiments caused her physical pain. “—For that I’m genuinely sorry. There’s a whole wide world out there, a beautiful world and you’re not going to get to enjoy any of it.”
“Mithtreth,” said Barry, trying to get her attention.
“Not now,” she said. “I’m talking to this young girl here.”
“What girl?”
“Now, your mother was – or is – a foolish woman. Far too headstrong, with a monstrously unbecoming chip on her shoulder but she was – or is – a woman of passions. She was full of grit and determination…”
Prudence’s attention wavered as she saw what Barry had been trying to point out. A pink sparkle of light had appeared in the air directly behind ap Shallas. From it wisps of light, like strands of hair, cascaded out towards ap Shallas. Prudence walked towards it and passed her hands through the growing curtain of colour. The Gellik orb…
“But mithtreth!”
“Do not interrupt me mid-sentence,” said ap Shallas and then, perhaps spotting the pink reflection, turned. The machine swivelled on feet or wheels – Prudence could not see. It pivoted with much effort, long arms swinging out. When ap Shallas saw what was happening, she gave a shout. “No! It is not time!”
Prudence realised it was a shout of annoyance, not fear.
“This is most inconvenient! Come back later!” she commanded the expanding portal.
The glowing light pulled her in, pulled the woman from the machine. She emerged, shedding braces and straps, clamps and girdles, clothed only in filth and rags. Prudence thought of the angry whelks, the vulnerable creature in its hard shell, and felt something that wasn’t quite pity for this woman, shouting in pathetic protest as she was extracted.
The thoggan dithered in panic, running backwards and forwards in his clanking pot armour. Ap Shallas didn’t seem to even notice him. She frantically grabbed for the papers and the one huge book that were sliding off her desk-lap, and Prudence realised the woman only had one arm. The other ended just above the elbow in a knobbly and ugly stump.
“Don’t!” she yelled, tumbling slowly into the light.
Prudence felt a peculiar dissonance as she heard ap Shallas’s yell with both these ears and her actual ears, in another plane of existence. She pulled back to hear more clearly…
……
……
……
…Prudence stepped back from the cement surface. There was grey dust on her hand. Away in another corner of the vault, pink light glowed and a woman yelled in unrestrained fury.
“What is that?” said Steve, still working on the wooden puzzle cube.
Prudence brushed the dust from her hands. “It is the ap Shallas. Mrs Vivian Grey. They’ve brought her back from Hath-No.”
“Is that so?” he said, walking to the shelf end to seek her out.
“Do you think I’m an empty Christmas stocking?”
Steve gave a whole-body shrug. “What’s a Christmas?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it wear big stockings?”
“No, I don’t think it’s like that.”
“You would make a big stocking, apprentice,” Steve assured her. “Although only a thin leg would fit. We would need to break your jaw and scoop your insides out—”
“No, not like that,” she said, impatient for the right kind of reassurance. “Am I useless? Has my purpose already been served?”
Steve gave her a deeply thoughtful inspection. “To what use would you like to be put?”
Prudence didn’t know how to answer that one. “No one wants me here. Mrs Grey said there’s a beautiful world out there and I’m not going to get to enjoy any of it,” she said.
“Everyone else is having all the fun,” agreed Steve. “I would like to burn things.”
Prudence wasn’t sure if burning things was how one went about enjoying the world, but it had an instinctive appeal.
“We should go see it while it’s still there,” said Prudence, then thought about the imprisoning circle that the professor had cast around the place. She took the heavy walkie-talkie from her pocket and pressed the button. It squawked. There would be no point asking her mother. She released the button.
“We should leave,” she said and, seized with by an impulse, took the wooden puzzle cube from the shelf.
“Be careful, mortal,” intoned Steve in as ominous a voice as the squeaky doll could manage. “The great artefacts of Prein can transport you to realms of infinite pleasure or relentless pain.”
“I thought we could go just go outside and look at, I don’t know, the stars. And flowers.”
“There are no flowers in the realms of infinite pleasure,” sneered Steve.
“What about for people who really like flo
wers?” she said, and twisted the sides. The symbols, written in an alphabet that did not want to make life easy for beginner readers, glowed and shifted. Three turns, four turns; move that inner segment round. There was the screech of planes of existence tearing themselves apart and a tunnel of blue lightning opened before them. The land squid warbled in alarm and tried to hide between two hardback books.
“Your mother is going to think this is my fault!” Steve shouted against the interdimensional winds that had sprung up. “She will punish me!”
“Then you’d best come with me,” said Prudence.
Steve considered the logic of this and, spear pencil held tight, jumped onto her outstretched hand. “Stars and flowers and burning things,” he instructed. “And then we will come straight back.”
Prudence held him tight. “Let’s see what there is to see while it is still there,” she said and stepped into the crackling vortex.
02:30am
Nina explored the back of the police van while Ricky drove. She was checking to see how they might accommodate a donkey. She wasn’t a hundred percent on the dimensions of a donkey, but was doing her best to imagine it.
“This van is pretty cool. There’s an actual cell in here,” she said. Reinforced steel sectioned off a tiny bench seat from the rest of the interior.
“It’s one of the newer ones,” said Ricky. “It’s got unbreakable plastic in the windscreen too.”
“Sweet ride,” said Pupfish, who reclined in a passenger seat up front.
They were on the Aston Expressway, heading north out of the city centre. From its elevated position, there were views across a good part of the city. The horizon was filled with burning buildings and huge shapes silhouetted against the glowing skyline. Over to the left there was some sort of smoky flaming vortex above Villa Park. It rose like a cartoon beanstalk, swirling so tightly it looked solid enough to climb up. The swirling pulsed in time with distant screaming sounds. A pungent smell, somewhere between ‘overzealous barbecue’ and ‘undiscovered dead mouse behind the radiator’, seeped into the van.
“Can we do something about that stink?” said Nina.
Pupfish stabbed buttons to try and turn off the van’s air conditioning, but only managed to engage the sirens. Ricky swatted his hand aside, turning off both sirens and aircon.
“We’ll get a donkey through here, won’t we?” said Nina. She held up her hands to gauge the size of the gap between the cell and the caged storage racks. They stood on either side of the rear door, and were optimised for humans. “Is a donkey about this big?” She turned round and held up outstretched hands to Pupfish.
He shrugged. “How many donkeys do you – ggh! – think we get on the Waters, dog? Uh, think we might have trouble up ahead.” He pointed.
Nina crouched behind the front seats to peer through the window and tried to make sense of what she could see. Sure, it was the middle of the night, and the city was burning, shifting and being consumed, but something was seriously off about the view.
“What’s normally there?” she asked, waving a hand at the middle distance.
Ricky Lee gave her an incredulous glance. “Spaghetti Junction? The M6 motorway? Those things, you mean?”
“Right. Yeah. So not like a great big Drayton Manor rollercoaster?”
“No, they tend to keep them at Drayton Manor.”
Nina knew that, but it was the only thing her brain could liken this to. Colossal loops corkscrewed away from them, high into the hideous sky.
Spaghetti Junction was a motorway interchange arranged over five elevated levels and composed almost entirely of slip roads – connecting and redistributing traffic headed along motorways west, east and south. Sutton Park was in the suburbs to the north, and they had to pass through Spaghetti Junction to get there. Now someone had stuck a giant invisible fork into the bowl of spaghetti and hoisted it, twisting, into the sky. The road they were on ran straight into the chaos.
“That looks bad,” said Nina.
“What the fuck happened?” said Ricky.
“Gods don’t want us leaving town, po-po,” offered Pupfish.
“We could find another route,” said Nina.
“Cars are still going along it,” said Ricky.
Nina could see them too. Like the other city streets, the impossible loops of the distended Spaghetti Junction were dotted with abandoned and crashed wrecks of vehicles, but some were definitely moving up there. They were even driving right round on the upside-down bits, looping the loop.
“Do you think we need to go really, really fast to do that?” she said.
“Those ones don’t look as if they’re going all that fast,” Ricky replied. “In fact, does that one look as if it’s trying to turn around to you?”
As they drew nearer, they could see one car, which looked like her dad’s BMW, turning around in the road. It performed the manoeuvre while completely upside-down.
“We should see it in a minute,” said Ricky. “It’s coming up.”
“We doing this? We going in?” said Pupfish.
“We loop the loop to get to Erdington, then carry on,” said Ricky.
“Thought I was the reckless one,” said Nina.
Ricky sighed. “I don’t see that we have much choice. We could try and get off the main road, but we still need to cross over that thing, Whatever it is.”
It dominated the skyline, and they watched in fascination as more cars scaled its sides.
“This reminds me of a bridge in Normandy I went over on a coach trip once,” said Ricky.
“Ggh! You mean Kings Norton, cop-man?” said Pupfish. “Canal over that way’s got—”
“Normandy in France,” said Ricky. “This massive bridge, a proper engineering miracle, but it’s really scary when you drive up to it. Looks as if you’re gonna just drive off the top into thin air or something.”
“Sounds like someone made it that way on purpose,” said Nina. “You can bet it’s right next to a Venislarn dumping ground, or something.”
“We ain’t gonna drive off into thin air or nuffin, are we?” said Pupfish.
“What goes up must come down, I’m guessing,” said Nina. “So let’s just all hold our bottle and pretend this is normal.”
“Is that your guide to life?” Ricky asked with a smile.
“Pretty much.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, nearly poking him in the eye with the corner of her hat.
Ricky gently increased the acceleration as they approached the upward slope of the road.
“Shouldn’t we have seen that BMW by now?” asked Nina. The road ahead contained nothing but a taxi that was travelling along in the same direction as them, about a quarter of a mile ahead.
Ricky shrugged. “Maybe it came off at one of the other exits?”
Nina craned her neck to look up at the road stretching above them. As they crawled up the slope, it became more difficult to picture exactly where they were, relative to the ground. There were loops and twists of dual-carriageway in every direction, with just the turbulent night beyond. Nina wanted to say something, because there were definitely no other exits from this dreadful loop, but she clamped her lips shut. Ricky had enough on his plate.
“Ggh!— Where’s up?” said Pupfish.
Nina knew exactly what he meant. It felt as if they had been driving up this crazy slope for long enough that they ought to be on the way down. “Can you tell, Ricky?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said. “It’s still like driving up a really steep hill, in terms of what the engine thinks it’s doing. We’re in a low gear and I’m accelerating hard.”
“So what would happen if you weren’t?” Nina asked.
“I’m not prepared to put that to the test. Nobody wants to be rolling backwards, completely out of control.”
“No.” Nina was not convinced their current situation could accurately be described as under control, but she would leave Ricky with the mechanics of driving. “Pupfish, let’s try and find a reference point
. Anything at all you can identify?”
They both stared at the surroundings as Ricky kept them moving forwards and upwards.
“I think that thing over there is Villa Park,” she said, pointing at a whirling, flaming blur in the dark. “We passed it earlier.”
Pupfish gave a nod. “So which end of that thing is pointing at the sky?” he asked.
Nina wasn’t sure. “Well, we have a choice of two, I guess. Keep looking.”
Pupfish had an advantage when it came to scanning a wide view, given the placement of his eyes, but he surprised Nina when he pointed straight ahead at the windscreen. “Canal is right there,” he declared.
“What? I can’t see anything. How do you know?”
“Samakha superpower, we always know where the waters are at.”
“You chat muda, Pupfish,” she grinned. “You ain’t got no superpowers.”
“I have.”
“Making mysterious fishy smells is not a superpower.”
“You’s racist, Nina. You know that?”
“It’s banter.”
“That’s how they keep us down, man.”
Ricky swerved without warning. A flash of headlights, a roar of an engine. Nina rolled in the back and landed uncomfortably against the storage racks.
“The BMW,” said Ricky. “Took its time getting back to here.”
Nina grunted as she sat up. She looked out the back window at the receding red lights of the speeding car. Something huge and flat and fingered flapped over the safety barrier at the side of the road, swatted the BMW flat and dragged it off the side. It all happened in a couple of seconds.
“Um,” said Nina and then swallowed. “Did anyone else see the massive hand thing?”
“What?” said Ricky.
“Jingu bis adn-bhul made!” swore Pupfish, his eyes wide (wider than normal) as he stared ahead.
