7. Pavement and Lady Peckitt’s Yard
We are now in the busy road known as Pavement. It is here that Xella and the narrator find themselves in the silent city. You will have noticed that in fact it is anything but silent. In the novel, it becomes clear that although there are hundreds of people wandering through the streets at this point, few of them are actually real—they belong in one of the other cities that are superimposed over each other, visible in this one but with no discernible effect on it. In fact by this point in the novel, it has become clear that everyone has their own personal version of the city, walking the same streets but forever separated, living parallel lives but never fully together.
Of course, this is also where the narrator hears the braying, the occasional wordless vocal noises emitted at a high volume by the few people who actually have an existence here. It is implied (although never actually stated) that Brent is one of them—his presence looms over the first half of the novel, even though he does not in fact appear until about halfway through. Xella explains that this braying is an attempt to fill the streets with their presence, an attempt to own, if not control, the parts of the city in which they can be heard. However, I prefer to think that it is a form of echolocation. Brent has no map to help him find his way out of the city, so tries to establish his position by listening to his voice bouncing off the various buildings. I accept though that this is a somewhat wayward interpretation, and that if you visit these streets at around ten or eleven o’clock in the evening, you will hear that the braying is very much a real phenomenon.
However, if you follow me through this alleyway, you will see that we are in a different world altogether, and a genuinely quiet one. Another medieval backstreet, although you will be relieved that this is more spacious than the one that we have previously visited. (You will have to excuse my progress on the steps, as I have difficulty with them following an accident a few years ago.) As you have probably guessed, this is the setting of another scene between the narrator and Xella, although this one takes place much earlier in the story, before the Minster. Here it is Xella who is attempting to convince the narrator to remain in the city, although at this point he still has the maps and no motive for not returning to his own plane of existence. This scene is as far from the beginning of the story as the later one is from the end, and is its mirror image.
If we cross the road at Fossgate, we will find ourselves in another passageway, where he loses Xella at the end of the chapter. However I should like instead to turn back towards the beginning of our walk, up Low Petergate back towards Bootham Bar, where we will find a location which is not featured in the novel, but which houses something I find rather interesting.
8. King’s Square
As you will see, King’s Square is actually a triangle. It is a popular spot for tourists to sit, and for street entertainers to blight, although we are fortunate that there are none such here today. It is also the site of a former church, Holy Trinity, which was demolished in 1937, and you will notice that some of the memorial stones are still visible. None of Croft’s biographers seem to be aware of it, but I wish to draw your attention to the fact that his name appears twice here, once as dying in 1797, and once in 1800.
The name could, of course, be a coincidence, but I find this unlikely. To me, these stones put to rest the idea that the man living in Vermont is the real Martin Croft. Of course, I hardly believe that the novel’s real author died in York all those years ago. It may be that at least one of these stones is a fake, installed by Croft himself. But a likelier possibility is that Croft took his name from the tombstone that was already here.
I believe that Croft adopted this stone, not as a memorial but as a marker stone or a “You Are Here” sign, a place that he could leave and return to and get his bearings from. It was an anchor for an anchorless man.
We shall now visit two more locations featured within the novel itself.
9. Marygate
We have now gone outside of the city walls the same way we came, and I can only repeat that you may prefer to retrace your steps at the end of the tour. You would not want to find the wrong version of York Minster.
Croft doesn’t name this road as the location of the fight scene between Brent and the narrator, but it can be deduced from the various directions given in the text. There is a certain ambiguity here in that the two could not possibly be in the same version of the city, but they remain visible, and of course tangible, to each other, in the same way that the people in the silent city were visible to the narrator and Xella. Indeed, there are hints in the text that the pair may be slightly out of phase with each other, which perhaps explains why they are so incompetent at fighting.
We are alongside the splendid Museum Gardens, home to York’s fine museum and world-class art gallery, but our attention focuses on this humble telephone box. Despite being designed for a single person, both the narrator and Brent were inside the box at the time of the fight; the narrator was worried that Brent would scramble the phone lines the same way he had scrambled York’s streets.
I would draw your attention to one curious detail. The text makes it clear that the narrator breaks several panes of glass in the box when Brent pushes him back against it. And you will see that the side of the box is indeed smashed. It may be coincidence; it may be that Croft saw the broken telephone box and incorporated it into his novel, although it is difficult to see why, and I would remind you again of his claim that he had never been here. Also there is the small matter of the time elapsed since the book’s publication, during which it would surely have been repaired. It may even be that the glass was smashed after publication by an obsessive fan. However, I am sure I am not alone in preferring to believe that it was broken in a fight over the only real map of the city.
We will now head outside of the city walls, towards the novel’s denouement.
10. Bootham
The novel’s final scenes take place on this footbridge over one of York’s busiest roads. In fact, the bridge has been replaced at least twice since the novel’s publication, once deliberately and once by accident when a lorry discovered that it was too tall to fit underneath. But it is essentially the same bridge, and you are welcome to climb it. I prefer to stay down here, given the unpleasant events that take place on it.
Xella, Brent and the cartographer are all present in the final scene. Brent, of course, has won, having finally used the narrator’s maps to escape from the city. We do not discover whether Xella has decided to follow him or remain with the narrator. Given Brent’s final actions, I think we would all like her a little better if she chose to remain, but this is her only opportunity for escape.
The fact that the novel ends so suddenly implies that the narrator dies as a result of his fall from the bridge. But you will see that it is of a height where a fall would be survivable, although one would expect a few broken bones. We can speculate, then, on the characters’ future actions. The cartographer, separated from his maps, would be taken to hospital by a route he could not trace, and would therefore be lost forever to the city he first entered, never again being able to fully retrace his steps. Brent, on the other hand, would put as much distance between himself and the city as he possibly could, probably even heading abroad. He alone would have escaped with the knowledge of the full story of what had happened, and we can only speculate as to what he did with it.
Xella, of course, remains a mystery. I simply do not know if she would have stayed in the city, or followed Brent.
As to the identity of the novel’s real author, perhaps I can be of more help. As I have said, I believe that he is alive, and not the man who is usually credited. I believe that somewhere in York, there is someone with an intimate knowledge of both the city and the novel which he wrote about it, which was in some way appropriated by his rival. Perhaps he still wanders within the city walls, unable to find his way out, utterly lost.
And perhaps he is merely waiting for a guide, for a mysterious woman whom he cannot bel
ieve abandoned him at the end. Perhaps he still has hope that she made the right decision, and will one day find him, and guide him through the infinite possibilities that this city has to offer. We all need such a guide.
Thank you all for coming. Thank you.
* * *
Neil James Hudson
Neil James Hudson is a UK-based writer who has published around 30 short stories, as well as the paranormal erotic novel On Wings of Pity, available from Amazon. His short story collection The End of the World: A User’s Guide is available from his website at neiljameshudson.net.
THE CELL WALL
Christopher Walker
Somebody must have denounced me.
The arrest came as I was making my way to work on the 07.13 sonic jet. Four masked men approached me, their badges flashing like sharp teeth, and the next thing I knew, they’d placed the immobiliser on my arms and when we landed they carried away my frozen body. I doubt anybody on the jet said a thing in my defence; either they were too startled or, as I would have been in their position, too scared to risk being noticed.
My existence was reduced to a kind of suspended animation. I awaited my call to trial, not even knowing if it would go so far. I was yet to learn the crime I had been accused of committing, or who my accuser was, but I had my suspicions. I wasn’t born one rotation ago, as we say. I was the editor of a literary journal and we published short stories and poems; the government has always thought that any imagined tale is just a hop, skip, and double tumble away from sedition. Too much room for abstraction, they liked to say. How do we know what the piece is really about, they follow that with. You had to admire their thoroughness.
Last year I published a poem that was no more than a series of numbers; the twist ending, if you can call it that, was that the last number in the series was one hundred and twelve. The censors steamed in right after the issue was lithographed, claiming I was undermining the system with my publication. Why? Because the incumbent had been serving for a hundred and twelve lunars. Was the poem meant to suggest his end had arrived? I made my mistake then, I think, because I laughed.
“I took that story in six weeks ago. It got bumped to this edition because of an issue at the printer’s.”
That witty riposte earnt me a fourteen-hour interrogation.
But I don’t know what I did to land me in this mess, frankly.
I barely remember what followed but the result of it all was that, two rotations later, I was whisked up to the lunar penal colony and thrown in this cold, damp cell.
When I had recovered my senses sufficiently and could bring my eyes into accordance with the dim surroundings, my two hearts sank.
I recognised one of my fellow prisoners.
His name was Talin Hask, and he’d had a story published in both my journal and a sister publication that specialised in inter-species romance. I wondered if he’d gone a double-step too far and suggested a relationship between a Thosk and a Terran could be sustained over the long-term. Naïve, clearly. Of course such relationships existed, but you couldn’t go about saying so.
The other two I didn’t know. There was a lanky Thosk whose flashing green eyes spoke of a truculence undiminished by his circumstances. He growled in my direction and retreated to a corner to defecate into a slot in the brickwork. He was a real charmer. When the first meal was brought, he did me the favour of stepping on my tray with one foot, whilst the other three he employed in kicking grime in my face.
And the last guest in our exclusive lodgings was a Terran.
With clothes reduced to mere scraps, it was hardly a problem to discern his gender. Most Thosks can’t tell the difference between a male and a female Terran when they’re clothed, but in his loin cloth and torn tunic, little was left to the imagination. I couldn’t remember for sure—where’s Hrundel when you need it?—but I don’t think female Terrans tended to sport bushy beards either.
I addressed him in one of the two Terran languages I knew, English. No response. Perhaps he raised a brow a few millimetres when I spoke, but in the gloom I wasn’t sure.
“You’re wasting your carbon,” Hask said. “I’ve been here six lunars and not heard so much as a whistle from the Terran. Rumour has it, he’s been here for nearly ten solars now, and hasn’t communicated with anyone.”
“Ten solars? Bless the Leader that’s a long time. Do you have any idea what he’s in for?”
Hask shrugged. “Espionage, I’d guess. That or missionary work. You know the Terrans. Forever trying to save the universe from following the wrong god.”
“Hmm,” I said. I saw the other Thosk eyeing me from the shadows, and I couldn’t risk either honesty or a direct lie here, not with his infra-red vision. I’d blush and he’d summon the guards and label me a-Leaderist. Unless I’d already been called that, of course.
“Don’t you know some of the other Terran languages?” Hask suggested. “Maybe that’s the problem, he doesn’t speak English.”
“I thought it was their common tongue,” I said.
“Yeah, just as I thought satire was ours,” Hask said. As I suspected—here for a sedulous short story. Pity.
I approached the Terran, who, crouching low on those two spindly legs, scurried away from me like a Trongan rat from a flame.
I held out my hand in a gesture I was sure would be understood as non-threatening, and I spoke.
“Salaam,” I said.
The Terran’s eyes lit up; well, they didn’t, but those flaps of skin that are supposed to keep their greasy eyeballs moist opened wider than before.
“Salaam alaikum,” the Terran replied.
“Looks like you were right,” I said to Hask.
I was full of questions for the Terran, but they would have to wait. For one thing, he was now rolling on the floor, saltwater streaming from the ducts that moistened his eyeballs, repeating ‘salaam alaikum’ over and over. And for another thing, it was interrogation time. We were dragged separately from the cage by black-suited officers, all three of us Thosks putting up a good fight as was expected of us; the Terran they left in peace, presumably having tired of his frail body and easily splintered bones.
Later, as I lay recovering from a heart-attack (the inferior heart, so not much to concern myself with), I saw the Terran approach the longest wall of the cell and run his hands over the pock-marked brickwork. He was muttering something to himself, but too quietly for me to catch. Occasionally he paused, his finger set against some particularly large indentation, and his expression would change from tormented to, I don’t know, blissful. At rest, not restive. I’m no expert on Terrans but from the films I’ve seen, I guess I’m trotting down the right lines.
Hask was asleep or unconscious and sported blazing red marks down his back, and the other Thosk lay with his eyes all open, staring dumbly at the high glass ceiling, his left arm bent at an impossible angle away from his thorax.
Now was my chance to talk to the Terran.
“Terran,” I whispered to him. “Terran, come here and talk. I have questions for you.”
The Terran turned to me and replied, “I don’t care about your questions. It’s answers I’m after.”
“Very well. I’ll leave you be.”
I meditated quietly on my fate and the Terran returned to running his fingers over the wall. Now, however, he seemed increasingly agitated, as if he was suffering some mental turmoil. It was easy to guess what it was. He’d been alone for so long; if there’s one thing all of us has had drilled into our crania at school, it’s that Terrans are social beasts and fare poorly when isolated as this one had been.
It wasn’t long before he gave up his enigmatic obsession and came to sit beside me.
“All right,” he said. “For the sake of some conversation, go ahead and ask me your questions.”
“I promise not to have too many for you,” I said to reassure him. “And remember, please, I’m not an interrogator. I’ve just been interrogated myself, and I’m sure that’s not something you want.”
“No,” he said, idly rubbing an angry scar on his hairy arm.
“I’m simply too curious for my own good,” I said. “I see somebody trapped as you are and I want to know how they came to be here. I wonder if it’ll help shed some light on my own dilemma.”
“Dilemma? You’re kidding, right?”
“Apologies. I have spoken so little Arabic in my lifetime. This, I believe, is only the second occasion on which I have pronounced your language; the rest of the time I have done no more than to translate texts imported from your lands.”
The Terran thought this over and then apologised for his curtness.
“Call me Alinor Filpslow,” I said. “It’s not quite my true name, but close enough. Terrans don’t have the interdental capabilities to say it properly.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” the Terran said. “In that case, call me Omar Khayyam. It is also not quite my true name, but it serves.”
The name echoed in the empty rooms of the back of my mind. I thought it sounded familiar but why I couldn’t say. Perhaps the interrogators had begun the process of working on my brain; it was the perfect torture in that it hurt like hell when it was happening to you, but later you couldn’t recall it even occurring; though sometimes you also couldn’t recall your mother’s face either. Such collateral damage was to be expected. The Imperial Police did not play games.
Our food arrived then, and for the first time since my arrest I ate in peace. Khayyam offered to share with me, which was a touching gesture but one I declined. Perhaps they’d poisoned his serving, who knew—but I didn’t want to risk it. I had enough in any case—Hask and I split the other Thosk’s food between us. He was still lying immobile in the corner, clearly dead or adrift in a coma. They’d come and take him out, but not until he’d begun to smell.
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