Subvision

by Andrew McEwan

  ‘What now?’ said the mutant, flapping his arms. These mixed tones reminded him of his father's peepers, their depth, glint, proximity, seeming to stretch from his skull as the story unfolded, his telling of ventures deep into the broiling anti-heavens.

  Scherzo, having passed the oven, approached the fridge and its blue-white enamel. The kitchen was full of sounds he made himself: churning of stomach and pumping of heart, the incessant roar of air through passages, the disturbing creak of bones. Muscles squeaked in his eight-year-old body. He paused at the fridge, imagining its contents and the likelihood of oiling. Before him sank the hallway, purged now of its father ghost, black and grey. The indistinct wallpaper, composed as it was of vertical stripes and interlinked vines, offered cages from between whose evenly spaced bars shadow creatures might pounce. But Scherzo disregarded them, his imagination, stubbornly anchored to a chaise longue, being uncontaminated by the less subtle inhabitants of bad dreams. Benign chimeras accompanied him daily, mischievous faces in seat-covers and coffee-stains, and these held the more pernicious at bay. Any fears he had centred on the front door and the very real possibility of it opening to admit a man of wealth and substance, alive and present, not remembered on a conscious level, yet whose majestic image lurked all the same, snapped like a fish from the murky depths of Scherzo's foetus days the instant that man's reflection sought to invert itself through the vitreous medium of his eyes and travel the optic nerve to his stalled cerebrum, banging a gong along the processional way.

  He didn't trust that door. The red ice, blue ice, black ice merged to form plateau, headless islands clothed in volcanic ash upon which were raised paradoxical armies of denial, those same armies engaged in a conflict of worlds, the debris of combat filtering down to stuff the ever busy ovens, the dead employed in the construction of mausoleums. Each man was a block, a slab, pillowed on heels and spine to spine or fixed upright (the gauche generals) with the weight of others distributed through their flattened skulls. The hallway contained them. The front door revolved too quickly to see, opening on worlds and spheres at random and marching the armies to battle. But Scherzo was oblivious, untainted by ideals, free not to think or closely scrutinize, and therefore aloof to these struggles. He wasn't interested in power, in holding the door and opening or closing it as he chose. Deaf to pleas and blind to slaughter he descended grey steps having washed them of colour by his refusal to judge, to intervene on one side or another, continuing down through successive layers, numbed by impossible offers, descending until the greyness fashioned into walls, an interior free of ectoplasm and spilt guts, a room of ceremony and ritual at whose far end shuffled a hairy man at a desk.

  ‘Name?’

  Scherzo declined to answer. Examining the walls he found them malleable, soft.

  The hairy man tapped his pencil.

  ‘What now?’ said the mutant, scratching his face. His grin was lopsided, engaged in bewilderment.

  The parlour was silent, the coffin perched on two chairs, its lid resting against the wall by the fireplace, brass plate struck with brass words.

  Scherzo approached the wooden box casually. He ran his fingers over the smooth and varnished pine, spun the butterflies which flew in circles, up and down threads that were hinged. The coffin, like a walrus, was narrower at one end, tapering from the shoulders.

  It was not yet time to look inside. Anyway, it was too dark. What he needed was a candle, some matches.

  Suddenly they were wrapped in flame, scorched and stripped of flesh so that only bones remained, glowing hotly like the wire-coiled elements of electric fires, twisted as a magician twists balloons into the likenesses of swans and gorillas, giraffes and penguins. The grinning danced without a tune, his radiant skeleton composed of letters of the alphabet, A to Z, aleph to taw, letters written in many styles, jumbled together and meaning different things, instructions his sometime flesh interpreted as left and right, up and down, heavy and light, a complex genetic code, arguably warped. The mutant was possessed of apostrophes and exclamation marks, the former as the latter, suspended in purposeful rows like the slats of a fence beneath his multi-jointed arms, the bones of leathery wings previously concealed from all but his mother, flapping uselessly as they were roasted, weakened, played as grisly xylophones by red-orange hammer-tongues whose music was no music but the disembodied strains of damned souls, their silent combustion activated by the mournful bellows of those same souls' baked and percolated lungs. Plucked one by one from the flames, their desiccated carcasses turned to white ash, the calcinated bones of the damned were crumbled into cardboard tubes and sold as fireworks, the main ingredient of a pyrotechnic enterprise, the crime of these powdered contents being a banality, a surfeit of the ordinary. Not for them the much dangled rewards of a life of evil; they were surplus to requirements, merely your average rapists, killers and fraudsters. Lacking imagination they had the flesh burned from them and their bones ground, tight-packed, fused and dispatched as sardonic messages in the sky over wedding parties and centennial celebrations, subliminal advertisements for the pit, the meanings of which lured others, in their eager redness, greed and faithlessness, to the appetite of the pyre...

  Scherzo, meanwhile, glowed like a neon sign, flashed on and off, his bone filament poorly connected, in danger of shorting altogether if not quickly insulated. Caring little for such informative distractions as his ribs and pelvis, he forced a protracted descent through the devouring flame to where the miscreant souls were shovelled in, wriggling like maggots as the fire reawakened them and flayed them repeatedly, unravelling their specially grown skins. Knee deep in powdery remains, naked toes gripping the sieving mesh, Scherzo felt around for bolts. The grinning spluttered overhead, struggling to keep in touch, fending off clinker-pocked penitents with his third leg that had become detached. Both man and mutant came under sustained assault, each being representative of a ladder. Scherzo, who was equipped with the spanner he'd discovered in the mighty hedge outside his window, cracked a number of pulsating skulls, their crusty brains spilling like salt. With his free hand he found what he was looking for and returned the spanner to its proper use, creating an opening in the grate through which the grinning and himself passed. They entered a realm of sooty clamour, noxious industry, the white ash adhering to their bones casting them as figures of pale uniformity, a bloated, doughy texture soon coloured as they progressed into the vaults of iron and steam, shaped by sound waves and moulded by memory currents, formed into individuals not unlike their original selves. One still clutching his spanner, the other his limb, the pair slid along greased corridors, negotiating bend upon circuitous bend, rattling foot-wide bridges whose rails were razor sharp, tripping through tunnels with no discernible floor, assailed from every quarter by winged beasts that ripped unleavened chunks from thigh and shoulder, smoke wraiths whose favourite trick was to lurk in the abundant mouths and vents of the air-conditioning system and spring noisome ambushes, smothering their pasty miens and so compelling them to run blind, risking a fall, or else stumbling head first into the belching workings of a resident machine. The noise was tremendous. They blocked their doughnut ears, but had to lower their hands in order to dislodge leechlike creatures from their swollen bellies before those creatures could burrow their way in and multiply. Pistons hissed and whistles blew, gears whined and presses slammed; bells chimed, and out spat more demons, imps and ghouls of every taint and odour. The heroic twosome sweated globules like ball-bearings with each breath, slick beads that proved hazardous underfoot, squeezed from their reconstituted bodies like fruit from compacted fruit cakes. Soon, thought Scherzo amid the mayhem, there won't be enough of us left to carry on. But far from feeling despondent he gripped his spanner firmly and laid about him with vigour, wreaking havoc to the everlasting delight of the laughing, hysterical machines, who sent forth their wireless subordinates to tidy up the myriad pieces and redeposit them in the machines' raw material bins that they might crunch, labour, heave, strain, retch and eje
ct these foul assemblages once more into the fray. The fight was desperate, the cycle endless. The grinning took a sharp blow in the abdomen. Scherzo had an idea. Ignoring the imps and ghouls he attacked the free-ranging machine subordinates, aiming blows at their vacuum nozzles and extendable claws, denting their glinting scoops and rearranging their remote control aerials, buckling their tyreless wheels, bending their hooked tails and destabilizing their spinning gyros before dumping them in the yawning bins to be churned out as different engines, frenzied and paranoid, spring-driven and steam-powered, in this hybrid state useless, mongrels of steel and plastic with a hunger their superiors hadn't programmed, a frame of reference disorder which resulted in their imminent breakdown, thus engineering a window of opportunity our heroes had only to wade through...

  They itched in the wake of this latest debacle and had to remove the whole of their tattered ash skins, stripping their bodies to the bare essentials, retaining a minimum of levers for perambulation.

  It slowed them considerably. Scherzo, short-ribbed, made an unfavourable assessment of the situation.

  ‘What now?’ said the mutant, reduced to two legs and one hand. The vital instrument, the horn his grandfather's grandfather had stolen, borne by the eldest son of that grinning line, was tucked like a forage cap between clavicle and scapula.

  The underworld became liquid and sticky.

  Scherzo walked round the coffin three times for luck, a fourth for the angels, eyes elevated to the minutely rippled ceiling. If he were to shed a tear it would fall upward and splash a brief crown on that black and white surface. His head ached, full as it was of distant worlds, crammed with images of farther places. A part of him wanted to climb into the coffin and join his sister, dragging the lid over and somehow fastening it down. But he understood this to be impossible. He had not yet peered beyond the pine lip. There was no doubt in his mind as to the box's contents. Her name was engraved on the brass plate and the brass plate screwed resolutely, raised from the grain of the wood.

  Annie had died without telling him. Scherzo felt aggrieved. Perhaps she had been angry; he couldn't say, knowing only that she'd gone.

  Formless, they struggled against the viscous current. Not wishing to be separated they'd linked hands, joined wrists, connected arms, ultimately melded along one side, the mutant facing slightly backward so that no matter which way they were thrown they would always have some idea where they were going. Progress, in whatever direction, was swift, Scherzo levering them between root girders, stretching them like elastic bands, the mutant kicking his two feet like flippers.

  Eventually they made it to solid ground; but even here they were denied respite, for the island whose shore they'd fortuitously encountered, dragging their candle-wax body ashore among the charred stumps of once spindly trees, rose like the nose of a massive submarine, one of a pair of domed buttocks whose muscle contractions flung them through layer upon layer of tissue-paper air, through a streaked succession of floors that dropped under them like the stratified remains of playing cards, aces and diamonds separating, clubs and hearts peeling beneath, allowing the jokers to drop, the below-decks sky fleeced with clouds of pure machine odour, thick clumps of oily red faeces tumbling as they, at increasing speed toward the round disc of the planet whose own velocity through the disputed black medium would soon to matched.

  Regardless of the laws of physics, Scherzo Trepan expected the giant turds to hit first. Pessimism necessitated a suitable patch to land in. And he had his flesh back, making the envisioned impact worse. The sound of a zip-fastener opening announced his restored singularity. The grinning turned in the rushing atmosphere and spun like an acrobat without a fear of heights, the grin circling his entire face.

  The planet grew more green than blue, suggesting they would be impaled on stiff vegetation before meeting with the turds, a rendezvous with raw nature Scherzo was in need of a solution to.

  He smelled the inevitable. It stuck to his cheeks.

  They fell past the sun. And now the mutant appeared relaxed, confident, for unlike Scherzo he had experience of dreams (more so than one), which he was convinced this was, and knew that he would wake up moments before impact in the cosy safety net of his bed.

  Annie's face held a dull sheen in the candlelight. Scherzo had found the candle along with one of his mother's discarded lighters in the sideboard, a drawer full of such things as doll's heads and old marbles, broken watches and leaking fountain pens. Setting flame to wick he'd dripped hot wax on the mantelpiece and pressed the candle's base into the pool. Dragging a third chair through from the dining room he positioned it by the side of the coffin, and standing on this, hands clasped, he stared at his sister in her wedding dress, and smiled. She was married to Death, he thought, knowing it to be true. Annie was the bride of ghosts and doomed sailors. Very carefully he rolled back her eyelids and peered inside. Her flesh retained a warmth that seemed quite natural. In her eyes fluttered tiny moths. Something more. He leaned over to the mantelpiece and snuffed out the candle. A perfect blackness arrived, taking over, absolute in its rule, erasing all trace of colour and contour. And yet, if he lowered his face to hers, finding her nose with his own, Scherzo could see that the moths were in reality hosts of tiny globes, each a dancing sphere of potential, the seed of exploded stars, cells dividing green or grey where they fell, on metal of organic culture...

  They penetrated, the redness with them, stopping abruptly inches above the stone floor of the room.

  ‘Name?’ inquired the hairy man with the pencil.

  Scherzo Trepan placed his feet beneath him and stood. The floor was hard.

  The grinning, bemused, walked up to the desk.

  The hairy man resolved not to torment him further. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it's me.’

  Whereupon the mutant resistance blew the horn in his ear, rendering him vulnerable.

  72

  It's not easy learning to fly, but I have a good teacher. Strapped into the yonderscope, familiarizing myself with buttons and levers, I wait while Staples makes some last minute adjustments to the suspension, a Polo mint impressed on his tongue. Satisfied, the fat cat jumps in my lap, his holstered Browning digging me in the balls, and we're off to Formalhaut via Rosemary's. She has requested the sack, a tool to employ in the search for her love, disappeared Moses, last seen in a strange rubber suit.

  Staples is pleased to be headed home. Pulchritude was fine, he tells me, while it lasted.