Vurt

by Jeff Noon

  Wonder who that was, caught that bad gift?

  Hope it wasn’t Mandy. Hope it wasn’t…

  And I felt myself being lifted up, lifted up above everything. Above the world of rain. Above the world with its screamings and its sirens. And all of its pain, dripping away, like the last few raindrops, into a small quiet pool of sunlight.

  Where was I going? And who was taking me?

  I’m walking through the leafy lane of a small town. Children are playing on the green. The postman whistles a jaunty melody. Mothers hang washing on lines, birds sing from leafy sundrenched trees. I walk towards the post office. Its sign calls it Pleasureville Post Office. And I know where I am now. I’m in Pleasureville, a low-level blue Vurt, nothing special, totally legal, been there before, years before, when such things excited me. But never like this.

  Never like this. Not without a feather. I was just there! Totally there. With no pain, no anxiety, no hassles. Smelt like sweetness.

  I was walking the quiet lanes of Pleasureville, only the tiny laughter of kids to trouble me. No trouble. I can handle that. And the whistle of the postman, and the singing of the birds. No trouble. I can handle that.

  And the knowledge that I was there, that I knew I was there, in the Vurt, and that another world was waiting for me, if I so wished; a world of pain. I could pull out any time. Or stay here forever.

  That’s forever.

  Which is a vicious temptation.

  GAME CAT

  There is a dream out there, of a nation’s second rise; when the dragon is slain and the good queen awakens from her coma-sleep, to a land capable of giving breath to her. The followers of ENGLISH VOODOO worship the new queen. The queen is the keeper of our dreams. Through her portals you can see a paradise of change, where trees are green, birds do sing, and the trains run on time. Also, lots of sex; that special kind, with a delicious English thump. The Voodoo is a Knowledge Feather. It leads to other worlds. It cannot be bought, only given. You wanna go down there? Into the English Voodoo? Fine. And beyond? Fine, very fine. Just take precautions. That wet trip is a demon-path of bliss and pain, equal amounts. Be careful. Be very, very careful. Those sugar walls will squeeze you to the bone. Cat knows. Cat has been there. And lived. Just. You want to see the scars?

  Well yes, I guess you do.

  Status: black, with sexy pink, and with glints of yellow. It’s got some doors in it, through to the Yellow worlds. Step softly, traveller, don’t get yourself swapped.

  Not unless you want to be.

  ON THE CUTTING

  OF DROIDLOCKS

  The first time that I came down, I came down into a dog world. Smelt bad, real bad after the sweet, feathery aromas of Pleasureville.

  There was a dog face looming over me; mixed in there, amongst the fur and the jaws, were some bare traces of the human lineaments. This only made it worse, the shock of seeing that face, one of the many heads of Cerberus, leaning right over me, and that breath, that stench on my face.

  They tell me that I screamed then.

  Maybe I did.

  I was too busy getting out of there, out of my head.

  The Pleasure postman greeted me with a cheery hello.

  ‘Anything for me today, Postie?’

  ‘Just the one, Mr Scribble,’ he replied, handing me a letter. I opened the sun-golden envelope, and pulled out a birthday card. The card was the brightest yellow I had ever seen. The words Happy Birthday were written in a dark and clotted red hand across the yellow.

  I opened the card to find out whose birthday it was.

  The second time I came down, I was in a travelling kennel of mad dogs. The stench was still there, ten times worse, but at least the dog face had left me alone.

  I was pressed against the rear doors, like I’d been the last to get in the van. There were no windows, but I could feel us moving, at some speed, some law-breaking speed along a bumpy path. Felt like a well jammed-up Beetle was at the wheel, the old style, and I was glad for that.

  I raised myself up on a pair of skinless elbows. How did that happen? I really thought the police had got me, and I expected to see Murdoch there, grinning, surrounded by her dumbfuck cronies.

  All I got was the fleshy hindquarters of dogs. There are times in life when this is all you get. They were tight-pressed in that small space, maybe seven or eight of them, difficult to tell, what with the van lights broken and the mishmash of their bodies. All of them had bits of dog mixed in there, and bits of human, only in varying degrees, and they were crowded and pressed over some other forms.

  What the fuck was under there?

  Then I saw Beetle’s face through a gap in the fur.

  But surely, the Beetle was driving the van?

  I was getting bits and pieces of the story then, coming back to me through the pain and confusion. Beetle’s face, that sudden glimpse of him, was full of suffering, and my heart jumped.

  Jumped.

  Jumped.

  Beetle had been hit…

  I couldn’t…

  Couldn’t…

  Looked like they were licking him!

  Then his face was covered by the closing fur once again and I saw Mandy for the first time. She was crouched against the van wall, holding on to nothing, just like the old days.

  Old days! Three weeks ago!

  ‘Mandy…’ I whispered, my voice drifting.

  She turned to me slowly. She turned her wet and beautiful eyes towards me, and I saw the hurt in there, way beyond the dream.

  That’s when Tristan screamed. From the dogs. From the middle of all those canines, those half humans. What were they doing back there? And why was Tristan screaming, like he’d been hurt, hurt real bad. It was the worst scream of all time.

  Then I remembered the stray bullet, and that maybe someone had been caught by it. And maybe that someone was Tristan.

  It was. But not in that way.

  Then Mandy reached out to me. In her hands she held a scrap of clothing. It was a black cloth, made dirty by some other substance, some kind of dark fluid.

  Blood.

  Beetle’s blood. And that was a piece of his favourite jacket, the black cord jacket, with the six buttons up the sleeves, and the double vents, and the tailored waist.

  Mandy’s hands were smeared with Vaz and blood. Like she’d been stroking his black clotted hair.

  But it was the cloth that held me. There amidst the blood and the dirt hung a lump of glitter. It was hard and slightly rounded, flickering green and violet, with a long tongue of gold protruding. The thing was fastened to the cloth with a tarnished brass pin and I knew it then for what it was.

  Snakehead.

  Dreamsnake trophy.

  He cut that fucker off!

  That was too much. Had to get out of there.

  I opened up a birthday card in Pleasureville. The sun was overhead, birds were singing, kids playing. The Postman was already whistling along the road to the next letterbox. Felt like a holiday, like a birthday. But whose birthday? I opened the card and read the message scrawled there in blood-thick ink.

  I could hear her voice calling, through the ink:

  ‘Happy birthday, Scribb! Bet you never realised, uh? You were always forgetting. Me, I’ll never forget. Sorry I couldn’t get my present to you, but will this do? Until we get back together? Don’t stop looking, Scribb. I’m still waiting. We’ll be together one day. Promise? Your loving sister, Des.’

  There were tears in my eyes. Must have been the first ever tears in Pleasureville. Nobody cries there. I wanted to keep the card so I reached into my pocket for something to exchange, to leave behind.

  I pulled out Beetle’s baccy box. I clicked it open and pulled out the Tapewormer feather. This I shoved back into my pocket. Then I closed the box and laid it down on a nearby streetbench.

  I looked up at a cherry tree. Its berries were ripe and bulbous under the eternal sunshine, and just then Pleasure started to stick in my throat, like a jagged chicken bone so I went back down
again, pulling the jerkout cord.

  The third time I came down, I came down to the breakfast table. I was back in my new flat, shovelling a bowl of JFK flakes down my throat. I came down with the spoon halfway in my mouth and the crispness of the flakes against the coldness of the milk made me feel like a king, like life was actually worth something, worth getting up for. That good, those flakes.

  Twinkle’s eyes were looking at me, from the other side of the table. ‘Happy birthday, Scribb,’ she said.

  ‘How did you know that?’ I asked.

  ‘Beetle told me.’

  ‘Beetle!’

  ‘Calm down, partner,’ she said. But I was on my feet anyway, the cereal bowl tipping over and spilling its milk all over the tablecloth.

  ‘Where is he?’ I demanded, everything coming back. I was back in the alley for a second, hearing the gunshots, listening to the dogs howling, seeing Beetle’s shoulder explode, feeling the wall scraping my elbows away, as I fell…as I fell…

  ‘Where the fuck is he?!’

  I was screaming, and it wasn’t very dignified.

  Well listen; fuck dignity. Fuck dignity to death.

  ‘He’s in your room,’ Twinkle said.

  ‘What’s he doing in there?’

  ‘He wants you.’

  This is a love story. You got that already?

  Took me a long while to realise; all those presents that I was getting.

  How many people have you had that are willing to lose something, just so that you can carry on for a little while?

  Count them.

  That low, uh?

  Listen, I’m an expert on this.

  I went into my bedroom, and found the Beetle there. Mandy was with him. She was sitting beside the bed, on an old wicker chair, painted green. It wasn’t my paint; I’d moved into these Whalley Range rooms only three weeks ago, on the run from the cops, and the Riders. Here we find ourselves.

  I loved that chair.

  Beetle lay in the bed. That old damp and tattered bed with its mattress full of bugs, and its springs all loose and rusted.

  How I loved that bed. Its short respite.

  The Beetle was lying in my bed with his eyes closed, a feather stuck halfway down his throat.

  ‘What’s he on, Mandy?’ I asked.

  ‘Tapewormer. What else?’ She sounded well pissed off. ‘All he does these days is ride that feather back. It gets kind of boring, Scribble…for a way-ahead girl.’

  Yeah, I guess it does.

  I pulled back gently, on the sheets, revealing the wound. His shoulder was a sprawling mess, but the strips of flesh were held together and bandaged with some kind of web. Looked like a nest of dog fur. The blood was congealing behind there. Some kind of healing, maybe. My eyes were wet. I could barely look.

  ‘What is that stuff on him?’

  ‘Dog people put it there,’ said Mandy. ‘Said it would help.’

  I looked close. His wound was tight-bound with strands of fur, crisscrossing, making a hold against the blood flow. The fur was glued in place with dog spit. Made me feel nauseous, except that it was saving him. Well, I could only hope so.

  ‘Why are they doing this, Mandy?’ I asked. ‘Why are the dogs helping him? He hates the dogs!’

  Mandy just shrugged.

  I looked deeper into the Beetle’s wound and saw tiny snakes moving there, a rainbow of worms, baby snakes. They took me back some way, like the maggots we bought by the handful, Bee and I, when we were just two kids planning a fishing trip. It made me pull back.

  ‘Christ, Bee…’

  He made no sound.

  I turned to the new girl. ‘Mandy? What is that?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In his wound…’

  She was leaning in.

  ‘There’s nothing there, Scribble. What’s wrong?’

  And when I looked back the wound was clean, under its bed of fur.

  ‘Beetle…Beetle…’

  My voice was searching, and I guess the Beetle must have picked up on it, down in the darkness, because he was mumbling words around the feather. They came out clogged by the Vurt, so I pulled that feather out, jerking him away from the dream. Just like he used to do with me, when I went in alone. The play was shifting, and I knew how bad it felt, to have your dream dragged from your mouth.

  He came back to us with a slow rising, as though he was used by now to being dragged back, maybe by Mandy, as though he was riding the feathers real easy these days.

  ‘What is it, my man?’ he drawled.

  I managed an answer, but it came out awkward.

  ‘Is there no end to the trouble, Bee?’ I asked, with a breaking voice.

  ‘No end…Scribble…’ replied the Beetle, slovenly, from the depths of his pain. His eyes weren’t even open. ‘Not since the schoolyard. Remember that?’

  His eyes were slitted, crusted, just a glimpse of eyeball showing through, between the twin layers of bloated skin.

  ‘I remember, Bee. You used to bully me something rotten.’

  ‘Aye. Good days. Good days…’ He was drifting off again.

  ‘Beetle!’

  His eyes flicked open, halfway, pushing apart the lids. ‘How’s Murdoch, Scribb,’ he asked. ‘Is she dead yet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

  ‘Maybe she is. Maybe we finished her.’

  ‘No, not yet,’ said Mandy. ‘I didn’t see that.’

  ‘What did you see?’ I asked.

  ‘That was some bad theatre, back there.’

  ‘What are you after, Mandy?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ she answered.

  ‘It’s everything.’

  ‘Don’t give up the fight, Scribble,’ said the voice. It was the Beetle’s voice.

  ‘How could I?’ I replied.

  ‘Keep on finding them. The Brid and the Sister. And the Thing. Don’t give up on me.’

  ‘Bridget was in the Slithy Tove,’ I told him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Bridget was in the Slithy Tove. I saw her there.’

  I was expecting him to say I was going off the edge someway, that I was feeling the pull too much, the pull of Tapewormer. Which is like willing the past into life.

  Guy should know. He was the one hooked.

  Except I got an entirely different answer.

  ‘Talk to the Dingo about this.’

  ‘What’s that, Bee?’ I said, puzzled. ‘The Dingo? Does he—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He might know something.’

  ‘Brid’s still alive?’

  ‘Maybe she is. I caught something in the van. They thought I was out of it.’ He smiled. It was a painful smile. ‘You know me, Scribb. Down, but never out.’

  ‘I just want to give in, Bee. It’s too much for me.’

  ‘Is life like that?’ the Beetle asked.

  ‘I don’t think I’m up to it,’ I replied, hating every word but knowing each one to be true.

  ‘Tristan needs your help, Scribb.’

  ‘Tristan does?’

  Somebody caught a stray bullet.

  ‘Help the man.’

  Then his eyes closed. His lips closed. The Beetle was sleeping, and it was my time to leave.

  I stroked the Tapewormer back into his mouth, gentle-like. Well, why not? Guy can only take so much. I was watching his face smile at the fake memories.

  ‘This is a neat piece,’ announced Mandy. And when I turned to her, she had Beetle’s gun in both hands, lining it up to the shadow clock on the far wall. ‘Neat. See the way it self-focuses?’ So I watched the chambers of the gun slide and whirr, locking on.

  ‘You know about guns, Mandy?’

  ‘Some. The Bee told me loads. We going into action soon, Scribb?’ Now she was rubbing some Vaz from the Beetle’s bedside jar into the firing mechanism.

  ‘Soon. We move in the early morning.’

  ‘I’m glad for that.’

  ‘I
didn’t think you were that bothered about Des.’

  ‘I’m bothered about you, Scribb.’

  ‘That right?’

  She put the gun back down on the bedside cabinet, and then looked over at the Beetle. He was smiling, so let him smile some more.

  ‘I’ve been thinking some crazy things, Scribble,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Like how you got me in here, in the Riders. You really sold it to me.’

  ‘You want to get out?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can see that. Things have turned bad. You wanna go, just go.’

  She was quiet for a moment.

  ‘Scribble…’

  ‘Just say so.’

  ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had.’

  Fun?

  ‘I’m not getting the picture, Mandy. What are you saying?’

  ‘I know I was just here to stand in for your sister. But that’s okay. I’ve been worse things. All the times I’ve been looking for something…something better than me…you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Just this kind of constant search for a man…a man who’s tougher than me. I never met him of course. So when you introduced me to the Bee…well…you know the feeling?’

  I knew it.

  ‘It’s the same with you and Des, I guess?’ she asked.

  This girl was getting to me, and I didn’t like it too much.

  ‘You don’t have to answer,’ Mandy told me. And then she turned back to look at the Beetle. He was still smiling, and the colours of his wound were vibrant and shocking. ‘I hate to see him like this. All that energy going to waste. Look at him! He’s almost laughing. It just makes me sad. A man like that…living in the past. Tapewormer sucks. I’m not the past…I’m the future. Do you understand me, Scribble?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I think I want to kill Murdoch.’ She had the gun in her hands again, and the threat looked so sexy…it was an immense pity that I just wasn’t up there, in the toughness stakes, far enough for this soldier.

  ‘Is that bad?’ she asked.

  ‘No. No it’s not. It’s real.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose him. Not ever.’

  Her eyes were getting wet, so I took her into my arms. ‘No way will that happen. Believe me.’