‘Please, I’m scared…’
‘I’ll be right beside you.’
‘There won’t be any problems, will there?’ Zero said this to Tom Dove. ‘You sure? This is a Heaven Feather, for fuck’s sake. She won’t die in there? You’ve done this before, haven’t you…this Shadow-swap shit? Because if anything…’
I was only catching this through mist, my Shadow struggling with fear. ‘We’ll be monitoring the whole trip on viewing feathers, don’t worry.’ It took a while to realise that Zero was talking to me now. ‘Any problems…we bail you right out of there. Okay? We won’t feel less of you.’
Some kind of life, and visions of Belinda and Jewel in my mind. My two children…
‘Let’s do it.’ And then I was reaching into Tom Dove’s mind, letting my fingers of Smoke play there, searching for a good hold. He came back at me with a firm grip, and then I was swirling through broken colours; knife-sharp flashes of yellow and red stinging at my Shadow. It was like digging my teeth into glass. I was trying to bail out already, making for comfort, but the Dove-cop had me by the throat. ‘Sibyl, keep cool,’ he said. ‘We’re doing fine. We’re travelling. Keep a good hold.’ His feathery hands were gripping mine, and then I was swooping down with him towards the realm of stories…
My very first dream.
My wings.
Tom Dove floating me gently through the colours, and then down into darkness. Easing the flight with his words: ‘Stay calm. I’m here. I’m here for you. Keep travelling. Nearly there. Stay cool. No worries. Nearly there. Nearly there.’
I had no time to think…this darkness was…did not lend itself to…other, stranger creatures were moving…through the darkness…my thoughts were…faces of pain and loss reaching for…too fast to be caught…my world and theirs…all becoming one…
I raised my hand to my face, but could feel nothing. I had no hands, no arms, no shoulders, no body, no head, no face, no voice; only the insistence that I was still living, somewhere. A door opens. A door opens. A hole. The hole is breathing. This door is slippery. Inside the door, another door, and Tom Dove is dragging me down towards this hole in sky. ‘This is where the fever is creeping through,’ Tom Dove tells me. ‘This is Juniper Suction.’ I can feel music. It feels like a purple haze. I no longer know where or what or why I am, only the sensation of falling…keeping…falling…keeping…falling me…keeping me…something. But…Christ! The hole was small, too small for even a worm to squeeze through. At first I thought this was a trick of perspective, until I realised…shit! I’m right up against the thing! There was no perspective in Vurt. Dove!!! What are we—No time to finish the question. Now my head was being forced through the hole. Yellow grains were drifting through the gap. The pain was burning. Tom’s thoughts came into my body of smoke: ‘Do I tell you how to travel through the Shadows, Sibyl? All pain is illusory.’ Fine, that was good to know, but passing through, between the worlds, was like squeezing through a slit of hot flesh. Like the fear of landing on the moon. My head was popped out into another world.
I could see the garden. The garden…I had seen this…
Darkness viewing me. The rustling of dry leaves. Pollen clinging to my skin…
One almighty push from the Vurtcop and then the pain was dropping away, drips of rain into a bucket…into calmness.
First of all Belinda feels revulsion at the intrusion; that feather is going too deep for comfort. Hendrix is running loud through her Shadow. And the map she is travelling is nothing like what she imagined the Hive to be; the roads are green and twisted like the roots of a tree. Belinda is the passenger, and Blush is Mike Mercury, and the Vurtcab called Charrie is dancing through an organic system. So the map is made out of roots, and the city is a flower that grows from the sap of the map. This was new stuff, this was knowledge. But in reality Blush is driving the Xcab, and Belinda is just a passenger on that wave. But at least she’s back on the map, the Vurtmap even, and she can feel the dreaming leather upholstery of Charrie folding her into pleasure. She can feel the cab shuddering with wonder as the Knowledge comes flooding. WHAT’S HAPPENING, MISTRESS? Charrie says. I THOUGHT I WAS LYING LOW IN LIMBO? Belinda tells him to quit talking and to just ride. SURE THING. WHO’S DRIVING ME? Charrie asks.
‘Her name is Blush. You can trust her.’
GRANTED, BUT WHERE ARE WE GOING?
‘This is a Vurt trip, Charrie. The centre of the map.’
And then a new voice comes on line: THIS IS GUMBO YAYA CALLING BELINDA. GUMBO YAYA CALLING BELINDA. THE WHOLE OF MANCHESTER IS LISTENING IN. YOU READING ME, BELINDA?
‘Reading you, Gumbo.’
YOU WANT TO TELL THE LISTENERS HOW THE TRIP IS GOING SO FAR?
‘The trip is going fine, listeners.’
EXCELLENT NEWS.
WHO’S THAT? Charrie asks. WHAT’S THIS GUMBO DOING ON MY WAVE?
‘Shut up and ride, Chariot.’
I’M RIDING.
But riding where? Because these serious roads are leading into a dark jungle. The sun has vanished behind a cloud of soil. Belinda cannot recognise the map any more. Where is she to go to? These are the roots of the world tree. Pollen is seeping through a hole in the map. Hot sauce. Sap dripping from bulbous green. Sweltering, black air, closing in. Cab-Christ, we’re under the ground, Belinda thinks. We’re underneath Manchester. The back-seat driver heads the cab towards the map’s opening, through the hands of Blush.
The map of roots unfolding around the centre which has no centre. A whirling of tendrils and feathers. Blush is laughing from the driver’s seat, ‘Crazy! I can’t even drive in the real world.’ But Belinda is feeling Vurtsick. Too much dreaming for one who has never dreamed before. ‘Where are we, Charrie?’ she asks.
ERM…NOT QUITE SURE, DRIVER-BELINDA. THIS ROAD IS A MYSTERY TO ME. ALL I’M GETTING IS THE-FORD-WHERE-OXEN-ARE-DRIVEN-ACROSS-THE-MEDLOCK-RIVER. IS THIS MANCHESTER?
‘This is Vurtchester, Charrie.’
SHIT.
‘I think we’re on the Oxford Road, Charrie. Scrub that. I think we’re underneath the Oxford Road.’
LET ME INPUT THAT. RIGHT…WE’RE HEADING TOWARDS THE CENTRE OF TOWN. ALBERT SQUARE, OR THEREABOUTS. INFO IS FLUTTERING, DRIVER.
‘I know. Stay on course.’
BELINDA, THIS IS GUMBO TALKING. I HATE TO TELL YOU THIS, BUT FROM MY SCREEN-MAP I THINK YOU’RE HEADING TOWARDS THE SOIL BENEATH BOOTLE STREET. YOU KNOW WHAT’S THERE?
‘Sure. The cop station.’
YOU WANT ME TO PULL YOU OUT?
‘Thanks, but no thanks. We’re doing this trip.’
GOOD GUMBO!
And then a cab-ride down into earth. Everything is dark and forbidding, tightly pressed and sorrowful, except for the hole in the soil from which grains of pollen escape. The root-paths are shaky. Blush is sneezing violently from the front seat, and the vehicle is swaying under her spasming fingers. ‘Gumbo, I don’t think I can hold it,’ she cries.
NEARLY THERE. KEEP IT COOL, KID.
Riding the shoot, down to the root.
Belinda can see all the roads of Vurtchester arriving and departing from that point in the soil just ahead. Worms are playing through the soil, turning their twistings into words that can be read over the Shadow…
INTRUDER, REVEAL YOURSELF. THIS IS A PRIVATE WORLD. The voice of Columbus.
Belinda sends a tendril of Smoke into Charrie’s cab-system, forcing his wheel into a bad position so that he can drive towards danger. The pollen wraps itself around the cab until the vehicle is covered in a fine powder. It gets into the ventilators, clogging the system with botany. Charrie sneezes…
AAAAAAAHHHHHCCCHHHHOOOOOSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Belinda has never heard a cab sneeze before.
DRIVER-BELINDA…he says. I’M GETTING A POLLEN READING OF 1764. I’M SUFFERING.
1766, ACTUALLY, CAB-CHARIOT, the Gumbo YaYa says over the wave. JUST TELL THAT CAB TO KEEP ON RID
ING, BELINDA.
DON’T LISTEN TO HIM, Charrie replies. THIS IS A NO-GO ZONE.
‘Keep riding, Charrie. Or I might not love you any more.’
The cab stalls then, just for a second, before shifting into ultra-gear, and the dirt and the roots and the worms become a blur.
BELINDA, I’M LOSING YOU! Gumbo cries.
Silence.
And then Belinda is alone, and underground. Jimi Hendrix has fallen away. Gumbo, Wanita, Blush…all have fallen. Only Charrie the cab remains faithful to the journey.
This world is tight, dark and damp. Insects crawl through the root-knotted soil that makes up the roads they are travelling. The noise made by flowers as they grow. It reminds Belinda of that crackling message she had heard over the phone when ringing Coyote’s pick-up number. Gnarled roots descend towards her taxi, breaking her window, wrapping her, and when she grabs at a tendril to push it aside, her Shadow flashes with vision. She sees all of Manchester stretching away into the mist and the rain, and laid over each road the shimmering lines of the map radiate like the vines of a spreading plant. Thousands of yellow-and-black ants scurry along the netted roots like roads. Along these roads Belinda herself has travelled, and it comes to her then that the ants are the Xcabs. And that each real world cab has its doppelganger down here in the Vurtmap. Charrie’s omission from the real map will also entail a missing particle in the dream; this is why Columbus is so desperate to find Belinda’s chariot again. The mirror is missing a reflection. In her driving days Belinda had often thought about the true nature of the map, seeing it in her mind as a vast array of pure information. Never for a moment did she consider that the map could be an organic, Vurtual system.
Shadow-cut.
And the cab breaks free suddenly of the root system and the dark earth. Now it travels through to a new sunlight and dazzlement. Belinda riding through the sunlight and the countryside, where all things are peaceful and unbound. Smells like paradise.
Rain dripping onto a deep purple flower. Echoes. Soundings. Tom’s voice in there, somewhere. ‘Welcome to Juniper Suction, Sibyl. I’m blinded this far. What can you see?’
I can see a world of green under black air. A forest. A blossoming jungle of sex. Flowers twisting around vines. Vines so very black. Dripping wet flowers. Bubbles of golden pollen popping open in the darkness, searching for lovers. Many of the pollen grains were floating through a hole in the forest’s floor.
This was the same world I had glimpsed in the last moments of Coyote’s life, Zombie’s life, D-Frag’s life, only changed from emerald to ebony. A demon had spread his hands over paradise, making a dark shroud for the blooms. Let me describe this to you, as best I can: I was hanging upside-down in a black forest, my feet trapped in the tallest reaches of an oak tree, lodged between branches. Above me only a storm-clouded sky, from which a torrent of water fell onto the platform of leaves, bending them earthwards with its force. All around my body lay a tightly knitted web of twigs and branches, a mask of leaves and dark violet blossoms. Sharpened thorns pressing into my skin. My suspended head peeks through the lower branches, surrounded by rotting fruit hanging from the vine. Below, a small clearing in a dense forest. Directly below, the hole in the ground through which the pollen escaped. From that orifice came the music, note for note, pollen for pollen; the rules of exchange. Day turned into night. The moon shining tearfully onto the glade, where hordes of the love-lies-bleeding flower shiver under its light.
Rainfall.
My name is Sibyl Jones. Sibyl Jones. Saying this to myself, over and over, making sure of my identity. This slippery world…
I am gazing down into a reversed theatre like an upside-down voyeur. A perverse audience. This is a play, a movement of plots, converging. If I could only work out the scribe of this…
A young boy is trapped like me, some few feet away in another tree, tangled into branches. The thorns are pressing into his flesh. His tortured face is familiar. A snake curling around his body. Blood is drawn, dripping down from the blossoms to the forest’s floor, red on green. ‘Help me, please,’ the kid says, his voice muffled by the leaves that creep into his mouth and by the dark snake that squeezes. The boy’s cheeks are riddled with maggots. He’s crying.
‘Who are you?’ I ask.
‘Brian Swallow…Will you not help me please?’
Of course. That picture that Zero had shown me. ‘I’m trying to. Did you get swapped?’
‘Yes…Exchanged.’
‘Who by?’
‘Persephone…Her name is Persephone…the flower girl…Please help me, lady…I want to go home.’
‘Where is Persephone now? Do you know?’
The snake is slithering thick coils around the boy’s body, and the branches are pulling tighter. Swallow cries out loud. ‘Help me lady, please…please…’
I don’t know what to do. Tom Dove’s voice has vanished. The hole in the sky that I fell through has now sealed up like a healed wound. I’m alone in a green feather world I know nothing about, with thorns digging into my flesh, and a young kid getting squeezed to death some two feet away. A filthy-looking snake crawling all over the boy’s face. Grains of pollen are pushing into my mouth, clinging to my legs, burning holes. The fat snake unties a section just to look at me…
It has a human face, that reptile.
The face of a young man, a cloud of flies buzz around his slithering body like symbiotic passengers. A sudden wind shakes the branches. They loosen around Brian Swallow’s body, and he drops some ten feet towards the forest floor before the snake darts around to grab the boy around the ankles, and then just lets him dangle there, two inches from the ground. The snake-man is laughing as he swings the boy over the clearing like the pendulum of a human clock. I’m reaching out to the boy, as best I can. My fingers are trying to prise that snake away from his body.
Sibyl!
I can hear Tom screaming over my Shadow, yelling at me that the dream was moving on, the window was closing, but how could I leave that poor boy alone in the devil’s garden? ‘I’m here for you, Brian,’ I cried. ‘I’m here! Look at me. I’m a cop…’
But I had no hands, no arms, no tongue, no head, no body, no heart to grab hold of him with. I was an overripe fruit hanging on a rain-blasted tree. The soot-black snake held on to Swallow with a knot of hard flesh, and then coiled his head upwards until the human face was staring into mine. ‘May I ask what you are doing here?’ His voice was as dark as the forest that he had seeped out from.
‘My name is Officer Sibyl Jones. I’m a cop. You’re under arrest.’ Cop rules kicking in, of course, and even as I said the words, the absurdity of it came home to me.
‘Really? How splendid.’ The snake-man’s sharpened teeth were reaching out towards my inverted face, and his split tongue was caressing at my lips. I could not move away.
‘Suspected illegal exchange of a human child,’ I carried on, my voice weakened by the pollen that tried, unsuccessfully, for my lips. ‘Suspected illegal importation of a restricted substance into reality. Do you wish to say anything? But I must warn you that anything you say now may be used against you later…later…in a…in a…in a court of…’
The snake’s tongue was stroking at my left cheek now, and the bemused look on his face had vanished into a snarl. ‘Officer Jones…how sweet you are.’ His voice was blurred with sibilants. ‘You’re trying to arrest Sir John Barleycorn, in his own domain! Excellent! You’ve come so far, but still you haven’t got a clue. How ineffectual you are. It really is most beguiling.’ As he spoke he enwrapped my exposed neck in his tender coils, and started to squeeze.
The light was dimming over the forest as my brain popped with blood.
Pain.
Pain, and the muscles of soot. This is what it’s like to look into the eyes of John Barleycorn. This is all the world comes down to finally. My breath leaving me.
My lonely voice reaching out…
Lost. Lost amidst the flowers. The forest closing in around me, cares
sing, vines wrapping my legs in wires, the man-snake squeezing at my neck with his knot of sinews. The snake whips his head back, pauses for a moment in the rain, and then zooms forward to bite me…
Please…no…
My neck squeezed by the flesh coils, thorns digging into my legs. Fangs. Blood seeping from the fruit.
‘Sibyl?’
A voice.
‘Sibyl, you still there? I’m trying to pull you out. All pain is illusory.’
Tom’s voice, all too distant, all too late, as the jaws of the snake snap shut around my neck.
My head is severed.
Falling…
Belinda drives Charrie along a green lane between endless stretching fields where waves of wheat and corn form billows of breath. Petals and birds sparkle and sing from hedgerows and bowers. The sun glistens on each leaf and flower until the world seems made out of segments of colour. In the distance children are playing around homesteads and cottages; a pig squeals in delight at being chased.
The cab squeezes through greenery and golden light, Belinda at the controls, Charrie loving the feel of the latest, hottest road. Both of them, driver and driven, have lost all trace of troublement.
They are free of all knowledge in a land before the knowledge-tree was plucked.
On the road ahead, leaning against a tree of abundant leaf, stands a young man of nineteen years with golden hair and a thumb that is raised to the road and to Belinda.
A hitcher.
Belinda has never taken a hitcher before this moment, but now she feels that stopping to make a pick-up is the best-ever move. Charrie feels the same.
The cab stops and the young traveller gets on board to the back seat. The cab moves off into a low-leaf-riding fairway between shadows and sunlight. Belinda asks the passenger his name…
‘Driver Boda, welcome to the world of Vurt,’ the passenger replies. ‘Except, of course, you’re calling yourself Belinda these days?’