BONELINES
Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead
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In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.
In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light. It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. (You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.) |
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Bonelines
Instalment 12 (Chapter 67 - the end)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith
Chapter 67
The Vale Without Depths was the place. There was something about the caravan in the patch of ground with concrete platforms, the tint of green that hung over it all, the baroque decorations and hints of hermitage, sea voyage and arts and crafts. Details floated free from the self-possession of the Vale. It was that autonomy that Mandi loved, the resistance to influence. It was itself. Visible from the train – when the line was up and running and not, as now, fallen in the sand – the Vale went almost entirely unremarked, barely visited, only ever on the way to somewhere else. It was the disconnection from the throb of commercial life that set it free, glorying in its unproductiveness, unremarkably.
Mandi had never had any illusions about the nature of her work. She was a parasite, living off the fat of a market while telling everyone else not to do so. She was not an entrepreneur, wealth-creator, businesswoman or producer. Only in the Vale did she feel the need to apologise to herself. Otherwise, she apologised to no one and about nothing. Just as the glasshouse full of brambles, the algae-tinted unoccupied caravan and the redundant platforms felt no need to apologise. They were and that was enough. Enough, she would be enough. Since her return from London, Mandi had developed a violent prejudice against existences predicated on destroying other existences.
She wanted Eddie to share in her experiences. She felt sorry for him. Despite the inundation of Lost Horizon the mobility of the trailers had been their salvation. A few were ripped up and scattered in bits, two or three floated out to sea, but a number had got trapped at the gates of the camp. There was water damage, but they had floated and were drier than their owners could ever have hoped. Almost immediately the waters had receded, residents returned and began to drag the surviving homes back to their lots. Not everywhere were folk as organised as the pagans of Lost Horizon. Society might scorn their eccentricity, but now there was general admiration for their communal coherence.
Mandi had found Eddie, alone, in the trailer she had allotted him, washed up against the inland fence. He seemed hungry and exhausted, he had observably lost weight in just a few days. Even when she brought him food, he seemed to have difficulty eating it. He became increasing listless, complained about “not feeling myself” and was unnerved at the prospect of returning to Birmingham. Mandi had her own bad memories to deal with; she could not be bothered to imagine what Eddie had been through.
She took a chance. As they wandered on the lanes between fields struggling to recover from their recent salty inundation, past the deep scores where ancient trunks had been dragged away, and shards of silvery wood were scattered like flying saucer crash sites, Mandi offered Eddie the vacant post of caretaker at Lost Horizon. Once the repairs and reassembling of the camp were in full swing, Mandi would appoint a new manager and Eddie, if he accepted, would work under their instruction. She wanted to make that offer out there, in ‘The Vale’, to help him understand her values now. Since her adventures on foot around the Lovecraft villages, Mandi felt comfortable holding a meeting in the open air. Efficient and informal; it was something she might sell on later.
Eddie seemed to enjoy the novelty of the walk. He was more ‘himself’. As they strolled gently along the lanes, he began to chatter excitedly about the future, staring at the ground in front of him, trying to recall the hours of the battle, of which he had almost no memory. He remembered meeting the reunionists off the Birmingham train, and guiding them around the danger zone, but about what happened after meeting up on the Port Way, where Mandi had seen his party arrive, Eddie became hazy and then disturbed and then changed the subject. Mandi had no memory of him after that, either. Perhaps he had run away in fear and was hiding that from himself, or perhaps his memory was protecting him from what had happened to him or what he had seen happen to others. Or there was something he did.
There were many victims. The media reported it as the worst climate related catastrophe since the flooding of East Anglia by the North Sea in 1953. Many of the fatalities from the fighting had been spectral; of those there was no corpse-residue. Otherwise, the authorities were overwhelmed. The living were bumped to the front of every queue; cadavers were processed rapidly and superficially. There were thousands of serious injuries to contend with, partly as a result of the waters, partly the numerous accidents as people fled in panic. As a result, those fatalities from the battle that were extant were mostly put down to the high winds and severe earth tremors. The few blunt force trauma injuries that were examined by pathologists were not ones they could easily attribute to modern weapons, and were mostly assigned to blows from falling boughs, dislodged boulders or car accidents.
The evidence of discharged weapons meant that an official police investigation was opened. It would be closed a year later, with no decisive conclusions presented. The media rehearsed a theory – clearly encouraged by the authorities – that some private local grudges had been paid off under cover of the storm. There was even a BBC drama. Some deaths were recorded without bodies; the flooding and destruction of morgues and funeral directors’ properties had led to a number of disappearances. Some bodies were found with serious wounds in submerged car wrecks. Others had been burned out. A few tight-lipped survivors suffering serious injuries presented themselves at A&E, but there were many reports of others who chose to nurse themselves.
The effects on private property were uneven; residents returning from evacuation to their homes on the edge of the Hoarfrost Estate were surprised by the violence of the devastation. The seaside town was almost finished; it would be years under repair. Indeed, there were calls to abandon the town as too vulnerable to future storms and too expensive to protect. It was here, rather than in the villages, that the media congregated. The deserted streets, the ruined amusement parlours, the household furniture and other domestic items damming the town’s stream, and the strange sculpture the waves had made of a church’s pews were gifts to reporters and photographers. The railway, the only line that crossed the county, was to be rebuilt, but this time on a causeway over the sea. In pubs and cafes and homes along the stretch of affected coast, discussions were oddly discreet and muted; as if no one had quite noticed what they had experienced, as if they had all lived a much reduced and trivial version of their lives. It had been an anomaly; normal service would be resumed shortly, surely.
Lost Horizon had suffered badly, but because it was already a mobile community, and much of the site had been cleared by the waters, insurance claims were already being settled. There was not much debate about properties found up trees or scattered across hillsides. The government had stepped in with a mixture of instant grants and loans. Mandi had been helping residents with the online applications. New homes were already rolling up the potholed access road. Electricity was reconnected, sewage pipes cleared, broadband restored. Most of the residents wanted to return.
Once there were sufficient people back in their homes, Mandi intended to organise a memorial service for their former caretaker. She was relieved that, of the residents, only Cassandra and Mimir seemed to suspect the true nature of their relationship. Ten days after the storm, Mandi’s father’s body was found washed up on the Sett, tangled in driftwood, fishing line and rope. Whether a gift from her Mother, or Her rejection of him, Mandi would never know. Once more she found herself organising a funeral and visiting solicitors and the Green funeral director.
Professor Crabbe’s son, Tony, Mandi’s brother, had been found in the tunnels of an old slate mine. The authorities were at a loss to explain how the iron door sealing the tunnel had been closed behind him, but some suggested that Tony had been sheltering from the flood and the surge had shut the door on him. The rescue services told Mandi that they had found Tony with a peaceful look on his face; what they didn’t tell her was that, after death, his mouth had been wedged with a large piece of slate. Of course, there was no explanation for the bodies of the hobgoblins, sprites and dogs the size of horses that turned up intermittently; despite their random scattering their treatment was remarkably consistent. Storms often washed up odd things – rotting basking sharks that looked like plesiosaurs – and, now, these mangled folkloric mutations were assigned to the same fate as the sea monsters; buried quickly and anonymously in landfill. Those who participated in the burials saw their mobiles thrown into the sea and replaced with a Samsung Galaxy Note 10. Odd stories about tiny people and giant hounds with red coals for eyes, shared selectively in canteens and the cabs of service vehicles, were all that marked the supernaturals’ demise.
Eddie said “yes”. He cried a little with excitement. Purpose seemed to flood back into his cheeks. Mandi felt disproportionately gratified. He did not seem capable of understanding what she felt about the Vale, fixated by his own stupidity, slow to grasp the feelings she tried to share with him; but, hell, he didn’t need to be a professor to be a caretaker. He would be fine. He had been in on the whole thing from the start and it seemed appropriate that he might help to tie up the loose ends. OK, if he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, he had been the one who knew all along what had been going down, who held onto that truth while the rest of them had built their own fantasies. He could see what was what, he would not let things drift.
“I hope yow know what yow is doin’!” he said, thanking her, oddly.
“I think so.”
They had not long left the few houses and community hall that passed for a village in the Vale, stepped off the lane, a small bonfire smoking unattended, and ducked through a grove of thorns trees and had come out into open fields. Woods fringed low hills around the horizon, the sea was hidden by the gentle incline, and the path bent violently around bright green empty fields. At the top of the rise, where the path disappeared between thick and disorderly hedges, with that rich but disconcerting promise of all the things that it might lead an inquirer to, a giant electricity pylon was waiting. Not just standing there, as far as Mandi was concerned, but waiting. It was evil; its shape, its malevolent hum, its ordering everything, the way the trees cowered back from it, its skipping rope wires impossibly taut. A flensed megalith, only skeleton remaining; it distilled the malignancy of the old stone circles and trapped souls in its wires. The wind, rising as a warning, began to protest in its struts.
“Eddie, do you think there’s anything odd about that pylon? That one, up ahead?”
Eddie looked up, as if he were seeing the fields and woods for the first time.
“Which one?”
“That one!”
“What’s up wi’ it?”
“Yeh, you’re right. We can walk that way, right?”
“Roight...”
As they approached, the pylon leaned over them, falling back into the sky. It swayed. Its empty heart and echoing brain vault whirring, its dead structure implausibly motivated, shaking, barely. The path veered away as if repulsed by it. Mandi paused involuntarily. Eddie took her arm by the elbow.
“There’s nought to fear ‘ere, silly booger.”
He pulled her gently, like persuading a frightened horse. She stumbled, then fixed her eyes to the ground and walked quickly on. She did not look back; for fear of what? That it was chasing them? No. For fear that it was witnessing them, blindly sensing them, its empty feelings reaching out and intuiting them? Trying to distract herself, Mandi looked about the vacant fields, finely balanced between being and abjection. There was nothing easy.
Eddie dropped her elbow. They did not speak until they were in sight of the gates of Lost Horizon.
“Have you been to the Everglades since the storm?”
“Why should I?”
“No reason, but I think we should check on it.”
“OK. If yow want...”
The Everglades were in a bad way. The storm had lifted tons of sand from the The Sett over the railway lines and tipped them into the back of the Everglades. Mature trees were buried halfway up their trunks. There was almost an alternative beach there, a vertiginous cliff of sand that looked unstable to Mandi; the sort of hazard that they should get cleared up. The last thing she wanted was some kid wandering in there and getting buried and kick the whole thing off again. The perfect project to get Eddie started on; but he had wandered off towards the junkyards further inland, where he was picking up carpet squares and strips of corrugated iron, blown in by the gale. Looking for something.
Where the storm waters had lifted the rail embankment clean away, it had also ripped into the loamy surface of the Everglades, tearing out the roots of ferns and spilling a darker, drier soil into the widened stream. The waters had been cloudy with the disruption, but they were almost clear again now. Staring down at the bottom, like a picture coming into focus, Mandi could see that the silt had been deeply disturbed; long lost toys and tinsel and animal bones had been exposed.
“What are you looking for?” Mandi yelled.
“Nothing. Slow worms!”
“Won’t they all have drowned?”
“Ain’ they trans?”
“What?”
“Live in water too?”
“For fuck’s sake...” Mandi turned away. Maybe she had made a mistake about Eddie. “All sorts of crap has got dug up! We’ve got to clear it up. We don’t know what was on here before it was a holiday camp.”
Mandi felt a chill. There might be chemicals or something. Maybe dumped during the time they made the railways. Did they use chemicals? Maybe to help season the sleepers? Three little kids had died here. What if it had been something contaminating in the ground, like the authorities said?
Everybody had come back the next year, but not to Lost Horizon, all the other camps were full; then every year afterwards, less and less people remembered. Even Mandi had forgotten eventually. Chemicals? O Jesus Christ, please don’t let it be starting again...
“Did you find any?”
“What?”
“Slow worms!”
“O... sure. Loads.”
“No? really?”
Mandi skipped the stream and vaulted a fallen trunk. Before Eddie could react, she had pulled up the first carpet square.
The bones, like the remains of a beef rib starter, were neatly lain in a row, just above the surface of veined loam. Webs of tiny roots were broken around them, where some force had pushed the bones up. They had the same curve about them, the same size, as the ones in the bottom of the stream.
Mandi’s mind was racing.
“It wasn’t dogshit, Eddie, it was us!” She blurted. “It wasn’t Satanic Abuse or whatever, ritual abuse fucking nonsense, I know that! But it was not the dogshit either. Was it? Was it!!! For Christ sake, Eddie, please! Was it??? We killed those kids. We opened up a space, a hole, a way through, I don’t know what, and we couldn’t handle it... we were kids too, remember... we didn’t protect ourselves... from what we were bringing through... and maybe that thing itself didn’t know what it could do... She’s a wonderful.... maybe it wasn’t that thing’s fault either, it was just so powerful... inappropriately powerful...”
“Yow think you opened up evil, Mans?”
“It isn’t evil!!! You know She isn’t that!! It’s just different... more different than little kids can cope with. We were kids like them; and we had a whole underworld coursing through our little bodies. Children are not... they are not... what’s the word... there isn’t something essentially strong in a child that makes it able to contain the natural... do you understand what I’m trying to say? We were plugging directly into life, without any... life training... did you ever learn any magic?”
Eddie shook his head, vigorously.
“No, me neither! I don’t know why it chose me; that isn’t clear...”
“I don’t think it was us, Mans. Look at us! Look-at-us!”
Mandi looked very, very, very hard at Eddie. He looked every bit the same as he had all day. But in the last few moments his voice had changed completely. The Brummie accent had dropped away and he had spoken like an actor, the kind who come from a family of shopkeepers but play public schoolboys in movies. When he spoke again, she listened very carefully.
“We were never anything special, were we? Children on holiday. At The Sett? Known for it. You, a camp owners’ daughter... no offence intended...”
“None taken...”
Fuck. Where had his voice gone? Where had Eddie gone?
“It was the place. The place chose you, Amanda.”
Mandi blew out a mouthful of air.
“You happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Or the right one.”
“Or the right. ‘Not special’, not our ‘special Amanda’? You were very special, you were incredible! We were all in love with Mandi, girls and boys. But I was the chosen one. You see, it wasn’t you and it wasn’t us. It wasn’t dogshit and it wasn’t Satan. It wasn’t chemicals either, Amanda...”
“The authorities said...”
“The authorities! You think they were ever going to tell anyone what really happens here?”
“What’s going on with you, Ed?”
He ignored her.
“They did it perfectly; firstly the abuse scare that as near as dammit finished your fake Mum and Dad, and then they uncover the real truth! Badah! Dogshit and e-coli! And that was a stroke of genius because it looked like a cover-up of bad drains in a holiday camp full of people that no one gives a shit about. People like me. People they underestimate, people they don’t even see as people. So everyone was happy. The stupid conservative ones believed that the truth had come out and could not care less, and the paranoid ones thought they knew what the real cover-up was and could keep on bleating about it without doing anything to solve it. But the only really powerful people in the situation, the only two magicians involved, were us. And I was the stronger; I was the one strong enough to kill, and you were the one weak enough to forget.”
“Why? Why would you do that? We were only kids? Stop it. You didn’t kill anyone!”
“Why did I do it? Fuck knows. I was born to it, probably. Many are called, but few are chosen. It was a natural talent, with me. Nothing calculated. It just happened. And when others mistook my eccentric little talent for retardedness, I found a way to protect my genius, by cultivating ways of destroying. You know, I can’t even remember their names. Their ribs are in that stream, under those carpet tiles, but I don’t know who they were, the ones no one found. Additional to the ‘Dogshit Three’. And all thate time, while I was having a whale of a time, you ‘mazed’ yourself... that’s what they say down here, isn’t it? – mazed yourself with your Mucky Mary Old Ma Squid crap. Juju and black magic with girls starkers, it’s a great way of pulling the wool over folk’s eyes.”
“Christ.”
Mandi was shaking so hard it was hurting her teeth.
“Why would you want to hurt people? I mean, get one over on people, show them who’s boss, but to erase their lives? What’s that about, you fucking cunt?”
“O, dear. It was nothing so vulgar as competitiveness, my lovely Amanda. The girl I longed for. But when I couldn’t have you, I wanted the emptiness that you left behind...”
“O fuck you!”
“When I felt the life go out of them, I felt the life go out of me, and I lovedthat. To be so calm, so empty, so controlled; joy and pain could not touch me. Only smack touches it. Feeling like that, I discovered I could do anything. I realised that people who think they are clever think stupid people can’t do anything; so I acted stupid. Dumbest of the dumb; I got to do anything I wanted. No one ever suspected me. They think if they can laugh at you, they control you. I let them laugh, then I killed them. Thoseso called friends I had in Birmingham, the kids who holidayed here, the ones who survived, they laughed at me, even when I was helping them around the storm, they thought they were so clever having fun at my expense; but they paid me back. As I watched the light fade in their eyes, I felt the darkness grow in mine, the pure dark roundedness of it; that beautiful strong calm, that empty landscape that reached right down inside, lit by a black sun. The dark side of your depths. There’s no difference between you and me.”
He gestured to her as if to say “over to you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
In the long silence, one of the faces of the dune that had invaded the Everglades began to crumble, handfuls of sand breaking off and piling up in a smooth heap.
“Are you going to hurt me, Eddie?”
“Not in the way you think. Not if you give me your nothingness.”
“You fuckwit! You fucking fuckwit!”
Mandi pirouetted and swept her hand along the bruised ground, her fingers settling around a metal stave discarded who knows when and yanked it out of the earth. She brandished it at Eddie.
“Amanda...”
“Don’t fucking ‘Amanda’ me...”
She rose up on tentacular legs, shimmering in the canopy, spreading out her wings as hot tears fell from her eyes and dropped on Eddie far below; then she slumped down to his level, and touched the grey-brown earth with her finger tips.
“Poor kids.”
Eddie shook his head.
“I went back to Birmingham with the same sort of kids – they turned into drunks, smackheads, benefit cheats, wankers, lazy scum, diseased. The kids I left in the ground here were the lucky ones.”
He stamped on the loamy soil. A chunk more of the sand felt from the face of the dune.
Mandi snorted in disgust, holding the point of the metal stave closer to Eddie’s throat.
“I suppose that caretaker’s job is out of the question now?” he chivvied. “Thought I could replace your Dad, did you?”
“Your knew about that?”
“I don’t forget anything, Amanda. I knew about your Mum and Dad, the real ones... you inherited his brains, but from Her you got your depth. Haha. I loved you, really really really fancied you, but I always knew I would never have you, so I took the next best thing, in a darker way of course, but just as empty, just as dark...”
“No, no. You tried that on before. You are not the dark side of me, you bastard. I already have the dark side. There’s no job vacancy for my dark side. Your emptiness is inadequacy, substitution, and transference.”
“Wow. And you... what do your kind call it? O yes, ‘nothingness’? That’s kind of obfuscation for emptiness, right?”
“And that is the difference between you and me. The emptiness inside you is yours, you possess it, it’s your own little empire. The nothingness inside me, is not mine, I do not own it, I worship it. IT IS HER INSIDE ME!”
And with that Mandi’s tongue split into scores of wriggling tendrils, spilling over her chin, before pulling themselves back through her lips.
“Impressive! Would make a nice sideshow.” He made jazz hands. “But I did not despatch the little kiddies and the big Brummie smackheads for a circus freakshow!”
“Why were you even on our side?”
Eddie laughed.
“You really don’t get it do you? All the way back to when we were children here, you never got it. I was never on your side, Mandi. I knew I could never be on your side, because I could be at your side...”
“What did you do? What happened up there, in the fields?”
“O, something like this.”
Nothing happened that Mandi could see.
“Like what?”
The seat of Eddie trousers began to bulge architecturally, as if he were having a giant reverse erection, or had inflated his pants with a cyclopean fart. A balloon of denim expanded around Eddie’s thighs; then with a wet-sounding ‘Pflap!” his trousers burst apart and hung in twin curtains from his belt. He began to fold forward from the middle of his chest, his ribs turning to marrow, his vertebrae crunching and detaching, a thick grey gooey flap issuing from beneath what had been his crotch and soaking up his front, swamping his collapsing legs, while another fat grey lip began to swallow his crumbling back, neck and head, pulling what had been Eddie down inside itself growing upwards as it enveloped him, pulling itself up on the last splinters of rib cage, femur and thigh bone, lifting the final fragment of Eddie high above Mandi’s head, its arsehole closing over Eddie’s bald patch and snapping together with a clap.
“You fucking maggot!” screamed Mandi and hurled the metal stave into the slug’s seething mass of grey ooziness. It slithered, a gob of goo flobbed out, and the stave wedged, appropriated in the gelatinous mass. Mandi’s wings drooped. Her head dropped. She knew, somehow, that it would not strike until she looked directly at it. She should keep her eyes down; but since when had Mandi ever done what she should do? Crap, did she really believe herself? That she had no responsibility for this abomination? That there wasn’t something in her magic that was this dark? Dumna’s nothingness: the other side of his emptiness? Only one way to find out. To let the slug have her. If there was love, if there was ever any real love, she would be lost in its stinking shit and digested down to emptiness. If the love was not between them, but was her love for her Mother and her Mother’s love for her, then maybe she would stick in its throat, spoil its emptiness, irritate the fuck out of its sad little world of control and death. Muttering to herself “angel outside, dark squid within, demon will die, Domna will swim”, she raised her eyes to the slug.
It had a peculiar tentacle in its brain.
Mandi, surprised at her own composure, heard herself think: “do slugs have tentacles?”
As if in answer, the tentacle withdrew through the slug-thing’s prow and the towering demon eroded, bubbling and heaving, its sheets of membrane, spew, shit and intestine dropping to the floor of the Everglades and spilling to the bank of the stream, the running waters dragging on the first gobbets of gunk and slowly dragging larger and larger portions into the current, pulling the lifeless slug away. In the gush of evil-smelling slime, there was nothing of Eddie, not a cheap shirt nor a chunk of fat or a finger bone. For the second time in a few minutes, Mandi had lost the last person alive she had shared this whole thing with.
Abruptly, with no crescendo, but starting at a roar the lid flew off the underworld. The already shattered trees were shredded in a moment. Pieces of leaf fluttered down like confetti bleeding green. Trunks split and fell in slivers, opening like chocolate oranges. The shadowy Everglades opened to the angry sky. The gale of sound died as quickly as it rose and was replaced by a deep creaking, as if a subterranean shelter were digging its way up to the surface, bending steel and grinding sand and gravel. The soil grew uncomfortably warm, the remnants of grass wilted.
“She’s coming,” Mandi said to herself.
Her frame was dwarfed by the Squid that raised her up and the life ran out of Dumna into her; raised up on Her tentacles, above where the tree canopy had been. She felt her wings like cliffs unpeeling and sliding into place, like the hangar doors of heaven, a wild clanging ran along the coastline.
The sky began to fall in thick sheets of rain, slapping down on the dome of the cyclopean Mother, a stream waterfalling off her beak. Mandi looked down on Her Mother. She wore the thunderburst like a magnificent cloak encrusted with sparkling gems. In the face of vulnerable truth and unhuman power there was no emptiness.
The Squid-Mother placed Mandi down, carefully, as if within Her gelatine swathes a muscle-memory had kicked in, of laying her daughter down on the shoreline so many years before, so gently that Mandi wanted to scream “I’m not a child anymore!” The monster paused, as if equally taken about by the curl in time, then in an explosion of sand She disappeared under the remains of the railway line and was dragging Herself towards Her sea. Mandi could not follow that way, but screaming “Mother! Mother!” she sprinted through the camp, out of the gates, cut under The Creep, its road half-buried in sand by the storm, and raced past the twisted rides towards the shifted shoreline.
There was no sign of her Mother, but the surface of the sea was boiling as if a bob of seals were dancing.
Mandi pulled up at the edge of the water, gentle waves breaking over the stones and tumbling hermit crabs, easy after all the epic violence of the storms. She shook her head.
“What had I expected,” she said to herself, breathlessly. “Mother is not that clever, not that intellectual. She just is, and she just is...”
She yelled at the ocean: “I love you! I fucking love you, Mum!!! Why can’t I be with you!!”
And in response there was no response. The sea went on wriggling and bubbling just the same. There was no accommodation to the human; her Mum was chaos, thatw as it, she was not smart or an idea, she was something else.
In the Bible, her Mother had been reduced to just one of the seven days of creation; the Hexamerons excluded her entirely. But the essential component of being is its opposite, there’s no meaningful creation without leisure and no being without nothingness. Her Mother had challenged the God-That-Was-All-Being. As nothingness, She was the only thing the Clumsy Old Bastard was not, the one thing He had forgotten to create. He bungled the one job he had, made the cosmos too full, too bright, too unforgiving until she swam into it and brought forth tension, drama, love and stuff. She came from the Abyss and She left a part of Herself in everything, except in those who would be God, those who, despite knowing Her, chose to struggle for ones or wholeness or transcendence, condemning others to suffer in their ashrams and laboratories. But She was a darkness where anyone could hide from crazy Perfectionists and cold Nihilists, in nothingness; without Her there was no good being.
Mandi knelt in the sand and wept extravagant tears, her wings reached out hopelessly; but as she watched the seething ocean subside and the dark shadow move away towards deeper waters, she was already wondering about whether Mimir might be interested in earning some extra cash as a caretaker, and whether Cassandra was up to being manager.
Chapter 68
Next season there were no temporary guests at Lost Horizon. Forensic teams were at work in the Everglades, DNA samples were recovered and compared, Mandi gave numerous interviews to detectives. The torn remains of Eddie Mann had turned up in an Exmouth trawler’s nets and were the subject of an autopsy report. No signs of foul play. No signs of very much at all. Mandi’s blog posts were as acerbic as ever, but her London friends chivvied her about a new metaphysical tone.
“What else are you left with, without metaphysics? Power?”
That usually shut them up.
Mimir and Cassandra did not accept their job offers, but they knew a couple who might and, after interviews, Mandi, with the distinct feeling that she now had a perpetual bit part in ‘The Shining’, appointed Loki and Sarah. For a Norse god and an empathic medium, they were remarkably efficient managers; within eighteen months Lost Horizon was restored, cleaned up, re-enthused, renamed and open for summer bookings.
As the hot August weeks melted into September, Mandi took a few days out from the London swelter and fighting white supremacist shug monkeys, and booked in for a couple of days at Devon Deep Holiday Park, for families and everyone, dogs welcome. After stowing away the contents of her suitcase, Mandi joined Loki and Sarah on the veranda of their giant trailer for pagan cocktails.
“Mmm, angelic! Haha!”
Mandi never ceased to enjoy the first salty sip of a Margarita. Loki spoke of a little shrine he wanted to build to Mandi’s Dad. Football commentary and burnt sausage embroidered his thoughtfulness. Sarah was crocheting a cap for an expected grandchild, their first.
Across the ranks of caravans and trailers, interwoven with the metallic creak of the rides beyond the Creep and the cry of herring gulls, the thuds of keepy-uppy and the scrunch of finished cans of cheap Polish Karpackie, Mandi could hear the voices of children, singing in Midlands drawl, floating in from the Everglades:
“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”
The END
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The Vale Without Depths was the place. There was something about the caravan in the patch of ground with concrete platforms, the tint of green that hung over it all, the baroque decorations and hints of hermitage, sea voyage and arts and crafts. Details floated free from the self-possession of the Vale. It was that autonomy that Mandi loved, the resistance to influence. It was itself. Visible from the train – when the line was up and running and not, as now, fallen in the sand – the Vale went almost entirely unremarked, barely visited, only ever on the way to somewhere else. It was the disconnection from the throb of commercial life that set it free, glorying in its unproductiveness, unremarkably.
Mandi had never had any illusions about the nature of her work. She was a parasite, living off the fat of a market while telling everyone else not to do so. She was not an entrepreneur, wealth-creator, businesswoman or producer. Only in the Vale did she feel the need to apologise to herself. Otherwise, she apologised to no one and about nothing. Just as the glasshouse full of brambles, the algae-tinted unoccupied caravan and the redundant platforms felt no need to apologise. They were and that was enough. Enough, she would be enough. Since her return from London, Mandi had developed a violent prejudice against existences predicated on destroying other existences.
She wanted Eddie to share in her experiences. She felt sorry for him. Despite the inundation of Lost Horizon the mobility of the trailers had been their salvation. A few were ripped up and scattered in bits, two or three floated out to sea, but a number had got trapped at the gates of the camp. There was water damage, but they had floated and were drier than their owners could ever have hoped. Almost immediately the waters had receded, residents returned and began to drag the surviving homes back to their lots. Not everywhere were folk as organised as the pagans of Lost Horizon. Society might scorn their eccentricity, but now there was general admiration for their communal coherence.
Mandi had found Eddie, alone, in the trailer she had allotted him, washed up against the inland fence. He seemed hungry and exhausted, he had observably lost weight in just a few days. Even when she brought him food, he seemed to have difficulty eating it. He became increasing listless, complained about “not feeling myself” and was unnerved at the prospect of returning to Birmingham. Mandi had her own bad memories to deal with; she could not be bothered to imagine what Eddie had been through.
She took a chance. As they wandered on the lanes between fields struggling to recover from their recent salty inundation, past the deep scores where ancient trunks had been dragged away, and shards of silvery wood were scattered like flying saucer crash sites, Mandi offered Eddie the vacant post of caretaker at Lost Horizon. Once the repairs and reassembling of the camp were in full swing, Mandi would appoint a new manager and Eddie, if he accepted, would work under their instruction. She wanted to make that offer out there, in ‘The Vale’, to help him understand her values now. Since her adventures on foot around the Lovecraft villages, Mandi felt comfortable holding a meeting in the open air. Efficient and informal; it was something she might sell on later.
Eddie seemed to enjoy the novelty of the walk. He was more ‘himself’. As they strolled gently along the lanes, he began to chatter excitedly about the future, staring at the ground in front of him, trying to recall the hours of the battle, of which he had almost no memory. He remembered meeting the reunionists off the Birmingham train, and guiding them around the danger zone, but about what happened after meeting up on the Port Way, where Mandi had seen his party arrive, Eddie became hazy and then disturbed and then changed the subject. Mandi had no memory of him after that, either. Perhaps he had run away in fear and was hiding that from himself, or perhaps his memory was protecting him from what had happened to him or what he had seen happen to others. Or there was something he did.
There were many victims. The media reported it as the worst climate related catastrophe since the flooding of East Anglia by the North Sea in 1953. Many of the fatalities from the fighting had been spectral; of those there was no corpse-residue. Otherwise, the authorities were overwhelmed. The living were bumped to the front of every queue; cadavers were processed rapidly and superficially. There were thousands of serious injuries to contend with, partly as a result of the waters, partly the numerous accidents as people fled in panic. As a result, those fatalities from the battle that were extant were mostly put down to the high winds and severe earth tremors. The few blunt force trauma injuries that were examined by pathologists were not ones they could easily attribute to modern weapons, and were mostly assigned to blows from falling boughs, dislodged boulders or car accidents.
The evidence of discharged weapons meant that an official police investigation was opened. It would be closed a year later, with no decisive conclusions presented. The media rehearsed a theory – clearly encouraged by the authorities – that some private local grudges had been paid off under cover of the storm. There was even a BBC drama. Some deaths were recorded without bodies; the flooding and destruction of morgues and funeral directors’ properties had led to a number of disappearances. Some bodies were found with serious wounds in submerged car wrecks. Others had been burned out. A few tight-lipped survivors suffering serious injuries presented themselves at A&E, but there were many reports of others who chose to nurse themselves.
The effects on private property were uneven; residents returning from evacuation to their homes on the edge of the Hoarfrost Estate were surprised by the violence of the devastation. The seaside town was almost finished; it would be years under repair. Indeed, there were calls to abandon the town as too vulnerable to future storms and too expensive to protect. It was here, rather than in the villages, that the media congregated. The deserted streets, the ruined amusement parlours, the household furniture and other domestic items damming the town’s stream, and the strange sculpture the waves had made of a church’s pews were gifts to reporters and photographers. The railway, the only line that crossed the county, was to be rebuilt, but this time on a causeway over the sea. In pubs and cafes and homes along the stretch of affected coast, discussions were oddly discreet and muted; as if no one had quite noticed what they had experienced, as if they had all lived a much reduced and trivial version of their lives. It had been an anomaly; normal service would be resumed shortly, surely.
Lost Horizon had suffered badly, but because it was already a mobile community, and much of the site had been cleared by the waters, insurance claims were already being settled. There was not much debate about properties found up trees or scattered across hillsides. The government had stepped in with a mixture of instant grants and loans. Mandi had been helping residents with the online applications. New homes were already rolling up the potholed access road. Electricity was reconnected, sewage pipes cleared, broadband restored. Most of the residents wanted to return.
Once there were sufficient people back in their homes, Mandi intended to organise a memorial service for their former caretaker. She was relieved that, of the residents, only Cassandra and Mimir seemed to suspect the true nature of their relationship. Ten days after the storm, Mandi’s father’s body was found washed up on the Sett, tangled in driftwood, fishing line and rope. Whether a gift from her Mother, or Her rejection of him, Mandi would never know. Once more she found herself organising a funeral and visiting solicitors and the Green funeral director.
Professor Crabbe’s son, Tony, Mandi’s brother, had been found in the tunnels of an old slate mine. The authorities were at a loss to explain how the iron door sealing the tunnel had been closed behind him, but some suggested that Tony had been sheltering from the flood and the surge had shut the door on him. The rescue services told Mandi that they had found Tony with a peaceful look on his face; what they didn’t tell her was that, after death, his mouth had been wedged with a large piece of slate. Of course, there was no explanation for the bodies of the hobgoblins, sprites and dogs the size of horses that turned up intermittently; despite their random scattering their treatment was remarkably consistent. Storms often washed up odd things – rotting basking sharks that looked like plesiosaurs – and, now, these mangled folkloric mutations were assigned to the same fate as the sea monsters; buried quickly and anonymously in landfill. Those who participated in the burials saw their mobiles thrown into the sea and replaced with a Samsung Galaxy Note 10. Odd stories about tiny people and giant hounds with red coals for eyes, shared selectively in canteens and the cabs of service vehicles, were all that marked the supernaturals’ demise.
Eddie said “yes”. He cried a little with excitement. Purpose seemed to flood back into his cheeks. Mandi felt disproportionately gratified. He did not seem capable of understanding what she felt about the Vale, fixated by his own stupidity, slow to grasp the feelings she tried to share with him; but, hell, he didn’t need to be a professor to be a caretaker. He would be fine. He had been in on the whole thing from the start and it seemed appropriate that he might help to tie up the loose ends. OK, if he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, he had been the one who knew all along what had been going down, who held onto that truth while the rest of them had built their own fantasies. He could see what was what, he would not let things drift.
“I hope yow know what yow is doin’!” he said, thanking her, oddly.
“I think so.”
They had not long left the few houses and community hall that passed for a village in the Vale, stepped off the lane, a small bonfire smoking unattended, and ducked through a grove of thorns trees and had come out into open fields. Woods fringed low hills around the horizon, the sea was hidden by the gentle incline, and the path bent violently around bright green empty fields. At the top of the rise, where the path disappeared between thick and disorderly hedges, with that rich but disconcerting promise of all the things that it might lead an inquirer to, a giant electricity pylon was waiting. Not just standing there, as far as Mandi was concerned, but waiting. It was evil; its shape, its malevolent hum, its ordering everything, the way the trees cowered back from it, its skipping rope wires impossibly taut. A flensed megalith, only skeleton remaining; it distilled the malignancy of the old stone circles and trapped souls in its wires. The wind, rising as a warning, began to protest in its struts.
“Eddie, do you think there’s anything odd about that pylon? That one, up ahead?”
Eddie looked up, as if he were seeing the fields and woods for the first time.
“Which one?”
“That one!”
“What’s up wi’ it?”
“Yeh, you’re right. We can walk that way, right?”
“Roight...”
As they approached, the pylon leaned over them, falling back into the sky. It swayed. Its empty heart and echoing brain vault whirring, its dead structure implausibly motivated, shaking, barely. The path veered away as if repulsed by it. Mandi paused involuntarily. Eddie took her arm by the elbow.
“There’s nought to fear ‘ere, silly booger.”
He pulled her gently, like persuading a frightened horse. She stumbled, then fixed her eyes to the ground and walked quickly on. She did not look back; for fear of what? That it was chasing them? No. For fear that it was witnessing them, blindly sensing them, its empty feelings reaching out and intuiting them? Trying to distract herself, Mandi looked about the vacant fields, finely balanced between being and abjection. There was nothing easy.
Eddie dropped her elbow. They did not speak until they were in sight of the gates of Lost Horizon.
“Have you been to the Everglades since the storm?”
“Why should I?”
“No reason, but I think we should check on it.”
“OK. If yow want...”
The Everglades were in a bad way. The storm had lifted tons of sand from the The Sett over the railway lines and tipped them into the back of the Everglades. Mature trees were buried halfway up their trunks. There was almost an alternative beach there, a vertiginous cliff of sand that looked unstable to Mandi; the sort of hazard that they should get cleared up. The last thing she wanted was some kid wandering in there and getting buried and kick the whole thing off again. The perfect project to get Eddie started on; but he had wandered off towards the junkyards further inland, where he was picking up carpet squares and strips of corrugated iron, blown in by the gale. Looking for something.
Where the storm waters had lifted the rail embankment clean away, it had also ripped into the loamy surface of the Everglades, tearing out the roots of ferns and spilling a darker, drier soil into the widened stream. The waters had been cloudy with the disruption, but they were almost clear again now. Staring down at the bottom, like a picture coming into focus, Mandi could see that the silt had been deeply disturbed; long lost toys and tinsel and animal bones had been exposed.
“What are you looking for?” Mandi yelled.
“Nothing. Slow worms!”
“Won’t they all have drowned?”
“Ain’ they trans?”
“What?”
“Live in water too?”
“For fuck’s sake...” Mandi turned away. Maybe she had made a mistake about Eddie. “All sorts of crap has got dug up! We’ve got to clear it up. We don’t know what was on here before it was a holiday camp.”
Mandi felt a chill. There might be chemicals or something. Maybe dumped during the time they made the railways. Did they use chemicals? Maybe to help season the sleepers? Three little kids had died here. What if it had been something contaminating in the ground, like the authorities said?
Everybody had come back the next year, but not to Lost Horizon, all the other camps were full; then every year afterwards, less and less people remembered. Even Mandi had forgotten eventually. Chemicals? O Jesus Christ, please don’t let it be starting again...
“Did you find any?”
“What?”
“Slow worms!”
“O... sure. Loads.”
“No? really?”
Mandi skipped the stream and vaulted a fallen trunk. Before Eddie could react, she had pulled up the first carpet square.
The bones, like the remains of a beef rib starter, were neatly lain in a row, just above the surface of veined loam. Webs of tiny roots were broken around them, where some force had pushed the bones up. They had the same curve about them, the same size, as the ones in the bottom of the stream.
Mandi’s mind was racing.
“It wasn’t dogshit, Eddie, it was us!” She blurted. “It wasn’t Satanic Abuse or whatever, ritual abuse fucking nonsense, I know that! But it was not the dogshit either. Was it? Was it!!! For Christ sake, Eddie, please! Was it??? We killed those kids. We opened up a space, a hole, a way through, I don’t know what, and we couldn’t handle it... we were kids too, remember... we didn’t protect ourselves... from what we were bringing through... and maybe that thing itself didn’t know what it could do... She’s a wonderful.... maybe it wasn’t that thing’s fault either, it was just so powerful... inappropriately powerful...”
“Yow think you opened up evil, Mans?”
“It isn’t evil!!! You know She isn’t that!! It’s just different... more different than little kids can cope with. We were kids like them; and we had a whole underworld coursing through our little bodies. Children are not... they are not... what’s the word... there isn’t something essentially strong in a child that makes it able to contain the natural... do you understand what I’m trying to say? We were plugging directly into life, without any... life training... did you ever learn any magic?”
Eddie shook his head, vigorously.
“No, me neither! I don’t know why it chose me; that isn’t clear...”
“I don’t think it was us, Mans. Look at us! Look-at-us!”
Mandi looked very, very, very hard at Eddie. He looked every bit the same as he had all day. But in the last few moments his voice had changed completely. The Brummie accent had dropped away and he had spoken like an actor, the kind who come from a family of shopkeepers but play public schoolboys in movies. When he spoke again, she listened very carefully.
“We were never anything special, were we? Children on holiday. At The Sett? Known for it. You, a camp owners’ daughter... no offence intended...”
“None taken...”
Fuck. Where had his voice gone? Where had Eddie gone?
“It was the place. The place chose you, Amanda.”
Mandi blew out a mouthful of air.
“You happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Or the right one.”
“Or the right. ‘Not special’, not our ‘special Amanda’? You were very special, you were incredible! We were all in love with Mandi, girls and boys. But I was the chosen one. You see, it wasn’t you and it wasn’t us. It wasn’t dogshit and it wasn’t Satan. It wasn’t chemicals either, Amanda...”
“The authorities said...”
“The authorities! You think they were ever going to tell anyone what really happens here?”
“What’s going on with you, Ed?”
He ignored her.
“They did it perfectly; firstly the abuse scare that as near as dammit finished your fake Mum and Dad, and then they uncover the real truth! Badah! Dogshit and e-coli! And that was a stroke of genius because it looked like a cover-up of bad drains in a holiday camp full of people that no one gives a shit about. People like me. People they underestimate, people they don’t even see as people. So everyone was happy. The stupid conservative ones believed that the truth had come out and could not care less, and the paranoid ones thought they knew what the real cover-up was and could keep on bleating about it without doing anything to solve it. But the only really powerful people in the situation, the only two magicians involved, were us. And I was the stronger; I was the one strong enough to kill, and you were the one weak enough to forget.”
“Why? Why would you do that? We were only kids? Stop it. You didn’t kill anyone!”
“Why did I do it? Fuck knows. I was born to it, probably. Many are called, but few are chosen. It was a natural talent, with me. Nothing calculated. It just happened. And when others mistook my eccentric little talent for retardedness, I found a way to protect my genius, by cultivating ways of destroying. You know, I can’t even remember their names. Their ribs are in that stream, under those carpet tiles, but I don’t know who they were, the ones no one found. Additional to the ‘Dogshit Three’. And all thate time, while I was having a whale of a time, you ‘mazed’ yourself... that’s what they say down here, isn’t it? – mazed yourself with your Mucky Mary Old Ma Squid crap. Juju and black magic with girls starkers, it’s a great way of pulling the wool over folk’s eyes.”
“Christ.”
Mandi was shaking so hard it was hurting her teeth.
“Why would you want to hurt people? I mean, get one over on people, show them who’s boss, but to erase their lives? What’s that about, you fucking cunt?”
“O, dear. It was nothing so vulgar as competitiveness, my lovely Amanda. The girl I longed for. But when I couldn’t have you, I wanted the emptiness that you left behind...”
“O fuck you!”
“When I felt the life go out of them, I felt the life go out of me, and I lovedthat. To be so calm, so empty, so controlled; joy and pain could not touch me. Only smack touches it. Feeling like that, I discovered I could do anything. I realised that people who think they are clever think stupid people can’t do anything; so I acted stupid. Dumbest of the dumb; I got to do anything I wanted. No one ever suspected me. They think if they can laugh at you, they control you. I let them laugh, then I killed them. Thoseso called friends I had in Birmingham, the kids who holidayed here, the ones who survived, they laughed at me, even when I was helping them around the storm, they thought they were so clever having fun at my expense; but they paid me back. As I watched the light fade in their eyes, I felt the darkness grow in mine, the pure dark roundedness of it; that beautiful strong calm, that empty landscape that reached right down inside, lit by a black sun. The dark side of your depths. There’s no difference between you and me.”
He gestured to her as if to say “over to you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
In the long silence, one of the faces of the dune that had invaded the Everglades began to crumble, handfuls of sand breaking off and piling up in a smooth heap.
“Are you going to hurt me, Eddie?”
“Not in the way you think. Not if you give me your nothingness.”
“You fuckwit! You fucking fuckwit!”
Mandi pirouetted and swept her hand along the bruised ground, her fingers settling around a metal stave discarded who knows when and yanked it out of the earth. She brandished it at Eddie.
“Amanda...”
“Don’t fucking ‘Amanda’ me...”
She rose up on tentacular legs, shimmering in the canopy, spreading out her wings as hot tears fell from her eyes and dropped on Eddie far below; then she slumped down to his level, and touched the grey-brown earth with her finger tips.
“Poor kids.”
Eddie shook his head.
“I went back to Birmingham with the same sort of kids – they turned into drunks, smackheads, benefit cheats, wankers, lazy scum, diseased. The kids I left in the ground here were the lucky ones.”
He stamped on the loamy soil. A chunk more of the sand felt from the face of the dune.
Mandi snorted in disgust, holding the point of the metal stave closer to Eddie’s throat.
“I suppose that caretaker’s job is out of the question now?” he chivvied. “Thought I could replace your Dad, did you?”
“Your knew about that?”
“I don’t forget anything, Amanda. I knew about your Mum and Dad, the real ones... you inherited his brains, but from Her you got your depth. Haha. I loved you, really really really fancied you, but I always knew I would never have you, so I took the next best thing, in a darker way of course, but just as empty, just as dark...”
“No, no. You tried that on before. You are not the dark side of me, you bastard. I already have the dark side. There’s no job vacancy for my dark side. Your emptiness is inadequacy, substitution, and transference.”
“Wow. And you... what do your kind call it? O yes, ‘nothingness’? That’s kind of obfuscation for emptiness, right?”
“And that is the difference between you and me. The emptiness inside you is yours, you possess it, it’s your own little empire. The nothingness inside me, is not mine, I do not own it, I worship it. IT IS HER INSIDE ME!”
And with that Mandi’s tongue split into scores of wriggling tendrils, spilling over her chin, before pulling themselves back through her lips.
“Impressive! Would make a nice sideshow.” He made jazz hands. “But I did not despatch the little kiddies and the big Brummie smackheads for a circus freakshow!”
“Why were you even on our side?”
Eddie laughed.
“You really don’t get it do you? All the way back to when we were children here, you never got it. I was never on your side, Mandi. I knew I could never be on your side, because I could be at your side...”
“What did you do? What happened up there, in the fields?”
“O, something like this.”
Nothing happened that Mandi could see.
“Like what?”
The seat of Eddie trousers began to bulge architecturally, as if he were having a giant reverse erection, or had inflated his pants with a cyclopean fart. A balloon of denim expanded around Eddie’s thighs; then with a wet-sounding ‘Pflap!” his trousers burst apart and hung in twin curtains from his belt. He began to fold forward from the middle of his chest, his ribs turning to marrow, his vertebrae crunching and detaching, a thick grey gooey flap issuing from beneath what had been his crotch and soaking up his front, swamping his collapsing legs, while another fat grey lip began to swallow his crumbling back, neck and head, pulling what had been Eddie down inside itself growing upwards as it enveloped him, pulling itself up on the last splinters of rib cage, femur and thigh bone, lifting the final fragment of Eddie high above Mandi’s head, its arsehole closing over Eddie’s bald patch and snapping together with a clap.
“You fucking maggot!” screamed Mandi and hurled the metal stave into the slug’s seething mass of grey ooziness. It slithered, a gob of goo flobbed out, and the stave wedged, appropriated in the gelatinous mass. Mandi’s wings drooped. Her head dropped. She knew, somehow, that it would not strike until she looked directly at it. She should keep her eyes down; but since when had Mandi ever done what she should do? Crap, did she really believe herself? That she had no responsibility for this abomination? That there wasn’t something in her magic that was this dark? Dumna’s nothingness: the other side of his emptiness? Only one way to find out. To let the slug have her. If there was love, if there was ever any real love, she would be lost in its stinking shit and digested down to emptiness. If the love was not between them, but was her love for her Mother and her Mother’s love for her, then maybe she would stick in its throat, spoil its emptiness, irritate the fuck out of its sad little world of control and death. Muttering to herself “angel outside, dark squid within, demon will die, Domna will swim”, she raised her eyes to the slug.
It had a peculiar tentacle in its brain.
Mandi, surprised at her own composure, heard herself think: “do slugs have tentacles?”
As if in answer, the tentacle withdrew through the slug-thing’s prow and the towering demon eroded, bubbling and heaving, its sheets of membrane, spew, shit and intestine dropping to the floor of the Everglades and spilling to the bank of the stream, the running waters dragging on the first gobbets of gunk and slowly dragging larger and larger portions into the current, pulling the lifeless slug away. In the gush of evil-smelling slime, there was nothing of Eddie, not a cheap shirt nor a chunk of fat or a finger bone. For the second time in a few minutes, Mandi had lost the last person alive she had shared this whole thing with.
Abruptly, with no crescendo, but starting at a roar the lid flew off the underworld. The already shattered trees were shredded in a moment. Pieces of leaf fluttered down like confetti bleeding green. Trunks split and fell in slivers, opening like chocolate oranges. The shadowy Everglades opened to the angry sky. The gale of sound died as quickly as it rose and was replaced by a deep creaking, as if a subterranean shelter were digging its way up to the surface, bending steel and grinding sand and gravel. The soil grew uncomfortably warm, the remnants of grass wilted.
“She’s coming,” Mandi said to herself.
Her frame was dwarfed by the Squid that raised her up and the life ran out of Dumna into her; raised up on Her tentacles, above where the tree canopy had been. She felt her wings like cliffs unpeeling and sliding into place, like the hangar doors of heaven, a wild clanging ran along the coastline.
The sky began to fall in thick sheets of rain, slapping down on the dome of the cyclopean Mother, a stream waterfalling off her beak. Mandi looked down on Her Mother. She wore the thunderburst like a magnificent cloak encrusted with sparkling gems. In the face of vulnerable truth and unhuman power there was no emptiness.
The Squid-Mother placed Mandi down, carefully, as if within Her gelatine swathes a muscle-memory had kicked in, of laying her daughter down on the shoreline so many years before, so gently that Mandi wanted to scream “I’m not a child anymore!” The monster paused, as if equally taken about by the curl in time, then in an explosion of sand She disappeared under the remains of the railway line and was dragging Herself towards Her sea. Mandi could not follow that way, but screaming “Mother! Mother!” she sprinted through the camp, out of the gates, cut under The Creep, its road half-buried in sand by the storm, and raced past the twisted rides towards the shifted shoreline.
There was no sign of her Mother, but the surface of the sea was boiling as if a bob of seals were dancing.
Mandi pulled up at the edge of the water, gentle waves breaking over the stones and tumbling hermit crabs, easy after all the epic violence of the storms. She shook her head.
“What had I expected,” she said to herself, breathlessly. “Mother is not that clever, not that intellectual. She just is, and she just is...”
She yelled at the ocean: “I love you! I fucking love you, Mum!!! Why can’t I be with you!!”
And in response there was no response. The sea went on wriggling and bubbling just the same. There was no accommodation to the human; her Mum was chaos, thatw as it, she was not smart or an idea, she was something else.
In the Bible, her Mother had been reduced to just one of the seven days of creation; the Hexamerons excluded her entirely. But the essential component of being is its opposite, there’s no meaningful creation without leisure and no being without nothingness. Her Mother had challenged the God-That-Was-All-Being. As nothingness, She was the only thing the Clumsy Old Bastard was not, the one thing He had forgotten to create. He bungled the one job he had, made the cosmos too full, too bright, too unforgiving until she swam into it and brought forth tension, drama, love and stuff. She came from the Abyss and She left a part of Herself in everything, except in those who would be God, those who, despite knowing Her, chose to struggle for ones or wholeness or transcendence, condemning others to suffer in their ashrams and laboratories. But She was a darkness where anyone could hide from crazy Perfectionists and cold Nihilists, in nothingness; without Her there was no good being.
Mandi knelt in the sand and wept extravagant tears, her wings reached out hopelessly; but as she watched the seething ocean subside and the dark shadow move away towards deeper waters, she was already wondering about whether Mimir might be interested in earning some extra cash as a caretaker, and whether Cassandra was up to being manager.
Chapter 68
Next season there were no temporary guests at Lost Horizon. Forensic teams were at work in the Everglades, DNA samples were recovered and compared, Mandi gave numerous interviews to detectives. The torn remains of Eddie Mann had turned up in an Exmouth trawler’s nets and were the subject of an autopsy report. No signs of foul play. No signs of very much at all. Mandi’s blog posts were as acerbic as ever, but her London friends chivvied her about a new metaphysical tone.
“What else are you left with, without metaphysics? Power?”
That usually shut them up.
Mimir and Cassandra did not accept their job offers, but they knew a couple who might and, after interviews, Mandi, with the distinct feeling that she now had a perpetual bit part in ‘The Shining’, appointed Loki and Sarah. For a Norse god and an empathic medium, they were remarkably efficient managers; within eighteen months Lost Horizon was restored, cleaned up, re-enthused, renamed and open for summer bookings.
As the hot August weeks melted into September, Mandi took a few days out from the London swelter and fighting white supremacist shug monkeys, and booked in for a couple of days at Devon Deep Holiday Park, for families and everyone, dogs welcome. After stowing away the contents of her suitcase, Mandi joined Loki and Sarah on the veranda of their giant trailer for pagan cocktails.
“Mmm, angelic! Haha!”
Mandi never ceased to enjoy the first salty sip of a Margarita. Loki spoke of a little shrine he wanted to build to Mandi’s Dad. Football commentary and burnt sausage embroidered his thoughtfulness. Sarah was crocheting a cap for an expected grandchild, their first.
Across the ranks of caravans and trailers, interwoven with the metallic creak of the rides beyond the Creep and the cry of herring gulls, the thuds of keepy-uppy and the scrunch of finished cans of cheap Polish Karpackie, Mandi could hear the voices of children, singing in Midlands drawl, floating in from the Everglades:
“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”
The END
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