Alternate Worlds
When Padgett Weggs looked at himself in the mirror, he discovered that he was not the person he thought he was. Another currently in the Mess came running over, on hearing him scream out.
"What be the trouble, Padgett Weggs? It sounds as if the Devil Himself has taken berth in thy very soul!" said Poke, his voice staying calm but betraying a hint of concern for his lifelong companion.
Whilst Padgett Weggs was a surly character, with worry-lines fanning in every direction across his "chamberpot" of a face, Poke was more typical of the Brothership, his lips being turned gleefully up at the corners, in contrast to the droopfish versions swimming across Padgett's face. Padgett's eyes, too, were sunken pits, whilst Poke's were usually receptive to the busybodying reflections of the sparkling stars aloft.
"I'm sick with worry that Clovis is leading the Brothership towards the whirring Fans of Hell," muttered Padgett Weggs.
"Come, come," said Poke, "this is no time for wavering - we've a Trial and a Quest to keep in motion."
"I know, I know, but I'm riven with self-doubt."
Padgett Weggs continued to stare into the mirror, wondering which was the image and which the image-maker. He could hear the cranking and churning of the pump outside the Brothership's Mess, no doubt being tended by Clovis. Soon Poke who had left the Mess would be with him, ensuring that the mighty pump retained sufficient lubrications in its moving parts. Clovis was a dear man, the only one who actually dressed as the rules of the ancient Brothership dictated, in full armoured leggings and coat of arms; he'd be preening himself, stroking his cockade as if it were the vibrant issue of his thews.
For years now, roughly twice in each of them, Clovis has shufflefooted his battered shooting-brake of a van into town - and he has always been struck by the large house silhouetted on the high hill. He could have sworn that the hill seemed higher with each visit, whilst the house itself remained in the same stage of distant dereliction.
The town was one not normally passed through. A traveller could only visit on one road and then leave by the same road. Yet Clovis was not entirely certain whether that had always been the case since his memory often played him tricks. He was half-convinced, moreover, that the place might have at one time been positioned near a short-cut to London. The town's buildings were rendered in chequerboards, often with the doorways partially set below the raised street level, the pavements being back-alleys in their own right. The town's name, Rosehearty, felt at odds with its nature.
Clovis had business in Rosehearty.
The populace was unusual in its proclivity towards such confectionery as boiled sweets, fudge and chews - and, indeed, towards saucy seaside bric-à-brac. Despite Rosehearty's proximity to an uncluttered coast, there never were any tourists to speak of.
Clovis was a free-lance confectionery salesman and purveyor of novelty knick-knacks and specialist prophylactics, bringing choice brands of sweets to Rosehearty, touring the corner shops (more such shops than corners, in fact) and re-stocking the neatly arrayed jars with jaw-breakers galore. He was particularly intrigued by the type of shopkeeper to be found there. Some wore smudged overalls as if grown on them like loose second skins. Others were round-faced individuals who had plenty of confectionary jokes to share ("Have you heard the one about the woman who couldn't resist bulls-eyes?" "No, but I bet she was a bit of a cow." Boom boom). Also there were narrow elbowy fellows who weighed out a quarter of lemon sherbets and then told the customer of the story of how these sweets lost their innards in the last dandruff shortage. Inscrutable chumps in red-stained aprons did a roaring specialist trade in beetroot-flavoured gobblers. One particularly nondescript man by the name of Poke sold throat sweets - which, indeed, looked like tiny throats torn from slightly less tiny living creatures. Clovis wondered who supplied Poke with such dubious delicacies because it certainly wasn't Clovis and, in any event, such 'sweets' should have been sold in a butchers shop - or so Clovis believed. And, finally, there was Clovis's least favourite sort of shopkeeper: the squat gleamy-eyed variety who did their business by slowly dropping the sweets (plop plop) into the home-made triangular paper bags, rather than in scoopfuls.
Clovis mopped his brow, but he couldn't be blamed for thinking the worst. The pump was spluttering in a mad tiswas and throwing up bits of brown sludge like fartfire into the dawn sky; the pistons were going twenty-four to the dozen, their sumpsucks soaking up the attenuating layers of nightsoil that Clovis thought the Earth incubated as a matter of nature.This was his lock, stock and muck barrel; his whole lifeforce depended on the mining of Earth-closets pocketed like wind bubbles throughout the underfeet lands; he intended to live off selling the opulent effluent that the pump had been designed to syphon. The others of the Brothership, such as Padgett Weggs and Poke, were simply pawns in a game controlled by a Dung-master, all seeds in Clovis' search for the one cache of gruel, the rarest spadeoak of stiffened slurry, the sole grail of bowel-fodder, which he could make into hardened pellets of sweet loot to last through the tail-end times. But, give Clovis his due, after his own needs were satisfied, then the others would be allowed to fight over the rest.
Most of all, it was the house on the hill that stirred the hackles of Clovis' fancy. So much so, on his last visit to Rosehearty, just before his planned retirement from the trade, he determined to climb up to it, in the hope of selling off his closing-down residues, gone-past best-bys, long-term returns and remaindered runs.
The path was long and nettly, the underfoot being particularly treacherous. But, by the late afternoon, he had made sufficient progress to spur him to the summit. Eventually, the house, itself in the typical local chequerwork, reared above the ragged edge of trees, a lugubrious sight indeed. The window shutters hung by the skin of their hinges. The roof appeared to sag around the protruding tent-pole of the central chimneystack.
He rapped, the slightly sticky front door feeling like hardened black treacle to his knuckles. He raised his eye-line to the top attic windows, suspecting that any inhabitants (if they could breathe at all this far up into the sky) were peering down to see who was unseasonably visiting their lair. But nobody could be seen, except the frayed frills of weather-worn curtains, flapping in spite of the stillness of the ensuing dusk.
For the first time ever in the vicinity of Rosehearty, Clovis sensed the heady tang of the sea upon the roof of his mouth. He had never seen the sea when visiting the place nor, indeed, questioned its whereabouts. The inhabitants were not obvious sea people, merely close to the coast by accident rather than design. And, notwithstanding their loose tongues on other topics, they could never be drawn by outsiders to talk about the sea nor, for that matter, the house on the hill. Not that Clovis was especially interested in the sea, even when he had been reminded of it by the rare screech of gull or the relentless undergrunting of rather inefficient fog-horns (which could do, no doubt, with a suck of Poke's throat sweets).
The house had no front door, but merely tangible darkness. Clovis walked through, realising that his own body was past the sell-by date and anything could happen. He had seen that the house was stacked over with all manner of chimneys, roosting like a battered hat upon the hill's hump. Brooding above Rosehearty, it caused the inhabitants to feel more than just a little persecuted. Apparently, Shamble Hall, as the house had always been known, was an architectural shipwreck, but nobody could be certain about its condition since the path which ancient maps once showed starting at the end of the High Street was nettled over.
"Perhaps the proper path is on the other side of the hill," was one suggestion on a day when nobody had anything better to do than chitter-chatter. The speaker resembled Poke himself.
"Don't be silly, the sea is on the other side," countered Padgett Weggs, the town clown. And Padgett Weggs removed a gobstopper, to allow freer speech, breathed deep, crystallising the salt in the air (upon his outlandishly long nostril-hairs) ready for use as seasoning upon his Mum's stew come supper-time - and then he spoke of amazing matters. He pointed with his pipe. "Last night, when I was the only one up, the moon was wide open, rising like a brown balloon above Shamble there."
Most of his audience did not conceal their loud jeers, because all knew that the geography of the known universe made it nigh impossible for any moon (let alone a full one) to appear in that quarter of the night sky. But Padgett Weggs did not pull his punch-lines. "I also saw a chimney smoke..." He blew a bubble of sooty mucus (more yellow than black) from the end of his pipe, as if in demonstration. "I saw it come out against the moon..."
"It must have been a ghost, Padgett Weggs." The others guffawed, as Poke tried to humour him. Then just as they split up amid the mumblings of dusk, lips still fresh from Weggs-baiting, they all saw a large blotched yellowy bubble slowly expand from Shamble Hall's tallest smokestack. In utter disbelief, they shuttered their red-rimmed eyes with their lick-fingers, as they ducked under the chequered lintels for their lardy bread and acid drops. Padgett Weggs screeched like a demented gannet. His words were garbled but they possessed the same rhythm as "There she blows!"
That night, whilst the townsfolk of Rosehearty moithered in their truckles, all they could hear was the distant swell of the sea. Padgett Weggs was out scouting for signs of life on the moon, which his mother had once told him was a blunt pineapple chunk. Poke was spitting things out into his chamberpot.
Padgett Weggs was left alone in the Mess. He was Knight pure and true. He looked again into the mirror and the one in the mirror looked back, and both were surprised to see the tears in the other's eyes. His illusions were about to be shattered by an encroaching epiphany.The whole Brothership, he included, had passed the Test of Wisdom, the Trial of Initiation, crawled on hands and knees through dark dripping shambles and emerged finally from a cave where an incontinent dragon had been said to leave its defecations as well as remnants of its brimstone stools ... and, on emerging, the drops of stenchfruit and fluid faeces would fall from their flesh, leaving them as clean as a virgin's breast.
Once marked with the Cruciform of Brothership, they were not allowed to produce a single turd from between their own nether cheeks. So with such inverted fasting and living just for this ever-onward Trial and Quest of Existence without throughput - the members of the Brothership simply drifted with the endless empathies that Big Pump supplied, and taught themselves to be merely content with such surrogates of excrement which spilled from Earth's innards. The ultimate bodily penance of eternal non-evacuation.
Padgett's tears were shed on behalf of the Brothership. Clovis had evidently let them all down - or so the mirror said. All had been falsely inculcated with a Godgiven task, whilst they were here on Earth, to fight on Spirit's behalf against Spirit's inevitable fleshy stirrings. Clovis had gained a mockery of sainthood from staunching man's natural spurtings whilst scrying instead Earth's hot brown springs, glorying in gory geysers, almost for their very own sake; relishing all the riches he fancied he could obtain from marketing sweet pellets from nursery volcanoes of shit...
But now, his mind overloaded with words, Padgett Weggs decided to take things into his own hands. He unoathed his oaths of metabolic celibacy, unvowed his vows of alimentary abstinence; he unlaced his trews, squinted at the reflection of his hairy hindparts in the repositioned mirror and painstakingly squeezed his very own tiny turd confection upon the shiny, disgusted surface. It crawled upon the glass like a slug, smearing and slurring the perfect pitch of reality that the mirror had previously contained. He then knew full well that he had altered forever the cycles of supply and demand upon which Clovis had so depended. And as only good could come of it, he was happy, perhaps for the first and only time...
Within Shamble Hall, the ladies, flounced up in great variations of ball-gown, sported ruffs and frills. Their ribbed showy corsets led tucks and pleats towards the most accentuating bodices. The nodding bustles and multi-layered under-skirts rainbowed the polished woods of the dancing-floor. They also wielded gossamer wings upon their backs, woven with slender bones. Furthermore, tantalising skeins stretched between each of these ladies like the finest confection of sugar-glass: beating like fans to cool their ardour whilst they waltzed from one set of leering beaux to another. The brilliant chanderlumes shone along the avenues of bobbing dancers as they took reflective rhythm from an ensemble of elbowing fiddles, sparkling silver flutes and trembling drum-skins. Candy-floss was being served at the bar where a contraption also extruded endless sticks of seaside rock. One silken-breeched footman crouched in the great fireplace, sending invitation messages tied to party balloons up the chimney.
Into the midst of such scintillations of sight, sound and sensuality, there tottered Clovis in yellow waterproofs, scratching his head and blinking his bleary eyes. He looked as if he had just disembarked from some godforsaken trawler in the Minches. "Lummee!" he expostulated. "I must be deader than a door-nail, but I didn't reckon on Heaven being like this. One moment a common commercial traveller and the next right up to my neck in this right old malarkey, this flipping Cinderella rag!"
Abruptly, Clovis' privities began to itch and, with the habit of years, he mauled at his flies to staunch the irritation. Then, the big stand-up clock struck its own version of midnight! His sea-proofs disappeared in a flash leaving him nuder than a fish - to reveal broken glass embedded in his groin, jagged shards of it splintering into the tenderest parts. A fine lady, still in her juiceable time of life, previously unnoticed by Clovis, skimmed off in a right old huff. True, the glass condom slipper he wore was far too small to fit ... but had, in turn, caused his privities to shrink amid erupting gorges of blood. It was probably irrelevant (but worth mentioning) that she didn’t spot the huge animal feast (which made its initial appearance as a big brown oxtail) emerging from Clovis’ backside.
The remains of the Brothership knelt around the dead pump, deep in unthinking prayer. Padgett Weggs’ forehead rested on the ground, as if the Earth and he were one, merely divided by the thinness of a skull. Poke, too, had just discovered that unthinking prayer was no better than death, his nostrils snot-ended, his hugely swollen eyeballs caked in yellow wax, his lips double-glued with a slick brown substance that had found the exit of least resistance.Padgett Weggs, his legs held steady by the well-intentioned Poke, eventually delved into the shitpump's silent silo and expelled the sides of his own pink throat-gum like bubbles from his windpipe. Now kicking free, Weggs wagged his head back and forth like a spade; his quest being to chase a foxtail to its earth ... but Clovis and his brittle testicles had already fled to a corrupt roseheart at the centre of the Earth, like God to His shipwrecked Heaven.
Padgett Weggs frequently kept watch - from downworld - upon the darkened hulk of Shamble Hall. He ruminated on next to nothing, whilst gently chewing what could very well be the end of the line in yellow bubble-gum. And he blew a fragile shimmering globe of it, growing more brown than yellow. The shopkeepers of the seaport's chequerboarded streets (Poke included) dreamed of new dreams, of old jokes, of Hansels, of Gretels and, finally, of alternate metabolisms that were interwoven with the rest, amid the rather inefficient fog-horns of their snores.
