Red, Part Eight - tasted like cough drops

My destination was a bare concrete platform with no building other than a phone booth. The sky was a dull metallic grey and there was a faint directionless rumble all around.

A man paced up to me, appearing from the booth. He was tall and rotund with legs and arms that were so thin they seemed about to snap with each of his enthusiastic motions. As he got closer I saw watery grey eyes with long eyelashes that gave him the look of some sleepy predator.

"Good morning Alan," he said. "Ready to face the dark-side of our happy society?"

He took me to dinner in an otherwise deserted restaurant. The food and wine were indifferent and I couldn't help noticing that the puppet serving us had a broken leg, poorly splinted with a thin length of wood.

"Pay no attention to Igor. He or she is far better off here that where I found him or her. Standing orders are that there be no medical interventions for injured puppets. There are always more where they come from."

I studied the puppet for a moment. Bald with deeply sunken eyes of undifferentiated misty blue. Each eye surrounded by a corona of what looked like cork. The rest of the face looked human but the body was very different. Thin, except for a pot belly, limbs that seemed to be too long and have too many joints. There was no sign that it was in pain. There never was.

I shared gossip from the West with him and told him of my journey, including the events with Yelena.

He looked sad. "I'm aware of the Yelena project of course. Everyone in the East is, but we try and keep it from people in the West. You tend to be puritanical about puppet improvement. You were wrong to kill what sound like a very advanced member of the class, the Novy Petrograd crown were very wrong to unleash her on you. Keep quiet and there should be no consequences."

I decided that this was the best I could hope for. I'd keep my head down until I returned to the West and then tell Giles' uncle everything.

The meal finished we sat drinking brandy that tasted like cough drops and smoking cigars that smelled like dung.

"You know why you're here of course?" he asked.

"To familiarise myself with the situation and report back to London," I said, filied with a sinking feeling that I was about to discover a new interpretation of my mission.

"Wrong. You're here as our new Tactician. Any experience in that?"

"None whatsoever. Anyway, I'm leaving in a week."

"I'm afraid you aren't. Read your orders? You must have pissed someone off big-time.

He threw a thin packet of papers across the table. I read them and sure enough they stated that I was on permanent secondment to the 20 N deg lat, 5000 E deg long camp.

"I never saw these before. They can't be real."

"Trust me, they are. Came through on the very slow, very unreliable radio link back to the West. You weren't given a copy?"

'No, nothing at all.'

'There you go. They didn't want you to make a fuss. Don't try to leave. The tube won't work for you now and the return puppet convoy takes ten years to get to the Urals."

Journal of an Airman

I. three signs of an airman: practical jokes nervousness before taking off rapid healing after injury three kinds of enemy walk: the grandious stunt the melancholic stagger the paranoic sidle three kinds of enemy bearing: the condor's stoop the toad's stupor the robin's stance three kinds of enemy face: the fucked hen the favorite puss the stone-in-the-rain three terms of enemy speech: I mean quite frankly speaking as a scientist etcetera three enemy questions: am I boring you? could you tell me the time? are you sure you're fit enough? three results of an enemy victory: impotence cancer paralysis three counterattacks complete mastery of the air lastly but ten it's moving again lastly but nine I forgot the sign lastly but eight it's getting late lastly but seven why aren't there eleven? lastly but six I dont like its ...tricks the maid is just dribbling tea and I shall not be disturbed until supper...

Rising Five

"I'm rising five" he said "Not four" and the little coils of hair Un-clicked themselves upon his head. His spectacles, brimful of eyes to stare At me and the meadow, reflected cones of light Above his toffee-buckled cheeks. He'd been alive Fifty-six months or perhaps a week more; Not four But rising five. Around him in the field, the cells of spring Bubbled and doubled; buds unbuttoned; shoot And stem shook out the creases from their frills, And every tree was swilled with green. It was the season after blossoming, Before the forming of the fruit: Not May But rising June. And in the sky The dust dissected the tangential light: Not day But rising night; Not now But rising soon. The new buds push the old leaves from the bough. We drop our youth behind us like a boy Throwing away his toffee-wrappers. We never see the flower, But only the fruit in the flower; never the fruit, But only the rot in the fruit. We look for the marriage bed...

From an even more defunct blog

Silver in the Moonlight Chapter One “Between the lighthouse and the hills At the crossroads that none can see When the moon is full, through the eye in the stone Turn east to come to me” Tom woke struggling to breathe, as though his sleep had been ended by some large beast leaping on his chest. His room was dark, lit only by the dim starlight through his window, and the only sound was the heaving of his chest. As his panic slowly ebbed away he struggled to hold onto the one thing he knew to be important from the dream that had caused it – the clear, unarguable knowledge that in moonlight blood looked like molten silver. The next day, he rose after spending the rest of the night trying to sleepily sort through the feelings this dream fragment had left him with. Fear certainly, but also a strange kind of exultation, as though he has been given a piece of knowledge that few others possessed and fewer still could use. That idea brought him to a halt as he absently pulled on...

fallslikesnow

Search This Blog