Hallucinating (4 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

...above 'Crystal Eyes'...

Back in Glastonbury they find a house in which to chill out, a flat above a New Age shop called 'Crystal Eyes'. Come quiet nights, as they lie huddled on the floor wrapped in a mass of blankets and polyduvets, wrapped around each other too, they hear below them the spectral murmur of crystal voices, as piezoelectric matrices grasp tiny electric currents which are amplified by the crystal speakers into a soft, bubbling music. A music of the hexagons in the case of quartz.

Relaxing, they find solace in hours of headphone-wearing sex, mellochips in their earpieces transforming their stretching-relaxing bodies into sensual riffs. This is the true meaning of the groove.

Much later, Kappa invites a few staff from the Faculty of Avalon around, ambient heads and green clubbers, four in all, who bring with them sachets of psychoactive tea and oat biscuits decorated in the baroque style. Nulight is pleased to notice that, although she is Dean, the staff are relaxed in her presence, and this is not an uptight authority situation. It is her experience that has brought her the Deanship, not some artificial hierarchical theory.

Nulight is asked about his uforic past. He says, "I was born and raised in Tibet, at the height of the red hat revolution against the Chinese. All my childhood I was stuck with these weird parents. They never left Tibet. Never did anything normal. Man, I was glued to 'em. They span their prayer wheels, chanted their mantras and saw their gurus, and they gave me lots of imported chemicals to taste. What can I say? It was like that. One day, about when my bush was unfurling, I was out in the fields kinda expanding into the sky, crows and vultures everywhere like there'd been an aerial burial. This huge blue bowl came outa the sky at me, like a lens disconnecting itself from the heavens, and it shimmered down at me and the world seemed to fold up to meet it. I was pushed to run away, but it was like paddling against a current. Then these bitty little saucers came at me from the centre of the clouds, lots of them, or maybe they were spherical... I can't remember exactly because of the
fantastically
heavy virtualsmooth riff that was pounding out of the bass bins at the bottom of each craft, which was weird 'cos virtualsmooth had only just hit Europe. Man, I was just drawn into the music, which was very intense and blocked off some of my sight. Like the notes were rippling in front of everything, yeah? So obviously I think there's gonna be an abduction, and tiny... well, my name's not important... tiny me was gonna be the victim. Screaming, I ran away, but some of the craft floated in front of me, and one opened itself out like a lotus, and there's this creature sitting there. Umbilical cord leading from lotus to saucer. The creature... well, alien, had two eyes but four ears. Pale blue skin. I just freaked. It's difficult to remember because the music was making my vision blur—and the smell, amazingly strong incense, like it had been crushed and compressed for decades then released into the air. Like, these crafts' exhaust fumes were pure incense. So the alien says to me, somthing like, we are watching you. Don't forget us. No way can I remember what else it said. I was a kid, you gotta remember that. So... well, that's almost everything. The craft folds into itself like origami, and they all drift into the sky and everything's whole again. And that is what happened to me in Tibet."

After this story, one of the guests puts on some faze music from '05, all indie guitar trance, and it is slightly bizarre nostalgia time since none of them were alive in that year. Then Kappa begins to consider her ideas for attracting the aliens, gaining some useful tips from her friends. Much later, when the scattered effluvia of teabags, wine glasses and back-issues of Festival Eye are signalling that the party is at an end, and the four guests have departed, Nulight and Kappa return to their physical obsession, and much more music is created.

At dawn, watching dust skitter around the town centre obelisk from their little, diamond-paned window, they wonder how they will achieve their goal.

"We need two things," Kappa says. "A good guitarist and a good guitar."

"It'd need to be specially made," Nulight says.

Kappa nods. She searches for lutinists on the internet, finding a likely man in Luton. Three e-mails and a webchat later they have arranged a meet.

"And the guitarist?" Nulight asks.

Kappa has already considered this. "Sperm out of Hanging Gardens Of Fungus would do it. He's got the imagination... he doesn't so much play the guitar as fly with it."

"Sperm? He's a nutter. Only fit for talking to mushrooms and six string foolery."

"You've never actually met him, have you?"

Nulight scrunches up his shoulders and shuts his eyes. "We've vidded over the net. He didn't turn up when the band signed to Voiceoftibet."

"Exactly. I knew Sperm when he was Roger de Waverley and he was a student at the Faculty."

"Roger de Waverley's his real name?"

"No. That was what he changed it to from Simon Bailey."

"Man, too confusing..."

...meet lophophoria...

To reach the grey urban splat that is Luton they have to pass through Buckinghamshire, and to make that tricksy trip they need a guide. The obvious candidate is Richard Allen. They meet this dude, an old man with a walking stick in one hand, in the town of Gerrards Cross.

Gerrards Cross. Population: bankers, stockbrokers, the idle rich.

"Hey," Nulight remarks, glancing at this road sign, "you live here?"

Richard Allen shakes his head. "I'm from Chalfont St Peter," he grunts, "just down the road. Population, the salt of the earth."

Nulight nods once, sensing a local rivalry. "Uh-huh."

They move on. Arriving in Chalfont St Peters, Richard shows them his cross-country vehicle, which sits quiescent like a giant insect. "The M25 is dead and gone," he explains, "so I'll drive you up to Bedfordshire in this. I'm afraid you'll be on your own in Luton. If you get out alive, I'd recommend you take the train from St Albans—I'll drive you there if you like."

"Okay," Nulight says. "You're the man around here."

Kappa opens the front passenger door of the vehicle, but Richard issues a warning. "Mind my friend in the front seat. You two sit in the back."

Nulight looks. Nobody there.

"He's invisible," Richard explains.

Nulight and Kappa climb into the back of the car while Richard gets in on the driver's side. He glances left, nods once at an invisible presence and says, "You ready?"

Silence.

Richard presses the alky engine switch. "Off we go then," he says.

The cross-country vehicle is more of a chrome spider than a car—it's a Lycosidae 250 GLS. It has no wheels; no point, given the state of so many roads in the south-east of England. The body of the car rises as the eight metal-and-plastic legs are activated, and then it is a lolloping journey along lanes and across fields, guided by Richard and...

"You haven't introduced us to your friend," Kappa observes.

"Sorry," Richard apologises. He flutters a hand at the passenger seat and says, "This is my friend Lophophoria Williams. Lophophoria, this is Kappa Smythe, Dean of the Faculty of Avalon, and Nulight, the guy behind Voiceoftibet Records—a great label."

"Hey, that's cool coming from the man behind Delerium," Nulight observes.

Richard burbles on. "I've programmed alot of the roads and land around here into the car computer, but further north it could get dangerous. You never know what you might meet these days. That's why I prefer to travel with Lophophoria."

"I understand," Nulight says. "I'm familiar with the Williams family."

For twenty miles or so there are no problems, as the 250 GLS rocks and rolls over the landscape, but as they approach Hemel Hempstead something baaaaaaaaad appears from the debris surrounding the town.

"This is what I was worried about," Richard remarks, winding up his window and turning off the headlamps.

Nulight fidgets in his seat. All he can see is tiny forms as yet too distant to worry about. Kappa grabs his hand, and asks Richard, "What is it?"

"Octobusses, dozens of them. Tarquin makes them down at the seaweed farm."

"Octopi," Kappa corrects. "Are they bad?"

In reply Richard puts the vehicle in neutral and allows it to stumble to a halt. He turns to Lophophoria and says, "We're going to need all your skills here, my friend."

Silence.

Richard shudders. "Really? Well, if we have to, we have to." He turns to Nulight and adds, "Everybody out."

Nulight is getting scared, the more so because this situation is deteriorating into surreality, an art movement of which he is no fan. "Who's this Tarquin dude?"

"A rogue bio-engineer. Octobusses are half mollusc, half multi-person vehicle."

Nulight shrugs, trying to deaden his paranoia. "Hey, they don't sound so bad. Can't we just ask for a ticket?"

Suddenly Richard is angry. "Are you
joking?
This is just the foot patrol. If we don't stop their advance, or escape, Tarquin will release the seaguns."

"Why can't we just drive off?" Kappa asks.

"They'd catch us. No... we'll have to hold out here and rely on Lophophoria."

Nulight looks around. They are alone in the middle of a damp field, Hemel Hempstead on the horizon, a wood behind them, the 250 GLS on the ground with its legs curled around its body. Now he feels vulnerable, frightened. What, is Richard saying they have to rely on themselves, just the three of them?

"Hey, like, you have weapons?" he asks Richard.

"Don't worry, Lophophoria will help us," Richard replies. He is kneeling behind the body of the 8x8, like some redcoat soldier on a bluff awaiting the arrival of tribal warriors.

Nulight can detect no fourth person, but then he sees the octobusses and his attention is drawn to the edge of the field. They are many and they move with a dreadful sound, a squelching, sucking noise that is underpinned by the screeching of driveshafts and the crashing of gears. The slimy grey bodies of octopi have been grafted on to red London buses; huge octopi and mini buses, the whole being as large as a horse. They smash their way through the hedges. Their tentacles quest out, and Nulight is filled with an urge to retch as he watches them squirm. There are indeed dozens of these beasts. The three of them are trapped and they're going to be strangled.

"Richard, fucking
do
something!" Nulight cries as he too conceals himself behind the 8x8.

"Keep calm," Richard counsels. "If we broadcast panic, Lophophoria will pick up on it and his defence will suffer. Our duty is to remain calm."

Nulight and Kappa hug one another. The octobusses are close now, thirty of them at least, hungry for prey, clashing and squelching, promising an appalling death. Their huge tyres have no difficulty gripping the muddy ground. They groan and screech as they approach. Their stench is of seafood—fishy, overpowering—and of burning oil which chokes them.

Nulight's sight is failing. Something's happening. Fading sunlight.

He clings to Kappa. Richard is muttering to himself and clacking his walking stick against the body of the 250 GLS.

The day is becoming dusk dark. A black mist is falling out of nowhere to lay a nocturnal blanket across the field. The octobusses are slowing, in second gear now, some in first, some even stalling. It is like ink seeping out of the pores between air molecules. This ink moves like fog blown from all sides, ever darkening, until all Nulight can see is the macabre and twisted forms of the octobusses, their stalled engines useless, their extended tentacles like the spiky hair of the electrocuted, their eyes open, circular, but staring lifeless at nothing.

Silence falls across the field. The air smells of damp earth and inkwells.

"Now we creep away," says Richard.

They climb into the vehicle and Richard starts the engine. The octobusses do not stir. Across the tenebrous field the vehicle moves, leaving the twilight scene, emerging into the sun and heading north, where Richard picks up the A4146 for Leighton Buzzard. It is a trail of pits and debris, but it is faster than wooded farmland.

...more nutters...

At Barton they leave Richard inside his vehicle, then as directed enter Luton through the smashed and smoking suburbs to the north of the town centre, alongside the remains of the M1. Lutinist David Lefebvre lives in a ghetto somewhere central, apparently tied by love of his skinhead wife, who will not move out. There can't be any other reason for him living in Luton.

The town looks as though it has fallen from a cloud. The roads are scattered with bricks, cement dust and flaking leaves whirlwinded by mini-weathers, and there is glass everywhere. The few remaining plastic trees have been pulled down and daubed with graffiti. Creeping on into the afternoon haze, they hear a fight, which they avoid: it is a pitched battle between two of the town's baseball teams. More central now, they tip-toe through a lane of Irish pubs, some so rough they lack roofs, doors, even signs, consisting of just four walls and McCaffrey's on tap. It is horrifyingly quiet. Doors swing open, windows swing shut. Cats and dogs and coypus are on the prowl. Muto-frogs emerge from the mud of the River Lea. A few people survive here, but they scurry by on their own business. Urban hell liveable by socially bludgeoned people. Sensitive Kappa is upset, but Nulight has seen worse as he once went to a reefer party in Staines.

At length they discover Midland Road, near the train station. Armed guards patrol inside the railway haven's razorwire fences. Lefebvre's house is up High Town Road.

His place is a rambling assortment of rooms. He lives with his extended family, his wife a local doctor and libertarian politician. He—goofy looking blonde guy with buck teeth and big hands—seems to be somewhat under her wing, but he flowers when he shows them his studios and the many guitars, or gee-tars as he pronounces the word, that he has made. Already he has completed the instrument required by Nulight and Kappa, receiving his instructions as soft packages, over the net. It is a maple top electric twelve-string with a hyper-solid nut. This nut is essential, as the tuning must not change from Einstein3's frequencies when Sperm strums. From a code-locked address on the Californian coast they retrieve the exact frequencies of the auton analysis, and then David Lefebvre tunes the guitar, using a half-metre spanner so the precise microtones can be set. The most unusual feature of the guitar is a digital thermometer. It has been pointed out that the tuning will change with temperature. When Sperm plays, the readout must be the same as it is now.