Hallucinating (7 page)

CHAPTER SIX

...Cornish rebirth...

A year passes and things are the same. The Boscastle seven—Nulight, Kappa and her parents, Zhaman, Sperm and Djo—hear nothing about the outside world except what little gossip is brought westward by Cornish vagrants. This gossip is half reliable. There are tales, sung to the accompaniment of accordian and bouzouki by minstrels of the Wellington Inn, speaking of death and nightmare across urbanised Britain. The apocalypse has laid waste. Other tales speak of flesh rending aliens and Mengele-stylee experiments. But in Boscastle this stuff is discounted. Nulight, aware of the alien consciousness, knows they come not from the depths of the human psyche but from a real planet. Separate biosystems means no interspecies gorging.

However the wandering Cornish minstrels—they call themselves bards, but they aren't that good yet—do bring news of a folk hero, a saviour for the 'fifties who has taken on the name DJ Merlin, and it is of course the invisible Master Sengel, erstwhile hero of the British Underground now promoted to rescuer of Britain. On a musical tip.

The CD sent the year before lies dusty on the study windowsill of the farmhouse in which the seven MaxNeefers live. They have listened and they have explored the CD-ROM sidetrack, but no clues emerge as to the plans of their distant saviour.

It becomes clear that the CD was just a sort of digital postcard when the leather dude on the Harley roars again into Boscastle, two packages stuffed into his machine's panniers. Wordlessly he chucks the brown paper packs on the farmhouse doorstep, and there they lie amidst the sunflower plants, mewing kittens in their cardboard box, and the mud and straw. Then he goes. The MaxNeefers watch the dust cloud sent up by his Pirellis until it is dispersed. Nulight tries to imagine his journey, on tarmac with no cars, past cities with no people.

Nulight it is who picks up the packages and takes them indoors. Only Kappa and Djo are in, the others picking supper from their forest-garden. When he rips them open he looks around as if for a ghost, and, glancing at Kappa's smiling face, he knows that Master Sengel has posted something in perfume-doused brown paper. Good. The first package contains four African shaking instruments; a sikesse, a tico tioco, a baobab seed, and a cabassa. They have been wrapped with great care in bubble-plastic. A frowning Nulight examines them, but they seem normal, no messages on them, nothing out of the ordinary—except the fact that they have arrived here.

"Open the other one," Djo urges.

Nulight does this. Inside is a bubble-wrapped multimedia laptop, one of what in '49 would have been considered the top Macintosh range. He shrugs. The farmhouse has no electricity to plug into, and no windmill. Kappa takes the machine and examines it. In the back lie eight rechargeable batts linked to the laptop's solar ultracells. So it can be used. She switches it on, and almost jumps out of her skin when, booting up, the laptop ejects a CD.

Excitedly they crowd around the computer. As the OS comes up and the carriage tray returns the CD to its drive, the screen darkens, brings up a Mac smiley-face, then fades to a black screen criss-crossed with glowing lines all the colours of the spectrum.

"Like the alien ship trails," Nulight mutters.

"But what do we do?" Djo asks.

Kappa tries to access the desktop, but no icons come up other than the ship-trail screensaver, the wastebasket and the CD icon. Then Nulight notices that this is no CD-ROM but a CD single, so he double-clicks and plays it.

Music. Abstract music. Abstract ambient music in a curious style—not auton, not that weird, but like nothing Nulight has heard, and he has heard every style there is. Though somewhere in his subconscious a bell has been rung. They listen, until after five minutes the piece ends.

"Kind of half familiar, man," Nulight mutters. He asks Kappa, "What's the Master up to?"

Kappa shrugs.

But Djo has an idea. "Twelve-tone style," she says.

Nulight nods. "Yeah, 'course! Early twentieth century atonal."

"Did you notice it had no key and only one rhythm?" Djo asks.

Nulight shrugs. "You're a DJ. I only listen to the vibe, know what I mean?"

Kappa frowns and asks Djo, "What does the 'O' stand for?"

"Orgasm." She licks her lips. "I'm great when I come."

Nulight interrupts, "What're you saying, Djo? The Master's trying to convert us to crap atonal music?"

"This isn't music," Djo replies. "It's a message. In code."

Kappa gasps. "The thing the aliens can't bear. Our music!"

Nulight sees now what is before him. Master Sengel needs a semantic vehicle immune to alien minds, so he has used a human music with the best chance of slipping through unnoticed. He says, "How do we decode it?"

"It's obvious," Djo says. "There must be, what, five hundred notes in that piece. We just write them down to get a string of letters."

"They'll all be A's and B's and stuff," Nulight objects.

"Use a bit of imagination," Djo replies. "It'll be A to G and five more. Anybody with a brain can work it out."

Piqued, Nulight tuts his tongue and goes out to help with the supper harvest.

After supper, they all sit around the fire in the study and listen to Djo. "I've written down the actual notes of the piece," she informs them, "and there are four hundred and eleven." She holds up a piece of A3 with the letter string in rows. "Now we have to decode it."

"Fire away," Zhaman encourages.

"It's pretty simple," Djo says. "The first two notes were A sharp and C sharp. If you take A to G and then A sharp to G sharp—I tried the scale in order first, but it didn't work—you get a palette of A to L, almost half the alphabet."

"What are A sharp and C sharp, then?" Nulight asks.

"H and I."

"Hi!" they all shout in unison. An atmosphere of excitement fills the study, and Djo then reads out the entire message.

'HI DJ CD CALL I LIKE ACID I LIKE LILAC I HECKLE LICE CABAL I HACK LICE CABAL I FIDDLE LICE CABAL IDEA I BELIEF LICE LIABLE DIE IF ALL DID ELEKKIE BELL GIG BLEAK BALD GELID HILL HALF DECADE E IF HELIO HIGH I LIKE GIG HIKE BLEAK BALD GELID HILL HALF DECADE E EACH ELEKKIE BELL HIDE HIGH LEDGE LICE CABAL DECK GLIDE LACK LEAF FIELD JIGGLE DECADE ADD DECADE AFLIKA CAGE FEED HEAD FLICK ELEKKIE BELL EDIFICE KILL LICE HIDE LICE CABAL DECK BLACK BIKE ELF CHECK LICE CABAL DECK FABLED LIEGE HIDE CHALICE DEFILE.'

"What the
hell
does that mean?" Nulight asks.

Djo gives them her explanation. "The first part identifies the CD as coming from Master Sengel. He is a DJ, his new incarnation, with a CD, and he likes acid and nice smells. Pretty clear to those in the know. Next he identifies a group he doesn't like, this cabal of lice, who must be the aliens. He has an idea. He thinks the aliens will die if a gig is performed. He suggests a bleak, rocky, cold hill approximately five miles east, which must mean Rough Tor at Camelford. He wants this gig to take place during the day, possibly because the aliens like the night. Anyway, we have to go to Rough Tor and conceal some stuff—which I'll come to in a minute—on a high ledge, then wait until an alien ship glides across Bodmin Moor. Then I think we start the gig. We shake twenty African percussion instruments, then—"

"Wait, wait," Zhaman interrupts, "what are these bells?"

"He calls them 'elekkie bells'. They must be electronically enhanced bells, or maybe some other instruments. Possibly they haven't arrived yet, though I can't help wondering about those African shakers. Anyhow, we're supposed to kill the aliens and down their ship. Don't ask me how. We then hide the ship on the moor. The leather guy on the Harley will check out our work later. Finally, Master Sengel says he's chilling out at a chalice defile, which I think must be the Chalice Well at Glastonbury."

"That is
brilliant,
" Nulight says, amazed at Djo's translation. Everybody congratulates her.

"Just one thing," says Zhaman. "How do we feed our heads?"

"I don't know," Djo admits. "But he says we'll have twenty, which implies more packages to come. I expect if we follow his plan it'll become clear."

Nulight nods. He is impressed. This is a woman with one hell of a mind.

...the Rough Tor gig...

So Master Sengel's secret plan is put into operation by the five MaxNeefer musicians. The weirdness of the plan makes them uncomfortable, but they are determined to put it into practice. Kappa is the leading light because she knows Master Sengel best.

Once all the musical instruments have arrived they pack them into canvas bags. There are twenty different African shakers, four each, and five massive djembe drums inscribed with Celtic patterns; these, Nulight surmises, are the electric bells spoken of by Master Sengel. Around their bases lie bulges of plastic-wrapped electronics. So they're to kill aliens with drum power?

With everything packed they leave the village and make east, through the hills beside Boscastle, across parched, bare land, to Rough Tor, isolated amidst a string of similar peaks. The weather is greenhouse hot, the sky cloudless. Far off lies Delabole windfarm, kept going by the locals. As the ground begins to rise up they pause, eat a late breakfast of biscuits and flat beer, then march on, until at noon they are standing windswept on the summit of Rough Tor, the heather gorse expanse of Bodmin Moor at their feet. Tired, they sit on the south-eastern ledges and finish their breakfast. Nulight and Kappa are on their backs, exhausted by the weight of the huge djembes, while Zhaman and Djo sit in a sunny crevice. Sperm, worried about skin cancer, removes his vest and shorts and covers himself with UV block. The sweet smell of florals wafts over the summit.

Nulight stares into the heavens. After the aliens struck, the sky became filled with coloured lines, as if scribbled by some unruly toddler, but now the lines have faded, and it is thought that the fleet of parentships has either moved on or taken a higher orbit. Nobody in Boscastle has seen a parentship, nor even one of the mini lotuses flown by the blue, four-eared ones, but tales are sung by minstrels of black laminae drifting oh so slowly across the moors, leaving only a musk trail as a wake. Nulight believes these songs. But he is aware that he believes them because he wants to. The thought that the aliens might have nonchalantly departed to leave the Earth ruined is too awful to consider...

After an hour of mooching about, Nulight and Zhaman unpack the shakers and experimentally give them a jiggle. Nulight frowns. A distinct odour of chemicals makes his nose twitch. A sharp, almost fungal smell. But they all like it.

"Cool," Zhaman says. "The seeds inside must be treated."

"You reckon?" says Nulight.

"I know botany."

The other three join them. Soon all five are setting up a rhythm with the African instruments, and quickly Nulight is aware of a heady scent being sent up by the shakers; his senses are becoming sharpened, deepened, as if during a mild mushroom trip. Colours and sounds are more intense and there is the feeling that his feet are just a tad above the ground.

"Hallucinogenic seeds," Zhaman says. "So we gotta set ourselves up for the drum trance. Get ourselves shamanistically in the mood. Keep shaking! This is how we feed our heads."

They trade cross-rhythms for half an hour. Each of them has a stack of four shakers, which they go through until they are completely tripped out and ready for djembe action.

Nulight looks out over Bodmin Moor. With his sharpened, deepened senses he can see the softly roiling perfume wakes of parentships that have come and gone, and they look like tunnels of pastel colour pierced here and there by motes as bright as stars. He understands that this part of the moor is on the flight path of regular parentship voyages. The land behind the nearest perfume trail shifts and blurs as if in the baking desert. He looks far off, like an eagle, to the edges of physical perception, and there he sees something tiny and flat and black coming their way, gliding, its outstretched wingtips moving up and down in response to air flow.

"One comes!" he cries.

They set up their djembes at the lip of the ledge so that they have an uninterrupted view of the moor. But the djembes seem unhappy. They act alive. They don't want to be stood on their bases. Nulight panics and tries to force his upright, but it fights him like a cat, wriggling out of his grip and lying flat.

Zhaman sits next to his djembe and whacks the middle of the skin. A
phenomenal
bass thrum leaps into the air, and suddenly Zhaman is laughing, tears streaming down his cheeks. He tells them, "They're bass projectors! Get the open ends pointing at the alien ship."

This they do. Tentatively Zhaman starts a rhythm. The power of the bass makes the ground shake, as if a bomb has been detonated some kilometres off; a low frequency, high fidelity thrum, like the sound of woofers from hell. This is what the djembes were waiting for. They are sensitised to the alien presence. When all five sound it is like being inside a mile high bass cab. Luckily the drums are highly directional, acting as horns.

"Calm it," Kappa warns. "We don't want to scare the aliens off."

They pause. The parentship closes, and soon they can all see it, an irregular chunk of obsidian, edges glinting, gliding like a broken frisbee. It is soundless. Nulight thinks of a piece of vinyl 12" bobbing on the surface of a slow-motion stream.

They drum when it is perhaps half a kilometre off, sitting behind their instruments, the open ends facing the moor. In their entranced state it is easy to set up a booming rhythm, complex and powerful, a kind of acid Burundi, until after a minute Nulight can see the ship shaking. Encouraged, they drum on, adding cross-rhythms from the resonant skin edges, pounding the bass-heavy skin centres. Now Nulight can see small lotuses leaving the parentship—fleas off a cat—but the tiny blue aliens cannot control their craft amidst the crashing waves of hypno-bass, and they fall to the moor. Now the parentship's left wing is dropping and the thing is circling towards them in slow motion, dropping lotuses and individual aliens, until it is spiralling to earth. Now it is almost vertical, a few metres off the ground. Nulight has stopped drumming, though he is unaware of the fact. He just watches. Like a cosmic shard of glass the great parentship flips to vertical and hits earth, to stand there, stuck like a knife in butter.