Weirdtongue (30) 

Weirdtongue (30)

===========================

Continued from here: HERE.



The soft plash of oars as the dinghy floated across the steaming lake, its occupants sporadically glimpsing the Choker’s castellated shape in the yellow gloom. Modal Morales and his right-hand girl Jane were searching for any face that floated upside down in the murky waters, making any recognition impossible to predict because of the wrinkled weathering by water or, indeed, the murkiness itself. They had already delivered one tall man with an untamed tongue to the Choker, but he wasn’t the only one dead or nearly-dead or nearly-alive - with untamed tongues or tentacular languages that observed no traditions of meaning - whom they needed to round up or trawl for the Choker. There were 6000 of them at the last over-exact count (i.e. another 5999), each a live body or corpse or zombie representing a 1000 others within itself like Russian Dolls in layers upon layers of thickened warhide or rind formed from hardened flesh, all previously gassed by the yellow steam given off by the lake, because they (when previously normal people) had not been given the antidote to prevent such toxic intake by the lungs. Consumption upon consumption in complication of or interference by Bird Flew. The Choker sure had its work cut out for the foreseeable future.

Suddenly the dinghy grounded to a halt upon a mass of such bodies, many bony and thin (belying the scope of their contents, mental or physical), elongated in height by the torture they had suffered at the hands of history. They were intertwined like fleshy rush-mats from shore to shore. Some moaned, others weltered noisily with mud upon their whipping tongues, a few as silent as the previous silence broken only by plashing oars and the wet raw planky vessel itself. Modal, knew deep within himself, that this was a dream. He was the Clown of Dreams, and within certain layers of these dreams-within-dreams or dreams by other dreamers infiltrating his own dreams, his job was to lighten and entertain the audience of co-dreamers with antics of farce or black humour, cart-wheeling in his baggy suit through false doors to baths of custard or slews of porridge beneath his huge skidding banana-feet – all a front or subterfuge, when he reached the bottom dream or the head-lease dream, for him being the reincarnation (or actual equivalence) of Yellowish Haze himself now set to put right the wrongs of centuries, including all those killed by history rather than by natural death.

+++
Gregory was separated from Suzie at some point between his own separate dreams. He found himself waking time and time again from an operation on his head (he felt fingers manipulating his brain) as he glassily stared up at faces that floated in the yellow gloom of the theatre*. This was not the convalescence he had expected. Not the lazy afternoons in a wicker chair by the side of the lake to which he had looked forward, being waited on hand on foot with all manner of medicinal cocktails. This was deep-rooted surgery itself. The convalescence, in hindsight, had been conducted at the previous hospital ward back home, a pre-illness convalescence, as it turned out, as he had then not been ill at all before then. Rest and care and recuperation and, yes, convalescence, prior to the disease hitting him. A vital pre-cursor (or pre-cure) to an illness that was incurable. It should always have been such with incurable illnesses. Because most incurable illnesses led to death, with no subsequent chance of convalescence. So best to have it first.

He fell back into dream. This was an anaesthetic of most confused proportions. He saw himself again as Baby Tuckoo, now a little older, a toddler with a new toy. A toy electric-shaver which, when he rubbed its business end up and down his cheeks and between his nose and lips and his chin (as a grown-up man would do with a real electric-shaver), played music.

+++
The Weirdmonger backed up his wagon (amid the alert of reverse hooting) towards the Choker’s drawbridge-door. Eventually, one of the Choker’s flunkeys carrying a slimy eel-like mass of rudery in his arms came out of a side door and loaded it on the wagon. The Weirdmonger gently touched the wagon’s scrawny steed with the end of his whip and trundled off, having paid cost-price (with some means of illegal tender to the flunkey) for this new stock-in-trade. Glistenberry Fair was his next stop.


[b]*Footnote HERE[/b].

=================================
CONTINUED: HERE

==================================