The Sirocco-Scarred City

 

A collaboration with Stuart Hughes

 

 

 

Benjamin Travis heard the knock and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

 

        He sat up, leaned forward slightly, and watched the door of his hotel room as a brown envelope slid underneath.

 

        Travis got to his feet and walked over to the door.  He peered through the eye-hole, saw nobody standing in the corridor.

 

            He bent down and picked up the envelope: brown, manila, A4.

 

            There was a sticker or seal across where the flap was spit-glued to the main body of the envelope ... as if nobody was intended to slit it open short of being accused of blasphemy or sacrilege.

 

            The sticker was in the form of a Christian cross set against a huge moon rising over what appeared to be a dry dock in a barren city.  Travis knew that city.  Not from being there or reading about it.  No, he knew that city so very well from dreams.

 

            The sound on the door had been in a rhythm not dissimilar to

 

the knock-knock jokes of stand-up comedians from the working mens' clubs of Northern England.  Articulate rapping, if barely so.

 

            “Knock, knock,” his mind intoned.

 

            “Who’s there?” he thought back.

 

            “Doctor.”

 

            “Doctor who?” he thought and smiled, remembering better times when he had been young and innocent and carefree, remembering better times before . .. .

 

            Travis walked back to the bed and sat down.  He slowly turned the envelope over and over in his hands, looking at the front and then the back and then the front again.  Apart from the sticker showing a strange, religious moon-rise, there were no other markings at all.  Not even his name scrawled untidily across the front.  The flap was sealed firmly, but left enough of a gap at each end for the insertion of a finger or letter opener.

 

            He took a deep breath, exhaled audibly.

 

            During the last ten years, Travis had stayed in many hotel rooms and had received many envelopes posted underneath his door.  He knew exactly what he’d find inside the envelope.

 

            Travis slipped the fore-finger of his right hand underneath the flap and tore the envelope open.

 

            There was no letter, of course.  Nothing so simple.  No "Dear Mr Travis..." nor "Yours whatever...".  There was a story, instead.  A story that started "Once you've slit this envelope open..." and, glancing to the end first, as he often did with pukka letters to read the signature, saw the words: "In the Acrid Archipelago, there can only be one ending: a thirst for death."

 

            In the story, Travis found the ambiance sufficiently vivid to travel to the city where the dry dock was situated: a gigantic steel works where smoke rose from side-vents and piston-valves, a makeshift foundry and sweat-laden men who slaved at rivetting wide bendy sheets of hull.  Indeed, Travis knew the only way to reach the Acrid Archipelago was to hitch a lift on a steamer.  And...

 

            Travis looked up from the closely columned print.  He couldn't believe anything, not even his current surroundings, such as the rocking of the hotel in some sudden minor seismic cavorting.  But even less believable ... a dry dock in some sirocco-scarred city ... looking for a ballast to balance in the hull of some oceanless frigate ... to stowaway towards an even drier pattern of moon-caparisoned islands...

 

            But he knew what he had to do.  Travis had stayed in many hotel rooms, and had torn open many envelopes which had been slipped under his door, and the contents of all those previous envelopes had led him to his destiny.

 

            This one would be no different.

 

            He knew what he had to do.

 

            Travis walked round to the bedside cabinet, slid open the top drawer, and picked up the obligatory hotel bible.  This time it was the Good News Bible and that was fine.

 

            Travis walked to the door of his hotel room and opened it.  He found himself looking out into a corridor and then the air in front of him began to shimmer.  His vision blurred and loud, jumbled noises attacked his ears.  He felt dizzy and nauseous, briefly, then things began to reach a state of unequal equilibrium.  The noises became less jumbled and Travis realised he could make some of them out: pistons and riveting machines pumping and clanking away, steam whistles belonging to cargo ships.  He found he could smell the acrid stench of foundry smoke and taste salt air on his tongue.

 

            As his vision began to clear, Travis clutched the bible tightly in his left hand and stepped through the door of his hotel room, not into the corridor, but out onto the dry dock of the barren, sirocco-scarred city.  He raised his hand in salute ... as if he were acknowledging the presence of a marvel destined to pan out towards the furthest edges of the story.  In truth, though, the salute was not a salute; it was his way of protecting the bareness of his face from the heat of the ship foundry.  He was cooed over by a woman in khaki jodhpurs towards the Stevedore Inn, the sign in frozen swing over the entrance depicting the sweating hunchback worker so typical of this city.

 

            "You look as though you could do with a gargle," said the woman in a voice broken by an almost fibrous heat haze.  She pointed within the suddenly raucous inn.  "They've got chill machines in there that'll give you burst pipes come the morning!"         

 

            Travis was uncertain what to do with the bible.  Not exactly a shade that had earlier aided his salute, but now it was more a rank stench of bound leaves - rather than the tome he'd toted here, ever swelling larger than a log.  He wasn't sure if it'd be considered blasphemy in this neck of the woods.  But as it no longer resembled the gospels, he gave it to the woman as a peace-offering or, rather, a token of some arcane ritual he would eventually understand, given his sojourn in the city lasting longer than just one single story.  He put his hands behind his back clasping the manila envelope which had earlier been slipped beneath the time frame.  A4 did not seem to be a measurement worthy of fathoming.  Teetering on the platform  -  within the inn that grew a skin of reality faster than a baby adjusts to leaving the womb  -  was a comedian of sorts, clumsily tussling with words that he evidently hoped would turn into catchphrases, if not full-blooded joke punchlines.

 

            "Ignore him," the woman said, as she led Travis towards the joint's only smoky alcove of snug privacy.

 

            Travis found it easy to do just that in this woman’s company.  She was more than a bar-maid, and her outfit - khaki top and jodhpurs - definitely made her more than a comely-wench although she had more than enough bosom and cleavage to look the part of a wench in the right attire, but there was something in her posture and the easy way she had cooed him over that suggested more . . . much more.

 

            “Ale,” she said, and was gone.  It was not a question and she had left before he had had a chance to order, not that this looked like the kind of establishment that would serve wine or cocktails to stevedores.

 

            Travis looked around the inn.  The comedian was being booed now from every which way and it didn’t look like he would be performing much longer - either bounced or lynched.  The vociferousness of the displeasure erupting from the inn’s patronage  suggested the latter and that fitted snugly with the surfacing sense of déjà vu Travis was experiencing.  Off to the right of the platform, a greasy-long-haired hunchback settled himself behind the piano, flexed his pudgy digits, then began to caress the finger, tinkling ivories.  The comedian stopped mid-joke, the clientele ceased their war-like barracking, and everybody listened to the sweet, sweet music.

 

            The heavenly music couldn’t erode the germinating perception of déjà vu.  Not only had Travis stepped out of his hotel room onto the dry dock, but he also felt he’d stepped back in time.

 

            “Your ale, sir,” the woman announced and thumped a tankard down on the wooden table between them.

 

            “Thank you,” Travis said and smiled.  The woman smiled back, displaying an uneven row of nicotine stained teeth.  “How much do I owe you?”

 

            “Well, sir,” she said and wiped the back of her hand across her lips.  “That all depends.”

 

            “Depends on what?”

 

            The woman moved round to his side of the table and knelt beside him.  When she spoke, she did so in a hushed, seductive whisper.   “That depends on who you are and what you’re doing here.”

 

            Travis laughed, the woman looked up at him, smiling with her mouth and her big green eyes.  A man could easily find himself lost and drowning in her deep whirlpool eyes.  She fluttered her eyelashes and Travis felt a stirring in his groin.

 

            “My name is Travis,” he said.  “Ben Travis.  And I’m just passing through.”  He cringed a little, at the use of the old cowboy cliché, but he doubted whether this woman or, indeed, this city could even imagine a t.v. set.  Such technological advancements as those were, surely, fifty years away at least.

 

            “And I’m Madeleine, but you can call me Maddie, Ben Travis.”  Maddie held out her hand and Travis took it in his and shook it.  Her palm was hot and sweaty, but her grip would have crushed the bones of many a stevedore.  Still holding his hand, Maddie added:  “Maybe you are and maybe you’re not.”

 

            “I’m just passing through,” Travis repeated.  “Like I told you.”

 

            “Yeah.  That’s what you told me sure enough.”  Maddie removed her hand from his and ran it through the long, dark curls of her hair.  “But I don’t believe you.”

 

            “You don’t think I have an honest face.”

 

            Maddie bellowed with laughter.  Behind her the hunchback stopped his finger tinkling and head’s turned to stare at Maddie, to stare at them.  Then the beautiful piano music enchanted the inn again and things were back to the way they were.

 

            “You have an honest face, to be sure, you have a good, kind face.  And I know you are a good, kind man Ben Travis because I know things.”

 

            Maddie reached up, placed a strong hand behind his head, and pulled him towards her.  Travis did not resist.  When their noses were almost touching, Maddie whispered:  “You have the face of the one.”

 

            And then she kissed him, hard and long and passionately.

 

            She got to her feet and inclined her head towards his tankard.  “Drink your ale, Ben Travis.”

 

            “The one?” he repeated.

 

            “Yes.  You are.  And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

 

            Travis didn’t argue.  He grabbed his tankard and took a long, hard swig of ale.

 

            She slid the bible along the table towards him.  “Don’t forget that,” she said.  “You’ll need it in the Acrid Archipelago.”

 

            And with that, Maddie was gone.  Swallowed up by the ever growing throng of customers.  She was swallowed up, gone forever, khaki jodhpurs and all.  But, knowing she'd probably been just a passing stranger (albeit with a tantalisingly graspable plum-tipped frontal gorge), Travis turned his attention to potentially more important matters and deeply scrutinised the currently empty tankard, still in the mid-swing of his well-practised drinker's arm.  He dwelt somewhat on the supposedly satisfying swig he had just taken.  Yet, his mouth felt dumbfounded, as if it had swallowed itself, having become even drier than before; the aftertaste was rancid to the root of his tongue, retchable to the bottom of his belly . . . betokening an ale that had been foundry dust simply mixed with the least moisture possible to allow it (without contravention of any local Trade Descriptions Act) to be called a drink.

 

            He grabbed the Bible (in some disbelief that it had reverted to a book which - following a subconscious inspection - he discovered had the edges of foxed parchment pages glued to a black-skinned spine) and proceeded to quit the pub.  A stripper had by now created her own beachhead, annexing the platform (and the piano-playing) for some pretty dubious divesting devices.  She was altogether more professional than the solitary stooge who had earlier occupied the boardwalk (almost a mini-pier poking out into the mock sea that had been laid between the panoply of separate tables as a runnelled carpet of woven sea-food designs) and, indeed, the punters cheered, whilst raising their tankards of seemingly one-way sloping swill.  They catcalled as each part of the performer's body was revealed - not exactly a slow-motion teasing with tossed-off garments, but more a sluggish bursting through of swelling parts one by one.

 

            Travis shrugged and ventured once again into the steamy purlieus of the city.  He put a few miles between himself and the dry dock, little knowing, other than by instinct, that he was following a path many had followed before.  There is never an entirely new story, only variations on a rare few well-tried templates.  This one was already bursting to the seams, as evidenced by the larks still now, no doubt, transpiring in the Stevedore.  He passed many silhouettes that tended to ignore Travis as well as each other.  They all seemed to be horseless riders, judging by the spring in their steps awkwardly combined with a hunched over demeanour.

 

            "Oi!"

 

            Travis turned to see what fissure of a voice had called him.

 

            "Oi! Oi!"

 

            Travis saw a wild-haired derelict slowly emerging from a cardboard-box that had evidently once held packets of a product called Smash.  Bouncing, with breath-reeking cheek, right into Travis's bodily territory, there seemed nothing even remotely able to recommend this newcomer other than, perhaps, a willing ability to further events.

 

            "You got the envelope then?"

 

            “Go away,” Travis said.  “Get out of here!”

 

            “No way, dude.”  The wild-haired hobo said, advancing towards Travis.  “I must fulfil my destiny, as must you.  Why do you not fulfil your destiny?”

 

            Travis backed away as the wild-haired man approached.  He was dark-skinned, his hair hung in dreadlocks, and he was wearing bearskins.

 

            “Go away.”

 

            And now the wild man was upon him.  Travis could smell his foul breath and pungent physique perfume.  Before he could escape, the wild man’s hands were all over him, feeling his shoulders, his chest, his back, his buttocks.

 

            Travis grabbed the wild man around the throat, choked the breath out of him, then threw him to the dusty floor.

 

            The wild man hit the ground, billowing out a cloud of grime, and lay still.  Travis watched him dispassionately - he hated killing, even now - and then the wild man coughed and spluttered for breath.

 

            “Get lost, creep.”  Travis said.

 

            The wild man scrambled to his feet, still coughing and spluttering.  He held the manila envelope.

 

            “Give me that.” Travis said.

 

            “No way, dude.”  The wild man said, and removed the manuscript from the envelope.  “Have you read this?”

 

            “Of course, I read it,”  Travis said.  “Now give it here.”

 

            The wild man shook his head.  “Then you know you were meant to wait for me in the Stevedore Inn.  Why didn’t you wait for Rafael?”

 

            “Why should I?”

 

            “Because it is written here.”  The wild man waved the manuscript.  “And because it’s your destiny.  You need me to help you stowaway on a steamer to reach the Acrid Archipelago.”

 

 

 

The story seemed to jump, without any conscious evolution.  Travis found himself even more surprised than anybody else - because he was party to the maiden voyage of             

 

a newly beaten stove-ship, which managed to plough the waves as if they were sand-dunes as opposed to the spawn of tides.  He was in a cabin that the wild-haired gent (who belatedly claimed formal allegiance with one or other of two particular Gods overseeing matters in the Acrid Achipelago) had billeted for Travis as a sort of bivouac.  For days now, Travis had stared through the grimy, acid-pocked porthole, counting sheep in the hope they were fishes or, in more down-to-earth moods, fishes in the hope they were sheep.  Sleep was a mere wet-dream spray away, but ever tantalisingly not close enough.  Maddie, the woman in now damp-stained jodhpurs, often paid him visits, with trays of provender, proving, if nothing else, that you couldn't keep a good character down. 

 

            Eventually, Travis had subjected himself to sufficient good behaviour to be allowed up top.  Abandoning his trusty Good News Bible (now neatly ensconced by some salt-proof miracle of size over faith in the very manila envelope that had started this adventure) in his cabin, he staggered against the sloping deck, realising that the provenance of weather was more a religion than an idle forecast at the tail-end of more important matters.  The sky was shifting with the darkness of overlapping silhouettes (simple clouds or huge Hellish seagulls) and the horizon was an impending death that came, not messily, but in fine geometrical progressions - or it was the edge of the culinary chopping-board freshly lobbed from the hotel's hot steamy kitchen and planted with salad palms in a mad attempt to betoken potential tropical maroonment. 

 

            Maddie was waiting for him on deck.  She took his hand and led him to the bow of the stove-ship.  They stood there, leaning against the rail to support themselves against the swaying motion of the ship, staring out across the vast ocean.  Away towards the horizon, Travis could just make out an outcrop of rocks.

 

            “Is that it?” Travis asked.

 

            “Yes and no,” Maddie replied with an enigmatic smile.  “Yes it is land, but no it is not the Acrid Archipelago.  To get there, you must cross the Sangressa desert.”

 

            “Will you show me?”

 

            Maddie shook her head, and her long, dark hair floated in the wind.  “It is not written so.  You will go with Rafael.  You and Rafael will cross the wilderness.  You will walk for days on end until you reach the Rock Mountains.  In the rock-face you will find a cavern and inside the cavern you will find a labyrinth of passageways that all lead, eventually, to the Acrid Archipelago.  There you will find two paths: the path of truth and the path of untruth.  If you take the path of truth, Ben Travis, you will find your destiny but Rafael will die.  If you take the path of untruth you will both die.”

 

            “Then I won’t go.”

 

            “You have no choice.  It has been written.  It is your destiny.  If you do not fulfil your destiny we will all cease to exist.”

 

            “Is there no way I can save him?”

 

            “It has been written that Rafael will die inside the cavern.  It is his destiny.”

 

            “No.”

 

            “Yes.”

 

            Travis shook his head and moved away from the rail.

 

            “Rafael has died many times before,” Maddie said, sadly, “and he will continue to die many more times.  There are always more stories.”

 

            “No,” Travis said, still shaking his head.  “No.”

 

            Maddie walked towards him, the swaying of the stove-ship accentuating the sensuous swaying of her hips, and smiled at him with her mouth and her big green eyes.

 

            “How will I recognise the path of truth?” Travis asked.

 

            “Land ahoy!” somebody called.

 

            She reached out a hand and Travis held it in his.

 

            “Take me to your cabin,” Maddie said huskily.  “We don’t have much time.”

 

            Travis had long known - albeit instinctively - that Rafael was the wild-haired gent from the cardboard suburbs of Dry Dock City, even though at least a passing resemblance to a suitably respected squire-cum-valet was now conveyed by the grinning halves of Rafael's shipboard face.