The bank of computers was flickering and some screens showed the same screen as others, others not.  There were only two operators: both women, one black, one white: pretty as well as at their prettiest age.  They had continually to change seats rather than take advantage of any network.  The set-up was ostensibly ultramodern with sleek flatscreens and optimal programmes, whilst retaining the appearance of being antiquated, with feeder-consoles of too much weight and size ... and programmes that were never quite fast enough to fulfil their promise as the slickest or latest.  The two women were clicking furiously into many Search Engines for the word 'burial'.  And half the screens in use at any one time were in a variable state of freezing (even crashing) whilst the search widened to every corner of the known web.

"The one in Hoo had no yester-pod planted with it at all," said one woman, with too much of an air of studied inwardness for the other to be able to articulate it back to herself.  Neither wanted to disturb the concentration of the other. "There was a mask buried … hmmm … a yellow face-mask that nobody found during the initial excavation…"

Eventually, as each Engine fizzled to a halt – its hits done – their conversation became more animated and interactive.  A music with its own conductor.  The  two one-sided conversations had been more like 'avant garde' configurations of sound with no meaning at all when laid  across each other like transparencies of talk.  Now, later, they knew what each wanted to say and what each wanted to hear in reply.

"Did you know before that there was an Engine for the pest?"

"And for the past!  'In Search of Lost Time'. 'Remembrance of Things Past'. Titles like that - or there or thereabouts.  But, even so, I agree it's difficult to access archives that never existed at the time simply because the web hadn't even been invented when they were first created."

"That doesn't stop us trying!"

"I found a completely white site with just the burial mound itself delicately picked out towards the middle like a geometrical figure.  I dug into it like this…" (and she prodded with the mouse several times upon its mat) "… and, see, the body had gone.  But the pod was still there.   The ground was bubbly, little yellow eruptions of gas.  No smell on the site.  Not sure this computer can find smells.  But yellow does seem to be an important colour in this whole thing."

"You're right.  I found another site where I saw things as they actually happened in real time via a webcam.  Houseboats on a yellowish creek.  But the church had no grave mounds so I didn't bother to search further there.  But, then, I had a brainwave ... a long pier-like structure stretching out into the cold-looking haze did give me the idea that in this particular case it could have been a burial at sea!  Had you thought of that?"

"Not really.  It can't be called a burial, can it, if you just drop the body into the sea?  And we'd have to fish around forever just to find the pods!"

"There are places where the sea and beach sort of mingle like a yellowy soup.  If the body's dropped in a place like that then it would be a burial of sorts, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose so."

"Oh, one thing I keep meaning to ask – do all these burials need to have happened at exactly the same time to count?"

"I'd've thought so.  Can't you move the webcam to look at the sky, try and do it with your mouse and see if there are sea-gulls flying or vultures?"

"I could give it a try.  But what would that prove?"

"It was mentioned in training, wasn't it?  If you see a vulture, dig deeper to see if the body has wormed itself specially deep from what it sees as danger.  Even if it has become a vampire already, it still fears the white fang.  It needs to make the fang a thing of the past by entering a different time zone, and the easiest way is by means of 'antipodal angst'.  I think that was the expression."

"There are too many expressions they didn't explain properly during training."

"Hmmm – I sometimes wonder if there is not a webcam 'trained' on us!  Or if there is someone even at this moment 'digging' for us! Excavating for excavators!"

Their conversational music degenerated into girlish laughter.

***

It didn't go anywhere.  A bedrock whereby no body could have escaped except upwards. The body must still be there buried like a ghost with the visible remains of its cancer making it seem if it was buried forever with the cause of the body's death itself outlasting it.

"Hey!  There's nothing here except stinky muck!" shouted an eager student girl, commissioned to discover the tomb of the unknown soldier.

Her boyfriend gave her an excited kiss on the cheek as they playfully managed to cordon off the area of the digging as soon as they realised that this could be an important historical site.  Then they scooted off to find the professor so that he could give the grave his imprimatur of archaeological provenance.

"Is it Hiver Jawn himself?" asked another girl meeting them halfway.

"Yes, it could be."

"All the burials were for the same person, the same body," a loner student shouted across the field with a degree of impatience, being a stern clump-eyed individual who was jealous that he had not stumbled upon the find himself.  Knowledge made him unknowledgeable with the confusion caused by frustration that others were less knowledgeable than him.  Nobody knew his name.  But he was a student that everyone thought everyone else knew.

The students gabbled. There were several theories about vampire-killers and how each version of Jawn (having visited several writers' sites with their own stories to tell about him) was buried at different stages in his life from along the fictional spectrum that had been set up variously within and without mutual consultation between those responsible for each slant on his supposed existence.  A spectrum of death without the earlier life to support any subsequent death at all, let alone a spectrum.  It made more sense to those willing to widen their brainstorming to contain nonsense as well as the deeply serious repercussions of not brainstorming at all.

Each tomb or hive or pod or egg were dropped one by one in a 'paper-chase' of muckheaps along a yellow brick road … leading from clue to clue towards darkest Africa, counting each forgotten footstep from Congo to Zanzibar as if each were an earth-embedded beacon to light the future … downward if not along.

Away from the city after which he was named (or vice versa), Rider Haggard galloped upon a wild stallion of flying hooves towards the towering rough-hewn stone-carving that was his own gnarled and barren face overlooking, like a mountain, King Solomon's Mines themselves.  Dive-bombed by vultures whiter than the blazing sunless sky.  And She-who-must-be-obeyed stalked into view, holding the youngest version of Jawn that had managed to remain unburied.

"Welcome, Rider, to the next stage," she-called-She said.  "The hunting and hounding of the dreaded pest in the motor of carcinomal disease.   The God in the Machine.  Deus ex machina.  Tabula Rasa with no easy ready blank to scrawl over. Here…" (and she indicated the latest Jawn to be unhived) "…we have the hero you can call your own to use as you wish with words if not deeds.  The best pest-hunter of them all.  Just seek out Lovecraft and Poe and other writers of Horror in their namesake cities to accompany you towards this worthy goal that all worlds will thank you forever more for trying to do than for not doing at all because you knew you'd fail."

In ripping yarns, there were no diseases at all.  This would be no ripping yarn.  No boyhood adventure.  This was a story built on muckheaps rather than imagination.

And  Rider  took Jawn from the black lady … and, then, as man and boy, mounted on steeds that snickered at even the slightest whisper in their pointed ears, they both set out to find the cities where writers factored in the same cities to help hold our future bones in sacred literary groves growing skeletons not trees.  Cities of Fiction.  Cities that hid the pest.  As well as the past itself.  The pair of them needed to exhume every trope till they reached the pest – a pest not nesting at the core-of-things (where the angel megazanthus was meant to nest) but on the edge – at the periphery – along the circumference – where we writers already worked around it without recognising it as the pest.  Till the Coming of Jawn.

Jawn thought Rider resembled a man he had once forgotten forever.  But Jawn was now too young to have ever known him in the first place.  Or till later.  And the question remained – would he be able strictly to remember someone he had not yet been able to forget?

And the young students, still gabbling, eventually reached the professor who smiled at their crazy brainstorming.

***

The haggard-faced comrade-in-arms for a young impressionable man now grown slightly older than the boy whom she-called-She had transferred so lovingly (as a mother would) into the man's care, was intimated, within past passages, to be Congreve, but nobody, including Congreve, knew he once was Congreve, except the words themselves stating the fact. The nobody-words that nobody read.

Any relevant memories had vanished piecemeal into the open sky because there were no restraining burial keeps to keep them together in an understandable form. And the various vultures themselves had ignored the passage of memories floating away beyond even their own side-eyes' soaring scrutiny.

Memories needed a present as well as a future to exist at all.  And this was already the past. And so Congreve and Jawn  no longer sought the past, because the past was here – here and now.

"Jawn,", said Congreve, with a smile, as their two steeds cantered side by side, "we shall call it our quest for the pest – no longer a quest for the past, not a search for lost time nor a remembrance of things past, because that stuff's old hat, because the true past, once accomplished, once lived, once forgotten, is a past that's marched too far for any quest to reach.  So we gradually change the past, by changing the purpose of the quest itself.  With this success in neutralising the past with altered goals beyond its own reach, we now seek the pest instead, the pest we should always have sought if it had not been for the similar words confusing us … so that we can then eventually quench the pest's poison and stymie its eternally foreseeable ability to bleed mankind dry with its cancers and other diseases of mind and body…"

Congreve laughed.  This was a speech he had learned from a book.  Jawn joined in the laughter, without understanding why.  He just enjoyed the comradeship simply for what it was – and for the sense of boyhood adventure. It mattered little what or whither the quest itself.

Congreve continued: "…and we need to gather forces from the dark imaginations of world literature to work with us as counter-spies or clandestine triple bluffs and so forth against the pest that already believes it has got them in its own pocket working against us!"

Jawn wasn't listening.  He watched the distant horizon as his own particular tutelary vulture created a rorschach blot with a meaningful twist of shape indicating a doom that – like Congreve's words – Jawn failed to understand.

He simply thought he once had memories of this man he now knew as Rider stolen from him – and Jawn had once been to the police to report these memories missing and the police told Jawn that they could not do anything about it since, as far as they could tell, no crime had been committed.

*

The police needed to be called to any archaeological site whereby it was considered that a human burial had been performed … so as to establish whether a crime had been committed.  The student couple who had initially dug the site in question stood around together as the forensic team erected a cordon around their own earlier cordon.  Others stood in the vicinity, including the clump-eyed student by his own  … and the professor himself stood talking to the policeman supervising the whole operation.

It was tableau vivant, a carefully positioned scene for a screen.

And, judging by later reports, a crime scene indeed.  One that was dramatically stolen from the yellow rushes on the cutting-room floor.

***

As the pair of horses cantered towards a hotter, more Iberian aspect of horizon, young Jawn saw the silhouettes of many windmills slowly twirling like toys that twirled to entertain babies in their prams on dry windless days, like this day.  The tussocks were hustled by an even drier windlessness than the parchment of Jawn's throat.  Windlessness with a motion it should not have possessed.

"What are those?" asked Rider, his rough-hewn face squinting to see exactly what he thought his horse couldn't see between its blinkers.

The windmill-sails were whickering and tilting between intermittently frozen frames of an ill-focussed camera. 

"They're giants for us to slay," laughed Jawn, whose saltiness of wit had grown in recent years as speedily as his limbs.

"Don't joke me, young'un, or I'll have to spank you come camptime!" said Rider, chortling under his breath.  Today he was more Wycherley than Congreve, more Lope de Vega than Cervantes, and his wit knew no bounds, instinctively literary as it was.  In fact, both of them had grown accustomed to outdoing each other with Godgiven words.

"When do we reach the city of Poe?" asked Jawn, eventually, as they now cantered between the very windmills themselves, the wheeling groans of sound now audible and the sizes now larger than giants indeed on either side upon the burning terrain, yet still not focussed in shape enough for Rider's tired eyes.

"We reach Lovecraft first.  Next week.  Then Poe in about three months."

"I hope I don't need to undergo the test of the cigarette-smoking whores, when we get to Lovecraft!" snapped Jawn, misunderstanding the meaning of the city's name.

"Nope, young'un," said Rider, surprised that  Jawn had even heard of such practises.  Rider had accepted that Jawn wasn't inclined the way he was himself, but he loved the young man none the less, and often enjoyed (in a semi-erotic way) simply teasing him with the description of peccadilloes he knew would never be taken up by the young man.  Rider would never harm a hair on the young man's head.  He would die for the young man rather than see him harmed.  He knew how important Jawn was to the final vanquishment of the pest.  But, even so, despite this sacred destiny, Rider was so intrinsically fond of Jawn he would have climbed to fetch the top brick of the world's tallest chimney if Jawn had wanted to have that brick.  A simple relationship.  But strangely complex, too.

"What is the pest, Rider?" asked Jawn.

"Many have their theories," replied Rider inscrutably.

This was not the first time Jawn had asked this question.  Never with a satisfactory reply. But, today, whether it was the influence of the giant wheels that spun like hazy corrosions of magnets-made-more-tenuous-than-metal barely beyond the corners of each eye or whether it was a general sense that Jawn was now (in the last split second) old enough to know more about the nature of the pest, Rider continued:

"The pest is many things.  It's what the world faces.  Things that already exist.  Cancer.  Madness.  Bird Flew.  Tyranny. Screening.  Religions. And there are other things I dare not broach for fear of bringing them into existence for the first time by merely speaking their names. And a hero-warrior is being created for each world that acts as the transparency for the next world and so on...  You are to be that hero we need for each world but you can't be in more than one place at the same time, so we need to bend time and reality and so forth by the means of fiction, imagination, music, painting, panoply, ceremony, words-that-mean-more-under-the-surface-than-they-mean-above-it, with the help of all the creative artists and literati and genre-workers that have always existed and thereby turning them into geography and conurbation. We need to bury you and unbury you in those terrains till the true hero is crystallised as each transparency fits neatly into place one above another…"

Rider had now lost Jawn, as Rider had lost himself.  Rider was slowly becoming as blurred mentally as he was visually.  But, even so, he gathered his thoughts, as he started talking of another version of Jawn already known to those working behind the scenes on this project in mudhut or computer-room (to give two extreme examples) – perhaps an earlier version of Jawn, one who had turned himself into a disguised form of yellow gas within the margins of the world in an honest, helpful, entirely heroic act of infiltrating (unnoticed) the evil chambers where other forms of gas were used to create the extinction of various races who cowered there at the behest of the pest.  Yet a new version of the pest had inadvertently been created as an unwanted spin-off of this brave act of heroism as the gas in question which was used as a disguise for this undercover operation was a form of slowly ignitable gas: a pest greater than any of the other pests so far identified as being a constituent of the archetype pest itself: and this constituent pest, thus accidentally created, was called global warming.  A dire pest.  Soon to be the pest.

Jawn shrugged as Rider tried to explain all this to the satisfaction of both of them.  They finally laughed (when Rider heartily slapped the younger man on the back from horse to horse) and they looked forward to that evening's camptime when they could rest both mentally and physically.  Rider with a wry smile and a deep affection.  Jawn with a gauche anxiety about he knew not what.

The windmills - in a new distance behind instead of in front - still audibly whickered in the windless heat.  Nobody had wondered how they turned at all.

***

The campfire lit up a fraction of dark purple sky stained by the slowing fading shadows of wings and things.  Rider meditatively spooned into his plate of beans and softly farted.  Jawn's face was the only face visible in the flickering yellow light. He smiled at the older man's uncouthness.  He thought of blind girls scurrying across a forgotten floor on all fours.  Must once have been a dream, he deemed.  He wondered if they still carried a flame for him.

"Tell me more, Rider."

"Well, when a hero seeks himself as the same but different hero who would set the world on fire…" (Rider glanced bristlingly at the campfire as if that were symbolic of a deeper more insidious heat destroying mankind) "…it will be like a writer seeking his own imagination so as to kill it because that imagination has damaged both itself and the person who owned it and used it to forge fables that have come back to bite him."

Jawn nodded.  For once, both protagonists understood the drift of the conversation between them.  A deep message had passed between them.  The most important message of all.  Until they passed on to more tangential matters.

"The burial at Sutton Hoo?  Was that the work of imagination?" asked Jawn.

"Yes, probably.  Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, too, if the truth were known."

The night vaguely squawked around them.  Neither noticed, so intent was the passage of words.

"What about Glaston-Bury?"

"My guess is that was real.  The hero was buried in a ship called Glittenburier which still has some provenance in history as a rigger and it (with the body in it) was lowered into the earth to form the Torless mound in hindsight.  That was when the gas disguise was sort of started, because someone told the authorities that millions were still trapped in death chambers following the war waiting to be gassed.  And again no pod to help us, not even the tiniest yester-egg buried with him. The damage was done.  But not too late, I hope, to salvage something.  We must hurry tomorrow.  And rest less, Jawn."

Jawn nodded.  The night was finally silent as they both slipped into slumbrous firelight.  Ruined ruins haunted at least one of their dreams.

*

The clump-eyed student squatted by his own clumsy campfire close to the archaeological site or crime scene.  He, too, pensively munched beans, his narrow pointed face expressionless.  Cold ones as he had nothing to heat them in except the jagged tin and beans cold were just as good as beans hot, he thought.

Until the light faded from the flame, he managed to read more of Gulliver's Travels.  This was his Bible.  His belief-system.  Just as real as the real Bible, he thought.  And smiled.  He wished he had company other than the imaginary tinies who squeaked beyond hearing's threshold and often covered his body like equally imaginary insects.  

Friendships entailed something more than just existing.  He studied hard.  He had no time for conversations.  He did listen to a ghostly dialogue of dark undertones, however, one that equally died with the dying of the light.  The sense of over-hearing it did not disperse the solitude, however. And sleep slipped the book into a steep slope.   He wouldn't wake till the arrival of real light such as that from the sun and the sound of  cars and slamming doors.  He decided to pretend he wasn't there at all.  And the chief of police did not notice the burnt out remains of the fire or the empty bean tin, even though they were within the police cordon.

***

Within the emptiness, the slow evolution of a consciousness – from a dimensionless pinprick of the same emptiness but imperceptibly at variance with the rest of the emptiness surrounding it – passed unnoticed.  That was the uncelebrated beginning of Hiver Jawn.  And during that beginning, he knew not whither or how fast his evolution would take him even beyond that barely acknowledgeable self to another more fibrous self to be crystallised as 'him'-in-potentia.  These eventual contaminants of his existence miraculously avoided the spinning vanes of semi-imaginary sharp-edged windmills-of-'name' inside an equally semi-imaginary machine grinding out its own version of creation towards the as yet deaf ears as well as blind eyes of the you and me that would eventually conceptualise this whole paragraph from beginning to end.

*

End was indeed end.  And so the said paragraph was never proved to exist at all.  Certainly not in print.  Maybe in a form of fibrespace more in keeping with the concepts themselves.  Ever chasing our tails, as well as the noumenon.

*

Most candidates-for-crystallisation were chopped into grue by the vanes, splattered out of existence.  Millions of budding existants tripped at the very last hurdle upon its razor-top.  It is to be wondered how many millions earlier tripped at the first hurdle. Some few, some very few, managed to survive all the wild grinding crusher-blades and emerge unscathed into the blinking light.  And reach out to the face of their mother, as Hiver Jawn managed to achieve in reaching out to the dark face of his own mother – against all the statistitical odds – and suck the soft milky dug beyond any condemned paragraph's claw-back of even sharper-edged words which – given their abysmal failure to stop him – even now yearn to be unwritten.

*

The wordiness saved him.  If it had not been for the texture of the text as a vexed skein of thought which acted as a protection against the blades, then Hiver Jawn would never have seen the same light as we have seen.  Or so it should be claimed by any capable of sufficient power-of-expression and understanding thus to claim.

Dreams interfered in this process – some of which were ordinary: about a life of office work and business rivalries and forgotten battles in boardrooms and along motorways.  Childhood.  Child-rearing.  Moving from parts of England to other parts of England.  Guilts and caprices.  This was a life he dreamed of, even lived through, but lost when he finally emerged from the spinning fan, never to regain, never to relive.  A dream itself can be a machine, in transit.  One where the dreamer has to crawl though the sludgy lubricants of dangerously moving parts.  Only after emergence, does the dream return to being a dream.  Meanwhile, it truly had been that machine all along, perhaps.

Other dreams were more fantastical, but nonetheless real as any other dream that seemed, at the time of dreaming it, more real.  The dream of Dream Sickness was the most fantastical of all.  Perhaps, therefore, the one that was most real.  The only truth is paradox.  The only texture.

*

Jawn woke to the embers of the fire, listening to Rider snore like a machine himself.  Despite the heat of day, nights were cold.  Sometimes, snowy even.  And the pair of them had huddled together to cheat warmth into their bodies, a warmth that both possessed separately, but no more warm by being put together. 

The sky-line slowly lit.  And Jawn suddenly saw – amid his bleary waking – an unidentified object in the sky … slowly revealing itself, by sight and sound, to be a spinning blade-winged chopper banking against the dawn-sparkling thermals of the air.

***

The chopper landed with a proud bump rather than even aspire towards an impossible gracefulness.  The pilot – when he clambered from the cockpit with the swooshing blades above his lowered head settling into the merest shimmer of movement-prior-to-rest – was a tall wrinkled man with one large yellow tooth protruding down above his bottom lip.

He was punch-drunk and I wondered how he had managed to fly the chopper with his glazed eyes and faltering abilities (as I later discovered) to fend off senility.  But my wonderment and the duration of such discoveries were short-lived as a young lady whom I half-recognised hopped lightly from the cockpit, having been the pilot herself - as she later came to inform me.  She waved a piece of paper in the air as if she had come with a peace treaty.

"But we have never been at war," I said, smiling.  Cracking a joke, without really understanding it myself.

"I know," she said with a light kiss on my cheek. "This is your short piece of writing entitled 'Value'."

I skimmed through the text, re-acquaintaing myself with what I had written in Lewis.  It was even better than I remembered it.

She had been my teacher.  We had become co-conspirators against the selves that crumpled when faced with the shyness we both betrayed.  We had evidently been given a second chance to meet.  A second chance to manage each other's affections towards a less clumsy culmination than before.  I called her Softie in honour of her kiss.  No longer dressed in amish black or stiffened by teaching duties, she was now a sweet petal of a girl.  Could it indeed be her?  I convinced myself she was who I thought it to be.  And she surely convinced herself that I was who she thought it to be.  The words I'd written on the paper all those epochs ago seemed to bind us together as the two people we simply knew ourselves to be.  Those earlier words also gave us added value beyond any previous ambitions of transcending ourselves to truly become ourselves.  Not even a tooth fairy between us. We laughed at our earlier false romances with fictional creatures like that.

Meanwhile, as Softie and I chatted over the quest for the pest, Yellowfang and Rider (the latter having now stirrred himself from his pit of sleep) were guffawing and slapping each other on the back.  I needed to watch them like a hawk.  They'd be drinking themselves into all manner of pub talk, if the chopper had any alcohol on board.  And what of the quest then?

We would certainly be able to reach the cities of Lovecraft and Poe much quicker than we hoped.  But what about our horses?  And was there room for four in the chopper?

It was with extreme mixed feelings that I learned the two older men would be proceeding on horseback whilst Softie and I plunged ahead by air.  It was at that precise moment that she told me she was the pilot.  I laughed with joy.  Then I gazed at Rider's face; it wore a grim expression as his eyes explored my body with the lingering thoughts that this may well be farewell.  I read his mind.  How could I not?  It is the drawback of writing this – becoming sad about things one wouldn't otherwise have known about.  That Rider loved me.  That this was the final farewell of many farewells between us.  Even as he kissed me on the cheek I knew this was code for forgetting.