pulp cereal part six

apologies for the delay. I got stuck: I knew where i want to go after this bit, but I hadn’t quite figured out how to get there from here. I was hanging out with miles and scott last night and miles made a joke suggestion which I realized was perfect.

I sincerely wanted to feel bad about the loss of the spanish brothers, but I was travelling with a man of extraordinary presence. A man of such warmth, such kindness, such wisdom and wit! You are lucky if ever you meet such a man, let alone befriend him. As I had known Gary for some years now, and had only just met Domingo and his brother, it wasn’t long before my heart ached barely at all. They had been good people, but they were gone, and Gary was not, and all other men pale when compared to Gary Dirin.

But even Gary Dirin pales somewhat when confronted with some of the wonders of the Old World. The demon, as it were, must have lived, such as it does, quite nearby, for after merely an hours walking, the stone tunnel shifted smoothly and seamlessly into a metal passage. I didn’t even notice but for the sudden clank of the rifle which served as my walking stick. The metal of the passageway was not shiny or dull or rusted, nor did it gleam or glint in the odd light, nor did it reflect much of it. It seemed more like stone than metal, but it definately clanked against the butt of the rifle, where the stone of the tunnel simply clacked.

Gary Dirin laughed and hurried his pace, and before long, we had walked some ways down in a tight spiral and came suddenly out onto a walkway. Or rather, the passage we had been walking along became suddenly a catwalk. Instead of a smooth cylinder, it was a smoothly cut half tube, about a man’s height across, with a bar running on either side at waist height. What was odd, besides the sudden change, was that the railing had no supporting struts, nor did the walkway appear to be suspended from the ceiling in any way. They simply continued on in a much broader curve off to our right, where some ways off it met up with a stone wall, or a ceiling rather, that sloped downwards, out and away from us.

Gary Dirin stepped out onto the catwalk and looked to his right, laughed and hurried ahead. Seeing no danger, I stepped forwards and was immediately struck by the noise: the passageway had been silent, but here in the open there was a steady grinding and whirring, as of a giant clock’s gears ticking away. It was so loud that I wondered how it was we hadn’t heard it before: it seemed as though it should have echoed up the tunnels… But I wished not to dwell on the tunnels, and so I followed the catwalk with my eyes, spotted Gary Dirin now paused and looking far below us, and looked in that direction to see what was there.

After a moment, I was able to make sense of things. At first, it appeared to be a gigantic ball of the same brownish grey metal as the catwalk, but it was a rippling like a rough sea. Then I was able to make out the details as I caught onto the pattern of movement, and I realized that what I was looking at WAS a gigantic clockwork machine of some sort. The outer layer was a giant mass of gears and wheels and pistons, all moving and pounding and grinding. There were no struts or axles, but between the gaps I could see further layers of machinery underneath the outer shell. Yellow light poured forth from within the construct.

The scale was impossible to tell, except for one thing. The cave we were in, if it was a cave for it appeared to be perfectly spherical, was vast. And the catwalk upon which I stood curved in a steady line around and around and around and down the cave wall, creating a segmented outer layer, before it finally curved back into the cave at the halfway point and went straight in the side of the clockwork mass, right into the center of a massive gear. The entire device, from that perspective, appeared no bigger than my thumb, and the walkway a single hair.

Another walkway led out the other side and then spiraled down the bottom half of the cave, and so, wondering if our path led us to the monstrous machine or simply through it, I hurried down the catwalk to Gary and asked him. But before he could reply the wall opened up and a harsh yellow light shone out upon us. Rough hands reached out to grab me, and I barely got a glimpse of the dark clad figure that wielded them before Gary landed a blow which knocked him back behind the light source, which seemed to bob and weave in the air just inside the doorway.

Now, Gary Dirin was a great bear of a man, and his massive greatcoat and heavy pack seemed as though they would have encumbered ten men to slow action. But quick as a rocket, Gary took a red stick from his coat, struck a match across his cheek, lit the fuse on what I realized was a stick of dynamite, and tossed the stick into the room, all this with his right hand. In the meantime his left hand was busily retrieving the collapsable fishing rod which I realized he had stowed in one of his many pockets after I retreived the rifle, and hooking it to his belt.

Once the dynamite was hissing inside the chamber and his other hand was free, he hooked the fishing line to itself around the railing, grabbed me about the waist, and tossed the both of us over the edge and down into the vast chamber. All this happened in the span of time it took our attacker to regain his footing and lunge for us again, but it was too late, and down down we plummeted, the line reeling out above us.

I saw Gary preparing a second stick of dynamite, and two things happened then. First, the dynamite above us went off, and sent the dark figure over the railing and down past us, where I watched him smash into the clockwork mass and disappear inside it, presumably to his death. Second, the line ran out and we stopped falling with an awful lurch.

It had been the longest fishing line available for sale, intended for deep sea fishing boats, but still we had barely fallen a third of the way to the clockwork device. As I watched Gary fish for another match, and he asked me to draw the hunting knife I had procured for the journey, I realized with some dread what his plan for the moment was. Still, this was Gary Dirin, and so I trusted him, more or less.

It is worth noting at this point that on many occasions, especially late and drunken ones in pubs of ill repute, Gary Dirin had put forth for us his theory that most of life’s problems could be solved with dynamite. Now, I had known Gary for quite some time, and although this was only the third occasion on which I had seen him see fit to test this theory, I knew well that the left front pocket of his greatcoat almost always contained seven sticks of dynamite, which is all it would hold comfortably. And although he never smoked, he invariably had a box of matches on his person, which he used mostly to light our pipes, as we never remembered the important things.

In any event, he had a fair amount of experience with explosives, and he often spoke fondly of his years as blast-master for the Russian railroads… I trusted that he knew what he was doing. So, clinging tightly to his pack, after he had lit the fuse and dropped the stick of dynamite and counted to three, I took my knife to the taut line and it snapped and we dropped. Gary rolled over so that he was below me, and then time seemed to slow down… I have been told that your life flashes before your eyes in the moment before you die, but I’m not dead yet, so I can’t complain that mine did not. I was simply scared out of my wits by the fall, this time without a line to catch us.

And then the dynamite went off, and as he had intended, the blast caught us perfectly and slowed our descent enough that we landed only slightly harshly on one of the massive gears of the clock. And we both sat up and took drinks from our flasks and laughed deeply as we had on many occasions, and tried to forget the horrible peril we had just endured.

It was the sudden appearance of thousands of openings in the cavern wall, and dark shapes silhoetted in the yellow doorways, that prompted us to slip down the stairway recessed into the gear and take shelter inside the clockwork device.