Sospan adopted the grave mien of the bespoke necromancer. ‘What sort of special?’
‘These are troubled times,’ said Eeyore. He always had a tendency towards melancholy, but this morning the glum tone had a sharper edge. Before becoming the town donkeyman he had been a cop for most of his life and had presided with great distinction over the processing of the town’s hoodlums, inhaling them one week, exhaling them the next from the iron lung of Aberystwyth gaol. Now he spent his years cleaning up after the donkeys, doing for them, some said, what for many years he had been doing for the people of this town.
‘Everything all right, Pop?’ I asked.
He looked at me, still holding the bridle of the lead donkey, Mnemosyne. ‘I’m a bit troubled today, son, to be honest.’
Sospan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I might just have a scoop or two left of the Absinthe.’
Eeyore shook his head.
‘Or the Ambergris?’
‘No.’
‘Mescaline?’
Eeyore considered. ‘No, not that. Have you got anything to ward off the evil eye?’
The light of understanding entered the ice-cream man’s eye. ‘I may have some blueberry made with water taken from the shrine at Lourdes. The blue is the colour of the famous stained-glass window in the apse of the chapel in Reims cathedral. That will put you right.’
Eeyore looked unhappy. ‘I’ve heard a troubling rumour.’
We all looked at him expectantly. He sighed. We waited. He shook his head.
‘What troubling rumour would that be, then?’ asked Sospan.
‘I’m not sure if I should say.’
‘Of course you should say,’ cried Calamity. ‘What’s the point in mentioning it if you aren’t going to say?’
‘It’s only a rumour,’ he said.
‘You might as well say it, Dad.’
‘Well,’ said Eeyore. ‘As I said, it’s just rumour, but I’ve heard they’ve put a Zed Notice on the town.’
There was a moment’s silence as we allowed the news to sink in.
‘What’s a Zed Notice?’ asked Sospan.
‘I don’t know,’ said Eeyore. ‘All I know is, it’s very bad.’
Sospan tut-tutted. ‘Who put it on us?’
‘I don’t know that, either,’ said Eeyore. ‘The people responsible for Zed Notices conduct their arcane rites in the shadows beyond the reach of the public gaze. Or, at least, that’s what this chap told me.’
Even though nobody knew what a Zed Notice was, it was unsettling to discover one had been put on the town.
Sospan broke from his trance. ‘I think I know what is needed. Something very, very special. Something from my under-the-counter “Katabasis” range. Of course, it’s not literally under the counter, that’s a figure of speech. I keep it off site, for obvious reasons.’
‘What was it called again?’ asked Calamity.
‘Katabasis; it’s the Greek word to describe a journey to the Underworld and, by extension, any journey through a dystopic realm. It’s made from the ayahuasca plant, which is a powerful hallucinogenic plant used by shamans of the Amerindian tribes in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. The name translates as “Vine of the Corpse” in their language. It comes highly recommended by Hunter S. Thompson and the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende.’
‘What does it do?’ asked Eeyore.
‘Opens doors.’
‘What sort of doors?’
‘Of perception, mostly. Look!’ Sospan crouched down and rummaged under the counter, then brought out a copy of National Geographic magazine. ‘This is an account by Kira Salak, an adventurer, of her experience:
I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable.
Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to terrorise me. ‘You will never leave here,’ they said. ‘Never. Never.’
I found myself laughing at them. ‘I’m not scared of you,’ I said. But the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from heartbreak – everywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies, its hatreds, its sorrows. I reached the bottom of the tunnel and saw three thrones in a black chamber. Three shadowy figures sat in the chairs; in the middle was what I took to be the devil himself.
‘The darkness will never end,’ he said. ‘It will never end. You can never escape this place.’
Sospan looked up as if expecting the sale to have been clinched.
‘I think I’ll just have a strawberry,’ said Eeyore.
Calamity, evidently bored with the Vine of the Corpse, asked Eeyore about the raid on the Coliseum cinema. ‘I remember it well,’ he said. ‘Iestyn Probert and the two Richards brothers from the garage at Llanfarian. A policeman was run over during the chase and they hanged Iestyn for it. Three of them were on the run for a while, out at Ystrad Meurig. For many of us that robbery marked a watershed. I suppose you could describe it as a loss of collective innocence. The takings were especially good because it was the opening week of The Sound of Music. The whole town went to see it, literally everyone: the streets were empty like on Christmas Day. They called it the day Aberystwyth stood still. Somehow it seemed below the belt to hit the cinema when Julie Andrews was playing.
Calamity pulled a face and Eeyore put his arm on her shoulder. ‘It probably seems daft to you today.’
‘I’ve seen the movie,’ said Calamity, ‘my aunt watches it every Christmas. Just some kids in Austria singing and then they escape from the Nazis, but no one really tries to stop them.’
‘Stated baldly like,’ said Eeyore, ‘I suppose it doesn’t sound like much. Things were different in those days. They didn’t have so many explosions and stuff; things were more sedate. The scenery was very beautiful and the singing was nice . . . and . . . you see, Austria was a faraway place, people didn’t take foreign holidays or go skiing in the Alps. Just seeing the mountains on the big screen like that was a thrill, and the music . . .’ He sang a couple of bars of ‘The Lonely Goatherd’.
Calamity said, ‘I can’t see why they had to escape from the Nazis just for teaching some lousy kids to sing.’
‘At the very least,’ I said, ‘you’d expect Julie Andrews to do some kick-boxing or something.’
‘Or dynamite the bridge so no one could follow them,’ said Calamity.
Sospan put the magazine back under the counter.
Chapter 4
The waiting steam train snorted puffs of strongly perfumed smoke into the blue sky. A man and a boy stood next to the engine, both identically dressed in neatly pressed black trousers and white shirts, open at the collar. The boy was listening to the side of the engine with a stethoscope.
Every railway station has a zone way out beyond the normal hubbub. Most people are too lazy to walk that far, but once you pass a certain point, beyond the front of the longest train, beyond the final pillar where the last awning peters out, the atmosphere changes; noise drops off, a wind that has been absent from the cauldron of the town centre cools your brow. The only sound comes from the soles of your shoes. This is where the narrow-gauge steam train to Devil’s Bridge stands awaiting orders.
The boy wrote something down in a notebook.
‘I hope she’s well enough to travel,’ I said with a smile to his father.
‘I bring my boy up to be observant,’ said the man.
Calamity and the boy stared at each other with the muted suspicion that kids of similar ages feel when a chance encounter brings their parents together.