No sooner had Sutton and his strange companion faded from sight among the distant grey trunks than the lepidopteran leader was keen to be off. Loofah now shared its sense of urgency and they resumed their expedition forthwith, following the same route as before the fallen Under Manager had appeared. And, in spite of the residual shadow of foreboding that still lurked at the base of his awareness, he was now suffused with a muted euphoria—whatever the details of his fate, he knew he was now reaching the end of a long, long journey.
A dazzle of sunshine ricocheted off one of the luminous wings and blazed into Loofah's eggshell skull. He blinked, scattering the light out into the wood in a rainstorm of crystal, coating the flowers, the plastic trunks, and the gloss-green leaves with shining diamond-dust. The hard fist of his heart squeezed tight and he spun like a dancer, arms outstretched, twirling after his guide.
The path skirted a low hollow in the jewelled woodland floor. The great pink mountain flapped one window-shutter ear and winked a china-blue eye in cheery encouragement. As Loofah waved back, he flashed a smile to the sugar almond spider who was swinging down her invisible ladder from the branches above. The air itself was electric; it tasted of freedom, it tasted of success. He had overcome all obstacles, he had outwitted his enemies, there was nothing now that could stand in his way.
He stopped dancing but kept his arms outstretched. No longer making any pretence of walking, he flew horizontally through the liquid air, a great eagle, a red kite riding the high wind.
A shadow flashed past overhead and he looked up. The two little spaniels were twirling round each other in an aerial balletic display, gliding on spread ears. Their tails wagged in unison when they saw he was looking and Loofah laughed for joy, executing a neat roll between the beech trunks, like a victorious Spitfire. To his left, the white deer leapt through the air, skimming the underside of the canopy with the upturned trees of its antlers, its subterranean eyes protected by a pair of wraparound Raybans.
He banked to right, curving elegantly around the vast swell of a beech trunk. The solid bark was as fluid as treacle, flowing into an infinite parade of curling twisting patterns. He saw legs and arms coiling around each other like mating earthworms, he saw grinning faces with four eyes and ears where noses should have been, he saw a human belly in melted grey plastic with lips for a navel that grinned and then opened as, with a silent squeak, a furry brown head popped out to greet him. As he pulled away from the liquid trunk, he rolled on his back like a playful seal and, through gaps in the canopy, caught glimpses of a stately diamond-headed zeppelin in black and yellow livery cruising the wide blue high above the wood.
The whole forest was liquid now; the trees and the light were melting into each other, before being spun out like molten glass by the steady pull of the butterfly's wings. Loofah was liquid himself, a soft drink being swallowed, propelled by the rhythmic peristaltic waves of the trees and the light and the pulsing hum that underpinned the noises of the wood. A pattern of black and white gelled out of the swirl and attached itself to a shape. The cow munched a celandine, watching him slip past overhead with the infinite phlegm of her kind. She seemed heedless of the seagull head pegged to her left ear or of the Alsatian that leapt over her withers, barking with excitement as it ran along under him like a street dog chasing a car.
The butterfly turned to the right, pulling him round after it with its traces of silver light. A small patch of emerald nettles slithered past, followed by a dwarf holly—and there, reclining among the lethal ceramic foliage, was a sylph of orange plastic, smiling up at him with sizzling invitation in her painted eyes. Yes, they were all here, every single one of them, from the pig to the peg, from the priest-dog to the lust-crazed doll.
Then a small cloud scudded over the tree tops, greying the dappled sunlight. No, he was wrong, they were not all here. He stopped dead in the middle of the path. Where was she?—she had promised to be with him. The grey woods now began to swirl around him in a slow whirlpool of encroaching shadow and the gloom pulsed with an ominous hum, a tonal aspic in which all other sounds were suspended. He was alone, completely alone, the whole wood empty except for him and the—.
He looked around quickly, just in time to see the butterfly flit behind a large holly bush. A sudden spur of cold fear dug into his flanks and he leapt after it.
'Wait!' he cried, 'I'm coming! Don't leave—' as he charged around the bush, he nearly cannoned into the girl '—me,' Loofah finished lamely, and grinned like a boy.
There was no sign of the butterfly.
She no longer wore the robe that she had worn on their shared journey from the Temple to the vanishing tree, but had changed into something more formal, befitting the significance of the occasion: a crisp white two-piece suit with matching kitten heels, and even a small pill-box hat fringed with white lace netting. Indeed, she was as suitably attired for a society wedding as for a conflux of giant molluscs.
'It's beginning to form, even as we speak, so I'm afraid we must hurry.' The nymph's tone was clipped, businesslike, perfectly matching her attire.
'Of course,' Loofah managed to reply.
'And we do understand that the timing is critical—you have to be there at exactly the right moment, otherwise the opportunity will be lost.'
'I'm ready when you are,' he said firmly, trying to match her professional tone.
She looked him up and down, and frowned. 'Not quite,' she said, 'I think that a quick bit of sprucing up might be in order. After all, we're expecting this to be quite an event.'
Loofah glanced down at his admittedly grubby attire.
'Oh, right. Should I be wearing a suit or something, then?'
She shook her head. 'Certainly not. In fact, the official uniform of the The Seeker is the required dress code for men.' She reached up and stroked his cheek. 'No, I think just a quick shave is all that's needed.'
Loofah too ran his fingers over his face. Although he certainly couldn't remember the last time he had shaved, the stubble growth didn't seem all that significant to him.
'Really? But if we're a bit short of time…'
'Won't take a jiff.'
'And in any case I haven't got my razor.'
She smiled and glanced over his shoulder. And there behind him, just beside the holly bush, was what appeared to be an old-fashioned barber's chair in polished chrome and black leather. Beside it stood a glass-topped trolley, complete with a pile of steaming towels, a shaving brush and a mug of scented soap. And when Loofah turned back to his companion, she was holding a lime-green barber's gown in one hand and an ivory handled cut-throat razor in the other. It was quite apparent that the Secretariat had no intention of letting him attend the much-anticipated convocation of molluscs with anything other than the smoothest of satiny cheeks.
The nymph's proficiency as a barber could be in no doubt whatsoever. No sooner than he had taken off his jacket and settled into the luxurious chair, than he was draped in the gown, muffled in hot towels with his chin and cheeks soaped up with almond-scented foam. And as her expert fingers guided the lethal blade over his face, her delicate touch on his skin—soothing yet electric—seemed to light a burner under the turbid pool of liquid mud that comprised his memory, which began to bubble and stir, releasing vaporous half-existent images one after the other, first of the journey from the Temple to the tree, then of a dove and a little white dog, of a concealing fog and a weeping widow—and of something else, something from long ago, something that now teetered on the edge of non-existence.
'Nearly done.' She spoke in a near whisper, close to his ear.
As the blade slid deftly over his upper lip and around his nostrils, he reached deep into the mud, probing every recess of his brain with the blind fingers of his mind—and eventually found what he was looking for; first there was darkness, cold and wretched, then a dismal bridge and a two-way river of light—and then finally she was there, the golden girl of purest sunshine. The newly liberated memory, as faint and fragile as a single thread of gossamer, coiled around in his skull—and an icy, pale flame seemed to ignite.
'There—finished.'
She dabbed away the last remnants of foam with a scented hot towel, then stood back to admire her handiwork.
'Smooth as a baby's bottom,' she said, 'Now all we need is a good splash of aftershave.'
She picked up a cut-glass bottle from trolley and held it up to the light.
'Oh dear, I seem to have run out. That is a worry—where on earth will we be able to find a bottle of aftershave in a place like this?'
'As it happens, I do have some of my own—it's in my jacket pocket.'
'How exceptionally well-prepared you are,' said the girl, unwinding the towels from his neck and sweeping away the gown, 'Splash some on then and let's get going—there's no time to waste.'
But as Loofah well knew, the effects of the contents of the little green bottle in his pocket went far beyond parfum pour l'homme and the toning of freshly shaved skin. The nymph was now squatting beside her trolley with her back to him, folding towels and stowing away her shaving gear. The material of her skirt was pulled tight over her thighs and buttocks, perfectly displaying their muscular yet enticing curves. The cold flame flared up inside him, sending a chill shiver through his abdomen.
Loofah swallowed hard. He now sensed the stern gaze of the serried ranks of the other officials—and knew that he must not allow himself to be distracted from the momentous task at hand.
'Actually I'm not sure that aftershave is a good idea,' he said, 'The scent of this brand may be a little, um, racy for an occasion like this.'
The girl stood up and turned to face him.
'Trust me,' she said, with what could have been a conspiratorial half-smile.
And so, under her vigilant gaze, he tentatively tipped no more than half a teaspoon of the aromatic liquid into his cupped palm.
'Oh, you can be more generous than that,' she said, 'We mustn't stint, not for an event of this moment.'
The nymph was part of the Secretariat, Loofah argued to himself, and who was he to disobey the orders of an official? He shrugged, then tipped out another good tablespoon and splashed it over his cheeks. The wave of floral scent ascending his nostrils triggered an excited thundering in the centre of his chest.
'That OK?' he asked, only just able to speak.
'Perfect. Just let me straighten your jacket collar and then we're ready to go.'
As she stepped towards him, the icy flame flared across his belly, chilling his bowels with giddy expectancy—it seemed as if his mission was now on temporary hold. And as she reached up to his collar, smiling and looking straight into his eyes, his heart stalled.
'That's better,' she said, patting his collar into shape, 'All ship-shape and…'
She never completed the sentence. Her smile petrified and she sniffed the air, tentatively at first. Then the smile ebbed away and she inhaled deeply, sucking in the lethal aroma. Loofah's heart beat again, pumping icy heat into his veins. A cold fire to match his own seemed to kindle in the girl's eyes; her hands, still resting on his collar, tensed as a strange shudder passed through her body.
The memory of their first meeting at the bridge was now as clear as day. Mission or no mission, this was right, so right, like a homecoming after a long and dangerous journey. He reached around her body and pulled her close. His hands, moving of their accord, slid down over her back and onto the firm curves of her buttocks. Then, as she coiled sinuous arms around his neck, his eyelids slid closed and he drifted into the white hot darkness of oblivion. As the swirling sea of delight engulfed him, he felt her electric flesh become liquid under his firm caress, he felt his hands melting through the fabric of her clothes and into her skin, his embrace closing through her, passing smoothly through muscle and bone, until—arm sliding over arm—he met himself in the rarefied tissue of her liver.
Loofah stopped, suddenly paralysed in the darkness—arms clutched around his chest, he was embracing nothing. Then something fluttered against his lips like a living leaf and he opened his eyes to stare out into a bank of swirling of whiteness—he was at the centre of a blizzard.
A blizzard, however, which was alive: the snowflakes were tiny white butterflies that floated silently in the liquid air, fluttering against his face and his hair, and the black leather of his jacket. There was no sign of the nymph.
An angry viper of frustration squirmed in his belly. Damn the girl!—how could she lead him on like that and then do this to him? He swatted irritably at a squadron of butterflies that was fluttering round his face, then stepped out of the insect cloud.
But, like the aroma envelope of a potent perfume, the cloud came with him. He strode on for a few swift paces, but to no avail: the cloud stayed with him, pace for pace. Spitting another curse, he windmilled wildly through the insects with both arms—though achieving nothing but a pair of swirling currents that spiralled out through the cloud before petering out at its perimeter.
'Right then, you little bastards,' he hissed through clenched teeth, 'If you want to play silly buggers, let's see what you can do over a hundred yard sprint. And don't forget I was athletics champion of my college—' he added, making the rash assumption that he had in fact been through higher education, '—for two years running.'
But no sooner had Loofah launched himself forward into the race than he stumbled to a halt, almost losing his balance; for he had nearly trodden in something, something that had snagged at the lower edge of his insect-blurred vision. Like a sheet of slime, a strange clamminess spread across his skin and he stepped back, staring through the lepidopteran fog.
Black and shiny, the length of human foot, it was draped jauntily across a half buried root and resembled a super-sized dog dropping. The mucoid lining of Loofah's jacket clung to his flesh and the hair-roots wriggled in his scalp like a mass of over-excited wire-worms; because dog droppings did not move, they did not slide across the forest floor on a shining carpet of silver with eye stalks bobbing innocently to and fro, sensing the dappled light. The ground tilted like the deck of a storm-tossed ship and the woods began to spin, spiralling in on him through the butterfly cloud. He stumbled sideways and clutched at a tree trunk as a hundred eels of giddy nausea wrestled inside him, racing each other around his stomach and up his gullet. He closed his eyes, but the slug was still there, sliding around the inside of his skull, an omnipresent, omnipotent mollusc, already the size of a hippopotamus and still getting bigger, expanding to fill the galaxy.
It was as he stood looking down at the third slug that Loofah first noticed the low hum—steady and continuous—that blended with the submarine green light to form the backdrop on which the invisible woodland birds traced their elaborate designs in echoing trills. In fact it had probably been there at the very start, imperceptibly increasing in intensity, an ominous one-note overture to the coming climax.
As with the previous two, this slug's trail of wet diamond ran as straight as an arrow away into the woods, a shimmering testimony to molluscan purpose. Loofah cast the route forward through the trees to where, in his mind's eye, it converged with those of its colleagues to meet at a single point. He then peered through the fluttering screen of insects at right angles to the trail and yes, there was the fourth, exactly where it should have been on the circle's rim, caught in a chance sunbeam which transformed the slime-covered body into a carapace of rainbow coloured jewels.
When he again looked down to the third slug at this feet, he saw that another twelve inches of silver trail had been laid across the dry leaves and its creator was twelve inches further forward, twelve inches closer to the inevitable conflux. He had found the circle—but already it was closing. A thousand excited maggots wriggled through his flesh to converge in his belly in a squirming knot of fear. He turned to the left, then to the right, and ran forward a few steps, scattering eddy currents of butterflies through the liquid air. Where is she? hissed a tiny voice in his head, where is she? Nowhere: the reply had the finality of a closing sarcophagus lid and the mass of maggots hardened into a solid fist. He was breathing hard, pulling at the slug skin of his jacket sleeve with sweat-slippery fingers.
'She isn't anything, she isn't anybody, she isn't anywhere—' the words whirled around his brain like a flock of rabid butterflies '—and she won't be anything anybody anywhere until she's been found and she can't be found until she's been—' The torrent of words stopped suddenly as the fist became a seed and the seed burst into a delightful efflorescence of naked panic that turned into a winged banshee that howled through his head as he charged to and fro between the trees, clutching at the remains of his hair, screaming his despair into the insect blizzard like a doomed Antarctic explorer.
A dog's bark cracked through the storm, silencing his cries. Wrestling desperately with the many headed monster of his panic, he peered through the snow. The Alsatian was sitting at the edge of the cloud, watching him with barely disguised contempt. Stay cool, said its self-assured voice, everything will be alright. Either side of the Alsatian were its two Cavalier cousins, both wagging their tails in encouragement. The panic struggled violently, but now Loofah was just able to keep his grip on it, even managing to force a nonchalant grin. Beside the dogs was the mountainous pig, looking distinctly Alpine through the blizzard, and behind him stood the tree-headed deer, the flatworm and the cow. They were all here, he was not alone. He could their voices drifting through the roar of insect wings, chanting in unison: 'everything will be alright, everything will be alright'. The steady rhythm blended seamlessly with the background hum and washed over him like a soothing balm; his muscles unclenched and he breathed deeply. Then the voices stopped and there was just the hum. 'At least we think it will,' muttered the Alsatian, almost inaudibly, and Loofah winced, clutching at his knotting intestines.
'Cannot this cup be taken from me?' he said, addressing the assembled ranks of officialdom, 'Must I truly drain its bitter draught?'
There was no reply. Instead the deer and the cow stepped aside and the butterflies parted briefly. Standing among the far trees, he could just make out three shadowy figures—a woman and two children—silently watching. When the insect curtains closed, the fear was still there, resonating ominously with the background hum, but now it was contained within a shell of hardened steel. Loofah stood tall and pushed out his chest.
'Very well,' he said, 'Then let it be so.'
A butterfly fluttered through his belly and his head spun with dizzy vertigo. He glanced down as a slug slithered past his feet, moving inexorably onwards. This was it: the fuel tanks were full, the capsule was sealed, and countdown had begun.
'I'm ready,' he said, through manfully gritted teeth, 'So do your worst.'
But he was speaking only to the slug—beyond the fluttering insect screen, the woods were once again empty. For a time-frozen eternity he stared down at the fateful mollusc while his isolation throbbed in his skull, edging to a strangely portentous climax. Then the skin on the back of his head sprang to life, wriggling like a nest of termites, and he turned, slowly, just as a figure rounded the trunk of a massive beech. Loofah's heart stopped beating and he peered through the blur—yes, it was a woman; he could just make out the outline of a fetchingly short hemline. She came towards him, raising an arm in greeting. And although he couldn't yet see her face—either of them—he knew, he just knew. Hands pressed together at his chest and muttering silent invocations, he gazed up into a golden shaft of sunlight that burst through the canopy. Then, before he knew it, she was standing before him outlined in a halo of dazzle. His leg muscles liquefied and he collapsed to his knees at her feet.
A slim hand reached down out of the light to caress his cheek.
'Your prayers are answered, mon chéri,' said the apparition, 'See, it is your dear friend, coming to your side in your heure de need.'
Loofah blinked twice and then batted a small flight of butterflies out of the way.
'Norbert,' he managed to stammer, 'How nice to see you.'