The White Room by Martyn Waites

Author:Martyn Waites
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

PART THREE

Downbeat

At night he dreamed the city.

A panoramic swoop: down from the heavens and through the clouds, through the cold air, the grey sky. The city becoming larger, getting closer: various shades of black spreading out from the centre, staining the surrounding greens and browns. Small twinkles of light, like strings of lost diamonds in mud.

Closer still to make out landmarks: Grey’s Monument. Royal Arcade. Grainger’s New Town: Grainger Street and its covered market, Grey Street and the Theatre Royal. The theatre showing, in this dream, nothing but Victorian spectacle and Edwardian tableau. Then the bridges: the Tyne. The Swing. The High Level. The King Edward. The Redheugh. And further along: Scotswood Bridge. Familiar objects. Dependable. A feeling of comfort and warmth: seeing things where they should be.

Swoop down into the city itself. Familiar still, but now different. Dream different. A city cobbled and stitched together from fragments of previous dreams. Buildings griddled with streets leading to skewed destinations. Follow them: along, around, down. Never emerging quite where expected. The routes become disquieting. A feeling begins to grow, low-level fear: things are not where they should be. How they should be. He realizes, with some concern, that perhaps he doesn’t know the city as well as he thought. A discomforting, disturbing feeling.

He gives up trying to follow the roads, to make sense of them, and instead lets them lead him where they will. He doesn’t trust them, yet can’t change course. He’s directionless, powerless. Panic begins to rise within him. He tries to quell it, concentrate on following the roads.

He sees people in the streets, unfamiliar, but also known to him. Dream known. He waves as he passes, tries to talk. He feels he knows them wholly, can tell life stories just from sentences.

They pass, drifting away. He tries to move faster, but the more he tries the slower he becomes. Like his legs have turned to stone, the streets to treacle. So he goes on, the roads leading him.

And then his destination is reached. The roads stop moving. Feeling returns to his legs. Before him is a building. Huge, cathedral-like with vaulted ceilings and archways, supported by massive pillars. All in soot-blackened Victorian red brick. Smooth, worn cobbles under foot. Daylight can be glimpsed through some of the archways, mist and fog rolls in. Huge chimneys belch out clouds of grey smoke. Furnaces around the walls blaze within great iron grates.

It is an abattoir.

Hanging from hooks suspended from ceiling and walls are carcasses. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Blood-drained racks of meat. No individual animals: all individual animals. The place is alive with activity, like flies on a dead dog. Men dressed in cloth caps and bloodied aprons wield sharp blades, toil before the meat. Bleeding. Skinning. Carving. Removing heads, guts and hearts. Some taking the parts away, others feeding them to the furnaces. The carcasses moving along, the racks creaking, groaning.

Further in he goes. Up close, the pillars and archways seem made of candle wax: run off and set solid.

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