Officer Angelo, not for the first time, had some
doubts about the success of his mission. If the Getham could sniff out a
reporter, surely they’d smell a rat with him? He shuffled uncomfortably and then the interrogating priest finally stopped in front
of him.
‘This is it.’ He thought, preparing himself to be led away
in shame like the reporter lady. He could feel the priest’s breath on his face,
so close was he.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he said softly in his ear.
Shadows lurched
larger than life in the flickering torch light as the group wound their way
across the blackest blackness anyone had ever seen. Shapes flitted across their
peripheral vision - slithering sounds, and groans like corpses expiring hissed
at them as they passed. No one dared look too hard in case they should see the
cause of those horrible noises. They pretty much all kept their eyes focused on
the back of the person in front, trusting implicitly in these strange men.
The Getham had been expecting him. Well, what did he
expect from a soothsayer? He was starting to believe that the Prophet truly had
the gift of foresight. At first he had taken it for granted that the man was a
charlatan, but in this surreal setting he wasn’t so sure. Not only that, but
the deeper into the dome they journeyed, the more he could feel his old
thoughts and prejudices drifting away. It was getting hard to remember what was
important. He kept forgetting why he was here, and had to keep reminding
himself with harsh admonitions to stay alert. But his mind wandered and slipped
through the quiet empty spaces in-between and made him feel content as he had
never been before. He could hear the faint echoes of a lullaby his mother used
to sing, winding in and out of the rusted rafters high above, lulling him into
a soft sense of sublime serenity.
He shook his head to clear the fuzziness.
“They’re going to kill me,” he said to himself in an
attempt to re-ignite his concern for worldly things, “If I try to take him away
from them they’re going to kill me. Don’t go to sleep on the job.” But he
couldn’t seem to convince himself for long. This mental lethargy seemed to be
affecting the others as well. They had mostly stopped whispering anxiously to
one another, and were wandering along with strangely calm and contented
expressions.
“You careful,” said the priest, snapping them out of their
reveries. They looked up and saw strange blue columns of light emanating from
some craters in the ground ahead of them.
“No touch,” said the lead priest. “You die. No touch.”
Every now and then they had to circle some derelict
building or crumbling factory, or wade through a fetid swamp that sucked at
their bare feet and had a smell that turned their stomachs. Angelo glanced
round at the group and was shocked by how much they resembled a band of
sleepwalking zombies marching unsuspectingly to their doom. He knew he should
warn them, but the thought was no sooner there than it was gone, and he slid
into silent concurrence once more.
“How long we still gotta go? This place is a dump. I hope
you’re not wasting my time…..” said the obnoxious lady with the
peacock-feather. She also had on, astonishingly enough, a pair of ornate
horn-rimmed sunglasses. She must have been from the Amerigues. For a moment the
group focused their attention on her, but her outburst was short-lived and the
strange and wearying place got the better of them again.
And then the seemingly endless journey was over. They had
arrived at a clearing around a collection of small mud huts. Angelo calculated
they must have travelled some five or six miles, but it could also have been
five hundred for all he knew. Everyone was pretty much exhausted and flopped
down where they could to rest.
“I have to go to the lavatory,” said the lady with the
peacock feather and the horn-rimmed specs.
Officer Angelo smiled to himself. She wasn’t going to like
the facilities here.
“You go there wee wee,” said the Getham priest, indicating
the smallest of the huts.
“You can see right through that,” she said, outraged.
Indeed, the mud on the walls was old and cracked, showing great gaping holes in
the wattle sticks behind that held up the wall.
“We won’t look,” said some wag from the crowd, and someone
else sniggered.
“No thanks. I’d rather wait.”
The Getham were now going from person to person, offering
them a drink of water from an old plastic coke bottle. Some refused, as they
had the foresight to bring their own water. Officer Angelo gulped half a bottle
of the Getham’s water down before he’d had enough, and was immediately sorry.
The water was stale and oily tasting. He hoped there wasn’t anything contagious
in it.
The huts were obviously where the Getham slept, all
arranged in a circle with a cleanly swept centre. The ground was hard,
compacted mud, and soon everyone was on their feet again, finding it much more
comfortable to stand.
‘I bet they sleep on the ground,’ thought Officer Angelo.
They looked as tough as old leather.
“So where’s the Prophet?” asked the obnoxious woman with
the feather.
‘Don’t know why she’s so keen,’ he thought, wondering what
was behind all that bling and bravado. He himself wasn’t in a hurry to find out
what their fate would be. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
“You see Plophet now. This way plee.”
AND BE SURE NOT TO MISS NEXT WEEKS EXCITING EPISODE OF SWEET DREAMS
