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that others will have to know. I'll put in more detail later if I can. The Underside has three
kinds of inhabitants, that I have seen. Again, I've not tried contact yet.
There are imagos. It's a term the old RH journal uses, as good as any. They're reflections just
like the buildings and the streets. I suppose you'd say they're the real natives. I think everyone has the ability to cast an imago down here. The old Praejnicki papers said that it was in
moments of great strife or stress. I can't confirm or deny it. I think mostly imagos are short-
lived, though, just a moment's flicker. I see them all over, just brief glimpses of people, real people, accountants and street sweepers and shoppers. Some must achieve a more permanent
existence. Perhaps it's the death of whoever's casting the shadow, but it's probably much less
dramatic. There are rogue imagos in the Underside, though, and there are hundreds of them. I
can state with absolute certainty that they've been accumulating for a long time because some
of them wear the armour of the legions. The bloody legions, Olly! Can you imagine? People
have been shedding these snakeskin things for two thousand years. I see them in small
groups, or singly, never crowds. They are all going about some kind of business. Once I saw
some fighting, though over what I can't think. They have some kind of volition. They look as
grey and blurred as the buildings. None of them have noticed me, though I keep my distance.
As I say, there are hundreds of them, but that's not much in a city like Reading. You can go
for an hour without seeing one.
There are real people too, like me. You can tell them because of the glow, that I mentioned.
I've only seen a few, and they were all monks. Yes, real monks, robes and crosses and tonsure
and all. They were, it's going to seem mad but they were tending a garden, and the plants in
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the garden were just imagos, but the monks were real. I think- it's only a speculation mind,
but I think they must have escaped down here when the abbey was pulled down. When Henry
the Eighth came to tear it up and put them all to death, some of them must have found a way
to make the insertion. An insertion in the sixteenth century! Without electricity or any damn
thing. You must see what this means!
Or of course you don't believe a word of this. Fine. Be like that. Just understand there are real people here. My latin's a bit rusty but I'm going to make contact with the monks when I get
the chance. I reckon they're the least likely to make trouble for me.
And the third category. Nearly got sidetracked there. There's a fauna down here. It isn't very
pleasant. Something got loose here a long time ago, no idea what, but it's evolved since. Real
creatures, although by now they're nothing like what you know. They eat imagos, and
probably pretty much anything else. There are several forms. There are almost certainly some
that actively hunt, but I've been lucky enough not to run into any. Instead I've just seen the
ambush predators. Lord alive, but they'd give you nightmares. They'd give me nightmares if I
had any drive to sleep - another thing, that I have to say here or I'll forget - no hunger. I've not felt any need to eat here, or sleep. My biological functions seem suspended. I seem to be
breathing, still, but perhaps it's just force of habit. I don't want to think about the implications of this.
But the ambush predators. Some of them spin webs, or at least I've seen the webs, though not
the spinners. There are others, though - I was nearly caught by one when the tide had me - it
was like a huge barnacle on the side of one of the buildings - with its feeding arms out into
the flow, ready to sieve me out and cut me up. On the major routes into town there are dozens
of them. When they catch an imago- I saw it just the once- they dismantle it, unravel it as
though it was just a piece of knitting or something.
Getting closer to the university. Gradient seems steeper than it should be. I had a nasty
moment when I ran into an Imago. I turned the corner onto Christchurch Road and was right
face to face with it. It was an old man in a flat cap, or the ghost of him. I'd place him
somewhere between the wars, maybe. He saw me. I could see his filmy eyes moving about,
looking at me. He didn't know what to make of me, which was just as well. He had a spear in
his hand. It was a long piece of- well, maybe not wood. Ghost-wood, perhaps. It had been
sharpened at one end, and perhaps it was darker there, as though it had been put in a fire. The
thing is - the revolutionary thing is - that the stick, the spear, whatever, was not part of the imago. That old man had not manifested with that stick. It looked almost superimposed in his
hand, not part of his concept at all. The imagos are working with their environment, making
tools and adapting themselves. The philosophical implications are staggering. It's as if you
came upon your reflection reading Plato's Republic.
Another pause. Just about in sight of the university now. The gradient up Christchurch and
Redlands is much steeper than the real. I want to make a note about the museum collection.
The real one, that you saw. Don't let them tell you that the thing there, the insect-thing, is just 40
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some sad old jenny hanniver. I've seen it- them, dozens of the things. Where the hospital is,
and where I'd bet some new wing is being put up, there they were. They were weaving it out
of nothing, crawling all over a kind of tracery of what the building was going to be, making it
more definite wherever they went. I don't know where they fit, in the scheme of things.
Perhaps they're a fourth category. Perhaps they're staff. I've called them constructor crabs, for want of a better name. I watched them for a long time, too long, probably.
I think I'm being followed.
Almost at the university now. It looks overgrown. I can see a kind of dense, tall plant-life
there, like the thorns in Sleeping Beauty. Perhaps the wilderness has got out of hand. There's
some kind of structure in the midst, though. I'm going to make a try for it. The imago of the
university itself might hold all the secrets of this place.
I've been wrestling with whether to write this. I decided not to a dozen times. Now I'm going
to write it before I can change my mind again. I know it'll lose me any sympathy, but the
stakes are too high. Just do not tell Carol anything about me. Do not mention me. If she asks -
and she will ask - say you haven't heard anything. Yes, lie to Caroline, Olly. Through your
teeth. Whatever it takes. This is not just me being mean. It's not just me being me, for that
matter. There is more going on here than you know, on both sides of the boundary. I cannot
stress this too much. You must not tell Carol anything, no matter what she says. There, I've
said it. Please, if you believe nothing else, if you just think I've gone mad or I'm playing some stupid joke on you, believe me in this.
I'm at the university boundary. The foliage is so dense and thorny I can't see a way in. I'm
having second thoughts anyway, from what I've seen. I even got up on one of the shadow
houses on the Elmhurst Road for a better look. I've seen what the structure is at the heart of
campus. It's an insertion point, a great frozen claw of exploded stone. It's just like mine but it must be all of two-hundred feet high. Fallon's lot had
a rough landing, and I'm not surprised
we never heard from them again.
I'm definitely being followed. Writing this quickly. Even-tide coming. Going to make way to
centre - see what's there - hope you get this - calculations should be right - write soon and tell me anything unusual that happens - may be life or death -
J
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4.
Jed, you’ve put me in a really awkward position here.
Carol’s been asking after you. In fact, she asked if I’d seen you recently. I was a bit flustered, but I asked her why and she said she thought she’d spotted you in the middle of town but she
hadn’t been able to cross the road. I asked how you’d looked but she was rather vague.
No, I didn’t tell her what’s been going on: since you’d asked me to keep it confidential that’s
what I did, but I felt rotten about it. And to be honest, you know I’m a bad liar and she did
take me by surprise … so she may have guessed I’m being evasive. She certainly gave me a
very funny look.
Jed, why are you so keen that Carol be kept in the dark?
As to your last letter, I really don’t know what to say. It sounds to me like you’re in a bad
place, whether it’s physical and literal or purely mental. Jed, don’t do anything stupid. I read the Evening Press every day just hoping that there won’t be some little news paragraph about
you having stepped out in front of a bus or something.
You wanted me to report anything strange going on. I assume you don’t include me driving
right through last Friday afternoon without hitting a single traffic jam … Okay, so that’s a bit feeble. Here goes:
There’s been a rash of cat disappearances around Cemetery Junction.
A whole bunch of students reported seeing odd lights hovering over the university
campus late at night on the 21st – but they’re just students so no one’s taken the slightest
notice.
A body was found in the Kennet at Blake’s Lock: white, male, aged in his thirties, heavily
scarred, so far unidentified. It gave me a nasty shock when I first saw the headline, but the
police reconstruction of the face looked nothing like you. The papers didn’t say, but I
heard rumours that the face had to be estimated from the underlying bone structure
because, well, because it was missing from the front of the skull. People are sort of
assuming it’s some gangland thing.
Local enthusiasts are staging a ghost vigil in the cellar of the Berkshire Pig public house
after a barman reported seeing the ghost of a Roman soldier amidst the kegs.
A Mrs Grayson, aged 80, reports seeing, and I quote, ‘a spider as big as a Labrador’
running between the bins at the back of the hospital. The newspaper didn’t actually report
what she was doing at the hospital but said she was an ‘outpatient’. They probably
wouldn’t have run the story except it was a slack week.
That’s what I found in the paper over the last fortnight. I’ve only got one other thing to
report, and to be honest it’s the reason I’ve taken a while writing back to you. I didn’t know
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what to make of it and I’m still really not sure it’s a good idea to tell you about it. But I can’t have you accusing me of hiding anything. Well, you know we had to replace all our
electronic equipment after our ‘lightning strike’ burnt the lot out? The insurance company
was surprisingly fast, and we had a new washing machine and fridge and everything in within
about a week. The only thing we had a real problem with was the television. We decided to
upgrade to one of those widescreen LCD TVs, but the first two that got delivered both went
‘phut’ the moment they were plugged in. The delivery men were muttering darkly about a
‘residual charge’ and suchlike but I think it was just technobabble to make themselves feel
better. I mean, if there was that much static still hanging around the house, wouldn’t we be
getting shocks off the carpet or something?
Anyway, the third one did work. But when I set up the Freeview box and let it run its
automatic tuning sweep through the stations it came up with something a bit odd. There’s an
unnamed station between BBC4 and Sky Travel which seems to be showing CCTV footage
of town … at least some of it is because I recognise the occasional landmark. I assumed at
first that we were picking up a transmission from some security company, or even the police.
There’s no sound, and it’s in black-and-white, and all it shows are shots of streets in town.
Transmission is irregular – sometimes you switch on and there’s just a blank screen. Even
when there is a picture it looks, well, grey and blurry. The really odd thing is that there are
hardly any people in sight – and no cars. Not one. It’s a little creepy, to be honest. I find
myself watching after Carol has gone to bed. It’s a weirdly guilty compulsion. The night after
installation I was going through the channels trying to decide which ones to delete and I
switched on to see a shot of a street full of terraced houses and there, right in the middle of
the empty road, a great big black fountain of solid tarmac. Like a kinetic sculpture.
I’ve not seen it since.
I’m not feeling at all happy about this, Jed.
Please write back as soon as you can and let me know how you’re doing. And reassure me –
you have got a way of getting back out if necessary, haven’t you?
Your friend
Oliver
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5.
My good, dear friend – no more than diary notes pending your next message. Will flesh out
later if I have time.
Have decided to make my way towards the centre of town. There is nothing for me at the
University. Fallon’s crash there seems to have obliterated the character of the place almost
entirely.
I made one attempt to get through the briars. There are things living in there that move like
monkeys. They are dark and spindly and have too many legs. Whether they are native or were
created by Fallon’s catastrophe I cannot say. There is nothing for me here, though.
I cannot face the tangle of streets between campus and the centre. I have found another way.
There is a straight thoroughfare that runs direct to the Heart. I hope it will be less frequented by imagos, and by the things that prey on them. The canal. I shall find the canal, or whatever
it has become. RH himself noted that waterways are ideal access points to the inner layers of
an echo landscape, and although he was writing in a rural setting the same should be true
here.
I am beginning to miss the reference books I could not bring with me.
--
It has been two days of hard travel to get to where I am, and, Oliver, you would not believe
what I am seeing. This is the nightside of Cemetery Junction. You know, the big X-shaped
crossroads with the old graveyard on one side. I used to live in a house near here, when I was
a student. You know the place: run-down tenements and a hundred fast-food outlets.
Well, Oliver, what would you say to Necropolis Junction? But it is. The graveyard, or
perhaps just the fact that common parlance has named the place after the graveyard, has
become the do
minating feature. The two arterial roads are mere tracks overshadowed by the
vast gothic reach of the tombs. It’s silent here, save when the commuter-winds howl at
morning and evening, and when the winds howl, all the inhabitants of the necropolis sing in
chorus with it. My God, you wouldn’t believe the sound of it: sad and lost and beautiful
beyond reckoning, as all the ghouls and spirits open up their throats. I was overcome. It was
an hour before I could move on. Oddly, with the half-glimpsed denizens drifting on every
side, I felt safer here than anywhere else.
I have pressed on though. The canal is only a street beyond. I have found it. The grimy, sorry
relic of a stillborn idea: canals, what is the point of them? The rails did them to death even as they were being built. How could I have doubted that the murdered idea of the canal would
have found a home down here. And here it is. There is more traffic on the Kennet-Avon
Beneath than there ever was above. The old boats, rotting and barren of life, drag their
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carcases between the concrete walls, and elsewhere the water ripples to show that things lurk
beneath the olive-coloured waters. Barring incident I should be able to make it to the centre
in a few days. What will I find there?
---
I have your letter now.
Carol…
(several lines of scribbled-through text)
No. I need you on my side, Oliver. You mustn’t ask. I mustn’t say. Just… Carol must not