Nigel James Wilson's News, Blogs, Articles and Short Stories

Writer

Spire Shire (Abridged)

It is February the 22nd. The year 2222. And it is my ­_nd Birthday.
 
I am past the age of parties, of any form. Especially with human beings. Or those of the outside social media virtual type making an ingression.
 
These days a Happy Birthday is a quiet, relaxing day of one’s own leisure. This for me, besides from being alive, is the best possible gift.
 
Talking of which, I had recently acquired - thanks to a notification from one of my favourite antique bays - a batch of used audiocassette tapes; that our ancestors played and listened to well over 200 years ago.
 
The antiquated, rectangular tape recording machine that I had already purchased for my collection was to be thus tested out.
 
My squat auditory contraption offered out its one armed hand of five-finger keys. All of the same size and shape, like those of a stunted miniature piano. But instead of white and black, there are four black keys with one red key on the end; looking reminiscently like an old-time workman’s oily hand with a bloody thumb.
 
A clear Perspex lid lifts up in the abdominal area of the recorder to reveal the audiotape cassette’s playing compartment. And just above this, behind a metal sieve, lays an inbuilt speaker. These brief descriptions complete the main features of the apparatus. This particular contrivance was not noted in history as being the best of its kind during its own era by any means. But it was available. And it is here. And it is now in my possession.
 
And although I had not been able to obtain what my forbears would have called batteries - nor could I locate an obsolete plug-in mains lead to put the recorder into its original galvanic form of operation - I had nevertheless procured a nueronic power adaptor. One that generates the appropriate current of power supply for all outdated modes of electrical technology.
 
I was familiar enough with the commercially produced vintage music cassette tapes of this early technological period. And in this batch of tapes there was a mixture of the aforementioned professionally prerecorded music tapes along with some blank tapes for amateur recording purposes. But as I mentioned earlier, they were all described as being used audio cassette tapes. Which included the “blank” tapes; and to my utter delight the latter tapes shed aural light. Taking me back by the ears over two centuries, to hear the day to day babble of, for example, a young lad taking vociferous liberties of an older young fellow; who quiet frankly was losing the battle of wits. A comedy performance that they had intermittently recorded over a home made recording of a blues-singing organist. The organ sounded like a Hammond Wurlitzer and the singer was obviously singing and playing very much in his element.
 
It was almost a shame to hear these two youths dubbing (Possibly “accidentally”) over the singing musician’s musical legacy. But it was a real and natural fate.
 
I have a saying, *“If it has happened, it was meant to be”. (Chuckling) Which reminds me of a couple of phrases that our Latin Master Computer used to shout out at us at appropriate times… “Si evenit fatale fuit” or “Si accidit fatale fuit!”
 
Impressive “sir”, but for me, not quite the same.
 
 
And besides that, it helped me to formulate two picture stories into my mind, of a long departed society instead of just the one.
 
I played through a number of such tapes: of random fun recordings of families with their new technological toy. Serious, dull people going on about their hobbies and surroundings and no doubt entertaining their friends.
 
They were all entertaining me now. And with a wry smile I floated over to look out of my spoke tower’s large, semicircular shaped, 180-degree window-screen. The panoramic weather was bleak, with wind driven sleet, snow and rain fighting for supremacy. I could see the points of the rocket ships piercing the low fog banks along side their plastic and synthetic treetops. By law every potential pollutant had to have at least one placebo anti-pollutant opponent.
 
The tapes rolled on. Each side of each tape producing 45 minutes of pleasure at a time - even when there was sometimes nothing on for a third of the tape’s length there was something refreshing in the grainy sound that the speaker naturally emitted. Coming as it were from the purely blank tape of a manufacturer’s production some twenty-five decades ago  - before having to turn the cassette tape around to listen to its other side. Giving a total of 90 minutes gratification for every cassette.
 
All morning and afternoon whilst I worked at my leisure, their delicious miscellany of the distant living past sounded through every apartment of my abode as clear as the complexion of porcelain. As I moved from room to room their sounds were uninterrupted; thanks to my architectural inbuilt Ampli-flinger facility. I could hear the little black box clearly, whether I was in the bathroom or the kitchen or anywhere else in my own residence.
 
I stopped the audio player for an interval, and in doing so the present loaded tape’s progress. For I now required a good space of silence, for the reading of an antique relic made from a material called paper, formerly known as a book.
 
After which engrossing hour, in preparation for our evening meal; Birthday cake and all. I then switched on and programmed my four holographic colleagues. Together with my fully charged gynoid wife and girlfriend. All were directed to be seated three to each side of our dining room table with myself at the head of the table. 
 
Our teas - deftly served out to us all by our old fashioned, flying waiter drones - consisted of fine traditional foods that of course we had to eat using time honoured knives, forks and spoons, from gently warmed antique bowls and plates. Which, to say that I did not intend to have a ‘party’ party, notwithstanding the cake, produced a very merry and interesting variety of teatime conversation. All of which was followed by the singing of the traditional annual aging anniversary song and the blowing out of far too many candles.
 
Subsequently my holographic friends were also extinguished. And then the ladies were accompanied by myself into companionable places for the long night hours a head. Where I switched down both of the women from being activated into their modes of standby.
 
Reading again, but this time by candlelight, and in the company of the vocality of the previously halted machine and unfinished tape, that I had switched on and restarted. During which time I had a feeling that I was not the only one reading my tome; such were the learned objections that I at first felt and then realized came from my wooden six-foot-six-inch tall, serpent carved, antique, unlit standing reading lamp and shade that stood behind my chair. Both forms were standing there combined together, in the momentumous weight of their own grotesque and sombre shadows. Each of them peering round, over and through my torso, head and shoulders; all of their routes of “vision” being covered at the same time, as though in their dimension my form did not quite exist in the same way as I believed it to do so in my dimension. Their inanimate “sights” behaving in a similar way to the particles in a 2-slit quantum experiment. Thus I conjectured that the light furniture seemed to me to be unhappy with my use of those interloping candles. But surely the lamp, stand and shade were not to be unduly concerned, wary, ashamed or jealous of us lighting up their own earlier ancestry for such a short space of time? Especially as they themselves were no chicklings of technology. No, maybe it was something in my reading that drew them out and created the atmosphere that I was now feeling myself to be in.
 
Coincidently some of the themes on this particular tape that I continued to listen to, were of bonfire night and Halloween, and the book that I was reading was of the history of witchcraft.
 
How becoming it is that some things wait hundreds of years to run along side their brethren. Seemingly at random. For the pleasure or displeasure of one future being or another. As was its wont the tape recorder snapped itself off when its cassette’s tape had ended. And as the tape had finished its second side, I removed it, and placed the last of the “blank” tapes into the machine. Then after pressing play I put my book away and sidled off to climb into a bath of hot, relaxing bubbles.
 
For quite a while the tape gave out that hand carved fizzle that the 21st and 22nd Centuries had slowly eradicated in their smooth, sterile, characterless, nothingness of self-deluded progress.
 
I laid back and closed my eyes. Removing the suds from around my ears so that their small popping and crackling noises did not interfere with the hiss of the tape. Presently the muffled, fumbling crack of a record button being pressed down some 240 years ago came into the bathroom. And nothing followed other than the sound of static. Then after a while various buttons were heard being half tried and then when the two buttons that mattered were fully pressed down together, a voice suddenly broke the sssssssssss sound off, and started on its narrative that follows after the following colon:
 
“After a nice drive into the remoter parts of Scotland - with my two canine friends Jasper and Jake for company - it was, as they say, turning out to be one of those days.
 
We had been on a good hike over the moors to a nearby lake. And on returning to the caravette I came to discover that the van’s keys had vanished from my rucksack.
 
Jasper and Jake were somewhat surprised to find themselves carefully retracing our footsteps and paw prints back to the moorland tarn. Neither the vigilantly searched route nor the carefully scoured picnic area at the lagoon offered to show us the keys to our food and beds.
 
Wearied, we headed back for the second time. Myself with thoughts of breaking the glass and my two furry friends with thoughts no doubt of breaking their fast.
 
By this time in the late evening, hovering just above the ground, not much higher than knee level, were those long, hazy, horizontal rolling columns of white snaking hail streamers. Atmospheric sucking, funneling air tunnels, loaded with polystyrene resembling, miniature ping-pong balls of light snow dust that form at certain times, and float and flow along in vast, raised swarming streams, like the cold breath of Icelandic snow dragons.
 
Their white forms made up of millions of miniscule, numberless bingo balls. All jostling, scurrying and flurrying around inside their drifting, wooly white, perforated cylinder strings of vast misty cloud. Imperceptibly striking past and discernibly skirting away from us in wonderfully undulating draughts of billowing, blizzard like powdery gas trails.
 
Silently, wreathing gossamer filled tubes of countless wafting, spherically formed, frosted water particles cascaded by. Playfully inviting us to follow, as they softly and soundlessly danced inside their serene Milky Way parades before our eyes. Magical, bending wand like, wanderlusting wreaths of a quiet and elusive nature that are gently spun and loomed from the moorlands transforming and alluring air.
 
And yet, with a strength of attraction that drew you a long inside their bunching and bombarding muted race; making you feel to be a light and a carefree part of their Graupel rolling and surfing structures; encouraging you with the inspiration to jog and skip a dance yourself in pace with them; amidst a rising and falling supernatural, wall to wall white tubed carpeted walk way that knew no directional boundaries.
 
The dusk was now slowly drawing its net like draperies down, before the final curtains of darkness enveloped us, as we finally passed by the dense copse of firs which marked our parking space at their furthest extremity.
 
Looking ahead for our much anticipated parking spot in the gloomy light, half expecting the van not to be there, and on seeing some familiar, yet empty aspect, I whispered to myself,
 
“I thought my nose was bleeding, but… it’s snot!”
 
But on rounding the woods a little bit more the camper was there after all. Its orange and white colours and motionless shape looking like a goldfish as seen through the weedy waters of a murky pond. And it was parked as we had left it, overlooking a vast expanse of Scotland’s finest countryside.
 
As was usual in my case, after a self-imposed mini shock like that, the last 200 yards were seemingly never ending. It reminded me of that disturbing feeling in the sea that I had undergone when I was swimming towards the beach and the coast was not getting any nearer.
 
The rip tide in this case, as we slightly veered away from the lee of the wood, was a strong, bitter cold headwind, blowing over a stony treadmill that we walked upon, without, it appeared, coming much nearer to our station.
 
The vista too had altered and shrunk to some extent with the darkening, and out of frustration I grabbed for the van’s off side handle; and tugging, its door opened! Much to my relief rather than to my surprise. But surprised I was! When there in the ignition were the gently swinging prizes that we had been a seeking.
 
“Oh, Joys of Joyous Joy.”
 
“Hallelujah!” “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!” I sang, as I danced around in fun with the keys, and the lads wagged their posteriors with their appendages in and out of time with my ad hoc little ditty and jig.
 
More surprising still was that my two stalwart pals had not leapt their way past me into their steering wheeled den. I had to go round to the other side of the caravette and slide the van’s big, long, side door open for their admittance.
 
Hot soup and bread overruled all philosophical thought on my part for the time being. The calor gas stove was lit and so too was a hanging light bulb, that I had hooked up onto a high wall handle and connected via jump leads to an old spare car battery that I kept charged and hidden under Betsey’s rear right hand side seat.
 
Cozy enough it was watching the shadowy trees moving in the darkling breezes. Awe inspiring it was too, as the sunset, dropping behind the trees’ tops, slowly drew out an ancient, grizzled blanket over all of our moorland views that delightfully spread across the moors’ rugged, mattress expanses. A hemped sheet of the deepest shadow that finally climbed the Highland’s footboard mountains and culminated above their distant peaked horizons. We reclined there, as we watched it plant its vast blackening flag up, through and around the summits of the heavens vault; viewed through the rounded rectangular one-piece glass of our compartment’s opposing long window.
 
What a magnificent place it is to be on the top of a moorland fell in the middle of the middle of nowhere, with a couple of tired, but well fed and contented friends; now laying flat on their sides, breathing peacefully but with one ear a piece pricked up.
 
A keen astronomer, I sought communion with the splendid stars and planets, but on this occasion a pall of low cloud cut us off from their sublime counsels and comforts.
 
And chilled I gladly reentered our snug little cabin; turning on the radio to listen to static on every wave length, bar one little nook on the dial in the medium wave that entertained us by playing the cool, improvised bluesy music of a faint and far away rhythmic jazz melody; which went pleasantly with my pot of sweet, hot coffee and crumbling cheese sandwich.
 
What a delight it is to eat and sip such simple victuals, and see those whirling mists lit by the gloam of a cloud fighting gibbous Moon. To relax back and watch their world of ethereal vapors as they come slowly swirling up the slopes of the moor and waft transiently over our berth’s windows and eddy around our place of rest.
 
For those unaware, caravettes have, in some cases, curtains on runners that track along the upper interior, above each of the long side windows. And these drapes can be fastened at their bottoms almost flush to the glass by a length of parallel elastic banding just beneath the windows. Ours was such a case, making our berth appear a little more spacious and trim inside. Paradoxically the padded insides of a coffin came to mind, and then whimsically my mind’s eye instantaneously flashed outside into a chuckling wind to view our transportation as a curtained hearse.
 
And yet a finer night’s sleep I do not recall. It had everything from the deep, happy sleep of childhood dreams to the clamoring of nightmare that would have made La Fanu quake.
 
Jasper and Jake I reasoned had had a similar night’s rest, because one of the two things that I could recall from my slumbering hours was the dogs’ intermittently whimpering cries of sleeping accompaniment. Although I found these to be familiar and vicarious sounds in themselves; and were on the whole a comforting company for my attendant soul. The other recollection being that of a sensation of rocking; that in my sleep felt like the roll of a vessel in a moderate swell on the ocean. Both recollections I presumed were simply the attributes and prompts of the rising and falling clutches of a strong, howling wind during the night.
 
After a crispy, smoky bacon breakfast with baked beans and poached eggs all round, we had one last look at the magnificent and drizzling landscape over a cup of tea. The key was turned in the ignition and off we drove reluctantly away. Heading back to the dreaded rat race.
 
And the emporium that epitomized this race was the petrol station. Until the electric engine came home to roost it was an unfortunate polluting first port of call for us, but at the time of recording, a necessary evil nonetheless.
 
Thrown back into the busyness of rushing people, flying around in their caged torpedoes, who had not been exorcised for a few days in the wilderness, I was meeting them in congested places with my metaphorical crucifix at the ready. To play free-floating dodgems, as if we were all on an open-air fairground ride.
 
Observing this all too familiar setting while filling up with fuel, I thought I heard the opening slide of Betsey’s side door on the other side of the caravette. But I was not sure until I had finished the job in hand, and had had the chance to go round and check. No the door was closed. But to my disbelief Jake and Jasper were gone!
 
Love them or hate them the CCTV footage showed no one opening the side door at the time that I thought I heard the sound, or at anytime, if indeed I did hear that well known reverberation.
 
Puzzled to near madness I remembered the last time that I saw my good friends in the van they were curled up on their blankets; after a stop off for a walk a few miles before the station. I had pulled in by the side of the petrol pumps without glancing back at them, because on some occasions they could feel my stare, and I wanted to let sleeping dogs rest.
 
It was some months before I was able to break free again from the bonds that tie. And this time I spent four days exploring the wilds of Wales. Camping at a new site each day with three human colleagues for company. The camper was meant to be the transporter but not the accommodation as the season was much warmer.
 
Therefore we would leave the van at a remote spot to hike with our tents to a remoter venue.
 
It was whilst driving slowly along at night after the last day of our stay, trying to find our way over isolated tracks, that there appeared a form as of a white wing or some loose, light coloured shrouding that flapped and rapped itself across nearly every window of the van as though looking in for a particular person.
 
A thing that eventually stuck onto the driver’s side (my side) of the windscreen as if plastered there in a wet, phosphorous paste. An halation that the windscreen wipers could not shift.
 
The article contained the face of a women. And the face was the complexion of a white newspaper. Of course not being able to see the road I naturally brought Bets to a stop; but it was not just because I could not see my way. I compulsively wanted to read this visage, and it was not for the lines of the face but the headlines above the countenance, that read:
 
“WOMAN LOST ON MOORS IN SEARCH OF HER HOUNDS”
 
And even though it was in a much smaller text the date of the paper stood out as a picture would in a dream. 22nd February 1922.
 
Curiously nobody volunteered to go outside to retrieve the head.
 
I found that I could not turn my own head away from the page to see my comrades, whom I knew to have been gathered around my small table, playing switch Black Jack by the light of a dim bulb whilst I was driving.
 
As far as I could tell - in the time it takes to toast a teacake – from the start of the rappings outside, to the face being plucked away as if by the powerful talons and wings of a large owl, helped by the sharp, wailing edge of a growing storm’s first exhalations, the whole occurrence was over.
 
By all accounts from the card players’ point of view, when I stopped Betsey, Col, Diggley and Nel had glanced over their shoulders and saw that I was reading the map atop the steering wheel by way of my torchlight. And of course it goes without saying that as far as they were aware the flappings and the arappings were merely the brushing of our van traveling through a tunnel of protruding foliage that had applauded us tacitly from the side of the road.
 
The storm came on fast and shook the van and our small party with strong winds and driving rain. Feeling that I must be more fatigued than I thought, I put the map and torch away, back into the glove compartment, and carefully drove to the nearest, suitable patch of land away from the lane. Where I turned off the engine, lit the stove, and put the kettle on to mash a cup of tea for everyone. And then joined in with the next game of Black Jack Changes.
 
The cards were very good to me, winning half a dozen games without ever having a single Black Jack in my hand. And when those two sought after picture cards finally came into my possession they exhibited to my mind the Jake of clubs and the Jasper of spades.
 
The wind whistled outside as loud as the kettle did within our snug casino. And the gale’s blasts were strong enough at times to rock the whole charabanc. Our solitary light bulb swayed gently and waved shadows around our table that had the effect of making the pictures on my cards move; and what is more, as I looked up at my opponents I thought I felt fur. Warm fur slide through my fingers. And as I looked back down I beheld two dogs’ heads between my hands that I could feel whine.
 
“Good Lord!” “I’m losing my marbles!” “But why and what for?” I asked myself. “Because that’s what happens when you’re going nuts” This sotto voce.
 
“Did you say something?” asked Col,
 
“Anyone for Pontoon?” I declared out loud, throwing down my hand at the same time as picking up my drink. And very welcoming it was too, my cup of Rosie Lee.
 
With the rain making the land boggy and the going dodgy, we all slept in the carravette that night, as tight as sardines in their shoal. Sleeping soundly. All of us happy to be lost in the bliss of our surroundings’ boisterous, dark seclusion. The next morning the storm had cleared away its mess to leave us with brilliant blue, cloud crumbless tablecloth skies.
 
Colleen and Nelly said au revoir and continued forthwith with their hiking and camping expedition.
 
Due to work commitments Diggley was to accompany me back to uncivilization. We were still along way from that repulsive destination, when, having climbed a long and winding mountainous road, steam came billowing out of Betsey. I quickly threw the anchor overboard and we came to a halt to checkout her condition and our situation. Simply water. A lack of it. After last night’s torrential downpour the last thing we thought we would need today was water for an overheated friend. Not a problem, there was bound to be plenty of aqua flowing down the hillsides somewhere. So with various receptacles we plunged into the country’s side. And before long we spied the spire of a small church lancing through the trees.
 
Climbing down the valley’s dense forest’s side, keeping our ears open for the trinkle of running water, we lost sight of the Minster for a while. Before gradually wending our way up through a sun speckled woodland’s undergrowth. Pungent with the moistures of the spinney’s dampened flora.  And yet marked by a silent stillness in the absence of any woodland fauna. Eventually we came to a relatively level grassland, interspersed with clumps of taller grasses and spread about here and there with man sized branchless stumps of trees, or rather huge living stakes; curiously all cut to sharp points, like the tips of a Giant’s upturned, well kept pencil collection.
 
Each stake pointing upwards as if beckoning to the darkening blue pencil sharpener skies to keep on turning; and vaguely noticeable on one or two of the more distant totem poles were the grotesquely carved faces of hieroglyphic gargoyles, that in the lowering light of the sun, seemed to shift their positions and follow us on our journey.
 
Still quite away off from our intended destination we crossed this studded plain, and circled around a dilapidated and unfortunately water deprived wellhead. And then pushing past a penultimate barrier of surrounding thickets, whose leaves to our touch were noticeably strange in their textures; we came against and followed a low perimeter wall, surmounted by a lofty, ivy laced, black, cast iron fencing. Whose closely spaced pickets, being topped by sharp arrow headed spikes, (we both soon decided) made going over the top of a commonly unnecessary option. Clambering along its boundary over roots and through undergrowth with this soft, dark green leafage and hard, sharpened ferrous barricade on our right, and with rafts of sweet smelling hawthorns’ May flowers and sundry shrubs on our left, we finally came out of our foliaged tunnel to meet with, and go under and through the lychgate.
 
We strolled through the quaint graveyard; armed with a flask apiece, Diggley’s hot water bottle and my old, crumpled up, clear plastic bottle. With no thoughts and no words we opened the church’s large heavy wooden door and entered. I do not think that I have seen an empty church before - pewless and devoid of all ornamentation - and this was nearly the exception. At the far end there were two red plastic chairs with thin, black metal legs, strangely congruous; as if, ahead of déjà vu, we had half expected them to be there, and had half intended them to be there.
 
Upon the floor, a little further on from the two school chairs, were two books. We both sauntered down our own make belief aisles towards them, looking up at the vaulted ceiling and around at the impressive architecture. Lovely Norman arched windows and their colourful glass towered down their light across and upon the pewless and aisleless nave. And high up in one dark corner above the transept, peering over its rafters, a large pair of orange eagle owl eyes glared down at us, just as a sudden bellowing breath of wind reverberated a deep, hollow bass note from even further up in the bell tower. And disappearing through an aperture in one corner of the church’s back wall like a shadow seeking sanctuary, slunk what at first appeared to be a large black cat. At the same time, a flickering flit as of a bat wing on a dark passing string caught my attention. And looking up, around and then down to my left, I noticed that there on the floor were two familiar objects: a green thermos flask and a pink rubber hot water bottle. I soon came to realize then that the shadowy supplicant in the distant corner had been Diggley crawling on all fours; and that it was he who had somehow (and for some reason that I am not sure of) shifted and sifted himself through the crack in the aumbry stones.
 
I came up to the two chairs alone, dumbfounded with perplexities. And standing in between the seats I mechanically put down my treasured, clammy blue flask along with the crumpled plastic bottle, placing them both on the chair to my left. Three steps further East to where the altar would have been brought me within reach of the two books. Both hardbacks. One blue and one green. I stepped over to the books, bending at the knees like a baby and picked up the blue covered book on the right. And casually glancing down at the book’s front cover I read out aloud (surprising myself) the title that was emblazoned there in a large silver type:
 
“This is a Rocket Ship. Please Sit Down.”
 
And so listening to my own voice echoing the words around the inside of our rocket I backed into the free chair on my right hand side, and did as I had bid myself.
 
Seated comfortably enough, I sat back, and naturally looking upwards on so small a stool, saw as if they were on an invisible thread from the dusty beams overhead, two smoldering orange orbs with burning black centres descending down together with swift rapidity towards me. And hurling my book at them with all of my seated might, eight lithe legs - or were they arms - with a strength and weight that felt like they were made from thick, black iron wire, straddled, sat and clutched across my lap and body. The sheet white peering face and head of a female Vampire, with a man sized Netcaster spider’s body and appendages, opened a mouth wide smile of pallid fangs, and drawn unstoppably forwards mute with terror, I passed out head first into its gape. 
 
I am presumably ‘standing’ up on the inside of a glass tube, which measures approximately eight feet in height and four feet in diameter. I have no visible body, and where my feet should be are my two receptacles. Both now containing water. We are inside a vast white space. Across from me in a glass tube of his own is Diggley. He is drinking from his flask and on the floor at his feet is a bulging, pink hot water bottle. And although his eyes cross my way he does not see me no matter how I gesticulate. Further down the lines of tubes, that are, as far as I can see, all of exactly the same shape and size, I believe I can see Colleen’s yellow and green hair sticking up.
 
There are tubes like mine that also appear to be empty of animated life. There are tubes that have unswirling colourful gases inside them that almost look as if they contain solids. And there are other glass valves that contain flat, clear liquids of different coloured tints. And somewhere, in the far background, yes I am sure, that at times, I can hear the joyfully barking voices of two familiar sounding dogs.
 
Over to one side on a watery wall of clearness there is what looks like a large map of a maze, but above it, in a text of a language that I do not recognize and yet can understand quite easily, there is a title that when translated proclaims:
 
“MAP OF THE UNIVERES ”
 
There I am sad to say I awoke. Ending the still vivid narrative. Which, as you can see from the above statement, at some point during the night I was compelled to write down word for word. The reason for which will soon become clear. Of whom this voice belonged to I do not know. All that I remember of its tone was that it had that of a lost chord quality to it that made it seem genderless.
 
Epilogue:
 
Chilled after what l imagined was quite sometime later on, from my sliding into a hot bath of bubbles, I awoke, to what I thought was the embarrassed laughter of female voices. And found myself otherwise alone and in silence, in a cold, bubbleless bath.
 
Dried and now warmly wrapped up in my night dressings, I wandered thoughtfully over to the recorder and lifted the clear lid of the cassette deck to make sure that the tape had reached the end. It had, without any jamming or twisting of the tape. And so closing the lid I pressed the rewind key. Then when it had snapped to a stop, back at the beginning of the tape, I pressed the play button again. And very soon realized that either this was not the same tape, - It had a 245 years old recording of an outdoor cycle race for its entire duration, which I had not heard before on any of the previous tapes - Or unlikely as it seemed to me, I had fallen to sleep much sooner than I could have realized. In fact before actually hearing any of the contents of this tape and dreamt all of my supposedly listened to narrative. But the race commentary on this tape started straight away. And I knew that the tape that I had put into the machine was blank for at least as long as it takes to undress and climb into the bath.
 
Amela looked at me mischievously from the sofa with her greenly tinged yellow vampire eyes; which when fully activated are hellishly vibrant; they now gently glimmered out of her moonlight coloured skin, under a fringe of raven black hair. Her blood red lips slightly curved into that artful mordant smile. So no, I felt reassured that there was nothing unusually suspicious or unreasonably underhand there.
 
I had often wondered if there was a hidden power of animation, a machined essence, a finished agenda of a soul developed and born for artificial intelligence.
 
Not growing. But grown complete among androids and gynoids. And was put into effect when mere mortals were unconscious. As secret as the face of God. And yet to Him, Her or It, merely a fundamental mechanism; all part of the workings of space and time. A source that had reached out to every tangent of each dimensional realm. Whilst in comparison we could only metaphorically tap along at them with our white sticks and guess at their structural vistas.
 
I was sure that to certain creatures they would be easily found and observed, below the one layer of reality that we accept as just that. And of which veiled activities, no hidden cameras from this continuum will show a shadow of.