Read Online Dream Paris by Tony Ballantyne - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tony Ballantyne
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
tunnel, back home. I’d given in to my fear, but the water ran a little harder, the air filled with a spicy scent, the muzzy, dizzy feeling took hold of my body and I was walking, turning around, following Francis once more. Following him through crystal waters, following him up to the mouth of the tunnel, following him to the butterscotch glow of sunlight welcoming me back to the Dream World.
DESOLATION ROW
I WALKED FROM the darkness of the tunnel into the brightness of the Dream London day. Blinding loops of light rippled on the crystal waters. The Dream heat pressed against me, and I knew my clothes would be dry in an hour or so, stiff and dry and smelling of smoke and cinnamon. I was staggering, reeling, unable to deal with the sensory overload. The buildings of Dream London were welling up around me, looming out of the glare like an approaching wave…
I saw red brick terraces piled high with extra stories, brickwork bent drunkenly around skewed doorways and misshapen windows. I struggled to focus, my vision overwhelmed by the crooked chimneys teetering on the roof tops, at the grey columns of monuments rising up behind them; crammed together, each crowned with some shape: a statue, a spiked ball, a dodecahedron. And then behind them , coming into focus, rising up to touch the sky, I saw the skeletal remains of the great towers, their bodies burned, the vegetation that had clung to them now withered and died. The towers were dead, dark bones on the horizon.
So much visual information at once, crowding in on me. Green gaslamps and pink posters and scarlet signposts. All that colour and light was almost too much after the greyness of London. I’d grown so used to the regularity of the mundane world. Here, there wasn’t a straight line to be seen, the edges of the buildings and the roads and the canal were cut out with pinking shears. I closed my eyes, I rubbed my face with the warm water of the canal.
Everything looked at once familiar and wrong: whatever power humans had held in Dream London had long been overthrown here. The towers might be dead, but the rest of Dream London was alive. The plants and flowers were running wild, they burst from the windows of the houses in riotous profusion, long green vines trailing scarlet flowers, their scent heavy on the air. The very countryside itself had encroached on the city in luxurious tongues of grass, in rounded hillocks that shouldered aside the buildings, cracking and crumbling the brickwork of the red terraces.
There was a chattering noise above me. I’d emerged into this remnant of Dream London beneath the arch of a white bridge. I waded forward a little, turned to look back at the marble spans, watched how they ran left and right into the overgrown mass of buildings that pushed amongst the green banks around us. Something was moving up there, peering out between the verdigrised models of octopuses that decorated the bridge…
“… sus fucking Chr…”
Francis waded up beside me. He seemed far more affected by the scene than I, but I suppose he’d only experienced Dream London for a short time, and that with a battle to fight. Rushing from one place to the next, watching out for enemies, he would never have had the opportunity to fully appreciate the strangeness. And now, here he stood, waist deep in water, wearing a backpack that trailed a wire back into the tunnel behind us, watching the group of blue monkeys gathered on the bank of the canal before us. They grinned and chattered and made obscene gestures. More of them looked down on us from the bridge above.
“Are they safe?” asked Francis.
I have to admit I was impressed by that. There was no false bravado with Francis: he didn’t need to act hard. He was hard. He knew that he could stand up in a fight, he’d done it. You don’t have to act when you know who you are.
“They’re nasty,” I murmured. “They used to torture cats.”
The monkeys pointed to us with pale blue hands. They
DESOLATION ROW
I WALKED FROM the darkness of the tunnel into the brightness of the Dream London day. Blinding loops of light rippled on the crystal waters. The Dream heat pressed against me, and I knew my clothes would be dry in an hour or so, stiff and dry and smelling of smoke and cinnamon. I was staggering, reeling, unable to deal with the sensory overload. The buildings of Dream London were welling up around me, looming out of the glare like an approaching wave…
I saw red brick terraces piled high with extra stories, brickwork bent drunkenly around skewed doorways and misshapen windows. I struggled to focus, my vision overwhelmed by the crooked chimneys teetering on the roof tops, at the grey columns of monuments rising up behind them; crammed together, each crowned with some shape: a statue, a spiked ball, a dodecahedron. And then behind them , coming into focus, rising up to touch the sky, I saw the skeletal remains of the great towers, their bodies burned, the vegetation that had clung to them now withered and died. The towers were dead, dark bones on the horizon.
So much visual information at once, crowding in on me. Green gaslamps and pink posters and scarlet signposts. All that colour and light was almost too much after the greyness of London. I’d grown so used to the regularity of the mundane world. Here, there wasn’t a straight line to be seen, the edges of the buildings and the roads and the canal were cut out with pinking shears. I closed my eyes, I rubbed my face with the warm water of the canal.
Everything looked at once familiar and wrong: whatever power humans had held in Dream London had long been overthrown here. The towers might be dead, but the rest of Dream London was alive. The plants and flowers were running wild, they burst from the windows of the houses in riotous profusion, long green vines trailing scarlet flowers, their scent heavy on the air. The very countryside itself had encroached on the city in luxurious tongues of grass, in rounded hillocks that shouldered aside the buildings, cracking and crumbling the brickwork of the red terraces.
There was a chattering noise above me. I’d emerged into this remnant of Dream London beneath the arch of a white bridge. I waded forward a little, turned to look back at the marble spans, watched how they ran left and right into the overgrown mass of buildings that pushed amongst the green banks around us. Something was moving up there, peering out between the verdigrised models of octopuses that decorated the bridge…
“… sus fucking Chr…”
Francis waded up beside me. He seemed far more affected by the scene than I, but I suppose he’d only experienced Dream London for a short time, and that with a battle to fight. Rushing from one place to the next, watching out for enemies, he would never have had the opportunity to fully appreciate the strangeness. And now, here he stood, waist deep in water, wearing a backpack that trailed a wire back into the tunnel behind us, watching the group of blue monkeys gathered on the bank of the canal before us. They grinned and chattered and made obscene gestures. More of them looked down on us from the bridge above.
“Are they safe?” asked Francis.
I have to admit I was impressed by that. There was no false bravado with Francis: he didn’t need to act hard. He was hard. He knew that he could stand up in a fight, he’d done it. You don’t have to act when you know who you are.
“They’re nasty,” I murmured. “They used to torture cats.”
The monkeys pointed to us with pale blue hands. They
Similar Books
