The Humdry Network, Part I by Teodor Reljic

I.

You scan the room slowly. Your eyes roam across the dimly-lit red upholstery and you wonder if you’ll be able to avoid the figure in the middle for much longer. Before the thing happened, you never absorbed the world like this. Now it was all you ever did, and it felt lonely. Your father mutters something before he starts screaming. He seems to have grown redder and fatter over the past few weeks. You begin to notice the marks time makes, you begin to see how changes happen. The sobbing starts. It’s a language you still understand. With your tiny hands on his collar, you shush him…and wait for the secrets.

*

Though he made a conscious effort not to limp, Herbert Price walked with a dizzy weight on his back. His steps chopped the wet ground with irregular rhythms. Fresh sounds to Humdry. Fresh sounds for quite some time. The little factory town never had many tourists and its inhabitants were accustomed to keeping things low-key: a trait for which they had become famous across regions both upper and lower. The ride from Thrifask was shorter than he had expected, considering what a submerged option Humdry is for travellers. When he did eventually find a scheduled train, it was populated by commuters and a smattering of students. Curiously, they all  shared a dusty, defeated demeanour.
Professor Price (senior lecturer of folklore and archaeology at the University of Thrifask), was on a sabbatical of sorts and would return for the new semester, which was two months away. With an imposing hunk of a nose and a chin that protruded unnaturally, he didn’t need a snarl or a weapon to put people on edge. Students, of course, found the kind of physical grotesqueness he was endowed with easy pickings for light jabs during class, but meeting him socially, as a peer, one would always feel like the learned ascetic would care very little for any damage he caused. As the summer was ebbing to a close, he had set his mind back to the exotic and arcane, which was what had originally drawn him to the discipline, as a spotty teenager in desperate need to shape obscurity into comfort. Knowing that it would give him an edge over the competition (which was as fierce as always), he made it a point to set off to the dullest town imaginable and unearth the remains of dead cultures by himself. No expedition, no archaeologists, no diggers. He would uncover the things he knew lay dormant and lost beneath the shallow meanderings of the philistine masses who populated the modernised Upper Regions. He could already see, in his mind’s eye, the living detritus topple over itself, and took great satisfaction in picturing the look on their faces after he had unearthed ancient artefacts that had been lying under their noses for millennia.
And so he made his way to Humdry. It being his nature to keep informed about whatever he was stepping into, he knew perfectly well that the little town, with all of it’s aspirations towards sophistication and economic importance, still relied on a primitive method of communication that hadn’t yet accommodated for the internet. This remained, of course, a terrible setback to the triumvirate of individuals (loosely referred to as ‘mayors’ though a correct term for this political muddle was yet to be found) who led Humdry and who had been promising to spearhead its ascent as one of the prime cities of the Upper Regions for over a year. Professor Price had been greatly amused by the press releases the trio – a perplexed young woman and two sober gentlemen who looked interchangeable – had released in some of the Thrifask papers. That they were too earnest was inevitable, but what struck him was their slow, lumbering rhetoric. Somehow he knew that they took their time to write things and pictured them scribbling away on pieces of paper before delivering a speech:

We – and by ‘we’ I am of course referring to my distinguished colleagues Mr Dustrich and Ms Strainerve as well as myself – point towards the increasing availability of independent Internet consoles across our city, which can be used publicly and which our citizens have learned to tackle – in the space of an admirably short amount of time – with the same ease as they would approach a payphone. It will only be a matter of time, we are certain, that the technology will become available on the commercial market. This development will – apart from it’s obvious advantages – help us to quell the instances of petty terrorism or ‘hacking’ that we were unfortunate enough to experience through the consoles found in Dulwich Street…

Exiting the station, he surveyed the town with a deep, private satisfaction. What he saw confirmed what he had read and written: it was, without question, a blissfully ignorant Sign of the Times, one of the many he had singled out for scrutiny in his behemoth of a monograph: ‘The Mundane Ruin: A critique of modernity from the Second Collapse to the Third’. He raised his walking stick – the only inanimate object he had ever cared to clean – and it landed on the concrete path with a hollow thwack. Clutching his smaller suitcase firmly by its handle and wheeling the larger one behind him, he ambled towards the pseudo-city with a lop-sided (though confident) trot. Negotiating his way across the streets, littered with buildings that appeared two-dimensional from any angle, Professor Price noticed that the hum of the town appeared to be waning with each passing minute. The grinding of the factories was slowing at a pace that was almost natural, that of an organism drifting into slumber. Its inhabitants, too, betrayed hints of conviviality as they thronged out of the factories and shops. Professor Price spotted some of them slinking into the grotty bars that seemed to frame every other street, their laughter like the capricious steam of an engine that was collapsing into disrepair quietly and discreetly.
Dusting invisible crumbs off his tweed coat, he headed into a side street, after consulting his map. ‘Hotel Humdry’ was a few doors away from its chartered location, but Professor Price couldn’t miss it. It was the only building in the street that made some effort to stand out, with the sign hung way above the actual roof, its canvas lining flapping in the weak wind. A fresh note of puzzlement disturbed him. It squirmed its way into his brain, unsettling both pride and composure. What it sprang from was the question: why place the town’s only hotel in a side street? The evidence of such twisted logic played havoc with his complacency as he suddenly realized that he should ready himself for further anomalies of this sort. The people may be tepid, outwardly harmless provincial blockheads, he told himself, but is there a limit to the dangers such stupidity can – unwittingly – lead to? But an overwhelming drowsiness stopped him from pursuing this fear any further, although he felt fully justified in his mistrust of the Humdry civilisation as a whole. He had, after all, studied the town’s amblings and fumblings and refused to be in any way steered off course by the general ineptness of its population. All he looked forward to now was a moderately-comfortable bed and an early morning to peruse notes and negotiate his way across dim-witted locals and dreary locations.
He walked to the receptionists’ desk and announced his room.  “Bed and breakfast, sir?” the receptionist asked. He was a boy, and could easily have been one of Herbert’s students. The thought didn’t comfort Herbert one bit, he had come to automatically despise anybody below the age of forty-five two years into his career. “No, I know about your bed and breakfasts!” Had Herbert let out a ‘hmph’, he would just as easily had conveyed his feelings on the subject, but he had just arrived to the town, and little voice inside him persuaded him towards enunciating his opinions in as brash a way as possible. They were, after all, informed opinions, although a suspicion of Humdry cuisine hardly required arcane knowledge. While the town itself was alien to the Upper Regions, its food had a reputation that seemed to exist independently of Humdry. Professor Price had wanted the receptionist to recoil and betray irritation, but the teenager merely tittered like a schoolgirl. “Yeah, don’t blame you. You’ll probably be better off with Jerry’s round the corner, makes a great anything,” Gilbert said (Herbert saw the boy’s nametag as he bent down to fetch the key. The thought that he shared a syllable with this wretch murdered Professor Herbert Price’s evening.

‘Hmph,’ said the professor, largely with his nostrils.

*

Gilbert’s body had a vitality he rarely exploited. His arms and legs worked with generous precision and he knew he could be accused of efficiency if he made the slightest effort. His skin was draped in an inexplicable, perpetual tan which just made him look sallow, since most of his days were spent seated in either his uniform (a basic affair whose only distinctive feature was a badge shaped ‘HH’) or a long overcoat. The truth was that he had always been a good slacker. While he did his best to do as little as possible, he did so with a kind of panache that few people had and that was frowned upon by the utilitarian Humdry. Something about the way he let chores pass until it was their time to get done had a reassuring effect on his acquaintances, however. He would let dishes and laundry pile up with abandon and yet the tiny bedsit that housed Gilbert and his cat always looked immaculate to any visitors. He exuded an effortless accommodation that was a boon to his job as bellhop and general gopher of Hotel Humdry, which was currently running a skeleton staff.  But as he ran from the hotel with Professor Price’s small suitcase under his arm, there was no hint of poise or purpose in his panicked jaunt. He wasn’t edgy about getting caught – the old man had been asleep when he smuggled the case of the room and nobody saw him leave with it – but he was more than anxious about putting his long-germinating plan to work. “Shit!” he spat when he saw the queue for the Billings Street console. He thought about using the Dulwich Street outlet instead but abandoned the option just as quickly – it was bound to be bugged to the teeth, if those ridiculous press releases were anything to go by. He could see the edges of the console, gaping out of the grey building like a trout. It was being inexpertly hammered by a girl with loud pink hair. Probably making plans to meet at The Crushed Petal, thought Gilbert. He hoped the old man behind her would turn out to be a console-pervert, an abundant culture that blossomed rapidly after the internet was introduced to Humdry some months ago. All he had to do was whip it out for the queue to disperse, and Gilbert would be free to continue his Great Work, soiled keyboard or not. But he appeared to be stranded in this line of Second Collapse survivors while the console-illiterate teenager wrestled with what Gilbert knew to be a very simple interface. He had little sympathy for ‘Petalites’, faux-hipsters who copied expired Thrifask fashions from faded magazines. Sighing audibly, he took his phone out and wrote a text as he moved away from the queue:

Ed, im biting d bullet.fuck it cant wait sum Petalite bitch taking 2  long,going on Dulwich as if those saps’ll catch us.I got em, man! The Humdry Network is ours!!

*

There is a bitter smell in your father’s room, but you’re eager for stories. You notice your mother from peripheries and her worries brush past you and infect the house, but you know your relief are the stories and that they are a passage closed to her. You sit on his lap and things are tranquil, more tranquil than when he was a regular dad. He tells you how the hero Triaman lost his life to the Ancient God Molestri-Kau, and how his family and his followers created the river separating the Lower and the Upper Regions with their tears. You would beg him to describe Molestri-Kau but he wouldn’t, and when you insisted you noticed tears welling up so you would stop asking. You searched in all of his books for details but found none, though sketches of his stories seemed to appear here and there, wafting out the volumes like dust.

A chasm is open under your bed. You know you are old now, but in your private moments you forget. You start to cry and the image of your father shuffles back and forth in your vision. You are asleep but your eyes feel wide open and the chasm tightens. Your father’s bat wings caress you and his face is like a photograph. He recites numbers with the greatest affection, and now you’re standing upright, the night sickening you before you drift into a blank sleep.

Continued…

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