head for the light? I lurch out of my paralysis and flounder along the corridor.
The light is more distant than seems remotely reasonable. I've no idea how far I trudge while it continues to stay unapproachable. Is it receding, luring me further into the dark? I no longer have any sense of the corridor; I could be striving to cross a lightless void. As if in response to my imagination, the source of the light begins to expand, which must mean I'm making headway. It isn't a spyhole, I see now. It's a window.
I'm supposing that it looks out onto the night when I realise that it must belong to a room, because silhouettes are peering through it. They would be nightmarishly tall if they were outside the building. Even if they're on the far side of a door I'm not sure that I want to see their faces. Perhaps my apprehension is fending off the sight, trying to preserve the illusion that they're too distant to identify. All at once, with a transition that seems to omit a considerable stretch of the corridor, I'm too close to deny what I'm seeing. I recognise everyone framed by the darkness, and the foremost is Mark.
He's at a computer keyboard. Nicholas is standing next to him, arms around his and Natalie's shoulders. The boy must be leaning towards the window, since he appears to dwarf his parents, not to mention the spectators behind them – Warren and Bebe and Joe. I can't make out the room they're in for the crowd at their backs. I suspect I could identify many if not all of those people – some belong to the Comical Companions, I'm sure, and are the girls at the very back Willie Hart's performers? – but I'm too thrown by realising that they aren't beyond a window at all. They're on the far side of a screen.
'Latterly,' I try to call to her. 'Kram, what do youth ink yawed ooing?' My struggles for coherence simply produce worse gibberish until my babbling gags on itself. Perhaps my language has run out, unless I'm silenced by the developments in front of me. Mark has used the mouse to pull a list of favourite sites onto the screen.
I've deciphered just a couple – SENOTSEMIL, DLOG FO TOP – when I'm distracted by his expression. His eyes and mouth have widened, shaping his best Tubby face yet. In a moment his entire audience, or mine, is copying him. The effort seems to inflate some of the heads in the crowd near to bursting, not least my mother's. Mark leans closer to the screen and passes his hand over his face, a gesture that reminds me of somebody much older deep in thought or a magician making a pass, and then he clicks on the name of a site. At once I'm staring through a window at tall slim houses and their writhing reflections in a canal.
I hear an eager object slither across the carpet. Before it can reach me I feel rather than hear another click all around me. I'm in a different hotel room overlooking a Christmas fairground. The slithering is closer, but a third click seems to cut it off, along with all the light. I'm enclosed by more than darkness; when I fling out my arms, wood bruises my knuckles. The impact sets hangers jangling and shakes the wardrobe. The past has finally caught up with me, or is it the future, or both? My companion hasn't far to crawl to me. I haven't time to cry out, even if I'm still capable of making any sound, before it clambers limblessly up my body and closes over my face.
EPILOGUE - I'M NOT LESSER
'Why you, Simon?'
'Why not?'
'But why did you have to be put through all that? What was the point?'
'Maybe there wasn't one, Natalie, except it was a laugh.'
'You shouldn't blame Mark. I don't believe he was responsible. He couldn't have known what he was doing, not entirely.'
'It was Tubby, Simon.'
'It wasn't just him either, Mark. It was everyone.'
Perhaps I might end up saying something like that if I ever let them find me, but I won't. I should have seen that it was everyone long before I did. How could it have been more obvious? Bebe was nothing but a letter doubled, and Warren was the labyrinth I had to follow, on the computer or to reach all the places I visited, if there's any difference. Nicholas sounds as if he was trying to combine Thackeray and me, and you can find Lane in Natalie too – Natal Lie, it might be more appropriate to call her. Joe was just a clown, but I have to scratch my wrist whenever I think of Mark's name, and the reddened flesh grins up at me. As for Rufus, how stupidly obvious a pun is that – a university lecturer called Red Wall? What a brick he was, or should I say a prick? And Colin comes out as Evil Conner with yet another of those extra consonants left over. (Memo: relist omens.) Does that mean he was lying in wait for me to hear of Tubby, or is he one more aspect of the past that has been changed? Even if I trusted any of them now, it wouldn't matter. My persecutor was indeed everyone, and not just those I've named. It is or will be you as well, because we're all part of the Internet, exactly as we've made it part of us. We've added it to human consciousness.
How many people really knew what we were creating? Tubby would have, and I suspect the clowns did. Perhaps that's the secret of their grins. Their comedy gives the subconscious and chaos a voice, however unheard it seems to be, but it's feeble compared to the Internet. That's worse than the subconscious, because nobody has noticed it's another dimension of the mind. It's hungry for all knowledge and equally for all falsehood, and how long before nobody can tell the difference? Its limits are infinite, but most of infinity is darkness, and chaos breeds in the dark. Like any aspect of the mind it can be overloaded, and I believe that has already beggun. I'm sure it can attach itself to your mind if you use it too much. Perhaps it needs our minds to store the overload. How can infinnity be overloaded? What sense does that make? It makes sense because it doesn't, just like Tubby and his discovveries. It's another aspect of greedy chaos. Once the net catches you it can reprogram your mind, reconfiggure it in its own immage, so that you end up following link after link aft er lin calf ter lin. That's why I couldn't and can't sleeppp.
Of course I can't afford to, since it never does. I have to stay alert for any references to Tubby and do all I can to render them so nonsensical that nobody will believe in them. Don't I risk betraying my location every time I intervene? I have to trust that nobody can trace me if I concentrate on the screen to the exclusion of all my surroundings. By now I have less than a memory of glancing through the window to see I'm in Thackeray Lane.
Or is my purpose a delusion? Could Tubby and I and all that he brought into the world have indeed been the last of the old? Then surely nobody is better placed to deal with the new mannifestation. That's a joke as well. It's not as if I'm going anywhere. It's too hard to walk, even if my feet scarcely fit under the desk.
I no longer mind being all allone. I don't need to talk to anyone, not that I can talk. The screen keeps me companny, and my faint reflection does, even if it often makes me fancy I'm watching Tubby in a film. The only thing I dislike is touching my face, but I have to adjust it now and then or make sure it's firmly attached. I don't know why, if I've been wearing it ever since I played hide and seek with myself in the dark. Perhaps encountering its siblings made it eager to spend more time with them, or perhaps it feels unwanted now that the Internet gives everyone a mask to speak through. So long as it doesn't prevent me from writing I'll endeavour to cope with its rubbery antics. I test it by widening my raw eyes and my grin until my face stings all the way to the bone. I'll keep posting my knowleddge on www.senseimtroll and www.lestmoresin and www.otestmerlin and www.meritsnoels so nobody can figure where I am, configure where I am, yam, yam. Anyone with informattion about Tubby or his influence or the activvities of what used him for a mask should email me at anny of the sites I use. I've ways to pick up your communiccations. Call me Smilemime.
