Free Nemonymous Night by D. F. Lewis Page A

completed—was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who—despite the frantic searching by the Authorities—were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper…
    “Nobody seemed to notice,” said Greg. “It’s not as if the sea is close by, but they must have re-cut the river to the sea overnight, too! Amazing what they can do.”
    “I heard the groaning of sheet metal throughout the night, but I couldn’t wake up properly—to check,” announced Ogdon.
    Meanwhile Susan’s sister Beth and Beth’s husband had entered the pub. A childless couple, but they had great sympathy with those who had lost children overnight.
    Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened.
    “I went to his room—and he said he would show me his if I showed him mine. So I escaped back down the stairs, helter skelter. A long way from his flat to the ground. Heh heh! The sea, you say? It’s not far to the coast from here, really. I once went…” He spat into his drink before he continued, oblivious that nobody was listening to his series of conversational non-sequiturs. “There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga—and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills—and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like ‘Angerfin’ on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing….”
    Nobody paid any attention to Crazy Lope’s failure of communication, a failure even with himself. He didn’t fill up the whole screen.
    Greg and Mike soon left the pub, intent on returning to the office where the computers continued to work throughout their lunchbreak, like huge sensory calculators with amputated keys. Each man felt the other was a website, a blog city, a click on the right point bringing everything up in various stages of construction. Either that or they were slightly merry from imbibing on empty stomachs.
    *
    Beth was beautiful but she often seemed bitter... or strident... transferring furrows to the face that seemed out of place there. Her personality had changed the character of her face. Her sister Susan was less physically attractive, yet her nature was calmer, more amenable—not necessarily kinder or smarter than Beth, but less prone to have mind rage at the slightest setback. Patience was something Beth deeply lacked and her non-descript husband took the brunt of her short temper—to the extent of having any of his own personality stripped from him, like a gossamer upperskin peeling off and jettisoned: left just to cling on, for dear life, to the cast shadow in his wake.
    When Beth’s nephew and niece disappeared, Beth initially failed to react sufficiently: but as soon as she did take initiative on her sister’s behalf, Susan stopped being simply bemused at losing two children she somehow hadn’t realised she had. Beth had at first retained her habits, however—arriving in Ogdon’s pub rather late and with cool nonchalance—yet later her inbuilt stridency took inevitable sway and she felt there was nothing to do but burn the candle at both ends, tussling insistently, if not violently, with the Authorities, whilst chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?”
    “Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained