Free Nemonymous Night by D. F. Lewis Page B

unsaid—unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.
    The dream sickness—like a ‘flu pandemic—caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered... but, unlike a ‘flu pandemic, the dream sickness was inspired by an inference regarding an infernal mass-hysteria linked to a mass-suicide syndrome rather than to any individual’s pain or conscious disability.
    Many parents set up search parties—because Arthur and Amy were not the only ones believed to have inexplicably gone missing. Some search parties overlapped with other search parties. There were petty rivalries, even bitter disputes between them, believing their own children were being sought by other parties and vice versa.
    Meanwhile, wells were dug all over the city towards the Northern coalfields. Separate queues were set up at these wells to reflect the medicine queues further south, as if some unknown synchronicity was sought to provide an explanation factor linking two imponderables and hopefully making them ponderable. Some children who hadn’t yet run away from home played sandcastles around the wells—damming and river-construction games mocked-up from various substances abandoned by gardeners in allotment sheds previously rifled by unknown hands and given to the children. Weighing bucket against bucket was a common daily reality even though it sounds more like something they should have dreamed about... being tantamount to a waking sickness, assuming anyone could get their heads around such a concept.
    *
    Much further south, towards the holiday ‘feet’ of the city-shape, other queues formed near ranks of parked silver craft that had been earmarked and then advertised as vehicles for tours beyond the city toward the sea in pursuit of adventures of which Jules Verne would have been proud.
    Crazy Lope and John Ogdon had booked for an undersea tour, but then decided against it. This would have been under the tutelage of a rather outlandishly garbed and dramatic Captain Nemo (or so it was blurbed in the brochure), cashing in on a vogue for such old-fashioned fantasy trips. Booking avoided queues but cost a lot more. Greg said he wanted to accompany them, but currently there wasn’t a vacancy, unless a late cancellation arose. At that stage Crazy Lope and Ogdon had not yet cancelled. Greg wondered if he really shouldn’t accompany Beth, Susan & Co. in search of Arthur and Amy. A holiday seemed a bit of a cop-out compared to participating in a pukka search party. Mike himself kept his own counsel.
    Long ago, Mike (or others on his behalf) believed he was a hawler but, with a generally increasing number of inscrutable dreams, that concept had vanished into some forgotten sump of tribal consciousness. The only thing known about a hawler was that there was no fact to know about a hawler. A hawler being a wide-faced creature that sat at the centre of the earth was an earlier description—but whoever or whatever created that description had since disappeared and thus become unaccountable for it.
    *
    Greg, meanwhile, remembered the zoo visit with some clarity. His face was a bit effeminate—and one could easily imagine him performing a drag act as a hobby. A Danny La Rue manqué. He was a loner but people in the office where he worked thought he was a rather pleasant individual and they believed many of the stories he told about his non-existent life. His suits were immaculate. His jokes tasteful. His visits to the loo kept to the minimum as he hated mirrors. The zoo, too. Rather good at his administrative job, a whizz with the keyboard and could build websites at a flick of his wrist—or so it seemed. A pity he had such awful, guilt-ridden dreams about a daughter