The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam Read Online Free Page B

hoping to sing,’ Alan said. He spoke slowly, because he was out of practice, and he did not want to fuck this up. ‘Do you think that is a possibility?’
    ‘You any good?’
    ‘I’m usually very good. But I’m hungry and thirsty, so my voice will likely be a little rough.’
    ‘As rough as them dog’s arses inside?’ The bouncer laughed. ‘They’d take some beating as far as rough voices go.’
    ‘So I can enter?’
    ‘’course you can,’ the bouncer said. ‘This is a friendly pub. But they likely won’t give you nothing to eat until after you sing. It’s a contest, see. Nice big juicy snake steak for the best singer.’
    Alan bowed his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
    The bouncer stepped aside, and gestured to the door.
    *
    So Alan fell into a different kind of Discard life. He met other Pyramid exiles – The Waxy Nut catered primarily to men and women kicked out of the Pyramid for loving members of their own sex – and began drinking heavily. He drank with sad, stubbly apes in ragged dresses, oldprostitutes with rosy cheeks painted onto cracked white greasepaint, disgraced holy men, and orphans whose parents had been killed by cut-throats, fever or venom. The Nut boasted a staggeringly poor selection of whiskies, one home-brewed beer that tasted like old dishwater, and a bewildering variety of mushroom teas, with which Alan experimented liberally, despite the ugly consequences of addiction being painfully evident all around him. Intoxication provided a respite from the remorse. He and Snapper regaled the regulars almost every night – sometimes with folk songs, sometimes with his own compositions, and sometimes with long, experimental pieces brought on by the mushrooms. And almost every night he drank himself to sleep in the bar. He found that if he did not drink, he could not sleep. When he did sleep, his sleep was full of nightmares. The nightmares were many, and he would awake with the sense that his rest had been distorted and broken by their volume and their jagged shapes. If he was not drunk, or performing, he was chewing his lip to pulp and remembering the marks on Marion’s face in almost perfect detail. Sometimes he woke to find himself naked and entangled within the limbs of others; sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes groups. On these occasions he’d find a quiet place outside, alone, and whisper words of love, shame and contrition to Marion, though he knew she couldn’t hear him. It was like praying. It
was
praying. But then he’d start drinking again, straight away, in an attempt toshut his brain down. The Nut’s cheapest whisky was called Dog Moon, and drinking it was like standing over a bucket fire and inhaling the hot smoke, and Alan had discovered a taste for it.
    He found out where Eyes lived from a transient who stopped by one night. He’d made a habit of asking about his old friend. There was no other way of contacting people; in the Pyramid, they’d had a network of message chutes, but there was no such thing out in the Discard. So he left The Nut behind, promising that he’d not be long, and set out on another journey.
    He played Snapper and sang songs at campfires for bugs. He bought Dog Moon, food – roasted pigeon, frog’s legs, dried apple, cured goat meat – and a couple of long knives from itinerant traders. He saw strange and terrifying things from great distances: beetles the size of dogs; a woman pushing a cart full of writhing snakes along the top of a huge metal pipe; green glowing eyes staring at him across the canyon between two rusting complexes at night; bandits stabbing a man in the stomach, and leaving him twitching beneath a ruined archway. For a long time Alan couldn’t work out how to get to that archway in order to help; by the time he did get to the man, who’d been wearing a gigantic and magnificent snail shell on his back, he was dead.
    By the time he found Eyes, he had grown harder and leaner, and built something of a reputation as a