AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, the old Bangladeshi punts off into the sunset, Samantha climbs out of the George Walker home in pursuit of Lassie, Ddwwchllyff shows off his suitcase-in-a-suitcase-in-a-suitcase ad infinitum. The chapter charges along at top speed in search of closure...
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 72; Part II

When Rhoda Crwys’s new companions Schumacher, Plenty Capable, Sunny Quito and Short Mat Bowls stepped into the room with everyone else, they were not surprised to see Wolfcastle and Ddwwchlyff arguing with two identical cherry-lipped assassins over the matter of hypo-superficial channels. They’d been told to expect something like this. They’d undergone a grueling seminar on the bewilderingly contentious topic of underground tunnels. They’d heard how the validity of a proposition on which public opinion fell evenly into two camps led to a statistically expressable likelihood of each side being exactly half-wrong. ‘My problem,’ Rhoda had alerted them confidentially as they entered the third floor window and stampeded over to the winding staircase leading up to the fourth floor and the professionally disembodied voices, ‘is that I can’t think of any ramifications. What is the way forward?’

‘Not that way.’ Short Mat Bowls gestured out the window. Largest Hill was increasingly isolated. The great metropolitan area was suffering a greater depression. The buildings, the streets, the bridges and, yes, the people were rapidly replacing the land once beneath them -- land mysteriously gone AWOL, land that had been miles deep and kilometers wide. Where had it gone? And why was it all filling up with water? And what was that long extended structure of intersecting lengths of a durable substance, spreading out to the horizon like an enormous concrete fisherman’s net flung upon the waves? Plenty Capable could not divine his thoughts, so she substituted her own in the tattered journal:
‘’Add salt to taste’’– I don’t think I’ll be decoding that for anyone’ She allowed herself a private smirk.

Meanwhile, the others were still over time ascending the winding staircase with its numerous switchbacks and hairpin curves -- a hurried recent installation, the architural feature evoked the Luxembourg autobahn beloved to the inventor whose manse it was. Coincidence? Bowls didn’t believe in coincidence: two events occurring at the same time was the stuff of cheesy science fiction. ‘Meanwhile my eye!’ he muttered.

‘Open the packet of seasoning’ breathed the jotting Plenty hoping she hadn’t heard right. It seemed a bit of a non-sequitur. Was the object of her reverence becoming unbalanced?

The detective and his one-woman entourage achieved the fourth floor shortly after the others to find it equipped with exactly the same accoutrements as every other floor in the joint. The new arrivals were mostly unaware of the sameness – not Sunny Quito, though, who’d spent many happy time spans playing pianos at various levels, twirling the Revolving Windows‰ and hiding in narrow well-organized closets.

‘ddwwchllyff!’ He recognised his old friend without hesitation, but the Elvis impersonator impersonator only stared at him blankly and briefly in the same way he stared at the other strangers before plunging back into the fray, for the quarrel had become a shoving match and escalated into a melee involving small arms and umbrellas. Impatiently, Plenty Capable broke it up with the skill of a professional bouncer. She then tipped the bouncer generously and sent him on his way, growling a warning -- ‘You didn’t see any of this.’ As he rowed away on his makeshift raft of ducks lashed together with thick rope, Schumacher shot him. It was best to leave no witnesses or future jury members. It made lawyering so much easier.

Sunny Quito noted with alarm that Rhoda’s mouth was half-open as if she’d been about to speak. He quickly clamped a millimeter thick hand over it.

‘tunnels’ he summarized. ‘that’s what she’s trying to say.’

‘Tunnels! Tunnels underground!’ gasped Samantha Panther as she clambered in the window dripping water and clinging to the mortal remains of a drowned collier. Somehow the dog had pulled the old switcheroo.

‘Tunnels.’ Erm realised as the ladder slowly teetered to earth. What were tunnels doing above ground? And where was Wales? Who was that Bangladeshi poling the submarine along the aqueduct? ‘Ouch,’ he concluded, and took a short nap.

It was all becoming a bit too much. The previously long paragraphs that had been shortened became longer once more. The chapter was already one of, if not the, longest yet. Did any of it make sense? It was difficult to tell and so nobody told. All that could be assumed was that a mottled crew of assorted and assaulted individuals had rambled, driven, climbed, carried, sauntered, submarined and generally gathered to the almost exact location of a certain luxurious mansion and / or George Walker arcane asylum for one time wrong doers, suspect suspects and failed politicians. Short snappy sentences. They seemed a thing of the past. Or were they?

Who was there and how they had made their respective ways – it was all so very hard to say. If only someone had been keeping track of such things! …

The chapter was coming to an end and they all knew it… They looked at each other the way I’m looking at you now, and feigned impatience to cover up their discomfort with never having been properly introduced: ‘Do hurry up, Ddwwchlyff, surely there can’t be too many more of these ever smaller briefcases one inside the other – that last one fit in the palm of your hand!’

‘Yes, do get on with it!’ and other such fakey anonymous urgings similar to those in books. Proper books.

‘That’s Ddwwchllyf not Ddwwchlyff!’ Ddwwchlyff indignantly reminded them.

He opened the last one at last but not before pointing out that Mr. Wong had assured him that it held Ddwwchllyff’s own DNA, mysteriously discovered in soil along the Luxembourg border. Three thousand year old Welsh soil dug from the deepest of pits and pulverized: deep underground ground ground. How the genetic information was found and traced to him was uninteresting, but the question was – how did his DNA get in soil not seen by any living thing for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years?

Everyone else ran screaming out of the room. Which room? If that was Ddwwchllyyff, she thought, then this must be...Everyone else ran back into the room and sat down. It wouldn’t do to miss the denouement. Anyone who did would be buried alive in the great subsidence or drowned. ‘Nobody cares about D&A!’ she shared. ‘We don’t even know what it is! Do we?’ She looked menacingly at the others.

Wolfcastle looked menaced for a moment, but the presence of so many other assassins looking equally menacingly at everyone else was reassuring. Now someone would kill someone and he wouldn’t have to admit he didn’t know what D’ya’neigh was. Some product enhancer, he supposed. ‘Why don’t you send it down to the boffins in the basement? We’ve still a few good chaps left, despite everything. Miss Casselberry was down there not long ago herself. If anyone can solve your mystery, it’s those lads.’

Ddwwchllyff quickly averted his face. Boffins? He tried not to laugh in his very old friend’s face.

‘The basement?’ intercepted Miss Casselberry. ‘There’s nothing down there but puffins.’

‘I thought you said-’

‘Puffins. I don’t know what boffins are but if they can’t swim they’d better not be in the basement.’

‘I’m sure boffins can swim.’ Wolfcastle, stiffly. ‘Now give me the D’ya’neigh, I’ll toss it down to them.’ Reluctantly his young inventor friend unzipped the dollsized briefcase and withdrew a dollsized mat of fur, ruglike in aspect. The shrunken toupee or dollsized frightwig or minuscule Schnauzer was dropped unceremoniously out the Revolving Window‚. It crawled back in moments later, unnoticed by the partyers. For partying they were! It was all over! They would be saved on top of the Largest Hill – just as was hastily foretold in the hoary canine myths.

‘It might only be half true, of course,’ Rhoda smiled, ‘I’d better have another..’

‘Make it a double,’ Sunny winked at her.

‘Perhaps I will.’ She did have a little time, after all.

‘If only we had a bartender.’

‘Your wish is my command’ said Ddwwchllyff’s dioxyribonucleic acid; but only Professor Erm heard it.

‘Uncle Wong! Where did you--?’

‘Come from?’ Shanghai originally.’

‘-- get that wig,’ Professor Erm completed his thought, snatched the hairy swatch off the crimepin’s head and swallowed it. Hmm.. a little slow-acting, but not bad...

Somewhere, a dog barfed on the rooftop next door. Bad dog!