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I suddenly felt an illness creeping up on me unawares. When I noticed the first jolt, a question went through my head as to the nature of the illness. One from within or out? The next thing that went through my head, a split second later, was an exocet missile of a brain tumour.
"You don't look at all well, ducks," said a little old lady who sat knitting near me in the pub. I was a local and, being in my usual seat underneath the moose-head trophy on the wall, everybody knew who I was.
"God, whatever's the matter with Mick?" said one.
'Too much of the bent arm, I dare say," said another.
"Blimey, Mick's gone all peculiar, and, look, the top of his head has blown off," said yet another, with a degree of surprise in his voice.
The pub landlord had by now left his favourite spot behind the bar where the optics gleamed and most of the money changed hands. He scowled at the mess on the carpet. Apparently it was quite all right to litter his precious carpet with beer-swill and dog-ends, but my headful of slime was unacceptable.
"Clear that up, Mick!" he snorted.
I could not budge an inch and stared sightlessly straight through the landlord as if he were dead. The pub was pulled down not long afterwards, to make room for St Paul's Cathedral - the one which they describe in the history books. My son's examination course left an opening for its construction sometime between 1650 and 1712, in case it later became a catalyst in the onrush of reality. But as it didn't, my son, like everyone else, was unaware of the Cathedral's existence until at least another window of opportunity presented itself on the night of the Millennial Lottery. I told him that St Paul's Cathedral was an epitaph to my book, a book that died even before I wrote it - as if one existence could salute another non-existence across the intervening realities.
"Why didn't you write your book, Dad?" he asked me.
"Because I had my head blown off in the First World War."
The landlord returned behind the bar, smirking as he pulled pints watered down with the produce of his own benders. The dear little old lady was gathering up what looked like a curdled cat's cradle of an exploded mind and she forthwith proceeded to stir it into a dome shape with her needles. My son sat grinning in the customary place under the moose-head. So, everybody thought it must be me. Meanwhile, Mick was building clouds.
(Published 'End of the Millennium' 1997)
I imagined the ghost. This was because I knew such phenomena did not really exist - so what else could it be but a flip of my own mind, or a flick of the light on its last legs ahead of darkness, or a flap of a weathered window-shutter, or the flop of a dropped dressing-gown, a fleck of reflection, a flippety-gibbet that deserved less credence than a dream?
But, then, when my colleagues at work started small-talking about the ghost in my house, without me having breathed a word to them about it - in fact becoming a topic of conversation taken more for granted than that of the weather - I began to have my doubts. Not that doubt is tantamount to belief. But doubt is the next worst thing, surely.
So, I began to doubt the ghost, rather than imagine it was a freak of my mind. Its existence wavered upon the edge of tangibility, true. But it was still something I locked away in the depths of silent sleep, come the fullness of night. My dreams were full of routine matters, such as the ledger at work and colleagues who spoke as if they knew me - and a boss who did. Call him God, if you like.
Then I gradually grew aware of matters that most human beings never encounter. One was indeed the ghost. A real one, this time. No doubt about that. I had died in my sleep, you see. It was only natural. I could not claw my way out, past the dragging fingers of jealous colleagues. But a wisp of me managed it. A mere wisp. Call it the ghost, as I say. The nearest you will come to believing. The nearest to proving the old Cartesian maxim: "I doubt, therefore I am." Or was it a flip of someone else's mind, or simply an unpredictable fluke of the weather?
(Published 'Wearwolf' 1994)
(Dedicated to Rachel Mildeyes who stayed in the ladies only carriage forever.)
Each morning, Michael had to change at Clapham Junction for Victoria.
It was well known that Victoria had been the last station to welcome steam trains into their platforms, when all the other terminals worth their salt had banned them, following the influx of diesel and electric. But Michael knew that there was still a station at least somewhere which allowed in steam trains at the dead of night, so that they could shunt quietly to their heart's content . . . as long as they kept their funnel-smoke to a minimum, gagged their hissing, deepened their whistles and coupled on tiptoes.
Day-dreaming can be a disease. Michael tried to shake it off as he crossed from platform to platform. But, then, the tannoys would take up their cries, in a language far beyond the comprehension of the common-or-garden commuter.
It often sounded like:
"OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L - EE'H YOG SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO!"
Or worse.
Michael seemed to be the only one to understand the messages; the others, clasping their cases and umbrellas for grim life, followed him across the foot-bridge so that they could catch the correct train. And it always came in disguise: bearing the strange Network South logo and, of all things, sliding doors, as if it were an underground train! Where were the leather tongues on the windows? The corridors? The third class carriages? The green sticker denoting the ladies only carriage? And where was the steam billowing into his face like curdling mists of coal-dust becoming forgotten fulsome night?
Day-dreaming again? He shrugged, stepped off the platform and settled into the smoking section. Except the train was only just arriving, and his bones would soon crunch upon the long teeth of the silver runners and upon the brown gums of the sleepers, his flesh to bed red between.
He heard the tannoy:
"This is Clapham Junction, This is Clapham Junction, Gateway to the North, This train is for Victoria own-le..." And so on, interminably, becoming shriller and shriller.
Pity none of the words made sense to him. So, having abandoned day-dreaming for good (or ill), he shrugged with a shudder and travelled on to his office job further north.
Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1992
He stored up words for future use. Relished insults aimed at himself. Nurtured slips of the tongue. Incubated resentments in the actual shape of glib sound-bites.
And then, at the optimum moment, he would tighten the key and take careful aim at the unsuspecting victim, a victim who, more often than not, had earlier acted as the very source of the barb's power.
Until, one day, there was a ricochet.
And the poisoned dart he had himself blowpiped did pierce his vocal screen-bytes with a bit of his own viral medicine.
Published 'Braquemard' 1996
"Nothing to suck."
The voice filled the room, despite being no more than an infant's - or so it seemed. The darkness hid the true identity. In fact, he imagined he was dreaming. Maybe he dreamed he was imagining. Whatever the case, he slapped his head back into the pillow as if that were the secret of sleep.
"I can't suck straight."
This time, a mistake was impossible. He sat propped against the headboard, listening with more than half an ear. In fact, even his heart had heard - beating twenty to the dozen, as it was. Yet the lungs were quiet, daring not to disrupt any possibility of silence - for which their owner yearned - with the faux pas of breath.
If only an untimely dawn would now soak the curtains in a spillage of orange light. He might have excused this mistake in the course of nature, in order to camouflage an even greater and more frightful hitch such as the voice which spoke of sucking as well as sounding as if the words themselves were syphonned up from a sump that had sucking as its second nature.
He could have felt for the light switch as second best. But manmade illumination was far from dependable. He did not know that. There was little else, however, in the midst of night. Even if the lamp broke into that yellow incontinence which was its shade's habit of casting after the dull click of the switch, it owed him nothing and, furthermore, felt no need to have truck with a ghost. He had sensed many such facts following the arrival in his new home. In any case, the ghost (or whatever it was) might be a chameleon and only the changing hues of daylight could throw up any figment of its presence...
He had no purchase on such considerations. He dabbed at the switch in his side and recognised the dull pin-click with a sigh.
"And now my teeth are cast crooked."
There, etched against the wallpaper, were two swelling tusks of black light, snagged one upon the other.
Silence was deeper than the empty space that quickly filled with a crumpled edge of cot-blanket.
Only with a blotted moon, of course, and the least tenable permutation of nature's secondary quirks, could vampires strut and stalk - freshly born from teething babies such as him.
Published 'Roisin Dubh' 1994
I must tell you of the time that I first came to the Clockhouse Mount - a year last Spring, I think it was, friend. Do you know the place? Yes, it's in the outer South London suberbs, in Surrey really, but you have to climb along a very long hill out of Cullesdon and when you get there, you see the Green, fronting a run-down parade of shops and, further over, the "Pail of Water". Mrs. Dobb, the landlady of the Pail, she knows all the gossip of the Mount. About the Sawdusts of Number 4 Rich Land: Jackie Sawdust once blew his nose, you know, in public view, he blew it so hard that he just stared into his handkerchief not knowing it was his brain wriggling there, he stared just a few moments, yep, before he dropped down dead. About the Clerkes of Long Land: their younger son was levanted by the Surrey press gangs for labour in far off spice fields. About the losers and the winners of the terrible family feuds. About this and about that...
There is a golf-course on one side, some other cul-de-sacs leading to small-holdings and desolate fields of staring horses, tangled woods and deadfalls, overgrown bomb-holes and the rusty discards of shortly forgotten squabbles. You know, they say that the clouds swag and belly heavier over the council roofs of Clockhouse Mount... and, as I plodded up, that day, in the hope of my first homely tankard at the Pail, large drops spattered from a previously clear sky. Even at noon, dusk was gathering itself and some laggard golfers were standing along the side of the road holding their clubs like spears, making funny faces beneath their tartan berets and wriggling their chequered trousers as if in some crazy fashion show. They would soon be off, no doubt, before the light had finally disappeared.
I looked across at the downbeat parade and saw that the shops had shut, not for lunch as I had thought, but because I, a stranger, had loomed up from Cullesdon and they feared what they considered to be my unwholesome custom. I shivered for had the Pail, too, locked its lounge and saloon doors? The locals were inside, apparently persuading Mrs. Dobb to let them have further illicit flagons of the home-made brew, as I forced an entry through an unoiled latch-door. The bobbled heads looked up, scowls muttering across their faces, and one signalled for me to sheer off.
"Dear Sackalive!" cried Mrs. Dobb, from behind the bar, a friendlier aspect indeed appearing to fleet across her countenance. "I didn't think you'd make it".
"By Cock!" I replied, banging my feet on the floor, "That was a long walk up from the town."
Meantime the locals gathered closer to me and one even fingered my turn-ups in some strange rite of inspection. I looked at the posters and the customary wall-scrawl, to see if this was indeed the day of the darts match that I had been promised. But, no - imagine my despondency, when I saw incomprehensible messages pertaining to a Wicca Meet, destined for that very night ... and further bills bearing such things I cannot now spell - Cuthloo, Shib-Shubbing in the snug, Yogger-Nogging in the saloon and, what was it, an outing at the weekend to the Goat of a Thousand Young for a turdle-eating competition.
I skipped pretty niftily from the pub, for, as they say, you shouldn't turn a heavy stone if something's moving it from underneath.
I ran ... but it was difficult, for what I had thought originally to be rain was in fact now great bulbs of bursting liquid cascading from, not clouds, but shifting, floating monsters in the sky. They extended and retracted, in turn, long arms of blackness, from several interlocked central bodies and, if I were religious, the nearest I could get to describing them would be a hell's brood, an overnourished confluxion of sky and foxflesh betokening the fall of old disgraced gods ... and several smaller versions were creeping over the brims of council roofs...
I ran ... but golfers and pub locals surrounded me. One, of the name Tokkmaster Clerke, as he later told me, wielded a massive rutted file, its frightful crenellations glinting in the flashing of the wings in the sky. I was held fast by one whose nose dripped as Tokkmaster moved the file across my skull. At first, my hair fell away in lumps and dropped to the ground, followed by my skin. He grated it up and down, scratched, sawed, and ground. I could feel the hideous vibrations, reverberations stunning and splitting my head. My skull scrunched. My teeth were on edge, as the grating continued, as he honed my bone. The file stropped and serrated my pure white skull. It ground and rasped. Against the grain. Gashed and scored. Etched and furrowed. Rutted. Fretted and chafed. Scrubbed and gnawed. Eroded and Kneaded.......
* * * *
I ill recall must of that but I live now with the Sawdusts of Clockhouse Mount, and they call me Jackie... They make me worship the great old gods of the Surrey Badlands and the Southern Mysteries... The top of my head is like the skin of cold stew, so I now always have to wear a hat: Mrs. Dobb made it, kindly, out of vinegar & brown paper... and the filing Clerke, he says he's my pal now.
Published 'Dagon' 1987
He woke with a start, scribbled a few notes from his dream. He had been sitting on a hillside, the climb to which had been through steep woodland, at the bottom of which he had left his children in the park, playing on the witch's hat, in the care of someone he could recall neither in the dream nor now. He watched the gliders taking off and landing on a raised airstrip across the valley. Each soared into the sky like an angel in splints, crested the thermals, as it dropped the winch line and circled above the model town in the valley.
His note. did not attempt to cover the precise nature of the town below him nor the whys and wherefores of the before/after of the precise moment in dream time. But, in writing the notes at all (which he often did after dreams he at least recalled having, if not their actual content), new visions came, ideas for future dreams and undercurrents of old ones that would otherwise have never seen the light of the day.
The sky soon filled with the gliders, the sunlight sparkling off their wings like stars on a clear night. He was horrified to see that two had collided and cartwheeled down.
That's when he woke, or so the notes said, when he read them that night before retiring. He was worried about the children he had apparently left unattended in the park. His own children were too old to be concerned about them in such a way. But he had a sneaking feeling that those in his dream were much younger.
He looked across at his wife who was knitting in front of the gas fire. He was horrified. It was not his wife at all. He looked down at his notes for clarification - for comfort - for some clue as to whether he was now embroiled in a new dream without the prior warning of going to bed and falling asleep.
The woman seemed to be knitting her own brain as it coiled from her revolving ear as if from a spindle. The white glistening wormthread was still clotted with her headblood. The finished product flowed over her lap and became the white grid of the gas fire which glowed ever upward nearer to its source. She smiled and said: "Time for bed, George."
His name, was it George? He could not even remember. The notes he had just been writing were now just marks on the paper in a language too unwieldy for translation.
A paper aeroplane flew past his nose, obviously constructed and launched by the creature with the brain knitting who was now staring imbecilically with a smile on quivering lips.
It flew into the next dream, where he was still sitting on the familiar hillside. He picked it up and read its message: "Your children have broken backs - unless you hurry down." Some gliders still hung in the sky, hovering like humming dragons. They were so close, he could actually see the dream aviators, smiling, waving - at him.
The distant airstrip bore the glistening groundling craft, and men as small as insects darted hither and thither, busy rewinding the various winches. An arc of a new moon rose early above this scene of activity.
George felt he must really hurry down to the park - he had ignored the message on the paper dart for at least half an hour.
But he woke before he could start off on the wooded slope - which he was suddenly desperate to scale down; for he feared that those he most loved in the real world were in the direst danger.
The utter frustration of waking from a dream too early...
The sky was below, the ground was above and he soared speedily towards two small children being weighed on a see-saw by a strange woman in a red felt hat.
Published 'Skeleton Crew' 1988
The sky hung in warm wet blankets. Tim Overdale wiped threads at sweat from his hair-line, as he turned off the car's engine. He had gratuitously steered into a lay-by off the A426, not to get his bearings so much but to assure himself that the air pressure had not dropped - he had an obsession with the tyres: a deep dread of blow-out or unexpected seepage of their firmness.
Tim turned over the cassette and pushed it back into the slot on the dashboard. He began to listen as the static hiss became music, a Stabat Mater by a composer he had forgotten. Fumbling for the case, he forced himself to read his own untidy handwriting., finding that it was by Dvorak.
"Four-Jack," he whispered to himself.
Time enough to test the wheels later; he was early for his appointment anyway.
He grabbed hold of the Guardian purchased earlier in a motorway service station. Watford Gap, he seemed to remember: or had it been Toddington? Probably neither.
There was some news in the paper that the American president made all his decisions in the light (or rather, thought Tim, the dark) of Astrology. Something. to do with the alignment of planets determining whether he should venture out of the White House or not. Wonder what the man on the other side of the world thought of that, having summit meetings dependent on the cusp of Uranus!
Bored, Tim let his eyes wander: he looked out of the car window at a blurred factory chimney reaching. up into the sticky grey of the sky. Smoke started to belch from it, as if it knew it was being watched...
A sharp tap on the rear window made Tim jump - he swivelled around in his seat to see a woman staring in at him. She was smiling at him, but there was more than a hint of sadness in her eyes. He got out.
"Yes? Can I help you?"
She was in her mid to late twenties, dressed in a uniform of white blouse and navy-blue pleated shirt that came to just below the knees. Her hair was windswept, or perhaps just untidy, in view of the lack of' wind, thought Tim.
A flicker of recognition lit a dim memory in his mind - only to be snuffed out as she replied.
"I wanted to tell you that one of' your tyres is flat." Her voice was husky, as if she was suffering from a sore throat, or perhaps from trying to reach him over the loud music. She pointed to the rear nearside wheel.
Tim cursed. His immediate thought was to the spare in the boot, would that be flat too? He had not checked it for at least two days. "Thank you..."
He did not question the arrival of the woman, next to the middle of nowhere as they were. The only sign of life nearby was the factory beyond the roadside field that was speckled unnaturally bright. yellow in the gloom.
"You have a spare, don't you?"
"Yes, I think so... Don't let me keep you, I can manage. Thanks again, I might have done some damage If I'd driven off with that thing...." He pointed to the ugly rupture, the flesh of the tread splayed out on each side of the hub. Cringing, he knelt to examine the damage, inserting his finger into the various holes. This was no ordinary puncture - the whole thing had been flayed.
"Nasty business." The voice was above him.
Tim looked up. She was a peculiarly attractive woman; the outline of her bra showed vaguely through the sheeny blouse in the steel light. Her face was round, a bit puddingy perhaps, but the well-defined curves of' the lips and the spearmint eyes...
Tim wondered why he was studying her to such a degree. He had more than enough trouble on his hands now to be spending time sizing up a potential pick-up. Years ago, he was always on the look-out for female hitch-hikers. But now, what with aids... He was older too, more mature, less over-sexed, less eager. Still, his hands flexed involuntarily.
"You sure I can't help?" The words seemed to breathe into his ear.
"No - no, thanks all the same. It's a simple matter these days. Jacks are much easier to handle..."
Hearing the faint strains of music still coming from inside the car, he stood up to go and switch it off.
"I'll do it." As if reading his mind, she opened the driver's door and disengaged the cassette.
It was strange how quiet it was out here. The sky had even started to brighten up, the drizzle relenting just before he had climbed out of the car. The heat was still oppressive, damping down any sound, including the footsteps as they negotiated around each other. She was, he thought, trying to get in the way.
"You know we were meant to meet here today."
Squatting by the blow-out, Tim stared up at her, at a loss for words. What could you say to a statement like that. So he ignored it.
He went to find the jack in the boot.
The afternoon was far brighter, for the sun had burnt off the morning mists. Tim's white car was still in the lay-by. The yellow field, despite the sunshine, was no brighter, it seemed, than it had been in the morning. The colour was true. You no longer needed to study the sky to see the factory chimney - it was just plain there and not worth the notice. The odd cars that pounded along the road were merely reminders of other human beings.
Tim had the driver's seat leaning right back. A gluey heat seeped down his face, so that he could hardly see through the sticky eyelids or breathe out of the bubbling nostrils. A twitching lizard's tail peeped from between his lips.
Music played. He had not put it on, he was sure, for he did not like jazz: a husky, bluesy voice, a mix of Elkie Brooks, Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin. He could not easily decipher the words, for his ears were fast waxing up with yellowing brain...
His lower parts stank: he could not smell them, of course.
Tim suddenly realised something he had known all along - he had seen that woman before today: she had once been a hitch-hiker, unlucky enough to get the younger Tim Overdale as a lift.
The car slowly sank to its chassis.
Yes, it must have been Toddington...
***
Published 'Flickers 'n Frames' 1990
As Therm thumbed his way towards the meanderable lanes of deepest Surrey, he maintained a picture in his mind's iritic eye of his old stamping-ground: the lamentable one-way gutters and blind alleys around St. Paul's Cathedral. He knew a dosser had to do what a dosser had to do - and that was probably die as soon as possible, both to rid himself of the world and vice versa. But death was never the easiest way out.
Of course, he could've used the services of another dosser called Jack who wielded knives in the dark like shooting stars just for the hell of it - but Therm decided he could think of better deaths than at the business end of one of those. Furthermore, he rather resented popping his cork beside some damnable City Bank. He wanted to taste sweet countryside, not only upon the pan-handle of his tongue but also with the very ends of his teeth. Only the twittering birds would suffice, he deemed, to attend his swansong, those in the beck-dripping woods further south. Not that he thought with such poetical turns of phrase and there was some doubt whether his mind generated such ill-cut gems of English prose, in any event, since he felt a larger than life force acting upon his mind - one that not only controlled his destiny like a Christian god so out of control it had forgotten about the free will of its flock, but one that also loved and hated him, in equal measures, more than any god of any religion ever could.
The lorry driver chuckled. She glanced at the hitch-hiker who was a mass of melted mutter in the passenger seat. She had never given lifts to thumbers like Therm before, so she couldn't comprehend why this old toothy toper of a tramp had managed to halt a reluctant juggernaut on the hard shoulder and wheedle his way into the cab for a lift to Ruffet Wood (where its route didn't lie, anyway). So, all she could do was chuckle: humour being the only cure for life's absurdity that humankind could ever find. The tall lights gradually faded from the sides of the road, whilst she steered between them, Therm thought, as if she were on a fairground ride. Gradually, humps of indistinct trees blackened the night around - leaving only hazy fleets of stars in the narrow inky channel above.
"Where do you want putting off, exactly?"
Therm thought her voice to be saying something quite different, since he replied: "Yes, I love you, too". And the lorry plummetted headlong into a massive tree which seemed to be planted smack in the middle of the carriageway, causing the trailer to jack-knife violently - rattling the bodies inside the cab, floppy dice in the game of Fate - and then tinning them like pig spam within a blood sump. Evidently, the Christian god hated one of them more than he loved the other. And there was very little poetry in that, other than the fact that the two iron-clad corpses of Therm and the lorry driver were discovered hand in hand by the cutting crew.
In a fleeting after-life, Therm was a woman, one without his teeth. The end of the world came suddenly, as the sun fell from the sky (faster than gravity could dictate) becoming smaller all the time, crunching towns in the near distance as it finally came to rest.
Once an undead always an undead - and Therm quickly regained his body's pigsweat. The most disturbing part was an after-life where he was female. The teeth didn't matter so much. He clutched at himself below the bedcovers in a sudden irrational fear which the resumption of reality had brought with it. Somewhat relieved, but further disturbed by the fact that he had actually seemed to need such relief, he turned over on his side to find his wife staring at him, with Jack the Cutter's luminous eyes. Her two hands each had a knife that looked like an elephant tusk.
Then he glimpsed a real after-life one which would eventually become his wife's. A Christian heaven was meant to be a home from home, wasn't it? How many times did they want telling? Her son had spilled all the cornflakes over the formica table. *And* her husband had done his favourite trick of making only one cup of tea - for himself.
"I didn't think you were getting up yet," he claimed.
"You could've brought one up, then," Therm replied in the shrill voice of his wife.
"Good job I didn't, as you're already up."
There was no winning of arguments with a pig, especially a man's man such as Therm's husband who had become a fire-officer by means of countless acts of bravery. Therm shrugged and turned her attention back to her son the piglet whose rummaging in his satchel finally gave birth to yesterday's sandwiches which he said he couldn't eat because they had too much blood inside. She was halfway through spreading a thin plasma extract on a new set, as if she were priming the surface for another generous smoothed-out dollop of fresh blood, in turn reminding her of the skidmarks on the underpants with which she was presented every other day by husband and son alike. She could not help thinking she was mad - because a mind in after-life automatically imported its own disbelief.
The house was dead quiet. Therm's husband and son had both gone. There was staccato twiddling with the wireless. Housewives' Choice was announced this week by one of her particular favourite disc-jockeys. What was his name? She couldn't get the station. The dial she twirled fine-tuned nothing but high-pitched whistles or a voice that called itself Jack. She wound herself up into a frenzy. Tying a scarf around her head in that pixied way most women did in the fifties and sixties, Therm released the heavy overcoat from the broom cupboard and bustled with it into the street. The sky was pink like the underbelly of a pig, with an aureole of teats around a faint white splodge where the moon had once been.
Organic spaceships. Unidentified Fixed Objects in the sky, sprinkler systems for a world about to catch fire. The words buzzed in Therm's head as if her bee brain had broken loose. She was Queen for a day. Nobody else about. She wandered the empty streets, weaving between the ill-parked cars, feeling herself undeserving of the senile dementia to which she had been abandoned by the head-lease dreamer. She was the tenant in a fleshy bivouac which could be sub-let no further down the scale of reality. She almost wished her two menfolk could return. At least, they presented some form of sanity, even if in the shape of teeth-tusks. The pink in the sky turned slowly black...
Therm woke from every conceivable after-life, including the one where he actually had a wife with his own name. Dressed in a cardboard suit, he levered himself over beneath the cold dark dripping arches. In the near distance sat the hunched silhouette of St Paul's Cathedral. He was alone in the whole world, neither demented nor sane. That was the worst thing of all. He tried to get back to sleep and retrieve some of the feminine wherewithal that he seemed to have in the after-life. There had been a Charles Lamb story about how civilisation invented roast pork. Such stories were almost sufficient to warm the cockles of his heart, like memories of his sandwich-making mother. He once loved the cold waking he had of it. The songs on the wireless still buzzing in his head. Would sleep never return? Could flesh be made palatable by freezing? Existence was like being encased in sheet iron which moved with the body, unfelt for most of the time. He poisefd his two protruding teeth upon the engorged arteries in his wrist. The yellow street-light flickered out, making it easier to sleep - and to welcome the cutting crew that rescued the undead from life itself.
Blacked up ready for the night, the Devil sat in his dressing-room, staring mindlessly into the mirror. His pointed face was ringed with flickering coloured light bulbs, so he could not fail to fathom his own eyes. They were staring so hard it seemed as if he were playing a make-or-break game with himself: the last to blink would explode.
Then, he plumbed such a long way, he saw a thought, an idea, a concept, a caprice, one which he did *not* want to see. Deep deep down in the dungeons of his soul where the funnel of his sight ended - deeper indeed than Hell itself - was a doubt. And never had the Devil doubted before. This doubt gnawed at his vitals and tempted him to believe that he was not the Devil at all, but a dosser called Therm: nothing but a wine-bibbing tosspot who spoke to himself in nonsensical rhyming couplets, to blot out the nagging loneliness in his heart....
There came a sharp rapping at the door: "Five minutes!" The voice was deep but heavenly sweet.
The Devil fled back up towards his sight, tussling through the blubbery membranes and red threadworms which surrounded the eyeballs. He would soon be on - if "on" is a word sufficiently weighty to convey the performance he was about to undergo, with no rehearsal, no other actors, no props, no stage to speak of, no audience....
Therm woke briefly from an undead's unnatural sleep. He sat up straight in the darkness, startling the other cardboard-suited dossers who had been lightly dozing nearby under the midnight moon. But now the moon was nothing more than an artist's careless smudge. This was because, upon the blackdrop of the sky, a circle of flashing fairy lights slowly revolved as they grew bigger or came closer.
"Blimey, they're piggin' spaceships!" muttered Therm who proceeded to squeeze his eyes shut tight like a child making pretend he was sleeping. Perhaps dreaming of tin-openers again. Or an after-life in Hell.
There was a raucous orchestra tuning up in the pit. Tap-dancing with cloven hooves was a deafening act to under-perform. So, he tip-clodded in, flowing mane coiffured by Hell's finest stylists, skewed antler-horn painted out against the scenery, forked tongue being tasted by its own guardian teeth. His mascara eyes were blinded by the searing twirling spotlights from above the seats in the gods. His innards felt like lolloping eels still alive, but he jabbed away desultorily with his furry hind-limbs. As the spots faded, he spied a spare pair of sparkles in the audience - like eyes on spikes. And Therm the vampire, thankfully, was consumed by a sleep like delicious death - too numb even to feel Jack the Cutter's preparing hands ... except from inside such hands like fingers in gloves.
Published 'Stygian Articles' 1996
The bookshelves were stacked with cassette tapes. Earfuls of them.
The body must have been left lying there for ages, since the high stench had literally sprayed from the letter-box into a kid's prying face, one who was delivering a free newspaper, despite the sign on the garden gate expressly forbidding such delivery.
When I was finally alerted, as head of paupers' funerals in the local authority, the police work had been carried out. They had decided that the dead body had been left lying for some weeks, if a successful suicide could be blamed for such dilatoriness - which I doubted. Still, a dead body has got broad shoulders, in more senses than one - bones tending to spread out with the grain of decay. There was a desultory investigation by the autopsy man, where, on peering over his shoulder, I saw that there was very little differentiation between the congealed blood and the flesh proper.
There being no family to pick over the bones, as it were, I had my beady eye on the cassette tapes. From a cursory glance of the scrawled labels on the narrow side of each unpliable cuboid, the dead body had been a great lover of classical music. He and I had at least that in common. Even, the autopsy man, a philistine at the best of times, whistled with some bemused amazement, claiming that he didn't mind "a bit of that philharmonic stuff like that big fat geezer who sung the World Cup theme tune and, yes, of course, Mantovani".
"Mantovani?" I pretended I was not old enough to remember.
"Yes, Mantovani. Haven't you heard his 'Charmaine'? And, who else? Semprini. He played nice stuff on the piano. Geraldo. I reckon a lot of that dance music is even better than some philharmonic stuff."
The autopsy man did a mock jig round the dead body's living-room, as if reliving a romance of his youth when he danced the night away with his loved one to the sounds of some godawful Max Jaffa palm court rave or a Victor Sylvester jamming session!
With him thus preoccupied, I was further scrutinising the cassettes. A lot of classy sounds. Ranging from Monteverdi to Boulez. All the Bartok string quartets (my favourite). Tippett. Mahler. Schoenberg. And some composers even I had never encountered before. Hugh Wood. Ruders. Glass. Steve Reich. Havergal Brian. The Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead?
They weren't particularly classical. Weren't they a flower power pop group from the late sixties? I seemed to remember a friend of mine (in his forties, now) saying they were the best thing since sliced bread. And why sliced bread was such a good thing to be the best thing since ... well, I had never, till today, questioned.
Meanwhile, the autopsy man was acting turvy.
He had grabbed a cushion and was waltzing it around the room.
No, I was wrong, because I couldn't believe my eyes.
The cushion was not a cushion at all. It only looked like a cushion. In truth, it was a part of the dead body's body, lace-trimmed with a tripe-like fatty gristle, tinged pink. Goodness knows what he would have done if he had real music to jab his legs to. Most of it was in his head. Yet, I suddenly heard the imperceptible 'it is, it is, it is' sound that one often hears from others' personal hi-fi sets: an irritating habit of live bodies when they travel on trains these days. But, no, the autopsy man's ears did not wield such a spider-headclamp...
Unnoticed by both of us (and presumably likewise by the policemen), the dead body's head possessed a sprung device consisting of a shiny black half-hoop embedded in the white skull bone like a cinemascopic rodent ulcer trying, not to escape, but to enter a sinking ship - each extension of the hoop bearing a sanitary lug-pad stained with yellow wax. The interminable it-is emanated thence.
We then heard the sound of something coming through the letter box. No doubt this month's 'Good Music Guide', but we had scrammed through the back way, without bothering to investigate. Paupers' funeral arrangements are not always such avant garde affairs, I hasten to add. Yet, sometimes, paupers kindly end up burying themselves, as eventually turned out to be the case with today's stiff. Saves on council money. A lot to be said for it. Anyway, my friend the autopsy-turvy man - I've managed to get him into Stockhausen and Frank Zappa, but only after I promised to accompany him to a Richard Clayderman gig next week. He'll be doing our packed lunch.
Published 'Sivullinen' 1994
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