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My name is Matthew Shakewell and I nearly died yesterday.
I shall try to relate as closely as I can my experience, but please keep your hand on your heart and read this story in the clear light of day...for you may die of fright, as I so very nearly did. Please take care, make sure my words are not those of a mad man or one who wants to frighten you gratuitously; make sure you do not put too much credit in their meaning as appreciation of their truth could have damnable effect on the mild-mannered or the nervous...but, as I write this, I genuinely believe each word I am about to devote to paper.
So much for the warning, now for the facts.
***
I snuggled into the warmth of the carriage as the train churned through acre upon acre of English countryside. It was impossible to view the trees and village stations we must have passed through, for the night enshrined everything; so the most sensible thing to do was to try and sleep until the time for arrival at my destination, where my uncle would be waiting to greet me.
I slept for how long and with what vague dreams? Nebulous vistas of strange dimensional cities intruded, warped visages staring and tentacles clutching, wet lips and things sucking near. I awoke to the carriage, the formless darkness sliding away past me and an old man snoring in the corner. I was quite shaken by my dreams as the memory of them lingered incoherently. But I soon realized on looking at my timepiece that I should have arrived at my destination about an hour before!
It was then that I comprehended I had not seen one thing from the carriage window. True, I was travelling through a comparatively uninhabited part of England, but this was decidedly peculiar; even though there were no stars nor moon, I should have seen the distant glow of some big town or the lonesome light of a spinster's cottage. But absolutely nothing could I see, presumably on acoount of the unusual blackness of the night through which I was speeding in a corridorless train. Might it be fog?
I relaxed back into the seat and viewed my sleeping companion. The fog would explain the lateness of the train, but what about its apparent speed?
I was convinced the train was traveling at a phenomenal speed, but it was now two hours overdue--without precedence on that line. I resolved to wake my companion and I stepped over to shake him. What curled from the hood of the duffel coat was an evilly scarred face and, on unwinding, gave me an imbecilic smile: a moon-face topped by a schoolboy's cap, giggling in the depth of its rasping throat.
"Mutation" is a word too medical, too clinical, as what I saw was essentially unwholesome; nothing created by a mother on this world, but fashioned far away in dim lands beyond the galaxy we know. The transfiguration took me completely by surprise as, before my eyes, the monstrosity literally dissolved and dripping from the brown duffel coat was a green, sticky slime, forming a viscid puddle on the swaying floor.
It held all the smells which disgust man throughout the world and others completely new to his nose, recalling my dream vistas and certain other things I could not quite place.
My first thought was to pull the communication cord, but I felt the train was slowing down--presumably my destination had been reached. My mind was a maelstrom as the train drew to a halt. On jumping to the platform, I realized it was not my intended destination, but a strange station ... and the nightmare train was drawing out, leaving me bewildered and valiseless. Amid the chaos of my mind, I knew I had to find a porter and share the horror I with him.
Empty tins and scraps of paper scuttled along the deserted platform, driven by the night wind. So, no fog! Visibility was excellent, but it still puzzled me why I could not see the moon nor the stars. I shouted for assistance, but none came: a forsaken station, forgotten by all who used to work there, those who, under a happy sun, waved green flags and blew whistles, carted parcels and drank tea. Dazed, I shuffled along the cluttered platform towards the station-house, sithouetted against the ceiling of the sky, ominous and spectral.
I came to a turnstile and, not surprisingly, it was enlaced with choking cobwebs, twining through the bars. The only exit I could see was through there, and so I pulled myself together to cut a path through its creeping entropy. As I entered, an over-nourished spider skittered to its lair. I wish to God I had not looked to the left into the ticket-collector's cab, for here was not a deserted seat, but the ticket collector himself sitting, not as he used to be, but a decaying skeleton-creature with a puncher in the bones of a hand. A plump worm coiled through his skewered ribs ... and I screamed ... ran from that blasphemous railway station...
...into avenues of ill-lit horror, through lines of trees, black and twisted against the blacker sky, along country roads twining between untended hedgerows ... until exhaustion put paid to my progress ... I saw the House; it rose out of the darkness, looming forbodingly. It was more of a castle than a house, and had two towering wings, pointing and mocking at the sky.
I should not fear its occupants, I told myself--they would probably disperse my fears and show my position on the map - so I plucked up enough courage to walk to the main door. Its massive oaken surface and golden knocker filled me with awe, but I grasped the knocker, pulled it heavily from the wood, and let it drop with a crash echoing throughout the whole house. It was such a loud noise that it startled me and put the fear back. There, I waited for what Fate would bring to the door, waiting, eternally waiting. But no one came. No one deigned to answer my call for help, so I decided to force my way in for shelter, but the door looked too mighty for entrance there. But I was mistaken as a single trial caused the door to swing open with a splitting creak revealing ... only darkness. I coughed as the atmosphere tightened in my chest and I felt for a suitable position to sleep the night out.
It was then that I heard something which I can hear even now inside my head, a funeral moan, harmonically illogical, resonant, deep but also shrill, coming from up above me, approaching down a rickety staircase, a moan carrying at one and the same time the horror of the graveyard, the scream of delight as ghouls ecstatically lift a prutrescible corpse from its resting place, the terror of a lunatic's laugh as he carves his own flesh, and all the pain and panic of the Pit where shapeless elementals vaguely swim in fire, chewing off the heads of the human damned.
After, came a slithering and bumping above me: a thing was moving across the floor and, then, it was squelching down the stairs emitting the long drawn-out moan. The alternate slithering and bumping rode the creaking, teetering stairs, inexorably drawing closer, nearer, faster, down, down, down...
...it seemed as if I were in another world, sucked in by intangible forces to a revelation of the cosmos, a panorama of all time; stars and streaks of light reaching to infinitudes of chaos and cult, ethereal glows and fresh, unmathematical lands. I saw a city with dome-like, square buildings on plains of kaleidoscopic bubbles and, in each bubble, a grotesque gargantuan gargoyle leering at the citizens in the buildings. Those citizens themselves were immaterial, covered by jellified green slime and motivated by an ectoplasm of orange exactly in the middle of its soul-light.
I saw vague ski-runs of blue effulgence stretching for aeons from
the mamnoth, bubbly planet past the barrier of time and space, almost an interpenetration of two universes. I saw an enormous sled skim down the runnels, carrying those unfathomably huge monstrosities of green slime, and it looked as if they were waving and laughing, gobs of jelly forming into limb-strands and mouth-holes where the orange ectoplasm turned into a flickering tongue.
They laughed! They waved! They grew even larger! And on their interuniverse journey, they bred more and more of themselves as they neared a familiar planet...
The vision changed: I was looking at the cities of earth--London, Paris, New York, all empty except for ill-twisted skeletons littering the streets, doing exactly what they were doing when they died. Until the visions faded...
I was still in the House blanketed in darkness. The slithering and bumping grew yet nearer until I could see it!
It was a luminous blob of green pus - looking as if it had plucked itself unceremoniously from the incubating slime of its huge host monster following arrival on Earth. By turns it materialized and dematerialized as it squirmed and hobbled towards me... and I imagined I saw a crease of a wicked smile where the green fat folded and twitched. I screamed and screamed. It touched my foot. It actually touched my foot! My blood curdled as I felt it gradually creep up my body. The breathing gunge greened me over, covering my face like slobbering clay. I was then a gibbering, juddering puppet, insane with disgust, but tittering in ecstasy. I felt it enter my mouth, ooze into my throat, a seething, thickening mess of spitting, burping stew.
I found myself back in the train, watching an old man in a brown duffel coat sleep opposite me ... and out of the window the distant glow of a city.
It must have been a nightmare.
***
The train was three hours late when it arrived at my destination. I feel an impending doom on our world. Nothing to be done. As I lie here in a hospital, the doctors are amazed and disturbed by my body, which is dyed a hideous green in and out.
(Previously e-published)
I forget whether my memory is as good as it used to be.
I once knew how it all ended, but now I despair of remembering it. All I can do is make various attempts at retracking - rat-tracking through the sewers of the past.
I decided to pay another visit to the house where, all those years before, events transpired which mythology has all but subsumed. It is said that the past is a monster waiting to return from the direction of the future, with green-flecked lips and accusing eyes. But, I vowed to ignore such fears and to face out any residual shame from such ill-reported times.
***
Could the house be in the mind, thus not just a simple train journey away? I sat in the shuddering carriage watching the leather window-strap swing from side to side. I itched to tug the red-painted alarm chain in the slot above the warning to passengers not to lean out. The tunnels seemed to be prolific - dark interludes in an otherwise straightforward succession of events. From all available evidence, there was no other passenger in the long corridorless train. But how was I to know for certain either its length or population? Only by disembarking.
I pulled down the arm-rest from its niche in the carriage's uphostlery and leaned my greasy head of hair upon the lightly engraved antimacassar. I desperately wanted to dream, in case reality had played me false and would land me in an incomplete scenario of trackless trains heading for infernal countries of night.
I did dream, I think. I saw visions of others who had dreamed before me - lands where history had come clean and laid bare the bones of its villainous participants - scores of skeletons clacking above the sleepers, like the tail-to-tail bony carapaces of unfreighted flesh - cities of scientists who went mad with religion - plain upon plain of inverted mountains....
I woke with a start. I had not been dreaming at all, only dreaming that I had. The train was pulling into a station, since I saw white boards flashing by with its name written up in clearer and clearer, and yet unattainable, definition.
I had embarked at Paddington, since the house I sought I knew to be in Wales. This principality had not yet been affected by the changing disguise of Europe, unlike the more malleable souls in London such as myself. During my last days in the hospital, I had ranted, it seemed, in my sleep, about the Black Mountains, where Creature Beings perched and spoke in the same Celtic lilt as I, the dreamer. Such Beings, through me, spoke goldenly of a Race older even than themselves which represented the most important group of Beings which Time and Space could ever encompass. And that Older Race, in turn, spoke of even greater Beings who managed to exist, in spite of their intrinsic untenability.
Now, as the train drew to a juddering halt, I, in a moment of misplaced logic, wondered if there were yet other Beings immeasurably greater than even those. And so on, ad infinitum and, perhaps, absurdum, until...
"Until you come to Man himself." A porter, or one I took to be such, had opened the carriage door for me and spoken as if continuing a conversation. In the dim flickering lights of the wind-swept platform, I saw his face possessed an imbecilic cast, topped off with a purple schoolboy's cap far too small for the head. Snot bubbled at one enlarged nostril. After he took my luggage, I saw he had a graveyard lurch, as he headed towards the station house and its waiting-room.
As I followed him, I heard the train shunting behind me, steaming up for the rest of its journey and, fleetingly, I turned to see faces pressed up against the grimy windows of that hissing beast. They were yearning with their eyes and I do not know whom I pitied most, me or them, as they sashed up and down upon the surface of the glass in a strange indulgent rhythm of farewell.
The thing in the cap motioned me towards a gas-fire which warmed one corner of the waiting-room. I rubbed my hands slowly above its glowing grid of orange bone, my mind inevitably drifting from the more natural courses of my thought-patterns. I had come to revisit the house, where I believed I had once been granted a vision of the future - when mankind would amount to nothing in the scheme of things. But now I suspected that the monster of green squelch I had faced then, had traversed the interlocking entropies of unimaginable existence from hyper-spiritual worlds, not as a precursor of Earthly colonisation, but as an emblem of the truth that had prevailed prior to the onset of reality itself. Or, at best, tangential to it.
***
One can learn to grow less afraid of any monster, if it is believed it is real, rather than a concoction of one's own terrified mind. Such is the crux of the matter, since I now realised (in the true sense of that word) I had come to this spot to lay the ghost which I myself once created, and I would achieve this by proving beyond reasonable doubt that it was truly *real*. And still is. Hence this rite of passage across the neat meadows of England...
To staunch the onward tread of worse and worse nightmares that are not nightmares at all, I needed to ascertain that the house contained a true monster of flesh and blood in its own terms, a monster that I could rationalise, encapsulate and even believe explicity when it spoke of forthcoming human doom in its characteristic voice of slimy conviction. Only by believing the truth of its message, could I exorcise and, consequently, nullify its effect.
***
I left the station behind me, as I trudged the once familiar country lane. There was the house. But, no, not yet, just a head of woods, grown together to present a common front to the hurricanes now so prevalent in this part of the world. A seat of green amid the swirling greys.
I was grateful for the warm-up in the waiting-room. How long I had been there listening to the ludicrous tales of the overgrown schoolboy, I could only measure by the growth of beard. He told me that the house was no longer in situ, since it had contracted a teetering, cancerous stairwell and collapsed in upon itself, even before the seasonal hurricanes had become endemic. I could not believe him, of course, because he also told me that I was a different person to the one who had come here all those years ago - not the one who had been frightened by the skeleton of a railway ticket-collector in his platform booth. He looked bemused when I countered by saying that I had not been afraid of the skeleton as such but by the plump worm for which its bones acted as home.
My dismay was great when he said he wanted to come with me to find the house. However, he spotted another train steaming towards the station and he went off to categorise it, number it and wave it through.
I left the woods behind me and, just as one of those lilty Creature Beings cut a screaming wedge of yellow light in the sky's blanket of night, I spotted the house itself, just as I think I remembered it.
But, incredibly, it was careering towards me out of the past, with steam churning from every chimney-stack.
Lights were being flashed on and off in every window, greenness slicking down the glass like net curtains of foullest slime. The monster had actually become the house, rather than remained an inhabitant of it. I put my fists to my ears to dull its pained bellowing - it had originally come to destroy the whole of mankind, but had merely managed to get up a sufficient head of steam to destroy only myself.
I realised I had, since my earliest times, absorbed the vile imaginings that this monster had created. Its metagalactic imprimatur was to mythologise the only tenable beings in existence who happened to be Earth's humans - and I now knew I had rescued the future for humanity. By fixing the monster under the impenetrable varnish of my creativity, I also fixed its dreams of us and made them real. As I sucked its Hell into my brain, the better was our chance to become angel-eyed and paramount - shimmering creatures in our own right with grains of honest phantasy - happily wandering among the gildenspires of the Heavenly City.
***
I am that house, I am that train, I am that ghoulish schoolboy, I am that ideologue weirdmonger...
I made myself actually become that monster. And, without me, you would never have been you, with desires and dreams and fancies and loves, all fit for gods and goddesses. You would have been mere puppet-jerks of Older and Younger Races, with a blood-engorged worm in the night-hutch of the head to replace that human brain of infinite possibilities.
To stop my own head from exploding into a thousand bone-shards, I ask you, please, I beg you, to hold me close - let me nuzzle in your cosy lap, so that such love and care will enable me to bear man's worst nightmares on your behalf.
***
But I look up and see that awful schoolboy's moon-face leering at me imbecilically, the maggot-riddled flesh slowly drooling from the sicker bones within - and my despair at forgetting how it all ended is never-ending.
Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1994
The bedroom was quiet, with the thunderstorm abating. No rain rushing along the gutters. No wind whining through the chinks in floor and roof.
Time to catch up on sleep. Husband and wife snored soundly, giving a wide berth to each other's shape, which was easy because the old-fashioned bed was possibly big enough for three.
Then, unlike the erstwhile weather, came a pinpoint of noise. Quiet at first, like the gentle nose-nose of mice or, at the most, rats, coming from under the floorboards.
Maude sat bolt upright, her every faculty primed. "Wake up, George," she whispered loudly.
George grunted. .
"Wake up, I said," she softly squealed.
The noise was now free-flowing rather than the initial separate sound of tentative snuffling. George eventually sat up and said: "What's up, Gorgeous?"
"Listen to that noise - whatever is it?"
His ears pricked. The moonlight, filtering through the slight gap in the print curtains, picked out the tiny glistening beads of sweat on his upper lip. "Nope - can't hear a damn thing, Gorgeous."
"You must be deaf, George. Just be quiet for once..."
The quietness was fast filling with another sound as if bare bones were rattling inside the chimney breast.
By now, Maude had switched on the bedside lamp with a click that always seemed louder at this time of night (especially with the moon on the wane.) "Look!" she screeched from underbreaths.
And they immediately clicked the light off, since what they thought they saw noodling from the cracks between floorborads were bloated worms, fangs denoting where snouts should have been if they did not simultaneously liquefy.
Maude and George long continued to sit bolt upright, fearful that a resumption light would attract further incursions.
"Gorgeous..." "Yes, George?" "The noise has gone, if I'm not too much mistaken." "Oh, George, I'm shaking fit to break and my titties are freezing, and I've got a splitting headache. Rub my feet for me, George." "Okky Doke, Duchess."
He tunnelled inside the bed, but there was a fleshy jelly with a spicy stench which slightly reminded him of Maude's night soil in the old days, before she had taken to wearing stiff underwear designed for those little incontinent moments.
Moonlight later saw fit to well back from the darkest hour before dawn. Still, nothing could be seen except the outer margins of varying consistencies of shadow moving about across the ancient king-sized bed. There were belching snorts as body rubbed against body, the air being sucked from between the red raspberries of skin.
And so much later in the night, it must have been morning. Something seeped into the print curtains like light, bleeding through rose-weft filters and willowy patterns of melting rhubarb.
Laid out across the huge bed were the flesh-sucked husks of two identical human bodies that had, at long last, shared the conjugal bed with a third party. And another storm could be heard grumbling in the distance amid jagged moonlight.
(Published 'The Night Side' 1991)
Baron Harch wanted to keep the principality of Harchwee clean and wholesome, but the docks let him down, since they represented little more than blasphemous effigies of bloated rats tucked up in a baby's frilly cradles. The parks and espalier trails were indeed litter-free, the courtyards and promenades neatly white-washed. Outside the cafes, elderly gentry played chess under the near endless summer skies, flasks of ice-green water ready to hand.
Le Pei left this inner sanctum of the Baronry, where castle turrets poked rocketship imitations at the tireless full moon of a hushed expectant night, and passed through the city gate, where late stragglers mouched and chatted in starry-eyed demeanour. The only sound was the squeaking of his shoes. He would soon hit the alleyways which revealed the beginning hair-line cracks of darker paths beyond. He cast a careless glance at the sky and shivered, for were they clouds reaching out for the yellowing moon? Was there a tinge of dampness in the air? After all, did he *really* want to proceed? At dawn, upon imagining the drone of bombers leaving alternate worlds with their bellies empty, he neared the river's edge, where the buildings became Monopoly Game houses, window- and door-less sheds, each a highly-coloured uniformity. They presented relief from the churchyards and the yew-black dripping shadows of the terraced suburbs and ruined shopping malls. He had yearned then for a friendly wave from a passing cousin, in bright holiday gear, but all he saw were the shifting patterns of dossers fidgetting in their sleep. One dosser in particular died in his arms, whilst stretching pleadingly for a toddy or a tiffin. Le Pei heard him whisper and, later, upon approaching the crazy wharf-side streets beyond the dank, dreary rat-runs of the night, he recalled what else the dosser said: "My head hurts, and I've no use for totin' it further." The soul left the dosser's gaping mouth, surrendering the faintest whine like a tooth-fairy stifling under a little girl's pillow.
The barges bobbed gently. The wharf men hoorayed to those on board, who in turn gave surly response. The Hopper crew, lately arrived, knew that their chief mate had been taken at the depth of dreaming sleep into jankers, and they feared he would never be seen again. The Captain, Tom Hopper, clasped the hand of a rough redneck as he lurched ashore by Big Bollard: "I've got lines of human heads packed like eggs, all with the needful fillings. Some already coloured up for Easter..."
The roughneck did not deign to reply, but merely pointed querulously at the Captain's companion. "'Tis my nephew, Ni-Al, he'll cause you no trouble. He'll bring the cargo of walking heads ashore." Further flat-capped locals grouped around and one of them explained that the cargo would need to be heat-stored in the red- and green-houses. How to get them there, was the query, of course. Captain Tom whistled between his teeth and, slowly, a human head, with sprouts of abortive hair, poked a face over the bows. Then, in a hypnotised gaggle, several others bounced to and fro along the deck, their socketed feet padding like toddlers "up the little wooden hills to Bedfordshire". Eventually, they ventured ashore, by puffing out their cheeks and rolling down the hawsers. Their sibilant gibble-gabble made the dock-men smile - but Tom did not see the joke as he tightened his belt on raw-hide breeches. Hundreds of human heads continued to career from shed to shed, inspecting the best billets available to bivouac for the night. They knew their brains would soon be torn out for the priceless smuggled fluid which they contained, but, as they hustled between the legs of Ni-Al Hopper, it was pain and eventual oblivion for which they actually yearned. As the Great God exacted futures for the several realities in His control, He relished in particular the roasting of such heads of Harchwee. These delicacies welded end to end would stretch from world to world and bridge the gulf between otherwise distant cousins.
Meantime, Baron Harch twitched an eyelid, twitched a second one and wondered if he happened to think less about the seamier side of his domain, it would cease to matter or even to exist at all. "Fitzworth!" he called to his factotum. A leather-aproned, flat-capped man eventually entered, rubbing his greasy hands upon his backside. "Yes, m'Lord?" "Do you believe in philosophy?" "Flossoffy? Blimey, what the heck's that? I don't hold with high-falutin' ideas. It don't pay to fill your head with things like that. I does me job, and that's that. I'm happy enough."
The land of Abrundy Tiddle, neighbouring Harchwee, lay between the two giant waterfalls of Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth. Through their sheer curtains, the first view was of the terraced villas, where painters, composers and literati met and discussed their new artistic projects. The villas huddled in clutters upon the hills, growing like Siamese Boxes from the woods that weaved the valley's basin. Rudely crafted canals (veining the ruined palace squares of Abrundy Old Town) intermittently branched from the main artery of the Tiddle. It was in fact that mighty frothing river which churned between the banks of the Straddling Church, where ordinary worshippers populated the pews on either side, sometimes glancing up at the great episcopal bridge (on which priests and arch-vicars wended their monkish courses amongst the richer church-goers). Those were the days when Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth were subject to conflicting geo-centric forces, the Tiddle often bursting its hesitant margins, creating large curds of salt-white to bleach the kneeling choirs of the Straddling Church. Even the altar-piece faced the rogue splatters of the ill-tempered river.
Legend said that the Straddling Church was merely an irritating reincarnation of the City of London's mythick domed cathedral of St.Paul - emerging as a vision from the mists and torrents and earthquakes. The Thames had split it asunder, the Abrundy writers had speculated. Some even believed that their collective imaginary world of Early England was more likely to exist than the real province of Harchwee which neighboured Abrundy Tiddle to the west. Religions were like that.
Abrundy pubs were full of loose talk. The kegs were tapped into the Tiddle itself. The Landlords were rich as a result of the many mouths sucking upon all the pumps. The bars were gorgeously decorated with nap-waterfalls and three-dimensional tags and pieces. The ash-trays and spittoons were cross-hatched with designer pus. But the talk was loose - words flying heedlessly hither and thither, with no sense of reponsibility nor even meaning. Four men sat carelessly around that night - lolled loudly in mock carven coracles and shot their mouths off about non-existent scandals, about unsubstantiated news reports and incoherent jokes, about false literary allusions, with ridiculous puns and unworkable plans of campaign, and about inland black seagulls with squeaky wings. To church and waterfalls, the conversation suddenly turned. "You know of the tales our writers tell?" "About the Great Head of Steam old Amster will fling off come Judgement Day?" "No, but another great quake could see us all dead, with both Amster and Mouth fighting each other like spitting wildcats - it won't be safe even in the villas - I've a good mind to join my cousin Feemy Fitzworth in Harchwee." "Harchwee will suffer floods, too, you know." One rose to go - the others too took his lead - and went to create smaller waterfalls of their own against the back wall of the pub.
Later, their conversation tailed off as they lay beside the bar, each with a drip-feed from the kegs and a brown fizzy liquid gurgling up to the lips from their stomachs. That same night, one of them had a vision of the real St Paul's. But he put it down to the drunken cavortings of his obstreperous noddle. The Head of Steam that old Amster then spat was a precursor of the mammoth cascade that would drown all of them one day, only to trickle out of existence itself down the brain drains of time. Baron Harch knew the legend of Abrundy-Tiddle as a disposable tear-off slip of history, but the Baron's favourite resort was Meadowport. Whilst neighbouring Abrundy Tiddle was unique in its situation between the two mighty waterfalls, in its many back-to-back, two-up-two-down villas huddling to the hills above the ruined palace squares of Abrundy Old Town and its famed church a-spawder the Tiddle, Meadowport was different.
The Baron, the summer before each Lady-Day in Harvest, spent the idle days of his calendar beside Meadowport's painted ocean; merely patchwork pastures in sculptured disguise - cows grazing among the so-called waves and giant model ships; wild geese packing between the mock beach-heads and garlanded dry-dock piers; and simple folk nodding in time to the rhythm of the weather jingles. The Baron's toady, Blasphemy Fitzworth, adjusted the tartan covers of his master's near-crippled wicker deckchair and said: "How's your napper? Cold? Want your hat, sirrah?" "No, thank you, Fitzworth, just start the gulls up, please." The problem was that the wings squeaked, but the Baron dozed off and had a nightmare. The field was planted with heads - stretching to every horizon, thousand upon thousand of human heads, socketed into the soil by every vein and membrane. They nodded; turned widdershins, and back again; they squawked hideous words; some had beaks and umbrella boils; others blew their cheeks into bubble gum shapes; a few even bore smaller heads, black and yellow, that mimicked their host heads; and, finally, there was one as big as a barrage balloon that called itself Moon. And Moon often dreamed about floating over a domed cathedral amidst the flak of some future blitz. The Baron was affrighted, but not without remorse. That panorama of rippling skull crop was pitiful indeed. But what was that noise? A coughing, spluttering engine broke the silence of the nightmare and, wide and lurching, it careered and harvested through the great red sea. At once, Moon, the natural leader of the planted pack, quacked a warning to his flock: "Whatever you do, don't lose your heads!"
The Baron woke abruptly. The wind had come up from across the canvas wastes and whined insidiously around him. The engine noise that had broken his dream had turned up in his waking and juddered from beyond the candy-floss stall. "Fitzworth! Fitzworth!" There was no answer from the toady - he had skedaddled already to his cunny-berry. Dwarfy ear-droppers gathered round the Baron's cot town and began to flawter the skin from his bone, with paring-knives, and entertissued it with erfkin spew.
He awoke again, this time from a nightmare within a nightmare, only to return to the engine noise and saw the mountainous paddle-wheels of the all-American thumper-momster. "Don't lose your heads," shouted Moon, "Keep low and it'll only curl your hair." "Sirrah, wake up!" shouted Feemy Fitzworth. "They say the Straddling Church has collapsed and killed thousands of worshippers!" Dazed, but purposeful, the Baron, in mock of some legendary film star President, stammered: "We must go to Abrundy, to aid our cousins..." Feemy continued: "The Falls have fallen. Amster-dam has lifted its lid and let a steam-critter out as big as the sky above. Surging-Mouth fought back with an endless tunnel of sucking-water ... and ..." The Baron motioned him to let up. "I must stand tall ... give them something to hang on to ... they need to look up and forget..."
Feemy was sad. His friends and cousins would have been at church that day: the list would be endless, all struggling within the dark screecher chasms of an upturned world, mouthing desperate futures they knew in their hearts as well as heads did not exist, fruitlessly undergoing the labour pains of death. The painted ocean of Meadowport twitched, humped its back and settled like a collapsed marquee. The end of the pier show sang on, and the joke got even worse: "I say, I say, I say, they say death is like sicking up all your innards in one go ... me wife made me eat her tumblefruit pie tonight, a special recipe, she said ... it feels as if I'm going to die many times over, I'd better stick me head down me throat, or deep down into the earth, to stop its terrible, terrible heaving..." The joke never reached its punchline, just tailed off. The Baron Harch? Well, he could be on the moon, looking down. Or that story's good as any.
Le Pei surveyed the wild thunderous torrents of Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth. He knew, as if instinctively, that there was a story here: one that, even if already told, could do with some re-telling. He shrugged, as he stopped day-dreaming. It was really London, the river the Thames and the cathedral St Paul's. But, to Le Pei, it would always be Abrundy Tiddle, with its gothic-turned church straddling the river on colossal pillar-legs. Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth fell straight as dies from the bluest sky, betokening further worlds up there from which these waterfalls stemmed. Le Pei knitted his brows - science was no longer anything in which to have faith: religion was the only real alternative. The dual torrents fed the Tiddle, but when does torrent end and full-blooded flood begin? That parahistoric day held perhaps the true and provoking answer. The World War had been over for as many days as it takes to mix a family Christmas cake, cook it and eat it. The War had lasted longer than anyone could remember, and the Blitz still echoed in Le Pei's ears. Remnant mortals were even now cowering within makeshift shelters in the shadow of the great cathedral. It seemed as if the mighty St Paul's could no longer grow into the future for fear of crushing the clumsily fashioned terraced Wendy Houses that had been set leaning beneath the north and south facing transoms. Le Pei peered into one such structure and could not make out where the mother ended and the child began. The news of the end of the War, if it had reached them at all, was not easily believed and, even if believed, not acted upon.
In those days, the river passed further from the very portals of our St Paul's than it was healthy to acknowledge. The history books stated, unarguably, that the cathedral had been built on the banks of the river; and a little birdie had also said that they were destined to become closer still. Le Pei sat next to a dosser who looked as if he had been tramping the Underground Lines for most of his life. "What's the reckoning?" asked Le Pei, desperate for even the smallest reaction to the news still filtering through from the fronts. The dosser, of course, made no reply, for he had eaten his own tongue, in preference to spam. Le Pei looked down at his own patent leather shoes. As he waggled his feet in them, they looked as if they were in an ugly face competition, speaking pitifully on behalf of those unable to speak for themselves. They spoke of days to come when everybody would stare at a thing called "Snooker" for days on end from a glowing square of colour in the corner of the parlour, in apparent enjoyment. This could be nothing but science for, if it were religion, it would at least be tangible and understandable. The shoes spoke of this and that, of beginnings and endings, of the hopes that would end in nothing except more unquenchable hopes. Le Pei turned to the dosser who had silentlly left him to his own thoughts. He had obviously disappeared off to plumb the extent of the Circle Line underground. He would report back on the rumours of life between High Street Kensington and Aldgate breaking out fitfully from the air raid Wendy Houses. Then, water started to trickle around Le Pei's shoes. In dribs and drabs, more ebb than flow but, later, in more noticeable coughs and splutters. It drove before it the ill-constructed coracles that had once been Wendies. The dewllers therein would no doubt scream if they had not already stuffed their mouths with spam, in an attempt to use it up - the War having ended too early.
The surging torrents penetrated to the point where a little birdie said it would; and out of the resultant standing waters, there stepped a drenched, doom-dreary figure who mumbled of coming to Abrundy Tiddle. Fears of not knowing whether he were coming or going set in. And he stepped back into the now swirling waters to find the London City he knew must exist. Le Pei watched himself go...
Who upturned the world, only the Great God knows. But at a point between then and now, things started to go badly awry. And the torrential rain fell down upon the sky. The snooker balls bounced off each other, as some are potted, some not. But nobody can hear their ricochet: for all have died and gone away, even the players. Was it boredom or plain despair, or the unbearable stench of cancered tongues in the coloured rolling heads? And having retold it all, Le Pei freshened up his newly barbered body beneath the hosing shafts of Amster-Dam against Surging-Mouth. Later, he walked down to the straddling cathedral, for the morning service was about to begin. There, Cardinal Hopper XXIII would signal this and that, of the shrivelling ends of beginnings, of the seeping fulfilment of hopes feeding upon hopes. A little birdie settled upon the Prayer Duct, fresh from pretending to be a plastic sea-gull in Meadowport, and squeaked another message for all to hear. Le Pei's shoes squeaked, too, and squelched as they entered the mighty portals - but the swollen tide between the pews had found its place at last; and the squeaks were never heard above the waves' wild career between sacramental shores. "If the Great God is so bleeding sane and sensible, how can He ever expect us to believe in Him?" was his last drowning thought.
(Published 'Weirdmonger's Tales' 1994)
If you find this typescript, please preserve it, for it's not that bad. I dropped it down the WC accidentally and where it will turn up beats me. But if it's still intact, please return it forthwith to the address at the end....
My name? What business is it of yours? Suffice it to say that, if you knew my name, you would be none the wiser at this stage. You would be side-tracked so severely that you would not even bother to read the rest of this tract, too busy with looking up a variety of encyclopaedias and getting all entangled with the many cross-references stemming from my name.
Well, follow me. Don't dilly-dally and when I say jump, you damn well jump!
This tunnel closely follows the route of a new canal that wends its way several leagues above us. At times, it is close, to such an extent that you can hear the self-conscious chugging of the narrow boats, and, at others, so far, that you're nearer the core of the earth than to the surface channellings.
Jump!
That was close. We just crossed a crevice which goes deeper than anything you've known before and ends up on the other side of the universe, some say.
That dim glow, which allows us to feel our way, filters down along special tubings fed from the daylight way above us. They've got it on top - just watch. I turn this valve, and the deep richness of a summer sunset fills your face with a healthy flush. Look closer, old pal, and see what I look like. It is about time you saw my face which, after all, should be of more interest to you than my name, surely. It's deeply marked with age, you may note, but I'm younger than you, I'll be bound. It's got character lines fanning out from brow to brow, hasn't it? You don't say much about me: what's got your tongue?
Well, keep mum, man, just follow a little way more, just round that bend.
Jump!
Godforsaken gentleman. Failed to jump in time, I guess. Gave him plenty of warning, didn't I?
Halloo! Are you down there?
No. Well, he wasn't much of a conversationalist anyway, and I don't suppose he'd have learnt much. Even if he was still alive, he'd find it hard to call for help. Because shy he was. Shyer than a blushing bride on her first night.
Us ley-line constructionists don't talk much at the best of times. We're too busy following the natural courses of our brains. It's the veinings which count.
My old apprentice disappeared down a gullet and is lost for ever, no doubt.
If you find him wandering around some mocked-up London Underground, following his nose, as it were, silently seeking the by-ways for my friendly chump, send him back to me. Straight to the secret Inlet, part of the way beyond the Bill, until you reach the Cape at the head of the Flight of Locks, here to the Naze, half-way up the encroaching Creeks and Backwaters which face up to that mighty Peninsula, poised in the flushing seas of sunset, down the Essex way.
That's the address for all your sendings.
***
As a belated afterthought, you still want to know my name? OK, I'll come clean and I'll put it at the head of this typescript, like a sign-post to the better things below it.
Finally, all I can say is that we must find better ways....I'm sick to the teeth with it all.
(Published 'The Third Half' 1987)
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