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aka 'The Tenacity Of Feathers' (part 90)
Scene: Lecture Hall, Earth Towers Hall, London
A new theory has emerged. We now need to proceed speedily from hypothetical literary matters concerning the use of Fiction as the New Magic in the role either of genuine cure or, at least, of constructively believable panacea. The Art of Fiction needs, therefore, to progress towards a stricter and more verifiable account of what happened or what will happen in the final war between humanity and a terrible foe and, subsequently, by extrapolation, to become a means to the end of neutralising the results of that very war.
Heretofore, it was believed (and I am the first to admit that I was one of those believers) that the Core – aka Earth’s Core, Mount Core, Sunnemo, Jules Verne’s Centre Of The Earth – housed a single malignancy known as the Angel Megazanthus or the Infinite Cuckoo or other possible names that were listed by various protagonists. Gradually, however, queries began to crop up as to whether its initial appearance as a malignancy represented in effect a benign force in disguise. One that fought on humanity’s behalf.
Then, with even more powers of creative meaning and truth, it was proposed that the force inhabiting the Core had not started its life there but had always existed as a generally migrating form in a wider universe … but then it was plucked from its otherwise slow and self-occupied passage through space-time and transported to the Core – perhaps accidentally – by a means of public transport invented by humanity.
It was a proposal coupled with a diverse concept of dream sickness, yet a sickness that enabled the potentiality for good to evolve.
Stub of pencil: Aide Mémoire. I’m getting stuck. The fact that a core could double up as a sun was probably the most crucial ‘vision’, when Captain Nemo – all those years ago – showed Sunnemo to Mike from the window of the Drill’s corporate lounge. Further thoughts that the actual force (or migrating form) transported (by chance?) to the Earth’s Core was a moving plug, a plug acting as a plug to itself! Also that William Blake had very few readers and needed to self-publish his own works. Jonathan Swift? Jules Verne? Marcel Proust? During these considerations, attention to be diverted, because I’m due to explain that the ‘skies’ of Inner Earth are beginning to be populated with vast machines that rival even Sunnemo in size and it must be wondered if these are related to the Unidentified Flying Objects that often pepper our surface skies. But a singularly outlandish flying-saucer hovers, currently, over Klaxon City, like a spinning wheel churning through soft earth as well as off-detritus. End of notes.
****
“The fish smelled!”
Arthur smiled as he replaced another divot above the body that he and his younger sister Amy had just buried during a solemn ceremony of childish reveration … marking a departure from life by one of Amy’s loved pets.
“He didn’t!” Amy dabbed at her eyes.
At that moment, a low-flying helicopter – vanes clacking fast – banked over the apartment towers, criss-crossed as in a display of aviation above the allotments and finally churned quickly into the distance. If children were able to feel their own paranoia for what it was, then Arthur sensed that his worst enemy was the pilot of that chopper spying on him … and, with the sensitivities that only children can feel but not understand, he somehow knew that the pilot was himself (Arthur) from a future he was yet to inhabit.
He turned to Amy, deciding to ignore his dark instincts with regard to the diminishing pinprick of the helicopter now being lost to the suburban horizon. While both their sibling feelings towards each other were typically abrasive he did, at heart, worry about her and, before being able to stop himself, he proceeded to quench Amy’s tears regarding her recently deceased goldfish.
“You’ve still got a canary in a cage. And that fish really smelled!”
“It only smelled after it died.” Her sobs worsened to the extent of giving her words an even higher pitch than normal.
When they had found her dear fish floating at the top of the bowl, the room was so filled with fumes, Amy’s canary showed signs of soon choking to death itself had not the fish-bowl been removed forthwith to the outhouse. And, if not death, certainly some state between life and death which could not easily be defined.
Arthur stared at Amy, his immediate impulse caught between hugging her and scolding her for being so sentimental, but the words he used to convey this thought to his brain were much simpler than words such as ‘scold’ or ‘sentimental’. He recalled their mother’s story of dream sickness and wondered if it would be any use in comforting Amy by reminding her of it in words she could understand. Arthur himself had failed to understand their mother’s version of it, but deep within yet another instinct similar to the earlier one regarding the helicopter, he understood the story quite well as he replayed it in his mind.
Once upon a time – their mother had begun by telling them – there was a country where people could not judge between the state of dreaming and that of experiencing real things while awake. A girl called Sudra lived in that country. Not a country of the blind, but a country of dream uncertainty. Sudra loved the new shoes that she had been given for Christmas. But how could she be sure they were new enough? Or even shoes at all in such a world? She decided to visit the wisest man in the country who happened to live in the same village as Sudra and her family. This man told her the shoes were not only new, but also real. She was relieved – at first. Until she worried if the wisest man in the country was a dream himself. Why would the wisest man in the country happen to live in the same village as Sudra? But he had to live somewhere. He had even claimed he was the wisest man in the whole world, not just the wisest man in this particular country. Did this claim not prove he was lying, and, if lying, did not the probability of this being a dream increase considerably? Or lessen? Sudra didn’t know where to turn. The shoes were strange shoes since at the front and back of each one were little bells. And they were yellow shoes. Her parents said this would help them find her, should she get lost. But Sudra had never seen shoes like them before in the country where she lived. They must have been specially made. And the family was so poor how could they have afforded such bespoke shoes? She decided to test out the reality of her current thoughts by unthinking them. People got over deaths by unthinking them. They got over grief and pain simply by unthinking them. Yet she still smelled the countryside that surrounded the house, she still smelled all the common and customary smells of the house itself ... and even with her eyes closed as she concentrated on unthinking all her doubts, the smell of the smells continued to smell around her. And when the parents entered the room to find her, she had vanished! Only the shoes remained, sitting silently on the yellow carpet. But Sudra’s smell remained for her parents to follow.
A sad or inscrutable ending – their mother had explained – but one that had many possible meanings.
Indeed it did, thought Arthur, as he more simply retold the tale to Amy. And as Amy wiped the tears away, she even smiled. Now the whole world would be her fish. Just one of the tale’s many morals.
They laughed as many other morals of their mother’s fable took root.
Meanwhile, a huge spinning wheel appeared over the suburban skyline, constructed of many shining metal stanchions and cylinders, its central top cockpit filled with the biggest head of an unknown creature the children had ever seen. Soon, however, at a vast slant in the sky, it dipped towards the ground where its spinning edges began to delve: throwing up great cascades of earth like fountains of detritus towards the clouds that soon became gritty themselves. This Unidentified Flying Object soon vanished below the ground towards further skies it hoped existed inside the Earth – or it had simply grounded itself like a pitifully sick whale beaching upon the bank of a river.
“If the fish smelled anything,” said Arthur, “it certainly can still smell you, Amy.”
And he took her hand to go inside.
“Wait!” shouted Amy. And she picked up her favourite flowerpot nearby, in which sat her favourite doll, and she took this with her as she followed a now freshly unthinking, unthoughtful Arthur overland towards their home.
(to be continued)
The first regathering of its steam by the train within Inner Earth was at Parismony. It would be folly to pretend that this was anything other than a short cessation for reprovisioning or renewed fire-cranking or water/ carbonised-angevin re-stocking. The passengers were intended to stay in the vicinity of the station awaiting announcements from the mini-tannoy system that had been set up merely within the hearing-range of the station itself. Parismony had no ambition to become another Klaxon, it seemed. Parismony’s tannoys could hardly be heard, except for a pitiful cartoonish squeak punctuating the steam-burnished hiss of the mighty iron beast that still billowed visible smoky off-detritus into the crowded atmosphere.
It is also folly to use the word ‘station’ – as it was more like an old-fashioned halt from that idyllic period in English history depicted by ‘The Railway Children’. Greg and Beth, together with their own two children, stretched their legs along the dark-roofed platform – amazed that a cavé was provided, one not dissimilar to the buffet used in the film ‘Brief Encounter’. Steaming samovars of freshly-infused concoctions of Indian leaf, plus various tiers of cream or coconutty cakes. And a large old-fashioned clockwork clock that told surface time, for the benefit of the smooth throughput of surfaceers such as Greg and his family. Amy and Arthur shuddered in their thin-limbed smocks, because the station was merely a dank, troublous tunnel – such as those tunnels punctuating the canals of surface England whereby Narrow Boats plied their own ancient, sluggish, chilly, gloom-filled, chugging paths of broken water – and the shyfryngs were almost second nature. Even Beth felt the gnawing to the very bottom bone. They were all relieved to get into the relative cosiness of the cavé, where they could replenish their stock of good-will and pluck.
Upon their alter-nemos’ first visit to Parismony, they had not been able to explore the city at all. In fact, a passing subterfuge of memory seemed to tell them that they had by-passed this city altogether in the Drill, just as, on this journey, they had by-passed Klaxon. Therefore, there was a temptation to leave the jurisdiction of the squeaky tannoys in the station and just poke their heads out for a moment and view the vistas available, including the famous pyramid on the hill (equivalent in historical interest to Klaxon’s Canterbury Oak or, on the surface, the Colchester Tree) – and, having discussed the chances of managing this without missing the train’s departure (ie. discussing these chances with the buxom white-overalled tea-lady behind the cavé’s counter) – they took off on Poliakoff-type adventures within the purlieus of Parismony and beyond the catchment area of the station premises, let alone just its tannoys. And perhaps those adventures are worthy of a whole book in themselves.
They were surprised, for example, that there were many other passengers on the train – judging by the very short queue of them that had alighted on the train’s first inward outward-journey. Many of these shadowy individuals eschewed a trip round the city, but a number did take the same risk as Greg and his family took. How many managed to get back to the train before it departed remains an exciting conundrum of rushed running and panting moments of dire stress. Each a book in itself.
The city was rather Eastern European in atmosphere, with a mighty cathedral on huge stilts that seemed to be around every corner they turned. No sign of the famous pyramid on the hill and there were rumours that it had toppled a few years before – killing three million citizens in the process. The city was a strange contrast to the close-ordered darkness of most of the erstwhile train journey – with muffled sirens from the front pullman – as well as being an equal contrast to the fleeting vistas of Sunnemo-lit dunes or lobes that took the continuously curving railtrack upon their backs. For something to be a contrast to two quite opposing contrasts simultaneously said a lot for the power of Parismony as a contrast.
By-passing the various books that will one day be available to tell of the adventures of Greg and his family in Parismony, they returned to the station just in time to hear the tannoy’s announcement of their train’s impending resumption of its journey to the Earth’s Core.
(to be continued)
The dowager stood on the windswept platform with two children either side of her, both clasping her hands, it seemed, for dear life. Occasionally, she lowered her head to listen to their words which would otherwise be lost to the wind, or to exchange with them her own choice of words, in evident mutual encouragement.
The children knew they waited for a train: more likely to spot its smoke first, snaking above the nearby hills, even in advance of the hooting whistle being conveyed to them, even now, upon the driving wind. They also retained a beady eye for scrutinising the silver runners of the track for any telltale sign of the clacking’s coming.
From behind the derelict station house, I approached the solitary threesome (guessing that such a few could sometimes feel more solitary than being truly alone as one). I could see the dowager’s wintercoat was weatherworn, but a bright yellow scarf at her neck relieved the dowdy appearance somewhat. She wore a large silver brooch depicting, I thought, the angel megazanthus, which secured the scarf against the cold’s onset. The small children were dressed in khaki jerkins, tangled laddered stockings and threadbare berets with bobbles of hair poking through. They shivered visibly. They failed to see me, since I now crouched in the old ticket collector’s booth, untenanted for decades – yet I could still sense the reek of that ticket collector’s rank shag doing its best to conceal the ripeness of his soiled undergarments. Scattered around me were a number of clipped platform tickets, among which I had long since ascertained were residue of used journeys from far off Whofage, Innsmouth, Agraska and St Pancras. Yet, who’d ever disembark at this railway halt’s neck of the woods? Surely, nobody.
The wind, in the interim, had died down to allow me to catch a good share of the threesome’s words together.
“We’ll be there before you can say ‘Knife’. A roaring fire right up the chimney and you’ll toast your hands – with Nanny Sudra’s stories all stocked up, just waiting to be told...”
“Shall Nanny Sudra be pleased to see us?”
“She’ll be so pleased, she’ll dance a jig of joy in her special shoes and give you both big kisses on your rosy apple cheeks.”
“And shall we stay there...to live for ever and ever and ever?”
“We’ll live there so long into the future that the end will always be too far away to worry about.”
“Look, I think I see black ghosts in the air.”
“That’s from the train’s funnel. An ancient train by the look of the dark steamy smoke it’s giving off, but a warm one, with an endless corridor.”
“I can’t hear it yet. Is it really coming?”
“Yes, it’ll be all darkness inside and those passengers in the Third Class will just have the reddening ends of their ciggies to watch.”
Listening to this chatter, I smiled to myself. I had feared that life outside my little world had not subsisted, ever since they closed the station waiting-room, the steamy buffet and the dark dripping Necessarium. I had been solitary for too long and the vision of such happiness was a tonic to my old heart. It was a pity that trains never stopped at this particular halt any more.
Momentarily losing interest in the threesome, I nibbled at one of the discarded tickets with my teeth, the taste of rich train smoke seeping to my lowest tongue of all. I slumped back in some meditative trance which was more than a little self-indulgent, because, by the time I looked from the web-choked cubicle again, the platform was deserted. Since I needed to keep exercising my limbs, I scuttled to where the threesome had stood. The wind was filling its own cheeks, I sensed, to fetch the tuggiest gust.
I picked up the megazanthine brooch that the dowager must have accidentally dislodged from her scarf as she hustled her charges aboard before the train slid past them into the trundling echoes of darkness. The brooch wriggled and its tongue flickered quicker than any eye could see. Not a brooch at all, but a large glistening insect the like of which I’d never seen before, slugged out by the sudden arrival of winter. I forthwith popped it between my jaws to allow its flavour to wash through me.
Nanny Sudra, awaiting the children’s arrival, sewed long stitches into a battered wintercoat – listening to the wind howling the length of the chimney. Or was it the sound of those spiny creatures with sticky wings that haunted her dreams, now attempting to reach her in real life down that very flue? She was pleased that she had the fire roaring in the grate, serving both to warm the room and to keep such unwelcome chimney visitors at bay. Still hemming, she moithered over mythic miscegenations, versions of competing history, regal heirs and graces playing Russian Roulette with Fate, tentacular bird-monsters who, in the same way as human beings, had insect-pests with which to contend – and, if only in her mind, she plucked unwanted fruit off the well-mulched family-tree. The clock pendulum swung idly to and fro in rhythm to her stitches. She still heard the mothballs clacking in the wintercoat’s lining where she’d sewn them, but Nanny Sudra didn’t know that I watched her from behind the clockcase, whereto I’d scuttled, black as coal, before she’d ignited the fire.
The two children watched the wreaths of black smoke billowing past the train window, as the wheels churned them through a wintering dusk. The leather strap that was used for raising and lowering the carriage window swayed gently with the clack-clack of bogies over runners. They knew the dowager sat between them, still in wintercoat and yellow scarf, for the cold would have seeped otherwise into her every bone. I could have informed her charges that if she had doffed such impervious garb, she would have allowed the cold to seep out again. A mature dowager, at least, should show some semblance of common sense. The children felt her shudder in tune with the train. On either side, they had their hands tightened within hers. If they let go, they sensed they’d never see her again. Or was I sensing it on their behalf?
The train entered the darkest tunnel. I lit a cigarette, so that they could see I was there. There was no corridor, only autonomous carriages – so I knew for sure they were still there. The train hadn’t stopped since they boarded it in the middle of nowhere.
I knew exactly how long the train would take to pass through the tunnel, having been on this journey, one way or another, for as long as I could remember. But they were new to its foibles. I listened to the children speaking, despite the surging tunnel.
“Why don’t they have lights on trains?”
“Is Nanny Sudra still expecting us? Won’t her fire have gone out?”
“Why don’t you answer?”
The train emerged into light, too quickly for a blink, and revealed the answer. The two children were hand in hand, the wintercoat lying like an empty rhinoceros skin between them. I had scuttled to the window where, with jaws clacking, I pressed my suckers to the stained glass to keep myself steady, as I stubbed my ciggie on the ‘out’ of ‘don’t lean out of the window’ and stropped my beetle pincers on the door’s leather tongue.
With its heart of fire driving steam-power towards the almost prehensile pistons, the Victoria-Vienna-Moscow-Megazanthus Express screamed through the bewintered bewildered heritage of history: into another horizontal chimney of smokes and spooks, this time, so far, an endless one.
****
Another or the same train disappeared with great whinings of fire-cranked pain (fed upon nuggets of blackened Angevin) … down the steep slope towards the centre of the Earth, ratchetting upon funicular gravity-braces. Aboard this corridorless vehicle, mock-timed for other eras when steam was the only motive force behind such iron beasts of transport, those in one carriage were immediately disappointed that there was no on-board lighting. Amy and Arthur were scared, but Greg managed to light a spill (one he used for his pipe). The glow upon their faces was more than just ghostly. It was comforting, too.
They felt the juddering of the gravity-braces as they slipped across the sleepers of time as well as of dream upon another set of sleepers: themselves. The Sleeper Express for the ends of the world.
In timely fashion they skirted a visibly far-stretching dune-curved lobe within a gigantic cavity, lit only by a subdued Sunnemo. Greg quenched the spill as they watched awe-inspired the glistening tracks vastly undulate into the numinous distance with a renewed flurry of choking smoke or steam: inferred to be thus choking since plumes of such emissions had only been cursorily test-run within mock-ups of these cavities or chambers, but the authorities had hoped for the best – in that the natural vents of an organic planet would naturally cope with such human interventions as fire-cranked transport.
Then utter blackness again, eventually dimly inflamed by another spill.
Followed, a few hours later, by a bright chink of a few seconds as the pyloned city of Klaxon was by-passed – viewed between the margins of a lightning crack in an otherwise unilluminated cavity of Earth’s most elephantine junction of rail-tunnels. The train’s whistle – becoming more like a siren by dint of the echoing cavity’s configuration of space and sound – blasted out for the first time (with the shuddering imminence or immanence of seemingly religious ‘antipodal angst’) as it continued its nigh unstoppable steam-driven course through a more benighted night than even those previously imagined.
(to be continued)
The Weirdmonger – upon his now legendary rite of passage through Klaxon’s peripheral mudparks – came across a dreamcatcher hanging in the sky. Feathers and netting upon a singular swinging frame of irregular shape – or, rather, of both regular and irregular shape. A collapsible frame when not in use, the Weirdmonger guessed. He wondered from where it was thus suspended swinging in the siren-breezes that played fitfully around it at this distance from the city proper. He looked into the cavity’s half-sky and only the light of Sunnemo gave any clue: itself. But the same light glared into his eyes – thus making it difficult to ascertain the dreamcatcher’s root.
He touched it tentatively and watched it swing more vigorously. Dreams flocked around it like moths or mosquitos into the netting, some stuck there as burrs would on fly-paper. One dream caught Weirdmonger in the eye: and he saw (ahead of time) his arrival in a war-ravaged city, his close scrutiny of Sudra’s shoe museum where the smoke from the chimney was like a huge stilleto-wedge rather than a plume or umbrella-shape, and the hasty departure of ‘The Hawler’ flopping from its pylon towards the gravity-logging of its pull only for the Drill's bit-tip to grind uselessly against the beach terrain which was apparently harder within Inner Earth than it had been on the surface.
Captain Nemo had to alight himself to sharpen the bit-tip whilst it was still spinning. And away the Drill went, faces mooning at the portholes near its back of vanes. The Weirdmonger knew – from the dreamcatcher – that the faces’ names were Greg, Beth, Edith and Clare. The Captain was left stranded as the Drill proceeded to push on into the under-surface without him. Fears for his passengers blackened his face. Nemo and Dognahnyi parted company at that moment of violent alter-nemo dispute … a symbiosis in reverse decorated with a flare of more mosquito dreams caught by feathers. With Nemo’s head yanked apart by a pair of its four limbs, the creature emerged from the red-sea gap in the skull with a smirk and a wave towards the Weirdmonger’s future in the city. It was Weirdmonger himself (aka Dognahnyi).
The dreamcatcher had saved him the rest of his journey across the mudparks, so stub-of-pencil now needs to returns that way itself so as to erase the relevant bit from the vexed texture of text with a renewed head of rubber, if not steam.
The Weirdmonger scratched his head. Identity was a very strange burden to bear. To take his mind off the momentary discursiveness, he wondered how Sudra’s museum was allowed to smoke in a smokeless zone. Fire was not allowed within Inner Earth – for obvious reasons. And, shrugging, he went towards a cavé to give the locals a piece of his mind.
****
I had been down to the sea front – eager for a breath of fresh air after a night tending my flew-ridden wife – only to find the landscape had changed. "Landscape" actually seemed appropriate. You see, what had changed was the customarily empty horizon between the perfectly geometrical edges of sky and sea, set afire by a recently risen dawn. Populating (if that is the right epithet) this very divider of space and substance, as well as the bulging sun, were several spread splodges of ships: ships simply imputed to be such: not budging nor giving any semblance of distinguishing themselves by smoky funnel or visible wake. The strangest thing was never had I seen more than the odd craft along this peaceful stretch of Clacton coast. More a resort than a dock. So, was this a fleet, a convoy, a logical gathering of otherwise nautical non-sequiturs? Amid seagull sounds at several knots of siren screech.
I returned with my shoulders uncontrollably shrugging as part of my quickening stride. I needed to get back to the bungalow to see how my other half was faring. The sea and its craft could take care of themselves. My lungs and face were appropriately leached, my body superficially exerted and my mind, if not my soul, intriguingly stirred. As they say, I knew where the bodies were buried. Yet, thankfully, most of my guilts and anxieties were now pigeon-holed in some disused office within the brain, creatures which could only be exhumed by the sleepless darkness night often fetched. The golden light had, by now, buried such skeletons in their cupboard. An oubliette beyond the reach of the sun's splattered egg-yolk sky.
A gull shrieked as I turned the corner into my road. Too big, though, for a gull. Its shadow darkened my own – as it slanted between high-rise smoking chimneys at either end of my bungalow. I found the key to my door's deadlock and twisted it several times. Almost as if my return recurred more often than it paid off as a visitor in disguise.
The place felt empty. Instinctively, I wondered if I had stayed away too long. I didn't believe in ghosts, but here I was sniffing the air as if one was imbuing everything with some waxy waft or savour. My tongue was touched with some sharp tang, a residue perhaps from my walk in sight of the biggest salt monster in the world: then, with flesh suddenly bleached by the ultimate angst of all, I stormed towards the bedroom to see if I could salvage anything from sickness. I vowed not to suffer despair, should I be too late. But would it be touch and go?
This was not a quake zone, the carpeted floor, though, swaying beneath me on recognition that my ancient marriage was still intact. There was a crease across one of the pillows just like her smile. The one next to it was mine. And death flew out, screeching for some other perch or dry dock – or, perhaps, simply the ever splodgeless sloping of the sea.
(to be continued)
The Prince did not wonder what the lady was doing in the Palace courtyard. Yet why should he have wondered what the lady was doing there, when he did not usually even wonder about anything in life? Indeed, he did not wonder at the huge paving-slabs of the courtyard and how they could have been transported to the courtyard before they made that courtyard into a courtyard; nor did he wonder at the birds that did not seem too scared to perch in the courtyard at the sun-kissed fountain's edge; nor did he wonder at his mother the Queen's nettly insistence that he left his room regularly to cross potentially romantic paths with the ladies who were allowed, against all historic wisdom, to enter the courtyard for simply passing-through it as a short-cut as well as--in this particular lady's case today--for sedentary solitude.
But the Prince had stopped not-wondering, seeing the lady seemed to be sketching the bird-edged fountain with her sketching-pencil, sitting, as she was, astride a sketching-stool before a sketching-easel with a sketching-pad upon it. Indeed, the Prince was now so intrigued he did not need the Queen's encouragement to leave his viewing-seat in the Palace's viewing-balcony and to venture down the spiral slab steps to the slab-baked courtyard where he intended to tiptoe towards the sketching-lady and take a sneaky look at the sketch she was sketching with the longest sketching-arm imaginable. His toes stirred the sketching-lady's pencil-shavings with a crackly swish and she looked round, thus causing the arm's length pencil to skid skewedly across the sketching-pad's topmost sketching-sheet upon which she had been sketching. The lady straightways fainted and taken on a stretcher by the royal gardeners to the local well woman clinic. The Prince returned, through the pencil-shavings, smartly to the balcony simply to wonder at wonder.
The birds scattered to the four corners of the air as the fountains's faintest edges faded into the shimmering heat ... and the Queen, whose lot in life was not a lot she loved a lot, realised that she was at a loss for words and, upon later learning of the day's events, announced that pencil-shavings did not a match make.
(published 'End of the Millennium' 1999)
I have dreams whilst dreams have me.
About this time every morning. I wake up with an ending, an indefinable air of having been through something utterly dreadful but equally beautiful. The room is stifling, the wife beside me snoring heavily into her chest as a soldier would in a trench. There is enough light, coming from the gap at the bottom of the bedroom door like bacon rind, to see that the wallpaper is slowly peeling back to reveal the plaster running with glistening sweat.
I sit up and I sit up again
And that is when I wake up as if from several dreams, folded within each other, their petals inextricable.
It’s always the same — the wife mops my brow and takes a ton of it to the water butt outside. She returns with an iced drink which I guggle down voraciously. She tells me to neaten up my tie whilst she brushes up the purple velvet ruff beneath her own chin like an eggcup. We need to be smart on occasions like this; even in bed, one should not have a devil-may-care attitude
The next time I wake up, I feel the bed rocking gently to and fro on its ill-suited legs. “I do tilt thy cot, to cully the fever in thy bloods,” hisses a horned face, emerging monstrously from another bedroom door I did not know was there during the day. I sigh with relief seeing who it was and fall deeply asleep once more.
Now I meet H. P. Lovecraft. He seems to stare expressionlessly from between the holes in his narrow white skull, but I feel he wants to know if he can be of any help in my current troubles.
“I don’t know exactly what troubles you mean,” I say.
“They are self-evident, my good sir, behind your smart appearance. You have no imagination, no sense of wonder — and it is a blend of high outward standards (where there can be no complaints where you are concerned)” — he ran his spidery fingers lightly over the perfect knot in my tie — with an inner strength to dream: it is that which creates the man from those who only think themselves men.”
He bent closer to me and I continued my rite of passage through his empty eyes into the cathedral dimensions of his skull. I journeyed for what seemed aeons between the hanging temples and well-drilled oxymorons of his mind. Sporadically, I pressed the flower of my ear to the ground and heard the seething whispers of pre-emergent Cthulhu. I knew instinctively that was the name of it, not arriving from the open stars, but from inside the Earth’s own inner cores.
The moral was not lost on me: the Angel Monster and its dreams do come from inside.
“And without the within there can be no without,” are his words which drift with me along the avenue of my return through dreams.
Each morning about this time, I finally wake up and know that tomorrow I can again return through yet more dreams to the deep wells of sight in his homely skull. I now try to remain awake till time for rising, pondering on the dark bliss inside the narrow carapace of his soul.
But, in the end, nearest dawn, I drift off again into lighter sleep, not before ensuring, however, that the knot in my tie is tight against my soft pyjama collar like a bud of involuted petals.
(published 'Crypt Of Cthulhu' 1991)
The voice seems to come from inside the wardrobe, rather dull, as if it is straining to talk through layers of clothes flowing from the hangers. From his position in the bed, he hears it move from the ceiling, now a trifle like his own voice, as if he had left himself up in the loft: earlier he had successfully retrieved some oddments for the local scouts’ jumble sale.
The foot of the bed is angled towards the door, with its head just below the window. He imagines he can hear the sash weights behind him moving up and down within the side frames, as if eager to budge the window open on their own, to allow the exit of some evil presence. He knows, however, that it is stuck tight with years of old paint and has not been shifted, even in his living memory. He begins to catch odd shufflings within the chimney breast, where the fire used to be in the days when this was his old grandmother’s bedroom. Then, the ghostly roar of ancient flames within...
Sitting bolt upright, the bolster crumpling beneath him, he raises his knees to eye level to form a desperate shield. No amount of rumbustious visits to horror flicks with his mates, where the only response to the ‘gross out’ scenes was laughter, back-slapping and bum-pinching horseplay, had prepared him for *this*. Real life horror. Unadulterated, unrehearsed poltergeist visitation, or whatever he likes to call it.
Unaccountably, a vision of Dorothy flitters across the backdrop of his mind. He tries to concentrate on that image, in an attempt to block out the changing manoeuvres of the terror entity. They plan to marry in about six weeks’ time. He even booked the honeymoon trip today. Korea had seemed an obvious choice after those splendid Olympics. Full of nice, smiling, slant-eyed people ... and fireworks … and meaningful ceremonial dances ... and matchless fair play.
He intends it to be a suprise. Dorothy will be delighted.
She is at charm school at the moment. A rather old-fashioned term for a finishing college. Cascades of giggles, he imagines, as the girls duck and bob with the tails of their skirts along the winding staircases of the country house. Not that she needs the input of more charm...
The entity is making him think of things he never knew he could think. He has just invented a fictional fiancee called Dorothy. He bets the girls in the charm school don’t wear knickers... But he’s not even heterosexual.
He tries to lower himself from the bed. But it is as if he’s ill: his legs are like jelly one moment, lead the next. Dorothy sits beside him, intermittently mopping his brow, lightly kissing his cheek, whispering incomprehensible endearments into his ear.
The window has at last managed to grind open behind him, and the curtains billow into the room like participants in a semi-religious ceremony. The night air sheds its warmth and the sweat bobbles like ice on his skin.
Dorothy offers him a box of confectionery. Looking at the display on the underside of the lid, he chooses the crystallized violet and places it upon the back of his tongue to allow the flavour to dissolve slowly. She chooses a marzipan triangle and a sweetloaf: sucks on them noisily.
“Who are you?” he manages to ask.
She drapes herself in the folds of the flowing curtains and dances a ballet with the music of the city night outside. She can throw her voice, disguise it and transform it even into a likeness of his.
“I’m the one who loved with a man in this room,” he hears himself say, “but he spurned me for another.”
At this point, the wardrobe door flings wide and the ceiling bells out, caves down: both reveal the toppling frightened face-blanks of men he once knew: the paint on the window frame blisters out under the flame-thrower of her breath: the chimney breast swells and reddens like the vein at the back of tumescence.
She twirls his still pliable body-part into a stick of barley sugar, sucks it to a jagged point. And giggles insanely as she impales herself upon it.
“Charming!” he mutters, as he drifts into another far worse nightmare: which is the real world full of new plagues that nobody understands.
(published 'The Edge' 1990)
Pete kept meeting dead-ends. Yet, the city was easy to negotiate during the day which he had in fact accomplished more or less regularly before tonight. However, with the hours of daytime drawing shorter these days, he was almost certain to be caught out sooner or later.
He had been delayed on the telephone, by an ugly customer - though Pete couldn't be sure just how ugly. The others in the office had turned off almost all the overhead strips before heading for home. They had then filled all the lifts and staircases with clambering bodies - like crabs in a fisherman's basket.
Pete's desk-lamp, gleaming waxily across his yet untidied papers, spotlit his hallowe'en mask of a mask of a face, while he tried to put paid to the hard-buy customer at the other end of the telephone. What cheek! What brass neck, giving Pete an earful, trying to be a paying customer at this time of day, when even the clock had clocked off! After all, the salesman's always right...
But Pete was not really a proper salesman. He possessed the soul of a backroom-johnny, a jerk-of-an-erk, one who felt out of his depth when trying to persuade (or, even, dissuade) someone to buy something. At the moment, he didn't mind which it was, as long as he, Pete, could go home and put up his feet with a nice cup of his wife's freshly brewed tea.
It then dawned on him that he couldn't separate his ear from the phone - as if the customer's voice was really an audible glue. Pete realised that he must slam the phone down rudely - the only way to close the sale. But, there he was, struggling horrifically with the handset: yanking at his fleshy lug as he would a cheesy pizza from its pan.
He glanced in desperation at the sepia photograph in an ancient gold frame of his dear wife on the desk, winking in the flickering desk-lamp, with his two kiddywinks either side - usually a comfort to him during normal office hours, since his work was for them, after all, wasn't it? Whenever a particularly ingratiating client came on the line to chat him up - well, his family's images were a godsend, a heart-warming consolation. Damn! Every sale meant extra paperwork for poor Pete and, indeed, commission thus earned would simply encourage his wife to want another extension of the family or desire better accommodation or, even, BOTH! Still, she *did* make a comforting cup of tea.
Slamming the phone down was normally the only answer...
He wandered the darkness of narrowing city streets, dazed and lost. The buses seemed to have stopped running - or merely turned over their engines somewhere out of sight, always around the next corner. The underground stations padlocked. Black cabs blacker than night itself. Every thoroughfare identical or so similar it was hardly worth walking from one to the other - leading round and round the oblong city squares. For a while, he sat on a park bench, feeling the side of his head. Thankfully the ear was still more or less intact...
But the voice inside it droned on.
The parlour was quiet, except for the woman's relentless clacking needles. She didn't know what she was making or, indeed, from what it was made, but the flowing grey matter, which the candlelight made to seem as if it were extruding from her revolving ear, had knitted together, spreading over her lap to the carpet - and back again.
"Mummy, what are you making?" asked a attractive little girl with a disfiguring lisp.
"Mummy, why don't you ever say anything?" asked an even littler boy smelling of the Vick spread across his chest to ease the breathing.
They saw her glance at the oval gold-framed photograph of her husband on the writing-bureau, where a candle guttered. Pete was late. They hoped she'd put the kettle on for a pot of tea - that always did the trick. They'd hear the garden gate go - and then...
The phone rang. The little girl scampered to answer it, delighted to be sufficiently grown up for this duty.
"Hello, theven, four, thix, thix, three..."
Pete discovered one of those old-fashioned red telephone boxes tucked away in a back-double. It should have been a welcoming sight, a throwback to the days before portable car-phones - but, in the circumstances, it was strangely off-putting. He felt the side of his head again and found something slimy drooling from an ear-hole. Mind slipping sideways, he tried to poke it back.
He managed to tug the heavy door open and squeezed himself in before it shut again. Damn! The phone was a left-ear one, and that happened to be the ear in trouble. Nevertheless, Pete picked up the handset from its cradle. But even before he had the chance to poke his digit in the various numbered holes in the dial, he heard a series of ratchets slipping home at the Telephone Exchange. Then, a babble of strangers' voices: the whole city talking to itself. At one point, he heard his own disguised voice. He wept bitterly when, in the distance, he made out the faint lisping of a little girl he knew he once loved - fading in and quickly fading out amid the aural mush.
Soon, all he could hear were the quick buck deals that everyone ripped each other off with...
"...five, thix, thix ... Mummy, Mummy, this phone's getting wet and thticky." The little girl held out the handset for inspection. The woman looked up from her knitting and smiled knowingly, her ticking needles weaving a cat's cradle of crossed-lines around her little boy's sleepy snorting head. After all, Pete *had* worked for an insurance company and knew all the best life assurance policies to sell - and buy. As far as customers went, Mummy had been Pete's best, and decidedly not ugly in any shape or form.
The one for the pot could be hers. But it was bound to end up with dead ants at the bottom of the cup, as she had lost the tea-strainer years ago. The garden gate didn't go. She saw there was a single silver tealeaf of a tear under of the little girl's eyes, but nobody said anything, particularly the mother.
(published 'XIB' 1993)
A COLLABORATION WITH JEFF HOLLAND
The office is empty, the unextinguished screens flickering like blue eyes in the darkness. The rig of Happy Birthday finery erected over someone's desk is a sad memorial rather than the intended happy welcome surprise tomorrow.
And Jacob's working late. Not poring over sheaves of paper, but thinking - simply thinking, instead of sleeping. Better than thinking at home. If he were at home, he'd be thinking of work, worrying his fingers to bone. But, here in the actual place of work, the office-type-Jacob can think of the home-type-Jacob.
There was something nicer in being *somewherenasty* because it seemed even nastier when viewed from *somewherenice*. And vice versa.
Jacob had stowed away in the toilet. Now he sits in the same revolving-chair, as he does during daylit hours. Ears pricked for the caretaker. Jacob could be just about anybody. And probably is.
Jacob knows he's Jacob. Mrs Jacob and Jacob Junior know he's Jacob. They're at home biting their nails regarding his absence. Or maybe they're not worried at all, since they're all asleep at home. Perhaps, Jacob is asleep at home, dreaming...
But he's not dreaming, is he?
With an abrupt recall to the reality of the present moment, Jacob hears something outside. The droning of an aeroplane increases the loneliness. This time it's inside his head: paradoxically outside the office building yet inside his head. He need not worry too long, because it must soon finish flying overhead. Probably going from somewhere nasty to somewhere nice.
The drone surprisingly changes pitch as the pilot does whatever pilots do as part of the landing procedure. From nice to nasty to nowhere.
Jacob's mind has already dismissed the sound because he hears the same thing many times every day. It's routine; backdrop; wallpaper...
He should be at the Jacob home. Why isn't he at home as part of Jacob United? Are they not, perhaps, united? God! What a stupid thought. Of course, they're Jacob united. OK, they have their ups and downs, who doesn't? Mrs Jacob usually has something to complain about and Jacob Junior is a real pain, but he'll be at school next year.
Jacob felt someone creeping up on him, perhaps a buxom caretaker in a deserted office block, if any such caretaker existed. Jacob's world was tinted. Rose-tinted. Blue. Black.
At home it was perfect-tinted.
Jacob's home was special but not his work world. His work world was that of any office junior. Back stab, grovel, suck, grab that leg-up, tread on that contemporary, apply for that promotion, don't show chinks in your armour. Bottom-of-the-rung office clerks can't last long with houses to maintain, cars to run, families to feed...
At 28 nobody had got past Jacob, not since he joined the firm.
Jacob - the oldest office clerk. How come no one had been promoted from office clerk since Jacob had arrived?
Jacob knew no one was as good as Jacob. If anyone was going to be promoted it was Jacob. So why hadn't he?
Jacob knew and Jacob wasn't saying, not to anyone, not to himself, not till now.
Jacob could manage. Jacob could manage a house, a car and a family on an office junior's money, so Jacob didn't try quite hard enough for promotion, so Jacob didn't get promotion but he, unlike the others, didn't leave either. And now he was starting to realise why.
Junior was nearly four years old yet there were no marks on the skirting-boards from his toys, no stains from his accidents, no repair bills from his high spirits.
The boiler was sweet as a nut and was never serviced, the drains never cleaned, the paintwork never washed, the wallpaper, yes, the wallpaper never replaced even if Junior did scribble on it.
Jacob loved his home and, in return, his home loved Jacob.
Just a little too much.
Just a little bit too real.
Just a little bit too, too ... too like something-that-was-alive. And now, like any long term relationship, there were problems...
The birthday rig in the late night office rattled. It looked like one of those fancy cots with a stiffened pyramid-canopy of fluttering lace and fine linen.
Only slightly rattling, but enough to startle.
Surely there were no draughts in this air-conditioned container of an office.
Dark sweat beaded Jacob's forehead like an ornament that girls in some Oriental country wore at religious ceremonies ... like gems glinting, the buxom caretaker thinks, as she approaches the desk where Jacob's body slumps at too acute an angle to support the head in its still waking position.
"I thought I'd find you here," she says, as if she knows she is not only breaking his revery but actually is aware of its contents.
This lady was so unlike Mrs Jacob, Jacob wondered how he could manage to conduct relationships with two such different women.
But this lady wasn't a caretaker, having no place in his domestic *or* business existences. So how had she ended up here? He usually only met her in the city flat - he'd been careful to keep her separate, sacrosanct, special.
"I'm not as special as you think I am," she says with a smile. Her cleavage is dangerous. Jacob finds his thoughts vanishing down its tunnel...
Junior had been born before Jacob first met this lady. Yet Junior possessed her eyes, her nose.
Jacob rose from a doze or fell into one, to find the office emptier ... almost as if Jacob himself had vacated it. The birthday rig, darkly silhouetted against the grey glow of the office window, seemed to wear a blue-tinted haze from the nearest screen ... like a ghost's robe.
The Jacob household cleaned itself every night when the Jacobs slept. It even dirtied the bits Mrs Jacob had cleaned the day before only to clean them even cleaner than she had left them.
Jacob shook his head. He helped clean sometimes.
No. No. Not those thoughts again.
Even his cack-handed do-it-yourself was repaired and returned to a state even better than new ... while he slept.
Junior's playroom - a pigpen of toys and mixed-up games by the end of the day - was sorted, SORTED by some all-year-round Santa Claus ... while they all slept. While offices and their denizens slept.
No wonder Jacob used a lady-of-the-streets with whom to dirty himself, to sully his bone-aching purity...
The lady herself wonders if she is indeed a ghost come to haunt Jacob with Guilt in spectral shape or is she simply the birthday rig - erected over some poor day-sucker's desk - in transitory animation?
No, not transitory but real, permanent, solid. She watches as the birthday rig appears to straighten itself, makes itself look taut and new, as though it really does mean to wish a "happy birthday" upon some aging day-sucker. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a shimmering screen wink out of existence and realises what is happening.
"Jacob," she screams, "Wake up, Jacob!" and she reaches across the desk and shakes his shoulder violently.
Jacob wakes from something other than sleep; he stares bemusedly down the gaping cleavage.
"Someone nice," he mumbles, "someone nice." And, as he slowly reaches towards her ... "I dreamt you were here and now you are."
She stiffened the ectoplasm of a preformative hand and smacked him once around the head. Jacob's eyes shot open.
"Don't you ever..."
"Jacob, get out of here!" she screamed, "Now! Now go!" She could feel the dust being pulled through the floor, see the nervous twitch of the dead keyboards, feel the cleanness coming.
Jacob leapt up, his seat slamming against the console behind him, and ran. He burst through a door at full tilt, finding speed to be the only element keeping him upright on the swaying, buckling floor.
Out in the corridor everything was still. Looking back through the door he could see the lady-who-slept-with-panthers frantically skipping and jumping away from the twitching, twisting building. She stopped when she saw him watching her.
"Get out, Jacob, get out!" And she waved her hands in a human, shooing motion. Jacob winced as the floor rose up and wrapped itself around her foot. There was a loud CRACK and the once female creature hobbled way on legs of uneven length, desperately trying to keep the building's attention focussed on her.
Jacob sniffed at the electric cleanness of the air and ran.
On the street, Jacob looked back at the building. Oh, well, he thought, shame to lose the job as well as the bit-on-the-side. Still, perhaps it was time for a change. A brunette, perhaps. Or hair only very slightly tinted. Possibly someone less voluptuous - more like Mrs Jacob. He shivered as a cold wind blew a stinging blast of rain into his face and a stray piece of paper wrapped itself around his leg. A piece of paper...?
"Oh, shit! The street's not yet been cleaned!"
Quickly he thought for a cab and a set of lights swung around the block. As he fell into the cab he thought of Mrs Jacob, of Jacob Junior and and of his home, letting the cab take the strain as he dropped into a fitful sleep in the cab's amorphous body. It was as if the cab had become his own body, his own shape, with spotlight eyes glaring along the wet sheen of the street...
"Somewhere nice, please," he said to the glutenous shape of the driver.
But he is dreaming, isn't he?
The driver's got goggles.
Mrs Jacob wonders who the dreamer is and who the dreamed-of, as she cradles her husband's head to her breasts like a baby. His birthday tomorrow. And tomorrow was a Monday. And all Sunday night people hated Monday morning people with a passion. Todays and tomorrows were never the best of bed-fellows and yesterdays were simply never anything, neither nice nor nasty.
Like a child, he was always overexcited at the prospect of his birthday. Jacob's mother had said that he always became catatonic with a hard-to-bear pleasure on the Eve both of Christmas and of his own birthday. This had transmigrated into adulthood - but Mrs Jacob cared for her husband in a simple fashion. It was almost like having a son who never grew up. At least, that way, he'd be someone nice forever. Nice, never nasty, often naughty. Fine linen diapers never dark, never dirty.
A plane slowly rose, droned and crossed the date-line of a sweaty city.
(published 'Sci-Fright' 2000)
He was known as Dickfixer Lawkins but, needless to say, that wasn’t his real surname. His Christian name was passed down from his father (and from many generations before him ) who followed an occupation which, until recent years, had fallen into disuse, subsequent to its earlier malpractice.
Some thought the job must have been something to do with baiting our loyal servants the police, whose powers, because of their monopoly in legally stopping people in the Street for no reason at all, once needed curtailing by the Dickfixers. Others, in their wisdom, often though he derived from an arcane stock of statue trimmers, since market squares in the Vind Valley catchment areas advertised their conveniences with prominent mock-ups of the male form.
If the truth were known, the Dickfixers WERE a secret society, but one of sharp medical practicioners learned in the Ancient lore of venereal disorders affecting those of an indiscriminate cast.
Our man Lawkins, at the end of his line of such fiddlers with the enthighed sanctities, was only too pleased to come out into the open at the very same time when the range of such nagging recoils again invaded, with renewed force, prized areas of carnal existence. He knew he would have to do a good job for, being of a fastidious nature himself, he had no son to carry it on. Either rid the Vind Valley in one fell swoop or just let the police have their own way and keep everyone indoors.
He has been seen often traipsing the high-sided alleys, where even the kerbside gutters were overflowing with a substance he suspected to be more than just melting snow… You couldn’t miss his characterful presence.
Arriving now at the sadness of the tale, Dickfixer Lawkins was, however, clean mad, but equally sane enough to conceal his background for shame of such madness, with the alias Lawkins. The statues outside the public letting-houses bore the brunt of his single-minded surgery (some said it was needful for him to practise first and the stone appendages were as good as any). But, it did tend to make him a trifle heavy-handed when it came to the real men upon whom he pounced within the dripping walls that the statues seemed to guard.
The thaw had set in. The spring was just round the corner. And it dawned on Dickfixer Lawkins that his job must be at an end. The lambing session was an area of time when he could hibernate, perhaps forever, sheep shears on the pillow beside him. In his fruitful madness, he began to consider other worthy causes (like doctoring the town’s drainage systems) - and, as he aimed against the brown-mottled enamel wall with his own stiff-brushed luggage, he placed the blades of his scissors at the optimum angle and snipped proudly with the merest crunching sound just once, like all good surgeons worth their salt (without even first testing the lie of the land with the more precise tweezers).
(published 'Trash City' 1989)
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