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The parlour was so sticky, its wallpaper seemed to be sliding off, even as I watched. But for what reason the woman had put me in the parlour I did not even question—since I had not seen the rest of the house.
She had given the impression of being in charge—not as an owner, more as a caretaker—whilst I had not yet taken the opportunity to examine the parlour. However, although I was someone normally averse to details, I did notice that the décor was decidedly choosy and chintzy—if blemished by blisters and peelings.
The woman suddenly re-entered with a feather-tickler on a stick, evidently uncaring whether a visitor might be disturbed by an environment of domestic chores or a pervasive aura of house-pride.
"Are you comfy for a moment?" she asked, digging, as far as feathers could dig, into one of the four top corners of the parlour—if such corners were indeed corners at all, judging by their being rather more like rounded alcoves-in-the-air. I nodded at her, failing to understand why a mere moment of my comfort was her concern.
A mere moment passed without duration ... and neither comfort nor discomfort were important during such an arguable length of time. Yet I nodded again and the whole room seemed to nod with me, by some quirk of eyesight.
I knew that a question needed an answer even if the answer was only necessary to ensure the question was asked. Any answer would have sufficed to square the circle.
Meanwhile, time did not fail to pass, in spite of consisting of nothing but overlapping moments. The woman drifted from my consciousness while, presumably, she had a go at other rooms nearby: rooms which I hadn't been able to check for sufficient viability or tenability as rooms, let alone the dust to warrant such an attack from her duster.
And I started to have a nosebleed: a nosebleed in the true sense where my whole body bled while my nose stayed essentially dry-nostrilled.
The nose, being merely a conduit, bled only inasmuch as its attachment, the body, bled. The nose wasn't cut. Something in the body gushed forth, employing the nose as an outlet. Unlike in the case of a nose, a finger could only bleed if the finger itself were injured. My nostrils were simply straws or syphons.
"Are you allright, my love?"
The woman spoke, upon returning to the parlour, in evident search of her yellow duster. She had noticed my distress: a distress which was redoubled by her use of an affectionate affectation of me being her 'love'. And the sickly backflow taste at the root of my nostrils was causing me to gag on the breath I couldn't quite catch.
"I'll put a cold copper coin down your back," she added, "since nosebleeds can otherwise be a devil to stop."
Abruptly, I choked on a spasm and threw a spray of abstract strawberries upon the wallpaper.
"There'll be a devil to pay," she continued, making me think she was hung up on devils.
It eventually dawned on me the reason for the existence of the choice of the decrepit chintzy room and for my presence therein. I saw it in her eyes. I saw that I was seeing her skull from inside her skull, a sight that effectively followed the drift of the brain's own sight of seeing it. Better get on with the housework, before my husband comes home from the office. I must scrape the grey grime off the innermost alcove with the edge of the hoover nozzle—then let its vacuum suck up the wayward thoughts with which poor menopausal women like me are beset.
Meanwhile, am I simply her fancy man, for when her husband's away? Or am I a night creature of complex motives, intent on sniffing out the fading residue of her seeping blood?
No answer from the room. Only the sound of a hoover breathing, the gentle popping of embolisms from under the wall-paper and bone china cracking in the distant scullery.
"Each month, there's a devil to pay." From HORRORMONES by Rachel Mildeyes
Walking into that house was not unlike coming home - and after a lifeful of disasters, it was good to feel everything panning out at last. Everybody deserves at least one lucky streak. So, as soon as I passed through the double-doored entrance, which had been left partially open, I felt instantly that I needed to turn straight back, if only to find the Estate Agent to tell him I would definitely have it at the asking price. And what did indeed the price ask? Only a few years of self-deprivation, until my inheritance worked itself through the system.
Inside the house, as well as darkness, there was a faint but pervasive scent, rather like flowers left fractionally too long in the vase. Indeed, I questioned my own motives of walking into the house without permission - although it did have a For Sale sign outside. Outside, its dark brown roofs had clambered towards a henge of chimneystacks, where I imagined my future children playing, as the dare-devils they would surely become. The walls that were half hidden by the shadow of the overhanging gutter were constructed from larger than normal bricks with generous fillings of grey cement - and, each about a yard apart, were set fluted pillars of what appeared to be creosoted wood. The garden path had led me, between rows of bending sunflowers, towards those double doors, doors which seemed to be the open covers of a black book with its narrow spine pointing right out at me. However, I could not read the title until I arrived close up and discovered it was not a title at all but the glimmering of a candleflame being carried up the long winding stairs to the first landing. The light disappeared as soon as I thought I knew it was a candleflame. I had slipped the latch of the garden gate with some surprising ease - after having previously negotiated some dreadful roofed alley-ways which led from the centre of the city. What I had spotted roosting on one of the chimneystacks was not a TV aerial, but something with a similar configuration: angular bones and a tiny beating heart: brooding as it gnawed upon a gable-post: balanced upon splayed elbows.
I would have come through Hell to reach my ideal home and, having arrived there, I obliterated all idea that evil lived in or on it. It was indeed a family house being sold by an Estate Agent in a normal city. The heady scent of dying flowers was stronger as I backed along the hallway searching for a light switch. Yes, yes, my inheritance would surely pay for this place. No fear of that. But, I would have a few years to wait, since my Maiden Aunt was showing no promise of death, as yet. To borrow on the strength of an inheritance, young man, the consultants had told me, was difficult, because no financial institution worth its salt would accept as security the fortunes of death, especially if connected with the continuation of an auntie's good will to her nephew.
For a moment, I believed I was still in the garden. The sky had disappeared altogether, leaving a black hole in its stead. The wafting of a sound like sea in the treetops became noticeable the further I edged towards the foot of the stairs, where the faltering candleflame had earlier climbed. Pull yourself together, young man, you were inside a house where you should never have ventured. You were not invited. Go back to the garden, where the flowers and daylight should still be fighting back the onset of darkness. Return down the garden path. Go back, young man, and found your dynasty amid a destiny elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I heard the stairs creaking, as if somebody was passing down them towards me - or some*thing* - or, even, something else.
"Who's there?" I asked in the faintest whisper, in case it heard me.
No answer. Whatever it was, it did not have the courtesy to renew its candleflame to shine up its face and allow me to recognise it. "But I never had a candleflame in the first place," it would snarl into my ear on eventually finding my ear.
"I saw the candleflame, when I came down the garden path," I insisted, "like the gold lettering on the spine of a battered black book."
When I had at first come to that city, the last thing I had expected was an adventure. I had arrived in search of a home, in some ordinary backwater close to an underground station. I had not anticipated actually having to crawl along the train-tunnels to get there. What else could one do, when there was literally nobody around to work the London Transport, with property prices in the city being so sky high? All to do with the base bank rate, my consultants had told me. My adventure was turning out to have no start nor end. Only an ever-expanding middle.
I remembered I had some matches in my pocket, for which I proceeded to fumble. Eventually, I produced a short-lived flame and saw sitting on the intricately carved stairs an entity with wide wire whiskers which turned widdershins and clockworkwise: the rest of its body not a body at all but a series of stair-rods erecting themselves from the treads. It was evidently related to the thing I had spotted brooding on the chimneystack when first I approached the house.
Travelling to the city, originally, had been a trial in itself. I hailed from north of the cotton mills, and all connections had to be arranged by my Maiden Aunt, she and I poring over the thick timetables for months in advance, till we both suffered the same small print headache. It all worked, though. Go forth, young man, and forge your connections. And so I did, bribing station workmen to bend the points in the direction I wanted to proceed and waving at railway children from the carriage, beckoning them to send their schoolfriends ahead into the tunnels to clear away the obstacles that old rail workings often had. In hindsight, I hope the wheels were soft on them kids.
Could this be the Estate Agent squatting on the stairs? Or a policeman, having been tipped off in advance about my breaking and entering? But I did not break anything, officer.
"Climb to the bedrooms, young man," the entity seemed to indicate with one of its bony metal feelers. It clanked and churned. It stepped aside, only to become part and parcel of the iron banisters.
All that in the flame of one match?
The stairs wound up for longer than I anticipated and I was sure they missed out floors, heading me towards the topmost attic, giving me no choice but to follow a destiny that was only at its planning stage. As I ascended, the banisters closed behind me, of which ratchetting only well-oiled machinery could boast. It gradually grew lighter, for sky was filtering through the ill-made roof.
I had bid farewell to my Maiden Aunt with a light kiss on the wrinkled petal of her cheek. She sat buried in her four-poster bed, surrounded by a lifetime's knick-knacks and her pen. She took me by the hand telling me to beware the city down south: "It's like a big cobweb of tracks, cantilever bridges, tunnels and flyovers, and buildings too tall for their own good." She had always had a wondeful turn of phrase and with her words ringing in my ears, I had entered upon the connections. Click, clack, click, clack, they went. And the roof was swelling down upon me, threatening to make the attic nothing but a room with no space, or a space with no room. Desperately, I pushed upwards. Changing direction, I realised that effort was now required elsewhere, and I pushed with straining muscles against the rising floor. I heard the crunching of my bones, as they splintered into my flesh. There was a war raging within my very body, so I quickly changed the track-points and escaped like a ghost down the empty stairs, leaving the rest of myself to its own devices.
It was easy now, because I had become the haunter and the house the haunted, instead of vice versa. With the likes of a ghost loitering along the stairways, the Estate Agent would find it even harder to sell. For a while, it didn't seem to matter that all this may have been a story in a book into which I had inadvertently stumbled. But there was one vital connection I had missed till it was too late - the despicable class of person who was to read the story. I suppose it could have been worse: I could have become a mere image on a small flickering screen in the corner of that person's room - fed by monsters to monsters - with no connection between except the TV aerial.
Somewhere else, I sensed that a little bit of me cried its heart out. And an old lady took off her wire glasses so as she couldn't see the tears.
(published 'The Stygian Dreamhouse' 1988)
There was madness in his method, peculiarity in his expressionless face, a quiver threatening his steadfastness ... but he was the same man, the man I'd always loved: Jess - except he'd changed his name.
I tracked him down to an obscure town up North - yet, of course, the town was never obscure to those who'd grown up there. The first person I met in that town, however, was as lost as I was. The second was little better, but pointed me towards a pub which, in a million years, I could never then have brought myself to enter. This individual - the one who shakily pointed a finger at the pub - told me something I couln't believe I heard straight, namely:
"They keep my bones in that pub."
I shrugged, knowing that I should walk as far from that pub and that individual as it was possible to walk if I wanted the nicer end of town.
How I reached the exact building where he was disguised as someone else my mind cannot now recall. I suppose - in hindsight - it was the namr on the sign: KINGS ARMS. Jess had always fancied himself as royalty - but when he opened the side door to my knocking, dressed in a gold-plated crown and very little else, I didn't know where to put my face.
"You!" he said breaking the silence and untying my tongue in the process.
"Jess, what on earth..."
"They don't call me Jess here," he said quite seriously, maintaining sanity in the face if not in the rest of the body. His lips were on the brink of a smile, a smile, I knew, which would break the spell of self-restraint.
A woman, I could now see, was slowly shuffling in huge bunny-rabbit slippers along the hall behind him towards where Jess and I stood. She was dressed in a tiara and tattered sari. I recognised her as the woman who had - a half an hour before - pointed out the dowdy pub and prattled of the bones therein. She had evidently walked faster than I.
"You!"
My mind cannot recall who spoke to whom, but a you can surprisingly condone, cover, collude better than any me or us.
We hugged each other, Jess and I, while the woman crouched in the hall sobbing. After we kissed with tongues, he went off and kicked her silly.
"No, Jess!"
But he would have none of it, as if he knew I knew kings could do anything they liked to whomsoever they wanted.
"Kick me instead, Jess."
And he did so - with a bare foot.
The woman was dead.
He went off to the pub.
I carried the woman's body to her bed, where we laid down together.
"You are my sweetest, sweetest child," I crooned as I kissed her all over to make her better.
When Jess returned blind drunk, he kicked me out of bed.
And he coupled with the body.
I disgraced myself on the bedroom lino, because I had not yet got used to the building's appointments - and it was too dark to see where things were going.
"You're making too much noise," said Jess, but I don't know how he heard amid the overlapping sounds he made with the body in the bed.
I left the obscure town the next day, taking an obscure train that happened to be running amid an extremely sparse timetable. Having tracked Jess down, I need not have stayed. The mere tracking down had been my goal and, once accomplished, I could return south whence I came.
I had satisfied myself that I could do it.
There's a lot of thinking time when a train's delayed as mine was that day. Good job, though, it had arrows in the carriages to appoint the way.
He was in the buffet bar, when I passed through it.
The building in the obscure town remains dark and silent. Only ghosts know how to keep bodies disguised, allowing the flesh to slip free and the bones to settle into shapes skeletons wouldn't be seen dead in. The sound of distant trains and the odd bus straining up the avenue outside makes loneliness seem tangible. And my mind remains unaware, even today, that Jess changed not only his name but also his mind. His madness was so very methodical. And some delays are like never starting off, you see.
(Published ‘Nasty Piece Of Work’ 1996)
Bernadette's frock rucked up. She was simply uncomfortable out of trousers, at the best of times. Her voice was more certain than her demeanour:
"The bomb was easy to place, no policemen nearby, just a few wide-eyed citizens who thought I was one of them. They did not suspect I was a freedom-fighter, for they would have scattered like pigeons on flickering toes. I was dressed as an old woman with a wicker basket, a shawl over my head with the threads running from my frock and laddered stockings..."
Patrick wanted to interrupt Bernadette's senseless, yet deliberate, ramblings. It was as if she needed to over-rehearse a well-worn story in order to exonerate her actions.
"When does it go off?" Patrick's gruff voice acted disinterested, forehead tracked with frowns.
"In plenty of time to catch the nine o'clock news," Bernadette answered. The frock rode more further up her thighs.
Pete arrived with Molly for some beer. He toted a few cans as supplement to Patrick's supply in the ancient fridge. By then, Bernadette had changed back into the man's clothes which she preferred to wear, with a tie half-pulled towards the unbuttoned shirt-collar.
Pete and Molly were ignored.
Bernadette really thinks she's a cool dude, thought Patrick. He had been gradually falling out of love with her ever since he first met her. As for most men, relationships had always started with the climax only to tail off into something quite mutually destructive. Still, the common cause was greater than the common good...
"It was on the six o'clock news..." said Pete, drawing attention to himself as he sprung the first can, his words tailing off as he tipped back to drink it.
Patrick and Bernadette had unplugged the TV, for fear of it turning itself back on. Such uncanny phobias in hardened folk amused Pete. If one is purveyor of terror, one must suffer it for oneself.
Molly smiled sweetly. Beauty, in one so principled as a freedom-fighter, is striking. She often risked being left in the path of the bomb she'd placed, just for the gut thrill. But, today, it had been left to Patrick and Bernadette, for it was a day off for Pete and Molly.
The bomb had indeed been positioned badly. It had mostly killed the wrong side. The news had reported the explosion fifth item down. Better than nothing.
"Patrick," said Bernadette, a cigarette whitening the air around her face. "Pete must be wrong. Don't look at me like that. I planted it for blowing not before eight. It promised to blow when the *next* march was passing..."
Patrick stared.
"Bombs have no brains, Bernadette," he said. "It is us who must guide them, nurture them, tease them into blowing straight."
"But it promised... Its heart beat true. Not like the last one."
Bernadette pushed her tie tighter into the collar, fabricating a purpose for her nervous fingers where one previously did not exist. This exposed her as the woman she was trying to shake off.
Molly looked up. Her blonde hair fell in curves down her back, the front of the dress unbuttoned to the lacy top edge of her bra.
"*I* was among those marchers in the second group which you were meant to hit..." she muttered at Bernadette.
Pete frowned. The whole matter was becoming far too complex for his liking. He and Molly had not seen the results on TV at all, but amid the reality of life around them. Pigeons, toes up; people lying around without their limbs, some missing heads, the gutters flowing, then silting up; drums rolling down the slope of Destination Street; windows shattered in the nearby Junior School, teachers wandering the playground in a dazed state, looking for the children; torsoes still twitching, even making phantom grunts through the stumps of the necks; Pete's own ear-drums still throbbing from the blast.
Molly had run up to Pete in the street, cursing uncharacteristically. She was wet-nursing a baby in her arms, a baby which was dead, Pete could see. Nothing had gone the way it was planned. This crippled baby was on their side. They should never have left the bomb for Bernadette to set.
Bernadette suddenly had the urge to change back into a dress. The whole evening had turned sour. But, after all, by her clumsy efforts, she had effectively saved Molly herself from being blown up. No wars would be won if all the fighters were suicide pilots. And Molly had an uncanny knack of always being on the winning side, without really trying.
Bernadette motioned to Molly to come upstairs with her.
The steep stairs creaked as they walked behind each other. The men would soon have too much beer. It was dark in this house. It was something to do with the way it was built to keep darkness inside. A safe house, yes, but one that did not lend itself to the emotions; Bernadette always felt ill at home here.
The bedroom was no better. The wallpaper hung in strips. The ceiling blistered. The window boarded over after a previous mis-placing of a bomb.
Bernadette collapsed upon the bed, holding out her arms to Molly. "Come on, I need to hold someone. Let's just be quiet for a moment ... gentle."
Molly shook her head, sitting in the dark corner on a rickety deckchair. The window creaked, as the planking shifted.
Bernadette felt her insides weep. She was a woman after all, and Patrick's baby had left scars ... and all for nothing, since its body had exploded on exit. An explosion in her dreams, at the time, but, later, she was unsure. Tatters of flesh and red gristle had slowly tracked down the window in this very room before it had been boarded up.
Now, there were other things outside, come to haunt Bernadette: trunks with bloodsuckers which, even if they had their limbs and heads returned to them, could have climbed no better the outside wall of this terraced house, towards the very room in which she now dozed. Others, patient in their recriminations, slouched along the pavements, grunting complaints to an unlistening world. Some, beating bones upon their own hearts like squelchy drums, gathered at the front door, despite promising not to come.
Molly, seeing that Bernadette was asleep, returned downstairs, where Pat and Pete lurked somewhere or other with the beer. The two men were too similar. Like their names.
She remembered to button up the front of her dress, before she walked down the dark hall and, with a sweet smile, unlocked the front door.
There were no heroes in a war. And only a few heroines to needle-fuck.
(first published 'Nasty Piece Of Work' 1997)
I once told you how I first came up that long, long hill out of Cullesdon and visited the local pub dubbed ‘Pail of Water’.
The rundown parade of shops, the golf-course on one side, the tracks leading to woodfalls and derelict smallholdings, and the strange mixture of council flats and semi detached owner-occupiers made that indefinable place, at one overnourished and prevalent, but at two disturbingly barren and bare-gnawn. Through the Southern Mysteries beyond Balham, it was soon that one met the Surrey Badlands, at the edge of South London, and that area to me by crap and root the core of such Badlands,
The golfers and pub locals stared imbecilically at any newcomers; the butcher’s shop kept so called satan-meat behind grinny windows; the girls begawed and bedecked themselves with flirting ribbons and enticing cockadilloes; the callow youths hung an arse round by the patron’s car park of the ‘Pail of Water’, sometimes helping the contraband lorries unload the cock-ale - delighted in by the local taste-buds; and the churn-owls swooped and whooped with the early dying of the afternoon light, betokening the preparation of other entities and elementals to squeeze themselves from between the sticky thighs of the night.
That day I arrived, after initiation from the shapes in the sky, they doctored me to their ways. The clan leader, Tokkmaster Clerke, who also acted as local general practitioner, served me the medicine and the mending and kept vigil by my several nights of bed-evil that ensued. He continued to move the bed on its ill-suited legs, muttering that the devil did rock my cradle, did cully my fever and did keep the bloody-flux at bay; but his hush-a-byes sure did beflum and bamboozle my thoughts for a while.
After, I stayed with the Sawdust family; they knew my history and why I had been called there, I was to be chief taster for those Societies that met at the Community Hall, standing across the road from the shops, a bit like an army barracks, with the letters of its name above the entrance mostly fallen completely or dislodged into a word I could not pronounce, The cabals and brotherships that there stretched their limbs from bodies politic within the big and small halls and lesser meeting-rooms feared sabotage from outsiders.
I had gained reputation in the ‘Square Mile’ further North as sniffer-out of poisons at the credence-tables of nobility and middle-class alike. I had cocked a tongue to many dire tidbit and toxic tiffin, and winked across to those sitting above the salt: telling a tale of treachery with my mere glance,
The Sawdust’s tried me out with every particle of local fare: the sometime bad toddies served at nearby Woodman-Sterne, the even more ill-reputed carrier worms dug from beneath nearby deadfall trees (considered a delicacy in parts of the Badlands ) and, finally, the scuds and curds that intermittently plummeted from the sky in crazy fibrous shapes that monsters said to be above the clouds sculptured from their own droppings.
And I passed mustard with every test.
Tokkmaster explained how the word above the Hall’s entrance, Cthulhu, was pronounced and what it implied; inside he showed me several huge black volumes with gold clasps with arcane titles, hidden with the drama props under the stage, whispered in my ears about the coming of even narrower fellowships and masonries to the area. And I was to be Chief Taster and Factotum to any such,
One day a banquet was held …. Of course, Tokkmaster Clerke was at the head of the huge oak trestle, being host and breaker of bread. The wine, deeply red, flowed down swift gullets. The food -great gristles of flesh, yellow fat and hairy skin lining the rare sides of boeuf and lion; even greater cow-udders, baked and prepared with the greasy tubes intact, the undersides green-fleshed and pocked with broken bubbles of melded fat; windfall fruit, knotted and almost branched with unwholesome sprouts of stale seasons; plates of flopping fish, still alive but unbelievably putrid, their fins pickled in vats of udder-grease as scaly extras; further dishes of octopus with inflamed, ridgy pores, squid with mutant tentacles, horny lapfish, swordfish bent and skewed, splattered blowfish, gasfish, rancid roe - the food was enjoyed at every hand.
All had passed across my credence-table for pre-tasting and, suddenly, a great boar’s head, overbaked and brainless, spoke the last word from the trestle: “Burp!” And spew poured from its sticky mouth,
They all looked up at me…. and stared icily, realization dawning. Dr Tokkmaster pressed his stethoscope to his own chest … to hear the devil in there. He grimaced and made as if to attack me…
I left that night, my job done, down the long, long hill. I was searching for some far-off pub to quaff a pint of their very best bitter and to partake of a packet of pork scratchings. Clean flakes of snow settled over me as I entered Cullesdon.
(published 'Works' 1988)
(The only poem on 'Numinous Magazanthus')
1.
The roads of the sky knoweth my body,
Cradled child by a lamp
Lulling his mother to sleep.
White birds, gulls at the window,
To seek shelter from the storm
In the green lap of the domicile.
I peck the glass,
Wind-smashed bones
In detritus dreams.
2.
Even the child knoweth the sky
And its dark secret message.
His mother, green from death,
Stares glassily mad,
As the song of cancer
Croaks its last deep riddle.
Even the child, even he, knoweth
That his body exists.
His blood will change.
His horizons will disappear.
The lamp will flunk
In the last bitter chaos.
3.
Air and body
Share a body
Of sin and love.
Child and mother,
Each a lover,
Each a doll
Teach a gull
To enter
The centre
Of their solitude.
4.
The winds are rude,
I’m bitten, brushed,
Caught, returned,
On wings of bone,
Scattered bird-meat,
Whitening the centre
Of the sky
Where a cross
Towers over all who loved
Their mother for her child.
(written 1967, published 'Eavesdropper' 1990)
THE HOUSE RINGS WITH THE SOUNDS OF RAMBLING CHILDREN. IF THERE ARE ANY GROWN-UPS IN ATTENDANCE, THEY CERTAINLY DO NOT MAKE THEIR PRESENCE FELT. IN FACT, THE PARTY IS EVIDENTLY AT ITS HEIGHT, SINCE TWO GIRLS IN PINAFORE DRESSES, OF INDETERMINATE AGES, LEAN FROM A PRECARIOUS BALCONY, HOLDING FUNNY HATS TIGHT TO THEIR HEADS IN THE LATE AFTERNOON BREEZE. A BOY BLOWS A SQUEAKY TOY FROM ONE OF THE MANY ATTIC WINDOWS. HIS SHOUTS CANNOT BE HEARD FROM THE SUMMER PAGODA WHICH SOME ANCIENT FOLLY OF A PERSON ONCE SAW FIT TO HAVE ERECTED BESIDE THE GREEN LAKE.
THE BOY, DRESSED IN A SAILOR’S TUNIC, IS AN ECHO OF MYSELF AT THE SAME AGE. HE WAVES BUT, SURELY, I CAN’T BE SEEN. I WAVE BACK BUT, SURELY, HE CAN’T SEE ME. EVENTUALLY, HE DUCKS INSIDE TO ESCAPE THE EDGE OF DUSK.
LATER, A SEXLESS CHILD, WITH A BLACKENED FACE, EXTRUDES FROM ONE OF THE CHIMNEYPOTS ON THE VAST ROOF’S STAIRCASE STACKS. IT HOLDS UP A WINDMILL TOY WITH BUTTERFLY SAILS WHICH I GUESS MUST BE SPINNING LIKE MAD IN THE PICKING-UP BREEZE. INSIDE, THERE MAY BE SEVERAL OTHER CHILDREN IN PARTY DRESSES, BIBS AND TUCKERS, PLAYING THE WHOLE HOUSE FOR ITS EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY. HIDE AND SEEK, PASS THE PARCEL, MUSICAL CHAIRS, HUNT THE THIMBLE, FORFEITS AND DRESSING-UP. OH, I SIMPLY WOULD LOVE TO JOIN IN, LIKE A DROWNER, GRABBING MY SECOND CHILDHOOD HOOK-LINE-AND-SINKER. I ONCE DISCOVERED GREAT DELIGHT IN MOTHER’S DRESSINGUP TRUNK, THE ONE THROUGH WHICH SHE ALLOWED US TO RUMMAGE ON WET SUNDAY AFTERNOONS...
JUST AS WE SURRENDERED ANY HOPE OF THE WEATHER IMPROVING, THE LATE SUN SUDDENLY SHAFTED ACROSS THE LOFT FROM THE SKYLIGHT, PICKING ME OUT AS A CHILD IN SOME ANCIENT SHE-COUSIN’S COMING-OUT DRESS, BILLOWING AROUND MY ANKLES IN GOSSAMER SEAS OF ENDLESS CHILDHOOD’S DREAM. BY COMPARISON TO THE NIP AND TUCK OF MY USUAL TUNIC TROUSERS, I FELT SO GOOD, SO LIBERATED. MEANWHILE, THE OTHERS AIR-TOSSED THE KALEIDOSCOPIC FLOTSAM OF FABRICS, FRILLS, AND FAIRISLE WOOL. MOTHER LAUGHED UPON SEEING US ALL DRESSED UP, OUR EYES ENGORGED WITH SUNSET. MY OLDER SISTER WAS LANCELOT OF THE GREEN LAKE, SPORTING GRANDPOP’S OLD FIREGUARD, WITH SEE-THROUGH BODY TIGHTS BENEATH; ANOTHER SISTER STRUTTED THE LOFT AS A QUEEN, IN MINK-EDGED ROBES OF ROYAL BLUE SATIN, UNDER A CROWN OF CAPTURED SUNLIGHT. YET IT WAS ME WHO EARNED MOTHER’S WARMEST PRAISE, AS SHE TIED A PINK RIBBON IN MY HAIR.
WITH PRICKLING EYES, I SEE ANOTHER GIRL IN FLOWING TWILIT LACE JOIN THE OTHER TWO ON THE TINY BALCONY. SHE WAVES, AS I WAVE BACK SIMULTANEOUSLY FROM THE PAGODA. SHE HAS BEEN DISCOVERED IN THE UNLIKELIEST OF HIDING PLACES, BUT NOBODY KNOWS WHO FOUND HER, SINCE A SEEKER HAS NOT YET BEEN APPOINTED OFFICIALLY. MY MIND WONDERS AS IT WANDERS — THE EVENING DRAWING IN WHILE I SPOT EVIDENCE OF HIGH-BANKED FIRES CURLING FROM ALL THE CHIMNEYPOTS LIKE FEATHERY SOOT.
THE BOY SHUT HIMSELF IN THE BROOM CUPBOARD AS THE BEST POSSIBLE HIDING-PLACE FROM THE SEEKER. BEST IN THE SENSE THAT HE DID WANT HER TO FIND HIM AT SOME STAGE ... BUT NOT TOO EASILY. SOME OF THE OTHER CHILDREN WOULD PROBABLY BE NOW ENSCONCED IN THE OUTLANDISH PLACES IN THE LARGE HOUSE, PERHAPS NEVER TO BE DISCOVERED. THE BOY COULD HEAR HER COUNTING IN THE DISTANCE, MISSING OUT NUMBERS HERE AND THERE, EITHER AS A JOKE OR, MAYBE, EVIL. HE LAUGHED. THE CUPBOARD WAS STUFFY AND MUFFLED HIS NOISES.
THE COUNTING CEASED AT AN UNROUND NUMBER. “COMING — READY OR NOT!” HE LISTENED TO HER FEET SCAMPERING AWAY INTO THE FURTHER REACHES OF THE HOUSE. HE WAS SURPRISED TO HEAR AN IMMEDIATE RATTLING AT THE BROOM CUPBOARD DOOR. AT FIRST, A GENTLE TEASING OF THE PLAY AT THE HINGES, GRADUALLY BECOMING MORE INSISTENT. HIS SURPRISE QUICKLY TURNED TO FEAR. THIS SURELY COULD NOT BE THE OFFICIAL SEEKER-OF-HIDERS, IN BODY TIGHTS. FEAR, ONCE FORMED, QUICKLY HATCHED THE TWIN FIENDS DESPAIR AND TERROR, A DARK-DERIVED SYMBIOSIS WHICH RESOLUTELY TOOK SWAY.
“LARDY-DAR, LARDY-DAR.”
THE VOICE WAS OUTLANDISH, MAKING HIM THINK IT WAS A BROOM OR SOME OTHER SWEEPING IMPLEMENT TRYING TO RETURN TO ITS LAIR THE CUPBOARD. THE BOY LAUGHED ... AND CRIED. THE HOUSE WAS SUDDENLY QUIET. HE TRIED TO STOP BREATHING TO SEE IF HE COULD HEAR THE INTRUDER BREATHING. “INTRUDER” DID NOT SEEM THE RIGHT WORD, BUT STRANGE WORDS OF WHICH HE KNEW NO MEANING ALREADY PASSED THROUGH HIS HEAD, PRETENTIOUS WORDS, SILLY WORDS. LIKE SYMBIOSIS.
THE NURSERY RHYME OF WHICH HE HAD JUST CAUGHT A LINE WAS NOT ONE THAT MOTHER HAD READ TO HIM. THE VOICE MUST BELONG TO ANOTHER HIDER-WITHIN-DARKNESS LIKE HIMSELF, FRESH FROM COVERING ITS SKIN IN SOOT.
I AM NOW OLD, GROWN OUT OF SUCH GAMES. GROWN OUT OF THE PAST. AND, LIKE ALL SEXLESS HUMAN CREATURES, I EVER SUFFER THE PANGS OF GIVING BIRTH TO A PARTHENOGENESIS OF WRINKLED, HALF-FILLED HUMAN SKIN.
“LARDY-DAR, LARDY-DAR.” I HUM, AS I HOBBLE FROM, THE PAGODA: GROWN OUT OF PEEPING UPON A VICARIOUS CHILDHOOD. WHATEVER IT IS THAT IS INSIDE MY BODY OFTEN TURNS OVER IN ITS DREAMFUL SLEEP. THE LITTLE BOY I ONCE WAS? A SOOT-STAINED SUCCUBUS? OR WORSE? ALL WAITING TO GROW OUT OF *ME*.
(published 'Not Dead But Dreaming' 1999)
I knew the businessman was Nicholas Chowder from the nameplate on his desk.
"Aggravation, nothing but aggravation!" he said with a smile.
My assessment of Chowder's frame of mind, however, stemmed not from his name nor from his understatement regarding aggravation nor from his smile, but from his throat which had accidentally developed a vicious-looking gash as a result of my wielding a blade rather too threateningly in the vicinity of his adam's apple.
"I am merely a burglar," I retorted.
I could judge he had already undergone a pig of a day amid the wretched uniformity of life's awfulness. Too many lost deals, too many unsatisfying lurches to and from lunch.
I snatched a quick glance at the papers strewn over his leather-topped desk. Anonymous mugging had never appealed to me because, by dint of its nature, such an activity was not only anti-social but also involved unsociable hours, whilst straightforward bodily harm allowed me to meet people in the course of my work. The doorman to the office block hadn't been worth spending the time of day with - the servant classes often weren't. So I had dealt *him* a deadly blow first off. I knew, simply knew, in those days of recession and hard graft, that the upper floors of the block would hold at least one late-working businessman crouched over as he sweated blood. Indeed, Chowder's papers bore an archipelago of marks, as if greasy fish and tomato-sauced chips had been wrapped up in them.
I held the blade slightly less threateningly to give him the opportunity to breathe again and - since I enjoyed anticipation more than anything - to prevent the incision I had made in his neck from haemorrhaging too soon. As I did so, I gathered from his papers that he had been writing prose of a creative nature as opposed to the tedious facts and figures wich business often thrived upon.
His words indeed told of creatures with seemingly misspelled names, faraway places, impending dooms, frowning fates and churlish investigators. None of it made complete sense. I was intrigued, because I had vaguely been acquainted with such a mythos as a child, when my father read me bedtime horror stories. They now came flooding back to me as I consumed further paragraphs of Chowder's scribble.
In the meantime, I released him and he flopped into his revolving chair, dabbing the front of his neck with a strawberry-spotted handkerchief. Robbery was no longer at the forefront of my mind nor, even, self-preservation. To have discovered this hotbed of literary endeavour in such a non-descript city block was sufficient to exclude all other considerations and I plumped myself down in his secretary's seat, shuffling more of his papers to within my range of vision.
"This is all very interesting..."
I raised my sight towards Chowder. He still smiled. The wound still welled without over-brimming.
"Your name," he said, in such a tone as it wasn't a question.
"I've been called Sharp End," I replied, ignoring his tone.
"I'm Liftcraft, Menshun Liftcraft."
So the Chowder nameplate was a diversionary tactic.
He proceeded to explain matters with many preambles of pointless logic, so that I would be eventually amenable to his revelations: such as the fact that many of the creatures described in his papers were real, with tentacles and undreamable features - and they squatted in the top floor boardroom of that very office block.
Over the years, however, they had actually mutated into human beings. Liftcraft (aka Chowder) blamed, he claimed, inbreeding for this state of affairs. No wonder - bearing in mind his written descriptions I had briefly browsed. Surely, I thought, the creatures' erstwhile ugliness must have been a disincentive to mating, a consideration which also compelled me to scrutinise, for the first time, the detailed demeanour of my victim, the one who called himself Menshun Liftcraft. A businessman's suit had indeed blinded me to the state of his complexion and facial landmarks.
"Let me tell you ... Sharp End ... when people stare at me as you are, then I start to think that they see more than there is to see..."
I shrugged, indicating, by default, that I hadn't understood his words. Yet how could I have previously ignored the gaping pores which exuded the greasy substance I had earlier noticed staining the papers ... and the rubbery nose ... the sunken sockets whence his eyeballs sagged.
"...or less," he added, after an inordinate pause.
I countered by uttering one of my most meaningful non-sequiturs:
"Do you think they're in disguise, your creatures? Fancy dress and masks would be a more believable belief-system than their actually becoming human beings by the natural selection of mutation, wouldn't it?"
"Fancy dress? It's a thought, I suppose. I hadn't considered that it might be feasible for them to disguise themselves as human beings ... unless evolution itself is a sort of disguise, albeit a slow-motion sort."
Liftcraft was thinking louder than he talked.
"Can I meet them?" I asked.
By now, I had mostly forgotten that I was a robber. I fancied myself more as one of those investigators I'd seen cursorily sketched by Liftcraft's written words. A part of my mind (that part not entrammelled by the residual problems of self-identification) wondered whether Liftcraft's bosses knew he spent office time writing stories about monsters. But, judging by the size of his plush room, he *was* a boss - one calling himself Nicholas Chowder, so as to conceal his real foreign name.
"You want to see them, do you, Sharp End? But there's nothing to see except replicas of normal human beings whom you can see walking along any street any day of any week. Why would you want to see such people?"
"But not so ordinary *if* they've bred themselves from ... aliens."
"No, no, not aliens. You're ... *we* are the aliens, Sharp End, not them. Those in the boardroom are Elder Gods, Ancient Ones, Cthulhu's childer - and, to them, everything else is alien."
He continued with such a rigmarole of unpronounceable names and words and places and book titles that I only caught fragments. No possible preamble could have justified such an outlandish diatribe. Yet, surely, only sense could be[i] quite
"Everything else is alien": that's what Menshun Liftcraft kept repeating before the office door swung open to admit a group of short-skirted secretaries. So - the building had not been left bereft by home-going, after all. Everybody worked late here, it seemed.
These leggy ladies caused me temporarily to lose my thread and there followed a short lull, before one of the newcomers shrieked as Liftcraft's neck wound dawned on her - ensued by clicking dominoes falling like echoes: tutting tongue-riffs shuffling like sticky playing-cards. Yet I soon realised I was wrong: the secretary was not kicking up such a fuss regarding Liftcraft's state, but a small creature skittered over the floor, one which the girls were evidently chasing with hysterical yipping noises.
There followed a frantic flurry as they scattered in all directions, this being an attempt to cut off the creature's retreat. One glimpse told me that I would need more than a glimpse to ascertain the creature's nature. A simple cat-lick of a glance might have told me volumes about a normal animal, but this was different, so different it wasn't even possible to differentiate difference from sameness.
Yet, now, there it perched, throbbing ... upon a filing cabinet, as if daring the circling secretaries to make a snatch for it. It managed this feat, however, without eyes. It looked like a long waggling nose between two wrinkled bulbous sacs, sacs that were so loose they were almost one, not two, and with sprouting side tufts of wiry hair. But, no, it *did* appear to have a single eye, after all, a sunken one, more of a needle's eye - in the centre of its snout-ends's unravelled helmet. The thing pulsed, throbbed and, yes, preened itself with a viscid milkiness which its weeping pinprick of an eye-hole seeped, then spat.
I felt sorry for it, despite the ugliness. It was one of Cthulhu's childer, as I was later to learn, and, thus, beyond pity, beyond, even, love, hate or envy.
The girls were soon herded from the room by Menshun Liftcraft who subsequently turned his face to me knowingly - knowing that I would never really know.
Meanwhile, the creature had flopped to the floor, whereupon it scuttled silently to the lap of my skirt and suggestively squatted there, purring.
"Aggravation, nothing but aggravation!" Liftcraft said with a smile. "Secretaries are so very empty-headed, but *you*, Miss Sharp End, are a different kettle of fish."
Knowing all along what variety of creature *I* was, he kindly offered me the nick in his neck.
I didn't argue. After all, having no real faith in Ancient Gods or Great Old Ones or any of those tarramadiddles, *my* soul's investment was simply in burgled blood.
(published ‘Black Moon’ 1995)
A COLLABORATION WITH PAUL BRADSHAW
Pediculus Humanus.
As she slept they multiplied, from hundreds to more hundreds, thousands to more thousands, spreading through her caramel-coloured follicles, less than microscopic in size, squeezing through root-holes and entering into the no-man's-land beyond. Now millions and increasing, they swarmed in all directions, chewing away tiny chunks of her brain tissue, sucking the blood, minute claws gripping and holding on to whatever they encountered in the darkness. Busily they continued, eating her very dreams, robbing her of all thought and perception, rendering her a mere vegetable. Unfeeling and unliving, and minus threequarters of a brain. When satisfied they scattered, fleeing that bloodless, brainless place.
Mrs Cricklehouse arrived once a month, armed with a frightful menace and a monopoly on largeness. She was all flabby and blubbery, huge and chinful, as if she had spent her entire lifetime demanding this obesity. She held on to a deadpan and mean-looking expression as if her death depended on it. She treated smiles with disdain, and did not appear to even attempt producing one. The children reckoned her scowl could frighten even the dead. They also fancied that the pockets of her apron were filled with nits, and that she would gleefully delve into those dark interiors and scatter the tiny beasts all over someone's head.
Peter openly trembled whenever she came. He shrank back into his seat until all that could be seen was his fear. He dared to gaze at Mrs Cricklehouse, but only in between fits of shaking. His Mum had told him not to be scared of the nit nurse, just as she had told him not to fear the dentist and the black creatures that lurked in the wardrobe at night. Creepy crawlies and crawly creepies he could stand, and all the terrors of a child's existence. Yet Mrs Cricklehouse created an anxiety in him, a feeling of dread that felt like a demon tugging at the strings of his soul.
"The nit nurse will see you now, Peter," said Mrs Fenton with a smile of pure madness spread across her awesome, glossy lips. The same lips that, according to rumours, often met those of the headmaster Mr Crabb, but only at opportune moments, such as inside the broom cupboard.
Quaking terribly, Peter reluctantly got to his feet, and then felt his legs quiver. His teeth chattered. His heart banged horribly. His anguish increased. His face turned warm and red. Because of his short trousers the knocking of his knees was evident. He felt like a puppet that had lost all its strings, all its equilibrium. He gripped the edge of the desk and steadied himself. But still his nerves were in a tangle, dancing some strange dance inside him.
"Peter, the nurse is waiting," said Mrs Fenton. And then, seemingly in order to infuriate him and the rest of the class, she scratched the chalk against the blackboard, creating some mathematical equation that disinterested the whole group of frightened souls.
Mrs Cricklehouse looked at him, her bulging eyes surrounded by oceans of flabbiness. He considered diving into the ink-well, anywhere to escape from this hideous torture. The prospect of becoming a boy of dripping blue did not dissuade him from this thought, but the practicality of it did, or rather the non-practicality. He started to walk. It was like moving in a dream, slow and death-like, as though he were stepping across the bed of the ocean. And with a blubbery shark not far away. Mrs Cricklehouse started to twitch. Peter noticed this, and forgot to breathe for a second or two.
Unfortunately for him he arrived within feeling and burrowing distance of the nit nurse. He wanted to scream. Especially when he considered what had happened to Wendy Aspinall.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," said the shark, devoid of all emotion.
Peter thought this to be one of the biggest lies ever told. Before he had the chance to prepare himself, Mrs Cricklehouse reached out with her icy hands and delved into his field of follicles. She really hurt him with her large probing fingers. They were like thick, pink sausages with elongated fingernails, scratching over his scalp, taking strips of skin away. He winced as she rooted around with a devilish abandon, plucking and tugging at his roots. She was like a madwoman, intent on discovering just one tiny louse, one excuse to force him into some kind of unpleasant treatment and humiliation. His fear increased as she searched with frantic eyes, until he hopelessly listened to the trickle of urine that was escaping down his bare legs.
Wendy Aspinall was of course the key. She had not been at school now for several weeks under the rumour that her Uncle was in prison for whatever prevented his niece's attendance... but Peter had other rumours up his sleeve, one of which was that Mrs Cricklehouse had, on a previous visit to the school, delved a little bit too far -- actually beyond Wendy's skull -- in search of the pesky pipsqueaks which swarmed in most heads of hair, the authorities implied, like all the decimal points in God's arithmetic.
He shuddered at the thought. Maths homework was worse than anything. He would suffer most tortures if the end result was avoiding the stranglehold of sums and such forth. Even the inopportune wet down his legs was bearable, when the long dry summer made it look like sweat. He had in fact escaped with very little aggro because the school bell had gone before the nit nurse had even begun to dare dig her nails into his ears. Nobody had noticed his predicament. He now relished the plump hot dogs his Mum dealt him out on his plate, rubbery hoses of meat running in grease, which he pretended were the Cricklehouse digits that either added up to grown-up grub or a delightful dream of come-uppance. Cheap at half the price. He gave himself a big hand for surviving the day.
Particulus Vulgarum.
The dream was shared. Boy and girl with minds conjoined. The tiny killer bees that were once snowstorms on the edge of Hell gnawed towards a tubular column of gristly tumour which both brains shared between them. These wild wild wens of weirdest insignificance of size needed not only the healthy blood of healthy children but also the greyer, greener nodules which these children's potentially older bones and flesh would nurture come the onset of later adulthood. Nits that travelled time in hunt for incubations of easy disease.
Peter woke with a start. He wondered if Wendy was awake too. Nobody was allowed to visit her after the so-called incident with her Uncle. Mrs Cricklehouse was not even on the same wavelength of his half-dozing dreams. She was a busted flush. He hoped her knickers sagged with the pests she sought in others. He laughed. Mrs Fenton and Mrs Cricklehouse both played fast and loose with Mr Crabb but this was neither here nor there vis a vis the all-important matters of the universe. Threesomes were not considerations given even the geometry of unholy triangles.
The night was long at this moment. At others, it was short. But at this precise moment it was long. He knew this as he tried to delve back into a dreamless sleep. Communion with Wendy again amid the shifting hexagons of full-blown slumber was more than a drift away. He sat up stock still against the bedhead. Watching the curtains -- embroidered by his Mum in better days -- blacken over with a deeper, more granular darkness.
Morning comes to everyone, and as the light of day swallowed the darkness of the previous night Peter clambered clumsily out of his dreams. Another school day beckoned, and he thought he heard a screaming inside his head. He escaped from the bed-mites -- an altogether more vicious breed -- and embarked on his unholy preparations. Teeth to be cleaned, features to be washed, fears to be quelled. Although he never really managed to achieve the latter. He imagined holding Wendy's hand again, that soft, soft grip, like clutching heaven. This was a dream he didn't wish to leave behind in his bedroom.
It was sunny but cold, as he stared out of the big windows at the trunks of the trees. He was sure that the barks formed faces, and that they were grinning his way, giving him further nightmares. Heaven seemed so far away at this tiny point in his existence of childhood and quasi-innocence. He then heard a voice, and looked up to see Mrs Fenton, spectacles sliding comically down the bridge of her nose.
"Composition time!" she declared -- but Peter didn't want to believe her.
Young heads bowed in concentration and wild thought. Peter tentatively glanced out of the window, and noticed the bark-faces displaying gruesome smiles of malevolence -- if they ever existed at all. Reality was so confusing. So he ducked his head on to the blank page, and clung to his pen, and an hour later the page wasn't blank at all.
He created a child-like tale he called Nits Are Not Nice. He poured his fears out like blood from a jug. Yes, out they tumbled, like drunken acrobats, hitting the paper to form words that Peter could hardly spell. Wendy was in it. And the abominable Mrs Cricklehouse. And the nits -- the lousy, lousey nits.
"Peter!" Mrs Fenton called out, so suddenly that Peter almost escaped from his skin. "Ink-wells!"
He looked up and discovered her face, all unnatural colour and cosmetically camouflaged, eye-lashes with lives of their own and lips all shiny with gloss. A memory came to him like a bolt of thunder, albeit a silent one. Stephen Kelly was absent with leave due to chicken pox. At least it had nothing to do with nits, Peter thought, as he ventured from his desk and passed all the half-empty, half-full ink-wells on his way out of the room. Being substitute ink monitor was the most important thing in the world, according to him.
And so he returned, armed and dangerous with a severe amount of Quink. Like someone consequential he shifted from desk to desk, unsteadily pouring from the dark blue bottles, filling each well with sustenance and life. What authority he had! But then he came to the silent seat, the dead desk that belonged to the delectable Wendy. He shivered and froze, froze and shivered. Could he see a ghost in that seat? A small girl with pig-tails and a smell of bubble gum? No! His Mum had told him that ghosts don't exist.
"Shall I fill Wendy's?" he shouted in a quavering style to Mrs Fenton.
"Fill them all, Peter," she instructed, with a tongue of unhidden menace.
Peter obeyed, but his hands were shaking, and when he heard Wendy's spectre-like voice whispering to him he dropped the bottle to the floor. Crash, and other sound effects. A dark pool of Quink crept around his toes as the class gasped in unison, uncontrolling their laughter and exasperation.
"Peter!" cried out Mrs Fenton. "Fetch a mop at once! Hurry!"
Peter pitied Mr Fenton as he departed from the classroom in a shocked haze. "It's not fair, everything happens to me," he told the corridor as his shoes squeaked on the shiny surface of the floor. He wished he could be an adult, to travel in time to those far-off years. He attempted to look into the future but only got as far as Tuesday. Then he opened the door of the cleaning cupboard and was unhealthily greeted by something akin to the Devil.
"Aaaaggghhh!!!"
Was that my own scream, he wondered as he studied the ugly creature inside the cupboard. Despite his Mum's warnings, awful things did seem to exist in the darkness. The first thing he spotted was exposed flesh, as naked as someone in the bathtub. Goosebump-covered skin, all thick and trunk-like. Sumptuous thighs and jiggly breasts. And the monster had two heads, which resembled those of Mr Crabb and... Mrs Cricklehouse!
"Aaaaggghhh!!!"
This was definitely his own scream. He gazed at the both of them but his eyes were outnumbered. He lowered his stare and noticed that the nit nurse was tugging at some long portion of skin that belonged to the headmaster.
"What is it, Peter?" said Mr Crabb in a voice that was strangely high-pitched and vastly unlike his familiar booming tone.
"Er..."
"Well, get on with it then, lad!" said the headmaster, his eyeballs resembling something Peter had seen during an episode of The Outer Limits.
Mrs Cricklehouse continued pulling at the thing as Peter reached into the grey interior in search of a mop. He saw one -- the thick grey strands of its head looked like Medusa's hissing serpents. Peter invented an image of those dashing tongues, spitting venom as an army of lice advanced, reaching out lizard-like to catch and devour the hideous, flying bugs. He didn't realise he was doing some tugging of his own. The pole end of the mop was caught between bra strap and shoulder, and as he tried to pull he noticed two lumps of the nurse's flesh were wobbling around like pink jelly. Suddenly it came out with a pop, sending other cleaning utensils crashing into the murk. Mrs Cricklehouse gave Peter a haunting stare which caused him to flee in fright. And as his feet clunked against the creaky floor he could hear Mr Crabb's loud and fantastic cry of sheer orgasmic ecstacy.
Humanus Peccatum.
The girl tried to drag herself from the vegetative process that dreaming had become. There were long black stringy hairs coiling wispishly from the turnip and she wondered if her side of this thick-skinned nodule was uniform and undistinct from his. And, if so, was it Peter who shared such stark oblivion of the spirit or was it some other boy who yearned to grow Crabb-like given the half-measures of evolution and fate?
Stephen Kelly woke from his pox-ridden fever wondering whose dream was which. There was nothing worse than yielding his ink monitor spot to such a yellow rat as Peter Pipkin. Stephen knew -- Stephen simply knew -- that submission to the ill-scrawled sick-notes that Ma Kelly had regularly scribbled just for the sake of his gratuitous excusement did not actually make him feel any better. This time, though, he was truly sick. And nobody who was anybody believed it. For years, it seemed, he and Ma Kelly had concocted several fictions for him of period pains and mad cows and alzheimers and pop-off strokes to get himself out of games -- and now a real dead-eyed disease darn well stitched him up, and nobody (including Crabb, Fenton and that old scritch-owl of a nit nurse) gave any credence to even his real doctor's mad map certificates of verifiable vileness.
On top of which, that godawful bad-apple kid called Peter Pipkin had not only usurped the gurgling fill-ups of Stephen's rightful ink-wells but also started dwelling in the same semi-detached dream, the gangrene growing on the plaster party-wall between Stephen and sweet Wendy. It was as if being officially ill was tantamount to being sent to the equivalent of Coventry in a bone-boring suburbia of pitch-black dreamland, leaving a young pretender to hold hands with the only girl Stephen had ever kissed (albeit only on the petal of her cheek).
It was when Ma Kelly came clucking home from her job in the cellar of the DSS that Stephen finally slipped into an uncommon unconsciousness, belying even the worst scenarios of the quink-blotted medical certificates that had been issued like thick-cut confetti. He was indeed approaching a non-existence whence even the most enlightened lesson of neo-revivalism would not trick him into believing he was about to be reborn -- poised on the spur of death, sadly without having first remembered his first day at school when Ma Kelly abandoned him to the smirking trainee teacher in mini-skirt and to the smell of plasticene and pissy pants.
The relative symmetry of the Fenton/Crabb/Cricklehouse boobs-and-cocks creature and the more sedate Wendy/Peter/Stephen papier-mache dream combo struck him like a bolt out of washable blue. The genderskins, upon scrutiny, were ill-defined. The art of mental arithmetic was not even half of it. Until he drifted back into permanent black.
Peter had stopped scribbling in his red glossy exercise book, the one with the weights and measures listed on the back cover -- waiting to be scolded by Mrs Fenton for not putting his rough work in the rough book first. But he didn't like the way the nib spluttered on the cheap knotty paper in the rough book. Nibs Are Not Nice. He chuckled at the alternative title. Wendy's Uncle was staring over his shoulder in cold scrutiny. But when he looked round there was nobody there. Only the blackboard.
The inevitable came expectedly.
"Peter Pipkin!" yelled the Fenton third of the lust triangle.
Peter's ears popped up like burnt toast from a toaster, minus the stench and the smoke. Mrs Fenton went on to admonish him, her voice as cold as the swirling sea in mid-December, and as venomous as the wobbling jelly-fish that lurked beneath the immediate surface. Or as hungrily, spittingly evil as the collection of nits that existed somewhere in the hell-world of Mrs Cricklehouse?
She exasperated him by yelling across the classroom, angry words flying from her pink-lipsticked mouth accompanied by dollops of feminine phlegm.
"What about the rough book, Peter?" she cried. "The rough book first! Do this again. Do it all again!"
She then shoved the red glossy book into her authoritative desk, not-nice nits and all, shutting it thunderously, awaking all the sleeping bark-ghouls outside. Peter was not pleased. He collapsed into his rough book, clutching his wooden stick of a pen like he would clutch his personal dreams. The words he produced looked like navy blue spiders spread across the blotty page. A Louse is in My House, he wrote. And then his thoughts wandered.
Meanwhile Mrs Fenton began to read out Belinda Buttershaw's offering, What My Mummy And Daddy Do In Bed At Night. Peter listened, and wondered why it was that grown-ups like to play such strange and remarkable games, forming gruesome flesh-monsters like the Crickle-Crabb he had seen in the cleaning cupboard. The children produced a gaggle of girlish giggles as the teacher's words were flung through the air. He regarded Belinda's production as vile rubbish. And she got top marks for that! How cruel is this world, he thought.
"Daddy was humping Mummy and I saw his bottom," read the talking, bespectacled sex-thrill.
Peter snorted, and settled back into his lice-inspired creation. He couldn't think normally, for he recalled the incident with the Quink like an awful flashback in an equally awful film. He wanted Stephen Kelly to die, a horrible, heinous death, so that he and he alone could become the King of the Ink. He had ambitions, you see. He looked across at Barry Inglethwaite -- the milk monitor! Yes, not only did he have this Quinky, quirky desire, but he wanted to be in charge of the clinking silver-tops. Barry Inglethwaite possessed an untidy mess of Beatle-style hair, as thick and black as dark fog. Ideal for a swarm of nits...
At playtime Peter crept back into the deserted classroom, his head swamped with desire. He cherished his gleaming red exercise book, hence this clandestine activity. He could smell the silence, his nostrils sniffing the nothingness that existed in the air. As swiftly as an advancing louse he lifted the creaking desk-lid that belonged to the Fenton femme fatale. It was there! And so he snatched it, and pressed it to his skinny bosom. Within those pages were private and intimate scribblings that referred to the darling delectable Wendy. But... there were other things inside that desk.
Scrawled notes in ink that was not Quink. Lots of them. Neatly piled atop each other, quivering like scared rabbits in damaged hutches. Peter, grasping his curiosity tightly, poked his head into the gloom and read the first message.
'Stephen won't be in today. He has the Marburg virus. Ma Kelly'.
Peter let out a gasp before studying the next note.
'Please excuse Stephen from games. PMT. Ma Kelly'.
Incredible, thought Peter, as he rustled around inside that desk, reading each and every detail of the messages from Stephen Kelly's guardian.
'Stephen has venereal disease'... 'Stephen has mumps'... 'Stephen's penis fell off this morning'... and so on. Until he discovered a discovery so almighty that Peter frowned and scowled simultaneously.
'Stephen is now a vegetable, his skull dripping with lice, infected with those pipsqueaking parasites. They are sucking him dry, absorbing his blood like nit-vamps, eating away his notions and ideas, his dreams and thoughts, his sanity and the waves inside his brain. I doubt if he will ever again function as a normal thinking person. He is merely... a husk. An inhuman non-human. A crushing example of something that is perhaps not living. Ma Kelly'.
It was at this striking moment that the door opened. In stepped two figures. Peter glanced across the room, and immediately anticipated the oncoming formation of another befuddling flesh-creature, for the two were none other than Mr Crabb and Mrs Fenton.
"Aaaagggghhh!!!"
His silent scream non-reverberated around the creeping walls. He slumped quietly to the polished floor, hiding his small bulk behind the enormity of the teacher-desk. And he watched, and listened, his ears agog.
The Fenton vamp swept away her spectacles in an entirely melodramatic manner, before demonstrating that the rumour was true -- their lips did meet at furtive moments of opportunity. After several embarrassing (for Peter) seconds their mouths parted with an alarmingly fervent sucking sound, like a sink-plunger being tugged from a plug-hole.
"I have something to tell you," she whispered feverishly into Mr Crabb's nostrils as their features pressed together.
"Tell me you want me!" enthused the lecherous leech of a headmaster, nibbling at the eyelids of Mrs Fenton.
"No!" replied his wanton love-bomb. "We are with child..."
Peter was aghast. How did they know I was here, he wondered, as he misinterpreted the hushed words of his teacher. He closed his eyes tightly, and awaited some wrath. It didn't arrive. Instead he heard the plaintive sound of a door slamming shut, and then emotional sobbing, and then shouting along the corridor, followed by quietude of an easy nature. He opened his eyes to find that the air inside the room was his alone. He swallowed a whole lot of it as he reached into the desk and filched the whole bundle of lame and feeble excuses scrabbled in the Ma Kelly scrawl. Then he fled from the room like someone frightened of something.
Espadrillus Vulvum.
Only in dreams could imaginary words conjure up real, if imaginary, diseases. The trio of young minds welded together where infected gristle met the three overlapping slabs of grey matter. Whirr-winged bluebottles (swilling back and forth, inside their transparent brittle bodies, with discoloured unwashable blood) swarmed larger and larger; together with the numinous nittles whence they'd grown. Greenish sludge swirling in from every corner of the cavernous skull. Whirlpools of spinnage.
But Peter hated spinach... as much as lumpy custard, stale bubble-and-squeak and unseasoned parsnip. He was not disturbed by the last dream with the sludge, because he'd not had it yet. But he surely would, he feared. Having fled home, chased, in his mind, by floating, flapping mini-sheaves of sick-notes; he stole a deliberate detour, and ended up tramping quietly on familiar garden-ground, creeping like weeds to peek through the Wendy windows at a silent-movie scene, but in colour. Glued eyes gaped in awe.
He had to see her; but not such as this. Her frail form was sprawled across the decaying settee, which was an unsightly brown colour. She was wearing the blue dress with the white spots, her chicken pox dress Peter called it. Lice leapt around her head, her baldy, baldy head, devoid of all hair and opened up like a spliced coconut. Her eyes were staring and inhuman, like those belonging to a stage puppet, big and bold. Peter winced; such horrors are not for small boys such as this wanton dreamer.
Kneeling before her was the Uncle, as ugly as a two pound coin. Slowly he leant across and extended his black tongue, inserting the hideous thing into Wendy's cracked abyss of missing brain. Nits jumped and skipped like insect athletes on steroids. The Uncle captured a tongueful, and tucked the leaping lot back into his gaunt mouth, chewing as if there was a tomorrow. He continued the measly meal, ridding the girl's head of all nit-like mites, his dark tongue gleaming with saliva and plastered with insignificant hair-pests. Wendy did not move. She remained still, lifeless and liceless.
Peter hoped that he was dreaming; hoped that she was dreaming. He ran home like a lonely long distance runner, then collapsed into the front room, missing the sofa by quite a distance, staring at the carpet-bugs eyeball to eyeball...
Only one as young as Peter Pipkin could experience such adult visions of lust and lice and still be able to consign them to the simple pigeon-hole of imaginary nightmares. That way he could survive. Even if he had slightly suspected that some of the things he'd endured recently were real, he would have completely gone off his sweet-tousled head looking for another body with which to stow his soul.
His face was so close to the front room carpet and its intrinsic tufts, he could delve even beyond its surface bugs and mites of common pestilence. There, deep within the pile, were other, smaller faces. Joined to squiggly lines that masqueraded as their bodies. He saw sorrow etched like a tracery of rivers upon their expressions. Stephen was there, his features sown with oniony warts. Wendy's embedded with amethyst-hard teardrops. Ma Kelly and the Uncle creature together weaving scribbly hair between the pitiless punctuation of sums. Cricklehouse, Fenton and Crabb making even worse faces than their own, as they melted in and out of vision with the sausage-filler maggots of their unbridled foreplay. All a language that knew no end.
Anoplura Lethalis.
The dream was somewhat strange. Peter was back in his rightful Pipkin place in the class, behind the pig-tails and smell of bubble gum. Stephen was refilling the ink-wells with Quink. Mrs Fenton leaning against the blackboard, slightly squiffy as ever. Mr Crabb was coming through the sun-shafts into the naughty babbles and squeaks of the form-room, accompanied by a scowling Cricklehouse woman. All was well with the world. All in its rightful pecking order. He tugged at one of the tails and laughed. Then he tugged at the other...
...and it came off in his tiny hand. It came off! Like a mad fool he gazed at the clump of woven hair, which was attached to the wiggy thatch that had covered her scalp. The familiar baldy head, gaping wide open, showing all the dark insides that lurked within. And lice too. Hopping and bouncing as though on hot coals. A parade of parasitic pestilence. He opened his jaws to scream, but gagged, like a clown without japes.
He watched as Mrs Cricklehouse approached the Fenton witch, blood-lust overtaking sex-lust. Her chubby fingers disappeared inside the pockets of her apron, seconds later emerging like behemoths from the salty ocean. She opened her clenched fists, and out sprang an army of nits, attacking the with-child vamp ferociously, attaching themselves to her hair wildly, delving and burrowing and helping themselves to bits of skin and blood and brain.
"You will not have his child," she cried in fury. Her own tummy-bulge was barely noticeable, hidden by fatty Cricklehouse flesh, as she trundled between the desks, chins wobbling fiercely. Showers of lice were spread over pre-pubescent heads, like a farmer scattering seeds of evil. The children shrieked like off-key castrati. Stephen's face was already a glaze. Wendy was beyond lice. Peter saw young heads split open quickly as the nits nested, blood-maps forming on shiny facial skin. And then the nurse was above him, her shadow falling across his shaking bones.
"Nits are nice," she professed, before casting a lethal dosage of pests upon his dark locks.
Both triangles were shattered, the ones of dreams and lechery, geometrical creations crushed by the lice-like gatecrashers. It didn't take long for him to join the brain-dead. He discovered that dead dreams don't exist, just a black, bilious void of everlasting nothingness. Lice are not nice, he insisted, as his silent screams rang out across the mountains of Hell. And the last thing he felt was a black tongue scraping inside his skull.
(published 'Voyage' 1999)
A collaboration with Rhys Hughes
Mannaz, the logic-souper, travelled the land in search of a bowl to hold his soul. And, once, within a grated house, he passed through kitchens measureless to manservants. He simmered with spite upon seeing a swarthy toad that sported an apron stained with spicy sweat: evidently the inventor-cook of gunpowder who had mixed the charge that blew its master's palate off ... later confessing it couldn't see what all the fuse was about.
"Hiss, bubble, glooop!" ... words cried forth from the crier's culinary glossolalia. A white hat, far taller than the wearer, was a veritable castle-keep around which the steams curled ... and the selfsame toadish wearer touched the strings of Mannaz's lute, taut as cheesewires. "Glub!"
"No," replied Mannaz, "I don't slice parsnips."
But he meant celery. Forsaking any further attempt to get the words right, he stepped through the open window and found himself in the midst of a garden-party. Chambermaids pranced. "Goats and Monkeys!" he cursed, weaving between steaming soup-tureens. In all directions, girls and boys of various cheer rotated or slept.
"Where have all the flowers gone?" enquired a girl with kissable lips. Her look implied that she had just woken up via various steps of eyelid-pouting dream.
"Beneath the mountainous corpses," drawled a gloomier one.
The kissable girl blinked at Mannaz and said: "Who is going to intiate me in the secret ways, promised when I was enticed hither?"
"I'm uncertain if you're ripe enough for such a beginning, upstart!" said Mannaz.
"Then try me!" And she spread her legs so that Mannaz could view what required educating. Better than any swarthy toad's soup, without the need to go back and compare certainties, he thought. His scrimshaw boner was too obvious to conceal, so he prepared himself for the task in hand. He hoped to rub off on her with an irony steamier and tastier than most hot ore.
Valets came to drag him away, shutting him into a prison. He relaxed as they closed the heavy door, closed his eyes, thought of them closing that heavy door, and silently closed waking's shutters as he slept on a cold earthen floor - only to dream he was snoring loudly through closed nostrils.
There was a demon giant in one dream who had a girl's arms and hands.
"What small arms you have!"
"All the better to juggle with."
"What gentle hands you have!"
"All the better to strum with."
Mannaz's snores sounded like laughter. He knew he had met the giant in a different form amid waking reality - but this dream showed the giant in its true form, a feat only possible assuming it were a dream that was being dreamed as if dreamed by a squirrely abbot who had studied the collected ontologies of existence's kernel rather than as if dreamed by a logic-souper such as Mannaz. Furthermore, the giant's skirt was a vast wrap-around tapestry which was tougher and coarser than prison walls...
...to which Mannaz returned upon waking up.
He ignored the heavy door of thunder-struck iron and - with the sardonic aid of his crooked shadow's smouldering eyes - scorched his way out through the wall of the prison tent.
He found himself in the heart of a battle. A local war, one that was scheduled to last three weeks, clattered its seventeen centuries around his ear-lobes. Its spoils of mortality had been mammoth, shocking even the most warlike. And to this spot Mannaz had followed the kiss-girl across the continents, which had not been easy for him as he toted a totem that had been skulking under the giant's skirt, one with a runic message cut into its length which lessened his load - but not by much.
Indeed, his body bent under its burden bit by bit. The message was a spell of peace, if indeed the wenching Mannaz could follow sufficient to find.
His crooked shadow - some have called it a gospeller, others a simple narrator, others a storyteller whose narrator has a competing tale to tell, others a bibliophile, others a chess maestro, others a saint - prayed his owner's journey never to end, since inevitable failure would mean despair.
Despite this, Mannaz tried to break his thoughtful shadow at its weakest point against a rock. But his muscles wrung: fossilised and veined with rivulets of cobalt frost. His head, with wrinkled brow and flapping ears, was elephantine, filled with thoughts of having juggled with tureens on days off and with women when asleep.
The now even more crooked shadow offered some advice: "I've heard this war leads to steps that give access to other worlds. You must slide down the bannister and thus outdistance your pursuer."
Mannaz frowned. Was he not the pursuer himself and where were the steps, where the bannister? His frown was dark, and he made black bread of his shadow's holy host, as was his yeasty wont at the darkest times, and dipped it into the luminous broth of his logically mismatched machinations.
Treading the path of such visible taste, there emerged the girl, that wench of unquenched kisses, one after whom even love lusted.
"I am your tree, I am your totem," Mannaz thought he was certain he mumbled.
The crooked shadow mock-mouthed the same message before shuffling off unseen into other shades of thought, whilst Mannaz followed the shapely figure - beside leaning wigwams, amid a maze of unlit trenches, beneath black-bleached orchids, across the fuzzy breath-marks of bleary beasts and up a sooty slope that ended in groping white-out ... eventually reaching a square of renewed darkness which was a doorway to a canvas-walled castle wherein resting warriors on stained couches feasted from tureens. As for Mannaz, he could not rest or, if he could, only piecemeal. Indeed, his dreams were excerpts, concerning chambermaids or swarthy toads or...
But Mannaz's mind tried to emulate its owner's crooked shadow by assuming absence, to relieve Mannaz of suffering and sorrow - through which much of Mannaz's life had already dragged - but, of course, absence of any emotions entailed absence of all emotions, including Mannaz's favourite one: joy, an emotion which was even preferable to love in his book, as love often became a pea-souper of missed chances, recrimination and frustration whence he rarely found himself whole again.
Whilst his mind was thus preoccupied, Mannaz had arrived at a castle room with the words HALL OF UNADULTERATED REST sewn into a billowing sign. A palliasse here, he thought, would suit a real treat - and he squinted up at smaller stitches saying 'Genuine Rust Purveyors and Dream Removers'.
Inside the room, a soup-seer greeted him morosely: "I'm going to make something of you, indeed I shall bestew a soul with your thoughts."
The stove threw a tiny flickering shadow of the speaker's nose on the tattered ceiling, the ghost of a butterfly-kite.
Mannaz decided not to react straightaway. He felt it important to gain his bearings, giving vent to potential thoughts, thus:
"I was born this day some forty odd years ago. I lived a simple life, each year dovetailed to the next. The people passing through my life appeared blinkered - perhaps that's why I kept to the sidelines. However, some caught me in the glare of their eyes and, of those, some loved me, others not. A few even hated me. Some I loved, others not. I hated none of them. Crystallising the man I surely am is more difficult than merely looking in the mirror at the reflection which happens to be there..."
The soup-seer, having been entranced by Mannaz's saying of sooths, stoked the stove-embers, made shadows of shadows and proceeded to stir the cauldron above the rekindled wings of flame. Then turning to Mannaz, he asked him what would happen if reflections were black or were eaten by solar flares or cut by political chisels into the door of the latest shadow cabinet. He asked how flat Mannaz would feel if he were a mirror.
"Well," said Mannaz, "what's done is double do-able. The crooked man plays chess without rooks. The girl is deflowered and strewn on dead people's graves. And knowledge has escaped into dreamerless dreams..."
Through the roof-gape swooped parrots, strings of chillies dangling from their beaks. Another ethnic restaurant had been raided, He glanced up, saw angels dying downward, mortals dying up, both believing there was a tandoori cadavery midway. Tonight, he would eat in, he decided. Or else have oven-ready irony and aviary-nest soup.
"Well," Mannaz said, "what's done was never done, what's known never known and what's dreamed never dreamed - or else!"
He wandered from the crooked castle and into a wood. Heliographs flashed sunlight through the trees. Squirrels leapt, cutting the signals. He guessed the received messages would be dangerously inaccurate. How many wars had been generated by this crude form of communication? It appeared that precision was not a prime concern of the region's lords. Mead and anvils were all they cared about; the former to kill toothache; the latter to give birth to swords.
As for Mannaz, love and lutes were all he cared about; the former to kill loneliness; the latter to give birth to words.
It might be best to seek work in a larger, more thriving castle. He soon found an example the size of a town. In a souk, feeling sick, he reeled from stall to barrow until, stalled outside one burrow, tent of the unreal, he watched men and women with jealous eyes enter and leave. He pressed back the flap and looked inside where a ugly parrotter squatted over a box and threw words into a shaft of light: "Anything a customer needs!" Thin as a silk cloak, the parrotter tugged his woolly beard.
Mannaz exchanged his turtle-lute (which, at some unknown point in his memory, had once been the rune-etched totem he toted) for a single try: opened the lid and thrust in his hand. "The favours of a girl's fiery kisses," he cried, "the fire of five hundred gems, the flavours of a flightless dove!"
The parrotter shook his head and uttered a groan. "Those are the things you want, not what you need."
Mannaz groped for a while and pulled out a second turtle-lute of inferior workmanship, with cheesewires upon which were threaded diced celery and small pieces of meat. The result was the basted son of his skewered lunch. "Shish!" he grumbled.
Granted a second apocryphal try, he pulled out a yew-patterned soup-bowl whence he deduced he was no legendary hero after all. Indeed, had he but known, his tardy godhood was the subject of ontological jokes amid the gildenspires of Acadreamia. Yet - the bowl was not a bowl but a skull, one that was patterned both in and out. Surely, the scratches inside were runes, devices stolen from an ancient bone totem, a totem which bore, inter alia, a title on its spine...
Mannaz knew that such a book was made from woven textures fluttering in the oasis winds. He played leapfrog lobotomy, became someone else; he guessed that death and sex were two sides of the same tossed coin. In his new guise, the coin had landed on its edge and the mirage in the bowl reflected the Unreal City, billowing on a hill that overlooked the Shift of Steps. And those citizens thereof who were under the suzerainty of sorrowful dreams dreamed at last of escaping such dreams by merely hoping.
"Hope," said an ancient woman he vaguely recognised, one with dried-out kisses on her lips, "is the thing you need, not what you want." And she indicated a castle (whereon a rook roosted): the whole castle being a single canvas tower with, hung from its central totem tent-pole, a man in his cups. His eyes, if not himself, watched the citizens digging holes for sandcastles...
Mannaz shattered the bowl.
He needed a job and, in the castle town, there were vacancies reaping prisoners-of-war. Scythe-blades were sharpened, poles lashed to the spokes of a waterwheel. The tapestry in the great hall made a fine conveyor-belt, stretched around the windlasses of two wells. One at a time, the prisoners were weighted down on the gaudy loop by pocketfuls of stones.
Mannaz sighed as the scythes rose and fell. He pulled and pushed on his handle. As the contraption bore the prisoners closer to their doom, he took a moment to study the tapestry itself. Although much faded with age the pattern was discernible. It showed peasants harvesting rye with iron sickles.
"A wry irony, eh? But ever seen a horny man impaled on his own totem?" The toadish foreman regarded Mannaz wih a sly smile. "Let me tell you what it's like."
Mannaz seized his chance for a non-sequitur. "My music is more captivating than that. I can strum with my tongue what other musicians cannot tickle with their toes. Give me this chance to play. You won't deny me a proper wage when you have heard."
The foreman pulled his warty ears. "You'll have to repeat that. A little deaf these days. Something about a different job? We're short of a minstrel-boiler. What can you do?"
Mannaz gulped a glub. "Sew walls."
But the following morning he fled the castle town. On the shore of a sea, he fell asleep and woke to find himself adrift in a coracle which - he realised when sought to stand - was actually a non-stick wicker cauldron. It twirled towards a maelstrom while mosquitoes landed on his stagnant lobe, infecting him with exotic diseases.
As the whirl grew, so did Mannaz, swelling with purple boils until the cauldron no longer held him. Bigger and bigger he festered, cauldron a slipper on a foot, pus in boots. When he plunged into the eye, he was so enormous he filled it entire. Still he grew.
Reclining in his oceanic bath, he scrubbed his back with a coral reef and viewed the gargle of the plug-hole with a dry smile. Finished at last, he waded to an island of giants.
On the steepest hill, an abbey made of sleeves was being erected. Translucent silks dyed with blackberries and the blood of rotting gums made holier windows than tapestries stained with soup.
The abbot, an ex-bishop with a bulbous nose, gestured at the altar and held his mitre in place as he nodded. "We hope to create a static environment, a dusty locale where nothing will change. When I recruit enough monks, we'll talk philosophy all day. Mead and women's nipples will be outlawed topics. As will bone totems, etched or not."
Mannaz wielded his tortoise-lute as if it were a priapic weapon. He laughed, suddenly ceasing the tattoo of his drumskins and the honing of his horniness. He sensed himself all over, looking down at what he had become: a black whole.
Tha abbot capered. "It was I who sent the cauldron, the soup-skull and the rare anemone in disguise. Even the contents of the sea obey me."
Mannaz rushed out into the arms of the kiss-girl; they tasted freedom as a storm broke over the island, an island that was them. Huge droplets, distilled through wildwood canopy, fingered their energy points. The flavour was a pagan soup, like a wet oakleaf on the tongue. Afterwards, upon the crest of a wave, he managed to secure a proper job stirring the sea, mainly because, in the interview, he likened the unsloping flow of the tide to soft steps - and hard steps to corners on their sides. Despite none of it rhyming with rune, the interviewer was evidently in tune with the brand of Mannaz's lateral thought and told him to keep stirring the sea until the sea thickened into oyster soup as the first stage in a coastal defence programme.
Although Mannaz knew little about the sea he was happy as a sandboy sailing the company dinghy and proudly wielding the ladle-oar with which he had been issued. Such a pleasant change from dry berths in land-locked oases whence he'd stumbled crookedly in fleeing the capering abbot.
Unluckily the job had side-effects. It didn't suit his cockadilloes, even his erotic dreams beginning to involve riggers that sailed too far from the wind and tuna trawlers that had no nets nor notes and Dutch cruisers that floated netherwards - rather than dreaming of bare buxoms and black forest soups to dunk his boner.
Unknown to Mannaz, there were many more fruitful ways than one to sow a sea-wall. And, furthermore, he never received any wages, because the kiss-girl, now become a witch again, absconded with them, merely leaving a note that pyramids were ideal to keep teeth in.
He knew no longer how to cross the sea, save to employ the totem he suddenly again found upon his person. "Bone that barge, pick that nose!" he idly sang to himself as he eased the dream-trunk into the fetid waters of the cold ocean. The current was like furmity, awash with rye-husks and neap-tide raisins.
Reaching the far shore, he wiped his nose and dried his totem. Along the beach jerked a pinstripe mob of shadows, armed with newspapers and helical hats. The leader, barbarically dressed in shirt and tie, marched in a straight line, canavas umbrella held lopsided before him.
Looking closely, Mannaz saw he was blind. He seized him by the arm. "Where are you going? What do you seek? And how so straight your gait?"
The shadow scowled at Mannaz. "We are forming a movement. What does a movement do but move?" He removed his headwear. "This is our symbol. The Boweler hat. It represents movement."
On a sudden whim, Mannaz broke the leader upon a rock-pool and began running in straight circles on the sand. Behind him, the mob of shapes fell in slag heaps, their shadowy motion no doubt carried.
As Mannaz listened to seeming silence, men upon oaken frames, with canavs wings and perforated buckets, swooped in to crop-spray the dead piles of shadow. But the leading shadow, although bent and twisted, was still alive and whimpered through its dentures: "Nature hasn't always had an upper hand. Once this land was acres of polluted swamp and incompetent industry. But irresponsible developers planted acorns and introduced wildlife. We hope to get back to the rusty ecstasy of metallurgy and fossil-fuel extraction and dry dreams."
"I'm looking for a paid job," Mannaz replied, wincing as a kiteman plummetted into his lobe.
The shadow protruded its crude-oily tongue and lowered his tone a sticky pitch. "Six strings to your lute, eh? If it was twelve..." He gestured at where the kitemen rested between bouts of flying. "We like to hear the traditional numbers. Rat Stevens is my favourite. Perhaps if you play his songs twice."
Mannaz turned away. Despite himself, his feet were tapping to the click of the shadow's mercury fillings. Keeping time, time, time. His own tongue looped through his mouth, a kite-wing stitched from slugs and avocado skins. This was no good, so he moved on, over the tallest dune and into the very thing he sought...
The Shift of the Infinite Steps was beneath the sun's bladder - yet, here, girls and boys wallowed in flowers, the hard edges of the steppery crooking their bare backs while straightening those that were already crooked. Mannaz both anticipated and remembered trekking up and down the steps for seeming ages and felt double his forty years ... or more.
"Squirrels and Scythes!" he cursed aloud, as he inadvertently tripped over a girl with kissable lips; but not seeing her it dawned on him that the going up and the going down, as well as the waking and the sleeping, were perfectly pointless, if not edgeless. Like soft steps. And soups and souls. And shadows.
(Published 'Ocular' 1998)
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