For Easter

An excerpt from my TENACITY OF FEATHERS trilogy of novels. This part to be re-contextualised whenever you can in the Nemonymous Night half of the The Hawler:


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A bus doesn’t touch the Earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing to float, two passengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

“We’re trapped on this bus.”

“You can get off at the next stop. It’s not like a plane.”

“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it. To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape – until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meet in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox – that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”

“Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.
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Guy de Maupassant - who possibly wrote the greatest vampire story ever i.e. entitled The Horla said:
"The least thing contains something unknown. Let us find it."


H.P. Lovecraft:
"This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice."
from "The Horror at Red Hook"

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I hope everyone has a good holiday.
des