Torque Tales (2) by D.F. Lewis

CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/torque-tales-by-df-lewis-part-one.html

***

NAAN BREAD AND SLIPPERS

 My shopping lists tend to be eclectic as well as quite lengthy. However, the day I visited Colchester to see my elderly Mother, my list was much shorter than normal, but equally eclectic. We needed to pass through the St Botolph’s Priory Ruins as a short cut to where she lived a sheltered life.

But the rest of that trip must remain a private one – now completed, with the peshwari naan bread consumed and the new carpet slippers fitting feet and well worn about the house.

So, we’ll leave that shopping list of two items to become another fiction of history, just a non-event eventually to become a false memory of something real. This is as much of life (now, then or forever) that one can manage.

Time itself, if not eclectic, is very lengthy. But one simply allows it to slip by without the consciousness of recalled choice: too easily oiled by non-stick serendipity or fast-fading existence.

Sadly, my story is therefore about a man whose need for naan bread and slippers was as fictitious as the need to be himself. A nothing dreamed by a nothingness.

His beloved mother became a dead silent ghost by his side, even if, at best, her walking-stick could still be heard clicking along Colchester’s pavements. The comforting familiarity of her shrill voice echoing from the past … or pre-echoing a time when she, as another ghost, shadowed an earlier self that was even less real than she would become. Shadowy Thirds all of them at different stages.

The man’s responses were slightly out of rhythm with the real man he surely must once have been – out of rhythm but synchronised enough to foster a feasible belief in himself. 

The slippers were too soft to make sound in the comfort zones of Heaven.  But I was now less than nothing – not even a fictitious ghost. Only crumbs of communion bread and a tattered shopping-list slipping away in the otherwise empty wind. And Naan became a new mystical word for Nothingness.

***

THE CUPOLA

They ended up not wanting to have names. A group of people who ripped off their unseen labels one by one. There needed to be an example set, however. Nobody would unname themselves without a lead to follow. A First Mover. The pre-emptive Clockmaker. If this were a proper story, the author would start with the example-setting character’s name – followed by a narrative of his rite-of-passage from name to namelessness. A tale of bravery and hardship, of a dimmer-switch controlling the light of the character’s identity, of those who failed to follow and remained named, of those who did follow and became unnamed. 

Yet to name the leading character as he was once named would be to jam the dimmer-switch by wedging in what the character itself was trying to dim. The others who remained named would gain prominence by having real characters’ names in the story while the rest floundered about unidentified – not only confusing the pecking-orders within the plot but the plot itself. To call them by false names or even by letters like A, B, C would, no doubt, cloud the issue even further. Meanwhile, it’s good for any story’s author to relax and concentrate on the plot’s landscape, its spirit of place, before worrying about the entrance of characters,

The public park in Colchester, with Norman Castle, flower-neatened gardens, an empty bandstand the tiny original of which decorates, as a cupola, the top of the nearby Wivenhoe church tower. In the park, meantime, the castle and its gardens eventually led down grassy slopes, somehow circularly zigzagging, towards a small boating-lake in the park’s valley. Nobody has hired a boat today. It must be one of those times when everyone is asleep at home. The Longest Day of the year. Light at Night like the Land of the Midnight Sun. Or the irrecurrent Blue Moon. Even here in England’s Essex. With the dimmer-switch of the Sun turned right up.

Without people, there can be no story to tell. But now, at first dimly seen, are tall dark shadows wandering around the Castle. They are the nameless Masters of Existence trying to form gradually into real people. They have been given no belief in the story-premise that all the real people are at home sleeping. Yet the Masters, so-called, remain only partly formed into what they had hoped to become since the story had given them no names other than as fictionalised Masters of Existence, no names on which to hang their identities. The story refused them any such luxury. So mere shadows (if slightly flesh-corrupted) they have remained, still circling the Castle like forgotten druids. Masters of Existence who could not even master existence for themselves!

Suddenly, there appeared, on the margins of the boating-lake, the legendary Clockmaker whose clocks had hands but no numbers but, sometimes, numbers but no hands, because, with the former, one could at least guess the time they told. A real flesh-and-blood person, this Clockmaker. As taught by Masters, but lacking their ambition of existence, the Clockmaker actually succeeded in becoming what they had desired but failed to be. The Clockmaker knew that any ambition destroys the goal of that same ambition.

And now is time for waking. We are here, stretching and yawning, fully-formed, still nameless, as stirred by many pre-alarmed timepieces within our minds, but we are pure of heart and unconstrained by the deadlines of finding identities to wrap ourselves in. Owning identities simply by  yearning for identities to own, because the only pre-condition for having an identity is not to have one at all.

And the story can at last begin. From the boating lake, there slowly rose the tip of a huge turning cathedral dome with its own cupola as the timepiece’s essential gnomon.

“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare

***

PIRATE

You heard earlier, in these Miniatures, of caryatids with vertical eye-patches, and pirate radio stations off the coast of old Essex, yet they seemed disconnected from what happened later, such as the small talk that has since become more grandiose than the pub, as an ex-mansion conversion, in which such small talk was spoken….

.

“A pirate as a person or a group involves an element of illegality or at least a bending of the rules, does it not?”

It sounded more like a statement than a question. And a long way short of a chat-up line, I guess. He stared at me at the dark bar on the edge of a nowhere where, lost, cold and hungry, I had just left my car in its car park of no obvious allotted spaces.

Women on their own in such places must be a rare event, I continued to guess. I had only come in here for directions, while deciding whether or not to partake of the establishment’s ‘hospitality’.

I looked sideways at the solitary barstool-occupant. He acted as if he had just seen a ghost. An old bookish man judging by what he held close to his chest.

“Excuse me?”

“A pirate can also mean people who are not eligible for things but take them nevertheless.”

I felt affronted. Could he mean me? Perhaps this was a club for carefully chosen members and I had parked my car outside ‘illegally’?

I was immediately inclined to leave without further conversation. This was part of the country to which I was unaccustomed. Visiting someone from University days I hadn’t seen for years. We’d just got reacquainted by some internet finding-old-friends site. Maybe old friends were not meant to rediscover each other – as in the old days, with very little means to do so. Such precarious reunions could cause all manner of ‘not-meant-to-be’ situations – and the world, via such a Butterfly Effect, sent off into directions equally ‘not-meant-to-be’. These were not original thoughts of mine that I was thinking as I waited to decide about my next move in the dark bar. I had had these thoughts for some time when deciding to pursue, via the internet, certain lost friendships in the first place. But there was something ringing at the back of my mind about my current predicament in the dark bar being a ‘not-meant-to-be’ direction of some significant risk to my health and safety. A pirate destiny, as it were.

If words could be caught like infections – there I had just thought about the word that seemed to be preoccupying the man in glasses who had just used it – twice. As if he was toying with it. Worrying it, teasing it, trying it out on his lips. Obsessed with it. Clutching the book closer to his chest.

A member of the bar staff – and I was pleased to see it was a female of some age and heft – now suddenly arrived in my vicinity hopefully to take my order.

“Is that your car outside?”

She pointed at a shape I could hardly discern through the window.

“I guess it is,” I said.

“Well, can you move it? It’s private.”

So, I hadn’t been far wrong with my earlier presumptions. But the place had a sign outside indicating it was a public bar serving drink and food.

“Private?” I responded in questioning echo.

“Yes, private.”

“Private,” more forcefully echoed the man in dark glasses.

“Is this private, too?” I asked with a nod towards the bar, trying to take some initiative without antagonising anyone with a forceful reference to the public sign outside.

Thoughts raced through my head. Time seemed to stand still. Many things put on the internet with the wrong assumption of it being private were often available for viewing by many millions. Just see the hit counter if there is one to see at all. Just because these potential millions don’t make their presence known to you does not mean they aren’t there, watching, reading, toying with you, hunting your ghost as a symbol of the real ‘you’, and, with their teasles, worrying at your words … obsessing … storing up a whole host of ‘not-meant-to-be’ scenarios. How often have you conducted what you think is a private conversation on a blog or a supposedly ill-frequented forum – only to discover it was far from private. It’s easy to imagine seclusion even when millions are watching you.

Suddenly, the bar woman pointed at a word engraved on the mirror – the backs of the shorts and optics reflected dimly in it.

The word was, of course, “Private”. Except the letters seemed slightly mixed up and one letter had teasingly been rubbed off as if in a game. It was then I saw in the relative darkness that the woman was wearing a black patch over one eye, fixed in place by a single elastic band across the top of her scarfed head. Stepping nearer, the man took off his glasses, then opened his chest and spoke…

.

There was a book on my bookcase – among an eclectic collection of other books – entitled ‘Pirate’ that I could not recall seeing there before. It seemed strange as it was at the level of the bookcase to where my eyes often wandered while naturally day-dreaming during work at my nearby desk.

The book had gold tooling on a navy-blue spine of some evident age. It showed no author’s name just ‘Pirate’ at the top in upper case and the publisher’s name (‘Torque & Jongleur’) at the bottom in lower case other than the ‘T’ and ‘J’.

Any such day-dreams suddenly dispersed, no doubt in some sub-conscious need to fasten upon what truly troubled me: the appearance of a mysterious book on my bookcase, sitting between familiar books in a neatly displayed row with continued intolerance towards further insertions. Not too tight for jiggle-room, yet tight enough to prevent leaning. So which book was missing – to have left room for the infiltrator?

I somehow fell short of pulling ‘Pirate’ from its position to investigate its nature: a more pressing matter, one would have thought, than ascertaining what it had replaced! Indeed, I couldn’t actually fathom what book it had replaced. They all seemed duly present and shipshape. The two tall books, now each side of ‘Pirate’, used to stand squarely and stylishly together, I was sure, i.e. ‘The Women I Met in Bars’ directly next to ‘The Ghostfarers’, both by the same  living author of whom I cannot speak without giving this author a name. 

I stretched out my hand to draw ‘Pirate’ from its berth. My finger pulled gently at the top of the spine. There was plenty of give. It was a smooth delight to deliver it to existence beyond the bookcase. I felt its heft in my hand, a chunkiness that many special books of a certain age retained when one would have thought they could have lost substance over the years by shedding or flaking from the stitched areas. Or moulting or sloughing as a part of foxing from the undust-wrappered boards or articulated outer rind. 

I imagined – upon opening it – that I would hear a crack when the book’s long unread ‘closetness’ was broken after seasons of gestation. I shook my head. The day-dreams had been taking me over again with a vengeance, it seemed.

The crack had indeed awoken me as I now gazed at the title page, slightly obscured by the tenuous quiff of the book’s conjoined ribbon-marker. 

What seemed to be a large insect was squashed, too, as a rorschach patch at the crease of the pages. A sign from days when contraband shipped such exotic or fantastical creatures from foreign gardens and jungles to other climes where these creatures ill-survived … but not before attacking those who opened books that were never meant to be read given the otherwise sane import and export laws designed to prevent things that were never meant to be where they ended up. 

Meanwhile the flanking books audibly leaned in the silence … keeping even dead memories alive with the prevailing dreams they once triggered. 

***

DROWSY WITH DIVINITY

There was an exhibition of paintings of women with their backs to us. I, as a woman, wondered why anyone would think to paint these paintings or arrange such a display of mixed motives: scornful watchfuless, loving care at a distance, stalking, pining… 

In fact, these name-hidden presences hung on gallery walls have given me some of the clues as to the possible permutations of reaction to such a ‘happening’ of themed images. 

As I walked around the gallery, I tried to put myself in the mind of each man who stood or sat behind each woman in the paintings … thus concocting for myself a new recipe of tempting emotions fitting for such an apparently bleak, often oblique experience.

Have you ever sensed eyes boring into your back? You dare not turn for whatever reason. It’s almost as if you are guilty about catching someone looking at you surreptitiously. They’re to blame for their own actions (or inaction in not looking away) but you feel guilty that you may have stirred their curiosity, their longing, distaste or even gratuitousness of idle gaze.

Well, today, that day, whenever it was to be, in that gallery-of-few-visitors but many guards-sitting-in-corners, you now somehow gazed at the backviews of each painting itself, knowing, in some intrinsic dream bordering on nightmare, that you were staring outward from the frame you could no longer see …. and you cried inwardly as you felt itches crawling along your back and nape of neck between canvas and frame’s backing. Or between canvas and paint. You could not be sure. Just the distant echo of a shout from a corner-guard whose words were deadened by the glass.

***

Later, I was filled by some greater sense of existence, ironically a drowsiness with divinity in various roles of painterly art. To the distant sound of violins, drums and flutes, reminding us that the planet’s paintings are subject to the twists of precarious immortality just as our own mortality is assured.

***

Symbols of genuine drowsiness or Null Immortalis? And backs turned towards us.

***

HANDLES

I was reminded of the handle that one needed to turn on a fruit machine or old-fashioned calculator, a contraption as a whole modelled in the shape of …what was it? I can’t now remember, with different stories between then and now, between up there and down here. I then made the tea for myself and my guest.

As I stood in the kitchen waiting for it to brew, I found my thoughts wandering. All things in the world have their handles. Some handles are handles proper, made to be handles. Other things have makeshift or ad hoc handles, and were obvious as handles once you began to handle an object, like a pen or a book or anything without an obvious protuberance to use as a handle. The kettle had a handle: the least hot place as well as one to fit the hand conveniently. A teapot and teacup, too. But the packet of biscuits I was about to open had no obvious handle to grab, but grab it I did at one end. What about the water I had used to fill the kettle? How would I grab that, should I need to do so? I laughed at the prospect of grabbing the handle of water. The tap had a handle of sorts – one that moved and did a job, i.e. to make the water pour, but the water itself was not handleable, and even if it were, it would seep through the fingers however tightly you kept them together. Like meanings themselves or a mad scientist’s inventions or implanted codes in texts like Easter eggs.

What about my thoughts themselves? There was an expression about ‘getting a handle’ on things…

Armed with a tray – teapot, two cups and saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl, biscuits on plates, all balanced precariously upon it – I returned to the sitting-room.

I asked, without further delay: “Why were you stuffing snotty tissues down my sofa?”

Silence. Nobody on the sofa. Well, nobody on it. I saw something pink and suggestive stuffed down the side where my guest had been sitting. Except I was the guest, and the host hadn’t yet showed up. I wriggled up and waited.

.

There was a belief that the wheel would last forever. The strongest design possible was, after all, the classic circular wheel that meant all forces around it played against each other before being able to focus any end force against the thing itself. Therefore, I stared at the nameless person as host who finally showed up and then revealed for me his design for a wheel and I could not believe it was a wheel at all. It seemed square but with handles or levers along most of its exterior points, levers that changed position as the whole thing was pushed … each lever levering the others with a series of internal pulleys and springs. I thought a real wheel would have been so much simpler – and I laughed.

And he laughed, too, as he produced from behind his back – like a conjuror – another thing he called a wheel…

“I am going to have another…” he intoned.

I expected him to continue the sentence. Another what?  Another cup of tea? I signalled the question with a single glance. But he remained silent, merely showing me another object and then another. As if they weren’t objects at all but speculative ‘anothers’, each ‘another’ complete in itself without another word following it to act as noun or descriptor.

Each ‘another’ was an invention. An invention of another invention. From would-be wheels, he progressed to was-once-upon-a-time musical instruments, and from those to never-could-have-been items of clothing. He even managed to produce a has-been. A ghost of an existence that took shape before my very eyes as he tugged pulleys, stretched out springs and opened hinges, above all turned a thousand tiny handles, the ghost’s eyelids echoing my own with each tweak he gave the contraptions. Was this finally the real ghost I had always sought?

To come full circle, I watched the nameless person’s  would-be bones refuse to fuse … and he clunked to a halt on a hillock like a premonition of a modern stairway of stone steps.

I climbed them expecting each one to be the last. But there was always another.

.

But before I could reach the final attic, I found a master bedroom where there was a collection of handles on the wall. To put any collections at all on walls was something I never understood at the best of times, like animal heads as trophies or various varieties of fork obtained for show rather than use. Forks with long or short tines. Forks more like garden implements than cutlery. And forks tuned for use between different purposes.

Paintings, of course, were fully intended to go on walls, to be viewed separately as well as cumulatively within the room’s. context. Most paintings were framed to give some comfort zone between them and the room. Every room has its own context, you see. Some call that context atmosphere or decorative personality. A room with its own original or inherent quality as a living-space. Or a room whose very sense of existence as a room was force-fed by human intervention with such collections or other imposed alterations. Even where the vast reaches above me gave way towards attic-complexes.

Well, all forks had handles. Except, of course, one variety of fork. A variety that had tines but no handle and called a Dunsany fork after its inventor. Often used in the old days as a childhood mouth-clamp to prevent irregular growth of the jaws. But more often used today – when fine-tuned – to sit as a specialist bridge on a violin.

So, on further reflection, it would be understandable to have the history of forks upon a wall, just for show, educative as well as visually aesthetic. More of a sculpture as art-installation than a painting, of course. Muck rakes, turnip snoflers, faggot forks (with just two wide-set prongs), dung probers, dock extractors and a species of fork that had two prongs but not so wide-set as the faggot fork, prongs as if set about the distance between my eyes instead.

But to have on your wall just the forks’ handles or, now I’m thinking about it, the handles of many different implements, all without their business ends? That was slightly more eccentric than seemed acceptable, don’t you think?

The nameless person but one defined by gender, who had evidently followed me here, looked as if he thought I were the mad one in broaching the subject at all. And he possibly feared that he was mad, too, in listening for as long as he had listened to me going on about collections on walls.

He was a Lord as born from the House, I now decided . I’d call it a Mansion, more like. A Lord of some standing. I had been invited, I now remembered, for an audition as his potential biographer. I had taken my nerves in hand – as, like many writers, I was untutored in social skills – and arrived, brief-case in hand, full of proof statements as to my experience being a writer-up of lives, some dead, a few still living. The latter unnamed.

 The subject of wall-collections had arisen because I had commented upon the collection he had on his own wall. I treated the subject as a sort of ice-breaker.

“Handy things, failsafe handles like that ,” I said, nodding towards them. “How many have you got?”

“Three thousand  around and about,” he said, in an irritated voice. I could read in his eyes that I was not going to get the job. I should go for broke.

“Are they all safes?” No answer. “Their handles with coded combinations?” No answer. “How do you remember all the codes?” No answer. “Are some of them pretend safes with nothing behind?”

I must have crossed some politeness threshold. I was shown the door.

I don’t suppose anyone ever wrote my biography. My memory now shrinking even as fast as I did myself. If not a biography, at least you have this very memento that is more than what most people get written up about themselves. A memento of how I spent the rest of my days in the darkness picking at a lock from inside with my teeth. Or were they implants shaped like tiny forks?

***

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/torque-tales-3-by-df-lewis.html

Torque Tales by D.F. Lewis (part one)

LOOSELY CONNECTED AND  CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/new-dfl-ghost-stories-commenced-in-later-2023/

***

NIGHTMARE’S WOMB

In the early to mid Seventies, the ghost hunter worked in Pall Mall near the National Gallery and later at a building erected upon the Temple of Mithras within the City of London near the dome of St. Paul’s, much of which appeared in the ghost hunter’s then written-down dreams. 

Many of you will know of the potential for ghosts in the mazy byways of those parts of London, but the ghost hunter also wandered into the streets of Whitechapel and Shadwell. And that was when Canary Wharf was still in its mine before being hawled out in earth-blasting array. Meanwhile, this is the start of a new series of Torque Tales as yet to be written from that direction of penmanship.

St Paul’s, of course, was the nub of such things, if I can be relatively blunt about the ghost hunter’s spiritually magnetic compass, which I suppose makes sense as that cathedral, in whatever stage of evolution, has been intended from outset to be a centre of a form of spirituality, if not necessarily the ghost hunter’s own form. The paintings in the gallery also carried a forcefield  of spectral punch. And this first tale in the new series implies a hand-twisted arch between the tip of the famous dome and one particular painting in the gallery that memory has veiled, whatever the distance needed to be plied between them. Not like the straddling cathedral in ‘Agra Aska’ that some of you may already know, because that was in an alternate world. These tales take place in our own perceived world of reality, even if it may be someone’s else alternate one! The ghost hunter took reality for granted in all their dealings with it. Even if their hunting’s eventual gestalt was gaslit like an ancient version of the city they now walked.

This is both an introduction to such a series of tales and a tale in itself. With scene setting comments as well as a beginning, middle and end, even if there is no ‘found ghost’ to speak of and no climax as yet to satisfy any avid reader of ghost stories. But I sense there is a slight pervasive frisson of fear for you to harbour in hope or even dread of such frisson’s future growth into nightmare. Until it fades like this print itself.

***

BOOK-KEEPING

I worked at my desk with a giant calculator looking like a cash register with many buttons and a large handle to turn, working with many others in the same open-plan place, clattering away during those mid-century days. So typical of offices then. No accounting for such humdrum existences.

There is an Early Netherlandish portrait (1434), an oil painting of the marriage of a couple on an oak panel, with a strange mirror behind them reflecting the scene in an oblique manner. And I often stared at it during my lunch-breaks away from calculators, with my having skirted, before arriving at the gallery, the Trafalgar Square and its imposing column with what appeared to be a sculptural depiction of a human being on top, but it was too far to see who it was. I won’t dwell on that for long, as you can already see where I am going with it, no doubt.

It’s the painting in the gallery I want to concentrate upon — and I certainly did during those early days of my career, the gorgeous green of the woman’s dress making her appear ‘with child’. The man in a black wide-brimmed hat and dark cape raises a hand in blessing, as if he is the priest exercising the necessary rituals to marry themselves! I won’t name them. No-one is to be named in these stories, for fear of unwanted truths being wrenched from the lips of too many people with more information than they need to know, especially when gentle persuasion turns into ugly torture. We’re heading in that general direction, I guess, in 2023!

I dreamt one night during the period of watching this painting, and as I found myself concentrating on the painting, its colours were now dripping muckily over its frame. Greens and blacks in some outer melting abstraction. I yearned to return to the office and to the ordinary people there who worked their lives away as clerks in mindless tasks and large paper ledgers. It seemed more comforting to be with them than in this dream. But when arriving at the exit/entrance to leave, I saw the gallery’s famous columns were now tall caryatids barring my way each with one vertical eye patched over. 

I woke in a sweat. I feared it might become a recurring dream, one with serial potential beyond its original ending. I was thankfully moved from that office soon afterwards to a different one within the same firm, and it was near St Paul’s Cathedral. They called it a promotion to a customer-facing role rather than backroom handle-grinder and number-cruncher. The cathedral, when I visited it the first lunchtime, turned out to have many more columns than was good for it, radiating, as it did, nether regions or heavenly ones. And, in my head, with some creative accounting, I calculated who was eventually to be married there. I shall keep them nameless.

***

ONE DROGULUS TOO FAR

The ghost hunter once wrote down their thoughts from dreams in what what was then later called their ‘first published story entitled Padgett Weggs’, named after a title of a piece of music they had improvised and recorded on cassette earlier — in which ‘story’ was featured the dome of St Paul’s crawling all over with Old Ones. Now, ironically, they are an Old One themselves. We are, too.

I am, I think, more than simply empathetic with such Oldness. And pronouns need their nails cutting, as you know too well. 

In that first ‘story’, Weggs found his mother dead in a septic tank, I recall. I would need to reread the rest of it about him and her, since the rest is forgotten. And also its immediate sequels need to be reread, too. And now today, around 40 years later, I write this latest sequel that could never have been predicted as being possible to exist, because of the potentially lethal hurdles of planet and personal self between then and now. A relatively long period of time, indeed, until now when everyone is a pronoun of choice, and we can only fully give names to people who are fictional characters. 

A twist of destiny as one watches the dreams unfold again and again, many of them each night, between bouts of necessary waking. A Drogulus here, a Drogulus there, instead of the real ghost one ever sought but cannot find, they’re on the landing outside the room of three beds, and each of them finds itself to be between a ceiling and a stairwell. And in the background one hears the music of flutes, drums and violins approaching nearer and nearer, as story follows story like levels in a mansion that towers with attic space to spare. No label of Babel, it just is.

And, so, life itself that one needs to live so as to write the stories that creates the life that created them in the first place, will be sure to prevail perhaps forever, whoever the one is whom one chooses to write them. Or the stories and novels one chooses to read, with author names one cannot now use, are wrenched into a wondrous texture of fiction as turned upon a single wheel. All ate all, while nothing still gnaws at nothing.

***

THE SHADWELL SHARK

Once upon a time, I often walked into the East End of London from the City where I worked, whether just by extending my lunch break or simply to attend a business meeting nearby which had finished earlier than expected, thus leaving time to kill, or I was simply skiving, I can’t now remember. Call it ghost hunting, call it what you will 

These streets among which I wandered at random, in the then early 1970s, were not overshadowed by today’s monstrously tall vertical sharks as I might call them or as my later verifiable ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ called certain other things in that pre-woke era when I used that expression! But one day, in hindsight, I guess I did discern one such shard when walking in Shadwell, or was I actually among other dark wharfsides (where my grandfather once worked), the randomness of my walks often being conflated with my fading memory of them. Limehouse or Wapping, I now have no clue. Well, whichever was the case, I saw a vast black crack in the side of the sky, through which I sensed something eyeing itself through it. 

It must have been an occasion, on second thoughts, where I had just left a business meeting where too much of the hard stuff had been circulating. That fact, if fact it were, would explain a lot about what I saw. The streets, even beyond the Square Mile, had buildings with intricate architecture, and I remember Brick Lane, a thoroughfare that always struck me as if it should have not been a lane at all but a building blocking it throughout from width to length, and, in that vicinity, were certain tops of shop-fronted mansions with messages and codes and carvings near the roofs beyond the normal eye-line of the motley people who happened to be walking the pavements with their heads lowered (they did so then, even without the magnetic power drawing them to consult their smartphones today!). 

How this fact of mysteriously arcane tops-to-buildings can be connected with the crack in the sky that I thought I saw as a ghost of itself in the shape of sky high architecture yet to be constructed for real in some distant future, was a question forever overtaken by the sudden wrapping round me of things I could not walk through. 

I may be there still. Having found a real ghost but never returnable enough to claim I had found it at last. Not a dream, even if I later woke up at my city desk surrounded by towering piles of files to deal with file by file as work yet to be done that would now be invisible within screens, such duties thus out of sight, out of mind. The sky-eye just lost on some corrupted hard-drive of the future.

***

THE TALK BIRD

”What is that?” asked one old man called Noel sitting on a sea front bench.

“It’s a Talk bird,” said the other old man called Leo, sitting with Noel.

“Never heard of it,” said Noel, folding and refolding the soft paperback in his lap. 

“They used to breed them in the City of London as a means of hearing secrets and then repeating them to the authorities.”  Leo was an ordinary old man who kept himself alive with eccentric tales to tell, or was completely mad. He was a bit like me. Looked like me, too.

“So why is it here by the sea with the gulls?” asked Noel.

“Just as temporary cover, I guess,” said Leo gauchely.

Noel nervously twisted and retwisted the cover of his paperback of ghost stories. And he wondered if words always sounded like they were spelt. Or if anagrams could possibly cancel each other out into nothingness. He then said, wanting to change the subject to something more sensible, “Did you know, Leo, that Clorinda in A.E. Coppard’s famous story with that woman’s name in the title is an anagram of Ironclad, which is relevant to the plot and essential to understanding it? I think I am the first person to notice that.” He, too, was a bit like me. 

“Shush!” urged Leo. “The Talk bird has just cocked its ear!”

“Fiddlesticks, that’s not called a Talk bird, and if it was, it couldn’t do what you say it can do. By the way, there’s another story with a secret in this book, a very rare one by Robert Aickman, but I’ve always liked it. “The Insufficient Answer” it’s called, and the answer at outset turns out to be the number 42 and it was written long before Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker!”

At that point the Torque bird twirled on its feathered rump into sluggish flight and, like a homing pigeon, clumsily curvetted towards St. Paul’s. And Leo and Noel diminished to a tiny mucky residue between the slats of the bench, eventually becoming Nothing, after their partial anagrams as names merged and became a single Drogulus, a word that was once invented by a British philosopher called A.J. Ayer so as to act as the perfect word for the real ghost that the ghost hunter never found. The gulls now screamed in the air.

***

THE AWKWARD TRANSMISSIONS OF A TWISTED POSTURE

I knew I had always to think about things in hindsight so as to deduce exactly what had happened, even if the print is fading, and I also needed to reach the end of something to judge the implications of its beginning, give or take the odd intervention by destiny, especially with it being an old eccentric man who stirred such thoughts in me. I had cause to befriend him at the seaside by initially realising that he seemed to be in distress as he tried to walk up from the lower promenade by using the York Road steps instead of his more usual route nearby, he later told me, of the longer but gentler Queensway ZigZag slopes.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

He explained that he had suddenly felt a dizziness, not just in the head but a wrenching of his whole body, a sort of seizure that was not painful but alarming. Despite my parents telling me never to speak to strangers, I took him by the arm and led him eventually from the top of the steps to the nearest bench on the upper promenade. I noted his steep stoop, as he walked. 

His immediate words other than the above mention of the ZigZag slopes that he should have used, was that he feared he might have changed the whole direction of the world by such an uncharacteristic choice of route back home. I nodded in sympathy with him as I tried to explain the Butterfly Effect or Chaos Theory, but he seemed to know about these phenomena already. He saw that, despite my being much younger than him, I was the sort of person to whom  he could talk of similar matters, and he then embarked on a description of a dream he had experienced the previous night, fully expecting me to be patient enough to listen to it.

“I was on the ZigZags at night, Miss, and the sea had a sort of blue darkness, can you imagine that?” He noticed my nod and continued. “And I remembered the pirate radio stations out there with tall masts broadcasting on the Medium Wave with enough reach to stretch as far as London. Anything was better than the dire fading-out and truncations of Radio Luxembourg. Anyway, those ships have long been gone. Listen to the slow swish of the sea. I could actually hear a similar noise within the dream itself, in fact it was the first time I have ever dreamt any sound in any dream. Have you ever dreamt sound, Miss?”

I decided I had never dreamt sound but he continued without waiting for my answer. He described to me a starless and moonless night, yet he could discern what he recognised as the dome of St. Paul’s slowly rising from the otherwise placid sea, a vision situated about what he assessed to be a hundred yards from the replenished beach beyond a fishtail groyne. It even more slowly turned on a timely axis, making the sea’s surface follow suit. He said it seemed to be a translucent structure, if there had been any light to prove that translucency was possible. Perhaps it had its own light from within, making his own earlier assessment as to its position in the now silent sea thus verified. 

It then faded beyond potential light with a silence more silent than silence itself. Or did it sink as slowly as it rose. The dream was foreshortened, and I cannot remember any more. I hope I didn’t miss anything out.

***

TUGGED HIS FINGERS FREE

I was in evident burn-out, my stories becoming more and more truncated. What should I do but quickly write another story, even if dangerously tailgating the previous one. Prove them wrong, old son, I say to myself. Be direct, shed any co-narrator, and be freehold not leasehold in what you already own the ownership of narrating. 

Yet, just as that urging had been said, I sensed another presence in the room, the ghost we hunt made manifest. Ah, just then, in the previous sentence, you somehow slid into the first person plural. You need to stick with the singular person you are, always have been and always will be, and then firmly persist with it. But your pronoun has morphed yet again, even before you realised you had by now slipped into the second person as a corruption of the first. Only the shadowy third can surely follow.

Pronouns were now coming out of the walls as packs of squirming worms, the biting points of their screws compromising the very integrity of the bungalow house where he had chosen to live for many years. His body was a shadow of itself, his mind straddling the vast distance between who he used to be and who he will now become. They ate his eyes, feasted upon his soul, tugged his fingers free, and used his own words for telling this, as if these words were their own words instead. Words that told me I had to attend some court of judgment to hear my sentence said.

***

When I first started the earlier Miniatures with Mansions a few weeks ago, I little believed we would end up here with different miniatures, different turnings. As well as being a ghost hunter acting as a ghost establisher I later started being employed as ghost exorcist proper. Burn-out on some arched motorway or heavenly bridge. Now a reteller or reviser or purger of memories and words without names, but certainly with lots of wiggle room and play. An exorcist not in any sense of cruelty to ghosts nor as a simple helper of human beings to rid themselves of fears, but mainly to ease ghosts into a proper death whereby their own fears can be added to the nothingness they had so far dodged . There was a man, for example, who had a large amount of statuary in his bungalow’s front garden near where I lived at the seaside but, when invited inside to do my business, I found quite a large detailed model of St Paul’s Cathedral on his sitting-room floor with a handle, as if it were a fruit machine or an old-fashioned clattering calculator with which I had once worked near the National Gallery in London, something you may recall from earlier. He wanted me to turn that handle for the first time and, with a wrench, I duly did, and so the stories flowed like a jackpot…..

***

MAELSTROM OF MINISTURES

The man had been stationed in the Gallery and, as if he were one of the wardens who usually sit in the corner of each room to guard the paintings, he now watched the desultory groups of art-goers as they came and went. It was a Show loosely depicting clowns and circuses through the ages. An exhibition perhaps  more suitable for an East End gallery nearer St Paul’s itself than Pall Mall. 

He had been hired for the day complete with his clown outfit to wander from room to room – thus to grant some Big Top atmosphere to proceedings. However, he was tired and had filched a warden’s chair so as to give his legs a rest. Toulouse-Lautrec (I am now allowed to cite dead names if not living ones in this series of tales) faced him and he studied the original painting as if it were the painter himself. He held imaginary conversations with him – only rarely interrupted by a new supply of art-goers in ones and twos who wandered through having wondered why he was tucked away in this room instead of greeting people at the main door. His baggy white tunic’s black rosettes and even his red nose sunk back into the shadows.

But then came three visitors who stayed longer than welcome – at least from our man’s point of view. These visitors evidently didn’t know each other, having arrived in this part of the Gallery by chance. They stared singly at each painting, returning time and time again to one particular painting which we couldn’t see, along with our man, from where he was sitting in the gloom. He hadn’t bothered to inspect each painting in the room before deciding to plump down in the fortuitously vacant chair. He had not even wondered to where the room’s warden had vanished. They were supposed to relieve each other. He didn’t get on with the wardens. They probably thought that his own role was a waste of time. A mere gimmick, bringing the show into tacky disgrace.

He turned his attention to the three art-sticklers in the room. He took unconscious pride in fathoming people by just looking at them. Indeed, unknown to himself, he had a tiny creature inside – separate from his brain but seeing through his eyes. This creature could dig deeper and more seriously into reality than the outward slapstick of his job as a clown could ever otherwise promise to deliver.

One was a Civil Servant, lover of Oscar Wilde’s wit, obsessed with tidiness, lover of Amateur Dramatics – who said “Mmm, Nice” as he approached each painting. The second was a middle-aged woman, unemployed, with a West Country accent even before she spoke aloud … but she did say something eventually with a “I’m sooooo tired!” to herself. The third was another woman, age 27, Administrator at a 6th Form College, someone who complained a lot, cynical about love or romance, and said, for no apparent reason, into the empty air : “I have never been drunk.” She had, by saying this, merely spoken aloud the title on one of the labels next to a painting depicting a clown who was apparently the only sober person centrally among many ordinarily dressed people who were riotously drunk. The clown, acting clownishly, also appeared drunk, but was acting the part of being drunk. One would need a lot of empathy to gather exactly the moral of the painting or its wider interpretation. For example, was the clown drunk, and were the others acting drunk?

Taken up by these hidden considerations, our protagonist man and even his inner creature had forgotten to continue fathoming the characters of the three visitors to the room, visitors who now seemed to have pitched their metaphorical tents for the duration, not one of them yet, however, communicating with the others, let alone with our man himself. They did gradually and more consistently gravitate towards one particular painting that we could now see in our mind’s eye even if our man, as our viewpoint, could not see it for real from where he sat. He pictured a portrait of himself sitting in the corner of the room. A poignant image of a sad clown or jester. But why did the three visitors not therefore visibly compare the painting to his presence in the corner? Surely they had spotted the resemblance and marvelled at the coincidence. He felt their gaze penetrate his baggy costume even as far as the distinguishing marks of his sunken chest and strawberry birthmark on his back. It was as if the painting was him and he was otherwise nowhere to be seen. He was urged to get up and start clowning about. Unlike most clowns, he could perform alone, so it would not be difficult to ad lib within the rarefied space he inhabited. After all, that was what he was being paid for – to give an atmosphere of the circus and its clowns.

But why should he? These were chance, unconnected visitors, each with their own agenda, each with their separate paths to the Gallery and, later, away from it. He could tell at least that fact from their very chance names we have not been able to divulge, their chance jobs, and their chance ill-chosen words. Let them make what they could of the unmakeable. Of the unremarkable. 

He’d give them no pleasure of synchronicity or serendipity. That wasn’t his job. He was there merely as a clown in a vacuum jar. Or just another frozen exhibit on the wall. But it was wishful thinking to imagine that he had no role to play other than simply to be just there.

He saw sinewy tendrils winding slowly in the air between the three visitors, a communication system of which they were evidently unaware. But which of them would break the silence first and to whom and why? The question remained in the air as they finally struck camp and left the Gallery, almost together, for the outside world.

The chair’s warden now returned to the room and gave our man a piece of his mind – to get going, circulate, make a brouhaha of welcome, get out on the street, rustle up a few more viewers for the Gallery… A clown among disguised clowns. 

Not to be rushed, our man sluggishly left the chair to its rightful owner and, before finally leaving the room, he walked over to discover half-heartedly what painting the three visitors had earlier gravitated towards. It was a meticulously detailed painting of of St Paul’s Cathedral, recognisable as such while straddling something more than simply squatting upon it, and, beside it, even conjoined to it, was an in-scale version of Nelson’s column slowly, he guessed, tilting downward.

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/torque-tales-2-by-df-lewis.html

New D.F. Lewis Ghost Stories (4)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-ghost-stories-3.html

***

THE GLASS ONION

 The ghost furthest from being a ghost, as it happened to be after hunting and then finding it, was unworthy of even the word ‘almost’ a ghost, and it featured during a lengthy sojourn with my young family on the Clockhouse Mount during the whole of Thatcher’s era into Major’s. My contemporaneous horror stories, if not ghost stories, featuring this place can be easily found by any enthusiast on one of my websites. 

It was so far from being a ghost, it ceased to be anything at all. Until hindsight kicked in, that is. The pub called The Jack and Jill — which I rediscovered, making a small diversion to see it when I was driven past  the area upon one of those life-guzzling motorways that connect places today —  is still there, even if almost a derelict shell of itself. And the man who once cut my hair was seen snipping away at an unseen customer. Now much older, he still traded behind the same window of the same depressing shopping façade. 

Memories welled up in me, like little rodent ghosts nibbling away at their past reality. Yet, I was mainly happy in this place, I remember, for many reasons I need not expand on here. There are some who shared my happiness there  who have the same memories, if filtered differently. Very important people in my life, such as those to whom I read nursery rhymes, as well as the walk-on parts of those with whom I worked in nearby deepest Surrey, and the workaday actors who shared the creaky stage with me in the Amateur Dramatics at Clockhouse’s Hillcrest Hall. And, of course, in the tradition of Reggie Oliver’s ghost stories, in that latter place, the ghost, about which I speak above, once resided. The ghost was, I think, most of all present when we performed a certain play — a farce called ‘The Glass Onion’, by a forgotten playwright — but was otherwise indescribable, even worth not mentioning at all. The ghost and the play.

Although this ghost was as attenuated as far as attenuation can reach without being nothing at all, it still haunts me with even more than  the horror I Ieft behind in the guise of the ludicrous horror stories written back there and that nobody ever reads, including me. Almost-nothing-at-all is quite unnoticeable, you see, when it secretes itself  in a pocket, stowing-away as it were, when I moved house by means of those damnable motorways to the distant Essex seaside, as it must have done in hindsight. It whispers silently, you see, as I ever write Beyond Credence. 

***

HALF HOAX, HALF HEX

I learnt some lessons today from a book review just this minute finished, which review, you may ask, well, it’s for me to know, and for you to find out. These stories, meantime, are half truth, half fiction, often with an established backstory, to give some substance to the scares, and to bolster the hidden codes (hidden is a better word, than occult), codes that my attempted wordplay deploys disingenuously but with some skills hopefully  of reality-erection and ghost-establishment in an otherwise scatterbrained hunting for such things. They scare me, you see, so I expect they will scare you, too. 

My established backstory today, is that of Hastings, Sussex, where I spent a few summer holidays in the 1960s with my grandmother who lived there on West Hill at that time. A wonderful place of vast views of the New Town and mazy Old Town bookshops and East Hill’s rough country where Pitch and Putt prevailed, as well as the sight of the Dolphin building whose Witch Doctor disco I attended, too, and, if memory serves, you could discern distant Beachy Head where people died. But my story takes place in next door St. Leonard’s where the old buildings half-soar, mentally half-squat, with digs galore within them, and there is the seasoned age and imposing awe of inland town and seaside resort merged, and where ghosts are sure to abound, as a certain unexpected ghost did that day when I, a ghost hunter rookie in the 1960s, visited there for no reason at all. Just to get out of my Nanna’s hair I guess, as she thought me too much of a homebird and spoilt by her daughter who happened to be my mother back in Colchester

It was not an obvious ghost, it was more a Close Encounter of the one and a half kind with a huge hovering UFO that nobody saw but me, judging by the expressionless faces of the bent and the upstanding streetwalkers alike and  holidaymakers who had lost their bearings. It reared above a terraced shop’s upper frontage, a UFO as mass of uncertain resemblance to anything that can be described, with more ancient flashing colours upon its silver bulk  than the Witch Doctor itself (in those days Psychedelia was as basic as lights going on and off to the sound of Little Stevie Wonder as he was then known) but this was a future Virtual Reality show to kill something at root in your soul. And things trooped from a vertical eye-shape in the UFO’s flank  (now a UFO landed as a ULO) onto the roof, indeed one of those many roofs invisible to ground-level eyes, even if you actually thought to raise the sight sufficiently to notice what the tops of buildings in otherwise run-of-the-mill towns sported as codes of found art or etched engravings too far-fetched to read. These things  must have found it difficult to walk on such roofs even if the roof slopes were not steep enough to see, of if not roofs there at all, such things vanishing into the terraced mansions below them. I use the word ‘walk’ advisedly, as these things I call ‘things’ did not appear to have legs. Nor did my belief in them have legs at all, however suspended my disbelief was eventually to become as I continued to watch them.

These ‘things’, however, before my belief in them finally vanished, did emerge from its sunk-roof syndrome with what seemed to be an old woman in a particular thing’s ‘arms’, but she did not seem distressed as far as I could tell. It was as if a moment of truth or proof had happened for once in this duplicitous world that was merely incubating itself in those just past the mid-century days of which I speak. I lowered my eyes for a moment, too, as if in respectful obeisance to something  I did not understand and when I lifted them again, all was as it had been before what later happened. 

A bent old woman undeniably standing next to me on the pavement smiled a near vertical smile at me and went her way, as did some others, even a holidaymaker who seemed to be in the know about some different code to mine, and, later that day, I returned  to my temporary West Hill home, with its widest view possible of countless New Town roofs as well as the cricket ground and the railway station, went home, indeed, to my then much younger Nanna. And I, for once, felt Rhagarol, and the world my oyster.

***

For eighty thousand years Pth’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei

This may be another instance of a tale derived subconsciously from déjà vu or a blatant retelling. Whichever is the case, I hope I have sufficiently embroidered it to be more than just a Victorian sampler or a barely post-mid 20th century naïvety as it truly was, but a relevance for today.

Meantime, you may be interested in knowing there is an old South Wales town called Llanelli, a place where my father was born and grew up in the twenties and thirties, a place that for some reason was, in my own time,  spelt as ‘Llanelly.’

Llanelli’s correct pronunciation is not unlike H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. In fact, I am not the only one to have made the case for some intangible synchronous connection between the two. On a visit there, whilst taking my late father from Essex where he had settled upon a nostalgic trip back to his roots, I could easily imagine the surly inhabitants possessing brothership with Deep Ones – and the deserted part of Llanelli docks being their lurkhole….

Imagine my shudder of delight when I soon after noted some words on the last page of ‘Shadow Over Innsmouth’ that I have employed as the title above. And, when I later related this fact to my own story-appearance in the since acclaimed ‘Shadows Over The Innsmouth’ (note the pluralisation), a plush hardback edited by Stephen Jones, since reprinted in several countries, well, I then felt I had hunted down a real ghost at last, one formed from the word-pareidolia  of coded fiction. 

Life is full of such coincidences. And I think immanent synchronicity and dark serendipity affect lovers of the dark side  of fiction more than most readers. Just as an example, whilst on that short visit to Llanelli, Dad scoured the local telephone directory in what he thought was a hopeless task to track down one of his old friends with whom he had gone diving at Llanelli docks as a boy: someone he had not seen or heard of for over forty years–and lo, that very friend was living directly opposite the guest house where Dad and I were staying, miles from the friend’s previously known abode! This chap turned out to be a Chief Mason in Llanelli with more resemblance to one of Deep Ones than was polite to notice. All true!

The strange forces of serendipity and coincidence ever seem to be at work, especially when writing stories in the ghost story mode. Either that or there is some wondrous mantra or muse steering our minds towards those priceless moments of creativity and gestalt.

Well, in hindsight, the previous paragraphs, still mainly in their pre-déjà vu state, may not be true at all, merely arguably possible. Certainly, those original tellings thus sampled were far too flowery, too pretentious and whatever else you might want  to call them. As an excuse, they were of their own age, with instinctive backdrops stitched from de la Mare, even Bulwer Lytton’s brain as fabrics to wipe Lovecraft’s fevered brow or to decorate his neat necktie tightened into a bud beneath his chin… And I admit, belatedly, this is certainly not a story at all but an intermission in my hunting for what I have not yet found save in a passion of the moment when writing about it.

***

FRINTON’S FRONT

Quite close to where I live in Holland on Sea is posh Frinton on Sea, well, I have managed to walk there at a push, until recently. Past the Haven’s radar mast, striding, or perhaps shambling in more recent days, along the sea wall onward to Frinton golf course, and eventually the town’s enclave itself where in wartime days my Mum worked for the Naafi. And in later years, a place that did not allow pubs, fish-and-chips nor buses to enter its  precinct. I think it has relaxed a bit since, if a place can relax, rather than the people who live there. 

H. Russell Wakefield, one of the great ghost story writers of all times, mentioned Frinton at least twice in his fiction, and so it may already have a readiness to be a venue for strange thoughts and even stranger sightings. But when I once spotted the church, the smallest in Essex, I believe, I sensed that ghost hunting would not go amiss in and around it. But that was in the days when I had not fully seen my métier for what it was and Frinton’s front was impermeable to me. But the church being quite close to the main shopping area, Connaught Avenue, one would have thought anything supernaturally eerie would be unlikely to happen. Not ripe for my quirky amateurish ghost hunting, as it was then (and perhaps Frinton itself had not yet fully fulfilled such a magnetic role, too, in such a context), even though my quirkiness was a mask for something more deeply unsettling than I could then imagine. And indeed I often found Frinton unsettling, despite its happy wide beaches with old-fashioned wooden groynes that had been replaced with rocky fishtails where I lived myself, and Frinton’s plush beach huts worthy of bigger constructions, ladders and outcrops of wooden backramps et al. And a shop that seemed to be a girl’s wardrobe. And a little park on the sea front with a tree carved into a sharp beaky bird, with a castle gate hewn into its base. Not forgetting the imposingly well-named Grand Hotel of Frinton facing the round  clock-shelter on the sea front upper green that looked like a morphing from  a time-travelling Tardis vehicle. The whole place seemed made for me. Both chirpy and unsettling, as I think I may have implied during these ramblings on my part. I can supply photographs if required. No rooms with spare third beds in these large houses and mansions hereabouts, rooms large enough to be single-minded and en suite, only to be shared when required. Sometimes, I wondered about just one room filling some of the town’s mansions. Duties as missing attics and lofts left for the owner’s beach huts to fulfil, especially in the off-season. But now I seem to be rambling off piste.

I simply must focus on my tale, if only for my mother’s sake, who spent most of her earlier years in Essex living on a boathouse called the ‘Onward’ as moored amid the Walton-on-the-Naze backwaters, where Arthur Ransome set some of his Swallows and Amazons  adventures. As a child, I preferred Enid Blyton, though. And Biggles at a push. Which brings me back to that outing on foot I once took from Holland to Frinton along with an old walking friend, now sadly deceased, whose mind was as wandering as now my own mind possibly wanders even worse than his did then. 

We saw Frinton in the distance as we left Holland Haven, and our proposed destination suddenly appeared to be an enticingly magical place over the brow of its own golf course, in the golden shafts of something that was not sun-bred. The shafts came from a direction in the sky, in fact, different from where the sun was meant to be. Golden as in something to be wished for. But there were bigger fish to fend off. And the sea shimmered not with the rich blue I described earlier in these storified reports of mine, but a deep yellow that, despite such dark deepness, blinded our eyes. We managed to hasten onward, onward being a word I cannot escape using in this context, and I shrugged off something my friend seemed to accept as natural as I helped lead him to the promised land of a later pub lunch in Walton which we would reach if we could walk that far, indeed plugging on towards Walton’s vast tiers of beach huts near its long pier and near where I was conceived, Walton being where we always intended to be rather than in Frinton, a plan that all along entailed our desire to by-pass Frinton despite the length of the walk we would be forced to strain our ageing sinews to achieve, and much of what I have  written above was to give that very false impression of our intentions to a place called Frinton that lay in wait for us, but by now it had discovered this my deceitful narration and was pulling us onward towards that small church inside its gates, a church that I mentioned before. Or was it the beaky bird that called us or the clock shelter cowering before a huge hotel with not guestrooms inside but a vast inner space gutted bigger even than the Tardis itself?

I can’t ask my friend now. But I am pretty sure we only escaped by pretending that we never intended to leave Holland at all, and with some boyish laughter and relief we turned back at the point in our walk where we always turned back, just as Holland became Frinton at the front edge of the latter’s golf course where stick-like figures with sticks they swung seemed to wave at us. We ever joked that we were auditioning for a new series of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ and we sought the actual number 42 in various configurations, too, just as a game to by-pass time. He thought these were my jokes, but little did he know how serious I could be. And I turned round to glimpse the Frinton we had escaped (or did it, for reasons of its own, relax its hold on us?) and I  saw with some relief that the sky had returned to pale blue, and the sea an even richer blue than I had ever seen it before. This story is merely now my aide memoire never to forget such events in honour of my friend. Pity I did not write it earlier when maybe it would not have been so wandering in its focus. And who knows, if we had reached Frinton, I may have found the very ghost that has ever eluded my hunting for it. Or does it hunt me, instead? Who or what is the front line we both defend

***

THE THIN KING

I have achieved little success so far in this canon of ‘stories’ to hunt out the real ghost that all ghost hunters seek to find, with erected holo-words filled up by codes as to such a ghost’s undeniable existence, while also bolstered by the truths of an author’s personal past life intrinsic to such stories as well as attempts at deploying the interspersed power of fiction itself to further, even more, such bolstering of the truths by lateral thinking, but the goal remains elusive, permanently tantalised by the brinkmanship of attainment. So try other means, I say. Strip a story of its setting, its set of people, its backstory, its plot and place, even its set of words, even losing a rare odd letter or two along the way, that would have couched any non-events’ onward course towards an ending. But these words that I use to express my intentions are words themselves, you claim, that I am using for you to read about them! And I shrug my shoulders and so plan to resort to all those missing ingredients of a story yet again. 

But GHOST stories surely do not logically exist by definition of what I fear can never be hunted down.

So there you have it, and my goal is finally reached. A philosophical impossibility made possible by fiction’s fearless force. A conundrum beaten out to the extra rhythms of Azathoth’s celebratory flutes and violins. Here, then, as necessary non sequitur, is the next story in line set out, as tempered by a restraint not demonstrated above. Meantime, it seems I have hunted down the ghost I sought during a lifetime of seeking it, simply by twisting a thought one ratchet further than I had ever twisted it before. ‘Torque Stories’, the would-be overall title of this still evolving collection of short-short ghost stories, to supplement  a volume called ‘Gauche Stories’ that is currently planned to be published independently before the end of 2023, that in turn will supplement the already published volumes entitled ‘Dabbling With Diabelli’ and ‘A Man Too Mean to be Me’ that were published following ‘The Last Balcony’ and ‘Weirdmonger’ before them. I have several more stories to tell, I hope, as a mass debriefing for now such a lifelong hunting’s sudden success. Thinking about it, to debrief a series of short-shorts is to make them longer, I guess. Thinking about such things again and again, perhaps forever, before the story proper shows its face.

Once upon a time, there was a thin King who doubted his own thoughts, despite the apparent worship his subjects demonstrated for each of his proclamations. His fairy tale castle resided in a world that sparkled less than some fantasy of yore, yet never so grim as Grimm either! These subjects, however, pretended to obey his words while doing their own thing without him knowing. The complete opposite happens between ruler and ruled in our own real world, you may already have noticed! But this is not a fable with a moral, but a fiction for its own sake, so please do not expect an easy message massaging your prejudices as you squat with your constant rage inside now legendary roofless and roomless mansions.

This thin King was the sort who knew more about dealing with whoever read about him in a  story about him than he knew about his subjects themselves within the story, subjects who had objectively never been taught to read beyond words of one syllable. His future bride, to be wed to him when she eventually came of rage, was a case in point with regard to the one-syllable syndrome, so his preliminary love letters written to her in the guise of ghost hunting stories went mainly to waste. So, she thought him to be some waster who wrote nothing but nonsense extending its various lengths null immortalis. PS I love you. Fat or not.

***

A VENETIAN TALE

Getting back to basics, allow me to explain that, for the ten years between 1975 and 1985, I wrote very little creative fiction material, yet as a character I appeared in stories written by unnamed sources and placed in plot venues I had not yet visited in real life. Towards the end of the century into the noughties, however, I travelled throughout Europe with my wife on coach tours, and thus I eventually managed to fulfil the visit to a particular city that my character had already made in the following  story from years before…

Venice saw the arrival of the ghost hunter who had English and Welsh roots. His name was ever unclear except for the epithet I have already given him. He tried to remain incognito as he believed such a state of tenuous existence as a person enabled an easier approach to supernatural phenomena who would be less suspiciously frightened of him if without a name and a passport. How he had reached Venice, in such insubstantial circumstances, still remains a mystery.  He mainly sought, he told locals, a ghost that was substantial enough to dress in real clothes. But that, in hindsight, I realised was an ironical claim, to conceal his real purposes.

There was a ghost that fitted very few labels or pre-conditions, about which it had been bruited in British paranormal circles as being one that haunted the canals of Venice while seeking very old locals who might remember a literary man and an unconnected youth both of whom once stayed there during a cholera outbreak, the latter youth accompanying a well-to-do family. But, in the end, I guess, they were a different older man and younger man the ghost sought than those who seemed obvious from the original terms of its reputed quest. Men that somehow crossed continents without official papers, too.

Indeed, the ghost hunter stumbled upon a different ghost altogether from any yet discussed, on a night of masked celebration for the city, a ghost wearing a mask with one slit not seeming to cover a proper face at all. I shudder even now at the thought. A vertical eye staring into the night, if the mask’s single slit was deduced correctly.

Which brings me to the nub of the night around which this story circles in uncertain currents. The ghost hunter was accustomed for his research to what we call mansions in Britain, readily generous as they were with many almost-ghosts, as I call them, but the Venetian form of these mansions were called palazzos, their roofs mainly still intact but their foundations sunk deep in the surrounding canals with often rank and real mucky water. The ghost hunter wondered about the nature of the rooms inside the palazzos and how residents  managed irrigation or ablution and eventual drainage. Commodes, he thought, must have been the answer.

A rising damp, too, he feared, a feeling that made his own bones seem to seep. Attics would be the safest place to hunt, if he could gain permission to enter them. Without a name, though, real people had more suspicion of him than he had assumed any potential ghosts apparently to have. Gondoliers were fussy, too, not taking any passenger without any checking, yet the ghost hunter was later poled, on a gondola with a single lantern, nearer to a particular incontinent palazzo, but a palazzo chosen by whom? This gondolier, who had agreed to take him in the end, was masked with a mask barely sufficient to see through to know where he was going. The water splashed with deceptively subtle tones of flute and violin, despite or because their respective holes and strings were slack or clogged, in contrast to the ghost hunter’s guilty heart beating, as he stood up precariously in the gondola under a quickly expunged crevice of the lantern’s light, indeed drumming as loudly as when the heart itself — while I was peering at his swaying shape with my vultural eye — had been snatched, upon its first drumming, from below a nearby Palazzo’s sunken floor.

***

THE TINIEST MANSION OF ALL

Any house, however basic-gaslit-1950s-bijou-cosy-needing-repair as it was then, with a toilet outside and no bathroom, can seem to be a mansion when an inhabitant who lives there magnifies its essential wonders. Time indeed now takes me back to Old Heath Road days, post Walton on Naze, having now moved to a terraced house slope-straightened upon a hill and next door to another such house that had then been turned into a small sweet shop-cum-grocery, just opposite the end of Scarletts Road that led to Colchester’s Recreation Ground… well, the more I reminisce, the  more the story will be lost. But I am first forced to to tell you about these school days of mine that involved St George’s Junior an imaginary enemy-filled walk away in Canterbury Road and later the Grammar School a two-wheeler bike ride away, as pedalled via the Army Garrison precinct roads. At the back of our house was a long thin garden containing a bullace tree in the branches of which I often sat wearing a Davy Crockett hat, and then further back some rough ground which the council later built up by means of cranes and diggers into a higher mound for new housing, and even further off, before the new houses arrived, two poplar trees, as iconic memories of those days, one tree taller than the other. Outside trundled past the No. 6 bus into town plus the equivalent, in the 1950s, of the wi-fi hub I dreamt to be under the pavement just in front of our gate.  My parents often at the Hippodrome Bingo having given up the black and white films they used to watch in Walton’s place for moving pictures. And me, when a little older, here in Colchester, watching the Dambusters film at the Embassy Cinema with daylight showing through its roof in echo now of something else I can’t now quite nail down. And much more from those days slides away even before I know it is there to grab.

With these pictures of the Old Heath Road locale now set in words, I find — especially at my age of such slippage — that the story I intended to tell  has indeed been lost with no memory of it connected to one or more of  those careful images from my past, including a ghost to feature in it actually to turn it into a ghost story, indeed the ghost I have ever since written about hunting and never found. A ghost story — that has vanished even before any chance to read it, or to write it, or even, in hindsight, to think it at all — is strangely the most frightening ghost story of all

THE END OF THIS SERIES OF GHOST STORIES