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
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