Lost Endings (3) stories by D.F. Lewis

 Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/lost-endings-2-stories-by-df-lewis.html

HOLE IN ONE

Whole and haven. Hole and Haven. Haven is only one letter short of Heaven. A place named Holland? Perhaps the Netherlands, the Heathen Lands, the Heaven Lands, the Heaving Lands after some holocaust of tides and coastal warming. Whole with a w is quite alien to the concept of hole without a w. But most unlikely it is the Holland as in the flattened and the windswept, those fens and dykes of the Below Lands, a place that, in the Double Dutch tongue, in that untranslatable Weirdtongue, has a name usually employed to label the wastes of time and space as threaded by all lost sailors of the living world. 

Yet we know the name more simply as Waterworld, a land hidden by unseasonable tides, a land that we all dream about from time to time, and, even if this name is lost in translation, we know it is some kind of haven or harbour for our boats when storms unexpectedly cause us to race towards Waterworld’s shimmery coast, a coast that some of us call Haven or Heaven, others of us call Hell or Hole.

Juses stood upon that unstable coast as only one with that name could stand upon it, as part of it, liquid coast and liquid man as one, juice with juice, mixed like a cocktail without a stick. He was once a Dutchman who had painted landscapes, but it was so ironical that his fate was to harbour himself in a land without landscapes at all. He raised a slanted edge of hand to his watering eyes as if in salute, but it was to protect his sight from the bright core of coastal warming positioned above where distant sea met a rippling horizon of distant sky. He had seen one of our boats plying its way toward the part of the coast where he waded in it. Or where it hugged him higher than wading boots could ever reach.

Juses had prepared himself to welcome the sighted boat into the relatively safe harbour or moated arbour that he called Holland Haven. He visualised the painting he might once have painted in oils or acrylics, but now in the water colour of his imagination: a seascape with a single solitary sail melting into or melting out of the worms of coastal warming that wriggled along the horizon’s length, such worms’ core or singularity firming and forming somewhat into a greyly coiled sun setting for the night amid its own tides of encroaching darkness. It was good that the boat looked as if it would soon reach the part of the coast wherein Juses’ feet were sunk, reaching it before any light in the Dutch Master’s water colour painting finally died.

He watched me carefully as I eventually disembarked from what had once been a boat. He dared not assist me, in case he sank into me, or me into him, thus prematurely destroying any separateness between us. I felt relieved that I had managed the voyage at all, reaching this relatively firm coast before the liquid light had spilled from the vessel of the sky.

I had been travelling forever, it seemed, during the rocking dreams of sleep that my fixed waking body had undergone while still on solid land. I had reached Holland Haven at last, I thought. I was on the brink of a wave’s culmination, the cusp of moment with moment, juice with juice. No sea defences needed at Holland Haven, because the sea and land had become at last an inevitable whole. Holistic, as description as well as name.

A torque of two doppelgängers. A ghost having now found its hunter.

***

GO GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD LIGHT

When I came downstairs in the middle of the night in the early Noughties or – as it turned out – very early in the morning, I discovered Edna in the living-room, squatting on the couch in her nightie, intently watching BBC News 24 on the TV. I had not previously noticed her going down the stairs from her room at such an ungodly hour – but, thinking back, it probably was that movement in itself having caused me to wake and feel the need for a visit to the loo which was in those days only downstairs and not also upstairs as it is now.

It felt as if I were entering a Science Fiction film scenario because the wide screen of our TV was showing flashing lights over the St. Paul’s Dome in London which the commentators could not explain. There was a hushed feel to the broadcast. Although live, it was taking its time to piece through the awakening awesomeness. A documentary in real time. And I gazed out of our window to see the beginning of the same slow lights and glints of metal in the sky above our own bungalow house that I called ironically a mansion, coming and going through a shimmeringly numinous blanket of what I assumed to be cloud. A milky grey, filled with a pulsing glow, one that contrasted with the blackness of the sky behind it. An aiaigasa of a threatening light show’s  self-encounter now being opened up above us, an arch of woven arches that not even a then future AI artist could possibly depict as straddling time itself.

Edna did not speak nor even slightly acknowledge my arrival in the room, having presumably been infected by the hushed whispers of the TV out-and-about commentators as they exchanged observations with the equally hushed anchor man in the studio. Obviously most of their reporters were still asleep or were already on their way to new reporting positions, rudely awoken by their mobiles. One disembodied female voice was even now discussing the huge slanting shaft of cathedral light (words that I’m sure she actually used to describe it perhaps as borrowed from what I had already written above) and her face eventually appeared on the screen as if to claim the description as hers. One could see the vast beacon or spotlight stretching from sky to earth behind her. She did not look scared. She did not look anything but business-like. I admired her. She fingered her ear as if the sound-plug had worked loose in the pent-up excitement of the occasion. It was whistling in her ear, I guessed. I called her Miss Earwhistles. Until I realised how rude that was.

It’s trite to say this now, but it all seemed like a dream. Edna and myself in the living-room staring at the TV screen which soon turned to its own form of lambent glow without the faces or voices to map the usual geography of news. Just the gradually emerging further images of the night sky’s light show that was duplicated through our window.

It was then I noticed the obvious. One sensed that it was as obvious as the original need for going to the loo but had taken its time to make itself known. My left foot was missing. I was amazed how I took this information as coolly as I did. There was a stump but no blood was present … and I must have used this leg – without any sense of pain – to walk down the stairs. Using it like a fixed walking-stick or crutch. A thick knee-knotted branch from a Canterbury Oak. I now saw Edna was hugging a foot as if she was the legendary log lady from Twin Peaks. But her dislocated appendage was as tall as the knee. Or the knee had become the foot itself. It must have been her own left leg as I could see only the single right one coming from the bottom of her nightie. At the point where the bent left knee should have been a part of the ridge of her lap was no evidence of blood from the thigh stump. Whatever had caused these injuries had been gentle enough to prevent major blood loss. But if Edna had her leg to nurse like a log (with St Elmo’s Fire playing along its bony rigging), where was my left foot? 

Back to the anchor in the studio…

Thank you. Reports are coming in of a dream sickness affecting the whole population. A whining whistle that makes each ear as big as a balloon. Bloated with a fine scrimshaw of veins like low-key rivers flowing with hushed currents towards a sea of white noise which, in turn, shafts like heavenly light from the dream to the very edge of reality which the dream fails to contain. Or fails so far.

Edna smiled. She had caught me in her dream. Or she in mine. How rude, like transgressing on Facebook, I thought. If we’d been sharing the same bed, this may never have happened. This would punish us for spending the night in separate rooms. All loving couples should make up their quarrels before the night begins. One should not go to sleep with the sound of unkind words still in your ears. Arguments should not be carried on beyond sleep. However, we had made up to some extent. A desultory forgiving. Symbolised by the hushed whispers. Thankfully, there was no blood. 

The cowed glances from the dream reporters and they now had little to say, it seemed, despite the world-shattering events going on around them. The lambent glows. The erstwhile earwhistles which were inferred as so high-pitched that silence was their only sign of existence. I switched off the TV with a sense of defiance. It vanished to a dot.

Yet my missing foot nagged me. But there it was on the sideboard next to the real world’s bowl of fruit, each toenail neatly manicured. It was slowly turning to soft wax threaded with a tracery of thin earth-wires which Edna limped over to light as if it were a candle with tangled wicks. Go gently into that good light.

We kissed. And smiled wistfully at the renewal of our love. Turning deaf ears to a slow leakage from reality to dream or vice versa. 

I do not know if we made up properly because later when the dream was completely forgotten by both of us: I said something to her: and she turned to me and said something so outrageous about the future, I assumed she was pulling my leg. And so it goes on. We dare not turn on the TV ever again. Except we did. And the anchor had gone.

***

MOTORWAY ARCHES

Hitchhiking, eh? Well, I gave it up years ago, before the world gave up hitchhikers and expected them to get real jobs and real cars, not that some of you will ever give this up, whatever the dangers. For me, it was a sore thumb, making me settle down, not wanting to stick out, not wanting to seem different. You know, when you get older, you can never remember back fully to when you were young. To that foreigner who once possessed your body and called it theirs.

But then, just before they put me away, put me away for good in some (god)forsaken home, I had the chance to go hitchhiking again. You would never have believed that an old crock like me could walk at all let alone have the gumption to find a carriageway carrying cars and lorries that were likely to stop when seeing a bent silhouette at the last old fingerpost next to the smooth blue motorway sign with letters and numbers. A motorway crossing counties like an arch with thick yellow smog hugging it was then only just a dream. These motorways were real, but each harboured such a future ghost of itself in spades.

Where did I want to go, you ask? And why not catch a train? Or, better, a bus pass instead, using a card with my wrinkled face on it, a card they gave all oldies like me to travel free and easy. No need to stick out my thumb at all in the cold cold days that I called my winter. Once a perpetual autumn now come out of its closet as winter.

But I did not want a lift to any old place. I wanted a lift to Hell.

Not that those travelling the bus-passes and bypasses of our land were likely to want to go there at all. They were probably going to some posh place to see some friends or relatives posher than them. I’d have to persuade someone I stopped behind the wheel that it was in their interests to take me somewhere else, instead. Somewhere where they didn’t want to go. You see, I wanted a lift to Hell.

I was sitting there watching the cars and lorries speed by. How could I even hope to stop them short of stepping in front of them, and then the brakes would not be their real brakes screeching under their foot, but my own flesh and bone snagging between tyre and concrete. 

But I did manage to stop one car… It had a driver sitting stock upright in the front seat, a flashing sign saying the passenger airbag was switched off. I shook my head, I refused his offer of a lift. Beggars could be choosers, I thought. The right lift would come along sooner or later. I just didn’t like his face, whether or not he liked mine. I tapped the side of his car and he drove off. I resumed my bent silhouette at the last fingerpost, thumb stuck into the air. I did did not want a lift to any old place. I wanted a lift to Hell.

Then, all of a sudden, another oldie, even older than me, came hobbling along the carriageway towards the same hard shoulder where I was sitting. His trousers sagged and sat ill against his scrawny thighs, a dark patch as evidence of the slowness of getting lifts these days, and I asked him why he hadn’t found a quiet spot, a dignified darkness, to relieve himself along this stretch of the highway. He shrugged and said something I couldn’t catch. He, too, though, I guess, wanted a lift to Hell.

Soon, there were a number of other oldies gathered on the same hard shoulder. Looking into a sky sown with starlight like a vast screen or arch they could not control from where they stood as anchors. They knew somehow where I was going. Something had told them as it had told me. And they all wanted to hitch the same lift as me, all of them become bent silhouettes like me, each with a thumb joyfully upraised. An odd finger, too. Even a left leg lifted by one of us who was female.

They didn’t want a lift to any old place. They wanted a lift in a different direction from wherever they’d all just come. They all wanted a lift to Hell.

***

GOD HAD ONLY ONE ROOM IN HEAVEN

The Stood Bedroom was a single story. 

Standalone, a bedroom house, a house with only a bedroom, and four exterior walls and two windows halfway up or halfway down as formed by corners like sharp, right-angled bays, with curtains inside to match and pull in different directions from halfway across. Commonly called a Stood Bedroom.

Inside, it was indeed a bedroom with no sign of its doubling as a bedsit for the purpose of entertaining guests. Meanwhile, it was only guests who knew that there was a whole catacomb of rooms beneath this single bedroom, with stairs leading down to them, and thus such extra rooms were naturally below ground level.

Kitchen, bathroom, sitting-room, even a hall and a music room, but, of course, no sun lounge nor conservatory. Although there was a type of garden-shed at the end of the cellar area. Where tools were stowed. The walls were provided by the earth itself. So repair work was minimal. Even though parts of it were real mucky.

This Stood Bedroom stood close to a council housing-estate. The houses there were normal two-up-two-down ones that sat above ground level, back-to-back as in the old days. (The clearance lorries and demolition workers only seemed to do work in other towns and cities nearby.) This estate housing had single sash-windows in most walls, except where the walls had been subject to defenestration laws. The inhabitants do not count in this story. Their views not sought. Their ghosts never hunted. Such abodes never had ghosts anyway, not even cellar ones, as they had no cellars. Just lofts without ladders. And asbestos in their roofs.

A modern mansion proper stood on the brow of a hill overseeing it all, and it is easy to imagine envy of its status and of those within it, till it was discovered it was made from faulty concrete. Then laughter rang out, instead. And being modern, no need to mention that this mansion had not even the provenance of ghosts. 

The Stood Bedroom, meantime, was only understood by its guests below stairs they never climbed, for want of grounding.

***

DEATH IN THE ATTIC

It was meant to be in the mansion’s roof, of course. But that was not a given, because there was no easy way to find a door upwards into its cavities. Hey Joe, the latest hit by Jimi Hendrix, was playing on Pick of the Pops when Edna again mentioned the status of her home’s attic: “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” I asked, knowing full well the answer to my question. Since reaching old age, she had specialised in recurrent identical statements, all of them referring to the supposed missing attic.

“Let’s spend the night together.”

That was not Edna – nor, me, for that matter. It was the next record being played on the wireless. It was considered to be a very naughty record in those days. I need not tell you it was by the Rolling Stones. Or perhaps I do. Matthew and Son was soon to be the next one, by Cat Stevens. And Edna’s cat she called Mew wound itself round the chair leg, pervasively purring against the noise. Not very good wireless reception, with there being much static on the medium wave, no doubt caused by someone electric-mowing outside somewhere. The much complained-about neighbour. The static sounded even louder than the mowing.

After a long considered delay, and with brows creased, Edna elicited a noise herself. A ptcha or a tut. Not sure which. A cluck of the tongue, at least. That filled in for a thousand words I had heard from her during previous visits. Over cups of tea and choice iced slices.

Mew was now upon my lap — to make a change, I assumed, from curling up like a black rose on hers.  

The attic gone missing, she said, used to be reachable from one of the landings at the top of the stairs. Full of bric à brac, she said, and old toys she played with from the ground zero of her life. I don’t now remember which of us first used that rather odd expression, but it seemed to suit a certain no man’s land of life before memory was able to begin.

I had gained the impression that Edna’s family had closed up any such attic following a police investigation about an event, deliberate or accidental, that had occurred there. But closing an attic should not entail that attic actually vanishing. I never managed to get her to clarify it to my satisfaction. It was something I am sure she ached to tell me — if she could. But I did wonder whether there was a scar left where a door or some other sort of hatch had been sealed up. There were two main landings to consider and I had often stood at each position staring up at the ceilings and imagined all manner of shapes and sizes of decorative realignment. I had also stood outside staring up at the top of the house to gauge where the attic must have been when it was an attic.

“I am a believer.”

That again was neither of us speaking but just the last record on Pick of the Pops. The number one record that week by the Monkees. She liked the programme’s DJ, Alan Freeman, she claimed. Fluff, some called him.

I heard the loud click as Edna switched off the wireless after the record finished. Even so, I tested out the thought as I stood on the optimum landing examining the optimum ceiling, repeating the words of the last song title.

Edna called up the stairs, asking if I was alright. I did not reply. I had clambered up somewhere she would never find me, as if I wanted to be the last memory she would ever have. But a loft ladder does not always lead to a loft. And an eaves cupboard can never be called an attic.

The last sound I heard was just the cluck of a tongue. Oh my, no one ever died in that house. Only memories of people and who they were, or still are.

I crouched up there on the open rafters with Joe. Hopefully, Matthew, too. And an odd organ grinder’s monkey. Surrounded by the mewing of Mew. I shall go eventually even higher towards the roof and change the old story title above to a new one. It never represented a familiar enough song you could sing along with, anyway.  But seemingly Mew knew where the wireless’s aerial was situated, to achieve the optimum signal. The whole reason I was up there at all!

The pervasive mowing suddenly stopped outside.

***

YOU WILL KNOW WHAT YOU WANT WHEN YOU SEE IT

The attic in question was one where you would expect a ghost to reside – well, at the time I had no real experience of the attic to judge that was the case, as I had not yet visited the attic. It was simply in hindsight that the ghost appeared in it after I had visited the attic. It wasn’t there at the time I visited the attic, but I sensed that a ghost would be visiting the attic after I had left it. Perhaps ghosts are like that, after-the-event visitors, and this is why nobody ever really sees a ghost or can prove that one can exist. There are ghosts, though; it’s just they are in places when I am not in them myself. Yet the places have a feel that a ghost is coming to visit it later. 

In the attic – my spinster aunt’s attic – I found a case in point. She asked me to fetch something from it as she was now too old to climb up there.

“OK, Auntie, what’s it you want from it?”

I had never been to her attic before, so I could not visualise what she might want from it. For all I knew, it was completely empty. Or it was full of things that would be difficult to get out as they had been put up there before the attic’s hatch had been reduced in size during a period of rebuilding and redecoration. Or it was full of toys and old dolls and other personal things – which was a more likely possibility than the other two!

She stared at me for a few moments and said: “You will know what I want when you see it.”

I looked quizzically, and so did she. I shrugged to myself and got up to start my mission to the attic.

It was indeed a difficult climb – with a ladder that creaked louder than any ghost, I thought.

I did manage to clamber through the hatch – but there was no attic light. I felt cobwebs or all sorts of imaginary fingertips touching my face. Auntie had not told me to take a torch. Common sense now told me, however, that I should have made better plans. And I could not get her to hear me or me her, although I had left her at the foot of the creaking ladder. So, how could I possibly guess what she wanted me to bring down when I had nothing I could see to choose from. Then, I realised I was in the wrong attic. She must have forgotten to tell me or, on second thoughts, I had forgotten that she had told me that there were two separate attics in this mansion with no connection between them. The ghost must have been in the other one. And always would be. 

And she must have been standing at the foot of a quieter ladder somewhere else.