Continued from: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/more-disconnected-miniatures-1.html
PARTICLE OF TIME
Ever balanced, life flows with flesh and blood between the banks of night and day, between past and future, between each particle of time.
Even today, I misunderstand the repercussions. Heart in my mouth, I entered the building only to look round and then scarper — fast! Well, that’s what I thought at that precise moment of time. Particle physics was not even invented then. A strange thought to have.
The building must have always stood halfway down the road…true, it is a strange affair if you could notice it at all, but it’s that type of building which no one hardly ever notices. You know, there is currently a vogue for collections of old black and white photographs of specific localities, which are sold like hot cakes to those living in each locality. Well, glancing through a few of such photos of this road, you will be hard put to take in this particular building off the page, as it were, let alone focus on it… It has pillars outside and several wide steps leading up, rather like a mini temple or ancient cinema. I only know that because I stumbled on the pavement — slid on a lump of ill-digested dogfood, if I recall correctly — and scraped my forehead on the bottom step of the said building. I’m sure the passers-by stared at me, as if to blame me for disrupting the balance of their day… going tip over arse in such an ungainly fashion is a bit un-aesthetic, I suppose. But they soon forged on to their own particular ends, and I was left with a slightly dazed perspective of the particular building in question. Particular this, particular that.
I was pretty sure that the road, so familiar to me, was purely terraced houses. So I scratched and scratched my head… Swaying a little from side to side, I stepped up towards the double doors — with a rotting keyhole, I noted. No sign or clue as to the use of the building, but it was definitely not derelict. Which brings me to the particular point of telling you about all this, though it will probably not be clear even when I’ve finished. Time will only tell.
I found the doors open. There were a group of people squatting on the bare floor, chanting quietly to themselves in unison. There was very little light, the only source being a truncated chimney stack at the peak of an inverted cone roof, from which wreaths of sickly yellow smoke penetrated the room. The people were dressed in costumes from a historical period which, to my then mind, had not yet fulfilled its particular promise in the hard and fast past. I knew the garments could not be from some future period, for I was convinced that I had learnt all about historic costume at school, and history had been my best subject. If anything, I was a bit of a dab hand at drawing together all the strands of the future into a composite picture. They say you can learn a lot of lessons from such trends to help you sort out the present.
Indeed, the people were from a particular past on which I could not put a finger. Suddenly, they all turned on their haunches and stared at me, as if they had been consorting with my other so-called ‘friends’ outside the building. The balance of their day had been shattered too, no doubt. I felt the blood rising like a tide to my face, for I’m used to minding my own business — and taking the blame of the world on to my own shoulders at each and every opportunity. I was sorry to be such a nuisance; I knew nobody owed me the slightest consideration and I was surprised even at the ability of my own body to take up space!
One of them came up to me and whispered instructions in my ear. I can only do what I’m told, for all things are in such a state of perfect balance, that I am swayed by the slightest external influence, until an even slighter one comes to take its place. And then I will probably be swayed by that even slighter influence. Swayed by even an otherwise insignificant particle of time, often known as a moment.
I always vote for the last candidate to talk to me. That is my most important confession.
The congregation proceeded to lie on the floor, side by side, and chanted louder, and yet louder. They called me Messiah. Without further thought, I determined to accept this role and, in the fullness of time, to follow my future disciples wherever they roamed, hanging on each and every word they spread. A Messiah of the moment. A momentary Messiah. One who slavishly dogged the footsteps of his own disciples. Followed his own followers. In that eternal photograph of the moment, as all photographs surely are.
I’m sure the building is still there even today, its roof in communion with the sky and taking suck of the pollution that our world gives off. Anyway, I hope it’s still there, but the black and white photographs inevitably do grow yellow from that pollution. I surely must walk past the building each day, without noticing it, along with all the other people who hunker down into themselves and walk mindlessly straight on from A to B, in search of the particular particle of time that has ever slipped behind them. Blinkered by the moment.
***
DREAM AS A FORM OF HITCH-HIKING
As the man thumbed his way towards the meanderable lanes of deepest Surrey, he maintained a picture in his mind’s iritic eye of his old stamping-ground: the lamentable one-way gutters and blind alleys around St. Paul’s Cathedral. He knew a dosser had to do what a dosser had to do — and that was probably die as soon as possible, both to rid himself of the world and vice versa. But death was never the easiest way out.
Of course, he could’ve used the services of another dosser called Jack who wielded knives in the dark like shooting stars just for the hell of it — but he decided he could think of better deaths than at the business end of one of those. Furthermore, he rather resented popping his cork beside some damnable City Bank. He wanted to taste sweet countryside, not only upon the pan-handle of his tongue but also with the very ends of his teeth. Only the twittering birds would suffice, he deemed, to attend his swansong, those in the beck-dripping woods further south. He could only hitch-hike that far, he guessed. Not that he thought with such poetical turns of phrase and there was some doubt whether his mind, in any event, generated such ill-cut gems of English prose, since he felt a larger than life force acting upon his mind — one that not only controlled his destiny like a Christian god so out of control it had forgotten about the free will of its flock, but one that also loved and hated him, in equal measures, more than any god of any religion ever could.
=
The lorry driver chuckled. She glanced at the hitch-hiker who was a mass of melted mutter in the passenger seat. She had never given lifts to thumbers like this man before, so she couldn’t comprehend why this old toothy toper of a tramp had managed to halt a reluctant juggernaut on the hard shoulder and wheedle his way into the cab for a lift to Ruffet Wood (where its route didn’t lie, anyway). So, all she could do was chuckle: humour being the only cure for life’s absurdity that humankind could ever find. The tall lights gradually faded from the sides of the road, whilst she steered between them, as if she were on a fairground ride. Gradually, humps of indistinct trees blackened the night around — leaving only hazy fleets of stars in the narrow inky channel above.
“Where do you want putting off, exactly?”
The man thought her voice to be saying something quite different, since he replied: “Yes, I love you, too”. And the lorry plummeted headlong into a massive tree which seemed to be planted smack in the middle of the carriageway, causing the trailer to jack-knife violently — rattling the bodies inside the cab, floppy dice in the game of Fate — and then tinning them like pig spam within a blood sump. Evidently, the Christian god hated one of them more than he loved the other. And there was very little poetry in that, other than the fact that the two iron-clad corpses of the man and the lorry driver were discovered by the cutting crew as having died hand in hand.
=
Once there was a woman, one without teeth. The end of the world came suddenly, as the sun fell from the sky (faster than gravity could dictate) becoming smaller all the time, crunching towns in the near distance as it finally came to rest.
Once an undead always an undead – and the man quickly regained his body’s pigsweat. The most disturbing part was a fleeting after-life where he had been female. The lack of teeth didn’t matter so much. He clutched at himself below the bedcovers in a sudden irrational fear which the resumption of reality had brought with it. Somewhat relieved, but further disturbed by the fact that he had actually seemed to need such relief, he turned over on his side to find his wife staring at him, with Jack the Cutter’s luminous eyes. Her two hands each had a knife that looked like an elephant tusk. Was dreaming a form of hitch-hiking, he asked himself.
=
Then, as if with a third thumb, he glimpsed a real everlasting after-life one which would eventually become his wife’s own after-life. A Christian heaven was meant to be a home from home, wasn’t it? How many times did they want telling? Her son had spilled all the cornflakes over the formica table. And her husband had done his favourite trick of making only one cup of tea — for himself.
“I didn’t think you were getting up yet,” he claimed.
“You could’ve brought one up, then,” she replied.
“Good job I didn’t, as you’re already up.”
There was no winning of arguments with a pig, especially a man’s man such as the woman’s husband who had become a fire-officer by means of countless acts of bravery. She shrugged and turned her attention back to her son the piglet whose rummaging in his satchel finally gave birth to yesterday’s sandwiches which he said he couldn’t eat because they had too much blood inside. She was halfway through spreading a thin plasma extract on a new set, as if she were priming the surface for another generous smoothed-out dollop of fresh blood, in turn reminding her of the skidmarks on the underpants with which she was presented every other day by husband and son alike. She could not help thinking she was mad — because a mind in an after-life situation automatically imported its own disbelief.
The house was dead quiet. Her husband and son had both gone. There was staccato twiddling with the wireless. Housewives’ Choice was announced this week by one of her particular favourite disc-jockeys. What was his name? She couldn’t get the station. The dial she twirled fine-tuned nothing but high-pitched whistles or a voice that called itself Jack. She wound herself up into a frenzy. Tying a scarf around her head in that pixied way most women did in the fifties and sixties, she released the heavy overcoat from the broom cupboard and bustled with it into the street. The sky was pink like the underbelly of a pig, with an aureole of teats around a faint white splodge where the moon had once been.
Organic spaceships. Unidentified Fixed Objects in the sky, sprinkler systems for a world about to catch fire. The words buzzed in her head as if her bee brain had broken loose. She was Queen for a day. Nobody else about. She wandered the empty streets, weaving between the ill-parked cars, feeling herself undeserving of the senile dementia to which she had been abandoned by the head-lease dreamer if not the freehold sleeper. She was the tenant in a fleshy bivouac which could be sub-let no further down the scale of reality. She almost wished her two menfolk, son and husband, could return. At least, they presented some form of sanity, even if in the shape of teeth-tusks. The pink in the sky turned slowly black…
=
The man woke from every conceivable after-life, including the one where he actually had a wife. Dressed in a cardboard suit, he levered himself over beneath the cold dark dripping arches. In the near distance sat the hunched silhouette of St Paul’s Cathedral. He was alone in the whole world, neither demented nor sane. That was the worst thing of all. He tried to get back to sleep and retrieve some of the feminine wherewithal that he seemed to have in the after-life. There had been a Charles Lamb story about how civilisation invented roast pork. Such stories were almost sufficient to warm the cockles of his heart, like memories of his sandwich-making mother. He once loved the cold waking he had of it. The songs on the wireless still buzzing in his head. Would sleep never return? Could flesh be made palatable by freezing? Existence was like being encased in sheet iron which moved with the body, unfelt for most of the time. He poised his two protruding teeth upon the engorged arteries in his wrist. The yellow street-light flickered out, making it easier to sleep — and to welcome the cutting crew that rescued the undead from life itself.
=
Blacked up ready for the night, the Devil sat in his dressing-room, staring mindlessly into the mirror. His pointed face was ringed with flickering coloured light bulbs, so he could not fail to fathom his own eyes. They were staring so hard it seemed as if he were playing a make-or-break game with himself: the last to blink would explode.
Then, he plumbed such a long way, he saw a thought, an idea, a concept, a caprice, one which he did not want to see. Deep deep down in the dungeons of his soul where the funnel of his sight ended — deeper indeed than Hell itself — was a doubt. And never had the Devil doubted before. This doubt gnawed at his vitals and tempted him to believe that he was not the Devil at all, but a dosser: nothing but a wine-bibbing tosspot who spoke to himself in nonsensical rhyming couplets, to blot out the nagging loneliness in his heart….
There came a sharp rapping at the door: “Five minutes!” The voice was deep but heavenly sweet.
The Devil fled back up towards his sight, tussling through the blubbery membranes and red threadworms which surrounded the eyeballs. He would soon be on — if “on” is a word sufficiently weighty to convey the performance he was about to undergo, with no rehearsal, no other actors, no props, no stage to speak of, no audience….
=
He woke briefly from an undead’s unnatural sleep. He sat up straight in the darkness, startling the other cardboard-suited dossers who had been lightly dozing nearby under the midnight moon. But now the moon was nothing more than an artist’s careless smudge. This was because, upon the blackdrop of the sky, a circle of flashing fairy lights slowly revolved as they grew bigger or came closer.
“Blimey, they’re piggin’ spaceships!” he muttered while proceeding to squeeze his eyes shut tight like a child making pretend he was sleeping. Perhaps dreaming of tin-openers again. Or an after-life in Hell.
=
There was a raucous orchestra tuning up in the pit. Not so much violins, drums and flutes (even if they were certainly involved) but tap-dancing with cloven hooves — a deafening act to under-perform. So, he tip-clodded in, flowing mane coiffured by Hell’s finest stylists, skewed antler-horn painted out against the scenery, forked tongue being tasted by its own guardian teeth. His mascara eyes were blinded by the searing twirling spotlights from above the seats in the gods. His innards felt like lolloping eels still alive, but he jabbed away desultorily with his furry hind-limbs. As the spots faded, he spied a spare pair of sparkles in the audience — like eyes on spikes. And the man, thankfully, was consumed by a sleep like delicious death — too numb even to feel Jack the Cutter’s preparing hands … except from inside, with such hands like fingers in gloves. In the wings, the toothless cutting-crew were waiting, if needed. And today nobody hitches lifts unless it is to Hell.
***
WRITTEN SPECIFICALLY FOR EACH READER
Old Boots are always better than no boots.
Freda lived a long life, and in fact it could have been longer if I had been stirred to describe her life sooner than now. You see, when I first put pen to paper with the words ‘Old Boots’ she had only died a few minutes before my doing so. She died with a broken heart when the nurses took her old boots away as being such very old boots that feet could not be consigned to their cavities, they said. But I disagreed but too late to mend Freda’s broken heart, or to assuage her dark daydreams or to mop up the dribbles dribbling down her chin…
I sat down, took up her old boots and now tried to refit them on her increasingly cold feet at such a distance from the death of the rest of her body. I wept real tears, as I tied the laces tightly. In some strange way, I thought this would help restore the heat that a living body normally possesses. The others laughed at me. It was a pity that I had not taken up the pen for my story when she was still alive – with such a well-meaning action on my part hopefully then kick-starting her old heart before it gave up its final ghost. Writing about her old boots, her sad daydreams, even her dribbles, might have changed the sluggish tide of general cause-and-effect. We shall never know.
Or shall we? Just as I finished off the last paragraph, the deceased Freda seemed to stir – or at least I felt one of her feet twitch within its newly fitted boot. So worn thin was the leather that I imagined I felt through it a faint pulse. The others laughed even louder when I told them about what I had felt. Even the two young nurses – seemingly meek and mild – jeered at me as if they had gone back in time to their high school to taunt a weak teacher.
I stared at Freda’s eyes to attempt discovery of new tears. But they were bone dry, yet I was sure I could see moving images across the upper spheres as if to indicate new daydreams. More dribbles from her mouth, but that probably didn’t prove anything. So I noted down, meanwhile, what I could remember of the faint visions I saw in her eyes, visions skimming the fragile spheres like tiny skaters from the mind rather than normal floaters that often beset our sight.
I could see myself leaning over her face, the two nurses behind me and the others in the room bearing various uncharacteristically gruesome stances that would probably get them imprisoned if this had been real life rather than daydream images in a dead woman’s eyes. But the saddest moment was when I glimpsed myself in the act of glimpsing, in her eyes, the old boots that she had loved so much during her life but had abandoned finally as useless, when the many leaks through their soles became tantamount to a single huge leak.
Most boots are discarded when our feet grow larger between childhood and adulthood. But in Freda’s case — I learnt from the images in her eyes — she had used the same pair of boots throughout her whole life, with the leather expanding to the shape of her feet. Perhaps this explained the attenuations through which I had sensed a faint pulse.
At that point I was stirred from my own daydreams by one of the nurses pointing and screeching in obvious distress, despite her earlier schoolgirlish jeering. She was pointing at where I had tightened the boot laces, so tight it seemed that a dark fluid was dribbling through the eyelets. Not Freda’s blood, I somehow knew, but some syrupy substance that the boots themselves had harboured since being hammered into existence by one of the old-fashioned cobblers who now tend to live only in daydreams.
The other nurse, meanwhile, seemed relatively unperturbed as she sneered at me with a silent “I’m not bothered” expression on her face. Nothing I could write about daydreams would alter the reality of which she was certain she inhabited. But the others in the room had thankfully faded back into the shadows whence they had first emerged during my earlier attempts to resuscitate the Freda who was still wearing her boots in contrast to that heart-broken Freda who had already abandoned them.
Hence, I wonder if the derivation of the word ‘reboot’ lay somewhere within this very story, a new story that has gradually become an ancient fable with a bespoke moral. Written specifically for each reader. Even for a reader like Freda.
***
THE TANGLED BONES OF DREAM
It was a bright hot day.
There was only one way into the mansion, with the back garden over-run by tall nettles. I could just catch a glimpse of a ladder beyond a corner wall, but what it leaned against was a guess beyond mine. The broken windows may not have looked too inviting as means of ingress, but the chimney took the biscuit: whilst wide enough to take a portly Santa Claus, its loose brickwork would have at least knocked some sense into the likes of him, but knocked some out of ordinary folk such as myself, assuming one could clamber over the rattle-slates of the roof in the first place.
So, there was no other option but to try the door. I secretly hoped it was locked but, being a secret, I was quite ignorant of my hope and the reasons for it. Fear often disappeared behind my more natural bravado. The door, indeed, was not locked, but it failed to open beyond a few inches. Some bulky object, which had more give than angles, jammed it from the other side in shortening jolts. I applied my shoulder to it, since matters had taken on a near urgency. But it had budged as far as it was likely to budge with one mere body-weight against it. Will-power was the only weapon left to gather residues of grit and determination. And the bottom edge of the door ripped open…ripped open what?
There was no obvious obstacle blocking the hallway. It was dark, but not so dark if it had not been so bright outside. A shadow limped along barely beyond the eye-spots that momentarily floated before my sight. It was a shiversome place — this I knew, even before I stepped into it; again, not so cold if it had not been so hot outside.
Not so frightening, if I had not been such a hero outside.
I waggled my torch around, more as a joke to cheer me than as a lighting device. The banisters twisted and skewed in co-rhythms. It was a squattish hall, but with a long flight of stairs. Eventually, I pulled myself (and the torch) together. There was someone in the mansion who the hero had come to rescue: a damsel not exactly in distress, but one who was suffering unduly in the upper reaches because of the distress she had caused others.
Even heroes have to shovel dirt sometimes.
The old floosie would be lying pissed to the gills in the master bedroom. That was probably at the front of the mansion above the sticky door. But I first penetrated to the no-man’s land of the middle back, where I could survey the sea of swaying nettles. There was a large slug crawling between the two cracked panes of the double-glazing, eyeing me lazily. The ladder was not in sight. I was trying to gain my bearings — and bravado.
Then the sobs revealed the fragile silence. Not soft, sighing sobs of the love-lorn, but staccato ones of somebody pretending to be sad or with a bout of the hiccups. Counting from 1 to 10 with the breath pent, I gauged the sobs’ direction. I followed the shuddering torchlight up a further flight. The doors were numbered. This must have once been a hotel. Number 72 was the Royal Honeymoon Suite, I guessed, taking up the size of three normal bedrooms – and, yes, predictably at the front above the difficult door. Thence the sobs emanated…
I shaped up my shoulders, expecting more give than angles. However, one twiddle of the knob and I was under the tall shaft-beamed sash-windows of the big boudoir. Her body was covered in syrupy blackness upon an otherwise blank canvas. But, no, not a painting, but a photograph stained on fabric, with the texture showing through the image with its stitching.
Stepping back from the huge blown-up balsa-framed monochrome photograph, I passed a few words with a complete stranger who evidently did not catch my meaning. I sensed an embarrassment which turned into a smile.
I was led by the elbow towards the next exhibit: another study in nudity, more a painting than a photograph. The artful lighting effects gave the body fuzzy edges and brought out its contents like long bones on an X-ray … but that was a mere fluke of the image: something I saw but no one else could.
Again, I tried to articulate my feelings to the stranger, but talking to anybody was a terrible struggle of communication, as if each word emerged from my mouth skewed and warped. A mansion become museum, in one seeming fell swoop.
I was a linguist in the country of the unlanguaged.
The next old photograph was a war scene, bodies strewn around St. Paul’s Cathedral and etched against the sky by a bright, if mumbling, blitz. I was startled as one body budged. A limbless corpse, blood creaming at every stump, edged towards another. I turned away, trying to clasp the stranger’s hand, since I could not bear to continue staring at the photograph.
“Are you all right?” And the stranger guided me through the swing-doors of the museum or gallery into the sunshine. I thanked the one who sounded like a man and, unfortunately, not the woman I had first assumed to be a damsel in Gothic distress; yet he no doubt failed to understand what I said. I clicked a white stick down the edge of the pavement, hoping that I wouldn’t miss the dark entrance to the underground. But, after much chopping and changing, I arrived in the wrong bedsit, one that struck me as belonging to a teenage girl: rag dolls (far raggier than when first new) scattered across the quilt and a pin-up of a hairy-chested pop singer spreadeagled above the bedhead.
I began to have my doubts, for there was a heavy-duty screwdriver poking out from under the bed and a line of prophylactic sacs pegged up over the dressing-table mirror. A jumbo Valentine card leant against the wardrobe, bearing a rather garish illustration of some religious icon. Whoever lived in this room was surely, if nothing else, someone else!
I lay back on the bed, staring up at the cracked ceiling. I dreamed that dreams were fundamentally made of abstract images, it being the sleeper’s duty to formulate the sense and to imprint its reality upon the subtext of craziness. I drifted into further dreams and discovered myself to be blind: a godawful scenario where the real bedsit tenant returned unseen from the photographic exhibition or a haunted mansion, and forthwith he proceeded to… do what? Detachedly, I felt limbs being separated from me as the flesh stretched out like pizza cheese … until the final breaking point seared my brain with a spider-web of flame. My stomach turned turtle, as long sharp, yet human, teeth embedded themselves right up to their gums in my belly button, no doubt to get at the food within. My buttocks were cleft from each other like the rare haunches of deep cut sides of monstrous beef. Being a dream with its blind down, I could only let the diverse realities work themselves through because, so far, it had not even dawned on me that I dreamed: too much pain for me not to have woken from the dream.
The room became entirely dark. I was still finding it difficult to breathe, as if my lungs were busy elsewhere like a couple of the used sacs on the mirror. The pop pin-up’s eyes of pinprick black stared. My head travelled to the foot of the bed. I had always been an “energetic” sleeper, as others would attest, and waking up was always akin to self-discovery for me. My left foot had gone to sleep, as I waited for the inevitable pins and needles to ensue.
My eyes swivelled towards the mirror … and in the blackness, I imagined the bladders full of dark winey blood. Then, I gazed towards the cracked ceiling where hung a veritable panoply of self-motivated pork-butcher’s rubble, giving an unconvincing display of belated Christmas decorations moving in time to the chopping and changing of my pulse. I could make no sense of it. Except the earlier reference to Santa Claus on the mansion’s roof. A roof now so attenuated it matched the mansion’s skeleton beneath it, with bones angled against each other.
Cuddling one of the rag dolls to my chest, I speculated on all this blackness being a pretext for my death … blown-up out of all proportion, if not a photographic texture framed on balsa wood.
I called it the Power Mansion. Just because grown-ups called it a shed only meant that they had silly words for things.
The kitchen garden was straight out of Watch With Mother… though I was not to know this, since there was no television other than the kitchen window and, for that matter, I had no real Mother.
It was much more exciting outside with my imaginary friends than staring at the soulless screenfuls with which the future besmirched the past: a past that was my present. The boy next door had sixgun shooters that were larger than any film hero’s, past or future. He called to a creature that lived in the Power Mansion to come out for target practice. Nothing came. Most days, nothing came. Merely the scrumpable apple trees at the end of the garden shook their leafy manes, set on invoking the enticing thud of windfalls. A low sun spread twirling spokes of golden light through the branches, to herald the changing of shifts … the syncromesh of day and night. An imaginary friend, now with nobody next door to imagine him. He patted the air just above his knees. “OK, Spot, go get him!”
The air moved in a shaft of visual interference towards the Power Mansion. Its door flapped in another attempt to summon wind amid the heavy closeness of the evening. Whether mansion, hotel, museum or gallery, it had the aura of spirituality and the main chimneystack blooming roundly downward to where the attics once used to stack themselves one upon another.
It was too late to see what was about to slither from the angled threshold … for a man with a wooden head came out of the kitchen, to make the boy come in for high tea. There’d be more than enough room around the trestle. And lashings of wild honey upon his fibre. Even if his mother had became a photographic image on curtain fabric again.
Life teetered on the brink of dream, as he clambered the wooden hills to Bedfordshire. Grains… veins… growing pains… more silly words, silly sleepy words. He heard, across the distance of night, Spot’s lonely bark. He snuggled down, hearing the blitz mumble nearer in the night. The cathedral’s shape of bones with more give than angles, its dome slowly sinking into itself.
But in my dream it was still a bright hot day.
***
WIDOW, WRAITH AND WIFE
He would not have gone into the parlour looking for his pipe, not even for a thousand extra reasons, if he had known that the women were in there. The curtains were already drawn, an angry log fire roaring straight up the back of the chimney. The bedraggled Christmas decorations, not removed from one year to the next, were swinging gently in the draughts from each corner of the ceiling. There was a tinge of chamber music, so quiet there was no point in it being played at all.
He was halted in his tracks by the frozen stares of the three women. All wide by hip and beam. One was evidently his wife, over-dressed as usual in her mother’s chiffon outfit with bumper brooches and bead necklaces. Next to her was that very mother, back straightened against the encroach of old age, with slumbering shrouds of night garb broadly winding its coils from breast, through lap, to floor and, perhaps, beyond. And, finally, the maiden aunt, his mother-in-law’s elder sister who never had the sense to allow her body to die before her mind did, but even then it was too late.
He did see what was meant. Too late for all of them, him included. Smoke and sparks marched up the chimney like thoughts on the inside of his skull. Where was his pipe? The great corner clock trundled through its inner machinations before striking a series of gongs, conjuring up past dinners and distant conversations over the port and cheese. And the decorations trembled in the after-shocks, catching the dying outside light from through the dusky curtains, catching it within every bauble, for split, scintillating seconds of held breath.
The women motioned him to sit. Unknown to him, compulsion itself had escorted him to this room. He had never had the choice after all, because this summoning was beyond any possible recourse to alternatives. He had never smoked a pipe in his life, of course. So why was he looking for one?
“Yes?” he asked, trying to prevent his own personality from showing.
“Donald, please don’t be like that — you know that all we wanted was what was good for you,” answered his wife. She pointed to the fire where, despite its sudden paucity of flame, the patterns of orange-fluted smoke were weaving images on the back of his mind, now more resembling unwelcome dreams than the inescapable reality of being Donald.
Then, his mother-in-law’s sister took umbrage at the silence that had ensued. Even in her heyday, she had been one to hackle at the slightest embarrassment. So, if conversations, once set in motion, showed any sign of weakening or tailing off, she would re-invigorate them with a few scolding lines from her repertoire.
“About time you tidied yourself up, Donald,” she said, more through her nose than her pursed lips.
Self-consciously, Donald tightened the knot of his dressing-gown cord as he looked into the wall mirror. Indeed, he thought, within the actual reflection of the parlour was where the darkness really bred. He could barely discern his wife’s face and the fire was quickly becoming merely two eyes blinking.
The only person yet to speak rose from the upright chair, her stick wielded like a fifth limb. Bodily parts he never knew he owned cringed violently of their own volition. At the best of times, his mother-in-law was somebody he would like to meet on a dark night and carefully throttle with gloved hands. But she never left the house, fearing, she said, it would collapse like a tower of playing-cards, if she were not there to stare back at the hairline cracks of its walls. She never left her daughter’s side, in fact, for very much similar reasons; Donald knew his mother-in-law, as a consequence, almost as well as his wife.
And, having waited a few dramatic moments, she finally indulged herself to say the following words: “Donald, we have come to a decision relating to the past. We cannot forgive, but we can forget…”
The light in the room was breaking up like the memories themselves and all Donald could now see were blurred auras where the three cracked faces of the women had once been. Being auras, they gave off no corresponding echoes at all in the mirror. He could still make out his own shape in it, however.
The clock’s loud tick had ceased; the eight day movement had expired. Dinner would be late tonight, no doubt. The Christmas decorations were also sacrificed to the darkness, but he could imagine them bearing the weight of night spiders, several of them so bloated they could hang low enough to reach out for the top of his head. The flames in the grate passed away like souls who’d just discovered they’d lost their host mortals; something or other could be heard clambering down the chimney flue, its haversack heavy with parts of its own body.
He shivered and made a fey whimper, as he sat in a suddenly vacant armchair. He wrapped the silk dressing-gown tighter around his calves, lifting — in the motion of what could only be called a seated curtsey — the pleats and flutings from the floor, in an attempt, perhaps, to tug them clear of the parlour’s vertically widening widths of skirting-board that also moved toward Donald in the centre of the room. And piecemeal even the chamber music weakened and finally died.
***
FOLLOWING THE RHYTHMIC RAKES
The Victorian city streets were amok with muck-rakers – and
Blasphemy Fitzworth, still plying the trade of cat’s meat vendor,
needed to weave his steaming cart between the jabbing brown-
clogged spokes. Following behind such spiky dredgers of the
surface sewage that dogged our ancestors came the scratching of
the solitary street-sweeper who completed the job, after the
chunky bits had been mostly gathered up. Dickens was a lover
of such street-sweepers, but there was a particular one he never
met or, if he did, never deigned to write about. And, indeed,
surprise, surprise, Blasphemy Fitzworth recognised him as
Todger Weggs, one time stink-man supreme, now evidently
promoted up the ranks of waste disposal.
=
“Hiya, Todge, got cleaner hands, these days, eh?” laughed
Blasphemy, nodding towards the stiff-bristled broom, as he
applied a wooden chock to his own meat cart.
=
“Well, Feemy, I spose I have,” replied Todger. “But less dirt,
less dough. Age creeps on forever, and dung’s full of ills us
oldsters can’t fend off.”
=
Blasphemy was about to delve into his pans for a scrag-end as
morsel for Todger’s taste, a morsel that would continue
twitching with the bubbles that the cart’s undercoals instilled
from ladle to mouth. A real treat for his old mate, Todger
Weggs. But, then, from across the roofs of turn-of-the-century
London, there glided something that, in future times, would
have been more at home preparing to land at Heathrow Airport.
Despite its fleeting presence, Blasphemy could see its outlandish
wings were ribbed, leathery ones with a body between spiking
out with its own version of muck-rakes. After briefly touching
the ridge of a nearby hospice, the massive kite-creature vanished
beyond the fog that simply snaked along the Thames and
nowhere else – the aeronautically inefficient tail-fins surging the
sky in its wake, near drenching Blasphemy and Todger with
more than just a piss-stained drizzle.
=
“Blimey, Todge, weather’s not what it once will be,” chortled
the cat’s food man, with his tongue so jammed in the cheek, it
felt anticipatory of the tastiest titbit from the best belching meat-
pocket of his cart.
=
“The Great Old Ones – they’re a dying race, Feemy,” announced
Todger, with a basinful of unmock seriousness in his bowling
eyes. “Soon you won’t be seeing any at all in our skies.”
=
“Zackly what I meant, Todge. Zackly what I meant. With
history about to become the least favourite subject for our
school kids, people may not even know that such critters once
plied their paths ‘cross our city.”
=
Todger nodded his head so slowly it was as if he had already
forgotten the topic of their conversation – a fact which,
eventually, was underpinned by the phenomenon of a little girl’s
voice echoing from the depths of a yet unraked side-street:
“Stout cat! Nowt cat! Watch their spokes spike out, cat!”
=
Blasphemy smiled, since he suddenly recalled the even older
days when his cat’s meat sales-cry was built up on similar
themes and rhythms – during that era when costermongers, such
as he, were often followed by a flock of tiny frocks: with even
tinier girls inside them. These ‘delightful’ children loved to be
thrown the odd morsel of gristle from the meat-cart and would
sport outrageously with Blasphemy Fitzworth with this end in
mind. Indeed, the ghostly piping that had just bristled the ear-
drums was as real as the air he breathed, Blasphemy considered:
haunting him with memories of girls like Pansy Pie, Lettuce
Weggs and Chelly Mildeyes.
=
Today, of course, with the fitful encroachment of Great Old
Ones across the city – a fact that the dog-eared history books
were due entirely to ignore – many of the children had been long
since evacuated to rural areas. Although he missed the little
girls’ merry, pig-tailed faces, Blasphemy was thankful that their
household pussy-cats had not fled, too, but remained in the
aging city: customers for the varicose valves, gristly grits,
mauve melts and ichorous innards that he steamed and poached
amid those choicer cuts he so proudly purveyed from deeper in
his cart.
=
As suddenly as the great substance of shadow had winged its
way across the hovels of ancient London – and even more so
vis-a-vis the abruptness of the ghostly girl’s echoey satire on his
erstwhile cri-de-coeur in costermongering cat’s meat –
Blasphemy Fitzworth felt a chill at his heart. A warning. A dire
hint of futures with no goodness in any of them, whatever the
choice. And he lifted the lid of one of his pans to reveal – not the
brown and juicy-grey cooking chunks of scrag-end ready to be
relished by all animalkind – but a bright red rawness and insipid
layers of rare pox-greened flesh. That he had forgotten to ignite
the slaggy coal in the cart’s underscuttles was his immediate
suspicion. But, earlier, amid dawn’s piss-yellow, he had warmed
his hands upon his own cart’s very sides, hadn’t he? And he had
felt shudders up his arms as he pushed it, not only from the
vibration of the cobbled streets, but also, he was sure, from the
bubbles, burps and belches of the piping hot gravies.
=
“‘Tis tidy strange, Feemy,” croaked Todger, as he peered, along
with Blasphemy, into the sorry raw mess.
=
“It looks like real bits of body! Not at all like meat for
wholesome souls…” whined Blasphemy, in evident shock.
=
And the sky darkened with another Great Old One – so huge it
stained the stagnant air with a pitch blackness that concealed the
unsheathed and stretched-out claw that delved for a sweet soul
as if it were a pearl in the oysterish crimson slurry of London’s
aspirant stews.
=
Later, quite unperturbed, and with unwelcome memories
misplaced, Blasphemy Fitzworth decided to test out his
erstwhile sales-cry, of which the day had somehow seen fit to
remind him:
=
“Gout cat! Spout cat! Watch the whiskers sprout, cat!
House cat! Mouse cat! Give the girl a spouse, cat!”
=
Ever following the scrape of rhythmic rakes, Todger Weggs
took up his bristly broom again – having wiped an aureate tear
from his misty eye.
***
ABRECOCKS & ZAWNS
I fell asleep an insect and woke up a man.
Back at the beginning, I must have been spawned for a span of incubation, short periods of which I can but vaguely recall. No doubt, human beings have vivid memories of their conception as a seed of life. I and my kind are simply tiny black wisps of living cotton-thread, but a human existence must literally flood in from the mother-body in which the pre-human was temporarily egged. It had a direct current, thereby, to her brain.
But when a human dies, it really does die. After our own death, we insects live on for at least a while in the motes of the air like illegible dot matrix, thus receiving compensation for our share of existence when all’s totted up.
When both light and dark were at their thinnest, Tokkmaster Clerke of Clockhouse Mount kept vigil in his Council bedsit. The non-resident drinkers at the Pail of Water pub had long since tumbled home; & the double-deadended culdesac, which Clockhouse Mount intrinsically yearned to be, settled into its own foundations for the bearing of night’s long residue.
His erstwhile companion, Ervin, had long since departed the meat-haven of a body; so Tokkmaster watched alone, with merely the sounds of his own rattle-bladder bubbling against the stop-cock. He picked his favourite apricots from the tree-mantle beside him & munched. He had lately recovered from a bout of vomito & needed to apply a sanitary poultice soaked in virgin’s milk to the red buttock-between—thus to staunch the uglesome pain. His box-camera eyepiece was tri-podded at sight-level. He kept the lens positioned towards the unlit sky &, as the early spaceships freckled the mid-distances, he flicked vigorously at the shutter.
Tokkmaster Clerke cursed mildly at the churnings in his venomed stomach—excitement often giving him such utterly butterfly flutterfuls. Yet he gobbled further apricots (stones & all) to stay their sucking convolutions. The star fleet grew brightsome above Clockhouse Mount, creating a Turk’s turban of dervish-light above the treefalls, above the reach-me-down shops and above the black flags of the derelict golf-course. The time, albeit shrunken with small hours, had duly come. If only Ervin were there, Ervin would have jumped for sheer joy with Tokkmaster & lurched across the Long Lands & Rich Lands to encounter the aliens leaving their craft in Big & Ruffet Woods.
Ervin had indeed snorted out his wriggling brain during the sudden fleshquake of a disease that had befouled his well-being since the relatively recent visit of the stone-priests. Those priests had seemed a swell-mob, but Tokkmaster had suspected they had brought a germ within the bulging folds of their cassocks. He had sworn to wreak vengeance, if ever the opportunity arose. Meantime, with Ervin gone, Tokkmaster himself had suffered side effects: Barbadoes Leg & Rattle-Mouse in the pissworks. He easily recalled the visit of the stone-priests to the Mount, whilst, tonight, he shuffled upsee-Dutch towards the evident landing-place of the multitudinous spacecraft and their alien contents. Such recollection of previous events was so slipstream-easy because the swelling dregs of disease in his belepered body blurred his vision of the otherwise more up-front present moment.
It was as if Ervin had arrived off the street, uninivited, unacknowledged, unnoticed. Stretching before him was a huge hall, gloriously swagged with chandeliers and oil paintings—rank upon rank of resplendent, goblet-winking tables, all dressed to kill. Multitudinous mouths framed by chops and chins were set upon dinner-jacket stalks. They muscled into the food. Their eyes reflected the silver platters as they turned towards a figure who had stood up. An after-dinner speech was evidently on the brink of utterance. Most was padding, ending with:- “So, as is proper with all our sales conferences, I propose a Loyal Toast: To Her Royal Majesty The Queen…” The speaker held up his glass as if it were the Holy Grail and all the other mouths-on-trousers ranged along the tables also stood to attention and raised their glasses:- “To the Queen,” roared round the hall with a manly gusto, and returned just as quick as if it were scared of the echoes. Black bows bobbed on adam’s apples, as each guzzled more than a mean mouthful of bubbly. As if it were a matter of course, they all then turned towards Ervin! He was standing dissheveled at the head-waiter’s side. The Toastmaster motioned Ervin to start and Ervin knew Ervin must be the token commoner, come to partake from the edges of their plates. So, Ervin lapped at one gent’s finger-bowl. Sucked at another’s bones. Snorted the crushed cigar butt of a young razzamatazz go-go high-flier who chattered intensely to his buddies without even deigning to cast Ervin a glance. Spat into some old fogey’s mouth who had no doubt recently suffered a heart attack, from over-indulgence. Finally, Ervin raised this dead gent’s half-empty glass and thundered:-
“I suppose it is at times like this, when a little after-dinner humour will not go amiss, especially as you’ve already been bored stiff. So here goes… I THOUGHT at first that you all must have something inside your heads. Well, you know what THOUGHT thought? He thought he had shit himself … and, behold, he had! And, what is more, gents, that substance inside your heads, it’s not inside your heads after all: it’s under your chairs!” Awkward laughter ran round the tables like an invisible tickler. Ervin finished off:- “I give you Grace—to God and all who ‘sale’ with Him!” This was the signal for every guest (except the dead gent) to drag the chamber-pots from under their dining-commodes and to upend the contents down their gurgling gullets, the Toastmaster included.
=
But, in the beginning, when present moments were more ancient, if not, redolently antique, baby Ervin had come into the world with a blubbery caul across his face, a veil blurring and slewing his normal features beyond recognition. Bones clicked loudly as he turned restlessly in the cot. His sounds were like a coal miner’s hopeless wail for help in a distant collapsed working and, at times, a canary’s dying gasp.
As Ervin grew, as grow he surely must, he wandered the deadfall trees of the Clockhouse Mount amid the Surrey Badlands and Southern Mysteries—muttering to non-existent companions about nights of Elder Panic that were bound to renew themselves. One among the locals, big old Tokkmaster Clerke, self-appointed leader and cheer-master of the Surrey community, spoke often to the boy: “Toddlekin, eat up yer turnip-tops and spatling poppies, make a man of yer” or “We’ll one day stride the fields when the Great Old Ones come from upper sky” or “We’ll stand on yonder bank’s feranda, a-gnawing at nut-bones at early twitterlight” or “No good being underwitted, Ervin me lad, it’ll be us humans the Great Old Ones’ll want to say things to.”
Whether Ervin understood the words or even heard them at all, the Undistributed Middles of Tokkmaster’s speech rhythms must have set up significant chords, since Ervin followed his big aged friend everywhere, the painful cathedral of his still growing bones cracking and splintering the vesperal lateness of the afternoons.
One special night, which several Surreyfolk had predicted would come, the Earth itself shook to its roots. Could the long expected visitors be approaching not from the sky, as futurists expected, but through the actual crust beneath such Surreyfolk’s feet? Ervin relieved himself into a nettle-bush; he did not seem to care that the cross-currents of truth-and-lie had at last centred on that one parahistoric flashpoint of time.
Out of the ground, there rose giant round heads, jolly bearded planetoids which bounced like hot-air balloons across the Badlands, and then played tag with meteors throughout the skies of the Southern Mysteries: an interplay that bedazzled Tokkmaster Clerke, who crumpled to the ground, head first, and made crazy jokes with the insects which crawled along his nether lip. But Ervin came into his own, his own body growing from the ground along a solidifying stream; the flashpoint flourished as if it had just been planted in fertile mulch. He was endless bubble gum, as he reached for the bobbling punchies and judies in the outer reaches of the sun-go-down. Ervin’s structure—his tessellated lattice of bone-domes and flesh-chimneys—became a translucent crystal palace above and around the sleeping Surreyfolk. He left the bony-meat haven, as soon as another one was ready vessel for his wondrous Ervinish soul.
Tokkmaster’s last words to Ervin’s old body were: “It be a shame Ervin be not now near to cuddle him to me, but give him Grace. He were flesh from our flesh, brain from our brain, but his sprung bones be stronger in Heaven and thus we go on, a rat race apart…”
Transfigured by a new body-glove, Ervin’s trek to the City of Fortunes must have been a sight to hear of: a slow, wordless pursuit of a misconceived goal by one who communicated only with the dossers along the way.
“Mark ye that Ervin who passes here,” said a dosser called Padgett Weggs. “He will only want to cuddle those Cityfolk who want to cuddle him, but slip a banknote between the kissing bones of his spine, he’ll even cuddle you…”
Ervin told Padgett Weggs about some ambitious creatures, without legs or arms, but amply supplied with wings as big as the biggest City Park, who dove down upon Churches, in the hope of reviving soldier-spirits steeped into the very stone bones with which such Churches had been built all those centuries ago.
The mighty dome of St Paul’s Cathedral was beyond the next but one horizon on his journey. The Cat’s Meat Man, who thought himself nought but a patch of Holy Urine on God’s pants if he thought at all, spoke of tags and pieces on damp walls in far Northern Cities where they, whoever they may be, tried to build other mighty domes. They tried to build them with bent coinage, the milled edges of which were engrained with coal-gum and broken toenails.
When Ervin viewed the visionary towers of the City, he stood be-dumbed and unfounded for many an hour. The tallest towers and squattest domes cuddled as lovers along the timeless river. The planetary forces pushed Venus into an impossible obtuse angle with Mercury. As Ervin’s facial veil slipped off to reveal the scarred fleshy outline of Britain’s map, each and every Mansion of the Zodiac snapped shut their frontiers against the coming smuts and smudges of alien solar systems, involving round-headed moons, asteroids with squealing sucking lipless mouths, shooting-stars in fearful orgasmic pain, living mountains of blind dream, and Old-timers.
Ervin entered the City, barebacked, just when Ludgate Circus was being photographed for an old black and white History Book. St Paul’s Cathedral was bigger in those days—more imposing but, for all he knew, just another Church among several similar. He did not know why there were many figures clambering across its dome on clumsily fashioned scaffoldings. The Century had come to the turnstile when all tops of buildings needed to be stiffened against the dangers that many thought impended from night skies.
A buffer, not unlike his old friend Tokkmaster Clerke, befriended Ervin in a pub and told him things without remembering why or how he understood them: “When the scaffolding first went up, we all wondered, but it was more serious than that. The roofs softened, bellied in like tent-tops; the brollies scabbed over and gristled down like black beetle leeches into the heads beneath them. Skulls, like bowler hats, bounced along the City streets on Easter Parade, but hands on creeper-crawlers unwound from River Thames and made grabs for ankles such as mine…”
Ervin loitered down Cannon Street, after a number of lengthless hours at the Monster Exchange on the Left Bank. He had a pocketful of loose change safe from the pycke-purses and some paper-clips. His voice was sore from screeching Commodities and Futures across the Bidding-Floor. No such things existed, but were valuable nonetheless: like make-believe.
Yet he had the energy to converse with another pubman who reminded him of someone he once knew even before Tokkmaster Clerke was born. Ervin spoke as if he were continuing something he had already said: “…to steep your dead mothers in, curdled cat’s meat for canary-headed dossers and also many fine examples of sunflower oil-paintings. Get up, for tonight’s the night, and all that I’ve told you about History, young oldster, is about to come true.”
Ervin later recalled the real Tokkmaster Clerke and his eyes weltered in pools of tears. And Padgett Weggs. And Blasphemy Fitzworth the Catch Meet-Man. Tagsters all. Chasers. Old-Timers. Gossipers. Go-spellers.
The Great Old Ones not only came from up the sky and down it, they scrabbled through the under-scaffolding of the Earth itself, passing like giant leathery sperms through the cream caches of the spitting Core, having collected in geomorphic pockets of stone and nosing on like insect-scaled torpedoes, ever hungry for folk’s undersides and trotters. At the lowest City pub that night, this night, the locals and strangers spoke of “nuddyn’ else, over pots of blackest stout”.
One Old One—with a body combining all ancient gossipers—said: “Ervyn, he pysses and he pysses, hys lyttle body vysybly shyfryng and goose-pympled o’er.”
And as the night began to never end, the last thing heard and would ever be heard by Ervin was the visibly unseen snicker-snacker of giant and ancient jaws. And even make-believe melted down into memory.
The spacecraft beacons flickered like computerised water across the darksome deadfall trees of Clockhouse Mount & specked the undersky with squawking yellow-yoldrings & chitterling canary-lamps—making an aviary light-show.
Tokkmaster squinted to distinguish present from past. His box camera forgotten, the rats in the walls of his stomach forgotten too, he simply stood hunchbacked & baked with frost, watching, watching, for the aliens’ eventual disembarkation.
Gradually they appeared, skew-whiff & bowsie, during tentative footings from the craft: bespattered & bescumbered by their journey. But they became right and stately, not unlike the stone-priests on their visit from the cathedrals. At last, they emerged, amid lashings of lasers, from cast caverns of camouflage, from once zany zawns of neanderthal night, & were human-seeming, legs a-spawder, with private parts (unnaturally elongated & widened & upraised) under ill-positioned plastic mackintoshes.
Tokkmaster gulped & blinked. The confluence of mushed apricot and excited belly-juices threatened upheaval &, doubtless, all his internal organs were to volcano, too. He was embarrassed, to say the least, when he realised that Earth’s very first visitors from outer space had evidently, whilst engaged in the complicated process of making landfall on Clockhouse Mount, tuned in to the sex channels on satellite television.
For him, Ervin had died. Tokkmaster was about to. Slowly, but how soon. The aliens stalked to the environs of Cullesdon town, as horny as rhinoceri on heat, yet meditative. In the end, they decided the place was not for them. They plucked a few apricots from old Tokkmaster’s shrivelling tree-mantle, but discarded them pointblank (together with the virgin’s milk) down the toilet bowls which they deemed open sewers & not at all healthy. They left amid the clucking & cheep-cheering of a well-heeled dawn—the aliens’ first and last.
We, the innocent we, each in his or her own body-glove of a bony meat-haven, we each ask: “Am I Dying &, if so, As I Die Slowly, Am I Dying Soon?” Whether it be in or of ignorance, little does it matter. Squatting & brooding, squatting & brooding—naming countless abrecock-stones, tinker, tailor, tokkmaster, thief—awaiting more dawns from A to Z—yet the dawns dimmer rise (unnaturally elongated & widened & thinned out), one after t’other, till they’re zawns themselves. And in slow wind-down, an elbowy creature upended a china urn of slime into its black shiny belly, slime which transmuted itself from pure white to an even purer brown even as it slowly drank away down the tarmac-coated hose: a huge dollop of kingdom come, entropy without end, for Ervin & Ervin, Amen.
Ervin, for a time, played ignorant. Yet he read the sky like a mandala or mantra … and as his new body knit firmly into the fold of the Ervinish soul, he shuffled his own bones like cards, to tell the timing of the slumps and surges in Fate.
London Bridge had long ceased to bear traffic, since many feared that its substructure was slowly submitting to the insidious slippage of the Earth. The weekly coster-market was now held upon the scaffolding that webbed St Paul’s mighty dome; and those who could afford it passed pennies around, like whispers, for the wares there displayed: peeping contraptions, with cloaks; box-cameras with shutters like Hell’s gates, to view the foreboding patterns in the sky; open-hearts in sausage-strings; cat-bands and elbow-tongs; door-frames and Wendy Houses for terraced streets in Northern Cities; wild bees’ honeybags in succulence for the third night after Christmas Eve; imrich soup bowls for pod-lovers, for cheesemongers and for those who sorted morling from shorling wool; tosspots of blackest thickest stout to steep your dead mothers in; curdled cat’s meat for canary-headed dossers…
The egg’s baldness sprouted the wild hair of my limbs, and I began to drown in air, as my tiny bubbly lungs slowly flexed themselves for the first intake of the new medium. I had thought the circumscribed slime in which I had been jellified was the whole unending universe. Now, I knew it was nothing but the sweat of birth. Later, I yearned for the return of its sweet over-ripe putridity, as I scuttled between the gargantuan garden flowers of unbearable wafting seeping scents and listened to elfin twinkles in the sky.
Something told me that I needed to seek out the red-tipped dugs of my mother’s bristly under-flank. But she seemed dead to my world, having given everything in hatching her children. Black pus fountained from her still tweaking pincer-mouth, upon which I proceeded to sup as a replacement for the bloody milk that had dried up within her, there being next to no animal droppings in this garden which would have provided stomach cuds.
I crawled into my cottish mother’s split sump to complete an incubation which, during interminable dozing dreamless days, I realised had been foreshortened by her crazy drum-beating with a cankered proboscis upon the egg I’d been in. The next thing I knew, after sleeping off my second birth, I found myself having been wafted—or fluttered by wings I did not realise I had—upon the eyelid of Toastmaster Clerke. Starting in his sleep, he swatted me with his fist and gave himself a black eye, at least a smidgin of which blackness was caused by my squashed body.
That’s how I fell asleep an insect and, by waking, woke a man.
***
IN THE CARREL
Chapman suffered.
Chapman did not know from what he suffered, but his body acted as host to different diseases, welcoming them to the all- night party of his soul. But he failed to enjoy the get-together.
Chapman sat and pondered his lot.
Chapman recalled the events of his life as a concertina of timeless agony. The whole world was simply a stage between countless entries and exits of dead-lash passions. Amidst the relentless struggling through the muscle of words as if such a vast vesicle were an unsilken skein clogging the brain after umpiring Finnegans Wake versus Unknown Kadath.
Now, in this half-dream state, he visited a dark library beyond the back of the back of disused terraced houses. The even darker librarians leered knowingly and nodded towards a carrel where Chapman could study anonymously for a night.
The librarians stamped them in and the librarians stamped them out, whilst those previously unstamped were devoured in search of some clue to the mystery of Chapman’s slow-departing soul.
Chapman browsed the nameless pages of the fabled Necronomicon.
Chapman dreamed of stately spires in an unfamiliar city, one infested by a herd of mutant chickens lately escaped from a desert island.
Chapman dreamed further of the Infinite Cuckoo as it sat and brooded and chewed at the core of things.
Perhaps, he thought, somewhere in these unlent and unlendable books, lay the answer to his troubles and he carelessly quoted from the pages, in the hope that some cipher would emerge … like magic. Except magic in dreams was like non-magic outside of dreams.
Chapman found himself perusing the pages of “The Cape of Good Horn” by one who thought he knew, but eventually knew he didn’t. The text was too long for a dream; but dreams are excerpts, in any event.
#
… My first survey of Taleh-Shedar was one of fertile desolation, unman-made meadows careering in patchwork to the far horizon, untilled farmland alternating fallow, crop, fallow, crop, set-aside and, over further slopes, lazy natives shaded in cornucopias of cosiness with stone umbrellas, lackadaisical lackeys swinging in stone hammocks from leaning, unkempt boles…
…Hundreds of backbent peasants chipped slowly at the arid soil with simple stone implements as two scrawny oxen pulled a roughly hewn plough through infertile crust and the scene was repeated into the distant ‘fields’ stretching before my companion, G. Ken, and myself. Wattled huts squatted among the reeds of stagnant pools and long-titted women ground meal in stone bowls beneath the twilight heat of a milky sun…
…Their earthly accoutrements were seemingly from a deeper lore, of carven figurets kept beneath the thatch, of a religion steeped in timeless sorcery. Peculiar rites were supposedly enacted around stone totems to the thin wailing of granite flutes. Sex was taboo for fear of the pale consistency oozing from purple-knotted loins. Plains of white slime were said to sag and curve beneath the very crust of the saline fields and the most handsome native youths have been known to sacrifice themselves to its germinal undertow. Creatures were purported to wriggle distraught feelers from the white catacombs networking the whole country and to clutch the limbs of young men, drawing them downward by some unfathomable geocentric force…
…Strangely enough, as the days continued in utter ennui, the peasants’ ceaseless prodding at the hard ground reminded me of the desperate probing of birdbeaks in search of temporary worms and their indeterminate glances hinted at side-eyes on bobbing heads…
…Dream or fact, I am still unsure, but as I lay on my front (habit of many sleeping years) I felt creep sluggishly through my entire body a subtle paralysis, a vague certainty that if I tried to move I would find it impossible. It is difficult to explain the phenomenon – I was balanced on a knife-edge of potent indecision. My eyes, as it happened, were facing the tent entrance and, amid the gloom, I barely discerned a dark shape entering. All seemed to be an illusion, an illusion within another illusion called a dream, an illusion of slow motion, viscid swimming movements, and I could not define the shape at all before it pounced on my back. The next few moments were part of a hazy background of false memory: a vital prodding, a tight clasp of claw on spine, a furry fumbling. Then, in a fish-eyed miasma, rose my companion, G. Ken, mightily from his bunk nearby, sword raised high in the darkness and, with the power of a giant bird of prey, the blade swept down upon my assailant. The last horrific moment of what, for the time being, I must call dream was the sound of metal clanking on stone…
…As a jaundiced dawn seeped along the horizon, waves of allegory and sculptural myth-arrangements vibrated in the very air around me. I could perceive sheaths and stone cloaks, mottled in gold and horn, decking the sprung spines of the arched probers of the stiff sod. I heard the gurglings of hidden unholy swamps fermenting beneath my feet, separated from me by the thinnest crust of shingly soil. I knew, as if intuitively from a dream I had not dreamed, that there, in Taleh-Shedar, was where the Earth shielded its demonic innards with the least cover…
…Coming into a slight cleft or vale, I saw, throgh the shimmering of unadulterated fantasy, the physique of G. Ken arched over. I remember the jolt that spun my dream on its head. Ideals shattered – pollution – blinding horror. Disease was his birthright. Putrid flesh layered upon putrid flesh – and I turned literally inside out. I bounded from my niche – I don’t know what powered me – was it the occult strength of the myth-drenched rocks – was it some theosophical radiation from Earth’s geomantic, centuried root? Whatever motor moved me, I was a fleeting flash of action across a strip of land and I grabbed the two-headed sword from beside the renewed rutting of G. Ken. I raised it mightily over my head, brought it down, like a giant eagle settling upon its fodder, into the mass of limbs … and slashed, slashed until my force was spent amid the red rubble that had been G. Ken, that wondrous man and friend. I imagined I heard him make a last collapsing moan as I dropped the massive bifurcated blade to the clanging ground…
…I walked from my accomplishment – I turned to take one last glance and I was not afraid of the beauty that gloriously filled my smarting eyes. The ground, through the simmering of further fixities of fantasy, was split asunder and shifting layers of creamy white flow was oceanic, panoramic, lapping the sides of the hill. As the sawn tatters of flesh and muscle sank slowly like a poulterer’s discards, ever so slowly, into the plasma, into the placenta of earthroot, earthcore, I heard the hymn of birdcall and saw, grouped around like speculative chessmen, the etheric statues of giant fleshy birds in monkish contemplation – as if praying for the journey to be good. And then I knew that G. Ken would thank for what I had done…
#
Chapman was sunk unto his bones as he read those passages – but implications tolled from distant bell-towers beyond the scrubland. In his library carrel, he read another tome, something called “The Isle Of The Accurst”. The narrator had been voyager on the ‘Valdemar’ and the rest of the crew were lost. Again, dreams automatically separated themselves into excerpts, but this time, Chapman dreamed the gaps as opposed to the excerpts that made them into gaps.
#
I cannot explain how I gathered together enough energy to pull my aching body from the lifeboat, how I overcame the feeling of hopelessness in the dire situation but, knowing nothing could be served by my continued sojourn in the boat, I pulled myself together (which was not a mean task) and jumped upon the blindingly white sand. Gloom, however, still pervaded my every thought as I sat on the firm particles. My meditation was one of inflow and outflow, back and forth, sea and twisted jungle, and no way out. If it were a dream, there was no waking from it. And if it were real life, there was even less escape.
Suddenly, I spotted that great lumps of the torn flesh I had previously noticed hanging from the shattered remains of the ‘Valdemar’ were actually being swept ashore by the onslaught of waves. Fighting back the disgust that welled in my gorge, I forced myself to recognise each piece as it came to rest before me: the ripped stump of a leg, a neatly sliced neck section, a head that had not originally belonged with the previous piece, the lobster-like privities of a man, a foot of still wriggling toes and many other remnants of the crew. Even in my dazed state, I was aghast to see many peices were oddly non-human, presumably mutated by those vice-like waves which I could see still pummelled the sinking wreck of the ‘Valdemar’. Of course, bits of the ship itself were inextricably mingled with this curdled fleshy lumber.
I heard noises behind me in the jungle. This was enormously startling as only the lap of waves had previously disturbed the atmosphere. So, at this sound, an uncustomary urgency shot through me and, noticing a nearby rock whereon rested lumps of the incoming remains, I ran to its cover as quickly as my depleted health allowed. I crouched there for several minutes and listened to the shambling noises that decidedly grew louder. Curiosity eventually overcame my terror and I peered around the side of the rock. It was necessary to cast aside slabs of the incoherent flesh to gain a full view but, when this had been accomplished, a sight met my aching eyes that lanced an unltimate freight of frights through my shuddering frame. For, gambolling amid the gory flotsam was a throng of what I can only describe as ostriches. But no, not ostriches, rather morbid bones that ended, in each case, with a long stump of a neck. I compared it to a plucked, beheaded chicken, one ready for the festive table, half-picked clean in a half-cooked state, standing precariously on thin, jointed, over-sized stilts with webbed feet – and, indeed, such creatures were prancing on the beach.
These geekens, as I was later to call them, scrabbled about in the crew’s mutant remains. They flung shreds and even bigger lumps at each other in evident frolic. They swallowed the tattered remnants. I could only guess they had been attracted to the strand by the stench (which compensated for their own) flung up by the human offal and, in unappeasable hunger, they feasted their own many gaping orifices. Inexplicably, I stepped forward from behind the rock. Yes, I actually ran twoards the monstrous bacchanale, for I had an undreamable urge to join their nameless fol-de-rols. Before the geekens had a chance to react, I found myself astride one of them, feeling the bone and tatters of disgusting skin between my legs, holding on by means of its scrawny wattle. I was bucking like a bronco, clinging on for dear life, a violent rodeo in a caterwauling freak circus.
Now knowing why God had chosen to preserve only myself from the ‘Valdemar’…
#
Chapman knew that the answer was near. The slit-eyed whisper had come.
Chapman gazed along the line of his sight and witnessed an endless parade of sick men returning their overdue books to the dark library, heads lowered, eyes squeezed tight to disguise theit encroaching blindness, muttering bits and bobs of stories to themselves in order to pass the interminability of their death. From their bodies – inside some belly within a belly – there clucked their gestating brood.
And from the curdling of Earth’s core, there brayed the Wurmhead out of Messer Shoggoth out of Yog-Sothoth out of the bubbling idiot-god Azathoth out of the Fowl Tuckoo that welcomed Spring…
Chapman’s real existence had become a series of excerpts. And he turned another page with his disjointed bone-like arm and read with his eyes or with what he thought were his eyes.
The dark library was now far too dark for reading, however. But Chapman heard the many whispers of pages being turned in other carrels.
The answer was indeed nearer than he thought. His revelation from being chosen was that if there was a choice between reading James Joyce and himself, then what choice was there at all?
***
UPON MANSION ROOFS
I flew in from the darker reaches of the night sky and settled on a roof.
In my home nest, they taught me things I should know on my journey to Earth and they taught me what I should do when I arrived there.
They said I would look like this … and I was shown a vision of a beaked dragon-like bird with snakes for limbs, new moons for claws and a devil’s bedding for wings. If attacked, I would attack first. But they furnished me not with weapons, for I looked too strong to fight. I would do this … was shown the “bird” that was me alighting on the roof of a mansion when night had relinquished all memory of the previous day and all hope of the next, and lowering my proboscis into the chimney to tease out any tasty flue-grubs. And I would sense this … was shown human beings in their beds, like beached baby whales, dreaming of creatures on the roof. And I would see this … was shown others like me, as far as my eyes could reach, roof-roosting contemplatively against a backdrop of stars. And, finally, I would dread this … was shown many bigger versions of myself flapping in, swooping across the sky, like giant vulture marquees, here to ensure the alert rapt attention of us sentries and enforcing the subtle curfew of the night.
There would come a time when they themselves would arrive, one solid pack of beings like myself in physical communion with every limb and feeler of each other, all previously dead things but by an interactive mutuality sparking off supreme faith in its own life-force.
=
There came a time when I needed more than just my own company during the interminable period before dawn. I had recited my prayers, counted the slates on my own particular roof-tree for the umpteenth time and re-learnt the consecration of the mansion. One word haunted my brain, one no doubt implanted by those others who are now a single entity. This was a strange echoey word, throwing up images of what humans called Heaven. My prayers were to what this word represented and even its sound (although it was different upon my tongue) brought a tingle to parts of my body. My limbs lengthened and turned stringy, my lower torso became loose chamois leathers ill-sewn together, and I wrapped the mansion into a parcel.
But then I knew something that I had not been taught. This special word could not possibly represent the immortality amid the stars which had been pledged following my tour of duty on Earth. It could not possibly be the sweet agony welling up along my winding extruding tentacles. It could not possibly be the key prayer to be passed from beak to beak, from roof to roof, in the lonelinesses of Earth’s dark side.
But it was shown to be the reason I and the others had been sent out weaponless into the unknown. Never shipped even a hand-spike…
Our naive strength had resided somewhere in that word, our primitive cowing in the face of the cruel mindless cosmos.
Then it dawned on what was left of me. The word in fact represented another human being! One of those human beings who, we had been taught, were as insignificant as the dreams they dreamt.
With that, I folded up my wing tents, cleared up the foot-thick stains I had deposited on the roof which were even now dangling into the gutter, straightened up the TV aerial, gave the chimney an affectionate adieu and, telling my companion roof-creatures that we should all stick together, I led them off in my wake into the realms of non-existence where we would perhaps feel more at home.
But not before joining up our loose ends into an unbounded ecstasy, eventually forming a weave of stars and poultry flesh which, for all I know, still wheels across the limitless wastes of a better mind than mine.
=
There were twelve terraced houses around a circular back-alley courtyard and each house had its own characteristics. The numbering system was quite straightforward, one to twelve with odd and even rubbing conjoined shoulders.
And unto these mansions there came signs which told mainly of mutancy and insanity. And upon the roofs of these came bodies none of which seemed human.
We crawled round an apparently circular loft area, with no dividing walls between; how long we had been travelling on hands and knees across the dusty beams was now unknown. We mis-recall entering, we mis-recall even if the direction was clockwise or anti-. We expected to meet others on the way, but maybe their direction was timed and spaced so that we would never meet.
We are twin brothers – and we had to be parted at birth, as if our love for each other was far too strong for our own good.
We had, they said, emerged side by side into the world … having been pulled from the tangled skein of strands that still wore the flesh of our mother. She it was who had to split down the middle with our lumbering arrival and, whilst we had to be unsewn and unpicked, she had to be re-aligned by the tireless darning and hemming of treadling seamster-surgeons.
We mis-recall the home in which we all lived. It was down a turnimg which led from blind alleys and double-ended culdesacs and, if we directed you there today, you would become lost in the world of dreams you had so desperately wanted to avoid.
We once knew a larger mansion, called Olive Villa, which stood close to the coast where a little boy who must have something to do with us once lived with a matriarch or two. He may have been one of us, he may not, but we did play in the villa’s garden on the clumsy swing, waiting for faces that did not please us to pop up and to reveal their long trifurcating tongues.
“Let’s play Corners … come on, do!” said one of us twins in the garden of that same Olive Villa, but now down beyond the alleys and culdesacs far from any sea or pier or naze…
“Don’t want to!”
And we skipped like the wings of a pastel-dusted butterfly amid the cabbage patches, towards a matronly figure reclining on the daisied lawn.
“He won’t play at Corners,” complained a bitter twin. “It’s so boring!”
The matronly figure unfolded as if it had been a sculpture with vibrant curves and angles that an artist had spent a lifetime formulating but was now sliding into a shape which was more human, if not completely finished.
She would point to certain things that no others could see. Up on the roofs, she said, were the wingy, stringy residue of creatures that once used the slates as sloping beds and the gutters as receptacles of their night soil. She would also tell us of a rogue creature who had stayed behind when all the others had gone back to where they originated. It cared not whether it be day or night: it did not honour the openness and candour of sunlight … and it would sit, wide-eyed and brown, so close to the tall chimney stack that one had to look twice to see it there at all. The slimy slivers of cuckoo-spit from its rear tuft of wings coiled down the slates toward the skewed guttering and must have given it away to the likes of our mother.
Giving us the nod, one day, she indicated that if we did not take the opportunity and look at it immediately and study its intricate plumage, its tangled cat’s cradle of tentacles, its postbox mouth and its underskirted collection hatch … then we may never have another chance to be among those very very few to see one of them. A chance of a lifetime.
But it flapped off, before we could even raise our pair of eyes.
She undergrunted, on other occasions, the names which only she knew or, if I mis-recall, was it that she was the only one who dared even to think such names? She told of two warring, but loving, “gods”, for want of a better expression. Both, apparently, wanted to rule the roost as far as the archetypal fears of general mankind were concerned. It was all very well, sending out cohorts of clucking wing-critters to scare the nineteen-fifties skin off houses and mansions. It was all very well, to breed, inbreed and cross-breed with chimney stacks, giving birth to clusters of TV aerials that would hand-spike the future skies. It was all very well, to formulate melting dreams which would sud the minds of future men. It was all very well…
But, one day, she said there would be a fight between the two reluctant protagonists. We twins would be the ones called to umpire and ensure their elbows remained on the table of the cosmos, as they strained and pushed, pulled and spluttered, like two giant vertical earthquakes. That’s what she said, anyway. We did not believe her. And, now, I even do not believe in her at all.
One night, she crawled out of our lives. Up the nursery chimney she went like a scrawny sweep. She had been starving herself for weeks in preparation. The waggling feet were the last things I saw of her, the soot in black snowfalls into the empty grate. Her voice lingered on for some little while as she continued to wriggle towards the roof, pleading for the two “gods” to lower their tentacle ladders to assist her ascendant sign…
I gained the impression from her last overgrunts that these two “gods” were in fact joined at the elbow. The words eventually died out somewhere mid-chimney.
Within this mansion of alleys, now, we listen to the interminable dual shuffling and shambling in the shuttered loft, around and around in ever-decreasing circles. But it may be the more distant scratching of claws on the slates … or the tugging out of aerials as tooth-picks … or, more likely, the scraping across the night sky of the hidden sun which never enters this our mansion of the stars.
Destiny is a core unto itself and we shall only be able to spend the rest of our lives elbow-fighting…
=
THE ELBOW FIGHT: a play in one short Act.
Scene a shuttered Olive Villa.
Voice: You say life is futile, don’t you?
Old man: No. It is futile to call life futile, for it is.
Voice: Your parents, did they give you a lot of love?
Old man: Yes, for that I am grateful. The rest is fiction.
Voice: Fiction as truth has always been my motto, especially when it makes a good story to suit a universal gestalt.
Old man: Yes, indeed. The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction as the Nemonicon has it. The nemo versus id and ego. Indeed, amongst such ‘shards’, my mother used to mop up the night soil from under my bed. She used kerchiefs and muckenders to sop out the messes. Nearly every night it was but she received thanksgiving from her god…
Voice (V): How could you have let her do it … and then to leave her alone with what you considered to be her deceitful god?
Old Man (Om): I couldn’t sleep. I thought night-critters or such were clambering over the roof, trying to get at me.
V: Oh, we’re going back to them, now, are we? Where did such ideas come from? Did you think the things on the roof had minds?
Om: They either came from my own mind and, if so, even a Shakespeare or a Mozart may have had them … or they were from others’ minds, let loose to hound and hassle me. When I was younger I had dreamed of sweeter things, flowers and such, cuddle-me-to-you’s, herbs-of-grace, lady’s-fingers, love-in-a- mists, soft hobmadonnas, none-so-pretties, forget-me-knots … but stuck out in their midst was an ox- pith, pointing to future dreams emerging from the gathering clouds and dipping sun of puberty. Sorry, old age makes me wordy…
V: Yes, you mumble on so. You told me earlier, did you not, that the night-critters were not of your mother’s god or even a paradoxical version of the otherwise hard-to-believe Trinity, but things that were born from a greater god called… what? ‘Tis enough to bend any mind. Hear its violins, flutes and drums?
Om: Too true. And night-eaters fed off my doings that I’d shovelled under the bed. Great jaws champing at the merds of my adolescent loins.
V: Perhaps your so-called roof creatures got into the room to scrabble and play under your bed?
Om: You’re oh so clinical, medical, in your questioning.
V: Sorry, I’ll try to keep quiet. Tell me what you have to.
Om: I kept a wooden contraption above my bed – ill-made perhaps – teetering and creaking in rhythm to my fitful tossing. Bit it did keep them at bay. You see, the roof had gaps… And now, you’re actually telling me that they may have been the things under the bed all the time. It’s coming back to me now….
V: Blame not another for your own mind’s leaning.
Om: I’ll be straightforward, or as much so as seeping senility allows. I lived a long time in that groaning house. There were gaps above me that literally let in the moonlight. My mother cared for me and preached of her god, meaning nothing to me and pitch-kettling the Hanseatic-league of my wooden bed defences. Yes, I must keep it simple, none of that stuff and nonsense about night-snaps, larrikins and lop-eared macaroons. I’m nought but a goose-cap on Lady-day in Harvest, sailing a moon-sheered craft from imaginary mordant Venice to the plague-sores of Toulon…
V: Simple, you said
Om: She fed my night’s doings to the tank outside. Her one time lover, the lavatory man, stole it away in his stink cart under cover of day. ‘Tothers thought it compost he lugged…
V: To the point, old man..
Om: Undoubtedly to the point that there was no point. The next I recall was the funeral. I covered her coffin with cuddle-me-to- you’s, herbs-of-grace, lady’s-fingers, love-in-the-mists, soft hobmadonnas, none-so-pretties, forget-me-knots as well as all her used sops and muckenders.
V: I must go now, nice talkin to you and thanks for the drink.[exit]
Om: I’ve been pondering here for some time, but I’ve only stared at the beer and had crazy pub talk with myself. Ego and Id, Id and Ego, I don’t know. Nemo, perhaps. Time to go home, Andy and Teddy are waving goodbye. Maybe the mansion knew something about it. I think I will dream tonight of times long ago when Darkness was an Edge, for today it’s nought but a Shroud.
V (off stage): And he never even shipped a hand-spike.
CONTINUED HERE:
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