The moment the ghosts became gusts, I knew that wind worth its salt was as ever thus haunted. Most gales carried such spectral phenomena like flotsam within waterless seas but only later to be crowded-out by heavy rain as the air’s ark of future street-dancing fairies. I pulled up the mackintosh hood, as my wellingtons sloshed through the puddles of the dancers’ corpses; the gusts grew even colder with each guest thus expelled.
***
“That’s what I’m looking for — slugs and trees.” I looked at him askance, this being Christmas Day. He called himself Mr Non Sequitur, as if that explained everything except a genuine eeriness in the number 249. “Stout appears in my story…” he continues meaningfully as if I would understand. He tells me he is thinking of drinking one bottle a week, after an abstinence of years. “Oh, my goodness,” he ends by saying, as if he has surprised himself.
But what story is he referring to? There are no papers in front of him, only the lamplit glow of the study room revealing bits and pieces that don’t follow on, nor do they make any sense at all in the context, if that’s not saying the same thing. On the other hand, connections and coincidences were very important to me, and the horror was in there being none at all. I am left empty-handed, indeed starved of meaning, with no sense of an ending. Just sight of the equally empty glass of stout, giving thin gruel to whoever followed us on by reading this, as reading it they eventually must. What’s your anagram as a bid for the numbered lot?
***
Mr Non Sequitur suddenly turned up on Boxing Day with 249 boxes to distribute to the poor and needy. He pushed them along in his trolley, all piled topsy turvy, but I was distracted from watching him by a horrific haunting that took the full attention of my spirit. So I never noticed a misstep that was going to happen and turned out to be more important to my future life than anything else would, and I fell through a potentially lethal hole in the road with its lid missing, so none of it mattered, except Mr Non Sequitur, out of the blue, rescued me and we got married for the rest of our lives together, except his life turned out to be very short and I was a widow forevermore to be followed by the same horrific haunting that had once threatened me more than it did today, the same one that had killed him instead so as to co-opt his spirit as an addition to the spirits it had already collected as parts of itself. An accretion of souls. The lethal hole now made whole. A boxful of box lids leaving room for very little else at all.
CODA
***
There was no longer a Mr Non Sequitur who would accept the name as his. Even his widow eschewed any mention of him in her presence. Yet, as a ghost hunter, I still sought signs of his absence, signs that would at least evidence the presence that he once was. He perhaps still wore that presence as a glove, but now the glove’s fingers were empty and flopped over the newel-post at the foot of the mansion’s stairway. Cracked white ceilings, I thought, indicated the path of his departure. Could his actual presence be stuck in a chimney demolished too early to be used as conduit or is his absence at least draped over an attic’s rafter. I heard distant laughter that would indicate something at least, it not being a woman’s laughter, but that of an echo within an echo whereby the hard-bitten wood of a rafter was involved in the laughter’s timbre. Did you know that the collective noun for turkeys is a ‘rafter’, look it up and see. And, thus induced to do so, I could count — through one of the widening cracks in the ceiling — 249 of their shapes gobbling together with wattles and snoods. Unsealing what? Revealing a terror to outbid the next terror that would be worse? Or simply a huge empty glove hanging loosely over the empty roofs and rebuilt chimneys, only to be blown away like a dirigible with floppy tentacles by the gusts of ghosts that not even Mr Non Sequitur could have preordained by dint of synchronicity or cause and effect in reverse. And I hunted upward not by newel-post roost or unshod stairway, but through the cracks in my head.
***
When Mr Non Sequitur reached his own form of non-heaven he met several other Nons who had discovered there were many a slip between cup and lip, as well as between well and hell, Mr Non Entity and Mr Non Descript just being two examples. Any other Nons had already gone on. This fanciful tale of Nons meeting up beyond the realms of death must not diminish the horror, though, of death itself, a cruel barrier that needed crossing before reaching a new life via the gentility of ideas and conceits. The initial way was thus tough, and each hurdle was not in any logical conjunction with the next as if it were Mr Non Sequitur alone who held such conceits in his head, whilst the other Nons were mere figments of his own. But the more he conceived, the bigger his head grew and, at the very last moment, it got well and truly stuck in the aforesaid barrier. The rest never happened. And nothing prevailed even for non entities in indescribable wastes. Our hero’s very last conceit.
.
I’ve somehow tenuously received the forthcoming message below — by the preternatural means of this controlled writing about it — saying that, when Mr Non Se Quitur finally met the infamous Dapper Man in the realms of non-heaven and non-hell, the world on our side of death’s barrier would receive High Suspicion notice of what would happen when we eventually crossed over ourselves, i.e. we’d finally find the Shape in Darkness we’d always sought, this being the only possible ghost that a ghosthunter could find so as to prove ghosts existed at all, which naturally meant the ghosthunter dying first. All of us, you will see, were once failed ghosthunters at heart.
My reading today from Solage represents some great passages of wondrous gaucheness transcended not only by its elegance but also by both the tiny and the vast, i.e. from the duplex far too small seemingly to house Bartholomew and his so-called ward Pollymina whom we see here developed into a budding central heroine, as she is both somehow trapped by the computer screen as young people are today but simultaneously expanded beyond it as if it is her own duplex Tardis arguably as a sort of Dr Who herself, although I wonder whether this is Solage’s own bookish intentions. Indeed, Pollymina’s potential dalliances with the local lads are subsumed by her dating connections with the mainframe Socrat-V7, and you surely must give up some of your own time to time-travel, by reading these passages, through a unique narrative evolution unfolding before and no doubt after it. Too many quotable quotes, so I shall quote none this time.
Some loose notes today…
Firstly, please forgive a long quote today, to compensate for yesterday, giving below admittedly only a part of this section’s landmark pen picture of the mainframe Socrat-V7 with its own architecture and (via mainframe to mainframe) its background love affair with Pollymina….
“There were no personnel working through the night to apply the brakes because the ancient machine operated on its own command remotely sealed up inside a vacuum tank so that no curious human might tamper with its inner components, not even to lay a glove on the many gauges that were suspended above protected against Trojan Viruses. / Socrat-V7 endlessly translated the mundane, finding value from the hum-drum life experience people encountered. Sometimes there were gems: a divorce, a juicy piece of marital infidelity, a favourite meal gone wrong, something of mirth or the odd mental health issue. The machine was intent upon turning it into some quote other people could abide, but people seldom submitted anything more important than a story about walking the pets.”
I, as quoter, cheekily inserted the italics above as my own co-opted italic portal or wormhole in the quoted text! “ho hum”.
There are also many new genuine italic portals in this relatively short section read today. Talking about pen pictures above, there is here the return of whom I am told are ‘bic pen’ characters, μ & φ, but whom I would rather call spear-carriers, and they are enlisted to deal with a virus aboard Socrat-V7.
I read most of Jack Vance’s work many years ago but they have by now slipped through my ageing brain, whilst I am now told that his writing soul may live on at least to some extent in the Solage book?
Finally: “…it wasn’t for nothing, she [Pollymina] was known as the Nimble Fairy, a nom de plume adopted whenever she used the messaging…”
“Both partners needed toxins imbibed from the unfathomable Elégiac drug, something to accelerate the functionality a love match required to create more human beings in wedlock.”
Two sections today re Michalis and Olympia respectively, with much material that seems gestalt-instinctively correcting for our times by extra-creatively solving such times’ difficulties, via word-portals or -wormholes, the glitches of genius versus the herein once prophesied AI onset, and via a bond-looping psychology amid the wastelands of Solage, we tussle with interpersonal squabbling, the Cane Asylum, a ‘team of tiny dopamine midgets’, the ‘crime of war’, ‘the brink of a coda’, and the ’same old’, ‘a future yet to be invented.’
“Throughout the land there was a settled boredom turned topsy-turvy in thesis, and retrospectively, every linked antithesis was possible to divulge.”
nullimmortalis Edit
“The dinghy assigned to hell was a form of transport designed specifically for those who posed as criminal types in the real world. Olympia bore their accumulative guilt during a present-day reverie.”
I am told that these earlier sections were first written up to twelve years ago and they certainly possessed portals into now. Even into yesterday when the author and I were, by happenstance, clearing out a cupboard. This section is a cupboardful of memories and music, ‘embossed grooves’, maybe bakelite and vinyl in a digital age, soon to be AI. And black and white photos of Clamforth. To be absolutely Franck, this is the most seminal section so far, and it needs to be repeatedly read and absorbed; indeed it is alone worth whatever you paid for the privilege of being able to read this book. I hope the author does not mind me quoting two ‘bleeding chunks’ (an italic portal explicitly used in a timely fashion within this very section’s text), the second chunk being…
“Only casual reflection much later in her life caused the uneasiness she felt on how her family background was linked with the objects she had inherited. After opening the two arched cupboard doors, Olympia found the grime covering each folio amazingly frequent. Dusty fragments were flying grey motes resembling a force field against her less than temperate curiosity. Up above she visualised tape loops placed neatly filling the shelf space with their cylindrical towers connected to each reel stacked up together as one entity — the reels were more foreboding than the circular records as there were no pictures embossed on the front lamination bearing such tidings as to what music would be contained within.”
Another section that makes the reading-mind morph out of shape in more ways than one, most of these ways being welcome inspirations. I riffle my fingers through the rest of the pages of this giant book with great anticipation, while believing, despite my connection with its author, that I can safely state that we have here a major work with a genuine unique and tantalising tone for our times.
Today’s section reveals Pollymina in Jaye with its seaside genius-loci and her ‘probation officer’ Nierman and she is also in interface with a proposed lover in the form of the mainframe Socrat-V7. If you reach this far in the book, you will duly receive your flame-licking badge! Meanwhile, a ‘bleeding chunk’ I could not resist quoting…
“ Pollymina though feverously impulsive, often felt compromised asking directions from the unsympathetic boat hands lounging against the sea wall whose rough dialect for the most part, hardly made sense. These sailors often spoke in riddles to strangers who bombarded them with their careless land talk. Jaye sailors were the worst of all. Their crazy accent often avoided by holiday makers requested that they be sent away on endless excursions around the several marker buoys placed offshore.”
“From the mighty to the meek they shambled through the numerous semi opaque glass structures, each holding a lamp emitting a dullish light over the dusty crazy paving chalk symbols scratched over blackboards cheek by jowl with the dialectic hieroglyphs denoting the overreaching umbrella equation comprised of everything in the universe.”
Two sections read today as a series of ‘nuggets’ or ‘pellets’ and bleeding-chunks alongside a ritual passage of humanity in interface with the sun as SOL and man-made, man-mad machines-as-machine. In Interface with the rarefied thoughts of Pollymina in youth and AGE followed by the human (?) or who-man spear-carriers or Bic Pens with Greek-looking letters, and much more.
“Socrat-V7 existed as a worthy champion for this, a collective exercise in salvation, a machine churning out lofty truths during a confused age where on a mass scale its peoples suffered from amnesia. […] …the machines encouraged anarchy, mostly because ‘they’ did not understand ‘them,’ their flock.”
“A swarm of faith based play-acting acolytes were eager to lash out in revenge and of course, the Trouser People were on the move vouchsafing their human rights against the diversions instigated by the state-run war. Rumour had it that the dragons were returning,….”
An inner soliloquy by Olympia via the filter of this Solagist device disguised as a book — as the rest of her life pans out post Alani, with her becoming a wartime nurse and involved with the radio transmissions of the mainframe in Jaye, I infer, and we meet other people like Ali Twain as well as some lettered coordinates of emotional geometry. This book continues to brush nerve endings other books can’t reach, but so far I can’t nail down exactly how it does this and toward what eventual gestalt!
“…the ever-younger Pollymina — her beliefs, as far as he could understand them, were pure hyperbole, most probably by the absurd argument that Socrat-V7, with arching girders ranging over her head from a central fusion point, was decided as a fitting subject for her hand in marriage, a predicament from which he surmised Pollymina would not allow herself to contemplate being just as single as before.”
Though, this section is not really about Pollymina, but more about Violet (whom we first met much earlier as a local chemist serving cough medicine in the same paragraph as Olympia being called the Tickler) and Bartholomew and his allotment, and a B&B in the post-famine era, and about Olympia herself and the etymological mechanics of the Olympia name. I won’t go into details, but this section also includes a remarkable description of a kiss and ‘canoodling’.
“…the mechanism widely known as the great sunrise.”
“Cob-Irena’s many electrical conduits cascaded around her development of a digital pattern-image representing Petrioc as he were to be reimagined via a subservient code procedure. They could both live somewhere in technological space beyond the plexiglass screen where he is fulfilling its every desire. Although the unit was an artificial intelligence by instinct, within its programming jargon there was the added strain of human dissemination. In the current plane of existence, Cob-Irena existed within its depot, while Petrioc’s physical presence stayed outside the logic gate and far from its reach.”
Ironic and interesting that ‘logic gate’ is not in italics. Another ‘bleeding chunk’ quoted simply because I had to do so. There is so much else for anyone to quote, so you will lose nothing by the time you read this enormous book, enormous in body and mind. These two sections read today seem as if a particular type of friendly ‘artificial intelligence’ first visited this world in 2011 when this book was being first narrated by its narrator in these early stages, and it as if we have been provided a deadpan portal or logic gate into its mind as it writes a novel, disarmingly embellished by some elegant gaucheries, to appear as an SF work of fiction. AS IF.
There is much more captivating and tantalising us today about the Sunny View B&B, Olympia, Michalis, Petrioc, Bartholomew, Violet, a stone-cast triptych, the Marble Palace, the ‘cage’ weather computer perhaps for our weather today that is also, I may be mistaken, known as Cob-Irena…