THE IMPROPER GANDER
Dalena stared back at herself in the mirror quietly intoning phrases like ‘hold your horses’ and ‘whiffling through the broad leaves’ — and ‘a sure opportunity for helicopters’, the latter being, for her, a brand new out-loud recitation of a poetic earworm as an unwitting portal. She scrutinised her own face for scars, but instead of those haunted sutures to which she had grown accustomed as a language of her life that had been writ large enough throughout the decades, the face itself was now relatively clear of scars or any nicks at all. A perceived process that seemed to be working in reverse since the wormhole’s era of what many people called the Big Change. This was similar to the losing of memories: a natural sea-change that old age eventually brought. The ghostliness of backroom staff in the hinterland of the brain, left unspoken.
The opposite of proper is not improper, as the latter tends to indicate a sort of human perversion rather than a reversal of what is proper in the actual scheme of reality itself. Dalena now whispered ‘what is bad for the goose is bad for the gander’, which seemed to pervert the alliterative resonance of the original homily. These words indeed seemed to constitute an impulsive rebellion against the power that onomatopoeia wielded as a means of semantic cut-through — or was it simply a spell of indoors weather? Finally, she spoke, more loudly, more defiantly, more insistently, without repeating herself as an incantatory refrain: ‘Goodbye, Dalena’. And she left the mirror’s jurisdiction for the chores of the day.
Who had got her gander, and was he still in the so-called lady’s chamber? Whetheroriginally upstairs or downstairs, Dalena could never relocate the whereabouts of such a regal boudoir, although the attic spaces she knew had by now spread above her were left unexplored. And as she heard the churn of many rotor blades circling her roofless mansion, she failed to intone the only words she knew would work against their noisily pervasive spell of spinning locks and barrels. Without even one hook, line or sinker between them.
She realised, by now, that her voice had vanished, along with all her facial scars, and what she had last spoken out loud would prevail forever, the sound of which would also be lost forever, too.
***
SAVELOY
Many people thought Jack to be a theatrical lovey of the most precious variety, acting out all sorts of ghostly mysteries just for show, but recently he, as the darling of his audience, had come to terms with the thought that every turning of fate, in a series of stages in one’s life, was not a free choice, but a pre-determined one.
Today was not a lovely one for any darling of stage or screen, as he stared at the ugly helicopter the shiny, sharply shivered blades of which would soon be spinning with the offlandish sound of loudly frictionless churning, a sound fit to grind down the bravura of even Honoré de Veil himself. A foreshortened helix to be opted for by the outline of ears alone, as the stumps — that his legs now felt like — were set to stumble aboard because he simply needed to go somewhere faster than any other semi-exorcists in the days of gridlock and panic that preceded Big Change. Not that he knew about the latter’s future alternation in existence then.
Jack waved at the ghostly face of Anne now staged as a picture of sorrow at their home’s window screen, a shuddering pink shape of features behind real net curtains to replace the false ones, an aperture also denuded of shutters as the neo-defenestration laws had by now forced on all who needed to be spied on. Not that bricks were easier to divert seeing through than glass, but who knew what the next docketed stage would be after the issuing of Dalena Mirrors as ways and means of providing concealed rearviews without the need to turn the human head. Periscopes as flat devices to replace the very windows themselves. Blinkers as optional extras. A saveloy just a common law to encourage buffers (or filter baffles) to rescue the existence of a building’s rudely vestigial plumbing that made urban photography the highly focused force of art it was truly meant to be.
Jack now noticed Anne’s window veils were already scarred and torn like net stockings by tinier, barely visible rotors that echoed those of the mother copter, and he equally feared that the tips of the bigger blades atop the now veering vehicle that he was about to board were within touching distance more than just to decimate the whole building let alone just blindly widen the few windows that the walls still managed to maintain against the odds around Anne’s last scored vestige of a face.
The rotors’ clatters shattered the shuttered silence with a sudden disregard for narrative piety. No way was the next change of paragraph a deliberate choice any more. Nor was the narrative to end where it actually did end, with the marching crowds in the urban byways sensing a significant paragraph change towards a longer history of our times, if not a change helped through an even bigger one triggered by plagues or politics. They indeed became tantamount to a dystopia mob salivating over hot dogs in mustard buns rather than a singularly theatrical chorus with wands of Elgar, as they now uttered muddled screams a few of which, when merged, sounded — under the harsh clattering above — like ‘Jack is a lovey!’ Munch munch.
***
THINGMEBOB FAIR
At first Honoré de Veil thought it was a misspelling of thingamabob or even thingamajiggy. He hummed a tune of thingamabobbers set to fish out sweet bleating chilvers that had fallen in the rushing river. Indeed, he knew the fairground he sought was near such a river, except the locals called it the raging river, instead.
He was not due to man the commonplace apple-bobbing game, as he had been told, but, at the last minute, his mission was slipped to him that managing the Ghost Opter was to be his duty. To stand outside a giant optical illusion that had replaced the old fashioned Haunted House lesser fairgrounds boasted. Ordinary rides or games were not for the Thingmebob Fair. Its scream school for innocents had been rejigged as what he now scrunched up into a ball of paper to hide the name he had been slipped. He hoped nobody had written it down and despite what the message’s signature letters indicated he was only to remember simply the simple acronym, the simple illusion itself.
Go, go, go, he chanted, as he quickened his pace past the teeming riparian currents that nothing owned, not even the banks. The sweet chilvers themselves would rather cope with unauthorised adventure playgrounds than such a maelstrom of directions.
He hurtled through a flock of bleating chilvers, and then he spotted the dreaming spires of several skelters, and the revolving joined-up windmill sails of deep-cast iron — the famous Ferrous Wheels of Thingmebob Fair, emitting screams of delight as well as fright, scaring the wild life into even wilder escapades of disorder. Not that the chilvers themselves were wild, having been farmed by would-be shepherds of a conscientious breed for many centuries in the environs of Thingmebob Fair. Nothing could be tamed, especially the sweet faces of our growing ghosts. Go, go, go, Honoré de Veil insisted as the manner in which he went. Acronyms aloft like spinning blades.
Go, go, go! And so he simply did.
The last we hope we ever hear his name, having jumped in the rejigged river, along with all his misspelt chilvers.
***
GRIMWADE’S GHOST
Jack Blanche was Ghost Opter, a title given to him after the name for the building that once served as a fairground ghost house, while all the time it was actually a real ghost house masquerading as a scary holiday prank for children and their carers. He rather relished the idea of optical illusions being real, and realities being merely optical. He had begun to search history for more examples of his namesake job title, so that he could channel any ambivalences in the past to strengthen his unequivocal powers as a moderator of hauntings today. Neither a believer nor a disbeliever, neither an antagoniser of spectral phenomena nor a pacifier of them. More an alchemist than an exorcist, more a catalyst than a collaborator.
The task in hand was a big hardback book he had stumbled upon that dealt with the life of the so-called Honoré de Veil, who was said to be the very first Opter, someone who had used a number of aliases, alter egos, even doppelgängers, the most ludicrous of which was by the name of Arthur Grimwade. It seemed hardly the gold standard of an alias, sounding to Jack very much contrived, almost a clunky memory of old children’s TV in the 1950s. Or a member of Dad’s Army. But possibly a name ideal for being hidden in plain sight.
Jack thumbed through the book that was heavier to handle than his familiar Anne, the latter now merely a reflection in one of his Dalena mirrors, a description which was a euphemism for her transubstantiation into stuff other than flesh, a sort of blacksmithery that Jack claimed was not black at all. Glassmaking with flat shiny bubbles. White magic, at most. Such mirror devices indeed outshone themselves and helped the few Opters worldwide with the descrying of ghosts — a means of reflection far more efficient and respectable and shinier than the more traditional crystal balls. Yet, the big book did not weigh as much as it otherwise seemed heavy. It obviously was the property of a poltergeist, for easier lightweight throwing about the room to scare residents of the house opted. The final paragraph left the best for last.
Jack turned to the end of the book where such a paragraph would reside. And it was where, in fact, he read about the circumstances of Grimwade’s folly being crystallised. The ridiculous revelation that the real person was Grimwade and de Veil the alias. Jack thought back to the old days of children’s black and white TV. Who then was who, and what then was what? In his pale-faced panic, he recognised Anne’s gentle reflective hand comfortingly entering his own hand, but with simultaneous gruff and grating whispers in his ears instead of the customary sweet nothings he had expected. Alchemy with only dead clay to turn into the potential of dross. The whispers hinted of Red Indian rights, and black masks around scarred eyes. With what damned smithery was he smitten?
***
OPTIONAL FEET
Anne Shona Stanley was written upon her birth certificate but her friends were more familiar with a nom de plume that followed her like a tiny pet dog on a lead. Its yapping was her signature tune as well as an unavoidable avatar clinging to her like a veil of afterthought, the latter even seeming to outdo the prominent elbow shapes of her body’s real shadow.
Anne had tiny feet but relatively large hands, and she often opted to overbalance rather than stare anyone in the face, a means to avoid small talk as well as any interactions with fate itself. Acting giddy, never to engage except in what she called her Dalena mirror, its reflective surface comprising an inner silvery base that managed to conceal any blemishes that her complexion might otherwise bear. But what of the barely healed scars and the near namesake scares exhibited as facial creases of which her frown had been the only example of indelible carbon paper at the once sweet level of flesh? In my lady’s chamber, a loose meander, upstairs and downstairs, a cooper’s barrel purpose-built as an easement for any bodily accidents of overflow, even of night soil. Thoughts that raced to reach their meaning, before anyone else did.
“Who go there?” she suddenly blurted out, having sensed a shadowy third as a new presence, and her own thoughts having returned like a homing pigeon to her mind.
“Bless yer, Sister”, said Honoré de Veil in a wounded tone, this being the one occasion he accosted her in the narrow urban street between two identically consecrated and constructed churches.
To which church he belonged was identified, in a sacred whiteness, by the dangly bow-tied ribbon he bore around his neck instead of a circular collar that would have engulfed the whole of Anne’s dog’s nominal body let alone just its neck. In fact, de Veil’s ribbon seemed more like a frayed plume than a man-made fabric. A fraying that mimicked the feather of a large bird instead of the sole token of his holy status. The church that was not his own church comprised a company of holy men who bore circular collars instead of frayed ribbons, so Anne knew straightaway the sect of the church that was de Veil’s church, but which church was on which side of the street she had forgotten. And, if the truth were known, so had de Veil! Even the collars got muddled, in the aftermath.
So, Anne was confused about the church for which she should opt in order to seek sanctuary in it from de Veil. As he continued to dog her up and down the single pavement that the whole street’s width had now almost become. Nothing to choose between apparently identical shoes for any tiny entity witnessing such manoeuvres from way down at the street’s own level of the humans’ feet. One figure shapestalkng, the other not. Outshadowed by widening white wings shifting stork-wise far above — creating darkness, despite their intrinsic colour. Poe or Hugo, eat your hearts out. However sharp your respective elbows are.
And there is the sound of two churches pealing their bells, a feat of outbidding each other as if they comprised all things tubular ever used in centuries of symphonics — fierce rivals to each other in the granting of sanctuary to any character whose unveiled naming might be better casked within a vintage wine of words than a barrel of laughs as a case of socks-off.
Whichever of the two aspiring steeples is opted for from either side of the ever-narrowed street that will make them one. Feet into inches.
***
FLETCHER DARLING
Anne worked at the David Livingstone Hospital where she was in charge of the arrows doctors pulled out of dead bodies and then it was down to her to cleanly dispose of them. She laughed out loud at herself. The thought that she was a reverse fletcher was one that occurred to her, a thought more suitable for the quiet thinking she preferred when working from home via zoom. Her on-line avatar or password was, well, it has been told already above; it was the whimsical, even affectionate, title of a book that Honoré de Veil wrote over a century ago, in the mode of the Prophets of the Old Testament.
It was ‘Dalena Fletcher’, not ‘Fletcher Darling’, though, on further study. Also, not African arrows, by the way, but Red Indian ones. And, what is more, Anne was not the Ghost Opter as many had assumed her to be; it was always a ghost itself who was the Opter, indeed the latest one that had chosen Anne as its familiar, a sort of reverse exorcist, as well as effective de-fletcher for tiny thin vampire stakes. ‘Save our souls’, the Ghost Opter had imparted by an even more tenuous means than the mirror worlds of modern screens. Speaking what sounded to be foreign words after saying ‘save’ the second time: ‘eloy eloy llama sabacktarmy’. A chilver had been a female lamb, so perhaps it was ‘lamba’ instead of ‘llama’. A holycopter with its namesake illusion of spinning blades instead of what gets you through light fastest.
When Anne was recalled to the hospital, she was most disturbed by the hubbub of noise and ached for a return to working from home. All those faces to meet, all those bad breaths to breathe in secondhand. No longer in her earlier rôle, she was given a position as a motherly midwife, midway between checking the baby was either glans or glut and actually wet-nursing these babies after most of their mothers had passed over whence they had come. The babies were mainly dull. But one was so pale faced it shone brightly. With tears in her eyes, she christened it ‘Jack’, after checking his quiver.
The ghosts swept round to thank her as the chosen one, but no sound — not even laughter out loud — could they emit for human ears to hear. So they opted for a default of haunted holy silence forevermore, merely pleased with just working from whatever invisible shapes they called their homes. Well, at least until Jack grew up full-fledged.
He had seen and heard the ghosts clearly from the very start.
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