THE OVERNATURAL
This being a far cry from the supernatural, he guessed. He wrung his hands together as if they competed in squashing each other flat.
AS His Own Alias — to be known as Ashoa forevermore with this name’s initial hyperlink thus represented by its imposed italics — peered at the row of yet uncounted salt-cellars lined up in the engine room of a structure that, he believed, because he had been brought here amid a cascade of blinds, was either a ship in a derelict dock or a static factory at the edge of dystopia. Except, his eyes now unshuttered, he could see that one of the salt-cellars had been replaced by a single can of Brasso polish. How many cellars make an engine room this deep, he puckishly asked himself, while ignoring the conundrum that he had been set by persons unknown. He liked jokes as a form of calm therapy, the sillier the better.
Jack Vance, a science fiction writer of the 20th century, had owned the official Eyes of the Overworld, when the Dying Earth itself was next to finally over with.
The sun had blinded itself. And Ashoa believed in Vance as a sort of deified being to whom he could pray for deliverance from any ‘overnatural’ phenomena that might turn plug ugly after being recruited to Ghost-hunt as a sort of catalyst for optimisation of any spirits that were usually more amenable than ugly. But when they seemed on some tipping-point towards the latter negative, as indicated by the OCD-shattering insertion of something out of sane symmetry such as the Brasso can, he tried to summon Vance’s Servants as competing spirits under the auspices of a dead author — no stronger support could be imaginable during the quandaries of a potentially failed optimisation. And so he did. And so the summoned one did come.
A double bass voice struggled frighteningly into being from behind the engine’s pipe work, one with ominous foreboding, but all it finally managed to say with a sense of ridiculous gravity was: ‘Opt for the odd one out.’
Ashoa thanked his lucky stars. As Above, So Below. And he laughed out loud as he carefully removed the chosen one from the domino rally line-up and forthwith polished it off as an integral item by means of his own brute force. And thus this latest mission was hopefully successful. At least it was well and truly over.
***
RAMPANT
Ashoa eventually learnt he was not an alias of the Ghost Opter calling himself Jack, but more in the situation of acting as the alias of a woman called Shona. But this was only the case because someone else thus wrote it down here — an uncertain figure with a quill pen that presided over events and recorded them in this way, but with due regard to the uncertainty of the events themselves and whoever on earth wrote them down on coarse album paper.
This was a question of the nature of ‘over’ as an ability to be on top of a job to be done, and this ability became autonomously exponential as a rampant covering. Small objects, each a minimal close-up by a form of digital photography with its own form of blinking more than once to give a tiny video of itself. Every act of crystallisation was an over-naturalisation by revision of what had gone before. For example, Ashoa, in his heart, knew that the line of single objects in the engine room was almost entirely made up of Brasso cans not salt-cellars, with only one salt-cellar to break the symmetry. The latter object being the glitch he was meant to snitch, not the other way about. So who had got it wrong? Who or what was more rampant with its eyes of the overworld than anyone or anything else? More spreadable? More pervasive from on high? More unterrestrial with each movement of its limbs? Photos are said, these days, to capture rather than take. But whatever else is trapped at the same time was only worth guesswork. Prana was a code word for a binding ingredient in esoteric yoga.
Ashoa felt himself to be more adhesive than free wheeling. And Shona spoke to him from hidden corners of broken brakes and shattered gearboxes. And those responsible for sifting these words could only work on the assumption of trust that over would never be over. Over and over again, with a hyper-reality belied by its own blurred photo of itself. As Ashoa peered at the fuzzy image of a couple from Victorian times, judging by the date written in ink on the photo’s blotted back. A black and white snapshot that bore stickily its now dislodged corners from when it was ripped from the album where it had been glued over a smaller photo of seemingly the same couple in quite a different pose. This time, more carefully, he prised the second photo from its own corners and read the ink on its back showing the names Jack and Anne. And, what was this? — in uncertain pencil with a question mark was the name Shona. So, Ashoa looked more closely at the ancient image on the front. But neither top or bottom of the photo seemed respectively over or under! The couple were hanging upside down together, as Ashoa pored over it and deciphered hidden details in it that might or might not be corners of his own face. So, he tried to sprinkle himself across the old grubby surface rather than slowly tipping over it whatever came from within the short-lived and slow-motion mantrap of these very words.
***
THE EKER-OUT
The Ghost Hunter has ‘Truth’ in its very letters of engagement, his services stretching from Llanelli to Walton-on-the-Naze. The establishing of his real identity became as scattershot as Dabbling with Diabelli. An Argue of Aliases was, we’re told, the correct collective noun to use. His methods of amenable harvesting of ghosts — rather than the dead exorcising of them — derived not from the Supernatural but from his belief in what he tentatively called the Overnatural. No clever-clever word tricks here. This is as it is. Simple as pie.
But, just as an experiment, let’s opt for a moment of pretence — a moment of optimising Ghosttruths towards a lubrication for the often slanted wheels in story-telling with turning-points upon serial tipping-points, thus revealing further Truths as enmeshed by a skein of choice that Fate seeps out to us day by day. Destiny with its slow gift of some slack. A determination of probabilities as an Eker-out of Free Will. And Jack the Hunter, alias Shona or Ashoa, aka AKA, never allowed himself to feel brassed or even browned off. He took his tasks seriously, never hiding, in hindsight, the Truth of dead-ends as a means to polish off any memories of the difficult pathways to reach such ends in the first place. He merely threw a pinch of salt back over his left shoulder into the Devil’s eye, and continued on his way beyond the end of each dead-end. As we all did, too. Still do.
***
THE PURFLING
The edges of guitars do not necessarily make for edgy music. Even one of Segovia’s softest melodies was played on an instrument of high purfling. While the most strident of Led Zeppelin outputs were visibly frayed or desiccated along each and every contour of the curves they vigorously strummed with every high pitched rock. Even Prince had hardened blades in his regency period before asking his purple reign to start.
Violins, violas and cellos, too, in every string quartet possessed variable hard-endings, some of these instruments, having been mashed by mindless entropy, just returned from the repair shop, some others, however, worshipped for their very crumbling of antiquity in each belt and brace giving pungency to the seasoned menu of music. It was the sound quality that counted. And what did purfling really mean for the spirits let loose in the guise of music? Dalena and Anne played duets on various string instruments and they feared the taut guts were rope that laid flabby under their fingernails or their bows, but the notes played somehow remained precisely ear-tingling. Pizzicato purfling of the highest order, whatever the associated nightmares the women underwent while performing to the masked audiences during Covid.
Saltings represent the generic name for various Essex marshes, but salting can also be a method of preservation for food. Dalena insisted that music was the food of love, and thus she kept piles of salt beside them on the stage, and, once, during a transcription for violin and cello of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, she could be seen sprinkling it in the air after each visitation by the gods above as tempted into ghostly existence by every swell and culmination of the music. She needed to maintain this unique perfect moment of music forever, she thought, and Anne, covered in white grains, played on obliviously but wondering why she ever thought Dalena could ever be a reasonable partner in music’s motivation beyond its own mutation. The ghosts were newly serrated, too, and helped bolster the sparse audience with a hard-cornered presence. Wearing masks or not. They just stared up with wide-eyed faces, hooping semi-silently to the now sharpened flats. Many unique perfect moments, not just the usual singularity, in unfolding threats of merging with the the serialist once-in-a- lifetime ‘perfect storms’ that arrived edge to edge. Till the frets of time fled up the women’s arms from the bending bows or fraught fingernails dead straight into the very unfurling of their sudden harp-like wings, denoted, as it were, to accept the nearest Repair Shop since the actual stairway to heaven itself softened short of where their toes could pluck. Desiccated coconut instead of salt. The onset of fully purflèd rain thankfully making it all seem more like unrepair than otherwise. An easement of relief at there being no punch-line climax at all. Perhaps not even a sodden coda.
***
‘I’M NOT TRYING TO BE AWKWARD’
It was a day of dull weather. Jack aka Aka as his latest Alias had not heard the above homily said before as a default refrain, until he heard a stranger in town — someone with whom, while sitting next to him on a park bench, he made small talk — yes, he heard repeated the same homily again and again. She was an elderly lady who was seemingly excusing her own controversial statements of belief with just such a homely homily disguised as a reflex of speech. It is perhaps laughably true to say that Jack gawped if not gawked at her brass neck, but decided it was not worth his latest alias arguing with each reactionary viewpoint that came out of this lady’s mouth; he humoured her, instead, as he would have done to any recalcitrant ghosts during the course of his business as an Over-Opter of such spectral apparitions on earth and the need to harness them for good or ill.
He did, however, allow his face to gurn slightly, a quasi mode of cringing from within, as he nodded at her constant barrage of contentions about life and the people who lived it. With each backward nod of her own head punctuated by a slightly different rhythm of ‘I’m not trying to be awkward’. But awkward she was, as if she knew who Jack was, and was trying to double-bluff what spirit lurked within her as simply her outer self. Her skin-surface personality merely a veil over what she chose to remain within. Something quite different lurking beyond the insides of any bony insulations of her aging shell, something not awkward at all. Something unnatural she naturally harboured. A sanctuary vaster than Notre Dame as visualised by the wreck that visualised it.
From over the town, Jack heard the distant tolling of a pair of bells he had never heard before, despite having visited the place several times in the past. He discerned an awkward cracked tone amidst the finer honed ingredients of the truer one that Jack had once memorised in a list from a bell’s over to its under: 1. yoke or headstock, 2. canons, 3. crown, 4. shoulder, 5. waist, 6. sound bow, 7. lip, 8. mouth, 9. clapper, 10. bead line.
The poor lady seemed stuck at stage no. 10, judging by the now scrawny cage he saw beside him on the park bench. A mere mode of almost Jack, whilst the lady seemed now to be made much smaller and less lumpy and more scarred than anything he visualised his own body to be. He wondered who was trying be less awkward and who outshone whom on a whim in such dingy weather. The bells had ceased before one of them had evidently stopped trying altogether.
***
ANABASIS (THE TEMPERING)
Pains never go away. Jack the so-called Over-Hunter aka AKA as his latest AliAs thought it more as if he were tampering with what should be left untouched! Let sleeping ghosts lie, as an intrinsic truth to embrace. He had indeed lived through many missions of harnessing rather than hindering these ghosts, and today he was to tie up all the loose ends as a legacy of optimisation by judicious opting. Tempering, in essence, the bitter antagonisms he had engendered from each campaign as well as the more sceptical of friends and the now more friendly of foes, the latter having watched the eventual result of his endeavours. He started wrapping from the middle outwards. As you do.
Over and over with layers of salted flesh, and polished slivers of precious metals as foils for fools. All foes and friends, by now, having been assuaged. Between each layer the aliases he had known, some that shone and others that were dull. As he reached the exterior of the bundle of achievements, he used more jagged pieces, including broken mirrors, all of which were soft-packed, for fear of jabs, by choicely skinned faces of once fleshy ghosts before their scars had been wished away. And he watched as he found his fingers with their own finishing touches. Tamping down rogue corners. Tipping points with blunt instruments. Topping and tailing straggles of loose material with neat scissory snips. Eventually a smoothed off morass of compaction now outshone by his own future sense of overtly never-over duties. A collusion of compunction with us all, alongside recurrently reopened cases of ghosts to avert towards better lives — a marching army of attention-rapping wraiths yet to be unwrapped as gifts for us all at Christmas. Not a single exorcism to sort cellars from haunted attics. All done without tantrum or ill temper. Opting for dulling the pains rather than outshining them. Untold pains yet to be told, never over-topped but detailed within.
***
‘JACK VANCE LOVED CLASSICAL MUSIC’
…on the bridge with a natterjack toad beneath it. The questionable words themselves were scrawled in red paint along the side of this carefully constructed bridge that spanned nowhere to nowhere. No way were the words perpetrated by a true artist, the scrawl, unlike any iteration of Banksy, seeming in fact to be a spontaneity that the scrawler thought important to say, and to say very quickly before he or she was caught saying it with such indelible methods — indelible short of demolishing the bridge itself. The paint itself was surely thought to be as indelible as the thought it expressed.
JV was, of course, a writer of Science Fiction and had no connection with our man also called Jack, nor with any of the aliases involved as doppelgängers’ eyes that the latter Jack employed as a means to view the dying earth from his vantage point directly above even the overworld itself.
The strangest eventuality evolving from over-thinking the above scenario was the silence that seemed embedded beyond the ramparted root of each bridge end. In the mind’s eye, at least, there could be envisaged the sound of the opening notes of Hector Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’, but not a single ‘symphonie fantastique’ in sight, let alone a post-nativity scene even to begin to believe in. But Jack felt as if he were the wandering hero represented by the viola as soloist within the overall music, in melancholic adventures quite beyond the scope of Lord Byron. Though, thinking about it, the latter poet did create the rarely read but astonishingly apocalyptic poem entitled ‘Darkness’. Even Wagner had his Gollum moments. So maybe, just maybe… we are each to be our own Childe Harold.
Space Opera itself often had a troll or two in the increasing emptiness between overture and overwith.
The question remains, though — what is scrawled on the other side of the bridge? And how do we get there to see it?
***
OVERWRITTEN
Blackstream, jocular Jack climbed the bridge at its middle instead of crossing over it from one of its ends. The sun was nearly out, the sky was in an awkward mode, and the weather changed as fast as anyone’s mind. Backsteam, a hiss of sibilant mud either from river bed or a gap in the bridge wall, not sure which direction whence it came and whereto it went, bypassing his upper toes. He had somehow been thrust on his back legs against the surly brick, some crumbling like salt and sand mixed down his calves. Midriver, blackstream now a wider rush, he grabbed at a useless reed to steady his floating off into the current like a pooh stick below the shadowy arch where the nattering toad squatted eyeing him quizzically with words of fee fi fo fum. Jacked-up toes now desperate thumbs against the roughness of it all. Jocular no more. His dreams no longer underwritten by the insurance of what or whom? Overtaken by events, conscripted out of existence, before his story ended.
As an editable aside, a nemotode squirmed in a riparian oubliette nearby, watchful if not fully alert, making an impossible stand of overlooking events from low down on the riverside’s eroding bank. There is no role for it to play, so a miracle if this bit of text is left as any legacy of narration at all.
Meanwhile, Anne, Dalena and Shona, now no longer grown up even as Alcott’s child women, leant, gossiping and giggling, over the bridge’s sigh, dropping lolly sticks into the swollen facials below, as broken by other reflections from behind them, smoothly dark but with bits missing. Their giggles became gurgles — then stopped intestinally. Which girl’s lolly stick floated furthest only the knitjack’s natter knows.
