But when, on that retrospectively fateful weekend, he brought a young lady to visit, one with a dagger-fish brooch on the left lapel of her cavalry-twill costume top - well, I would have needed to resort to the direst vocabulary to warn them both off.

I was indeed sure there would be no safety in numbers. I wanted to continue my life in the magic realism of solitude--and, so, it would be necessary for me to get in my tantrum of making the pair of them unwelcome before they had the chance to sneer at the shortcomings of my abilities as a host.

It is difficult to disentangle my reasoning on such an occasion, as the words slide too easily from my memory, staining the screen of my mind's eye with a pattern of meaning comprehensible only to Hottentots; I even wonder whether I’m actually capable of perpetrating the Queen's English, let alone that alien dialect which the Old Spaceships once crated to Earth in the beaks of insane, if articulate, chickens.

Back to fundamentals.

I opened the front door upon hearing the knock, thus allowing dustmotes and sunlit air to swirl past me. He had warned that he might be coming for a long weekend, if time permitted. There, though, with him, was this female with goggle eyes, both feet planted on the balding doormat. She peered over my shoulder into the well of the hall.

''Yes?'' I scowled. Well, I think that I scowled, since only in stories can a narrator really see through the eyes of others. I had already decided to treat them both as strangers--that was at least what my son deserved by bringing someone I couldn't trust at first sight.

"Hello, Dad ... can I introduce Felicia Kelp?" He did not spell out the name so, even now, I’m unsure as to whether even the Hottentots would be able to get their tongues round what I visualised as the correct words.

I glanced into the sky blue yonder and caught the fleeting sparkle of a star-hopper slowing down for Heathrow . . . or, at that hour, it may even have been Gatwick. Light travel (or travelling light as the popular song of the time put it was so inconsistent. Tachyons had not really bottomed out until AJ Sylvester later dissected one under a microscopic microscope, using a near endless array of diminishing pulleys to guide a scalpel manufactured from one highly sharpened molecule.

Just as I was about to answer as unwelcomingly as possible, I heard a furor from the chicken run in the back garden. The squawking and screeching was fit to raise the Devil on his hindmost. Something had disturbed the creatures' equilibrium. Either too much grit in the meal or the barely perceptible shift of the Earth off its axial cord, which tended to happen nowadays, had gone to their coxcombed heads. Luckily, the moon no longer toppled into the sea, as it did back in the more poetic days of pre-reality--only to be put back in the sky by everybody's image of a God with flowing white beard, trident and sharkbone corsets.

Without a further word (saying nothing was indeed more unwelcoming than pointedly expressing my grievance in stronger language), I showed them into the parlour. There was a put-you-up in there, just big enough for two thin ones, I indicated. I saw Felicity Kell (or whatever her Christforsaken name was) studying the framed photographs on the mantelpiece. One was of me and my late wife.

"Mr. Lewis, you sure looked young in the past." That was no way to inveigle me into accepting her as a complete stranger no longer (or even an incomplete one). I could imagine, indeed, nobody stranger. Before I could protest, my so-called son intervened.

"What's wrong with my own bedroom, Dad? Hasn't it still got hot and cold running water?" He motioned as if to take their suitcases to that very room.

Whether it was the deep rumbling of the starhopper landing across the other side of London, he did not seem to hear my reply:

''You're not taking any see-through floosies up there, Johnny me lad. Your dead mother would turn over in her bed."

He shrugged. He knew I had spoken something, since I had watched his eyes trying to follow my lips. For a man, his eyes were very widely set apart. In his heart, he must have been aware of my misgivings.

"We'll go and feed the poultry for you, Dad." He took his lady friend by the arm (both of which were extremely short for her body, I noticed) and directed her towards the front door, via the parlour door .

"Done it already," I said, pointing to the carriage clock which was between the photographs like a sentry of old. The imperceptible swing of its pendulum proved that the ancient maxim of time never standing still was worthy, at least, of scrutiny by that breed of scientists even now living in the think-tanks of old Ministry of Defence establishments dotted along the eroding coasts of downtown Great Britain.

The lady, who had evidently stolen my son's heart, made herself at home. She spread her legs in an ungainly fashion as she settled down in what used to be my wife's wicker basket, allowing me to see as much as the stocking-tops, but no further. My son smiled at my blushes, if blush I did.

In an attempt to bring matters to an even keel, he started on one of his long boring conversation-pieces about the ancient research into how fish think, make music. Highfaluting college talk, I called it. He needed his brain flushed out. The lady said nothing, while tugging at the harness of her bodice and wriggling to remove her most sensitive areas from the basket's various discomfort points. Then, without prior warning, the shrill alarm in the carriage clock blurted out.

"Time to fill the house!" I shouted, scorching for the tap by the open radiator.

I was just in time. The lighter-than-air water gradually filled the parlour, before our lungs could burst from our mouths like punctured balloons. The water was lukewarm in view of the season. It was strange what routines post-reality brought along in its wake.

That's the way the world is, these days. At least, the three of us stopped the inane chatter. Creatures under water can only open and shut their mouths in the arcane rhythm of misspent speech. When words are empty, lip-reading is worth no more than braille to those now limbless coffins of flesh which were once called human beings kept locked up in disused nuclear shelters, as they are--for their own good, let me add.

My eyes slid round to my temples, slugs that merely looked like the marbles children used to play with. Despite this, I could still discern my son's grinning from side to side, as I think he knew I knew he probably hated the lady (whatever her name) and it was only a matter of time before he unscrewed the stopcock of the sewage outlet under the television set. But would it be wide enough?

The sun shafted through the parlour window and milled with the multi-coloured plankton that swirled from the secret coral seas beyond the stocking-tops.

I would have told my son not to darken my door again, if I hadn't first fallen asleep and dreamed of drowning.

You Walk The Pages - Mark Valentine.

2012-01-20T15:41:00.001Z

One of horror's favourite archetypes is the highly intelligent, articulate and cultured homicidal psychopath, yet most real acts of evil are committed for petty reasons, by people who are a little insecure and not very bright. Real characters with these properties are not popular because they are less engaging and more annoying, yet Mr. Valentine has created one we can absolutely enjoy spending time with. It's a first person narration from someone with little literary skill, but the character voice is consistent and engaging, and the slow drip feed of growing terrors is nastily effective.

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It's called "You Walk the Pages", and was written by Mark Valentine, a writer I only know by name. Also quite short, this story is narrated by a clearly insane man who wishes to relate how he used the services of a gift website called youwalkthepages.com to get back at his enemies. The site -- which, if some version doesn't actually exist now, certainly will soon -- takes classic literature and replaces the names of the heroes with the names of whoever you want to give the gift to. So if someone wanted to get me a copy of Ulysses wherein I can read things like "Mr. Bill R. ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls", that's how you'd go about it. But our narrator has the idea to place his enemies in the position of victims in horror stories. The resulting private volume is Valentine's horror anthology. And I know what you're probably thinking about where this one's heading, but I'll go ahead and spoil it, sort of, by pointing out that no, these enemies do not suddenly drop dead. This is because our narrator is insane. He's delusional. He's never not those things, and the story doesn't try to fool us into thinking that what he believes might be true but might not be true -- it pretty obviously isn't, and the horror of "You Walk the Pages" is the horror of the narrator's madness. On this level, it is entirely successful. When describing one of his "enemies", an old man who takes up too much space at the library table, our narrator says: "I want to sit there and make notes, I only have a standard size notebook, I do not need much space, but it is all I can do to get a little patch of the desk because of all the space he has got with his papers. He does not even look up, he does not give any sign that he sees you, or that you might want some space as well, you might as well not be there. If he saw what books I was looking at and what i was writing in my book he might take a different attitude I believe." I also like the approach to the anthology idea here. While O'Driscoll's approach is as delightfull literal as you might expect when hearing the idea for The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, and Hughes's approach is to sort of not approach it at all, Valentine imagines something entirely new and unique and on point. Well done.

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The title of this excellent story refers to an internet service which allows you to replace the name of a principal character from a famous book with your own, or that of a friend or family member- or perhaps, of someone you might consider to be your enemy. This captures the imagination of Mark Valentine’s colorful, obsessive and fastidious writer-narrator. ‘One day I sat in my room wondering what to think about, what should engage a man who is a thinker and a dreamer, who is able to have visions like I am.’ I won’t say more but that the narrator incorporates ideas concerning the magical properties of the Seven Wonders of the World into his narrative to great and chilling effect.

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“You Walk the Pages” by Mark Valentine deals with a similarly autistic-seeming individual who uses horror stories as a way of getting back at people who offend him, like the lady in the chip shop, by substituting their names for the characters in the stories and making them suffer the same fate, or worse. It is the hilariously deadpan first person narrator that made the story work so well.

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Horror Planet - S. D. Tullis

2012-01-20T15:32:00.000Z

It is almost impossible to pick and choose what should be lifted from the text and quoted as I would have to retype the entire story here. I suggest you pick up a copy of this anthology and read everything in it including this story and then you will see what I mean. But I will quote one observation here: ‘But he knew, or at least guessed- which for him was as good as knowing- that it was how the mechanics of dream operated: constructing through an unfathomable process a piecemeal assemblage of dream-motifs, a willy-nilly patchwork culled from first- and second hand experience, overactive imagination, and even smuggling them in from already dreamed landscapes of the unreal.’ This is a guy meets girl story. Robert falls in love with Charlotte. I am still not giving too much away to say that we end up in space, hurtling towards the sun. There is a role to play for a horror anthology. I’m just going to quote one more paragraph here. No I’d better not. I want to though. I must resist. Read the story.

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"...its acid trip condensed narrative bringing to mind similar voyages by J.G. Ballard and Malzberg." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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S.D. Tullis’s “Horror Planet” consists of a deconstructed narrative that flits between scraps of seemingly random thought, depicting, in a few short pages, a kind of planetary collapse. I loved the frantic pace of this story.

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The Writer - Clayton Stealback

2012-01-20T15:23:00.001Z

Some beautifully written passages and nice touches of domestic detail make this a convincing little tale. It's a study of obsession, sliding into psychosis, all undermined by a magnificently unreliable narrator.

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"It is a cracker though. Really, it is."

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"...with the suggestion of somnething more sinister and conceptually daring in the background." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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For several weeks Steven has been wrestling with a short story he wants to submit to a horror anthology called Dark Heights. He just can’t seem to finish his story, he constantly redrafts, reedits, rewrites, changing paragraphs around, polishing sentences- the story is going nowhere and it is driving him crazy. His wife Alice is getting fed up with the routine. Every night when Steven crawls up into his attic to hack away at his story, she sits alone on the sofa downstairs, nodding off to the news of financial collapse on TV. Strange things begin to happen. They must not be revealed here, though they involve elements of Steven’s narrative bleeding into the reality of the story. There are some great one liners of internal rationalizing here, and I was smiling to myself all the way through this story. It was genuinely scary as well. I was reminded somehow of Ash from the Evil Dead films, suddenly confronting surreal and horrific forces. But is it real? Are the manifestations a result of Steven’s imagination? You have to read the story to find out.

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This is one of those stories that keeps you guessing right up to the end. The worlds of fiction and reality start to meld into each other as author Steve struggles to finish writing a short story. This is a very good story. That manages to be a fresh take on this sort of tale.

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In several of the stories, the process of writing itself is evoked in all its arduousness – the anxiety, the growing sense of purposelessness and the sheer bloody-minded determination to define the indefinable, half aware that, in the very act of creating, the author destroys the very thing he is trying to perfect, the beauty of the idea submitted to the harsh and sometimes ugly reality of ink and paper. Oh the horror! “The Writer” by Clayton Steelback draws on this creative struggle. The story gradually assumes an uncomfortable presence in the writer’s life, becoming ever more concrete until an evil character breaks through into real life. The horror of nightmares becoming flesh crops up in several of the stories. As authors perhaps we are more than usually susceptible to this illusion or delusion, perhaps because we are always striving to model characters from real life. I’m surely not the only author to feel confused as to whether a memory of an incident is from real-life or one I imagined for some self-created literary world. Perhaps it’s the first sign of madness. [...] In other stories plants poison or become symbols of annihilation as in “Flowers of the Sea”. In “The Writer”, a vase is transformed into a multi-stemmed plant that scatters its spores and invokes a state of madness.

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The Pearl and the Boil - Rosanne Rabinowitz

2012-01-20T15:09:00.000Z

In adolescence, we form very strong attachments to music, films or books that seem to speak to us. Such things can stick with us for life, and a rediscovery in middle age can be as evocative of youth as photographs or diaries. This story is about that rediscovery, about regret and missed opportunities. Ms. Rabinowitz writes in a subtle impressionistic style that perfectly complements the subject matter.

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Flying back from Oxford to New Jersey, Cora joins her sister Julie in helping their parents relocate to a new home. When Cora stumbles upon an undiscovered, unopened letter addressed to her childhood self, she is flooded with memories and sensations concerning a collection of stories called The Scarlet Thread and the Amber Road. The letter it turns out, is a response to a note which Cora has left in the very book and returned to the library – almost like a message in a bottle. The message could be understood as Cora’s childhood self longing to share her experience of the stories with a kindred spirit. The story shifts from the first to the third person, scenes from her adult self are juxtaposed with moments from her childhood, the scenes overlapping with fragments vividly described from the collection of stories: A girl enters a house that is filled with sky, another girl is trapped in a bottle, a flower mysteriously starts to play music only to devour the little girl who has nurtured it to bloom, statues come to life during a moment of passion, cities exist where colors are banned, a train is filled with distorted bodies. There is a rich pattern of images and colors and sensations in this story.

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Rosanne Rabinowitz’s finely detailed study of a woman’s search for a book she once picked up in the school library acknowledges the power of books as totems, somehow focusing a person’s entire worldview. The story within this story develops the idea of feelings or ideas transforming people’s lives –either for the better – a pearl, or for the worse – a boil. The story’s psychological depth allows the reader to appreciate the symbolic power of the book. A girl and boy encountered in a field of flowers, provides a sort of Arcadian vision for the story’s protagonist, towards which she strives. Flowers and plants are symbols of love but, later, in a different story within the story, another plant engulfs and digests the girl who tends it.

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"There's an element of something almost fable like about this story, with the events described entirely empirical on the surface, but beneath that the hint of fact and fiction entangling in the manner of sympathetic magic." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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"And the warmth and final joy of "The Pearl and the Boil"?"

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The American Club, - Christopher Morris

2012-01-20T14:57:00.000Z

A story with layers of meaning, it leaves the reader with many questions unanswered, but that's fine by me. Elements of Jeckyll and Hyde, and The Spiderwick Chronicles

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When Daniel Polzer receives a phone call informing him that his father is dying in a hospital in Ockham, Wisconsin, he is forced to abandon his school work during finals week and rush to his bedside. His father Edgar Polzer is the victim of an anonymous hit and run accident. As Daniel sits vigil at his bedside with his sister Sarah who has also returned home, we discover that Edgar has been displaying increasingly strange and paranoid behavior, particularly just prior to his accident. He fears the family home is haunted, he believes that he is being watched and followed. Without giving any more away, the story centers around a Faustian collection of tales, one of which has been penned by Daniel’s father. You have to read this gripping tale to find out the significance of the title. The setting in Wisconsin, and certain elements of the story reminded me at times of something we might encounter in a tale penned by Peter Straub, but Christopher Morris’s voice is his own, and the title and its significance is incorporated into the tale in an interesting way. The story made me want to turn the pages to discover what was going to happen next.

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“The American Club” by Christopher Morris follows a young man named Daniel who discovers that his eccentric writer of a father is in a coma following a car accident. Daniel finds a letter from his dad instructing him that in the event of his death, he should to burn all his fiction, the majority of which is unpublished. This is a top class mystery that unravels with perfect pace and likeable voice, and has a tense finale that leaves an unsettling aftertaste.

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The American Club by Christopher Morris is a griping dark story which sees a son dicover his father’s hidden talent for writing and the dark secret behind that talent.

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The American Club by Christopher Morris is a brilliant tale, Daniel Polzer is a student sitting his final exams, but when he hears that his father has been put in hospital after a hit and run accident, he has to rush home. When he gets there he discovers that his father has been acting odd, and it all seems to centre around a collection of tales. A highly enjoyable read.

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“The American Club” also features a doppelganger, of sorts. The narrator delves into the enigma of his dying father’s writing but uncovers an unpalatable explanation for his father’s refusal to publish his work. This is an intense study of the subconscious. A ruined building with its decaying staircases and abandoned cellars acts as a metaphor for the writer’s twisted imagination and reflects an over-arching theme of this collection – the horror of the literary imagination. As writers in search of horror we become subjects of our own literary endeavours. What could be worse? The author, Christopher Morris, is astute enough to leave the ending insubstantial, to give the reader the merest hint of the dark truth.
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Residua - David Mathew

2012-01-20T14:47:00.000Z

A lovely and gradual unfolding of the psychological complexity of an apparently simple, if unpleasant scenario. Mr. Mathew takes a not entirely original concept and moulds it into something new and unique.

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Steve Bilty is in prison, sentenced to 18 years of hard time for a crime he may or may not have committed. A prison guard, Orwenson, seems to know something about it. When Bilty comes across an Alfred Hitchcock presented anthology called Ghostly Gallery in the prison library, strange things begin to happen behind the prison walls. The enjoyment in this involving story revolves around the scenes between Bilty and the prison guard Orwenson. The dialogue between these two characters just jumps off the page. Slowly we come to realize what is haunting Bilty, and you have to read this entertaining story to find out what his crime may or may not have been, and if he is guilty or innocent. (And those Hitch anthos surely have seeped into the impressionable minds of many a young reader.)

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One of the longer tales, “Residua” by David Mathew is the intriguing story of a possibly-innocent con who becomes attached to a book called Ghostly Gallery in the prison library. He starts to encounter characters from it in real life, also baffled by the intentions of an oddly benevolent guard who seems able to read his mind. It notches up the tension and curiosity well with strong, fleshed-out characters and snappy dialogue. There’s a lot of subtle fear in this story, and when some horrible truths come to light, it pans out into an absorbing journey of damage with a cheeky punch-line.

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Residua by David Matthew, Steve Bilty is in prison, and prison guard Orwenson knows something about the crime Bilty has been charged with. When Bilty comes across a copy of and Alfred Hitchcock anthology, strange and mysterious things begin to happen. This is fun story which could easily have found a lace in Hitchcock presents antho. It will keep you guessing as to whether Bilty is innocent or guilty. Highly recommended.

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“Residua” is ostensibly a story about a prisoner who is, by all accounts, innocent of the crime of which he’s accused. The characters and setting evoke the prisoner’s world, but it’s the story’s growing sense of unease that goes beyond the setting and presents the reader with a disturbingly surreal conclusion. With its flashbacks and character transpositions, this should have been a confusing piece but it is anchored by a strong pair of central characters and worked beautifully.

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"...cleverly blurs the lines between reality and fiction,..." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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The Fifth Corner - E. Michael Lewis

2012-01-20T14:36:00.000Z

A great little supernatural tale, somewhat in the style of Ramsay Campbell with a little nod to Lovecraft. Short and pacy, with a good sense of growing menace.

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Vered Kyle, an associate professor of literature, is assembling an anthology of ghost stories for his debuting university press imprint, and he wants Roman Maddox Booth, an university alumnus and author of golden age pulpy ghost stories and revenge plots to include an unpublished tale in his anthology. This he hopes will draw some notoriety and attention to his book. Private and ascetic in life style, old and wheelchair bound, Booth now lives in an old manor house, Heatherby Estate, outside a town called Blackchurch. The ‘Fifth Corner’ it turns out, is a tale which Booth had penned upon hearing of H.P. Lovecraft’s death, a tale so terrifying that it has been sealed in an envelope and sown into the seat of one of booth’s limousines, a 1933 Rolls Royce Phantom II, in nearby Marymont: ‘a three story pseudo-gothic brick and marble edifice’ filled with other notorious cars. The only copy of the tale in existence it turns out, is to be found inside the car. Drawing on occult Lovecraftian themes, infamous and legendary Necronomicon texts, and images which reminds me of King’s Christine, and more perhaps, From A Buick 8, E. Michael Lewis has penned a straight to the gut horror story, which is very welcomed in the collection here. Scenes are genuinely well handled and gripping. Sometimes the straight, no nonsense horror story delivers what it promises, it does what it says on the box, or in this case, in the car, and this story does it well.

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The Fifth Corner by E. Michael Lewis is another dark tale which has some powerfully scary scenes as an old vehicle refuses to give up it’s secrets.

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The Fifth Corner by E. Michael Lewis, is so far the most horror story, horror story here. Looking to assemble a great anthology of horror stories, Vared Kyle wants an unpublished tale by Roman Maddox Booth. However, Booth after writing this story thought it too terrible see the light of day. It has been sealed in an envelope and stitched in to the lining of one of his limousines. This is an out and out horror story that tips its hat to both H P Lovecraft and Stephen King's Christine. A nice change of pace in he collection

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In the creepy, superbly crafted “The Fifth Corner” by E Michael Lewis, the manuscript of a terrifying ghost story ( and much more than that) lies hidden within a very sinister car.

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“The Fifth Corner” by E. Michael Lewis is a well-written story that might have made its way into any collection of horror fiction. It’s the story which stands out for me as being less concerned with the world of literature and ideas and more with the standard tropes of the horror genre: a struggle against a manifestation of evil. It kept me on the edge of my seat and turning the pages but I was aware, even as I admired its technical skill, of the extent to which its central “horror image” was familiar to me from films and stories within the genre. The protagonist, unlike many of the other characters in this collection, seems to emerge unchanged by his experience. It serves as a reminder of what it is about “horror” that the small press and particularly the slipstream is so good at subverting.

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The Rediscovery of Death - Mike O'Driscoll

2012-01-20T14:24:00.000Z

Common Myths and Misconceptions Regarding Rita Kendall - AJ Kirby

2012-01-20T13:31:00.000Z

Rita Kendall, scream queen of schlock horror films of times past, is perhaps past her prime herself, and she now spends her halcyon days languishing in front of a swimming pool with strong drink at her side. Expecting to recount juicy details of her days in the film business, and eager for an extended modicum of fame, she accepts an offer to have an in-depth piece written about her by a visiting writer in residence. Martin Smart (Smartin), the ‘writer in residence’, has been commissioned to write an in-depth piece on her by a mysterious patron, a horror aficionado, who wishes to remain anonymous and assemble a collection to be titled: The Horror of Horrors Anthology- the HOHA. In the space of the story AJ Kirby draws what feels like an effective in-depth portrait of his heroine, using flashbacks, psychological fugues, fragmentary well chosen observations- all infused with rich film imagery that increasingly draws into question Rita Kendall’s fragile mental condition.

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Common Myths and Misconceptions Regarding Rita Kendall by AJ Kirby. Is an account of past her prime horror actress Rita Kendall, who is recounting her life for a reporter commissioned to write an article for The Horror of Horrors anthology. This is a well written, story, that draws you in with some excellent use of flashback story telling.

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This is an ingenious exploration of identity, with a protagonist we empathise with from the start, even as we gradually realise how little she is in touch with reality. There is a tragic past, some things we are all actually afraid of, and a proper horror story moment.

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Werner Herzog said that the thing to be avoided at all costs, in cinematic terms, is the clichéd image, as presented through the lens of any Hollywood movie. The stories in this anthology avoid the clichés of horror, either by creating fresh sources of disturbance or by getting inside the horror image to dissect its psychological power. In “Common Myths and Misconceptions Regarding Rita Kendall”, A.J. Kirby exposes the world of an aging horror starlet whose famous scream is subjected to analysis by a bored magazine writer who thereby uncovers the star’s secret source of guilt. As Rita Kendall’s shadowy doppelganger is slowly and clumsily sleuthed out by the hack we slowly witness the pain behind the melodrama and the emptiness of the celebrity life that conceals it.

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Horror Stories FOR Boys - Rachel Kendall

2012-01-20T13:16:00.000Z

Despite a series of powerful and caustic flashbacks spurred by the discovery of an anthology in his childhood home, Gary, the story’s anguished, melancholic protagonist, reluctantly decides to make the two hundred mile drive to visit his dying father in hospital. Perhaps due to the main character’s first name, I was reminded in moments of the writing of Gary McMahon, particularly in its unflinching honest portrayals of often grim existences. Rachel Kendall’s writing voice is her own however, and the power in the story lies in the hard and bitter decisions that Gary has to make, but you have to read the tale to find out exactly what those choices are.

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In “Horror Stories for Boys” Rachel Kendall presents a powerful story of a man suffering from migraines who must visit his dying father and face an abusive past. The author managed to make me feel that bitter-sweetness of nostalgia – even though the past evoked isn’t mine – and although light on plot, this is mature and emotional writing. Of a similar calibre is “Midnight Flight” by Joel Lane about an old man losing his memory, searching for a book he recalls from childhood. Both these tales satisfy with very brittle emotions and atmopshere.

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...an excellent examination of the consequences of childhood trauma.

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Horror Stories For Boys by Rachel Kendall revisits an abusive childhood and the escape offered by a much loved book, it’s a rich and emotionally powerful story.

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Horror Stories For Boys, by Rachel Kendall, has Gary a migraine sufferer having to make a journey to visit his dying dad, a journey that throws up old memories, and decisions that Gary must make. This is a grim and melancholic story that works very well.

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“Horror Stories for Boys” by Rachel Kendall is a gloomy tale of hate and pain, featuring a man visiting his dying father and bringing back grim childhood memories.

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"The emotions are keenly felt,..." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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At the heart of this story is a rather implausible incident, but Ms Kendall writes so nicely we have to forgive her. A story firmly rooted in reality, and the banal everyday horrors of troubled families everywhere. She just pushes it a little further and skews the point of view enough to make this a compelling read.

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Rachel Kendall’s “Horror Stories For Boys” shows no restraint in revealing the brutality of an abusive father and the traumatic effects of his up-bringing on the son who returns to his childhood home to remember, with the aid of a book of horror stories, and rekindle his hatred of his father. But it’s the final scene, as he visits his dying father in hospital which carries the full sting of this powerful narrative. This is a story full of light and darkness and a terrifying realism.

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Paper Cuts - Nick Jackson

2012-01-20T12:50:00.001Z

Mr. Volpius, a writer of horror stories, is bitten one morning by a serpent coiled around the thorny stem of a rose bush in his front garden. Panicked, he quickly instructs his wife Eva to call upon a doctor, who soon turns out to be of dubious intent. The story takes off from here and revealing more would spoil this entertaining tale. As in Rhys Hughes’s previous story, some absurdist and comic elements are incorporated into the narrative to great effect. The story explores ideas concerning poetic inspiration, the solitary nature perhaps of the writer’s life and his imagination- and particularly, the role of his muse (and her infidelities, also to great and grotesque effect.) The tale moves beyond its boundaries in its final act, contrasting nicely with the well handled claustrophobic parameters in the first half of the story.

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Paper Cuts, by Nick Jackson, one morning horror writer Mr Volpis is bitten by a serpent hiding in his rose bushes. Is a fine story that mix the comedic elements of the story well with the more tenser moments.

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In this collection, the theme of circularity crops up several times. Here, a writer writes about a writer, and the words bite back. Every writer will recognise the feeling of digging as deep as you can inside yourself, laying your soul on the page and still only seeing a poor shadow of better writers' work. Sometimes your own words come back and mock you - here they do worse than that. Ironically, this is a highly original piece, and often quite beautiful, in a red, squishy and dripping sort of way.

Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will appear in the comments below.

My own views: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/

Tears of the Mutant Jesters - Rhys Hughes

2012-01-20T12:49:00.001Z

Books, in Rhys Hughes’s absurdist horror story, can be fastidious things. They can make noises in the middle of the night, they can howl and cry out in pain, they can wail and wince, they can groan and eject weird vomit, they can sob and shiver and even shift position and mess up even the most careful bibliophile’s regimented collection of books. The book in question, an anthology of one hundred surreal and fantastical horror stories, can even suffer from appendicitis! (Nearby volumes have other ailments: Athlete’s footnotes, allergic reactions to bookmarks, and my favorite, particularly relevant to anthologies: the loss of consciousness.) Such is the absurdist mode in this comic and disturbing tale, rich with anthropomorphic literary devices. The story seems to want to perhaps challenge the idea that there is no place for comedy, surrealism or satire in the weird tale of terror. It is very much welcomed here.

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Rhys Hughes’ “Tears of the Mutant Jesters” is a pleasant diversion from the more serious material involving a book with appendicitis (a vestigial echo of the time when books ate grass). A short tale, it brims with clever wordplay and wry humour.

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It’s not all darkness, there is humour, of a sort, in Rhys Hughes’ Tears Of The Mutant Jesters a typically Hughesean bizarre tale which bends, warps and twists the English language into a remarkable story about sick books.

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Next up is a humorous tale by Rhys Hughes, where an avid book collector has to deal witrh a book that is suffering from appendicitis, yes Mr Hughes loves a pun, and story is filled with puns. It is a lightweight tale that after three very heavy and serious tales brought a nice bit of light relief to the collection

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One of the contemporary horror writers whose name O'Driscoll drops is Rhys Hughes, and Hughes just happens to have his own story in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies. It's a short one, six pages, called "Tears of the Mutant Jesters", and while laziness played a role, I did choose two very short stories to follow up O'Driscoll's long-ish (not very, though) story because I wondered how the premise inherent to the whole anthology could be gotten across, while still leaving room for anything else, in a six or seven page story. Plus, one of those stories was called "Tears of the Mutant Jesters", and I'm not made of stone. Well, in Hughes's case, it doesn't matter, because "Tears of the Mutant Jesters" plays more like an advertisement for surreal horror than anything else, and a pretty low brand of surrealism, at that. "Tears of the Mutant Jesters" is the title of a horror anthology beloved by Thornton Excelsior. It is a collection of surreal horror, "a somewhat sidelined subgenre." The six pages of the story mainly consist of the book needing readjustment on the shelf, the book weeping, Excelsior's attempt to help the book, his various conversations, which are basically each exactly the same, with his housekeepers -- none of whom he hired which is pretty surreal when you think about it -- named Dawn, Midday and Dusk. So you'll have lines like "Dusk was sweeping the land", which is a pun, but also she really is sweeping the land -- sweeping up mountains. Anyway, I guess I missed the thing where everybody likes puns again, but I still don't. Hughes features them prominently, and makes me very much against the idea of partaking in his brand of surreal horror.

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There is a tightrope between intelligent wordplay and groan-inducing puns, and this story strides along it with confidence, with a couple of minor slips. A short and amusing piece, it plays with deep existential themes but doesn't properly explore them. Shades of both Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde. Fun.

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In “Tears of the Mutant Jester”, the books themselves become sick, vomiting indigestible words and having to be relieved of their unnecessary appendices. Rhys Hughes’ brightly punning narrative transforms the darker subtext of horror like a breath of fresh air. Where other authors see an opportunity for expressing angst, Hughes seizes the chance to make us laugh at this literary conceit – books have feelings too!
Thornton Excelsior, Rhys Hughes’, character understands the power of books and the words they contain as much as any of this collection’s authors. We spend so much time in the company of printed words that we know their power: their ability to create or destroy, to provoke wars and reduce men to quivering wrecks, to inspire love and devotion and to raise our eyes to beauty. Books are the driving force of many of the characters’ lives.

Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will appear in the comments below.

My own views: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/

Further Thornton Excelsior stories have appeared since the HA of HA here: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/real-time-review-of-tqf-39/

The Useless - Dominy Clements

2012-01-20T12:46:00.000Z

As in the opening tale, Dominy Clements explores the idea of a text spreading or infecting those that come into contact with it, willingly or otherwise. Daniel Ausema’s story similarly employs the image of the severed tree to paint a larger canvas, a synecdoche of the condition of the surrounding landscape. This tale incorporates both of these elements whilst raising questions as to the reliability of the narrator’s perceptions. Dominy Clements’s main character, the wife of a university lecturer, finds herself stranded alone in the desert after she and her husband’s car has run out of gas. In a memorable early scene where she awaits her husband’s return on foot from a nearby gas station, her eyes fall upon a strange figure lying on the side of the road. ‘For some reason, my brain has been accepting that everything is as normal as the situation allows, and I fall back into a more relaxed state on seeing the return of my better half.’ The better half however turns out not to be her husband but a stranger, a man who introduces himself as Bob. Her husband he informs her, is unwell, and waiting for her in the nearby town. Revealing more of the story would spoil any surprises. The tale has a nice twist, and several memorable weird scenes. It also provides an additional interesting variation on the relationship between the body and text, and those perceptions that bind them.

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The Useless by Dominy Clements starts out as a cliche, a breakdown in the dusty west, but soon moves beyond that into a nightmarish exploration of the power of words

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The Useless by Dominy Clements, is another unusual tale, it is a well written, spooky tale, with an image of a wierd woman who thows balls at trucks, that is really unnerving. However I'm not sure I really got the what the story was about.

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"The events described are weird and disturbing,..." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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This starts in a fairly standard way, with an easy-to-follow lineal narrative. Mr Clements takes a couple of horror cliches from our collective comfort zone, then turns everything on its head. I had to read this twice to figure out what happened, and I'm still not sure. A confusing, but satisfying read.

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“The Useless” is Dominy Clements’ totally unconventional contribution to this anthology. It’s brutally short and it succeeds, with charming simplicity, in confusing the hell out of you whilst leaving you on the lingering verge of understanding.

Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will appear in the comments below.

My own views: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/

“Can you recall the lasting effect of the most deeply disturbing collection of horror stories you’ve ever encountered? The narratives join hands…” — From THE USELESS by Dominy Clements

Colleen Anderson - It's Only Words

2012-01-20T12:43:00.000Z

Colleen Anderson’s opening story of shifting malleable identities, temporary unsatisfied catharsis, exorcism and infection (of the body and of actual texts) opens this DF Lewis edited anthology of horror stories. Kudos must go to Tony Lovell’s excellent cover artwork and photography which already seems to perfectly complement Colleen Anderson’s opening tale. Lloyd, the tale’s protagonist we discover, is plagued by some form of personality disorder or schizophrenia. He might also be haunted by the stories he has been reading since he was a boy. It is a strength of the story that this disparity remains unclear-his thoughts and mind however are certainly subject to a cacophony of voices. A seemingly banal incident involving the protagonist’s car being unjustly towed away has harrowing consequences. Revealing more would spoil this excellent tale. Colleen Anderson incorporates elements of body horror and intertextuality in an effective and original way.

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Curtain-raiser “It’s Only Words” by Colleen Anderson is a muscular start with the tale of Lloyd, a frustrated and unhappy man who collects horror anthologies. He finally snaps and kidnaps a smug wheel-clamper, but rather than the murderous revenge-against-society one might expect, the results are much more memorable and interesting. I won’t spoil it by revealing the moody sting in the tail of this original piece.

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The opener, It’s Only Words by Colleen Anderson is a “chronicle of pain and lonliness” where a library of horror anthologies is used to teach others life lessons in a variety of splendidly gruesome ways.

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Kicking of the anthology is It’s Only Words by Colleen Anderson. In it Lloyd, who is an avid collector of horror stories, struggles with everyday life, he finds it hard to interact with people, and thinks that everyone is out to get him. One day he finally snaps, and kidnaps a smug smart arsed traffuc warden. Once he is bound and gagged in Lloyds house, Lloyd dsecides to tell his story to the traffic warden in a very unusual way. Soon Lloyd embarks on a quest top get his story told to all those who deems have wronged him. Colleen Anderson kicks off the anthology in a stunning fashion, this is a moving tale, tat shows there is a power in words and stories

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"...the tale providing a tasty sampler of what is to come." (Black Static #25 - TTA Press)

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There is a grand metaphor at the heart of this short piece, about the power of words to remake an individual. Ms Anderson handles it quite deftly overall, her high poetic language beautiful and emotive, though some of the more prosaic sections seem a bit dull by comparison. A good idea, well executed, which is as much as one can ask from a piece this length. I might have preferred it without the last paragraph, which more or less explains it all - I was enjoying the uncertainty.

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In “It’s Only Words”, the fine first piece in the anthology, the protagonist uses fragments of texts to cocoon his victims, thereby relieving the thunderous discourse of the inner voices that poison his existence but, as people around him begin to lose their ability to communicate, he fears he has become the agent of this linguistic decay and the final impression is of a world spiralling into chaos.

Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will appear in the comments below.

My own views: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/

DFL’s Best Four for fiction published in 2011

2012-01-13T16:22:00.000Z

Best Novel: HERE COMES THE NICE – Jeremy Reed
Best Anthology: The VanderMeers’ massive ‘The WEIRD’
Best Collection: ‘Allurements of Cabochon’ by John Gale
Best story or novella: ‘Suburbs of the Black Lyre’ by Ron Weighell

Plastic Scab

2012-01-13T14:11:00.007Z

Cosmetic surgery has been in the news recently and, with some of the problems attached to it, one has to ask: WHY DO THEY BOTHER?

Anyway, that’s beside the point. Opinion is never a question of absolute truth. Opinion is another form of story-telling. However, what I have to tell you about is the absolute truth: a backstreet in an out-of-season seaside resort (I won’t say exactly where because I don’t want anyone going there to check). I stumble across a building that looks as if it was once a bijou cinema from before the days of déjà vu or dvds. Along its frontage, there are the words SCAR MUSEUM. It isn’t as derelict as I at first imagined. I can still hear the sea from across the roof: beckoning me. I wish to heed its beckoning. But I am beckoned instead by an actual human shape – from a dilapidated kiosk at the front of the so-called SCAR MUSEUM. It’s as if I’m being hypnotised. I feel my cheeks being visually scoured for scars.

I pay over a £5 note. The only one I have. I see a notice that no change is given: just like on carpark ticket-dispensers, a fact that seems strange with a human ticket-dispenser in a kiosk.

“What am I paying to see?” I ask. A little too late to ask.

“Don’t the name give it away?” the individual sneers rhetorically with a backward click.

“You have exhibits then that are ... scars. Body scars.”

“Yes.” The final s of Yes is certainly a hiss and a half.

I feel drawn within. There are cases with sloping glass covers and inside them things that – if I hadn’t already seen the name of the place – I might assume are damp disfigured postage stamps or crumpled bits of beige carpet or torn bits of old parchment.

I feel followed.

Not by the ticket-dispenser but by someone else covered in a huge pair of tights through the legs of which I vaguely glimpse bones. And a face, through the gusset.

And that face seems to have right in the middle of its forehead a mystic Third Eye or, on closer scrutiny, an oriental cosmetic mark or, on even closer scrutiny, a patch torn from a 1950s toy. A reddy brown piece of Bakelite or synthetic flashing that a toddler child might have torn from an Airfix model he had got fed up with glueing soon after receiving it at Christmas.

“I’m starting to heal, you see,” a voice tells me: pointing to the forehead with the reddy brown thing there. “All of me will be healed soon,” it adds.

I think to myself with a mode of story-telling needed during these days of Credit Crunch and Eurozone Crisis – that one can now never depend on demand streams, even supply ones, to process the end products of what one needs to manufacture for mere subsistence if not, one hopes, for entrepreneurial greed or financial gain.

I leave the building with a sense of downbeat silence unredeemed even by the one huge tidal teardrop that is the sea. Everything mends in the end, though. Sort of.

Celebrity Big Brother - 2012

2012-01-08T17:04:00.002Z

Kirk Norcross probably thinks Essexist jokes are about Linda Blair.

The Dark Damp Corner

2012-01-05T13:19:00.002Z

It wasn’t always dark, it wasn’t always damp. Or should I have said that the corner was never only dark, it was never only damp. It seemed to go in cycles. It was a top corner of one of the second floor chalet-bungalow bedrooms; near its chimney flue and where the severely sloping ceiling met the outside wall. The cycles comprised periods of not being damp or dark at all. For months on end, and going back in history, for years on end, I suspect. Neither damp nor dark. Then cycles comprising periods of being both damp and dark at once. Never one condition without the other. Darkness and dampness as a tug of war: a host in creative or destructive battle with its parasite, but I was never sure which was which. Darkness or dampness as the cause or effect? How could I tell? I am not a surveyor or professional builder. I was simply sure that you always needed both dampness and darkness for each to exist.

Meanwhile, it was a mystery in other ways, too. There seemed no obvious reason for it. The roof in the corner’s vicinity had been repaired (and eventually the whole roof was replaced as just one repercussion), various other pointing or structural jobs done, chemical treatments given to the wall, even prayers given up to whatever gods controlled dry rot or whatever the condition was called. When in a whimsical mood, I often compared the phenomenon of that corner’s characteristics to those of a real person, someone with moods. Body as well as outer personality and inner mentality.

Someone like Charlie.

Or someone like Mary-Ann.

Both with their own moods and cycles that coincided. A marital pitch-battle that thrived as a battle for its own sake rather than a battle that exacted its climactic defeats or victories. For them, darkness and dampness were called by different names. Only one memory away from a false future.

Charlie and Mary-Ann had lived together in the chalet bungalow for many years. I lived there, too, but they never saw me. I was usually where they were not. Except on the rare occasion when the three of us attended the same room; I would hide behind something in the room, made myself as small as possible, climbing in, for example, behind a book on the bookshelf. Of course, today, with E-books no such hiding-places for me. Not the dampness aura of old books nor the clinging darkness that one imagined littering their fiction plots in the shape of words. Most books had unhappy endings in my experience. Or perhaps that was because I only read books with unhappy endings?

“What’s that noise?” Charlie asked.

They were sitting together in the centrally-heated lounge that stretched from back garden to frontward street. The lounge, being downstairs, was naturally longer than the combined width and length of the two bedrooms, even though one of them was above the stairs-area and the kitchen. Both bedrooms, though, were kept centrally heated, too, in this modern age. I think I was the only one who had got to grips with the logistics of this place where we lived. Its spaces and margins, and its accoutrements or aids of comforting existence that swelled and unswelled with the seasons. Neither Charlie or Mary-Ann gave the impression of ever even thinking about such matters. Mysteries for them were never mysteries. Unless you consider something to be mysterious, it never becomes a mystery.

“It’s the wind,” Mary-Ann replied.

But, upon thinking about it, I am possibly just as unthinking as they are. I never questioned their existence, never thought about how old they must be now, never wondered what I was doing there and why there was a purpose in me being there. Doing and being, different words meaning the same thing perhaps. What and why. What doing? Why being? I knew it was not the wind. I knew it was me they had heard. That was the ‘what’ at least? The ‘why’ remained beyond my reach to know. Beyond, indeed, my reach to be.

I scuttled from the lounge as soundlessly as possible and then up the stairs on all fours, on all my tip-toes. My favourite lurking-hole was in one of the bedrooms beneath the roof. Yes, you guessed it. That corner. That dark damp corner. That damp dark corner. Each room normally has eight corners, half of them ceiling level, the other half floor level. I kept repeating “dark damp corner, damp dark corner” in some form of incantation. Not with words aloud, but from thoughts inside. Thoughts are always silent. Even when you come to speak thoughts, they turn out to be quite different thoughts from the thoughts you thought you were thinking before you spoke them or they are not your thoughts at all!

Perhaps my presence explained everything about that corner. Explained everything that did or didn’t do; was or wouldn’t be. Eventually, I hear the whispering Charlie and Mary-Ann coming upstairs with their light bedtime reading. The days are closing in, growing shorter, during this time, of course. Autumn: the only season I know for certain. For me, mysteriously never-ending. Ever dry-leafing, ever wet-rotting. Very little kindling. Reason unknown.

(written today and first published here)

“TARSHISHIM – boxed limited edition” by Ron Weighell

2011-12-30T13:02:00.014Z

Real-time review continued from HERE

The Voice of the Silence

“Adam Weishaupt’s ultimate secret was that the secret that there was no secret has served to conceal the secret.”

With “Wax candles spread their golden light” and “teachers who have been busy lighting candles”, the ‘Illuminatus!’ of this accretion-cage of meanings grows with both political contraptivity and mystical glowing: here a 19th century scenario hinting at a great female Theosophical thinker who also seems embroiled with this book’s ‘co-spiricy’ of or with Angels and Demons. Despite some false starts in my gathering leitmotifs from this Classical Weird of symphonic proportions towards a gestalt, I am now much more confident about my own abilities to ‘bottom-fish’ fundamentals (as well as trawling any ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’) from the ‘decks’ of the literary vessel that is the Box. [Any faulty gaps between the book's own seams are taken as read particularly in the light cast by the still ribboned pack of loose-leaf yellow journal notes yet to be investigated after finishing the book. Meanwhile, still no sign of those apparently missing items I mentioned at the beginning of this review.] (30 Dec 11 – another 90 minutes later)

The Law of Unintended Consequences

“In his long experience the unexpected arrival of an expensively dressed, arrogant looking civilian in the heart of a military operation heralds nothing good.”

…like a presumptuous real-time reviewer seeking the heart of a book but trampling – as well as stumbling on – precious vessels and veins as a result like a bull in a china-shop? Meanwhile, this story has a neat equinish conceit involving the Veterinary Surgeon being presented by the civilian to “the unstoppable future of our Nation’s Cavalry.” Causing, end-interpolatively, many real horses to act like lemmings. Sad, yet stirring. Rhys Hughes-ian. The law of averages is not an average law, I say. One wonders whether the Eastern-looking tent or pavilion was more of a ‘contraption’ in keeping with this book’s dutiful thread? (30 Dec 11 – another hour later)

[I quoted "the anatomy of the whale" earlier. I'm sure - in the light of my review techniques - I misread this as "the anatomy of the whole"...] (30 Dec 11 – another 30 minutes later)

The Lion Serpent Begets Gods

“The music, by the way, was superb. I congratulate you, Scriabin.”

If this book previously went into ‘overdrive’, it is now in overdrive’s overdrive! Gorgeous things (both decadent and undecadent depending on your point of view) embodied in sumptuous, Galean prose: depicting a new Bayreuth or Rutland Boughton Glastonbury (my inferences, not the book’s) – while tying up the book’s ’dutiful thread’ with Classical Music and other previous theosophical and “qliphothic” matters, Historical, (here) Russianised, Engravured, Empyrean, Close-Closeted or Universal. [I brought this real-time review to my surrounding 'Classical Horror' website before I realised the book was here to extrapolate on Classical Music at all. My family actually discovered Scriabin for BBC Radio 3 in the 1970s, by requesting his music.] A Panoply of Human Gods. Listed, like buildings. [I wish this book would get its internal hyphens sorted out as in 'frost- etched' and "white - veiled".] Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrickian, too, by inference of wide-eyed deliverance of the Reader to these ‘secret’ scenes (albeit non-sexual, so far). (31 Dec 11)

On the Side of the Angels

“In fifteen sixty six, when Suleiman’s Sorceror called up demons to fight alongside the Ottoman army, an Angelic Host led by the Archangel Gabriel was summoned to oppose them.”

Felicitously, amid the book’s dutifulness towards its own Angelic thread, there is much synergy not only with my own long-term definition of ‘magic fiction’ as a real power in human affairs but also with the use made of it in warfare as described by the masterpiece ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ in the name of Susanna Clarke. Also, arguably, a textual hint here of the internet as part of these processes, which my real-time reviewing also taps into, I suggest. “I take it you are not well read in the works of the master, Edgar Allan Poe? I thought not. It was his belief that if you wish to hide something, the best place is in full view.” This book is fast becoming, in full public view, an important part of my life, retrocausally as well as linearly forward in time. Remarkably, it mentions in this section today “Marston Moor” as one of the battles where “Beings” were sent, i.e. a battle which, synchronously, only yesterday was mentioned independently to me on a semi-public internet forum (here) as being a battle that (with right or wrong on my side, angels or demons?) I am currently fighting on behalf of real books against ebooks. (31 Dec 11 – four hours later)

Control

“…and flickering firelight, full of the smells of old books…”

A scholarly meeting in tune with M.R. James but, refreshingly (with scholars worth their salt), leading not to a plot-sized populist ghost story but to implications of more ‘musical’ interactions of Fine Art (fine as well as foul?) and Philosophy within the book’s Angels & Demons thread / Rationalisation and Magic / Control and Totalitariansim - and how each of us – however firm we are in our beliefs and in our own hard-won goodness – teeters in the grey area between such pairs of ‘similar opposites’, such Ewers-Spider symbioses or host/parasite-uncertainties-of-which-is-which — {Swedenborg or Blake?} [The paragraphing and speech-marks at one point in this section made it difficult to differentiate speakers]. (31 Dec 11 – another 90 minutes later)

Satyrs Gathering

“…the magic that could be wrought by the decoration of books.”

A short telling Coda to the previous story, regarding Chaos Theory (butterfly effect between earthly things and Angels) and much else contained within its Tardis of words. Serendipitously, Blake figures here (Hitler again, too): and the cats and other creatures from the VanderMeers’ massive ‘The WEIRD’, and the London Stone ley-lines from Ackroyd – and the oxymorons within salvation… And it also reminds me that Caruso’s decorations are suffused with Blake’s, in a good original way. Another symbiosis. (31 Dec 11 – another hour later)

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED IN 2012: HERE

Here Comes The Nice

2011-12-26T11:03:00.012Z

Real-Time Review continued from HERE.

Here Comes The Nice – Jeremy Reed

Chômu Press 2011

Chapter 10

“Paul looked out into the street again, confused by the Face’s weird crossover from style completist to gene-hacker, and the putative correlation of the two into a Mod aesthetic.”

Paths cross, tomorrow not necessarily a legacy of today, and, amid the mind- (sometimes glove-neat sex)-resonating page-text, I’ve come to this new review page to stop others googling ’Tony Blair’ or ‘Dominic Sandbrook’ – and a ’2011′ conspiracy to punish the former for war crimes. Meanwhile, SF tropes mingle with the intertwining ley-line audit-trails of Paul and John Stephen (via Max who knew JS in his hey-day of real-time and via the Face who supposedly knows JS today despite JS dying in 2004), of Paul and the Face himself head-to-head, similarly Paul and his ‘Suzie Q’. Apparently, as I infer, TB and JS had one thing in common – committing deliberate crimes to test the alertness of those who should prevent such crimes. Suzie Q, too, in her way. I feel sorry for Alex. This book is now at “full tilt”. Unmissable. (26 Dec 11)

Chapter 11

“…Pete Townshend typically burying his guitar neck in a Marshall speaker, like a Boeing thrusting its nose cone through a mirrored tower,…”

It was ‘full tilt’, in hindsight of this new chapter, just on the point when entropy began within the ‘Mod aesthetic’ and developed (Ready Steady Go!) a submission to an image-veneer. In spite of this (or accentuating such a contrast), The Who now take centre stage; you just have to listen to, as well as read, this book to believe its conjuring-up of this Hoovian anti-destructive vacuuming into tangibility and then out of it, then back to it, time and time again, a strobing that’s always had a place in life despite sometimes being imperceptible. Just try, please, even if you know nothing directly about the Mod and/or Modern worlds this book depicts. Empathise with the Face, even if your Liberation front-to-come or beach-head is not the same as his: give your own slant to the “retrovirus” of this book. When I watched ‘Ready Steady Go!’ on the TV in real monochrome time, I never realised how this ‘programme’ of gene or virus or atom particle could now be brought back into my life in 2011 so meaningfully. Nor the fact that, today, I happen, by chance, to live in Clacton, not Hastings! (27 Dec 11)

Chapter 12

“…his own preferred method of time-travel, writing.”

Paul, in our own real-time today, is in “asymmetric warfare” regarding, against or along with ”the quantum weird”: a fashion statement, a physical book to carry around with you like Catcher in The Rye, but now it’s a book called HERE COMES THE NICE. But when it’s just one of a million ebooks on an ipad, you can carry a million books around with you and assassinate a million John Lennons. Each Mata Hari “infatuation” just another of those ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ or “filleted wallets” scattered upon the Barbara Vine trackside. Blair as “viral glue“. I’ve given up logically reviewing this book, but am just enjoying being infatuated with it. The Dead and Living cancelling out each other’s context within a palimpsest of nostalgia and retro-dread. Of “confectionary” and ‘confectionery’. "Writing about the dead was like Pirate Radio..." (27 Dec 11 – three hours later)

Chapter 13

“Death to him represented the absence of shopping and music.”

As the potentially ”disempowered” Face fears the loss of, inter alia, “Jacob’s cream crackers, four-finger Kit Kats,..”, his desire to optimise a fashion-eschatology for his own immortality takes on practical possibilities; meanwhile mingling with aircraft imagery, the gayrisk of the still elapsing or entropic 1960s (beyond their ‘full tilt’), and, above all, a SF-surrounded Music Hall (Jeremy Reed as Leonard Sachs?) starring brilliantly evoked and contextualised acts-of-the-day as they take on, in turn, each Face-centred chapter’s centre stage: here The Small Faces with ‘Here Comes the Nice’ parts one and two. (28 Dec 11)

Chapter 14

“The Face came back downstairs adroitly, on springy feet, every movement an economic fit with the clean line of Mod ethics.”

Paul, two-timing (in more than one sense!), in our own “real-time“ of Alternate-World-Blair-baiting-and-inner-terrorism-masquerading-cinematically-as-suicide-bombers-while-the-gene-rejigged-Face-as-unsuicide-bomber-in-present-day London, now hits the crux facing him not only by the Face but also by a ‘rejigged’ John Stephen himself fresh from pre-Death. You know, this book, somehow, makes all this feel not only real-time but real. And not only seeming real, but being real. That’s its skill. ‘Magic Fiction’ as I have defined it publicly for several years, and, now, due to this book, a feat managed by a form of hawling. Yes, that’s what the Face is doing: hawling. (My expression not the book’s). The art of the “off-message weird“, too, as co-sponsor. Additionally, I feel, Peter Ackroyd lends weight to to the book’s Magic Fiction by dint of his ley-lines and London Stone, I guess. All hands to the real-wheel. Meanwhile, towards the end of this chapter, the book takes me into its underground toilet. The book‘s underground toilet, not the plot’s underground toilet into which Paul wanders… (28 Dec 11 – another 3 hours later)

Chapter 15

“…but still he knew Mods were essentially over, the corrupted strain diffused into skinhead revivalists with their raw fuckedness quotient of sham.”

1969 and a poignant description of the Stones concert in the heat of Hyde Park following the death of laconic Jones. And an almost unbearable mini-sketch of Marianne Faithful. This chapter is the Face’s ‘dying fall’ within real real-time and it is to this book’s credit that the real Reader cannot yet tell where it’s yet to go and where it’s all going to end, despite there being now only two chapters to read. Marc Bolan taking up the baton…? (28 Dec 11 – another 3 hours later)

Chapter 16

Pages 239 – 250

“…brands sold over the counter like Yacon, Yohimex and Viritab, and wanted to explore its libidinal increase further as part of his own self-regulated programme of sexual gratification.”

Paul’s own ‘dying fall’ now in less real real-time? Amid a Spitting-Image ballooning (I infer) Tony Blair as part of a an economic seedbed culture of decay, diaspora … and fractious guerilla warfare in London as Lebanon. Meanwhile, Paul speculates on his own two-timing! And sexual Zencore-ism (my expression not the book’s). Earth’s Core-ism (ditto). Max provides (tellingly in the context of this book) ”a memory of a memory” concerning John Stephen; as fictional-truth perspectives continue to both lock together and diverge… (29 Dec 11)

Pages 250 – 267

“…then you can join us in the sixties – the orange sunshine decade. You can cross the time-barrier.”

The time barrier? With this world of aircraft imagery and music, I’d say the sound-barrier, myself! — Meanwhile, this is a stunning chapter where the Face and Paul have their Shakespearean face-off (with Olivier playing one of the parts). There is one clincher fact I had not realised before in the emotions lying behind what Paul sees as the Face’s Time-stalking of him – and to reveal anything about it to anyone who has not yet read this far would be a spoiler. But rest assured you will not be disappointed by this book’s ‘dying fall’ of nostalgia and retro-dread, as I put it. Both sad and uplifting, where ‘aloofly’ has become “blankly“, yet a multi-charged two-timing sex / sf romp which creates truths rather than fictionalising them – incredibly so. Truths about the reported facts and sounds and senses of, I’ll say it again, nostalgia and retro-dread. It bears repeating, like a sonic boom or a “dirty bomb” in Canary Wharf or physically / mentally explosive Viagra / Zencore / Bombay Mix. And, here, for the first time (at least for me), ‘The Look’, central to this book’s fashion statement, is in fact an other-worldly literary term about making fiction LOOK as if it is non-fiction or, if not non-fiction, being injected straight into the underground toilets of your veins. This Book is the Look. It all comes home to roost for me. I only hope the protagonists receive their own fair share of credit amid the ‘dying falls’ – not only the author and publisher, although they deserve credit, too. There is more value in being a “deluded Mod impersonator” (the jury is out on that, anyway) than being an ex Prime Minister on the lucrative head-Talks circuit or a real-time reviewer like me (“I’m always one step ahead of my upcoming thought“) or a mere Reader like you with your life’s “weirdly counterintuitive events“. (29 Dec 11 – another 4 hours later)

Chapter 17

” – nobody, he realised, listened to the language of madness.”

A ‘dying fall’ is one thing, a Coda another.This is the perfect Coda. One where you can even hope with some conviction that Looks never blur into each other. Books, neither. Despite a retro-dread that they did, still do and will do. But, for me, the end fire and/or crystal ice in the drugs are provided by the real stiff-to-and-from-soft book in your hands: supplied to the Face, Paul, Alex, Semra, Suzie, John Stephen, Terry, all the Groups from the Ham Yard Scene, then towards BowieBolanRoxymusic and beyond… feeding off the words provided by the Book’s Look at them and, through Magic Fiction rather than Magic Reality, allowing them to exist for real rather than via the fictional drugs they think they put in their veins (dirty bombs and/or clean shafts of orange sunshine). … I recommend this truly stunning book unhesitatingly and I recommend it unconditionally, even if you’ve never heard of Mods in Sixties Britain. Or especially so. (Meanwhile, hoping with some studied aloofness to counter any suspicion of exaggerated enthusiasm.) (29 Dec 11 – another 90 minutes later) END

Encounters with Terror

2011-12-19T13:44:00.004Z

"There can be no past without a future and, of course, neither without the way station of the present." Rachel Mildeyes.

The little boy, in short grey flannel trousers, was on all fours upon the Persian carpet, watching a clockwork train that couldn't escape from its rails. He laughed to himself, trying to imagine a real steam train chasing its own guard's van, with a huge heavy-duty key turning round and round in the side of its boiler.

A large mother loomed at the door, spoke words that were below the hearing threshold and retreated with a wave of the hand. The boy squinted along the line of tin soldiers that filed from the velveteen foot-stool towards the glinting rocking-horse in the dim corner. The fire suddenly spurted, as a coal dropped, causing red sparks to march up the back of the chimney, and he shivered to think how cold this room would become once he had tucked himself into the cot (which already had its barred side down for him). The fire would cease to be a friend, when the last glow died - but, in sleep, you needed no friends other than those you met in the dream, who would take you by your tiny hand and show you a path between the monstrous shapes that haunted the dream's edges...

The world is full of terror. It stares from every corner, impends from clear and gloomy skies alike, follows its subject like an invisible shadow, waits in the wings for situations and moods to develop.

Francis first came across terror when he was a new born baby in his mother's arms, gazing up for the first time into her beautiful face and watching her red lips move in tune with some meaningful sounds. Terror stamps this memory upon his mind like a photograph blown up out of all proportion, since terror knows no boundaries, sometimes reaching into the womb and, at others, into the grave.

He thus saw terror reflected in his mother's eyes: a baby with birth scars fit to frighten a seasoned surgeon. It leered at him from her eyes, as if it were the evil changeling he could have become if different circumstances had prevailed. And so, in her bed of confinement, his mother cast Francis away to protect him from the creature in her eyes, but his umbilical cord became entangled with her diamante lizard brooch. For a few seconds, he simply hung there like a lump of dripping butcher's meat.

He did not feel like mounting the rocking-horse. But there was a long time to pass, almost a lifetime to someone of his age, before the little boy would feel sufficiently tired to crawl into the cot. The clock on the mantelpiece which he was prevented from reaching (if not by the heat of the fire or the anger of his mother but certainly by the shortcomings of his height) turned over its workings as if it were about to strike - but it never did.

He was tired of playing with with his toys. He needed a pee badly, so he wandered out into the long landing, lined with paintings on one side that were too high up for him to make out their faces clearly in the half-darkness. His little feet padded on the thick pile, before he reached the blue door marked "Necessarium".

His mother had tried to teach him to unbutton the front of his trousers, but he always used the side of the leg-hole. If he had only known all boys of his age did this little contortion, it would have made him feel less guilty.

The hiss of the stream against the side of the bowl had a temporary calming effect - but he never relished venturing far from his room at this time, when evening was putting on its night clothes. He frequently feared that a red-hot coal might drop from the fire, in his absence, and burn a hole in the Persian weave - then bore straight through the floorboards, right down into the kitchen, only to kill his favourite servant, Nancy, dead in the top of her head!

Terror can have no diary, since there are no words to describe it. However extreme and specific the event that engenders this orgasm of the soul, it will remain unwritten and vague, despite the vivid scars it leaves.

The next time he recalls truly making the acquaintanceship of terror, however, was in his teens, although he knew that it was there all the time, whether seen or unseen. Parts of wall, insides of wardrobe doors, in most bathrooms: he tried not to look directly at it, but he knew it was there out of the corner of his eye.

Then, whilst at school, he was snatched from the changing-room shower one day by his sweaty peers, who proceeded to rumble him, frogged him to the cricket-gear cupboard and forced him to look terror in its one eye.

"Hello, Francis," it droned drearily.

"Hello," he replied through gritted teeth.

"I'm glad you've grown up like me, son..."

He managed to claw himself from his captors: most were helpless with cruel laughter, but some with kind tears.

As the little boy slipped back along the cold landing, he noted it had grown darker even in the short while he had been in the bathroom. He arrived at the door of his nursery bedroom and listened at the keyhole, a ritual he often enacted, for no evident reason. Except this time, the breathing was louder, deeper, longer in its rhythm. He entered, heart in mouth, and saw the horse in the corner rocking in the same rhythm as the breathing. The cot covers had been moved, he was sure, while he had been away, tucked tighter, neater, with a sheet lip where the silk pillow glistened. Nancy must have been in already - or it was another servant, the one with the big teeth and and long red tongue whom he always tried to put out of his mind.

He knew he would keep awake as long as possible, hurting his own tongue with his first childhood teeth to do so - in order that the day could be sealed with a goodnight kiss from his mother. But he felt tired enough to get into the cot. So, without clearing up the tin soldiers or retrieving the clockwork train from beside the jack-in-the-box where it had derailed itself, he climbed, with difficulty, between the taut covers that pinioned his body, whilst springs prodded his back. He stared up at the ceiling, ill-lit by the fire, and discovered a new crack. There seemed to be a new crack each time he studied its wicklow crazing. There were worlds up there ... vast continents, warring nations, endless oceans and archipelagos ... where Nancy and he lived happily ever after.

Then comes his third and final encounter with terror. It was a war that he'd been told needed to be fought, since causes were everything: he was not exactly a mercenary, but more one of those innocently caught up in the onrush of hostilities. A tri-cornered affair with no causes other than hate. The last battle had been fought and he was the only one left alive.

His own bravery disgusted him: he had fought as man would if possessed by a ravening beast. He wept cruel tears, as he tried to prize his swollen hands from the blood-grimed rifle.

The corpse of the soldier Francis had just killed groaned in death as if it were a fitful nightmare he sleeped. The belly gaped upon wriggling innards as if these were new sexual organs the corpse wanted to be fondled and loved.

Then Francis dreaded that terror was the sky itself, staring down at him with one searing eye.

"Our Father up in Heaven..."

Except he knew it was a mother, not a father.

Francis muttered a nursery rhyme he had nearly forgotten from his mother's red lips. And by smearing the changeling soldier's blood and guts over his own life-long ugliness, he prepared himself for healing reunion with the extreme of terror itself: the unsurvivable past.

As the fire began to settle in the grate, the ceiling cracks faded. Just before sleep took purchase, the little boy managed to turn on his side within the tight covers and was sure he saw another little boy on all fours tidying up his toy soldiers in front of the fire and through whom could still faintly be seen the stunted flickering of the fire's one solitary flame. The last thing the real Francis ever yearned for was the approach of his long-awaited mother's goodnight kiss, which would further ease him into deepest slumber - but he felt someone's big tongue and, then, the long teeth, instead.

"Terror has no diary, since Terror cannot write."

Charles Maturin 'Melmoth The Wanderer'

Story Published: Dark Horizons #34 (1993)

Born From Night - Talkback - Ogthrod Ai'f Geb'l

2011-12-11T08:50:00.000Z

Born From Night

"Nothing to suck."

The voice filled the room, despite being no more than an infant's - or so it seemed. The darkness hid the true identity. In fact, he imagined he was dreaming. Maybe he dreamed he was imagining. Whatever the case, he slapped his head back into the pillow as if that were the secret of sleep.

"I can't suck straight."

This time, a mistake was impossible. He sat propped against the headboard, listening with more than half an ear. In fact, even his heart had heard - beating twenty to the dozen, as it was. Yet the lungs were quiet, daring not to disrupt any possibility of silence - for which their owner yearned - with the faux pas of breath.

If only an untimely dawn would now soak the curtains in a spillage of orange light. He might have excused this mistake in the course of nature, in order to camouflage an even greater and more frightful hitch such as the voice which spoke of sucking as well as sounding as if the words themselves were syphonned up from a sump that had sucking as its second nature.

He could have felt for the light switch as second best. But manmade illumination was far from dependable. He did not know that. There was little else, however, in the midst of night. Even if the lamp broke into that yellow incontinence which was its shade's habit of casting after the dull click of the switch, it owed him nothing and, furthermore, felt no need to have truck with a ghost. He had sensed many such facts following the arrival in his new home. In any case, the ghost (or whatever it was) might be a chameleon and only the changing hues of daylight could throw up any figment of its presence...

He had no purchase on such considerations. He dabbed at the switch in his side and recognised the dull pin-click with a sigh.

"And now my teeth are cast crooked."

There, etched against the wallpaper, were two swelling tusks of black light, snagged one upon the other.

Silence was deeper than the empty space that quickly filled with a crumpled edge of cot-blanket.

Only with a blotted moon, of course, and the least tenable permutation of nature's secondary quirks, could vampires strut and stalk - freshly born from teething babies such as him.

Published 'Roisin Dubh' 1994

----------------------------

Talkback

He stored up words for future use. Relished insults aimed at himself. Nurtured slips of the tongue. Incubated resentments in the actual shape of glib sound-bites.

And then, at the optimum moment, he would tighten the key and take careful aim at the unsuspecting victim, a victim who, more often than not, had earlier acted as the very source of the barb's power.

Until, one day, there was a ricochet.

And the poisoned dart he had himself blowpiped did pierce his vocal screen-bytes with a bit of his own viral medicine.

Published 'Braquemard' 1996

---------------------

Ogthrod Ai'f Geb'l

(Dedicated to Rachel Mildeyes who stayed in the ladies only carriage forever.)

Each morning, Michael had to change at Clapham Junction for Victoria.

It was well known that Victoria had been the last station to welcome steam trains into their platforms, when all the other terminals worth their salt had banned them, following the influx of diesel and electric. But Michael knew that there was still a station at least somewhere which allowed in steam trains at the dead of night, so that they could shunt quietly to their heart's content . . . as long as they kept their funnel-smoke to a minimum, gagged their hissing, deepened their whistles and coupled on tiptoes.

Day-dreaming can be a disease. Michael tried to shake it off as he crossed from platform to platform. But, then, the tannoys would take up their cries, in a language far beyond the comprehension of the common-or-garden commuter.

It often sounded like:

"OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L - EE'H YOG SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO!"

Or worse.

Michael seemed to be the only one to understand the messages; the others, clasping their cases and umbrellas for grim life, followed him across the foot-bridge so that they could catch the correct train. And it always came in disguise: bearing the strange Network South logo and, of all things, sliding doors, as if it were an underground train! Where were the leather tongues on the windows? The corridors? The third class carriages? The green sticker denoting the ladies only carriage? And where was the steam billowing into his face like curdling mists of coal-dust becoming forgotten fulsome night?

Day-dreaming again? He shrugged, stepped off the platform and settled into the smoking section. Except the train was only just arriving, and his bones would soon crunch upon the long teeth of the silver runners and upon the brown gums of the sleepers, his flesh to bed red between.

He heard the tannoy:

"This is Clapham Junction, This is Clapham Junction, Gateway to the North, This train is for Victoria own-le..." And so on, interminably, becoming shriller and shriller.

Pity none of the words made sense to him. So, having abandoned day-dreaming for good (or ill), he shrugged with a shudder and travelled on to his office job further north.

Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1992

Notes From A Dream - Foxflesh

2011-12-11T08:47:00.000Z

Notes From A Dream

He woke with a start, scribbled a few notes from his dream. He had been sitting on a hillside, the climb to which had been through steep woodland, at the bottom of which he had left his children in the park, playing on the witch's hat, in the care of someone he could recall neither in the dream nor now. He watched the gliders taking off and landing on a raised airstrip across the valley. Each soared into the sky like an angel in splints, crested the thermals, as it dropped the winch line and circled above the model town in the valley.

His note. did not attempt to cover the precise nature of the town below him nor the whys and wherefores of the before/after of the precise moment in dream time. But, in writing the notes at all (which he often did after dreams he at least recalled having, if not their actual content), new visions came, ideas for future dreams and undercurrents of old ones that would otherwise have never seen the light of the day.

The sky soon filled with the gliders, the sunlight sparkling off their wings like stars on a clear night. He was horrified to see that two had collided and cartwheeled down.

That's when he woke, or so the notes said, when he read them that night before retiring. He was worried about the children he had apparently left unattended in the park. His own children were too old to be concerned about them in such a way. But he had a sneaking feeling that those in his dream were much younger.

He looked across at his wife who was knitting in front of the gas fire. He was horrified. It was not his wife at all. He looked down at his notes for clarification - for comfort - for some clue as to whether he was now embroiled in a new dream without the prior warning of going to bed and falling asleep.

The woman seemed to be knitting her own brain as it coiled from her revolving ear as if from a spindle. The white glistening wormthread was still clotted with her headblood. The finished product flowed over her lap and became the white grid of the gas fire which glowed ever upward nearer to its source. She smiled and said: "Time for bed, George."

His name, was it George? He could not even remember. The notes he had just been writing were now just marks on the paper in a language too unwieldy for translation.

A paper aeroplane flew past his nose, obviously constructed and launched by the creature with the brain knitting who was now staring imbecilically with a smile on quivering lips.

It flew into the next dream, where he was still sitting on the familiar hillside. He picked it up and read its message: "Your children have broken backs - unless you hurry down." Some gliders still hung in the sky, hovering like humming dragons. They were so close, he could actually see the dream aviators, smiling, waving - at him.

The distant airstrip bore the glistening groundling craft, and men as small as insects darted hither and thither, busy rewinding the various winches. An arc of a new moon rose early above this scene of activity.

George felt he must really hurry down to the park - he had ignored the message on the paper dart for at least half an hour.

But he woke before he could start off on the wooded slope - which he was suddenly desperate to scale down; for he feared that those he most loved in the real world were in the direst danger.

The utter frustration of waking from a dream too early...

The sky was below, the ground was above and he soared speedily towards two small children being weighed on a see-saw by a strange woman in a red felt hat.

Published 'Skeleton Crew' 1988

---------------------------

Foxflesh

I must tell you of the time that I first came to the Clockhouse Mount - a year last Spring, I think it was, friend. Do you know the place? Yes, it's in the outer South London suberbs, in Surrey really, but you have to climb along a very long hill out of Cullesdon and when you get there, you see the Green, fronting a run-down parade of shops and, further over, the "Pail of Water". Mrs. Dobb, the landlady of the Pail, she knows all the gossip of the Mount. About the Sawdusts of Number 4 Rich Land: Jackie Sawdust once blew his nose, you know, in public view, he blew it so hard that he just stared into his handkerchief not knowing it was his brain wriggling there, he stared just a few moments, yep, before he dropped down dead. About the Clerkes of Long Land: their younger son was levanted by the Surrey press gangs for labour in far off spice fields. About the losers and the winners of the terrible family feuds. About this and about that...

There is a golf-course on one side, some other cul-de-sacs leading to small-holdings and desolate fields of staring horses, tangled woods and deadfalls, overgrown bomb-holes and the rusty discards of shortly forgotten squabbles. You know, they say that the clouds swag and belly heavier over the council roofs of Clockhouse Mount... and, as I plodded up, that day, in the hope of my first homely tankard at the Pail, large drops spattered from a previously clear sky. Even at noon, dusk was gathering itself and some laggard golfers were standing along the side of the road holding their clubs like spears, making funny faces beneath their tartan berets and wriggling their chequered trousers as if in some crazy fashion show. They would soon be off, no doubt, before the light had finally disappeared.

I looked across at the downbeat parade and saw that the shops had shut, not for lunch as I had thought, but because I, a stranger, had loomed up from Cullesdon and they feared what they considered to be my unwholesome custom. I shivered for had the Pail, too, locked its lounge and saloon doors? The locals were inside, apparently persuading Mrs. Dobb to let them have further illicit flagons of the home-made brew, as I forced an entry through an unoiled latch-door. The bobbled heads looked up, scowls muttering across their faces, and one signalled for me to sheer off.

"Dear Sackalive!" cried Mrs. Dobb, from behind the bar, a friendlier aspect indeed appearing to fleet across her countenance. "I didn't think you'd make it".

"By Cock!" I replied, banging my feet on the floor, "That was a long walk up from the town."

Meantime the locals gathered closer to me and one even fingered my turn-ups in some strange rite of inspection. I looked at the posters and the customary wall-scrawl, to see if this was indeed the day of the darts match that I had been promised. But, no - imagine my despondency, when I saw incomprehensible messages pertaining to a Wicca Meet, destined for that very night ... and further bills bearing such things I cannot now spell - Cuthloo, Shib-Shubbing in the snug, Yogger-Nogging in the saloon and, what was it, an outing at the weekend to the Goat of a Thousand Young for a turdle-eating competition.

I skipped pretty niftily from the pub, for, as they say, you shouldn't turn a heavy stone if something's moving it from underneath.

I ran ... but it was difficult, for what I had thought originally to be rain was in fact now great bulbs of bursting liquid cascading from, not clouds, but shifting, floating monsters in the sky. They extended and retracted, in turn, long arms of blackness, from several interlocked central bodies and, if I were religious, the nearest I could get to describing them would be a hell's brood, an overnourished confluxion of sky and foxflesh betokening the fall of old disgraced gods ... and several smaller versions were creeping over the brims of council roofs...

I ran ... but golfers and pub locals surrounded me. One, of the name Tokkmaster Clerke, as he later told me, wielded a massive rutted file, its frightful crenellations glinting in the flashing of the wings in the sky. I was held fast by one whose nose dripped as Tokkmaster moved the file across my skull. At first, my hair fell away in lumps and dropped to the ground, followed by my skin. He grated it up and down, scratched, sawed, and ground. I could feel the hideous vibrations, reverberations stunning and splitting my head. My skull scrunched. My teeth were on edge, as the grating continued, as he honed my bone. The file stropped and serrated my pure white skull. It ground and rasped. Against the grain. Gashed and scored. Etched and furrowed. Rutted. Fretted and chafed. Scrubbed and gnawed. Eroded and Kneaded.......

* * * *

I ill recall must of that but I live now with the Sawdusts of Clockhouse Mount, and they call me Jackie... They make me worship the great old gods of the Surrey Badlands and the Southern Mysteries... The top of my head is like the skin of cold stew, so I now always have to wear a hat: Mrs. Dobb made it, kindly, out of vinegar & brown paper... and the filing Clerke, he says he's my pal now.

Published 'Dagon' 1987

Jack the Cutter - It Must Have Been Toddington

2011-12-11T08:45:00.001Z

Jack The Cutter

As Therm 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 Therm 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. Not that he thought with such poetical turns of phrase and there was some doubt whether his mind generated such ill-cut gems of English prose, in any event, 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 Therm 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, Therm thought, 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?"

Therm thought her voice to be saying something quite different, since he replied: "Yes, I love you, too". And the lorry plummetted 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 Therm and the lorry driver were discovered hand in hand by the cutting crew.

In a fleeting after-life, Therm was a woman, one without his 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 Therm quickly regained his body's pigsweat. The most disturbing part was an after-life where he was female. The 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.

Then he glimpsed a real after-life one which would eventually become his wife's. 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," Therm replied in the shrill voice of his wife.

"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 Therm's husband who had become a fire-officer by means of countless acts of bravery. Therm 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 after-life automatically imported its own disbelief.

The house was dead quiet. Therm's 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, Therm 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 Therm's 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. 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 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...

Therm woke from every conceivable after-life, including the one where he actually had a wife with his own name. 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 poisefd 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 called Therm: 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....

Therm 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!" muttered Therm who proceeded 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. Tap-dancing with cloven hooves was 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 Therm the vampire, thankfully, was consumed by a sleep like delicious death - too numb even to feel Jack the Cutter's preparing hands ... except from inside such hands like fingers in gloves.

Published 'Stygian Articles' 1996

--------------------------

It Must Have Been Toddington

The sky hung in warm wet blankets. Tim Overdale wiped threads at sweat from his hair-line, as he turned off the car's engine. He had gratuitously steered into a lay-by off the A426, not to get his bearings so much but to assure himself that the air pressure had not dropped - he had an obsession with the tyres: a deep dread of blow-out or unexpected seepage of their firmness.

Tim turned over the cassette and pushed it back into the slot on the dashboard. He began to listen as the static hiss became music, a Stabat Mater by a composer he had forgotten. Fumbling for the case, he forced himself to read his own untidy handwriting., finding that it was by Dvorak.

"Four-Jack," he whispered to himself.

Time enough to test the wheels later; he was early for his appointment anyway.

He grabbed hold of the Guardian purchased earlier in a motorway service station. Watford Gap, he seemed to remember: or had it been Toddington? Probably neither.

There was some news in the paper that the American president made all his decisions in the light (or rather, thought Tim, the dark) of Astrology. Something. to do with the alignment of planets determining whether he should venture out of the White House or not. Wonder what the man on the other side of the world thought of that, having summit meetings dependent on the cusp of Uranus!

Bored, Tim let his eyes wander: he looked out of the car window at a blurred factory chimney reaching. up into the sticky grey of the sky. Smoke started to belch from it, as if it knew it was being watched...

A sharp tap on the rear window made Tim jump - he swivelled around in his seat to see a woman staring in at him. She was smiling at him, but there was more than a hint of sadness in her eyes. He got out.

"Yes? Can I help you?"

She was in her mid to late twenties, dressed in a uniform of white blouse and navy-blue pleated shirt that came to just below the knees. Her hair was windswept, or perhaps just untidy, in view of the lack of' wind, thought Tim.

A flicker of recognition lit a dim memory in his mind - only to be snuffed out as she replied.

"I wanted to tell you that one of' your tyres is flat." Her voice was husky, as if she was suffering from a sore throat, or perhaps from trying to reach him over the loud music. She pointed to the rear nearside wheel.

Tim cursed. His immediate thought was to the spare in the boot, would that be flat too? He had not checked it for at least two days. "Thank you..."

He did not question the arrival of the woman, next to the middle of nowhere as they were. The only sign of life nearby was the factory beyond the roadside field that was speckled unnaturally bright. yellow in the gloom.

"You have a spare, don't you?"

"Yes, I think so... Don't let me keep you, I can manage. Thanks again, I might have done some damage If I'd driven off with that thing...." He pointed to the ugly rupture, the flesh of the tread splayed out on each side of the hub. Cringing, he knelt to examine the damage, inserting his finger into the various holes. This was no ordinary puncture - the whole thing had been flayed.

"Nasty business." The voice was above him.

Tim looked up. She was a peculiarly attractive woman; the outline of her bra showed vaguely through the sheeny blouse in the steel light. Her face was round, a bit puddingy perhaps, but the well-defined curves of' the lips and the spearmint eyes...

Tim wondered why he was studying her to such a degree. He had more than enough trouble on his hands now to be spending time sizing up a potential pick-up. Years ago, he was always on the look-out for female hitch-hikers. But now, what with aids... He was older too, more mature, less over-sexed, less eager. Still, his hands flexed involuntarily.

"You sure I can't help?" The words seemed to breathe into his ear.

"No - no, thanks all the same. It's a simple matter these days. Jacks are much easier to handle..."

Hearing the faint strains of music still coming from inside the car, he stood up to go and switch it off.

"I'll do it." As if reading his mind, she opened the driver's door and disengaged the cassette.

It was strange how quiet it was out here. The sky had even started to brighten up, the drizzle relenting just before he had climbed out of the car. The heat was still oppressive, damping down any sound, including the footsteps as they negotiated around each other. She was, he thought, trying to get in the way.

"You know we were meant to meet here today."

Squatting by the blow-out, Tim stared up at her, at a loss for words. What could you say to a statement like that. So he ignored it.

He went to find the jack in the boot.

The afternoon was far brighter, for the sun had burnt off the morning mists. Tim's white car was still in the lay-by. The yellow field, despite the sunshine, was no brighter, it seemed, than it had been in the morning. The colour was true. You no longer needed to study the sky to see the factory chimney - it was just plain there and not worth the notice. The odd cars that pounded along the road were merely reminders of other human beings.

Tim had the driver's seat leaning right back. A gluey heat seeped down his face, so that he could hardly see through the sticky eyelids or breathe out of the bubbling nostrils. A twitching lizard's tail peeped from between his lips.

Music played. He had not put it on, he was sure, for he did not like jazz: a husky, bluesy voice, a mix of Elkie Brooks, Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin. He could not easily decipher the words, for his ears were fast waxing up with yellowing brain...

His lower parts stank: he could not smell them, of course.

Tim suddenly realised something he had known all along - he had seen that woman before today: she had once been a hitch-hiker, unlucky enough to get the younger Tim Overdale as a lift.

The car slowly sank to its chassis.

Yes, it must have been Toddington...

***
Published 'Flickers 'n Frames' 1990

House Trained - Culture Vultures

2011-12-11T08:42:00.002Z

House Trained

My name is Matthew Shakewell and I nearly died yesterday.

I shall try to relate as closely as I can my experience, but please keep your hand on your heart and read this story in the clear light of day...for you may die of fright, as I so very nearly did. Please take care, make sure my words are not those of a mad man or one who wants to frighten you gratuitously; make sure you do not put too much credit in their meaning as appreciation of their truth could have damnable effect on the mild-mannered or the nervous...but, as I write this, I genuinely believe each word I am about to devote to paper.

So much for the warning, now for the facts.

***

I snuggled into the warmth of the carriage as the train churned through acre upon acre of English countryside. It was impossible to view the trees and village stations we must have passed through, for the night enshrined everything; so the most sensible thing to do was to try and sleep until the time for arrival at my destination, where my uncle would be waiting to greet me.

I slept for how long and with what vague dreams? Nebulous vistas of strange dimensional cities intruded, warped visages staring and tentacles clutching, wet lips and things sucking near. I awoke to the carriage, the formless darkness sliding away past me and an old man snoring in the corner. I was quite shaken by my dreams as the memory of them lingered incoherently. But I soon realized on looking at my timepiece that I should have arrived at my destination about an hour before!

It was then that I comprehended I had not seen one thing from the carriage window. True, I was travelling through a comparatively uninhabited part of England, but this was decidedly peculiar; even though there were no stars nor moon, I should have seen the distant glow of some big town or the lonesome light of a spinster's cottage. But absolutely nothing could I see, presumably on acoount of the unusual blackness of the night through which I was speeding in a corridorless train. Might it be fog?

I relaxed back into the seat and viewed my sleeping companion. The fog would explain the lateness of the train, but what about its apparent speed?

I was convinced the train was traveling at a phenomenal speed, but it was now two hours overdue--without precedence on that line. I resolved to wake my companion and I stepped over to shake him. What curled from the hood of the duffel coat was an evilly scarred face and, on unwinding, gave me an imbecilic smile: a moon-face topped by a schoolboy's cap, giggling in the depth of its rasping throat.

"Mutation" is a word too medical, too clinical, as what I saw was essentially unwholesome; nothing created by a mother on this world, but fashioned far away in dim lands beyond the galaxy we know. The transfiguration took me completely by surprise as, before my eyes, the monstrosity literally dissolved and dripping from the brown duffel coat was a green, sticky slime, forming a viscid puddle on the swaying floor.

It held all the smells which disgust man throughout the world and others completely new to his nose, recalling my dream vistas and certain other things I could not quite place.

My first thought was to pull the communication cord, but I felt the train was slowing down--presumably my destination had been reached. My mind was a maelstrom as the train drew to a halt. On jumping to the platform, I realized it was not my intended destination, but a strange station ... and the nightmare train was drawing out, leaving me bewildered and valiseless. Amid the chaos of my mind, I knew I had to find a porter and share the horror I with him.

Empty tins and scraps of paper scuttled along the deserted platform, driven by the night wind. So, no fog! Visibility was excellent, but it still puzzled me why I could not see the moon nor the stars. I shouted for assistance, but none came: a forsaken station, forgotten by all who used to work there, those who, under a happy sun, waved green flags and blew whistles, carted parcels and drank tea. Dazed, I shuffled along the cluttered platform towards the station-house, sithouetted against the ceiling of the sky, ominous and spectral.

I came to a turnstile and, not surprisingly, it was enlaced with choking cobwebs, twining through the bars. The only exit I could see was through there, and so I pulled myself together to cut a path through its creeping entropy. As I entered, an over-nourished spider skittered to its lair. I wish to God I had not looked to the left into the ticket-collector's cab, for here was not a deserted seat, but the ticket collector himself sitting, not as he used to be, but a decaying skeleton-creature with a puncher in the bones of a hand. A plump worm coiled through his skewered ribs ... and I screamed ... ran from that blasphemous railway station...

...into avenues of ill-lit horror, through lines of trees, black and twisted against the blacker sky, along country roads twining between untended hedgerows ... until exhaustion put paid to my progress ... I saw the House; it rose out of the darkness, looming forbodingly. It was more of a castle than a house, and had two towering wings, pointing and mocking at the sky.

I should not fear its occupants, I told myself--they would probably disperse my fears and show my position on the map - so I plucked up enough courage to walk to the main door. Its massive oaken surface and golden knocker filled me with awe, but I grasped the knocker, pulled it heavily from the wood, and let it drop with a crash echoing throughout the whole house. It was such a loud noise that it startled me and put the fear back. There, I waited for what Fate would bring to the door, waiting, eternally waiting. But no one came. No one deigned to answer my call for help, so I decided to force my way in for shelter, but the door looked too mighty for entrance there. But I was mistaken as a single trial caused the door to swing open with a splitting creak revealing ... only darkness. I coughed as the atmosphere tightened in my chest and I felt for a suitable position to sleep the night out.

It was then that I heard something which I can hear even now inside my head, a funeral moan, harmonically illogical, resonant, deep but also shrill, coming from up above me, approaching down a rickety staircase, a moan carrying at one and the same time the horror of the graveyard, the scream of delight as ghouls ecstatically lift a prutrescible corpse from its resting place, the terror of a lunatic's laugh as he carves his own flesh, and all the pain and panic of the Pit where shapeless elementals vaguely swim in fire, chewing off the heads of the human damned.

After, came a slithering and bumping above me: a thing was moving across the floor and, then, it was squelching down the stairs emitting the long drawn-out moan. The alternate slithering and bumping rode the creaking, teetering stairs, inexorably drawing closer, nearer, faster, down, down, down...

...it seemed as if I were in another world, sucked in by intangible forces to a revelation of the cosmos, a panorama of all time; stars and streaks of light reaching to infinitudes of chaos and cult, ethereal glows and fresh, unmathematical lands. I saw a city with dome-like, square buildings on plains of kaleidoscopic bubbles and, in each bubble, a grotesque gargantuan gargoyle leering at the citizens in the buildings. Those citizens themselves were immaterial, covered by jellified green slime and motivated by an ectoplasm of orange exactly in the middle of its soul-light.

I saw vague ski-runs of blue effulgence stretching for aeons from

the mamnoth, bubbly planet past the barrier of time and space, almost an interpenetration of two universes. I saw an enormous sled skim down the runnels, carrying those unfathomably huge monstrosities of green slime, and it looked as if they were waving and laughing, gobs of jelly forming into limb-strands and mouth-holes where the orange ectoplasm turned into a flickering tongue.

They laughed! They waved! They grew even larger! And on their interuniverse journey, they bred more and more of themselves as they neared a familiar planet...

The vision changed: I was looking at the cities of earth--London, Paris, New York, all empty except for ill-twisted skeletons littering the streets, doing exactly what they were doing when they died. Until the visions faded...

I was still in the House blanketed in darkness. The slithering and bumping grew yet nearer until I could see it!

It was a luminous blob of green pus - looking as if it had plucked itself unceremoniously from the incubating slime of its huge host monster following arrival on Earth. By turns it materialized and dematerialized as it squirmed and hobbled towards me... and I imagined I saw a crease of a wicked smile where the green fat folded and twitched. I screamed and screamed. It touched my foot. It actually touched my foot! My blood curdled as I felt it gradually creep up my body. The breathing gunge greened me over, covering my face like slobbering clay. I was then a gibbering, juddering puppet, insane with disgust, but tittering in ecstasy. I felt it enter my mouth, ooze into my throat, a seething, thickening mess of spitting, burping stew.

I found myself back in the train, watching an old man in a brown duffel coat sleep opposite me ... and out of the window the distant glow of a city.

It must have been a nightmare.

***

The train was three hours late when it arrived at my destination. I feel an impending doom on our world. Nothing to be done. As I lie here in a hospital, the doctors are amazed and disturbed by my body, which is dyed a hideous green in and out.

(Previously e-published)

-------------------

Culture Vultures

The bookshelves were stacked with cassette tapes. Earfuls of them.

The body must have been left lying there for ages, since the high stench had literally sprayed from the letter-box into a kid's prying face, one who was delivering a free newspaper, despite the sign on the garden gate expressly forbidding such delivery.

When I was finally alerted, as head of paupers' funerals in the local authority, the police work had been carried out. They had decided that the dead body had been left lying for some weeks, if a successful suicide could be blamed for such dilatoriness - which I doubted. Still, a dead body has got broad shoulders, in more senses than one - bones tending to spread out with the grain of decay. There was a desultory investigation by the autopsy man, where, on peering over his shoulder, I saw that there was very little differentiation between the congealed blood and the flesh proper.

There being no family to pick over the bones, as it were, I had my beady eye on the cassette tapes. From a cursory glance of the scrawled labels on the narrow side of each unpliable cuboid, the dead body had been a great lover of classical music. He and I had at least that in common. Even, the autopsy man, a philistine at the best of times, whistled with some bemused amazement, claiming that he didn't mind "a bit of that philharmonic stuff like that big fat geezer who sung the World Cup theme tune and, yes, of course, Mantovani".

"Mantovani?" I pretended I was not old enough to remember.

"Yes, Mantovani. Haven't you heard his 'Charmaine'? And, who else? Semprini. He played nice stuff on the piano. Geraldo. I reckon a lot of that dance music is even better than some philharmonic stuff."

The autopsy man did a mock jig round the dead body's living-room, as if reliving a romance of his youth when he danced the night away with his loved one to the sounds of some godawful Max Jaffa palm court rave or a Victor Sylvester jamming session!

With him thus preoccupied, I was further scrutinising the cassettes. A lot of classy sounds. Ranging from Monteverdi to Boulez. All the Bartok string quartets (my favourite). Tippett. Mahler. Schoenberg. And some composers even I had never encountered before. Hugh Wood. Ruders. Glass. Steve Reich. Havergal Brian. The Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead?

They weren't particularly classical. Weren't they a flower power pop group from the late sixties? I seemed to remember a friend of mine (in his forties, now) saying they were the best thing since sliced bread. And why sliced bread was such a good thing to be the best thing since ... well, I had never, till today, questioned.

Meanwhile, the autopsy man was acting turvy.

He had grabbed a cushion and was waltzing it around the room.

No, I was wrong, because I couldn't believe my eyes.

The cushion was not a cushion at all. It only looked like a cushion. In truth, it was a part of the dead body's body, lace-trimmed with a tripe-like fatty gristle, tinged pink. Goodness knows what he would have done if he had real music to jab his legs to. Most of it was in his head. Yet, I suddenly heard the imperceptible 'it is, it is, it is' sound that one often hears from others' personal hi-fi sets: an irritating habit of live bodies when they travel on trains these days. But, no, the autopsy man's ears did not wield such a spider-headclamp...

Unnoticed by both of us (and presumably likewise by the policemen), the dead body's head possessed a sprung device consisting of a shiny black half-hoop embedded in the white skull bone like a cinemascopic rodent ulcer trying, not to escape, but to enter a sinking ship - each extension of the hoop bearing a sanitary lug-pad stained with yellow wax. The interminable it-is emanated thence.

We then heard the sound of something coming through the letter box. No doubt this month's 'Good Music Guide', but we had scrammed through the back way, without bothering to investigate. Paupers' funeral arrangements are not always such avant garde affairs, I hasten to add. Yet, sometimes, paupers kindly end up burying themselves, as eventually turned out to be the case with today's stiff. Saves on council money. A lot to be said for it. Anyway, my friend the autopsy-turvy man - I've managed to get him into Stockhausen and Frank Zappa, but only after I promised to accompany him to a Richard Clayderman gig next week. He'll be doing our packed lunch.

Published 'Sivullinen' 1994

Conjugal Spice - The Imprimatur of the Monster

2011-12-11T08:40:00.000Z

Conjugal Spice

The bedroom was quiet, with the thunderstorm abating. No rain rushing along the gutters. No wind whining through the chinks in floor and roof.

Time to catch up on sleep. Husband and wife snored soundly, giving a wide berth to each other's shape, which was easy because the old-fashioned bed was possibly big enough for three.

Then, unlike the erstwhile weather, came a pinpoint of noise. Quiet at first, like the gentle nose-nose of mice or, at the most, rats, coming from under the floorboards.

Maude sat bolt upright, her every faculty primed. "Wake up, George," she whispered loudly.

George grunted. .

"Wake up, I said," she softly squealed.

The noise was now free-flowing rather than the initial separate sound of tentative snuffling. George eventually sat up and said: "What's up, Gorgeous?"

"Listen to that noise - whatever is it?"

His ears pricked. The moonlight, filtering through the slight gap in the print curtains, picked out the tiny glistening beads of sweat on his upper lip. "Nope - can't hear a damn thing, Gorgeous."

"You must be deaf, George. Just be quiet for once..."

The quietness was fast filling with another sound as if bare bones were rattling inside the chimney breast.

By now, Maude had switched on the bedside lamp with a click that always seemed louder at this time of night (especially with the moon on the wane.) "Look!" she screeched from underbreaths.

And they immediately clicked the light off, since what they thought they saw noodling from the cracks between floorborads were bloated worms, fangs denoting where snouts should have been if they did not simultaneously liquefy.

Maude and George long continued to sit bolt upright, fearful that a resumption light would attract further incursions.

"Gorgeous..." "Yes, George?" "The noise has gone, if I'm not too much mistaken." "Oh, George, I'm shaking fit to break and my titties are freezing, and I've got a splitting headache. Rub my feet for me, George." "Okky Doke, Duchess."

He tunnelled inside the bed, but there was a fleshy jelly with a spicy stench which slightly reminded him of Maude's night soil in the old days, before she had taken to wearing stiff underwear designed for those little incontinent moments.

Moonlight later saw fit to well back from the darkest hour before dawn. Still, nothing could be seen except the outer margins of varying consistencies of shadow moving about across the ancient king-sized bed. There were belching snorts as body rubbed against body, the air being sucked from between the red raspberries of skin.

And so much later in the night, it must have been morning. Something seeped into the print curtains like light, bleeding through rose-weft filters and willowy patterns of melting rhubarb.

Laid out across the huge bed were the flesh-sucked husks of two identical human bodies that had, at long last, shared the conjugal bed with a third party. And another storm could be heard grumbling in the distance amid jagged moonlight.

(Published 'The Night Side' 1991)

--------------------

The Imprimatur Of The Monster

I forget whether my memory is as good as it used to be.

I once knew how it all ended, but now I despair of remembering it. All I can do is make various attempts at retracking - rat-tracking through the sewers of the past.

I decided to pay another visit to the house where, all those years before, events transpired which mythology has all but subsumed. It is said that the past is a monster waiting to return from the direction of the future, with green-flecked lips and accusing eyes. But, I vowed to ignore such fears and to face out any residual shame from such ill-reported times.

***

Could the house be in the mind, thus not just a simple train journey away? I sat in the shuddering carriage watching the leather window-strap swing from side to side. I itched to tug the red-painted alarm chain in the slot above the warning to passengers not to lean out. The tunnels seemed to be prolific - dark interludes in an otherwise straightforward succession of events. From all available evidence, there was no other passenger in the long corridorless train. But how was I to know for certain either its length or population? Only by disembarking.

I pulled down the arm-rest from its niche in the carriage's uphostlery and leaned my greasy head of hair upon the lightly engraved antimacassar. I desperately wanted to dream, in case reality had played me false and would land me in an incomplete scenario of trackless trains heading for infernal countries of night.

I did dream, I think. I saw visions of others who had dreamed before me - lands where history had come clean and laid bare the bones of its villainous participants - scores of skeletons clacking above the sleepers, like the tail-to-tail bony carapaces of unfreighted flesh - cities of scientists who went mad with religion - plain upon plain of inverted mountains....

I woke with a start. I had not been dreaming at all, only dreaming that I had. The train was pulling into a station, since I saw white boards flashing by with its name written up in clearer and clearer, and yet unattainable, definition.

I had embarked at Paddington, since the house I sought I knew to be in Wales. This principality had not yet been affected by the changing disguise of Europe, unlike the more malleable souls in London such as myself. During my last days in the hospital, I had ranted, it seemed, in my sleep, about the Black Mountains, where Creature Beings perched and spoke in the same Celtic lilt as I, the dreamer. Such Beings, through me, spoke goldenly of a Race older even than themselves which represented the most important group of Beings which Time and Space could ever encompass. And that Older Race, in turn, spoke of even greater Beings who managed to exist, in spite of their intrinsic untenability.

Now, as the train drew to a juddering halt, I, in a moment of misplaced logic, wondered if there were yet other Beings immeasurably greater than even those. And so on, ad infinitum and, perhaps, absurdum, until...

"Until you come to Man himself." A porter, or one I took to be such, had opened the carriage door for me and spoken as if continuing a conversation. In the dim flickering lights of the wind-swept platform, I saw his face possessed an imbecilic cast, topped off with a purple schoolboy's cap far too small for the head. Snot bubbled at one enlarged nostril. After he took my luggage, I saw he had a graveyard lurch, as he headed towards the station house and its waiting-room.

As I followed him, I heard the train shunting behind me, steaming up for the rest of its journey and, fleetingly, I turned to see faces pressed up against the grimy windows of that hissing beast. They were yearning with their eyes and I do not know whom I pitied most, me or them, as they sashed up and down upon the surface of the glass in a strange indulgent rhythm of farewell.

The thing in the cap motioned me towards a gas-fire which warmed one corner of the waiting-room. I rubbed my hands slowly above its glowing grid of orange bone, my mind inevitably drifting from the more natural courses of my thought-patterns. I had come to revisit the house, where I believed I had once been granted a vision of the future - when mankind would amount to nothing in the scheme of things. But now I suspected that the monster of green squelch I had faced then, had traversed the interlocking entropies of unimaginable existence from hyper-spiritual worlds, not as a precursor of Earthly colonisation, but as an emblem of the truth that had prevailed prior to the onset of reality itself. Or, at best, tangential to it.

***

One can learn to grow less afraid of any monster, if it is believed it is real, rather than a concoction of one's own terrified mind. Such is the crux of the matter, since I now realised (in the true sense of that word) I had come to this spot to lay the ghost which I myself once created, and I would achieve this by proving beyond reasonable doubt that it was truly *real*. And still is. Hence this rite of passage across the neat meadows of England...

To staunch the onward tread of worse and worse nightmares that are not nightmares at all, I needed to ascertain that the house contained a true monster of flesh and blood in its own terms, a monster that I could rationalise, encapsulate and even believe explicity when it spoke of forthcoming human doom in its characteristic voice of slimy conviction. Only by believing the truth of its message, could I exorcise and, consequently, nullify its effect.

***

I left the station behind me, as I trudged the once familiar country lane. There was the house. But, no, not yet, just a head of woods, grown together to present a common front to the hurricanes now so prevalent in this part of the world. A seat of green amid the swirling greys.

I was grateful for the warm-up in the waiting-room. How long I had been there listening to the ludicrous tales of the overgrown schoolboy, I could only measure by the growth of beard. He told me that the house was no longer in situ, since it had contracted a teetering, cancerous stairwell and collapsed in upon itself, even before the seasonal hurricanes had become endemic. I could not believe him, of course, because he also told me that I was a different person to the one who had come here all those years ago - not the one who had been frightened by the skeleton of a railway ticket-collector in his platform booth. He looked bemused when I countered by saying that I had not been afraid of the skeleton as such but by the plump worm for which its bones acted as home.

My dismay was great when he said he wanted to come with me to find the house. However, he spotted another train steaming towards the station and he went off to categorise it, number it and wave it through.

I left the woods behind me and, just as one of those lilty Creature Beings cut a screaming wedge of yellow light in the sky's blanket of night, I spotted the house itself, just as I think I remembered it.

But, incredibly, it was careering towards me out of the past, with steam churning from every chimney-stack.

Lights were being flashed on and off in every window, greenness slicking down the glass like net curtains of foullest slime. The monster had actually become the house, rather than remained an inhabitant of it. I put my fists to my ears to dull its pained bellowing - it had originally come to destroy the whole of mankind, but had merely managed to get up a sufficient head of steam to destroy only myself.

I realised I had, since my earliest times, absorbed the vile imaginings that this monster had created. Its metagalactic imprimatur was to mythologise the only tenable beings in existence who happened to be Earth's humans - and I now knew I had rescued the future for humanity. By fixing the monster under the impenetrable varnish of my creativity, I also fixed its dreams of us and made them real. As I sucked its Hell into my brain, the better was our chance to become angel-eyed and paramount - shimmering creatures in our own right with grains of honest phantasy - happily wandering among the gildenspires of the Heavenly City.

***

I am that house, I am that train, I am that ghoulish schoolboy, I am that ideologue weirdmonger...

I made myself actually become that monster. And, without me, you would never have been you, with desires and dreams and fancies and loves, all fit for gods and goddesses. You would have been mere puppet-jerks of Older and Younger Races, with a blood-engorged worm in the night-hutch of the head to replace that human brain of infinite possibilities.

To stop my own head from exploding into a thousand bone-shards, I ask you, please, I beg you, to hold me close - let me nuzzle in your cosy lap, so that such love and care will enable me to bear man's worst nightmares on your behalf.

***

But I look up and see that awful schoolboy's moon-face leering at me imbecilically, the maggot-riddled flesh slowly drooling from the sicker bones within - and my despair at forgetting how it all ended is never-ending.

Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1994

Spam - Southend-on-Sea

2011-12-11T08:35:00.000Z

Spam

Baron Harch wanted to keep the principality of Harchwee clean and wholesome, but the docks let him down, since they represented little more than blasphemous effigies of bloated rats tucked up in a baby's frilly cradles. The parks and espalier trails were indeed litter-free, the courtyards and promenades neatly white-washed. Outside the cafes, elderly gentry played chess under the near endless summer skies, flasks of ice-green water ready to hand.

Le Pei left this inner sanctum of the Baronry, where castle turrets poked rocketship imitations at the tireless full moon of a hushed expectant night, and passed through the city gate, where late stragglers mouched and chatted in starry-eyed demeanour. The only sound was the squeaking of his shoes. He would soon hit the alleyways which revealed the beginning hair-line cracks of darker paths beyond. He cast a careless glance at the sky and shivered, for were they clouds reaching out for the yellowing moon? Was there a tinge of dampness in the air? After all, did he *really* want to proceed? At dawn, upon imagining the drone of bombers leaving alternate worlds with their bellies empty, he neared the river's edge, where the buildings became Monopoly Game houses, window- and door-less sheds, each a highly-coloured uniformity. They presented relief from the churchyards and the yew-black dripping shadows of the terraced suburbs and ruined shopping malls. He had yearned then for a friendly wave from a passing cousin, in bright holiday gear, but all he saw were the shifting patterns of dossers fidgetting in their sleep. One dosser in particular died in his arms, whilst stretching pleadingly for a toddy or a tiffin. Le Pei heard him whisper and, later, upon approaching the crazy wharf-side streets beyond the dank, dreary rat-runs of the night, he recalled what else the dosser said: "My head hurts, and I've no use for totin' it further." The soul left the dosser's gaping mouth, surrendering the faintest whine like a tooth-fairy stifling under a little girl's pillow.

The barges bobbed gently. The wharf men hoorayed to those on board, who in turn gave surly response. The Hopper crew, lately arrived, knew that their chief mate had been taken at the depth of dreaming sleep into jankers, and they feared he would never be seen again. The Captain, Tom Hopper, clasped the hand of a rough redneck as he lurched ashore by Big Bollard: "I've got lines of human heads packed like eggs, all with the needful fillings. Some already coloured up for Easter..."

The roughneck did not deign to reply, but merely pointed querulously at the Captain's companion. "'Tis my nephew, Ni-Al, he'll cause you no trouble. He'll bring the cargo of walking heads ashore." Further flat-capped locals grouped around and one of them explained that the cargo would need to be heat-stored in the red- and green-houses. How to get them there, was the query, of course. Captain Tom whistled between his teeth and, slowly, a human head, with sprouts of abortive hair, poked a face over the bows. Then, in a hypnotised gaggle, several others bounced to and fro along the deck, their socketed feet padding like toddlers "up the little wooden hills to Bedfordshire". Eventually, they ventured ashore, by puffing out their cheeks and rolling down the hawsers. Their sibilant gibble-gabble made the dock-men smile - but Tom did not see the joke as he tightened his belt on raw-hide breeches. Hundreds of human heads continued to career from shed to shed, inspecting the best billets available to bivouac for the night. They knew their brains would soon be torn out for the priceless smuggled fluid which they contained, but, as they hustled between the legs of Ni-Al Hopper, it was pain and eventual oblivion for which they actually yearned. As the Great God exacted futures for the several realities in His control, He relished in particular the roasting of such heads of Harchwee. These delicacies welded end to end would stretch from world to world and bridge the gulf between otherwise distant cousins.

Meantime, Baron Harch twitched an eyelid, twitched a second one and wondered if he happened to think less about the seamier side of his domain, it would cease to matter or even to exist at all. "Fitzworth!" he called to his factotum. A leather-aproned, flat-capped man eventually entered, rubbing his greasy hands upon his backside. "Yes, m'Lord?" "Do you believe in philosophy?" "Flossoffy? Blimey, what the heck's that? I don't hold with high-falutin' ideas. It don't pay to fill your head with things like that. I does me job, and that's that. I'm happy enough."

The land of Abrundy Tiddle, neighbouring Harchwee, lay between the two giant waterfalls of Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth. Through their sheer curtains, the first view was of the terraced villas, where painters, composers and literati met and discussed their new artistic projects. The villas huddled in clutters upon the hills, growing like Siamese Boxes from the woods that weaved the valley's basin. Rudely crafted canals (veining the ruined palace squares of Abrundy Old Town) intermittently branched from the main artery of the Tiddle. It was in fact that mighty frothing river which churned between the banks of the Straddling Church, where ordinary worshippers populated the pews on either side, sometimes glancing up at the great episcopal bridge (on which priests and arch-vicars wended their monkish courses amongst the richer church-goers). Those were the days when Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth were subject to conflicting geo-centric forces, the Tiddle often bursting its hesitant margins, creating large curds of salt-white to bleach the kneeling choirs of the Straddling Church. Even the altar-piece faced the rogue splatters of the ill-tempered river.

Legend said that the Straddling Church was merely an irritating reincarnation of the City of London's mythick domed cathedral of St.Paul - emerging as a vision from the mists and torrents and earthquakes. The Thames had split it asunder, the Abrundy writers had speculated. Some even believed that their collective imaginary world of Early England was more likely to exist than the real province of Harchwee which neighboured Abrundy Tiddle to the west. Religions were like that.

Abrundy pubs were full of loose talk. The kegs were tapped into the Tiddle itself. The Landlords were rich as a result of the many mouths sucking upon all the pumps. The bars were gorgeously decorated with nap-waterfalls and three-dimensional tags and pieces. The ash-trays and spittoons were cross-hatched with designer pus. But the talk was loose - words flying heedlessly hither and thither, with no sense of reponsibility nor even meaning. Four men sat carelessly around that night - lolled loudly in mock carven coracles and shot their mouths off about non-existent scandals, about unsubstantiated news reports and incoherent jokes, about false literary allusions, with ridiculous puns and unworkable plans of campaign, and about inland black seagulls with squeaky wings. To church and waterfalls, the conversation suddenly turned. "You know of the tales our writers tell?" "About the Great Head of Steam old Amster will fling off come Judgement Day?" "No, but another great quake could see us all dead, with both Amster and Mouth fighting each other like spitting wildcats - it won't be safe even in the villas - I've a good mind to join my cousin Feemy Fitzworth in Harchwee." "Harchwee will suffer floods, too, you know." One rose to go - the others too took his lead - and went to create smaller waterfalls of their own against the back wall of the pub.

Later, their conversation tailed off as they lay beside the bar, each with a drip-feed from the kegs and a brown fizzy liquid gurgling up to the lips from their stomachs. That same night, one of them had a vision of the real St Paul's. But he put it down to the drunken cavortings of his obstreperous noddle. The Head of Steam that old Amster then spat was a precursor of the mammoth cascade that would drown all of them one day, only to trickle out of existence itself down the brain drains of time. Baron Harch knew the legend of Abrundy-Tiddle as a disposable tear-off slip of history, but the Baron's favourite resort was Meadowport. Whilst neighbouring Abrundy Tiddle was unique in its situation between the two mighty waterfalls, in its many back-to-back, two-up-two-down villas huddling to the hills above the ruined palace squares of Abrundy Old Town and its famed church a-spawder the Tiddle, Meadowport was different.

The Baron, the summer before each Lady-Day in Harvest, spent the idle days of his calendar beside Meadowport's painted ocean; merely patchwork pastures in sculptured disguise - cows grazing among the so-called waves and giant model ships; wild geese packing between the mock beach-heads and garlanded dry-dock piers; and simple folk nodding in time to the rhythm of the weather jingles. The Baron's toady, Blasphemy Fitzworth, adjusted the tartan covers of his master's near-crippled wicker deckchair and said: "How's your napper? Cold? Want your hat, sirrah?" "No, thank you, Fitzworth, just start the gulls up, please." The problem was that the wings squeaked, but the Baron dozed off and had a nightmare. The field was planted with heads - stretching to every horizon, thousand upon thousand of human heads, socketed into the soil by every vein and membrane. They nodded; turned widdershins, and back again; they squawked hideous words; some had beaks and umbrella boils; others blew their cheeks into bubble gum shapes; a few even bore smaller heads, black and yellow, that mimicked their host heads; and, finally, there was one as big as a barrage balloon that called itself Moon. And Moon often dreamed about floating over a domed cathedral amidst the flak of some future blitz. The Baron was affrighted, but not without remorse. That panorama of rippling skull crop was pitiful indeed. But what was that noise? A coughing, spluttering engine broke the silence of the nightmare and, wide and lurching, it careered and harvested through the great red sea. At once, Moon, the natural leader of the planted pack, quacked a warning to his flock: "Whatever you do, don't lose your heads!"

The Baron woke abruptly. The wind had come up from across the canvas wastes and whined insidiously around him. The engine noise that had broken his dream had turned up in his waking and juddered from beyond the candy-floss stall. "Fitzworth! Fitzworth!" There was no answer from the toady - he had skedaddled already to his cunny-berry. Dwarfy ear-droppers gathered round the Baron's cot town and began to flawter the skin from his bone, with paring-knives, and entertissued it with erfkin spew.

He awoke again, this time from a nightmare within a nightmare, only to return to the engine noise and saw the mountainous paddle-wheels of the all-American thumper-momster. "Don't lose your heads," shouted Moon, "Keep low and it'll only curl your hair." "Sirrah, wake up!" shouted Feemy Fitzworth. "They say the Straddling Church has collapsed and killed thousands of worshippers!" Dazed, but purposeful, the Baron, in mock of some legendary film star President, stammered: "We must go to Abrundy, to aid our cousins..." Feemy continued: "The Falls have fallen. Amster-dam has lifted its lid and let a steam-critter out as big as the sky above. Surging-Mouth fought back with an endless tunnel of sucking-water ... and ..." The Baron motioned him to let up. "I must stand tall ... give them something to hang on to ... they need to look up and forget..."

Feemy was sad. His friends and cousins would have been at church that day: the list would be endless, all struggling within the dark screecher chasms of an upturned world, mouthing desperate futures they knew in their hearts as well as heads did not exist, fruitlessly undergoing the labour pains of death. The painted ocean of Meadowport twitched, humped its back and settled like a collapsed marquee. The end of the pier show sang on, and the joke got even worse: "I say, I say, I say, they say death is like sicking up all your innards in one go ... me wife made me eat her tumblefruit pie tonight, a special recipe, she said ... it feels as if I'm going to die many times over, I'd better stick me head down me throat, or deep down into the earth, to stop its terrible, terrible heaving..." The joke never reached its punchline, just tailed off. The Baron Harch? Well, he could be on the moon, looking down. Or that story's good as any.

Le Pei surveyed the wild thunderous torrents of Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth. He knew, as if instinctively, that there was a story here: one that, even if already told, could do with some re-telling. He shrugged, as he stopped day-dreaming. It was really London, the river the Thames and the cathedral St Paul's. But, to Le Pei, it would always be Abrundy Tiddle, with its gothic-turned church straddling the river on colossal pillar-legs. Amster-Dam and Surging-Mouth fell straight as dies from the bluest sky, betokening further worlds up there from which these waterfalls stemmed. Le Pei knitted his brows - science was no longer anything in which to have faith: religion was the only real alternative. The dual torrents fed the Tiddle, but when does torrent end and full-blooded flood begin? That parahistoric day held perhaps the true and provoking answer. The World War had been over for as many days as it takes to mix a family Christmas cake, cook it and eat it. The War had lasted longer than anyone could remember, and the Blitz still echoed in Le Pei's ears. Remnant mortals were even now cowering within makeshift shelters in the shadow of the great cathedral. It seemed as if the mighty St Paul's could no longer grow into the future for fear of crushing the clumsily fashioned terraced Wendy Houses that had been set leaning beneath the north and south facing transoms. Le Pei peered into one such structure and could not make out where the mother ended and the child began. The news of the end of the War, if it had reached them at all, was not easily believed and, even if believed, not acted upon.

In those days, the river passed further from the very portals of our St Paul's than it was healthy to acknowledge. The history books stated, unarguably, that the cathedral had been built on the banks of the river; and a little birdie had also said that they were destined to become closer still. Le Pei sat next to a dosser who looked as if he had been tramping the Underground Lines for most of his life. "What's the reckoning?" asked Le Pei, desperate for even the smallest reaction to the news still filtering through from the fronts. The dosser, of course, made no reply, for he had eaten his own tongue, in preference to spam. Le Pei looked down at his own patent leather shoes. As he waggled his feet in them, they looked as if they were in an ugly face competition, speaking pitifully on behalf of those unable to speak for themselves. They spoke of days to come when everybody would stare at a thing called "Snooker" for days on end from a glowing square of colour in the corner of the parlour, in apparent enjoyment. This could be nothing but science for, if it were religion, it would at least be tangible and understandable. The shoes spoke of this and that, of beginnings and endings, of the hopes that would end in nothing except more unquenchable hopes. Le Pei turned to the dosser who had silentlly left him to his own thoughts. He had obviously disappeared off to plumb the extent of the Circle Line underground. He would report back on the rumours of life between High Street Kensington and Aldgate breaking out fitfully from the air raid Wendy Houses. Then, water started to trickle around Le Pei's shoes. In dribs and drabs, more ebb than flow but, later, in more noticeable coughs and splutters. It drove before it the ill-constructed coracles that had once been Wendies. The dewllers therein would no doubt scream if they had not already stuffed their mouths with spam, in an attempt to use it up - the War having ended too early.

The surging torrents penetrated to the point where a little birdie said it would; and out of the resultant standing waters, there stepped a drenched, doom-dreary figure who mumbled of coming to Abrundy Tiddle. Fears of not knowing whether he were coming or going set in. And he stepped back into the now swirling waters to find the London City he knew must exist. Le Pei watched himself go...

Who upturned the world, only the Great God knows. But at a point between then and now, things started to go badly awry. And the torrential rain fell down upon the sky. The snooker balls bounced off each other, as some are potted, some not. But nobody can hear their ricochet: for all have died and gone away, even the players. Was it boredom or plain despair, or the unbearable stench of cancered tongues in the coloured rolling heads? And having retold it all, Le Pei freshened up his newly barbered body beneath the hosing shafts of Amster-Dam against Surging-Mouth. Later, he walked down to the straddling cathedral, for the morning service was about to begin. There, Cardinal Hopper XXIII would signal this and that, of the shrivelling ends of beginnings, of the seeping fulfilment of hopes feeding upon hopes. A little birdie settled upon the Prayer Duct, fresh from pretending to be a plastic sea-gull in Meadowport, and squeaked another message for all to hear. Le Pei's shoes squeaked, too, and squelched as they entered the mighty portals - but the swollen tide between the pews had found its place at last; and the squeaks were never heard above the waves' wild career between sacramental shores. "If the Great God is so bleeding sane and sensible, how can He ever expect us to believe in Him?" was his last drowning thought.

(Published 'Weirdmonger's Tales' 1994)

---------------------

Southend on Sea

If you find this typescript, please preserve it, for it's not that bad. I dropped it down the WC accidentally and where it will turn up beats me. But if it's still intact, please return it forthwith to the address at the end....

My name? What business is it of yours? Suffice it to say that, if you knew my name, you would be none the wiser at this stage. You would be side-tracked so severely that you would not even bother to read the rest of this tract, too busy with looking up a variety of encyclopaedias and getting all entangled with the many cross-references stemming from my name.

Well, follow me. Don't dilly-dally and when I say jump, you damn well jump!

This tunnel closely follows the route of a new canal that wends its way several leagues above us. At times, it is close, to such an extent that you can hear the self-conscious chugging of the narrow boats, and, at others, so far, that you're nearer the core of the earth than to the surface channellings.

Jump!

That was close. We just crossed a crevice which goes deeper than anything you've known before and ends up on the other side of the universe, some say.

That dim glow, which allows us to feel our way, filters down along special tubings fed from the daylight way above us. They've got it on top - just watch. I turn this valve, and the deep richness of a summer sunset fills your face with a healthy flush. Look closer, old pal, and see what I look like. It is about time you saw my face which, after all, should be of more interest to you than my name, surely. It's deeply marked with age, you may note, but I'm younger than you, I'll be bound. It's got character lines fanning out from brow to brow, hasn't it? You don't say much about me: what's got your tongue?

Well, keep mum, man, just follow a little way more, just round that bend.

Jump!

Godforsaken gentleman. Failed to jump in time, I guess. Gave him plenty of warning, didn't I?

Halloo! Are you down there?

No. Well, he wasn't much of a conversationalist anyway, and I don't suppose he'd have learnt much. Even if he was still alive, he'd find it hard to call for help. Because shy he was. Shyer than a blushing bride on her first night.

Us ley-line constructionists don't talk much at the best of times. We're too busy following the natural courses of our brains. It's the veinings which count.

My old apprentice disappeared down a gullet and is lost for ever, no doubt.

If you find him wandering around some mocked-up London Underground, following his nose, as it were, silently seeking the by-ways for my friendly chump, send him back to me. Straight to the secret Inlet, part of the way beyond the Bill, until you reach the Cape at the head of the Flight of Locks, here to the Naze, half-way up the encroaching Creeks and Backwaters which face up to that mighty Peninsula, poised in the flushing seas of sunset, down the Essex way.

That's the address for all your sendings.

***

As a belated afterthought, you still want to know my name? OK, I'll come clean and I'll put it at the head of this typescript, like a sign-post to the better things below it.

Finally, all I can say is that we must find better ways....I'm sick to the teeth with it all.

(Published 'The Third Half' 1987)

Don't You Dare (2)

2011-12-10T15:05:00.002Z

Don't You Dare (2)

«H E »email

posted Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Written today and first published here

In the ancient days, when all was modern, one was allowed to take photographs of architecture or public statues without fear of contravening artistic rights and so forth.

But that was before the so-called ‘Don’t You Dare’ law was enacted, forbidding any form of plagiarism including the plagiarism of form itself. Thus ‘architecture’ or ‘statues’, as defined, were bracketed with ‘paintings and other fine art’.

The ‘Don’t You Dare’ nickname for such a wide-ranging and restrictive law was adopted because even the act of quoting the real name of the law was considered to be, in itself, a form of plagiarism conflicting with the terms of the very law that, therefore, necessarily had to remain unnamed.

I once caught a surreptitious student outside my listed house with his mobile at a suspicious angle (hiding his face) and I shouted through the window that my property was out of photographic bounds because of the ‘Don’t You Dare’ law. The custom, in these circumstances, was to shout out that very phrase. Everyone then knew what you meant.

He middle-fingered me. But, of course, the law was so strict that being caught breaking it would entail harsh penalties. So, he slouched off, amid a concealing huddle of complicit students. I shouted expletives towards their backs.

“Flea off! And don’t let me catch you even writing a description of my house, you copy-typists!”

It was written in the small print of the ‘Don’t You Dare’ law that the term ‘replica’, embodied in the wording, did include essay-writing on the spot or even memory-training to visualise any architecture or statue for later reproduction-by-any-means.

Only one of the students responded to my shouts but I’ve already exceeded my descriptive powers in depicting the earlier middle-finger, perhaps, because there was a recent test case that people themselves could be included within the definition of ‘statue’.

I felt the need to run after them to give them a piece of my mind. One needed to blow one’s top. Bottling-up was not good. I ran down the stairs, while endeavouring to keep my thoughts at bay as far as possible, because I feared even thinking about certain things might contravene the Statute of Statues.

Good job my memory was so poor. That was thankfully not the real name of the law.

Halfway down the street, however, the student with the mobile abruptly turned to face me and started to shout at the top of his voice: ‘Don’t You...’, as if envisaging a future identity parade at the local nick. Whose identity (his or mine), I dare not even imagine. Even envisaging the envisaging of anyone else might contravene smaller print than it was ever possible to read. And which of us was the Medusa became a moot point.

In the ancient days, when all was modern, the laws were always sensible. Political Correctness never crossed swords with unwritten hindsight. Nor was poetic licence set in stone.

Don't You Dare

2011-12-10T15:04:00.002Z

Don't You Dare

«H E »email

posted Saturday, 10 May 2008

Written today and first published here

I needed only one more corner to negotiate before I reached the promenade and the full-frontal voice of the waves. The day-trippers had already scattered because the creature I called the sea was in a 'don't you dare' mood today. So there was no-one else to be seen on the promenade when I accosted the endless view head-on. I stood, hands on hips, facing the grey surging plough-tracks of the wind from above and of the tides from below.

Amazed, I abruptly saw that where previously there had been nothing, a fort-on-stilts had been built ... about a quarter of the mile from the shore. Not a rig, as such. More like a squat pier without beginning or end.

"They built it all last night to help make wind-farms," I heard spoken from close quarters. I turned quickly to gauge who had become capable of conversation against the whining and hissing of the weather.

It was ... a creature.

I identified it as a simple creature of the night with some doubt because I now saw that dusk had dyed itself with abortions of wrong-headed time. The present moment felt as if it should have been part of a dawn scenario but the immediate sky had already pigged upon a fading dusk - dusk that was fast being extruded from the tail-ends of some ebbing duration of blackened history. So it was not a simple creature of an even simpler night that had spoken, but a purveyor of a tranche of time and tide that swept in off the sea like the overlapping of all nights through which I had recently tossed and turned sleeplessly.

I felt my only avenue of escape was to dash directly into the comforting arms of the sea itself. Comforting, by comparison with those of the creature that now awaited my own rhythmic ritornelle of conversation just set in near-karaoke motion. The potential overlapping of voices would match that of the conflux of various nights as one. Or several flotsam-choked tides meeting to tongue-kiss a whirlpool.

I listened for the vocal backdrop of the waves to beckon me more strongly. One could not take the sea for granted.

I hesitated ... and then I set off at a run across the subsiding pebbles.

But the sea was not ready to love me. I had not visited it as often as I should. The sea needs visiting at least once a day, and trudged beside on each occasion for at least four miles, whatever my age or health. If I had done that religiously over the past days or nights, I would have seen the 'rig' being built and perhaps even prevented its presence as a parasite just off-shore. Building wind-farms seemed a pretty lame excuse to pollute the purity of the sea, to blot the horizon with fixed white wings.

I wept. But the sea did not notice.

The ghostly creature hunched and left the promenade, removing its various multi-coloured coats of night one by one.

The body that had once been me was now just one more item of flotsam nuzzling against the pier-legs of the rig ... as a first attempt to make this story have a happy ending. But there were to be no more attempts. And the wind died at dawn.

A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA / TOO MANY HEROES

2011-12-10T15:00:00.005Z

A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA / TOO MANY HEROES

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posted Sunday, 30 December 2007

EDIT (2 Jan 08) The version below has now been superseded by the workshopped version here:

http://vaultofevil.proboards75.com/index.cgi?board=filth&action=display&thread=1199024788

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A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA / TOO MANY HEROES
PROLOGUE
He tried to be simple but it never worked. He tried it without a name. But it involved several guesses that simply made it more complicated. He then tried it with his real name. This led to an unholy mess of recrimination. He then tried a pseudonym. That worked better. Also two titles worked better than one, but arguably less well than none. Certainly better than more. That could not be explained. So, he had a certain amount of perplexity about possible titles but learned to live with it. Two titles became the optimum. Neither crowded or uncrowded.

He then questioned whether it should have a beginning. And if no beginning, why not no end as well? But everything needed to have a beginning and an end even if he did not intend them to be a beginning and an end. Perhaps they were simply beginning and end by default.

There was never any question about authorship, however. Everything was what it was, with no unnecessary nomenclature together with the minimum use of long words and heavy syntax. And Potter was whoever he was, even if disguised by a pseudonym.

Now we come to the unravelling simplicity of a work with two titles, with no author, with a main protagonist conveniently known by an otherwise unwanted name -- and ostensibly a work with no beginning or end, because Potter had caused the whole to be truncated or cropped after it had been finished.

***************

Potter was a lover of old English churches. He loved especially those single-towered or single-spired churches with basic styles, such as undecorated wooden box-pews, an unwordy pulpit, a crudely manufactured (even makeshift) altar, silent bell-ringers and a pervading atmosphere of natural faith uncluttered by any sense of evil or even by a simple doubt.

He had left his wife at the hotel, telling her that he may be quite a long time today as he wished to explore St Nemo’s Church in Desborough with particular care, because Sir George Jackman was supposed to have found his final resting-place there.

Jackman had been a figure who featured quite heavily in an unnamed book which Potter was investigating so as to simplify a view of history that had wrongly been complicated by unworthy historians just in it for the money.

He hoped that there may be some textual or textural inscription on the tomb that would explain why Jackman had been given his title. Particularly with which monarch he had found favour, there being several possible monarchs whose respective periods of reign had crossed the time-line of Jackman’s own life.

“The plural of opus is opera,” said Potter, with characteristic absent-minded absurdity. He then told his wife he would need a lunch-box for his day at Desborough, in hope that this tone of homeliness would make her forget the absurdity he had just voiced.

“Have you asked the kitchen staff for a lunch-box?” Mrs Potter asked. Evidently, Potter’s ploy had worked well.

“They told me to ask again in the morning,” he replied. He laughed upon thinking that the word ‘replied’ had ‘lied’ built-in. Then immediately he brushed away the thought that had caused the laughter.

The night was full of dreams that Potter, in his search for simplicity, also tried to brush away come morning. Dreams were easier to forget than most things. He had effectively forgotten about his own untruth about planning to ask the kitchen staff in the morning because he actually did ask the hotel’s kitchen staff in the morning and they fortuitously provided a lunch-box for him to take, although it was full of what later became a congealed mess.

He said goodbye to his wife and began his trudge through the Essex creeks towards the church at Desborough. The weather was inclement and he was thankful for his thermal vest.

“Thank you, thank you...” he muttered absently to himself, as he watched the spire gradually exceed the distance between itself and the hotel from which he came. The journey should have been more straightforward, but one had to account for the number of missed turnings. As ever, there was only a single complex way to describe everything; unfortunately that would not have helped Potter’s ambitions to capture a confident simplicity from between the jaws of difficult doubt. The journey was probably full of tangents and misadventures. Potter preferred a straight unbroken line between A and B and so it turned out to be for our purposes here. But he did allow report of the lost lunch-box. He would tell his wife about it later to excuse his excessive appetite.

Despite the never-ending glimpses of the spire seeming to move by its own volition rather than from Potter’s changing vantage-point, the destination was eventually reached before the end.

The exterior of the church was lit by a sudden glance of the sun through the clouds, simultaneously lifting Potter’s heart in the process. He had been particularly crestfallen by the loss of the lunch-box as well as by the anti-climax of arrival. The sun, however, seemed to lift the church from its own slough of despond. The wet roofs of the surrounding village could be seen through the trees as simple as an impression. Not a painting so much as a forgotten dream.

Potter approached the door of the church, having first ascertained there was no relevant stone-marker in the graveyard concerning Sir George Jackman. Such an important titled personage would probably have his resting-place within the church walls ... and so it turned out to be, his carved stone likeness crowning the tomb’s lid, giving the impression that he had two bodies: one hard and permanent that was on view, the other just the congealed mess within.

“Thank you, thank you...” Potter again muttered absently to himself. “Hmmm, this must be him. A simple turn of events. What was expected is what has happened. Thank you, indeed.”

It was too dark inside the church to make out the box-pews with any degree of clarity. Rearing from one of them, a huge grim shadow held out Potter’s missing lunch-box. Was this simply what one would have expected given the circumstances of time and motion? Or the most frightening experience possible?

The sunshine, evidently now permanently in existence outside the church, was illuminating the altar-window like glimpses of a true Heaven rather than stains of a false one. A diversion thankfully back towards simplicity.

“Don’t forget me,” he heard his wife say inside his head. She must have known he had been in danger; but, sitting in the hotel lounge reading a Henry James novel, she was, in fact, further away than any such impression could vouchsafe.

But there had been no need to worry even if she had given herself good reason to worry. Her hero returned before nightfall.

“There are two Heavens, one called Hell, the other History,” Potter noted in his note-book after lightly rubbing, for many hours, a soft pencil-lead over his own thermal vest stretched like tracing-paper upon the alphabetical interstices of the benighted stone box-lid.

God is the one true monarch: he thought his last thought.

There was no ending to crop off.

===========
This opuscula was first written today by DF Lewis

STRIPPED OF TITLE

2011-12-10T15:00:00.002Z

STRIPPED OF TITLE

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posted Wednesday, 19 December 2007

First written today and first published here.

The fog came down like a safety-curtain. The voice I then heard wasn’t muffled but seemed as clearly struck as a well-tempered bell. It rent the air in much the same way as I imagined an opera singer would rend it in recitative to himself, probably unaware I was close by.

I made as if to answer but this was too early in the morning to trust any voice. Cold and crisp as a Christmas older than simply old-fashioned.

My wife Maude had often scolded me for failing to be wary of strangers early in the morning.

“You know it’s just as dangerous and as lonely at dawn as at night-time, George.”

I would nod. Maude’s warning strangely reminded me of the case of late-night drinkers religiously avoiding driving themselves home because of the law regarding inebriation, but then they would get up early in the morning after a similar skinful the previous night and drive without thinking. If they were breathalysed they would still be over the limit. Old Christmases were full of drivers weaving all over the road, at any time of the day or night, looking for innocent parties to maim, it seemed. If it wasn’t so funny, I would have laughed at this train of thought. The thought itself was confusing. I almost felt drunk myself, but I never drank.

Upon this morning in question, however, my mind was as clear as the aforementioned bell. Maude’s warning took root as I heard the lonely traveller’s relentless soliloquy become a sing-song rant that rent onward through the now mist-turning fog, while retaining a vague resemblance to spoken speech. I could see the face at this point for the first time amid the ‘smoke’ rising from the dawn frost that the fog was, even as I spoke, simply allowing to take its place. It was a muzzily kind face, clamped into the sweetest smile I had ever seen on a man.

The figure held out an upturned palm as if singing Christmas Carols for a charity. However, there were others behind with faces that looked far from Christmassy. They could have easily found a suitable dance routine in a film of thrills, I thought, as I gathered myself to run. All of them must still be suffering last night’s skinfuls, as they shuffled closer into view. The stitching of their outer surfaces allowing their innards to poke though.

At heart, I knew I was too old to run. Maude had often told me that age brings dignity, together with a counterproductivity beyond our control, representing forces that eventually destroy the very dignity that brought these forces into being. It was now I wished I had been drinking. Then, none of this would have seemed to matter. I absently heard cars on the near-by by-pass. This was the onset of commuter traffic as, against the odds of reality, a once permanently static dawn turned to rush-hour.

“Run, George, run as if your life depends on it.”

I head Maude’s voice as if it were actually there. It overtook the operatic crooning from the shamblers of the morning’s school run. Kids once run over, now alive again to seek retribution from those who had swerved into their young bodies, because of drink. Led by the stylish figure of the smiling soloist for an unseasonal chorus of trick-or-treating.

“I am Sir George Corbett,” I piped. “Knighted for good works and donations to help the wheels of civilisation go round. Mistaken identity. Begone!”

My voice was never as strong as Maude’s but I stood my ground. The world was going round as if I were truly drunk. Running was never even a starter.

“A bad trick. A bad treat. I was never a drunk driver. Was I?”

I intended to intone inwardly. Strangely, I realised the sound of the words had come out all wrong. It was as if I were also singing ... just like the unholy chorus ... but in counterpoint ... using a rich baritone uncharacteristic of me. My normal squeaky undertones had vanished. My feet may well have been packed in ice, but my voice was pure molten gold to match the maturing sunrise.

“Not a drunk driver, Sir George, but a bad one.”

It was unspoken. But I at least knew the truth. Drunk drivers were pilloried. Bad drivers simply endured. We can all have accidents.

It was then I saw that the leading figure was Lady Maude herself, face still scarred by windscreen shards. Neck gored by gear-stick. Too long in the tooth for comfort. Her voice had broken during the oldest Christmas of all, that dark season when those tricked from life before their time reached out for resurrection.

Upstaged, unsung, stripped of title, I took her in my arms and poured out a poignant aria, till I myself succumbed to the final curtain lowering across the most dangerous time of day in the pretence of being the safest. The shuffling shambling angels took my body away, no doubt.

“There are no seat-belts in Hell.” From ‘Deaths and Dodgems’ by Rachel Mildeyes (also author of ‘Pre-Raphaelite Music’ and ‘Heaven without God’. )

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PS: The title was originally: 'A Knight at the Opera'.

Slaughterhouse

2011-12-10T14:59:00.002Z

Slaughterhouse

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posted Friday, 14 December 2007

Written by me as the 10 minute speed-writing exercise (with a surprise title) during the Clacton Writer's Group meeting last night and, now, exactly transcribed below:

SLAUGHTERHOUSE
The Slaughters were a well-known family in the area. In fact there had been generations of Slaughters. A Slaughter line radiating back - it was said - to a noble who fought in the War of the Roses.
The latest issue of young Slaughters - like most people - never really understood the ins-and-outs, the Political and Royal machinations involved in the War of the Roses. Nor the relationship betwen Yorkshire and Lancashire, red roses and white roses. It was sad that something so central to their family's stock was so little understood by its descendants.
They simply hated the fact that the family home was known as Slaughter House - and could not be changed, as if the name itself, as opposed to just the actual house, had National Trust protection for never being allowed to change into a more acceptable name. Could names be protected? It was like living in an abattoir, where they killed animals for eating or walking in or sitting on. Indeed, the whole of Slaughter House was filled with leather furniture and nobody had really noticed the significance of this. It was perhaps instinctive that the place was also full of white roses to welcome visitors. Red roses were not appropriate, in the circumstances, but nobody ever really understood why. It was all undercurrents. A bit like the causes that underlay historical events, human interaction, Politics.
The younger Slaughters were unaware of these things. They just played games on their computers, little realising they could easily have looked up Wikipedia to explain the complicated events of the past. Like all modern people, they simply lived on the surface of things - skimming over a lake of time that would soon melt through global warming.
At night, they slept too well to hear the animals screeching in the cellar. The clunk of axe through neck-bone. The squealing of pigs. The honking of gooseflesh. They slept too well, too easy with life. The slaughterhouse reeked of dead roses, lit by silent blinking computer-screens.

Too Many Heroes

2011-12-10T14:58:00.002Z

Too Many Heroes

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posted Monday, 10 December 2007

Written today and first published here today.

The soldiers marched through the forest, some even taller than the trees. These soldiers were actually over-engineered robots at the same time as being scaled down to appear like giant human beings; they marched under the orders of two special robots that were in turn scaled up to appear like stunted versions of the gods depicted in the Ancient Book.

It was as if nobody understood the chain of command but were jockeying for positions in the variously perceived pecking orders of robot, human and god.

“How many more?” roared one god to the other.

“Millions, millions of them, marching to their death,” was the reply, with redoubled roar to outbid the screeching air.

Wild bird-fighters soared and slanted, sky-skidding and -skimming above the belittled forest. A huge forest belittled by those who marched through it.

One by one the soldiers died a terrible death, across eternities of hand-to-hand fighting, the single force of a single army battling within its own ranks amid a makeshift war.

“There are two many heroes,” roared a pipsqueak god, diminished by the cruelty he oversaw.

“Too many brave hearts,” roared an even pipsqueakier god.

The roars were only roars because all other sounds had become a foil of silence. The roars were – in pitiful effect – barely beyond the threshold of hearing.

One solitary robot having survived the eternities looked towards the twin towers of what once were the gods who had held sway upon the infighting army. He wore a soldier’s metal armour and was in truth merely a soldier disguised as a robot, as would become clear in almost instantaneous hindsight. The towers became – amid the roiling mists at the end of time – the covers of the Ancient Book. Spineless and without title. The forest’s trees were bending down between them like courtly pages-in-waiting.

Smothered by silence, our last soldier tried to find another soldier like himself to fight, rather than have his eyes pecked out by a bony bird-fighter settling – even as he thought about it – upon his face from the sky. But it was simply a ghost configured from the soldier’s own metal-eyelid wings hovering like eye-floaters.

The last hero was one too many.

The Merest Creak

2011-12-09T12:41:00.002Z

The Merest Creak

posted Monday, 3 November 2008

Published 'Wearwolf' 1993

Feeling knackered, the saviour clambered on board and went the rest of the way in the boat. Eventually on land again, he was brought to a paralytic man lying on a stretcher-bed. “Your sins are forgiven,” announced the saviour. “Rise and take up your bed.” The man rose with a satisfying sigh and the merest creak of bone - walking off, without bothering to take up his bed. The saviour was spitting mad, shouting for the man to come back and take up the bed, but the wretch merely wagged his finger at the saviour and bounded away. As it would have been a pity for unmitigated anger to become the only shortcoming in the path towards Divinity, the saviour calmed down ... then deciding to use the abandoned bed for a long snooze.

Pirate Radio Snippets

2011-12-07T16:42:00.003Z

posted Tuesday, 11 December 2007

First published in 'Eastern Rainbow' 1993

Spotting something about Pirate Radio in the last issue of ‘Eastern Rainbow’ has spurred me to mention that, living in Colchester in the mid-sixties enabled me to listen to he famous stations off the Essex coast. Simon Dee opening Radio Caroline (Easter 64?). Radio Atlanta--->Radio London – Tony Withers/Windsor (“See you around like a record”), Ed Stewart, Keith Skues, Kenny Everett leaning the ropes from Tony Windsor. Dave Lee Travis. Robbie ‘The Admiral’ Dale. Mike Aherne. Emperor Roscoe. John Peel (Perfumed Garden). Combined boat (Britain Radio/Radio England). Johnny Walker (Percy Sledge record and flashing from courting couples on cliffs). Screaming Lord Sutch station – Radio Sutch--->Radio City. Tom Edwards. Radio Essex. Radio Tower (which you could only hear in Walotn-on-Naze!). Medium Wave reception from the sea. Storms, breeches buoy and customs raids. Radio 390. Radio Caroline travelling round to Liverpool broadcasting as it went and became Caroline North (Tom Lodge). Spangles Muldoon. Tony Blackburn!

The Soft Scoop

2011-12-07T09:05:00.003Z

Posted Tuesday, 8 January 2008

Written today

It started with the shadow dance. The few people in the know thought this dance craze was just another physical expression of body and soul to follow on from the jive, the jitterbug, the black-bottom, the twist...

People had been jabbing their limbs about since time immemorial, it seemed, just as inexplicable and pointless as all the other amateur artistic activities such as daubing, musicking, moulding, scribbling ...

Life’s survival, the workaday existence from dawn to dusk, needed these light reliefs for their own sake. Especially George who had a most lugubrious life outside of his penchant for wild-limbed dancing. His various girl friends would have had a lugubrious life, too - simply by being his girl friends, without such scatty bouts of dancing. With no dancing side to George there would have been no girl friends. Indeed, there may not even have been any George at all.

So pointless, yet not pointless. A strange paradox. There was no end result to dancing, unless, of course, one were a professional dancer. And George never aspired to anything beyond the dancing itself. Maybe, however, an odd girl friend here and there harboured different feelings about the dancing shared over the years with generations of George. One girl by the name of Emily, for example, during the Blitz years, admittedly considered dancing as not having an end beyond itself, but, against that, dancing, for her, was a thing-in-itself, a tangible artifact, a visual retrievable mass of limbs and faces that lived on forever even without the aid of film or any other means of recording by artificial device or by human memory. It simply was. And still is. The dance of George with Emily. It didn’t even need words to describe it for it still to be able to remain forever as a thing-in-itself. It did not even need knowing about by others. All of us would see it (experience it) soon enough. The dance was almost an aid to immortality, but that often came too late.

Emily’s shadow dance, then, was at first the simple act of walking arm-in-arm with George (leading rather than being led) through London’s blacked-out streets: more a shallow dance, because the night was like a tunnel, with no sky, until the bombers droned ever nearer in tune with opportune sirens and visibly protective flak higher up than the earlier ‘tunnel’ roof.

“How much further?” asked George. He was a slim, pencil-moustached gent of old-fashioned waters. Typically a time of the forties then, while also in his own forties. Emily was a sternly beautiful woman in high-fashion gloves and beetling hair-style so typical of the times: quite a catch. Neither could see each other at the moment. But the ‘dance’ existed already: their future life together, given certain eventualities that probably would never happen.

Eventually, however, they did reach their destination.

Much hustling and shooing by bouncers at the doorway so as not to allow any light to escape from the hall to alert the enemy bombers. But soon George and Emily were together in the blinding expanses of the Palais de Danse, amid what felt like literally millions of milling dancing pairs, fleshy dodgems vying for romance as well as for the simple pointless pleasures of the ongoing waltz. But waltzes don’t last forever... After the foxtrots and the quicksteps, there came an even more crazy craze.

History books have not told of all the fads and fancies that came into their own through the various periods of human conflict. The soft scoop was one clincher of a smooch that nobody got to hear about. One with no wild limbs, no hints of future Dad Dancing in the gauche eighties, no separate jigging on the unromantic spot that so typified the later discotheques...

The soft scoop was a sleek, lithe snaking together as both partners slowly consumed each other piecemeal during the deepest, darkest kiss that tongue-tied shyness might otherwise have prevented. George and Emily watched the others perform, before she took him by the hand, with a slight anticipatory peck on his cheek, tugged him to the centre of the ballroom floor, like vessels being launched into the brightness of a bashful dream.

The single ghost that left the shattered palace did not exist because each of its two minds mutually neutralised any of the other mind’s thoughts. But it existed forever. If only as a dance.
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A Watery Grave

posted Sunday, 6 January 2008

He lived by the seaside, in fact he loved living by the seaside, but certainly not for just the ‘side’ side of the seaside! He felt the sea was a constant companion, a tutelary force, a system of friendly waves and not so friendly waves. Not that he had any physical contact with the sea itself. He did not even walk on the beach. But he tried to visit sights within sight of the sea each day on his morning constitutional. He had been brought up by the sea when a small child. Perhaps, now he turned 60, that explained why the sea was such a magnet, recently drawing him back to these parts after a career lifetime away inland. A big all-purpose magnet that attracted in an unfocused way across the bleak workaday lands that intervened between him and it. Now a smaller magnet, perhaps, since it only needed to attract from around the corner where he lived in a bungalow, if not within direct sight of the sea, certainly within whiff and smell of it - and, on certain windy days, within sound of it.

That was real. Now for the fiction:

Except there was no fiction, was there? It was all real. It smelt real, it looked real, it sounded real - but did it feel real, did it taste real? He was sure, before he finished this story, he’d walk down the beach for the first and final time to complete the circle of senses with regard to the sea.

EGNARO

2011-11-22T19:01:00.000Z

An extract from review HERE

Egnaro – M. John Harrison

“…but is it possible that the real pattern of life is not in the least apparent, but rather lurks beneath the surface of things, half hidden and only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye?”

Egnaro or Aleph (or gestalt)? This story would surely be an all-time classic story in whichever book of genre it is couched. From “Corrie” to “Crossroads”, from this book’s Peake to Merritt, herein mentioned, as is (now) the all-consuming Cowper Powys – and the “dead miners” from the Shea story - we have here the Mancunian Man – a pervasive rubbing-along philosophy of flock-wallpapered Chinese restaurants and rust-edged SF books and frontier-cultures in behind-the-counter books in bookshops that fight with and alongside the Accountant Narrator’s version of ’quantitative easing’. But Egnaro, the elongated ‘gnole’ giving a clue as to its nature (wasn’t one of this colour earlier in the Sandkings-edifice?). A world that Leman set up earlier in this book as the Whovian nostalgia-tableau or un-sat-navved, non-GPS-ed country. But it is the Bradbury ‘crowd’ that turns up when the future finally reaches its accident with the past, its interface with nostalgia as a Proustian Egnaro. A “transparent membrane” that is not the Hell Screen but the wrapping from this book’s Francis Stevens story. But the durable soul always remains the durable soul (and I count myself as one of those), even if it’s just ‘fast food’ or forgotten fiction as mine is. A desperately sad, yet uplifting, masterpiece. “He’s spent his life exploiting their fantasies to subsidize his own.” (22/11/11 – another 3 hours later)

Martin, Leman & Campbell

2011-11-21T16:39:00.000Z

Extracts from Review HERE

Sandkings – George R. R. Martin

“They seem to limit their growth to fit available space. If I moved these to a larger tank, they’d start growing again.”

And, I’m sure, that is exactly what happened to the book that contains all these stories, including this one! At first, it is what I would personally call an old-fashioned SF story, yet within this ‘tank’ of a tome, it takes on scary proportions with many implications. Its initial connection with the fog/mist trope of the Basso and its “feed him a litter of unwanted kittens“ echoing the cruelty to pets in Aickman and Tiptree; this particular ‘zoo’ or gestalt-experiment turns out to be a war-game insectoid hive-mind that grows completely and utterly out of proportion (like my own gestalt-experiment with real-time reviewing this book?) - with didactic but creatively manipulative self-aware self-God ‘religious philosophy’ and God’s own induced iconoclasm implications (wasn’t another George Martin the ‘God’ behind the Beatles as a more benign form of the same phenomenon?) leading to a Du Maurier / Hitchcock birdlike-siege preventing the protagonist’s escape. “A cruel idiot god” al la Azathoth. And another ‘spiderous symbiosis’, at one point, as a guest brings a spider to test out the integrity of the protagonist’s Sandking edifice of castles, maws, mobiles, colours - and, eventually, a hungry house, again, literally! A major read for me. “…she had not mentioned the prank to anyone.” (21/11/11 – three hours later)

Window – Bob Leman

“Magic words. Don’t look disgusted yet. It makes sense, in a way. We were funded to look into telekinesis -” (Cf. the Bixby story, an important comparison, I feel.)

Words/Windows/Willows. ‘Window’ follows the same imaginative/emotional rhythm or template as ‘Sandkings’ – at first an engaging tableau-zoo experiment (here arising more by accident than design, a Whovian pasture of nostalgic time travel) – gradually taking up a pace of darkness – and, here, eventually arriving at the transfiguration (cf Monty Python’s ‘Anyone for Tennis?’ sketch). The concept of the ice cubes, via a contraption described in similar detail as Kafka’s Harrow, being used from the present to penetrate the new idyllic time zone of yearned-for pastness so that they would melt and not taint it – is a concept with which to conjure! And the , though, produces within it a book cover-disguised as a Bible with “thin, tough paper” – another reference to the book you hold. Over there, they already knew the story, “mouthing the words”. The ultimate symbiosis of author and reader. But which the ‘spider’? (21/11/11 – another 2 hours later)

The Brood – Ramsey Campbell

“It was autumn. Night had begun to cramp the days.”

This re-reading of mine – after too many years to countenance, I guess – deserves one of my formal ‘Wows!’ of literary criticism I mentioned earlier. It came up completely fresh like an old friend I had forgotten but knew always at the back of my mind I had unconsciously missed. Fresh, yes, an old friend, yes, but startlingly simile-texturedly steeped in a truly tangible gloom and foreboding of words and meaning, yet aesthetically constructive, if gloom and debris and dereliction can be constructive. Now enhanced even further in the preceding context of Maybury’s cat encounter in ‘The Hospice’, Tiptree’s animal experiments, Basso’s ‘sweep-shot’ doctor (and cat!), Martin’s Sandking-’pets’ tortured so that they could torture the face of their ‘God’, plus this book’s general discrete loose-skull ‘pets’ – and, so, now, to Campbell’s Liverpudlian Vet and his own ‘sweep-shot’ Neighbourhood-Watch of his darkly disshevelled environs and the processions of customers and their ‘pets’. He is the antidote to appease this book’s previous sufferings – and he even jokes about a toothless woman who may be a vampire – and there is a guest appearance, I guess, unintentionally or intentionally, by Fritz Leiber’s roof shape, too … and a ‘hungry house’, I infer, towards which our protagonist Vet’s pitifully well-meaning mission is sucked gumlessly (and from which sort of place he can tellingly see his own kitchen window glowing across the way) — all conveying a miraculous nocturne – miraculous, that the reader can come out the other end intact. But you won’t know whether you can unless you try. “Night thickened like soot on the buildings“, and this book has already taught us what soot can incubate… Perhaps not “…spiderwebs, gleaming like gold wire.” (21/11/11 – another 2 hours later)

My Story

2011-10-21T14:45:00.002+01:00

My story was a Mystery. That sounds glib, but it’s true. It turned up one day in my red Silvine memo book that I kept in the inside pocket of my jacket. Nobody else had access to it. The handwriting, true, was similar to mine, but I could tell or thought I could tell that there was something about it that made it somebody else’s handwriting. Imagine my puzzlement bordering on shock. On a trip to the tall buildings of the capital, I silently read it to myself while sitting on an underground train between the Oval and Elephant & Castle. The lights flickered from time to time and, beneath me, the seat juddered. I had pulled out the memo book to find a telephone number. Why here? My mobile wouldn’t work underground. Well, certainly not in the 1970s. Wait a sec. Nobody had a mobile in the 1970s. I looked at it quizzically. Not much larger than a packet of 20 Senior Service. Suddenly, it trilled like a blackberry bird. I had no idea what to do with it. I only remember this now as I’ve suddenly rediscovered my memo book again at the bottom of a drawer. It is now 2011 – and I hardly remember why I needed to go to London that day forty odd years ago. Perhaps I’d find a clue inside where I might have noted down some of my journeys for the disinterest of posterity. I walk into the bright garden and sit in a ready-erected deck-chair. My story. Still a Mystery. It is couched in my handwriting of today, matured slightly from what it had been when I was younger. Except there are some unattributable block capitals. Suddenly I heard a dying trill and felt a juddering and the sun flickered. THE END

Benny's Bingo

2011-10-21T14:16:00.004+01:00

Benny had been in charge of the Bingo Hall for 42 years when it happened. In the early days, he was the caller of numbers: proud to set a modern trend by calling only the bare numbers themselves with no silly rhymes as had been the erstwhile rage. Then he had to have a throat operation to rectify all the wear and tear caused by the old smoke in the Hall. He then couldn’t even hold a conversation with himself which he’d often voice alone. The Bingo Management allowed Benny to stay on as manager – with his experience in keeping the books balanced and the balls lop-sided. He hired a buxom lady-caller – someone who spent her time floating on a deceptive mill-pond inside her mind and maintaining a fixed baggy look under her brow like the Lone Ranger’s mask. She only came to life upon opening the mike and staring steelily at all the ancient ladies with their thickly indelible marking-pens and the rough coloured paper that the numbers were printed on. “33 – Blonde and free; 55 – Sexy alive; 69 – Body wine; 77 – Bed in Heaven...” With all these innuendoes, Benny asked her (by handwritten note) to keep her numbers bare – no need to embroider them. But when she later slipped in a non sequitur: “42 – Rabbit Stew...” that was it for Benny. You see, Benny had a fatal attraction for Bunnies.

Shifting Vigils

2011-10-18T11:45:00.004+01:00

A: Who told them?

B: I can’t remember. It seems to be common knowledge.

A: Who are these people called common and who the hell told them!

B: Well, you nearly died. Something needed to be said, didn’t it? Somebody needed to be told. We needed to get your family together to say goodbye.

A: Huh! A death bed scene is not the ideal way in which I’ve seen myself dying. Certainly not when watched by that so-called family of mine.

B: So, you wanted to die suddenly in your sleep? Or in a fatal accident?

A: Anything’s better than lingering. .....Though, thinking about it, lingering would have irritated that family of mine more than finding my dead body in a bed. Hmm, perhaps a death bed scene would have been the best thing, a really looooong death bed scene, with the need for shifting vigils. Shifting vigils, yes, I like that thought!

B: Lingering is something we all do I suppose ever since we were first born? Lingering on the edge of something none of us can really explain.

A: I see life as a sort of pride before a fall. The pride is a sort of denial about death. The fall, death itself.

B: Death, in whatever form it takes.

A: Death itself is a life thing. A sort of long painful life process. The state of death after death is not really death at all.

B: If there is a state of existence after death at all. Nobody has proved there is such a state, either by going there and coming back or fetching someone dead back. A lot of charlatans showing that state of existence ... exists – but there has never been any real scientifically rigorous proof.

A: Some say that a few people get so near to death, they experience or, at least, see in the distance what after-death experience looks like after they die. I believe that I have been very near to becoming that near – as near to the ultimate nearness as this gap between my finger and thumb.

B: Going back to what you said about pride. I find that quite interesting. Life as a phenomenon of pride: the ability to uphold or balance the precariousness of life. A pride in that confidence in balancing the unbalanceable. Or a confidence in that pride. A confidence-trick.

A: Are my family still here?

B: Yes, they’re all in the sitting-room next door.

A: Probably drinking all my drink, knowing them.

B: Drinking for some people is a way of underpinning that pride or confidence to balance life against death, I suppose. Anyway, shall I bring them in, now? I hope they will be able to see me or at least hear me call them in.

A: You mean fetch them back for the rest of the Wake?

B: Yes, the wake or the deep sleep? The black pit of the deepest possible sleep or the wake left by some unknown tide of endlessness.

A: Wake or sleep, deep or endless, they’re all the same to me now that life’s balance or pendulum has stopped swinging , stopped at least for me.

B: Ha! The Pit and the Pendulum.

A: The Pit and the Pride, more like.

B: The pity in the pride, more like.

2011-10-15T21:42:00.001+01:00

Weirdtongue cruelly sawn, its stump pumping red

Horrasy, Horrasy, the Hawler's dead!

A Poetry of Proverbs

2011-10-10T11:13:00.008+01:00

.

“Pride comes before a fall.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous, then?”

“Of course, it’s dangerous. Put one wrong foot wrong when doing something like that turns doing it at all into the wrong foot itself and then you’ll have fallen into that huge black pit some call death.”

“You were always so damn poetic! It’s just that if I don’t try I shall never succeed. I know I’m good at it. I think I’m in fact the best in the world at it.”

“How many people have tried it before you? You can only be the best at something if others have also done it and done it badly. Being the only one to have done it does not mean you are the best, because someone else may be better at it than you, but has not been bothered or foolhardy enough to do it. And I’m not trying to be ‘damn poetic’ there, as you put it. Just realistic.”

“You always had a flowery turn of phrase. ‘Poetic’ was the wrong word. Poetry is cleverer than mere floweriness. I don’t want you to think I’ve ever thought you clever at anything! Ha Ha.”

“Point taken, Sandy! Oh, hello, John, I didn’t hear you come in. Sandy and I are talking about her doing it at last. What do you think. Pride comes before a fall? Or only fools can get near enough to joke with death? Ha ha. I like proverbs, even if they don’t mean anything!”

“Yes, I heard what Sandy said to you. No wonder she’s now blushing. Errr. A blush in the cheek is to brush the cheek of death. That’s another new motto for you!”

“John, you know full well that Peter hates the thought of me doing it. You could at least give me some encouragement.”

“Give you some encouragement to die, Sandy? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“Well, if you know that I’m bound to try doing it, whatever you two say, your encouragement is better than your discouragement. You’re only wanting to feel less guilty if it all goes wrong by discouraging me when you simply know I am definitely destined to do it. Encouragement may help me do it successfully. Discouragement may increase the risk of me failing. Think of it logically. .... Peter! What are you doing? Let go of my wrists! John, what are you going to do with that rope?”

“It’s for your own good, Sandy.”

“Yes, Sandy. Sorry. We’re being cruel to be kind.”

“But what’s that! MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...”

“Well, that’s that then, John.”

“Did we really need the gag as well? She can hardly breathe. She could only have done what she intended to do with her hands. Well one of her hands, really.”

“The writing or typing hand?”

“Yes, or the hand that draws a thin blue line in the sand against false criticisms. Ha ha.”

“But the gag is for her own good, too. She might have been able to shout loud enough for her critics to hear! They might be lurking next door with their evil tangles of unspooling threads!”

“Yes, but they might be able to read her mind, though, even at a distance. Things can pass over vast areas these days with all that damn webbery in the air!"

“Yes, you’re right. We’d better finish the job. We don’t want them knowing that she intended to publicly complain about the nature of their reviews of her novella, do we? That would have been dreadful. Something worse than death, in fact. Critics hate being criticised. They’d chase authors into Hell itself, rather than put up with being criticised themselves.”

“So, if death can’t put a halt to it, then, there is no point in following a gagging with a deadly daggering, as they say. It’s best just to let her experience near-death as long as possible till her mind goes awol and she forgets or wipes clean that she was utterly determined to complain in public about their devastating reviews. They can’t possibly read an empty mind. Lingering longer abashed is better than precarious pride."

“Yes, give Sandy till Autumn, I say. A mind in endless fall is worth a million fell swoops.”

“MMMMMMMMMMMM...”

DIALOGUE - A Near-Death Experience

2011-10-06T11:17:00.005+01:00

"Who started this?"

“I didn’t. I think it was you.”

“Well, I can’t remember anything before you said you have been deceiving yourself your whole life.”

“I can’t remember talking about self-deception. Didn’t you mention that you had started to love Johnny – for his sake, not yours?”

“I don’t think that’s anything to do with self-deception.”

“I do. You think you love Johnny only because he has got used to you loving him and your withdrawing it now would make you unhappy because it would make someone you once loved become very unhappy, so you have blotted out that you really have stopped loving him, and so you actually feel that you still love him as a consequence of something I can only call a subconsciously induced self-deception.”

“Look at me, do I look like a liar?”

"Well, no proper liar looks like a liar. I see a woman who has blonde curls turning slightly to grey, still pretty, and a personality that has made you my best friend since before... Well, I don’t think there was ever a time when you weren’t my best friend. Our mothers wheeled us side by side when we were babies, don’t forget. As far as I know, you have never lied. Except, that is, perhaps, those lies you tell yourself.”

“Johnny was your boy friend first, don’t forget. Don’t you think there was some element of deceit on my part during that period of him leaving you for me?”

“No. It was a natural process. I was never suited to Johnny, nor he to me. You did us both a favour.”

“I haven’t told you this before. But I seduced Johnny. My intention was to steal him away from you. I had no idea you weren’t suited to each other....”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I’m glad I’ve got it off my chest now. Perhaps you have deceived yourself that you weren’t suited to each other when you discovered he loved me more than he loved you. I’m sorry. Truly sorry.”

“Why tell me now?”

“I don’t know. And while we are on the subject. When we were in our pushchairs, parked next to each other on Market Hill outside Tesco, I stole your rattle.”

“I don’t remember."

“Perhaps because I was slightly older?”

“Hmm.”

“Old enough in fact to lean over and release the brake on the backwheel of the pushchair... Are you listening? ... But I didn’t actually release it, but only very nearly did. ........ Where’s Johnny?”

From the Hearth

2011-10-01T12:39:00.001+01:00

First published in the anthology BENEATH THE GROUND edited by Joel Lane (Alchemy Press 2003)

FROM THE HEARTH by DF Lewis

Only those who follow the story can understand how frightening the road they tread. Susanna understood this when it was too late. Following the road, she found it became a tunnel where the sky was worse than Hell.

Today, though, she often wondered why the actual road where she lived was lower than the rest of them in an otherwise flat Essex town. Whilst standing at its top corner, she could still see a range of chimneystacks sloping down into distance. Perspective was everything. Even the past had perspective. She was a wild-witted girl of whom advantage could easily have been taken, had it not been, in those more innocent times, for an over-protective step-father. An industrial working-class town where heads often nested in honestly persil-clean pillows, heads that sweetly squeaked and squawked, pretending that their bodies only existed for fondling. Susanna's family was close-knit half the time, wildly ill-suited the rest. Dysfunction with a purpose. They tried to thrive on leisure, despite the work ethic that awaited them once they crossed the threshhold of the front doorstep straight on to the blurred chalk of the road's hopscotch lines. Susanna's menfolk drew dole as if it were a throwaway sky-line where even angels (with oodles of self-righteousness) floated around painting pastel-shaded frescos upon otherwise ugly weather fronts.

Tom was her half-brother. Grizzled and grown-down to a tussock from a promising start as a stripling. Pamela her real mother. And, yes, her step dad, Donald, the one with the wide whiskers and wraparound beer brims. His hat, too, was larger than life. Played the snooker balls as if they were dam busters. Which reminded Susanna that Tom was currently outside in the road scuffing his best shoes with yet another game of football amid his gnarled cronies of childhood. Often kicking around a bristly youth called Hugger or, if Hugger were not available, a knurled mini-millstone—enough to jar even willowy calf-bones.

Susanna had only a few god-given graces. Anyway, lacking a finish to her breeding began to serve a purpose when her best friend happened to become a certain Lucy, a coincidentally separate individual, albeit one with sufficient similarity to engender inseparability. Lucy was a red-eyed droopy-lip of a wench who seemed rather resentful of having only one best friend in the shape of Susanna. Both yearned for the more meaningful companionship of the proud-looking sporties in an older class—those who wore gymslips like flags of war. After all, it was wartime, and the most patriotic spirit in those days resided within such middle-of-the-road communities.

Susanna and Lucy, therefore, by lack of other influence, were gradually attracted towards darker, direr affairs than polishing boys' faces. Susanna had inherited, through some miscegenate unaccountability, books and papers from step-dad Donald's attic, an attic which seemed deeply unvisited because nobody else knew of its existence either by angle of exterior roof or potential of perspective. Brother Tom and step-dad Donald had spoken of it, though, as if they suspected the existence of realms beyond man's understanding—spoke of it in barely audible words of one syllable (most of them mispronounced). Yet, with inadvertent intention, the two girls were somehow directed towards this attic where they were to discover mouldy documents speaking of worlds even lower than the basement—a dark sphere of imputed eeriness more in keeping with the Gothic Humours than the workmanlikeness of the local trades. Both girls were remarkably precocious as far as the written word was concerned if not in the more spoken sides of their physical nature. The itches they needed to scratch they did more by reflex than salaciousness. Their singing in unison was perfect.

In any event, some particularly mouldy words in the attic's documents spoke of toad creatures harbouring themselves beneath the town's China Factory ... stating that some of the more decorative crockery was based on fitful sightings of these creatures, creatures that had recently drawn too near the surface. The fact of the factory workers' children being sent away, soon afterwards, was both a mystery and an all-too-clear sign that sirens were about to wail of war.

The toad creatures, of which the attic's mouldy configurations told, were nurse-like to the bottom of their Earthen natures—so much so, the two girls yearned to visit them and gain an inkling of how properly to nurture others. They did not want to grow up into the thrusting womenfolk they might otherwise have been destined to become during the more modern future.

At first, they delved along the road's alleyways that—according to the tracks the attic's tract told them to tread—traced a downward path, below the basement, to where the bravest toad creatures were said to prick their ears. Susanna and Lucy tried to crack jokes and enact a life of hockey-sticks and mild matriculation to ward off any encroaching eeriness. They had, indeed, since our first acquaintace with these two girls, become delegate Prefects at school—against the very base natures coursing through their inherited veins. Both step-dad Donald and brother Tom had, independently, long since vanished on imagined forays in North Africa or towards the Antipodes. Mother Pamela boiled soup interminably, often misrepresenting it as stew—a fact which caused Susanna to suffer from imputed anorexia before its time. Lucy, too, loved to suffer with her friend and, thus, refused the more filling platefuls at her own home so that she could share the scraps and swill which mother Pamela dished up on faded and chipped crockery. This thinness of diet, it was reported, allowed the two girls to squeeze through gaps others couldn't even see.

There was a local belief which was so very local it was held solely in that part of the town or, even, just in Susanna's road itself. Up was down. Down was up. Then was now. Now was then. Admittedly, it was the loose-lipped gossip of a belief which, perhaps, nobody fully construed. This belief was often voiced abroad when digging the local allotment; probably in preference to War Talk proper which, as primary sources maintain, often did cost lives during that inimitable make-do-and-mend era. It was as if Faiths grew and flourished from the very chimney smoke. The cleaner the flues, the more that clarity prevailed. The sootier, though, to the point where the smoke was close to becoming tangible curds of tar, crazy extrapolations were spoken with the straightest possible faces. The darker it was, the dafter the beliefs became.

It has already been known that there was a boy called Hugger—a village idiot with no village to call his own. He saw two extremely thin girls but wondered whether he was seeing double because, in his eyes, different parts of the town shimmered out of perspective with each other and most roads felt as if they were already underground. He promised to accompany them, on the final foray, after several dress rehearsals, to the very cellar where he told himself (if in different words) that the tops of some of the toads were embedded in the concrete like turnips. How Hugger knew about the mouldy parchment in Susanna's attic was never satisfactorily explained but that was because the girls forgot they had already told him to keep this a secret, there being a requirement for someone else to keep the secret to make it a better secret, a secret worth keeping. The more who knew the secret ... well, there was an optimum level before the secret was officially out. And there being three of them was certainly enough to make it a secret more secret than most. By leading them down, Hugger was merely re-enacting a story he thought he'd already been told. This was where the frights let themselves be known, irrespective of any force wielding such frights. Fear came from not being warned or even propely made to be afraid. Fear was strongest where there was nothing of which to be afraid. It can be sensed only in words, not in deeds, activities or even threats. Especially not in any real atmosphere of darkest horror. Intimations of a wicked reality were scarier than even that wicked reality itself could be. And the sense of fear grew and grew, merely as the words grew and grew, as Hugger, in the guise of a Sweep, led his water babies down to a deep cellar of chimneys-tops, their pots sticking up from the ground whence cataracts of smoke churned and choked.

"Hold my hand, Hugger."

Susanna could hardly see him in the gloom beneath the imputed floorboards. Lucy could hardly see her own face in front of her hand. Hugger could see neither of them—though often he lived up to his nickname and gave them childish sooty cuddles to guarantee their presence. He had shown them how to lift the trap which revealed the dizzy steps and, wordlessly, he made them follow through ... a quest which, until they knew its meaning, held no meaning at all.

"Toad creatures, they are what the attic mould foretold," thought Susanna. Lucy even said it ... with a short sharp laugh to relieve the impending terror ... but Hugger was uncharacteristically quiet, his hunched shape growing darker and darker as it led the way ... holding the sweet fingers he thought to be a girl's.

Earlier, the three of them had gone into a huddle and discussed the quest. If this is being heard (as opposed to being read), one may already have overheard their mindless, middling lightness of laughter. The words were spoken in between, as if learned parrot-fashion from someone more omniscient than themselves:

"There seems to be an awesomeness, almost a religion..."

"Yes, yes, the war has angels you know ... many think they see them in the sky as if the gas ovens give birth to birds as well as to dry stews..."

"What's all that to do with the toad creatures, Hugger?"

He turned and spoke as if he spoke for the very first time: "The attic mould must have blotted the paper there ... and 'toad' may have to be read as 'road' to get the full sense."

"Road creatures, Hugger?"

"Yes, Man is naturally the wanderer, the refugee..."

Susanna and Lucy nodded in unison. The talk went on for hours. Mother Pamela could be heard shifting beds upstairs. The monochrome snapshots of step-dad Donald and brother Tom in their gold-tooled holders glinted in the semi-blackout which the world still allowed.

Meanwhile, the trio of shadows—bordering on silhouettes—delved deeper into the bowels of the road. Hugger knew he was almost alone. His mind came to the forefront, if only by some false perspective. Always destined to be the protagonist, he drew sympathy and identification. Hugger was a hero, not an idiot. The girls were just two of the Song-Lines he followed. He loved their legs and the growing shapeliness of their being. He had watched them fondling each other, when they thought nobody could see. Love was often like that. He wondered, as a strange non-sequitur, about the aboriginal heart of the matter ... as he negotiated the lowest reaches that Mankind could ever reach without Hell itself kicking in.

The darkness was wet to the touch. The girls had now re-established themselves with a growing provenance, relegating Hugger to a corner of their consciousness. The ground was littered with human heads, the blackness blurring their various racial leanings. The girls somehow knew, without being told, that the rest of bodies below the heads were embedded vertically below even this furthest reach of surface existence, their various legs stretched out in wide frozen stride or mean limp. The girls watched Hugger start kicking these heads to check how well the necks prevented them from becoming separate footballs. The resultant cracks, throbs, bleats and squelches thankfully filled the girls with more wholesome thoughts, visions, even, of the toad creatures they'd originally hoped to see—honest-to-goodness horrors which would have made them shudder with mere fright or simple disgust

Susanna woke with a start. A siren wailed far off. The first of many. She heard Tom, Donald and Pamela scuttling to the basement air-raid shelter. But she stayed in the safety of her own bed, hugging her knees as if that would ward off an inevitable past. Flashes, as if passing under chimneys of light in an otherwise endless tunnel of nightmare, made her dark shape fitfully invisible. Lucy had failed to return to any degree of visibility at all, however. Never hugged her own curvy ley-lines. Never been told the frightening story in the first place.

Listen, though, and you will hear your own black heart. You don't need ears for that.

Breaking Dawn (2)

2011-09-20T09:25:00.000+01:00

The first voice: “Every time I wake up I feel awfully anxious, but it tends to get better during the day, as other things take my attention.”

The second voice: “I’m the same, really, and it plays havoc with my stomach. I can’t even face dry toast first thing, but I try to force it down as I hear it’s good for nervous acid.”

The first speaker was hidden by the shaft of sunshine – like a heavenly girder sloping through the window – as she (evidently a ‘she’ from the voice) now made a point of ceasing her belly-aching from the armchair:

“But it’s so much nicer with the sun out, and there are so many even worse troubles at sea. Other people have to put up with things far more serious than my own worries, I always tell myself.”

The second speaker was equally unseen because I seemed to be looking through his eyes (evidently male not only judging by the voice but also from my view of the trousers on his legs which were just above my lowest sight-line). He spoke with a slight slur. A bit early in the morning for that, I thought, as the sun was surely not yet over the metaphorical yard-arm.

“It doesn’t help me,“ he said, “when i think of other people’s troubles. They cannot have any effect logically on how I feel about my own troubles. Millions are currently dying at this very minute in the world, some naturally, some violently, some peacefully, others in pain. What possible bearing can those unknown deaths have on me. Anyway, I agree that a nice day helps...”

I looked along with him towards the breaking dawn, as the single sun-shaft twirled around swirling dust-motes and around the now real, if impressionistic, face of the woman in the armchair, as she spoke again:

“Pain can be shared, pain should be shared.”

And the face’s impression became even less defined by the light-filled raindrops from its eyes. Sadness without gravity.

And the dawn had finally broken. Broken within or from my own eyes, too.

My faltering voice had already broken. Broken for good. Dry as unspreaded toast.

Breaking Dawn

2011-08-30T10:24:00.006+01:00

It came as a shock that Avian Influenza was back in the breaking news. It was the day I made a visit to the National Gallery not far from where I lived in London. I wasn’t entirely sure whether it housed ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ and, if I had a computer, a computer that actually worked, I could have looked it up I suppose before I went. One fact of which I was sure, however, was that ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ was not the painting’s correct title; it had been christened that by some future Victorian lady. Its eyes (or, rather, his eyes) not only follow you around the room, they also follow you, perhaps, through time itself. A knowing, smirking look that told each one of us something. Something like: trust in me and I’ll save you. Or: I am nothing but chemical pigments, so despair!

Dawn was breaking, like a Turner, before I reached Trafalgar Square. The taxis looked as if yellow yolk had spilled all over them. It made me think this wasn’t London at all, but a different city that did not otherwise exist. I was driven by some unknown purpose. Taken a sickie from work. It was almost as if I then thought that ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ was a form of lucky charm, a talisman in tangible form, to ward off the onset of doom. Whatever else it might have said with its eyes.

I imagined a chicken soul. A tiny spirit of existence that was obsessed with eggs. The dawn by now had become slugs of orange marmalade crawling along the roof-ridges and draping the top of Nelson’s Column (i.e. Nelson himself) with pithy residue from God’s lemon-squeezer.

I cursed. I could see the Gallery was not yet open. Foolishly, I imagined everyone else had, like me, been up for hours. It felt like lunchtime to me. I asked a passer-by whether the Gallery contained ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ because, if not, I would be able to kill time with a task satisfyingly useful: like tracking it down elsewhere. I was ignored as if I were considered 'persona non grata'. With some dismay, I suddenly realised the painting might not be in London at all. But in some upstart city like Amsterdam or Madrid. Upstart. The word had ‘art’ in it! I laughed with self-mockery as I opened my earlier packed lunchbox while sitting near the stone lions and the fountains.

Swarms of pigeon-life swooped around in synchronised patterns because some tourists illegally scattered breadcrumbs for them in the square. That reminded me that the news had only broken late yesterday, the news about the re-awakening of Avian Influenza or H5N1 as some called it. Many of these torurists may not even have heard about it. I liked the expression Bird Flew. I laughed again. This was no laughing matter. When you eventually read this and see how I spelt ‘Flew’, you won’t laugh, either. Unless you never get to read this...

Eventually, I saw the doors of the National Gallery being opened. Dawn, had, by now, finally broken. And the oranges and yellows were slowly fading to grey. Like a painting that had sat too long in the sun. Hung in a window that got too much exposure to the prevailing heat of a long hot summer. I replaced the uneaten Marmite sandwich in my box and I called across to one of the Gallery wardens standing on the outside with a cigarette in his mouth.

“The Laughing Cavalier?”

“Wallace Collection,” he shouted back.

I shrugged. At least the wings’ communal shadow might protect this painting of the city from the desiccations of light. Its moving column of darkness following wherever I looked.

(written today and first published here)

The Pilot Looked Round

2011-08-17T16:12:00.003+01:00

The stiff key – or what I thought to be a stiff key – became sticky in the lock and bent out of true as I tried to turn it. The place I was trying to unlock seemed more like a barn than a cottage but I had already convinced myself – based on earlier-read literature – that it was comfortable inside. Well, as a cheap place for a weekend break, pretty basic, but still acceptable with a real bed. No need for heating at this sticky time of the year, I thought, as, despite having bent out of true, the key released the tumblers one by one in slow motion sound.

Inside was dark. No lights. I cursed as the switch by the door made no difference at all – not even a short-circuit flash. Despite the lateness of the hour, there was still enough natural vision to read the notice just inside the door: “The pilot is under the sink in the kitchen”. This was the shorter of two notices. The other one was full of small print relating to the temporary tenancy.

I presumed it meant the pilot light.

I lingered for a while looking back through the open door at the wonderful view of rolling hills. I found the key still in my hand – strangely in two bits, as if I had just carried out, absent-mindedly, my own version of a Uri Geller trick of softening metal with the will-power of my tender fingertips. I’d better find the pilot light under the kitchen sink before it was too dark even to find the kitchen.

The rolling hills had merged with the twilit sky even as I gazed at them back through the open door. The moon had carved its horn-shape into Heaven’s ebony under-roof. Words that had taken over my mind, as if I were a poet, not someone who had very little vocabulary before entering this edifice of text, let alone the holiday cottage or pitch-black barn.

I felt my way along the wall, meeting protuberances that I would not care to describe or guess their nature despite my increased word-power to do so. I desperately tried to stop my new gift of imagination running away with itself. Normally, I could not even imagine anything beyond my immediate selfish needs.

Eventually, I found what I guessed to be the kitchen – judging by the smell of rank food. But then I stumbled into what could only be described as a bed. Soft covers – too soft – my fingers going through the material and its under-stuffing with uncomfortable ease. But then I found the sink – drip, drip, drip, said the tap – so loudly I wondered how I hadn’t heard it before now. Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, said the drain beneath the open plug. I bent down to open the cupboard where I imagined the u-bend to be. Even if I found the pilot-light, how would I ignite it? With a hiss of flame or the mere click of a switch – as the whole place would hopefully, at best or at worst, spring into flumes of gaseous gloom, a gloom capable of outshining the darkness that had by now set in with an impenetrable shroud, thick enough to touch.

I saw the back of someone’s head under the sink, strangely luminous with smooth brylcreemed hair glistening off the reflection from my eyes, eyes still storing depletions of hillside sun that I had kept inside the hump of my own head. Slowly, that head looked round – as if on a revolving plinth like one of a seaside array of novelty clowns.

I struck a sudden match, snapping this unexpected find in two, but not before allowing the flame to ignite one of the nostrils – and bright red eyes broke open not only from the head in question but from scores of other heads around the walls like Hallowe’en pumpkins.

This was not going to be a holiday easy to forget, I thought, my absent mind now returned to simple words and simple thoughts. I was ever the simple soul...

In the glowing blood-light, he staggered back to the disintegrating plumpness of the bed-covers – tired of the dreams. He twisted the key in the lock and let sleep do the rest.

Shifting Sands

2011-07-31T12:45:00.006+01:00

When the sands started shifting I knew it was the end. But to know anything is an end one needs to exist beyond that end to be able to see it for what it is – or was. That day I met Edna was one such end – as well as beginning. Beginnings and ends can be very close indeed and still keep their identities either as a beginning or an end. Beginning: the sight of a vehicle looming from the corner of your eye – middle: collision – end: death. All in a few seconds. Except, from what I said earlier, death as an end is not an end in itself unless you view it from afterwards as an end. Therefore, death is not an end. It’s something else altogether. An end’s end, perhaps. But not the end. Not an end in itself. Not an end you saw as a whole process of a verifiable end after it has ended. And only you can verify it. Anyone else verifying it is merely hearsay.

Before I get you too confused, I’d better tell you more about Edna.   She was sitting on one of those many back-support bench-type seating-arrangements of ribbed solid plank-wood that are plentiful along the promenade looking out to sea. Not that the bench itself looks out to sea, but the people sitting on them. The protruding pier just off to the right.

A middle-aged woman (with no name at that stage). Too young for me, and I didn’t really think it appropriate for me to engage her in talking so I prepared to walk on. But then I heard a helicopter off to the left – outlandish clattering growing louder and louder – presumably the air ambulance or a coastguard patrol. It was so low I feared it was going to ditch, but it eventually clattered off towards Jaywick, with no obvious reason for its manoeuvres in hindsight. I looked back to the bench and Edna had vanished, presumably lost forever in the ocean of strangers with which the world is mainly populated. Some of that ocean is close by in your own neighbourhood, the rest in far reaches of the world you will never ... reach. A literally man-made ocean with its own inexplicable, often dangerous, tides across cockle-beds or shingle or ribbed beach or sieved granulations or rocky coral.

But in addition to that ocean of strangers there are usually local inlets or lakes or rivers of non-strangers. Friends or lovers. Colleagues or drinking pals. People you know or have met however briefly – even just seen in the distance. Like Edna.

Thinking about her, Edna probably doesn’t count as a real meeting or encounter, because she would have had to look at me, too. Just an exchange of passing glances would have sufficed for it to have been qualified as a proper encounter. But, as far as I was aware, I had looked at Edna, but she had not turned to look at me.

As I continued my walk along the promenade towards the pier, I started musing again about Edna. Suppose she had looked at me while I was preoccupied by the noisy manoeuvres of the helicopter? I can’t imagine that would have been the case as I guess everyone was looking at the helicopter at that stage rather than at each other. But that is only a guess. Edna may have scrutinised me closely, even at some length. The incident with the helicopter, I now recalled, lasted at least a few minutes. Time enough for Edna to get as close as a couple of dancers about to embark on a waltz at the local palais. Skin-pore close.

I shook my head and shrugged. I was getting carried away.  The relationship with Edna had begun and ended with my pointless glance of appraisal at a nameless middle-aged woman sitting alone on a bench looking out at sea. There I go again. A bench doesn’t look out at sea. It’s the people sitting on it that look out at sea. Watching the tide come in and out across the rattly shingle. Wondering which tide would be the last one. Which cloud in the sky the last one that you would ever see skimming above? Feeling eyes boring into your back, and not daring to look round.

Shingle isn’t like shifting sands. But my lap rucks oh too easily without even daring to move the bent knees within it. Not daring to move is equivalent to being on the brink of it being impossible to move. To move or turn. Ever upon the quicksand of hesitation. Ever on the benchmark of differentiating trial and error. Ever upon each edge of the end.

The tide faintly sweeps in like some soft machine.

A Vignellarette

2011-07-25T11:09:00.000+01:00

A Vignellearette is a short prose fiction exhumed and /or edited from the past by the serendipitous / synchronous needs of the present.

Haunted Manor

2011-07-21T22:09:00.002+01:00

They lived here for real many centuries ago. Today, they are ghosts. Right now, under my nose. Or, rather, if the truth is known, they live for real today and many centuries ago their ghosts lived here. Real people as the eventual fulfilment-in-flesh of their earlier ghosts. In many ways, that seems to be the most logical order of things. For centuries, people have believed we precede our ghosts, while all along ghosts preceded us. But that begs a question – where is here? It is Haunted Manor on the road between Colchester and Chelmsford – once well known for receiving visitors on day trips, but, today, a near-forgotten hulk where the old family – now on hard times – manages to cling on. I am their only member of staff: a man-with-many-tricks-of-the-trade, they call me. A do-it-all who haunts the Manor in body, mending broken things and, if the truth be known, breaking things so that I can mend them again. Indeed, I do jobs not only for the old family but also for the even older one – trying to match up the old with the less old when and where they happy to coincide in the same part of the Manor. That’s what I call mending things: introducing people to themselves – across time.

You may wonder whether I have managed to coincide with myself across the centuries in the Manor that haunts the older version of itself. Except when it was older, it was, of course, newer. Which goes for us all, I guess. And tonight is the night when I shall mend myself. I shall discover the broken body with the knife I placed into its chest so very long ago. And then I shall slowly, ever so slowly, withdraw the knife – trying not to hurt him, watching the smile return to his mouth before I can even realise he is trying to smile – trying to smile at me. And as he does so, I feel tears arrive in my eyes – and I plunge the same knife into my own chest. And the noise of traffic from the A12 slowly fades.

(Unaltered off-the-cuff speed-writing exercise at the Clacton Writers Group tonight.)

Two Cans of Lager and a Packet of Crisps - II

2011-07-20T22:01:00.000+01:00

The man walked into the pub. It was just an ordinary day and he had no reason to think otherwise. To be called ‘the man’ rather than by his own name was rather extraordinary, however. Not that he felt himself to be part of a story as an anonymous man. He felt real. He wanted a drink. Felt it in his undeniably long unquenched thirst. The person he was with wanted a drink, too, the man somehow knew. And a few crisps wouldn’t go amiss. A foregone conclusion that they’d share a single packet with their drinks. He walked to the bar and asked for two cans of lager and, of course, a packet of crisps. Except he garbled ‘lager’ and it came out as some other word closer to another word for a secret or private language.

“Cans?” queried the pub landlord. “What do you mean, cans?”

The man was stumped. He had not expected such a reply. It seemed very important, indeed life and death, to receive cans of lager that they could pour for themselves into empty glasses. The precision dismantling of each tab with a ‘sizzz – sizzz’ was something almost ritualistic. Something that they had already done and here they were - purely to fulfil having already done it. So watching lager being served in any other way was like an act that would likely cause the world to end.

Another man – during all these singular thoughts from the man already thinking them – had by now arrived at the bar, not the now missing person whom the first man had originally been accompanying, but someone else altogether, someone utterly new, someone with a badge indicating he was a lover of - if not an expert on - real ale. A CAMRA member, in fact. He already had his own clean empty glass, with a design on it from some beer festival. In fact, given the absolute truth, this was not a pub at all but a beer festival in a church hall. The first man had assumed it was a pub because there were all these people – mainly other men – standing around gripping straight glasses swilling with all manner of room-temperature strains of brown, tan and near-black.

Our first man wanted a dimpled glass anyway. One with a handle. Life and death. The world would stop spinning if he was forced to drink from a straight glass.

“What’s CAMRA mean?” he asked the other man, while inspecting his badge.

“It’s a word meaning a room you can’t get out of. You must have heard of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play IN CAMRA?”

At that point, the person who had arrived with the first man was suddenly aware of his own existence in a room full of others he did not recognise and who stared at him upon him suddenly appearing as if out of nowhere where nobody had stood beforehand.

He wanted to know what possibilities there were. What choices he had. What he could do. He assumed he must know who he was but if he’d thought hard about it he would have realised he had no idea who he was at all. Who am I? A question he did not even begin to ask.

But what could he do? That was a question he felt potentially able to ask. In the jargon, what could he accomplish – going forward?

“Can...?” he began to ask with a deceptive feeling of filling out his existence with a full body. “Can...?” he began to repeat. But he never finished his empty question even on the second attempt as he vanished as fast as he had appeared. With a singular double-sizzz.

Someone else altogether, someone utterly new, mischievously blew up an empty crisp bag and popped it. The room, meanwhile, remained at room temperature.

My most recent real-time reviews

2011-07-16T17:35:00.001+01:00

(22 Jun 11): The Mauve Embellishments – by Charles Schneider

(22 Jun 11): Link Arms With Toads! – Rhys Hughes

(1 Jul 11): Allurements of Cabochon – by John Gale

(4 Jul 11): The ‘Star’ Ushak – by Louis Marvick

(7 Jul 11): Dying to Read – by John Elliott

(9 Jul 11): Old Albert: An Epilogue – by Brian J Showers

(11 Jul 11): The Bestiary of Communion – by Stephen J Clark

(13 Jul 11): ‘The Exorcist’s Travelogue’ – by George Berguño

Endless Chronicles

2011-07-15T08:47:00.000+01:00

An excerpt from my review of 'The Exorcist's Travelogue' by George Berguño (Passport Levant / Ex Occidente Press) HERE:

A Chronicle of Repentance

“…, and disrobed me with invisible fingers.”

A chronicle can never begin or end, I sense, as someone needs to tell a chronicle, and its beginning and its end are only restricted by what that teller can tell by dint of knowledge or his/her own finite life being within rather than overlapping the period in question of which he tells. But can a chronicle fill in its own gaps (such gaps being at either end as well as partway through) by dint of parthenogenetic imagination. But to save one’s body from ultimate torture in Hell by giving it just a part of that ultimate torture in life is a fool’s errand, a misguided absolution by either one’s self or chronicle of self. And the carnal needs of one person are often simply satisfied by fulfilling the carnal needs of another. But all humanity is connected by desire – for, without desire, they may not have existed in the first place. Eternity through desire, each of us passing the baton of life to another. But, one day, you may give birth to an invisible body on an empty stage rather than just a body, say, with its fingers invisible by having been burnt off in that partial attempt to avoid Hell’s torture. That ultimate creation of invisibility in the guise of something that you deem as real: a creation by those creatures one hated in life, those Pigeons from Hell flying across your last balcony. This is not what I found in this story. This is what this story found in me. (14 Jul 11 – another ten hours later)

Defragging the Past

2011-07-13T08:07:00.000+01:00

An excerpt from my review of 'The Bestiary of Communion' by Stephen J Clark (Ex Occidente Press) HERE.

IX. “…the audience were the true source of the illusion.”

Forced to return tonight by the need to fulfil some renewed urge to read before going to bed - it is as if the foundling House has leaves of Vegetation towards a snowy Narnia – but here a filmic, painterly, weird, East European, self-contained, undidactic ambiance of fantasy not a Christian Allegory - a fantasy that reminds me of the day as a youth I always visited the cinema and they customarily had ‘continuous performances’, where the section of the film you watch after being shown to your seat by the usherette’s beaming torch is what you end watching just before you leave, say, from film’s midddle to middle, and you have had to work backwards to visualise the film in the correct order, by changing things, skipping motives, forgetting sadnesses, ditching happinesses, defragging politics and logic and history and desecration and holocaust … in some strange ritual of half-shafting screen-lit darkness, red embers and billowing cigarette smoke – and blindly snogging couples. (My erstwhile vision, not the book’s, but uncannily it is this book’s vision …later, perhaps. But tomorrow never has today’s vision.) (12 Jul 11 – another 3 hours later)

Death and the...

2011-06-29T14:56:00.002+01:00

Nobody can barter with Death.

Johnny tried his hardest: giving his own Death all sorts of options as to how to kill him but with the only proviso that if the option that Death chose turned out to be wrong then Death would leave him alone forever. Death thought it was on to a winner. It had never tried to barter with a human subject before and found it an amusing game. Why not give this Johnny-me-lad a bit of fun, too, just a chance of avoiding Death and befriending an Impossibility called Immortality? Give him this fun, and then snatch it away, with Death ever having the trump card: because only Death could choose how a human died and therefore it would choose an option that would later be fulfilled by the destiny of certainty. Johnny believed in free will, however, even in Death’s free will and consequent fallibility.

Johnny’s wife – Dymphna – was not kept in the loop. Johnny’s big mistake and Death’s good fortune. Johhny had not shared secrets with Dymphna for many years – and a habit extended forever is a habit that by-passes Death – or so went the religious tracts in the only water-tight religion that existed among the gullible race of humans. Not telling Dymphna about his pact with Death was all part of the scheme he hatched. Because he knew Death was a blabber-mouth and would itself tell Dymphna – thus breaking the vicious circle that kept that Impossibility called Immortality at bay. All manner of cause-and-effect and virtuous or vicious circles were at play here. Johnny was no fool. But Death, reading this, had got more and more confused. Until one night – a lucky break for Death – Johnny had a dream that he told Dymphna everything, i.e. that he had bartered with Death and that Death had chosen Mental Breakdown as the cause of Johnny’s own death: a strange choice to make, but Death liked to give itself challenges.

“You can’t die from Mental Breakdown,” said Dymphna in the dream.

“What if I top myself?” said Johnny – in the same dream.

The logic of it was that Suicide was the real cause of death, while the Mental Breakdown itself was merely the Proximate Cause, a term used in Insurance Law.

This put at least nine cats among the proverbial pigeons.

Death did not approve of Euthanasia, of course. And that, coincidentally, was Dymphna’s second name.

Johhny’s still dreaming. A different dream now, with an easy entry doorway from the previous dream that had contained Dymphna, but now a dream with no exit doorway. Perhaps, a prolonged dream of being dead – stretching towards forever forever: a sort of dream that only a rare form of Mental Breakdown in alliance with Sleep could cause. A concept beyond the scope of any religion ... or political correctness regarding insanity ... or the necessity of Pascal’s wager.

This left Death in the doldrums and Dymphna both married to and widowed by the same man. And me left with no real ending, the worst fate of all.

Death and the Lost Gambit. Titles are always best last.

The Stereograph

2011-06-27T10:12:00.000+01:00

An extract from my real-time review of 'The Mauve Embellishments' by Charles Schneider (Passport Levant 2011) here.

The Stereograph

“Yes. He had heard a fragment of a rumour many years ago at a slide collectors convention in Blackpool.”

Blackpool, or Menton? Seriously, I’m sure I’ve now reached a genuine Weird fiction classic, as if I’ve been led craftily towards this story by the previous ones so the shock is processed to the fullest. The obsession of collecting, to the point of not even sharing the primest item in the collection with oneself! Collecting and death in symbiosis. The secret of parthenogenesis reached but only for those of us who can ‘gestalt’ the twin paintings or illustrative leitmotifs affixed-within-white-space to this text. A rorschach of extreme identical opposites. Clark Ashton Smith eat your heart out. (27 Jun 11)

TO BE CONTINUED

Castle Cesare

2011-06-27T09:26:00.001+01:00

An extract from my real-time review of 'Link Arms With Toads!' by Rhys Hughes (Chomu Press 2011) here.

Castle Cesare

“From the balconies of our highest turrets the entire firmament was accessible to our curiosity…”

But do we ever reach the last balcony? Not according to this story, as the hero protagonist – in a 2oth century East European literature flavour of a mediaeval fable – becomes a cross between the ‘Russian Doll’ hero (my expression not the story’s) from ’333 and a Third’, plus Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver, Doctor Who and a solar-systemic Phileas Fogg and ‘you’ or ‘me’ by fictionatronic empathy with an orrery degree in endless imagination…… Indeed, I can’t imagine how big Rhys’ imagination must be to create this insular-picaresque fiction (seriously), but it seems central to some fabrication ‘magic fiction’ that I shall christen here, officially for the first time, ‘fictionatronics’. A fabrication that only Rhys can bring off. Ever chasing the noumenon but thankfully never reaching it because, if reached, it would become less than its unreachable essence. (27 Jun 11)

Draugr

2011-06-26T19:48:00.000+01:00

"There are things that have to exist but cannot." - from 'The Mauve Embellishments' by Charles Schneider (Ex Occidente Press).

The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies

2011-06-26T10:01:00.001+01:00

The Book’s Title…

…is The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies so as to describe the plots of the Horror Stories that all centre around unreal Horror Anthologies that are real books for the unreal protagonists in the stories.
It is not intended to portray grandeur as a Horror Anthology in itself. If there is a double resonance, it is meant to be a playful one.
With due respect here to the noted Horror anthologists who have served our contemporary Horror genre community so well, like Peter Crowther, Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, Karl Edward Wagner …. not forgettting also all the Small Press editors and publishers of varying muscular reach towards the genre’s readership.

Our planet as reliquary

2011-06-21T17:09:00.002+01:00

http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/treasures-of-heaven/

Nemonymous Night

2011-06-15T07:51:00.003+01:00

Publication Date – 15 June 2011

Nemonymous Night is not an easy read; however—and here’s the rub—it’s entirely readable.
NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS (today)

Chomu Press: Prize Draw:-
Are you nemonymous?
“It’s the kind of work you’d like to put in the water supply of a major city, just to see what would happen.”
Publication Date of NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chomu Press) 15 June 2011
www.nemonymous.com
===============================

Busy Blood Forever

Twelve collaborations with Tim Lebbon

A Dream of Real Air

You Walk The Pages - Mark Valentine.

Horror Planet - S. D. Tullis

The Writer - Clayton Stealback

The Pearl and the Boil - Rosanne Rabinowitz

The American Club, - Christopher Morris

Residua - David Mathew

The Fifth Corner - E. Michael Lewis

The Rediscovery of Death - Mike O'Driscoll

Common Myths and Misconceptions Regarding Rita Kendall - AJ Kirby

Horror Stories FOR Boys - Rachel Kendall

Paper Cuts - Nick Jackson

Tears of the Mutant Jesters - Rhys Hughes

The Useless - Dominy Clements

Colleen Anderson - It's Only Words

DFL’s Best Four for fiction published in 2011

Best Novel: HERE COMES THE NICE – Jeremy ReedBest Anthology: The VanderMeers’ massive ‘The WEIRD’Best Collection: ‘Allurements of Cabochon’ by John GaleBest story or novella: ‘Suburbs of the Black Lyre’ by Ron Weighell

Plastic Scab

Celebrity Big Brother - 2012

The Dark Damp Corner

“TARSHISHIM – boxed limited edition” by Ron Weighell

Here Comes The Nice

Encounters with Terror

Born From Night - Talkback - Ogthrod Ai'f Geb'l

Born From Night

Talkback

Ogthrod Ai'f Geb'l

Notes From A Dream - Foxflesh

Notes From A Dream

Foxflesh

Jack the Cutter - It Must Have Been Toddington

Jack The Cutter

It Must Have Been Toddington

House Trained - Culture Vultures

House Trained

Culture Vultures

Conjugal Spice - The Imprimatur of the Monster

Conjugal Spice

The Imprimatur Of The Monster

Spam - Southend-on-Sea

Spam

Southend on Sea

Don't You Dare (2)

Don't You Dare (2)

Don't You Dare

Don't You Dare

A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA / TOO MANY HEROES

A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA / TOO MANY HEROES

STRIPPED OF TITLE

STRIPPED OF TITLE

Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse

Too Many Heroes

Too Many Heroes

The Merest Creak

The Merest Creak

Pirate Radio Snippets

posted Tuesday, 11 December 2007

The Soft Scoop

Posted Tuesday, 8 January 2008

A Watery Grave

EGNARO

Martin, Leman & Campbell

My Story

Benny's Bingo

Shifting Vigils

A Poetry of Proverbs

DIALOGUE - A Near-Death Experience

From the Hearth

Breaking Dawn (2)

Breaking Dawn

The Pilot Looked Round

Shifting Sands

A Vignellarette

Haunted Manor

Two Cans of Lager and a Packet of Crisps - II

My most recent real-time reviews

Endless Chronicles

Best Novel: HERE COMES THE NICE – Jeremy Reed
Best Anthology: The VanderMeers’ massive ‘The WEIRD’
Best Collection: ‘Allurements of Cabochon’ by John Gale
Best story or novella: ‘Suburbs of the Black Lyre’ by Ron Weighell