THE WEIRDMONGER'S CIRCUS

THE WEIRDMONGER'S CIRCUS



We all lived on the outskirts of a wind-infested scrubland: more a child's scatterered playbricks than a town, but we loved and hated each other sure well, because everyone was our parent and spouse and sibling and offspring all wrapped into one.



The heat felt as intense as that in the brick ovens where we tenderised the hairy cabbages and long carrots. Nobody hardly visited us to share the stews we created from next to nothing, but we never missed their company. It was too stuffy to talk, anyway - despite the winds.



Until the circus came.



It came in on us - an army of tents and caravans - across the brows of the sun-kissed hills. Banners and bugles met the desert sandstorms head on and foisted their poles and guy-ropes, like another universe, around our humble hovels. We basked in a new-found shade and saw sights fit to shake us out of our petty self-dissatisfactions.



The clowns were sadder than those in my dreams. One particular talkative pierrot, in a harlequin's hose, informed me that their sadness was an image they had consciously developed so that the punters would laugh the more at them. But this seemed to be an excuse in hindsight and, indeed, I cried to see their make-up petering down their cheeks.



The circus animals were happier than the clowns, beasts of burden set loose to turn somersaults and make mock of those come to watch them. The ones in cages seemed to love their iron bars, as if they knew safety was in such confinement. Their bones, I somehow believed, were physical extensions of such restraints. Some, with trunks, waved them about like creatures from the horror films, such films having been projected in the past by a travelling cinema upon the wall of my uncle's house. Others snorted and brayed with each dusk and dawn, until they were fed and, more importantly, had their huge parts massaged.



The trapezists danced amid the high rigging of the Big Top, some rarely coming down, others just dying up there and a few becoming part and parcel of the texture of the canvas. The safety-net below them was more a cobweb than a trawling device for dead fliers and, I was sure, one day, I caught a glimpse of a giant spider, more angular than a giraffe, lurking in the net's trammels.



My family and I visited the circus every night during its stay. The ringmaster called himself Weirdmonger, but why, I shall never know. He claimed that whatever he said would happen, would happen, however far-fetched. And he was right, I think.

Which brings me to why I'm telling all this.



The night in question was to be starless, as could happen in our climes when the days's dust is still heavy with air. The heat had been fiercer than I could ever recall, the winds stronger, the town's torpor like an over-feasted snake resting and extruding its last five meals. The first sign of night was the sun dipping early behind the hills, silting the haze with baked blood. The sky became streaked with the searchlights of the circus, criss-crossing across the perfect backcloth of blackness with the twirling sword-blades of a space adventure film.



The whole township - together with hermits from the hills - flocked, with blazing stinking tussock-torches, along the valley towards the central ring of the circus site. The band had already taken up a riotous version of "Oklahoma!" The tumblers, acrobats, jugglers and fire-eaters were erecting themselves into towers of interlocking limbs (some of which limbs supposedly separate from their owner bodies and others flaming at both ends). Weirdmonger, with the tallest top hat he had so far worn, stood on his dais, conducting the whole affair with his whip.



I had only just sat down amid my immediate family, when Weirdmonger beckoned to me with each of his fingers in turn.



As if hypnotised (though I wasn't), I stood up and entered the limelight of the Big Top. The beasts careered and honked around me, but I seemed to slide between them as if by magic. Soon, two clowns had me by the hands and they sobbed bitterly. This time I did not laugh or cry.



Up face to face, Weirdmonger was uglier than anything my immediate parents had taught me about sin. He was creased with pain, but a pain he seemed to enjoy.



The words he saw fit to utter were strange, but understandable in the even stranger context. But they became heavy with innuendo, far beyond the means of my immature mind to grasp, like the dialogue in some of those Fellini films so beloved of my uncle. I can still repeat, by rote, however, syllable for syllable, the words he lovingly plucked from the air and to which he gave branding-iron meaning all of his own:



"As you know fair well, dear boy, I'm Weirdmonger. My eyes have been on you at every performance, for my circus needs stars to keep it turning. If you join our world, I have one who can be your simpering bride, one for you to love and be loved more than you can ever otherwise hope to love or be loved. One to love you more than you will ever deserve. And, for this gift of gifts, all you need do is leave your body here and promise me your soul at the end of time, which is further off than a boy like you can ever imagine. A sweet tractable bargain you will agree."



I shook my head silently. Turning to the clowns, my eyes yearned for something they evidently could not give. They stared straight in front of them like manikins, like dummies with no hope of ever retrieving the aid of the One Great Ventriloquist in the skies.



A huge lion had padded near and, from its roaring mouth, there stepped a lady dressed in heavy frills and flounces. But her face was bearded, as if she'd sat in the dark for centuries.



We were to be married before the circus left town.



On the day of the wedding, my immediate mother taught me how I could kiss my bride without choking on her beard and how - when I finally delved beneath her thousand lace layers, revolving hoops, bustles, interlocking corsets and so forth - I could gauge for myself which way further to go. There could be no hard and fast rules until I saw how the land laid. I must expect anything ... and everything.



As I shivered in my bed (for the nights turned colder, the days hotter), I wondered why all this had come to pass. It was like being part of something that was not part of me.



I could hear the safety-net spider clucking in its sleep, even at this distance from the Big Top, and my dreams felt dizzy as if I'd just alighted from the playground roundabout. Sometimes I dreamed of my intended with her beard in curlers.



Nobody could help me now, not even my family the town. I could only try to help myself, but I inevitably thought that even if I could escape the confines of my own body, leaving only independent mysteries to consummate...



Unbroken sleep intervened.



The wedding itself is still a blur. Chimney-hatted Weirdmonger was, of course, Master of Ceremonies. The pierrot clown was my best man and the animals were seated on my side of the congregation beneath the shining undulations of the mighty canvas. This was because there was no hide nor hair of my brothers, sisters, cousins, parents, ancestors. I was on my own and not even that...



The bride had silk ribbons decking her beard, I do remember. She slipped a ring on each of my fingers in turn and then christened me with a wet bristly kiss.



I am now the official keeper of the trapezists, bringing them down in droves from the Big Top's banner flypapers, taking others up there for a short life of flight...



Part of me, at least, knows that all was for the best. The other part I've grown used to ignoring.



Weirdmonger often tells me that life is happiest when you ask no, answer no questions, when you tell no, accept no lies.



My own tenet is that life is saddest when happiness is simply a purpose rather than a reflex.



The endemic winds still abound and my sweetheart often has cottonballs ludicrously caught in her beard. One day, I've been promised, we're to be filmed to show others our wondrous magic reality.





First Published in 'The Standing Stone', 1991

The Two Ways Of Anonymity (revised)

The Two Ways Of Anonymity (revised)

posted Tuesday, 24 November 2009


I have revised my 'Two Ways of Anonymity' (eight years in the drafting), at least partially thanks to a ghost-writer called Alexicon here: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/2904.html?1259082955


The Two Ways of Anonymity

(one) The most common way - to say something you don't want to be known as saying, i.e. possibly for *devious* purposes (which could be spite, nepotism, insult, cruelty, dubious joke etc etc.) -- or publishing pornography, issuing a Valentine's card, hiding one's identity to avoid reputation depletion etc, ghost-writing, being an artisan writer who is simply having anonymous fun on a literary internet discussion-thread, being in a war where identity-concealment could save a life...

(two) A way that is hardly ever used - to make an artistic statement (within the philosophy of Aesthetics), such as Nemonymity,
(i) whereby the fiction author wants some objective view of his work to be made without his name getting in the way -- and I, as an editor, equally don't want it to get in the way when I consider his submission for publication and
(ii) as an experiment in fiction anthology presentation as a new gestalt reading experience (i.e. stories written independently and remaining separate yet somehow more 'together') and
(iii) leading to a brainstorming approach to reviews and critical appreciation and
(iv) bringing fiction nearer to the artist-naming (late-labelling) approach of other arts such as fine arts, architecture, music etc. (instead of having the name on the spine, on the title page and, often, on the top of each alternate page throughout the book) and
(v) trying to bring fiction more easily to an interstitial or between/cross-genre optimum.

I think it true to say that some elements in (one) above bring anonymity into disrepute, a cross which Nemonymous has to bear.

Further input would be welcome.





comments (1)



1. Weirdmonger left...
Wednesday, 7 July 2010 3:44 pm
While writing about 'The Conspiracy Against The Human Race' by Thomas Ligotti today, I decided that a (vi) should be added to the list above, saying: "attempting to reach a state of pure pessimism".

Cerne's Zoo

Cerne's Zoo

posted Sunday, 22 November 2009



From my personal review' of the CERN ZOO book here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo__a_dfl_realtime_review.htm


Cerne's Zoo

"...Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, among others who have contemplated the possibility that souls exist in not only people..."

Another important story that has so far escaped under the radar. A touching and original ghost story about Zoo creatures and the death-bed confession of Cerne Lincroft (Christened thus as he was said to be conceived under the aegis of the Cerne Abbas chalk giant) who once smuggled an elephant with him on an aeroplane between USA and UK because the elephant felt home-sick. However, the story is far more tender and serious than that implies. It has a telling connection with THEORY, too, vis a vis its take on Animism.

================================================

ADDITIONAL COMMENT:

After two respected scientists recently proposed that the Hadron Collider is sabotaging itself from the future and a bird escaped from the Zoo's aviary dropping a piece of bread into the Collider's cooling system, it is now good to see that the re-starting of the Collider's process (after 14 months) has gone so well in the last couple of days. However, one must not take things for granted. For example, I dreamt last night that an aeroplane flew over the Collider and dropped an elephant upon it.

Hadronic

Hadronic
posted Sunday, 15 November 2009



From here: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=33848&styleid=35#post33848

Re: Is the Internet something one should resist or embrace?

Quote

There is far too much to take in so they focus in upon a few specific things and then obsess about them. Sometimes the obsession is fruitful and positive, sometimes it is negative and polarising.
I think if you find the internet is making you unhappy, you should use it less. You should also set time limits when you use it and only use it for specific planned tasks. And you should stay away from the things that upset you.



I've been giving this much thought. It is very wise.

I tend to use the internet for expressing my fiction in a public way.... and philosophising about all manner of life's angles, original (I hope) and/or traditional.
Hadronic and/or Elizabeth-Bowenesque. Ligottian and/or Rhys-Hughesian. And/or...

This is tied up with a burning creativity (good or bad) and an ambition (but I'm not sure about the nature or goal of that ambition).

Rhys Hughes on Ligotti and Lovecraft

Rhys Hughes on Ligotti and Lovecraft

posted Friday, 13 November 2009




Fascinating take by Rhys Hughes on Ligotti and Lovecraft at link below. The link leads to my initial on-the-hoof Rhombus response, and Rhys's post is just above it. The thread itself starts with an equally fascinating TLO interview with Rhys.

http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=33697#post33697

...

Rhys has promised more on this subject - so keep your ear to the ground.

He is not only a great fictioneer but also a great controversialist.

The Piano

The Piano

posted Sunday, 18 June 2006

I don’t know where to begin – that’s what they say when you get into a situation you don’t understand, but you want to get it off your chest as quickly as possible – without, if possible, confusing the direct lines of cause and effect. So, yes, I’ll begin with the effect, because I still don’t fully understand what the cause was … and still is. Or when it started. My wife Alison is none the wiser, it seems.
With most situations of decay, everything decays, except possibly metal or stone. But stone soon enough crumbles in the cosmic scheme of things and if matter gets hot enough metal bends then melts … much like my sense of reality. My sense of reality? It was steadfast, unimpeachable, so blindingly certain, that I couldn’t really believe it when that very sense of reality of mine itself began to bend and melt … before my very eyes. And Alison’s, too, judging by what she says.

Decay is the best word for it. Other people – who have explored the Thesaurus – may use the word Entropy. The natural propensity of life, the universe, everything … toward inbuilt decay. The softening of Creation’s very arteries as they thread – in increasing tangles – the weft and woof of all known reality and truth as we know it. But who had heard of this Decay just attacking one aspect of life? All the rest remaining as steadfast as ever. In this case it was wood alone that decayed. Wood still on trees and wood manufactured into furniture. Wood in buildings. Wood in otherwise still thriving forests. Wood in woodfuls of it, in fact. Woods of wood where the bark began to crumble first, then the inner rings of age, branches crashing to the ground and soon turning to mulch, leaving the leaves as green as when they were growing on the tree. Peppering the soft bogland of the previous wood like emeralds in the moonshine.

Buildings where window frames softened into the likeness of the putty that once fitted the glass tightly within such wood-planed margins. Sash-joints wilting leaving the heavy plumb-lines taut but allowing the panes to crash to the ground, where they splintered into shards fit to kill an army of folk – except by then most people knew what was happening and avoided the sides of building as once they superstitiously refused to walk under ladders. Mahogany tables turned into ghosts of tables. Willow cricket bats turned as willowy as wisps and couldn’t stop the hard red ball from scattering the non-existent stumps. Oaken vats spilled their innards of port wine across the cobbled cellars of our past.

Yet the rest of life remained as steadfast as ever. My sense of reality was only affected in its sensitivities for wood. The feel for knots and shavings of wood. The texture of wood disappeared and became little more than dark custard. Whilst flesh, leaf, pebble, stalk, blood, metal, mineral, air, water, all these things and more managed to retain their consistency of truth. It was just the wood that went.

I promised to start at the beginning. But I failed. Shows how confused I am by recent events. It all started when Alison and I went to a concert. Before that, wood was wood. I carbon-date the change from that evening of the concert when… but let Alison speak. She has a better handle on things than myself.

Yes, he’s right. I vouch for every word he’s said. Except I can see the wood for the trees better than him. He’s a bit loose-limbed in the thinking department where he used to be so hard-headed about things.

Hey, Alison, I may have passed these narrative things over to you so that a new perspective can be given, but no need to imply my thinking arches have fallen. My thoughts are still thoughts. It’s only wood that’s gone AWOL.

Anyway, whatever the case, he’s basically right. The concert was a televised piano recital given by an up and coming pianist, a young lady who played Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms. Or who was due to play these composers, but soon after the third movement of the Schubert – with most of the audience having spent their coughing fits on empty spaces of silence between movements – the lid of the grand piano toppled from its prop with a thunderous crash. I actually saw the prop wilting in the television lights…

Come on, Alison, it was not so much the lid’s prop that wilted as more the lights dissolving it before our very eyes. The keys later soon clattered to the ground like rattling bones. And the sides of the grand caved in. The stage gave way and the poor lady pianist vanished in a smoke of splinters. Splinters that became diamond dewdrops on the TV screens across the country – assuming the screen’s casing hadn’t crumbled first. But we shall never know.

It was never as sudden as all that.

Yes it was, Alison.

No, you yourself earlier said that people avoided the sides of buildings for the fear of falling windowpanes. If all this had happened at once, then there would be no need for this ever-present caution on their part. The windowpanes would have long since fallen.

Hindsight, Alison, is not a luxury I can afford. The events are seen through the filter of my present observation of past events. Unless, of course, things are changing even as I narrate them. And if they are thus changing, hindsight will be duped just as easily as a direct account of events on the spot, like a horserace radio commentary. Back to the piano…

Well, yes, the concert piano was a grand. With open lid and resonating chords that filled the concert hall and also filled the rooms of viewers countrywide. In these parlours where families crowded round the TVs to watch when otherwise they wouldn’t … they must have known, beforehand, that significant events were afoot. Why else would they be watching a dry boring old Schubert piano recital? A record audience for such an event. 30 million in the UK alone. Eager for every note. Eyes twitching away from the screen to view their own surroundings to see if … well, to see if their own upright pub piano was as steadfast as ever. The one where they played Russ Conway ditties as well as popular classics. Not that many families own pianos these days. And, yes, the wood from their own upright pianos began to crack, splinter and crumble and finally mulch itself into shapes like dog manure. The tautened piano-strings remained behind like a harp, where the hammers still desultorily hit them without anyone touching the keys…

I can’t recall any of that, Alison.

Well you forgot my birthday, didn’t you.

I’d bought you a carving by that famous sculptor…

But it wasn’t there was it?

The carving was there, Alison, but the wood it was made from didn’t fill the carved space…

Excuses, excuses.

There’s a terrible draught in here.

Let’s cuddle to keep warm. Touch each other there and there…

Wait, stop, I can hear piano music.

It’s a recording.

Yes, must be a recording.

I hear choking noises as if things are coming to get us.

People coughing between movements, shuffling along in their seats.

But, wait, look at this photograph I took at the concert just before the piano went.

Yes, I can see there is a hole in the pianist’s stocking. END


(published 'Irregular Quarterly' 2004)


=================================

The Visitor

THE VISITOR

posted Saturday, 3 June 2006
This is a full-length novel written during 1973 and, to date, only two people have read it: the author and the author's correspondent whose then concurrent (meta-)comments on the unfolding novel were bodily incorporated in the novel itself during its later stages.
===========================================
THE VISITOR
by DF Lewis


PROLOGUE by Des Lewis

For many days, he-who-was-known-as-the-art-Master had loitered through those streets, far from his home and fireside family, searching - in the gruesome cafés, disused railway sidings and forgotten bins - for a sign, some scrawled communication, that art was alive and well, despite the silent ignorance otherwise abounding. I shall say no more than that he did not find it.Instead, he stumbled, one day of slanting rain, into a dark schoolroom where a teacher, with spectacles, gown and mortar board, gestured with a white cane to row upon row of upturned faces, faces innocent and fixed. Their brows were creased in concentration. The art Master took a spare desk at the back of the class, behind a pofaced girl with golden plaids, and he commenced to absorb the room: its black walls and deep ceiling, the smudged panes set high where brown light struggled through … the exercise book resting on the desk before him. Carefully turning the front cover, but not without the slightest squeak, he saw revealed the first blank page, sharp white in the darkness. It reminded him of a canvas before the planting of paint, frighteningly empty. Meanwhile, the archetype teacher, standing before the speechless children, still waved the cane, seemingly oblivious of the art Master’s arrival. His whole being was centred on the one message he was now presumably conveying … but the string of words that flowed from his lips was very difficult to hear, let alone understand.

The art Master imagined himself at the front, in the teacher’s place, stressing to the children the value and beauty of art, perhaps explaining the philosophy of aesthetics - whether a canvas with one mere haphazard scratch be art or not - even exhibiting items of primitive carving and of classical painting. He dreamed of the lecture he would have made. He mused on his life and his family...

His dreams were suddenly dispersed, for his sullen eyes had noticed something peculiar about the teacher. There was a broad streak of blood across his brow, a deep, dripping scratch. Still unaware of the art Master’s wide-eyed curiosity, the teacher proceeded with the incomprehensible lesson that entranced the silent girls and boys.

No sooner had the art Master set his eyes on the fleshy gutter in the teacher’s brow, than into the classroom crept an old man, also sporting a mortar-board and bent like a grotesque sculpture. He shambled up to the first teacher and whispered in his ear. After a few seconds, when the words had been absorbed in his slow mind, the first teacher uttered the following unmistakable words:

“The class is dismissed.”

He grabbed a large clapperless bell from his desk and shook its silence violently. The children immediately erupted into cacophony as their shouts followed their forms through the door, leaving the startled art Master sitting at the back. At times of stress, he would often pray to Art, as poets of old did call upon their Muse … and he did this now, crushed his mind beneath Beauty and Art, those helpmates on many a previous occasion. One such, he recalled, was the period when his family was starving through lack of money. In desperation, he had stretched his supplicating hands to Art, as if it were a god, and, to support this plea, he had bent his body all night before a neighbour’s blazing log fire. The following morning, with no obvious solution to his problems forthcoming, he had made a terrible scratch across a virgin canvas poised on the easel. Need more be said than that the canvas was sold for an extraordinary amount of money to a foreign gallery.

Coming back to his present surroundings, he saw the teacher replacing the bell on the desk, meticulously ensuring that the imaginary clapper did not repeat its knell. The other, the wizened old man, slowly clearing the books from the untidy desks, gazed curiously above his half-spectacles at the seated figure.

“Who are you?” he monotoned.

“I am an artist, known in my home town as the art Master. I apologise if you feel that I have intruded, but I was captivated by this classroom as I passed.”

“As you passed?” the other intoned.

“Yes ... yes, I was roaming the streets, seeking work ... some artistic work. Perhaps I may be allowed to stay and paint this classroom?”

“Can’t you see, thicko, that we have a problem.” The old man motioned towards the first teacher, flopped in his chair and dabbing his wound. “We have no time to pander to strange intellectuals. So, yobbo, git!” The voice was cracked and twisted - like the neck.


========================================

To read the rest of this novel, please transfer: HERE:
http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/


=========================================



comments (1)



1. Paul Dracon left...
Monday, 19 June 2006 9:33 pm
Thank you for posting this, Des. It's going to be a treat to see how your style has evolved over a thirty-three year period.

Big Brother 11 (2010) - Part Four

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2010/08/big-brother-11-2011-part-three.html


Marion wrote:
One of those moments which make BB the greatest reality TV show on earth. JJ crumbled.

Although I agree with that, I'd interpret last night's momentous events in more of a theatrical, inevitable nemesis of all the HMs (some returned to face this Fate), of BB in general over the years, of our society in the last ten years, as crystallised in John James, John James as the redemptive anti-Messiah whom Dave may sub-consciously see as a Charismatic, evangelical archetype of Biblical darkness. (Lucifer is now generally perceived in modern times as the 'hero' of 'Paradise Lost' by Milton.) Apocalyptic John, Apostle James. Fisher of folk. Null Immortalis.

Corin is just a player in this Morality tale, just one of the Greek Chorus, albeit the most effectively vocal.

Meanwhile, Josie could win BB11, based on her performance last night, not Corin. Josie was the Judas Iscariot.
.
Josie was crueller by wielding the dagger from under the the love-blanket. Josie is the Queen of Hell.
Corin is merely taking small paces with exquisite skill, but small paces nevertheless. She's not in the same league as Josie.

Four evictions tonight, I hear.


I suspect John James, Steve, JJ and Dave will actually go.

But I hope that Corin replaces John James in going so as to punish her for her camera-gazing.
.
Steve goes, as expected. Quite a dignified exit.

I wonder what he said to Mario after he heard Mario calling him 'pervy'!

I think Nathan was given a speech to read on the telephone.

Josie was very articulate about John James' behaviour. I really think she now deserves to win.

Yes, I'm fickle. Corin has begun to grate with me again. She just doesn't ring true.

Well, none of them really ring true but she rings postively false.

John James will now go, and JJ and David?

But if others agree with my view of Corin, perhaps she will go tonight.

And oh yes - Bob Righter - as a real body - absolutely brilliant. Stylishly creepy. A perfect symbol for BB11.
.
I agree that the programme is going to be boring. I feel none of them deserve to be there, and I would have said that whoever had got through. A pity BB is ending as such a damp squib.

Sam and Corin and John James should perhaps have been there for talking points and potential entertainment. But people vote for various reasons, some for those with less fakery about them, some for those who have more eye-candy, some as a result of flashmob voting organised by supp0rters and other reasons of an unpredicatble nature (what paper they read, their IQ, their politics etc).

Josie does have something of the Doris Day about her, and the Carroll Baker. She is sometimes articulate and funny. With the competition she's got, I can't see who else may win. Except possibly Mario. Even Dave? He's improved with time even with the Glory-Hole of his religion.
.
John James in DR: I've acted like an opinionated prick.

BB: How do you think you will be remembered, John James?

John James: Well, I can't think of any way I'll be remembered other than as an opinionated prick because - err - because I am an opinionated prick. (stares mindlessly into the distance)
.
A classic - Josie evicting two biscuits, a custard cream and a rich tea. A born comedienne. :)

Not sure about Mario starkers, though, or that rather childish, if gently humorous, forgeone conclusion of a task involving Andrew as a yes man. But I wonder - does he really fancy Mario? There's more truth in subterfuge than meets the eye.

This is the calm before the storm, ie. the Housemates of Horror are due to arrive at the House next Tuesday...
.
Sorry for the intermission but this new book of mine does mention the 'Big Brother' TV reality Show:
Weirdtongue (by DF Lewis)
Just received my contributor copies from InkerMen Press.

HOORAY!!

They've really done me proud.

http://www.inkermenpress.co.uk/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=27&category_id=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=4&vmcchk=1&Itemid=4

.
yes, sad day - to end like that.

Still - Josie's 'glow' is accentuated when compared to her sliding into spittly thumb-suction and then tenting her knickers in imitation of JJ's boner. A glow aglow is more greatly aglow when within darkness.

She does have a 'glow'. Something one possesses naturally and cannot really acquire by deliberation or fabricate by acting. In that respect, she's streets ahead of Corin. Glow a good word. Thanks, Dave. Dave for second?

That highlights show is symptomatic of what has been wrong with the whole BB 11 series - in the old days the HMs were marooned with each other; throughout this series they have been beset by others who are not HMs. That & the retrocausal special effects.

Tonight is the BB Final I've least looked forward to.
.
Josie won with nearly 80% of the votes....
Dave, in the end, a worthy second.

Now she's back in with- wow! -

my mate makosi
ulrika svenbang
nasti nick
nasti nikki
john snot mccrick
nadia natterjack
brian darling
chantelle gobsmack & Preston North End
coolio foolio
.
An admission. I never watched BB 1 - I only started with BB 2.

Nasty Nick is a mystery to me, therefore.

I agree that Chantelle has not changed objective shape bodily or facially but still gives the impression she is now a bruised windfall. And Preston has grown an aura of bounder or cad or brush salesman of the old school, while before he was a pop star whippersnapper.
.
...and, Marion, where is Miche the Moucher from the year we started discussing BB on TTA (2004)?

And here are three of my separate comments on Makosi in 2005:

And Makosi is a visual and mental delight, clever and incisive.

Makosi is a star! And she has created some of the bext drama on TV since 'The Wednesday Play' !

My first real laugh in this series - seeing Makosi lead the conga with Science at the back.
.
Unaccountably, I woke up this morning thinking of mutton sausages.

LOL! at Marion's concept of John McC as a cupid in a diaper.

This group of people is the most dysfunctional distillation from earlier already dysfunctional distillations. A tontine of terror.

Ulrika "world-wearily witty" - what a wonderful description.

Makosi vs Nadia as the battle of the Divas? I'll take on Makosi, if Marion takes on Nadia, because I have a death-wish appropriate for the dying days of BB.

Nikki and Nick - John and Coolio - as catalysts of as yet unknown tree-rings or DR about-faces.

Prestelle as just another misbegotten publicity germ like that of mutterden JosiJJ.
.
Tearful Chantelle and Josie.
Might not see tomorrow's show....

Does anyone know what were the 'circumstances' of the break-up of the Chantelle / Preston marriage? They still seem to care for each other.

Josie is 'normal' she claims. She's not a celebrity. She is a celebrity now, my own Doris Day.... :(
.
Spot on, with everything there, Marion, including the mutton chops. What a sight! McC is even less scenic than me!

But what happened to Chantelle and Preston in those dark days of a foreshortened marriage four years ago? Was it the Curse of Celebrity? A running theme in this Ultimate BB. The final curtain. The final curse. The final curtailment.

Meanwhile, which grizzled curmudgeon to go?
.
How ludicrous can you get!
Fabrication upon fabrication - notes left in places for someone else (not a genuine HM) to find? What's all that about?

Josie seemed genuine - not stage-acting a departure.

Chantelle's matronly look - I've just discovered she's had breast implants. What a silly girl!

The whole lot are silly.

Has BB come to this?

All of them to go!
.
All is forgiven. Mr Snuggles is the most horrific clown I've ever seen - beyond anything even in King's IT.
Poor Nikki!

She's on toast.
.
Baked beans and toast?
Victor & Michelle?
One should be on top of the other, and the other should not.


PS: If anyone is interested in the Horror genre on this discussion forum, they should take a look at the first entrance of Mr Snuggles. Beats any Horror film hands down.
It only needs Bob Righter strutting backwards to be seen at the edge of sight...
.
This below is what I wrote in 2004:

I was very upset at the eviction of Victor on Friday. He was a greatly misunderstood character - and the way he sometimes 'performed' (and created whirlpools of mannerist theatre around him) I felt the whole thing was a wonderful Tennessee Williams play. Miche the Moucher is a likely bunny-boiler. Hope she doesn't read this thread. She knows where the bodies are buried.
Actually, BB is symptomatic of a lot of what is wrong with life today. Swearing, loose morals, blatant exploitation etc. However, paradoxically in a way I can't really explain, it also seems constructive, semi-dramatic, inspiringly nightmarish, thought-provoking in its development of one's own insights into the psychology of the modern angst. The question is what one does with those insights. Turn it by alchemy into art (writing)? Or allow it to help you understand and help yourself and others in this human jungle?
Yes, Dan was and has always been very impressive.
Shell the 'posh eye-candy' gets on my nerves.
Nadia is improving all the time.
Stu and Jason are also-rans in my book. Never liked Jason ever since he started in the house (dressed only in a (what do they call it?) ... thong).
Stu was subsumed by Miche the Moucher and now remains a Charwoman's Shadow (a la Lord Dunsany)

CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2010/09/big-brother-11-2010-part-5.html

_________________
WEIRDTONGUE - If it's nothing else, it's a fiction unlike any other.

Left Foot (2)

Left Foot (2)

posted Thursday, 16 March 2006

When I came downstairs in the middle of the night or – as it turned out – very early in the morning, I discovered Susan in the living-room, squatting on the couch in her nightie, intently watching News 24 on the TV. I had not previously noticed her going down the stairs from her room at such an ungodly hour – but, thinking back, it probably was that movement in itself having caused me to wake and feel the need for a leak.
It felt as if I were entering a Science Fiction film scenario because the wide screen of our TV was showing flashing lights over London which the commentators could not explain. There was a hushed feel to the broadcast. Although live, it was taking its time to piece through the awakening awe. A documentary in real time. And I gazed out of our window to see the same slow lights and glints of metal in the sky above our house, coming and going through a shimmeringly numinous blanket of what I assumed to be cloud. A milky grey, filled with a pulsing glow, that contrasted with the blackness of the sky behind it.

Susan did not speak nor even slightly acknowledge my arrival in the room, having presumably been infected by the hushed whispers of the TV commentators as they exchanged observations with the equally hushed anchor man in the studio. Obviously most of their reporters were still asleep or were already on their way to new reporting positions, rudely awoken by their mobiles. One disembodied female voice was even now discussing the huge slanting shaft of cathedral light (words that I’m sure she actually used to describe it) and the voice’s face appeared on the screen as if to coin the description as hers. One could see the vast beacon or spotlight stretching from sky to earth behind her. She did not look scared. She did not look anything but business-like. I admired her. She fingered her ear as if the sound-plug had worked loose in the pent-up excitement of the occasion. It was whistling in her ear, I guessed.

It’s trite to say this now, but it all seemed like a dream. Susan and me in the living-room staring at the TV screen which soon turned to its own form of lambent glow without the faces or voices to map the usual geography of news. Just the gradually emerging further images of the night sky’s light show that was duplicated through our window.

It was then I noticed the obvious. One sensed that it was as obvious as the original need for a leak but had taken its time to make itself known. My left foot was missing. I was amazed how I took this information as coolly as I did. There was a stump but only a vague pink seepage was present … and I must have used this leg – without any sense of pain – to walk down the stairs. Using it like a fixed walking-stick or crutch. A thick knee-knotted branch from a Canterbury Oak. I now saw Susan was hugging a foot as if she was the legendary log lady. But her dislocated appendage was as tall as the knee. Or the knee had become the foot itself. It must have been her own left leg as I could see only the single right one coming from the bottom of her nightie. At the point where the bent left knee should have been a part of the ridge of her lap was evidence of pink seepage from the thigh stump. Whatever had caused these injuries had been gentle enough to prevent major blood loss. But if Susan had her leg to nurse like a log (with St Elmo’s Fire playing along its bony rigging), where was my left foot? Back to the studio…

Thank you. Reports are coming in of a dream sickness affecting the whole population. A whining whistle that makes each ear as big as a balloon. Bloated with a fine scrimshaw of veins like low-key rivers flowing with hushed currents towards a sea of white noise which, in turn, shafts like heavenly light from the dream to the very edge of reality which the dream fails to contain. Or fails so far.

Susan smiled. She had caught me in her dream. Or she in mine. If we’d been sharing the same bed, this may never have happened. This would punish us for spending the night in separate rooms. All loving couples should make up before the night begins. One should not go to sleep with the sound of cruel, squabbling words still in your ears. Arguments should not be carried on beyond sleep. However, we had made up to some extent. A desultory forgiving. Symbolised by the hushed whispers. The mere seepage of faded blood. The cowed glances from the dream reporters with not much to say despite the world-shattering events going on around them. The lambent glows. Even the limp excuses for not making things up indicating that we were about to make up. The earwhistles which were inferred as so high-pitched that silence was their only sign of existence.

Yet my missing foot nagged me. But there it was on the sideboard next to the real world’s bowl of fruit, each toenail freshly lipsticked. It was slowly turning to soft wax threaded with a tracery of thin earth-wires which Susan limped over to light. Go gently into that good light.

We kissed. Without tongues. And smiled wistfully at the renewal of our love. Turning a deaf ear to the slow leakage into reality of increasingly numinous dream. I prayed that the reports – when made up – would not be as confusing as the real things they were reporting. Susan would be going to work soon when the light was fully up. Her next shift on News 24.

(written today - 16 March 2006)

================
In hindsight, one interpretation of the above is that the dream sickness is its own cause: i.e. a dream about a dream sickness that creates the dream itself. OR the aliens in the fable above caused themselves to be created by the dream sickness as creating their own dream for us to dream about themselves caused by the same dream sickness (as a weapon of war against us).
This may explain 'The Tenacity Of Feathers' as a whole whereby reading (and understanding) it can create the solution to the world problems that the trilogy depicts.

For the word 'dream' it is possible to use the word 'fiction' in the above consideration?
20 March 2006.

Headcount

Headcount

posted Monday, 27 February 2006

The special tree seemed always smothered in blooms and these blooms had formed like clusters of shelled prawns. It stood at the bottom of the orchard garden amongst its pippin cousins, preening itself somewhat.
Who had planted it there? Perhaps a mischievous servant from the big house at the other end of the garden, having found the strange seed at the bottom of the festive nuts. Or, more likely, the relentless wind had brought it there from exotic realms. Whatever the reason, it caused something magical about the place. Moving about the place. Never still.


As a child, I was fond of playing in the orchard garden. My father had strung a strong swing from two of the more dependable looking pippin branches - and I spent many a happy hour in a pendulum motion, legging it up into the ever blue sky by my own volition. I never questioned the movement of the earth itself. I never needed playmates. And they never really needed me.


My father was, on the face of it, a strait-laced business man who did his pin-striped duty by his family, by going to some godforsaken hole of an office complex for most of his waking hours. He dressed pretty smart for going there and put on his best uncharacteristic behaviour ... whilst, at home, he spent all his spare time writing little stories about nasty things. He broke wind and treated my mother as if she had been born a drudge. Soon, he became an exclusion zone. The only real decent thing he did for me, other than “bread-winning”, as he so proudly put it, was indeed the swing. I don’t count his insistence on reading his damn silly stories aloud to me. I never understood them anyway.


My father once announced that he’d got me some playmates. He knew I’d been hankering after them (which I hadn’t). I wouldn’t be able to sense them, but they’d be there all the time, he said, making sure I was safe, pushing me on the swing in the cantilever sunbeams of filmy afternoons, playing hidey-seek, chattering plentifully of this and that (albeit formulaic sayings) ... but how he envisaged them doing these things whilst being invisible wraiths, I’m still unclear, even now in the museum of middle age.


Over a period of four seasons, the strange tree grew ... whilst I at the same time transformed from child to man. The swing could no longer bear my weight. My mother, poor dear, passed away sometime about then. My father was cut up ... literally. It seemed he believed his own stories. He claimed the corpse of my mother had ripped runnels down his face with her still-growing fingernails. Blood, instead of tears, as he put it aphoristically. I sobbed in despair, as the blood looked like ink from an old black and white movie..

With the arrival of the pink blossom, though, I could begin to believe in the existence of the playmates. Typical of Father, though. They were the sort of kids you’d hate at school, a whole bunch of them in one place. Wicked for wicked’s sake, making nice children weep ... and I was the only nice one in the whole orchard garden.

Soon, I grew out of them. With my puberty, they disappeared. As if they were then scared of what I had got wrapped up. The smell of it in the air, no doubt.

Not long afterwards, the tree, the special tree, wilted. But it first formed nuts where the bloodworm blossom had been and dropped them to the piny ground. They were like tree bark skulls, oozing a white slime from the fast appearing haircracks.

The tree’s back arched. Beckoning Adolf Hitler to stab his spurs in the spotlit flanks. All to the tangled backdrop of unspooling memories and misrote sayings.

I screeched and stamped my foot in petulance, since I gathered I was frozen in one of Daddy’s stories. My urchin nails not long enough to cut the ice.

But, no, surely not - the red-striped, chimney-hatted drooler at the attic window, leering at me was too real and frightening to be smuggled into one of his ill-packed stories.


(published 'Twisted' 1991)



comments (1)



1. Paul Dracon left...
Monday, 27 February 2006 3:13 pm
***I sobbed in despair, as the blood looked like ink from an old black and white movie..***

I sobbed in despair, knowing I can't write this well!

Des Lewis and the Polo Mints

Des Lewis and the Polo Mints

posted Friday, 10 July 2009




This is a copy of a poem written by Coleen and Paul Bradshaw who have kindly given permission to show it here. I am told it was read out aloud at the Bradford Terror Scribes meeting about a week ago, and a copy of the poem was won in a raffle.


DES LEWIS AND THE POLO MINTS

Des Lewis bought some polo mints,
They’re the mints that everyone knows.
But when he opened the packet
The mints didn’t have any holes!
‘Where are all the holes?’ he cried,
‘This really is the pits.’
For although he liked the outside parts
The holes were his favourite bits.
He looked over here and he looked over there,
He looked everywhere around.
He even looked where he couldn’t see,
But the holes were not to be found.
‘I’m not having this,’ he said to himself,
And back into the shop went he.
‘These mints have got no holes!’ he yelled,
‘And that’s no good to me.’
The shopkeeper smiled an enormous smile,
For Des is very well known.
‘Didn’t you know?’ he said at last,
‘You can now buy the holes on their own!’
So he handed Des a packet of holes
Which he slipped into his jacket
And when he got outside the shop
He gingerly opened the packet.
He slowly took out one of the holes,
Which felt all lovely and new
Then he popped it into his mouth
And started to suck and chew.
He thought they tasted exceedingly good
And in no time the holes were all gone.
‘Polo mints are really good,’ he said,
‘But I’m going to buy the holes from now on!

Intentional Fallacy

Intentional Fallacy

posted Tuesday, 30 June 2009




I had another on-line discussion about the Intentional Fallacy yesterday. I have a book called 'The Verbal Icon' by WK Wimsatt that I first owned in the late sixties, a book sitting, as it happened, on my bookshelf in immediate proximity to 'From Blue to Black', a novel by Joel Lane - which was coincidentally appropriate as the discussion in question was with Joel himself!


I was pleased to find this quote in the Wimsatt book to help demonstrate the point I was trying to make:

"In his essay on 'Hamlet and His problems' TS Eliot finds Hamlet's state of emotion unsatisfactory because it lacks an 'objective correlative', a 'chain of events' which are the 'formula of that particular emotion'. The emotion is 'in excess of the facts as they appear'. It is 'inexpressible'. Yet Hamlet's emotion must be expressible, we submit, and actually expressed too (by something) in the play; otherwise Eliot would not know it is there - in excess of the facts. That Hamlet himself or Shakespeare may be baffled by the emotion is beside the point."

Beyond Death

Beyond Death

posted Saturday, 6 August 2005

Vampires don't exist, unless we start to believe in them. Until similes become full-blooded metaphors, we shall always live in the negative darkness of a world in proper pain. The world this side of death, where we happen to reside, for our sins, is a living nightmare, but one that is not positively horrific; it's simply a reality without imagination, an everlasting wake without dream, a narrow house of flesh. Recession hereabouts means the receding of spirit, as well as of material things: a place where nightmares are their opposite.
We need to jump-lead the rich seams of gothic synergy in the spirit and to dark-light the way. Already, there are pinpricks of positive nightmare, in our neck of the woods - and we cannot help thinking that less directness and more obliquity will allow us to see better round corners. Eye to eye doesn't show us the soul, but simply its well-head. And in Hell there wait those who were wrongly thrown out of Heaven that sorry day universes ago. Indeed, the road to Heaven is paved with bad intentions.

And what of the vampires? They no longer believe in us.

Horror should be Nightmare disguised as Dream, Blood as Ruby Sea, Hell as Shadow. Not the other ways about. We are the best such disguise. That tells more about us than a thousand close textual surveys of our works. Search out, I say.

I have recently been reading the best sensitive horror going. Undercurrents of spectres and sensuality. Read such writers if you can. But if you want horror really oblique to the point of non-existence (but nonetheless powerful), try claustrophobic novels of timeless family life written earlier this century.

So, with due decorum, I shall hasten on to a quieter London Adventure of Three Impostors. A few weeks ago, we wandered through the ancient London by-ways and visited a Museum: a place beguiled with duplicitous perspectives, bulging with bizarre statues and skeletons, topped with a lop-sided roofscape of skylights, sown with darksome knick-knacks, peopled with peering paintings &c. &c. - and we felt as if we had walked straight into a story, a story limned by dream out of hybrid hells.

We also sat chatting around fountains in peaceful sunlit squares, viewed the dome of St Paul's Cathedral from new shimmering non-Euclidean angles, saw the outside of an inscrutable apartment where a writer we admired did hone his masterpieces of myth and monsters ... and, oh yes, as one of us wrote in a subsequent letter: "the first pub we visited where our conversation was so scintillating I could see it as an episode in a book."

We mustn't forget: even if blood were dream, vampires would sniff at it.

Well, we are not dogs too old to learn new tricks. Exploring, as we do, from time to time, some of the older books in our personal collections, we recently stumbled across some really special ones. Yet, the trove is deeper, the treasure richer, as one delves into even lesser known works which touch on preoccupations of ours regarding ambivalent existences and dimmer-switch identities. The style, too, is a deliciously woven tapestry of clause and sub-clause ... and the aftertaste is sweeter than honey yet black-peppered with other concerns that will stay with us within daylight as well as night - and during those dimnesses between.

Another wonderful reading experience, during moments of the sweetest synchronous serendipity, echoed another browsing of books. By chance, one of them expands upon the tantalising themes of crossed personality and involuted individuality, together with a disturbing treatment of bodily mutilation, plus the vibrant historical immediacy of eastern European venues.

It warmed the heart. (We hadn't eaten hearts for a long time - and even if the hearts present were insufficiently warmed through by the fellow feeling (or by the heated discussion) they were probably more palatable than conger eel with or without onions!)

Vampires would eat their hearts out to have innards.

Well, we have been guilty of brandishing bare words without elaboration, assuming that everybody must know, love and cherish books; but perhaps we are wrong: we are often wrong.

We all live out ghost stories - of sorts. Many are surrealistic, without resort to over-intellectualism. They infect dreams. There are often undercurrents of eroticism and perversion. They are ungraspable, without being opaque. Macabre. Poetic. Yet full of character and dialogue. Frequently a happy mixture of traditional and experimental; a rare dream which is successful in being both accessible and inaccessible at the same time! Frightening. REALLY SCARY. All this is our opinion. And we are often wrong.

About to draw in my feelers. Armed with a stake, I penetrated a vampire the other day on my kitchen floor, without first suspending my belief. Much messier than fiction. Even messier than dreams.

I am half Welsh, my father having spent his boyhood in his birthplace of Llanelli, South Wales, before being dragooned to fight in the War of the Worlds in 1941 - eventually ending up stationed on the English east coast in Walton-on-Naze, Essex, where he met my mother...

On a visit to Llanelli recently, whilst taking my father on a nostalgic trip back to his roots, I could easily imagine the surly inhabitants possessing brothership with Deep Ones - and the deserted part of Llanelli docks being their Lurkhole. And I think immanent synchronicity and dark serendipity affect lovers of the dark side more than most. Just as an example, whilst on that short visit to Llanelli, Dad scoured the local telephone directory in what he thought was a hopeless task to track down one of his old friends with whom he had gone diving at Llanelli docks as a boy: someone he had not seen or heard of for over forty years - and, lo, that very friend was living directly opposite the guest house where Dad and I were staying, miles from the friend's previously known abode! This chap turned out to be Chief Mason in Llanelli with more resemblance to one of the Deep Ones than it was polite to notice.

The strange forces of serendipity and coincidence ever seem to be at work, especially when amid stories in the horror mode. Either that or there is some wondrous mantra (or muse?) steering our minds towards those priceless moments of creativity and gestalt. Astrology, one such mandala, is not concerned with cause and effect; it is an empirical study of human behaviour and of life-force trends as paralleled by the positions of all the planets in the Zodiac at the precise moment and place of birth. The concept of Synchronicity (i.e As Above, So Below) could not be more logical. If our Universe and all its ingredients failed to move in cogwheel patterns with perfectly overlapping ripples, that would surely be more ridiculous than if they did move in that way. So why is belief in Astrology deemed ridiculous when a disbelief in it would be more ridiculous? Those people who ridicule Astrology - who decry this interpretative study of synchronicity empirically derived from (a) scientifically calculated patterns of the universe and (b) simultaneous human actions - will never know whether it works, because the Astrological influences in their own horoscopes may well demonstrate that very ignorance which they were born to suffer: a vicious circle of disbelief.

The movement of all bodies, Heavenly or otherwise, is surely a refined, interactive process, having taken merely a single eternity of preparation to produce our infinitely complex mortal life. Only those who believe will in turn be believed, because Faith is a two-way conduit. As Above, so Below.

If we are vampires, the stars are our stake-outs. As Below, so Above.

Indeed, there once existed a wonderful writer for Horror/Ghost story lovers as well as for people who love huge panoramic, picaresque, idiosyncratic tours-de-force of social history ... his books being full of Victorian fogs, street-sweepers, costermongers, plug-ugly villains, fresh-faced maidens, well-meaning heroes, weird characters with even weirder names, laughter, pain, farce, surrealism (yes, a genuine surrealism that predates the twentieth century by a good number of years!) and, above all, scenes that can horrify and gently haunt you. The style of language takes us along winding paths within an overgrown maze of meaning and resonance, whereby digressions become main narrative threads - and vice versa - until we reach an understanding of something important to life, something which is not at all obvious unless we apply a retrospective ear to a whole novel's wondrous dream-like or nightmarish or side-splitting backwash of sound.

In many ways, these novels remind me of probably the most mysterious phenomenon within the universe known to man, yes, my own greatest passion: music.

With due respect - and I may be wrong here since I'm often wrong - I imagine many of you enjoy popular rock music in its various forms ... which is fine, carrying, as such music often does, mind-stretching horror images, eeriness, nightmare, alternative religiosity (even quiet contemplation): especially when you're in the right frame of mind to bring ordinary music-listening towards your spiritual antennae.

Well, so far so good. But if you want more, if you want something different, why don't you try modern orchestral 'serious' music? I know a number of people denigrate what they call avant garde music - saying it's a load of pretentious noise. Well, yes, some of it is. You're right. But there are some composers whose music I cannot live without. The secret, for me, is to listen to such pieces time and time again until they settle down, where the unpredictable sounds and apparently tuneless passages begin to match the rhythms of your self-induced waking dreams.

There was one piece of music that originally stirred me into the outlands of taste, turning me from the more 'normal' ways of my beloved parents who only ever listened to melodic music and watched television. As ever, I will not name names.

Vampires play the flute.

I must admit that an ambition of mine is to blur the distinction between so-called literature as praised by artsy-fartsies and our own beloved horror genre. There is someone who, to my mind, embodies this ideal better than anyone. His running themes are murders, historic London, inhumanity, mysteries, literary tricks ... with such dark undercurrents one can actually sense the incubi of his demons close by, penetrating even the stones of modern London as one wanders, at random, its streets.

The first novel of his I read was one where he entwines past and present, flaying bare the seed-beds of arcane evil that marinate the very stones and statues and walls. A detective story that will haunt and horrify you forever. Another discernible theme is the ambivalence of gender. Like the phenomenon of Spontaneous Combustion, androgynous ambiguity and sexual sleight of hand are, I feel, untapped sources of material for fiction of horror and of psychological terror - although some of us subtly and perhaps unknowingly demonstrated them in some stories.

In many ways, when children didn't spend all their time glued to computer screens and had a good grounding in stylistic English, they would certainly have enjoyed these explorations into occult and mystic realms of fear, since some stories, indeed, feature children as their protagonists. Child-like grown-ups, I guess, are the only possible candidates for wonderment these days, because most of our real children have been 'spoilt'. And those grown-ups among us who read and write in the horror genre I've often thought are child-like, in this positive sense. They have not been jaded by the act of growing-too-old-too-quickly, they do not zombie round with cowed bleary eyes and a spiritless soul. Even madness is better than mindlessness.

I have a great faith that Mankind's creativity (particularly the creativity of literature and music) can be our only soul-mate in this otherwise material universe. Other people are merely passing strangers who you befriend or, even, love, but, through their very mortality, they will depart your territory, inevitably leaving you quite alone one day. And I feel that literature and music, wherein you can drift, or even fly, supplies what you are missing when the world's crazy religions are shown up for what they are: just things that make people cruel to each other.

Mankind can create its own bespoke world - and horror fiction is a very efficient tool for expanding the mind beyond the matter that constricts it. I have always condemned mind drugs that are administered to the body from outside it. I have never taken such drugs (except, I admit, for my occasional weakness for drinking alcohol!) and I never shall. Drugs come from within.

There can be no goodness without its balance of bad. Perhaps Mankind is fundamentally ill-created, perhaps people have evil inbuilt at birth, and, by recognising those facts, by simply writing about the bad-the-ugly-and-the-frightening, this act of honesty alchemically refines the "soul". Perhaps a vampire is only evil because of the human vehicle it drives.

Sometimes I wonder - does horror need to be horrific?

To be truly horrific, the images and conceits that are embedded in a plot do have to stick in the mind - and only a craftsmanship with words is able to carve out the haunting quality that is necessary whether the horror be physical, psychological, fanciful or supernatural.

Some stories are essentially literature in its purest form - wonderfully rumbustious, humorous, word-magical fantasies, liberally peppered with honest-to-goodness horror - involving the fabulous traditions of surrealism, fairy stories and piquant wit. They strike me of the feeling one would have upon entering a treasure trove of a bookshop and discovering for the first time works that had been written in some ancient future, a future impossible to believe ever possessing the antecedence of a present let alone of a past. There is one book that I had dreamed of reading but never thought I'd be so lucky ever to do so in real life.

Even if you have a complete blood change, your mind will never forget...

As I sit here - within my chalet bungalow close to the North Sea where recently, due to a storm, many pleasure beach-huts were smashed to smithereens or even entirely snatched away - I wonder what defines an island. The world is an island, I suppose. I am one, too. The horror art (i.e. the words and pictures we manufacture to depict the dark side of humanity) is perhaps a personal sea against which our mental and physical coast-defences will eventually crumble. But before this happens, we should seek out the sandbags.

The only activity we are are possibly good at is this art of horror. And we want to be famous, remembered after we are dead, rumours of our existence to be blessed with at least the life-span of this island planet. But to be remembered as being sick! No, never! But that's what will happen, if we don't beware. Our families and friends will remember us as people who got carried away by our art, subsumed by our own insular minds. And if we couldn't control ourselves, what sort of people were we?

Unless, of course, we can justify the art of horror itself.

Many ordinary people love horror. Simply that. Everybody is cruel at heart. Why not give them what they want? Lay the horror on as thickly as possible. But people like a lot of things that are not good for them. This argument of personal responsibility is an unending one. If we could resolve it here, we would deserve to be famous. Or is Horror actually good for people? A purge. A catharsis. People have evil built into the fabric of their souls at birth. And what the horror art does is dilute that real horror with its imaginary equivalent. And imaginary horror, surely, is preferable to any other kind. On the other hand, perhaps we are intrinsically evil, inexcusably warping people's imaginations. Our corrupt soul needs an artistic outlet for its own self-satisfaction. But why also submit such art for others to publish? We want to provoke. We have always provoked people since being kids, haven't we? Mainly in minor ways. Ways that we thought would not harm them. But perhaps we are more harmful than we ever expected. We must never admit that, though. Even if it's true.

Sticks and stones may hurt our bones, but names will never hurt us. What harm can there be in simple words or drawings on a page? But we want our art to get under the skin. Be more than just art. Perhaps, if we are truly honest, we want to bite home. Only nasty medicine can cure, they say. But there's something we are missing. An imponderable that we cannot even set down on the page properly, let alone successfully address. Monsters can live in our nightmares and by describing them, hopefully we circumscribe them. By writing, I circumscribe myself. I fetter myself from creating the only horror that will harm you as well as me: me.

Yet, there is much humour in our art. Sick humour, perhaps. But it's meant to make people laugh. Laughter and horror are often bed-fellows. Audiences often burst out into chortling at the most frightening bits of films. Mischief and the poking of fun are part and parcel of our attitude. Seriousness could only lead to unwelcome admissions. Perhaps, we are the appointed providers of horror. Without bad, there couldn't be an equal measure of good. Good is only good when compared with bad. We are thus do-goooders. But this absurdity means we have run out of further thoughts. Leaving us with Nothing. Bliss. Nirvana. We hope that we are forgiven by our loved ones - especially when our final artist's block comes ... or after the abandon-edit button is pushed before anything is saved. Meanwhile, the sea is in an ugly mood again, tonight. Even the fish have fangs and flop ashore, bleating for breath. And horror surrounds me with wave upon wave of self-doubt. But, as some philosopher once said, doubt is strength.

By the way, there is a misprint later. For blood, please read beer.

Each time I try to enter the non-fiction mode, ideas for stories seem to take over and I feel myself slipping away into my usual sort of convoluted dream or cruel conceit. And this set me to thinking. It strikes me that fiction represents a fusion of real life and imagination, one feeding off the other. How otherwise can one appreciate the frisson of fear or the gulp of revulsion without believing it is really happening? Suspension of belief is, I think, an expression often employed. But it is more than this. Yet would I be pretentious enough to maintain that reality is fiction and vice versa? Well, maybe.

It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we'd be nothing.

Furthermore, Horror fiction shares a bed with surrealism and humour as well as with the more usual ingredients of grim acts, monstrous creatures and ghostly visitations. Literature, indeed, uses all kinds of devices, tropes, figures of speech, call them what you will, to make the welding of reality and unreality as seamless as possible. But why make something seamless, when there are no seams in the first place? It only takes a few lateral thoughts or, as I have proposed here, spinning ones. Horror fiction can accomplish this feat with some degree of logic, because the realms actually created by it are indeed real - and perhaps that is because there is nothing more horrific than being real in reality as we know it. I am only in it for the blood.

I don’t know whether any of you have ever been to Docklands, a reclaimed area in the East End of London, where my Grandfather travailed on the cranes before the Second World War - but, when I arrived on the amazing Docklands Light Railway, amid the tall behemoth constructions that still pay obeisance to Thatcherite Britain, I really felt myself to be in an Alternate World. From my hotel bedroom, I could see the same railway-on-stilts arriving through the corridors of a Wellsian Metropolis on the other side of an in-city waterscape ... and, yes, despite myself, I was awestruck... exhilirated, even.

Life is a dark dockless ocean of meaning and sound, something that will haunt our dreams forever (even beyond death) as well as make us believe that our beloved horror genre will eventually encompass all art and literature. But, surely, there is more to life than mere monsters and vampires.


(first published 'Roadworks' 1999)



comments (1)



1. Paul Dracon left...
Saturday, 6 August 2005 3:02 pm
"Even madness is better than mindlessness."

Yes-- MUCH better.

Looking at Paintings

I've discovered the best way (at least for me) of looking at paintings. Imagine that a particular painting (modern or old) was on your bedroom wall throughout your childhood. Not a painting you chose or even liked particularly (although you might have done) but put there - for whatever chance reason - a painting which you lived with and looked at morning and night as you got up and went to bed - or sat in there reading, through your formative years. I find this process a relatively easy thing to imagine when - today - appreciating any painting. Even if one looks at it only for a minute or two, you can make it become that painting on your childhood bedroom wall and appreciate it in that light, as if you've lived with it. Try it.

Thje Lethal Chamber

The Lethal Chamber

posted Sunday, 8 May 2005

There were a couple of feet that needed shoe-horning. But those involved knew it was merely one foot and two shoes to share it between. Meanwhile, moored boats gulped soporifically upon the belly-wall of the Lake Carcosa. Not many visitors today, despite the friendly heat of the sun and it being the season's height. No much custom for the Lethal Chamber, today. Too much happiness about, for voluntary suicides. Only a short queue of miserabilist writers, looking glum as ever.
Alec speculated on the law of averages. What made places the favourite venue for a day? Everybody could decide to go to the seaside on Monday, whilst nobody went to Lake Carcosa. On Tuesday, vice versa. But, no, it couldn't happen. There was, after all, the supply and demand of Fate.

His children had already embarked on the lake, growing smaller and smaller as they rowed like slowly spinnning turtles beyond the islands. A few stragglers creaked in unison with clumsy oars. A number of geese slid far more easily through ripples of sparkling gold, as gulls dived to divert attention from the reflected food that both breeds confusedly envied. All seemed like recent-dipped sculpture returned to life.

A fleet of anceinet jets had just idled over the lake from the nearby reconstruct of an air base ... following each other like the bobbing geese, now truly frozen in time, bar flight. Alec had forgotten the proper name for these aircraft. Tank-busters, perhaps, from the Mother of all Battles. One of his children (Genevieve probably!) would be certain to remind him of the name, when they returned from the boat trip.

To the tune of the relentless gulping, he closed his eyes in the warm afternoon sunshine and floated off into pleasure dreams. But, in actual fact, was burnt to death by friendly fire. No need of the Lethal Chamber for him

"I'll help you unravel them, Nanny."

“You’re very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket," said Nanny to little Genevieve, whose universal sense of loss included the death of her father. But, after that fateful trip to Lake Carcosa, she never remembered her brothers and sisters, those fading faces who must have been fostered elsewhere before Genevieve’s less instinctive memory was born.

With the evenings now drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.

"Sorry, Nanny, I didn't mean to get it all mixed up."

Genevieve was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her ringlets with fingers. She knew about fairies as well as ancient commandos.

"It will be the devil's own job to disentangle the silk cottons, specially yellow from yellow, with knots seeming to evolve merely by the act of looking for them," thought Nanny as she tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals, all a noodly black that the coloured yellow strands had seemed to become. From the tangle came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors.

"I'll help you unravel, Nanny."

"No point, Genevieve ... I'm leaving here tomorrow ... there'll be a newer nicer Nanny this time tomorrow evening."

Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of Nanny's eyes—whilst Genevieve smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: "I'll help you pack your luggage, then, instead, Nanny."

The fitful wind gulped in the chimney. Nanny had long since retired for her last night in the large rambling house. Genevieve felt she had also died ... died, out on Lake Carcosa all those years ago ... but, today, she was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition. She hadn't died, of course. She wasn't even dreaming. She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which a lack of peers and playfellows had engendered. She opened pop-up version of THE KING IN YELLOW and allowed her eyes to surf the pages without daring to intake meaning.

Unlike Genevieve, Nanny was scared of the dark and she sat bolt upright in the truckle bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of the empty fireplace. Only one more night to endure, then she'd be free of this insidious unnatural love, a love which she couldn't live without. Nanny thought that being besotted in both body and mind with Genevieve was not very dignified ... and she watched skeins of yellow tubing erupt from the chimney into the grate, as if the corpse of a yellow-clad Santa Claus had blurted out spools of its innards in one last foul spasm of many such spasms since Christmas, attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue.

As dawn spread itself behind the house like a backdrop in a pantomime (or a war), shades of yellow began to curl from the many chimney-stacks—thus a sign that at least someone was up and about. A face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for the first hour of the sun's shredded gold. Genevieve was praying that next Christmas she'd get the best present of all—a playmate of her own age ... or, at least, a real Nanny to taunt at bathtime, instead of the imaginary one.

Meanwhile, Santa Claus halted stitching together his disjointed noodles ... having failed to imagine a real girl like Genevieve to whom he could take presents next Christmas, like a real father would. And he imagined a city instead, one which was a picture of yellow roofs and chimneys rearing magnificently through the dawn mists. Alec had not died on the boating-lake but merely vanished into another world where he had been ejected from his mistress's flat at the first mere hint of daylight. Her flatmate, you see, was rather averse to having strangers in the place. But was he really the single stranger that all women feared? Surely, there must be at least one person who saw Alec as the familiar figure that everybody trusted. He laughed. Well, his mistress had indeed shared her bed with him. But trust could only thrive on a series of interactions, not on a single encounter, however intimate.

Most of the bodily dealings last night had been conducted under cover of darkness and they had met only briefly in the cocktail bar in advance of sacrificing the safety of life and limb to each other in this way. To call her a mistress was a trifle heavy-handed. Mistresses were merely fancy women of long standing or, at least, an intermittent acquaintance with whom a convenient mutual scratching of itches was the sole criteria for dating. Life's events for him were like promenading around an art gallery, praising or excoriating or, simply, remaining indifferent to each yellow-tinged pictures of ancient twentieth-century knights and kings, then passing on to the next. Memories were merely recognitions, when or if such pictures, by design or fortune, passed again in front of his indiscriminating viewfinder of a mind. He never expected to revisit a one-night stand or even a canvas on an easel entitled 'fancy woman'. Yet there was something a little out of the ordinary about this city and this world, an existence which had provided his latest partner of the dark. He shrugged, as was his wont when he consigned any particular memory to his sump of lost worlds and missing mistresses. He even smiled, a rarer occurrence, because, while he was searching such wastes of expended passion, trying to find a space for his newest forgettable femme, he suddenly came across a token of love—not the love he had for mere mistresses, but a real love, one that he had felt for someone about whom he must have completely forgotten. Yet this had been his one true love. His memories were surprisingly independent creatures, scurrying off to their earths at the first sign of hope or hunter.

A grown-up Genevieve, had, last night, been one mere veneer away from her father Alec: she being, coincidentally, the next door neighbour of Alec's latest mistress: this the Genevieve who feared strangers as much as thin partitions. But, now, she'd been left behind yet again with her dreaded books, as Alec traced a rite of passage which unfolded randomly within fate's strict parameters. Yet another world's city streets were never-ending, as if a puzzlehead cartographer once had a fidgetty day with the marking-pen, not taking it off the cartridge paper as a sort of Dare. Alec should have known it would not be easy to lose himself, when there were no corners to negotiate. Every building seemed to be a thriving Lethal Chamber.

Old Scratch was on his tail and Alec found it the devil's own job to shake him off. And, you see, Old Scratch had been queening it a bit in the D'Ys (as this part of the city was inexplicably called)—until Alec came along in an attempt to expose Old Scratch as a pretty low and common denominator. Alec did not know Old Scratch's face but, from the yellowing police records which he remembered somehow studying, he was sure he would recognise the rhythmic pace of the following footsteps and the ill-disguised snort of lungs. Alec guessed Old Scratch would be uglier than an eviscerated corpse half-floating in the whipping-crust outside the Bertambers Arms gentlemen's excuse-me.

As Alec escaped down the street, hoping to find at least one side-alley forgotten by the cartographer and thus dodge the searing limelight of Old Scratch's bulging, flameshot eyes, Alec spotted an urchin running towards him from the opposite direction of the limitless distance where the mapmaker had evidently confused perspective with phantasy. They both squatted on the pavement, regaining their breath in snorts.

"What's your name, ragamuffin?" Alec asked, trying to conceal the gabnash of his own teeth and gums.

"Robert." The girl lied, being Genevieve again, strutting upon a different stage of timeless fate. She was no older than Alec had been at her age, though she acted as if she had the knowledge of the whole cosmos upon her narrow shoulders.

"Robert? That be a 'trestin' name for a girl. Are yer runnin' up the street for any good reason?" Alec’s voice cracked. He could well believe he had not used it for centuries. Or he had gone back into the past where the future had not even cast its backward echo.

He was astonished, too, at his own crude dialect. He was in fact only to recall one reincarnation in which he had seen fit to talk. He kept looking over his shoulder to see if Old Scratch was lurking behind the back of his mind. And there was a corner shop just extending its awning like a tongue, opening for the afternoon session. Funny—he'd thought it was early closing day in this neck of the woods. The shop sold gobsuckers, the window being dressed with aniseed balls, penny chews, blackjacks, pear & acid drops, pineapple chunks, bullseyes, throat-stoppers &c. &c. He was convinced the shopkeeper would be finger-grating at his large bald pate to fill the lemon sherbets. The shopkeeper may have been Old Scratch himself in sudden disguise. Alec turned back to the urchin who now held out her begging-hand, with an expression on her grubby face indicating that she thought him a clinch-fist.

"I'm not goin' ter give yer any-fing, Robert, 'cause I can't even buy meself a clump-sole." He showed her the undersides of his shoes, next to useless without the hardened leather-flesh of feet to supplement them.

"You be pie-powdered," the girl enunciated painstakingly.

"I be not so dirty as I look, young 'un," Alec claimed, rising from the swill-gutter and tapping the precocious witmonger on the shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but she flinched, her whole existence seeming to bodyjack before his very eyes. Good heavens, Genevieve might have been Old Scratch in disguise, for Alec saw the underfurrows of age unshrining, as if she had a different flavour inside. Her soul was wither-wrung, and Alec read words in her sticky mouth like sweets dissolving on the blotchy haft of a misshapen tongue and slicking a putrid throat which Alec could peer down if he stayed long enough to do so.

Seeing that the wacky cartographer had the space with which to work, he hived off some backstreet areas just to give them map room. Good job, too, seeing Alec was now in the relatively disease-free uncharted yard complexes of the city where the pubs were open all day. He ambled into the Bertambers Arms, as jolly and carefree as he could pretend, ready to order a tumbler of fizz for his narrow-billed lips and the sucking-sides of his throat. The landlord held out a webbed hand for payment of tuppence-ha'penny in exchange. Reddening to the bottom, Alec fumbled in his britches since his purse had been confounded with the umbilica of his intestines. Robert must have been a nifty pycke-purse. He could only find his Share Certificates in the Carcosa Cargo Company that had gone out of business when they first invented firearms. Smuggling, in any event, was hard on inland lakes.

He scrammed as quickly as he dared, with the first mouthful of fizz still bubbling against the shaft of his gristly clapper which waggled from the depth of his gullet. He hadn't savoured the look of the likes of the landlord, anyway, nor the foul-slanted cut of his jib, what with his humbug eyes and a speckled spray of spittle with every word from his lop-sided mouthful of lips. The landlord looked a trifle too much like Old Scratch—and, now, knowing the city streets better, the wanderer in Alec, somehow, tried to get lost, on a quest not unconnected with acting out dreams.

In a peculiar way, he knew that Old Scratch and the King in Yellow were one and the same. It sent a shiver down his spine. He would travel on the underground railway and alight at any random station with an unlikely name. Not a believer in aids such as the city map, he intended to wend the endless terraces and semi-avenues, loop closes, test cul-de-sacs—try, against all the odds, to abandon himself to the city's mystery. Come dusk, which was usually earlier and yellower than he ever expected, he would succeed in finding, in the nick of time, another underground station by which means, because of the over-simplified out-of-scale poster map therein, he could lead himself back to Square One—emerging into the darkness of the streets he had grown to know since the accident at Carcosa Lake.

But, like the underground map, nothing was ever what it seemed. Robert Alley quickly became Genevieve Avenue without even turning a corner. Lethal Chambers, here, were back-to-back, two-up-two-down, as well as side by side in dark terraces. He had been lost for unconscionable hours, yet through the sapping drizzle, he saw with some relief, the blurred sign for Friendly Fire Crescent, sending up dawnish yellow like ghostlight. Shaking from his exertions, he allowed himself to wander in his thoughts. If Santa Claus existed, it was probably true to say Old Scratch existed, too. Alec also allowed himself to be trundled down the empty half-lit wooden escalator, knowing that the untended lifts were simply asking for trouble and that the gaping hole of the spiral steps was trouble asking for him.

Later, as he clattered along upon the deserted train, he wondered why such a small station had possessed a triple choice of descent. Eventually, reaching a familiar station, the silver escalator was far longer than he recalled it, stretching, it seemed, limitlessly above, with a strong wind funnelling down upon him. He gathered a yellow overcoat about himself. Other people, people like doctors after patients, nannies after children, people after souls, descending in the parallel trough, watched him quizzically as Alec passed them upwards. They evidently found the slow speed sufficient and his demeanour more interesting than the tiered advert posters. Even the photos of people in piss-coloured underwear did not distract them from looking at Alec. He felt his face blush, dreading that the icy looks he suffered would guess what he wore under the overcoat. It was as if they picked his pockets with their eyes, snipping the purse-strings to his heart. Each coin was a silver bullet.

He suspected that the creature (call it the Mistress of all Changes or, rather, the Mother of all Fancies) who followed him through the various worlds had no respect for the law of any land they traversed, whilst scratching a living simply from breathing. But, at long last, the escalator delivered Alec, via the barrier, into some semblance of open air. Nobody collected tickets, only a slowly swivelling chair. The cold sponge of darkness was a shock to his system, especially as the streetwise set-up of back-doubles which he faced was confusing. He yearned for a friendly fire.

He always considered déjà-vu to be a fiction, which would make more sense without the use of the word 'always'. But he now depended on déjà-vu to find his way. Only the night before, he had dreamed of these surrounding. Each turning and line of houses were gentle reminders. He thanked God for small mercies, because it would have been far worse in a completely out-of-the-way area. He was at least on someone's common ground. The windows were mostly dark. Some, dully lit. As he rounded each corner, shadowy figures slammed doors, as if they had been lying in wait for him, only to make this obvious point of unwelcome. Curtains fluttered as did his own sodden eyelids. Silence was just the swishing of rubber blades on a windscreen. His engine gunned—and died.

He had drawn to a halt halfway down a road of high-rises. He had never owned a vehicle other than himself—yet, uncannily, the treads of his clump-soles squealed as he applied the wet weather brakes of his yellow taxi. Braces tightened against his upper frame, pulling the belt to which the braces' crocodile-clips were affixed like a band of hot iron. His sock-suspenders cramped his calves, turning them rock hard by guying the pinions of his searing sinews. His briefs cut into the groin, lifting and separating. The holster seared a diagonal line between the shoulder-blades and breast. The implement he toted within the holster had a hair-trigger too delicate for unwieldy fingers: a lady's jewel-studded automatic: ready-cocked, feather-alert, for beggars, muggers or other ne'erdowells.

The house, outside of which he had broken down, was between two high-rises, a Victorian Detached with twin attic towers and steeply stacked chimneys. The floral curtains in one bedroom were ostentatiously tweaked by Genevieve’s poster-white face. He tried desperately to recall the cutpurse incident from the night before, which was fast becoming a key to this night's reality. But having reached such a point, he had established a new spirit-of-place, irretrievably ... thus to set off again, mapless, upon the low-lying tracks towards station names, some not even appearing on the official simplified grid of coloured lines—which lines were not only out-of-scale but also inconsistently out-of-scale. The yellow one was called Circle. Many of the direction angles were misleading, too. But, tonight, the new world could not be shaken off, determined as it was to become real. The drizzle became sleet, as the door of the house opened and a couple of hooray-henries and their skittish molls galumphed down the steep porch-steps, pranging sticks against the metal banisters as if they were once tearaways now made good, clumsy muggers made citybright, urchin beggars made legal, ne'erdowells turned into prancing do-gooders.

The yellow cab into which they disappeared with slamming doors snorted off. Alec heard them shout a destination (in the posh side of the city) to the shadowy driver propped up at the large wheel. He scratched his head. He thought the tail-lights vanished towards the rough end of town, where dark Limehouse hunched against the horizon, made even darker by the now cascading lamp-lit snow. Reality or unreality, he was past caring, yet something told him that someone else sat waiting, with back scratching against night's warehouse wall. Thick-as-thieves, the creature was. Alec lightly touched the hardware he wore, confident with its presence. As he fingered the tiny nipple within its iron aureole, fire thrilled along his arm. Shivering, he negotiated the guttering street, determined this time to reach the end of this reality—or remember whom he feared so that he could make avoidance plans—or, at least, find another underground sign that would allow him to regain his bearings. Eventually, he thought he made out 'Lakeside Mews' on the sign. He prayed it would have an escalator and lifts and stairs, to cover the strange odds that only Fate could offer, it seemed. He felt extremely cold without the overcoat that he suddenly recalled once had his own shadowy body inside it.

Now, as luminous and numinous as the snowlit moon, he reflected off the glass wall of an anonymous city office-block. He was indeed a trifle too much like the creature who followed him, but even more like the one who followed the creature. No tongue to speak with, Alec and Old Scratch drew their weapons on the moment's spur, and they waited to see who would touch the trigger first. The scribbling of crack-deep scratches over the face-plate was the first Alec knew he was no longer there or, even, anywhere. Only an explosion of yellow fire.

A voice only sounded when everybody within hearing distance was asleep or, better, dead. That night, an ancient Genevieve was neither. It was a hot night and she dozed fitfully under a single smooth sheet as if she were still young enough for a Nanny to come with a goodnight kiss. Then she snored for a while in a relentless rhythm and, with the state of self-hypnosis thus engendered, she ceased breathing entirely. It was indeed a most realistic death. She had ensured the house was empty, having packed off the rest of her servants and other hangers-on. She was determined to lay the ghost, come what may.

The ghost was evidenced by knitted spools of yellow ectoplasm, discovered all over the carpets on the mornings following its supposed visitations. Tape recorders left running overnight picked up its crazy half-hearted attempts to haunt the house. Almost like a little girl's, it hinted at a lisping voice in the corners of night's white noise. But every time a sleeper was heard to stir, the tape indicated the ghost keeping deadly quiet. A shy thoughtful ghost perhaps, but ghosts were ghosts whose games needed stopping, in case they frightened the children and servants. Moreover, old Genevieve wanted very much to prove her own disbelief in them. Ghosts were indeed known to become more dangerous, the older they grew. Their age-yellowed winding-sheets would eventually flap across the dark landings and stairways, uncaring of whom they stung during their approach to a mutant fleshy reincarnation. Or so Genevieve believed, if she believed in them at all.

So, on that night, she was to get to the bottom of the ghost. As she lay there in her self-imposed state of refined existence, she heard its unprotected voice seeping through her auto-hypnotic defences. Not a tape-recording: a voice indeed unprotected by nothing but the air itself. Her muscles rippled and shimmered, as she heard the fateful voice:- "You who hearest my words via no prophylactick are sure to wear my body, me yours, thus able to scratch mutual backs in our endless struggle against non-existence."

No lisping this time, clear as a ringing bell. The sleeper woke, only to find she did not believe in herself let alone in any sign of exploding yellow, and forthwith curled into a dark foetus beneath the piss-stained sheet.

"I'm not goin' ter give yer any-fing," Alec and Robert announced in rash unison, but later toasting each other in friendly fire to celebrate that both had reached the real world. They had fought hand over fist to give birth to each other, finally realising that such fierce body-to-body in-fighting was more like love than even love itself. A sad king, meanwhile, sang a plaintive "I'm dreaming of a yellow Christmas" beside a friendly hot-chestnutted fire, and, nearby, Robert's Lethal Chambers set up in business in every available building. But the war soon did away with their need. In any event they though the King in Yellow had already killed himself and that was the reason why such places had been invented in the first place, awaiting their most important customer to come.

Finally, the King's plaintive voice spoke these words: "I'll help you unravel."




comments (1)



1. Paul Dracon left...
Friday, 5 August 2005 5:00 pm
This kind of fiction helps me unravel, too. Outstanding piece.

This sort of story blurs the distinction between lost and found, in my mind...

Woken With A Kiss

Woken With A Kiss

posted Friday, 1 April 2005

I am not a human being - positively not. My mind is at least clear on that point.
So, the only element of doubt is why I have a mind at all preoccupied with such a self-conviction.

Perhaps, I’m imagining the mind - or it’s a ghost of a mind - or it’s someone else’s mind (your mind?) that I’m using.

I suspect it is a mind of sorts, but an alien template of a human one. I’d be a creature from outer space, if that wasn’t so laughable.

No, the truth surely resides somewhere else. The best clue is upon looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and seeing a complete stranger there with pouting lips and eyes tightly closed.

So, it’s all a dream. A dream without a dreamer.

Perhaps.

I only know I’ve fallen deeply in love with that zombie in the mirror. I close my eyes and lower my lips toward the glass. . .


(published 'The Ultimate Zombie' Dell 1993)

Films as Ghosts

Films as ghosts

posted Friday, 20 March 2009




From this thread: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/1698.html?1237558293



Q: I watched A PASSAGE TO INDIA last night for the first time in ages and was struck by its almost supernatural atmosphere. What other films have a similar mood without slipping over the line into the explictly ghostly?


My of-the-cuff answer:

The Passage to India film (as I recall it) simply reflects (in a good way) the book as you suggest.

All films for me have the presence of ghosts (perhap the cameramen and crew whose shadows can be often glimpsed or imagined (in a bad way)).

Many black and white films carry viruses of haunting, some intentional others not.

'Death In Venice' is probably the best example of a film that carries a supernatural soul that is not obviously fabricated by the film-makers.

Jaded by Fiction?

Jaded by Fiction?

posted Sunday, 8 March 2009

From here: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=17625&postcount=13
Quote Originally Posted by Alberto D. Hetman
It is being harder every time I pick a book to find something new, something that amazes me, that makes me wonder as much as when I read my first Poe's tale when I was 16.


I think most of us would be familiar with that feeling.

I still find the odd exciting fiction - often it is only published on the internet.

And there are writers I'm always amazed at: Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman...

And I've been excitd by a whole tranche of good Horror stuff in some new books by new writers recently: eg: by Richard Gavin, Matt Cardin, Gary McMahon, Gary Fry, Simon Strantzas, Mark Samuels ....


....and Tamar Yellin.

It's never too late to cease being jaded with literature.

I Hope You See What I Mean

I hope you see what I mean

posted Friday, 6 March 2009


From: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2651


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

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp
It's a selfish concern, but as someone who writes, I fear that I will be obsolete very soon. I am producing more and more complex fiction, and I feel like the human brain is, collectively, losing the ability to digest that kind of thing, as if I am writing in Latin or some other extinct language. As to what I will do when my obsolescence becomes complete, I don't know. Unlike some, I view the future almost entirely with dread.


I agree -- but I look forward rather than dread this inevitable outcome... and I continue to write my (complex?) prose but then immediately put it on the public internet as some sort of acceptance of the type of thing you say. I haven't submitted anything to a book or mag publisher since 1999 and I feel that is the best way to remain positive in a negative way! I hope you see what I mean.


comments (1)



1. Weirdmonger left...
Friday, 6 March 2009 12:11 pm
When I say not submitted anything since 1999, that means off my own bat. I have been solicited for work to be printed from time to time (not often!) and I have supplied it.