CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-stories-2.html
***
THE VERTICAL EYE
Despite smiling with stoical forbearance for most of my life, well, at least smiling inwardly, the scares and frights were never really over. I had been led into a sense of false security or dire failure, whichever way one chose to look at it, by a series of disappointing ghosts that cancelled out the earlier shudders induced even by the pointing ghost, indeed, by the painting one, too, yes, most of my hunting’s finds were disappointing ghosts, not really cutting the mustard in the scheme of being able to establish them for real as a result of hunting for them in the first place. (By the way, I remind myself that I shall later tell you of one particular Disappointing Ghost that deserves a story all of its own.)
Disappointing ghosts, you see, are usually just that, especially when they pass through our lives without our really noticing their tenuous presence, although sometimes glimpsed out of the corner of the eye with the most minor of frissons felt.
That ‘corner of the eye’ cliché meantime somehow reminds me that I was once a ghost-hunting nerd, who manufactured ghosts from the slightest suspicion of one, from the most outlandish of forced pareidolia or the most unconnectable of connections or the most unsynchronous of synchronicities or the most forgotten of dreams, thus striving to bolster the manufactured ghost into more than it was. But as I grew older, the ghosts I found in ‘found art’ as well as fine art, and in literature and music, were more defined, more likely to unflesh out into real spectral existence, but so far never quite managing it, never quite crystallising into the ghost I ever sought.
I had, however, high hopes for the ghost that I named ‘The Vertical Eye’, whereby a fleeting moment of an eye’s ‘smiling’ joy and a pathetic teardrop perfectly blended, therefore nourishing the belief that this was the Real McCoy. It was a mild ghost, yes, but it seemed to be a real one to nail down and then flag as a success for my ghost-hunting Curriculum Vitae. But instead it managed to nail me down and then shook what was left of me in its own random winds of induced fate, whereby I needed to disown its capture completely by blocking it without even knowing why I needed to do so, and putting myself in undeniable denial, so that I could then forget it had ever existed at all. Except I do recall there remain several mementos of it in the book entitled ‘Weirdmonger: The Nemonicon: The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction’ (2003) which thankfully nearly everybody, including me, fails even to look inside, let alone read for real.
Yet, I am suddenly aware, in real-time, that a version of the Vertical Eye coldly stares at anyone who happens simply to skim or take a quick look at this story as well as at anyone who closely reads it in full. Just cast your eye to the right hand side of this text! Or in some cases below it.
***
THE SHADOWY THIRD
I really must not allow this recent gushing of new fiction works to return to its erstwhile dribble, but, as they say, the inevitable truths that fiction contains will inevitably out!
So, as would-be fiction writer again, rather than the ghost-hunter manqué, I took myself, upon a trip seeking writerly inspiration, to the annual Convention of Pareidoliacs in Ipswich. I had never attended a previous one, so I was staggered at the array of trestle tables displaying various attendees’ prized items, some with photographs depicting cloudscapes and such, others with physical objects, vegetable and mineral, that took the evident shape of what they were not. A painting called ‘The Stalking Horse’ was the most popular item, and I wish I could reproduce it here, but cameras were banned in the Convention hall.
I attended some of the early lectures and talked to many attendees who struck me as not as odd as I had predicted, even perhaps not as odd as me. And I now began to see myself as a practising pareidoliac, a sense of self that was consistent with ghost hunting and its branch-line of dreamcatching. But when I met a man called Douglas — a dapperly dressed man in a monocle and plus fours — I found myself listening to his tales of animal taxidermy as a form of pareidolia. He was later due to give a lecture on this very subject.
I do not know why I have attempted there to give the start of a character study with regard to Douglas, as our acquaintanceship was short-lived and I later forgot about his lecture in favour of another event when many of the attendees collected in the town’s Butter Market to scry the buildings in a session of mass pareidolia.
But, of course, this is all fiction. Just a sleight of hand, a prestidigitation of writing to defeat a dearth of words otherwise. My mind was elsewhere most of the time dealing with my own true vocation of spectral and spectator research, as yet unfulfilled, while I followed two people I had befriended at the convention, now turning their heads in the Butter Market as if they had sensed a ghost behind them. Or as if they had seen, from the corner of the eye, a human body as shaped from nothing, an entity striving poignantly to fit itself into some pantomime horse of existential believability or potential outing of truth from within, indeed as the very thing it sought or actually sought to be. An internal scrying. Or the flippetygibbet of a stopgap between other roles, if truth be known
***
THE DISAPPOINTING GHOST
As promised, here it is. A ghost story with a ghost that belies the title I have just given it! And maybe that is all I need to write.
Indeed, I may regret writing more. In the end, I should have left it hanging there, just as I did when writing about the ghost in ‘The Third Bed’!
But to take this beyond just a tantalising legerdemain of narration, the hnext ghost — that I almost established and to which I have assigned the above name — has ever since threatened in my mind to turn up again and prove itself wholly or holistically as an entire entity without the need of that italicised word. And the time has come, here, now, with a real-time witnessing of a story title overturned.
You see, I have been ghost hunting in and around the Jumbo Water Tower in Colchester, an area which, with sudden second thoughts now thought too late, should have remained nameless, in case you all flock there to check out this ghost.
Ghost hunters, you see, can be pretty ruthless, often counterproductive to the cause or course of actually producing an established and checked-out paranormal apparition, often acting as if they are performing a trick as a tour de force in the stage act that life has become, with any established ghost now likely to be revealed before the very eyes of millions, a viral act of self-defeat in a world of trending media, because any real ghost, believe me, all too readily dissolves into little more than mucky residues in the gutter when placed under the strain of such enormous scrutiny.
So, there you have it. I should have left it with the two short sentences above at outset. I promise the next story I shall write will be not only a real story with believable characters, but one with a ghost also capable of being deemed as such. (No wonder old ghost stories often had placenames replaced with just an initial and a dash.)
***
AS TEXTED ONE LATE NIGHT TO A RANDOM RECIPIENT
Back to the mansions, as well as to the hopefully haunted churches, a somewhat expected path judging by my more recent stories, but for the first time I find myself treading along it towards both at once.
I top the hill with my hiking boots just as the sun is setting, and discern two mansions and two churches close to some afforestation that appears to be unmapped by Google but self-evidently (because I had started off that morning hiking there!) within the precincts of Suffolk, not far from Rendlesham. You see, I usually enjoyed not knowing where I was going and I where I was due to stay the night, and did not even carry a tent because I simply knew serendipity and weather were usually my friends amidst such voluntary directionlessness — unless I was forced to break such a rule when becoming out so late, darkness being its own weather, and still without a roof to cover me.
Neither of the mansions appear to be hotels; the churches, too close to each other for comfort, are obviously last resorts even when given the kindness of a friendly priest, curate, verger or sexton. I have no illusions. This was no longer the era of Walter de la Mare, and I now admit I was often disappointed by my own serendipity at the end of the day.
There are a few odd houses scattered between the two mansions, one of which mansions, close-up in the dying light, appears to be quite roofless in its unwelcome. Many of the houses roofless, too, it seems. Except one. The second mansion at the other end of the ‘High Street’ does appear to maintain a roof, but all its windows appear permanently shuttered.
I turn my attention towards the two churches set back from the so-called street, both almost sunk into the trees that seem to have grown taller with the equal sinking of the sun. One church with a spire, the other with a tower. A bit worse for wear. Or for lack of worshipers in a thinly crowded market for them. Collection plates must go spare here, I assume.
But I need characters to bolster my story, and I soon realise that I don’t need to create them out of thin air, because a few actually appear, as if on magical cue, at the door of the sole house that has kept its roof. Evidently, strangers were a curiosity hereabouts, and, from their point of view, I, as pilgrim, was the stranger, not them, of course.
“Anywhere to stay?” I ask, while pointing meaningfully at the darkening sky.
A woman about my age stays silent, as if that’s answer enough.
A younger man with whom she evidently counts herself to be an ‘item’, does say something or other that I do not catch, and if this were fiction, I would no doubt have concocted something audible for him to say. Which proves something, I suppose.
The third individual with a dog is of indeterminate gender under a thick coat, someone whom I would get to know better. But at this point, my guess is as good as yours.
“Where am I?” I’m evidently trying to make small talk. If only there had been a pub, pub talk being the best ice-breaker of all.
The dog now starts barking at me as if in answer to my question. It’s not aggressive barking. I think this dog to be the nearest thing to being real in the whole place, as a consequence of its apparent readiness to respond.
But, then, I notice what I have hoped all along to meet since arriving here, a single friendly-seeming churchman approaching our group from the church with a spire. I try with squinted eye to see exactly how friendly, and I am reassured by an almost vertical smile from between chubby chops and above a bright white dog-collar, as this item of ecclesiastical regalia is often impolitely called. I hold out a hand along with my own version of his smile.
He’s followed, though, by another and another friendly churchman. And soon there was the start of more churchmen spilling from the other church with a tower. All of them emanating friendliness, but the fact there are so many of these churchmen all seeming to be as friendly as churchmen should be in wayside places such as this, a place complete, I now see, with graveyards and much stone-etched text to scry, from the headstones at late evening, into a single pattern of meaning. A mass over-friendliness that causes the individual with a dog to take me by the arm and lead me to the shuttered mansion for shelter. Whether we reach it in time I need to leave to the responsibility of serendipity to decide. I wonder whether this mansion would furnish any rooms to stay in at all and whether the roofless mansion would be a better bet. Or would both, between them, present a vast gutted space… My phone gutters, too, now upon the cusp of its dead point of having run out of power. A sort of convivial hospitality source with the shrunkest bar imaginable. And the dog is dead already.
***
THE GHOST HANGAR
As that of a ghost hunter, dreamcatcher, author, reviewer, publisher, pareidoliac, electronic-photosynthesist and mnemonic-beachcomber, my daily constitutional for some years has been from Holland on Sea where I have lived for many years towards Clacton Pier, starting out at the Queensway ZigZag slopes that featured recently in my Nightjar publication ‘The Birthday Presence’ and now proceeding with, ahead, the familiar haunting sight of the pier sporting its closeness to the silhouette of a Ferris wheel and bearing itself a helterskelter and other rides alongside inferred buzzing amusement arcades, a pier whose actual own outline echoes those of the Essex Serpents disguised as rock-sculpted groynes leading up to the pier, as I walk. A magical journey on foot, keeping Mortality hungry at some distant corner of time, perhaps till an ever encroaching ‘now’. Recently, though, it is not a surprise that some of my ghost hunting ambitions are increasingly bearing fruit. Just yesterday I witnessed the three haunted and hooded figures, plodding one behind the other, as if from some distant Zeno-trod war, proceeding along beside the deepest blue sea I have ever seen since living here, as followed by a small orange canoe with two people rowing upon the richly coloured sea beside them. I knew then that tomorrow (which is now today) would be Airshow Day here, weather permitting. Somehow, I had reached some apotheosis of ghost hunting, but the ghost hunter stood still.
Not yet, he said, surely not yet. And he thought of some other living names to add to those in ‘Alone With the Horrors’, these perhaps deserving a nod of obeisance for their actions if not only for their work alone, or both equally, or just one of these two aspects, viz., in no particular order, Wamack, (Kirk S.) King, Tullis, Harper, Veres, O’Driscoll, Cox, VanderMeer, Ostermeier, Schaller, Wehunt, Rothermel, Toase, Holmes, Nurrish, Nogle, Ghahwagi and more such names no doubt saved for later in this series of stories. And I thought again of the buzzing amusement arcades, and compared them to the old fashioned ones I haunted as a child while accompanying my Mum in the early 1950s, with my having been born near Walton on Naze pier in a seaside town that recently hosted the scene of the Third Bed syndrome within this concurrent canon of fiction, but perhaps not so much able to be called fiction as the hunted and haunted ghost awaiting around the corner, a turning that one seems ever to fail reaching. Time to watch the planes. One of them will sure to be a ghost, too, as it opens a second set of angel-like wings while shedding its first set with a synchronous splash below in a sea that has grown grey since yesterday. I just need one old penny for a mechanical toy crane to turn the handle of which an impossible prize will hang.
***
WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?
One of the first ghosts I almost established was in the late 1960s when living in the seaside resort of Morecambe, Lancashire, while a young student attending the nearby University at Bailrigg. And it was in fact the latter placename — and perhaps I should have replaced it with an initial and a dash, as in many ghost stories of yore — that triggered much in my life with its wordplay aura of rescue by arty installation and/or by happening and hoax or even by the sea’s wandering ghostly vessel that I never saw for real till yesterday as reported in the previous story. And believe me, I did need rescuing in those youthful times. But that is merely backdrop to the real ghost story I now wish to tell for the first time.
As some of you may know, Morecambe has Northern grit, with an ambiance of stand-up comedy and dance halls with ageing couples slowly twirling to the scrape and tunefulness of Palm Court strings. And a potentially lethal bay, instead of a sea proper, although sea it surely was.
I lived along with the White Album in a tall terraced house that had seen better times, wherein holidaying folk stayed whenever the students returned to their parental homes. The landlady, Mrs Gill, was a force to reckon with, as was the garish wallpaper. Not so much a pale yellow wallpaper for the slow diminishment of my body and spirit, but a tasteless jagged retreat to times when modernity was a future nightmare but people still seemed to want to emulate it in the guise of a projected nostalgia of what we were all due to lose sooner or later. I knew not how to write even then, as you can see, but I still managed to erect essays of study that both haunted and hoaxed my tutors at Bailrigg. And thus, despite some sporadic sinking setbacks, I finished with a commendable level of achieved degree, as also helped by the support of my then future wife whom I met at Bailrigg and who stayed in digs nearby in Morecambe.
So much for the brand of truth that acts as backdrop to this story, I must move on now to a different truth that is fiction. I met a ghost one night during one of the most sunk periods for my vessel of life. Unless this, too, is a constructed hoax, it derived from attending a concert at the Winter Gardens where Alan Price was performing a set, having left the Animals. I now wish the ghost sighting had been a happening at the brashly atonal extravaganza I earlier or later attended within the late 1960s, it being a gig by Cornelius Cardew mainly bashing a piano in relentless rhythm like a future Philip Glass on steroids, an event taking place in one of the churches of Lancaster that served as temporary university space while quite large amounts of Bailrigg were still being built around the students who stayed and studied there. A church was meant to contain a ghost, after all. But, no, as I have said already, the ghost was connected to my visit to the Morecambe Winter Gardens on its Pop Music night, with a dark wintry Northern night outside, thus attracting locals more than any residual day-trippers. Students, other than myself and a few others, were sparse there, too. I have no colluding witness for my truth or for my hoax. Most people there that night are now dead, I guess, or huddled together with different ghosts elsewhere without thought of why their consciousness may still have survived until now.
I idled outside the Winter Gardens while smoking, despite the fact that I could have in those days smoked inside it, and I discerned a large vessel floundering upon the deceiving currents of the completely dark bay, only visible because the vessel was darker than darkness.
“What do you think that is?” I heard a voice ask rhetorically. I turned to see a shape that could well be human, even if the voice didn’t sound as if it was human at all. This shape smoked, too. Those were the days when everyone and everything smoked like chimneys. I managed to give up the habit gradually throughout the ensuing years, so you now know I must have survived long enough to do that, despite what happened to me on that night of which I tell. Sorry for removing all suspense from my story by making that fact clear. Yet something happened that makes even such certainty on my part as vulnerable as the vessel I thought I saw that night upon the bay. Not a hoax, not a trick of fiction. But a devastating huge blast against all the vulnerable vessels I contained, a blast of all the future music that I was destined to hear, often by choice during the rest of my life, all here in an unimaginable ‘mix’ into one fell concatenation of various premonitions and styles to choose from, before they happened. Just as a deep darkness stood out by dint of an even deeper darkness, or vice versa, the vast cacophony stood outlined against itself, too. Inside the Winter Gardens, Alan Price sang on. Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear. Remember it’s all just fiction. Except for Mrs Gill, the wallpaper and the Glass Onion. And maybe more.
CONTINUED HERE:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-ghost-stories-4.html
Journalstone Publishing 2023
