There are no more trains today…

 There are no more trains today, the officious railway women told me, with their 1950s style spectacles moving on their noses like trackside signals. It was indeed the 1950s for real. But no possible style could really represent such a black-and-white era, although I lived through it all, and it was full of colour. Meanwhile, a rather altered view of the time intervened, because the war had not ended in 1945 but extended right up to 1963 and women were still doing men’s jobs throughout, and then long into the future,  as most men never returned, except the men like me who never went away in the first place.  There were not many of us, and they were sidelined into their own sidings late at night when the blackout still meant that the red and green stop and go stayed blind to movement as well any shunting manoeuvres. The men had in fact become the trains with cute faces upfront, like those of Thomas the Tank Engine and other similar trains with masculine names. I was driven by a lady called Marigold who could stoke coal to save Britain, and hissed out steam as if there were no tomorrows that would one day ban coal itself for fear of the climate changing as well as history. Indeed, history laid out its own maverick plans of social habits and manners and things that were allowed and things that were not allowed. Television  was banned at outset, snuffed in  the bud, as its bad effects were recognised upfront and there was no coronation to broadcast for reasons it’s beyond the story to tell. Nobody predicted the Internet because there was no Internet to predict. And women made do and mended with women, and the few remaining men simply worked their socks off hauling things through tunnels. Luckily, things lighter than coal, but with no light at the metaphorical end where the tunnel was supposed to end. Time was its own tunnel and gradually all trains vanished into them. I, for one, never came out of them again. And over population and bad housing remained a problem because nobody like me as reliable narrator was allowed to deal with it or even know about it.  And nobody had predicted the fertile passions of the things that came  into humanity’s personal space from their own, but everyone lived happily in the utopia because there would ever be no more trains today, as replacement busts and bosoms sufficed. Yes, I saw through it all, the only one left to live on a dark empty siding, tapping  away at a screen that shone like a smouldering coal fire behind glass reflecting my tank engine of a face, and I adjusted my spectacles upon my nose, sometimes flying off on their adjustable wings that long went out of fashion, even as a facial decoration. What with all colours eventually merging as one, and artificial intelligence not intelligent enough as a predictive force to see it would destroy itself instead of humanity. Ah yes, I know there were still  the ghostly sounds of shapes shunting where all tunnels merge as one, too, so becoming the ultimate old-fashioned male-merge that computers and their spreadsheets would have allowed had they not gone off to their own endless war before computers were even invented. I am sure there was a better ending, had it been left to me.

New Discrete Fictoniatures (2)

 Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/new-discrete-fictoniatures-1.html

THE GLISTENBERRY FESTIVAL

It ended with one band playing to one person. A forgotten emblem of a time when music filled many peoples’ lives, ranging from mediaeval to modern, with no division between classical and popular,  between a rock and a hard place that I often enjoyed containing 12 tone as well as ‘nurse with wound’,  late Scott Walker and Roger Sessions, Philip Glass and Xenakis, Schubert and Mahler, vocal and non-vocal, mixes and purities. It all became one, as streamed forever to one person, either listening to it with only one ear or in stereophonicjj concentration, even in a spatial reality that claimed Eno was just an anagram for One.

The music of which I write, however, is pure fiction, that of Weirdtongue, ironically, proving that non-vocal music could deploy words comprehensible as such. 

Gregory sat in the Summerset sun, listening to the Glistenberries grow. Suddenly, he held his two ears in his hands and sung along with inner plosives and fricatives that were atonally sung in obeisance to a new eye in the sky that betokened our world’s  end. Yet the normal sun still shone on, oblivious of the arrival of its inimical neighbour in the same quarter of the sky.

Suddenly,  the field below the Tor filled with more of the same as Gregory. Each a certain type, destined to witness whatever was due to be performed on the pyramid stage now placed before them, although it was not the season for it. No jobbing electricians, no stage shifters, no sound engineers, no microphones at all, simply an empty stage, and a small blue cat walking upon it, followed by the essence of music that told this story, shadows that shifted without impulse, and voices that were voids.  Weirdtongue spoke, and nothing came out. Yet all was clear and Gregory listened until it was too late to listen any longer, leaving imaginary violins, flutes and drums, and only two dead eyes in the sky to see Gregory walk to the stage and  pick up the stray cat to comfort it before it was too late to do so.

The most  frightening thing that made this story a proper horror story — one you can involve yourself in and comprehend to the hilt, with its two major characters, one human, the other animal, and its plot’s beginning, middle and end — was the fact that it also played its music indiscriminately through surroundsound’s self-cancelling earphones, including the story’s own words written to convey such music in the first place.

***

THE HORROR ANTHOLOGY

I first found the huge Horror Anthology under a pile of several discarded toys as soon as I was sufficiently grown up to be able to read it with some objectivity. It was almost as if it was planned that I should stumble upon it in this way, but who placed it under such layers of rusty train tracks, clockwork engine, once led soldiers and their wooden fort’s remains, Meccano pieces still screwed into a mysterious contraption that I had forgotten making, and much else. I was not surprised to find a book in such a pile when exhuming it. I had indeed been an avid reader as a child, but this was usually with more innocent books, such as Blyton and Biggles, so I was surprised by what appeared to be an anthology of stories that involved ghosts and monsters, some of the ghosts being kind and loveable but most being monsters, as well as separate intangible monsters without ghostly means to exist. The names of the authors in the contents list were mostly unknown to me then, but since become more familiar to me. Some since quite famous such as Poe and Lovecraft. The less familiar Aickman was there, too. I had heard of course of Charles Dickens but not as a short story writer, and I had not, at that time, embarked on my marathon reading of all his novels. Elizabeth Bowen and Walter de la Mare, also, but then simply names. And many others that have long meant nothing at all, except my own name. It was plain as a pikestaff, my initials plus surname, giving me quite a shock, and I quickly skimmed through the dog-eared pages to it. I think I was only 15 at the time when all this happened and my heart was in my mouth when I read the first few lines of a fiction work apparently written by myself in it. Perhaps, that’s why I write horror stories now, to rid myself of such an inexplicable haunting and make it more explicitly comforting. As I read it, I twiddled Meccano pieces with my fingers in the holes from which screws had fallen, and it was more than just convoluted with abstruse words that fazed me at the time. It sort of clinched, though, in later hindsight, the whole anthology’s contents into something really special, a unifying theme as unified by what looked to be something I had written, but had not written.  How else could I put it? How could I have possibly written it? I am humble enough to believe I never wrote it, but immodest enough to think I might have done! It was contained in this mega-paperback from the far-fetched future or one from some alternate past, all manner of possibilities arising in my mind. I’ve never read a greater anthology then or since, and I finally investigated the name of the supposed publisher of this well-thumbed paperback with a garish cover. Oh yes, it did have a picture on its cover, seeming to depict myself much older than I was ever to become.  Even Dickens  could not have written up such an ugly oldster’s creation. The artist’s name was not given.  I wondered which story it portrayed within the anthology. Certainly not mine. Indeed, my story so-called was not in a style in which I think I could ever have then written so it was just a coincidence. The publisher’s name you ask? That must remain my secret, as must remain the reason I was never able to write an accessible story in caseit became the plain and simple one I have just now re-read from the horror anthology, a plain fiction story that once terrified me so much even if it were because of the coincidence of the by-line attached to it. No, you are wrong, don’t even think of the story, as if written by me, as being this one. It was actually very good despite using what I now consider to be an over-plain style, so utterly good, the story is a story forevermore that  I needed to get off my chest, not by copying it out but by reliving the experience of reading it for the first time. The coincidence was perhaps strange, but no stranger than finding this book in the first place. I could ramble on forever, and now the only weak link, the only thing that can bring the whole thing down as a believable story is keeping the secret as to who is shown to have published it in the anthology. I will now simply say something I never intended to say when I started this ramble; it was a hybrid name somehow involving the word ‘anthology’, and that far-fetched aspect of this whole narrative is a burden I shall ever need to carry, thus making this story about a story seem to fall, as I say, at its last hurdle, but that makes it all the more true, because nothing true can ever be perfectly true, just as any human is always fallible. And every book is left with at least one typo, whatever must have always led to many precautions being taken to avoid them. Another burden of error, here, was the terror itself: a coincidental ghost as the ghost’s inner monster. The ghost at last?  Ha Ha, laughter is the only cure for cancer if not for an extreme horror that mistakenly exists as a single far-fetched truth.

***

A STORY WITHOUT A VICTIM

In most of life, it was generally clear that someone would have to pay for some indefinable hubris and it is impossible to avoid, in any human interaction, that some of us come out of it more successful than the others, and vice versa, and a few of us are more often, if not always, in one category than the other. I invariably found myself, of course, on any losing side in any polarity of endeavour, but I had not yet reached the point of having my will-to-live completely defeated. On the other hand, my so-called friend Peter was a general example of the opposite propensity, but not becoming too cocky or overconfident to the point of foolhardiness. As a preamble to this story, I shall tell you we were both investigators of the science of the ‘preternatural’, and neither of us would like to be deemed Ghosthunters in so many words, but that was exactly what we were! Certain words we completely eschewed were ‘supernatural’ and ‘paranormal’ both of which have taken on the taint of the other. Why we allowed ‘preternatural’ into our vocabulary, however, was a mystery because it too had taken on the taint of both the other words that we have so far put up for discussion here. Perhaps, it was because most people did not understand the word ‘preternatural’, but we knew it was meant to imply a sense of doubt in the phenomena, by implying an equivalent sense of the neutrally inexplicable rather than the airy-fairy fears and superstition of the other words, while vying between us to find our first ‘ghost’, a word we accepted, too, when push came to shove. Semantics is a funny game at the best of times but Peter and I agreed we had hit on the best word in ‘preternatural’ out of all the possible words available, while  the words ‘occult’, ‘witchcraft’, ‘black magic’, even ‘white magic’, were not even considered. Therefore this word we finally chose did pass some sort of muster to cover what we hunted in friendly rivalry, when together as a team and sometimes separately. What else could we be pursuing via a belief in — and study of — the preternatural but ‘ghosts’, at the end of the day? And thus we come to my story.  Peter is now a ghost.

***

CONE ZERO

I first came across this terminology in the noughties when playing about with the concepts of CERN Zoo and Zencore. At the time, it had nothing to do with the art of ghost stories, but more with reading periodicals such as Interzone with its vast cosmic visions, so it was great to have my mind expanded at that time beyond the darkness of fiction scenarios more in keeping with haunted mansions by other writers, although some of them, at my request in 2008, each wrote for me a story based simply on the theme: ‘cone zero’, where ‘mansions of the moon’ now assumed the mantle of the terminology used, by name, in the synchronicities and harmonics of the otherwise disreputable art of astrology in which I had been steeped in the 1970s. That was when I first met Liz Greene in Chalk Farm to learn about the esoteric astrology of Alice A. Bailey. This was Ms Greene’s speciality at that time and soon after, I ceased attending her classes by coming to the end of their natural term. I often scratch my head at what exactly had been going on, and at that time I had not even studied basic astrology, let alone esoteric!  Now, with that prelude told, largely containing elements of biographical truth, I will now begin to create fictional variations from such core themes and, far from shattering illusions by such an admission of fictionalisation, I have a theory that such methods bolster, even swaddle, illusions into facts as long as I can fall short of actually smothering them. My name is Tullis from Null Immortalis, and if you don’t believe any terminologies anywhere above and below in this text, please check on Google. I have long lived with many concepts of eventernal slumber and perpetual autumn as well as Zeno’s paradox being the classic sticky ‘ficton’ or burr. Liz Greene, let me tell you, is, I believe, still alive somewhere, not much older than myself, and she first formulated Cone Zero for me even though she didn’t use those words, only predicted their use by me in 2008 as a Nemonymous book title.  She said, “Tullis, you show promise, even though you can’t yet tell your metaphorical elbow from your arse, your Aries from your Sagittarius, your progressions from your planetary transits, your Lunar Nodes from your cusps of the Ascendant, and I shall now tell you something that you would not otherwise reach until 2023 should you otherwise merely follow the linear learning instead of leapfrogging, with my help, from today in 1975.”  When she said this, I was fazed beyond belief, but now I am literally on the cusp of seeing the true cone zero and I wait with bated breath. This ‘story’, I am sure, is the catalyst or trigger that not even AI brains will reach until around the 2030s. Cone zero has now come and gone. I hope you glimpsed it, too, as hidden in plain sight as this story will ever be. It flickered for a moment as as well as stayed forever — the ultimate sticky paradox before which even madness bows and scrapes. Apologies, if any are needed, for dragging you with me to this vanishing-point that only a distillation of fiction-truth can provide, after which only sanity can survive. By the way, I think I heard an old crackly female voice say, “Tullis, I am proud of you.” I felt mothered and slightly smothered, despite there still being very little age gap between us to speak of.

***

 CERN Zoo 

I first misread it as CERN 200 but I soon realised this was the city-centre zoo I had once mentioned in a different work. It was an area eventually with many potentially  empty cages, as well as one enormous enclosure that seemed to be some sort of stable, now deliberately uncovered. By simply entering this zoo zone as a whole, meanwhile, you were allowed to differentiate, so to speak, between dream and reality with certainty. It did not prevent you sleeping as well as dreaming within its precinct, but it definitely gave you the knowledge of exactly when you were dreaming, indeed a psychologically healthy knowledge, even when dreaming of the feral animals that once populated the zoo’s cages, and its once moving model of the Collider within the large  enclosure as part of some makeshift science block created from an erstwhile stable. Today, then, when you dream within the zoo, you recognise — and fully deal with — any miscellaneous personal dreams as well as the involuntarily shared dreams with others of your ilk. So, to further summarise, dreaming was not banned in this derelict zoo, but you simply knew you were either dreaming or awake in it, dreaming of the zoo’s past or of its eerie present, and this was quite different from the areas around the zoo, to which you returned at night, when the prevailing dream-sickness would return to you, one symptom of which sickness was that you did not know whether you were dreaming, or not!  This being an insidious mix of waking and sleeping with sickly visions, a state of life’s instability, dreams and nightmares that seemed just as real as the still busy city around you seemed utterly real wherein you held your appointed backstreet billet. You may ask why you were not allowed to stay within the zoo grounds permanently and the answer was you had to take it in turns to optimise advantage of its sleeping facilities within the cages as supine figures of curiosity. We all loved to go and see and poke fingers into the cages to touch you as you slept. But there was room for only a couple of hundred of you at any one time from the vast city outside, to take turns to become this finite number in this way. These prodding and prying spectators themselves were simply ghosts, death being the only way that the zoo’s turnstiles could be cheated into turning for unofficial visitors such as us, inward as well as out. I  was one such unofficial spectator along with some others forced, piecemeal, to sleep when night unexpectedly overtook us, indeed to sleep within the open enclosure described above,  if ghosts can actually ‘sleep’ at all, while our spinning could not stop, and our molecules could not divide or coalesce. The God-particle, you see, was born Instable.

***

ZENCORE! — SCRIPTUS INNOMINATUS

It started with the exclamation mark and I worked back from that. The man — in a coat he refused to take off despite the heat — told me where to look in the document. He kept his name to himself. But I did wonder how he had entered my house without my permission, and thought it quite normal to station himself on my couch from where he officiated matters. I half-recognised him, and at first, I took it all for granted, except, later, when he started humming interminably and pointing at what he believed to be ‘chakras’, he said, in his own body. That’s when it started to dawn on me that I should be fearful of him, if not terrified. The document he gave me turned out to be many-layered with inner pages that were not obvious, having to unstick them from each other’s ever-soft gluiness. The writing appeared to be deliberate nonsense words not unlike those often attached by an AI to its triggered artwork. Words seeming to be in a language that could be learnt. With some characters crossed between Russian and Chinese (or Japanese). And just one recognisable: ”Zencore!” But I knew it also needed a number as well as the upper case to make it valid.

But its trigger worked, nevertheless, and I knew I was in a story that would soon take off with all manner of its own characters. Human shapes, with recognisable relationship with myself. A future family.  And those who would oppose me in life.  And a coterie of friends. And my alternate life in a parallel digital universe … where I began to live in a nightmare world, one where I fear that everything I want to do on the internet requires a password but I have forgotten a growing number of passwords or have failed to grasp the procedure for rediscovering the passwords that I’ve forgotten, procedures that become more complicated with every day that passes, because the more you forget, the more you are liable to forget exponentially. Not only on the internet. In real life, too. But, in many ways, the internet these days is the real world. The amount of real time spent working the internet in real time is frightening. Each path barred by an impassable gap.

I once met a password in the flesh. It stared at me, at first, and then it mouthed obscenities, as if tempting me to guess which one to use back at it. The face was unspeakable, leaning in two directions, one being towards a hope of recognition, and the other a dread of recognition. Not Munch’s Scream so much as a Scream’s Munch, a half-swallowed pre-gurgitation that stifled one’s own cri de coeur as the web-pages did shuttle into a concertina of codes. Like putting on and taking off different coats from the party dump of them on a bed in a room with a casement upstairs.

Figuratively, I met the love of my life at this party on the hottest night of the year. She sat on the stairs, apparently abandoned there by her boy friend who was now looking for new entrées or she was simply spaced out and single.

I pondered what to say first. It was as if my life depended on exactly what word I now uttered. A life with this woman on the stairs or a life without her.

I said nothing, not daring even to breathe.

She opened her mouth and shouted ZENCORE! loudly right in my face. Not a scream but a shout. And a shout contains recognisable words whilst a scream does not.

“I’ll get my coat,” I said.

***

NULL IMMORTALIS

Reading back to the beginning, it seems an eternity since David was asleep. Insomnia was not even the beginning, middle or end. Insomnia itself would’ve been tantamount to a cure for what David suffered day by night, night by day. When I first met him, his face was a yawning chasm, eyes hollowed out, yet his body still sufficiently pillowed by flesh, I could imagine him sleeping within it somewhere.

 I have been employed as butler for David and his family, all of whom live in a mansion near… where?  Do you readers know that authors used to keep place-names  unclear with with one upper case initial and one long dash. A long dash slowly — but a dash to where? I also had to face facts. They were too many mansions in my world and not enough covered markets or dry docks, but that was an in-joke with some readers, but even I could see that most places no longer had mansions, but blocks of flats or renovated supermarkets. 

Mansions were really part of the past.  David‘s mansion was certainly the nearest anybody could get to one, situated in the middle distance of flattened Essex, where the skies were so wide, one couldn’t breathe properly for fear of floating upward into them. Or was it the fear of stopping to breathe? 

The mansion itself was sleepier than Yoda Fair. With a few bent shapes tending the topiary around it, and they looked as if they were dreaming of someone walking through the gate with my butler gear and a fishing rod. I’d been told there was a lake behind the mansion that teemed with fish like a river would. I’ve pulled up the gold knocker and let it drop with an echo from within the Earth beneath my feet. 

I knew David himself would not be fit enough to come to the door, but without a current butler, who could possibly do so other than one of David‘s family. Highly unlikely, I thought. So I took it upon myself to try opening the door from the outside. I was, in theory the butler designate, so I could step within the hallway, and then open the door to myself, just seeming to be the obvious thing to do, or was it simply ‘mansion madness’?

The whole rambling place literally surged  with regular breaths to keep the outside from coming in, to keep the above from becoming the below, to obviate or absorb the sleep of foundations, the sleep of walls, the sleep of floors and ceilings, the sleep of roofs, but to allow the waking of windows,  one window in particular that had woken at the sound of the knocker. At which face appeared David’s big-head, with me still outside.

Whether it was death warmed up or sleep downgraded, I saw David‘s face quizzically moon down at me. I  bet you anything he shaped up nicely later when I managed to pass my induction and I was allowed to attend to his needs. The next thing to do after that was to sort out the topiarists outside who were sleeping on the job.  As to David‘s family, I  could find no hide nor hair of them. Some say they spend much time swimming in the lake.

 With so many duties. I slept like a hollow log. David promised me an under-butler of my choosing, but none have yet arrived for me to interview.  I could ramble on and on about my life in David‘s mansion, ‘til Kingdom Come. A story that spreads sluggishly around without purpose or turning point. 

That was in tune with what I intended at outset, but that is now happening by default. An eventernal slumber, leading to no epilogue or death. Another terrifying story without victims, except perhaps any of you reading it — until that final dropping of the knocker and the arrival of who? A long dash for anonymity, while D____ is still greedy for a name

Endless false endings, ad infinitum, ad absurdum. And that still was not the last ending. Reading back to the beginning. And even such a circularity was far too obvious to be  a turning-point.  Null Immortalis. 

New Discrete Fictoniatures (1)

Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/old-and-new-fiction-miniatures-mixed-2.html

 KLAXON

Once upon a time, there was a land called Klaxon pervaded by the sound of loud sirens at all times of the day and night. The repercussions for human beings with two ears are manifold and the stories involved complex. It was a landscape honeycombed with cafés that had been established in a mountain’s caves, otherwise known as cavés, with no other businesses or residences or shops or transport systems. The living quarters were in the immediate hinterland of each cavé that eventually became conjoined the further into the mountain you managed to reach beyond those living quarters. Daily life entailed visiting each other’s cafés for a friendly cuppa, such sociability making their whole society thrive without the need of economic theories.  

 The only drawback (a severe one!) was created by the sound of the sirens, relentless and ever urgent, as if an air raid was persistently on a tipping-point of appearing in the skies, or a crime ever about to be committed, or an arson on the brink of being perpetrated, or an accident on the very cusp of continuously happening whatever health and safety precautions were taken to prevent it, and there were very few such precautions in Klaxon! Goodness knows what emergency services would have been called in the event of these cliff-hangers actually  becoming unhung!  

Yes, it was a land of suspense and heavy-duty ear-muffs. And I suspected that the café owners would go into a mode of mutually voluntary self-help in the eventuality of an emergency suddenly crystallising into actuality. It would no doubt involve a sort of metaphorical chain of fire-bucketfuls of water passed from hand to hand to douse a fire. 

When I first visited Klaxon, my heart was in my mouth. It seemed strange to see everyone wearing ear-muffs, with my having just arrived from Clacton, England where all my compatriots were wearing lower-half face-masks and who touched elbows together instead of shaking hands. I had been warned to pack several such muffs in case of fouling them with earwax. But then it occurred to me that a certain conundrum had not yet occurred to me. If these people were so damned gregarious in their vital lifestyle, travelling between each other’s cavés for a gossip over a friendly cuppa, the question was — did they have to shout so as to be heard through the muffs? Not a possible solution to the conundrum, as I had heard that Klaxon ear-muffs were more sound-cancelling than bluetooths! 

My own muffs, it turned out, were not really fit for purpose. And I could still hear the agonising of the sirens through them and thus I vowed to delve as deep as possible into each cavé for my convivial coffee, even if nobody followed me there, a method which did somehow seem to defeat the purpose of doing it! Furthermore, there were no tables and chairs other than within the cafés proper at the very front of each cavé. And when one walked further into the mountain, it is true, the sirens did take on a duller tone, but they never really went away because the greater the distance one achieved the nearer one eventually seemed to reach another café, where the whole process started again. 

But to answer your yet unanswered question — no, the inhabitants did not shout pointlessly at each other, nor did they use sign language as a gossipy semaphore, nor did they even write down their conversations ready to be read via exchanges of bits of paper between them like a ‘consequences’ game nor was what they said to be later printed in a book, hence none of these vital exchanges for the circulation of their life-blood  have been replicated here in this capsule conundrum that ever drums within my reeling head when writing down for you my experiences in Klaxon. Until, I realised that faces in Klaxon silently implied things that were then inferred. Simple as that.

I have now caught on to the essential knack of the life-style in Klaxon but it is almost too late as, yesterday, I very very nearly fell down into a lethal chamber that was situated a bit back in the cavé from where the café counter is situated at which I have recently started serving lattes to pay for my upkeep. I used to be a café waitress on Clacton Pier, you see, therefore such job experience is likely now to pay me dividends. The ironic thing is that when I do eventually fall into that lethal chamber, the sirens will cease.

***

THE ANGEL MEGAZANTHUS

Despite its reputation as an alter ego of Azathoth, this otherwise good-for-nothing angel was at least good for me by teaching me writing skills for mainstream magazines or anthologies, skills that were to be straightforward and non-dependent on my customary contrived wordplay and idea-convolutions. But not before I had written this! So, I leave the rest of it as purely simple as possible, as I know this Angel as muse or mentor would have preferred  even blankness to more of the same old, same old  from my pretentious pen.

***

NO LONGER ANY LOUD MEAT

There are millions climbing up the walls. Stories telling each other.

More step out their once locked cages, keys left carelessly in the keyholes where other stories had turned them with hands and fingers as created by what was written about them in these stories that were already free enough to free others.

Focussing on a relatively small area of this Story Zoo, I noted that one enclosure was already empty, its walls being low enough to climb by whatever beasts of burden it had once contained. The nearby cage, too. 

I stared up at the invisible giraffe, gasping with astonishment. At last, I believed it existed. 

The silence later felt tangible.

***

EMOSS CRACK

Once upon a time, there was a land called Emoss Crack where spaceships were tied up high on tethers, because, hereabouts, part of their buoyancy was being lighter than air when stationary, and would only gain weightiness again by travelling through space, especially when accelerating between lighter than air and faster than light. The tipping-point was when a spaceship became heavier than itself, not because of the crew that had boarded it such as myself and Gorringer, but because of the mix of various gravities that it passed through interacted with the material from which it was made. Or so I was told by Gorringer before I wrote this down for posterity to read. 

We had reached the tether-land in question with its own characteristics of oscillating gravity and no gravity at all. Gorringer looked at me with due seriousness when explaining the complexities of your world that we were exploring for the very first time. So how he could possibly know such information was beyond me. We duly tethered our craft to the top of a pylon where it floated like a metallic kite, often misshapen by the changing gravities, some of which seemed more severe than I had ever imagined. Yet Gorringer and I, as functioning humans, felt ourselves quite unaffected and could breeze along just as we might have done back on Earth. He told me that we were more adaptable than our spacecraft, and we automatically shed aggravating gravities and only accepted the most amenable ones. 

We walked towards what seemed to be the nearest cathedral among many cathedrals that spread in holy panoply before us leading towards a horizon where several suns vied for the correct positioning while simultaneously setting and rising. I looked back at our tethered craft at the top of its holding pylon, among many such, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to see which one belonged to us amidst the morphing currents. When cowboys in the Wild West used to tether theirs horses outside a saloon bar, they had none of this trouble. And there did not even seem to be one drinking-hole for cowpoke like me and Gorringer. So, why were we here, I heard myself asking him. He looked at me again with due seriousness before  vanishing. I luckily took sanctuary in the nearest cathedral that happened to be near enough and solid enough to allow me to preempt my own dismantlement by forces I did not understand as well as Gorringer did. I have lived in your world ever since, as sole bellringer. 

***

THE COVERED MARKET

I was let go as the butler in a mansion near St. Osyth. There was one simple reason for this and it was nothing to do with my abilities as a butler, I assure you. Plain and simple, this happened on the day following the Great Storm of 1987 which took the mansion’s roof off in one fell gust while many of the surrounding trees were equally felled! 

In other words, the whole mansion became unliveable overnight, and I have since lost contact with the owners, having effectively washed my hands of that part of my life’s journey. No more dainty afternoon teas to officiate, thank goodness. Nor recalcitrant children to escort between facilities. Nor my bowing and scraping to certain inscrutable individuals who came and went. I enjoyed parts of the job, however, such as ensuring that the various accessible attics (and their bric à brac contents) were kept in order while the generations otherwise slipped through my fingers along with the rusty-hinged dollshouses and the stuck-up rocking-horses, and the small crates of which I never discovered the contents.

But that is in the past and I have no idea why I am telling you all about this mansion and its fate during quite a long prelude to the otherwise potentially even shorter story below…

=

The next step in my life’s journey, although I am now getting a bit long in the tooth, has been to work at a new job in a particular town — not in Essex, I hasten to mention, and remaining nameless for reasons that will become clearer — and this job is in what many call this town’s Covered Market. It is rather ironic that a mansion that was made roofless effectively caused me to take a job in an establishment with such a name.  It was simply an open-air market of traders selling much of the attic bric à brac I had earlier handled under what was once a permanent roof elsewhere. 

The market’s sides had been left open, or I should say there were so many open doors within its supporting walls, walls that were intended to be temporary but never replaced over the years, that made it seem its sides were left open. No sign of brick to hold up its roof, but I did not question the secret of such architecture, if that is not too extravagant a word to describe the whole structure. Whether a blind eye was turned or not, it was a thriving venture whereby many small traders were allowed to set up their stalls under the roof covering. 

I was what was called the market usher and troubleshooter, assisting customers to find the items of bric à brac they sought. The fact I was an ex-serviceman (albeit from a war I hope one day to forget) helped affairs, because some of the customers  were what one might call ‘difficult’. The job did not pay me much, but it kept a roof over my head and served my simple needs. I looked smart  — not a uniform as such, but I did wear a badge proudly with the words ‘Market Official’ embossed, but you did have to get close to read it.

One day I was approached by a gentleman with an eye-patch who broke all the rules of my personal territory with his hot breath. In hindsight, ‘gentleman’ is not word I would use now. He seemed interested not in bric à brac but in what kept the market roof up and what it was made of. He seemed particularly keen on ascertaining whether I knew it would be strong enough to hold certain weights, should there be a need for whatever things he had in mind to settle upon it from the sky. At that point I noticed a dull demonic glow in his visible eye. I looked as askance as I was able to look. In fact, I could not answer his question, as knowledge of the roof was above my pay grade, although, whenever I had glanced up at it, I did fear for its ability to withstand another Great Storm, or even a less great one. And that would indeed be ironic for my life’s journey, as you will readily appreciate.

When I looked up at it, though, during the man’s visit, it did seem to me to be corrugated and fixed in place by employing a material that had recently been deemed to be an example of faulty concrete now bruited about in the newspapers; indeed it was the brackish concrete once used post-war for all manner of buildings. So, now, without any question in my mind, added weights upon it would be deleterious at least. These facts had not really occurred to me until that point. Anyway, I told the man a pack of lies to get rid of him.

The following night, I dreamt of the sky darkening at some high noon to a pitch sufficient to coagulate and lower itself, making heavy weather of its downward subsidence. Eventually it sunk like a soggy black bladder upon what I thought of as my beloved Covered Market and, with great sadness, I helplessly watched the roof slowly buckle beneath what I now saw as a living ceiling of pliable coal-mud with a single vertical eye….

Madness creeps equally slowly, equally relentlessly. 

I thought this thought as a thought within the dream, if dreams can have any thought within a time and place that did not exist other than in a dream. I also saw my figure standing inside the market itself, with the proud badge fully visible upon my lapel and I wondered if this is what happens when one dies. The swaddling of illusions rather than the more usual shattering.  Until the concrete proved me faulty, somehow, instead of the roof or the walls as potential weakest links.

 Needless to say, I never woke up. In fact, I couldn’t remember when or even if I ever fell asleep at all, however many bricks I counted in the first place. 

All is now utter darkness within somebody else’s scraped-together  memories, not mine. Not to mention there being no mention of any mansion whatsoever then or now. Just the smothered market.

***

THE DRY DOCK

If this were a dream, I’d tell you straight up here at the beginning. It simply is not. It was as real as the elbow in my face the ghost gave me at the end. Not that I am telegraphing the ending by perversely creating a spoiler this early in my tale of events. As you know, I’ve often told you about this inscrutable city’s dry dock and its visiting crafts. The most huge of the ships suddenly appeared overnight at its giant repair shop without any obvious means of ‘sailing’ there. They must have needed what was called “Hawler” transport, I guess, along extremely wide railway tracks, but that’s another story. The latest ship’s silhouette towered over the covered market like that of a Victorian train station, one of the wet warehouses of which sounding as if it housed an actual train approaching with a brightly haunted headlight. That last bit, by the way, was half reality and half dream. Lol.

Near the dry dock is where I roamed the night away, along with my sidekick Crazy Lope. Although he would disown the ‘sidekick’ label, well, he’s still alive and can speak for himself, and we both worked then at the covered market under the auspices of an ex-serviceman whom we both hated.  Although my story is definitely not a dream,  I need to tell you about the dream we had at that time. Lol. Both Crazy and I comparing dreams making them effectively co-vivid in the more modern parlance. Since our dreams were thus shared, I have noted they haunted nearly everyone else who had dreams at that time, should one question these dreamers. 

There were two main dream scenarios, the first prevailing at a pub which was a bit downtrodden and inexplicably long-lasting as a memory into the waking state, a pub that was darkly, even dirtily insidious but also somehow charming with regular locals and a landlord one never remembered, and the back room that one never entered until the very last dream of all, which, in my case, I have not yet dreamed. The second dream was a tall mansion resplendent throughout, except for a very seedy  bedsit at the top where sat an old man whom we thought we knew very well, except it was really someone younger from our earlier days, someone we never knew long enough to grow this old. The ceiling above him was in fact, a set of floorboards that served as a base for attics. We assumed the bedsit’s floor was more like a ceiling as our feet sunk into its plaster as we walked around the man’s bed, and that’s where the dream always ended. Anyway, forgive me for having sold this story at outset as not a dream when it actually turns out to be about dreams, but there is a difference. It is, however, my purpose to concentrate on the dry dock which was and still is utterly real. 

As soon as a new ship appeared within the dock’s vast vices etched upright in the sky, clamped either side of a damaged hull, those unforgettably gleaming vice-slabs that sat at the buffer zone of the wide tracks which must’ve had as their source the sea itself, yes, as soon as a new ship replaced an old ship, the terminology dry dick actually became clearer for a while, an expressions my autocorrect often turns into dry dock. Think about it. It was where dreams dried out and became truth. It was where we could establish ourselves, yes, dock ourselves in impassionate realms of philosophy. Beyond the trembles of humanity’s fallible grasp. I do not call it a religion, but I suppose it was reality as a religion, steadfastly dried out in many more ways than the one I have already given about dreams. Crazy Lope once observed to me that we never got drunk in dreams even when we had been carousing at the aforementioned pub, any residual overhang from such a woken dream not really being a hangover, but the pub still haunts me today. I nodded as if realising for the first time that Crazy was good, and as  I wait for his departure, I know Crazy could also be very wise, if sometimes it was only in dream. Did we get drunk here in the ‘Dry Dock’? Yes, but in that pub, hope was ironically an anchor, the very anchor we all sought and that saved us eventually from ourselves, revealing a hope that some of you still seek. ‘Hull holed below!’ howled a gangly gauche ghost hanging over the dry deck inspecting the work to be done. And that was the last I heard before falling asleep into a real dream. Where getting plastered was just one way to avoid getting old. lol. But something else will eventually hit me in the unprotected proverbials, something that always gets the last laugh. Hope not, though.

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/new-discrete-fictoniatures-2.html

Old and New Fiction Miniatures Mixed (2)

 Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/old-and-new-fiction-miniatures-mixed.html

***

THE PRESENCE IN THE WORDS

The mansion’s antechamber was bustling with people, bristling with barbed comments.

Richard Wiles wondered how all the various paths he could have picked in life had finally led him here of all places. Sooner or later, the double doors would open and he would be allowed entrance to the Presence; along with all the others who were currently standing with contortions of cups on saucers and iced biscuits on plates. Not forgetting the cucumber sandwiches for the still peckish.

There was an older lady in particular whom Wiles found attractive, her eyelashes batting like crickets’ legs: and a young lady he half-recognised from a different occasion. As if in echo, the latter half-smiled at him, but her eyes remained cold and self-seeking. He knew she was here, like all of them, on trial or, perhaps, audition. He decided to test the water: “Coffee’s up to scratch, for a change.” Or was it taste?

 She nodded minimally.

“I don’t know about you,” he continued, “but I’ve got butterflies doing pike-and-tuck in my stomach.” Or were they death’s-head moths?

However, by now, the double doors had swung suddenly wide — and Wiles, as a mere constituent of people-flow, was ushered into the Presence. Relative quiet had settled upon everybody, whispers intermittently breaking the silence, awe and wonder shrouding their earlier pointed remarks.

Wiles noticed the young lady’s hemline was too short for comfort. And she didn’t seem to mind him crowding her: the touch even of their clothes being a taste of deeper attractions. And the mixed-up sharing of a coffee cup.

=

The night before, Wiles had tasted a haunted mansion. Or was it tested?

The dream had been his earlier special assignment for the “audition”. He had left it to the last minute to ensure optimum build-up of “effects”. The edifice stood amidst the woods and the winding slopes at the very edge of the city, whence one could still just discern the distant sky-scrapers slowly rippling in the heat haze. The two towers of the mansion itself could easily be mistaken for trees, as Wiles clambered the nettly shingle. But he knew better. A full-fledged human being had built the main chassis earlier in the century from disused Elizabethan bricks and, there not being sufficient of them to finish it off, had erected its two front corner towers from well-seasoned planks of hybrid wood. The real trees, furthermore, sheltered the building against an all-over scrutiny from any angle of approach. This added to its mystery. Indeed, it had probably been built solely for its mystery by those early pioneers of imperfect humanity. And at night, both imperfection and darkness were indistinguishable.

Wiles did not bother to knock, despite a suspicion that something was at home. The chimneystack was smoking — surely such a constructed appendage, spoiling the otherwise regular lines of the roof, was not made of wood, too.

He walked straight into the hall, without further speculation, and bumped, with little or no foreplay, into the first vampire, which abruptly emitted a squirt of blood: boy-shaped with eyes all over its head like sunken wounds where eyelashes formed patches of hair. The neck was the colours of a peacock’s tail. The white frockcoat hid further disharmony.

Wiles did not have time to wonder why the vampire hadn’t hidden itself, when a second one slid down from the floor above, disguised as stair carpet. It led Wiles, squashy-underfoot, towards the lower bedroom areas.

The third vampire, lying inside a large cradle that was bent-coffin shaped, beckoned him with doughy fans. Confident of this being a dream, Wiles knew none of it was real; he burned a cigarette in evident nonchalance. Scientists were meant to be cool. And, after all, what else could he be called but a scientist with a metaphorical butterfly-net trawling “effects” to the hilt, indeed an objective ghost hunter of rational rigour. He somehow realised the vampires angled towards him leading them to the Presence in the city. Without realising the Presence might be already here in the mansion. 

Meanwhile, he knew that things had become so clinical and impersonal, so technologically soulless, so “screen-staring”, the off-beat humours of outside-city idiosyncracies such as these in a vampires’ mansion were worth far more than priceless gold to the Presence, wherever it happened to reside.

As Wiles mimicked being upon a torrent of terrors, the vampire in the coffin-cot weltered in moony-eyed desire. So Wiles had to try blotting out his own lust by opening himself to other thoughts: for example, the Presence itself in the city, what was it? An essence constituted of all the sophisticated communication systems of the city vibrating as one? A god that needed to drain souls to fill up its own soul? Or just a building with meat ingredients, a combo of inner yells of pain and outer inscrutabilities of living death?

The thoughts tangled in the thinking. Wiles smiled and surrendered to the trawling flirtation of the vampire. Wiles thought he might as well enjoy himself while he was here in a dress-rehearsed dream on a test and he slipped into the wide cradle-crypt. Ghosts hung about like heavy, disused Christmas finery — dead, but intended to make the place alive with extraneous joy. The vampire in the cot, although girl-shaped, brought something special  to the sensual banquet upon a bed of pilau bristles. Wiles cursed for even all vampires seemed more male than was good for them.

=

She nodded maximally.

It was the same young lady with whom Wiles had attempted small talk, in the antechamber. The Presence surrounded them;  the change in ambience had driven her even nearer to Wiles. Better the evil you know than the evil you know even deeper. She took his hand; a haunted look batted back and forth between their faces: more than just love. Wiles was itchy with something he both wanted to scratch and not scratch, in equal extreme measures.

All the audition-makers were giving forth with their weekend’s assignments, releasing fluttering wings of gathered idiosyncracies into the chamber for the benefit of the Presence which needed such will o’ the wisps and human frailties to feed upon; otherwise it would be nothing but the brick walls it was made of.

Wiles swaddled his brain with a ravelling irrelevancy: there was not any wood at all in the city centre.

Then, abruptly, everybody, except Wiles and his adopted sweetheart, turned away from the Presence. They somehow suspected that there was at least one among them ill-fitting the ambience. Wiles visibly wilted in the wake of the others’ unswerving glances, crumbling under the memory of the unadulterated terror he had once tried to channel from carnal passion. He was indeed the inadvertent carrier of red-riddled death to the Presence, rather than simply the frills of human frailty. The young lady fleetingly flinched from his side, realising with whom she had been courting more than just small talk. No wonder the coffee they’d sipped from the same cup’s lip had become surface-mapped with crimson. 

Thankfully, they’d both learnt that true presence was in the deep draughts of earlier  dreams. Never upon the pages of a book that were originally sliced from wood. Real ghosts, you see, were mainly depicted on-line. And vanish as soon as they are printed.

***

A Large Rambling Mansion

“You’re very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket,” said the Nurse to the girl.

It was the time of the year when evenings were drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to get it all mixed up.” The girl was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her fingers into her ringlets.

“It will be the devil’s own job to disentangle the silk cottons, colour from colour. The knots seem to be created merely by the act of looking for them.” Nurse tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals of black noodles which the coloured strands had become. Out came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors. Even a tiny pencil-sharpener.

“I’ll help you unravel….”

“No point, I’m leaving here tomorrow. There’ll be a newer nicer Nurse this time tomorrow evening.” Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of her eyes.

But the girl smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: “I’ll help you pack, then, instead.”

The fitful wind gulped in the chimney.

= 

The girl died, but 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 the lack of playfellows had engendered.

She wasn’t scared of the dark.

=

Nurse sat bolt upright in the truckle of her bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of its empty fireplace. 

Would morning never come when she could leave?

=

The girl spent  most of the night listening to the sounds of Santa Claus attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue of the chimney, having first been stuck there two Christmases ago. Tangled bits of him kept falling into the grate which she’d been clearing away regularly for months.

=

As dawn spread itself behind the large rambling mansion like a backdrop in a pantomime, smoke began to curl from the many chimney-stacks — thus a sign that the servants were up and about, if nobody else.

A small face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for some hours. Waiting eagerly to see the nurse leave. She hoped the next arrival would be a playmate, instead.

***

NOT EVEN DEATH WAS DREAMLESS 

I was convinced she would one day marry a brutish good-for-nothing if she didn’t become my wife. So, for her sake, in a moment of selflessness, I asked for her hand. Indeed, I began to love her more than I could love any other, but could it be the true love that many said to have experienced? Yesterday not only did everybody in the street have their thumb and index finger as far apart as possible, but even domes seemed to be pyramids and the tops of chimneys were sunk to the waist in brick bubbles. But last night she returned to haunt me. I should never have started thinking about her again, because such thoughts made me guilty of resurrecting her.

For months I slept alone in the double bed we had once shared, recalling the way she had slid the sheet’s lip up and down, playing peeky-boo with me and rubbing my feet with hers. Even in the pitch darkness which we both had cherished during many a sleepless hour together, I had managed to discern her half of the bed rising up in even pitchier, sootier darkness. Love for me then was simple cuddling. She had never complained, only rubbed harder with her feet on my feet.

Una was her name. She told me of a father who never said anything. The psychology was beyond me, but it confirmed my belief that marriage to anybody else but me would have been her ultimate nightmare, worse than any possible father with doubtful leanings, but, on the other hand, wasn’t a spouse merely an idealized reflection of the respective parent?

So, last night, Una returned. In the darkness, I saw the tossing shape beside me, making tears come to my eyes — real tears, not the ones I used to wet my face with in the en suite bathroom. The deepest agony was finding no night smile. Yet, how could any credence be placed in ghosts, especially those that pretended to exist by kicking up bedcovers at the dead of night? They were the worst kind of ghost, because existence was a foul crime if such existence was impossible. My only weapon against ghosts was the disbelief in ghosts. Giving them the sense of satisfaction in your belief in their existence would make them into monsters far worse than ghosts could ever become. With this logical response, I ignored Una’s pleas for my acknowledgment of her presence. I simply turned over in the bed as I often did following marital squabbles in the early days. My wrenching sobs soon petered out and, upon turning back, I discovered there was nothing in which to disbelieve, in any case.

Today, I reconciled for the first time the exact circumstances of Una’s death. I must have always known that I would eventually reach such a crunch point. After all, a crunch was what it was. An amazing coincidence of converging misfortunes, her being in the street, slipping the Yale key into our front door, when the chimneystack collapsed upon her with no prior warning. There wasn’t even any wind. And the roof had never even threatened to leave us. Paradoxically, those sort of accidents made belief in God’s existence easier, which in itself was a far-fetched idea at the best of times. Indeed the act of existence itself implied He must be a bad God.

I heard Una’s single scream, cut off in half blast. I was in the front room, channel-hopping on the T.V. and I literally felt the place shudder, followed by the scream less than a split second later. I know the feeling will stay with me forever, that loathsome cataclysmic sickness, because I must have loved her after all. So, hindsight get thee hence! My earlier presumption of it being for her sake that I took her from the emotional catchment area of other men was all very well, but fundamentally I loved her madly. To hear her stifled scream and then be faced with what the fallen chimneystack hid beneath it, made me love her even more — if that were possible. I knelt in prayer and kissed the feet that had once rubbed so tenderly against mine, ignoring pointblank all the moon-eyed bastard bystanders, none of whom had thought of calling the ambulance men.

In my heart, I knew she was dead. I blamed the Building Society surveyor. Madness often struck at times like that. I felt like going round to his high faluting mansion in the suburbs (if I’d known the correct address) and doing him the direst mischief imaginable. If not him, the people who palmed the house off on us. Or the Estate Agent himself, who was a greasy spiv. The way he showed us the photograph of the house back in his office — yuk! He had it at an angle, holding it between thumb and index finger. Pointing to the chimney stacks. Una said he probably tricked his wife out of the housekeeping he allowed her. Yet, reliving that day did some good. The thing masquerading as my dead wife failed to return for ages — and soon my thoughts petered out — much as they still petered in.

I must have needed to admit to myself the cruel details of the accident. Accident? I still believed someone pushed the chimney off the roof. Perhaps the husband she would have married if it had not been for me pre-empting him. Whereas she had never told me if her father was still alive, I had always assumed he was dead and I did not push her into giving me any gory details of her past with him as a father. The word “interfere” seemed to cover a multitude of sins or minor irritations.

So, yes, she returned last night. Una for real this time, complete with night smile. The guise of ghost was not even viable for someone as dead as she. Love was much easier now. She my widow, because I was the widowing one, a widower being one who widowed, like a winnower was one who winnowed. And so much better to believe in the dead being able to return than having regrets on one’s own. Una’d come again, given half the chance, dressed as a chimneysweep, so I wouldn’t see her, bar the broom’s spiky darkness. 

Remote controls could channel-hop solo, its pure remoteness tantamount to autonomy. The central heating began to hum all night now with the onset of cold weather. I couldn’t bear too many bedcovers — gave me a case of Russian-doll claustrophobia. Petering in and out could never be complete. Not even death was dreamless. 

I even had thoughts that the remote control not only directed the TV programmes I watched but could also take clawhold upon the TV aerials themselves, perched so haphazardly on the precarious chimneys. Always had done so, without thinking about it.

***

THE MANSION OF MALDON

 As far as I know, the only mansion in the world shaped like an elbow is to be found in Essex, and it is near Maldon with the name Plume Villa derived from some past events about which I am only vaguely knowledgeable. I am sure, however, the place was not involved with the Battle of Maldon, although who knows what inner ramifications there are in history that are often kept out of academic books? The elbow configuration can only be seen by helicopter or drone, both of which had not been invented, so at the time I write this story about it, I am only guessing. And when I say elbow it is not just the bony ‘corner’ of the arm but also the more fleshy extensions towards hand and shoulder. The lower bicep houses the servants and animals, the corner itself the kitchen areas, and the rest of the wristless arm — from the elbow’s hinge opening at about sixty degrees — seems to enter woodland further down where one would guess the hand to be, had it existed. This latter part of the arm houses the main living accommodation and famous library, the tops of its roofs beneath the open skies with tall chimneys stretching up like onion domes would otherwise bulge from the Eastern European versions of the same type of architecture, as an echo of its original owner’s participation in the Crusades, I guess. All of this stately structure is sitting amid gentle hills that, for an otherwise flat and densely populated Essex, are deemed to be mountains!

The main purpose of my brief story concerns the aforementioned library. I had  been  called to catalogue its contents that had been in place since time immemorial, and being an antiquarian and bibliographer, I was more interested in the mustiness and stitching of the spines ranked along countless shelves. I fingered them lovingly as I carefully pulled books without breakage of the spine’s top from between each other in order to note down from foxed pages publication dates &c &c, even titles and authors’ names, as the printing on the spines was usually as faded as my lady overseer was faded. She lived in a room nearer the corner of the building, as an employee of the mysterious owner of the whole building, mysterious other than the owner’s name was Plume, as far as I could gather, after which family the mansion itself was named, as earlier indicated.  Why Villa I asked the dour lady and not Mansion or House? She shrugged her shoulders as she did at most things, except when the mysterious Plume figure came to visit the library, at which time I was placed in a carrel where I could not be seen nor could I see whoever it was who had just entered the room. Their voices were undercurrents that I can only call droning, but I did catch the odd word or two like ‘gristle’ and ‘bone’, and if ‘muscle’ was used I failed to hear it. Such talk originally gave me the clue as to why I had written this account at all, as if I once had prior knowledge of what I could not possibly have known even later. Like the ghosts in the kitchen areas, that cooked stews with meaty substances that exceeded their numinous strength even to grasp such comestibles let alone lift them and place into saucepans. One of the library’s books into which I read more deeply than the others  eventually told me all I needed to know about the legends that did abound with regard to this Mansion of Maldon. And I have only told you a small portion, and my other passion, as well as books, is ghost hunting, so my whole life has been enhanced by this job experience, and later I intend to branch out, after I have left University, into more mature avenues of study and discovery. I shall never forget the excellent tasty stews, however. And, oh yes, the dreams of droning at night outside my room nearer the ‘bicep’ area, unless I was disorientated and was in fact billeted in one of the ‘fingers’ hidden within the woodland. But now it’s time I knuckle down and take my life seriously instead of simply  writing stories for nobody to read. Or, at best, written for ghosts hidden in their own version of plain sight. The stews seemed full of grease, by the way, even if their taste was great.

***

SCRIPTUS INTERRUPTUS

When the dreams came, there was not even any sleep to accompany them, just a castle (not a mansion!) somewhere above me, and a whole day to forget what I dreamed, making it wise to record them here in real-time, but even when I take this precaution, they become garbled after only five minutes, so best to write quickly and not explain the process too much, as much about the dreams will escape me. But why is it important to record these dreams, anyway? Well, it gives some anchor to the night as it proceeds through my body’s bed-prone posture and its supposedly thinking head, indeed a method to obviate the sporadic guilty madnesses and the frequent sweats of deep-seated ichor as well as the deeper dreams that are experienced but never remembered enough in order to forget them in the first place! 

Well, tonight is turning out to be a journey and a half! Equally spiritual and borderline insane, with spectators of it to boot! But the latter, I now feel, have been part of the dream itself, if not instigators of it, and now readers of this reportage by me about them. I can’t ask them, as they have now vanished, complete with what I can on,y recall as vertical eyes. Later, no doubt, in this reportage, they will have reverted to normal eyes,an in fact, even as I write this, I can on,y visualise them with normal eyes. And the castle, after all, was a mansion, IS a mansion, one without a roof. I look imploringly down at my mentors who are fast becoming wispy ghost hovering in the mansion’s tiered attic areas. I’m now above the mansion, you see, floating above whatever this building turns out to be, rather than vice versa. How I able to float in now impossible to judge. I am sitting in a waiting-room, writing this, in my iPad Notes facility, expecting to be called soon for my Covid booster as intended for vulnerable 75 year olds like me, and by the time I return to this page, all memories of the dreams of the previous night will have vanished completely. But while they are at least partially still in my head, let me just … my one finger typing does very little to help the speed of my task. The preceptors have now vanished but I never relished their misshapen forms, in any event, and they were of very little help. My number is up next. No. 41. For some obvious reason, I wish it had been 42. It would have given me more time, those extra few minutes…

I have now emerged from the injection room. I recall nothing at all about the dreams now except what I have written above, words that I keep unchanged and, where necessary, I leave any minor typos uncorrected. I simply remember the otherwise unknown lady sitting next to me in the waiting-room suddenly saying, just before I was called in by the injector, “I am 42, so I am after you. And why don’t you type with more than one finger?” She must be a very perceptive lady. My answer was “I can’t.” And then, after a pause, I said, “I’ll now put you in my story.” A friendly promise on my part, not an inimical threat. None of this paragraph was once a dream, so it is set permanently in my head, give or take, of course, the possible onset of future senility. All true

***

DEAR POD

I have asked the same question several times. Is there a mansionn where each room is shaped like an elbow? They tell me I am an alien or, at best, a mutant AI. Never ever in my wildest dreams to be even a cyborg. But asking questions like that made me all too fallibly human all over! 

 But the fact that I can dream makes me question the whole matter. Why cruelly feed me dreams and memories of a human being as a ‘joy ride’? There is another entity beside me in the Pod as I warden the man-made movements through the universe. Most traffic is cargo being transported from galaxy to galaxy in tin pot spaceships and our sole job is to police the lanes to ensure one way routes stay that way. The other one’s name is Joy. She is beautiful, as well as happy, believe me. 

I snuggled down under the bedclothes, trying to make the world forget about my existence. There was once a Russian novel in which a character called Oblomov spent chapter after chapter in bed, failing to summon the will power to get up. Once he started down the slippery slope of wallowing in his own mattress, he found it more and more difficult to summon up the friction. But sooner or later, as a human being, I had to go to the dentist. So I struggled from my pyjamas, dressed and then shambled down the road, squinting against the bright sunlight. 

I had forgotten the whereabouts of the dentist’s but, being a small town, I eventually found it impossible to miss. I was shown into the waiting-room by the lift boy and there I found a circle of faces staring ahead into the middle distance, colour supplement magazines growing stale upon their laps. Despite being the last to arrive, I was immediately called into the surgery by a sweet nurse in a uniform. I perked up a bit at the sight of her. She fitted in with my dreams of one called Joy. 

However, the dentist himself was not a sight for sore teeth. Eye-teeth, to boot. He towered by the long recliner, a metal implement poised in his hand as if he were shaping up for a rumble in the beer belt. He motioned me into the seat, where any patient was to be set back with a violent jerk. 

“Well, I don’t like the look of your teeth at all.” 

Without further ado, he wrenched my mouth open with a crack, and started drilling at the first tooth he saw. The grinding of metal on bone spread to the skull itself, as if the whole upper extension of my neck needed filling. Then, he decided that the tooth would have to come out instead. The nurse pushed her thighs against my side as she yanked my mouth wider to ease entrance by further implements in the dentist’s thinly veiled hands. Another tooth was seemingly gripped by a vicious vice, and not even the strength of the tall dentist, nor the crooning noises of encouragement from the nurse, could entice it to budge, as if it were conjoined to the spine itself. However, after several hours, it crunched sickeningly, enabling the dentist to gouge out the root in bits with a pair of draughtsman’s compasses for another hour or two, taking delight in a job finally well done. (I may, in hindsight, have exaggerated the hours!)

“That’s shifted the little bugger.” 

It felt to me as if the dentist had been chiselling out wedges of jaw bone. 

“Have you got it all out?” I managed to ask, whilst spitting on splinters. The dentist took great delight in matching up the red raw chunks upon the white enamel rinsing-bowl, so that I could see that it was all there. I forthwith fainted, my head lolling upon the nurse’s bosom, which reminded me of someone called Joy’s bosom. 

“Blimey, he’s completely flaked out,” she muttered. But how did I know that? 

The Pod’s called Oblomov. Even Joy has the privilege of a name. And that’s because she’s probably a real human being, despite the matchless beauty she disports. Having said (or thought) that, I can report that my own teeth today feel like long pearls. Hers must be an irregular saw-edge of white miniature tombstones, to prove she really is human. Her eyes look reflective and vulnerable. My eyes are glassed over with lenses or, perhaps, glass all the way down to the optic fuse. 

Oblomov skitters momentarily in a rare space gust, thrusting me against Joy’s cushioned thigh-bone. I struggle with the control-stick for a few seconds, until it actually seems to take control of my hands. And then we’re on an even keel again. Shepherding a recalcitrant star-freighter towards its destination, beyond any of the smugglers’ side-channels, is not conducive to day-dreaming. 

“Listen With Mother” was my favourite wireless programme when I was a toddler. I lived in a seaside mansion called Olive Villa near the pier. I used to settle down on the floor under a blanket with one who called herself Nanna. I often said I loved her more than all the money in the world (plus sixpence). After listening to what was incomprehensible to one so young, a soap opera called “Mrs Dale’s Diary”, in which, after the harp strains, someone with a motherly tone of voice was always ‘worried about her Jim’, the comforting sounds of something far more understandable (despite being full of nonsense nursery rhymes) was broadcast, so damn interesting and calming, 

I often fell into a nap which seemed to overtake both me and my Nanna for the rest of the short afternoon … until high tea and the roaring of the coal fire — a fire which someone-called-Father stirred with violent up-draughts created by a single double-sheet of newspaper stretched across the yet barely flickering hills of cobbled black that had sat in the grate since the century began, only to end up providing shuddering orange silhouette-shows against the queer news stories which filled those far-off days of the 1950s stretching pitifully into an uncertain future. 

Everything was endlessly contorted make-believe, even to the extent of my nursery bedroom becoming shaped like a moveable elbow at night … until  I grew up, listening, despite being English, to Del Shannon records — and other black vinyl singles which slotted down one after the other on my spinning Dansette auto-changer. My mind was on the brink of acting without its own volition. I could hear every scratching note. But when deafness finally settled upon my head like large padded ear-phones, even sound-cancelling blueteeth, all I could make out were the sounds of Hell’s underground seas. I could no longer listen with mother. 

The fires had died in the hearth, and nobody had life in them to fight wars, let alone die in them. Father was one of the few who vanished towards the rumour of a war and nearly died of disappointment when nobody would pay him anything for the useless hand to hand mauling that had transpired. They would not even let him have a demob suit to hide the fact he was now shankless and fell out. 

Nanna, despite everything, could not listen either, because she was inside the very sound-box of my plugged-up head, screaming to escape from a tangled tapestry of memories which would never end. And when the nonsense rhymes started up again, I found I could actually understand, as well as hear, them. 

Joy places her hand in mine, thus interrupting my revery. We have a juke-box in the Pod’s cockpit and I key in an appropriate number to get my favourite Del Shannon record, “Runaway”, on to the turntable… 

There was a tall narrow shed on the edge of those backwaters where I played when still young enough to recall feeling fresh-buttocked from the nappy-changing. A boy slightly older but dim-witted and gangling enticed me into the shed. The boy said he had a secret to share. He proceeded to show a thing which he said was bigger than mine. I ran from the shed, before he could have the enticing opportunity to flaunt his own. 

Next day or next decade, I wandered the dank streets of the dock area in a large city. I knew no home nor comfort and had surrendered hope even for one called Nanna. The yellow fog was lower tonight than I could ever remember. It even came close to easing down the drains and then dribbling along with the gutter slurry. Dark figures passed by on either side wrapped in night clothes in spite of the lateness of sunset. They ignored me, for they were intent on arriving home in time for high tea. If I had been able to catch their eyes in mine like I used to catch sticklebacks in jam-jars on the backwaters, I may have enticed one of them into conversation. 

I reached the edge of the wharf where a henge of crates was stacked against the hull of a loose-planked river freighter which dipped up and down in the sluggish oil that the river had long since become. And the rubbing, the creaking of the crates made me think of the old days when my childhood bed had seemed like a vessel afloat on dreams. I had often imagined Nanna, Mother and Father, together with my several best friends and even a stranger or two thrown in for good measure clambering on board my bed with me … to drift amid nothingness for an interminable period of survival and camaraderie. Yes, they needed to load cans of food and the other imperishables of life along by the bed’s foot-board, in the hope that such provisions would last till the journey ended or the company broke up by hitting the maturity-line, when dreams could safely fade. 

All the dangers of the disaster dream-movie would be neutralised merely by the communion of togetherness. But the bed being loaded to the seams, it had creaked, despite the nothingness through which we floated. I set the company tests on arithmetic, general knowledge, capital cities, spelling. That passed the time. Nanna enjoyed that, but didn’t like the unfairness of my marking, and threatened to alight. 

Now, else when, I inspected the crates on the dockside. More like coffins than cargo. The lids screeched on rusty hinges. In one was a friend from early childhood, but I couldn’t remember the name. Whoever the friend was, he had grown older, so I could hardly recognise him, and the body was too big to fit, hunched up and foetus-like in its last resting-place. In another crate was Father, a sheet of newspaper stretched across his face like the coal fires he once tried to ignite. Nanna slept sedately in another, staring icily into my eyes, as if I had let her down in one way or another. 

In other crates, there were people I did not even begin to recognise, since I had not known them, except perhaps in a forgotten dream: a middle-aged woman with glasses and two dead babies of either sex pressed against her dry breasts in one, and a frilly-dressed gentleman in another who had a date stamped on his forehead. These last ones were the strangers, no doubt, who were the makeweight crew. They had existed and grown older in some different, preferable future, I guessed. 

One long crate, resting on two others like the top of an ancient gateway, had a gangling lop-sided body in it that was almost alive, grinning imbecilically, with a protruding tongue that was engorging. 

There was a single empty crate. Better load the others on the freighter first, though. I’ll be in dire need of rest, then. 

Such memories echo off the close-formed walls of floating darkness, as if they only have ears to suck them back, like unshared secrets. By now, Oblomov, a Pod that is the cornered centre of an arm’s elbow-shape, is stationary in night cover. Both Joy and myself have long given up being mutually affectionate. It was all show. How can she ever love something like me? 

My only significant dread was that my eyeballs would one day swivel round in their sockets one hundred and eighty degrees and they would only be able to see the frightening blackness of my head’s cavernous innards. I did not allow this reasonless phobia to mar the day to day conduct of my life, of course. That way would lie madness. However, I did have certain preoccupations concerning these my windows-of-the-soul. I always wore shades, so that the eventual fulfilment of my dread would be less marked, by comparison. Also, I would never allow girls to look winsomely into my eyes, as many other couples allow each other to do, while they waft off on wings of true love. Whether this was purely a selfless act, even I was uncertain. Not that girls ever wanted to canoodle in this way with me, anyway. Until I eventually met my one true love in a different but preferable future.

Even as a boy, in one of those archetypal school playgrounds — where the cracking of conkers, like elbows, were often louder than that of boys’ skulls in boisterous play hitting the arcanely white-lined concrete — I would never dare enter an “out-staring” game with my friends in case the final Big Blink was not quite as fail-safe as one would normally expect. Opticians, to me, were far more a gross-out than the worst conceivable dentist. 

One day, in the local pub, I picked up a loose-limbed lovely whom I christened Joy in honour of my dreams. As usual, all the signs were there. I found myself staring at her blonde downy legs, travelling up the curves with my eyes, mentally unravelling the knitted dress.

“What you giving me the eyeful for, mister?” Her voice was as coarse as her body was beautiful. But I was literally trapped by her gorgeously unclouded bowls of sight, mooning out towards me, weltering in cosmetics. “Well, feel my knee!” she crooned loudly, as I shuffled nearer on the legs of my bar stool, knowing instinctively that this was exactly what I wanted to start doing. At least, she couldn’t possibly be a qualified optician, with a voice like that. But, when I bent her arm up behind her back in some apparently motiveless nostalgia for the good old boy’s school playground (or perhaps I thought she was a fruit machine), I saw the writing on the wall. She kicked me hard in the crutch … and I found himself teetering above a bottomless pit of black slime seething and burping between the stalags of my own gigantic brain. 

Joy is awake, even if I’m not. She has startled me with a jump-start from unconsciousness. Indeed, we require a watch-out, like carnivores need back teeth. The freighters find it easier to give us the slip at night, even though the degree of darkness is unchanged. It’s something to do with moods, or with half-chances, because the art of surreptitiousness needs only a tiny twiddle on the tuner for the programme to change. The juke-box whirrs in the background, its needle only a fraction of space and time between hitting the scrawling tracker-groove of “Hats Off To Larry” by Del Shannon and hovering there forever like Pod Oblomov itself. 

Even awake, it’s difficult to land thoughts. 

The voice was clear and bright, like freshly hammered bell steel. I could not believe what my ears told me, for I was ensconced alone in a sound-proof booth, acting as a guinea pig for an experiment in solitary confinement. For days now (it could have been weeks for all I knew or grown to care), I had rested on my back, connected up with relatively silent in-and-out drip feeds which penetrated the sides of the coffinish booth through light-tight valves. Only the sound of an odd muffled bubble had infrequently broken my dreams. 

How I had been landed with this job began as a long story cut short, now long again. Suffice it to say, I was stony broke, loveless and careless. Hence, the job would give me warmth, sustenance and physical comfort for as long as it would take to use up several dole cheques. So, until the novelty wore off, I was in clover. I had yearned for such an opportunity when not needing to get up nor exert myself either physically or mentally: a perfect memory in the making. 

Then (and how!) the darkness grew darker in my eyes, the silence a dead weight, my body and non-body alike becoming a mass of aches and mental prickles. They’d told me (and I’d forgotten who “they” exactly were) the various drugs contained in the food streams should prevent any bodily discomfort. But, I began to suppose, that’s what the experiment was designed to discover: the efficacy (or not) of such medication and, indeed, the adaptability (or otherwise) of the human condition. 

It was strange how I became philosophical under the increasing strain. At one time an “ordinary, relatively normal” member of the human race — listening to the football results come a Saturday afternoon, getting my end away (or leg over), coping with the wear and tear of entropy (though I now call it balls-aching old age) and negotiating the trivial, transient matters of which most lives are constituted — I was now speculating on the Existence of God (and why God was so goddamn important to warrant speculating on His (god)forsaken existence), the undependability of the senses (speculating even on the uncertainty of my own existence), the mind-body dilemma until the thoughts tailed off as if they couldn’t be bothered any longer to stop disowning me as the thinker thinking them. And an elbowy Pod that threatens to crack open at the hinge as the weight of global-warming bore down upon it, a climate change spreading like a pandemic into outer space itself, making the whole universe subject to man’s uncaring tenancy of it.

But, then, as the symptons of discomfort infiltrated from each and every angle and as I actually discovered that my body was jacking against the pinions which shackled it, my haywire mind would slip out of gear and become entrammelled in the labyrinthine syncromesh of premature senility. So before such an onset, I should introduce myself as the one running the Oblomov Experiment, with one beautiful assistant, true, but she’s currently off sick with Covivid. So, it’s predominantly me with a notepad beside my elbow that I write in sporadically and upon which  posterity will have to depend. Sleepless nights galore, all for the sake of science. One dead of night, I will hear the bell-clear voice ringing out at the same time as Oblomov’s moving graph pen indicates that a man screams from inside the sound-proof booth. But I fear that the screaming will come from my own mouth, penetrating places where even the Richter Scale fears to tread. Then I’ll be dead, or entombed, I don’t know which, but not before I have a chance to finish a real dream. 

Dear Pod, You feel good in my hands, as I thread you through the channels of space. It just needs the slightest touch on your controls which, by means of the craftily positioned pulleys and gears, shifts your majestic bicep-rudder in wide sweeps … thus drawing as much friction as is possible from the vacuum that space surely is, without the need of fiction. 

And you’re like a person to me, Pod. That’s why I’m addressing you personally. We’ve been together, it seems, since eternity itself began all those years ago, man and boy. Or is it man and something else? Whatever the case, we took off when I was but a mere stripling and, as you know, I hadn’t experienced love. Thinking about it, they (whoever “they” were) were rather cruel sending the likes of me on an endless task like this … but all’s well that ends well (if at all). I’ve at least known your love, dear Pod, and that I cherish more than anything in the whole world (plus sixpence). The world? What is this thing called World? Only a mind can hope to know, if only via its own filter of reality. 

I often speculate on the channels of space through which we thread, dear Pod. I’ve always liked that “we”, makes me feel cosy, but, one day, perhaps, I’ll call us me, then we’ll never be separated, I’ll never be us again, or some such words, if you get my drift, dear Pod, ramble though I’m prone to do. Yet I have nagging doubts. I often wonder if these are but channels in my dreams and if the freight be cargo-cults of memory … that you don’t exist at all … utter benighted solitude … just me, in an imaginary impersonal coffin-cask, shifted from pillar to post amid the mere quirkish stalactites and stalagmites of my own brain … that’s a thoughtless doom to face. Not surprising that I’m fed up to my back teeth with consciousness. Upon a bed of gums by means of which only I managed to escape, and I must sign off. Time for sleepy-byes. I can rest long and easy because you’ll keep me safe, won’t you, dearest Pod. And, surely, you love and care for only me. You see, automatic pilots, by definition, are mindless as well as shankless and I am no exception. Control is so very very sweet. With that last thought, I sign off, dear long-lost Podcast. Yours adoringly, Joy Stick.

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/new-discrete-fictoniatures-1.html