Fictoniatures (3) by D.F. Lewis

 Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/fictoniatures-2-by-df-lewis.html

—

WAYFARERS AND STEERERS

“I daren’t set pen to paper, in case the truth comes out,” he said.

I stared at him, wondering whether he was set to continue. It seemed odd, to say the least, that he should unburden himself to a complete stranger like myself. I laughed out loud at a private joke whilst studying the man’s demeanour. He settled deeper into the seat and pulled down the padded armrest from its vertical bed. His cheeks were so loose they looked like quivering jelly, as the train failed to slow down to negotiate a series of points.

“One day, there’ll be a terrible accident along this part of the line,” I found myself saying — which was, in hindsight, some pretty bizarre small talk!

He began to take more notice of me and, as he leaned forward to meet eye with my eye, his waistcoat buttons strained against what must have been his wife’s ancient needlethread. Unaccountably, I placed a hand over one of my eyes, like a patch, as he told me the strangest stilted traveller’s tale imaginable.

= 

Jack felt happy behind the wheel. So much more in control than forsaking oneself to public transport (like this train, dear sir). Anyway, the sense of power travelling up the arms to the brain always gave him a kick. Although he’d seen the traffic pile-ups now a rage as art exhibits in trendy galleries, he somehow felt immune behind the windscreen, as the ribbon of road shot under his two front wheels. It was like playing one of those seaside pier games, where if one impinged upon the hard shoulder into the wayside rubble, Brownie plus-points were merely lost rather an impression made on the actuarial mortality tables: tables very much in vogue as bedside reading for the nouveau riche.

Well, Jack turned slightly to view his passenger (closer together, of course, than you and I in this carriage): an elderly, but still elegant, lady who, he knew, had, for most of her life, suffered from asthma and bouts of emphysema. It was her birthday and, as a treat, he was gratuitously taking her on a mystery tour. She particularly enjoyed watching the Narrow Boats on the Union Canal as they negotiated the flight of locks at Pyecroft. So, of course, this place was included in the otherwise flexible itinerary.

In her younger days, she was a dab hand on the tiller, guiding the long sluggish beast of a boat, whilst carefully compensating for the delayed reaction of its slowly swinging prows. It helped that she had never driven a car, since the canal boat’s steering was, by comparison, back to front. And, often, a whole day’s journey length for such an unwieldy craft was a matter of a few second for a car. (Of course, trains, dear sir, are quite a different kettle of fish.)

Anyway, the tiller tales she had to tell were many. Jack smiled, relaxing back into the car seat, fingers of one hand resting lightly on the heel of the steering-wheel, foot evenly pressed upon the gas pedal, surging past other drivers who didn’t have the same courage of their convictions. She was rambling between clogging breaths, and it was not possible for Jack to catch more than three quarters of what she said.

“Did I tell you,” she said making it sound more like a statement than a question (and sorry if I can’t imitate her voice exactly, but I’ll have a good go to give you a flavour of her talking). “You know, it was easy in those days to find a berth. People hadn’t got the canal bug, so much. Me and Tom, well, I took him once into a relatively unopened part of the Stewpot Ring — you know round Brum. The Cut was just an excuse for the land to end and begin again on the other bank. The towpath simply a shadow of its former self, grass crumpled down here and there by gongoozlers. But where the gongoozlers went or where they came from and who they were…”

It may not even have been her voice at all as it sounded so unfamiliar to Jack. The words were too wordy, for one thing. Still, the way the phlegm lay on her chest affected the vocal cords and made them into something less than or, at least, different from, real words. Jack sensed her shrugging but when he turned away from the fast lane for a second, it was easy to believe that she was half-asleep. The rattling in her chest was growing louder, too.

“Well, Tom said we should moor soon,” she resumed. “It was getting dark … very quickly as it happened … you’re not allowed to ply the canal after dusk … we discovered a ridiculously large Winding-Hole which Tom and I knew no others would be using for turning the boat in the night, so we moored on the overgrown bank … but we feared grounding ourselves, you see…”

Jack must have nodded, but he was convinced she was snoring. The car needed to slow down through some cones and on to a contraflow. As he pumped the pedal to put on the anchors, the voice continued its droning, between stertorous breaths: “Well, you see, Tom was a one for ghosts. And we just sat there on the stern for a while watching the last daylight drain from the trees. I told him a story that I had told him before but he had forgotten, it seemed … about a ghost that one day met a zombie…”

Jack thought he must have imagined the word ‘zombie’, because any such words were likely to be outside her vocabulary. Anyway, he found himself yawning. A plague on her. Not only was she talking out of character, it now didn’t even sound like her phlegm!

Motorway tiredness was not something from which Jack usually suffered. But now it was hardly possible to hear the passenger’s words (and I hope mine are clear enough, dear sir, bearing in mind the racket this train’s making!). She seemed to be digging ever deeper into her chest, via the phlegm, for further words to say.

It was now part of the motorway which crossed the beginnings of the Pyecroft canal systems. Jack had once been taken on a cruise, by this very lady (her last canal-boat voyage, as it happened), and under this very carriageway on which he was now driving was where this very voyage under it had taken place. They had heard the roar of traffic in the “sky”and the odd ambulance siren, then wondering why the authorities had not cleaned the undersides of the motorway. Both Tom and Jack had joked around with windlasses at the locks as if they were both axe-murderers. But, now, as he took the road for Pyecroft proper, there was evidence of someone having knocked down the direction sign in a previous shunt — now cleared up except for a few stray tyre shreds. “…Like the flayed flesh of an African slave.” Could Jack have really said that?

The old lady snorted like a trench man, the tiller tale held in suspension. He hoped to be able soon to arrange that nice cup of tea which she so craved. It would no doubt help cut the morning’s phlegm. Loosen it up, at least.

As the car broke the back of the hill with a mere stirring of the gear-stick amid what he considered to be the jelly-like muscles of his old car’s faltering engine, Jack noticed that more miles had been clocked up than this journey usually took for the same space of time. But there were congratulations due for the points score (if you see what I’m driving at, dear sir!)
The moored flock of Narrow Boats glistened in the sun like some child’s best toys, as Jack drove into Pyecroft valley towards the harbour. The flight of locks stepped into the sky, with white-water pounds each with its own churning, waiting boat. The bikini-clad tiller girls would, Jack guessed, be staring sightlessly into the near distance while their automatic impulsive piloting within the increasing lock-space kept the brick sides from closing in. A bit like a short tunnel without a roof.

As he turned off the car engine in the parking lot, there was a complete silence inside the bodywork. The lady passenger didn’t even appear to be able to breathe at all.

At heart, Jack knew that her story of the canal trip with Tom would never be completed. He wondered whether the ghost discovered that the zombie was its own erstwhile body: a body made with black-pudding flesh even nastier than the stale remains of asthma on the lungs which even the most scalding tea possible would fail to dislodge. But, no, not even someone like Jack could have thought such thoughts (unlike me, presumably, dear sir, eh?)

The old lady crooned tunelessly, as her own thoughts finally sunk — twirling into the Winding-Hole of her mind — yet funnelling the wrong way for this hemisphere.

=

My co-traveller on the train stopped his tale at that tantalising moment. I decided not to acknowledge what he had told me and merely said: “This part of the line has not had an accident upon it, to my knowledge — but have you seen the red scarecrows that some silly ass of a farmer has seen fit to put among his sugar beet alongside the track?”

The answer to my question was pre-empted by the tunnel arriving much earlier than I expected or vaguely remembered. It seemed awkwardly impolite to allow the darkness to enforce silence upon us (the driver at the front having forgotten to switch over to the on-board lights) so I asked him for another tale, but decided in the end to tell my own as a token thank-you for his.

=

“The house stands in its own grounds,” announced the lady guide.

I turned round to argue the point. Where else could it possibly stand? But she had proceeded to describe the Summer Pagoda which was artfully concealed behind fruit trees at the bottom of the landscaped garden. The other visitors trooped desultorily behind her, whilst I veered off to inspect the folly of a tall chimneystack that the first Lord of the Manor was said to have built “for the smoke from the fires of Hell to escape.” And, yes, standing solitary in the stable area, it towered into the encroaching dusk, the jagged tops of its two chimney-pots clawing a faint white scar into the sky where the moon should have been.

The lady guide’s voice disappeared into the distance, but I could still make out her calling her flock to attention. She was about to tell of the Pagoda’s ghost. I knew the story because I had done my homework on the Manor before coming. The ghost was said to be controlled from the past by a man who had actually released it with his suicide. I never quite understood properly, but there seemed to be a grain of truth about it, however unconvincing the actual story.

My wife and I were staying at the only hotel in the area. (And it would interest you to know that there were many canals about. Indeed, I think it was probably not far from Pyecroft.) Most of the other visitors had holed up in bed-and-breakfast places, not being able to afford such full star luxury. Gold fittings in the bathroom were not the be all and end all, however, you know. The pair of surly women who ran the hotel were worth at least one less star in their own right — and I had left my wife there today, not really because she didn’t feel well (although she did have a slight sick phlegminess when she first woke up), but more because she had heard the outrageous legend of the Manor with regard to married women. Indeed, several ladies had returned from a visit there only to find themselves pregnant, after years of unsuccessfully trying. Not that any of that could possibly affect my wife, at her age and her state of health. But the hints were enough: she would stay behind and have a quiet day in the hotel garden reading the latest Anita Brookner and, being a great needlewoman, finishing off a sampler. I rather envied her, in a way. But holidays always caused me to feel guilty if I were not spending the time “constructively” visiting the sights.

Whoever had constructed the Manor as mansion must have been a master mason. It literally owned the hillside on which it sloped in tiers. I could almost believe its turrets and chimneystacks sucked night early into the vicinity with their dark arches at both extremities of the building (like those old-fashioned childhood magnets). But whether I thought that at the time, I can no longer recall. Anyway, if I did think such thoughts, I soon shook them off: I had stayed too long for my own good. The other tourists had hustled the lady guide off to the local pub. If I were to view the Pagoda, it would be necessary to do it on my own. The grounds were not to be shut for at least another half hour — and I checked my watch, because the darkening skies caused me to doubt the actual time of day. Casting a backward glance at the ludicrously autonomous chimneystack, I think I imagined it was Satan’s finger stuck through the earth in a loutish gesture. I almost disowned my imagination for playing such games with my own thoughts.

The Pagoda itself had become just another common or garden shadow, as I approached it from the fountain area. I had skirted the landscaped maze, studiously eschewing the perverse welcome of its various entrances and exits. A maze would indeed have been a folly, at this time of night.

=

As I paused in my tale at the end of the tunnel, I saw there was one other passenger sharing the train compartment. I now recalled that she had climbed on from the halt at Pyecroft Locks, a woman of indeterminate age in a tweed costume that seemed too old for her. There being no corridor on the train, she would probably have chosen her random travel companions with as much care as the train’s short flirtation with the high platform would allow — being on her own. I was rather perturbed by her behaviour, I must admit, having opened the window without asking the permission of any “sitting tenants” — but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. There were bits of my traveller’s tale I would have censored, if I had remembered her being there.

The long leather strap that worked the window up and down was beginning to unstitch along its length. As I watched it swinging with the train’s fitful rhythm, I recalled the family hassock in my local church, equally needy of repair. Every time I knelt on it these days, more stuffing came out. Before long, I expected to feel just the bare boards of the church floor.

The day had turned darker as we left the tunnel. Probably a storm brooding, I mused. The stout gent had withdrawn into himself, with the flesh of his face clinging to the bones as a result of the renewed acceleration. However, seeing me again (as if for the first time) he told me how he had travelled this line for forty years (he didn’t look that old, I must say) — and how he had intended to write about his experiences, in the form of memoirs, describing the various “wayfarers and steerers of the rail” (as he put it), whom he had encountered and the incidents, near-misses and trackside sights he had managed to accumulate in his “bag of tales”. But, somehow, he explained to me, he had never been able to commit anything to paper. It was as if he felt that actually writing it all out would be a form of curse fulfilment, making things true that should never have been true. Making the track’s sleepers into real fictons, as it were.

I nodded, pretending to understand. Ever since boarding the train with him at Brum, I had wondered why I had not opted for a different compartment. This being an out of season jaunt, there must have been plenty of vacant ones and I could have spent my journey in supreme seclusion. It was the way he had almost expected me to follow him into the same compartment, so as to help him lift his luggage to the rack. Why a daily commuter on this line, which he had given me the impression he was, should require such heavy luggage was, at that time, a mystery. The combined boarding must have been tied up with travelling incognito, as I was. I did not want to attract attention to myself — and so I had surrendered matters to chance: enticed into some kind of pilgrim’s proximity with him, for whatever reason, then unclear.

“Were your ‘memoirs’, as you call them, going to include descriptions of co-travellers — such as myself? Did you not mention the possibility of character studies, as well as views from windows and — what were they? — near-misses, incidents, danger-points…” I asked, in a tailing-off way.

“Yes, I was going to put in real people, of all things, but maybe I won’t. It would be too … cruel, perhaps.”

The third passenger looked up from her corner, where she had begun by staring at something on her knee. She must have taken up knitting in the tunnel, for I had not noticed till now the clacking of the needles, audible even above the trundling train — and strangely in rhythm with it. She seemed to grow less winsome with each nod of her head towards the business ends of the bone-white needles. She suddenly spoke quietly, her own traveller’s tale, I suppose, but yet, peculiarly something else.

=

In the hotel garden, it was still warm even when the sun had gone down. The moon’s curdled eyes was like a balloon which I controlled. October had always been very pleasant in recent years. I closed the Brookner library book. In a way, I didn’t want to read to the end tonight. Even my sewing looked unappetising. There was a late bird competing with the squeak of a rodent, behind the gurgling sounds of the garden’s natural spring. The windows of our hotel bedroom, I thought, should not have been left open so late. Tom should be home soon to shut them. I’d stay out here till then, it being so warm. Dinner would not be for another hour. I coughed gently. Something was working round me, I feared. Days that were long before Covid.

The two hotel women, despite their ill manners, could certainly cook — or at least one of them could, I mused. Their voices bickered from an open window. Concerns like hotels more often than not were run by a man-and-woman partnership. Off-putting, otherwise, with no children to take over the reins one day. Tom and I had in fact tried for years to produce a child. We both prayed for our own Jack and Jill pigeon pair. Preferably in that order. Just one of them would have done, though. Better than none. However, lately, we did not even think of it as a potential child, but more a vehicle like this one for transporting our fortune into the future…

I must have felt at my belly. But it was more my chest that seemed loaded. I was not certain enough to tell Tom about my suspicions. After the holiday, I thought it might be a good idea to visit the doctor. The doctor who knew me inside out. I guess, as Tom sat inside the Summer Pagoda, he imagined me in the hotel gardens, as if he were within my head. Being in the wrong head, I suppose, would be like steering one of those big clumsy canal-boats…

Quite uncanny, some of my thoughts, when I remembered the operation I underwent a few years before. No baby could survive a traumatic episode like that. Tom must have sensed the distant movements inside the ground beneath him I felt the tremors, too. I reckon the other tourists had, by now, reached their bed-and-breakfast places, dreaming of being reincarnated out-of-bounds. Well, I did have thoughts like that, in those days. I’m better now, though.

Then, being blinkered by night, I must have felt a snagging tug on one of my ears, as if I were guided by unseen reins. And, with the past still jerking the present, my eyelids shut like the library book’s covers — closing a story before its end, before its abortive future with only a zombie to read it.

But, as I say, I’m better now.

=

She resumed her erstwhile silence. I may have imagined some of the more outlandish details, but I don’t think so. Whatever the case, the scarecrows were there outside the train window, just where I remembered them from my previous journey along this line about five years before. Dressed in tatters of used bandages, some bent over as if sowing, others with arms outstretched in pitying appeal to their audience. It was bluntly uncanny. Some of them were quite fat, for scarecrows. One female scarecrow (if scarecrows could ever have gender) stood in a crimson pool of sunset. It looked as if there were an unfinished scarecrow on the ground nearby, tilting over by being top-heavy. The train had slowed, but not enough, as if to tantalise me with the sight. 

When there was nobody left in the carriage, following its tailgating at Gridlock Halt, the worn leather tongue on the door’s window looking as if it were covered in the cold translucent slime of dusk’s weird effulgence; it still wagged with residues of vibration. Sadly, the platform buffet was boarded up, so the long yearned-for cup of piping hot tea had sadly slipped off some mindless story’s end. Each of you readers of it being wayside gongoozlers, no doubt, watching points change instead of locks. But I end with one question: can scarecrows be built with large bellies on purpose? (I preferred big-headed ones like me.)

***

WHICH WAY SHALL I GO?

That was the question on a handwritten note that faced me on the main entrance when I arrived at the next mansion in my tour of duty. I have grown accustomed to such notes left outside places, say, for Amazon delivery drivers saying: “Please leave package here, back soon” — or more generally: “No cold callers”, “ No Hawkers or Travellers”, “No Junk Mail” etc. But never before “Which way shall I go?”  Did the ‘I’ refer to the person who wrote it? Or was it to shed doubt on the reader’s ability to negotiate some treasure trail or quest as a party game — a universal ‘I’ for whoever it was intended? I took it as the latter … until I spotted a distant figure wandering in the large garden  as if he or she were lost. Crashing pell mell into runner bean canes, or somehow tripping over the legs of what appeared to be a beehive. Obviously, a honey trap, this place, I thought. And I laughed. But the close encounter with the runner beans seemed to have caused the figure to start running back to where it had once been. It seemed to behave, after the beehive, more and more frantically as if suddenly waking to the full importance of the handwritten note it had left on the mansion door. I wondered whether this was a lesson for me to learn. Could this be the very ghost for which I had long hunted inside mansions, now outside in the open air, not existing between the walls of a building. I  had ever assumed any ghost must be pent up to exist at all, kept there from whereto it should have gone. This was an eye-opener for me. Indeed, was the world one huge open space for an infinity of ghosts to thrive? I took the note from the door as if it were intended for me to take and return to its perpetrator. I started running to where I last saw the figure had been, somehow knowing it had now taken the responsibility of all the decision-making away from me and thus resolving the anxieties of a lifetime that whatever decision I made I would become lost. I followed each fork and turn, drawing closer and closer to each other. Until the figure turned and smiled. And I returned the smile. We had somehow resolved a problem that had beset us both until now, and I guessed neither of us had known what the problem was in the first place, if there had been a problem at all. A cold calling across the chasm of being.

===

 “How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare

***

In a form of continuation here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/victims-fictionalised-by-purging-torque.html