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