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.