IN THREE MOVEMENTS
PROLOGUE
He tried to be simple but it never worked. He tried it without a name. But it involved several guesses that simply made it more complicated. He then tried it with his real name. This led to an unholy mess of recrimination. He then tried a pseudonym. That worked better. Also two titles worked better than one, but arguably less well than none. Certainly better than more. That could not be explained. So, he had a certain amount of perplexity about possible titles but learned to live with it. Two titles became the optimum. Neither crowded or uncrowded. But I sensed there was a shadowy third.
He had earlier, questioned, though, whether it should have a beginning. And if no beginning, why not no end as well? But everything needed to have a beginning and an end even if he did not intend them to be a beginning and an end. Perhaps they were simply beginning and end by default. A story with no middle like a mansion without a roof.
There was never any question about authorship, however. Everything was what it was, with no unnecessary nomenclature together with the minimum use of long words and heavy syntax. And he was whoever he was, even if disguised by a pseudonym.
Now we come to the unravelling simplicity of a work with two titles (and a shadowy third), but with no author, and a main protagonist conveniently known by an otherwise unwanted name — and ostensibly a work with no beginning or end, because he had caused its ending to be truncated or cropped after it had been finished.
***************
He was a lover of old English churches. He loved especially those single-towered or single-spired churches with basic styles, such as undecorated wooden box-pews, an unwordy pulpit, a crudely manufactured (even makeshift) altar, silent bell-ringers and a pervading atmosphere of natural faith uncluttered by any sense of evil or even by a simple doubt.
He (our man) had left you at the hotel, telling you that he may be quite a long time today as he wished to explore St Nemo’s Church in Desborough with particular care, because a famous knight was supposed to have found his final resting-place there. A knight who had featured quite heavily in an unnamed book which he was investigating so as to simplify a view of history that had wrongly been complicated by unworthy historians just in it for the money. Our man hoped that there may be some textual or textural inscription on the tomb that would explain why the knight had been given his title of ‘Sir’. Particularly with which monarch he had found favour, there being several possible monarchs whose respective periods of reign had crossed the time-line of the knight’s own life.
“The plural of opus is opera,” said our man, with characteristic absent-minded absurdity. He then told a hotel worker he would need a lunch-box for his day at Desborough, in hope that this tone of homeliness would make the other forget the absurdity he had just voiced.
“Have you asked the kitchen staff for a lunch-box?” this hotel worker asked. Evidently, our man’s ploy had worked well.
“They told me to ask again in the morning,” he replied. He laughed upon thinking that the word ‘replied’ had ‘lied’ built-in. Then immediately he airbrushed away the thought that had caused the laughter.
The night was full of dreams that our man, in his search for simplicity, also tried to brush away come morning. Dreams were easier to forget than most things. He had effectively forgotten about his own untruth about planning to ask the kitchen staff in the morning because he actually did ask the hotel’s kitchen staff in the morning and they fortuitously provided a lunch-box for him to take, although it was full of what later became a congealed mess.
He said goodbye to the hotel as if it were a person instead of a renovated mansion, and began his trudge through the Essex creeks towards the church at Desborough. The weather was inclement and he was thankful for his thermal vest.
“Thank you, thank you…” he muttered absently to himself, as he watched the spire gradually exceed the distance between itself and the hotel from which he came. The journey should have been more straightforward, but one had to account for the number of missed turnings. As ever, there was only a single complex way to describe everything; unfortunately that would not have helped his ambitions to capture a confident simplicity from between the jaws of difficult doubt. The journey was probably full of tangents and misadventures. He preferred a straight unbroken line between A and B and so it turned out to be for our reading purposes here. But he did allow report of the lost lunch-box. He would tell you about it later to excuse his excessive appetite.
Despite the never-ending glimpses of the spire seeming to move by its own volition rather than from his changing vantage-point, the destination was eventually reached before this part of the story’s end. The exterior of the church was lit by a sudden glance of the sun through the clouds, simultaneously lifting his heart in the process. He had been particularly crestfallen by the loss of the lunch-box as well as by the anti-climax of arrival. The sun, however, seemed to lift the church from its own slough of despond. The wet roofs of the surrounding village could be seen through the trees as simple as an impression. Not a painting so much as a forgotten dream.
He approached the door of the church, having first ascertained there was no relevant stone-marker in the graveyard concerning the knight in question. Such an important titled personage would probably have his resting-place within the church walls … and so it turned out to be, his carved stone likeness crowning the tomb’s lid, giving the impression that he had two bodies: one hard and permanent that was on view, the other just the congealed mess within.
“Thank you, thank you…” our man again muttered absently to himself. “Hmmm, this must be him. A simple turn of events. What was expected is what has happened. Thank you, indeed.”
It was too dark inside the church to make out visually the box-pews with any degree of clarity. Rearing from one of them, a huge grim shadow held out his missing lunch-box. Was this simply what one would have expected given the circumstances of time and motion? Or the most frightening experience possible? The sunshine, evidently now permanently in existence outside the church, was illuminating the altar-window like glimpses of a true Heaven rather than stains of a false one. A diversion thankfully back towards simplicity.
“Don’t forget me,” he heard you say inside his head. You must have known he had been in danger; but, sitting in the hotel lounge reading a Henry James novel, you was, in fact, further away than any such impression could vouchsafe. You would have preferred M.R. James. But there had been no need to worry even if you had given yourself good reason to worry. Your hero returned before nightfall.
“There are two Heavens, one called Hell, the other History,” our man noted in his note-book after lightly rubbing, for many hours, a soft pencil-lead over his own thermal vest which he had earlier stretched, like tracing-paper, upon the alphabetical interstices of the benighted stone box-lid of the knight’s tomb. God is the one true hero: he thought his last thought, later in your arms. There was no ending to crop off. But soon there would be!
****************
The soldiers marched through the forest, some even taller than the trees. These soldiers were actually over-engineered robots at the same time as being scaled down to appear like giant human beings; they marched under the orders of two special robots that were in turn scaled up to appear like stunted versions of the gods depicted in the Ancient Book. But not the same ancient book that our man once cherished and taught you to read in humility. A book more likely to be name-checked in Lovecraft than James.
It was as if nobody understood the chain of command but were jockeying for positions in the variously perceived pecking orders of robot, human and god.
“How many more?” roared one god to the other.
“Millions, millions of them, marching to their death,” was the reply, with redoubled roar to outbid the screeching air.
Wild bird-fighters soared and slanted, sky-skidding and sky-skimming above the belittled forest. A huge forest belittled into a wood by those who marched through it. One by one the soldiers died a terrible death, across eternities of hand-to-hand fighting, the single force of a single army battling within its own ranks amid a makeshift war.
“There are two many heroes,” roared a pipsqueak god, diminished by the cruelty he oversaw.
“Too many brave hearts,” roared an even pipsqueakier god.
The roars were only roars because all other sounds had become a foil of silence. The roars were – in pitiful effect – barely beyond the threshold of hearing. One solitary robot having survived the eternities looked towards the old spire that had one represented an earlier god who had held sway upon the infighting army. Our man wore a soldier’s metal armour and was in truth merely a soldier disguised as a robot, as would become clear in almost instantaneous hindsight. The spire became – amid the roiling mists at the end of time – an image upon the cover of the Ancient Book. Spineless and without title. The forest’s trees were bending down between them like courtly pages-in-waiting.
Smothered by silence, our man as a cyborg soldier tried to find another soldier like himself to fight, rather than have his eyes pecked out by a bony bird-fighter settling – even as he thought about it – upon his face from the sky. But it was simply a ghost configured from the soldier’s own metal-eyelid wings hovering like eye-floaters.
The last hero was one too many.
**************
The fog came down like a safety-curtain. The voice you then heard wasn’t muffled but seemed as clearly struck as a well-tempered bell. It rent the air in much the same way as you imagined an opera singer would rend it in recitative to himself, probably unaware you were close by. You made as if to answer but this was too early in the morning to trust any voice. Cold and crisp as a Christmas older than simply old-fashioned.
Our man had often scolded you for failing to be wary of strangers early in the morning.
“You know it’s just as dangerous and as lonely at dawn as at night-time,” he said. You would nod. His warning strangely reminded you of the case of late-night drinkers religiously avoiding driving themselves home because of the law regarding inebriation, but then they would get up early in the morning after a similar skinful the previous night and drive without thinking. If they were breathalysed they would still be over the limit. Old Christmases were full of drivers weaving all over the road, at any time of the day or night, looking for innocent parties to maim, it seemed. If it wasn’t so funny, you would have laughed at this train of thought. The thought itself was confusing. You almost felt drunk yourself, but you never drank spirits. Or even beer.
Upon this morning in question, however, your mind was as clear as the aforementioned bell. Our man’s warning took root as you heard the lonely traveller’s relentless soliloquy become a sing-song rant that rent onward through the now mist-turning fog, while retaining a vague resemblance to spoken speech. You could see the face at this point for the first time amid the ‘smoke’ rising from the dawn frost that the fog was, even as you spoke, simply allowing to take its place. It was a muzzily kind face, clamped into the sweetest smile you had ever seen on a man.
The figure held out an upturned palm as if singing Christmas Carols for a charity. However, there were others behind with faces that looked far from Christmassy. They could have easily found a suitable dance routine in a film of thrills, you thought, as you gathered yourself to run. But your limbs were now rusted metal, it seems, not flesh. All of these faces must still be suffering last night’s skinfuls, as they shuffled closer into view. The stitching of their outer surfaces allowing their innards to poke though.
At heart, you knew you was too old to run. Our man had often said that age brings dignity, together with a counterproductivity beyond our control, representing forces that eventually destroy the very dignity that brought these forces into being. It was now you wished you had been drinking. Then, none of this would have seemed to matter. You absently heard cars on the near-by by-pass. This was the onset of commuter traffic just as, against the odds of reality, a once permanently static dawn turned to rush-hour.
“Run, run as if your life depends on it.” You heard his voice as if it were actually there. It overtook the operatic crooning from the shamblers of the morning’s school run. Kids once run over, now alive again to seek retribution from those who had swerved into their young bodies, because of drink. Led by the stylish figure of the smiling soloist for an unseasonal chorus of trick-or-treating.
“I am the knight,” you piped. “Knighted for good works and donations to help the wheels of civilisation go round. Mistaken identity. Begone!”
Your voice was never as strong as our man’s but you stood your ground. The world was going round as if you were truly drunk. Running was never even a starter. “A bad trick. A bad treat. I was never a drunk driver. Was I?”, words that you intended to intone inwardly. Strangely, you realised the sound of the words had come out all wrong. It was as if you were also singing … just like the unholy chorus … but in counterpoint … using a rich timbre uncharacteristic of your voice. Your normal squeaky undertones had vanished. Your feet may well have been packed in ice, but your voice was pure molten gold to match the maturing sunrise. And the golden limbs with which you walked.
“Not a drunk driver, Sir Knight, but a bad one.” It was unspoken. But you at least knew the truth. Drunk drivers were pilloried. Bad drivers simply endured. We can all have accidents. It was then you saw that the leading figure was our man himself, face still scarred by windscreen shards. Neck gored by gear-stick. Too long in the tooth for comfort. His voice had broken during the oldest Christmas of all, that dark season when those tricked from life before their time reached out for resurrection.
Upstaged, unsung, stripped of title, you took him in your arms as you would if he had been yourself and you poured out a poignant aria, till succumbing to the final curtain that lowered across the most dangerous time of day in the pretence of it being the safest. The shuffling shambling angels took his body away, no doubt, before the pre-emptive ending was truncated, even airbrushed away, to the extent that we shall never know that our man as the last hero had already come to your rescue before any of it had happened or merged as one. And he was knighted for it. Placed in gold armour and then embedded in stone, as belt and braces.
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