Death and the...

Nobody can barter with Death.

Johnny tried his hardest: giving his own Death all sorts of options as to how to kill him but with the only proviso that if the option that Death chose turned out to be wrong then Death would leave him alone forever. Death thought it was on to a winner. It had never tried to barter with a human subject before and found it an amusing game. Why not give this Johnny-me-lad a bit of fun, too, just a chance of avoiding Death and befriending an Impossibility called Immortality? Give him this fun, and then snatch it away, with Death ever having the trump card: because only Death could choose how a human died and therefore it would choose an option that would later be fulfilled by the destiny of certainty. Johnny believed in free will, however, even in Death’s free will and consequent fallibility.

Johnny’s wife – Dymphna – was not kept in the loop. Johnny’s big mistake and Death’s good fortune. Johhny had not shared secrets with Dymphna for many years – and a habit extended forever is a habit that by-passes Death – or so went the religious tracts in the only water-tight religion that existed among the gullible race of humans. Not telling Dymphna about his pact with Death was all part of the scheme he hatched. Because he knew Death was a blabber-mouth and would itself tell Dymphna – thus breaking the vicious circle that kept that Impossibility called Immortality at bay. All manner of cause-and-effect and virtuous or vicious circles were at play here. Johnny was no fool. But Death, reading this, had got more and more confused. Until one night – a lucky break for Death – Johnny had a dream that he told Dymphna everything, i.e. that he had bartered with Death and that Death had chosen Mental Breakdown as the cause of Johnny’s own death: a strange choice to make, but Death liked to give itself challenges.

“You can’t die from Mental Breakdown,” said Dymphna in the dream.

“What if I top myself?” said Johnny – in the same dream.

The logic of it was that Suicide was the real cause of death, while the Mental Breakdown itself was merely the Proximate Cause, a term used in Insurance Law.

This put at least nine cats among the proverbial pigeons.

Death did not approve of Euthanasia, of course. And that, coincidentally, was Dymphna’s second name.

Johhny’s still dreaming. A different dream now, with an easy entry doorway from the previous dream that had contained Dymphna, but now a dream with no exit doorway. Perhaps, a prolonged dream of being dead – stretching towards forever forever: a sort of dream that only a rare form of Mental Breakdown in alliance with Sleep could cause. A concept beyond the scope of any religion ... or political correctness regarding insanity ... or the necessity of Pascal’s wager.

This left Death in the doldrums and Dymphna both married to and widowed by the same man. And me left with no real ending, the worst fate of all.

Death and the Lost Gambit. Titles are always best last.

The Stereograph

An extract from my real-time review of 'The Mauve Embellishments' by Charles Schneider (Passport Levant 2011) here.

The Stereograph

“Yes. He had heard a fragment of a rumour many years ago at a slide collectors convention in Blackpool.”

Blackpool, or Menton? Seriously, I’m sure I’ve now reached a genuine Weird fiction classic, as if I’ve been led craftily towards this story by the previous ones so the shock is processed to the fullest. The obsession of collecting, to the point of not even sharing the primest item in the collection with oneself! Collecting and death in symbiosis. The secret of parthenogenesis reached but only for those of us who can ‘gestalt’ the twin paintings or illustrative leitmotifs affixed-within-white-space to this text. A rorschach of extreme identical opposites. Clark Ashton Smith eat your heart out. (27 Jun 11)

TO BE CONTINUED

Castle Cesare

An extract from my real-time review of 'Link Arms With Toads!' by Rhys Hughes (Chomu Press 2011) here.

Castle Cesare

“From the balconies of our highest turrets the entire firmament was accessible to our curiosity…”

But do we ever reach the last balcony? Not according to this story, as the hero protagonist – in a 2oth century East European literature flavour of a mediaeval fable – becomes a cross between the ‘Russian Doll’ hero (my expression not the story’s) from ’333 and a Third’, plus Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver, Doctor Who and a solar-systemic Phileas Fogg and ‘you’ or ‘me’ by fictionatronic empathy with an orrery degree in endless imagination…… Indeed, I can’t imagine how big Rhys’ imagination must be to create this insular-picaresque fiction (seriously), but it seems central to some fabrication ‘magic fiction’ that I shall christen here, officially for the first time, ‘fictionatronics’. A fabrication that only Rhys can bring off. Ever chasing the noumenon but thankfully never reaching it because, if reached, it would become less than its unreachable essence. (27 Jun 11)

Draugr

"There are things that have to exist but cannot." - from 'The Mauve Embellishments' by Charles Schneider (Ex Occidente Press).

The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies

The Book’s Title…

…is The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies so as to describe the plots of the Horror Stories that all centre around unreal Horror Anthologies that are real books for the unreal protagonists in the stories.
It is not intended to portray grandeur as a Horror Anthology in itself. If there is a double resonance, it is meant to be a playful one.
With due respect here to the noted Horror anthologists who have served our contemporary Horror genre community so well, like Peter Crowther, Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, Karl Edward Wagner …. not forgettting also all the Small Press editors and publishers of varying muscular reach towards the genre’s readership.

Our planet as reliquary

http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/treasures-of-heaven/

Nemonymous Night

Publication Date – 15 June 2011

Nemonymous Night is not an easy read; however—and here’s the rub—it’s entirely readable.
NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS (today)

Chomu Press: Prize Draw:-
Are you nemonymous?
“It’s the kind of work you’d like to put in the water supply of a major city, just to see what would happen.”
Publication Date of NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chomu Press) 15 June 2011
www.nemonymous.com
===============================

A Weird Weird Novel

Putting my brain where my mouth is:
NEMONYMOUS NIGHT:

Background: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/what-is-weird-literature-and-who-represents-it/

The Hummum

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

Whirlygig (2)

“I see the sea, but can the sea see me?” 

The voice sounds physically close to my ear but, when I turn to see who whispers such sweet nothings, nobody is there.

I turn the other way in case the voice’s owner has gone behind my back.

A stranger stands there with a glass of water in his hand, holding it out to me.  I know it is water because strangers can only offer water to other strangers to drink.  This to avoid skullduggery.  Filtered clear, spring-like, untampered with.

I take the glass.  He smiles as he nods me to quench my thirst.  I surreptitiously sniff it a split second before I sip it.  Then a gulp as the next mode of intake.  Lastly, a long, breath-held quaffing. Until the glass is emptied to its last drop.

I smack my lips in satisfaction.  The stranger smiles. We seem no longer strangers to each other.  But friends of recent making.

He takes me by the hand towards the edge of the sea, where it can see me.  The sea is short-sighted. The sand starts hard-ribbed as left by the tides, but it is soon pulpy enough to make footprints.  I throw the glass into the sea.

He shouts. He is angry.

“The sea’s monocle!” I shout back, stork-legging like a latter-day Jacques Tati, as the ground surrounds me with its dizzying whirlygig of horizons, some man-made, others sea-edged. 

The man makes me dig where the sand is pulpiest.  Despite the light-headedness, I reach the finger-holes of a human skull.

I shrug my shoulders and try to throw this into the sea, too.  But the whirlygig has made me throw it back not forward.  Straight at the man’s caved-in face.

A groundswell of mixed emotions.  The sea is the only witness.  Unreliable, of course.  The shattered ribs of a wreck poking through. History is a series of challenges and responses via a filter whose lens-baffles allow a two-way flow.  Tides ebbing and flowing into each other.

I sip suspiciously, then hold my breath ready to quaff a million million spinning strangers.

The House of Mr Moses

Strange characters - Mr Superbus, Mr Bermuda, and others without names - sit around a communal lounge swallowing various tablets, comparing them, exchanging ... until someone brings a new and bigger supply. Some are pure white with designs on them, others are capsules with multicoloured contents, yet others are huge unswallowable things that have to be inserted elsewhere...

One man seems to grind various sorts into a crunchy paste... Another seems to be satisfied with a simple nose-spray. They look forward to the arrival of Mr Superbus's daughter who always visits on Thursdays. She is bosomy and chiffony but they have to refuse her gifts as they are not prescribed ones. Tablets lent and borrowed, yes, but the tablets need to be officially prescribed in the first place at least to someone in the lounge. Well, that’s the story being stuck to, despite what comes later.

You must just concentrate hard on not annoying Mr Moses (who's in charge) and await  the arrival of Superbus's daughter any time soon.

****

The big problem is that by telling you about the house of Mr Moses at all, I am certain to annoy him.  I am one of those to whom I’ve given no name sitting around the lounge with Mr Superbus and Mr Bermuda.  My own tablet chart is kept religiously and I very rarely dabble in the medicine chests of others who live here.  In fact, we rarely have access even to our own chests, because Mr Moses has the only keys.  It’s just his lax care policy that allows us to picnic on stuff Mr Bermuda orders from abroad, brought here by men in hoods. 

I keep telling Mr Bermuda that such tablets are not prescribed ones.  But he assures us all that we are merely supplementing/mixing our official prescriptions with creative ones, home-cured ones - a bit like with the old-fashioned toy chemistry-sets that we all so much enjoyed during our childhood in the Fifties... and I suppose it’s this sort of information that would get Mr Moses into trouble, should it get out.  He should have a more rigorous hands-on policy for one so much in charge of things.

Oh, I’d better shut up.  Here comes Mr Moses right now.  Judging by his look, he is the bearer of bad news.  I watch him whisper something into Mr Superbus’s ear.  I reckon Mr Superbus is his favourite here.  Oh dear, Mr Superbus’s skin has gone deathly white.  As Mr Moses slouches from the room, I watch Mr Superbus literally cram his mouth with a handful of ready-mulched tablets, to such an extent its surplus amounts become tantamount to a facepack.

Mr busy-body Bermuda strolls over. Trust him. He’s probably got a really special tablet or two for Mr Superbus to swallow.  Yes, I can see one of them is bigger than a horse-pill.  Bloody hell, I couldn’t even take that one up my back passage by the look of it!

***

Tonight, I dream about Mr Superbus’s daughter.  Mr Superbus himself, I understand was once a Member of Parliament ... or have I got that wrong?  Perhaps he was only a Council representative in Hastings town where we live.  She often told me about how her father was big on conservation and had arranged the recycling of recent years, rather than depending on landfills.  I used to work on the rubbish dump in Hastings in the Sixties when all the Mods and Rockers were about.

In the dream, I see that Mr Superbus’s daughter is in trouble.  Quite nude, too, but, for shame, I can’t see her clearly enough because the whole dream itself seems choked with the chiffon blouse she usually wears on Thursdays when visiting us at Mr Moses’.

I now dream of standing on the hill looking right down over the sloping expanse of houses reaching distantly towards the sea below.  The nearest house is the blue one, the House of Mr Moses.  But I haven’t seen it for many years from the outside as I don’t walk about so much these days.  I’m usually housebound for medicinal purposes.  My whole prescription regime is strict for almost each minute of the day.  My neighbours in the lounge, similarly.  Only Mr Bermuda and Mr Superbus usually have the width needed to get out for breathers.  They go to the pier, they say, to play on the Amusements, gawping from side to side like the clowns’ heads whose yawning mouths we once aimed balls into for cheap prizes.

I suddenly see an insect-sized speck in the distant sea.  It is intuitively Mr Superbus’s daughter. She’s screaming. I’m sure she’s drowning.  But I can’t do anything about it, because I know that I’m still in the blue-painted house below me, and this is only a dream of me standing above it in the open air.  But how can I hear her screams?  Even in real life, I wouldn’t be able to hear the screams from up here.  In the old days, I couldn’t even hear the Mods and Rockers motor-biking or scootering along the prom from up here.

***

“You should keep taking the tablets,” said Mr Moses with a jokey laugh.  I had evidently woken the whole house with my screams.  I looked up at his benighted face.  He didn’t often joke.

“How’s Mr Superbus ... after the news?” I asked.  It was uncharacteristic of me to think of others before thinking of myself.  But here I was showing concern for someone else.  I secretly admired Mr Superbus and all he had done for the local council.

“He’s taken a sedative,” said Mr Moses.  “He’ll be OK.”

Despite his earlier jokey comment, I could see he was annoyed about having to get up in the middle of night.

He lifted a glass to my lips after crushing the multicoloued contents of at least six capsules into it.  I swallowed like a gurgling baby, plaintively smiling to assuage any further annoyance.

I wanted to get back to my dreams of mermaids with rocket salad.

***

Strange characters - Mr Superbus, Mr Bermuda, and others without names - sit around a communal lounge swallowing various tablets, comparing them, exchanging...

 The men in hoods haven’t been here for ages.  They’ll be running out of tablets soon.  Even Mr Moses is taking a low profile these days.  It’s Thursday again.  This is a nice day.  Mr Superbus’s daughter usually visits on Thursdays.  She always has a kiss for each of them. Dreams are quickly forgotten. One unnamed lounge-lizard hopes to be off medication altogether soon and then – who knows? – they may allow him out for walks on the cliff.  He looks through the window and sees a figure looking down at the house of Mr Moses.  Oh, to be like him.  He looks even older.  Sixty is no age at all.  Some people start a new life at sixty. Never too late.

He simply needs a suppository or enema to get him fighting fit.  One that can clear his whole system out, hoover out all life’s discards.  Shoot him up with a motor-bike to the upper bowels.

He watches Messrs. Bermuda and Superbus look into their pill-boxes with consternation.  And then he hears the gentle flip-flop of footsteps outside the lounge door. 

Dead People Writing

Hmmm, to begin a fable ‘Hmmm’ is a little more involving than ‘Once upon a time' or ‘The night was dark’, perhaps indicating that the writer is annoyed or mystified – not by the story he is about to tell – but annoyed or mystified by the reader ... you.

How was the writer to gear the story to an unknown reader, a reader who irritatingly gave away no identification? But the ‘Hmmm’ was perhaps a sign of struggling with the thought of your writing the whole thing retrocausally.

Eventually, no longer concerned with such rarefications of the reader, he teased himself with the prescribed title: The Death and the - - -. The Death and the dash dash dash. Not the Death and the Maiden, of Schubert fame. Not the Death and the Reader. Three dashes implied three words – or one word with three letters.

He turned over his pencil as if poised to erase the three dashes and replace them with words. He decided finally to retain the three dashes in the title and he erased “Death and the” – leaving some tiny bits of used rubber residue sprinkling the paper around the three dashes.

Aflliction often preceded Death but Death in itself was not an affliction because Death had no effect. Death was the end of effects. The end of causes, too. Death and the whatever, Death and the Salesman, Death and the Heart, Death and the Blind Venetian, all good titles, but they could not mean anything even if they had fitted the three dashes. Death could accompany nothing. Death absorbed everything into itself as soon as it was known to be what it was or had been. Death possessed none of the five senses, yours or its own. It had no sense of sensing or of being sensed. It could not be coupled, therefore. Or, if coupled, coupled only with itself. Death and the Death. Never more than two Deaths because as soon as there were more than one there was simultaneously only one. Death and the One.

Dead people write in pencil. Posthmmmously.

Soaring Above

Charlie woke before the alarm.

It was a difficult time for him, what with his elderly mother often unwell and he needed to visit her regularly to change light bulbs or to open tight jars.

And he had plenty of people attacking him for equivalent problems in various public works and utilities: like town-planning applications gone astray, dustcarts disappearing before they got back to the dump, park-keepers who lost their parks, communal baths with no plugs and apprentice tighteners who tightened the tops so tight the glass cracked.

He had to walk to work because the bus-drivers avoided the route on which he lived. Once at his work station, he would sort through the morning’s postal delivery - often a month old, having been lost and found again, only for it to be lost again in some pretty sloppy filing systems that he had to maintain himself because the filing-clerks were on strike over demarcation lines set in statute as well as in common law concerning their duties he thus delegated to himself.

Walking to work, this morning, Charlie looked into the sky – knowing that any aeroplanes would be grounded by ill-tempered disputes in the Pilots’ tiny toilets at the Terminal.  But, there, soaring above the grey sky, he saw a second sky leaving the first sky suffused with a beautiful shade of sunless blue, then, soaring above that eventually blended sky, a shimmer of silver as if an all-enveloping foil was slowly wrapping his world of existence like a trussed-up fowl about to be roasted. But while the so-called foil visually formed an anti-clockwise swirling – demonstrating its attempt to release what Charlie imagined to be a spiritual pressure-cooker lid screwed down upon the residual happiness left untouched by night’s anxieties – everything eventually separated out into curds of darkest emptiness, leaving him to witness, soaring above everything else, a phenomenon of which he had himself written to himself as Chief Administrator, a phenomenon he called the Rapture. A developing tsunami of synchronised cause then effect soaring above effect then cause. A Rapture about which he had warned himself by post – a letter that had been a month late then mis-filed.

And each soaring above soared above another soaring above for a skittled-out eternity of reality’s demarcations and strikes.  (Only a well-aimed hammer would be able to reach the contents of the past but that needed forethought in the light of experience and training).

Charlie went to sleep before the alarm.

Cream Cakes Two

Two cream cakes sat on the deck, uneaten, possibly untouched – and that begs the question: how did they get there? The Marie Celeste of the nice-but-naughty set.

We were the crew set to tow this craft into harbour before the storm struck. Tom and I who simply enjoyed tug-work and did it for nothing as volunteers. And when we weren’t tugging, we were in the Lifeboat under Cox Swain’s jurisdiction. Cox did not suffer fools gladly, but Tom and I were trusted crew, I’m pleased to say, woken many mornings – during the fog and its resounding horns – by the Lifeboat Cannon itself resounding in the open cavities of the grounded air and the imaginary skies beyond. We’d race into our wet-gear, then continue racing along the seagull-missing streets towards the Lifeboat Ramp. Our sight often obscured by darkness as well as fog.

Cox Swain would then set the craft slipping, sliding towards the sea, wondering what misbegotten souls had chosen these conditions for sailing through. Becalmed or sinking, we were never sure, till we found those stricken. Tom often grasped my hand as a sign of our togetherness, our spirit of doing-good and never doing bad. We’d even rescue heretics or other bereft souls rather than let them drift away forever towards invisible horizons. But there were some people Tom and I would have simply drowned so as to put them out of their spiritual misery, if not to relieve the world of their corruption. Burial at sea, you see, is just one method of cleansing existence of its foul flotsam. But Cox Swain would never allow any cherry-picking of the crews we saved. His was a simple world. Black and white. Save their souls, to save ours. SOS by mutual selfish consent. Tom once said that he thought some of the missing crews actually went missing at sea in the first place to ignite some redemption for everyone, them as well as us.

Cox Swain – an inscrutable man whom we only ever met on board his lifeboat – allowed Tom and me to moonlight on the coastal Tug, we being volunteers, not paid employees of the Lifeboat Charity. The Tug’s company didn’t pay us, either, as they considered the experience they were giving us was payment enough. Since the Government’s abolishment of apprenticeships, there was more need of apprentice ships (we laughed at that), and we were lucky enough, I suppose, to be allowed on board the Tug as it plied its towing duties from quay to oilrig, from pier to windfarm. We were eventually allowed to crew it alone together.

The stricken craft that day could be clearly seen: etched between the slowly spinning turbines. No fog that day. Just the threat of immediate rain and gales by night-time. We knew, as if instinctively, that the craft was uncrewed even when first spotting it like a dead bug balanced on the taut line of the horizon between two turbines. The swell of the undertow made it seem alive.

Which brings us full circle to the two cream cakes sitting on the deck. And the conundrum of those who had jumped overboard before eating them. Too nice to be naughty, I guess.

Tom looked doleful. I don’t know how I looked to him. The Tug ripped into an engine roar fit to burst our ear-drums as it turned – almost instantaneously – towards its tow of duty. Each turn of the nearest turbine blades punctuated the silence after the engine unexpectedly died. Swish swish. The rain started to soak through even our skinny wet-gear. We had evidently come for the cream cakes as today was someone’s birthday. As well as the day of someone else’s death. A coincidence of epochs. Each worth celebrating. Squish squish.

Cream Cakes

Upon the sea’s horizon – a blue, cooler-than-before, but still-warmer-than-average morning at the tail-end of April – was a Thames Barge with taut-rigged sails calmly sliding from right to left. It was accompanied by the neat parades of the Gunfleet Windfarm turbines that did their best to remain visually fixed despite their involuntary conjuring-trick of moving along with the Barge in its fast decelerating wake.

Given free rein, one might have imagined a breakfast party on board. A honeymoon couple like Kate and William. Or a group of high-flying business-people trying to emulate various alternately loyal and disloyal permutations of Kate and William while travelling on this essentially working-class craft, bringing boredom nearer the edge...

Someone among them had brought along a box of cream cakes. Containing cream that was real fresh or clotted. In contrast, those synthetic, slightly sour, vaguely discoloured or metallic consistencies of the fillings in cream horns of a 1950s childhood in Lyons Corner Houses, where cakes were delivered on silver tiers along with infusions of best tea and a Max Jaffa ensemble of musicians, were a thing of the past. Today, all is authentic, even life itself. Any suspicion of imitation cream as well as imitation human behaviour would be concealed beneath various invisible layers of veneer. Even from where one stood on the promenade, one could just hear the shriek, as one munched on a cake that squirted cream into an eye, whether the eye was someone else’s or that of oneself. And, of course, there’s always one.

Here’s one for Kate. And a cake is raised as if in toast. And here’s one for William. And another cake raised this time as a clown might raise a cake in the shape of a custard pie poised upon the edge of slapstick. One for Harry. Another for Charles and Camilla as one. And a final one for Elizabeth and Philip, but this one is one of those double cream horns that someone at least recalls from the 1930s but no-one else can. Full of real cream. The past is full of real cream. Only the memories are synthetic and slightly bitter. If death can taste of anything at all.

Later, there is one abortive suffusion of sunset sparsely striated with charcoal-sketched oars of turning air. The Thames Barge finally slides into the side of the sea as its arcs of sail are blushing blood-coloured either from the promise of a distant dawn or from more royal squirts.

The Crimson King and the Dark Tower

III. The Crimson King and the Dark Tower

“Some moments are beyond imagination.”

For me the perfect pre-Epilogue, pre-Coda ending for this book. So perfect in fact, I wonder if I shall ever forget this experience as a dark journey of self-blame or always remember it as my personal triumphant End-World, End-Life crystallisation in reading literature over 60 years? Anything else I happen to read before I die merely its coda? [It is remarkable that a book of mine that I've had on the stocks for nearly two years now (a second collection of my stories) and originally prepared for a certain Ex Occidente Press at their request: as my sort of last bow: and I then suggested to them the overall title 'The Last Balcony' that suddenly came to me on a discussion forum here. But I later erased that book unilaterally, a fact that is on record in several places.] I wonder if all great books like ‘Dark Tower’ are designed to be highly personal, highly bespoke to each reader. Also like Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time‘. [Which is perhaps, now, in hindsight, resonant with my Weirdtongue Palaver blog ("EEEEEEEEEEEEEE! YOU! DON'T DARE MOCK ME! YOU DON'T DARE! EEEEEEEEEEEEE!") posted by me this morning on another subject.] And the ‘Lost Time’ in Roland’s last watch. And, meanwhile, Patrick’s pencil sketch being suffused now with a plucked or dry-twisted-out rose is, as an imagination-leap, almost too sublime to bear. And, meantime, again, today, on St George’s Day, I surely can’t pass over this unexpected quote in this chapter: “It’s his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form.” (23 Apr 11 – another 90 minutes later)

All my reviews - of DARK TOWER by Stephen King

The Tet Breaks

The Dark Tower (vol VII) by Stephen King

Part Two

XII. The Tet Breaks

Publicly reviewing piecemeal in real-time one’s first reading of a fiction book is a special experience, making the reading even more significant. I have never read The Dark Tower books before (although I have read most of its Writer’s other fiction as it came out from ‘Carrie‘ onwards). I somehow never fancied reading DT, until realising I hadn’t done so and wondering why, having just admitted this fact on the official Stephen King internet forum a few months ago, after real-time reviewing ‘Full Dark, No Stars’. The act of having now created a duty to report back here upon each of my readings (usually of whole chapters) accentuates a certain soul in these books that pre-existed (Jungianly? By todash?) a consequently discovered ‘coincidental-kindred’ soul in myself. Indeed, the sadness of this particular chapter is enhanced (made even sadder) by this actively public real-time approach. And I can empathise with the book’s next journey to find its Writer – and to preserve the Beam that brought me to this chapter today for the first time. And I can also empathise with those who have been stopped in their tracks from sending out Wolves (quite innocently?) to bring back Calla children for sucking out their brains as part of a different process to stop that very process of bringing me each day (almost religiously) to these books. I can’t explain it. Whatever the case, I shall follow the Path that Sheemie’s brave, almost kamikaze, efforts created for transporting me (in more senses of that word than one) back to the Keystone World of Writing. Leaving any residual, selfishly-unpenitent Thunderclappers on their Tea Breaks. And, meantime, from that riddling-ridiculous to a sobbing-sublime, I can now ponder upon Susannah and her own terribly mournful mission. And, so, here I am telling you about it having just pondered it for the first time in the last hour or two when absorbing the words I’d never read before today. Makes it somehow an actual experience of life shared as well as lived, rather than a lonely experience of merely reading a book or kindle quietly in my study. (19 Apr 11 – another 2 hours later)

Notes from the Gingerbread House

The Dark Tower (Novel VII)



Part Two


VIII. Notes from the Gingerbread House



"It's a place outside of time, outside of reality. I know you understand a little bit about the function of the Dark Tower; you understand its unifying purpose. Well, think of Gingerbread House as a balcony on the Tower: when we come here, we're outside the Tower but still attached to the Tower."




I have, for me, some very important information to impart on a personal level and I trust you agree. This chapter ends with the significance of the Writer - of Stephen King or 'Stephen King' - and of saving him from his becoming roadkill before the Beams are Broken, i.e. to cut a long story short into words that probably don't convey the true sense of what you would gain by reading the long story itself. In any event, tied up with that (as it has been throughout all these books) is the persistence of no. 19 in various places, and in words and names. And I've just realised that my own full name DESMOND FRANCIS LEWIS on my birth certificate is made up of 19 letters! I can't explain what a striking revelation it has been in realising this today. Also, incidentally, my definitive collection of stories is THE LAST BALCONY, perhaps replete with relevant synchronicities and still semi-aborted fruition. And, so, I must don my 'thinking cap'......





My full review of all THE DARK TOWER books by Stephen King linked from here: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/my-real-time-reviews-of-stephen-king-the-dark-tower-etc/

Taking the Ball

My latest chapter review of the gigantic 'Wizard and Glass'  by Stephen King



VII. Taking the Ball

If I could draw a crude basic eye here, I would, so as to serve as heading for this chapter’s review, a chapter concerning an ambush of our three sterling youths, and other characters fulfilling gradually their own ominous destinies, including Rhea’s: who uses the glass pink ball to watch a woman she torments through it by making that woman do her housework by getting on her hands and knees and licking into all the house’s corners with her tongue! And the author uses the book, this book, to picture tantamount the same thing: thus acting worse than Rhea: because he created Rhea. He effectively created the readers, too, by writing so damned well we cannot fail to read his work, we readers, who entice him, by our presence, to see things in his own version of a ’pink ball’ for us to see them later, readers who are effectively worse than the author by conspiring to make the events real by completing the circle of creativity, a circle that needs dependable readers or witnesses or pupils or, even, reciprocal teachers to make everything real by symbiosis, a circle representing - or soon becoming - a pink-veined eyeball. No wonder the Rheader desperately clings to the ball when others come to reclaim it. Who is the Wizard, him or us? (26 Mar 11 – three hours later)

Stubber

Claps of thunder, flaps of weather, flaps of leather, at the end of my tether. I sang to myself – out of the blue, without rhyme or reason: well, there was some sort of rhyme, but you know what I mean – as I sat on the top of the double-decker bus. I sat at the front, pretending that I was driving, holding the window safety-bar and pushing it in one direction or another but, I guess, I imagined it was a tiller of a canal-boat, because I pushed it to the left for the bus to turn right and pushed it to the right for the bus to turn left. Claps of thunder, flaps of weather, flaps of weather, at the end of my tether. Suddenly, the bus...

Before I tell you exactly what happened, let me reminiss for a while. On top of most buses in those olden days, there were signs saying things like “no spitting”, “no standing” etc. and on the back of each seat below a five-inch metal ratchment there was a sign saying “stubber”, although it acted both as a stubber and a serrated surface for red-headed lucifers. In view of that, you can assume there were no “no smoking” signs...

Also, there was a circular mirror-thing or porthole in the top right hand corner at the front. I often wondered what that was. Invariably, there were other passengers upstairs. Like today. I turned and flapped my tongue at them. I didn’t spit, though. I definitely didn’t spit, m’lord.

There was one particular man toward the back who bent forward in his seat and seemed to be rubbing the front of his forehead quite fast along the seat-back that was in front of him. Back and forth, it went. Flaps of this, flaps of that.

A few minutes later, I sensed something had happened behind me as I momentarily took my eye off the road ahead to check what that something was. A hubbub that was worthy of its name even though there was only one person who made this hubbub. The man’s head had burst into flame.

I pointed to a sign close to the ‘no spitting’ one. “No butting”, I read aloud offishushly. No butting, no cutting, no grubbing, no rubbing.

Meantime, the side of the bus had scraped sickeningly along the side of a warehouse wall. I blamed myself. But blame was irrelevant really. Blame is often a waste ‘in extreemiss’...

I thought of a demon barber stropping his blade along my tongue. And a train window that had a leather tongue inside. At least a train needn’t be driven by passengers. Trains had a man at the front to do that, a man with a huge face covering the whole front boiler. The last thing I think I thought was the circular mirror-thing in the top right hand corner of the bus's top-deck – with a single huge blinking eye filling it. Beady beady, greedy, greedy.

Suddenly, the sparks milling through the open side-window caught me alight. A pity I couldn’t spit on myself.


Epilogue: Heaven and Hell are situated on the same floor, not Heaven above and Hell below, as many seem to believe. So, for one of them you need to turn left to reach, the other right. But I did not know which was which. I hoped to strike lucky.
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written today and first published above