tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44706795824284533352024-03-07T20:56:41.803-08:00Tumescent Moon<b>A dumping ground for my horror fiction and anything else that I might be obsessing about. The copyright to all written material on this blog is held by John McConnochie who wrote it, amended it, rewrote it, amended it again and will probably ultimately despair of it all.</b>
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If you like any of my stories and would like to read some more of them then please comment or donate by clicking on the Paypal button which you'll find on the right of the page. Thank you!</p></p>Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-32995732327558135872011-09-10T06:17:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:29.026-08:00The Death Of Certainty?I've just discovered - nearly ten years after the event, but I never claimed to be fast - that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_hawking">Stephen Hawking</a> has changed his mind and declared that a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything">Theory of Everything</a> is unachievable. This is not quite as radical a piece of side-switching as the Pope announcing his conversion to Islam would be, but it's pretty significant and his reasons are interesting (not new, but interesting anyway, especially given his status in the world of science).
<h2>Some Background</h2>
Towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a general feeling among scientists that explaining the universe was on the verge of being done and dusted: there were still some minor issues to be resolved, but essentially all the elements of a complete explanation were in place and all that was left for the future was further refinement. So much for science, but in the field of mathematics things were not quite as rosy - the branch known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory">set theory</a> was undergoing a major crisis as a result of the discovery that it permitted logical contradictions.
<p>
The idea of sets is so simple that even I can comprehend it but the nature of the particular problem requires a little thought to understand (at least for me it does, anyway). The crux of the issue is this: set theory allows for the creation of a set of all sets that are not members of themselves, resulting in sets that are members of themselves only if they are NOT members of themselves. Paradox! Disaster! I can only just about get my head around this (if you're looking for a more complete analysis go <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox">here</a>) but the next link in the chain that is leading us (I promise) to Hawking - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompleteness_theorem">Gödel's incompleteness theorem</a> - leaves my comfort zone as a distant spot dwindling on the horizon (so any requests for clarification would be better addressed to a slab of concrete than to me).
<p>
Here we go, anyway: both the set theory problem and the incompleteness theorem(s) are variants of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_paradox">liar's paradox</a>, an old philosophical conundrum. What Gödel succeeded in doing (by means that are completely beyond my ability to grasp) was to encode <i>'this statement is unprovable'</i> and embed it in arithmetic. The implication of this remarkable feat is that mathematics is incomplete. In other words, there will always be statements which are true but which can never be <i><b>proved</b></i> to be true.
<h2>Meanwhile back at the homestead ...</h2>
Along came Einstein and abolished some common sense notions about the universe, but his theories subsumed Newtonian mechanics so - albeit with a little grumbling - they were accepted without too much of a problem. And then there was Heisenberg who demonstrated that, at least at the subatomic level, there could be no such thing as certainty, and that was a heavy blow but the desire to arrive at a theory of everything persisted, and thus was born string theory, superstring theory, M theory, and wherever-the-fuck-we-are-now theory.
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There are good philosophical reasons (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume">Hume </a>and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper">Popper</a> et al) to suppose that even if a Theory of Everything is possible we can never be sure that we've arrived at it, but Hawking's point, insofar as I understand it (and he's not the first or only person to make this argument, just the most famous), is that because mathematics is incomplete physics, too, must be incomplete and because mathematics never <b><i>can</i></b> be complete neither can physics. Bye-bye Theory of Everything. Obscurely, that makes me happy!Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-25829940609179772082011-08-22T03:03:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:28.744-08:00The City Of Dreadful NightThis started off with a search for the poetry of W.B.Yeats and, through the magic of site-skipping, ended up somewhere else entirely, but first a small digression:<br />
<br />
Somebody - I can't remember who now - asked me fairly recently why I don't write poetry and I don't think I answered the question at the time so I'll do it now, and the answer is 'I don't write poetry because I suck at it'. In my mid to late teens I turned out reams of the stuff, all heavily indebted to Dylan Thomas and each one individually the literary equivalent of a steaming cow turd. Unfortunately having the technical knowledge necessary to construct poetry is no guarantee that the final result is going to be any good, and that same knowledge robs you of the ability to deceive yourself about its merits. For a while I embraced free verse as my saviour until it dawned on me that the lack of a formal structure actually makes it <b><i>harder</i></b> to produce anything worthwhile. So I gave up, and I remain given up.<br />
<br />
Anyway, getting back to the true subject of this post, I'm not sure exactly how I ended up with James Thomson's 'The City Of Dreadful Night' but it was like meeting an old friend after an absence of many years. Thomson was the author of '<a href="http://vasthead.com/Thomson/sunday_river.html">Sunday Up The River</a>', a technically accomplished but, in my opinion, rather limp specimen of the kind of sentimental verse that Victorian parents doted on and considered sufficiently undisturbing and morally improving to be part of the literary diet of their children, and to which I was subjected at junior school (it could be that I'm being unfair in this assessment, which is based on memory of an abridged version of the piece. I haven't read the whole thing and I'm not sure that I will).<br />
<br />
Somewhat later - in fact during the period when I was producing my sub-Thomas crap - I came upon an extract from 'The City Of Dreadful Night' in a poetry anthology, which started with this stanza:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>As I came through the desert thus it was,<br />
As I came through the desert: All was black,<br />
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;<br />
A brooding hush without a stir or note,<br />
The air so thick it clotted in my throat;<br />
And thus for hours; then some enormous things<br />
Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:<br />
But I strode on austere;<br />
No hope could have no fear.</blockquote><br />
Now for someone whose imaginative life was already warped by weird fiction and surrealism this was heady stuff but it took me years to track down the full poem, and I wasn't disappointed when I did. The poem is a tour de force: a lengthy meditation on madness and despair, on a life spent locked in the benighted city of the melancholy mind.<br />
<br />
The poem is too long - truly epic in fact - to post, but you can find it <a href="http://vasthead.com/Thomson/city_night.html">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Enjoy it (if you can!).<br />
Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-26861171340600362042011-08-17T01:47:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:28.837-08:00Into The MysticI was half-watching a documentary about one of Dan Brown's books of piffle (probably 'Angels And Demons' but I wasn't really paying a great deal of attention) that (undoubtedly <b><i>because</i></b> I wasn't paying a great deal of attention) inexplicably seemed to segue into a nun waxing indignant about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson">Higgs boson</a>. Now it's always pleasant to be presented with evidence that scientists have a sense of humour, but nicknaming the thing 'the God particle' was possibly one jape too far as it presented this poor woman with a large number of sticks, the wrong ends of which she was waggling vigorously and embarrassingly in public.<br />
<br />
This reminded me of a piece I read quite some time ago in which Deepak Chopra was trying to pray the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation">Copenhagen interpretation</a> in aid of the proposition of Eastern philosophy that reality is <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/glg/glg29.htm">constructed by the mind rather than the other way around</a> (it's not actually as absurd an idea as it may sound!). The comprehensive rogering that he received on various militantly atheistic blogs as a result should persuade him to leave quantum theory to the three people who understand it in future but - lovely man though he undoubtedly is - I suspect he's too stubborn to give in so easily. Anyway, it has to be said that while in principle I support the debunking of woo wherever it is to be found I often read these blogs with irritation because it seems to me that in pursuit of rationality their authors dive into a kind of reductionism that throws the baby out with the bath-water and then dismantles the plumbing too.<br />
<br />
As may have become clear over the course of previous posts I'm not exactly a fan of religion - in fact I can quite understand, if not quite approve, the desire to burn every prophet in history on top of a bonfire of every religious text ever written - and I find the traditional ideas about the existence and nature of God (or gods) ludicrous and, in the case of the Old Testament Thunderer, despicable. When it comes to making claims about the nature of reality then I want to see empirical evidence in support of those claims before anybody starts making laws and judging people on the basis of them, and so far evidence for the existence of a deity or deities equals a big fat zero. Nevertheless, perhaps because of mystical experiences (or bouts of temporary insanity if that's your preferred interpretation) I had as a child, I'm reluctant to completely dispose of the numinous, or at least of the notion that both human beings and the universe itself are somehow more than the sum of their parts.<br />
<br />
<b>So where does that leave me</b>: <br />
<br />
Belief in the existence of a personal, kind and loving God? Not a chance!<br />
<br />
Belief in existence of the universe? Yes, if only on the grounds that denying it leads to some serious philosophical problems and might possibly cause me to end up in an institution where the walls are made of rubber.<br />
<br />
Belief that the universe possesses consciousness and intelligence? Well, some parts of it certainly do but whether it does as a whole I don't know.<br />
<br />
Belief in survival of the personality after death? It doesn't seem likely.<br />
<br />
Belief in the survival of some kind of essential me after death? I don't know.<br />
<br />
Belief that I'm a part of something greater? Definitely yes!<br />
<br />
Where all of this is leading me is something I'm still trying to work out, and part of that working out process will be a post about where I think reductionism might have it wrong and mysticism might have it right.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-67364735753638907652011-08-09T02:28:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:29.600-08:00There's a riot going on ...<blockquote>"What causes riots is a hot Saturday night in any dumb cockroach-filled neighborhood where there's a lot of guys standing on the corner and they don't have no bread, no broads and no wheels." - Murray Roman</blockquote><br />
OK, flippant, but you get the picture and it isn't untrue: whatever the proximate cause may be the <b>underlying</b> one is just a bunch of people with a feeling that they've got nothing to lose. Those who do the finger-pointing in the aftermath of a riot - the politicians, the police, the media and all the other self-styled leaders of men - throw words like 'thugs', 'gangsters', 'anarchists' at the participants, slap mobile phones and Twitter around a bit for aiding and abetting and don't take the analysis any further because they <b>can't</b> take it any further without admitting that there's a larger problem to do with society itself that they are unwilling and unable to fix.<br />
<br />
Let's for a moment forget about those who actually take part in riots (and there are doubtless many seriously unpleasant people among them, but the existence of such people does not provide an adequate explanation in itself of what's going on here) and let's take a look instead at those who <b>don't</b>. The people who don't riot, and would never dream of rioting, are those with good jobs, nice houses and a tolerable life, those in other words who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. So the solution is ... never going to happen. Unfortunately the next best solution, a revival of the social contract that guaranteed that no-one would be homeless, without adequate medical care or stuck in a life without hope or joy is not going to happen either because it's unachievable without squeezing the rich, who have the money to buy enough politicians to ensure that they <b>don't</b> get squeezed.<br />
<br />
Nothing will change this until enough of the people with good jobs, nice houses and a tolerable life find themselves without these things, and the consequences of that will be so far from pretty that everyone should be breaking into a cold sweat of fear at the thought and moving the foundations of the Earth itself in search of a solution, but they aren't and they won't: if I've learned anything from all these years on this planet it's that human beings learn nothing.<br />
<br />
<b>Addendum:</b> the destruction of people's livelihoods, homes and peace of mind is inexcusable and intolerable in any kind of civilised society. Riots are an evil, full stop.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-52532151668104089852011-07-23T12:14:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:29.507-08:00Religion Sucks: Norway And An Abrupt TerminationRecent events in Norway have, rather than fuelling the fire of this discourse, had the opposite effect of dampening it. I could - I fully intended to - grab my trusty Chainsaw Of Logic and cut the world's religions (most of them anyway) into bleeding chunks but I find myself wondering what the point of it all would be: it's all been said before by more intelligent people than me and, ultimately, I don't really care how absurd anyone's beliefs are as long as they give them some measure of happiness and <b>they don't use them as an excuse to hurt anyone who can't accept them</b>.<br />
<br />
The problem is not even religion per se but our own accursed and apparently incorrigible habit of mistaking the mental models we make of reality for reality itself. Whatever ideologies we embrace, whatever stories we tell ourselves for the sake of comfort or understanding, whatever scientific or magical structures of thought we build in explanation of the universe and our place in it, are, at best, approximations to the truth and not truth itself. In other words they're all flawed and we have no business making them the basis of any kind of coercive or punitive action against anyone who is doing no measurable and indisputable harm to anyone else, and we certainly shouldn't be killing children to make some kind of political point.<br />
<br />
It's wrong, that's all there is to it.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-76839061247902382922011-07-17T08:02:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:29.973-08:00Religion Sucks: The Personal StuffI’m the child of occasionally church-going parents (an escaped Catholic father and a Presbyterian mother) and between the ages of five and ten I attended a Church of England school (not as the result of any religious conviction on the part of my parents, it was simply the only school in the village). The teachers at the school <b>did</b> do their best to pump us full of Christianity: I’m not sure how successful they were on the whole but I don’t think I can be counted as one of their triumphs in that, looking back, I don't honestly think I ever truly believed in God, or at least not the God they were anxious I should believe in. On the other hand I didn't do much questioning either.<br />
<br />
Until my mid-teens I went through all the 'right' motions - even attending a weekly Bible class - but in all honesty my motives for doing so were insincere and self-serving. I suppose that I could have continued to pay unreflective, agnostic lip-service to the culturally-approved mythology forever (many do, I think) except that at some point, and for reasons that are obscure to me now, it occurred to me that <b>it didn't make any sense</b>.<br />
<br />
When I say that it didn't make any sense I'm not talking about the mismatch between the Biblical world-view and the scientific one (mainly because I was too ignorant of science at the time to be aware of it!) but the ludicrous nature of the exposition(s) of the nature of God and the whys and wherefores of creation: to believe in something because it is absurd is just not an option for me, and in any case the explanations offered by the Abrahamic religions strike me as not merely absurd but out and out bonkers!<br />
<br />
I was suddenly left without a spiritual basket for my eggs and, impelled by a combination of egotism and need, I went through a few - among them Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, a kind of non-literal polytheism and Taoism - before fetching up as a pantheist who is just a wafer-thin mint away from being an atheist.<br />
<br />
And that will do for now, I think, as I have to go and grind an axe or two in preparation for the next post ,,,Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-72497028507101616122011-07-15T04:24:00.000-07:002023-11-17T01:39:29.693-08:00Religion Sucks, PreambleI've been promising myself (or somebody, maybe even a Higher Power!) that I'd try to worm my way around the writer's block by producing something - <b>anything</b> - even if it's not fiction. I don't guarantee that any of the parts that form the postamble will be cogent, coherent, comprehensible (or even written in anything that is recognisable as English) but I'll give it a bash.<br />
<br />
What may (or may not) follow this brief introductory spasm may (or may not) be a series of personal reflections on the greatest misfortune ever to emerge from the muddled thinking and desperate hopes of humankind, i.e. religion. These will probably not be well-reasoned, and for reasons of personal sloth they will certainly not be supported by references, but this will give everyone the opportunity to point out the deficiencies and suggest amendments or corrections, or to pile in and hammer the crap out of me.<br />
<br />
I'll amble away now and leave you with a quotation from Mark Twain. Take it away, Sam:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!</blockquote><br />
From <i>The Mysterious Stranger</i>Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-42557399366739278742010-01-31T13:31:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:29.132-08:00Teddy Bears' Picnic<b>Friday October 31st</b><br />
<br />
As Christopher manoeuvred his wheelchair across the bare pine boards of the dining room floor he was startled by a sudden jerk as the right wheel passed over some obstruction, which emitted a loud, protesting squeal. He looked down at the tiny furry object. <i>Another bloody bear!</i> he thought and leaned over to pick it up from the floor. It had once had a pink plastic face, but the passage of the wheelchair had dented and cracked it so that it now resembled an aged and dim-witted Pekinese. He squeezed its belly and it bleated loudly.<br />
<br />
He didn’t recognise this particular bear but his wife had had so many hundreds of them that it wasn’t really surprising. He made a grimace of disgust. <i>Thought I’d got rid of them all, but they keep turning up!</i><br />
<br />
He flung the bear into the open fireplace and watched the flames from the log fire dance over the nylon fur for a moment until he was satisfied that it was well alight. Somewhat mollified, he resumed his progress towards the telephone in the lounge.<br />
<br />
"Cartwright and Olafson, Solicitors" chirped the professionally cheery female voice at the other end of the line.<br />
<br />
"Mr Cartwright, please."<br />
<br />
"Certainly. Who shall I say is calling?"<br />
<br />
"Mr Robbins"<br />
<br />
"Just one moment, Mr Robbins ..."<br />
<br />
There was a second’s silence before the line was commandeered by a reggae version of "I Fought The Law, But The Law Won". Christopher winced.<br />
<br />
"Good morning, Christopher."<br />
<br />
"Did you <i>have</i> to do that?" Christopher almost snarled.<br />
<br />
"Do what?"<br />
<br />
"Choose that particular song to play to the poor bastards you put on hold?"<br />
<br />
There was a brief, hurt silence. "<i>I</i> thought it was quite amusing."<br />
<br />
"Well, I haven’t phoned you up to discuss your lamentable lack of tact and juvenile sense of humour. I want to know what can be done about my wife’s will."<br />
<br />
Christopher sensed a pent-up sigh from the other man. "I’ve already told you that I’ll do all I can, but you must understand that your wife was legally compos mentis at the time she made the will. The fact that the restrictions she made concerning your inheritance are rather onerous is something we can argue in court but these things take time, and I can’t guarantee that we’ll win."<br />
<br />
"Onerous? Onerous? I can’t leave this bloody house for more than a week at a time without losing the money! And I <i>hate</i> this hideous, rambling Gothic dump! You know why, don’t you? It was so her bloody teddy bears wouldn’t have to go without company for too long! She thought the bloody things were <i>alive</i>!"<br />
<br />
"That may be so, but if those were her reasons she made no mention of them in the will. I’ll do what I can, but in the meantime you must abide by its terms."<br />
<br />
Christopher tried to frame some retort but words failed him and in the end he simply snorted and hung up the telephone with a glare into the middle distance. After a while he realised that he wasn’t simply gazing vacantly and viciously into space, but at something. After a few moments he identified it as one of his wife’s twee paintings. Bought at some auction for a ludicrously inflated sum, if his memory served him. At this distance his myopic vision couldn’t focus well enough to see all the details, but he recalled it depicted some vilely winsome brat in a long Edwardian style summer dress treating half a dozen fat stuffed bears to a picnic served on a doll’s tea-set. He hated it. It brought back memories of the scratched and crackly 78 of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ that his wife had played every afternoon for the last 18 years of their marriage.<br />
<br />
<i>That painting’s going!</i> he thought. <i>The record, too.</i><br />
<br />
He headed towards the hall and the modern oak-panelled double-doored lift shaft that housed his only means of transporting himself to the upper regions of the house. The motor of his wheel-chair purred contentedly to itself, in perfect counterpoint to his own ill-humour.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Later, his mood lightened a little by the bottle of brandy he kept in the drawer of the antique desk that occupied one corner of the sitting room in the small granny flat that he’d made his own after his accident, he reached for a pad and listed the pluses and minuses of his situation.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
As he wrote he could dimly hear the roar of a vacuum-cleaner coming from somewhere below. The industrious Mrs Kenny, the lady from the village who ‘did’ for them every weekday afternoon, was clearly hard at work. Christopher liked Mrs Kenny. He admired her busy efficiency, and she had been his sole ally in the long battle against the teddy bear invasion that had eventually led to the claiming of every nook and cranny in the huge old house by cuddly toys. The distant evidence of her presence cheered him.<br />
<br />
He looked again at his list. Under the ‘pluses’ he’d written:-<br />
<br />
<i>Mary dead.<br />
Bears gone.</i><br />
<br />
And under the minuses:-<br />
<br />
<i>The bloody will.</i><br />
<br />
He sighed and inwardly mourned the loss of the woman he’d once loved, and had come over the long years to hate. He’d met her when he was a young and struggling literary agent and she a young and ambitious writer of romantic fiction, and he’d been from the first in awe of her: not of her talent, because she had very little of that, but of her implacable will and the unconcealed cynicism that matched his own. Together they’d forged an alliance that had made her a fortune and him a prisoner of her success. In the end the imprisonment had become almost literal after the car crash that had shattered his spine had confined him to the grounds of this hated bloody house.<br />
<br />
In retrospect, he supposed, her decision to buy the place should have been his first warning that she was becoming unhinged. She’d described it as ‘romantic’, a word that when he first knew her she would have been unable to utter without an accompanying sneer. And her decision to sell her London flat and give up the hectic city social life - although welcomed at the time by his own more reclusive nature - was so uncharacteristic that something in him should have reacted with alarm rather than relief.<br />
<br />
<i>Oh well,</i> he thought, <i>it’s too late now.</i><br />
<br />
They’d been in the house for two years when the Bears began. During that time they’d been happy enough. She’d continued to write, her books had continued to sell, and he’d even been faintly charmed by the increasingly evident, and previously unsuspected, whimsical side to her nature that had begun to manifest itself.<br />
<br />
He’d often wondered over the years just <i>what</i> had caused the Bears. Had it been some smothered maternal instinct doomed forever to unfulfilment first by her own infertility, and later by his own physical paralysis, that had begun her slow retreat into childhood? He’d never know now, he supposed, but in any event she’d returned one afternoon from a trip to her publisher’s offices in London with an old wind-up gramophone, <i>that</i> 78 and a battered old teddy bear she’d rescued from a junk shop somewhere in the East End.<br />
<br />
"Isn’t he <i>wonderful</i>, darling?" she’d breathed at him in the little girl voice she’d recently begun to affect, and which grated on his nerves.<br />
<br />
He’d muttered something non-committal and she’d retreated to her bedroom (this was before the accident, but they’d begun to sleep apart for no reason that either had ever enunciated but just because it seemed right) to play the record over and over again.<br />
<br />
After that, every trip to the city resulted in an armful of teddy bears to add to the growing army which gradually took over every corner, every vacant space, in the house. He’d complained, of course, but she was completely impervious to his arguments and, as she always said at the end of every squabble, after all it was her house. He’d taken in the end to driving to the nearest village every evening, preferring drunken isolation in the saloon bar of the Fox and Ferret to the fruitless angry exchanges and the endless playing of that bloody record. He’d been driving back from the pub after a particularly heavy session one evening when his old, beloved Bentley had skidded in the rain and wrecked itself and him against a vast and gnarled roadside oak.<br />
<br />
He sighed and threw the pad aside. He’d go down for a chat with Mrs Kenny.<br />
<br />
It was as he was passing his wife’s bedroom on his way to the lift that he noticed that the door was slightly ajar. He paused in momentary puzzlement - the door had remained closed since his wife’s cancerous womb had stopped her breath in there some three months previously (her final words to him had been "Take care of the Bears". He’d <i>certainly</i> done that!) - turned his chair and pushed the door open.<br />
<br />
To his left was the large four-poster in which she’d died and ahead of him, through the windows in the opposite wall, he could see the drizzle-sodden ashes from the huge funeral pyre he’d built on the lawn the day after her funeral, where he’d burned every single one of the Bears he could find. In the far corner, beyond the bed, his wife’s computer sat on its work-station, an endless parade of animated teddy bears marching across its screen.<br />
<br />
He steered his chair over to the work-station and touched the mouse. The screen-saver flickered and disappeared and was replaced by his wife’s favourite word-processing package. In large letters, centred in the screen, were two lines:-<br />
<br />
<i>If you go down to the woods today<br />
You’re sure of a big surprise</i><br />
<br />
Christopher recognised them, of course - from that bloody song he’d heard so often over the last two decades - and he was torn between anger and astonishment. His wife had been working on a novel up until the day she died (a ghost-writer was busily engaged in finishing it from her notes at that very moment. Her publisher expected it to be a major best-seller) but he was sure that the computer had been turned off after some suited ghoul had spent an afternoon diligently transferring files to disks. He shuddered as a cold wind momentarily blew against his soul, turned off the monitor and the CPU, and, rather more rapidly than he could rationally explain, left the room, firmly shutting the door behind him.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
It was cold and he was naked. His breath formed phantom shapes in the air around his mouth as he walked through the trees. Everywhere he looked the petrified leaves sparkled with bright beads of ice. Around his feet ashes blew and stained his skin black where they touched it. His nostrils and throat were filled with the thick stench of burning hair. He choked and fell, long and lonely, into the darkness.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<b>Extracts from the diary of Christopher Robbins, Saturday November 1st</b><br />
<br />
<b>9.00 a.m.</b><br />
<br />
It was bitterly cold when I woke up this morning. The bloody flat’s supposed to have its own heating system - she would never permit anything as ‘unromantic’ as central heating in the main house, of course: open bloody log fires everywhere, Mrs Kenny’s forever moaning about the mess they make - but it breaks down every five minutes. I’ve turned up the thermostat and I’ll have to hope that does the trick, as there’s no chance of getting someone out to the house to fix it at the weekend. I hate weekends. There’s nothing to do until the decent TV comes on in the evening and no company, not even Mrs Kenny. I might get the paper and do the crossword, but that means going down to the front door and for some reason I feel nervous about leaving the flat. Ridiculous. I’ll have some brandy to warm me up and then I’ll go and fetch it.<br />
<br />
<b>11.15 a.m.</b><br />
<br />
The door to her room was ajar again. I meant to go straight past it but I could hear a clicking noise coming from inside and so I had to have a look. The computer was on again. When I’d got rid of the teddy bears on the screen it just said ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’. I suppose she’d set the thing up to turn itself on and display a bit of doggerel to her every day. God knows why, or how she did it, but in the end she became as much of a mystery to me as computers are. Strange that she should have been so sympatico with the machines when so much of her life was a retreat into the past. Anyway I unplugged the bloody thing this time. I doubt that there’s any way she could have arranged for it to plug itself in as well as turn itself on! I must get someone in to look at the door.<br />
<br />
There was a letter from the solicitor. It would appear that I am - or at least I will be - a millionaire several times over. I’m not sure where all the money came from - it was more than I expected - but of course I stopped being her agent after the accident made me a bloody welfare case. The crossword looks easy today. Pity, I was hoping for something to keep my mind occupied. I feel horribly lonely. I wish I’d let her have a dog now when she mentioned it; it would at least have been some kind of company.<br />
<br />
<b>3.00 p.m.</b><br />
<br />
I’ve been watching athletics on the TV. I haven’t done that since the accident, although I used to love sports. Was a goodish cricketer when I was younger, and a fair hand with a squash racquet. Anyway, it just got too painful for me to bear after I got saddled with this bloody wheelchair so I stopped watching it. Stopped thinking about it at all, really. But I need the distraction, so that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s not just an occupying the mind thing, it’s that I want the sound. The funny thing is that earlier I could’ve sworn I heard that bloody Teddy Bears’ Picnic record of hers. But it’s impossible. The wind-up gramophone’s in the conservatory at the back of the house so there’s no way I could’ve heard it from up here. Gave me the willies.<br />
<br />
Strange, now I come to think of it I didn’t see the bloody machine yesterday when I was watering the plants in there. Could Mrs Kenny have moved it for some reason? I’ll get rid of the bloody thing anyway.<br />
<br />
I can feel cold creeping into the flat from the main house, although the radiators in here are blistering hot. It looks as though it’s going to be a bitter winter.<br />
<br />
<b>9.00 p.m.</b><br />
<br />
It won’t stop! That bloody record keeps on playing over and over and I can’t stand it! I’ve been through the entire house looking for the bloody gramophone and I can’t find it, and no matter what room you’re in it always sounds as though it’s coming from somewhere else. Am I going mad? Is this some kind of guilt thing? I’ve never had much faith in all that psychoanalysis stuff, but what’s happening can’t be real so where does that leave me?`<br />
<br />
I tried phoning Mary’s mother earlier but the bloody phone isn’t working. Wouldn’t do me much good, anyway. She never liked me. Never liked her daughter either. Cold-hearted bitch. When she came down for the funeral all she wanted to know was when she’d get her share of the money.<br />
<br />
The house is like an iceberg. I’m trying to get drunk but I can’t.<br />
<br />
<b>12.30 a.m.</b><br />
<br />
It’s stopped. So tired.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<i>She wore a long white summer dress drawn in at the waist by a white cotton belt. On her feet were high laced boots and in her hair she wore pink ribbons. She giggled as she poured imaginary tea from a tiny teapot into the tiny cups set in front of each little bear, and chided the smallest one of all who would not sit up straight.<br />
<br />
In the trees the summer birds sang brightly but the grass around her was thick with frost. When he looked into her eyes he saw endless fields of snow.</i><br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<b>Extracts from the diary of Christopher Robbins, Sunday November 2nd</b><br />
<br />
<b>10.40 a.m.</b><br />
<br />
Fell asleep in the bloody wheelchair. Never happened before, always made the bloody struggle to get into bed. It was just too bloody much, all of it.<br />
<br />
Saw Mary in the night. Don’t know when. Woke up and she was standing in front of me dressed in some white bloody dress. Never wore white. Said it made her look fat. Looked at me like she used to when I first met her. Hard and bitter, not shit-soft like she got later. Smiled. Hard smile. Gave me the willies. Pissed myself in fact. Should change clothes but I’m so tired.<br />
<br />
Bloody record again. Won’t stop. It’s so bloody cold in here.<br />
<br />
<b>12.00 p.m.</b><br />
<br />
Got to get out. Cold. It won’t stop. Going mad. Got to get out.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The wheelchair moved slowly down the corridor, leaving tracks in the thick frost that covered the carpet. The door to Mary’s room was wide open as he passed it, and he could see the flickering light from the monitor on the ceiling, and hear the blaring brass band that accompanied the march of the teddy bears across the screen. Some small core of sanity assured him it couldn’t be happening, but he was no longer interested in listening to it. He was freezing and he was frightened and he wanted his mummy to comfort him. As he moved down the corridor he sucked the thumb of his left hand for comfort.<br />
<br />
The brass button that opened the lift was so cold that shreds of his skin peeled away from his fingers and were left trailing from it like streamers. Inside the lift the military band was muted but The Teddy Bears’ Picnic seemed to swell up from somewhere beneath him and scratched its way into his brain like the insistent claws of an angry cat. And it was icy. The air coalesced on his skin, forming delicate crystals that sparkled in the overhead light.<br />
<br />
With a thud the lift came to a halt on the ground floor. With bleeding fingers he prised open the inner doors, thumbed the button that opened the outer doors and ...<br />
<br />
... thick, languid heat poured over him. The house was gone and he was surrounded by the dense, sun-dappled trees of a forest. Beneath the wheels of his chair the hard-packed earth of a well-worn path led out into a clearing. The sun shone down from a supernaturally blue, cotton-wool flecked sky as bees droned among the nodding flowers of a drowsy summer afternoon. Nearby a red and white checked tablecloth was spread against the intense green of the grass and on it was laid plates and cutlery, gleaming white cups and saucers and, in the midst of it all, a large yellow picnic hamper. A wind-up gramophone sat in the lazily waving grass, playing ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.<br />
<br />
Scattered indolently around the tablecloth were several ... well, they were undoubtedly <i>bears</i> but neither their size nor wicked claws or sharp teeth made them look in the least cute or cuddly. Somehow they sensed his presence and rose as one and he realised, as they began to move towards him, how horribly <i>close</i> they really were. Bizarrely, one of them wore a napkin around its neck and was clutching a teacup in one of its paws.<br />
<br />
Christopher frantically tried to turn the wheelchair but the thick undergrowth on either side of the path held it fast. He backed the chair instead, but much too slowly. Just as they reached him he found himself wondering, idiotically, what was in the yellow hamper.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-11378276625659663852010-01-31T12:33:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:28.369-08:00Pretty BirdLow, but insistent, the sound insinuated itself into his ears and pulled him slowly from his bleak dreams. He muttered to himself, winding deeper into the blankets and drawing them over his head.<br />
<br />
<i>Tappety-tappety-tap!</i><br />
<br />
Knuckles rapped against the door of his mind. A fragment of some long-ago-known but now forgotten jazz melody floated over the top of the odd, disjointed rhythm and then was gone.<br />
<br />
<i>Tappety-tappety-tap! TAP!</i><br />
<br />
The coarse blanket scratched the skin of his face. A thick string of saliva wound its way down his chin and pooled in the notch at the base of his neck. He sneezed as stray fibres from the bedclothes tickled the back of his nose.<br />
<br />
<i>TAP!</i><br />
<br />
Some deep part of him panicked briefly at the suffocating closeness and his arms flailed and flung the blanket away from his face. His fingers kneaded his eyes, rubbing the night-grit from their corners.<br />
<br />
<i>TAP! TAP! TAP!</i><br />
<br />
<b><i>"What?"</i></b><br />
<br />
The sound of his voice startled him, sounding thick and menacing in the gloom of his bedroom.<br />
<br />
<b>TAP! TAP! TAP!</b><br />
<br />
<i>(From behind the black curtains at the window ...)</i><br />
<br />
<b>TAP! TAP! TAP!</b><br />
<br />
He wearily hauled himself up, his hand stretching automatically towards the dressing-gown that was flung over the back of the rickety chair at his bedside.<br />
<br />
<i>What does it matter? There’s no-one here to see.</i><br />
<br />
Nevertheless habit over-ruled the thought and he pulled the threadbare garment around him and knotted the belt.<br />
<br />
<b>TAP! TAP! TAP!</b><br />
<br />
<b>Tappety-tappety-Tappety-tap!!!</b><br />
<br />
Fast. Furious. Hot needles in his forehead. He winced and tore the curtains open.<br />
<br />
He blinked as the spring sunshine rushed joyously into the room. A fat raven sat on the other side of the glass. Its head shot forward.<br />
<br />
<b>TAP!</b><br />
<br />
The glass <i>shook</i> in its frame from the impact of the beak. The raven cocked its head and looked at him slyly.<br />
<br />
"You <b>bastard</b>!", he screamed.<br />
<br />
He pounded against the window, wheezing in his fury.<br />
<br />
The raven grinned. Mockingly. It spread its wings, flapped them languidly, and rose into the sky.<br />
<br />
His wheezing grew worse. His heart fluttered in his chest.<br />
<br />
<i>Like wings. It feels just like wings!</i><br />
<br />
His hands trembled as he fumbled open the bottle of pills. A white shower spilled from it and separated, each dry droplet bouncing on the dusty carpet. He fell to his knees and scooped up a handful of them, shoving them into his mouth and swallowing them. He coughed, and the wings inside him beat more urgently.<br />
<br />
<i>Doctors! Bloody doctors!</i><br />
<br />
His hands clutched the pounding centre of his chest as he sank backwards and lay gasping on the floor. His head moved from side to side until his eyes rested on the photograph on the bedside table. Pretty, nose freckled by the summer sun, she smiles into the camera.<br />
<br />
<i>Called her my pretty bird. I did. Loved them, she did. But they killed her.</i><br />
<br />
<i>(A hand reaches out towards the injured gull, flapping broken-winged on the ledge. And reaches out forever. In a cascade of stones they fall together towards the far-below sea.<br />
<br />
<b>"NO!"</b>)</i><br />
<br />
A tear began in the corner of one eye and tracked its way down the crease in his cheek.<br />
<br />
<i>Fifty years we would have been together by now. Me and my pretty bird.</i><br />
<br />
The frenzy in his chest lessened and stilled, but he continued to lie there, his breath rasping as he indulged in the self-torment of picturing a marriage that never was: the children and <i>their</i> children, the happy hours walking and talking, even the disputes made sweet by the reconciliations that followed them.<br />
<br />
<i>Birds. <b>Bloody birds!</b></i><br />
<br />
It was, he supposed, time to gather in the morning’s harvest of revenge, to take what small satisfactions it would offer him. Stiffly, he rose and dressed and, pausing to pick up a plastic carrier bag from the untidy heap on the kitchen floor, he shuffled through the back door and out into the overgrown garden.<br />
<br />
Perhaps half a dozen small, brown corpses lay stiffly on and around the bird table that nestled in amongst the tall nettles. Muttering disgustedly to himself, he picked them up and dropped them into his bag. One had died with a piece of the poisoned daily bread still wedged in its beak.<br />
<br />
<i>So <b>many</b> I’ve killed, but still they come. Filthy, <b>dirty</b>, robbing creatures.</i><br />
<br />
As he picked the last one up some final spasm of life briefly reanimated it. A brown, beady eye fixed on him, communicating an emotion he found impossible to identify. It moved in his hand and its beak closed painfully on his flesh. He screamed and dropped the bag, the corpses spilling out around his feet. He hurled the still-twitching thing from him and sucked at the blood that welled from the tiny puncture at the base of his thumb. An ominous throbbing began in his chest.<br />
<br />
As he reeled backwards, the sudden shock of adrenaline dizzying him, a cloud seemed to darken the sun. He heard and felt the bones of one of his victims crunch under his foot and he slipped and fell among the tall strands of dewy grass. He landed on his back with a jarring impact that drove the breath from his lungs and left his heart fluttering wildly and painfully against the cage of his ribs.<br />
<br />
Far, far above him, a turbulent thick cloud boiled in the sky, shredding the sunlight.<br />
<br />
<i>What?</i><br />
<br />
His eyes strained to make sense of the sight.<br />
<br />
<i>Ravens! It’s ravens! Thousands of ravens!</i><br />
<br />
His heart lurched. He could feel it take on a life of its own, tearing itself from its anchorage and scrabbling furiously upwards.<br />
<br />
<i>Pills. My pills!</i><br />
<br />
His hands tore uselessly at the grass as his consciousness shrank to a single bright point and he died, his jaw dislocating itself as his mouth opened in a final, silent scream.<br />
<br />
In the sudden calm no-one was there to see the scarlet bird which flew out of his mouth and then up into the centre of the black cloud. Welcoming - <i>loving</i> - it closed around the single red dot at its heart and bore it away into the vast blue sky.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-4847899637710649842010-01-30T12:04:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:28.247-08:00She Called Me SweetheartFrom the shadows under the trees that grew behind the garden wall at the back of the house - <i>his</i> house - he watched as the last light went out. He coughed and spat some bloody slime from his broken lung: he knew it would be soon. The after-midnight moon brushed with silver the grey fur of a cat stepping daintily along the top of the wall, the light making lamps of its eyes. The cat turned once, twice in its tracks and leapt from light into shade, pursuing some small scurrying animal into the deep darkness beneath the trees. He watched it go, his imagination making them brothers of the hunt.<br />
<br />
As he waited for the hush of the night and the warm, soothing waves of moist summer air to sink the world into sleep he allowed the memories to fill him once more. The cold fire sang within him, tracing its icy way from the pit of his stomach through muscle and nerve until it filled his head with a pure and cleansing rage that fused his intellect and will into a hard, brilliant crystal of hatred.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it was true, he reflected, that he’d gone too far in disciplining her that night - he’d been drunk and he remembered nothing of what had happened - but she’d seemed alright the next morning, had given him no hint of inner turmoil, and after all his right to discipline her had been an accepted - for her a <i>needed</i> - part of the relationship for more than four years.<br />
<br />
Maybe he had gone too far but hadn’t she understood that he’d had a lousy year? Did she think he’d been drinking like that for fun? How could she simply forget the four years during which he’d nursed her through her own doubts and insecurities; the times when he’d comforted her all night long, gentling her until the desire for death left her and she finally slept?<br />
<br />
And she’d behaved normally in the morning, had even smiled and joked as he left for work. It was only when he’d returned home that evening to find the policemen waiting for him outside the empty house that he’d known something was wrong.<br />
<br />
The anger suddenly surged within him causing him to shudder, and his teeth to draw blood from his bottom lip, as he recalled the humiliation of the trial and the bleak agony of the two years of voyeurism and violence that was the essence of all they had done to him in the name of psychoanalysis. Two years of twilight existence in a demeaning limbo which marked him as not mad enough to be locked away but not sane enough to be left alone: he hated her most of all for that.<br />
<br />
He breathed deeply, willing himself to relax as he filled his lungs with the humid night air. When he felt calm again he lit a cigarette, coughing as the smoke reached his crippled lung. When he had finished the cigarette he tossed the butt behind him, waited for five minutes and then lit another. When he’d thrown away the tenth and final butt he hauled himself over the low wall and headed towards his appointment with revenge.<br />
<br />
"I’m coming Melissa," he whispered as his feet hit the wild and ragged grass on the other side, "I’m coming, you bitch!"<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Nervous, but deliciously so, filled with an excitement that thrilled him, he moved as silent as some predatory spirit from the long-ago folklore of howling desert or empty plain towards the large shed that in happier times had served him as a workshop. As he’d suspected she hadn’t bothered to change the combination on the lock - probably neither she nor her new boyfriend had either the inclination or knowledge to do so - and he was delighted to see that all of his tools, though dusty and somewhat rusted, were still serviceable. He was particularly happy to note, as he brooded on the threshold and surveyed its interior in the dim light from the 40 watt bulb in the ceiling, that the large workbench with its four sturdy legs had been left in place. At the sight of it he recalled with a pang of regret the many hours they’d spent apart, and had yet been united by creative endeavour: she at her easel in the house, he in here mending some broken machine or creating some new plaything for her from wood and metal.<br />
<br />
But there was something else he needed. He rummaged through the clutter in the tall steel cabinet that stood against one wall for a few minutes until he found what he was looking for - a small hand-held blowtorch which he’d used mostly for burning ancient paint off whatever he had been refurbishing at the time. Experimentally he tried lighting it and was reassured by the fierce blue flame. More rummaging produced several spare gas canisters - more than enough for his purposes - and some short lengths of stout cord. Perfect!<br />
<br />
Placing his treasure trove on the workbench he snapped off the light and sauntered the hundred or so metres that separated the shed from the house, whistling under his breath in pleasure.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Entering the house through the conservatory at the rear was even easier than he’d expected. He’d been resigned to making a return journey to the shed to fetch whatever tools he might need to force an entry - and he’d been nervous that the inevitable noise would wake the sleepers upstairs - but, incredibly, the conservatory door was ajar and, more incredibly still, his old key still fitted the lock on the glass door that led from it into the lounge.<br />
<br />
In a moment of forgetfulness he found himself resolving to give her a stern lecture for her sloppiness. He felt momentarily giddy and had to suck in a deep breath to steady himself. God, how had he put up with her incredible impracticality for so long? Artistic temperament was something he supposed he understood, but when it distanced you from reality to the point of being a threat...<br />
<br />
No matter. He patted the blade of the hunting knife concealed in his inner jacket pocket, savouring the wicked heavy feel of it through the folds of cloth, and moved into the house.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
He paused for a few seconds inside the lounge to allow his eyes time to adjust themselves to the reduced light - a rapid process since his night vision had always been extremely acute - and as he waited he took stock of the once so-familiar room.<br />
<br />
He was glad he’d done so as she seemed to have filled the end of the room in which he stood with her equipment. To his right was a large easel, and everywhere he looked was a bewildering array of tables bearing pots stiff with pencils and pens and brushes. Bottles of ink and tubes of paint were everywhere, even spilling over onto sheets of newspaper spread on the bare boards of the floor. If he’d tried to navigate solely by his memories of the room as it had been when he shared this house with her, he wouldn’t have managed a half dozen steps without bringing something crashing down.<br />
<br />
"From Chaos comes Art", he quoted (or misquoted, he wasn’t sure) to himself with a sneer. Oh, he’d come a long way tonight to show her what Art really was...<br />
<br />
Gingerly he picked his way through the clutter and made his way towards the spiral staircase that climbed from the front of the lounge to the upper storey, wincing at every creak from the wood beneath his feet.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
At the top of the staircase the winding stairs left him facing towards the back of the house. Breathing heavily - but quietly - he halted. Doors led off the narrow corridor on either side of him, but the only one which held any interest for him lay at the end of the corridor, immediately opposite where he now stood. He could see the open door of the large bedroom whose light he’d watched go out from where he’d lurked among the trees, and by now his eyes were so well-adjusted to the gloom that he could even dimly make out a corner of the bed in which she must be lying.<br />
<br />
He reached into his jacket, pulled the knife from its concealment and waited for a few seconds more to taste in anticipation, like some long-awaited treat, his approaching triumph - <i>it would be soo</i>n - before creeping as silently as the bare floorboards (why hadn’t he insisted on the carpets he’d wanted?) would allow him to do towards the open door.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Peering through the doorway he saw that she lay wrapped in the arms of her new lover, presenting a picture so tender that for a moment his eyes misted with tears. He was slim and muscular, and so like the way he had been when they’d first met that for a moment he was lost in remembering...<br />
<br />
And then the anger, the hatred, came back to claim him. He ran the remaining distance to the bed and plunged the knife into the throat of the sleeping man. And at once blood was everywhere, great gouts of it leaping from the wound and spraying thickly over him, the walls, the sheets, Melissa, everything. For a moment he recoiled in horror - nothing he’d ever seen or imagined had prepared him for this - but he recovered almost instantly when he saw her eyes opening.<br />
<br />
"Remember me?" he hissed at her, and, seeing the recognition come and her mouth opening on a scream, he slammed a fist into her jaw and hurled her back into the darkness.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Negotiating the spiral staircase with her limp body slung over one shoulder had proved to be much more difficult than he’d imagined, and by the time he’d staggered under the burden as far as the shed he was gasping for breath and drenched in sweat. He was still a strong man, lean and hard with bunched muscle under the bloodied suit, but he was no longer a fit man - the last two years had taken a terrible toll on his body as well as his mind - and he was trembling with the exertion as he strapped her down to the workbench, binding each of her limbs firmly to one of its legs.<br />
<br />
Still, he’d managed it in the end, and he permitted himself a small smile of satisfaction as he contemplated her naked body - as perfect in its every detail as he’d remembered it - and the rich lustre of her hair glowing red and gold against the dark and pitted wood.<br />
<br />
He waited patiently now, and at peace, until he saw her eyelids flicker and her mouth begin to move against the oily rag with which he’d gagged her. He lit the blowtorch and set to work.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Rage and desire took his hands and pulled him into madness as he toiled there amongst the coils of smoke, his eyes smarting and his nostrils weeping from the stinging assault of burning flesh and hair. He worked on, delirious, furious, carving from the artist a work of art - <i>his</i> art - as beautiful in the intensity of its passion as anything she herself had ever created.<br />
<br />
He worked on, immersed in the act of creation, until something - some glazing of her eyes - warned him that the end was near. Her mouth moved purposefully against the gag and he tore it away, anxious to hear from her in the end some appreciation of his skill: some harsh words, some final mouthing of pain and hatred to acknowledge and crown his artistry.<br />
<br />
"Oh," she said.<br />
<br />
He waited, trembling with excited expectation.<br />
<br />
"Oh sweetheart." And all of his hopeless, soured love for her rose up to drown him. As she died he began to weep: he wept for her, and for him; for his loss and for hers. And he knew that he would never, ever stop weeping again.<br />
<br />
With fumbling fingers he inserted a fresh canister into the blowtorch, ignited it and set it reverently on the bench at her feet. He drew up a chair and set to work a final time.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
They found him in the morning, still facing the burned-out torch, and beating with his fingerless, blackened fists at his temples. His body was convulsed with violent sobbing, but no tears could come from the charred, lidless pits which had once held his eyes.<br />
<br />
All he would say, over and over, was "she called me sweetheart."Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-25467766607658246052010-01-30T11:46:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:28.651-08:00WhistlerCharlie whistled. Incessantly.<br />
<br />
Charlie had whistled ever since, at the age of five or six, his father had taught him the secret. His was a sunny disposition which no misfortune could ever darken; in him there were no hidden shadows, no bitter memories, no nooks and crannies where sorrow could take residence and grow. He was shallow, but he was happy. And he whistled.<br />
<br />
His unremitting cheerfulness had won him many friends: everybody loved Charlie, although most people could only take him in small doses. The only person, apart from his parents, who had ever endured more than a day or two of his company - his former wife - had finally exploded one morning and in the grip of a menstrual rage had bellowed at him "Why the fuck can’t you be miserable like everyone else?" before hurling a particularly hideous vase at him (Charlie had bought it as an anniversary present for her the previous year - he had the aesthetic sensibilities of a flatworm) and stomping out, never to return. The vase had missed and shattered against a wall. Charlie had whistled as he swept up the debris.<br />
<br />
Charlie’s mouth music carried him through life. Occasionally he would render any popular song which was sufficiently catchy for it to have registered on his consciousness, but most of the time he simply trilled like a demented budgerigar. Indeed, his whistling had become such a constant part of his life that he was largely unaware of it. Until one morning ...<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
He had taken his usual route to work (he was employed as a delivery driver, a job which gave him much satisfaction and which kept him away from his work-place for most of every day, thus helping to keep his workmates happy), a route which involved using a pedestrian underpass to avoid crossing a busy and rather dangerous main thoroughfare. As was his custom he took advantage of the acoustics in the underpass to attempt a rather more complex melody than would normally be the case, happily savouring the extra resonance which the echo imparted to his whistling.<br />
<br />
He’d made his way jauntily down half of the passage before the need to concentrate on side-stepping a large pile of dog-shit caused him temporarily to fall silent. To his surprise the echo did not die immediately but carried on for several seconds. Indeed it seemed to him that it continued the melody from the point at which he’d broken off, although the song itself - some mindless ditty sung by half a dozen pretty but otherwise meagrely-talented girls - was so repetitious that it wasn’t easy to tell. Startled, he whistled a little more of the song and then fell silent again. The echo died with him this time, and he shrugged off the previous delay as some kind of aberration and continued on his way.<br />
<br />
He had a busy day. The food warehouse for which he worked was the largest grocery wholesaler in the area and consequently he had little time for thought, a situation which suited him fine. A day of constant motion, filled with trivial human contact, was the sort of day which fuelled Charlie’s cheeriness, and by the time he’d begun his walk back home from the warehouse his whistling was audible for dozens of yards in every direction.<br />
<br />
His journey through the underpass was without troubling incident this time, although he noticed that the echo of his footsteps seemed a little delayed, almost as though someone was following him. "Imagination!" he thought, although it would’ve been difficult to find anyone who knew him who would be prepared to grant him much more in the way of imagination than that exhibited by the average corpse.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Charlie’s evening passed as most of Charlie’s evenings did: phone calls to friends (his friends generally welcomed his calls with rather more enthusiasm than they welcomed his visits: after all he couldn’t whistle and talk at the same time), a game of chess with one of the other lodgers in the guest-house (he was a lousy chess-player, but bore every defeat - even against his landlady’s eight year-old nephew - with his usual unfailing good humour), a late supper of cheese and crackers and, finally, bed.<br />
<br />
It was as he was performing his nightly ablutions in the communal bathroom, whistling happily to himself as he did so, that he noticed the return of the underpass phenomenon. He’d stopped whistling to brush his teeth and the echo continued for what had to be at least a minute afterwards. In fact it wasn’t an echo! Charlie had been whistling a formless, rambling sequence of notes but the echo had responded with a snatch of ‘Good Day Sunshine’, Charlie’s favourite Beatles song.<br />
<br />
He strained his ears for a repetition, but the bathroom - indeed the entire house - seemed almost eerily silent. He shuddered, hurriedly brushed his teeth, and retreated as rapidly as he could to his room and the security of his bed. For once he didn’t whistle as he climbed into his striped pyjamas, and sleep did not, as usual, claim him instantly. Instead he found himself listening intently, and it took a conscious effort to relax enough to sink into oblivion.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
By the following morning Charlie’s good humour had returned. He had no real explanation for what had occurred the previous night but he was not by nature a brooder and the sun was shining and he felt good.<br />
<br />
Charlie broke into a whistle as he applied marmalade generously to his buttered toast, poured himself a nice strong cup of tea and settled down at the table. He bit into the toast and ...<br />
<br />
From out of nowhere ‘Good Day Sunshine’ returned, and this time it didn’t stop. Stunned, Charlie listened, his toast still held to his mouth by a suddenly limp hand as the whole song, complete with choruses and middle eight, filled the room. When it had finally ceased Charlie felt himself torn between the urge to ransack the room in search of the hidden whistler (although he knew that there couldn’t possibly be anyone in there with him) and the urge to get out into the sane world as soon as possible.<br />
<br />
The latter urge was the one which prevailed in the end, and in consequence he found himself at work a good half hour earlier than usual, despite having been delayed by opting to cross the main road rather than using the underpass. He hadn’t whistled once during the whole journey.<br />
<br />
The day which followed was a nightmare. Every time Charlie recovered enough of his buoyancy to begin whistling, the mysterious whistler responded with ‘Good Day Sunshine’: sometimes just a brief excerpt, sometimes the whole thing, but always the same song. By midday Charlie had, for the first time in his life, begun to feel bad-tempered - he’d even snapped at an especially dense and officious supermarket security guard who’d insisted on scrutinising every last piece of paperwork connected with the delivery, asking endless idiotic questions before he could be convinced that Charlie was not a terrorist bent on bringing an explosive end to the grocery trade.<br />
<br />
By four o’clock he’d had enough and he abandoned the attempt to complete his round, growling "not feeling well" at the warehouse supervisor as he handed in his keys, an excuse that was readily believed since the man had never before seen Charlie exhibit anything other than light-heartedness and an almost cloying bonhomie.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Charlie spent that evening in a state that - had he ever experienced it before - he would have recognised as depression. He’d - illogically he knew, since the whistling followed him around - searched his room repeatedly for concealed tape recorders and had to restrain himself from phoning a friend of his known to be a practical joker to accuse him of perpetrating an exceptionally unpleasant prank.<br />
<br />
In fact he couldn’t bear the thought of phoning anyone at all, couldn’t bear the thought of chess, couldn’t bear anything. Despite his misery he more than once found himself pursing his lips to whistle and each time desisted with a shudder.<br />
<br />
The night dragged on into an eternity in which he sat listlessly staring into space waiting for enough fatigue to accumulate to allow him to sleep. When at last, towards dawn, he fell asleep in the chair in which he was sitting he had uneasy, fragmentary dreams in which he was pursued down a tunnel by an unseen whistling train.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
When he woke it was light outside and he could hear bird-song and the sound of children playing. It was so normal that for a moment he couldn’t recall the cause of the previous day’s agitation. But then, so low that it was only just audible, he heard someone whistling ‘Good Day Sunshine’.<br />
<br />
As his attention was drawn towards it the shrill noise gradually grew in volume - sourceless, directionless - until it was loud enough to be distinct without drowning out any of the sounds which were coming from outside. Despair engulfed him.<br />
<br />
As an experiment he once more tried whistling himself - reasoning that if his own whistling had started it up it might put a stop to it - but no matter how often he started and stopped the constant irritating melody persisted in haunting him. For a while he even found a brief pleasure in harmonising with the unseen minstrel, but this quickly palled and was replaced once more by depression.<br />
<br />
He phoned in sick - the first time in more than twenty years of continuous employment - and made an appointment to see his doctor.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The wait for the afternoon appointment had been almost more than Charlie could bear. That damned song had pursued him everywhere: down to the local shopping precinct while he picked up his newspaper, all the way to the small park where it was his custom to feed the ducks on scraps of stale bread, and then all the way home again.<br />
<br />
Back in his room he’d become so desperate that he’d buried his head in pillows but it was no good - although the whistling seemed to come from some indeterminate source outside him its volume was in no way lessened either by the pillows, or the plugs of cotton wool he inserted in his ears, or indeed by a combination of both.<br />
<br />
By the time he reached the doctor’s surgery he was in a state of profound and very visible agitation, so much so in fact that the doctor had to force him through several minutes of deep breathing before he was sufficiently composed to speak.<br />
<br />
"Now then," he said in the traditional opening gambit of all doctors, "what seems to be the trouble?"<br />
<br />
"There’s a whistle after me!", replied Charlie.<br />
<br />
"Eh?"<br />
<br />
It took several minutes for the doctor to assemble something like a coherent statement from Charlie, and when he’d finally arrived at the point he found himself not much the wiser.<br />
<br />
"Well, it could be tinnitus," he said, "or an auditory hallucination caused by a problem in the brain itself."<br />
<br />
Charlie looked alarmed.<br />
<br />
"Not to worry," said the doctor breezily, attempting to convey more confidence than he actually felt, "I’ll write you out a prescription for something to settle your nerves and something to help you to sleep, and we’ll get you to the hospital for a check-up."<br />
<br />
"But ..." began Charlie but by the operation of some magical procedure known only to doctors he found himself outside the surgery clutching a prescription and a letter to the hospital without having had the chance to complete his sentence.<br />
<br />
"Oh well," he thought, "there’s no help for it then. Better get to the hospital."<br />
<br />
He sighed at the thought of the rest of a beautiful sunny afternoon being wasted on the proddings and pokings of the medical profession, but there really wasn’t any alternative, was there?<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
In fact it had been far worse than he’d imagined. After a nurse, and then a doctor, had listened to his story, they’d minutely examined his ears and then made a further appointment for a scan the following day. They’d all been polite enough but Charlie had the impression that no-one was really listening to him, and by the time it was all over he’d been close to tears.<br />
<br />
In the meanwhile that song had continued to plague him mercilessly, whistled by the unseen assailant who, Charlie had realised to his chagrin, was far more talented than he could ever be. The more often he repeated it the more embellishments and refinements he added to it, until it had become almost symphonic in its structure. Whoever the bastard was, Charlie hated him, and he had never hated anyone in his entire life before.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The week of waiting for the results to filter back from the hospital to his doctor had proved to be almost unendurable - although the tranquillisers and sleeping pills had helped a little, as had Charlie’s decision to demolish his entire collection of Beatles records with a hammer (with the exception of ‘Revolver’, which he melted in a frying pan. The pan was ruined, of course, but the satisfaction had been unbelievable; thank goodness he’d never bought himself a CD player - vinyl was so much easier to destroy).<br />
<br />
When the day finally came he found himself almost eager to return to the surgery. Surely they’d found some nice, curable condition that would free him once and for all ...<br />
<br />
"No," said the doctor, "nothing at all, I’m afraid."<br />
<br />
"But there must be!" wailed Charlie.<br />
<br />
"No. No damage to the ear-drums; no sign of a brain tumour. I think it might be an idea to make you an appointment to see a psychiatrist ..."<br />
<br />
But by this time Charlie was no longer listening. He left the surgery in a state of dazed unbelief. On his way home he found himself in an off-licence and - practically unheard of for him - bought himself a bottle of scotch.<br />
<br />
Just as he turned to leave the little, bird-like old lady behind the counter startled him by saying "Oh, I love that song!"<br />
<br />
"What?"<br />
<br />
"‘Good Day Sunshine’, isn’t it? You whistle very well, young man."<br />
<br />
Charlie fled in terror.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
It was late when Charlie finished the last of the scotch. He was - for the first time since his twenty-first birthday party - completely, utterly, invincibly pissed.<br />
<br />
His head felt heavy and unwieldy and his tongue had turned into a squirming lizard which defeated his every attempt to form words: "Ishza basar,’" he said more than once of the unknown whistler, "gonna killim."<br />
<br />
At last it got to be too much for him. The room had begun to rotate in a sedately but unnerving fashion around him and he felt sick.<br />
<br />
"Gotta ge’out," he told himself, "geshum freshair."<br />
<br />
He ricocheted like a pinball off the walls in the landing as he made his uncertain way down the stairs to the front door. His lurch down the path to the street was anything but graceful, and he’d used the front door to steady himself as he went through it, which meant that he’d pulled it shut behind him with a crash that must have woken up just about everyone in the street.<br />
<br />
Once through the gate he allowed instinct to provide him with a direction for a progress which was too ungainly to be dignified with the word ‘walk’. He shambled and stumbled on in a bleary haze for an uncertain length of time until he came back to some of his senses with the realisation that he was entering the familiar underpass that led him to his workplace.<br />
<br />
He stopped for a second.<br />
<br />
"Wothehell," he said. He was far too drunk to be afraid.<br />
<br />
The lighting in the underpass was feeble at the best of times, and the demise of most of the bulbs in a section about two thirds of the way down it meant that it was thick with shadows. He strode, or rather swayed, on obliviously until one of the shadows seemed to detach itself from the others and move into his path.<br />
<br />
He halted and blinked, trying to clear his eyes.<br />
<br />
"Wothehell," he said, and a flicker from one of the bulbs behind the shadow caused a shady tendril to drift from its centre and touch his lips.<br />
<br />
He felt something cold and thin enter his mouth and uncoil down his throat. Of their own accord his lips pursed themselves and his lungs worked and he began to whistle. For the first time in more than a week, against his will, he began to whistle.<br />
<br />
The all-too-familiar notes of ‘Good Day Sunshine’ began to assemble themselves in the air, and as he breathed out a mist seemed to accompany them, to issue from his lips and be absorbed by the shadow.<br />
<br />
Faster and faster he whistled, almost too fast to draw breath, and the mist that flowed from his lips came thicker and thicker, and as it touched the shadow it seemed to glow within and take form. Arms and legs took shape, indistinct at first but growing firm and thick; then a vague impression of a torso clothed in a rumpled raincoat; and at last, as the air in Charlie’s lungs gave out and his heart burst, he saw his own face grinning back at him from the phantom head of the shadow.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Much later, in the chilly twilight of not-quite-dawn, a man passed the heap of rags carelessly dumped at the side of the underpass and, barely seeing them in the gloom, carried on his way to work. He whistled as he went, not even noticing the strange delayed echo that followed him down the tunnel.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-27411770924796970582010-01-29T13:05:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:28.931-08:00The Princess And The WoodcutterThe Princess walked through the trees. From a long way behind her she could hear the voices of the ladies of her retinue as they chattered and giggled like schoolgirls. She wondered how long it would be before they noticed that she had gone. There would undoubtedly be hell to pay if her father ever discovered that she’d disobeyed his orders to be with her ladies-in-waiting at all times - and she shuddered as the thought of the flogging block and the birch twigs fleetingly crossed her mind - but she was desperate to escape her boredom. Her life was suffocating her: she felt that all the luxuries in the world were inadequate compensation for the loss of her freedom to do as she pleased, to escape the routines of ritual and duty that defined every moment of her waking day, to have adventures, to be alone.<br />
<br />
The tinkling of a forest stream drew her onwards through the blossom-perfumed gloom to where a break in the trees allowed a bright shaft of sunlight to stand in the summer air like the column of an insubstantial but glorious temple. Within it pollen danced - millions of golden sparks blown from some celestial fire - and the wings of a dragonfly blazed with the momentary richness of an artist’s dream. At its base the stream widened into a languid pool which shone like silver in the light.<br />
<br />
She stood above the pool, watching her reflection trembling in its depths, and she thought <i>I am beautiful</i>. Her red hair fell in an autumnal tumble over her shoulders and her eyes were as green as the leaves that framed her image in the water.<br />
<br />
As she stood and looked at herself her fingers moved almost of their own volition to the pearl buttons that held her summer gown closed and undid them one by one until it fell at her feet. Her fingertips gently teased her nipples and stroked the amber down that surrounded her sex.<br />
<br />
The breeze chilled her skin and caused delicious shudders to run through her. She kicked off her slippers and carried them in her hand as she waded through the cool water, her gown slung across one shoulder in what she imagined was a nonchalant fashion.<br />
<br />
The trees thinned out on the other side and she soon found herself walking through a meadow. Swaying daisies punctuated the grass, and golden butterflies crowded the air in dancing flurries. Ahead of her a grey horse - freed of its cartload of logs - contentedly champed at the grass, and she could hear a cuckoo calling from the forest.<br />
<br />
The Princess adored horses. She had been drawn to them helplessly: hopelessly in love with them since she could first recognise them, long before she had ever learned to pronounce the word ‘horse’. This wasn’t some sleek thoroughbred from her father’s stables, but nevertheless it was a horse, true scion of the King of Beasts. Dropping her gown in the grass she stroked its mane and kissed its nose, murmuring her love in its ear.<br />
<br />
"And what would you be doing there, missy?"<br />
<br />
She turned, her heart suddenly hammering in her breast.<br />
<br />
He was dressed in a brown leather jerkin which was open at the front to reveal the thickly matted, glistening hair of his chest. His long chestnut hair fell nearly to the waist of the canvas trousers and he was darkly bearded. His face bore a look of almost cruel amusement as he dropped the axe he was carrying and moved towards her.<br />
<br />
As he approached she could smell him, an acrid animal odour of mingled sweat and woodsmoke that took her breath away. Suddenly conscious of her nudity she folded one arm across her breasts while a protective hand fell to cover the mossy gateway between her thighs.<br />
<br />
Uselessly.<br />
<br />
As he reached her he took one hand in each of his and drew her arms open with a strength and self-confidence that stilled her struggles before they had even begun. His mouth moved powerfully against hers, and as he drew her to him she could feel the hardness of his manhood against her thigh. Her senses swam as he pulled her to the ground and ...<br />
<br />
The telephone rang.<br />
<br />
Rachel hung for a moment on the edge of her dream, her fingers still working busily at her clitoris, before the telephone rang again and pulled her completely from the magic.<br />
<br />
"Shit!"<br />
<br />
She flung herself across the duvet towards the phone on the bedside table.<br />
<br />
<i>Who the fuck? ...</i><br />
<br />
"Hello?" she said into the receiver, politeness smoothing her voice even as the anger boiled inside her.<br />
<br />
"Rachel?" The voice was hesitant, pathetic in its uncertainty.<br />
<br />
"Josh? What do you want?" The irritation broke free from her control and she could hear the sting in her tone.<br />
<br />
"Rachel, I’ve really done it this time. I just wanted to say goodbye, princess." His voice held the pleading undertone that she’d come to detest so violently over the last few months.<br />
<br />
"Done what?" she asked, her thoughts adding "you gutless little wimp" to the question.<br />
<br />
"I’ve eaten all the sleeping pills the doctor gave me. I’m dying, Rachel."<br />
<br />
<i>Good! I might get some peace now.</i><br />
<br />
She wrestled the thought into submission and tried to summon up some last dregs of sympathy.<br />
<br />
"Listen, Josh, I’m sorry that you had the breakdown. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to help you through it, but I’ve got my own life to live. We had some fun for a while and I’ve tried to be a friend since, but I really don’t have time for this. Get yourself some help and LEAVE ME ALONE!"<br />
<br />
Despite her best intentions she slammed the phone down on him.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
He lay on his bed staring upwards at the ceiling. Waiting.<br />
<br />
The phone was clutched in his right hand. He gripped it with a force that threatened to crack the plastic of the receiver.<br />
<br />
It had only been a few minutes but he could feel the drowsiness sliding over him: a long, dark wave that started at his feet and washed gently to the crown of his head, before retreating and then returning with slightly greater force. Over and over.<br />
<br />
His fingers loosened and the phone fell onto the bare boards of his bedroom floor with a clatter that set up a resonating throb in his temples.<br />
<br />
He thought of Rachel and the dull ember of antipathy that had glowed sporadically within him since she had told him to go suddenly grew brighter. In his mind’s eye he could see it turn from ruby to orange to yellow to a searing white heat that blazed through him and burned away his body as it lay dying.<br />
<br />
As he fell forever into darkness a shining arrow of his hatred shot through the night towards its target.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
She lay fuming in the pool of light shed by the bedside lamp, her hair a rioting red fan of wrath against the white satin of the pillow. She’d had quite enough misery as a result of Josh’s illness without wanting to bathe in it any longer; she had no patience left either for him or his morbid fantasies. And part of her anger sprang too, she knew, from a certain sense of guilt that no amount of rationalisation would quite overcome: after all it really hadn’t been her fault that the pressures of his work had pushed him into depression, and she just wasn’t the kind of person who could sustain a relationship through that kind of strain. Ending it when she had was undoubtedly not the best thing she could have done from Josh’s point of view, but she’d had to put her own interests first - she couldn’t risk being pulled down with him - and he had other friends to support him.<br />
<br />
She angrily kicked the giant stuffed panda he’d given her for her birthday off the bed, where it landed sprawled face downwards on an abandoned copy of A. N. Roquelaure’s 'Beauty’s Release', and swore. The stupid, weak arsehole! How dare he!<br />
<br />
She was fraught. She knew it. The demands of her <i>own</i> work were unravelling her nerves and she desperately needed some rest, some support. She often woke from some uneasy dream to find herself grinding her teeth, a childhood habit which had returned in recent months.<br />
<br />
The panda looked as desolate lying where it had fallen as Josh himself had come to look at the end. It awakened a disquieting sense of his presence - she could almost sense him watching her, and she shivered.<br />
<br />
She relit the small joint that lay half-smoked in the ashtray and took a calming puff. She picked up the book of fairy stories that lay on what had once been Josh’s side of the bed and began reading where she’d left off.<br />
<br />
Soon she allowed her fingers to wander, and her eyes closed as she sank blissfully into her favourite fantasy.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
As she walked through the last of the trees the world grew sharp around her, impressing itself upon her senses with an immediacy that said "I am no longer a Dream; I am Real". The daisies hurt her eyes with their brightness, and the butterflies flew in such numbers that golden lights danced everywhere on her skin as their wings reflected the sunlight. Ahead of her the grey horse grazed, snorting and tossing its head as the flies buzzed around it. Dropping her gown in the grass she stroked its mane and kissed its nose, murmuring her love in its ear.<br />
<br />
"And what would you be doing there, missy?"<br />
<br />
She turned, her heart suddenly hammering in her breast.<br />
<br />
He was dressed in a brown leather jerkin which was open at the front to reveal the thickly matted, glistening hair of his chest. His long chestnut hair fell nearly to the waist of the canvas trousers and he was darkly bearded. His face bore a look of cruel amusement as he moved towards her, seeming changed from her previous dreams, as though someone she knew from another place or time lay concealed beneath the beard.<br />
<br />
"Josh?" she whispered as the recognition struck her.<br />
<br />
The last sound she ever heard was his axe singing through the air. Her head lay where it fell among the green grass and the golden butterflies crowned her brow with their wings.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-21107059354121384852010-01-22T02:37:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:28.557-08:00The Lord Of Thunder"Of course it’s unfinished", he said, flapping with a muscular hand and brawny forearm towards the squat, square outline of the stone figure which stood in the approximate centre of his lawn, "but with Johnny’s stuff who could ever tell?"<br />
<br />
His chuckle died half-formed, to be replaced by an inward sigh at the same look of frosty disapproval which had seized the pretty face in front of him at his every attempt thus far at either humour or flirtatiousness. "God," he thought to himself, "this woman is a pain!"<br />
<br />
He’d forgotten all about her visit. He’d been drowsing in a garden chair, eyes half-closed under the shadow of a straw hat in the blazing hot July mid-morning, when the mobile phone resting next to the jug of iced Planter's Punch on the table at his side had sheared through his reverie. He’d picked it up, and before he’d even managed to utter a sleepy "hello" a young but clipped feminine voice had announced "Laurence Maynard? Laurel Taylor here. I rang last week about the article I’m writing on your brother’s work. I’ll be there in an hour."<br />
<br />
"Fine," he’d said, his mind struggling to retrieve the forgotten appointment from his memory, but even as he’d said it he’d realised he was talking to a dialling tone.<br />
<br />
And now here she was: a soft, sundressed vision of loveliness sitting in the garden chair opposite him; a golden-haired, sensuous-lipped angel from a wet dream but cursed with the warmth and charm of a regimental sergeant major: <i>Johnny would’ve loved her</i>, he thought grimly. She aimed her digital recorder at him in a manner that suggested it concealed the power to blow his head off.<br />
<br />
"Unfinished?", she queried in a tone that indicated that he was both too stupid to understand his brother’s work, and unworthy of discussing it. In fact, it had not taken more than a couple of minutes of her icy company for Laurence to gather that Ms Taylor not only regarded his brother as the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century - and some kind of saint to boot - but also that she regarded the fact of his having had siblings as being an offence against his uniqueness.<br />
<br />
"It was the last of the ‘New Gods’ series," he replied with as much grace as he could muster, referring to the realisation in stone of his brother’s own personal mythology. "Johnny always stopped work for a few months on each figure just before it was completed. You see he actually believed that the act of carving the stone planted the seed of a god in it, that it had to gestate before he could give birth to the god by adding the finishing touches to the statue. This one" - he waved a hand once more in the direction of the figure - "he named ‘The Lord of Thunder’, but he died on the very day that he stopped working on it to allow the god time to grow inside the stone." He sighed. "Frankly, Ms Taylor, my brother was a nutcase."<br />
<br />
She flinched, and her eyes snapped at him. "Your brother was a genius! A true artist! A man of real passion, not a shallow, vain, empty-headed pig like you. <i>He</i> wouldn’t have spent an entire hour wasting my time with lewd comments and willing me to take my clothes off!"<br />
<br />
That did it! Nothing provokes fury quite like being found out, and Laurence’s temper gave way.<br />
<br />
"My brother," he spat, "was a lunatic who murdered his wife and then killed himself! He earned a fortune from his art and spent most of it on fortune-tellers and phoney mystics. He rattled with tranquillisers and anti-depressants and he kept a whole raft of psychiatrists and psycho-analysts in business all on his own. He thought he was the Messiah of a new religion, but he pissed on the floor and wandered naked in the street. He was a great artist, Ms Taylor, but he was also a grade one certifiable fruitcake! And I’d be grateful now if you’d leave..."<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
After she’d flounced out Laurence made himself another jug of punch - with a rather higher rum content than the previous one - and settled himself back in the garden seat. For a while he sourly contemplated the statue.<br />
<br />
"I’m glad I killed him," he thought.<br />
<br />
A little more than nine months ago. How quickly time passes. He remembered the day well: chilly and dank as autumn slyly drew back the curtain on an early winter. But he’d been sweating up there in his brother’s bedroom, his back glistening as he forced his prick into his sister-in-law’s arse and she moaned face down into the pillow.<br />
<br />
He’d loved that, fucking his brother’s wife. Of course she was beautiful - he did have his standards after all - but it was <i>who</i> she was that mattered the most. It was a little revenge for all the years during which his poor, sickly younger brother had had all of his parent’s attention and Laurence had been frozen out: ignored, or punished when he reminded them that he still existed; revenge for the fact that although he’d been the one who’d gone to art school his brother had turned out to be the one with talent; revenge on him for being the humourless, prudish, puritanical git that he was. Revenge...<br />
<br />
Of course Amelia had had her reasons for the affair, too - and Laurence was not the first of her lovers by any means - but revenge had not been among them. She’d genuinely loved her austere, distant, crazy husband but, as she’d confided more than once to Laurence, he could rarely be aroused to sexual passion, and he was as stiff and unsatisfying as a lover as Laurence had always felt him to be as a man.<br />
<br />
And it was there that it happened. Laurence never knew what warned him - certainly Amelia, her face buried in the pillow, was oblivious to anything but the delicious pain between her buttocks and the nails that tore at her shoulders - but he looked up just in time to see the shining arc of the knife and the thin hand that held it, just in time to catch the wrist as it swung down towards him.<br />
<br />
Even given the advantage of his position, poor scrawny Johnny was no match for his brother. Levering himself up from the bed Laurence forced the blade back against Johnny’s throat and let the years of resentment tell him what to do with it, while all the while his brother spat into his face.<br />
<br />
After Johnny fell to the floor Laurence turned towards the bed and saw the hatred there in Amelia’s eyes. It was too late, he saw, for soothing words; too late to wriggle out of this one. While the shock still held her he took a tissue from the dressing table, wrapped it around the handle of the knife he took from his brother’s hand and allowed her to die for her love.<br />
<br />
He’d placed the knife back in his brother’s hand, showered the blood from his chest and feet, reclaimed his clothes and left the house as discreetly as he could. He’d never had the slightest illusion that a thorough investigation of the deaths would not have led the authorities inexorably to him, but his brother’s madness had served him well: no-one had questioned the apparent course of events.<br />
<br />
As the sole surviving relative his brother’s estate had passed to him. The sale of the house and statuary - except for the one piece he kept - had paid his brother’s many creditors and even left him with a little profit. All in all he felt well rewarded for the years of neglect.<br />
<br />
Laurence settled back in his chair and allowed the afternoon and the rum to sink him into dreamless sleep.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
He awoke to the sound of distant thunder. The sky was thick with purple cloud and the air had become moist and oppressive. He saw that his shirt was soaked with sweat. His legs felt numb and his mind was slow and confused.<br />
<br />
He struggled to rise but his legs were uncooperative, his feet sliding uselessly over the grass, flattening it as the sky opened and an ocean fell down on him.<br />
<br />
Laurence was instantly drenched. The sheer weight of water pushed him back into his seat and held him there, helpless, while he gasped for breath. He tried to rise but found himself flopping about in his chair like a landed fish.<br />
<br />
The thunder roared again - this time closer - and then again and again, each time louder, until the world filled with its roar, and each clap was like the hammering of spikes into his ears. Then there was a clap that seemed to slice his head in two from ear to ear, and his ear-drums burst and little streams of blood trickled down his cheeks and were washed away by the rain. And even through the terrible pain the silence that followed was blessed.<br />
<br />
Then came the lightning in jagged forks that seared the grass, stalking him, teasing him, closer and closer, so bright that he could see it through his closed eyelids, so close that he could smell the ionised air of its passage. And he struggled against the rain, and silently whimpered, and prayed to a God he did not believe in, until his world became filled with a light that was the essence of pain.<br />
<br />
The lightning struck the metal frame of the garden chair and stayed. It pulsed like a living thing for seconds, then minutes, as the plastic of the seat melted and bubbled and burned away his clothes to form a second, obscenely liquid skin on his back and his buttocks and his thighs. It stayed while his eyes popped out of their sockets and dangled on his cheeks. It stayed while the hair on his head - even in the midst of that colossal downpour - burst into flames. It stayed while he burned inside, and he opened his mouth and smoke poured out.<br />
<br />
And then it went, save for a single brief flickering reprise that struck the rain-soaked statue and caused a few chips of stone to fall to the ground. In its wake the terrible downpour slackened.<br />
<br />
Underneath Laurence the chair toppled and he fell on his back amidst the ashes that were all that remained of the grass that had surrounded him.<br />
<br />
On the black soil, in the pink cup of his upturned palm, the summer rain jumped and danced.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-19736890275159045752010-01-22T00:48:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:28.463-08:00The Hollow ManNorris hovered uncertainly at the edge of the dance floor. He wanted very badly to lose himself in that swaying, tangled forest of arms and legs, but every time he tried to move into a gap it magically closed up and he was once more barred from entering the holy circle. The dancers seemed to be possessed by a single consciousness one of whose imperatives was to exclude him at all costs.<br />
<br />
After a while he gave up and looked for a vacant seat somewhere. The song wasn’t one of his favourites anyway - some gibberish about a motherfucker in a motorcade which, judging by the frequency with which it was played, was by somebody really well-known and important but not, of course, recognised by <i>him</i>. In any case, although he’d practised for hours in front of his bedroom mirror he had the uncomfortable feeling that when he danced he resembled nothing quite so much as a praying mantis in the grips of a terminal epileptic seizure - his arms and legs seemed to move to separate rhythms of their own, and more than once he’d flailed himself to the floor and into a painful entanglement with items of bedroom furniture.<br />
<br />
While he was still looking for somewhere - anywhere - to sit, the track ended and something came on he did know, Darkseid’s reworking of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ from the live album their record company had rushed out after old Todd Wotsisname had topped himself. He’d bought the album of course - everyone had bought it - but he’d hated it and had only ever listened to it out of a sense of duty. He took it as a definite sign from the gods that he ought to sit down and headed for the only vacant seat he could see, opposite a sprawling semi-collapsed form wearing a top hat that he recognised as he got nearer as - oh God! - Marty.<br />
<br />
<i>Oh well</i>, he thought, <i>at least Marty talks to me, and that’s more than anyone else around here does.</i><br />
<br />
Mind you, Marty’s conversations tended to be haphazard, disjointed affairs, their content and structure determined by whichever component of his mix of recreational drugs happened to be at the forefront at the time.<br />
<br />
"Hey, erm...", Marty said as Norris sat down.<br />
"Norris."<br />
"YEAH! MAURICE!" Marty almost bellowed, pronouncing it the French way. His eyes were wild and unfocused and his enthusiasm hinted at speed as being the current prevailing influence on his psyche.<br />
"It’s <i>Norris</i>."<br />
"What?"<br />
"Never mind."<br />
"Oh, okay. Say Murray, guess what I just saw!"<br />
<br />
Norris was frankly surprised, given the state that he was in, that he was capable of seeing anything, but he took the bait anyway.<br />
<br />
"What did you see?"<br />
"What?"<br />
"You said you saw something."<br />
"Did I? Oh yeah! I saw a vampire, man!"<br />
<br />
Oh Christ, thought Norris, not again! In the few weeks he’d been coming here he’d heard more than enough on the subject to last him a lifetime.<br />
<br />
"No, really man, it’s true. Of course he didn’t look like a vampire, I mean no Christopher Lee type shit <i>(Well, that makes him different from 90% of the people here, thought Norris sardonically)</i>, but I could TELL, man. He went up there."<br />
<br />
He gestured upwards towards the first floor balcony.<br />
<br />
Norris sighed, but he supposed any conversation was better than nothing.<br />
<br />
"So what did he look like, Marty?" ... "Marty?" He saw that a downer of some kind in Marty’s Mix had kicked in and his chin was buried in his chest. A gentle snore escaped his lips.<br />
<br />
Norris sighed again and studied the dance floor in the hope of seeing Snake. Snake was the reason he’d been coming here all these weeks. She worked at the boutique two doors down from the classical music store where he was employed as trainee manager, and from the first time he’d seen her he’d wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his entire nineteen years of life. She was so different, so mysterious, so sexy, so cool. He loved the way she dressed - the black velvet, the silver jewellery, the corsets, the mini-skirts and fishnet tights - and the way she made up her face, and the way her long black hair so perfectly framed her pale, feline features, and...<br />
<br />
Well, he’d long ago given up on trying to list everything about her which he found attractive. She was just the most exotic woman he’d ever encountered and he wanted her. He adored her. He worshipped her. He was obsessed with her.<br />
<br />
He’d taken to trailing discreetly behind her at lunchtimes and eavesdropping on her conversations with the friends she met in the Yeoman’s Arms. He’d learned where she spent her Saturday nights and had begun work on the transformation which he hoped would in the end win her over. He’d spent a small fortune on black clothes and silver jewellery, had begun to grow his hair and - with more than a little regret - had swapped Vivaldi for Cradle of Filth.<br />
<br />
At last he felt he was ready to brave whatever weirdness he might find in The Club and so, nervous and jittery, one Saturday night had found him here. That first night had been a disaster: he’d wandered around in a state of rootless confusion, trying to make sense of the milling chaos, growing ever more depressed by his inability to feel a part of the swirling madness that frothed and foamed around him. It had been Marty who’d saved him, who’d allowed him to begin to get a handle on what was going on around him.<br />
<br />
Marty, of course, talked to anyone who would listen to him - indeed, he didn’t much care whether those he jabbered at <i>were</i> listening to him - and his palpable state of constant, extravagant intoxication allowed him to cross social boundaries in a way that others couldn’t, so that even those whom Norris came to dub The Cool Ones treated him with an amused and half-admiring tolerance.<br />
<br />
And Marty was the one who clued Norris in to the fact that there were social strata here. Of course he didn’t treat Norris to a sociological dissertation, but he was able to glean enough from the three hours of verbal diarrhoea that flowed over him (Marty had clearly been consuming a seriously heavy stimulant) to begin to work it out for himself: Norris might be gauche but he was far from stupid.<br />
<br />
At the bottom of the heap were people like Norris - wannabees - to whom nobody who was either cool, or who <i>wanted</i> to be cool, would be seen in anything other than accidental proximity. Above them were the bulk of those who came here: those who, for the most part, wanted to be cool but who didn’t quite make it. And above those were The Cool Ones, the aristocracy.<br />
<br />
Snake, of course, was one of the Cool Ones and Norris was like a pane of glass through which she stared unseeing whenever he encountered her. The most he’d ever wrung out of her by his attempts to start a conversation had been a pained smile and a rapid retreat from him. Norris hadn’t even managed to strike up anything more than a nodding acquaintance with any of the other newbies who came in here - somehow even they seemed to recognise that he didn’t fit in. Probably even Marty recognised it but, let’s face it, Marty didn’t give a damn about anything that wasn’t psychoactive and ingestible.<br />
<br />
Norris felt a wave of depression roll over him. He also felt a sudden urgent message from his bladder, which was demanding the release of the substantial amount of vodka he’d sucked down at home as a preparatory morale-booster before leaving for the club (And <i>that</i> had worked r<i>eally</i> well, hadn’t it?). He patted Marty gently on the top of his hat and headed for the toilets on the first floor.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The Gentlevamp’s Convenience (yes, a notice in blood-red, dripping script on the door declared it to be just that. Norris winced every time he saw it) was a dismal, dirty place that stank perpetually of urine and vomit. It was also, usually, crowded with clubbers chatting or adjusting their make-up in the mirrors over the cracked sinks, the constant babble of voices punctuated by the occasional raucous laugh or suspiciously loud sniff from one of the cubicles. But right now Norris appeared to have the place all to himself <i>(Great. I’m driving people away even in here!)</i>.<br />
<br />
He pissed energetically into one of the row of clogged urinals, trying to avoid the yellow pool that had gathered underneath them, and washed his hands with a slimy bar of soap as he stared sourly at his reflection in the mirror.<br />
<br />
As he was doing so - wondering all the while if the soap wasn’t transferring more bacteria to his hands than it was removing - a voice from somewhere behind him said, in a conversational tone of voice:-<br />
<br />
"Of course there are no such things as vampires really, but if you were to go looking for one then I guess I’m about the closest thing you’d find."<br />
<br />
Norris almost shrieked, and the bar of soap shot out of his hands and ricocheted off the tiled wall, landing in the sink with a dull thud.<br />
<br />
He turned round, his hands and knees shaking, to see a rather nondescript middle--aged man dressed in a dark business suit leaning nonchalantly against the wall.<br />
<br />
"Christ! You nearly gave me a heart attack! I didn’t hear you come in."<br />
<br />
He smiled. "Of course you didn’t. I was here all the time. My kind can be quite invisible when we choose to be you know."<br />
<br />
O<i>h God</i>, thought Norris, <i>he’s a loony!</i> He began edging towards the door, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly fashion, although the muscles around his mouth told him that they were fixed in a terrified rictus.<br />
<br />
"And... And just what is your kind?" Norris asked, as he sidled.<br />
<br />
"Oh, I don’t think we’ll go too deeply into that at the moment. It would take far too long to explain it and our time together is, alas, rather limited." He grinned at Norris, revealing a row of teeth which, although clearly strong and very white, were completely innocent of anything that might mark him out as a vampire.<br />
<br />
By this time Norris had reached the door and he tugged at it frantically but uselessly.<br />
<br />
"Tut! I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that we won’t be disturbed, Norris, so the least that you can do is stay and hear me out." He gave him a disapproving, slightly hurt, look.<br />
"Wha-wha-", babbled Norris. Then, as it hit him, "H-How did you know my name?"<br />
"Oh, it’s just a minor talent of mine," - he grinned again - "but I find it’s a very effective way of getting people’s attention. It <i>is</i>, isn’t it?"<br />
<br />
Norris nodded, lost for words.<br />
<br />
"And do stop quaking. I’m not going to murder you. In fact I have a little proposition to make to you."<br />
"Prop-proposition?"<br />
"Yes, indeed. Tell me, Norris, what you want more than anything else in the world is to be cool enough to be impress Snake, isn’t it?"<br />
"Well, yes." said Norris, who was puzzled by the trend of the conversation but who was at least temporarily reassured that his demise was not imminent.<br />
"And you’ve tried wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music, and you’re still not cool. Isn’t that so?"<br />
"Well, yes. I’ve really tried to fit in, but none of it works somehow."<br />
"Exactly. Well, has it occurred to you that the problem isn’t so much what you do but what you <i>are</i>?"<br />
<br />
Norris raised a quizzical eye-brow.<br />
<br />
"What I mean is, being cool depends more on the absence of certain qualities than anything else. Marty called me a vampire, and in a way he was right, but what I extract from my - er - victims isn’t blood but just those human characteristics which are getting in the way of you achieving your ambition."<br />
<br />
<i>God, this guy’s a real nutcase</i>, thought Norris, <i>but how come he knows so much about me? In any case it can’t hurt to humour him, I guess.</i><br />
<br />
"What qualities?"<br />
"Oh, things like empathy, modesty, humility. Plus a large chunk of what you’d call conscience: <i>all</i> of it, in fact that isn’t there just for show. Come here, I want to show you something."<br />
<br />
As Norris came towards him he turned to face the wall he’d been leaning against and muttered something he couldn’t catch. As he did so the wall seemed to dissolve like smoke, and Norris almost fell to his knees in shock.<br />
<br />
"Jesus, you’re for real!" He was looking out over the balcony towards the dance floor below, watching the lights pulse and the dancers dance. He stretched out his hand and his fingertips touched the invisible, but solid, cracked plaster and stone that his companion had been leaning against seconds before.<br />
<br />
"Oh yes, Norris, I’m for real alright, and the offer I’m making you is absolutely genuine too. But you have to know exactly what the nature of my ga- er, I mean, offer - is, and you have to accept it of your own free will. See old Marty down there?"<br />
<br />
Marty had obviously recovered somewhat in the meantime and had made it to the dance floor where he was engaging in a shambling, spastic dance with some female in a black evening gown who was clearly almost as far gone in chemical incapacitation as he was.<br />
<br />
"Old Marty has rather more of the qualities I’m talking about than most. It’s not a very comfortable way to be, which is why he’s busily shortening his life-span in a desperate attempt to numb himself."<br />
"Poor Marty."<br />
"Ah, pity. Well, that’s something that will have to go, too, along with its bigger sibling, compassion. Look at those you call the Cool Ones."<br />
<br />
Norris followed his gesture and saw Snake and her friends in a busy knot at one side of the dance floor.<br />
<br />
"I’m afraid there’s not much compassion for Marty - or anyone else - there. Some people would call them shallow, but I prefer the word 'hollow'. They’re skin-deep, Norris, a pretty but thin facade covering a large amount of not-very-much-at-all. Are you sure you want to be like them? It’s time to choose."<br />
<br />
Norris looked again at Marty, and then at Snake, his head spinning with the force of his sudden desire. <i>God, I <b>want</b> her</i>, he thought, <i>so <b>very</b>, <b>very</b> badly.</i> Something inside him knew he was making a terrible mistake but his lips formed the words of their own accord:-<br />
<br />
"Yes, yes please."<br />
<br />
A strong arm spun him round to face the triumphant grin of the stranger, whose left hand shot out and, somehow, passed through his chest and into his body. Norris felt a wrench, something that felt more intense than - but akin to - the removal of a tooth under anaesthetic, and he immediately felt <i>sharp</i>.<br />
<br />
"It’s time to go, Norris", said the stranger as he withdrew his closed fist.<br />
"Oh yeah," mumbled Norris, wondering who this odd-looking dude was, "Nice talking to you."<br />
<br />
He squared his shoulders - feeling more confident, more <i>alive</i> than he’d ever felt before - and headed for the dance floor.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Downstairs he strode purposefully towards the Cool Ones. He could feel his new-found confidence shining like a beacon as he went. Snake smiled at him as he approached, a puzzled expression of half-recognition surfacing on her face and then disappearing.<br />
<br />
"Hi!" she said, and simpered at him.<br />
<br />
<i>God</i>, he thought, <i>what a bimbo. Sexy, though...</i><br />
<br />
The newly hollow man smiled a shark’s smile back at her. Norris knew he was going to fit just fine in here...<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The Stranger stood on the balcony and watched Norris’s progress with interest.<br />
<br />
<i>And Marty called <b>me</b> a vampire!</i> He chuckled to himself.<br />
<br />
He opened his fist and looked at the tiny, brilliantly-hued butterfly that twitched in the palm of his hand. He carefully placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket with all of the others, feeling them fluttering against his chest.<br />
<br />
<i>Not a bad haul for one night</i>, he thought, <i>and I’ve still got the West End clubs to do...</i><br />
<br />
He smiled one last smile at Norris and Snake dancing together below him, and then he was gone.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-49424882638465480482010-01-03T06:18:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:29.414-08:00The House Remembers: Day 5Nothing. No dreams at all, just darkness and silence.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
It was, Todd guessed, about 11 a.m. His head pained him slightly, but otherwise he felt better than he had any right to do, given the amount he'd had to drink. A deep sense of satisfaction filled him at the thought of being able to slam an entire album's worth of material onto Big Al's desk on Friday morning: <i>that'd</i> show the sneering fucker that he hadn't lost it!<br />
<br />
So good was he feeling, in fact, that he practically vaulted out of the bed and headed for the bathroom. As he was shaving he noticed that the bourbon-induced puffiness of recent months had entirely left his face. In fact, he looked a good ten years younger than he had on the day of his arrival. Even the slow retreat of hair from his temples seemed to have reversed itself.<br />
<br />
"Jesus!" he crooned at his reflection, "You're one beautiful fucker! Maybe I ought to do this country-living thing more often."<br />
<br />
No breakfast this morning he decided, just grab some coffee, set up the equipment and get to work.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Two hours later he'd assembled all the paraphernalia of his profession in the space in front of the garden window, a short stroll from the coffee table, to which he'd added a few more bottles from the cellar. <br />
<br />
"Just as well I'm leaving tomorrow," he'd thought as he'd plonked the bottles down, "there's no space left for any more - I'd have had to start throwing the empties away!"<br />
<br />
With a contented sigh of anticipation he adjusted the mike-stand he'd placed by the armchair that he'd earlier dragged in front of the window, plugged in his portable Yamaha keyboard and sat down.<br />
<br />
As he played that afternoon he heard a fire in the music that had long been absent from his life. His fingers seemed more nimble, his voice firmer and clearer than they'd been in years. The music transported him, carrying him away to some dark but magnificent realm of his imagination and a deep peace filled him.<br />
<br />
He was happy...<br />
<br />
... until with a tiny 'plink' the filament in the light bulb in the pink shade that grew like an obese rose from the centre of the ceiling gave out, and the room dropped like a rock into the depths of a black sea lit only by the dim glow from LEDs and his computer screen.<br />
<br />
Shock gripped him. He'd been so immersed in the music that he'd been unaware of the passing of time, unaware of the thickening of the shadows outside, unaware of the encroachment of night.<br />
<br />
"<b>SHIT!</b>"<br />
<br />
The abruptness of the ending of his reverie, combined with the fact that he had made several trips to the coffee table and was more than a little drunk, left him confused and helpless. He stood, breathing heavily, trying to get some kind of mental grip on what had happened.<br />
<br />
Gradually his eyes adjusted somewhat to the darkness and he could make out, at a distance of what seemed miles, the coffee table with its rows of wine bottles standing like stiff sentinels in the darkness.<br />
<br />
On the table, he knew, were candles and a lighter. If he could find them he could at least provide himself with enough light to find the door and get a replacement light bulb from the kitchen.<br />
<br />
He began to shuffle towards the table.<br />
<br />
"Got to be careful." he told himself, "Cables all over the place."<br />
<br />
Gradually the coffee table came closer , but the muscles in his legs were beginning to ache and it did, indeed, seem as though it was miles away, and that he'd been walking for hours.<br />
<br />
In the end, though, he'd almost made it when his foot encountered a solid object on the floor. The unexpectedness of the contact was too much for his alcohol-diminished sense of balance to cope with and, after an arm-windmilling, swaying few seconds' fight to remain upright, he plunged forward.<br />
<br />
As he fell he felt the object shift. It uttered a satisfied "meow" and disappeared.<br />
<br />
Todd crashed forward onto the table, which collapsed under him. Glass broke loudly as he fell, and although instinct had raised his arms to protect his face he felt stabbing pains in his forehead and cheeks.<br />
<br />
He lay gasping amid the debris for a while until, raising a hand to check for damage, he felt a shard of glass embedded in his cheek, and he panicked.<br />
<br />
"My face," he screamed, "My <b>face</b>!"<br />
<br />
Scuttling like a crab, he moved towards the door until his head made contact with its solid oak. He groped for the doorknob and hauled himself up.<br />
<br />
Stumbling through the door, he saw that the light in the hallway was dim, yellow and flickering but he was too terrified to wonder at it. He had to get to the bathroom and look at his face!<br />
<br />
He fell twice as he mounted the stairs but his sense of urgency impelled him to his feet. He had no time to notice the thick smears of blood that his hands left on the bannisters, no time for <i>anything</i>.<br />
<br />
Half-running, half-falling, he plunged head-first into the bathroom. Putting his hands on either side of the sink he steadied himself and, steeling himself for the worst, he looked into the mirror.<br />
<br />
Relief flooded through him. There were a few red marks on his forehead. Tiny slivers of glass glinted here and there in his cheeks, but not big enough to leave scars, or at least no scars that make-up couldn't hide. He reached for the tweezers with which he plucked his eyebrows and began to tease them out.<br />
<br />
He didn't see the deep gashes in his wrists, didn't hear the swift dripping of his blood into the sink.<br />
<br />
Suddenly, he felt weak. He braced himself against the sink, but lacked the strength to hold himself erect and he fell to his knees.<br />
<br />
His vision was blurring in waves: things would shift into sharp focus, and then grow indistinct, and the waves came faster and faster. He looked down at the floor between his knees, at the growing red puddle that was forming there.<br />
<br />
"Have to get someone in to clean that up." he thought.<br />
<br />
One by one, throughout the house, the lights went out.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-75693020762346710682010-01-03T05:42:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:29.879-08:00The House Remembers: Day 4She was delicately pretty, with long lustrous dark hair, and she stood naked before the old four-footed bathtub. Around her all the sorrows of the world were gathered and she knelt amidst them, clasping her hands together in prayer.<br />
<br />
"I'm too weak, Lord," she whispered, "Too weak for him."<br />
<br />
"Forgive me, Lord," she whispered, "Forgive me for loving him."<br />
<br />
She lowered herself into the steaming water, and reached out...<br />
<br />
From her wrists, from the deep furrows where the knife had been, her blood formed pink clouds in the water.<br />
<br />
Above her, on the bathroom window-ledge, a fat black cat raised a paw to its mouth and licked.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The grey of the previous few days had finally given way to late autumnal sunlight by the time Todd awoke. His head throbbed but, apart from the slightly nervy feeling which seemed to be constantly with him now, he felt good and - as he told himself - the cellar held plenty of headache-medicine.<br />
<br />
"Strange dream", he thought, "but there might be some way of fitting it in somewhere." Something about the prayer. The house destroys intruders by preying on their weaknesses? Well, whatever. Get some breakfast. Think about it later.<br />
<br />
He threw on a tee-shirt and some jeans, washed and shaved hurriedly in the bathroom. He was pleased to notice that he was looking a great deal better than he had the previous morning; better than he had done in months, in fact. He admired his reflection in the mirror for several minutes before his stomach growled at him, reminding him that he hadn't eaten at all the previous day.<br />
<br />
In the refrigerator he found eggs, sausages, bacon, mushrooms and a further hunt around the kitchen turned up some slightly stale bread, all of which he fried while the coffee percolator bubbled away on the work surface. As he worked he hummed the melody he'd heard in his dream, the melody from what would be the title track of his album, "The House of Shadows".<br />
<br />
After he'd breakfasted, a mug of coffee cradled in his hands, he thought about the way he'd allowed himself to become so spooked.<br />
<br />
"Well," he thought, "I've always had a pretty powerful imagination and I guess it's no surprise that it should run away with me now. Still, I'll get the writing finished tonight, get something recorded tomorrow and then get out of here before my imagination kills me!"<br />
<br />
He smiled at the idea.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
As dusk began to fall he went through the house switching on every light that he could find. He'd already added several more bottles to the empty ones lined up on the coffee table and was carrying the first of these in his hand, sipping from it occasionally, as he progressed through the rooms. It was obvious to him that his nerves were shot, and he didn't feel that he'd be able to settle down to serious work while he was jumping at shadows - it was a sensible precaution, that was all...<br />
<br />
The evening passed uneventfully, and he worked as furiously as before. He'd decided that the house was as intolerant of human weakness as its builder and he'd elaborated on the idea of the house turning the weaknesses of 'intruders' against them: it was the key he needed to finish the songs about each owner of the house, and the stories of how they met their individual ends. Of course he knew nothing about any of them - not even their names, save that of the last owner from whose estate he'd purchased the place - but he found no difficulty at all in furnishing all the detail he needed from an imagination whose sudden fertility frankly astonished him.<br />
<br />
And, fuck, what he was writing was pure fucking poetry! Words had previously been his great weakness as a song-writer, it had always been a terrible struggle to turn his thoughts into anything that didn't read like nursery-rhyme shite, but now, man, he was inspired!<br />
<br />
"Maybe it's the wine, man!"<br />
<br />
He giggled tipsily at the thought and reached for another bottle.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
By the time the birds began singing in the greying darkness outside he was, he thought, all but finished. All he had left to do was to get something rough on to the hard drive tomorrow and he could get back to London and some serious partying. He was exultant, and he hummed happily to himself as he took a final swig of wine and headed for the door.<br />
<br />
Just as he was leaving the room he turned, and through the window that overlooked the garden he saw two green eyes peering in at him.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-88887053544843345302010-01-03T05:12:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:30.159-08:00The House Remembers: Day 3He was at a party - a celebration party - his face artistically made up, and looking his coolest in tight leather trousers and black frilly shirt. All night long he'd been lionised, feted by the famous, congratulated by everyone on the artistic and commercial success of his album, and he was sitting now in a corner of the room listening to the ice tinkle in his glass of bourbon while at his knees, on either side of him, a beautiful young girl, and an even more beautiful young man, stroked his thighs and made adoring noises up at him.<br />
<br />
He kissed each in turn on the lips, drained his glass and handed it to the girl. <br />
<br />
"Have another one." she said, passing a magically refilled tumbler back up to him. "Doesn't it taste good?" <br />
<br />
He sipped at the drink. <br />
<br />
"Doesn't it taste good?" she asked. <br />
*** <br />
<br />
He awoke to another dirtily grey morning with the taste of bourbon in his mouth and a terrible pressure in his bladder. Stumbling into the bathroom he urinated urgently, splashing the toilet seat. When he was done, he looked at himself in the mirror. <br />
<br />
"Christ, I look like shit!" he muttered to himself, surveying his lank, greasy black mane and his blood-shot eyes in the mirror. "I really do look as though I've been partying all night!" <br />
<br />
From downstairs the telephone began shrilling. "Alright! Alright!", he snarled as he snatched up the receiver.<br />
"Are you really, Davey-boy?" said Big Al, "You don't sound so good to me."<br />
"I've just woken up! How do you expect me to sound! What time is it anyway?"<br />
"Ahh ... about half past noon, Davey. Working late last night, were you? Ideas starting to pan out?" <br />
"Yeah," he lied, "It's starting to look good. Listen, was there some urgent reason for this phone call or are you just harrassing me for lack of anything better to do?" <br />
"Tut!" said Big Al, "I'm hurt, Davey-boy! I'm simply looking after my favourite one-time money-spinner; just concerned about your welfare, that's all. But then Davey always was a grouchy boy with a hangover, wasn't he? Listen, son, I'm pleased that this retreat thing is working, but do us both a favour and don't let the bottle get in the way of the music, OK? I'll be in touch." <br />
<br />
Once more Al clicked out of Todd's life and he was left fuming at the receiver. The nerve of the fat fucker! How dare he assume I've been drinking! How dare he lecture me about music! How ... <br />
<br />
Wait a minute. What time did he say it was? I've slept for twelve hours? No, it can't be! I must've just lost track of the time last night, that's all. Must've been a lot later than I thought when I went to bed. <br />
<br />
"Christ, I've blown nearly a whole day already!" he moaned. "Better skip on breakfast today and get down to work. I guess I could afford to lose a little weight anyway". <br />
<br />
He made himself a cup of coffee and returned to the living room. <br />
<br />
By mid-afternoon the paper mountain had grown considerably and Todd's temper had worsened. He couldn't concentrate, and the memory of the taste of bourbon from last night's dream kept coming back to haunt him: Christ, but he could use a drink! And, after all, why not? He wasn't really an alcoholic, he'd written some of his best stuff while loaded, and if that fat fucker thought he was drinking then he fucking well would! <br />
<br />
He stormed down to the cellar and arrived back in the living room with half a dozen randomly selected bottles and a corkscrew he'd grabbed from a drawer in the kitchen. Extracting the cork from the first he took a hefty swallow from the neck of the bottle. <br />
<br />
"Well," he thought, "It's not exactly bourbon, but I guess it'll do." <br />
<br />
Leaning back in the settee, his eyes chanced upon something half-buried under the heap of paper on the floor. Pulling it out, he realised that it was the photograph album. <br />
<br />
"Funny", he thought, "I don't remember bringing that down." He opened it.<br />
<br />
As he swigged at the wine he flipped through the pages. The photographs which fascinated him most were the earliest ones of the house, particularly those which showed the interior of the place. It seemed pretty much as he'd imagined it before he entered on that first day, the hall much as it had appeared to him in his dream. <br />
He found himself continually returning to the very first photograph in the book, which had clearly been taken in the living room. It showed a gaunt, bearded figure in his early thirties sitting stiffly in a high-backed wooden chair. Behind him, dozing on the ledge of the window which looked out on to the garden was a very fat black cat. <br />
<br />
The photograph was undoubtedly that of the architect, builder and only resident of the house ever to live a long and peaceful life within its confines (although looking at the grim features that scowled from the photograph Todd doubted that 'peaceful' was precisely the right word to descibe it: at any rate he had died a very ancient man in the master bedroom of the place he had built. The house had then stood vacant for more than a decade before anyone else had ventured to live in it). <br />
<br />
Todd had re-read the article that had originally sparked his interest before committing himself to his 'retreat' and he tried to recall the details of the man's life: he couldn't quite remember his name, but he knew that by reputation he was a man for whom the word 'dour' was too gentle a description. A harsh, unbending Calvinist; a humourless, unforgiving misanthrope whose only love, after the death of his wife in some unspecified accident, was the house in which they had both lived. <br />
<br />
"Man," he thought, looking at the photograph, "You certainly look as though you believed laughter was the ultimate sin." <br />
<br />
Looking up from the album he realised with some surprise that he was halfway through his second bottle of wine. A gentle fatigue was overcoming him. He curled up on the settee and slept. <br />
<br />
In his sleep he was swept like a leaf on the wind through the branches of the tall trees surrounding the house, and filling his ears was music: grim, melancholy, but full of dark triumphant power... <br />
<br />
When he woke the room was in darkness. He blinked, trying to adjust to the reduced light. There was something strange about the dim shapes made by the furniture in the darkness: it seemed as though it had been moved around and it looked heavier, bulkier than before. He reached behind him for the light switch and clicked it on. <br />
<br />
The prim room was just as it always was. He sighed with relief and remembered the dream. More importantly, he remembered the music he had heard, remembered it well enough to write it down, and it sounded good to him as he replayed it in his mind. Excitedly, he reached for his pad and... <br />
<br />
No.<br />
<br />
"Get the atmosphere right first, Davey-boy!", he giggled to himself. <br />
<br />
He lit the candles on the table and turned off the lights. The shadows swelled and claimed most of the room, and immediately began their twisting dance of the night before, as though groping towards some new, solid form. In fact there was one tall shadow in the far corner that almost seemed to be shaped like... <br />
<br />
"Jesus, there's someone in here with me!"<br />
<br />
He leapt for the light switch and stood panting and sweating for several seconds afterwards in a room of which he was the only inhabitant. <br />
<br />
"Christ, my nerves are fucked!" <br />
<br />
When he'd calmed down he decided that perhaps working in a giant doll-house might not be quite as creatively stifling as he'd feared. He reached for the writing paper and the half-empty wine bottle. <br />
*** <br />
<br />
Bird-song finally roused him from his scribbling. Five empty wine bottles stood on the table, the sixth was two-thirds finished, and haphazardly scattered jottings (together with one completed song stored away on the laptop) attested to his night's labours.<br />
<br />
He'd never experienced anything like the creative frenzy which had gripped him during the night in his entire life before. Inspired by the music of his dream and the old photographs of the house, he'd begun to sketch out a series of songs which told the story of a house which remembered its maker and strove always to return itself to the way it was when he lived; a house which destroyed those who intruded upon its silent, loving communion with the spirit of He who had made it: a spirit which lived on, infused into its very walls and foundations. <br />
<br />
Todd read through his work and saw that it was good. <br />
<br />
"Man, what a fucking imagination I've got!" <br />
<br />
He happily downed the last third of the bottle, and reached for the light switch, then withdrew his hand. <br />
<br />
"Perhaps I'll leave it on. After all, I can afford to pay the bill!" <br />
<br />
He giggled and opened the door into the hallway. Strange shadows hung on the walls, looking almost like framed prints. Todd hurriedly snapped on the light. <br />
<br />
"Leave that one on too!" <br />
<br />
He giggled again, and carried on turning on lights and giggling all the way up to his bedroom. He left the light on in the bedroom while he slept.Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-46445291508295369832009-12-20T12:50:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:29.227-08:00The House Remembers: Day 2<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><div>He was walking up to the porch of the house, but this time as he fumbled in his pocket for the keys the door opened to reveal an elderly gentleman in evening dress. <br />
<br />
"Welcome," he said, "Allow me to conduct you to the ceremony." <br />
<br />
"Ceremony?" <br />
<br />
"Yes, indeed! They're all waiting for you, you know. Just follow me." <br />
<br />
And taking him by the elbow he led Todd down the hallway. But the hallway was not as he remembered it: pale pink, bright and bare. This time it was dark and sombre, with what appeared to be framed religious prints lining the walls. And it was long: they walked down it for what seemed like hours, seeing no sign of the stairs to the upper floor nor the doors to left and right which should have led to the study and living room. But just as Todd was beginning to despair of ever reaching the end they finally got there. <br />
<br />
Ahead of Todd was the door to the kitchen. <br />
<br />
"Here we are," said the gentleman, gently nudging him forward, "Just go through. They'll be ready for you by now." <br />
<br />
"Who the fuck are <i>they</i>?" he began, turning to the old man but he was gone. Todd felt no curiosity at this strange disappearance, but rather a mounting excitement; Destiny, he felt, was waiting for him on the other side of the door. He grasped the knob and turned and the door opened into... <br />
<br />
... a vast, crowded, brightly-lit space. Tables thronged with diners in evening dress were scattered seemingly randomly about, while waiters moved in a seemingly haphazard fashion through the crowd, alighting here and there at the tables like anxious bees with silver trays. In the distance Todd could see a stage and someone he half-recognised - an actor perhaps? At any rate certainly a celebrity of some kind - was standing at a microphone. <br />
<br />
"And here he is!" cried the man with the microphone, "Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand to the talented man behind the biggest selling rock album of the year - Todd Ravenhurst! Come up, Todd! Come and collect your award!" <br />
<br />
Dazed, but beaming, graciously nodding to acknowledge the applause, Todd moved towards the stage and... <br />
<br />
... woke up. There was a persistent ringing in his ears which, after a few moments, he identified as a telephone. <br />
<br />
"Phone?" he thought bemusedly, "Where the fuck's the phone?" <br />
<br />
Feeling distinctly cheated, Todd wrestled himself out from underneath the bedclothes and padded off, bleary-eyed, to locate the source of the intrusion. After some minutes of searching he tracked the racket to the hall table and, lifting aside the laptop which was still sitting there from the previous day, he picked up the receiver. <br />
<br />
"Hlmmphh!" he said, his tongue appearing, temporarily at least, to occupy an area several times larger than his mouth. <br />
"Davey-boy!" cried Big Al, unnervingly loud in his ear, "Just checking to see if everything's OK!"<br />
"Shfline."<br />
"Great! Great! Anything coming yet?"<br />
<br />
Making a determined effort to force his tongue into something like its normal position and dimensions, Todd mumbled something about a few ideas, and immediately wished he hadn't. <br />
<br />
"Great! Keep with it, Davey-boy! Just to help you orientate yourself it's 10 a.m., it's Sunday and you're in a shithole in the middle of nowhere! Go make yourself some coffee." <br />
<br />
There was a click and Big Al's bellow was replaced by soothing white noise. <br />
<br />
Todd dropped the receiver onto its cradle (both pink! What else?) and regarded it sourly for a moment or two. He had gained the impression from the ending to their brief conversation that Al suspected him of having smuggled some bottles into the van (of course he hadn't loaded it himself. What was the point in being rich if you couldn't hire people to perform that kind of tiresome work for you?). Al was a cynic, a confirmed believer in the doctrine of the impossibility of reforming anyone, and refused to believe that Todd hadn't touched a drop of hard liquor in ... uhmm ... well, ages. Coffee indeed! Actually, it probably wasn't that bad an idea - his head felt full of cobwebs - so he breathed a sigh and headed for the kitchen.<br />
<br />
Approximately half an hour later, having breakfasted on microwaved croissants and strawberry jam and consumed a litre or so of coffee, Todd began to feel like a Rock God again. Admittedly an overweight, drug-raddled Rock God, but then that wasn't exactly untraditional: it certainly hadn't dented Jim Morrison's legendary status. Sitting at the kitchen table, inhaling fragrant steam from the coffee pot, he began to consider options for the day. <br />
<br />
He supposed he ought to begin by completing his survey of the house. There was still the attic and cellar to investigate, and he flipped a coin to determine which of the two he would begin with. Attic! Piss. That meant he would have to climb the stairs rather than taking the easy route from the doorway in the kitchen that led to the cellar steps. On the other hand, if he left the coffee-pot on while he checked out the attic he could refresh himself before tackling the cellar. <br />
<br />
Ten minutes later, having pulled down the folding ladder that led to the attic and coated his fingers with dusty (but still sticky) cobwebs while groping for the light switch, he stood in it. It was disappointingly empty. The only object of interest among the odds and ends of broken furniture, faded fabric and plastic sheeting was a large trunk, presumably containing the remnants of the late Edith Henderson's personal possessions. <br />
<br />
Todd didn't expect much from it, and on first inspection he was correct: old school exercise books, sheaves of dull business correspondence, an old tartan blanket, a bunch of withered roses, a broken china doll, a flattened teddy bear which had lost most of its stuffing, and some half-finished embroidery. But at the bottom he found a leather-bound photograph album. In gold lettering on the cover were the words 'The House Remembered' and it was filled with photographs of both the interior and exterior of the house, the earliest, judging by the yellowing of the photographs and the Edwardian clothing of the few people pictured, dating from the turn of the century, not long after the house had been built. Todd slammed the trunk shut and, tucking the album under his arm, made his way out of the attic. <br />
<br />
Back in the kitchen, he flipped through the book while he sipped at a reviving coffee. There were nine decades worth of photographs in the thing although (doubtless, Todd thought, due to the less than photogenic appeal of the place) that didn't really amount to all that many. The final photograph was of Edith herself, dated a month or so before her death, and therefore about a year before Todd himself had bought the house. She was sitting on an old wicker chair (he vaguely remembered seeing it in the study before he'd buried the room in equipment) outside the front of the house, in the height of what passed for summer in these parts. A book lay open in her lap and she was squinting into the sun from beneath a large straw sombrero. The shadow of the photographer fell at her feet, an indistinct and amorphous blot on the ground. She was smiling happily, wisps of grey hair straying over her cheeks and forehead. <br />
"And dead inside a month." thought Todd, "What happened to spoil it all, lady?" <br />
<br />
Snapping the album shut, Todd noticed that he had misread the inscription on its cover: it didn't say 'The House Remembered' but 'The House Remembers'. Curious. Oh well, the cellar...<br />
<br />
Concrete steps, rough-finished stone walls, a hint of mould. Not bad. Certainly more atmospheric than the rest of the house. Arriving at the bottom of the steps he peered myopically into the darkness (he was slightly short-sighted; his eyes were too sensitive to bear contact lenses for any length of time and he was far too conscious of his image to wear glasses). He dimly made out a pull-chain dangling by his left hand and tugged at it. <br />
<br />
Half a dozen bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling flickered into luminescence. The floor of the cellar was comprised of bare stone flags, cracked in many places, with dark compacted earth showing through. Arranged around all three available walls, from ground level to shoulder-height, were wine-racks. Astonishingly, although there were a few empty spaces here and there, there appeared to be dozens - no hundreds - of full bottles of wine. <br />
<br />
"Fuck me!" he thought, "Why did nobody cart all this stuff away?" <br />
<br />
He went over to one of the racks and pulled out a bottle. It was dusty, the label was mostly illegible and, since what Todd knew about wine could have been written on a postage stamp with more than enough space left over for the Lord's Prayer, it wouldn't have meant anything to him even if he had been able to read it. Nevertheless, when he moved it in his hand, it burbled happily to itself and its weight said it was full. <br />
<br />
"Oh wonderful," he thought, "here's me trying to give the stuff up and I'm living on top of an alkie's paradise!" <br />
<br />
He returned the bottle to its niche, and retreated to the kitchen. The photograph album was where he'd left it on the kitchen table, but he couldn't be bothered to spend any more time with it. He guessed he'd better get down to trying to write something, but he had a dreary feeling it wasn't going to work. <br />
*** <br />
His intuition really was becoming astoundingly accurate. Evening found him ensconced in a two-seater settee, the glass-topped coffee table in front of him aglow with candle-light, the floor covered in crumpled-up sheets of note-paper as he pecked disconsolately at the keyboard balanced awkwardly on his knee and. Apart from a mid-afternoon break for a microwaved moussaka (greasy, but palatable) he'd been making a paper mountain on the floor without actually managing to come up with a single viable musical or lyrical idea. <br />
<br />
It was now ... well, he didn't wear a watch so he couldn't be sure, and the carriage clock on the mantle-piece hadn't been wound since the death of its former owner, but he guessed it was around midnight and he was so tired that the shadows in the corners of the room seemed to be continually on the verge of solidifying into something, endlessly shifting and forming half-shapes: he'd have to give it up for the night. <br />
<br />
He stood up and reached for the light switch behind him and clicked it on. The shadows instantly retreated, but just for a moment he could've sworn that the densest patch of shadow, over on the window-ledge of the curtained window that led out into the garden, actually held its shape for a second or two, almost seeming to scurry away from the light. <br />
<br />
With a sigh at the tricks that short-sightedness and fatigue can play on you, he left the living room, turned right down the corridor to the kitchen and picked up the photograph album, intending to have another look through it before he went to sleep. Book under one arm, he climbed the stairs to the upper floor, thinking that the pink glow from the landing light seemed now to have a yellowish tinge to it, and it seemed to flicker, almost like gas-light - perhaps he <span style="font-style: italic;">ought </span>to wear glasses, he thought, at least when there was no-one around to see him in them. <br />
<br />
Flopping onto the bed, he was once more asleep within seconds, the photograph album abandoned on the floor beside him. <br />
</div></span></span>Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-86767799201175991452009-12-18T11:04:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:30.066-08:00The House Remembers: Day 1It was the mid-morning of a particularly grey and clinging November day that Todd Ravenhurst crunched across the damp gravel of the drive that led to the house. He paused for a moment, a laptop under one arm, as he contemplated the storm-battered, squat Victorian edifice that he'd purchased on a whim some six months earlier.<br />
<br />
"Fuck!" he muttered under his breath in satisfaction, "you're ugly."<br />
<br />
Yes, he thought to himself, two storeys of what must be one of the most depressingly hideous failures of the architectural imagination to be found anywhere in the world, set in bleak and despairing moorlands. Perfect!<br />
He'd read about the house in some throwaway magazine - an article entitled Houses Of Doom, or something equally uninspired - and although the article was clearly unadulterated piffle, he'd been sufficiently intrigued by the account of the suicide of the previous three owners, and the gloom that seemed to emanate from the photograph which accompanied the article, to set his personal assistant to work on finding out more. They had, it transpired, all chosen a remarkably similar and messy end - slashing their own wrists (in some final protest against the ugliness of their environment, he guessed) - and the house had acquired such an unsavoury reputation as a result that it had become unsaleable. He'd bought the thing, complete with furniture and fittings, for no better reason than that he was rich enough to indulge himself, and having bought it had allowed himself to forget it. But now it might serve some purpose after all.<br />
<br />
For longer than he cared to contemplate he and his band, Darkseid, had been a solidly successful musical entity - "straddling with intelligence and elegance the divide between Gothrock and Metal" to quote one of the many glowing reviews of their first album - but his subsequent solo career had been somewhat less remarkable. In fact it had sucked. Two albums had sold barely well enough to cover the production costs, and such praise that had come their way had been distinctly faint. One of the songs on the most recent had even been described by a critic as "almost cheerful". Todd had heard tolling bells in that phrase.<br />
<br />
What the critics didn't know was that all of the songs had been juvenile efforts, written long before the years of success. In truth, he'd been struggling with incipient alcoholism and a massive writer's block, and he could see the inexorable dwindling away of his career unless something was done to halt the process. It wasn't that he needed money - he'd accumulated sufficient wealth over the years to glide into an obscenely comfortable old age even if he never produced another piece of work - but the one thought that nagged at him constantly, filling him with fear, was that he might be forgotten, becoming some ageing old has-been, propped up by chat shows and gossip columns until even <i>they</i> had forgotten him. He couldn't bear the thought of no longer being recognised in the street, of no longer being famous.<br />
<br />
Hence the house.<br />
<br />
"What you need, Davey-boy," his manager had said (David was the name his parents had cursed him with. He hated it as much as he hated them), "is to get away for a while. Recharge the creative batteries. Go sun yourself on a beach somewhere."<br />
<br />
Todd had regarded his manager's advice with the usual contempt that he reserved for any pronouncement made by the man on any subject other than the purely financial - 'Big Al' (I'm Your Pal) Baker had not amassed a fortune larger even than Todd's by being anything less than shrewd where money was concerned - but the idea of taking himself away from all the pressures nevertheless lodged somewhere at the back of his mind and resurfaced from time to time. Of course he wasn't about to risk his carefully cultivated pallor by lounging around on a beach (and in truth the drinking had bloated him more than a little - he was starting to resemble a Michelin Man version of Brandon Lee in 'The Crow'. Wouldn't look at all good if some passing paparazzi happened to capture his acres of pallid flab on film), but there was some merit in the idea nevertheless. What he needed was solitude and a fresh injection of the gloom that had always characterised his finest work, to sink himself into the atmosphere of somewhere bleak and dispiriting, and where better to achieve that than this drab and undistinguished Gothic horror miles from anywhere, in the midst of what had to be some of the most severely unattractive scenery to be found in the British Isles?<br />
<br />
Todd marvelled once more at the brutal, philistine insensitivity of the mind that had conceived this house, its total lack of any instinct for lightness or levity, and he breathed a sigh of pleasure. Utterly perfect! He fumbled in his pocket for the keys and let himself in.<br />
<br />
He was totally unprepared for the interior. In his mind he had pictured ugliness to match the outside of the place: dark oak panelling, monstrous Victorian furniture, the smell of damp and decay. Instead the entrance hall was bright and airy, painted pale pink, and smelled of furniture polish and disinfectant. Of course, the estate agent had arranged for the place to be cleaned in preparation for his arrival, but he had a terrible feeling that the décor reflected the taste of the house's last owner - Edith Henderson - a successful illustrator of children's books and painter of moorland wildlife. He was right.<br />
<br />
Dumping his keyboard on a fragile-looking hall table he commenced a tour of the house. Every room - living room, study (both huge) and all four bedrooms - was painted the same pale pink, and the furniture was modern and tasteful in an old-ladyish kind of way. There was an abundance of lace and frills. The kitchen was of fitted pine units, the cooker modern, the large fridge-freezer (stocked at his request with convenience foods) clean and purring. The bathroom was of pink tile and boasted a shower stall in addition to the large bath. Todd's spirits sunk with every step he took until, finding himself once more back in the hall, he screamed "SHIT!" at the top of his voice.<br />
<br />
"Why didn't I have this fucking place checked out before I came? Why didn't somebody tell me it was like this?"<br />
<br />
The answer, of course, was that he'd never asked, never visited his acquisition, and no-one had had any reason to tell him.<br />
<br />
He decided to sulk for a while and then, realising that there was no-one around to pay any heed to his sulking, contemplated his next move. There was still the attic and cellar to investigate, but they were probably every bit as unatmospheric as the rest of the place and he was feeling too down-hearted to face them right now. He could simply climb back into the van and drive back to London, but it was a long way to travel and he would have to face a sneering Big Al if he spent any less than a week in the place. On balance he decided to collect his gear from the van and make the best of it: doubtless the isolation would be good for him, there was still some wonderfully depressing scenery and, judging from what he'd seen of it from the living room windows, the garden could've been transplanted wholesale from a Hammer film set. If he worked in the evenings by candle-light the living room might be persuaded to look a little less like a room from the doll-house of a giant pre-pubescent girl with a taste for mimsy.<br />
<br />
By the time he'd emptied the van of musical equipment, clothing and toiletries, dumped the clothing in an untidy heap in the wardrobe of the master bedroom, dumped the toiletries in the bathroom, and left everything else in an untidy heap in the study, it was early evening, the light was not so much fading outside but apparently being sucked up by the trees and bushes, the central heating system had sprung into gurgling life and he was famished.<br />
<br />
Hunger was quickly taken care of courtesy of the microwave he´d brought with him - thank God for convenience foods! - and after eating a rather glutinous chicken biryani he was left feeling exhausted. Slightly sick, too, but mostly just very, very tired.<br />
<br />
"What the fuck." he thought, staring from the depths of an immense armchair at the candle flickering on the coffee table in the living room, "S'been a long day. Go to bed."<br />
<br />
Doing his best to ignore the cheery glow from the pink lamp-shades that glowed at intervals from the lights that lined the walls in the hall, and climbed up beside the staircase to light his way up to the master bedroom, he shrugged out of most of his clothes and collapsed face-downwards on the pillow. Ten seconds later he was asleep.<br />
<div><br />
</div>Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-75094978983313026892009-12-17T03:29:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:29.786-08:00Cat Lover<div>CAT LOVER</div><div><br />
</div><div>BY</div><div><br />
</div><div>JOHN MCCONNOCHIE</div><div><br />
</div><div>Can you hear me out there? Can you hear me now that I am unhusked emptiness, now that I am merely a flicker of light at the back of an eye?</div><div><br />
</div><div>It was her eyes that captivated me from the first, those fathomless black wells of sin floating in the liquid amber of her irises. I had seen the advertisement - `Pedigree Kittens For Sale’ - in a local paper and, because I had always liked cats, and because I craved companionship - a release from my loneliness - I gathered up my small courage in my hands and phoned. She had my heart from the first; there was something about her - some indefinable grace and delicacy, and of course those eyes - which set her apart from her brothers and sisters, and looking at her I was reminded of the time when I had found a tiny black kitten wandering lost and pathetic and, ignoring my mother’s warnings of disease and the ruin wrought by claws on furniture, had installed it in my room and tended to it for a whole weekend. How eagerly - for once - I had returned home from work the following Monday to be greeted by my mother’s tearful tale of the kitten’s escape and its demise beneath the wheels of a passing car. Coward that I am, I had not faced her with my discovery of the broken and bloodied broom-handle hidden beneath the sacking in a dark corner of the cellar but had continued to hug my long hatred of her to myself in self-recriminating silence.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Sabrina - for so I named her - was expensive but I was not poor, for when my mother’s suffocating lungs had finally ended her suffocation of my life she had left me well-provided. I remember the pride - even <i>then</i> the fierce possessiveness - with which I clutched the cardboard box in which I carried Sabrina home.</div><div><br />
</div><div>During the weeks which followed we both grew, my beautiful Sabrina and I, she physically and I emotionally, for after all the empty, nagging years there was finally something in my life which I could love unreservedly. I grew to know her ways, to recognise her moods: to know when she wished to be alone, when she wished to be caressed; I came to know her tenderness, her sudden passions, and I grew to love her.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Often, in the evenings, when she would sit upon my lap and suffer my strokings and the little musics I would make with my mouth to soothe her, I would gaze into her eyes and, transfixed by love, I would be carried away in transports of adoration; I felt then, in the depths of my exaltation, that she was a kind of goddess and I wished I could worship her in all ways, and forever.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I met him - he who would in the end murder my happiness, my simple uncomplicated joy in Sabrina - at a Cat Show, for my pride in her beauty was such that I had to share it with others, to hear their words of praise, to see the envy in their eyes. I don’t know what made him pause as he walked by- perhaps he sensed something in the way I brushed her fur as I burnished her perfection for the judges - but at any rate stop he did.</div><div><br />
</div><div>He was carrying a small wicker cage, from within which green eyes set in a face of almost supernatural whiteness peered disdainfully out at the world.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"She has beautiful eyes", he said admiringly as he looked at Sabrina and I was instantly disarmed, for no other approach could have penetrated my habitual reserve. So, eager to hear further words of acclamation of my beloved, I permitted him to engage me in conversation, and for the first time in my life I found myself liking another human being. And so it was that later, after the judging, when he suggested that I might care to accompany him to his home to share a drink in celebration of our triumphs, I agreed.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The house to which he drove me was not quite a mansion, but it was a large, three-storied affair several miles out of town, set back from the road along a long and winding drive and hidden from view by a screen of tall trees. Inside it was all oak-panelling and oil-paintings: the house of a rich man, and a far remove from my own small flat.</div><div><br />
</div><div>We sat in what he referred to as 'my study’, a cosy room in which, to judge by its atmosphere of lazy comfort, I swear no serious studying had ever been done - and, while our cats warily surveyed each other and then settled comfortably before the fire, we sat and drank and talked. Our discussion began with the prosaic - small talk of shows and grooming and feeding - but as the evening wore on so our philosophical scope broadened and he held forth on the mysterious soul of cats; of their sensuality, their cruelty and tenderness; of how they have been sometimes worshipped and sometimes reviled and gradually, as the drink loosened my tongue, I confessed how at times I felt an almost-religious adoration of my Sabrina. And he understood; he understood! His talk then grew more impassioned, more confessional, and he told me of things which at first seemed strange to me, even a little horrifying, but at which something within me exulted. How I wish I had shut my ears, gathered up Sabrina, and fled.</div><div><br />
</div><div>After that came the Brotherhood and my initiation; the gift of the keys to his house, which were also to unlock the door to his secret. God knows in what arid desert hole of forgotten Egypt, in what mouldering papyrus he found that secret!</div><div><br />
</div><div>I remember that first meeting: the candlelit attic with its barred and shuttered windows into which I was ushered. It was already crowded with those who were to become my brothers and in it stood a vast statue: a golden-earringed cat which dominated the room and before which the treasured pets of the Brotherhood sat enraptured. I remember the incense, the chanting, the giddy ecstasy which took me and I remember, too, that terrible moment when he - my host - called for the `little mouse’ to be brought in and the sudden realisation of what that little mouse was, before the struggling, mewling bundle disappeared beneath the wave of surging fur, leaving for an instant one tiny hand helplessly waving in the air.</div><div><br />
</div><div>And then after - when the feasting was done - I remember how the Other Sabrina came to me. I remember the way she looked: her pale, flawless flesh; her breasts; her long, black hair; the drops of sweat which glistened on her belly and traced tiny rivers on her skin as they crept slowly down towards her pubic hair; I remember the way she moved beneath me as her nails tore my back. But most of all I remember her eyes.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I knew it was wrong, <i>of course</i> I knew it was wrong. Listen, my mother hammered her loveless, guilt-cored version of Christianity into me almost before I could think, she embedded it like an irremovable nail into my heart. I knew it was wrong, but you must understand the way I felt. My immersion in the Other Sabrina was not the trivial addiction of an alcoholic: long before I met her she had been a part of me, and the first encounter of our flesh was merely the confirmation of a relationship which was already so intimate that it was impossible to draw a line which divided our souls one from the other. But in time, away from her, the dreams - those dreams in which the squealing of all those days and weeks and months of little mice woke me screaming so loud that I thought my ear-drums must rupture - began to overwhelm me. I could not sleep, and the eternities I spent apart from that attic and the Other Sabrina were spent in a daze of horror.</div><div><br />
</div><div>And so, when the burden at last became intolerable, I made my plans. I should have gone to the police, I suppose, but I doubted that they would believe me. Or at least that’s what I told myself. In truth, I suspect, I knew what they would do to me if somehow I did make them believe me, and I could not bear the thought of being separated from Sabrina; it would pain me enough to lose the Other One -to lose both, to be plunged back into that awful well of loneliness, lost forever inside myself in some institution for the criminally insane - was too much for me.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So when the Brotherhood next met I phoned and made my excuses: I was ill, I would see them at the next meeting. And indeed I was ill, in the same way in which they were all ill - the only difference was that I suffered while they delighted in their sickness.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It was late when I left my car at the bottom of the drive. I walked so that no-one would hear, and be alerted by, the sound of tyres crunching over the gravel. I let myself in with the key that was the symbol of my membership of their foul ranks and of my degradation. After that it was easy: there were only two staircases to the upper levels of the house - the grand one leading from the main hall and a small enclosed one leading from the kitchen - and I soaked the lower steps of each with paraffin. The fire spread quickly up the stairs, and outwards into the house. I knew that they would be deep in their pleasures at this hour, that they would not smell the smoke or hear the flames until it was far too late.</div><div><br />
</div><div>On my way back to my car I paused, startled by some furtive sound within the bushes that lined the drive and, seeing nothing, I turned for a while to watch the fire claim the house.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The flat was empty when I returned to it. Sabrina had doubtless exited through the open bedroom window in my absence and was engaged in some feline pursuit or other out on the rooftops. Sitting in the threadbare armchair by the gas fire I opened a bottle of Scotch - one of countless which had kept me company over the past months - and drank until, at last, I felt I might sleep. Then I went to bed.</div><div><br />
</div><div>While I slept I dreamed that I lay, my hands and feet tethered to pegs, upon the goat-cropped grass of a village green while the villagers came one by one and laid heavy stones upon my chest, all the while crying "Witch!" and "Murderer!".</div><div><br />
</div><div>I awoke with all the guilt of the world crushing the breath from my lungs and my newly-opened, sleep-befuddled eyes were trapped in an amber stare - Sabrina! I tried to rise but her eyes held me where I lay, struggling feebly against her terrible weight while between her soul and mine there passed some unfathomable communication that filled me with fear even as I struggled to comprehend it.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Then a paw -dainty even then - its claws gleaming with gold-red fire from the rising sun, rose and fell and rose and fell, again and again!</div><div><br />
</div><div>Can you hear me out there? How can I be here, here in the grey light? How can that be <i>my</i> face, <i>my</i> blood upon the pillow seeping from the ragged wound in my throat? How can I be here, looking down at myself. And purring...?</div>Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470679582428453335.post-46885253243257602692009-12-16T09:20:00.000-08:002023-11-17T01:39:29.321-08:00The Raggy Man<div>The Raggy Man</div><div><br />
</div><div>by</div><div><br />
</div><div>John McConnochie</div><div><br />
</div><div>The Raggy Man hurried to answer the bell which was tinkling over the doorway of his shop, 'Mortimer's Second Hand Goods'. His name was Mortimer, but everyone called him the Raggy Man and he had not been addressed by his real name for a very long time. The name Mortimer was dignified, befitting someone possibly shabby yet still genteel, whereas <i>he</i> was simply old and smelly and decayed: his body as noisome and decrepit as the ragged old clothes he wore.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It was lunchtime and the sign in the window quite clearly said 'Closed', so the visitor must be one of the Raggy Man's very special ones, and he thrilled with anticipation at the thought of the pleasure which was to come.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The Raggy Man opened the door which led onto the narrow, dark back-street in which his shop was the only remaining inhabited building. He peered into the gloom of the overcast day and there espied the most favoured visitor of all.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Young Tommy!”, he cried with joy, "Come in! Come in! Ready for a story from your old Uncle Mortimer?”</div><div><br />
</div><div>Thomas Wright, six years old, angelic of feature, quiet, biddable and - greatest virtue of all where the old man's stories were concerned - attentive, stepped over the threshold.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Where does your mother think you are? Out playing with the other children? Good! Good!”</div><div><br />
</div><div>He allowed himself a sigh at a world grown so mistrustful that it could read the possibility of sexual abuse into an old man's stories, but he had to be careful, even if that meant deceit.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The Raggy Man hurried Tommy through his shop, which was filled with sagging, overflowing shelving and disorganised piles of treasures and almost-treasures (but mostly junk), and into the little parlour at the back which he maintained for visitors in a condition which, while it might not have actively embraced the concepts of cleanliness and tidiness, was at least markedly more civilised than the squalor of the flat above the shop in which he actually lived.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Milk? Biscuits?”</div><div><br />
</div><div>Beaming at the head-noddings of assent from the child, he scurried around the little kitchen at the rear of the building and reappeared with a greasy glass and a chipped plate piled high with chocolate digestives.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Here you are, Master Thomas! And what have you got there?”</div><div><br />
</div><div>The child had picked up a triangular-bladed dagger from the debris on the floor by the chair in which he sat. Its hilt was of stone carved in the shape of a monstrous demon.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Ah that!” said the old man, "That's a sacrificial dagger. Quite genuine, I believe, and very old. Sold to me only last week by some silly old biddy who didn't know what it was. Here, here, give it to Uncle Mortimer now! It's very sharp. You could hurt yourself.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>He plucked the knife from the child's hand.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"We can look at it later, if you like.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>He sat down on the sofa next to the boy's chair and fondly patted him on the knee.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"So!", he said, his hand stroking the boy's thigh, "Another of old Mortimer's stories, eh?". His face creased in a smile. "Well...”</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Once upon a time there was a country in what is now Eastern Europe, although none of the people who lived in that country would have recognised the concept of Europe - do you know what a concept is, Tommy? It's just a fancy word for an idea.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“Anyway, there was a country, and this country had a king. Now, I'm talking about a time when kings were really kings, when they could do anything they wanted to do. Kings these days have to ask permission of just about everyone before they're allowed to draw a breath, but the king of this country, well, as I said, he could do anything he wanted. If he didn't like somebody's face he could have the skin stripped from it, and he sometimes did just that. He was what most people these days would call a tyrant. Do you know what a tyrant is, Tommy? No? Well it's a word that foolish people apply to those they're jealous of, because they've got the power to do the things that they secretly want to do. Do you see?”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“Just move a little, Tommy and let your old uncle get a little closer. That's a good boy! Relax now, and listen...”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“So, where was I? Oh yes, well this king, he had what you might call a restless nature. He was ambitious.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“What? Oh, 'ambitious' means that he wasn't content to have second-best. Just wait and you'll see.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“Yes, as I said he could do anything he wanted but after a while he found himself becoming bored. After all, there are only so many things you can do with people: he invented lots of interesting games to play with them, and a great many of his subjects didn't survive his little fancies I'm sad to say. But that didn't matter so much because he was their king - what mattered was that there were limits to the things that he could do.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“So what did he do about that, you may ask. Well, he found that he wanted to control people not just by fear, but on a deeper level. He wanted them to be like puppets, you see. And not just people, but other things too.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“Eh? Like what? Well, like thunder and rain and the waves and so forth. Oh, and he wanted to live forever too.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“So, he sought out knowledge that would help him to be like that. We would call it magic, and he looked for it in all the places that he could think of. He found a lot that wasn't true magic, and I'm afraid a lot of his subjects got rather badly damaged in the process, but of course they didn't matter much. And in the end he found what he was looking for.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“He made a pact - that's like an agreement, Tommy - with what the know-nothings of this world would call demons, but they were really gods, gods from a much older time, a time before human beings had even been thought of. So what this agreement said was that if he would serve these gods then they would teach him their secrets. And that's just what they did.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“They told him to write the secrets down in a book, so that all he had to do when he wanted some special thing was to look in the book and do what it told him to do. But his subjects got jealous of him, as people with little souls always do, and they made up terrible stories about him - why, they said that in order to live forever he ate the heart of a little boy or girl every once in a while! Can you imagine such a thing?”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“Now don't fidget, Tommy, there's only a little more to this story, and if you sit still and listen Old Uncle Mortimer will give you a very special treat. There, that's better!”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“Now, where was I? Oh yes. They got jealous. And they rebelled. They tore down his palace and they burned his book and cast the ashes on the sea. They couldn't <i>kill</i> him - he was immortal, you see - but they forced him to hide in the wilderness like an animal. And a terrible thing happened to him: without the secrets in his book he grew old - even though he couldn't die - and he couldn't get anyone or anything to obey him any more.”</div><div><br />
</div><div>“So, what did he do? Well, what his silly subjects didn't know was that the book was immortal too! Oh yes, you could burn it, or tear up its pages, but in the end it would always mend itself and be whole again. And so, of course, he set out to find it. And he's looked for it ever since: always sad, always alone, but someday he knows he'll find it."</div><div><br />
</div><div>The Raggy Man paused.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Why Tommy", he said, "I believe you're not even listening to me! And look at the mess you've made of that chair! Still, when you bring me a delicacy like this I could forgive you anything."</div><div><br />
</div><div>The Raggy Man nibbled daintily at the bloody morsel in his fingers and sighed with pleasure.</div><div><br />
</div><div>January 1st 1997</div>Tumescent Moonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00006714337525606347noreply@blogger.com1