WEIRDTONGUE 30, 34, 39, 44 & 49

WEIRDTONGUE (30)

The soft plash of oars as the dinghy floated across the steaming lake, its occupants sporadically glimpsing the Choker's castellated shape in the yellow gloom. Modal Morales and his right-hand girl Jane were searching for any face that floated upside down in the murky waters, making any recognition impossible to predict because of the wrinkled weathering by water or, indeed, the murkiness itself. They had already delivered one tall man with an untamed tongue to the Choker, but he wasn't the only one dead or nearly-dead or nearly-alive - with untamed tongues or tentacular languages that observed no traditions of meaning - whom they needed to round up or trawl for the Choker. There were 6000 of them at the last over-exact count (i.e. another 5999), each a live body or corpse or zombie representing a 1000 others within itself like Russian Dolls in layers upon layers of thickened warhide or rind formed from hardened flesh, all previously gassed by the yellow steam given off by the lake, because they (when previously normal people) had not been given the antidote to prevent such toxic intake by the lungs. Consumption upon consumption in complication of or interference by Bird Flew. The Choker sure had its work cut out for the foreseeable future.

Suddenly the dinghy grounded to a halt upon a mass of such bodies, many bony and thin (belying the scope of their contents, mental or physical), elongated in height by the torture they had suffered at the hands of history. They were intertwined like fleshy rush-mats from shore to shore. Some moaned, others weltered noisily with mud upon their whipping tongues, a few as silent as the previous silence broken only by plashing oars and the wet raw planky vessel itself. Modal, knew deep within himself, that this was a dream. He was the Clown of Dreams, and within certain layers of these dreams-within-dreams or dreams by other dreamers infiltrating his own dreams, his job was to lighten and entertain the audience of co-dreamers with antics of farce or black humour, cart-wheeling in his baggy suit through false doors to baths of custard or slews of porridge beneath his huge skidding banana-feet – all a front or subterfuge, when he reached the bottom dream or the head-lease dream, for him being the reincarnation (or actual equivalence) of Yellowish Haze himself now set to put right the wrongs of centuries, including all those killed by history rather than by natural death.

Gregory was separated from Suzie at some point between his own separate dreams. He found himself waking time and time again from an operation on his head (he felt fingers manipulating his brain) as he glassily stared up at faces that floated in the yellow gloom of the theatre. This was not the convalescence he had expected. Not the lazy afternoons in a wicker chair by the side of the lake to which he had looked forward, being waited on hand on foot with all manner of medicinal cocktails. This was deep-rooted surgery itself. The convalescence, in hindsight, had been conducted at the previous hospital ward back home, a pre-illness convalescence, as it turned out, as he had then not been ill at all before then. Rest and care and recuperation and, yes, convalescence, prior to the disease hitting him. A vital pre-cursor (or pre-cure) to an illness that was incurable. It should always have been such with incurable illnesses. Because most incurable illnesses led to death, with no subsequent chance of convalescence. So best to have it first.

He fell back into dream. This was an anaesthetic of most confused proportions. He saw himself again as Baby Tuckoo, now a little older, a toddler with a new toy. A toy electric-shaver which, when he rubbed its business end up and down his cheeks and between his nose and lips and his chin (as a grown-up man would do with a real electric-shaver), played music.

The Weirdmonger backed up his wagon (amid the alert of reverse hooting) towards the Choker's drawbridge-door. Eventually, one of the Choker's flunkeys carrying a slimy eel-like mass of rudery in his arms came out of a side door and loaded it on the wagon. The Weirdmonger gently touched the wagon's scrawny steed with the end of his whip and trundled off, having paid cost-price (with some means of illegal tender to the flunkey) for this new stock-in-trade. Glistenberry Fair was his next stop.

WEIRDTONGUE (34)

Glistenberry sat, on one side, within the shade of the Tor-on-the-Hill, and beneath the sun of an over-hot British Summer, on the other. The animal zodiac was snoozing, next to invisible … it was never awake unless in rain or cold. Indeed, only a few people believed in the landscape containing or representing an animal zodiac at all. You needed to go up in a helicopter so see it plainly. And, even then, there were doubters. And people scared of flying.

When the seasonal fairs and festivals and circuses and markets came to settle with their sails upon the ocean of green and earthy-compartmented farmland – one wondered whether that was a metaphor at all but, rather, the intrinsic truth about inward voyages to the self itself. But, even in the bright sunshine, one found thoughts turning to darker visions that went above the heads of the jollifiers and holiday-makers and music-lovers and sight-seers. Rudiments of myth and melancholy.

Today, carts and wagons and tent-carriers dotted the trunk roads towards this part of Summerset, building up in volume as the traffic cycles revealed their propensity to rhythmic jamming. Together with henge-dwellers and romanies in caravans … plus ready-made canvas conveyances that were none of these vehicles but their own very special breed of transport particular to the ethos of the Glistenberry Romance.

John Cowper Powys House was, however, a dark stone building lurking quite close to the Tor area (or as the locals called, Torus) where the scratchings of the first animal sign could be discerned in the loose contours of scrubble underfoot. An animal sign that belonged to no sane horoscope or natal chart.

It is that house to which we must later divert our attention. New, as yet unnamed, protagonists are about to open the house's shuttered gloom and take root there – not as squatters, as such, but, rather, as budding contestants in some form of race that had not yet been defined (both in margins of eligible track for racing and the race's rules). They had been given permission to camp out in the derelict, dark, damp house free of charge. In the sun of daytime, the drawbacks didn't seem to matter so much. It was only at night or in gloomy weather that the darkness, dampness and dereliction crept back. A 'Big Brother' house with no audience or other ways of spying on them … except by us.

WEIRDTONGUE (39)

Whether senile dementia is nemophilia or nemophobia, the result is the same.

When Suzie left the hospital, after seeing her Mum, she took some time to recover her own equilibrium. She popped into her local corner shop only to be confronted by its proprietor. He told her that her newspaper delivery bill was owing. She mindlessly listened to his rant before settling. She was mad, not bad, she implied. She only wanted a pint of milk, today. They ended up inferred friends again. She failed to realise the connection between him and the clown who had performed with Goldfrapp the weekend before. The connection was that there was no connection at all which gave any thought that he might have had such a connection very strange indeed: and strangeness is strangely (in itself) the strangest connector of all. Establishing a connection by needing to say there was no such connection.

Greg was still asleep when she got back to the flat.

"Don't bother to get up," she called sarcastically.

No reply. She shrugged. No connection, there, either!

Feemy Fitzworth examined his own hand. It was certainly smaller than he remembered it but, literally while he thought about it, the hand's margins seemed to grow again with further inches of itself reconstituting even as he watched the process. A peculiar feeling for Feemy to feel. He had recently grown smaller and smaller, scrawnier and scrawnier, ever since dragging his body back towards England from Poland. Indeed, earlier, during transit, there had grown hazy yellow borders replacing the outer limits of his body – then vanished into thin air – then grew again as they replaced the new more inner outer-limits, leaving only bits to wrinkle and harden like stale food. Today the process seemed to be in reverse again – new areas of body replacing new areas of yellow haze. He couldn't account for such a reversal of a reversal of his body margins. And which was the direction of emaciation, and which the direction of fattening, became as inscrutable as the difference between nemophilia and nemophobia.

He should have taken the opportunity to ring his latest lady friend – Mrs Mummerset – because, soon, in fact in the last few lines of the previous paragraph, his fingers had grown too big to manipulate the holes in his mobile's tiny dial. He wanted to reassure her about a few things including his continued love for her and to establish whether he could extend the various investments she had made in his business venture as well as in his very state of existence. Words were more important than money. Even words sent via mouthpieces rather than mouths.

Later, in what he saw as moments of greater clarity, he continued his trek across the desert between Middle Europe and the white cliffs of England. He watched the ever-widening motor-kites heading to bomb some of the remaining cities that had survived Hitler's first bombardment. He felt he was being dragged down by more than just his own bodyweight. He imagined he had grown a huge tail that was leaving a deep slimy trench in his wake and that some telephony company would probably take the opportunity to lay a land-line along it in due course. He had left a charged-up webcam at one point in the desert pointing at his proposed onward route, a webcam with a connection to the tiny screen of his mobile, whereby he could now see himself progressing into the distance until his body eventually disappeared.

I woke up at the sound of her voice.

"Why did you just wake me?" I asked.

"But you spoke first!"

I couldn't see her in the dark. I felt huge pouting or pulsing things on my face, things I couldn't differentiate from the skin of my face beneath them. They were a "Why did you just wake me?" monster in bits and as a whole – its interrogative hook actually now buried in my face. But what had it said first – to wake my wife?

WEIRDTONGUE (44)

During the height of the panic caused by the unexpected air-raid over Wagger Market, Suzie found herself hustled into a surprisingly available shelter that was almost 'fit for purpose'. It was better than the ones in London – i.e. those hastily dug for the Blitz proper by means of Anderson Shelters in city-street gardens together with makeshift kip-points on Underground platforms – but, even so, it was too dark to see very clearly in this subterranean part of Summerset and the walls were still earthen without any attempt to finish them off by plastering.

Later that night Suzie was to fall asleep with difficulty creating dreams that she was sheltering, along with others, within a bodily cavity still warm from continuous life that had been fortuitously provided by one of the terrestrially in-built 'animals' of the Glistenberry Zodiac. But, whilst still awake, she was faced with harsh reality, despite the best intentions of those who had built this particular shelter.

At times, she also believed she was within a chamber that would soon be full of a deceptively pale yellowness, but she could not fathom this belief.

For a while, the shelter's inhabitants looked bleary-eyed, cowed, taciturn, rather than outright scared or at risk from suffering any renewals of noisy panic. They could all hear, no doubt, the dull thumps of bombs distantly shaking the ground. Suzie feared for the integrity of JCP House, even the pinnacled brick-built Tor stuck up high on the hill above Glistenberry for many centuries. The Abbey Ruins would be ruined even further, she thought. She also feared for the safety of someone she did not know. She ached for this very stranger's arms to enfold her.

Before finally falling asleep, she had cast glances around her co-shelterers, some now mumbling in odd twos and threes. She forced back the dreams that teetered upon the brink of sleep's approaching onset. She spotted – for real – a figure that looked remarkably like Mary of Mangle herself. It was surely, indeed, that very woman. Suzie had often seen her on regular tours of JCP House. She looked less imperious, now, less certain of herself, but still with an air of tallness despite sitting down on the rough floor. Pitiful to see such a downfall, despite the imputed cruelties of her reign.

Mary of Mangle opened her empty mouth widely meeting darkness with darkness. Some of her flunkeys and sycophants approached her. One tried to force-feed her with a large amount or tripe-like slobber that the Weirdmonger had earlier been seen (if not seen by Suzie herself) cutting up as an elixir-of-life on his Market stall. Mary of Mangle refused to swallow it but kept it in her mouth, like a spoilt child. As some of the substance was now missing, the words she eventually emitted by its means - via the curds of it thick slobber – appeared incomplete: "Gout … Spout … Watch ... the … Sprout …!"

Others turned towards this sound of her 'voice', half-heartedly mystified. Then they returned to further attempts at sleeping, as helped by what they put down as a dream. If one was dreaming, then one must be asleep. A great psychological help towards real sleep itself.

In another corner, a rank-smelling man tossed and turned in his premature sleep, using a filthy rucksack as a pillow. Suzie thought he would have been more comfortable without the pillow. She bum-shifted away from that man as far as possible because he was now speaking of things in his sleep that she did not wish to hear together with the sound of farts she did not wish to smell. She was, consequently, nearer Mary of Mangle herself who had, apparently, fallen asleep, still ruminatively chewing the curdish cud with a renewed air of sway and swagger and pride that only the oblivion of sleep could have brought to someone so fallen from grace.

Modal Morales picked up one of the papers in his shop. There were news agency photos of a freak storm in Somerset. Glastonbury Tor had been toppled. Amongst the crowds that subsequently gathered (in one of the more detailed photos) around Glastonbury Abbey's shattered remains, Modal half-recognised a face he did not wish to recognise at all, one which gave him an inexplicable frisson of fear. He fingered the black rosette in his lapel and replaced the newspaper in the delivery boy's pile – and looked up as the shop door went 'ding'!

WEIRDTONGUE (49)

Mrs Celia Mummerset missed a number of people.

She still visited the living body of Mrs Rachel Milledges at the hospital whilst the real friend who used to exist within that body was missing, presumed lost forever. Mrs Mummerset also missed her own son: she knew not where or why. She kept her mobile switched on day and night in the hope he would ring – with the combined hope that her latest male admirer (another missing person) would also ring: from abroad where she believed he was currently travelling on business. She missed Mrs Lettuce Weggs who had drowned in her own septic tank. She missed another friend: Mrs Maria Morales who had died one wash-day…

The circumstances concerning this death of Mrs Morales are still sub judice or, at least, subject to a version of their own circumstantial evidence. Her son, Modal, one Monday morning, left his corner shop – having shut it with a card on the door saying "back soon". He seemed to have deterred most regular customers, in any event. He was intent, today, upon setting off to visit his Mum for some advice regarding the pests that had attacked him. She was an expert, he knew, upon old-fashioned complaints that bore names from old wives' tales and that only the old wives themselves - versed or steeped in the real past as they were - knew how to suffer properly or with dignity.

Ever since the pests – as he knew them – had attacked his shop, he had felt one such pest eating away at him from under his skin. To help palliate it, he needed simply for it to be named. His Mum was a wise woman, better than any doctor. Modal loved her in his own quaint way. In any event, he was, today, finally, at the end of his tether, having decided to shut up his shop and tell his Mum, without further delay, about his own worst fears. But he had forgotten it was wash-day. He should have guessed, however, judging by the breezy blue of the sky and the fulsome white billows of configured clouds veritably racing above him like the airy ghosts of cattle.

"Hi, Mum!" he shouted as he spotted her pegging out smalls on the washing-line. "How's Sidney the Suds and Albert the Clothes-Horse?" he continued shouting as he thus joked across the street from where he could already see her waving at him.

Yet, from that distance, he spotted that she seemed skinnier than her habitually jolly wash-day plumpness. Now as thin as when she was a young slip of a girl during the Spanish Civil War all those decades before. The matter somehow concerned the ancient rusty-handled mangle through which she'd just been strenuously wringing the sodden clothes. Nobody could later fathom exactly the nature of any available circumstantial evidence – other than that she turned out, upon investigation, to be quite dead, waving like a flag from where she was pegged out upon her own washing-line.

Posted at 09:40 am by Weirdmonger

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