PROLOGUE 1

I flew in from the darker reaches of the night sky and settled on a roof.

In my home nest, they taught me things I should know on my journey to Earth and they taught me what I should do when I arrived there.

"They", who was made of one entity calling themselves Cthulhu, said I would look like this ... and I was shown a vision of a beaked dragon-like bird with snakes for limbs, new moons for claws and a devil's bedding for wings.  If attacked, I would attack first.  But they furnished me not with weapons, for I looked too strong to fight.  I would do this ... was shown the "bird" that was me alighting on the roof of a house when night had relinquished all memory of the previous day and all hope of the next, and lowering my proboscis into the chimney to tease out any tasty flue-grubs.  And I would sense this ... was shown human beings in their beds, like beached baby whales, dreaming of creatures on the roof.  And I would see this ... was shown others like me, as far as my eyes could reach, roof-roosting contemplatively against a backdrop of stars.  And, finally, I would dread this ... was shown many bigger versions of myself flapping in, swooping across the sky, like giant vulture marquees, here to ensure the alert rapt attention of us sentries and enforcing the subtle curfew of the night.

There would come a time when Cthulhu themselves would arrive, one solid pack of beings like myself in physical communion with every limb and feeler of each other, all previously dead things but by an interactive mutuality sparking off supreme faith in its own life-force.

There came a time when I needed more than just my own company during the interminable period before dawn.  I had recited my prayers, counted the slates on my own particular roof-tree for the umpteenth time and re-learnt the consecration of the house.One word haunted my brain, one no doubt implanted by Cthulhu themselves.  This word was Lovecraft  -  a strange echoey word, throwing up images of what humans called Heaven.  My prayers were to this Lovecraft and even its sound (although it was different upon my tongue) brought a tingle to parts of my body.  My limbs lengthened and turned stringy, my lower torso became loose chamois leathers ill-sewn together, and I wrapped the house into a parcel.  Squeezing hard on its walls produced the wild juices of Lovecraft from the suckers along the length of my erupting udder.

But then I knew something that I had NOT been taught.  This Lovecraft could not possibly be the immortality amid the stars which had been pledged following my tour of duty on Earth.  Lovecraft could not possibly be the sweet agony welling up along my winding extruding tentacles.  Lovecraft could not possibly be the key prayer to be passed from beak to beak, from roof to roof, in the lonelinesses of Earth's dark side.

But Lovecraft was shown to be the reason I and the others had been sent out weaponless into the unknown.  Never shipped even a hand-spike...

Our naive strength had resided somewhere in that word Lovecraft, our primitive cowing in the face of the cruel mindless cosmos.

Then it dawned on what was left of me.

Lovecraft was in fact a man!  One of those human beings who, we had been taught, were as insignificant as the dreams they dreamt.

With that, I folded up my wing tents, cleared up the foot-thick stains I had deposited on the roof which were even now dangling into the gutter, straightened up the TV aerial, gave the chimney a continental kiss as adieu and, telling my companion roof-creatures that we should all stick together, I led them off in my wake into the realms of non-existence where we would perhaps feel more at home.

But not before joining up our loose ends into an unbounded ecstasy, eventually forming a weave of stars and poultry flesh which, for all I know, still wheels across the limitless wastes of a better mind than mine.

 

PROLOGUE 2

There were twelve terraced houses around a circular back-alley courtyard and each house had its own characteristics.  The numbering system was quite straightforward, one to twelve with odd and even rubbing conjoined shoulders.

And unto these mansions there came signs which told mainly of mutancy and insanity.  And upon the roofs of these came bodies none of which seemed human.

 

PROLOGUE 3

I crawled round an apparently circular loft area, with no dividing walls between; how long I had been travelling on hands and knees across the dusty beams was now unknown.  I mis-recall entering, I mis-recall even if the direction was clockwise or anti-.  I expected to meet another on the way, but maybe its direction was timed and spaced so that we would never meet.

 

INLOGUE

My name is Clovis Camber; and I once had a twin brother called Tristan  -  we had to be parted at birth, as if our love for each other was far too strong for our own good.

We had, they said, emerged side by side into the world ... having been pulled from the tangled skein of strands that still wore the flesh of our mother.  She it was who had to split down the middle with our lumbering arrival and, whilst WE had to be unsewn and unpicked, SHE had to be re-aligned by the tireless darning and hemming of treadling seamster-surgeons.

I mis-recall the home in which we all lived.  It was down a turnimg which led from blind alleys and double-ended culdesacs and, if I directed you there today, you would become lost in the world of dreams you had so desperately wanted to avoid.

I once knew a largish Villa, called Olive, which stood close to the coast where a little boy who must have something to do with me once lived with a matriarch or two.  He may have been me, he may not, but I did play in the villa's garden on the clumsy swing, waiting for faces that did not please me to pop up and to reveal their long trifurcating tongues.

"Clovis, let's play Corners ... come on, do!" said Tristan in the garden of that same Olive Villa, but now down beyond the alleys and culdesacs far from any sea or pier or naze...

"Don't want to!"

And we skipped like the wings of a pastel-dusted butterfly amid the cabbage patches, towards a matronly figure reclining on the daisied lawn.

"Clovis won't play at Corners," complained a bitter Tristan.

"It's so boring!"

The figure unfolded as if it had been a sculpture with vibrant curves and angles that an artist had spent a lifetime formulating but was now sliding into a shape which was more human, if not completely finished.

I recall that she was nude.

Her mummy-mounds, as we called them then, despite her evident time of life, were pert and tantalisingly pulled apart by pale-blue fibres in the stretched skinny fat; the paps were like hairless nostrils.  The hair which sprouted like grated carrot from between her legs seemed to crinkle and coil of its own volition and, as she turned on to her front to respond to our remonstrations, it was visible through the crack of her rising bottom.

If it were not for the widening fishbone scar from neck to V-point and again from V-point to neck, she would have joined in our romps across the summer lawns of endless childhood.

She would however point to certain things that no others could see.  Up on the roofs, she said, were the wingy, stringy residue of creatures that once used the slates as sloping beds and the gutters as receptacles of their night soil.  She would also tell us of a rogue creature who had stayed behind when all the others had gone back to where they originated.  It cared not whether it be day or night: it did not honour the openness and candour of sunlight ... and it would sit, wide-eyed and brown, so close to the tall chimney stack that one had to look twice to see it there at all.  The slimy slivers of cuckoo-spit from its rear tuft of wings coiled down the slates toward the skewed guttering and must have given it away to the likes of our mother.

Giving us the nod, one day, she indicated that if we did not take the opportunity and look at it immediately and study its intricate plumage, its tangled cat's cradle of tentacles, its postbox mouth and its underskirted collection hatch ... then we may never have another chance to be among those very very few to see one of them.  A chance of a lifetime.

But it flapped off, before we could even raise our pair of eyes.

She undergrunted, on other occasions, the names which only she knew or, if I mis-recall, was it that she was the only one who dared even to think such names?  She told of two warring, but loving, "gods", for want of a better expression, called, and she spelt them out for us, CTHULHU and ETEPSED-EGNIS.  Both, apparently, wanted to rule the roost as far as the archetypal fears of general mankind were concerned.  It was all very well, sending out cohorts of clucking wing-critters to scare the nineteen-fifties skin off houses.  It was all very well, to breed, inbreed and cross-breed with chimney stacks, giving birth to clusters of TV aerials that would hand-spike the future skies.  It was all very well, to formulate melting dreams which would sud the minds of future men.  It was all very well...

But, one day, she said there would be a fight between the two reluctant protagonists.  We, Clovis and Tristan, would be the ones called to umpire and ensure their elbows remained on the table of the cosmos, as they strained and pushed, pulled and spluttered, like two giant vertical earthquakes.  That's what she said, anyway.  We did not believe her.  And, now, I even do not believe IN her.

One night, bare again, she crawled out of our lives.  Up the nursery chimney she went like a scrawny sweep.  She had been starving herself for weeks in preparation.  The waggling feet were the last things I saw of her, the soot in black snowfalls into the empty grate.  Her voice lingered on for some little while as she continued to wriggle towards the roof, pleading for Cthulhu and Etepsed-Egnis to lower their tentacle ladders to assist her ascendant sign...

I gained the impression from her last overgrunts that the two "gods" were in fact joined at the elbow.  She yearned for them to splice her, then service her well.

The words eventually died out somewhere mid-chimney.

 

EPILOGUE 1

Within this house of alleys, now, we listen to the interminable dual shuffling and shambling in the shuttered loft, around and around in ever-decreasing circles.  But it may be the more distant scratching of claws on the slates ... or the tugging out of aerials as tooth-picks ... or, more likely, the scraping across the night sky of the hidden sun which never enters this our mansion of the stars. 

Destiny is a core unto itself and we shall only be able to spend the rest of our lives elbow-fighting...

 

EPILOGUE 2  (The Present)

Voice: You say life is futile, don't you?

Old man: No.  It is futile to call life futile, for it is.

Voice: Your parents, did they give you a lot of love?

Old man: I only had a mother ... who used to mop up the night soil from under my bed.  She used kerchiefs and muckenders to sop out the messes.  Nearly every night it was but she received thanksgiving from her Christian God...

V: How could you have let her do it ... and then to leave her alone with what you considered to be her deceitful God?

Om: I couldn't sleep.  I thought night-critters or such were clambering over the roof, trying to get at me.

V: Oh, we're going back to them, now, are we? Where did such ideas come from?  Did you think the things on the roof had minds?

Om: They either came from my own mind and, if so, even a Shakespeare or a Mozart may have had them ... or they were from others' minds, let loose to hound and hassle me.  When I was younger I had dreamed of sweeter things, flowers and such, cuddle-me-to-you's, herbs-of-grace, lady's-fingers, love-in-a-mists, soft hobmadonnas, none-so-pretties, forget-me-knots ... but stuck out in their midst like a piss-burnt phallus, was an ox-pith, pointing to future dreams emerging from the gathering clouds and dipping sun of puberty.  Sorry, old age makes me wordy...

V: Yes, you mumble on so.  You told me earlier, did you not, that the night-critters were not of your mother's God or even a paradoxical version of the otherwise hard-to-believe Trinity, but things that were born from a greater god called Cthulhu (is that how you pronounce it?).  'Tis enough to bend any mind.

Om: Too true.  And night-eaters fed off my doings that I'd shovelled under the bed.  Great jaws champing at the merds of my adolescent loins.

V: Perhaps your so-called roof creatures got into the room to scrabble and play under your bed?

Om: You're oh so clinical, medical, in your questioning.

V: Sorry, I'll try to keep quiet.  Tell me what you have to.

Om: I kept a wooden contraption above my bed  -  ill-made perhaps  -  teetering and creaking in rhythm to my fitful tossing.  Bit it did keep them at bay.  You see, the roof had gaps...   And now, you're actually telling me that they may have been the things under the bed all the time.  It's coming back to me, now.  Messer Shoggoth with webby sticky wings and ox-pith proboscis.  AND that worm which called itself Yog-Niggurath ... oh yes, I recall it all now.  Damn you, for your memory pricking!

V: Blame not another for your own mind's leaning.

Om:  I'll be straightforward, or as much so as seeping senility allows.  I lived a long time in that groaning house.  There were gaps above me that literally let in the moonlight.  My mother cared for me and preached of God, her God, meaning nothing to me and pitch-kettling the Hanseatic-league of my wooden bed defences.  Yes, I must keep it simple, none of that stuff and nonsense about night-snaps, larrikins and lop-eared macaroons.  I'm nought but a goose-cap on Lady-day in Harvest, sailing a moon-sheered craft from imaginary mordant Venice to the plague-sores of Toulon...

V: Simple, you said.

Om: She fed my night's doings to the tank outside.  Her one time lover, the lavatory man, stole it away in his stink cart under cover of day.  'Tothers thought it compost he lugged...

V: To the point,old man..

Om: One day, as she bent her creaking back, with her sops and muckenders, a worm with a human face plurped from out the darkness under my piss-a-bed.  It had a cheesy colour.  Shock changes to delight in my mummy's face.  Wetglueslimy wormbody nestles nudgingly into the sweat of her palms.  She strokes it, bathing the wormbody in love, love which my mummy has missed for many a stark day.

V: This is nought but another dream, is it not?

Om: Hardly.  I truly recall my mother forgot about her God for several of a day, side-grunting names like Cthulhu and Etepsed-Egnis instead.  All this time she was involved in a relationship with that worm.

V: An intimate one, to your mind.

Om: Undoubtedly, from the things I saw going on.  At first I thought she had died with it inside of her, or so the family doctor told me just before he committed suicide.  The next I recall was the funeral.  I covered her coffin with cuddle-me-to-you's, herbs-of-grace, lady's-fingers, love-in-the-mists, soft hobmadonnas, none-so-pretties, forget-me-knots AND all her used sops and muckenders.  However, there was one item on her coffin  -  the ox-pith as central death-tower  -  which reminded me of the worm Yog Niggurath.  I knew her body had been found in the stink tank by the lavatory man.  He reckoned she must have squatted in there, pinched her nose and devoted herself to the substance of her despairing love.  I suddenly realised that the doctor must have lied, for his own nefarious reasons.  I ran back to my bed, scattered the wooden wendy house above it to the inside winds and searched for the crazy worm...

V: To wreak vengeance?

Om: Mebbe.  But the worm, or whatever it was, had turned to a mess, an unspeakable, nameless lump of greengurgleglaucous poo ... curdling, seething, burping...

V: Ha!  It was not the worm, I guess, but the roof-critters stealing away like burglars, leaving their mark for YOU to clear up  -  how fitting!

Om: I thought you wanted to help, not to confuse me further.

V: The only way to make simplicity shine out is to confuse the confusions for contrast.

Om: The simple point is I loved my mummy for the first time after clearing away the living muck under the bed. And I prayed, then, to God, HER God.

V: And did He answer?

Om: No.  I suppose He had left the room to go for SEEMLY relief of His bodily functions.

V: He probably didn't think you were terribly important, anyway.  I must go now, nice talkin to you and thanks for the drink.

Om: I've been pondering here for some time, but I've only stared at the beer and had crazy pub talk with myself.  Ego and Id, Id and Ego, I don't know.  Time to go home, Andy and Teddy are waving goodbye.  I think I will dream tonight of times long ago when Darkness was an Edge, for today it's nought but a Shroud. [exit]

V: And he never even shipped a hand-spike.

(published ‘Midnight In Hell’ 1992)