A collaboration with Tim Lebbon
First published in 'The Dream Zone' 1999
“PLEASE let me grab some shut-eye!" grumbled the man to himself as he literally willed his own bones to soften so that they could counteract the bed's hardness.
The other man, who was still sitting on his mattress in the far corner of the room, had been speaking of his previous experiences in this remote area of South East England. They had met whilst beating tracks between two dots on their respective maps and, having conducted fitful conversations along the way about this, that and the other, they decided to share the cost of a double room at the next inn, being cheaper no doubt than two separate single rooms.
They had quickly ascertained that they were both of an academic frame of mind, sharing an interest in Standing Stones. But having that in common did not prevent them from arguing about the various theories regarding the meaning of megaliths at, say, Carnac and Callanish.
James Fardew continued to toss and turn, trying to blot out the candlelight which flickered from beside his companion's mattress. They had not predicted their dissimilar states of tiredness, and Fardew cursed the other man under his breath. Eventually half-dozing, Fardew began to misplace his own whereabouts...
Professor Oliver Gant had not told Fardew of his ability to remain awake for literally hours on end. It had not seemed necessary. He rifled through the vast tome which he had found in the bedroom's makeshift tallboy. Gant had of course expected it to be a Gideon's Bible, since the old religions still held water in these parts near London, but he was pleasantly surprised to find it to be a strange artefact bound in a substance which felt like black skin to the touch. There were highly polished gold corner-stops and an embossed title in a language that even he could not fathom. On first creaking open the front board, he whistled with delight at the glossy feast of spider-web illuminations.
Let me illuminate you, he thought giddily, but the voice was not his own.
If pages could talk, then they would do so now. And they did.
The creaking front door of the inn drifted open, and a whistle of fright sent hanging bells clattering and papers rustling their displeasure on beer-soaked tables. Wet feet splodged across the bare boards, sending puddles of water rippling into the dark cracks in between. Leathery skin flapped in the breeze, ropish hair swung heavy at the figure's waist. A voice coughed out. The rain and cold had stolen its volume, so it croaked its request once more. But there was only silence. The place had evidently shut up shop for the night.
The man hauled himself out of his wet coat and let it drop to the floor. It gathered itself up, slid across splintery boards and wrapped itself around a chair to dry. The man's hair rose around his head like a peacock's tail-feathers, shimmering in moonlight dirtied by the dusty windows. The dregs of the fire still burnt, and the memory of that evening's heat set about drying the man's mane. He padded over to the bar, twisting his neck to remove an old ache, and sat on one of the high stools. "Let me illuminate you," he said, imagining the landlord standing there at that moment, all greasy whiskers and garlic breath. "Let me tell you why I came back." He tapped long-nailed fingers onto the bar, setting his words to a dark rhythm. "You stole from me. You will pay me back, or you will lose more than just a hand."
But the landlord was not there, and the imagined conversation was pointless, save as a dry-run for the real thing, whenever that would be.
The man's coat sighed contentedly from the other side of the room,and he knew that he would not venture out again that night. He could not face the aggravation. Instead he slipped off his shoes, stretched his feet and scraped his extended nails down the front of the bar, scoring out tiny twists of wood like miniature pig tails.
He pulled himself out of his wet shirt, and a rectangle of scar tissue stared lividly from between his shoulderblades. And his phantom skin tingled - somewhere, someone was runnihg their fingers across his back. And, now, it became his turn to have maggoty divots scored by sharper nails than his own - scoring them from his backflesh and painstakingly spelling out, as such gashes did, his name: REM-SEM.
His eyes strobed in pain.
As they had earlier wended their way towards the horizon of evening, Fardew and Gant had made a peculiar pair - the former with his plus-fours and hunchback baggage, spectacles ever sliding on sweat like mating stick-insects; the latter older but sprightlier, tussling with his foundling walking-stick as if the shapes he fended off were perhaps more than simple shadows.
Their lively conversations of ghosts and scholars and other things had soon petered out as the sun dipped beyond the Surrey Badlands. Gant believed that the stones hereabouts were typical of the Southern Mysteries and had been left lying around by turn-of-the-century tribes, only to tease future scholars such as Fardew as to ley-lines and geomantic zodiacs. And Gant had no illusions about the lucrativeness of his professorship at the Northern University - he was remunerated for waffling, so he waffled. Thus, he spoke to Fardew in undergrunts of the stones' significance and, in the same breath, whispered of what "things" and "other things" might be found under them.
He turned the title page of the black book, as Fardew's snores punctuated the silence. Gant had surrendered to Fardew the tail-end of the desultory conversation, the latter mumbling a few unthought-out words as Inevitable sleep took sway, despite the bed's discomfort:- "You know, Gant, what you said this afternoon ... there's something in it. Those standing stohes outside here did have a certain look of, what can I call it ... fleshiness."
Gant laughed to himself. But the stones could easily be seen as having a strange aura, conjured up by the translucent prisms of sunset slanting across the Southern Mysteries and sheening the rutted boulders in pink gold ... making them look almost sentient and sentry-like, as they led up to and in the inn.
Upon the innkeeper's pulpit-like reception-desk, indeed, had rested the largest guest register either Gant or Fardew had ever seen. The garlic-steeped landlord found it difficult to separate page from page. Eventually, he fingered the area where he required them to signature, and both Gant and Fardew made forgeries with a flourish, but neither were conscious of their motives in so doing.
The landlord had carried their luggage and led them to the top of the building. The unnumbered rooms they passed were as silent as the grave - but, being long accustomed to such establishments, they feared that the small hours would fill with loud music and boorish laughter. Gant grumbled complaints, since he was of a mind to get his spoke in first. Fardew grudgingly nodded agreement. Neither need have bothered, since the landlord was evidently stone deaf, still tottering in advance of them along the gloomy corridor, muttering - under his garlic - words sounding like: "Rem rem rem, sem sem sem."
A meaningless hum that meant much more than meaning itself.
When the landlord opened the door to their room Gant and Fardew had paused on the shadowy landing, suddenly afraid, terrified that their forged scrawls on the register were really chippings on an old headstone. What judgement would they have called down upon themselves by faking their own names? How would they find their way in whatever afterlife waited in the wings, if they did not even own up to their own identities?
The doors faced out into the corridor like great stone slabs, and these were surely left by mischievous tribes only just passed into history. No prehistory here, in this old inn where even the creaks and groans were at home. No lost memories floating around in this atmosphere or, if they were, then their final traces would be subsumed by stale garlic and the hoppy stench of spilled beer. They all looked the same, and what if that were the case? There were no numbers, perhaps because each room was the same room, and the walk in between merely a wasted expense of energy.
Fardew had already entered inside, and was wearily testing the bed for hardness, when the moment passed. Gant stepped across the threshold, fully expecting to be struck down by some weighty revelation. But instead, all that touched him were the eyes of the landlord, weighty themselves, more alive because of his dead eardrums. His pupils dilated, his hand stretched out, and Gant dropped a wrinkled note into the heavily lined palm. He tried to catch a glimpse of the landlord's life line, but the canny old goat knew what he was about and folded his hand, and the note, neatly into his trouser pocket.
"Read all about it," the landlord said, then swung the door shut behind him as he left, muttering all the way: "Rem rem rem, sem sem sem," and on, into silence.
REM-SEM himself wore blood on his back and little else. He wished sleep would come naturally, like his mane, but his coat refused to curl into a pillow shape and the wood of the old benches was cold and hard against his tired old skin.
So he laid awake, staring into the fading embers of the fire, imagining himself shrunken and thrown into the red hell of charred wooden blocks and still-glowing coals. He would crawl between the hottest points and cast his spells wherever he could stand for longer than a few seconds. Roughly translated, this reflected his life, and he guffawed bitterly as he felt the blood hardening into a fresh black coat on his back.
Somewhere, someone was reading his book. A book bound in skin, and set in blood. More his book than any which had ever belonged to anyone, ever. Yet here, ownership was not nine-tenths of the law, and never had been. Fate was what drove the law, and fate obeyed laws beyond even the ken of REM-SEM.
Gant's candle finally gave up the ghost, just as he reached the middle of the book. He had browsed upon the yellowing pages for hours and, despite the cold logic of his brain, drew esoteric conclusions from shapes of words which in the cold light of dawn would have signified next to nothing - or so he suspected. The darkness shrouded a carefully worked illustration of what seemed a black shiny monolith slowly rotating in even blacker space. He cursed, just as his companion Fardew had done earlier in a different context. He would not bother to relight the candle but take up the book come dawn's return. He placed it on the floorboards beside his bed.
Fardew woke with a shudder. Or was it Gant? He who thus awoke could not be sure. The darkness around him glowed, even though it remained impenetrably black. In the distance, he caught the thud of feet stamping , .. or could it have been the erratic beating of his heart? Burying his face in the pillow, he tried to muffle both sight and sound. And succeeded in sleeping against all the odds: dreaming of Morris-dancers with outlandishly large stone bones clacking instead of wooden batons and silent jingle-bells sparkling in an alien sunlight.
Gant was abruptly wide awake, now certain he couldn't be Fardew dreaming he was Gant. He had always slept sporadically for most Of his life, so the fact of being Gant was now incontrovertible. He even recalled his own theories on science and history, only recently expounded to the relative stranger who now shared the same room as himself. He looked across at the dark humping shape of what he took to be Fardew in the bed. "Still worried abouts its hardness, no doubt," Gant whispered to himself silently.
He was surprised he could see anything at all amid the strobing tides of darkness, but waffling was his job, wasn't it? Each of his five senses could waffle like the best of them ... and, indeed, the sense of sight was blatantly brazen, quite unashamedly all-mouth-and-trousers as it wilfully conjured up a scribble-surfaced swagginess that hugged as much as it humped.
Gant heaved himself up onto an elbow (whose, he wasn't sure), then tumbled upwards some more until he was lying on a cold wooden floor. The bed was now a door, cast in stone and hinged with the accumulated moss of time. It was vertical, too, glittering with his perspiration like a trillion inset jewels. He looked up (or across) and saw that the ceiling was similarly adorned, cracks In the old plaster finish akin to time-creaks in old coffins, where the fingers of decay worked their way around carefully pounded nails and gave vent to that which was dead anyway.
Fardew still slept, of that Gant was sure, although he could neither hear nor see him properly. Instead there was a humped shape somewhere in his memory, a moaning individual who had walked a hundred miles to complain about the standard of service even here, this close to the break between this world and the next. Complain, and tempt fate as well, by sleeping on the hard bed that was little more than a gravestone into the world of the dead. Lucky they were no grave robbers. But what of the grave digger, and the keeper? Surely he was still around somewhere?
Perhaps downstairs?
Gant stood and swayed unsteadily in the rush of altered perception. He tasted distance and spoke words of heat. waffling on like a sensory deprived suddenly finding freedom. He wanted the book again, reached out but could not find it, certain that an explanation of what was happening here lay somewhere within the last few pages. But to reach the end he had to read those pages before it, like taking steps on a ladder to reach the top. He didn't like heights, either vertical or knowledgeable, but this was something he had to do. Now more than ever.
"Fardew!" he hissed, thinking that the other man may be able to help. But his voice filtered away into the dark, sundered by sightlessness and sent spinning into incoherence.
He'd had an idea of what the book was, but in the homely light of the candle all ideas had seemed false, fed by atmosphere rather than deduction. Now, maybe they were right: it was a digging manual, for opening holes between here and elsewhere; it was a hanging manual, for setting those cold stone doors in place in the inn; it was a phone-book for the dead, each entry listed by manner of death rather than name, so that it would take forever to find just one person.
Whatever it was, it needed finishing. An unfinished book was like unfinished sex, pleasant enough in a way but still yearning that final explosive revelation.
Treading carefully, Gant headed downstairs.
REM-SEM awoke. He'd nodded off without knowing it, and woke up in the same manner, so he never even knew he'd been asleep. REM-SEM's soon-to-be-revenged upon victim had only been granted guests to make him more easily into a landlord whom REM-SEM remembered needed punishing. So, as well as being spear-carriers and scholars, Gant and Fardew were merely their own waffles. Ghosts, guests, the words were close enough ...
The fire was heading for coolness, the windows smudged with something of the morning sun, without night having even begun its departure. And there were footsteps from above, descending, owned by someone who needed a hole dug, no doubt.
REM-SEM stood, lifted his arms and accepted the warmth of his coat onto his body. His back still ached where the skin was stripped, but it could just be a strain from all the digging and tending he had ever done. Sometimes he wished his life away. He dreamt in fire, and worked in clay.
Amid the clotted skin, though, there slowly developed an itch, a knotty pustule, almost a deep-steeped tandoori gnat with an eye movement so blessedly rapid it could only see and be seen by stone. Its polygon scales were little better than the landlord's catchy saw. Far and few between, the mesmericks were wed to the dreamless many.
The two dots, as it happened, you see, were not only on different maps but on maps under quite separate zodiacs, so never to be joined by journey nor, even, allied by axis ...
One guest (Fardew?) seemed momentarily to wake to a curdled dawn. Gant was the hump in his back. Silent as a Donatello sculpture. The landlord had been left crucified upon the book of his own black skin: a kiln-hard garlic-doll, hanging on the window amid the screaming yellows of a reluctant sun-stuck there by a knurled kind of cake duly chipped from unboned batter after being baked within a rock of hinged halves. A waffle.
