The girl was wan and wasteful. Moon-eyed. With a rag tag and bobtail of coloured scarves hanging from her waist upon the black bolero skirt. Moon-eyed, yet with decidedly sharp features upon a squeaky face. The black tights lent an insect ambience to the ensemble, which sat a touch uneasy with the fluffy fair hair. Younger than my daughter, seeming a smidgin older. But my daughter had left with my wife, and memory couldn't compare them with any degree of certitude. The girl merely hung around like a potential dose of neurasthenia. Sat on my doorstep, as it were - waiting for an invitation to come inside. Not exactly a beggar, nor even a waif and stray - and not a good time girl on the game. More a foundling left by a gang of elves because she wouldn't join in with their wicked ways. Or a groundling. I knew that my garden was visited by elves because, come the mornings, the grass was strewn with umbrella-like toadstools - dabbled in daisy-dew and reeking with a rankness. The fungi marked the foot-loose breadth of elfin midnight paces - yet unpoisonous, because poison rarely stinks. That was how I could be so sure about the girl. She stank to high heaven. I yearned to give her a bath, if for no other reason than to see if the smell could be expunged. I allowed her to dwell in the scullery. Not that she was any more a kitchen maid than all those other things a girl of her relatively tender age could be. The optimum position, I suppose, in hindsight, would have been chambermaid.

I always judge people at first sight. Second sight is something my wife professed to possess; perhaps that is why she left me so suddenly and gleefully. But my trust lies in my senses, five of them, honed by a lifetime of observation and the recent months of detection in my back garden. As such, I thought the girl to be homeless but homely; grubby but garrulous; haughty and human. It is in the last, perhaps, which my senses failed me, and the niggling doubt in the back of my mind sniggered maliciously.

She was curled in the corner when I came downstairs, arms and legs wrapped around herself in a bony blanket. For a second, I coveted her comfort, but then I saw the scattered, moist patches on the concrete floor and stone wall of the scullery.

“You awake?”

She whined, stretched like a small, skinny dog and slowly hauled herself to her elfin feet. At first, when I heard the gentle phut-phut sliding through the heavy atmosphere, I looked away in fatherly embarrassment. But then I realised that the soft noises were not coming from within, but without. Small, sickly grey fungi pattered to the floor of the scullery, and before I could see whether they were born of her own pale skin, or the damp clothes she slept in, she had quickly patted herself down with anxious hands, and stepped past me into the kitchen.

I kicked at one of the mushrooms, toadstools, whatever, and it exploded against the wall in an almost silent cloud of dry-looking dust. Frowning, I turned around.

“Heard the little ones outside last night,” she said matter-of-factly, perhaps the facts mattering less to her than the hot coffee she was pouring. “Must be more inclined to wander, now I’m gone.”

“Gone?”

“Inside.” She looked at me, eyes sad but still amused. “Not out there.” She waved in a vaguely gardenward direction. “On the cold step.”

I felt a flush of concern and regret, and hoped she would not see my red-burning face. “The scullery was cold, I suppose.”

“The floor and walls were, but the thoughts there are warm.” She peered over the lip of the large mug, the steaming coffee distorting her face in a laughing heat-haze. “You have a warm heart.”

And then she told me of a dream she had last night or was it every night? Her voice was so understated I did not dare even breathe, let alone create a connection between us by the means of crude interruption. Indeed, she did not speak at all, the words “warm heart” being, I feared, the last words of hers that would ever need speech marks.

During the night, several white pigeons roosted along my bedhead warbling in almost a musical rhythm. I descended the steep stairs, putting my mind at the back of my mind, since I had today been promised a breakfast fit for a Princess like me. And yes, I was not mistaken; there were the maids (not much older than myself) lined up in the great raftered dining hall, with costumes primped up from the sparkling buckles of their heel-hoppers to the tilted titfers of their bee-hives. But I had no eyes for such things, as I surveyed the steaming fare neatly arranged upon the groaning trestle table. A choice of husk cereals, even at this moment being chewed over by the castle's pet squirrels to make the grains and seeds palatable for a Princess. Trencher-plates weighed down with hefty sides of bacon, pierced all over with culinary darts dipped in waxy spittle-yeast to help make their texture work to just the right turn of taste. The chef sharpened the carving cleaver, allowing the sparks of metal dust to settle upon the twitching pig-steaks, obviously as decoration rather than seasoning. I took a deep breath as my gaze wandered over the curded combs of wild honey that nestled like pupae in tureens of clarified night-oil. Hafts of rare deconstituted elm bread sat thickly buttered on platters of wood proper. Low-lying fish lolled in twin dishes, with fins fancily cut with crimping scissors. A whole pigeon squatted on a silver platter stuffed with its own young and roasted till its feathers charred. Tender monkeys had been broiled in a state of coitus interruptus, then skinned to show the separates of white meat stained with arty doodlings of pond scum. Sagging pyramids of coddled eggs oozed slimy yellow puddles into the very cross-grain of the trestle. Also, there were churns of fertilised milk to pour over the bowls of cereal slurry - now that the squirrels had been taken off to be cooked for my elevenses snack. A mug of lemony swill steamed, ready to wash it all down. As the chef rashered the still palpitating bacon, I sat at the table, knife and fork poised like I was in the refectory of a poor orphanage - and screeched for the rest of my breakfast.

“Breakfast, you want your breakfast. Ah, I see.” I laughed at the roundabout way she had expressed her state of hunger.

“You have a warm heart,” she said, for perhaps the first time.

I thought I was down to the sawdust in the bottom of a CornFlakes packet, followed by toasted stale bread. But by the time breakfast was ready, somehow, through the ministrations of imagination upon the meagre contents of my fridge, a veritable feast lay before us. Amazingly unconcerned at the fishy miracle which had waved in my morning, I tucked in with the girl. Soon - after several dead animals and a gutful of saturated fats - I began to think about work.

I had a warm heart, she said. My wife had always told me I was so cold.

Originally, he had been sent to collect her for dinner. Now, after so long seeking her trail, years wandering the famine-stricken wastes of other-worldly streets and commons, he thought it more likely that she would end up on the table. When he found her. When the smell of stale meat left his nostrils.

His hands swung at his sides like joints of meat; the left a fisted pink of beef, the right a twitching clutch of porcine fingers, forever splaying and clasping as if seeking a scrawny neck. He muttered silent profanities under his breath, which itself puffed from his mouth accompanied by clouds of spores. They settled on his clothing, a living dust, coating him with a white-grey covering which was effective camouflage against the grim suburban sprawl. Behind his ears there sprouted mushrooms, and under his crotch and thighs grew a tenaciously crawling mould. He would have been a walking fungi, if a fungi could have had thought; yet his thoughts were as shallow as a mushroom root, and the differences were not as vast as first appeared.

He paused and stepped into a darkened doorway. A crowd passed him mumbling through alcohol clouds and carrying the taint of smoke along after them. One of them laughed, another farted; he pressed himself back against the cold glass.

He could smell her. His mouth spat like sizzling fat as he drew in huge lungfuls of air, sorting through the myriad perfumes of the city until he had her isolated; rank, putrid, the noxious stink of the chased. She had not turned, he could tell; no poison there. His stomach rumbled as several heads popped on his face, showering a million tiny seeds of himself onto the unyielding concrete of the street.

He could almost taste her. A poison-helmeted fungi rose from his groin, its head spitting spores. He yearned her touch; he could not wait to imbibe the brilliance of her beatific smile.

And so I spoke to her of the future, with merely my eyes as words.

The trouble was: the woman the man sought was the girl with whom I breakfasted on glorified sawdust and puddingy pats of blood. Hindsight was often a great breeder of passions, but here premonition was a teaser supreme.

I was to be that very man who came to collect her for dinner - one day ... given sufficient passing of time to make her grow into a woman fit for my vein-ridged manhood. Meanwhile, tea came too early. Neither of us had even sunk enough burps to rid our systems of brunch.



Later, just before supper was given its due arousal of speechless thought, the lake was a picture postcard. Not frozen by a winter too hard to forget, but simply idyllic, too perfect for movement. No time for sail-boats, not even the sign of a twitch in the willowy banks. It was spring: warm enough for summer, but with an underlying edge of dusk. The girl was turning white-thighed somersaults, followed by a large butterfly which looked as if it wasn't there at all. Too large, in fact, for belief, which shed some doubt on the girl herself. "Freda!" I shouted from the veranda. I did not want to disturb her play. And indeed she ignored my call - merely stood stock still with her back to me, staring out across the milk-pond of the lake, as a sudden cloud blurred the sun for a nonce.

But then turned with a smile as if she knew I referred to her as Freda: "Yes?"

I spoke lower as she approached me amid a deafening hum of bees.

"The circus - do you want to go?" I asked.

"Yes, yes. Can I? Can I? Tonight?"

"Promise you'll be a good girl?"

"Freda's always a good girl." She winked, an action too old for someone her age. Referring to herself by this name was, however, endearing, as well as surprising. I smiled. "Well, then, tonight's the night." And I showed her the two tickets in my hand, fanned out as far as two tickets could be. A trick of tickets. She abruptly burst into tears.

"What's the matter?"

"I can't go."

"Why ever not?"

"Because there's no circus - there's never any circus. No such thing. You're teasing again. Just like those imaginary feasts."

"I'm not teasing - look!" I pointed to the treetops on the far side of the lake, above which could be glimpsed the signs of a bell tent. "That's the circus. They arrived during the day. Didn't you see them putting it up?"

"No - and I can't see anything now."

"Didn't you hear the lions roaring - and some other animals braying - in the menagerie?"

"Freda doesn't hear anything."

She was now close enough for me to grab around the waist and I lifted her bodily into the blue sky. "Can you see now?" There was nothing in my hands except the magic of memory. They were my own tears into which she had abruptly burst.

And even that was a trick. Supper was all that was left us, that day.

She stood by the lake, the cool Spring sunshine frozen in reflecting rainbows, her hair hanging in motionless abandon in the light breeze. Her hand was half-raised, as if to catch the final burst of sunlight, or divert the moving air into her mouth. Motion haunted the image, plucking beneath the surface like a promise of memories, a memory of innocuous vows.

Movement came instantaneously, so naturally that the stillness of before seemed a lie. She turned and mouthed something silently, an answer to a call, perhaps, skipping and flipping and twisting through the air, twirling gravity around her little finger.

His mind gaped at the beauty of the girl, yet a sadness coloured the image with a sepia tint, condemning the thoughts to history. The girl still danced her way through his mind, smiling and pirouetting and denying him the possibility of whatever future he thought he saw. A new image came, stark and stressed; the girl - or an older girl with her looks and vitality and smile - balancing on the prow of a boat; eyes still happy on the surface, but her expression bearing more of the knowledge of adulthood. Not the lake, this time, but a sea, a sea where calmness implied violence beneath the surface, where the playful plop of a dancing fish eased the surface tension of the waters and allowed out a vivid red blood. The fluid flowed quickly, pumping up from the pressurised depths below, an eager scarlet volcano. And soon the girl stood terrified in a leaking boat on a sea of red.

I awoke to silence. I tried to see Freda at the foot of the bed, but the wisp of thought that stood there scared me more than the emptiness.

I thought she may be in the cellar, but there was only the cool dampness of the lake-waters where they had bled through the ground in the night. Flies and gnats and other hovering things buzzed past me into the light, escaping the smell of corruption. On its way through the soil, the water had picked up all manner of pollution and nastiness, letting it fester and transmogrify into bulbous, dream-laden growths which could possibly be fungi, though an unidentified variety. One of the straining heads popped, and brief images danced across my vision; Freda, dancing and smiling at my ignorance; my wife, her face determined and set in anger; a huge flying thing, a hotchpotch of a million types of insect, large and small.

I left the house and walked around the lake towards the wooded far side. I saw fleeting glimpses of something moving through the trees beside me, a smiling face, a vital smell of health.

“I’m going to the circus,” I said to no-one in particular, “you’d better come now if you want to see the lions. I hear they have an elephant bird, too, though they dress it as an ostrich.” I saw Freda walking from the trees, tears drying under the warmth of her smile. “Too precious,” I said.

I walked contentedly around the lake, Freda floating beside me, darting into the trees, dipping in and out of the ground in a surreal parody of the butterfly stroke. Where she entered, the soil rippled like water; when she emerged, a spattering of expanding mushrooms marked her wake. Her smile became stronger as we neared the circus; the sounds and smells of childhood overpowered the cool morning tang of the forest.

Freda cried out, the truth apparently finding its way through her ecstasy. The circus vanished with a clownish giggle through make-up, the make-up of make-believe, made real.

I always judged people at first sight. But, now, no longer. My wife was a stickler for hunches, assumptions, prejudices, the whole gamut of hard-nosed looks-that-could-kill. Now, with the influence of my wife lifted from my brain, I could savour people with days upon days of interchange and evaluation, almost never making up my mind about them! Nevertheless, my wife did profess an ability to second guess, which meant, I suppose, she had a safety-net of paranormality where if, she judged wrong initially, she could blame the repercussive influence of, say, astrology or I Ching. But, with the make-believe made to believe, I saw...

He saw the Circus Tent bedecked like a girl’s dress, with ribbons and frills. A towering thing that, one wondered, must have been more obvious from the other side of the lake than it actually had been. Someone (a clown, I think) lifted the hem-line for him to enter the dark interior. By this time, Freda had absconded with other children, though from their elvish mien he did speculate whether they would enjoy this human extravaganza as much as a human. Still, it would do Freda a world of good to be reminded of whence she came. He did not begrudge her the company of her peers. He would simply clap his hands more slowly and smile less broadly when the clowns did their antics and the elephants their ostrich-walk. Monkeys played mum, but he suspected them in perpetual coitus interruptus with their tiny hearts on a static blink. The pigs that sprayed sparks from their snouts were a wonder to behold and he had to narrow his smile purposively to re-establish his grown-up credentials. The grand climax - after the ringmaster had stuffed a live pigeon with its own young amid the squawks of stub-winged rooks that circled above amid the trapezists - was the shafting spotlights being played further into the depths of the Big Top than had been previously needed even to illuminate the shimmery butterfly ballerinas, creatures that gently kissed the floral sides of the mock sky in their wispy flights of fancy.

The twirling spotlights thus revealed the lacy knickers of one who stood astride to protect - with her frock - the fol-de-rols of the conical circus-ring below: protecting it, so-to-speak, from the weather outside. Not that the weather was all that bad. The clapping had sounded like rain, I recalled, as the last spotlight doused itself. And there was a suspicion of wetness where the final beam had been playing, betokening a sudden catching-short or lack of sanitation. The audience put up their umbrellas believing the shiny patch to be an emblem of an imminent sudden drenching. I collected Freda from the little’uns corner ... and, as she kissed goodbye to the long-eared ones in particular, I asked every one of them whether they had enjoyed the performance.

“I loved the clowns.” “No, the birds and butterflies...” “I loved the things with webbed feet that pretended to be...” “Perhaps, the spotlights forking up and down...” “No, No, it was the invisible things that most of the audience couldn’t see...”

That last speaker had been Freda herself. I smiled broadly. It was quite a relief not to be expected to smile. I clapped my hands vigorously, for a similar reason.

On the way back, around the perimeter of the now inky lake, I tried to draw her on these mysterious invisible things. But then it did begin to rain. And we rushed home, giggling...

Eventually, he did collect her for dinner. Amid a rainstorm that blackened the streets with puddles of blood. She was a woman about his own age, which in hindsight would in no way make sense, he supposed. But, never mind, it wouldn’t spoil the evening. There was a huge oak trestle. The wine, deeply red, so red, black it was, flowed down the banqueters’ gullets. Great gristles of flesh; yellow fat and hairy skin lining the rare sides of bœuf and lion; cow-udders, baked and prepared with the greasy tubes intact, the undersides green-fleshed and pocked with broken bubbles of waxen shit; windfall fruit, knotted and branched with unwholesome sprouts of stale season; plates of flopping fish, although still alive unbelievably putrid, their fins pickled in vats of subscrotum sweat as scaly extras; further dishes of octopus with inflamed, ridgy pores; squid with mutant suckers; an unaccountably familiar fungus-thing, its poison-helmeted head spitting spores; horny lapfish, swordfish bent and skewed, splattered blow fish, gas fish, rancid monkfish, fat fish. He tucked in... Fin

I tucked Freda into bed, as wan as when I judged her at first sight. It had been a long day for us. Now she could have sweet dreams, enough for both. One day in the fast future, I’d surely imbibe the brilliance of her wasteful smile, one broadly broken across her dimpled face.

Wan and wasteful the girl may be, but she has never passed judgement on me. And she never did. She slipped away quietly in the darkness, stirring in me a dream-of-before as she flitted through the walls of the house and outside, to join the circus.

I awoke to silence, but then I was used to that. I stood in the cold night of fey - trembling unsteadily as I pissed, holding myself and wondering at the profusion of spores which waited, always, to be freed.

I jumped. I could smell something, nothing, which meant something else. I ran to Freda’s room and saw the empty bed even before I opened the door. She had gone, leaving the bedclothes tidied and undisturbed, her impression on the mattress little more than a mimic of her life. I gasped, cried out, but I knew then that this time she had gone for good. She knew I would see her again, somewhere, but the loss of the instant was almost too much to bear. I started to cry, but even my tears were only memories. Instead, I went for a walk.

The sun was just peering over the wooded horizon like a luminous face, casting shadows across the waters of the lake. The dew was melting into mist, hauling itself back into the sky in readiness for its next journey. I walked around the lake, approaching the area where the circus had stood and expecting to see a field full of silent, sleeping caravans. Tied to trees around the lake, marking the way as if I did not already know, were coloured scarves, knotted into the old wood. They were silky and hardly there, but I followed them anyway. Insects buzzed and clicked, a squelchy fleshy mass which could once have been anything.

The field was empty. In place of the scattered profusion of caravans and coloured pantechnicons was a great expanse of new, fresh mushrooms. They seemed to have been fertilised by the silent applause of the invisible stars of the circus. The sound of their growth came as a steady, calmly mumbled itch. The sun reflected from their expanding surfaces like a shattered mirror, throwing second-hand light in all directions. In one of these beams, illuminated mostly for my own view, stood a woman.

She was moon-eyed and older than my daughter, yet younger than my wife. The wasted meals came to mind - but she was still there, smiling playfully and waving distractedly at the small thing flying about her head.

“But my daughter was Freda,” I said, the sudden realisation connecting many threads into a still-obscured tapestry of interwoven butterfly-wings.

“I’m not Freda,” she said, “I’m Angela.” She moved towards me, crushing fungi into flattened nothings beneath her bare feet.

“But my wife was Angela!” But I should not have been surprised at what she said.

“Angela. So be it.”

And she drifted past him to the lake, kept going, her flighty footsteps coughing up sad droplets of water which hung in the dawn light like unclaimed jewels. As she moved silently across the water, the splashes formed their own acrobatic shapes, dispersing into fluid rainbows.


(Published 'Dread' 1998)