Mrs Eeble told Donkin that it was a good clean room. Forthwith, she led him by his hand which still shook from lugging a large suitcase from one side of town to the other. Having abandoned his case in the dark hallway, he was now towed towards the foot of the steep stairs of the semi-detached house, one which struck him as typical of those built in the early thirties, before anyone in England had heard of Hitler.

A gangling youth appeared almost from nowhere and limped along the dark landing, with a Mohican hair-do. His elbows were tattooed with intricate cobwebs and names like Yog Sothoth and Cthulhu, spiders and other even less substantial creatures hanging towards the wrists.

"This is my adopted son Walter," said Mrs Eeble after a moment's hesitation, "but I've forgotten your name."

"Donkin. Abel Donkin."

"This is Mr Donkin, Walter."

She need not have bothered, for the kitchen door had already slammed.

"Walter is not all that sociable - he’s ever talking about Outer Gods controlling him, and books with titles that don’t make sense - you won't need to talk to him, when you come across him - won't expect it nor give you any thanks for it - always doodling tentacles and monsters on his sketch pad or playing with his marbles, anyway."

"Do I share the kitchen?"

"You'll have the burners on the left..."

"And half the oven?"

Abel Donkin laughed out loud - a thing he had never done before. He was pleased that it took one of his own jokes to accomplish this.

"You can have the top shelf in the oven, Mr Donkin - Walter and I will make do with the lower."

"We'll need to coordinate our meals, then - what about the sink, the bathroom - the toilet?"

He laughed again but, this time, Mrs Eeble joined in with a chuckle, more out of politeness than conviction.

Later, as Abel Donkin lay back on the lumpy bed, he recalled how the house had presented a jagged zig-zag frontage upon approaching it from the Westway. The top bay windows of each of the semi-detached houses were vertical triangles rising out of kilter with the roof. It was as if the geometry betokened deeper lores or fabulous dreams. Then, when he returned downstairs, soon after the dinner-gong sounding, he found Walter playing with a clockwork train in the dining-room. The engine went round and round on a circular track, the large key turning anti-clockwise in the side of its boiler, apparently never winding down. There was one station platform on the perimeter of the track, called Dunwich Halt, where Walter had lined up lead soldiers on parade.

Neither Donkin nor Walter noticed something in the corner, watching proceedings.

"These soldiers are off to war against the Ancient Ones, Mister - as soon as the choo choo stops at the platform, that is."

Walter's voice grated like squeaky chalk. Donkin felt he ought to respond with the obvious: "The train's got nowhere to go, as far as I can see." But he didn't. Mrs Eeble had arrived with a big steaming tureen held out before her like a ritual offering. She plonked it on the oval table.

"Grub's up, Mr Donkin."

He turned his attention from Walter to the meticulously placed settings. Everything was just so, the cutlery queued up in the perfect order, serviettes folded and re-folded into tower crescents, fine-cut crystal glasses on tall stems for choice of wine-courses, silver condiments glinting in the hundred watt bulb, finger-bowls with wedges of lemon floating like oriental junks and so forth.

It was a pity about the comestibles themselves, however. The sludgy innards of animals (or creatures that were not even animals at all) were ladled out upon chipped porridge bowls, where they sat awaiting the hungry spoon. Donkin cringed as he watched Walter tuck in. As for himself, he'd rather be gargling with swordfish. But they weren't his words. He had never used that expression before, even in his private thoughts. It was as if it was fed to him by an external mental force stronger than his own. An alien osmosis? Or emanations from those Outer Gods. Or Walter exercising a positive telepathy as opposed to its more passive version?

Donkin could hear the clockwork train whizzing behind him. He looked round and the soldiers had disappeared from the platform. Hitler would have a lot to answer for, he thought. "I expect his planes will bomb this house into oblivion, if he has enough bombs to go round," he thought himself think. "But only half a bomb will do no damage at all." He laughed to himself. Something in the corner sniggered, too - still unnoticed. Soon after, Mrs Eeble became Mrs Donkin, both being stirred into activity every evening by the dinner gong. They knew it was coming, although there was a mystery regarding the perpetrator, since the house had no domestic help. Despite the expectation, however, it still startled them, like shellshock. But they descended the stairs, hand in hand, for snacks and ready-mades.

Donkin's mind was now nigh empty, a middle-class, middle-aged torpor which became more and more common the longer the Godless twentieth century lasted. Donkin's real thoughts had now taken root in Walter, a Walter who was young enough to remember the present more than the past. Only the past knew which hands held the puppet-strings of Fate and the Future. And Walter adjusted the metal helmet on his head, most of his muscles frozen with fear that the train taking him to war would indeed arrive at its stop. His ankle hurt bad. As bad as a foot full of butcher-axed bone. He had been trudging the God-glowering hills for longer than daylight hours, and it was, in fact, during the rising of what turned out to be a half-hearted sun that he had first twisted his foot into a divot-ditch, the pain of which worsened piecemeal. The return of night now threatened to blanket down in curdling swathes and ink-stains of mist. And he was, apparently, no nearer his so-called destination. Hitler had a lot to answer for. It would have helped if he knew for what he was meant to be searching. The authorities had said: "You'll know it when you see it, Walter, and you'll see it when you know it."

Yog Sothoth was never so undreamable to Walter as present reality was turning out to be.

He had said to himself: "I'll see it, when I believe it."

Despite having no ambition to be an army scout, he supposed his supple limbs and strange tattoos had marked him out for such a position. Sprung prehensility, they called it. If only they knew he was at heart a coward who missed his home's creature comforts. But he didn't care for that empty-headed Donkin whom his mother had married. So, perhaps better here than there.

He huddled against a dank rock, nursing his foot as if it were a new-born baby. He mewed at the toes, wanting to suckle them clean of the dirt. But his mouth was too far away. Only the things in his dreams were sufficiently double-jointed for such contortions. Normally, he depended on his body clock to wake him before the next approach of the sun. Wars were geared to the convenience of the combatants and, so, it was likely that the enemies would not be expecting an early start in the morning. Both sides enjoyed their lay-in's. Thus, it needed a rather special person to steal a march on them, by breaking free from the bleary-eyed cosiness of the bed-pack, which was always warmest just before dawn. He never liked getting up at the best of times, as his mother could have attested. Even his cosmic clock was stuttering to a halt...

Tonight, his body was heavier than ever, really heavy, almost too heavy for the sodden ground to bear - yet he was a damn good scout, despite his inability to be brave. The ranks of conscripts trundled in his distant wake, dependent on his tracking skills. Whether he pioneered paths which he knew to be safer for a scout than for the war machine that followed him, he did not bother to worry about. He had secret scruples, at least.

He woke after the dawn, realising that he was indeed going nowhere that day. His foot had swollen to a bright mottled blood blister of enormous proportions. He stared at it, frightened that it would burst simply by looking at it. It was a similar pain as the one he felt at home when something pierced him with its eyes from the dining-room corner - except he had blamed a migraine for such anguishes, which made more sense than the real cause.

Nothing seemed to matter, because the sun, beaming through the unheeded clouds, revealed a tournament stretching into the sky's zenith, each human constituent of which being a combatant of the one below and of the one above. The soldier at the base and the one presumably somewhere at the top had, of course, only a single antagonist with whom to grapple, but no doubt these two had other matters of balance to keep them busy. For those in between in the people pillar, fighting feet to hands (and vice versa) was evidently as difficult as one might have expected. It reminded him of those childhood doodles he once painstakingly scored with a blunt pencil, his red cheek resting on the table close beside the graph paper. Doodling with unmentionable dreams and catalytic creatures that hissed of the Necronomicon and Olaus Wormius and others even more arcane. Such artistic endeavours frequently depicted a chain of matchstick men reaching out from skyscrapers, from crazily positioned diving-boards, from the margins of the paper, from tops of pyramids, joined hands to hands, hands to feet, feet to shoulders, feet to heads, hands to heads, heads to heads, feet to feet and so forth. As if the whole of humanity was the single creature some called Cthulhu.

The particular tournament that he now surveyed was a real humdinger of a vertical battle, tooth and nail. He had evidently been left out (as in all those distant school games when his peers had chosen teams) because of his swollen foot. Who ever heard of a scout being late for a battle, anyway? One thing he felt certain: he did not know it when he saw it nor saw it when he knew it. Belief was not even a runner. The column toppled towards him, tearing a terrible red gash in the side of the stormy sky. For a single moment of timeless immobility, his body clockwork stopped ... and he prayed that the whole affair was either yet another dream or merely a schoolboy's doodle regarding a Mythos that had not even started out as a mere myth. He would rather gargle with swordfish, any day.

The gong went for the end of the fight. The dinner gong.

And after the war and back in the Donkin dining-room, Walter decided he wanted to kill someone - merely for the experience. It was a pity the war had not managed to provide fruition of this murderous desire at the optimum moment. Life's too short to miss anything, he told himself. Even prison's trials and tribulations had tended to make the man of him. Thankfully, capital punishment had been abolished for deserting the army. But who to murder? There was, of course, Mrs Donkin, who had once been Mrs Eeble his mother - and that inscrutable husband of hers. Also there was an unconvicted murderer who lived next door - and what about the strange chap who stared at him in the Arkham Arms pub? And so forth. The list was potentially endless. Then, he decided it would have to be random, to obtain the full benefit from the experience. A gratuitous act deserved a gratuitous victim. The method of randomness needed careful thought and he set his mind to it at each opportunity, quite a fulfilling task in itself. Peering through the gloom of the dining-room corner, the Great Old One could see Walter carefully ruling out many grids of twenty-five squares (five by five inches). It then saw him place a compass point roughly in the centre of each square and draw a circle, the size of which was determined by a whimsical thumb-flick upon the legs of a compass.

"Hey, what you up to, Walter?"

Mrs Donkin had entered, so the Old One drew back into its corner.

"I'm working out something to do with life," answered Walter.

"You've got too much up top, and not enough down below," she jeered as she left the room. Lost his marbles, she thought as she headed for the burning smell in the kitchen. Walter appeared to ignore the interruption, now involved with a flurry of many further circles upon interlocking cross-hatches. This was beyond any doodle he had yet managed. Even the circles were more endless than ever before - like some of those eternal childhood summers he barely recalled - from before the time he had been tattooed in his sleep by the same creature in the corner that Walter had foolishly allowed to escape from one of his nightmares.

Abruptly, he froze, as if taken up with an idea that was so mind-blowing it had literally done so. His eyes glazed over as he turned towards the corner where the creature had installed itself since those heady days of Walter's boyhood.

"What's there?" he croaked.

But why what and not who?

The creature kept silent by trying hard to squeeze itself into a nothingness. It had no right to be spying, anyway. It had no permission to be there from the Rulers of Destiny nor from the Cosmic Circles of Fate nor, even, from the slightly more amenable, albeit uninhibited, Grids of hand-to-hand Free Will. There'd be hell to pay if it was discovered lurking hereabouts. It then decided, what the hell: it would be rather a hoot to knock off poor old Walter before his time. The experience of a non-entity's lifetime, it thought.

Walter was not exactly a random victim, true, but nobody would miss a nobody. The creature launched itself from the corner, making shadows with the shadows of its wide wings. Walter had returned to his intricate designs, having seen the creature in the corner, but not believed in its existence. He drew in the last circle, which piece of the jigsaw abruptly placed everything else in terrifying context. The soft geometry revealed on the paper a convoluted likeness of the very creature that was at this very moment sucking Walter's brains out through the ear - using the ring in Walter’s lobe as a clawhold.

The shame was that there was no such thing as pure randomness. Since the war, Walter had undesrtood that Hitler’s other name was Azathoth. The war, too, having failed to fulfil Walter's necessary death at the optimum moment, some cruel safety-net of Nemesis had now been unleashed by the nastiest mind-switcher of them all. Gargling with swordfish. Feasting with panthers. Diving with Deep Ones. Shaking down with the schutzstaffel. And, with such strange thoughts recaptured, the Great Old One roared off to another suburban corner, eager for the fruit of old-fashioned wars, wars that continued into modern times - and it became an Elder force that was soon to be even more virulent amid the towering internets of our electronic minds...

Mrs Donkin banged the gong for dinner. But Abel, her husband, slouched down the garden path, lugging his suitcaseful of Walter towards the Westway. Yes, the whole of time’s humanity was a single uniform creature...


(published ‘Imelod’ 1998)