A collaboration with Tim Lebbon


He lived in a dormer bungalow that had the heart of a mansion. At night the walls were higher, the windows deeper, the shadows older and more haunted than the 1970’s house had any right to be. Rooms lay undisturbed for years on end, old portraits stared moodily into the half-light of the landing, and there was even a hidden tunnel beneath the patio for fleeing clergy. All in all a monster of a house, then; one passed by by whispering children; studied secretly by historians of the outré and grotesque. And inhabited by Drogazine Penmurphy, fifteenth cousin to Denzil, gravedigger for the local crematorium, an underground bird-catcher and a collector of gasps and sighs.

Drogazine had grown up hearing voices in his head. It was not until he was twenty, when he opened the top of his skull, that he realised there really were small people in there. One of them wound thin veins constantly around his little fingers, then flicked them down Drogazine's nose as clotted lumps. Another hid behind one of his ear drums, tickling and scratching until Drogazine could barely keep his balance. Yet more did other, less recognisable things, involving stolen sparrow feathers and wishbones plucked from living chickens. How any of that got in there Drogazine did not know, but he vowed to be much more careful on his underground pursuits.

All of those in his head spoke incessantly. Now he knew who was in there the words sometimes made sense but, ironically, they were far more confused for this. And what they asked him to do one cool November morning would have driven a madder man to sanity.

What he was told to do, in so many words, could never be written. Gasps and sighs might be easier bottled for later use as hiccoughs or burps than rationalise the unrationalisable with which - after all was said and done - Drogazine was now faced.

He stood in the road looking back at his bungalow - white noise of the sea in his ears - wondering why the two dormer windows looked out of the roof like unblinking eyes. TARDIS was not even in the same league. Too many stories even for floors to polish. Indeed, he felt the place had headroom to spare for multiple attics-above-attics as well as scope for an arseful of Russian-doll privies let alone a honeycomb of oubliettes in every fundament - but, surely, it was merely his imagination being played tricks with by the things in his head.

Nothing really fitted the fading memory of once seeing that hive of head-mice from up above his sliced-off skull, all those years before, during an out-of-body experience fit to make even pukka ghosts go green with envy (which was preferable, after all, to them being retrospectively mildewed by placental decay). So, now, no memories sufficed. No premonitions. Not one jot.. For he was to dream the unthinkable. Think the undreamable. He walked to where the dormers could no longer see. He walked, he thought, north seaward, to search out a marriage with a mermaid. But that was only half of it.

The other half was tinnitus, perhaps, or badly balanced memories at the very least. For although memory was held in abeyance by those strangest dreams, there was always a bit of mind mindful of itself. Clearly speaking - for that’s what Drogazine preferred, notwithstanding all the coughs and burps of metaphor - he was still his own man. Head full of chaos and unknowable dreams he may have, but he made his own decisions.

He wanted to go down to the sandy beach where white horses continued to play out of sight, but his senses told him otherwise. They told him to go north, young man, take yourself out beyond the stare of Home, and there to find a young myth sitting lazily among the rocks, bathing herself out of sight of Humankind’s doubt, sunning her silky, scaly tail, pointing firm breasts up at a sun too infrequently frequented. She was there, he knew, but on the way there was so much more to see.

“Drogazine,” an old man of the sea said, hauling in an endless procession of mutilated marlin from the breakers, “Give me a hand here, would you? The wife’s waiting for tea, and all these buggers are chewed.” Drogazine mooched over and tugged on the line, surprised to find it so dry after decades in the sea. The old man smiled sideways at him, stinking of fish and guts and salty dogs.

Something else came out of the sea. It was caught up in the line, bloated and split in death, long hair braided by weeds. A nude form, tail chewed, upper torso pink and perfect … apart from the death, of course.

“No!” Drogazine cried out. How would he marry such as this? The corpse hit the sand and was reeled in by the old man, laughing now, his wife joining him with a jar of Tartare sauce and a bottle of cheap wine.

Then he was walking again as if it had never happened, and from way up north a mermaid began to sing. And, before he could go as far north as north could go without becoming some other corner of the compass, he came to the pleasure pier, where weekend folk spent their weeks living it up. Little did these shrieky folk know, as they twirled aloft on the Ferris Wheel, that, below the boardwalk, twined around one of the barnacled bulwarks, was the slimy seaweedy remains of yet another mermaid, except this one wasn't quite dead. Her voice came to Drogazine in snatches from Pelleas and Melisande - awkwardly cast upon the spray with a castrato's timbre. Mermaids, he began to think, were, logically, after all, the next best thing to castratos, far preferable, of course, to the corrupted chords of counter-tenors, yet, when push came to shove, not quite so decadently fresh as altos and trebles. However, at the end of the day, in what way could one tell mermaids apart from mermen - except, perhaps, only by a fisherman's ear for a broken voice?

Drogazine - thinking warmly of his dormer bungalow by sending himself, as it were, a mental wish-I-was-back-there holiday postcard - ignored the catcalls from the Ferris folk and waded thigh high into the briny waves towards the marooned creature of his dreams. She - if she it were - was in a pitiful state. The singing had become mere mews and plaints. He fingered some of the festering wounds in her midriff area where top turned to tail. Further up, though, the milky white breasts, revealed from under swags of kelp and fucus, were a delight to behold - not exactly pointing to the storybook sun in the sky but certainly pertly consistent enough lovingly to fondle. And Drogazine did. But as fondle turned to rub, a genie in the bottle, as it were, flew out.

It could have been another shriek from the mermaid, or the squeal of clashing gears on the Ferris Wheel, or his ears popping as his body finally righted itself to his existence. Whatever the case, the sound stunned him for a time, and before he knew it he was swallowing a sandy sea full of turds and curds, spluttering, coughing, standing again to see something far different wrapped around the pier's support. The mermaid, yes, luscious bosoms still inviting his touch, but a tease of a mermaid, someone who would say, 'yes, come on, give it to me now', but who could never deliver on that promise. Unless, of course, those wounds in her midriff …

But something else was there too. The potential of an evil mermaid (or merman?), still covert but suggesting itself to him through crusty eyes. She stared sadly and the evil glared madly. No genie this, but a monster, promising only pain and slit skin with salt rubbed into the wounds. Drogazine tried to back away but the sea held him firm, tight around his legs like quick-drying concrete, still in motion but solid. Maybe his feet were sinking into the sand - maybe the Ferris Wheel would drown out his final choked scream as the tide came in - maybe he and the mermaid would die together, two little deaths making one big one - and perhaps that was how mermaids really did it, lacking the more traditional pink-pert opening.

'I wish I were on that clanky old Ferris Wheel,' he thought. And he was. One wish used. But it was not a good wish or a clean wish, it was one which required payment in blood. And no sooner did Drogazine find himself spinningly aloft, when the Wheel twisted, buckled, arched tired old steels at the sky and fell in a mess of metal and bone. Then he realised that the Penmurphy clan had never been able to take anything for granted. WYSIWYG was all bent and twisted, too, simultaneously a part and a parcel of the mutant machine that a possible future had become ... and this particular Penmurphy called Drogazine clambered from the ruptured cantilevers' clawholds, across the once joyful faces of the shrieky folk (now embedded like the Royal Mint's templates) and, eventually, he dangled down, in daredevil loop-de-loops, as if he were a one-man flesh-shaped airshow, towards the agog, but still human, faces on the nearby beach.

It did not take too long to acclimatize himself to a new situation. The multitude of teabag-testers in his head were coming back together as one, sufficient to persuade him that the Ferris Wheel was still in its rightful place on the pier, now repaired from the wear and tear produced by the possible future he had glimpsed. He felt his own eyes staring from the upper half of his skull like the dormers in his roof back home, watching a wonderfully alive Punch-and-Judy show just about coming to its climax, with the squat-bummed kids screaming for a crocodile's come-uppance. Drogazine knew the resort's head puppeteer was on holiday, it still being low season, so he wondered whose gloves threaded these fingers of finely-tooled fantasy. He poked his head under the canopy and discovered Miscegenate Lenin moving his face muscles in tune with self-expression as if that gave some credibility to the heads aloft.

"Hiya, Drog. What's all look like? The heads up top? Coming on? Look OK?"

"The kids are crazy."

"Well, they would be, Drog. How's you, these days, you and your own heads? Behaving themselves?"

"Took a nasty turn, just now. But got clear. I have a hankering for a mermaid, somehow, but then..."

"Mermaids are dying out all over the place. I wouldn't be surprised, Drog, if, one by one, they're dropping like flies. The next one always in a worse state than the one you saw before."

"I'd love to have one as a pet, though."

Drogazine, dreading the reply, withdrew his head and joined the kids on the sand to watch the end of Lenin's show. But now that Lenin had spoken to Drogazine the show was all different, progressed on from superficial 'no-he-hasn't, yes-he-has' shadow-play to more serious issues. He thought that his future fancy was flying with him once more, but then he heard some of the kids shout out with fright when one puppet started buggering another mermaid-fashion, and he knew it was time to leave.

Though he had not seen Miscegenate for many years - and meeting family members was not a thing he was so used to - Drogazine bypassed the possibility of a tea and a sticky bun and an equally sticky session of reminiscing to go in search of his mermaid.

Dying out, Miscegenate had said. Dying out indeed.

Drog wandered through the tail-end of the fairground, where half-eaten burgers congealed into new life forms, wires and cables and tubes transported secret messages from one ride to the next ('hey, this kid loves the up-and-down but pukes from the side-to-side. Watch your workings, too, he's been drinking cider.'), and fairground freaks no longer needed in the days of sordid television wandered aimlessly between tents and caravans and holes in the ground. Holes, he thought, they may well have dug themselves for something to do.

The Bearded Lady was combing her splendidly curly mass, picking out beetles and fluff and small dogs.

"Excuse me," said Drogazine, "you don't happen to have seen a mermaid around here, have you?"

The Bearded Lady looked at him through sad wide eyes. "We used to have one once, if I recall. A real one, mind, not some old tart with aluminium scales and a penchant for flashing her tits. I can't recall her name - and as I recall she never told us - but she sure was beautiful. Now, what happened to her?" She stared into the sky for seconds that stretched into minutes, reliving some past Drogazine could not see or imagine. In the end he left her to her contemplation.

On the way between two caravans he bumped into two people in one, a combination of ginger and baldness, cheek and cheerful. The Siamese twins were Asian, three arms and two legs between them, one heart and two bowels and one ribcage and two minds and one arse and two cocks. Cheek and cheerful - the only way to handle such a predicament, Drog thought.

"A mermaid!" Cheek said before Drogazine could even ask.

"Cheeky mermaid!" Cheerful said.

They were more puppet-like than Punch and Judy. Except they had real bodies inside their kid-glove stockings of grey flesh and Death for them would be a question of standing the stuffing up as waxworks...

Drogazine Penmurphy brought his thoughts to a high wire halt. Madame Atelier was the fount of all wisdom. But who was she? Life is surely not real if it lets such non-sequiturs live and breathe as full-blooded cameos of unimpeachable anticipation. Yet she it was who once married a mansion and gave birth to a dormer bungalow. He'd forgotten how someone like her had predicted this very quest for mermaids, each mermaid in better nick than the next, only for her (even her) to look good, by comparison, at the tail-end of the day.

Madame Atelier was his official dream courier but it was only from within dream that he had previously known her. So why, here, now - in a patch of waste ground between the Bearded Lady's gypsy caravan and the twin trapezists on the Thai wire of their own tumorous connection - could he possibly dredge up the living shape of Madame Atelier? Well, it was a sort of incarnation: the blackest flower possible in the patinated lapel. He was sort of getting married and he still wasn't certain he wasn't dreaming the confetti.

Madame Atelier, with a fish up her backside, waddled like an ill-balanced tightrope walker along the path to his bungalow, evidently eager for Drogazine to lift her - fashionable tailfin skirt and fifties pinched-in waist and all - into his arms and carry her over the threshhold. But, no, he would have none of it. He brushed the multicoloured plankton from his shoulders where they had somehow mysteriously settled, it seemed, in perpetuity - and stood to outface the proposed invader of his bachelor solitude.

"Don't pretend you're a mermaid, Attie! You don't fool me."

She smiled and quaintly issued a fishy fart ... as if that would convince him of her innocent intentions. Just like the bungalow, though, she had space to spare: mezzanines to squander. Cheap and cheerful, she almost toppled back into her own illicit miscegenations of Uncle and Niece liaisons in squalid backrooms that the smallest low-rent hovels ever seemed to harbour - in their prestidgitative hinterlands - as safe havens for mutant births.

She watched, with detached confusion, the dabbing of an odd foot or twiggy member from the corner of each eye-socket or nostril of her presumptive husband Drogazine, though he seemed unaware of this sudden abandonment of his upper storey by the head-mice and flea-men like rats leaving a sinking skull ... refugees hopefully tuning into the broken Song-Lines of some other stranger's body rather than endure sharing Drogazine's discordant marriage with the likes of Madame Atelier.

Marriage! He'd never dreamed of such a thing, even though a dream courier could often insinuate illicit intentions into an unguarded head. He followed Atelier toward the bungalow but never seemed to get there. Instead there were cries from all around, some of them human, others far more than human, or less than, or not at all, or human but with the humanity blended out by the continuous abuse of the sea.

"Come on them you old coward!" Atelier cried, stumbling on boxy feet. She'd reached the door - a pursed lip rather than a gaping mouth - and now she knocked on a fleshy knocker. For a moment her legs were one, a flipper tattered and torn by all the years he'd been looking for her. "My mother was a witch, you know!" the hag cried. "She was burned alive." She paused in her attempts to urge the door open. "Sad, really."

The castratrix cries continued, rising in pitch until they disappeared into the non-audible, though they were still there somewhere. The fish up Atelier's arse seemed to hear them, anyway. "I can't marry you," Drogazine said suddenly, "it's just not right."

"What's right when it's at home? Ah, here we are." And she opened the door.

Well, what the hell, thought Drogazine. All the mermaids I've seen up to now have been pretty poorly - best to take the bad than take nothing at all.

The wedding was a grand affair. Sand made do as confetti, the Best Man was the Great Hairy Beast of Bodmin (otherwise known as Peter Parcell from Cardiff, an unemployed performer, now employed), the Priest the very reverend Softroe Stalin and the bridesmaid was a swilling thing from down by the sea.

Later, on honeymoon, Drogazine wondered just how near he'd come to marrying a mermaid. There was a constant fishy smell around the caravan - it was something he'd have to talk to Atelier about one day soon - and sometimes in the night he'd hear the scaly rasp of something larking under the pier, out of reach of any trawler's net. Voice-training, if not surfing.

And in the day, well, his house kept a good watch for him. Penmurphys' Law.



"There were a million insects swarming over the putrid fish: the worst smell imaginable. But if it were the insects smelling 'stead of the stenchfruit they ate, then you readers of the insects - insects that march over the page in ranks of dots, crosses, tails and loop-de-loops of print - could only hope the text was electronic rather than the painstaking calligraphy of octopus ink. Though, even the slipperiest stories must have backbones."

From THE HEAD-INSECTS by Rachel Mildeyes.



FIN.


(Published 'Hadrosaur Tales' 2001)