Published 'The Banshee' 1994

The purpose of Bingo was to cross off numbers on a pre-printed sheet of coarsely recycled paper as some loud-mouther called out the numbers to be deleted from the sides of bouncing ping-pongs. The supposed randomness of such a method was unquestioned...until, of course, the occasion on which I thoughtfully accompanied my mother on her birthday. It abruptly dawned on me that such a haphazard method was relative only to the law of averages. Indeed, this law of averages is not an average law, being far more powerful than, say, the law of wasting assets: even, the path of physics that science finds itself treading is nothing compared to it. Futhermore, Chance, that some treat as a deity greater than God Himself, sometimes has to curtsey to Fate, which, in turn, is subservient to the law of averages...

My mother did not seem to listen to these ramblings of mine with which I assailed her. In fact, she was rather irritated, because her almost religious concentration on the numbers was being adversely affected. Had she won, I imagine the whole matter would have blown over and lain down like sleeping dogs in the mercenary fortunes of war. However, I was deeply perturbed at the manner with which my mother's gullibility was being milked for the little she was worth. There could only be one set of winners. Those bingo bongos. Chance chancers. Snotto blotto scavengers of the golden average. Whatever they were called, they couldn't even lose a blind farthing.

On top of that, there was a single punter who kept on winning all the games, the full house, the pyramid, the single slice, even the so-called nationwide jackpot; a little lady with granny glasses who was, I suspected, one of the snotto-blottos in disguise. So, they weren't even playing the law of averages by the rules. Means and medians were by-words for something far more insidious.

Ignoring my mother's pleas, as she tugged at my sleeve, I stood up in the middle of a game and shouted BINGO! at the top of my voice. This was despite only having crossed out a measly two numbers. The scowling scoundrel with multicoloured ping-pongs for balls motioned to one of his side-kicks to check out my credentials, which he had obviously pre­empted with prejudice.

In the meantime, my mother was as good as having a coronary at the embarassment of me sticking my head above the parapet of averages. The grannied lady had turned her bristly chin towards us. She nodded to an accomplice who was directing the spotlights.

With the help of osmosis rather than self-built instinct, I suddenly realised that all the punters, my mother included, had actually paid good brass for the purpose of being ripped off by slick merchants -- all part of an enjoyable evening's entertainment -- and I was in the process of spoiling it with my jumped-up principles. Losing was better than winning, because people of my mother's vintage can no longer handle good luck. It would deprive them of the ability to complain bitterly about their lot in life.

I waved the side-kick into touch, indicating that the numbers I had crosses on were more faith than fact. The spotlights uncrisscrossed and abandoned me to re-gather my resources in a moment of simple shame at trying to untangle the knots that held the world up.

My mother smiled, showing me that she had already crossed out all her numbers. Too shy to shout. Too long saddled with sadness to suffer the statistics of success, even on her round-numbered birthday.

Published 'Daarke World' 1994

            "You were very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket," said Nanny Bobbin to the girl. Since it was the time of year when evenings were drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.

            "Sorry, Nanny, I didn't mean to get it all mixed up." 

            Annabel was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her ringlets with fingers. 

            "It will be the devil's own job to untangle the silk cottons, and colour from colour.  The knots seem to be made merely by the act of looking for them."

            Nanny Bobbin tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals, noodly black which the coloured strands had become.  Out came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors.

            "I'll help you unravel, Nanny."

            "No point. I'm leaving here tomorrow. There'll be a newer nicer nurse this time tomorrow evening." 

            Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of Nanny's eyes.

            Annabel smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: "I'll help you pack your luggage, then, instead, Nanny."

            The fitful wind gulped in the chimney.  Nanny Bobbin had long since retired for her last night in the large rambling house. 

            Annabel had died, but was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition.  She hadn't died, of course.  She wasn't even dreaming.  She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which the lack of playfellows had engendered.

            Unlike Annabel, Nanny Bobbin was scared of the dark. She sat bolt upright in the truckle bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of the empty fireplace.  Only one more night to endure, then she'd be free of this insidious love she couldn't live without. Being besotted in both body and mind with Annabel was not very dignified, after all. She watched skeins of jet-black tubing erupt from the chimney into the grate, as if the corpse of Santa Claus had blurted out spools of its innards in one last foul spasm of many such spasms since Christmas, attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue. 

            As dawn spread itself behind the house like a backdrop in a pantomime, shades of grey began to curl from the many chimney-stacks—thus a sign that at least someone was up and about, if not anybody else.  A face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for some hours of the sun's shredded gold.  Annabel was praying that next Christmas she'd get the best present of all—a playmate. or, at least, a real Nanny to taunt at bath-time, instead of the imaginary one.

Published 'Beyond the Brink' 1994

Donboy was a stand-up comedian - always had been, always would be.  He had jokes running through him even to the darkest pit of his soul.  Armed to the teeth, too, with the courage to defeat his own lack of confidence, he stood there, spotlit, more on his own than the very solitude of death, opposite a shining darkness that he knew, but could not see, was peopled with those watching and judging him.  Hopefully crammed with such constituents of an audience, all ready to laugh out loud.  Half empty halls tended to produce a quarter hall's laughter.  The more hands to the wheel of laughter, the easier it was to reap the mass suicidal hysteria that a crowd often felt, but didn't usually recognise in itself.

            Donboy had perfected his act at Working Men's Clubs, interspersed with the odd seaside booking - culminating in what he now considered to be his hey-day, warming up for the so-called Big Names in order that the audience's lips would have ready laughter brimming over.

            His gimmick, if birth were a gimmick, was his unconscionable height.  In his early days he wielded the nickname 'Beanpole', then 'Lamp Post', finally (before he eventually became the serious stand-up comedian without a nickname to his name) 'Babbling Tower'.

            So, as Babbling Tower, that was just what he did.  Babbled.  Gibble-gabbled.  Jabbered.  Gibbered.  Giggled.  Bubbled.  A gurgling bone-cistern whose forte was toilet humour.  A walking burbling brain that got its laughs at the soft end of the market.

            Today, Donboy stood tall.  Yet, his jokes were so very much part of him, he needed to rip them out through the membranous section of his soul, dredging up ruptured fibre and bleed-riddled skeins of something he should've jettisoned in his more private moments or during the necessary ablutions of the day.

            The members of the audience were unaware of the pain he expended to produce their laughter.  Nor he their own pain in forcing out such laughter.  They merely awaited the Big Names for whom Donboy was warming them up as if they, the audience, were a cold bone stew on the back-burner of glib existence.

            "Is there anyone here who's come from far away?"

            He often had conjuring-tricks of the mind up his sleeve to supplement his bread-and-butter of verbal horseplay.

            "Me! Me!"

            A little girl in a yellow frock stood up at the back of the auditorium.

            "Your name ... let me see ... is Sarah."

            "No, it's Milly."

            Donboy still stood tall.  Milly was someone whose mind he couldn't read.  Not that he was an official mind-reader in any event.  His job was jokes.  Not see-through sleights of mental prestidigitation.  He couldn't read Milly's mind because it was his mind and little girls didn't know their own minds until they became much much older.

            Yet, Milly could read Donboy's mind.

            He thought himself simply a tragedy that desperately waited its comic relief: Macbeth's Porter who killed himself sooner than answer the relentless knocking of whomsoever was behind the castle-tower's lavatory door.

            The Biggest Names of all Big Name comic double acts sidled on to the stage as Donboy was carried off it.  They'd have to do without warming up tonight.  They dreaded corpsing each other, they didn't even tell any jokes.  Stooge-pigeons, both of them.

            Milly, nevertheless, laughed and laughed till she couldn't stop crying.  She had told a lie.  Her name was Sarah, after all.  But that, in turn, was another lie that even her blubbering couldn't flush out.

            And Donboy?  His name became the nobody it always was.  Donboy Nobody.  Or just another tall story.

Published 'Stuff' 1994

The thing in the wardrobe was wearing garments that had previously hung there by the merest volition of skewed metal and curved hooks and skeletal shoulder-blades and twisted joints...

The coat-hanger creature had indeed gathered substance for itself by the creative force of its abruptly aware mind. A brain is more powerful in its earliest stages, of course, but only if the body that contains it has the wherewithal to accomplish the mind's commands. Human babies are too weak, too small, too fragile and shrivelled, too damn helpless and hopeless, to take advantage of the sudden mental shaft of lightning within its soft-capped skull...

The coat-hanger monster was mammoth mind in motion, its metal arms donning winter clothes whole­sale. The unravelling tourniquets of steel probed the sleeves and leg-holes, giving birth to a jerking marionette of mounds and bundles.

The wardrobe—ill-constructed as it was by human buffoons from ridicu­lously measured components which would have been more useful as firewood than a blueprint for furni­ture—shifted on its feeble foundations with a lumber-smitten roar of split and splayed plywood planks.

There was nobody in the room to witness such creativity at work—but the bed did cringe beneath its covers, only thankful that it was a mindless mass of cloth, twill, canvas and soggy springs. Its plump plump pillows, however, surreptitiously nurtured steel porcupine foetuses within feath­ery down...

Upon the air, there burst a baby's mindless screeching to high heaven from a distant part of the house. No doubt it wanted the night nurse to change its soggy nappy or to respring the big diaper-pin. 

Published 'Deathrealm' 1994

Every month there was a day when Bob and I met to talk of life, the universe, everything.  My dear old mother would have had kittens had she known the places we ended up.  Yet there was one occasion where I had my own doubts.  In fact, wild horses could not drag me to the venue Bob had suggested.

            "If not wild horses, how about some loose-limbed lovelies, eh?" said Bob, as if he had read my mind.

            I looked at him askance, or at least I think I did.  As usual, what had started off as a serious dialogue between deep-thinking individuals about the State of the Nation had quickly degenerated into ludicrous pub-talk and tasteless smut.  However I still retained scruples enough to respond:  "Bob, I wouldn't be seen dead in such a place, even if one of your so-called loose-limbed lovelies tugged me there by the short and curlies!"  I could not believe my own ears.  Had I really said that?  Or was it purely the shallow imagination of a hard-pressed narrator?

            Bob laughed in an uncivilised manner, with spittle-bullets rattling out like a Lewis Gun.  During the rump end of our conversation, there had arrived a third party: a wide-skirted female by the look of it.  She sat amongst the other shadows at the back of the otherwise deserted coffee bar.  I could sense her eyes boring into my neck.  I saw Bob once or twice glancing over in her general direction.  We gave each other knowing looks, in some pretence of macho coolness, each hinting to the other that the situation, albeit mysterious and pregnant with unpredictable possibilities, was one that we surely could keep within the tolerances of control.  He took to whispering, so that the shadow could not hear, whilst the sounds of her fidgeting on her chair indicated to me at least that she believed that even the slightest change in her stance would bring improved acoustics into play, thus enabling her to gain purchase on our words and, by so doing, to affect their meaning by the simple method of misinterpretation.  But the Wurlitzer Juke-Box in the corner seemed to have other ideas, taking on a life of its own, since it abruptly rotated through a number of clicks with, finally, the grating noise of the sapphire stylus dropping neatly into the dusty leader-groove of what transpired to be an ancient Buddy Holly disc.

            Then, even Bob and I could hardly hear each other speak.  And, with the music, the western-style saloon doors of the coffee bar swung wide, to reveal a giggle of what I could only describe loosely in Bob's terms as - what was it? - lick-limbed lovelies, dressed in an attractive Fifties mode, who forthwith commenced dancing a rather suggestive form of Rock and Roll.  I glanced at Bob to see if this was what he had meant.  As he stared glassily straight ahead in front of his face, I saw the jitterbuggers reflected in his engorged eyes.  I mouthed a remonstration to indicate that this was not my scene at all.  My mother would not only have kittens, but tigers, too.   But Bob's mind had decided to go walkies.  Nervously, I clutched my coffee cup and hunched my shoulders as a carapace of protection.

            One 'lovely' approached our table and, beneath the music, muttered a few words to me, trying at the same time to drape her length over my lap.  I was paralysed, but the shadow in the corner bellowed some innard-clogged gutterals which, despite their bestial incomprehensibility, the 'lovely' seemed to understand and she withdrew from my vicinity.  I returned my attention to Bob, relieved to see that he was back from his skull-out.   He leaned across and tweaked my shoulders, as if he wanted my ear nearer.  The Juke-Box stopped suddenly (as they sometimes did if a coin of too low a denomination was used) and his whisper becmae louder than intended: "I've got a hard-on!"

            The dancers freeze-framed.  I grimaced, as embarrassment seeped up from the pit of my stomach - bringing with it a prurient froth to the roof of my mouth and rancid bile to my nose and nostrils.  "Bob, for God's sake!"  He blushed, as I must have done, too, and tried to stand up.  However, the 'lovely' lurking at our periphery loomed to the very edge of out table territory.  I could hardly bring myself to look up, whilst Bob, now forced back into the bottom of his coffee cup, desperately scried the pattern of its dregs.

            The shadow's voice was simply a series of tongue clicks, throat grunts and belly laughs.  The lights were doused, as if the meter yearned another shilling.  I heard a sound that was too obvious to be implied: a crunching-off, like celery, a splitting asunder, a tearing-out of a fibrous root from the body-grabbing earth.  And the she-shadow was now touchable terror: harnessed to such a root, as she jigged and jived, in the flickering of her own luminescence - like a jester on heat.  The dream-eyed 'lovelies' gave grudging welcome to the jump-lead she now wielded, as they were in turn short-circuited to the very bottom bone and hell of the she-shadow's searing soul.

            The lights flashed once and then came on permanently.  The Juke-Box completed the Buddy Holly disc - but it now seemed to be a different song altogether, reminding us that love is getting closer, going faster than a rolercoaster...

            Bob was slumped across the table, his head lolling, thick coffee drooling from his lips upon the formica.  And there was a slurping noise upon the floor from somewhere below the table, a spilling that became a splattering.  I shrugged.  I could've wept blood.  I'd taken Bob out on the wrong day of the month - yet again.

            There was no sign of the 'lovelies' anywhere.  Loose bits, all of them!  I cursed my mother, for not warning me about life and its pitfalls.  All she ever did was irritatingly twiddle her whiskers as she nagged me to keep clean by licking my underparts and always to help the earth to gobble up my doings.

Two fictions just discovered from the same fox-hole:

DOWN THE SPIRIT-HOLE (published 'Daarke World' 1993)

When I retired for the night, I naturally removed my teeth.  By my age, such habits had become second nature, bare gums and me, well, we were like this – (and I crook my two little fingers together, as if in demonstration of the intimacy). I first had false teeth when I was in my twenties.

So, when I woke up in the middle of the night, sheet-tossed and sweaty, I was perturbed at finding more than a tongue inside my mouth.  Crammed up against my familiar gums were shards of bone which felt like a cross between real teeth (as far as I could remember them from my youth) and large false ones.  Two were particularly protrusive – and sharper than a new pin, as my tongue soon discovered.

Eventually, with growing alarm, I wondered how it was possible to be so coolly detached when faced with such a mouthful.  Indeed, I had been studiously describing my predicament, as if I were an actual character in a story.

But it now slowly dawned on me that this was no story. 

This was real. Too real for comfort.

My bedroom was dark.  Too dark.  Dark for death. 

I fumbled beside me to reach the comforting shape of my wife and found her a widow instead. No, I was talking through the back of my head. I could not think straight – (and I place one of my pointy fingers to my temple in a screwing motion as apparent proof positive).

I flailed to the other side – with more deliberation this time – and felt the selfsame slats.  More a fence than slats.  A cross between a fence and a wall - as if an earthen material had seeped through the cracks and made it firmer.

Indeed, underneath was similar.  And the ceiling, too - so close, I could feel its damp surface with my nose.  I gingerly touched it with my teeth.  I snarled, as I tried to gouge slots into the its grain.  Jawfuls of wood-pulp.  Part of me panicked.  Another part still coolly detached. 

I had not read 'Premature Burial' by Edgar Allan Poe, nor that famous chapter from 'The Ka of Gifford Hillary' by Dennis Wheatley.  In fact, I had never heard of them. I was a television man, myself. A straight-up-and-down individual who liked nothing better than a flutter on a horse race.  Thus, the fact that I had been buried alive was furthest from my thoughts.  Not  in a sane world, surely.  If I was dead, I was dead.  Doctors could not possibly mistake death for something else.  Unheard of. 

My wife would have wanted to be certain.  She would never have allowed her husband to be carted off, otherwise.

But why did I possess more knowledge now than before?  Those two books by Poe and Wheatley – if they existed at all – how had they come into my mind? What was the explanation of the wooden crate in which I found myself embedded? (I am asking these questions aloud, muffled and teeth-tangled). I didn't mind betting it was all a dream.  Some godawful nightmare.  But why couldn't I wake up? 

I tried to pinch one hand with the other, to gauge this hypothesis.  (A finger and thumb on my left hand takes a wad of flesh just below the knuckles of the right hand and squeezes it unmercifully).  I shrieked in pain.  But shrieks in such a closed environment did not sound like shrieks, but rather moans and groans.

I was a cross between a corpse and a spirit.

But I hated crosses.

(I prod two fingers down my throat in an attempt to finish it all but only end up being sick - waves of warm salty fluid all over my winding-sheets).

The groaning became endless guffaws of ghoulish laughter, as I pummeled upwards.  Evidently, I was stronger, as well as cleverer.  I could move heaven and earth – (and do).  You hoped my up was your down.

==============

FROM THE SPIRIT-HOLE (published 'Penny Dreadful' 2000)

When I retired for the night, I naturally removed my teeth.  So, waking up, sheet-tossed and sweaty, I was perturbed at finding more than a tongue inside my mouth.  Crammed up against my familiar gums were shards of bone feeling like a cross between real teeth and large false ones.  With growing alarm, I wondered how it was possible to be so coolly detached when faced with such a mouthful of horns.  Indeed, I had been studiously describing my predicament, as if I were a character in a story. But, in the overwhelming darkness, it now slowly dawned on me that this was  real - too real for comfort. Too dark for death. 

I fumbled beside me in the bed to reach the comforting shape of my wife and felt something that was not my wife - nor even my widow. Nor was it the bedroom wall; unless the wall was made of wooden slats - slats so close to one another that I injured myself by snagging a fingernail on one of the raw splinters. I flailed back to the other side - with more deliberation this time seeking some vestige of my wife. Again, I touched the selfsame slats.  More a fence than slats – or rather some novel combination of the two. It felt as though some earthen material had seeped up through the cracks, making them firmer. Indeed, the surface beneath me and above were slatted as well - the ceiling so close, I could sense the dampness of its surface with my nose.  I gingerly touched a single slat with my teeth; then snarled, as I tried to gnaw slots into its grain.  Jawfuls of wood-pulp gagged within my throat.  Part of me panicked, though another part remained strangely detached.  I wasn't to know which part was which until the end.

I have always considered myself to be an ordinary man - thus, the fact that I might have been buried alive was furthest from my thoughts - surely in a sane world, such atrocities could not happen.  If I were dead - I were dead.  Modern medicine could not possibly mistake death for something else.  Such things were simply unheard of.  At least my wife would have wanted to be certain that I was dead.  She would never have allowed her husband to have been carted off, otherwise.

But why did I possess a deeper capacity for thought than ever before?  I didn't mind betting it was all a dream - some godawful nightmare - but if s, why couldn't I wake up?  I tried to pinch one hand with the other.  A finger and thumb on my left hand took a wad of flesh just below the knuckles of the right hand and squeezed unmercifully.  I shrieked in pain.  But shrieks in such a closed environment did not sound like shrieks, but rather, moans and groans. I was a cross between a corpse and a spirit. But I hated crosses – even in the abstract. I prodded two fingers down my throat in an attempt to end it all, but only succeeded in making myself sick - waves of warm salty fluid spilling over my winding-sheets.  The slats must have been dripping with it.

The groaning became endless guffaws of ghoulish laughter, as I pushed upwards.  Evidently, I was stronger, as well as more clever.  I could move heaven and earth.  Between each slat was a slit.  And the slut moaned as I gnawed my way out of her womb. 

The Devil born, at last - blasted horns and all!

(1)

Peter asked Nita to stand ... just there. He claimed that was just where ... well, just where the ghost had stood earlier, when he had been looking through the bedroom window straight into the blinding sun of freak weather conditions, a time of day when he often expected Nita to arrive, but today she had been late, and instead of Nita, he had witnessed just there the appearance, apparition, approach of what he could only call a ghost ... the ghost of his own mother. Yes, just there. Peter waved and pointed as he stage-managed Nita into position beside the bullace tree, just in front of the grinding, creaking wooden-gate, a step poised upon taking another step up the stone steps towards the front-door that Nita always rang with a happy flourish. You see, Peter and Nita were in love. And today Nita had been late.

Peter actually noticed that sunshine lit things in a weird way that night – for day had indeed soon turned into night uncharacteristically without any intervening twilight or dusk, a fact that Peter blamed on the freak weather conditions. The sun still seemed to shine, however, despite the coming of night; the sun was a dark blob on the horizon which shook Peter to his roots. He feared that he might not survive the implications of global warming that had been described by scaremongers day in and day out throughout the pages of his consciousness. It was almost a relief to worry about something as old-fashioned or as traditional as a ghost. The ghost of his own mother. But his mother was not dead. One cannot have a ghost if one were not dead, could one? He squinted at Nita's shape masquerading as a ghost in the garden, simply so that he could rationalise, reconcile something he knew in his heart of hearts to be essentially irrational, irreconcilable. Nita would do anything for him, though, would even play silly goose or ghost games or games with the light and with the imagination. But it had not been imagination, he assured her. What about a quirk of the light, then, she asked?

Putting aside nasty thoughts, stuffing the head of his necktie tight within the white starched collar (as meticulously laundered by his mother), Peter suddenly decided to answer the door – it having now been rung by Nita following her masquerade as a ghost in the garden – he himself now intent upon disappearing off with her to the pictures. In those old-fashioned, traditional days in England, the only way courting couples could snatch a kiss was upon the back row of a cinema as the film played itself out upon a loop of customers coming in and going out to the continuous performance rhythm of seeing through a film up to the point when they had started watching it ... at the same time as kissing and cuddling amid the luminously smouldering cigarettes. One of his mother's favourite sayings was about people who reached the end of the long road by kneeling along it: a religious conviction that could not be expressed in any other way. She also made sure Peter wore clean underpants when he went out with Nita, not that Nita would ever likely see them.

Pathé News today, somehow with an anachronistic monochrome of stilted cinematic commentary, predicted that modern weather patterns would become even more memorable – almost like science fiction in reverse ... but did future problems infect their own past with renewed dangers? ... unless all of us, in those days, were too busy watching the passing of reality itself in the same way as we watched films, from the middle to the beginning, and then back again.

Peter and Nita tentatively stared up towards the huge flat moving faces, their own kisses forgotten when contemplating the future's ghosts passing in silhouette or in shadow across the wide white screen ... while a giant usherette's torch shone out beam-like, disguised as a projector populating the darkness with shapes thus summoned to give credibility to these same shapes in reality. Peter whispered sweet nothings in Nita's ear as they returned to canoodling ... oblivious of his mother watching them from the upper circle, where her last short breaths were intensifying amid the billowing tobacco-stained air.

Prayers and Nuances tremble, shadowily bent towards the gate they hoped to enter without a creak or grind. Silence is a language with too many words, so many words indeed that one cannot even begin to choose which words to speak.

Peter and Nita tease sweet dark kisses from each other just as an approaching dawn skidmarks the sky ... just along and above the horizon ... just there.

(2)

Published 'Gathering Darkness' 1993 

Jamesiah Fenn settled back into the chimney corner of the Innsmouth Arms, upon a well-worn seat which he had made his own from decades of supping and chin-wagging.

          When other less hardened regulars wandered into his conversational catchment area, they were often amazed by his ability to feed off stale gossip which they brought with them, often thus creating new gossip of his own for them to translate into action.  It was like visiting the Oracle of Rumours, an ever-tipsy greybeard with telltales and memories to weave, which his audience could subsequently live out as best they could on the stage of life.  Thus, memories became real...

One evening, he was talking aloud even before the others gathered round with pint-pots to drink in his every word...

          "There was a curious shop in the backstreets, not far from the seafront, called Brix & Malta, where I once worked as a nipper. It was next door to a wetfish shop, selling long cod in the main, I remember..."

          I dreaded a tangent.  Fenn's tea-stained face nodded in tune, not with his speech, but with some contradictory inner rhythm caused by an encroaching disease which old age could no longer disown.  His eyes weltered with tears, but I wondered if it really were sadness that had brought such glistening to those sunken oases either side of the beached nose.  He decided to continue with his story of Brix & Malta.

          "It purveyed bric-a-brac from the Mediterranean, things made with care and unmodern hands.  The figurines glinted in the bay window ... and there was one item in particular..."

As he hesitated lengthily, I nodded. I was the only one present.  The rest were strangers of one kind and another, I realised, irregulars fresh from beating tracks along the esplanade, those on solitary holiday from the cities further north.  The locals, who usually populated the Innsmouth Arms were noticeable by their absence: a peculiar evening of coincidence, by all accounts, since they all must have dicky stomachs or been kept at home in the fishing cottages by overwhelming wives.  Pity, that, for tonight, Fenn was in evident form, eager to let drop perhaps a prize tidbit of scandal-mongering.  Being on my own, it was not too difficult to interrupt him, for he could see I was a thinking being, unlike those irregulars with the mindless routine of the cities still hanging about them like a set of glassy-eyed masks in the window of Brix & Malta.

"Hey, Mr. Fenn, I bet you anything the item you mention in Brix & Malta was a painting in a splendid frame."

          He turned to me (and I was grateful that he had at least recognised me for what I was) and nodded his head:  "Yes, you are right about the painting, if not the frame.  It showed our resort when it was little more than houses and redoubts made of upturned boats.  The artist had captured the sea and its close inhabitants with a few deft strokes and just a little bit of imagination on the part of any that viewed it."

          All this time, the Innsmouth Arms was filling up with more seeming strangers (some more complete than others and a few with saucy postcards in their hatbands).  Old Fenn scowled and continued, whilst finger-combing his beard.

"I was so desperate for that painting myself, I can tell you. I tried to prevent anybody else from buying it.  I told the customers that it had been in the shop for twenty year or so, gathering dust, because nobody wanted it.  So nobody did want it, even (or especially) at a knock-down price."

          "Why didn't you buy it?" I asked, knowing the answer all the time, but hoping to lead him away from another tangent.

          "I had no money, of course.  I was paid in kind.  Crusts of bread dipped in pulse soup.  My mother used to send me to Brix & Malta, because there was nothing else for me to do and nothing at home to eat.  She used to have nightmares about men who scratched underneath our home, themselves wanting something to eat.  Did you know my home?  Even the fish swam no near it."

He turned more positively towards me, as I asked:  "I understand your family lived in one of the boathouses on the backwater?"

          "Yes, the sea weeds did crackle outside the porthole of my bedroom."  He leaned closer to me as if I'd become the confidant he'd awaited for decades.  "You see, it was our boathouse at the centre of that painting..."

          I sighed with relief.

          But the strangers were now growing even stranger around me.  They were tanked to the gills.  I hoped the pub would soon shut up for the night.

          He had stopped speaking because of an incident at the entrance door, but it soon passed over.  For a moment, you had thought some regulars were being forcibly kept outside, their bellies having now abruptly rumbled out their long pent up bouts of wind.

          Not to be swerved unduly from the fateful course of his speech, Jamesiah Fenn continued:  "Yes, I think our boathouse at the centre of the painting had a face at one of its portholes.  And it may have been mine ... with terror in the eyes..."

          I could only interrupt:  "Surely you must have bought that painting in the end.  You surely wanted it so very much ... a souvenir of childhood..." 

Silence intervened.  He looked simply inscrutable and then laughed his butt off.

          But memory can only play tricks.  I was hustled, I think, from the Innsmouth Arms by many hands with unseen faces.  Some had children's sand spades grasped in them and others fanned out yellowy close-up photographs of human genitals like raw meat.  And if I had not seen fit to write all this down, even the certainty of Fenn's existence would be merely another item of gossip.

          I can tell you one thing for certain, however.  The shop that was once called Brix & Malta is now a pork butchers.     

Cheryl knew she wasn't in Brighton for nothing. A message, an email or text on her mobile, or whatever: saying a gentlemanly ex-String Quartet was needing her services for a come-back.

She didn't know Brighton very well, but she felt her way: near the pier, where shops and houses strangely mixed with each other in a untypical fiftyish style; indeed it may have been a part of Brighton nobody knew!

A single pub where she thought a supermarket must once have stood. Called the Dog and Onion.

Cheryl shook her head; this couldn't be right. Over there she spotted some dilapidated back-to-back cottages, where a modern internet caff – many years before – had done a roaring trade in Jaffa cakes, as well as electronic chat-shows. The pub was crawling with low life. Cheryl was, of course, a theatrical agent; hired to bring back the dead. Corpsing was not allowed on her stage! The four old ex-musicians, complete with instruments, sat in the snug, eager for a reprise of a late Beethoven quartet.

"About time!" snarled the ex-cellist, leaning his beer-mug on the curved brown shoulder of his seasoned scrape and shudder.

"Sorry, I was held up at East Croydon," Cheryl announced, sitting beside them.

"Would you like a drink?" asked the ex-violist. He caressed his instrument as if it were a new born baby or, rather, its young mother.

She nodded.

The two ex-violinists played a playful trill with their bows and catgut, almost in unison, almost replicating the devil's own fiddling. One of them bustled over to the old-fashioned bar, where a balding drag-queen pulled at the pumps. Cheryl had not even said what she wanted.

"You see, Miss, we'd rather like to get some bookings in London." The ex-cellist passed his bow over his instrument without making contact. A tentative, tantalising manoeuvre more in keeping with salaciousness than chamber music. His voice was two octaves awry. Indeed, the mumbles and grumbles of the other ex-quartet members were decidedly shrill, making Cheryl wonder if this were typical of the whole of Brighton.

Meanwhile, a yellowy-creamy snowball was delivered; and the four gents started squawking. Their bows raising a squall of notes that even avant garde musicians would rather have eschewed.

The rest of the pub crowd looked askance and the balding drag-queen managed to slant his eyes in their direction with veritable daggerpoints emerging from the pupils. Cheryl managed to quell the racket. She told them that London was full of String Quartets, Piano Trios, Ensembles of French horn and other brass and woodwind - and the four gents would do better on the north east coast of Essex, like Clacton on Sea, a resort simply clamouring for more adventurous music of the serious variety. They'd just fit the bill.

The gents beamed and entered upon a soft lullaby with tingling touches of their gnarled fingers on the necks of their instruments.

The tides shushed back and forth beneath the nearby pier's boardwalk in accompaniment.

The pub smelt of potato crisps and mild. The clientele returned to their bevies with a will. The balding drag-queen head-pointed towards the old stand-up piano in the corner. Evidently a Piano Quintet was in the offing. One by Alfred Schnittke.

Cheryl left the paper contract on the table and sidled from the pub. She thought rather avant-gardely that the new arrival – an ex-pianist – probably had horns under his saucy seaside hat.

Even the noise of the sea couldn't conceal the rather loud pub music she left behind.  Thankfully she'd not forgotten that she hadn't left a forwarding address for the contract.

 (unpublished)

Published 'Black Lotus' 1993

If fear were music, it'd be the near silence of the bedroom when you woke in a house you knew ought to be empty of anybody but you – and you caught the sound of low breathing coming from your fitted wardrobe.

Then such music was accompanied by your own heavier breathing which sleep had previously kept away from your consciousness, albeit the ears knew a thing or two: a counterpoint in terror.

Then, the crescendo reached fever pitch. With the hyperventilation of your clambering crawl across the carpet in the dazed doze of near nightmare, you questioned, somewhere deep down inside yourself where the heart's fast percussion was deeper than any ear drum's range, which of the two participants in such dire duet was more hysterical with fright – you or the thing in the wardrobe.

If death were music, its marching strains would surely not be those of a funeral, nor even a dirge of last minute forgiveness to the world, but more the missing notes of a silent tomb where you could wake to mar such silence.  And you could have no hope of rescue this time. No pomp, no circumstance, no march, nor even clambering crawl.