“I daren’t set pen to paper, in case the truth comes out,” he said.

 

                I stared at him, wondering whether he was set to continue.  It seemed odd, to say the least, that he should unburden himself to a complete stranger like myself.  I laughed out loud at a private joke whilst studying the man’s demeanour.  He settled deeper into the seat and pulled down the padded armrest from its vertical bed.  His cheeks were so loose they looked like quivering jelly, as the train failed to slow down to negotiate a series of points.

 

                “One day, there’ll be a terrible accident along this part of the line,” I found myself saying - which was, in hindsight, some pretty bizarre small talk!

 

                He began to take more notice of me and, as he leaned forward to meet eye with my eye, his waistcoat buttons strained against what must have been his wife’s ancient needlethread.  Unaccountably, I placed a hand over one of my eyes, like a patch, as he told me the strangest stilted traveller’s tale imaginable.

 

 

 

Jack felt happy behind the wheel.  So much more in control than forsaking oneself to public transport (like this train, dear sir).  Anyway, the sense of power travelling up the arms to the brain always gave him a kick.  Although he’d seen the traffic pile-ups now a rage as art exhibits in trendy galleries, he somehow felt immune behind the windscreen, as the ribbon of road shot under his two front wheels.  It was like playing one of those seaside pier games, where if one impinged upon the hard shoulder into the wayside rubble, Brownie points were merely lost rather an impression made on the actuarial mortality tables: tables very much in vogue as bedside reading for the nouveau riche.

 

                Well, Jack turned slightly to view his passenger (closer together, of course, than you and I in this carriage): an elderly, but still elegant, lady who, he knew, had, for most of her life, suffered from asthma and bouts of emphysema.  It was her birthday and, as a treat, he was gratuitously taking her on a mystery tour.  She particularly enjoyed watching the Narrow Boats on the Union Canal as they negotiated the flight of locks at Pyecroft.  So, of course, this place was included in the otherwise flexible itinerary.

 

                In her younger days, she was a dab hand on the tiller, guiding the long sluggish beast of a boat, whilst carefully compensating for the delayed reaction of its slowly swinging prows.  It helped that she had never driven a car, since the canal boat’s steering was, by comparison, back to front.  And, often, a whole day’s journey length for such an unwieldy craft was a matter of a few second for a car.   (Of course, trains, dear sir, are quite a different kettle of fish.)

 

                Anyway, the tiller tales she had to tell were many.  Jack smiled, relaxing back into the car seat, fingers of one hand resting lightly on the heel of the steering-wheel, foot evenly pressed upon the gas pedal, surging past other drivers who didn’t have the same courage of their convictions.  She was rambling between clogging breaths, and it was not possible for Jack to catch more than three quarters of what she said.

 

                “Did I tell you,” she said making it sound more like a statement than a question (and sorry if I can’t imitate her voice exactly, but I’ll have a good go to give you a flavour of her talking).  “You know, it was easy in those days to find a berth.  People hadn’t got the canal bug, so much.  Me and Tom, well, I took him once into a relatively unopened part of the Stewpot Ring - you know round Brum.  The Cut was just an excuse for the land to end and begin again on the other bank.  The towpath simply a shadow of its former self, grass crumpled down here and there by gongoozlers.  But where the gongoozlers went or where they came from and who they were...”

 

                It may not even have been her voice at all as it sounded so unfamiliar to Jack.  The words were too wordy, for one thing.  Still, the way the phlegm lay on her chest affected the vocal cords and made them into something less than or, at least, different from, real words.  Jack sensed her shrugging but when he turned away from the fast lane for a second, it was easy to believe that she was half-asleep.  The rattling in her chest was growing louder, too.

 

                “Well, Tom said we should moor soon,” she resumed.  “It was getting dark ... very quickly as it happened ... you’re not allowed to ply the canal after dusk ... we discovered a ridiculously large Winding-Hole which Tom and I knew no others would be using for turning the boat in the night, so we moored on the overgrown bank ... but we feared grounding ourselves, you see...”

 

                Jack must have nodded, but he was convinced she was snoring.  The car needed to slow down through some cones and on to a contraflow.  As he pumped the pedal to put on the anchors, the voice continued its droning, between stertorous breaths:

 

                “Well, you see, Tom was a one for ghosts.  And we just sat there on the stern for a while watching the last daylight drain from the trees.  I told him a story that I had told him before but he had forgotten, it seemed ... about a ghost that one day met a zombie...”

 

                Jack thought he must have imagined the word ‘zombie’, because any such words were likely to be outside her vocabulary.  Anyway, he found himself yawning.  A plague on her.  Not only was she talking out of character, it didn’t even sound like her phlegm!

 

                Motorway tiredness was not something from which Jack usually suffered.  But now it was hardly possible to hear the passenger’s words (and I hope mine are clear enough, dear sir, bearing in mind the racket this train’s making!).  She seemed to be digging ever deeper into her chest, via the phlegm, for further words to say.

 

                It was now part of the motorway which crossed the beginnings of the Pyecroft canal systems.  Jack had once been taken on a cruise, by this very lady (her last canal-boat voyage, as it happened), and under this very carriageway on which he was now driving was where this very voyage had taken place.  They had heard the roar of traffic in the “sky”and the odd ambulance siren, then wondering why the authorities had not cleaned the undersides of the motorway.  Both Tom and Jack had joked around with windlasses at the locks as if they were both axe-murderers.  But, now, as he took the road for Pyecroft proper, there was evidence of someone having knocked down the direction sign in a previous shunt - now cleared up except for a few stray tyre shreds.  “...Like the  flayed flesh of an African slave.”  Could Jack have really said that?

 

                The old lady snorted like a trench man, the tiller tale held in suspension.  He hoped to be able soon to arrange that nice cup of tea which she so craved.  It would no doubt help cut the morning’s phlegm.  Loosen it up, at least.

 

                As the car broke the back of the hill with a mere stirring of the gear-stick amid what he considered to be the jelly-like muscles of his old car’s faltering engine, Jack noticed that more miles had been clocked up than this journey usually took for the same space of time.  But there were congratulations due for the points score (if you see what I’m driving at, dear sir!)

 

                The moored flock of Narrow Boats glistened in the sun like some child’s best toys, as Jack drove into Pyecroft valley towards the harbour.  The flight of locks stepped into the sky, white water pounds each with its own churning, waiting boat.  The bikini-clad tiller girls would, Jack guessed, be staring sightlessly into the near distance while their automatic impulsive piloting within the increasing lock-space kept the brick sides from closing in.  A bit like a short tunnel without a roof.

 

                As he turned off the car engine in the parking lot, there was a complete silence inside the bodywork.  The passenger didn’t even appear to be able to breathe at all.

 

                At heart, Jack knew that her story of the canal trip with Tom would never be completed.  He wondered whether the ghost discovered that the zombie was its own erstwhile body: a body made with black-pudding flesh even nastier than the stale remains of asthma on the lungs which even the most scalding tea possible would fail to dislodge.  But, no, not even someone like Jack could have thought such thoughts (unlike me, presumably, dear sir, eh?)

 

                The old lady crooned tunelessly, as her own thoughts finally sunk - twirling into the Winding-Hole of her mind - yet funnelling the wrong way for this hemisphere.

 

 

 

My co-traveller on the train stopped his tale at that tantalising moment.  I decided not to acknowledge what he had told me and merely said:

 

                “This part of the line has not had an accident upon it, to my knowledge - but have you seen the red scarecrows that some silly ass of a farmer has seen fit to put among his sugar beet alongside the track?”

 

                The answer to my question was pre-empted by the tunnel arriving much earlier than I expected or vaguely remembered.  It seemed awkwardly impolite to allow the darkness to enforce silence upon us (the driver at the front having forgotten to switch over to the on-board lights) so I asked him for another tale, but decided in the end to tell my own as a token thank-you for his.

 

 

 

“The house stands in its own grounds,” announced the lady guide.

 

                I turned round to argue the point.  Where else could it possibly stand?  But she had proceeded to describe the Summer Pagoda which was artfully concealed behind fruit trees at the bottom of the landscaped garden.  The other visitors trooped desultorily behind her, whilst I veered off to inspect the folly of a tall chimneystack that the first Lord of the Manor was said to have built “for the smoke from the fires of Hell to escape.”  And, yes, standing solitary in the stable area, it towered into the encroaching dusk, the jagged tops of its two chimney-pots clawing a faint white scar into the sky where the moon should have been.

 

                The lady’s voice disappeared into the distance, but I could still make out the guide calling her flock to attention.  She was about to tell of the Pagoda’s ghost.  I knew the story because I had done my homework on the Manor before coming.  The ghost was said to be controlled from the past by a man who had actually released it with his suicide.  I never quite understood properly, but there seemed to be a grain of truth about it, however unconvincing the actual story.

 

                My wife and I were staying at the only hotel in the area.  (And it would interest you to know that there were many canals about.  Indeed, I think it was probably not far from Pyecroft.)  Most of the other visitors had holed up in bed-and-breakfast places, not being able to afford such three star luxury.  Gold fittings in the bathroom were not the be all and end all, however, you know.  The pair or surly women who ran the hotel were worth at least one less star in their own right - and I had left my wife there today, not really because she didn’t feel well (although she did have a slight sick phlegminess when she first woke up), but more because she had heard the outrageous legend of the Manor with regard to married women.  Indeed, several ladies had returned from a visit there only to find themselves pregnant, after years of unsuccessfully trying.  Not that any of that could possibly affect my wife, at her age and her state of health.

 

                But the hints were enough: she would stay behind and have a quiet day in the hotel garden reading the latest Anita Brookner and, being a great needlewoman, finishing off a sampler.  I rather envied her, in a way.  But holidays always caused me to feel guilty if I were not spending the time “constructively” visiting the sights.

 

                Whoever had constructed the Manor must have been a master mason.  It literally owned the hillside on which it sloped in tiers.  I could almost believe its turrets and chimneystacks sucked night early into the vicinity with their dark arches at both extremities of the building (like those old-fashioned childhood magnets).  But whether I thought that at the time, I can no longer recall.  Any, if I did think such thoughts, I soon shook them off: I had stayed too long for my own good.  The other tourists had hustled the lady guide off to the local pub.  If I were to view the Pagoda, it would be necessary to do it on my own.  The grounds were not to be shut for at least another half hour - and I checked my watch, because the darkening skies caused me to doubt the actual time of day.  Casting a backward glance at the ludicrously autonomous chimneystack, I think I imagined it was Satan’s finger stuck through the earth in a loutish gesture.  I almost disowned my imagination for playing such games with my own thoughts.

 

                The Pagoda itself had become just another common or garden shadow, as I approached it from the fountain area.  I had skirted the landscaped maze, studiously eschewing the perverse welcome of its various entrances and exits.  A maze would indeed have been a folly, at this time of night.

 

 

 

As I paused in my tale at the end of the tunnel, I saw there was one other passenger sharing the train compartment.  I now recalled that she had climbed on from the halt at Pyecroft Locks, a woman of indeterminate age in a tweed costume that seemed too old for her.  There being no corridor on the train, she would probably have chosen her random travel companions with as much care as the train’s short flirtation with the high platform would allow - being on her own.  I was rather perturbed by her behaviour, I must admit, having opened the window without asking the permission of any “sitting tenants” - but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.  There were bits of my traveller’s tale I would have censored, if I had remembered her being there.

 

                The long leather strap that worked the window up and down was beginning to unstitch along its length.  As I watched it swinging with the train’s fitful rhythm, I recalled the family hassock in my local church, equally needy of repair.  Every time I knelt on it these days, more stuffing came out.  Before long, I expected to feel just the bare boards of the church floor.

 

                The day had turned darker as we left the tunnel.  Probably a storm brooding, I mused.  The stout gent had withdrawn into himself, with the flesh of his face clinging to the bones as a result of the renewed acceleration.  However, seeing me again (as if for the first time) he told me how he had travelled this line for forty years (he didn’t look that old, I must say) - and how he had intended to write about his experiences, in the form of memoirs, describing the various “wayfarers and steerers of the rail” (as he put it), whom he had encountered and the incidents, near-misses and trackside sights he had managed to accumulate in his “bag of tales”.   But, somehow, he explained to me, he had never been able to commit anything to paper.  It was as if he felt that actually writing it all out would be a form of curse fulfilment, making things true that should never have been true.

 

                I nodded, pretending to understand.  Ever since boarding the train with him at Brum, I had wondered why I had not opted for a different compartment.  This being an out of season jaunt, there must have been plenty of vacant ones and I could have spent my journey in supreme seclusion.  It was the way he had almost expected me to follow him into the same compartment, so as to help him lift his luggage to the rack.  Why a daily commuter on this line, which he had given me the impression he was, should require such heavy luggage was, at that time, a mystery.  The combined boarding must have been tied up with travelling incognito, as I was.  I did not want to attract attention to myself - and so I had surrendered matters to chance: enticed into some kind of pilgrim’s proximity with him, for whatever reason, then unclear.

 

                “Were your ‘memoirs’, as you call them, going to include descriptions of co-travellers - such as myself?  Did you not mention the possibility of character studies, as well as views from windows and - what were they? - near-misses, incidents, danger-points...”  I asked, in a tailing-off way.

 

                “Yes, I was going to put in real people, of all things, but maybe I won’t.  It would be too ... cruel, perhaps.”

 

                The third passenger looked up from her corner, where she had begun by staring at something on her knee.  She must have taken up knitting in the tunnel, for I had not noticed till now the clacking of the needles, audible even above the trundling train - and strangely in rhythm with it.  She seemed to grow less winsome with each nod of her head towards the business ends of the bone-white needles.  She suddenly spoke quietly, her own traveller’s tale, I suppose, but yet, peculiarly something else.

 

 

 

In the hotel garden, it was still warm even when the sun had gone down.  The moon’s curdled eyes was like a balloon which I controlled.  October had always been very pleasant in recent years.  I closed the library book.  In a way, I didn’t want to read to the end tonight.  Even my sewing looked unappetising.  There was a late bird competing with the squeak of a rodent, behind the gurgling sounds of the garden’s natural spring.  The windows of our hotel bedroom, I thought, should not have been left open so late.  Tom should be home soon to shut them.  I’d stay out here till then, it being so warm.  Dinner would not be for another hour.  I coughed gently.  Something was working round me, I feared.

 

                The two hotel women, despite their ill manners, could certainly cook - or at least one of them could, I mused.  Their voices bickered from an open window.  Concerns like hotels more often than not were run by a man-and-woman partnership.  Off-putting, otherwise, with no children to take over the reins one day.  Tom and I had in fact tried for years to produce a child.  We both prayed for our own Jack and Jill pigeon pair.  Preferably in that order.  Just one of them would have done, though.  Better than none.  However, lately, we did not even think of it as a potential child, but more a vehicle like this one for transporting our fortune into the future...

 

                I must have felt at my belly.  But it was more my chest that seemed loaded.  I was not certain enough to tell Tom about my suspicions.  After the holiday, I thought it might be a good idea to visit the doctor.  The doctor who knew me inside out.  I guess, as Tom sat inside the Summer Pagoda, he imagined me in the hotel gardens, as if he were within my head.  Being in the wrong head, I suppose, would be like steering one of those big clumsy canal-boats...

 

                Quite uncanny, some of my thoughts, when I remembered the operation I underwent a few years before.  No baby could survive a traumatic episode like that.  Tom must have sensed the distant movements inside the ground beneath him  I felt the tremors, too.  I reckon the other tourists had, by now, reached their bed-and-breakfast places, dreaming of being reincarnated out-of-bounds.  Well, I did have thoughts like that, in those days.  I’m better now, though.

 

                Then, being blinkered by night, I must have felt a snagging tug on one of my ears, as if I were guided by unseen reins.  And, with the past still jerking the present, my eyelids shut like the library book’s covers - closing a story before its end, before its abortive future with only a zombie to read it.

 

                But, as I say, I’m better now.

 

 

 

She resumed her erstwhile silence.  I may have imagined some of the more outlandish details, but I don’t think so.  Whatever the case, the scarecrows were there outside the train window, just where I remembered them from my previous journey along this line about five years before.  Dressed in tatters of used bandages, some bent over as if sowing, others with arms outstretched in pitying appeal to their audience.  It was bluntly uncanny.  Some of them were quite fat, for scarecrows.  One female scarecrow (if scarecrows could ever have gender) stood in a crimson pool of sunset.  It looked as if there were an unfinished scarecrow on the ground nearby.  The train had slowed, but not enough, as if to tantalise me with the sight.  I, too, am better now.

 

 

 

When there was nobody left in the carriage, following its tailgating at Gridlock Halt, the worn leather tongue - looking as if covered in the cold translucent slime of dusk’s weird effulgence - still wagged with residues of vibration.  Sadly, the platform buffet was boarded up, so the long yearned-for cup of piping hot tea had sadly slipped off some mindless agenda’s end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 A collaboration with Gordon Lewis         

 

         

 

          The night is indeed dark, but probably not as dark as the inside of Tom’s head. After a few fitful starts, he feels his way by brushing fingertips along the tops of garden walls. Evidently it was Suburbia — just as he had been told. No longer lit by the nation’s power industry, but merely dependant on separate electricity companies.

 

          Tom believes he is some kind of a government agent hired by a private detective agency to seek out wrong-doing in its own ranks. The agency, is in return, investigating the same government department for which Tom happens to work. We are all windfalls, he thought, off the same tree of bad apples.

 

          Tom likes incomplete things. He thrives on broken links. His whole existence depends on misunderstandings and cross purposes. He lives off shattered mirrors.

 

          He revelled in complexities, piecing together whatever he was investigating as one does with a giant jigsaw puzzle. The case on which he was now employed was both complex and sensitive. His main object was to investigate an official supremo from one of the sections in his own department. The investigation would have been better placed with another department, but Tom’s immediate superior wanted the primary investigation kept within the department before handing the whole thing over to the police authority.

 

          Tom had already driven around the area during daylight hours, but what he was embarking upon now would have to be under the cover of night. The inadequate street lighting was a great help. Also the houses along the avenue were not bothersome, being well laid back off the road, each having quite long drives up to front doors, with very little light emanating from them.

 

          Tom eventually reached the house in which he was interested. He was pleased to see that the front of the property was in complete darkness. Pleased too, to find the drive was of smooth tarmac, for had it been gravel-covered he would have to plough through wet grass and shrubbery to approach the house.

 

          He thought Sir Harold Whittaker was away on government business, but there was no knowledge of the whereabouts of his wife, or any servants left to do the ‘house-sitting’. Gaining entry to Sir Harry’s study was going to be difficult if there was someone in residence.

 

          He knew there was a burglar alarm system but having preknowledge of the type of system, Tom promised himself it would not be difficult to circumvent. As he drew near the back of the house, he cursed under his breath, for there was a lighted window high above the ground. It could mean there was someone left to look after the property, but knowing how mean Sir Harry was, it could be a light that automatically came on as it grew dark. But great care would have to he taken; the situation was extremely dicey. Sir Harry must not be given an inkling that he was under some kind of investigation. Tom simply had to get in and out of the building without leaving a trace of his intrusion.

 

          Tom’s commander had been a guest in the house on several occasions, so was able to provide an accurate plan of the building which Torn had committed to memory. An expert like Tom would easily gain entry, for the alarm system was totally inadequate for such a large house — further evidence of the meanness of its owner.

 

          So Tom made his way to a large hidden manhole cover at the rear of the property, knowing it was not connected to the system. Why it wasn’t connected was a bit of a mystery until Tom’s commander found out it was left disconnected to facilitate delivery of the Anthracite coal used in the large Aga cooker in the kitchen of the house.

 

          Tom used to have an Anthracite burner of his own — one with a glass-panelled door and plenty of elbow-grease needed to keep the damn thing banked up at night. After all, his whole central-heating system at home used to feed off it. There came a time, Tom recalled, when the job — at which he worked to pay his rent and, also, the cost of the Anthracite nuts themselves — did hang in the balance due to the time wasted otherwise stoking the burner morning, noon and night.

 

          Tom shrugged off such thoughts. His commander had not discovered, evidently, that this bunker, to which the manhole was an access, was merely a front for Sir Harry Whittaker’s wine caverns, nuclear shelters, war chests and gold bar stashes. Tom sensed these things instinctively. Also the Aga cooker was merely a subterfuge or, at best, a means for cooking heavy suppers for Sir Harry’s subterranean sidekicks who delved hither from God-knows-whither...

 

          Tom’s wayward thoughts were abrubtly halted by a shafted beam of yellow light from one of the electrical dumps; evidently a power company experimenting with a newly invented energy source. Then the beam flashed off at the same moment Tom had managed to prise up one of the manhole cover’s edges.

 

          Inexplicably, he wondered why it was called a ‘manhole’. A hole for a man to clamber through? Or the means for Earth’s vegetative resources to be funnelled in pursuit of some rudimentary heat exchange with which Sir Harry Whittaker chose to warm his abode — lacking confidence, as he did, in the separate electrical companies’ ability to provide anything suitable for the more modern devices which modern civilisation boasted.

 

          The flash of light — whatever its mysterious cause — enabled Tom to spot a rope ladder leading down into the interminable vertical darkness. It appeared to be a chimney… of sorts. Its sides were coated thickly, not with coal dust, but black soot! It didn’t matter. He was filthy already. And with heart in mouth, he started tentatively to worm his body down the shaft. Destiny, after all, meant that if this were to be the right hole, Tom was, without doubt, the right man for it.

 

          Tom had the foresight to wear coveralls, expecting coal dust in what he had been told was a coal chute. But as he dropped into the darkness, rope rung by rope rung, he was glad he had prepared himself for this venture. The shaft seemed to go deep below the foundations of the house. Nothing like it was included in the plan with which he had been provided and Tom began to wonder how he was going to gain access to the cellar area of the house — so to reach Sir Harry’s inner sanctum — his private study. There had to be a safe there, or, at least, Tom’s commander presumed there to be one.

 

          Tom’s feet came to rest on solid ground, and, switching on his powerful torch which he carried attached to his coverall belt, he found he was on a form of landing. To his right the shaft carried on obliquely downwards. To his left there was a hatchway, a door of sorts that led under the property. Certainly, Tom didn’t want to follow the shaft to his right. His main purpose that night was to search Sir Harry’s study. The hatch moved silently inwards as he leant his weight upon it; he clambered through the opening, carefully closing the hatch behind him and, by the light of his torch, he climbed the sloping shaft until he deduced he was in what was the cellar of the property, a cellar that he remembered from his study of the layout of the house. He was below the kitchen area.

 

          His feet in black trainers made not a sound as he climbed the cellar steps, where, with the aid of his light, he could see the door was locked. Prepared for all eventualities, Tom reached for his bunch of picklocks and made short work of unlocking the door’s simple rim lock. Inching the door towards him soundlessly, Tom found himself in a large kitchen. Padding along on silent footsteps, he laid his hand on the Aga cooker. It was hot to the touch which proved one thing, it must have been stoked up that very day. There could well be someone in residence.

 

          Moving like a shadow out of the kitchen, he fancied he heard the faint sound of music, music that grew slightly louder as he came to the foot of the grand staircase. It was evidently coming from one of the upstair rooms. His torch lit up the doors leading from the hall, fetching him unerringly to the study door. At least he had got this far. Gently turning the door knob, he cursed under his breath. It was locked. Again his skill with a picklock paid off. Another lock was tripped — this one, a mortice, proving more difficult and taking him longer than the simple cellar door lock. He had reached his destination — he was safely in Sir Harry’ private study. Relocking the door, he swiftly drew all the curtains; then switched on the light, after making sure he had an escape route by unlatching one of the windows, and leaving it slightly ajar.

 

          Tom looked in all the usual places for a hidden safe, finally deducing there wasn’t one; he turned to old-fashioned roll-top desk. That too was locked but it would prove easy to open with the expertise of Tom’s fingers. He could easily have made a successful cracksman, but had decided the right side of the law was to be his occupation. At least he was in the house without leaving any signs of someone breaking in. This was all-important; Sir Harry was not to know that he was being investigated.

 

          “At least I’m in the house without leaving any signs of someone breaking in.” Tom spoke aloud, as if repeating to himself something quite crazy that had just gone through his mind. It was an attempt at rationalization and he laughed as he saw his own blackened footprints leading up to the desk. Time enough to retrace his steps...

 

          He laughed again, but his thoughts were suddenly interrupted as the house light he had recently switched on started flashing and flickering. Tom checked his watch. This was the time when one electric company was taking on the responsibility of supply from another one — the transition rarely being a smooth one. But, tonight, the flickering continued for at least 30 seconds and when the full steady beam eventually resumed, he heard the music again — evidently louder than before; since there had been no sign of it since his arrival in the private study.

 

          He turned his attention to the roll-top desk, he tried to shrug off the sounds of distant voices which now seemed to mingle with the music. Whether or not the voices derived from the same source as the music, it was hard to tell; they then began to sound as if they were in the walls… moving about with clips and clops of toe-caps the other side of the skirting-board.

 

          Tom sighed with relief, as the voices faded into the distance. The desk was of the variety where the lowering of the ribbed cover locked all the lower drawers when it was snapped down into place after use. A devil to rifle, after all.

 

          Tom frowned, he enjoyed incomplete things. Broken links. There could be no misunderstanding with this integral piece of utility furniture… until he paid attention to the cracked mirror on the wall behind the desk... showing that the back was heavily knotted and far from proud to the wall. The reflection revealed a single irregular hole about a third of the way down it. Tom leaned round, with some effort of contortion, and blindly poked his index finger as far as it would go into the desk’s interior. He touched something hard and craggy… a bit like stone or hardened earth...

 

          The study door swung open with an abrupt flourish. There stood the surprising figure of Sir Harry Whittaker. Tom knew who it was straightaway from the man’s many appearances on television as an expert on matters of espionage. Tom embarrassingly realised his finger was stuck fast and there was no way he could make himself scarce. Quick feats of prestidigitative disappearances were usually his forte when caught in such extenuating circumstances, but evidently not tonight! He prayed that the floor would swallow him up — and he closed his eyes to envelop himself in darkness. In his mind’s eye, he believed he had seen Sir Harry accompanied by a bearded midget in winkle-picker shoes. But then his prayers were answered as the lights flashed off — and Tom could open his eyes again.

 

          Tom wrenched his finger away from the clutches of the desk, grimly tight-lipped; he kept himself from crying out in pain. Though the game was up, Sir Harry might assume he was dealing with an ordinary burglar because darkness, due to the glitch in the power supply, became Tom’s ally that night. Quick thinking was a necessity in Tom’s occupation and, like a flash he shone his powerful torch in the direction of Sir Harry, effectively blinding him for a precious second or two. In his hurry to escape from the room, Tom shouldered his superior to the floor, and in so doing he knocked a what-not stand over as well, with its bearded bust of someone on the top. There was no sign of anyone else in the room.

 

          Tom was out of there in the twinkling of an eye, and racing to the front door, he swung it open ... but did not escape through it. Instead he hurried to shelter in the well of the staircase, giving the impression he had fled the property. With the plan of the house etched on his mind he decided to lay low for as long as it would take — even if it meant a hour or two for the house to settle down again. He was determined to try and complete the job he was set to do. Evidence of Sir Harry Whittaker’s treachery was of paramount importance.

 

          The lights came on but Tom was safe in the shadows; his hiding-place was ideal, for he could see what was going on without being seen. Sir Harry came rampaging out of his study with a gun in his hand, and seeing the front door wide open he assumed his quarry had made a hasty exit from the house. He slammed the door and shot the bolts, little knowing that Tom was still in the house. He paused at the hall table to pick up the telephone, and hesitating for a while, he recradled the receiver. The last thing he wanted was the police all over the place, especially in his study.

 

          A hour or so later, when the house seemed quiet, Tom stirred from his not too uncomfortable hiding place once again to enter the old boy’s study. Locking the door behind him, he left his picklock in the keyhole, making it impossible for the door to be unlocked from the other side. Making sure once again that there was a window off the latch, he decided that would be the way he would finally leave the house. With the lights on, he carefully re-examined the room with a fine tooth-comb. He was sure that something was hidden in the room. Crossing to the desk again, he was surprised to see it had now been moved to butt right up to the wall. There simply had to be something hidden behind it. He determined to move it well away from the wall and was surprised at how easy it proved to be; the desk was fitted with well oiled castors.

 

          As with the various electric companies that queued up to take turns in providing the Nation’s light, Tom had a quirky feeling that his own mind intercut between different personalities. Somewhere deep within himself was the furnace of soul to be fed with the Earth’s coal. Up top there flickered a brain that could not even take purchase of whom or what he pursued — nor who or what pursued him!

 

          The desk was too light for there to be anything worthy of rifling. Too light? The words were ambiguous. All he really knew was that he was an undercover spy — yet, at the end of the day, all of us are clandestine. Never telling the honest truth, unless...

 

          Tom glimpsed the desk’s roll-top cover rolling, shimmering — and the keyhole which was the next candidate for picking. Pick-axes were the best pokers when fires needed re-igniting in the depths of Hell.

 

          The bearded bust rolled on castors against the backdrop of his consciousness, reminding him of the character who acted both as temptress and double agent in wars that crossed continents as well as time zones. The sharp-toed stilletos kicked and grazed as they careered from study wall to study wall. A wrung rope clamped in its jaws.

 

         

 

                     

 

          Sir Harry Whittaker woke in his study. Spying was a wonderful occupation — taking him into realms where even he didn’t realise who was in the know and who wasn’t. He rubbed his cold hands together as the roll-top burst into golden fire, ribbing the walls with tortured silhouettes of those who had suffered wars — without even a hole to let the gas out.

 

         

 

                     

 

          Tom kicked against the traces. He stumbled from the manhole, if clambering through the hot chimney could actually be called ‘Stumbling’. He knew he was guilty. Guilty as those he sought. Human beings, all of us. At the end of the day, even Hitler had a roll-top desk where to keep his papers and plans and ill-timed excuses for the darkness in his head. A moustachioed Mate Hari pouncing round and round her cage. Round and round the dark inside Tom’s head.

 

         

 

                     

 

         

 

          After several such fitful endings, Tom arrives back among his old haunts… feeling his way along the tops of of suburban walls now jagged-edged with some substance reminiscent of glass or flint. He had scrumped the juicy crisp apples of youth — now he leans over and feels squashier things with rank smells. And amid the spluttering of an uncertain street light, he curses...

 

          He’s sad that Mankind rots from the centre, as he manages to squint at a reinvigorated TV screen flickering from within one of the suburban boxes. He is sure it is Sir Harry Whittaker’s tiny image upon it, complete with false beard and puppet strings. Tom laughs and picks his way more confidently through many windfalls. After all, complexities are his game: complexities and broken links that can reach further than anything straightforward and whole could possibly reach. The more irregular and shattered the coal, the sooner there’s light to feed the fire!

 

         

 

         

 

         

          

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

A landscape by Constable I could take for granted.

 

A seascape by Turner, too.

 

A single painting by both artists – a collaboration – would bear a cathedral in full marine rigging, as it rose between banks or waves of wild flowers or flows or saltings or maltings or tiles or ridge tides. 

 

Torn between truth and trust in truth.

 

I dreamed this hybrid plant into existence.  Plant and machinery of dream deliberately planted within a linear flow of impossible or clandestine art.  A painting on the wall that I could reach out to touch – if the gallery-guard of dreams would allow me to get close enough to its reality.  Constable had never collaborated with Turner except along this edge of dream and non-dream.  Turner turned to me with a vicious face, waking me to his anger at being dreamed into a passably believable collaboration policed only by a sense of nonsense…

 

A joint effort he had never wanted to share.

So, he showed me his Fighting Temeraire.

He showed me, too, his bent shape

At the easel of a still-wet seascape –

The distance being widely vast,

The remains of the ship a simple mast

Upon a site of fleeing sea-bed

Rising through its own hardened head

Into runnelled landscaping rains

Pierced by turning spires and drenched hay-wains.

 

I felt the two artists within me arm-wrestle to win the canvas of vision upon which their elbows rested…

 

Until one was sunk

And the other buried

Below the haltings of seascaped land,

Leaving each just one brushless hand.

APPLIED MADNESS

Published 'Inflated Graveworm' 1997

My daughter once played in the garden below my bedroom window, a fact which makes it even lonelier - with the evenings drawing inward and her gone.

I often hear her shrill voice; then crooning over the spinning-top she once released; finally, singing songs without words into the surrendering twilight. If ghosts sing, I doubt that the living can hear the songs at all. Voices break with death - one remove from a choirboy sacrificed upon the vocal tree bark of adolescence.

I suspect these thoughts of mine are quite mad, but I cannot be certain since madness breeds more madness when re-applied. So, I raise myself from a prone to a seated position, the yielding mattress only allowing me to see under the shrunk curtains into the gathering stained light of the garden. A shape squats in the flower plot, digging with extensions of its arms. Calling out, I hope it's my daughter returned to reclaim her birthright from her father. The shape looks up with empty face and croaks.

#

I lie back in my bed. I should love my father for the life he once gave me. I smooth down my silk nightie with a free hand. But to know that one's father is the grubby critter eating dirt at the bedroom window is not something I'm glad I was born to know. So, indeed, I should hate him with all my guts for granting me existence during a single moment of unbridled passion, a passion which he clumsily fashioned with an unknown woman whom he now croaks about so pointedly from the garden.

But then again, I cannot be bothered - and simply croak back from my pillowhead of flowers.

#

"Mourning the cat, eh?" I asked, looking meaningfully at the black new moons of my daughter's fingernails.

"What cat?" she asked, absently.

"Only an expression ... for them!" This time I pointed with my own nurtured nail to indicate her slovenliness.

#

My father possessed the air of being an old man forever, an antiquity stretching back into the past, overtaking her boyhood - and now so very old, he'd never die.

"Didn't you ever have dirt under your nails, Daddy?" I asked in a moment of innocence, not as an excuse, but a diversionary tactic. The worst possibility was his fierce anger.

"How dare you even think to ask such a thing!" My father seemed half serious, tongue flickering like a lizard's, eyes reflecting the open fire.

#

As a boy, I squatted before a similar fire, if not the very same fire that had never been extinguished, during one of those days when there was very little to entertain indoors people - other than the dancing flames, the act of refuelling them, the sparks dying as they marched up the sooty chimney ... only to return to the pop-up picture-book abandoned on the armchair and desultorily resume leafing through the stiff familiar pages.

#

I examine the downward pleats of my skirt whence my knobbly knees do poke. My ankle socks seem to get further away, every time I consider the matter, to the extent that I try to convince myself that my feet are not fleeing my jurisdiction. How can they, joined as they are to my shins?

The sound at the parlour door was so quiet, I wonder if it is not intended to be a subterfuge rather than a call to attention. Words come easy to my mind, despite my age. One day I'll be given proper books worthy of my intellect. One day, too, perhaps I'll be so very old I'll be able to scold my own daughter about dirty nails. But, equally, perhaps, I'll look back at these days of coal fires and pop-up pictures with more appreciation, despite the lack of grown-up things to do.

The sound from the direction of the door has become a full-blooded noise, interrupting my nostalgia from the future - or is it a feeling for the past whilst still part of that very past? Nostalgia has so much more clarity when it is a primary source. I shrug at such strange thoughts.

#

Mr Hickbrood is the tutor I have employed to brush up my daughter's Latin.

#

I heard my father's voice from behind Mr Hickbrood as he was ushered into the nursery. I wondered if I ought to divulge some of Mr Hickbrood's habits to my father - things I hardly noticed, when he was first my tutor, but when viewed in the context of retrospective accumulation, these things assumed a sinister slant. Although I was very old for a child, I was not old enough to judge the true depth of Mr Hickbrood's darkness.

#

Now, as I sit leaning against her wickery legs, my aged daughter looks down at me as if she wants to tell me more about her childhood but doesn't want to frighten me. I'm winkling garden dirt from under my nails with a darning-needle, a task fraught with danger - as demonstrated by the need to suck off the blood-drops which well from the little finger on the left.

"Have you heard the word 'Yesterfang'?" my daughter asks me mysteriously.

I nod, not wishing to show my ignorance and tempt her anger; it was all part of my game of pretending to be a little boy, if pretending it were.

"It's from Latin, you know," she maintains, in a dark undertone, knowing that I know that Hinkbrood must have taught her such words.
I advise her to stop bothering her pretty little head with such matters and go back to the book with pop-up pictures.

#

Only much later in life, when I was as older than anybody else I knew or had known, did I regain the knowledge generated by a retrospective accumulation of previously unconsidered factors. And the day before, I looked up 'Yesterfang' in an ancient Lloyd's Encyclopaedic Dictionary, the definition of which word I learned by heart: "That which was taken, captured or caught on the day preceding." There was a quote showing the word in modern use: 'That nothing shall be missing of the yesterfang' - Holinshed: DESCRIPT OF SCOTLAND Ch. ix. Much to my anger, its derivation wasn't shown to be Latin at all. I righteously scribbled over the entry signing it with my name: Amy Hinkbrood.

#

Mr Hinkbrood will want her to stroke his cat, before long. She doesn't like to do that after it has just been digging in the flower-bed for remains of a dead frog or to cover over its own business. It even had dirt under the skin at the end of its pop-up tail. Re-applied dirt.

JACK BE QUICK

First published ‘Not Dead, But Dreaming’ 1998



Amy was woken by complete silence. By complete darkness too.

The hotel room had been lit by the pulsing advertisement sign outside. She recalled it faltering to a fitful halt, in the peculiar way one does when barely beyond the state of conscious dozing. The alarm clock had stopped ticking also: the one she had meticulously positioned on the bedside table to wake her in the morning. Also, she had reserved an early call from the telephone exchange--to be on the safe side. “Belts and braces”, as her father once said. Except the words had come out like “swaddled in rabbitskin” or something even less similar to what he had intended to say.

The blower’s dialing tone stopped purring in her head, despite clumsy sleep-drugged fingers having already dislodged it in a witless attempt to make a last minute call.

As a little girl, she had loved her father. She rarely understood what he said, although she trusted him implicitly. Even nursery rhymes like “See Saw, Margery Daw” and “Jack be Nimble, Jack be Quick, Jack jump over the candlestick” made more sense to her than his so-called conversations.

Closing her eyes, she had tonight tried the old trick of relaxing from the toes up. She forgot to relax halfway through, at the left arm--certainly before she reached the brain. The harder she tried, the more sleep seemed to slip from her grasp.

As a girl, she used to picture soporific sheep jumping over fences, counting each one backwards from a huge number like a thousand, as they caught their coats on the barbed wire...until her father came in with his strange lullabyes.

Now a grown woman, Amy’s attempts possessed more transcendental sophistication. Yet, she eventually found herself counting things which became no better than the poor little sheep which Bo Peep had once lost in another of those ancient rhymes.

On the rare occasion when Amy shared a bed with a man, counting his snores was equally useless. The separate body warmth nearby was positively counter-productive…as if territories had electric edges.

Tomorrow, she was due to attend an important breakfast meeting with some power-dressed business contacts; she desperately needed her sleep, especially after the jet lag.

She turned over to check the luminous time.

No, that could be fatal. If it was, say, only an hour before getting up, Amy would never be able to go back to sleep, with that sort of nagging awareness. She recited some of her father’s lullabyes. They often seemed to get her to sleep. But now they just seemed banal, almost crude, reminding her of things she wished were completely forgotten. They were sad, too: he had died before the future had really unfolded for his daughter.

But Amy eventually slept, amid false starts and empty cuddles, her brain like a cauliflower of snagged wool.

The darkness swirled into the shape of the Devil, tree bark as flesh and something even rougher as voice: like snores laid end to end in fits and starts of curdled articulation: leaning over to whisper in the shell of her ear that Amy’s baa-lambs were not only lost but dead--or worse than dead--and lost, too, was the business she was braced to obtain in this neck of the woods, even if she were woken in time. The voice then swirled into recognizable templates of an erstwhile miscegenation:

Baby Baby Bunting
Daddy went a-hunting...

The snoring ceased abruptly, but only a lagging split second before the clock and the telephone rhythmically trilled in useless unison...

First published 'Dagon - DFL Special' 1989

When Clive invited me to his house late one Summer to partake in a weekend of literary discussions, little did I realise...

To fill in a little background, my name is John Hope and I am well known in the field of literary Criticism, but when I say “well known”, I do not mean to imply that the man on the Clapham omnibus would con¬stantly have my name on his lips. However, speak of me at that time to any caught up in the arcane circles of London literary life and my name would be known — though I wonder if any remembered the actual articles that I had written! I am unmarried. Being somewhat shy of the opposite sex, I had been led to many a celibate nightmare, but now approaching the autumn of my days, I had grown used to the solitude of my room and books.

I rush to admit that I was often branded trampish and over-scholarly. I had even been declined entry to many a posh club in Inner London because of my dissheveled appearance. However, I was, on average, happy and, in the main, financially self-sufficient.

Clive Hunt, a life-long friend, was much richer than I. No doubt, he would have been even more trampish than myself, if he had been left to his own devices. He was naturally and all-embracingly intellectual, but a rich Aunt had cared for his physical and monetary needs. One may read what one likes into that, but I must stress that Clive was a gentleman’s gentlemen, full of the most fitting good humour, kindness and wit. Some may call it unfortunate that his intellectual pursuits could only be described as pertaining to the weird and marvellous. Under various pseu¬donyms, he had supplemented his Aunt’s income with money stemming from stories in the fantasy field.

He lived in one of those up market Inner London suburbs south of the Thames where relative peace can be found amidst the turmoil and cosmo¬politanism of life in the Eighties. Since his Aunt’s sudden death (a death which must have affected him badly, but how badly I was about to discover), I knew he would be financially secure in view of the large legacy that she must have left him. As I travelled on the tube towards his stop, I speculated on the weekend before me but, I must repeat, little did I realise ...
 * * * * *

 

I knocked on the door of the detached house, set back from the quiet avenue and encroached upon by a dense garden of unkempt ferns and weeds. From within I heard the pad of Clive’s customary slippers plodding along the parquet hall. His gait was a shuffling, shambling hop, skip and jump and, before I could appreciate the well known sounds, he opened the door...

I had not prepared myself sufficiently for the damage that his Aunt’s death had wrought on his features. His normal pallor was redoubled — a chalky visage now creased with the added years of grief. This mask attempted to grin a welcome but could only manage a sick grimace as a stiff arm raised itself to my shoulder to give it a reassuring tug. As he led me down the hall, his typical shamble was that of some half-mutilated prehistoric creature — an image that was lent some credence by the ill-kept hair straggling in greasy knots down his back ... and the grey flannel trousers mottled by stains.

I made my usual greeting and then embarked upon a speech that I regret¬ted making as soon as I had in fact made it. I berated him for his pitiful state, accused him of disgusting decay and threatened leaving at once.

“Why, man, you can actually see the bones of your skull and cheeks! Have you not eaten?”

I followed as he padded into his book-lined office. This was so familiar to me from many a previous visit, that my affection returned and recalled the occasions on which we had sat together in that very room and partook of literary discussions and recitals. I remembered a much younger Clive Hunt, fresh from some domestic skirmish with his Aunt, standing before me and reading aloud, with avid and proud intensity, from a new attempt of fantasy story-telling. The guttering lamp would flicker along the spines of the bookcase and across the juvenile lines of his face. As he came to the customary horrific climax of his little piece, he would glance up at me childishly expecting to see awe and praise in my eyes and I would smile knowingly...

As these memories hit me at the threshold of the study, I suddenly real¬ised that I had not yet mentioned the death of his Aunt. Of course, I had written to him and commiserated in the most conventional of ways but, naturally, he would expect some odd sympathy or two now face to face.

“I heard the tragic news… with such sorrow, Clive. Please don’t think me hard-hearted if I...”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got over it now. It takes time but I have accepted the fact and can only try to forget”.

I knew that Clive had had many disputes with his late Aunt but, as in all love-hate relationships, his affection for her had been deep. I took his last statement to mean that he had accepted my condolences but, forthwith, the subject was closed… so I immediately took him on to literary matters and suchlike. I tried to ignore his shaggy demeanour and also the seeming intangibility of his mood… and turned the convers¬ation to the latest Science Fiction and Fantasy he has read (or written).
 * * * * *

From that time, we spent countless hours with Clive reading aloud to me, only broken by my humorous asides, by the quickly gobbled meals and the snatched naps that replaced normal lengths of sleep.

One night, however, Clive, still unwashed and as untidy as I had first seen him, suddenly became serious. How he could have previously restrained such comments as he now made, God only knows! All I could see was that he must have been awaiting some fulcrum of events, some flashpoint of atmos¬phere, to settle on my ears the most interesting thesis. Evidently, the moment had to be right and therefore, triggered by timely coincidence, he put down the book from which he had been reading and said:

“Excuse me, John, I have been thinking. I have been thinking quite a lot since ... my Aunt’s death...”

The last words seemed to be blurted out despite the obvious grief he was undergoing. I did not interrupt but kept my unflinching eyes on his mouth.

“... You know, you have sat with me on many an occasion listening to horror stories, to my futile attempts at fantasizing ... This is all very well. It is all very wall ... but, be honest, John, it’s crude escapism! Books are just the televisions of the intellectual, little better, little worse. But — think about it, just imagine, what if our fantasizing were true? What if every little fantastic scene we were to conjure up would appear realistically before us — and we were subject to and endangered by the forces therein? Impossible, you say?”

“Nothing is impossible until proved to be”, I said in an attempt to humour him.

“And, if all this were true, how so much more worthwhile would our discussions and play-acting become. One only needs the strength of mind, the strength to dream and, perhaps, if the strength was actually greater than the strength that God or whatever force stabilizes the so-called reality around us ...”  He waved a demonstrative hand around the book-lined study as if this were the “so-called reality” of one who may be God. “.... if we could but pitch our mental strength against the forces of nature, call it what you will, we could ... say, create a door from that bookcase!”

He pointed feverishly at a bookcase filled with his favourite fantasy books, viz, the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, the multi-faceted landscapes of Clark Ashton Smith, the garlanded vistas of Vance, the ghost-trodden corridors of Algernon Blackwood.

“How apt! If that bookcase, if that particular field of semantic force were to become an opening to some vast world of horror and undreamable spectacle — how apt!”

“How can this ‘strength’ of which you speak be conjured up?”

“Simplicity itself, my dear John”. He looked askance at me as he ran his fingers through knots of hair. “Just imagine — the culmination of two minds such as ours. Also, we cannot afford to fail. We shall swear to kill ourselves if we fail — and, consequently, we shall muster the strength to dream!”
 * * * * *

Our first attempt ... was a ghastly experience. Not that we failed wholly

For several days after our first discussion about creating an opening or gateway from Clive’s bookcase, we sat and planned how such a phenom¬enon could be formulated. Primarily, we had to consider the conflux of time involved — at what point in the duration of our “seance” and for how long were we to concentrate our wills on the potential opening; how many strands of atmosphere and flashpoints of happenstance would be required to coincide before our gateway to horror and outworld spectacle would open before us; and how hard would we have to bind our trances and mutual fantasizing (too hard and we may be swallowed up forever in unchanging, unconscious nightscapes; not hard enough and we would only see thin miasmas of horror hooding the very room around us)?
Then ... Clive and I sat staring at the bookcase for several minutes, allowing ourselves to be engulfed by the mental vibrations that we were both trying to create. I cannot even hint at what was going on in our minds nor can I list the various rituals of gathering moods that we had previously engendered. Those elements were too vague, too transient and easily forgotten. All I can do is just state, as blandly as possible, the results of our first foray.

It is difficult to depict Clive’s expression for I was staring unwaver¬ingly ahead at the bookcase. However, if his nerves and tendons were taut as mine, if his eyes were round, rolling and fully exposed from the rippling cheekbones as mine, and, if his hands were fisted in pain above his vibrating knees as mine, then he must have been a tragic trance-jerked puppet.

Firstly, the bookcase swam before my eyes — the spines of the books rippled and bubbled to some obscure rhythm ... but, instead of the moving vista of watery reality becoming even more tenuous, even more diaphonous, and, finally, instead of turning into an opening or gateway... the book¬case rippled back into hard reality. I turned to Clive with disappointment greying my face and he turned to me likewise.

Then… I sniffed the air. What a shocking stench! I could only liken it to the putrid offal of some dark, forgotten canal in Venice where ghostly corpse-barges moon through the unending nights of Latin decay.
I turned again to the bookcase — and it seemed to shift in sharp jolts away from the wall. Straightaway, Clive and I rose and stepped towards the fidgetting bookcase. Together almost, we peered at the space between the now toppling case and the wall against which it had previously rested — and we saw a sight which sickened us beyond reason.

The emotional overtones are certainly indescribable. Between the book¬case and the wall was squashed the twitching carcass of some tentacular beast; its flesh was deeply pored, inflamed and haired, its lists were mottled with melded fat and stained with great warts and wriggling cancers.  It was like the half-cooked remains of old poultry — still alive and panting in sick sighs. It was knobbed and crustaceous and in each pit of limb and body was a crutch of jellified, yellgreen pus. But, the worst was its face: decked with a cock’s comb, red as blood, was the human face of Clive Hunt’s deceased Aunt!

As our minds lost their occult grasp, its form slowly faded from the room.
 * * * * *

Little by little, Clive returned to normality… he listened to my insistent comments on how it had only been a “vision”, a sure example of the success of our strength to dream. The “vision” had merely been enwebbed in some strange “afterdeath” process that had become wedged in Clive’s brain. It had to be released — this “afterdeath” — it had to be purged — this Aunt fixation — before we could progress on to the true success of our experiments.

It may be said that I should not have encouraged him to further exper¬iments. But I considered it my duty to do so. Like a rider who falls  at a difficult fence....

“Clive, it was only vision, only imagination. It was not your Aunt at  all”.  I swept my arm across his desk as if to clean away any dust.

“But, John...” His voice was weak and cracked. His appearance was even worse than when I had arrived. “We had to move that bookcase against  the wall! Mark that! That bookcase was a full ten inches from its original position...”

 “True — but there was not one stain on the carpet. Not one fleck of decayed flesh. Not even one hair. The “thing” had been realised as matter, yes. But it was vision. It did not exist. It was not your Aunt in some tortured limbo. It was not her terrified soul struggling to release itself from monstrous clutches. It was a psychosomantic, poltergeist-type image, a catharsis, a purging of your complexes and fears. We are now free to explore true vision”.

I had in fact been caught up by the idea of material vision. Clive’s enthusiastic idea had lost momentum in his mind and, instead, here I was selling the idea back to him!

About a week after the “afterdeath” monster vision, we both sat before the fateful bookcase, the same engendered stares pinned to those favour¬ite fantasy books, the same elements of time and space focussing their energies through our wills. The bubbling and rippling returned, the books doubled up, trebled up, twisted, merged and lumped into wadges of blurred image. The actual area of the bookcase, its face and front darkened like ink silting into blotting paper — and before us opened the gate…

II

He had sat there for an eternity and a half — or so it seemed to him. Perched on a boulder as large as himself, he looked above at the grey skies, heaven upon heaven of unending greyness — strangely morose and lowering. It was as if a great fall of snow was imminent — except that the atmosphere was sticky and thunderously humid. Snoi-Snep sat there as still as a contemplative statue, as he had for an eternity and a half.

Snoi-Snep was an ape-like figure — black and hairy — and his bald ebony dome rested in meditation on thick hands. He kept strong links with humanity: his eyes were mellow and deep, almost philosophical; his nose was well-shaped around dim nostrils; his limbs were those of an Ancient Greek athelete. But for the glance at the grey, lowering skies, his pose was indeed statuesque and peculiarly eternal.

The landscape was as desolate as the skies. With the exception of the boulder on which Snoi-Snep waited, the wastes around were unending shades of brown, strewn with small stones and unshaped rocks.

Waiting was religion. The depth of his eyes, the dark pools of intellect that welled there, spoke of a faith as deeply purple as the sky was deeply grey. For an eternity and a half, he had awaited the Coming of those who would lead him to a haven. He had yearned for respite from the boulder seat; some strange paradise would be the destination as those for whom he had waited took him by his black hand to lead him over the brown deserts to a lagoon of peace and rest. When his dark dome was not resting in contemplation upon his thick hands, he would be staring towards the endless horizons for those who must come.

Then, movement came! One day amongst a trillion others, one endless day amongst the endless days without night that the brown desert bore, he saw movement: two dawdling forms approached from the dim distance — and they were heading in his direction!
 * * *, * *

“Are you ready, Mr. Hunt?”

“I am, Mr. Hope”.

We both hopped into the opening, not forgetting to draw the veil of “firehearthness” across the opening to stop anybody following us.

“Yes, it was certainly a good idea to disguise the opening as a fire-hearth, but would it not have been better to replace it with the original bookcase?” I asked.

“Perhaps, Mr. Hope, but now we are in the dark and heading for the end of this godforsaken tunnel, let us not worry about that. We have visions to seek.”

When we left the tunnel, I suppose it was inevitable. Whether it was conscious or unconscious, we were flexing our imaginative muscles and the vision before us stretched endlessly to each horizon in the style of every fantasist we had ever appreciated: the mediaeval water-wells and thatched cottages of Morris; the gambrel-roofs and twisted root-bogs of Lovecraft; the strange beyond-cities of Machen; the ghostly promenades of Aickman; the werewolferine reaches of afforested Averoigne; the space-scapes and tube-effigies of Vance; the castellated sorceries of Howard, Robert E....

That vision of multiform and conglomerate fertility soon faded (as our “muscles” weakened) into the brown dunes of some mouldering, sunless desert. The original hiccough of startled fantasy had given way to inevitable insipidity — negative, Pagan, silted, waterless wastes drifting ever to the margins of our minds.

“Well, Mr. Hope ...,” shrugged the man whose study we had left seemingly ages ago.

We trudged over that brown and infinite desert. We trudged over that brown brown, as if a goal was beyond the brown or amid the brown, a goal toward which our silent symphony wended.

I glanced towards Clive, one day, and I think he glanced at me simultaneously. One realisation apiece and we knew that a strange wonder was afoot. We had been trudging brown ‘pon brown for apparently months, or perhaps years, and no sustenance had passed our lips.

“Could we be dreaming up ourselves as well as this environment?” I swept my hand across the vista as I said this.

“Do you mean to say, Mr. Hope, that not only are we fantasizing in concrete form this vile vision of endless wastes, but also ourselves in some godly form — whereby we need neither food nor drink?”

“I mean that very thing, my dear sir.”

Stylization of our speech, in this way, seemed to be the very scaffold of the vision.

It will be remembered that Clive had been dirty and unkempt during those far-off days in his South London home. Now, his visage, although pale like some effete angel, was golden-trimmed and shining. His clothes were robes of some garlanded religion — an offshoot of a peculiar Dunsany cult. His eyebrows arched like some intellectual Conan of the Spheres as he responded to my hypothesis of self-creation:

“I am looking at you, Mr. Hope. I am taking you in. You are like the hero of a romantic book. Your locks are dark. Your brows are deep and reasoning. Your lips are full and delicious. Your beard is grey-streaked with wisdom. And I have never known you different. You are you. And you were you before we started this trail of mind and inner-mind...”

“I am looking at you, too, Mr. Hunt. Your face is almost transparent, showing from within the fine vessels of silver fluid. Your garb is flowing and Christ-like. Your speech is glowing and Cicerone ... You are you. And you were you...”

There are many tales of another passenger along the way — at first unseen but, then gradually realised. Do you recall how months, or years, passed as we trudged the brown dunes of duration? We wondered whether at first our fellow passenger was nothing but a sunless shadow of one of us. Then, we knew, gradually, we were being accompanied by a negro of leonine cast. He had strange timeless tales to tell — he told of three who followed us. Of three who wished vengeance. And of those three, he was one,

His name was Snoi-Snep. We learnt, little by little, of his utter fear of himself and of his own relentless pursuit of himself in company with two creatures such as ourselves. We also learnt that those two companions were in relentless pursuit of our good selves. So, we patted Snoi-Snep on the back and pledged our support to him against himself and against those Englanders who we knew little of except their eternal quest across our own created plains and visions — for our good selves!

I tell of our flight through the visions of our favourite fantasies, pursued by an impossible possee, a deadly crew of thoughtless beings. We set up obstacles of horror behind our trail, we created every crevice and cranny of formulated fantasy to bar their way. We threw behind us pits and nets of thought, we dropped in our wake countless mazes and labyrinths of horror and supernatural, endless avenues of ghosts and monsters, unalter¬able chasms and ravines of imagination ... taking special care not to stumble back ourselves into these carefully constructed nightmares.
 * * * * * *

When .Clive Hunt and myself actually saw the three figures pursuing us across the plains of brown waste, we literally shook with fear and anger combined. How dare they chase after artists across the very canvas upon which those artists intend to paint!

We had to think quick. We had to shrug off our self-imposed tautologies and refinements to throw back defensive fantasies. Crude as they might be, unplanned and rough-edged as they definitely were, we had to think dreams — and damn quick!

It must have seemed to Snoi-Snep that we were setting up a stage, a proscenium arch, with a red, red curtain. We visualized crudely pottered puppets and amateurish scenarios. We thrust our hands into glove dolls and pulled at our tangled threads of tear-stained, jerking Pinnochios.

We pulled the red, red curtain together and, pushing those dirty devices through the various slits in its surface, we gargled frightening gutterals to fit the antics of our puppets ... and just hoped for the best. One of Hunt’s puppets was particularly effective and was the main cause of the utter rout and flight of our three pursuers...

…*******The red glare had started. At first, shafts of red light bore down from the previously dreary sky. Hunt and Hope could not tell whether they were sharp, angular shafts at regular intervals of space or if they were blurred splotches of irregular bursts of red fire. In any event, the shafts quickly spread in magnitude and blinded them with a continuous sheet of uniform fire. Brighter and brighter burned its hue. Then, out of the hinterland and mid-mysteries of its shapeless infinitude, Hunt and Hope glimpssd sharp visages of scorn. Tongues lolled carelessly from tusked openings and eyes, redder still, winked malignantly above green-snotted nostrils. Then... AUNTIE CHICKEN stepped out of the red murk and waddled as if with a broken back. She had brooded in the shittah-tree for centuries and now she yearned vengeance on those who had ill-created her. She squawked beneath her bleeding red cock’s comb and gobbled up their sucking-pig souls...******
 

We had no doubt called up our own selves, our own Destiny and Cthulhu from where it should not have left.

“I glance at Mr. Hunt”.

“And I glance at Mr. Hope”.

And we perch in the land where the corpses grow and Snoi-Snep tells us far-fetched stories for an eternity and a half.

Many aeons and worlds away, others warm their hands by the fire-hearth that burns on fuel of page on page.

Fin.

When the lady with the whistling ears saw the box pews, she automatically thought of  a library full of private-study carrels with only a sparse number of communal tables furnished between the carrels - tables which nobody seemed to use, presumably because the reading duties in this place were more than normally private and avoidance at all costs was required regarding any heads leaning too far over to pry into what someone else was studying.  However, the church was louder than a normal library, because prayer meant more noise than the brain-wrinkled approach to literature or history or philosophy would otherwise entail.  Even so, the lady with loud ears knew it was indeed a library.  So, not box-pews but carrels after all, even though the students installed therein were high-necked with the garb of nuns or of a sisterhood that required the garb of nuns even if they were not nuns at all.

As she peered closer, by skirting a few randomly chosen carrels - the wooden walls over which she managed to snoop - she discerned that the books were not being properly read, but rather catalogued after only a cursory inspection of its pages, some stuck together with substances she did not care to imagine being anything other than unfixed foxing.  However, she was soon noticed when one of her ears gave out a particularly unbecoming shriek.  Like a prayer coming back to her.

The nearest nun climbed from her chair and propped her chin on the carrel wall:  “What you doing, Madam?  Do you need any assistance?”  The shiny face scowled within the oval frame of her hood.  The book she had lately been inspecting she clasped to her chest like a Bible she planned to defend at all costs.  The Lady of Whistles tried to scowl back but was not sure whether she succeeded, because the nun evidently thought she had made quite a different facial expression.  “You should not smirk.  There is no entry here. How did you get in?”

Meanwhile, other shiny-faced nuns had emerged from their box-carrels and stood around like statuesque predatory birds. Each clasping the book they had been interrupted processing.  The first nun to have been disturbed beckoned the man standing at the door to come out of the shadows and do his job: whether it be security or negotiation with strangers or punishment of interlopers or whatever his duties entailed.  He appeared to be dressed as a circus clown, but only subtly so, as our Lady of Whistles was not quite sure whether this was the intended impression he intended to give.  He however lost no time in opening his bright lips to say:

“I spend each day climbing a mountain.  But they never let me come down.  How can I climb the next mountain, I ask, when I’m still atop the previous one?  But I still manage to climb the next mountain without having first climbed down the previous one.  How do you think that is?”

His tone of voice seemed to indicate that he blamed the intruder for whatever his predicament happened to be, not the nuns who must have really known more about his situation than they were letting on.

The lady, adjusting the ear that had earlier shrieked, asked:  “Do you jump from one to another?”

The clown grew flustered.  “Dear Lady, how does that allow me to climb each mountain.  My job is to climb mountains, not cheating by jumping from one to another.”

“Can you not climb down them, then.”

“Climb means to go up not go down,” the clown muttered, as if he himself was now questioning the nature of his own complaint.

“Hmmm… but people do suffer themselves to have climb-downs when they have been too precocious or premature in their certainties.”  The lady said this while backing away from direct confrontation with the security guard.

He, in his turn, had drifted into deep thought.  As if his whole claim to climb mountains every day would eventually entail such a climb-down as the lady with the noisy ears had suggested, in her subtle way of saying something without really saying it.

The next time he turned his face upward for communication to be renewed between them, his face was tear-stained into twin rainbows of eye-shadow.  And he recited parrot-fashion a famous extract from an even more famous book – tantamount to a prose fable that, as was gathered later, indeed <b>too</b> late, was the passage the shiny-faced nuns had all day been seeking in the books they had been inspecting.

<I>Sunniman the Scarf loved soccer.  Most of his friends, however, were rugby fans and rather looked down upon Sunniman the Scarf for his interest in soccer.  He dreamt of them strangling him with his own supporter’s scarf.  Then they hung him from it in a large tree towards the edge of the dream, where the sun was a soccer ball in the sky – until one of the friends lifted a hand and plucked it from the sky and replaced it with a sun more similar to a rugby ball.  Until God climbed down from Heaven as far as the sky and replaced it with something more suitable for Sunniman’s dream.  This was a shiny-faced orange.  But God was not alone in the sky.  There was God, also.  And God.  And God.  And, oh yes, of course, there was God.  Which made God angry as he did not find himself in the sky.  And he plucked God from the sky and replaced him with God.  And God climbed down further to see Sunniman the Scarf in the tree, his arms becoming the very branches.  And the sun grew hotter.  This was God climbing even further down to watch the others in the dream kicking Sunniman’s head like a football. The Sun had not only grown a lot hotter, but a mad hatter, too.  Got its hat on. Hip hip hip hooray.</I>

The ears were piercing as she began to climb a staircase of jutting spines (or a single spine with individual juts) towards the next geometrically impossible staircase leading down where only sense would allow it to lead up.  Tomorrow there would be another to scale.  She clasped a large book to her chest. She did despair, however, of ever reading between its lines for the ultimate truth. And, flanked by various versions of herself, she cast yet another prayer like a pager shrike into the echo-chamber of death, a death she so dearly sought so as to ease the increasingly unbearable pain in her heavy unvented head.  But nobody heard her prayers but herself. The clown was dead at his own feet.

(written today)

 

Climb Down Every Mountain (2): 

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/05/climb-down-every-mountain-2.html

 

Rhona felt the chill of the rilling moonbeams as she pushed the sash-window with a painful grind.  She closed the floral curtains.  She should never have left the bed, should she?  Yet she could not get her teeth low enough for the food otherwise.  Matron was sure to scold her.  She felt tainted by the moon, as if she were a vixen who had just eaten its young.  She managed to retrieve her note-book from under the remains of her meal and sucked the business end of a red biro...

 

A typical seaside town, one slightly posher than the run-of-the-mill versions further along the coast.  My only visit was on the occasion of a carnival, an evening of lighted candles in the park and a fancy-dress parade on the pier.  The sea attracted me most, however, where the orange and turquoise dusks were a sight to behold, with merely a hint of breeze  -  and, once upon the cliff, looking down at the strollers on the prom, I thought that the whole world's history had led to this one point in time.  The past and, indeed, the future only existed to frame this single moment: and, closing my eyes with a sigh of lashes, I sucked deep of the sea air.  My troubles gradually dissipated with each breath.

 But all good things have their ending built in.

 I have always considered myself to be part animal, part angel - the combination that made Rhona.  I wore clothes that did no justice to the shape within, sported heavy cosmetics which my face did not need and concealed my lights under such spectacles which would not have been fashionable even ten years before.

 Imagine my surprise when I sensed a stranger within my body's territory, just as I was finishing my clumsy nirvana.  I looked up at met the eyes of a woman scarcely out of girlhood.  She smiled and then lowered her head slightly as if expecting me to strike up a conversation after her first move.  She was dressed in a grey corduroy skirt, ending just below her knees, a half-length cagoule - which surprised me as there had been no sign of rain for days - and high heels that must have meant a difficult climb to this point on the cliff.

 She spoke, evidently having surrendered any hope of me taking the initiative:  "There are not too many evenings like this..."

 I nodded but still could not bring myself to speak, since this intriguing encounter had been too sudden by half, too soon in the scheme of things.  Rhona was not ready for such attentions from one of her own sex.

 The other woman continued:  "When winter winds loudly howl in chimneys, I dream of evenings like this.  The sky could not be more perfect, don't you think, makes you want to be in contact with anybody who is near..."

 I found myself studying her face, believing that the dipping sun was hiding my stare by shining off my glasses.  She was no doubt all angel: skin luminescent and features finely modelled beneath a coiling sprig of dark hair at which the sea breeze gently tugged.  And such mild eyes, belying her outspoken manner to a complete stranger such as Rhona.

 She wore her soul upon her pretty face.

 I broke from my prison of silence at last:  "I do not know his name, but that author who wrote 'only connect...' was right."

 She shook her head violently:  "The author was a fool, then!"

 And she raised the cagoule, to reveal - not the pert girlish bosom I expected nor the lace-trimmed brassiere she ought to have worn.  Where nipples should have been were the wriggling ends of blind but evidently malign cancers still germinating from within the body's incubator and striving to close the circle of their disease like a snake in search of its own venomous tail.

 I closed my eyes - in one moment of horror and grief and compassion and, even, guilt.

 I opened them.  She was gone of course.  A damp grey mist encroached upon the sea and, eventually, upon Rhona.  A solitary war plane droned and juddered in the distance.  I set off to return to my hotel, in the desperate hope I would pass a chapel where I could light a candle in her memory.  Not a carnival candle, but a holy one.  The fact that she never existed did not seem to matter.  But, by the time I reached the prom and walked amongst those late strollers with dogs and spouses, I had forgotten her.

 

Rhona stared at the red biro, shaking her head at the careless way it had been manufactured.  It blotched ink everywhere.

 

The parlour was frankly too full of my knick-knacks.  Too chintzy by half.  But I enjoyed my parlour more than I enjoyed anything.  Merely the plain sitting in the wing armchair with knitting-needles clacking among my fingers.  Or embroidering fresh antimacassars for my still dark hair to rest upon.  Or simply listening to the Home Service on the wireless, at such an ungenerous volume I could hardly make out the words of the bespoke announcers; only the chimes of Big Ben marking the top of important hours were sufficient to break the autonomy of the relentless clock's ticking from its carriage on the marble mantelpiece.  Rhona, if past her prime, was at peace at last.

 Noises in the road outside were far and few between.  The heavy velvetine curtains, which I preferred drawn tantalisingly close, particularly on purling moonlit nights, muffled any extraneous outburst from the soap-cart kids who often used my pavement as their race track.  A motor scooter or bubble car back-firing was bearable ... just.  But when the dust-carts arrived, I sat in ear-muffs, staring blankly at the wireless.  I rather resented these rough and ready men clattering uncouthly along the otherwise rather select road ... because I prided myself on never putting out any rubbish for them to collect.  Rhona, you see, was not a rubbish sort of person.

 There was one particular person I recalled, who permeated my day-dreams.  Charlie whom I had almost loved.  A person of the breed Mysterious Man: who wore made-to-measure suits, with trousers specially for a gent who "dressed to the right", as the tape-worm of a tailor had once sneered out loud whilst measuring Charlie ... in my presence! 

 You see, I was a lady who always wore high-fashion gloves whatever the occasion and, for me, Mysterious Man's attraction was the heady smell of after-shave, the jar of Brylcreem, even the cakey cylinder of Erasmic left suggestively at the edge of the wash basin.  I did not want to delve deeper into other more dubious activities nor know more than was good for me about his private areas.

 So, I pushed Charlie out of my life.  All because of a chance remark made by a bespoke tailor about some intimacy of a crutch-panel lining.  Life's too short not to have standards.

 The parlour was an audible game of Pick-a-Stix, as my needles competed with the clock.  A ready-laid fire in the grate asked for lighting, its ruffled tongues of yesterday's Daily Telegraph showing from below the meticulously arranged firewood.  I was willing to shiver rather than start a flame just for their benefit.  I feared it may remind me of what I had stuffed up the chimney...

 Despite the whining of winter winds, the soap-carts trundled outside, kept in queue by the gutters.  Those kids should soon be off for their high tea.  Meantime, their otherwise shrill voices were deadened by the curtains - as I hoped would be the incessant peep-peep of the dust-cart's reversing.

 

Rhona stared at the blots on the paper and wondered if there would be enough ink to complete the story.  It would be a shame to waste omniscience.  After all, there were few leaks in certainty.  And even fewer floods in moonstreams.

 

The Old People's Home was set back a little from the road, up a winding path between some bushes that had evidently been scorched by an out-of-control bonfire in the recent past.  I took him around the grounds and even laughed when he said it looked as if they must have had a pretty wild fireworks party that November.  Now being December, the undertent of the sky hung browny grey: soon, all would be blunted by snow.

 I was not exactly ancient.  However, senility was now particularly prevalent in those of my sex.  Scientists said it was a disease; others, less tactful, said it must be as a result of women leaving the shelter of the family home and trying to go out to work like their menfolk. 

 My visitor was in fact older than myself.  He was rather gratified to see how well I looked, compared to what he had imagined.  It was not as if I had lost all my faculties but he must have felt the saddest part was when I called him by my late father's name. 

 We strolled, arm in arm, towards the large double-doors of the Home's entrance.  He felt the spattering upon the back of his neck and, unaccountably, he began to dwell upon a memory of one of those rare white Christmases as a younger man.  I was then a mere slip of a girl, with pigtails which I often tied together across my flat chest.  I became excited about the Christmas Tree and its topmost angel.  He used to give me rides upon his knee.

 This memory made him cry, but he concealed it from me as best he could.  He guessed I could see it in his eyes.  In fact, he wondered whether I recalled those old days, when he used to be invited along to all major family occasions as a vestigial uncle figure.  I smiled, as we walked into the relative warmth of the Home.

 He tried to keep his eyes on me, so as to avoid seeing the other inmates nodding silently to each other from their armchair rafts.  The large television in the corner had a flickering image but no sound, and many of the residents stared back at it, glassily.  They thought it was the Light Programme.

 I still maintained my figure and a certain dress sense: although this may be the credit of the Home's service.  Whatever the cause, I was still a woman at whom people could not help looking twice if they saw me walking the streets - which, of course, I never did.  The skirt-length hung in tantalising pleats and folds, with a tuck-ribbon fastened at bottom-back, just above the closely-carved ankles.  My bosom and hips were graciously shapeful, if I may say so, the neck revealing the positions of the slender bones, the cheekbones high.  Despite Rhona's dimming eyes, the onsetting weather had not blunted her figure.

 I looked round at him once and then joined the ranks of the armchair brigade, to nod away the rest of the evening before going to bed.  In that one short glance, he must have read a sort of farewell which, despite its vagueness, plumbed to his tormented depths of self-delusion ... hinting in my own half-wit fashion that I still recognised the obsession in his soul ... for me.  I suppose I blamed him for my present troubles.  Something in the past hung in the air between us, something mostly forgotten.  It was as if I felt his hands on my budding breasts, even now.  He knew it would be pointless to try to convince me of his innocence.

 Having come to the conclusion that my mild eyes had not said anything at all in that last moment in the Home, he left without even giving his regards to the Matron in charge.

 Outside, the tears no doubt turned to snow upon his cheeks, as, increasingly desperate, he looked for his car.  You see, Rhona narrated parts of the story she didn't even know.  Women have more instinct, which even senility cannot change - or which senility actually engendered.  In fact, there was a wondrous wisdom about women like Rhona.

 

When she had finished writing, there was ink upon her mouth like smudged lipstick.  There were rodent ulcers travelling from the roof of her mouth to the bottom of the throat.  She glided to the bedroom window and selflessly drew back the floral curtains.  It was a turquoise summer evening, between dusk and darkness.  She felt drained by the gurgling moon but happy that death was to rid her of all the pains at last.  She looked down at her lap.  She must have eaten her own breasts.  Only puddingy tatters remained and one scabby nipple...

 Strangely, despite the change to calm weather, the wind in the chimney howled in agony.

(published 'Ah Pook Was Here' 1994)