Madame Claire inched her bottom towards me on the chaise longue. We were waiting together, based on the theory that two heads were better than one. Split the difference. Halve the elapsing time. The fact that one of us waited for something entirely dissimilar, as well as secret - well, it should have been neither here nor there. Yet, both our waits were pointless, as it turned out, since there arose another factor altogether a ghost - altering the course, not only of Madame Claire’s life and of my own, but also that of the dead person that had given it life ... a ghost that thus reflected backward with its effects as well as forwards: as ghosts often did in the old days. The eerie side-shape was more than merely a ghost, however. There was a semblance of hope, a dread, a memory, a supposition - all these things at once - tinged with a supernatural element that had more in common with basics than anything higher: God the ground exhaling an angel of air. Madame Claire nodded, agreeing with my silent description of the phenomenon. We kissed for the first time. Evidently, the chaise longue could wait no longer.


(published 'Oasis' 1997)

Too Short For A Name

He was sick of drawing triangles, parallelograms, rhomboids, trapeziums, cubes, polyhedrons in his exercise book.
Under the searing eyes of the maths teacher, who had it in for him, he drew a paranoid...

(published 'Psychopoetica' 1990)

Tom was out and about near the pier, mainly cruising. Waiting to see what would happen. Most of his friends had grown up faster than him - and he was left more or less alone in this godfearing, godforsaken, godawful town...and there didn’t seem much point in whistling along in his fashionable suit just to outsmart a series of blank-faced strangers who didn’t seem to know a good time even if it sped their way at full tilt.

Nevertheless, almost religiously, every Saturday night, Tom strutted his sharp-edged stuff down the High Street...only later to lope back up it.
He might venture into old haunts, such as the now deserted youth club - where he recalled Little Eva making a personal appearance in a past era which was truly providential compared to the tawdry present one - or the Crab and Pumpkin where old people longed for a tug at the dugs of the latest low-cut barmaid whilst lobbing darts into a cork circle and, yes, even older folk sitting around at tables of six tussling with quiz questions on sublects that tried to summon a nostalgia even for the present as well as for the provenance of some untimely erstwhile hinterland of hope.

“Who wrote the road to Hell is paved with good intentions?’ asked the questionmaster.

“Some bloke called Blake,” fluted Tom in his wake, as he quit the pub’s purlieus. This particular Saturday, there was rumoured to be a hop that only needed loungers with beerpots to stand around waiting to pluck up courage to ask loose-limbed floozies to leave their handbags and dance with them instead of each other.

Rumours in this town were worst than cancellations, though, Tom thought, as he swaggered down Rosemary Road, seeing the lights of the MAGIC CITY arcade frozen in their flickering. Indeed, the Y of CITY had gone fully out. Bingo numbers were being called by a lady’s dulcet amplifications of tone - but no-one played. Once blank-faced strangers were no longer mooching. Even McDonald’s windows had milked up and Tom couldn’t see if any customers were slowly queuing up inside. He took to loping again and reached the end of the pier. The sea was dark but perceptibly stationary. The waves looked razor-edged.

Time was when he’d have stood here in the quiff-stirring winds along with others of his kind - burping and cheering and even hopping off into the sea as a beery sort of Dare. But, now, there was silence.

Tears and waves have one thing in common. The salt.

Time hung heavy. He slipped out of his snazzy outfit and wondered if Heaven would have a Magic City, too - one where no-one played.


(published 'Monas Hieroglyphica' 1999)

It was darker towards the middle of the room.

There is no fear greater than that of a greater fear. And a fear of death is not the greatest of all, by far.

John’s thoughts fired off each other as he dreaded their eventual outcome: insanity, complete and utter.

He had been in this room since daybreak. He had woken up on the couch, having the previous night fallen asleep, he thought, in his usual bed upstairs...if indeed he were downstairs at all.

The couch was under a bay window, a wooden surface with a narrow mattress on it. Most of the daylight hours he had been snoozing between dreams. Now with dusk, he noticed that the outskirts of the room, including even the windowless walls, were shirmering with light, leaving the central rug between the fireplace and the bay window in shadow. Not only shadow, but an almost tangible sooty mist rising towards the ceiling.

With growing horror, he realised that the dreams need not have been dreams at all, but merely what he feared most: the onset of insanity.

Then cane the big doubt, the one flaw in his line of argument. His mind flooded with mental fire, as he grew less confident about the nature/demarcation line of dream and insanity. Then, of course, there was that first rogue force called reality which feeds from both dream and insanity and then calls itself sanity for convenience (or just for the laugh). He felt more than a little confused, without properly understanding that the degree of his confusion was affecting all his senses, not only that of thinking. He smelled awful. He tasted his own dead body. He saw nothing but his own eyeballs slowly revolving in their sockets, with all the scratching at the window to get in. He touched the top of his head and felt a gluey substance instead, which action in itself seemed to cause other senses to be worse affected. The darkness in the middle of the room disappeared from sight.

John woke up in his usual bed upstairs, having slipped peacefully through a dreamless night, a beauty sleep to end all beauty sleeps. But it was still very dark outside.


(published ‘Midnight In Hell’ 1991)

Bricken Hall was the large house on the hill, during Michael's childhood. He sometimes half-looked up at it from the school playground, never questioning its presence and, as time continued, barely noticing it at all.

Like all towns where people are raised, he took many of the landmarks for granted, however they might have appeared to strangers - the quirks and nooks, winding alleys, architectural peccadilloes, long walls without entrances, squares with fountains amid the odd statuary, and the line of terraced houses where Michael himself had been chosen to live, with stylish out-jutting windows and carved ornamentation more akin to gargoyles than one would think typical of the Utility Years.

But he never really noticed anything at all. He played at being a steam-train along the lines in the pavements, as he wended the familiar course to school. Sometimes he decided that the blue-mottled paving-slabs meant death, so he had to hop over those for fear of his very existence (albeit a tenuous existence at the best of times). Then he reached Temperance Street where, if he had only realised it, the school was itself an architectural peccadillo, with it squat priapic bell-tower, endless red-brick walls, and two playgrounds, one for boys and the other for those who were at that time a mystery to him - they were called "girls", but that was all he did know, other than the fact that they seemed to dress differently - and teachers with pea-brain whistles, looking older than they really were either because of the strain of the job or the comparison with Michael's insultingly young age - and playtime when he had to pinch his nose for fear of the ripe stench in the Boys Lavatory, followed by games such as Denno and chants of "fight! fight! fight!", whereupon a teacher arrived breathless from the affrays Michael later learned took place within the sanctuary of the staff-room, to tear apart, limb from limb, those ruffians partaking in a catspit scrap, and other games, yes, like flicking cigarette cards so they flew off as bodiless helicopters into corners of the playground where, on different occasions, he sometimes sat with a crony or two debating the nature of existence (however tenuous) and whether "girls" had willies.

Those were the best days of his life. The horror was he could not later remember them with any degree of clarity. But, presumably, he did not need reminding that, one day, upon emerging from the Boys Lavatory, deeply inhaling the comparatively fresh air of the playground, he had looked up for once at the large house that stood on the hill. Bricken Hall, they called it. A teacher, during Gym that day, whilst the brawnier boys dragged the thick bristly exercise-mats from the bike-sheds and the weaker morsels toted the bean-bags from the Boys Lavatory, told Michael (as, the teacher said, Michael was the only trustworthy one), that Bricken Hall was haunted. Michael stared back quizzically, not speaking, for he hardly ever opened his mouth (except to nourish his tenuous existence with food) and, inretrospect, that was probably why the teacher trusted him so much. In later life, Michael could still see him, standing there, staring at Michael's three-quarter length trousers, which demurely hid his knobbly knees. The teacher's eyes were blue and younger than the other teachers. His horn-rimmed spectacles reflected Michael's own face twice over...

For several months after that, Michael was intrigued by Bricken Hall. He began to notice it more and more. He went to the library to read up about it, searching archives of local history, questioning the spinster type who stared into space at the front of the reading-room. She told him more things than any of the books could tell him. The books were more concerned with the personalities that had passed through the annals of the Town Hall (which, Michael supposed, if you had the time, would itself prove to be quite an interesting building to study, with its Gothic clocktower and yet unrepaired war damage). It was perhaps because he remembered more about facts when given to him by word of mouth (the eyes saying as much as the lips), that he literally ate up the sounds, recompensing in due course, he hoped, for his own silence. She knew what he needed to know, without really being asked. She must have read it in his face like an open book.

She said that parts of the Temperance Street School were older than Bricken Hall. Its bell-tower was, in itself, the oldest part of the whole town. And from the boys' playground (and no doubt the lavatory, too) had emerged some of the world's leaders, such as Disraeli, Cromwell, Churchill, Thatcher and so on. Michael ate it all up.

But, when he heard about Bricken Hall, his mouth gaped open and stayed like that for days afterwards. It had ghosts, true - many had seen them. Not only that simple fact, it had actually been built to house the ghosts that already populated the once bare hill.

"What sort of ghosts, I hear you ask me," she continued (and he later could not recall what she had said precisely with that strange Welsh underlilt). "They came from all walks of reality, but the ones that linger most are literary. E.F. Benson stays locked up in the room in the tower, scribbling social comedies. M.R. James even today sits in its bookroom, illuminating clues upon all the fly-leaves, sometimes confiding with Carnacki who has recently taken to roosting up one of the chimneys. H.P. Lovecraft has left to go to a better place, but he has abandoned many of his more striking creations in the shuttered attic, where lesser monsters dare not go. Matthew Gregory Lewis ponders on why his Nun was bleeding and his descendants such crass people. Sitting in the kitchen polishing the silverware of his dreams, is one with a remarkable resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe..."

She rhythmically intoned the last name, almost too low for a woman to reach. None of it then, as later, made any sense to Michael, but it was all so perfectly mysterious; each word fell into place like a massive jigsaw that would keep him busy for at least a decade of Christmases.

#

He could not remember ever noticing Bricken Hall again. The teacher who had drawn his attention to it was never seen again. There was a rumour doing the rounds in the Boys Lavatory that he had been sacked for venturing into the "girls'" playground "out of season", as it were. Michael never even again noticed the hill upon which Bricken Hall had sat. Life took on a new urgency, speeding up, doing things to his body that he feared he would never understand. Events leapfrogged. Exams seemed all-important, for he wanted to follow in the footsteps of the famous Old Boys of Temperance Street Juniors.

He became older and, he hoped, wiser. He thought he had left that town far behind him, both in mind and body. The image of Bricken Hall did not cross his thoughts for all these years of helping his own children winnow the impossible jigsaws from the rest of their lives. But then I came to haunt you, Michael, with memories, memories which you perhaps hoped had slipped away beyond recall. I was a ghost from the unchangeable, if forgettable, past, bringing it all back with me like the black lace train of a funeral dress. I had come to teach you that the past was all-important and should not be filed way in that forgotten drawer which was full of old childrens' clothes. You should have riffled through the old yellowing photographs that your eyes once snapped - such as the reflections in a pair of glasses. I was to renew the mysteries of the opposite sex which, at the best of times, you never really plumbed. I was to show you how to tread fearlessly on the blue-mottled paving-slabs. So, whatever you might have done and was still to do, Michael, I was surely destined to live an existence (sometimes shy and tenuous, sometimes neither) in the shuttered attic of your brain.

Michael looked up for the last, and perhaps first, time and saw a shape waving from the top of a bare hill. He however barely discerned the glint of its glasses in the setting sun - or was it the naked sparkle of its tearstained eyes?

Published ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ 1994

“I think, deeper than memory, there is something indefinable which triggers us into a perspective and a hopeful leg-up towards recapturing the past. For example, I have had wide experiences over the years (many tears and laughter) but very little seems now to be directly accessible; yet upon an ‘event’, I can often nod sagely and recreate ‘memories’.”

They were the first words of the body which I was inspecting for possible habitation. Its selling-point.

‘Vacant possession’ I understood it to be, if one employed the old parlance of Real Estate … vacant, of course, except for the thought expressing itself in this way of speech. I decided to query the paradox. Yet, naturally, the party selling the body for habitation was the body itself. Unless houses or other similar properties had become autonomous, they had always needed a third party for any transactions to be viable.

Which reminds me – years ago, before I can even remember, I was indeed a house; my bricks a jigsaw of my boneless skeleton; my roof a hot tin one; my chimney a vestigial stand for aerial spokes and unwanted thoughts; my rooms the soft spaces of the heart … and the ghosts simply emotions that made me the me I was.

I screwed up my face in a surrogate scowl. I was rather bemused by the unspoken concepts that had seamlessly derived themselves from the initial pattern of speech. “Soft spaces in my heart?” I laughed. I had a big heart.

Laughter is never the laughter that laughed last. Torn from my throat like soot from a chimney.

Legged-up into the flue from the hearth’s grate, I blamed the old days for my predicament as a child sweep. Someone, though, was sweeping down the other way. Someone or something.


(Published 'Not Dead, But Dreaming' 2001)

The park was surrounded by silos and gleaming metal pylons, with puffs of electric-blue smoke escaping from the enormous silver canisters which floated in the metal-grey sky.

“Didn’t you know I was coming?”

“If I did, I would not be here, would I?”

“I don’t know how to take you, Parket.”

“Take me how you like, Sprake, but do not read any meaning into my words, because I guess I am not even talking to the likes of you.”

Sprake squinted quizzically at his companion on the park bench. The opening gambits were expected to be tentative, feeling their way towards less insubstantial statements fitting for a Summit Meeting between dossers.

Parket wielded an empty whisky bottle, at which he looked wistfully from time to time. His dowdy clothes, which had not even seen better days in the best of times, belied his well-spoken, rounded-out articulations of speech. His brief had been merely to test the ground, since the man called Sprake may have been shrewder than given credit for. When the world teetered on the balance, not even half chances could be taken.

Sprake carried a brief-case, evidently brand new, in real calf leather, with his own embossed initials. Taking a gold key which was tied to the string around his waist, he inserted it into the lock and, after hiding his fumbling with the combination numbers, he opened it with the sound of falling domino trip-tumblers and the crack of fresh-cured leather.

Parket noticed that Sprake’s garb was an army greatcoat, stinking of mothballs even out here in the cold air and veritably green with well-seasoned mould. His tie seemed as if it had not been unloosed for at least fifty year or more and his shoes, if they had once reflected the beaming faces of children in the polished uppers, were now hidey-holes for scuffed demons...

“If you’re not talking to me, what’s all this bother then in actually moving your lips and letting noises out?” weasled Sprake.

“Good heavens, man, do not take what I say personally,” laughed a perky Parket.

“I cannot hold with such high-faluting talk. I’m a man of means.” Sprake moved his oily hair from in front of his eyes as if he were shutting back the cover of a book.

“I do not doubt it, Sprake.”

Sprake had never considered Parket doubting it, so he wondered why the other dosser was making such a song and dance about not doing so. He rummaged in the briefcase and, after a period of heavy tutting, produced from it a scroll done up with red sealing-wax and a ridiculously large bow of blue ribbon.

“You know wot I have here?”

“I do not doubt it, Sprake.”

Sprake appreciated the non-sequitur: “Well, supposing there may be some doubt, Parket, I’ll put it on the record...”

“No need, no need.”

Unknown to the two dossers, several other faces were dodging in and out of the old park rides nearby: grimy, unsmiling, pointy faces which leant forward to tease out at least some clue as to the words passing as a real conversation. A lot seemed to hang on this meeting, more than the individual importance of the two participants added together.

“This here is a charter.” Sprake pronounced the word “charter” with care and some pride. “A charter for world peace". He elongated the vowel in such a way as to give a further meaning to the word “peace” which it really could not support unless he mistook it for a different word altogether.

Parket was not to be out-done by surprise props (even though his own prop was already out in the open). “And do you know what this is?” He pointed to the empty whisky bottle which did not bear any label or sign of identification other than its glass and characteristic shape.

“A bo.. .ttttel.” Sprake accentuated the consonant to show he had breeding (and no favouritism towards vowels).

“Not just a simple bottle, Sprake. It is an *empty* bottle - and you do not regularly find many of these about, do you? You will have to go a long way to find an *empty* bottle. Full ones are two a penny.” Parket pointed at the surrounding electric pylons hung with what appeared to be bottles of fizzy lemonade.

“An emptttty bo...ttttel, then.”

“Yes, Sprake, this is the emptiest bottle you will ever see. Never has there been an emptier bottle.”

The prying faces had now been joined by the broomstick bodies they owned and were grouping nearer to the park bench, many of them straining to hear the fateful, if haphazard, words.

Parket continued: “Give me that charter and I will put it inside the bottle for safe-keeping.”

“Let me see your Kree-Denshalls...”

“In the beginning there was the Word. At the end, there were merely Credentials.” It was almost as if Parket were making it up as he went along.

“You reeeelly are him, then? I didn’t believe it, but you are him, no mistaking.” Sprake had not wanted to appear ignorant of any passwords or codes and handed the charter to Parket who forthwith threaded it into the narrow neck of the bottle, surreptitiously leaving just a tab of ribbon poking out. The pointy faces were now so close they lurched like puppet-heads on poles between the co-conspirators.

After shaking hands, Parket walked back along the path which wound between the pylons and silos towards the park gates. Sprake remained sitting and, with a further crack of new leather, snapped his brief-case shut with a flourish. He lay down on the bench using the brief-case as a pillow and snored himself to sleep. It had been a hard day. Working towards world peace was very tiring.

Even Sprake had forgotten that the *real* charter was still in his brief-case and the cleverly crafted duplicate was now in Parket’s empty bottle. If Parket discovered this trick, which he must when the future dictated, there would be Hell to pay. But it was all worthwhile: for the sake of just a little quiet, a little peace to snooze and forget the troubles of the world about him.

Even in his sleep, he was sure he had taken out the right charter from the briefcase. How could *anyone* doubt it?

The faces on broomsticks spoke, each with a line from a conversation yet to be held, or never to be held, or was held once in a different past to this future.

“Do not doubt it, Sprake, do not doubt anything.”

“Each of the two charters was a replica of the other one except perhaps for the words inside.”

“You know what was written on the charter, Sprake.”

“Mere figures of speech but I forget exactly what.” Sprake often spoke to himself when asleep.

“But we thought you were a man of means, Sprake.”

“Right on, I always mean what I *do* say, even if I wonder sometimes whether I meant what I *did* say.”

“You’re a man of impeccable credentials, Sprake.”

The snoring grew louder as the parkland darkened. The scarecrow shapes, now fat with shadow, shambled off to see if they could find Parket.

In anger, Parket threw the empty bottle at the nuclear power station complex into which the land had long since grown, hoping for a lucky (or, better still, unlucky) strike.

He had time, however, to fold the blank charter into a ship shape and launch it upon the viscous meniscus of radioactive slurry which the park’s paddling pool had already become. He did not notice the lolly-stick children launching toy tanker-boats from its margins, amid pointed laughter.

Parket had been wrong since at the last the world lacked credentials.


(Published 'Alternaties' 1993)

“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.