MAPS OF TIME

by Scott H. Urban and D. F. Lewis

          There was nothing in the morning to set it aside from any other, no hint of a demarcation between the many thousands which had come before and which Owen now entered -- irrevocably, irretrievably embarking on an existence-altering odyssey that would leave him markedly changed from the not-much-more-than-primate status he enjoyed at its outset.  Rising, scratching patchy chest hair; shaving, rinsing grey stubble down the drain; dressing in the suit meticulously laid out the night before -- it was all so routine, so mind-numbingly pedantic that he negotiated his flat in a state that could only marginally be called 'consciousness.'  He did not turn on the radio or the television, he did not look at the paper, and no mate chattered in his ear.  He was insulate, effectively cocooned in a room-wide layer of white noise which he did not even disturb with the spoon-stirring of his tea. 

          A short time later, he pushed a bowler atop his brow and hooked the crook of an umbrella over his arm.  He glanced up at the sky just long enough to ascertain it wasn't raining nor likely to do so on his perambulation, then set off for Threadneedle Street.  Papers, numbers, and columns would face him all day long, and if he were lucky, he could get through it without having to endure more than two or three face-to-face conversations.

          He had strolled perhaps two-and-a-half blocks when it happened.

          The ground in front of him -- most of the sidewalk and a foot or two of the road beside -- gave . . . collapsed . . . fell in.  Without a warning rumble, without a sub-audible quake, seemingly without reason.  The implosion produced a chasm perhaps fifteen feet across, almost perfect in its unique circularity.  Looking straight ahead, Owen would have walked right over the edge of the precipice had he not seen an elderly woman with a tragically- coiffed poodle drop directly out of his line of sight.  As it was, he still nearly stepped into the gulf, since he continued walking while trying to puzzle out what might have happened to her.  When he looked down and stopped himself short, he was a mere six inches from the verge of the pit.

          It produced only the third or fourth start he had experienced in his life.

          Raising one eyebrow, Owen stepped forward so that he could see into the abyss.

          Owen thought her name was Rachel Mildew.  That was what it sounded like when he helped her out, leaving the forgotten poodle to remember itself.  Owen was too caught up in his own routines to appreciate the implications of why this woman looked less old when seen close-up than at a distance -- with her milky-grey glasses and the unexplained single eye-patch underneath them.  His father had died the year before, and the house seemed empty without him and it seemed that any odd-bod picked up off the street was a good idea as a stop-gap.  Nothing, however, changed his feelings for his mother, the one who had once bounced him on her knee and told nursery rhymes together with tales of flower fairies and of poodle-dogs drowning in wells.

          Rachel Mildrew bought him an atlas.  That's what it was all about, at first -- the atlas.  Rachel had a bee in her bonnet about presents having to be educational.  Even Christmas ones.  But, that atlas looked swish in its glossy covers, with each political/financial area shaded in a pretty pastel colour, and the relief maps having swirling contours of variegated brown.  The countries' names were full of mystery and adventure.  This made Owen think there was more to education than met the eye.  He mooned over the various maps during the long hot summer evenings when he was put to bed far too early.  Not only were other people younger, but also so was his very own self.  His bedroom was in fact a solace, the wallpaper depicting various breeds of poodle pups.  He really felt cosy there.

          He never guessed at that time that most of the countries in the atlas would disappear in the then unforeseeable future.  But it served a very useful supplement to his trusty stamp album and he was indeed amazed why such a small place as Monaco produced outlandishly big postage stamps.  And Andorra, San Marino, Saar and British Honduras were seen in context for the first time.  He even began to like Rachel Mildew for her gift.  And his bowler hat had begun to fit bigger heads than his.  His habits, other rituals.  His job vacancy filled by other voids.  Threadneedle Street sown with empty souls not holes.

          Sometimes, late at night, Owen would opem both the atlas and the stamp album side by side on his kitchen table.  He would locate the corresponding pages in each volume.  He would practice enunciating the exotically tongue-twisting appellations:  Sri Lanka, Tierra del Fuego, Papua. . . .  He would run his hands over the atlas pages, as if by some psychic telemetry he could drink in a vast and distant culture through his fingertips.

          He could never be completely certain, but there were times when he swore he turned to pages in the atlas that had not been there the night before.  He wondered, perhaps half fatuously, if God were magnifying the circumference of the globe, thereby increasing its surface area.  If so, new countries simply had to occupy that space (no longer was any square inch of the earth not someone's), and their boundaries, obviously, must be reflected in the atlas.  He would bend his head to the newly invented pages, scanning for clues, but usually he could not tell where exactly these novel territories were located.  He knew about the break-up of communist Russia and had heard that there were scores of little splinter countries spun out of that debacle.  He had heard their names, once upon a newscast, and none of these names corresponded with his memories.  How could he have missed these in -- what?  fourth-form geography?  Perhaps a new continent had sprung up in the last five years, and he simply had not heard about it?  He supposed it was possible.  After all, Rachel Mildew walked in and out of his life, and if he allowed that, anything was, indeed, possible.

          One night, seated at his table, hunched over like a scribing monk in a cloister, he scanned one of the intrusive pages in the atlas.  It presented a country whose name was an improbable, unpronounceable combination of consonants, full of X's and Q's and Z's, without a vowel in sight.  Where was this land?  Who dwelt here?  Why couldn't he recall this name?  Surely something so alien would have stuck in his memory.  Why did he have this vague sense that somehow he was connected to this locale, although he could not recall hearing about it ever before?

          "Pick it up," directed a high-pitched voice from behind him.

          He had not known Rachel was present in his flat, but the fact did not disconcert him.  She seemed to come and go at whims known only to herself; he did not even know how to begin to investigate them.  Her clipped words, however, threw him; she was rarely so direct.

          "Please say again?" begged Owen.

          "Pick up the atlas."  She came and stood slightly behind him, to the right.  She smelled faintly of lavender and unopened closets.  "Hold it on the sides.  Good boy.  Now, bring the page up close to your face.  That's right.  Go on.  Closer still."

          Owen frowned.  "But . . . to what end?" he sputtered.

          Rachel shushed him like an impatient schoolmistress.  "Touch your nose to the page.  Yes.  Now close the covers against the sides of your face.  That's right.  Harder.  Keep going."

          The bulk of the book had closed out the light.  What an exercise in silliness, Owen thought; why am I shutting my face up in an oversized map?  He fully expected the covers to warp, molding themselves to the contours of his head, and yet, his skull seemed to have no substance.  The front and back covers were slowly yet inexorably meeting in the space where his bland visage should have been.  Owen the Threadneedler was gone and I was here in his place.  In his geographical stead.  His thoughts and acts of physique merely contours.  Mine a spine.  A backbone of mountains stiffening an otherwise imaginary land called Mind.

          I was soon due to become a soldier and Rachel had been tearful for months before this, but, in retrospect, she was not upset by my imminent departure from home to risk my life for a mere splodge of colour in my dog-eared atlas.  I was glad to get away, however.

          The train trundled through the Home Countries.  Several other khaki shapes were slouching in the corridor, cigarettes glimmering, talk kept to a minimum.  I had been lucky to grab a seat at Hemel Hempstead and so was able to mull over my childhood atlas (my only memento of home).  It was not detailed enough to trace my current route, so I was already several days ahead of myself in the more mysterious parts beyond wide seas which I was to experience for the first time in the flesh.  It was all very well hearing about such places on the wireless, but I knew, deep down, that seeing would be no more than half-way towards believing.  The faded photographs in ancient school text books were often worse than useless, because the colourful people in them had long since disappeared, with the places themselves transfigured beyond any recognition.

          Even history lessons I had taken with a pinch of salt.  All those crazinesses of mankind would have indeed explained the equally ridiculous configurations of countries shown in my atlas:  all shapes and squiggly sizes, sometimes with no rhyme or reason at all.  Even considerations dictated by physical, as opposed to political, geography appeared to be ignored.  I laughed out loud when I thought of a jokke about a frontier-post that was bent and skewed by the constraints of the boundary it marked.  The lady opposite me in the carriage stared coldly at my outburst.  She was old but not too old to be a target for my blossoming passions.  But she was not a patch on Rachel Mildew.

          The war was long and hard, with no sweethearts.  Indeed, I returned home in a modicum of glory.  The village had strung a banner across the main street saying "welcome home" with my Christian name appended (which was a great honour, no doubt, despite being slightly misspelt).  I still had the atlas.  It was still dog-eared, even poodle-tailed -- and many of the countries I had been privileged to visit persuaded me that its maps were nothing but a sheer fantasy world.  I had been a gullible fool to believe any of it.  Still, it had nostalgia value, if nothing else.

          My childhood home had moved down the street from its original site.  But this was not definite, with all the terraced houses having identical walk-in parlours from the street.  Television aerials had sprouted on nearly every chimney, giving an anachronistic modern feel to the area.  I dreaded, however, it might turn me back into a bowler-hatted Threadneedler.

          Meantime, I was proud of myself -- having done my little bit to change the world.  Or was it to preserve the world?  Yet I needed to weep upon discovering that Rachel had hung different wallpaper in my bedroom:  a complicated design of flower fairies that now held very little interest for me.  Indeed, I discovered that ennui, turpitude, had become my new nemesis, for there seemed to be nothing I could focus my attention on any more; I paced the ground floor endlessly, hundreds of ambitious designs and grandiose plans swirling above my brainpate, but none of them settling long enough for me to seize and act upon.  Increasingly revolted at myself, I found myself pick, pick, picking away at whatever was in the immediate vicinity -- the edge of the coffee table, the wallpaper beside the doorjamb, my nose -- inane, vacuous idiosyncracies I once despised in others and now could not bring myself to curtail.  Cur.  Tail.  Dog's end.  Yes, I suppose that was how I sometimes thought of myself.

          Rachel was there less and less, an evanescent presence that barely seemed to register even when I knew she was in the house.  Is this how ghosts come about?  Individuals' auras, their ambience, simply tenuously attentuate out toward nothingness. . .

          Some day or some century I sat on the hassock, rocking back and forth as mindlessly as an autistic child, flipping the pages in the hardbound atlas, reaching the end only to begin over again, almost as if the book were cylindrical, an ouroboros serpent, its mouth enveloping its anus, and yet, and yet, at one point that was different from the others, I noticed a variation, a novelty, a page or actually a two-page spread that I knew had not been there before (and who was printing and slipping in these pages, even as I held the volume in my hands?).  The new land was huge, covering both pages, seemingly larger than any three other continents combined; its name was MORTUIS and its capital ABBADON; the colour selected for its depiction a disturbing puce unused anywhere else in the atlas. 

          Although no one gave me instructions, I knew what to do:  I placed the open book on the floor, planted one foot firmly on each page, and slowly arose.  As I did so, elevating myself to my full height, so too did this land spread out like a swelling stain from the atlas, the puce-coloured countryside blotting out the old homestead, my merry village, and all of the green and pleasant land; instead of me going to MORTUIS, I had brought MORTUIS to me (or perhaps we compromisingly met on some plane inbetween).  I licked away ashy dust from my upper lip and scanned a horizon marked only by stunted shrubs that bore no fruit.  I wondered that I could see at all under a sky so overcast as to be no brighter than a bomb shelter, yet I also understood this was full midday and would never be otherwise. 

          An apparition appeared and neared.  It might have taken a year to draw close enough to recognize.  The milky-grey glasses and eyepatch identified Rachel Mildew, although there seemed to be precious little physical mass remaining beneath the stringy remnants of what had once been a dress.  I entertained fantasies of flight, but somehow I knew this was a closed universe, endlessly looping upon itself:  I would reach the border only to begin all over again.

          Rachel reached down and grasped the hem of her draping rags.  She lifted up the material to reveal the gaping cavity where her heart once lodged.  "Put your fist inside me, O Doubting Owen," she commanded.

          Then I knew it was time to be gone.  I flitted away from Owen the Threadneedler, as he would be becoming an emissary for representatives of Those who sat even behind the Movers and the Shakers.  Dei gratia.  I feel nothing but love and gratitude.  With sparrow's wings, I beat against the tangible arc of the sky and search for egress, Sisyphus-anew.

          "A Thatcher God threads the straw -- weilding a huge heavy-duty

          needle against the rain's islands of Spain on the roof of your

          brain.  Earn a lot, own a lot, die in pain."

                   - Rachel Mildeyes, Tails, Dots and Other Archipelagos

NOT EVEN IN LEGEND a collaboration with Anthea Holland

In the darkness of the moonless night it was impossible to make out the contours of the trees and overhanging branches scratched my face at every turn.

I cursed to myself as I made my way indoors, and wondered at the foolhardiness of venturing into the garden without shoes or cloak of some description.

            It hadn't, after all, been the cat I had heard or, if it had, the creature had quickly made its escape.  I had been on a fool's errand anyway, trying to follow a cat in the pitch dark. 

            I let myself in the back door and decided Montague would have to spend the night shut out in the cold after all.        

            As I went to close the door behind me I heard the noise again. This time it came from the direction of the conifer bed to the right of the path.  It was a small noise; I was confident that it was made by an animal rather than a human being or I would not have ventured forth in the first place, alone as I was tonight. 

            The darkness was absolute apart from a tulip shaped area where the light spilled out from the open door.  Suddenly I remembered the torch, which hung just inside the cellar door.  We hadn't got round to fitting light in the cellar yet and the torch was necessary to stop us from tumbling down the worn stone steps. 

            I hurried through to the kitchen, the stone slabs cold on my bare feet, and opened the wooden door to the cellar.  As usual, the smell of damp, musty earth assailed my nostrils and I felt my throat close in protest.  I grabbed the torch and gratefully closed the door on the darkness, glad of the modern fluorescent light in the kitchen. 

            Did I really want that torch to reveal more than what I had assumed to be nothing worrying?  It felt cold in my hand and, despite its steady usherette’s beam, seemed somehow dark, as if it had fed off the darkness of the cellar where it had been kept.  An object for lighting, yes, but one that had soaked up all the damp impenetrability of my cellar, a cellar that must have been like death itself when shut and untenanted. 

            The torch, however, played its rightful part in uncovering a path towards the thing that had shifted in the conifer bed.  I forgot that I had earlier seen a shape darker than the surrounding darkness, a hunched mound that pulsed, twitched, blinked … if pure darkness could blink … until, now, the power of my unwavering torch dispersed the surrounding shadows.  It was not Montague, my cat - thankfully, not this the sole companion in my own encroaching benightedness of life.  It was more something Montague might have attacked and left for dead, despite it being twice the size of my dear pet.  An overnourished rodent.  Or a crippled crow of even greater disproportion, one that had chosen to attempt an ill-timely flight on the stubs of night-shrunk wings.
            I stepped back in disgust.  I hated dead things.  Having run the gamut of birds and rodents of all descriptions when Montague had been a younger and more active feline, my stomach had heaved with each tiny body that had been presented to me with pride and disposed of with revulsion.

            But this was no ordinary road-kill.  Surely this - whatever it was - ­would have got the better of Montague, not the other way around.  Perhaps, though, the cat was even now breathing its last in some dark-ridden corner of the garden.  I called again.

            "Montague, where are you?" My voice sounded loud in the stillness of the night.

            In the conifer bed something stirred.  Did the thing I thought had safely beaten a retreat to its maker in fact still possess a heart-beat?

            The torch suddenly blinked out.

            I was in such utter darkness, even the powers of the real King Arthur could not have blown any residual smouldering coals of his own legend into the full-blooded fire of border warfare.  Montague had been a descendant of King Arthur’s own brood of special kittens – the ones that had scratched and clawed (if playfully) at the Round Table itself.  I was convinced of this.

            Thus, unseeing, I listened with the prickiest ears known to humankind.  I smiled.  I could not fear anything when I knew what lurked nearby to defend me from other lurkers.  I felt Montague rub against my calf.  I bent to stroke him down to the hardening tail.  He seemed … familiar … yet with the uncharacteristic mews of some pathetic or plaintive plight.

            I struggled with the torch which seemed to have come alive in my fist, despite its outright defiance to re-illuminate itself.  I sensed it throbbing like some science fiction ray gun.  The cellar was evidently some powerhouse which had charged the torch with more than just the ability to show someone to his or her seat in a picturehouse.  It had become a weapon.  I was surely being cared for by the strongest authorities of both depth and height.  The hinterland of history itself was behind me …

            My mind flew to other things that were kept in the cellar - long forgotten things many of them - confined to the safety of the dark.  But if the cellar contained powers to bring inanimate things alive - as it seemed to have done with the torch, what would it have made of the dead bodies that had been disposed of there?  I shivered at the thought of what I might have been living above; King Arthur himself would not have wished to meet such fearsome beings, even with his glorious knights.

            The thing in the conifer bed stirred again and Montague growled at my feet.

            "Hush!"  I bent down and stroked him, his fur seeming whole and wholesome against my fingers.  No signs of injury, I was relieved to note.

            But what was I to do about the thing in the conifer bed?  Revolting though the thing seemed, I was reluctant to leave any living creature to a slow and lingering death and yet the torch, which still jumped and twitched in my hand, seemed unable to cast light on my problem.

            Hey!  Something abruptly dawned on me.  My homeless brother – who had been terminally ill for years – wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my mind.  Yet, why, from the conifer bed, did I transfer that mound (which even now, in retrospect, grew bigger by the minute) into my image of my brother in his salvation army billet.  A lumpen near-corpse, kept alive so that someone could merely gain satisfaction from the act of nursing him.  They might as well have ‘put him to sleep’, like some sorry pet, rather than prolonging his life as care fodder …

            There was a long-forgotten legend about the ancient King Arthur himself.  He was kept alive beyond his usefulness, simply because the border armies needed him as a figurehead, someone for whom to fight tooth and nail.  Little did it matter that he had almost always been a sorrowful sack of sighs and embolisms.  Many had knelt beside his bed, candles aloft, in vigil for his persistence as a symbol.  A Christ figure that required no icon other than himself.  No cross to bear.  Merely his frame, upon which bone-sculpture his flesh was stretched like a tent. 

Aptly, too, my brother’s name was Arthur and, instead of candles, we, his family, often criss-crossed torchbeams like revolving Second World War defences against the Luftwaffe, as we mustered round his pauper’s bed every year, come December.  Except I’d been unforgiveably absent from this ritual now for at least ten seasons of Yule.

Could it be …. No, surely not!  I shook the torch angrily, keeping a tight hold on it so that it didn't jump out of my hands in its wild attempt to liberate itself.  Still the light that shone from it was selective, shining only where it wanted to shine.  In the centre of the beam - where the thing was, there was only darkness, an ungiving, unforgiving lack of light.

I got down on my knees, less afraid now that I thought I knew what the object might be and laid the torch on the ground where it scuttled like some frightened rabbit away into the undergrowth.

Arthur - my­ Arthur, that is, not the legendary King - was little more than a memory to me now.  When I did think of him - which was seldom - it was not as a regal figure but rather as a court jester.  This was not entirely because of the joke that life had made of him; when we were young it was always him that managed to get the torch-light of laughter to shine around us.

Feeling my way very carefully, I tried to ease my arm through the conifers to what lay beyond, but, try as I might, the conifers resisted my attempt.

Shears, then, I thought.  Honestly, who would expect to be pruning conifers in the middle of the night?  Yet, the shears were in the cellar: and I was of such a frame of mind, now, to believe that their consequent storage power would be even more dangerous than that of the torch: with edges so sharp, even simply looking at them might cut you to the quick.  If the torch could scuttle, God knows what the shears would do, given their liberty from the coalface of the cellar.  So, instead of fetching them, I merely tore wildly at the natural growth leading to the conifer bed – tore it with my bare hands, as blindness superseded darkness with redoubled force.  Even the natural grey sheen normally in the dark air – even on cloudy nights – was missing.  Montague rubbed his sleek body against mine as we both crouched on all fours; intent on the same mission; to uncover the mound (that, even now, if only in my mind’s eye, was growing bigger by the minute).

I gained much comfort from Montague’s presence.  I was sure it was him.  We were rescuing, somehow, a Messiah of sorts from the tangled nettles of my garden’s conifer bed; everything had spoken to me thus from the moment the words started, those crazy words which whispered clues and cue-words of the story I enacted so as to make the story true.

“In the darkness of the moonless…”

I halted.  I froze.  Somebody had spoken for real.  Not in my imagination.  But for real.  Close to my ear.  So close, not even a lover could have got closer.

Inside my head then?  It seemed so, and put me in mind of the games that Arthur and I used to play as children.  We had been so close then, that we could read each others thoughts.  It was only later, when his mind had left him completely that this gift we shared had been annihilated.  Indeed, the body that now lay on the billet I no longer considered to be my brother.  The essence that I assumed to be him had gone - flown away somewhere else.  Hence my lack of visits to that empty shell which would have been totally meaningless.

"…night" - the phrase was completed in my head.  Nights and knights seemed to tumble over themselves.  A knight then?  A cowering beastie of chain-mail?  Only one way to find out –

But, with Montague’s mouse-like plaints nearby, I saw two green eyes switched on like tiny torches.  They seemed to illuminate the thing that owned them as well as the path of the thing’s own sight.  Rather a huge fir-cone than an amorphous mound … upon a bed of mulch.  My knees sank beyond their caps, my fingers to their knuckles as I attempted some messy cross bteween a retreat and half-hearted advance.  Sheer terror was not even possible.  It was beyond that.

The enacted story could have no definite ending, no punch-line of eventuality.  No identity of thing or thought.  I could not even make out the contours of my own body aura as I was ushered, like a loved pet or dark-eyed cinema-goer, towards the gap between the eyes.  Not only with face scratched, but the soul, too, like some shriven martyr.  I was happy, though, upon sensing Montague’s soft shape was inextricably joined to mine, as we hovered together towards some promised battle-weary bliss.  I did not hate dead things any more.  Every story needs a twist, though.  I’d never had a sister, you see.  Not even in legend.

The house was twouptwodown, with battered tin bath and the wooden hut of a toilet at garden's end—a longish nettly path of crazy paving strewn with the broken bottles thrown by local ruffians—and, even in the depth of cold, poor old Madeline had to make a bee-line through all weathers when the unexpected call came at any hour of the night ... struggling the bedraggled coat over her hand-embroidered nightie and donning the floral headscarf around the hair-curlers ... then past the water butt, frozen like steel, with a poor seagull embedded within, itself now like the steel...

            Madeline wondered if she would ever be able to afford a better house, one without a walk-in parlour from the busy street outside.  She yearned for one of those push-button showers with choice of flow strengths, dual-flush loo and, if she could ever understand how it could be used—a bidet!

            Yet, tonight, there seemed a definite tang in the air of bonfire and roast spuds.  Guy Fawkes Night often had a mixture of smells, some good, some bad.  It did not cross her mind that anything she couild muster in the hut downwind of the house would make an ayporth of difference to the sea air.

            She gazed up at the sky.  Peppered with blurred pricks of light, the bigger the blurrier.  She heard the shouts (some joyful, a few fierce).  Then some locals screeching past as they left a drinking binge.  She pulled the lumpy coat closer to her as the unseasonal snow swept around her like the ghosts of killer bees.  So much for global warming; but Madeline she failed to ponder such abstruse concerns.

            Then it was she saw that the toilet was already being used.  Through the diamon-shaped aperture crudely cut into the wooden door there shone a bright golden light.

            Who could have such damn cheek to have jumped into her rear garden to relieve himself.  She'd give him a flea in his ear and no mistake.  Madeline was a feisty lady—and a half.  Even with her advanced years. 

            She imagined the intruder to be a man, of course.  It did not occur to her it might be someone of a fairer sex...

            Abruptly, she recalled that the toilet didn't actually boast a light.  She always had to fumble round in the meanest of darknesses—but she knew the geography of her own accoutrements as well as of those behind the wooden door.  She'd never need a light.

            One day, one day, she'd be rich enough to have a mansion—where going from room to room would be sufficient for the lights to turn themselves on.  One day, one day—she'd been saying one day one day for years.  Ever hoping that something would turn up.  She thought positively, though.  One day, one day, she might buy that little car she'd interminably promised herself to visit friends and relations.  But there had not even been a slightest sniff of a windfall.  Windfalls didn't seem to land for the likes of sweet petite Madeline.  Hopes, dreams.  One day, one day.

            Such thoughts really made Madeline scream. 

            At herself.

A series of rockets lit up the sky's gaps; she simply decided to open the toilet door, thus, in truth, allowing fate to decide.  Heaven was, after all, the ultimate windfall.

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

BRICKTEASE

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

A collaboration with Tim Lebbon

First published in 'The Dream Zone' 1999

“PLEASE let me grab some shut-eye!" grumbled the man to himself as he literally willed his own bones to soften so that they could counteract the bed's hardness.

The other man, who was still sitting on his mattress in the far corner of the room, had been speaking of his previous experiences in this remote area of South East England. They had met whilst beating tracks between two dots on their respective maps and, having conducted fitful conversations along the way about this, that and the other, they decided to share the cost of a double room at the next inn, being cheaper no doubt than two separate single rooms.

They had quickly ascertained that they were both of an academic frame of mind, sharing an interest in Standing Stones. But having that in common did not prevent them from arguing about the various theories regarding the meaning of megaliths at, say, Carnac and Callanish.

James Fardew continued to toss and turn, trying to blot out the candlelight which flickered from beside his companion's mattress. They had not predicted their dissimilar states of tiredness, and Fardew cursed the other man under his breath. Eventually half-dozing, Fardew began to misplace his own whereabouts...

Professor Oliver Gant had not told Fardew of his ability to remain awake for literally hours on end. It had not seemed necessary. He rifled through the vast tome which he had found in the bedroom's makeshift tallboy. Gant had of course expected it to be a Gideon's Bible, since the old religions still held water in these parts near London, but he was pleasantly surprised to find it to be a strange artefact bound in a substance which felt like black skin to the touch. There were highly polished gold corner-stops and an embossed title in a language that even he could not fathom. On first creaking open the front board, he whistled with delight at the glossy feast of spider-web illuminations.

Let me illuminate you, he thought giddily, but the voice was not his own.

If pages could talk, then they would do so now. And they did.

The creaking front door of the inn drifted open, and a whistle of fright sent hanging bells clattering and papers rustling their displeasure on beer-soaked tables. Wet feet splodged across the bare boards, sending puddles of water rippling into the dark cracks in between. Leathery skin flapped in the breeze, ropish hair swung heavy at the figure's waist. A voice coughed out. The rain and cold had stolen its volume, so it croaked its request once more. But there was only silence. The place had evidently shut up shop for the night.

The man hauled himself out of his wet coat and let it drop to the floor. It gathered itself up, slid across splintery boards and wrapped itself around a chair to dry. The man's hair rose around his head like a peacock's tail-feathers, shimmering in moonlight dirtied by the dusty windows. The dregs of the fire still burnt, and the memory of that evening's heat set about drying the man's mane. He padded over to the bar, twisting his neck to remove an old ache, and sat on one of the high stools. "Let me illuminate you," he said, imagining the landlord standing there at that moment, all greasy whiskers and garlic breath. "Let me tell you why I came back." He tapped long-nailed fingers onto the bar, setting his words to a dark rhythm. "You stole from me. You will pay me back, or you will lose more than just a hand."

But the landlord was not there, and the imagined conversation was pointless, save as a dry-run for the real thing, whenever that would be.

The man's coat sighed contentedly from the other side of the room,and he knew that he would not venture out again that night. He could not face the aggravation. Instead he slipped off his shoes, stretched his feet and scraped his extended nails down the front of the bar, scoring out tiny twists of wood like miniature pig tails.

He pulled himself out of his wet shirt, and a rectangle of scar tissue stared lividly from between his shoulderblades. And his phantom skin tingled - somewhere, someone was runnihg their fingers across his back. And, now, it became his turn to have maggoty divots scored by sharper nails than his own - scoring them from his backflesh and painstakingly spelling out, as such gashes did, his name: REM-SEM.

His eyes strobed in pain.

As they had earlier wended their way towards the horizon of evening, Fardew and Gant had made a peculiar pair - the former with his plus-fours and hunchback baggage, spectacles ever sliding on sweat like mating stick-insects; the latter older but sprightlier, tussling with his foundling walking-stick as if the shapes he fended off were perhaps more than simple shadows.

Their lively conversations of ghosts and scholars and other things had soon petered out as the sun dipped beyond the Surrey Badlands. Gant believed that the stones hereabouts were typical of the Southern Mysteries and had been left lying around by turn-of-the-century tribes, only to tease future scholars such as Fardew as to ley-lines and geomantic zodiacs. And Gant had no illusions about the lucrativeness of  his professorship at the Northern University - he was remunerated for waffling, so he waffled. Thus, he spoke to Fardew in undergrunts of the stones' significance and, in the same breath, whispered of what "things" and "other things" might be found under them.

He turned the title page of the black book, as Fardew's snores punctuated the silence. Gant had surrendered to Fardew the tail-end of the desultory conversation, the latter mumbling a few unthought-out words as Inevitable sleep took sway, despite the bed's discomfort:- "You know, Gant, what you said this afternoon ... there's something in it. Those standing stohes outside here did have a certain look of, what can I call it ... fleshiness."

Gant laughed to himself. But the stones could easily be seen as having a strange aura, conjured up by the translucent prisms of sunset slanting across the Southern Mysteries and sheening the rutted boulders in pink gold ... making them look almost sentient and sentry-like, as they led up to and in the inn.

Upon the innkeeper's pulpit-like reception-desk, indeed, had rested the largest guest register either Gant or Fardew had ever seen. The garlic-steeped landlord found it difficult to separate page from page. Eventually, he fingered the area where he required them to signature, and both Gant and Fardew made forgeries with a flourish, but neither were conscious of their motives in so doing.

The landlord had carried their luggage and led them to the top of the building. The unnumbered rooms they passed were as silent as the grave - but, being long accustomed to such establishments, they feared that the small hours would fill with loud music and boorish laughter. Gant grumbled complaints, since he was of a mind to get his spoke in first. Fardew grudgingly nodded agreement. Neither need have bothered, since the landlord was evidently stone deaf, still tottering in advance of them along the gloomy corridor, muttering - under his garlic - words sounding like: "Rem rem rem, sem sem sem."

A meaningless hum that meant much more than meaning itself.

When the landlord opened the door to their room Gant and Fardew had paused on the shadowy landing, suddenly afraid, terrified that their forged scrawls on the register were really chippings on an old headstone. What judgement would they have called down upon themselves by faking their own names? How would they find their way in whatever afterlife waited in the wings, if they did not even own up to their own identities?

The doors faced out into the corridor like great stone slabs, and these were surely left by mischievous tribes only just passed into history. No pre­history here, in this old inn where even the creaks and groans were at home. No lost memories floating around in this atmosphere or, if they were, then their final traces would be subsumed by stale garlic and the hoppy stench of spilled beer. They all looked the same, and what if that were the case? There were no numbers, perhaps because each room was the same room, and the walk in between merely a wasted expense of energy.

Fardew had already entered inside, and was wearily testing the bed for hardness, when the moment passed. Gant stepped across the threshold, fully expecting to be struck down by some weighty revelation. But instead, all that touched him were the eyes of the landlord, weighty themselves, more alive because of his dead eardrums. His pupils dilated, his hand stretched out, and Gant dropped a wrinkled note into the heavily lined palm. He tried to catch a glimpse of the landlord's life line, but the canny old goat knew what he was about and folded his hand, and the note, neatly into his trouser pocket.

"Read all about it," the landlord said, then swung the door shut behind him as he left, muttering all the way: "Rem rem rem, sem sem sem," and on, into silence.

REM-SEM himself wore blood on his back and little else. He wished sleep would come naturally, like his mane, but his coat refused to curl into a pillow shape and the wood of the old benches was cold and hard against his tired old skin.

So he laid awake, staring into the fading embers of the fire, imagining himself shrunken and thrown into the red hell of charred wooden blocks and still-glowing coals. He would crawl between the hottest points and cast his spells wherever he could stand for longer than a few seconds. Roughly translated, this reflected his life, and he guffawed bitterly as he felt the blood hardening into a fresh black coat on his back.

Somewhere, someone was reading his book. A book bound in skin, and set in blood. More his book than any which had ever belonged to anyone, ever. Yet here, ownership was not nine-tenths of the law, and never had been. Fate was what drove the law, and fate obeyed laws beyond even the ken of REM-SEM.  

Gant's candle finally gave up the ghost, just as he reached the middle of the book. He had browsed upon the yellowing pages for hours and, despite the cold logic of his brain, drew esoteric conclusions from shapes of words which in the cold light of dawn would have signified next to nothing - or so he suspected. The darkness shrouded a carefully worked illustration of what seemed a black shiny monolith slowly rotating in even blacker space. He cursed, just as his companion Fardew had done earlier in a different context. He would not bother to relight the candle but take up the book come dawn's return. He placed it on the floorboards beside his bed.

Fardew woke with a shudder. Or was it Gant? He who thus awoke could not be sure. The darkness around him glowed, even though it remained impenetrably black. In the distance, he caught the thud of feet stamping , .. or could it have been the erratic beating of his heart? Burying his face in the pillow, he tried to muffle both sight and sound. And succeeded in sleeping against all the odds: dreaming of Morris-dancers with outlandishly large stone bones clacking instead of wooden batons and silent jingle-bells sparkling in an alien sunlight.

Gant was abruptly wide awake, now certain he couldn't be Fardew dreaming he was Gant. He had always slept sporadically for most Of his life, so the fact of being Gant was now incontrovertible. He even recalled his own theories on science and history, only recently expounded to the relative stranger who now shared the same room as himself. He looked across at the dark humping shape of what he took to be Fardew in the bed. "Still worried abouts its hardness, no doubt," Gant whispered to himself silently.

He was surprised he could see anything at all amid the strobing tides of darkness, but waffling was his job, wasn't it? Each of his five senses could waffle like the best of them ... and, indeed, the sense of sight was blatantly brazen, quite unashamedly all-mouth-and-trousers as it wilfully conjured up a scribble-­surfaced swagginess that hugged as much as it humped.

Gant heaved himself up onto an elbow (whose, he wasn't sure), then tumbled upwards some more until he was lying on a cold wooden floor. The bed was now a door, cast in stone and hinged with the accumulated moss of time. It was vertical, too, glittering with his perspiration like a trillion inset jewels. He looked up (or across) and saw that the ceiling was similarly adorned, cracks In the old plaster finish akin to time-creaks in old coffins, where the fingers of decay worked their way around carefully pounded nails and gave vent to that which was dead anyway.

Fardew still slept, of that Gant was sure, although he could neither hear nor see him properly. Instead there was a humped shape somewhere in his memory, a moaning individual who had walked a hundred miles to complain about the standard of service even here, this close to the break between this world and the next. Complain, and tempt fate as well, by sleeping on the hard bed that was little more than a gravestone into the world of the dead. Lucky they were no grave robbers. But what of the grave digger, and the keeper? Surely he was still around somewhere?

Perhaps downstairs?

Gant stood and swayed unsteadily in the rush of altered perception. He tasted distance and spoke words of heat. waffling on like a sensory deprived suddenly finding freedom. He wanted the book again, reached out but could not find it, certain that an explanation of what was happening here lay somewhere within the last few pages. But to reach the end he had to read those pages before it, like taking steps on a ladder to reach the top. He didn't like heights, either vertical or knowledgeable, but this was something he had to do. Now more than ever.

"Fardew!" he hissed, thinking that the other man may be able to help. But his voice filtered away into the dark, sundered by sightlessness and sent spinning into incoherence.

He'd had an idea of what the book was, but in the homely light of the candle all ideas had seemed false, fed by atmosphere rather than deduction. Now, maybe they were right: it was a digging manual, for opening holes between here and elsewhere; it was a hanging manual, for setting those cold stone doors in place in the inn; it was a phone-book for the dead, each entry listed by manner of death rather than name, so that it would take forever to find just one person.

Whatever it was, it needed finishing. An unfinished book was like unfinished sex, pleasant enough in a way but still yearning that final explosive revelation.

Treading carefully, Gant headed downstairs.

REM-SEM awoke. He'd nodded off without knowing it, and woke up in the same manner, so he never even knew he'd been asleep. REM-SEM's soon-to-be-­revenged upon victim had only been granted guests to make him more easily into a landlord whom REM-SEM remembered needed punishing. So, as well as being spear-carriers and scholars, Gant and Fardew were merely their own waffles. Ghosts, guests, the words were close enough ...

The fire was heading for coolness, the windows smudged with something of the morning sun, without night having even begun its departure. And there were footsteps from above, descending, owned by someone who needed a hole dug, no doubt.

REM-SEM stood, lifted his arms and accepted the warmth of his coat onto his body. His back still ached where the skin was stripped, but it could just be a strain from all the digging and tending he had ever done. Sometimes he wished his life away. He dreamt in fire, and worked in clay.

Amid the clotted skin, though, there slowly developed an itch, a knotty pustule, almost a deep-steeped tandoori gnat with an eye movement so blessedly rapid it could only see and be seen by stone. Its polygon scales were little better than the landlord's catchy saw. Far and few between, the mesmericks were wed to the dreamless many.

The two dots, as it happened, you see, were not only on different maps but on maps under quite separate zodiacs, so never to be joined by journey nor, even, allied by axis ...

One guest (Fardew?) seemed momentarily to wake to a curdled dawn. Gant was the hump in his back. Silent as a Donatello sculpture. The landlord had been left crucified upon the book of his own black skin: a kiln-hard garlic-doll, hanging on the window amid the screaming yellows of a reluctant sun-stuck there by a knurled kind of cake duly chipped from unboned batter after being baked within a rock of hinged halves. A waffle.

Most DFL story collaborations:

DFL COLLABORATIONS (!) ARE LINKED FROM HERE:

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/dfl_collaborations.htm 

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

CONTINUATION OF STORIES PREVIOUSLY PRINT PUBLISHED AND NOW UPLOADED TO THE 'WEIRDMONGER WHEEL' in 2008:

Smart Suit Day (Psychopoetica 1996): http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=386897173&Mytoken=2EFBCA49-E941-4A8E-B48403816449D31612109248

Ancient Crafts (Stabat Mater: Multimedia DFL experience - Digital Workshop 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/272.html

Gardening Tips (The Cimmerian Journal 1996): http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2008/05/01/

Soft Steps & Rockeries (Butterfly & Bloomer! 1996): http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/soft_steps_and_rockeries.mws

Dawning (Purple Patch 1996): http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/dawning.mws

Simply Sick Again (not dead but dreaming 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/05/published-not-dead-but-dreaming-1996.html

Belly Laugh (Spotted Rhubarb 1996): http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/belly_laugh.mws

Simply A Stranger (Psychotrope 1998): http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2008/05/11/

Only Parts Are Real (Next Phase 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/277.html

Trooping the Colour (Footsteps 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/05/trooping-colour.html

The Prince's Wood (Sierra Heaven 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/05/princes-wood.html

Rising Sap (In Your Face 1996): http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=398041693&Mytoken=84DF62C3-4F48-4CF0-8F284B789D6AA9B266821464

Somewhere (Colchester Library 1996): http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1816326/somewhere/

Wake In The Morling (Eco-Runes 1996): http://augusthog.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1816331/wake-in-the-morling/

Tree Panning (Geek Love 1996): http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1817713/tree-panning/

Folded Away (Mail Art - Wearwolf 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/folded-away.html

Magicked by the Moon (not dead but dreaming 1996): http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=9868

Wooden Box (New Hope International 1996): http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/weirdtongue/index.blog/1818887/wooden-box/

Face (frisson 1996): http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=445884539&Mytoken=993BA952-B44E-4FEC-AE5A7EB37B2812B7212196726

Comings and Goings (Three 1996): http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/06/09/comings-and-goings.html

Posthumous Prize (Psychopoetica 1996): http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/posthumous_prize.mws

Mummy's Boy (Trash City 1996): http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2008/06/10/

The Provenance of Souls (Dreams & Nightmares 1996): http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/278.html

Rituals of the Clock (Writer's Block Magazine 1997): http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/108323.html

Widow's Weeds (Beyond the Boundaries 1997): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/widows-weeds.html

Desultory (QRD 1997): http://nemonymous.tripod.com/word_hunger/index.blog/1820917/desultory/

INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION (Strange Wonderland 1997): http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/industrial_evolution.mws

In The Beginning Was The Word (frisson 1997): http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=406732971&Mytoken=8DD1C038-471F-4956-939EE05E6548C86A205349400

XXXX (Zine Zone 1997): http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/279.html

Oblongs of Oblation (Psychotrope 1997): http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1863951/oblongs-of-oblation/

The Secret House (Unreal Dreams 1997): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/secret-house.html

Transferred:

Separation (Dementia 13 1991): http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1826766/separation/

The Dream I Was (Masque 1994): http://augusthog.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1826765/the-dream-i-was/

Headless Hall (Barddoni 1991): http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1826764/headless-hall/

Love & Stitches (Psychotrope 1994): http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=414179590&Mytoken=C81CC67F-14F7-484D-8EEAB50D21C9B88924255531

The Jinx (Purple Patch 1990): http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/280.html

Epilogue (Hadrosaur Tales 1997); http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/07/epilogue.html

The Groundling (Dark Horizons 1990): http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/100142.html

Office Block (Purple Patch 1990); http://augusthog.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1863952/office-block/

Where I Came In (Cobweb 1990): http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/07/11/where-i-came-in.html

CONTINUED ELSEWHERE ON THE WEIRDMONGER WHEEL

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

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

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/08/backseat-dreamer.html - Backseat Dreamer

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/08/both-sides-of-midnight.html - Both Sides of Midnight

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/08/deathless-in-venice.html - Deathless In Venice

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/09/dark-hem.html - The Dark Hem

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/09/ounce-of-three-castles-and-packet-of.html - An Ounce of Three Castles and a Packet of Blue Rizla

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/09/dark-miscegenation.html - A Dark Miscegenation

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/10/monkey-who-did-not-like-its-hat.html - The Monkey Who Did Not Like Its Hat

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/11/deep-one.html - A Deep One

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/11/spare.html - Spare

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2005/12/end-of-season.html - End of Season

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-blame-mother.html - I Blame The Mother

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/04/dies-irae.html - Dies Irae

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/05/old-familiar-places.html - The Old Familiar Places

THE EXQUISITION: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_exquisition.htm

Solaris (A Lyttony): http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/solaris.htm

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

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.

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)