(Forgetting) that I'd soon forget missing him.

 

Softie and I banked into the clouds with the churning of the blades obliviously dividing one flank of a vulture from the other. 

 

 

***

 

 

Swift City  was just that.  Everyone in a hurry.  Watched from above scurrying like ants in fast forward to the music of Philip Glass.  Just missing each other and the traffic with which they tried to blend by inches or seconds.  Giant towers in the shape of statues of celebrants in the race of humanity landmarked each corner, each T Junction each roundabout and bend in the road.  Swift by name and method. 

 

Swift, too, by later sarcasm when the whole place slowed down with the ant-people growing bigger, more sluggish and the towers diminished as a religion until a white dot on a just switched-off old TV screen.  The towers had never been swift.  They were steadfast memorials to when the sky was full of birds.  Not only swifts, at that.

 

The cause of the slowing down was a dreaded disease come to haunt the scurriers of Swift City as well as those that became more sluggish and larger with the swellings of the same disease.  It did not kill people.  It simply slowed them up.  They now had time to look up at the giant statues and saw that these towering statues were models of themselves.  They did not wish to grow as sluggish as those steadfast fixtures of an earlier similar race simply scaled up and slowed down.  So they took to scurrying again.  But not for long, as the disease took deeper root in their souls. And in their faith about what life was all about.  Not a rush.  But a doddle.

 

The disease killed the birds because birds could not slow up without falling from the sky.  As they did.  Aircraft, too, piloted by gradually slower and heavier people could not stay up and lowered lower and lower towards the ground as their pilots and passengers and air stewards and stowaways grew even heavier with their own geometrical progression of increasing size and sluggishness, until they, too, crashed-landed with many fatalities that freed up the T Junctions for slow walkers and thin crowds – compared to the mass scurrying that had typified the period when watched from above to the background of fast Philip Glass music.

 

Nobody could get up to the top of the topmost giants to watch from above, any more.  Then as the planes crashed into the towers, these giant statues, modelled on the shape of real people, crashed to the ground also, until there was literally nowhere to watch from above.  The skies were silent.  No birds.  No planes.  Ever again. 

 

The streets slower and more lugubrious.  And minds buried in despond and sorrow as depression set in with the sluggishness and the inability to fast forward.  Pitiful faces lurched from door to door in search of friendship or at least a faith that would make friendship possible.  But not being able to hurry had made this difficult because nobody liked lazy people.  And everyone was lazy.  They renamed the city.  But you can't rename a city because of all the pre-printed stationery, and Swift City it duly remained.

 

Sid was the keeper of the stationery.  He managed to make a meagre living from selling letter paper and envelopes with perfume imbued into their texture.  People now had time to write letters, because any other means of communication or transmission were not possible with the disease affecting even the ability to text each other at a shake of a homing pigeon's tail. 

 

Speed was anathema, however much they loved speed.  The disease made them hate what they loved and love what they hated.  And God tossed and turned in His own bed above Swift City because He was now unsure as to His wherewithal as a God.  He was lazy as the rest of them.  But He had <i>always</i> been that way, expecting others to pray for his speedy attentions knowing all along that prayer would never work with someone as lazy as He knew Himself to be.  Now everyone was lazy, He feared everyone was now their own God.  Praying to themselves at night, instead of Him, because they though miracles could never work in time, so why bother believing in a God of miracles?  Each was now a God unto him- or herself.  Seemed to fit the more sedate and self-seeking ways of Swift.

 

Sid spent much of his time debating which end of a boiled egg to start cracking it open with.  This seemed something people could write letters about with the spread of time like a pool of never-ending slime towards the margins of the city until everyone was stuck like flies in aspic.  The paper he sold seemed more suitable for long-winded philosophical or religious thought such as the noumenon of a boiled-egg and the nature of time itself.  Even God showed up on the pages as a tranche of slow-moving words all tangled up by syntax and over-convoluted grammar.

 

"Hey, Sid, we'll miss you when you've gone," said his doctor whom Sid knew as Lemuel.  Doctors and other important cityfolk were all now known by their forenames as there was no time to reach their surnames.  Over-familiarity no longer bred contempt. It was simply a necessity in such static times.  Life was too long to waste it on too much assiduity towards respect.  Time allowed everyone to become important – eventually.  Or so they had sufficient time to believe.

 

"Why will you miss me, Lemuel?" asked Sid.  He saw that the doctor had arrived all tangled up in string as if he had spent the night trying to unravel himself simply for the sake of solving a puzzle to while away the ever-expanding night.

 

"Well, Sid, with your stationery, we can make paper aeroplanes and skim them like the birds and planes used to do."

 

"Umm...  I hadn't thought about that possibility for a sales drive.  Perhaps I should manufacture stiffened letter-paper for just such a purpose.  I would of course have thought of it myself before long."

 

"I'm sure you would have done, Sid.  Every thought eventually is simply there to be thought.  Still, I'm not a psychiatrist.  I've come to test your blood pressure...  Hold out your arm. I may have to prescribe some pills if it's too high.  Sorry I've taken so long to get round to it, Sid."

 

Too late. At that moment Sid died of a sudden heart attack.  Suddenness was still a possibility in Swift.  And Sid had just suffered from suddenness with a vengeance. 

 

"Lemuel, I hope people don't go on missing me forever," he managed to splutter out before he entered the slow death process that prevented further speech and gradually stiffened the body as if in preparation for erecting on a street corner as a statuesque product of rigor-mortis.

 

At that moment, Lemuel scratched his head in slow amazement as he heard a helicopter crossing the city.  He did not even have time to rush to the window to look at it before it was completely gone, along with its choppy clatter.  And this was despite it giving the impression of slowing down over Swift City for a while. Each clatter of its vanes picked out as a separate moment. It had perhaps slowed up for the occupants to look down on the non-scurrying streets.  Or simply because it was crossing Swift City – and <i>everything</i> was simply slower here, even directly above in the city's territorial skies – a fact that had now been discovered, slowly dawning on the cityfolk when they became accustomed eventually to forgetting that the helicopter had even crossed the city's air space.

 

The street-corner statue of Sid held a stone paper-aeroplane in its hand.  Till even that failed to remind anyone about sky travel.  It simply was a symbol of something far deeper than they had time to fathom. But they never forgot Sid himself.  Lemuel had put a plaque at the foot of the statue saying: "Missing Sid".   For old time's sake.

 

 

***

Against the extensive blue panoply of arching horizons made wider than heaven itself, Softie wildly grappled with the controls, as she was still a relative beginner in managing both to maintain the helicopter's spinning in a straight line and to navigate that same straight line between two points: i.e. towards a point of destination directly under the helicopter's turning shadow of itself from a point of departure where the selfsame shadow had first contracted to its darting sharp-edged configuration of cross-country torque.  Jawn did his best to encourage her, yet teaching himself simultaneously about the art of synergy as derived from his experience of being air-borne for the first time amid the variously converging and diverging forces of balance and mind manipulation needed to be mastered by both of them as  prospective pilot-lights.

  

Sometimes her glance was steely, stern, sharp-etched: revealing reflections of the earlier woman who had instructed him in Lewis; but more often than not there were flashes of a gentle soul, of unmistakeable kindness and beauty and regathered youth all of which crystallised the girl of his heart as well as of his dreams: flashes that gradually merged into a steady beam of mutuality, a beam of untimely yet welcome moonshine blended from an ancient cathedral window's variously pastel-coloured light transfusions cast upon a figurative floor of intricate mosaics.  Numinous moonshine-of-stained-glass into which lambency Softie and Jawn both eventually dipped the aching limbs of the past.

               

 Although neither of them had yet openly divulged a revived feeling for each other, there was a common acceptance in the air that their earlier ham-fisted attempts at relationship had been a fiction or dream that neither could now believe – and their sky-borne synergy was a true waking reality, today, here, now, as they adventured forth across the bouncing blue towards a quest neither understood as well as they understood the budding love for each other that would make any quest not only bearable but achievable.

 

Softie's hesitant hovering – amid the ungodly clatter of misapplied amounts of gas to the power drive – caused them to veer, in nail-biting feats of banking, towards a magnetic force slowly sucking at them from below – one that threatened to draw them into the ground's premature embrace.  They only escaped by the skin of their teeth, having almost clipped one of an unknown city's towers that luckily a fabricated history of disease had foreshortened through a lens of magic-fiction-made-real.

 

"I wonder what they thought," said Jawn  "I can't see how we managed not to crash into that city!"  He was now old enough to call himself a man.  He spoke with a gruff voice.  But remained a boy inside.  He knew not why he had altered the instinctive silent synergy of flight with interference by spoken word.  Childish in the extreme not to be satisfied with silence alone, he thought.

 

Softie did not reply as they soared out of control higher and higher to more rarified strata where neither of them would be able to breathe, let alone talk.  Then as she managed to reverse the upward ricochet, they both could see and recognise tentacle-woven Lovecraft City on the hazy horizon of real land interspersed with separate dancing geysers of yellow gas eventually spraying wider and wider into the mystic form of a quite different moonshine-show than their own earlier metaphor for love.  Unnatural shine.  Unnatural flight.  Softie continued to fight with the controls as they did with her in a mutual give-and-take while the helicopter spun like a cruelly fly-sprayed wasp down down down towards the increasingly choppy waters of a once eternally placid lake close by the city's polypous margins of miasma and frog-spawn.

 

 

***

...down down down ... and the twitching slime of congealed and eel-threaded lakewater-weediness – long turned rancid, if not poisonous –  provided the globe-fish bowl of the inverted chopper's dunking with a green-streaked curtain against a vision of the horror that the seemingly bottomless depths of Lac du Lac harboured within its mud-edged bosom.

 

The huge vanes, churning uselessly in choked rotation, served to discourage further sinking by its entanglements with an associated curtain of squidgy entrailments from various serrated accretions of tendril and rooted lily-pad.  Further below, emerged the huge bulbous eye of Azathoth's mother lurking upon the cusp of depth and depthlessness  – an eye set like an oysterish jewel in a slug-blackened face, an eye, indeed, that mocked not only herself but also her past partial miscegenations with frogs and squid: a congeries of masted relationships that crossed time, space and mud-curds.

 

Whether the more lively tendrils were indeed tentacles and not plant-life was a mystery to Jawn ... or rather an unnecessary irrelevancy as he tried to remove Softie from impalement upon the chopper's joy-stick, with which she had been struggling before crashing into Lac du Lac.  And if they were tentacles, and not tendrils (however immediately irrelevant), were they potentially dangerous?  Probably harmless if they emanated from the polypous sockets of Azathoth's mother with the one pitiful eye... waving like a marine scarecrow rather than a real monster-of-the-deep.  One somehow needed to balance immediate danger with the repercussion of other possible dangers which the avoiding of the immediate danger actually entailed.

 

"Softie, Softie," gurgled Jawn, mixing teardrops and bubbles.

 

She stirred as he delicately tried successfully to extract the joy-stick from her stomach with a bodily plop that failed to signify relief or anguish because it was one of many plops, some more indicative of pain than others.  Could she have smiled?

 

Softie's smile, as smile it surely was, represented Heaven for a man like Jawn who'd never received such a smile before: a truly-meant smile of love where love had not earlier fully blossomed until this very smile.

 

And 'Heaven', here, became the key-word, effectively an intrinsic concept – a click-into-position of various items of misunderstood logic – that furthered the inevitability of a sod's law-of-averages that he would be deprived of such Heaven-in-reality (that few ever attained) by being force-rescued ... thus to await any prospective Heaven with a sad certainty he'd never reach such a state-of-grace again.  Heaven could only come once in a lifetime, he thought – as he felt the chopper abruptly tugged from the lake with the loud ripping asunder of both tendril and tentacle, causing the eye below to turn into a sorrowfully pulsing pulp of pain, simply because the spiky harvest of inverse motherhood had been cruelly torn from the ready-gaping belly that the eye's owner also owned.

 

 

***

Apocryphal tailpiece.

 

The horror is not in the actual horror itself but in the expression of the horror.  The deeper one goes into such descriptions, the more horrific they become by dint of phonology, semanticism, graphology and syntax.

 

It's over-texed. 

 

Or more simply, the text of 'Yesterfang' is becoming darker, more tenebrous and increasingly fibrous ... a canal tunnel of meaning and meaninglessnes whereby the wet, dripping, echoing walls only reflect a thicker, pastier, pestier density-of-authority from whose cloying claws we cannot clamber free.  Pest control at its minimum.  Omniscience squashed by a higher authority even than omniscience.

 

We await the arrival of Jawn and Softie into the tighter tautologies of lovecraft as an antidote to tightness itself ... over-rich and preciously prose-like (if not prosaic) with every desperate scratch of the pen that punishes their illusions of adventure and romance with textures we cannot even yet imagine being created from mere words.  You heard the warning here, first.  However, denser, deeper warnings are never as strident or urgent as the more easily expressed warnings that precede them.

 

The pest is at the very door of the past.  What could be simpler than that?

 

 

***

"Cheapest, ripest, dampest tentacles of tender bite!" shouted the seller of wares that he described by such superlatives, words that exercised the plosives and sibilants of speech, thus furthering sharp and airy articulation as an art form divorced from the past meanderings of thick, turgid talk-making that had plagued Lovecraft City's councils since the days of Yog Sothoth (now discredited and disowned from any past whatsoever). The fact that some of the superlatives used weren't always particularly appropriate, it did not seem to matter as most things sold were fundamentally indescribable in any event.

It was market day in Lovecraft City. Today, however, was also noteworthy for the giving of a relatively rare speech by the Esquire of the City Brothers. He was expected to report on the recent "salvage of a foreign body from the city's bloodstream", whilst taking the opportunity of explaining why 'salvage' was perhaps not the most appropriate word as the thing turned out, upon examination, to be a pest, not an asset. Two separate consciousnesses within the overall spiky tumour turned out to be quite a dangerous breed, in his view. Luckily one was badly wounded and incapable of mischief ... and the other just a moony-eyed marshmallow in love with itself who was wounded in soul, if not in body.

The rest of the Esquire's speech – with no apparent connection with its earlier part – went as follows (as all citizens huddled round their ancient wirelesses to listen):

"The past tells us that it is not the most appropriate word for itself. The past is not to be cherished as an intensely sought nostalgia for past tradition and its more sedate ways of life. We simply need to create a new past for our future. We must cut the old past from our bosom for the pest it truly is. Or was. So I am pleased to announce as an interim report, that we, as citizens of this great commune city, continue to succeed in shaking off the traditions of that past, all those Lovecraftian trappings of intertextual tentacularity and xenophobia, even while knowing that intrinsic parts of ourselves would truly cherish those traditions with an in-built nostalgia if we had not already plucked that canker from our memory of the past. We are now simply called Lovecraft for safer, more romantic associations than the founding father could even dream about. We bear no malice of racism. We love all strangers. If strange they truly are." (He seemed to ignore the paradox provided by this present part of his speech with its past about the 'pest' dredged from Lac du Lac.) "So, therefore, I congratulate you. Unweave the binding of the tentacle! Release your gambrel roofs! Unstopper the dreams from the witch-house! Unhook the red hook! We are new-fashioned not old-. We shout at the rats in the wall and tell them: 'Begone'! The past is past. It's dead meat. A non-parrot, an ex-parrot, a speech that I no longer give by mimic or rote, but by a true understanding of what we are and where we're going. Towards a uniformly warmer and happier world. And, meanwhile, I devote our ambitions to the arms of Azathoth's mother. Bless all who sail in her belly."

At that traditional wording to end to all speeches (as meaningless as 'For Ever and Ever, Amen'), the city's many wirelesses were turned off before any jolly music could start. The paradoxes were sacred. They needed calm to dwell on them.

*
The clump-eyed student stared upon the surface of his morning tea, as if prematurely reading its residual leaves prior to drinking. He scried thereon both Jawn and Softie sitting together inside a cage loosely wickerworked from amputated tentacles. He prayed for their escape from the Lovecraft's commune city towards a safe transference to Poe's river city ... and prayed, too, for Softie's healing from a mortal wound in her belly. When thinking of the latter, he forced back tears - and then commenced to write the essay that had been set by the professor about the past's sacred burial sites for coursework purposes. Trying to bury his own madnesses in the process. Being a student of Archaeology, this was another paradox, if not to cherish, certainly to wonder at. A Premature Burial of self.

 

***

The Poe River flowed like continuous quaffs of dark ale between vibrating intoxications of city-matter made magnetic.  The city-buildings seemed to be a series of giant tuning-fork arches interlocking like constituents of Christmas party-games –  trapped metal-pieces as tangled puzzles for eager, ham-fisted hands eventually to release. 

 

A shape of assumed human intention was seen to be delivering a heftily-mishandled oak-cask labelled 'Amontillado' through one such arch's open underpass ... amid the ancient squealing sorceries of rat-like pussy-cats in black. Squealing of walls and retribution.

 

Situated in a nearby run-down city square were the outer innards of Earth's hawling-tunnels and  gas-workings - where, only here in Poe City, the entrance to the lower bowels could be unlocked, when a carefully concealed code was broken if not solved.

 

The human shape having despatched the cask – and become drunk upon heavy stomach-loads of the fortified sherry mis-labelled 'Amontillado' that he himself had shifted in enormous quaffs of downing in one session – staggered into the square with arms akimbo and eager for the  rendezvous with those in the know regarding the quest for the pest.

 

Another taller figure followed him.  His one yellow fang sharpened by moonlight.

 

How these two men had travelled by barely beaten trail through the surface terrains slower than it has taken to describe it (sometimes in talkative company together, but often taking turns surreptitiously to track each other either for practice at so doing or because they had fallen out) would be an account longer than there is space for.  Suffice it to say that any adventures and cities they had enjoyed or suffered together in transit were as multitudinous as they were deeply experienced separate incidents.

 

One of which incidents was inadvertently to rescue Softie and Jawn from the tentacle-cage in Lovecraft City. None of the parties involved were then aware of the actual course of events, either by proximate cause or chance reaction or lucky break ... but the two men were so unpredictably behaved one night (amid an outdoor festival of Erich Zann's music) that the accidental combination of avant-garde noise and the serendipitously broken shafts of fulsome moonshine (at strictly the optimal angles of tripping lock-tumblers and cage-bars) caused what nothing else could cause: both a belly-wound sealed like magic and a tangled wickerwork unravelled tentacle by tentacle...

 

There was indeed no proximate cause.  But given knowledge of the circumstances, the two men would have taken credit for the event simply by being there.  However, neither pair knew of the other pair's presence in the area, as each pair continued - at that time - their separate onward paths for Poe City's gasworks and interlocking magnet arches.

 

***

Having watched Softie and Jawn spin off into the clattering sky, Yellowfang and Congreve (or Fang and Rider as  they preferred to call each other) had eventually agreed that they should pull together rather than indulge in rather fruitless rivalries for the purposes of the current concerns in both focussed and unfocussed endeavour.  They had, of course, been intermittent lovers over many years – enjoying the tiffs as well as the wild rows that involved biting and spitting – but the current stage in their lives being at the older end of the spectrum, they decided they no longer yearned for each other physically.  Too old and ugly even for short bouts of mutual relief.  Yet they retained the original affection.  Each would have killed for the other.  Killed others or themselves.

 

This new-found faltering friendship as comrades rather than as lovers took many a reverse, before it became a relatively stable routine during their subsequent travels from city to city. Each laughingly remained the other's pest.  Pest was a more gentle word in the vocabulary of their conversations. It had not yet transmuted, as a meaning-in-itself or as a confusion for 'past' or 'pissed', and they played around with the word as if guided by undercurrents of destiny that neither yet understood – eventually needing to pool their 'intellectual' resources even to begin to reach some basic instinct of knowledge regarding their importance in wider schemes of things.  Hence a natural forging of fresh links between them simply for the sake of something that was not themselves.

 

As they neared Poe City (its vast spiky silhouette interspersed with roundier things against the darkening sky), Fang gabbled a few sayings evidently intended to make sense:

 

"…Pesky magnets make a man a sucker. A pust-up lake makes for sticky swimming.  Gas pistons hiss and crank like old men…"

 

"Like us, you mean?" roared Rider, slapping his companion on the back rather more vigorously than mere comradeship would have otherwise warranted.

 

Poe, too, had a lake, one called Usher, but more like a moat than Lovecraft's Lac du Lac had been.  A remote moat where it had given up its aspirations to surround.

 

Usher shimmered in the fresh starlight, an expanse of water set below where the pair of clumping men tentatively hoofed it down the scrubbly slope towards this lake or tarn, indeed a lake or tarn sown with floating curds of evident inflammatory matter with which Fang had freighted his earlier reference to 'sticky swimming'.  Hence, there were to be no further manly backslaps between them for fear of accidentally knocking each other off their saddles into the so-called lake or tarn.  They did believe, from earlier evidence, that Poe City had a river not a lake, but perhaps geography in these parts was no longer a fixture given the subsidal influence of the gasworks and hawling-tunnels said to penetrate buildings as well as the ground within the city.

 

 

*

Jawn and Softie – following mysterious resurrection from the tentacled enclaves of engroven Lovecraft – still wandered its city streets for a period of delay, thinking they were somewhere else – a place called Lewis or Innsmouth, equally unsure which was which, failing to differentiate ambiance from ambiance.  Shapes of fishish physiology, if not physiognomy, flopped along the backwalks, alongside the young couple as they headed towards a tentative route between Lovecraft and Poe, without truly realising the identity of either starting-point or destination.  When time came for sleep, Jawn caressed his companion's breasts through the stiff prison-clothing still stained with seepage from the tentacles that had immured them.  Softness multiplied by word as well as substance.  They took drain of their deepest kiss yet – as they huddled together, within each other's arms, to ward off the sounds of gurgles and fins back-flipping against seaweedy walls.  Their love was a protection against loving too much, in fear of destiny or death finishing that love at its most unbearably high point to feel to have been thus finished by fish. A backstory yet to have a front.

 

 

***

I dreamed of our crashed helicopter.  Now softened by the chemicals in the water, it began lifting its head above the tarn's curdles like a giant bulbous insect or dragonfly, crawling towards the bank as a humped creature to spoil my dream by making it real.  Then another 'helicopter'… and yet another.  Time and time again, until there was a bedraggled earthbound herd or horde of silent drowned helicopters – all the more frightening for being silent.  Then I shook my head.  This could not possibly be real.  Our helicopter had crashed into the lake at a different city.  This was a relief. A relief that relief was even possible within a logical universe where my current thought processes were being formed. And I simply gave the instruction for this dream to renew its rightful sway over reality.  "Bring it on!" I screamed.  Waking Jawn in the process.  As well as myself.

 

 

*

Fang snored within the cigarette-stained fingers of those testing the burnability of any clumps of body-hair that he sported.  Now longer, more tangled, than during his earlier youth.

 

Rider's snores woke Fang to the starlight only to find himself sleep-walking quite close to the quirkily reinvigorated campfire.  Rider still snored nearby.  And it was these snores of Rider's that Fang had believed to be his own.  Fang looked up at the starlit bowl of night, dreaming of distances beyond death.  He sighed.  He loved adventure.  Especially adventures where he knew not their purpose or ability to bear a happy ending … or not.

 

He thought of the girl he had treated as a daughter – taking her on clattering sky-rides fit to outdo the greatest visions of childhood fantasy.  He wished he had children of his own, like her.  But fathering would be difficult with simply Rider as a mate!  Is it ever too late to change orientations?  He sighed and fell asleep - desperately trying to re-enter the dream of slender cigarette-stained fingers fumbling at his privates.

 

Instead, he now dreamed of the biggest man he had ever seen (in or out of dream) – almost the archetypal giant of fairy tales  with a large bloated face.  Even zombie expressions failing to fleet across the wide features between each cheek's edge.  This giant was lying on his back …. stretched upon the ground within the light of the still spluttering campfire and using a smaller man (a normal-sized man) as a sort of blanket.  When spotting Fang in the distance, the giant cruelly thrust aside this 'blanket' and lurched to his feet, slowly lumbering towards Fang with dogged purpose: the flies of his enormous trousers mis-buttoned.

 

Fang prayed that he could wake up.  But Rider had stopped snoring.

 

 

*

Wind swept Swift with lonely waywardness.  The statue of Sid the Stationer crumbled top down.  Or it seemed to crumble from inside out.  Or it simply contracted without direction. His poised hand finally dropped the 'paper-aeroplane' with a concrete clump upon the cracked slabs of the city square.  Then the hand itself finally fell off.  Except the hand flew off instead of dropping to the ground.  Resulting in a question being asked: can statues dream?  And, therefore, a further question: can ghosts ask such questions about dreaming when they are in fact the subject of dreams?

 

 

***

 

It is a thankless task writing dark fantasy.  There is no reward for inveigling readers by all manner of mock-clever means towards the edge of a dark pit – and then to let them drop for real beyond the safety-net of what they believed to be a suspension of disbelief at the optimum moment of thus truly believing such disbelief … towards the very brink of toppling into the deepest abyss that humanity could create from previously imagined powers of imagination.

 

The parthenogenesis of reality from artifice: magic fiction.

 

This is important stuff.  Too important for mere fiction to convey.  So be it.

 

The mining facilities in Poe City were ostensibly piping natural gas as a conspiracy of over-warming or incubating the world's tepid germs of latent disease for political purposes.  The United Nations tried to prevent test runs of hawling this gas by channelling contrary fictions into the veins of history itself.  Fiction as gas.  A dangerous gas created to defeat an even more dangerous gas.

 

And under cover of this process were mined millions of pests or pods or hives known as yester-eggs.  Sheer millions.  Slag-heaps of them at each and every minehead.  A whole cobbled past quarried into mountains of waste, indeed a past within every pest from which to hatch…

 

The only hope is for Hiver Jawn and Softie Mildeyes eventually to overcome their inhibitions and consummate their own egg of eggs as reality's stop-gap creation against the ultimate emptiness of everything.

 

 

+++++++

Rumours remain rife.

 

That the only part of Sid the Stationer's statue now left on the lost island of Laputa is his left foot, strangely endowed with only four toes. 

 

That the industrial complex of gasworks and hawlpits straddling Lovecraft and Poe is a fabrication of fiction - a subterfuge, a decoy for the true complex elsewhere.

 

That global warming has caused the Brueghelian snow-line cities to have melted revealing a configuration of contours loosely described as geography: a landscape - when viewed from above as a gestalt by the many buzzing helicopters - depicting the blackened face of Mother Earth herself. 

 

That the author has returned to Lewis to rediscover his true self, only to discover not himself at all, not even a wardrobe and a lion, but a small child digging the grassy ground with bare hands intent on Adventures in Wonderland.

 

That this is the end of Yesterfang ('what was captured yesterday') or simply the end of Part II (The Pest Of All Worlds), with Part III awaiting real readers to react thus far in order to make it worthwhile for any future yester-egg of magic fiction to be parthenogenetically created from artifice and then re-sown between the yellowish appliqués and woven interstices of the Proustian Panoply.

 

Bring it on! To quote Softie.

 

 

++++++++++++++++

The end of YESTERFAN ?

 

Yes, if I receive insufficient reactions to the novel so far.

 

des

 

 

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

The set of Fanblade Fables was an apocryphal epilogue to YESTERFANG. Below, in turn, is an apocryphal epilogue to that apocryphal epilogue.

*******

Hiver Jawn heard the helicopter crash with a clatter of vanes.

The accident was so slow-key, the fractures were minor and the injuries slight.  A sluggish ricochet between the towers of Swift City. The occupants managed to slide off like reptiles - ashamed of their mismanaged piloting.  At least it had been a soft-bellied landing.

Carefully, at the crash site, Jawn pieced the constituents of a fragile lady's fan together - vaneblade to vaneblade - creating, eventually, more than one fan to cool his ardor for existence, each fan circularly forming a seamless goblet or grail.  Holy with no holes.

He looked up to see if he were over-looked.  And I could no longer see him.  He had mined himself inward to search further down for the blades spinning within the vent of his own bottom; the only way to escape was in the form of yellow gas.

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

Apocrypha beyond the last apocrypha:

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/10/14/hiver.html

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ADDED 6th OCTOBER 2008 - CERN ZOO 'BAFFLES':

http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2008/10/06/

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/cern_zoo.mws

http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/287.html

http://augusthog.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1846252/cern-zoo/

http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1846251/cerne-zoo/

http://nemonymous.tripod.com/word_hunger/index.blog/1846260/cerne-zoo/

http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1846254/cerne-zoo/

http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/weirdtongue/index.blog/1846257/cern-zoo/

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=438786805

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=136537694&blogID=438788207

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=147731320&blogID=438789994

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=138197636&blogID=438789474

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=145421249&blogID=438788748

 

The previous miscellaneoous 'Baffles' in one place:

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2007/09/dfl-baffles.html

 

The links to the ten fanblade fables:

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

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/fanblade_two.mws

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/fanblade_fable_3.htm

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1077&blog_ID=Simonymous

http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1687755/fanblade-six/

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1217&blog_ID=Simonymous

http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/weirdtongue/index.blog/1687756/fanblade-eight/

http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2006/10/12/

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/10/fanblade-9.html

http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/190.html

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/10/14/hiver.html

 

 

 

 

FUTURE WEIRDTONGUE NAVIGATION:

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1084&blog_ID=Simonymous 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE 30, 34, 39, 44 & 49

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (30)

 

The soft plash of oars as the dinghy floated across the steaming lake, its occupants sporadically glimpsing the Choker's castellated shape in the yellow gloom.  Modal Morales and his right-hand girl Jane were searching for any face that floated upside down in the murky waters, making any recognition impossible to predict because of the wrinkled weathering by water or, indeed, the murkiness itself.  They had already delivered one tall man with an untamed tongue to the Choker, but he wasn't the only one dead or nearly-dead or nearly-alive - with untamed tongues or tentacular languages that observed no traditions of meaning - whom they needed to round up or trawl for the Choker.  There were 6000 of them at the last over-exact count (i.e. another 5999), each a live body or corpse or zombie representing a 1000 others within itself like Russian Dolls in layers upon layers of thickened warhide or rind formed from hardened flesh, all previously gassed by the yellow steam given off by the lake, because they (when previously normal people) had not been given the antidote to prevent such toxic intake by the lungs.  Consumption upon consumption in complication of or interference by Bird Flew.  The Choker sure had its work cut out for the foreseeable future.

 

Suddenly the dinghy grounded to a halt upon a mass of such bodies, many bony and thin (belying the scope of their contents, mental or physical), elongated in height by the torture they had suffered at the hands of history. They were intertwined like fleshy rush-mats from shore to shore.  Some moaned, others weltered noisily with mud upon their whipping tongues, a few as silent as the previous silence broken only by plashing oars and the wet raw planky vessel itself.  Modal, knew deep within himself, that this was a dream.  He was the Clown of Dreams, and within certain layers of these dreams-within-dreams or dreams by other dreamers infiltrating his own dreams, his job was to lighten and entertain the audience of co-dreamers with antics of farce or black humour, cart-wheeling in his baggy suit through false doors to baths of custard or slews of porridge beneath his huge skidding banana-feet – all a front or subterfuge, when he reached the bottom dream or the head-lease dream, for him being the reincarnation (or actual equivalence) of Yellowish Haze himself now set to put right the wrongs of centuries, including all those killed by history rather than by natural death.

 

*

Gregory was separated from Suzie at some point between his own separate dreams.  He found himself waking time and time again from an operation on his head (he felt fingers manipulating his brain) as he glassily stared up at faces that floated in the yellow gloom of the theatre.  This was not the convalescence he had expected.  Not the lazy afternoons in a wicker chair by the side of the lake to which he had looked forward, being waited on hand on foot with all manner of medicinal cocktails.  This was deep-rooted surgery itself.  The convalescence, in hindsight, had been conducted at the previous hospital ward back home, a pre-illness convalescence, as it turned out, as he had then not been ill at all before then.  Rest and care and recuperation and, yes, convalescence, prior to the disease hitting him.  A vital pre-cursor (or pre-cure) to an illness that was incurable.  It should always have been such with incurable illnesses.  Because most incurable illnesses led to death, with no subsequent chance of convalescence.  So best to have it first. 

 

He fell back into dream.  This was an anaesthetic of most confused proportions.  He saw himself again as Baby Tuckoo, now a little older, a toddler with a new toy. A toy electric-shaver which, when he rubbed its business end up and down his cheeks  and between his nose and lips and his chin (as a grown-up man would do with a real electric-shaver), played music.

 

*

The Weirdmonger backed up his wagon (amid the alert of reverse hooting) towards the Choker's drawbridge-door.  Eventually, one of the Choker's flunkeys carrying a slimy eel-like mass of rudery in his arms came out of a side door and loaded it on the wagon.  The Weirdmonger gently touched the wagon's scrawny steed with the end of his whip and trundled off, having paid cost-price (with some means of illegal tender to the flunkey) for this new stock-in-trade.  Glistenberry Fair was his next stop.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (34)

 

Glistenberry sat, on one side, within the shade of the Tor-on-the-Hill, and beneath the sun of an over-hot British Summer, on the other.  The animal zodiac was snoozing, next to invisible … it was never awake unless in rain or cold.  Indeed, only a few people believed in the landscape containing or representing an animal zodiac at all.  You needed to go up in a helicopter so see it plainly.  And, even then, there were doubters.  And people scared of flying.

 

When the seasonal fairs and festivals and circuses and markets came to settle with their sails upon the ocean of green and earthy-compartmented farmland – one wondered whether that was a metaphor at all but, rather, the intrinsic truth about inward voyages to the self itself.  But, even in the bright sunshine, one found thoughts turning to darker visions that went above the heads of the jollifiers and holiday-makers and music-lovers and sight-seers.  Rudiments of myth and melancholy.

 

Today, carts and wagons and tent-carriers dotted the trunk roads towards this part of Summerset, building up in volume as the traffic cycles revealed their propensity to rhythmic jamming.  Together with henge-dwellers and romanies in caravans … plus ready-made canvas conveyances that were none of these vehicles but their own very special breed of transport particular to the ethos of the Glistenberry Romance.

 

 John Cowper Powys House was, however, a dark stone building lurking quite close to the Tor area (or as the locals called, Torus)  where the scratchings of the first animal sign could be discerned in the loose contours of scrubble underfoot.  An animal sign that belonged to no sane horoscope or natal chart.

 

It is that house to which we must later divert our attention.  New, as yet unnamed, protagonists are about to open the house's shuttered gloom and take root there – not as squatters, as such, but, rather, as budding contestants in some form of race that had not yet been defined (both in margins of eligible track for racing and the race's rules).  They had been given permission to camp out in the derelict, dark, damp house free of charge.  In the sun of daytime, the drawbacks didn't seem to matter so much.  It was only at night or in gloomy weather that the darkness, dampness and dereliction crept back.  A 'Big Brother' house with no  audience or other ways of spying on them … except by us.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (39)

 

Whether senile dementia is nemophilia or nemophobia, the result is the same. 

 

When Suzie left the hospital, after seeing her Mum, she took some time to recover her own equilibrium.  She popped into her local corner shop only to be confronted by its proprietor.  He told her that her newspaper delivery bill was owing.  She mindlessly listened to his rant before settling.  She was mad, not bad, she implied.  She only wanted a pint of milk, today.  They ended up inferred friends again.  She failed to realise the connection between him and the clown who had performed with Goldfrapp the weekend before.  The connection was that there was no connection at all which gave any thought that he might have had such a connection very strange indeed: and strangeness is strangely (in itself) the strangest connector of all.  Establishing a connection by needing to say there was no such connection.

 

Greg was still asleep when she got back to the flat.

 

"Don't bother to get up," she called sarcastically.

 

No reply. She shrugged. No connection, there, either!

 

 

*

Feemy Fitzworth examined his own hand.  It was certainly smaller than he remembered it but, literally while he thought about it, the hand's margins seemed to grow again with further inches of itself reconstituting even as he watched the process. A peculiar feeling for Feemy to feel.  He had recently grown smaller and smaller, scrawnier and scrawnier, ever since dragging his body back towards England from Poland.  Indeed, earlier, during transit, there had grown hazy yellow borders replacing the outer limits of his body – then vanished into thin air – then grew again as they replaced the new more inner outer-limits, leaving only bits to wrinkle and harden like stale food.  Today the process seemed to be in reverse again – new areas of body replacing new areas of yellow haze.  He couldn't account for such a reversal of a reversal of his body margins.  And which was the direction of emaciation, and which the direction of fattening, became as inscrutable as the difference between nemophilia and nemophobia.

 

 He should have taken the opportunity to ring his latest lady friend – Mrs Mummerset – because, soon, in fact in the last few lines of the previous paragraph, his fingers had grown too big to manipulate the holes in his mobile's tiny dial.  He wanted to reassure her about a few things including his continued love for her and to establish whether he could extend the various investments she had made in his business venture as well as in his very state of existence.  Words were more important than money.  Even words sent via mouthpieces rather than mouths.

 

Later, in what he saw as moments of greater clarity, he continued his trek across the desert between Middle Europe and the white cliffs of England. He watched the ever-widening motor-kites heading to bomb some of the remaining cities that had survived Hitler's first bombardment.  He felt he was being dragged down by more than just his own bodyweight.  He imagined he had grown a huge tail that was leaving a deep slimy trench in his wake and that some telephony company would probably take the opportunity to lay a land-line along it in due course.  He had left a charged-up webcam at one point in the desert pointing at his proposed onward route, a webcam with a connection to the tiny screen of his mobile, whereby he could now see himself progressing into the distance until his body eventually disappeared.

 

 

*

I woke up at the sound of her voice.

 

"Why did you just wake me?" I asked.

 

"But you spoke first!"

 

I couldn't see her in the dark.  I felt huge pouting or pulsing things on my face, things I couldn't differentiate from the skin of my face beneath them.  They were a  "Why did you just wake me?" monster in bits and as a whole – its interrogative hook actually now buried in my face.  But what had it said first – to wake my wife?

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (44)

 

During the height of the panic caused by the unexpected air-raid over Wagger Market, Suzie found herself hustled into a surprisingly available shelter that was almost 'fit for purpose'.  It was better than the ones in London – i.e. those hastily dug for the Blitz proper by means of Anderson Shelters in city-street gardens together with makeshift kip-points on Underground platforms – but, even so, it was too dark to see very clearly in this subterranean part of Summerset and the walls were still earthen without any attempt to finish them off by plastering.

 

 Later that night Suzie was to fall asleep with difficulty creating dreams that she was sheltering, along with others, within a bodily cavity still warm from continuous life that had been fortuitously provided by one of the terrestrially in-built 'animals' of the Glistenberry Zodiac.  But, whilst still awake, she was faced with harsh reality, despite the best intentions of those who had built this particular shelter.

 

At times, she also believed she was within a chamber that would soon be full of a deceptively pale yellowness, but she could not fathom this belief.

 

For a while, the shelter's inhabitants looked bleary-eyed, cowed, taciturn, rather than outright scared or at risk from suffering any renewals of noisy panic.  They could all hear, no doubt, the dull thumps of bombs distantly shaking the ground.  Suzie feared for the integrity of JCP House, even the pinnacled brick-built Tor stuck up high on the hill above Glistenberry for many centuries. The Abbey Ruins would be ruined even further, she thought.  She also feared for the safety of someone she did not know.  She ached for this very stranger's arms to enfold her.

 

Before finally falling asleep, she had cast glances around her co-shelterers, some now mumbling in odd twos and threes.  She forced back the dreams that teetered upon the brink of sleep's approaching onset.  She spotted – for real – a figure that looked remarkably like Mary of Mangle herself.  It was surely, indeed, that very woman. Suzie had often seen her on regular tours of JCP House. She looked less imperious, now, less certain of herself, but still with an air of tallness despite sitting down on the rough floor. Pitiful to see such a downfall, despite the imputed cruelties of her reign.

 

Mary of Mangle opened her empty mouth widely meeting darkness with darkness.  Some of her flunkeys and sycophants approached her.  One tried to force-feed her with a large amount or tripe-like slobber that the Weirdmonger had earlier been seen (if not seen by Suzie herself) cutting up as an elixir-of-life on his Market stall.  Mary of Mangle refused to swallow it but kept it in her mouth, like a spoilt child.  As some of the substance was now missing, the words she eventually emitted by its means - via the curds of it thick slobber – appeared incomplete: "Gout … Spout … Watch ... the … Sprout …!"

 

Others turned towards this sound of her 'voice', half-heartedly mystified.  Then they returned to further attempts at sleeping, as helped by what they put down as a dream.  If one was dreaming, then one must be asleep.  A great psychological help towards real  sleep itself.

 

In another corner, a rank-smelling man tossed and turned in his premature sleep, using a filthy rucksack as a pillow.  Suzie thought he would have been more comfortable without the pillow.  She bum-shifted away from that man as far as possible because he was now speaking of things in his sleep that she did not wish to hear together with the sound of farts she did not wish to smell.  She was, consequently, nearer Mary of Mangle herself who had, apparently, fallen asleep, still ruminatively chewing the curdish cud with a renewed air of sway and swagger and pride that only the oblivion of sleep could have brought to someone so fallen from grace.

 

*

Modal Morales picked up one of the papers in his shop.  There were news agency photos of a freak storm in Somerset.  Glastonbury Tor had been toppled.  Amongst the crowds that subsequently gathered (in one of the more detailed photos) around Glastonbury Abbey's shattered remains, Modal half-recognised a face he did not wish to recognise at all, one which gave him an inexplicable frisson of fear.  He fingered the black rosette in his lapel and replaced the newspaper in the delivery boy's pile – and looked up as the shop door went 'ding'!

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (49)

 

Mrs Celia Mummerset missed a number of people.

She still visited the living body of Mrs Rachel Milledges at the hospital whilst the real friend who used to exist within that body was missing, presumed lost forever. Mrs Mummerset also missed her own son: she knew not where or why. She kept her mobile switched on day and night in the hope he would ring – with the combined hope that her latest male admirer (another missing person) would also ring: from abroad where she believed he was currently travelling on business. She missed Mrs Lettuce Weggs who had drowned in her own septic tank. She missed another friend: Mrs Maria Morales who had died one wash-day…

The circumstances concerning this death of Mrs Morales are still sub judice or, at least, subject to a version of their own circumstantial evidence. Her son, Modal, one Monday morning, left his corner shop – having shut it with a card on the door saying "back soon". He seemed to have deterred most regular customers, in any event. He was intent, today, upon setting off to visit his Mum for some advice regarding the pests that had attacked him. She was an expert, he knew, upon old-fashioned complaints that bore names from old wives' tales and that only the old wives themselves - versed or steeped in the real past as they were - knew how to suffer properly or with dignity.

Ever since the pests – as he knew them – had attacked his shop, he had felt one such pest eating away at him from under his skin. To help palliate it, he needed simply for it to be named. His Mum was a wise woman, better than any doctor. Modal loved her in his own quaint way. In any event, he was, today, finally, at the end of his tether, having decided to shut up his shop and tell his Mum, without further delay, about his own worst fears. But he had forgotten it was wash-day. He should have guessed, however, judging by the breezy blue of the sky and the fulsome white billows of configured clouds veritably racing above him like the airy ghosts of cattle.

"Hi, Mum!" he shouted as he spotted her pegging out smalls on the washing-line. "How's Sidney the Suds and Albert the Clothes-Horse?" he continued shouting as he thus joked across the street from where he could already see her waving at him.

Yet, from that distance, he spotted that she seemed skinnier than her habitually jolly wash-day plumpness. Now as thin as when she was a young slip of a girl during the Spanish Civil War all those decades before. The matter somehow concerned the ancient rusty-handled mangle through which she'd just been strenuously wringing the sodden clothes. Nobody could later fathom exactly the nature of any available circumstantial evidence – other than that she turned out, upon investigation, to be quite dead, waving like a flag from where she was pegged out upon her own washing-line.

 

  FUTURE WEIRDTONGUE NAVIGATION:

 

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1084&blog_ID=Simonymous

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE 4, 9, 13, 19 & 24

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (4)

 

Blasphemy Fitzworth was, as many already knew, a cat's meat man who sold his wares throughout the winding catacombs of streets in Victorian London.  The children that followed in the wake of his steaming, bubble-sounding meatcart (as he pushed - or more often pulled - its tiny sprung wheels) were often cock-a-hoop with life, despite the mouching, slouching way of dirt and life that threaded their young bones with yellow marrowfat as well as feeding further redless pigments into their bloodcourses.  They joyfully shouted 'Feemy' (a foreshortening of his name) when they heard his costermonger's cry in an indeterminate distance, slowly drawing nearer and nearer from (to them) impossible angles of approach:

 

"Gout cat! Spout cat! Watch their whiskers sprout, cat!"

 

The legend - not among the kids as they were too young to know - indicated that Feemy Fitzworth was a spy from other times, from other worlds alternating with ours, ever on the search for evidence of greater and (then again) greater Gods than those in which the indigenous peoples already believed.  A step-ladder toward the noumenon.   Ecumenical, if not economical, with the truth.

 

The choice of cat's meat vending as a disguise was first described by another visitor to our times, but facts got so crosswired  (not only the times whence this scribe came but even his identity and whereabouts themselves) they have become ludicrously confused with where he was going or whence he'd just been and why.  Some even believed that the scribe was Feemy himself.  But that confusion was one confusion too far.  A first straw that broke the linear dromedary's back.  But none knew.  None probably cared.

 

Chelly Mildeyes was one such kid, maybe a kid in disguise, who followed Feemy by becoming a spy upon a spy or, more likely, a reminder of the ghost she replaced.  But that is only hearsay.  Other texts may tell fresher truths, but today we can only be sufficed with this one, given any timely exegesis by external sources or not.  She certainly mixed in with the other scrawny, tornly dressed kids with a will and a believability that makes any doubt quite parsimonious and self-demeaning. 

 

She plumped a fist into the meatcart's back pan, evidently not eager to clutch at the valves of still heart-beating brisket melts (hence the fist rather than a clawing open palm), but to see if she could do it without Feemy noticing.  A devilment for its own sake.  Either to enhance her disguise in face of Feemy's own disguise or, more likely, because she actually enjoyed devilment for its own sake.  She was soon interfered from her childish dipping by the sight of Feemy saluting the sun as a sort of shading of the eyes against its glare.  She thought he said he could see Great Old Ones gliding in with huge cattle faces from a direction he'd not expected.  Their lowing filled the sky with a monotonous low-key invisble thunderstorm.

 

It was then he heard his mobile ring - out-trilling the squeaking meat of the middle pan where he'd stowed it.

 

 FUTURE WEIRDTONGUE NAVIGATION HERE:

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1084&blog_ID=Simonymous

 

WEIRDTONGUE (9)

 

The sailors lowered their sails.  The ship managed the rest of the long voyage into the harbour by means of a motorised force that was hidden from view.  Its noise was gutturally similar to half-articulate human speech. Complete with glottal stops.  Feemy watched the pouring of great flagons of thick black fluid as it was fed into various openings in the deck, as imputed fuel. Taking him - along finely engineered mechanisms of motive force as lubricated by the flesh of those who worked in the bowels of the ship - from one mist of memory to another.  He remembered the stuff he used to sell from his meatcart, liquidised black-pudding, similar to the fuel in consistency, in look and, possibly, feel, if not edibility.

 

Feemy had only met the Captain the day before, but by that reckoning, based on memory of duration, the meeting must have been before the voyage started.  Or, even, whilst it was still being planned.

 

The Captain told him that it may be Victorian in London, but the rest of the world would likely never to have heard of the Queen who had given the era its name.

 

The Captain was the tallest member of the crew but surely that feature wasn't the only qualification for his position in the ranks of navigation.  Yet he was the only one who could reach the handle of the door to the wheel room.

 

As they eye-balled each other over the dinner table in the Captain's quarters, the conversation became flippant and casual, rather than the earlier seriousness concerning latitudes, sextants and galley-slaves.

 

"Where we're going they speak a language called Weirdtongue," the Captain said, nibbling on some slimy provender Feemy himself had contributed to the ship's victuals.  Fishily slimy, despite being meat.

 

"Oh? Do they have people to translate?  I thought they spoke Chinese where we were going," said Feemy, changing tack halfway through this his latest share of the dialogue.

 

"We changed tack halfway through the voyage.  The cargo was moved halfway across the world so that we could pick it up to return it."

 

Feemy looked quizzical.  Litle Chelly would have enjoyed this small talk.  Ludicrous as some of it was. 

 

Feemy missed his small customers in the City streets around St Paul's and wondered how he had reached this particular pass in life.  A drug-runner was never a job he was ambitious about as a boy.  He'd rather have been a train-driver.  He scratched his head.  Not only was the conversation hitting double-notes of misfired music in the meaning, so were his own thoughts.

 

"Can you speak Weirdtongue?"

 

The Captain shook his head up and down and then from side to side, as if the very question was in a language he didn't understand.  He was away with the fairies in his head.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (13)

 

Gregory stared at Suzie - and at their respective mothers who had separately and independently interfered by visiting during the couple's first session of light petting on return from the park, both circus and friques forgotten or at least pushed to the back of the mind where any dream sickness sucked but could not stick.

 

Suzie's Mum had been ill whilst Gregory had been in hospital.  A traditional homely illness like flew or migraine.  She was now on the mend and had arrived at Gregory's flat concerned that he we was about to renew his 'evil influence' on her daughter.  The bloke's weird, she thought.  And Gregory simply knew she thought this so there was not much love lost between them.  With many episodes of Lost lost, too, with no TV available in the hospital, he couldn't help thinking, with a wry smile.

 

Gregory's Mum loved Gregory, hence her many failed attempts at visiting him (and no-one else) during hospital visiting hours.  Currently, with any dream sickness relatively subdued, both had forgotten the baleful glances between each other as she visited other patients in the visiting carrel, patients she had pretended to be the real Gregory.  Equally, mundane matters resumed their importance in day-to-day life with no possible escape into fantasy, real or otherwise.  There was a difference between known fantasy and fantasy disguised as reality.  But, now, such whimsical concerns - inevitably raising their heads from time to time as they still did - had no option but to retract into their snail-shells, impatiently awaiting the return of any signs of dream sickness or, better still, nemophilia / nemophobia in the minds that controlled such intrinsically uncertain demarcation-lines between (i) reality, (ii) fantasy and (iii) reality/fantasy combined, whilst changing perceptions confused any such ambitions by often being in danger of seeing the actual definitions of (i), (ii) and (iii) as each other's definition.

 

In consequence (but with no logical connection to enforce any consequence at all between what went before and what followed), Gregory's Mum, showed delight in having rediscovered her son (in company with Suzie whom she quite liked despite disliking her mother who was also present).  Despite this, Gregory noticed that his mother kept looking at her mobile, no doubt for text messages from her current 'bloke'.

 

"Why has my bank book been emptied, Mum?" Gregory suddenly asked, with a look towards Suzie, as if eye-balling his own mother was not possible whatever the provocation.

 

Suzie's mother looked embarrassed and made as if to depart.

 

Gregory's Mum looked up from her mobile which had trilled to indicate the arrival of a message.

 

"It says that he wants more money sent overseas so that he can buy another cart," she said quite innocently, as if changing the subject of Gregory's bank book was the furthest thing from her mind.  In fact the two things may well have been connected.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (19)

 

It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Feemy Fitzworth no longer needed a physical meatcart to tote his wares around Victorian London – but, if pinpointed, it was the moment when he became the meatcart himself.  So many words had been ingested by his 'persona', swelling his glands into even fattier tissues – and he used the steaming heat of the weather that often attacked London in those days to cook the slices he would later slice from his belly quarters and hocks from his hind-calves and heifers from his humpback. A walking carvery.

 

But without the words he would never have found himself in such a (lucky?) position where he was a self-perpetuating purveyor of cat's meat for the clipped-back folk of Lower Thames Street.  The words used on his behalf immediately turned into fat or flesh or sometimes pre-cooked meat upon his previously lean-shanked hams as soon as they hit the vicinity of his mean gait in front of the soon-to-be-discarded meatcart, discarded, at first, by becoming a ghostly meatcart being towed behind him amid the excited imaginary coos and shrieks of now ghostly children, who had died from food poisoning or simply been stuck up chimney-flues.  The cart later  - in dreams if not in ghostly form - soon took on the traits of the Weirdmonger's medicine wagon on Weirdmonger Wheels.  Cat's meat liquidised into doses of linctus to stave off Flew or Quinsy.  But then, when the shape of a giant circus tent grew from the canvas wagon, Feemy left the dream before it finished, and dreamed of other things, like the tall Captain Bintiff and his way of talking Weirdtongue.  Then, as already indicated, Feemy became the meatcart himself simply because the words said so.

 

Yet, worse dreams returned to frique and vex the mind of Feemy.  He could not endure the strain of toting himself round the streets as a mound of steaming dung disguised as meat (as it later became).  He would often doze off within the shade of St Paul's Dome during the unseemly summers that a backward echo of global warming surprisingly caused without any history books noticing … listening to the ghostly Luftwaffe bombers from the future, while pre-filling the role that Padgett Weggs would later play in a similar position on the pavement (60 years' hence) as he filled out the silhouette that had once been Feemy's.

 

Captain Bintiff stood statuesque against his own larger silhouette, wagging a huge protuberance from his mouth – a rude gesture that Feemy wondered if the school playground chant would be spell enough to ward off the curses from the sound of language thus produced: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names or words will never change me.

 

Or even ringtones.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (24)

 

Following attendance at the festival's main stage, Gregory Mummerset and Suzie Mildeyes later yearned for the more gentle melody of lullabies rather than the thumping thumbprints of sound pressed into the soft-imagined carapaces of their once new-born heads.  They returned to their tent along with raging migraines: potential op-art dreameries if sleep should help to dull the pains alongside its more customary provision of creative gliding through the fripperies of unreality.

 

They had enjoyed the 'circus' stage-show but the delayed diminishment of competing sounds – rehearsed as well as unrehearsed – from all corners of the benighted site did little to encourage the curative qualities of sleep.  The tent was cross-skewed itself as if hordes had skirted it during the collateral damage caused by some ill-reported war here among the valleys beneath the long-tongued Tor.  The ground's mildewy discomfort gave sleep further excuse to keep poking from its shell, antennae quivering in search of further delay.

 

The couple looked pitifully into each other's eyes; leaning  forward from time to time while lightly kissing away the tears.  They were out of depth.  Gregory even feared he might need to return to the hospital.  Mildeyes and melody-boxes.  Somersaults and summersets. The cavortings of a clown. A group called Friques in a side-tent.  Safety-net spiders spinning big tops for pops. Marionettes hanging half-dead between the tangling spools of sleep's slow withdrawal and the crazy-paved merging of two migraines. The incredible Mister Kite.  A dark shadow swooping in…

 

*

Blasphemy Fitzworth was aboard the fair-sailed Glittenburier as it entered a new harbour of choice without visible steam or sound.  Captain Bintiff had long since left this particular texture of truth upon the original craft of Feemy's destiny with a crew chosen from several of the other voyages that had since intervened yet remained strangely unreported by any of our correspondents in the field.  Where Bintiff had gone, nobody in these parts even pretended to know. Feemy's new Captain if he had a long tongue certainly hid it with a short one.  As hidden as his name.  A nemophile with emptiness for a face.

 

Despite the beauty of the fantastical turrets (each a hill-topping Tor in its own right) built upon each new brow of dream, there was a wholesale war afoot here, too, and here and here - with many wild machinations of politick and bent magick. Feemy tried to retain his innocent task of selling meaty parts of himself to the natives – but natives who prided themselves as more civilised than Feemy felt they had no need of such meagre off-cuttings of grease and gristle.  They had edible luxuries (rich in protein) hidden within their own humps, but failed to be able to reach round to mine them.  Yet, simply knowing luxuries were there (just behind them) made the natives feel confident enough to near starve rather than buy provender from the likes of Feemy.

 

These natives were native of nowhere.  Nemophobes in the main, however, they vigorously sought a name for the land that Feemy had now reached as well as names for themselves … names for the land where they (these as yet nameless ones) purportedly lived amid the mass of hill-topping Tors and nightly-lit circuses and festivals galore in each valley cleft.  If any reader has a name for this land and its natives before we visit its veils and piques again, please let it be known.  If, indeed, any reader wishes actually to enter as a real character into the throes of the story towards bolstering, even curing, these various vexed textures of destiny or truth known as Weirdtongue, please also make yourself known to the narrative hospital.

 

 

 

 

 

YESTERFANG PARTS 3, 8, 14, 19 & 24

 

 

YESTERFANG (3)

 

The wide-flighted birds-of-prey cast their individual twirling shadows over the vast blank plateau – seeking the toddler Jawn – in absurd pretence of assisting the villagers scattered (in alternately separate and joined-up examples of handwriting) over different sections of the same plateau … with the additional precisions of shadow that represented more ground-based search-parties in seeming competition with those masquerading as such in the skies above.

 

Jawn himself was oblivious to those interchanging patterns of pursuit as well as independent of the shuttling shapes in variously hopeful staged rescues of the yesterfang.

 

Jawn knew no such terms.  Simple-mindedness could never stretch that far.  And as each day went by, his wanderability knew no bounds. Only human minds that had been trained by self-enforced complexities could subsequently stay on board bodies that constrained their wild adventures by always returning home – if crestfallen – into the arms of loved ones.  With simple-mindedness, any wanderability was infinite.  Hence, Jawn running away … escaping into the bottomless pit of simplicity and honesty where no search-parties (friendly or otherwise) could follow.

 

In Hell, one needed the strongest fans possible to waft life-giving draughts of air towards any who had inadvertently wandered there.  The birds-of-prey screeched with scorched wings.  And the villagers stood far back from the flames for fear of being burnt into even blacker versions of their own rorschach blots.  Beyond the wild curtains of infernal orange, they saw the silhouette of Jawn, dancing and jabbing like the clown puppet of all dreams but yours.

 

Jawn, meanwhile, still toddled across the snow – having left a decoy in Hell.

 

In the distance, he saw – with simple-minded clarity – a cage-on-legs following him, evidently not deceived.  Motherly love knew no decoys.

 

 

 

YESTERFANG (8)

 

Having attuned his eyes to the haze of the hothouse, Jawn proceeded to pinch himself.

 

He was real. 

 

Events, admittedly, had  not been amenable to character-building as a real person in real situations, but Jawn was completely satisfied that he was real, had real emotions of surprise together with growth as an individual from toddler to his current stage of beard-teazled youth.  A young man in an ever-failing search for his lost youth as his own past vanished with each event transpiring towards completion – a past that indeed vanished, given the normal course of events of a typical young man’s mindless search for excitement and challenge.  However, to obtain a graspable sense of his own being, Jawn needed to be captured by each moment with such moments later being pulled from some future hat like magic tricks of himself to assist his natural development as a unified character facing a known and believable reality.  Thus, he needed to build yester-hives of himself along the way for when he needed to travel back there one day.  A phalanx of deja-vus that maketh the man. 

 

As long as the past moments thus stored were not false moments.

 

He felt unaccountably sad about the departure of Congreve.  He read too much into it to cause such sadness.  But, meanwhile, he needed to acclimatise himself to the variable levels of haze that stained the air around him, through which he glimpsed apparently blind girls in stiff plain frocks crawling about the floor continuously striking matches.  He felt the urge to pinch their legs but, when he did just that, his actions evoked no visible reaction to his presence as the girls merely continued to groan and mouth nonsensicals of sound.  However, he did eventually discern two other girls who were seated together on a sofa.  They beckoned him over.

 

“I’m Sarah,” one said.  A pretty girl who made no attempt to flirt with Jawn. She was just a person rather than a sexual animal. “You need to stop breathing so hard or it’ll choke you.”  She pointed to the atmosphere.  “You can’t smell it but it’s there all the time.  Sometimes you can’t even see it.”

 

“Leaks?” asked Jawn rhetorically, the first word he had spoken since Congreve’s departure.  He noticed that the atmosphere was clearing (as if in tune with Sarah’s prediction that it might) and he was now able to make a whole from the room.  A bare utility working-class parlour from a real post-war London.  Jawn recognised it from a depth of memory he didn’t know he possessed until this very moment.  Hopefully, not one of those false moments he had earlier feared, but a real memory during an equally real trigger of such memory as represented by the room.  He watched the blind girls curl into a corner and simper in a strangely satisfied manner.

 

“Don’t worry about them.  They’re not really there.  So blind they don’t exist.”  Sarah spoke with intelligent conviction, in contrast to her outward dizzy winsomeness as a vision of attractiveness.

Her words made a strange sense within the context, and Jawn turned to the other girl who looked even more becoming than Sarah.

 

“I’m Julie,” she eventually said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“You expected me?” said Jawn.

 

“Sort of.  Sarah didn’t believe me, but I told her you would come.  And that’s why the haze is clearing…”

“Well, now he’s here, what next?”  Sarah asked.  Both girls were a match for each other’s winning wit and wisdom.

 

Jawn turned to look at the corner where the blind girls had crawled – only to find them gone.  Despite the clearer view, things that had once been there weren’t there now, as if a new invisible or non-characterisable haze had intervened between him and them.  However, the room retained its character.  Not so warm.  And he felt the beginnings of a cough from the after effects. 

 

Jawn thought of Congreve and cried.  Then, just as suddenly, he shrugged off such thoughts as he turned towards his new friends, Sarah and Julie both of whom smiled at him, ready to participate in a silent vigil for memories lost - with new ones waiting in the wings … in the making.

 

Sarah, shivering, eventually got up to switch off the fan.

 

*

Congreve, having left the vicinity of the hothouse, laid down as close to the London Magnet as it was possible for any commoner to reach.  While the white snow around him gradually turned into faint tinges of yellow and, finally, to a deeper more diseased form of the same colour, he beckoned the wheeling shape of the vulture from the sky, inviting it to descend and cuddle him close with its huge white wings.  The hefty weight of the bird settled upon him, with a flutter of feathers, as the beak’s fang opened his face and fed on the brain.  Congreve – before the destruction of his brain – had known instinctively that was what the bird’s fang was about to accomplish – an assisted suicide for the loss of a loved one.  And despite the brain’s destruction, the remains of Congreve cried … cried for longer than Jawn had managed to cry in earlier reciprocity.

 

Eventually, the vulture lifted into the sky, itself temporarily stained by its lengthy feed, leaving a muckheap of a brighter red and yellow (separate and mingled), a muckheap that steeped the otherwise virgin snow of London’s Magnet precinct with its landmark of memorable colour.

 

YESTERFANG (14)

 

I  had to leave the place called Lewis sooner than I expected.  I renewed acquaintance with Sarah.  Julie was mysteriously no longer on the scene.  And Sarah’s skin appeared thicker, perceptibly wrinklier, as if she had been through a lot of heartache.  She maintained a youthful beauty, including the sleek charms of her race and colour, and at my then age of 22, I radiated an admiration towards her, one that I now wore like a badge of reciprocity, as I had learnt to be more confident about my own attractiveness as a human being.  This was despite my earlier disaster with the young teacher of fiction.

 

Indeed, it had been a one-night stand with the teacher in her place near the pier.  And I threw sickies thereafter as I could not bear her near me any more.  It was the beginning of my downfall in the city. I slouched most days around the backwaters eyeing houseboats to see if any were habitable, when I should have been in the classroom. I stopped writing altogether. But I always returned to the foster home, where I now stood out like a sore thumb amongst delicate fingers.  My sexual act with the teacher was barely describable, even within the realms of fiction.  It was neither erotic nor romantic.  It was because I had never done anything like that before, I suppose.  I was confused.  And she expected the pungent soul of my fiction also to be apparent in my own body.  She must have been bitterly disappointed at my clumsy pre-maturity. She, I guess, must have aged over night, and became again the humourless authority figure I had originally assumed her to be.  Prior to that night, she, too, had been innocent.  I never learned her real name.  Or which bits were true, and which not so true.

 

Sarah, on the other hand, found me down by the pier (why was I there that day so close to the teacher’s house – through guilt? hopes of meeting her again?).  It was off-season.  No day-trippers or saucy hats or laughing children with candy floss.  Just a wind off the turgid creeks.  Wind?  When had the weather returned?  I must have been so beached upon my own emotional breakwater, such matters had passed straight over my head.  It was symbolic of deeper things.  The return of weather along with a sense of reality.  A sense of futility.

 

As I say, I suddenly spotted the dark face of Sarah as it glistened like mangled eels between two piles of fishermen’s netting. 

 

“Hi,” I shouted.

 

This was not the first time we had experienced such a chance encounter in recent months.  I never mentioned Julie. Nor did she.

 

“Hi, Jawn.  You look sad.”

”There are no happy endings.”  I laughed as if this statement was just that – a happy ending.

 

“Had enough?”  Her face smiled, the teeth standing out with the striking whiteness of our earlier times together - against the skin that framed them.

 

“I don’t think this place was what it once was,” I said.  “Or it never was what I thought it was.  You see, I dreamed last night of a wardrobe and a lion…”

Sarah looked knowingly.  She must now be in her thirties, I guessed.  And I yearned for her arms to enfold me.  Not as a mother, but as a lover.  Instead, she quickly got up, took my hand (as of old) and we walked down the windy pier together as if there was an expanse of sea at its other end instead of creeks.

 

 

YESTERFANG (19)

 

When Count Congo arrived, Jawn was surprised that this was no fey gentleman in a portly decorated suit from turn-of-the-century Anatole France.  He was slim, decidedly manly-by-penchant and concerned to betray no quirks of behaviour that condemned him to any possible caricature (effeminate or otherwise).  However, he was accompanied by another gentleman who did resemble the inverted archetype of a person that Jawn had expected the Count himself to have been prior to seeing him.

 

“This is Lord Egg,” said the Count. 

 

Lord Egg himself strutted about heavily in a baggy black uniform sparkling with medals that he had obviously not won in any war for bravery.  He simpered like a huge woman.  He examined Jawn in his hammock as if visiting a patient in a hospital. 

 

 Count Congo eventually asked Lord Egg to leave the vicinity.  Lord Egg was obviously only expected to meet Jawn briefly and then leave, as if simply, by his presence, to bring out the Count’s own sharper articulations by contrast.

 

As the Count prepared to conduct the interview of the stranger-he-did-not-know-was-Jawn, Jawn himself saw that Lord Egg was crouching in the willowy shadows of darker yellow waiting to see if the Count failed in his endeavours to draw any salaciousness from an otherwise dry-baked cake that Jawn first appeared to be.  Congo and Egg were rivals in love if not appearance.  Their respective ranks unclear.  Perhaps they took it in turns to make the first attempt at conquering any innocent stranger who happened to sail into Proust on a chance tide.

 

The Nurse was also present in a secondary shadow by a frond of torn parchment.  Yesterday, Jawn had managed to claw himself from the darkness of mixed motives towards some position of empathy by seeing himself through her eyes via his own eyes.  Today, she seemed to be fully aware of the whole tableau vivant (the interacting ballet of desire and mimed confusion), even without Jawn’s empathic help.  She was the manipulator without needing any particularly adroit people-skills other than an air of womanly wisdom to organise affairs like a conductor of an opera composed by Poulenc or Debussy.  Today she looked more like a Nun than a Nurse.  Certainly not the family cook she yesterday pretended to have once been.  More Shakespearean than Proustian.

 

She soon departed to fetch the tea to accompany the plate of cake that the hammock-net had steeped in yellow sleep most of the previous night.  Her infusions of oriental leaf were currently giving off a burning haze in her ancient kitchen having earlier been thus fired into existence by the hob’s brightest gas-ring : piping hot within the capaciousness of a priceless samovar that came from an even more writerly precinct of preciousness than Proust city itself.

 

*

 

The scientist carefully prodded the dead beetle with his stethoscope with no idea of the context of any apocryphal findings so was quite gulled into believing it was what the earlier part of the sentence said it was: a beetle.  How it had infested a work of art in a gallery was neither here nor there.  His religion was amply provided with proof of nearly everything.  A scientist-with-faith was so convinced of his faith that even its unscientific nature was sufficient to increase its strength time and time again by circles of powerful kaleidoscopes of convincing illogic that even plain-spirited logic itself could not withstand.

 

An art parasite, therefore.  Things that fed off creativity like worms in sculptures or spiders that climbed the staves of music or one-bee bee-hives within blown bookspines.  These seemed so natural he needed no further empirical delays.

 

But the ‘beetle’ wasn’t dead.  He heard it breathing within the leathery outer-casing of itself that was also itself as well as its container.  By dint of such expression, it was clear that scientists were thus evidently clearer thinkers than fiction writers.  And he smiled in pride as he proceeded to search with some difficulty for one of his precision instruments of surgical investigation. 

 

 

 

 

YESTERFANG (24)

 

It didn’t go anywhere.  A bedrock whereby no body could have escaped except upwards. The body must still be there buried like a ghost with the visible remains of its cancer making it seem if it was buried forever with the cause of the body’s death itself outlasting it.

 

“Hey!  There’s nothing here except stinky muck!” shouted an eager student girl, commissioned to discover the tomb of the unknown soldier.

 

Her boyfriend gave her an excited kiss on the cheek as they playfully managed to cordon off the area of the digging as soon as they realised that this could be an important historical site.  Then they scooted off to find the professor so that he could give the grave his imprimatur of archaeological provenance.

 

“Is it Hiver Jawn himself?” asked another girl meeting them halfway.

 

“Yes, it could be.”

“All the burials were for the same person, the same body,” a loner student shouted across the field with a degree of impatience, being a stern clump-eyed individual who was jealous that he had not stumbled upon the find himself.  Knowledge made him unknowledgeable with the confusion caused by frustration that others were less knowledgeable than him.  Nobody knew his name.  But he was a student that everyone thought everyone else knew.

 

The students gabbled. There were several theories about vampire-killers and how each version of Jawn (having visited several writers’ sites with their own stories to tell about him) was buried at different stages in his life from along the fictional spectrum that had been set up variously within and without mutual consultation between those responsible for each slant on his supposed existence.  A spectrum of death without the earlier life to support any subsequent death at all, let alone a spectrum.  It made more sense to those willing to widen their brainstorming to contain nonsense as well as the deeply serious repercussions of not brainstorming at all.

 

Each tomb or hive or pod or egg were dropped one by one in a ‘paper-chase’ of muckheaps along a yellow brick road … leading from clue to clue towards darkest Africa, counting each forgotten footstep from Congo to Zanzibar as if each were an earth-embedded beacon to light the future … downward if not along.

 

Away from the city after which he was named (or vice versa), Rider Haggard galloped upon a wild stallion of flying hooves towards the towering rough-hewn stone-carving that was his own gnarled and barren face overlooking, like a mountain, King Solomon’s Mines themselves.  Dive-bombed by vultures whiter than the blazing sunless sky.  And She-who-must-be-obeyed stalked into view, holding the youngest version of Jawn that had managed to remain unburied.

 

“Welcome, Rider, to the next stage,” she-called-She said.  “The hunting and hounding of the dreaded pest in the motor of carcinomal disease.   The God in the Machine.  Deus ex machina.  Tabula Rasa with no easy ready blank to scrawl over. Here…” (and she indicated the latest Jawn to be unhived) “…we have the hero you can call your own to use as you wish with words if not deeds.  The best pest-hunter of them all.  Just seek out Lovecraft and Poe and other writers of Horror in their namesake cities to accompany you towards this worthy goal that all worlds will thank you forever more for trying to do than for not doing at all because you knew you’d fail.”

 

In ripping yarns, there were no diseases at all.  This would be no ripping yarn.  No boyhood adventure.  This was a story built on muckheaps rather than imagination.

 

And  Rider  took Jawn from the black lady … and, then, as man and boy, mounted on steeds that snickered at even the slightest whisper in their pointed ears, they both set out to find the cities where writers factored in the same cities to help hold our future bones in sacred literary groves growing skeletons not trees.  Cities of Fiction.  Cities that hid the pest.  As well as the past itself.  The pair of them needed to exhume every trope till they reached the pest – a pest not nesting at the core-of-things (where the angel megazanthus was meant to nest) but on the edge – at the periphery – along the circumference – where we writers already worked around it without recognising it as the pest.  Till the Coming of Jawn.

 

Jawn thought Rider resembled a man he had once forgotten forever.  But Jawn was now too young to have ever known him in the first place.  Or till later.  And the question remained – would he be able strictly to remember someone he had not yet been able to forget?

 

And the young students, still gabbling, eventually reached the professor who smiled at their crazy brainstorming.

 

 

**These pests appeared to be a strange language of words with voices using the words as sights rather than sounds.  Mr Morales did not understand exactly what he was seeing but instinctively, if with nemophiliac distraction or detachment, he sensed that this language called  Weirdtongue was indeed called just that: Weirdtongue.  It was a genuine world language, rather than an experimental Esperanto-like attempt to draw in all the languages of the world (except Basque or Hopi) and turn them into an easily understandable communication system upon air or paper for even the simplest of mortals and peasants to use.  Esperanto had failed because it ceased to be organic or intrinsic to the meanings.  Weirdtongue, on the other hand, was more a religion than a language, but serving both purposes - a religion that needed no prior understanding, because its components stuck to the skin like burrs and poured meaning via the pores into the mind without the intervention of intelligence. Religion at its worst, even if all known religions were similarly bad enough to a greater or smaller degree. The vexed outcome was that not only meaning was injected but also poisonous thoughts that attached to the meaning like a particularly virulent type of fiction.  Not Horror fiction as such, but, in the same way as Classical Music was reputed to be fiction stories injected straight into the vein without the necessity of reading them first, this language of true fiction was black magical realism: a fundamentally weird-corrpted ‘langue’ that later turned into bodily cancers and tumours (euphemistically known as ‘pests’ in the jargon), starting with the tongue itself.  Quite a drawback for any language.

 

Maybe all that's too obvious to say.  But best to establish demarcation lines even if it's just for the sake of my own integrity.  Needless, also, to say that I had not yet grown closer to either of them than just a mere hand-holding.  They both seemed too good for me.  And far too pretty.

 

Also Julie told me that this place wasn't off Western Scotland at all but a loose-flung city of Utility housing striating and threading the backwaters of the north east Essex coast of England during the period just after when the big storm of 1953 had filled the creeks with dead bodies.  Apparently, I had been deceived more than once by first impressions.  Comes with the territory, I guess.  A delta with no river.  A community excited about a Coronation and a new Elizabethan era dawning.

 

Julie soon started whispering in my ear for fear of any official over-hearing: "Those weren't TV aerials you saw, Jawn.  But a miniature wind-farm." 

 

I recalled the forest of wire devices on the roofscape of chimneystacks.  So far, she told me, any prayers for wind in this weatherless world were unanswered.  And these potentially spinning icons to garner the forces of the world remained like rust-corroded weathercocks.

 

I failed to ask: if there was no weather, how come there had been a great storm just a few months before?  I should have asked.  I needed to become more pro-active if I was to survive here.

 

Eventually, the two girls and the officials together agreed that it may be a good idea that I became a writer.  A profession that – in those days – was respectful, societally helpful, personally lucrative and, above all, possible!

 

As a test they gave me a piece of paper and a Cumberland pencil.  An audition for authorship.  Below is a copy of what I wrote on that day in 1953.  It was of course not about me. The art of writing is to separate the self from the creativity.  It was a feat of imagination: a constructive fashioning of a real world from fiction.  Not magic realism as some fantasy fiction became to be known in later decades, but more a form of magic fiction. A hive of ideas where the bee-keeper was confident enough not to wear protective clothing. A literary suicide-bomber. I liked to strip away any insulation rather than resemble the cities on the snow-line that were insulated both literally and figuratively.  Anyway, without further ado, it was the first thing I ever wrote and read as follows:

 

VALUE by Hiver Jawn

Everyone has their value except me.  I was an unwanted child who remained unwanted for as long as I can remember.  My real mother didn't want me.  My foster mother soon didn't want me. The people in the children's home didn't want me even before I got there.  My friends didn't want me or they wouldn't want me if I had friends.  The school didn't want me.  Then the special school didn't want me.  The prison didn't want me as it was too full.  Finally I didn't want me. 

Then I met you.  You seemed to want me. I can never understand why you wanted me.  I asked you time and time again what possible value could someone like me have for someone like you.  You always smiled without answering.  So I had to keep asking.  The fact that you kept on not answering my question, I lost my temper with you one day.  You vanished that night, with my question still unanswered.  Leaving a single tooth under my pillow.

 

*

 

 

The next stage in the process was to attend lessons in fiction writing.  Jawn sat at the back of a large musty classroom using one of many ranked and age-seasoned desks with sloping lids upon which to rest one's work. There was a large window overlooking the houseboats on a creek which this place called Lewis boasted at each edge of its conurbation.  Many of these houseboats were derelict, but not as derelict as some that had already sunk into the mud over the years when the tide was out. 

 

The ever-blue sky promised sunshine.  Night was without stars or moon, but by that time Jawn was taken back to his foster home, where it was not the acceptable behaviour to have bare windows to look from.  Just the chitchat of peers. Broken by reward periods of windfarm spirituality as they listened to the vanes spin from the direction of the chimney-flue. One could only hear the vanes spin, never watch them as they only spun at night. Then to bed in a dormitory where most, if not all, were kept wake by each other's snores.  Or so it seemed.

 

Jawn remembered the day he had written 'VALUE'.  Julie had kissed him.  A delight he imagined he still felt as a tender caress on the cheek where she had lightly planted this kiss.  Sarah was over the moon with the subtle tantalus of its ending which readers thought they understood, but when in bed that night, they knew they would never understand.  There was no doubt that Jawn had passed his audition with flying colours.

 

When they left the red portakabin office, he was sure the surroundings had changed and that he had just exited into the city's centre itself not into its outskirts.  They took him to a pub, where the girls had cocktails and, bearing in mind his age, a soft drink for Jawn. 

 

He rarely saw the girls after he was transferred to the foster home – but when he did, it was by seeing one of them, if not the other, among the crowds in the streets.  He'd wondered how deep the affection each girl had for the other girl.  He wouldn't have minded if their mutual love was the reason for either of them failing to get closer to Jawn himself. But he once thought he saw Julie in the street arm in arm with a man.  He kept the whole dormitory awake that night, not with snoring but with weeping.  Till he fell into a dream about a white vulture.

 

The classes were well-ordered and strictly conducted.  The teacher – as a first impression – was a very strong authority figure.  It was only when one looked more closely at her face that it was realised that she was relatively young and pretty.  Her bearing had given her inauspicious age.  Jawn enjoyed it when she leaned over his desk to look at his work, judging his work as if he were drawing a picture and thus immediately able to assess the gestalt of lines that produced the picture.  Instead, they were spidery lines of handwriting that she scanned and so quickly judged.

 

"That's promising, Jawn," she said with an uncommon smile.

 

"Thanks, Miss."

 

"I hope you will be able to manage a sad ending this time.  Happy endings never happen in life."

 

He knew, however, that his masterpiece called 'VALUE' did have a happy ending, although it was interpreted by others to be downbeat.  He would never have passed the audition with an ending of overt happiness.  But it was happy enough for Jawn.

 

The teacher's ways of expression were in keeping with the mission statement of the class: "Confront, don't accept."

 

The economies of Lewis depended on fiction being downbeat and constructively depressing, if not confrontational.  Horrific in its implications if not in its slasher gasher violence or monstrousness.  Ghosts with a sense of their own potential subtly to eroticise.  Not a method of brainwashing but a certain instilling of a bleak mysticism that kept the masses indoors within their brown studies.  This replaced the invention of TV as a represser of the masses.  Visions of creativity buoyed up upon the sound of spinning vanes.

 

Jawn wrote things with sad endings that he never showed to the class teacher.*  Perhaps he took the mission statement far too literally, even to the extent of confronting confrontation itself.

 

* example here:  http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/09/16/the-meaning-of-life.html

 

 

*

I  had to leave the place called Lewis sooner than I expected.  I renewed acquaintance with Sarah.  Julie was mysteriously no longer on the scene.  And Sarah's skin appeared thicker, perceptibly wrinklier, as if she had been through a lot of heartache.  She maintained a youthful beauty, including the sleek charms of her race and colour, and at my then age of 22, I radiated an admiration towards her, one that I now wore like a badge of reciprocity, as I had learnt to be more confident about my own attractiveness as a human being.  This was despite my earlier disaster with the young teacher of fiction.

 

Indeed, it had been a one-night stand with the teacher in her place near the pier.  And I threw sickies thereafter as I could not bear her near me any more.  It was the beginning of my downfall in the city. I slouched most days around the backwaters eyeing houseboats to see if any were habitable, when I should have been in the classroom. I stopped writing altogether. But I always returned to the foster home, where I now stood out like a sore thumb amongst delicate fingers.  My sexual act with the teacher was barely describable, even within the realms of fiction.  It was neither erotic nor romantic.  It was because I had never done anything like that before, I suppose.  I was confused.  And she expected the pungent soul of my fiction also to be apparent in my own body.  She must have been bitterly disappointed at my clumsy pre-maturity. She, I guess, must have aged over night, and became again the humourless authority figure I had originally assumed her to be.  Prior to that night, she, too, had been innocent.  I never learned her real name.  Or which bits were true, and which not so true.

 

Sarah, on the other hand, found me down by the pier (why was I there that day so close to the teacher's house – through guilt? hopes of meeting her again?).  It was off-season.  No day-trippers or saucy hats or laughing children with candy floss.  Just a wind off the turgid creeks.  Wind?  When had the weather returned?  I must have been so beached upon my own emotional breakwater, such matters had passed straight over my head.  It was symbolic of deeper things.  The return of weather along with a sense of reality.  A sense of futility.

 

As I say, I suddenly spotted the dark face of Sarah as it glistened like mangled eels between two piles of fishermen's netting. 

 

"Hi," I shouted.

 

This was not the first time we had experienced such a chance encounter in recent months.  I never mentioned Julie. Nor did she.

 

"Hi, Jawn.  You look sad."

"There are no happy endings."  I laughed as if this statement was just that – a happy ending.

 

"Had enough?"  Her face smiled, the teeth standing out with the striking whiteness of our earlier times together - against the skin that framed them.

 

"I don't think this place was what it once was," I said.  "Or it never was what I thought it was.  You see, I dreamed last night of a wardrobe and a lion…"

Sarah looked knowingly.  She must now be in her thirties, I guessed.  And I yearned for her arms to enfold me.  Not as a mother, but as a lover.  Instead, she quickly got up, took my hand (as of old) and we walked down the windy pier together as if there was an expanse of sea at its other end instead of creeks.

 

 

*

 

"Can I ask where you got this?"

 

"It came down to me from my father.  It's just been stuck in a cupboard and, since you were coming here, I had a sudden urge to bring it along."

 

"Well, I'm very glad you did.  For the benefit of the people at home, I'll describe it.  The camera's view of it on the screen is simply not enough.  It is a painting, of certainly some age, but difficult to pinpoint the era, as the style is not one I recognise.  Layered in certain areas are some very precise mountings of a complicated design, which must have taken the artist months, if not years, of careful application.  It is breath-taking the scope of the work to turn a painting into a texture of real life.  If you look at the surface sidewise on, you see – or at least think you see – images of items that are not depicted in the design proper.  Even the frame, as you can see, if you look here […] contributes to the full effect.  Where do you think your father got it from?"

 

"He never told me but I get the impression it was passed down to him ... and there were secrets attached to it.  Vague tales of a disgrace.  And many legends associated with a distant relation's romance with … what can I say? ... someone with whom he should not have had a romance."

 

"Hmmm... Well, we can't speculate – especially as it might take away from its effect if it doesn't stand alone for what it is.  I must say I am very excited.  We don't usually have such striking objects – of obvious great value – to examine on this programme.  I can only relate it a to a period of art of which I've heard but not had the time or resources to follow up. I don't know if you can see, with the combined effect of the images (both frontward and sideward), a face, where one moment there were trees and the next buildings of some oriental character.  A face of a woman, that sort of evolves from shadows."

 

"Yes, when I was a child I had nightmares about it.  I saw all manner of things at different times.  Perhaps that's why it was eventually left in the cupboard.  To put paid to the dreams."

 

"I'm sure if we put this to auction, we would expect ... I don't know.  It should be insured, I'd say for 250,000 pounds."

 

"Good God!  You're joking.  Did you say 250,000?"

 

"Yes, at least that.  Would you allow us to get some other experts to look at it.  But wait, is this a signature here...?"

 

"I've never been able to make one out."

 

"I just glimpsed some letters just now as the camera lights reflected in a certain way.  Doesn't look like a real name.  Ah, yes, H.I.V.E.R .  That's French for Winter.  J.A.U.N.  Yellow?  Hmmm.  There <i>is</i> a yellowish haze to the patina.  I wonder if that's a signature or a title or just an accident of the light or a deliberate mystery. I don't know. The whole thing reeks of fabrication and if it wasn't for its obvious potential for provenance and undeniable great age, I'd say it was a deliberate attempt at obfuscation.  A modern artefact steeped in sepia and combed against the grain to look older than it is.  No other words, really. I'm not usually so imprecise, as you know, after all the years on this show.  Yet, the charm is winning. Its authenticity so real.  A vexed texture that is quite unfathomable.  So difficult to nail down.  A magnificent conundrum.  It's not a winter scene, that's for sure.  It's too dry ... too, clammy, what did I say, yellowish.  A bit like complex straw in places. But difficult without getting it out into natural light away from these cameras. In any event thanks for bringing it in.  You've made my day."

 

"You've made mine!  Thanks."

 

 

*

The 'painting' was lost in transit, before being inspected by other experts.

 

Or it became a prized exhibit that millions made pilgrimage to view in its purpose-built gallery in London.  But the snow only allowed a few of them to reach the frozen banks of the Thames, where the gallery was sited.  Worldwide criss-crossings of many new snow-lines did nothing to prevent the onset of stay-at-home tourism where art could only be seen by electronic means.  And books printed domestically from their only source on the internet by some new method that many called publication-on-reading. 

 

Or it was proved to be worthless, indeed a modern fabrication to give context to the crazy ideas of its creator.  He lived in a gas-generated city far beyond the edge of civilisation as we know it.  In fact his whole head was full of yellow gas that could only escape by manipulation of his lower vents.  An inner world that stank to high heaven.

 

Or it never existed at all.  It was just another configuration of fantasising dressed up as magic fiction.

 

*

At least  Jawn would be fully aware of its provenance at inception if not of its future beyond its source as something he created and left behind as a yester-egg for later discovery by others if not by himself.  It was his fiction-writing become visually textured.  In the same way as music was fiction injected straight into the vein, the 'painting' would derive (once completed) from fiction made into configured tree bark and stained by the weathering of the yellowy el niño that prevailed in the city where he next visited after vanishing beyond the end of the pier in long-forgotten Lewis: so forgotten literally nobody at all remembered its name. 

 

Equally, Jawn and Sarah were simply ideas from the furrowed head of the teacher who proceeded to erase them wherever she could find references to their existence: an easy process because all text had been forethought, late-labelled and written with a Cumberland pencil.  She loved Jawn more than she could ever remember.  But tears told a deeper story, tears she could never quench.  Her students could only then write happy endings, in misguided attempts to help her apparent plight.  Meanwhile, she had failed to find a single reference to Jawn and thus failed to erase it.

 

*

There was a boat at the end of the pier.  A fishing dinghy abandoned for the night at its fragile mooring, luckily still holding fast, but not for much longer.  The creeks had been overridden by the sea in a repeat performance of 1953; lobster pots loudly tapped against the pier's oaken legs, legs that in turn creaked and even splintered in the renewals of swell; ghosts of breezes had been the instigators of the weather's insidious return to the realms of climate; ghosts of real people to crew the dinghy towards as yet invisible coasts where the sea gradually thickened into land; and monsters beneath its hull lightly knocking the sea-seasoned planks as the dinghy plied the channels with moon-dripping oars.

 

Whether the monsters fully followed the whole voyage with their under-knocking is answered by the fact that Sarah continued to glimpse their horrific faces beneath the waves outside of slumber, outside of dream, outside even of creativity itself.  They were monsters true.  And the era of Jawn's pilgrimage towards eventual completion was now entering a monstrous phase, beyond the help of mortals, beyond even the help of nurses specially implanted there to hold his hand.  Without even a kiss farewell, she slipped gracefully and gratuitously off the end of the dinghy when he wasn't watching … and the softly plashing grooves of land-stirred sea now took the impetus from the mis-rollocked oars and eased him (alone) towards a cityscape of complexly textured straw and gesso ill-ventilated with turgid air-currents.

 

 

*

For once, Jawn somehow knew what to expect.  In the past as toddler and teenager, he'd felt instinctively what his life was all about – as a counter in a game over which he had no control.  Now he was more or less master of his environment, even over his own intentions within that environment.  He had grown up.  He had become a man.  A man of meaning as well as means.

 

He continued to dream of Sarah.  Her shiny black face approached his own sallow one – a smile across it.  Tears of happiness or sadness preceded the smile, but remained undefined by the smile.  Undefiled.  Jawn lifted his own mouth ready for the kiss … a kiss that never came. 

 

He mourned her departure without fully understanding when she had gone – or how.  Or where.  Death concealed an afterlife simply by remaining mysterious, unexplained and, most significantly, unnoticed.  She had left Jawn's world perhaps because of her sorrow about losing Julie. Or at losing Jawn himself before even having gained him.  Or at the thought of once losing a baby to the spinning vanes of misplaced memory and ill-conditioned faith.  But these were human interactions no longer directly concerning Jawn.  Just like the blind spot left in his heart by a man named Congreve.  And the half-remembered sight of blind girls with a smoking habit fit to conflagrate a whole city.  Not even snow could douse the flames.  A shimmering curtain of fierce flag-waving yellow reflected off the almost impenetrable bead-curtain of floating snowflakes.

 

He waded through the land-clogged edge of sluggish silent sea, because the dinghy could not reach as far as the confused borderline of wet and dry.  A tutelary gull imitated the wing-span of a much larger bird as its shadow scraped together a sense of departing moon and coming dawn. 

 

Jawn was welcomed ashore by a new protagonist.  One that Jawn in turn welcomed with a firm handshake and a stern eyeball-to-eyeball appraisal in studied mutuality  – instead of fearing  a newcomer as Jawn once might have done in his younger days when first exploring the strange worlds he faced.  After all, Jawn was the newcomer to the newcomer's world.  Jawn was indeed the stranger.  And the stranger was no stranger at all.

 

The new dawn glimpsed their meeting on the cusp of sea and land, between the edge of twilight and no light at all.  For there had never been a moon, it seemed.  That earlier 'moon' had just been a smouldering glimmer of another world beyond this world when a small blotched ring of light opened up in the sky and just as quickly closed again, revealing a soon-forgotten sign of surrender.  White was an offer of negotiated truce.  Yellow for unconditional surrender.  Circular flags of custom and convenience.  Here the moon was yellow.  Here the moon was too scared to exist at all.  Or, if not scared, shamefaced by the flowery sentences used to describe it and by the half-repressed sexualities of this city upon which it wished otherwise to rise and set.

 

Jawn watched the new city (or new to him) evolve beneath the slowly arriving light.  It was a painting he had painted with his mind's eye only a few night's before when still in a forgotten-named city.  However, here, in real life, it was no painting, but the series of brushstrokes themselves that made his breathing more difficult as if the very fibres caused him to gag and jerk.  The straw base hurt his bare feet, having left his thigh boots in the dinghy through over-excitement.  The shutters on the windows were clammed tight like diseased eyelids.  A cakey city within a sleepy yellow gulch. 

 

"Welcome to the City on the Plains, welcome indeed to pretty pretty Proust city," the stranger heard.

 

It looked hot here, but so intense in its own belief that it wasn't hot it made Jawn believe it was simply cool not baking hot at all.  And he heard a distant friction of sound against sound, gradually more tuneful: delicate and conversational like Chamber Music for string quartet, as he was taken to a woven billet beside the tangled bulrushes of a dried-out river basin, where this music served to replace the water-current with a soporific siesta of day-wide semi-consciousness.  In search of lost time. 

 

The gull widened its wings even further and vanished seaward. If sea there still was.

 

*

 

 

The next day, I discovered the stranger in his hammock drifting slowly from side to side against the more unnatural swings he was trying to instil out of pure contrariness towards what he thought was the capriciousness of gravity.  The jaundiced complexion – after the sea voyage in a mere dinghy – seemed to have now blushed back towards rude health.  He actually smiled as I approached the wickerwork den in which I had billeted him overnight.  His first night in Proust. A night of creaking dreams.

 

It must have been hotter than he expected because, I could see, he had covered himself with dried reeds to the extent of sweating several pounds off his bodyweight.  Last night, I thought he was about thirty.  Today, I'd guess he was in his early twenties.  However sudden his body changes were, he seemed to have taken them in his stride.  Time goes at different paces along with the self that experiences it. And I saw the stranger's self today was quite different from last night's self.  But not to the extent of becoming a changeling.

 

I am his Nurse, older than my years.  I am also a family cook. But, in my youth, I was an example of the delicious young females he'd likely find irresistible: one of those timeless quiet girls, shapely, too, as they bowled their hoops along the old-fashioned promenades before taking rides on one of the butterfly yachts as it skimmed the Ravellian water surfaces.  But now, I'm stouter.  More motherly. 

 

As I officiated over the stranger's shaving, I admired his body.  Never too old to look!

 

He wasn't sure how to take the joke, but the toy electric-shaver I gave him played music as he rubbed its business-end over his cheeks and chin and under the nose.  A tune that – he told me – reminded him of the <i>Pavane for a Dead Infanta</i>.  He eventually laughed at the device.  Proust had no electricity, in any event, battery or otherwise, and the rubbing had started a clockwork device inside not dissimilar to a music box.

 

I ignited the gas flames on a portable hob to heat a basin of water, so that he could have a wet shave.  Meanwhile, I guarded the blade with my life, before he was ready to test its magnetic powers of self-sharpening with each scrape he took.

 

The stranger, after he had been scraped, needed to be spruced.  Later he was due to meet the Count.

 

"I have to make thee pretty for Proust city," I crooned, as I took the mascara pencils and small tubs of rouge from among my store of oils and unguents and precious powders and disinfectant wipes.

 

*

When he saw the painting in the London Gallery, he could not believe his eyes.  This was just like his dream.  He had been there.  It was a real place despite the abstractions evidently employed to disguise it as a work of art.  Under an appliqué of teased papyrus he glimpsed a small beetle at rest.*  He went to inform one of the gallery officials that the whole place was probably infested with crawling life even to the extent of the works of art themselves being invaded by foreign bodies.  The official's face – under the peaked hat – listened to the complaint with patience.  So patient, he didn't know when the complaint had ended, and thus failed to respond at all ... failing also to recognise that the complainant's face had foxed rather than blushed with anger.

 

 

*When the official finally investigated with tweezers – upon realising the relative enormity of the complaint – it is said that he discovered the art parasite not to be a beetle as such but a small shiny black egg, leathery to lick.  He passed it to the museum's natural history department for further investigation.  Tomorrow a full report will be given to the authorities.  The complainant is being kept informed.

 

 

*

When Count Congo arrived, Jawn was surprised that this was no fey gentleman in a portly decorated suit from turn-of-the-century Anatole France.  He was slim, decidedly manly-by-penchant and concerned to betray no quirks of behaviour that condemned him to any possible caricature (effeminate or otherwise).  However, he was accompanied by another gentleman who did resemble the inverted archetype of a person that Jawn had expected the Count himself to have been prior to seeing him.

 

"This is Lord Egg," said the Count. 

 

Lord Egg himself strutted about heavily in a baggy black uniform sparkling with medals that he had obviously not won in any war for bravery.  He simpered like a huge woman.  He examined Jawn in his hammock as if visiting a patient in a hospital. 

 

 Count Congo eventually asked Lord Egg to leave the vicinity.  Lord Egg was obviously only expected to meet Jawn briefly and then leave, as if simply, by his presence, to bring out the Count's own sharper articulations by contrast.

 

As the Count prepared to conduct the interview of the stranger-he-did-not-know-was-Jawn, Jawn himself saw that Lord Egg was crouching in the willowy shadows of darker yellow waiting to see if the Count failed in his endeavours to draw any salaciousness from an otherwise dry-baked cake that Jawn first appeared to be.  Congo and Egg were rivals in love if not appearance.  Their respective ranks unclear.  Perhaps they took it in turns to make the first attempt at conquering any innocent stranger who happened to sail into Proust on a chance tide.

 

The Nurse was also present in a secondary shadow by a frond of torn parchment.  Yesterday, Jawn had managed to claw himself from the darkness of mixed motives towards some position of empathy by seeing himself through her eyes via his own eyes.  Today, she seemed to be fully aware of the whole tableau vivant (the interacting ballet of desire and mimed confusion), even without Jawn's empathic help.  She was the manipulator without needing any particularly adroit people-skills other than an air of womanly wisdom to organise affairs like a conductor of an opera composed by Poulenc or Debussy.  Today she looked more like a Nun than a Nurse.  Certainly not the family cook she yesterday pretended to have once been.  More Shakespearean than Proustian.

 

She soon departed to fetch the tea to accompany the plate of cake that the hammock-net had steeped in yellow sleep most of the previous night.  Her infusions of oriental leaf were currently giving off a burning haze in her ancient kitchen having earlier been thus fired into existence by the hob's brightest gas-ring : piping hot within the capaciousness of a priceless samovar that came from an even more writerly precinct of preciousness than Proust city itself.

 

*

 

The scientist carefully prodded the dead beetle with his stethoscope with no idea of the context of any apocryphal findings so was quite gulled into believing it was what the earlier part of the sentence said it was: a beetle.  How it had infested a work of art in a gallery was neither here nor there.  His religion was amply provided with proof of nearly everything.  A scientist-with-faith was so convinced of his faith that even its unscientific nature was sufficient to increase its strength time and time again by circles of powerful kaleidoscopes of convincing illogic that even plain-spirited logic itself could not withstand.

 

An art parasite, therefore.  Things that fed off creativity like worms in sculptures or spiders that climbed the staves of music or one-bee bee-hives within blown bookspines.  These seemed so natural he needed no further empirical delays.

 

But the 'beetle' wasn't dead.  He heard it breathing within the leathery outer-casing of itself that was also itself as well as its container.  By dint of such expression, it was clear that scientists were thus evidently clearer thinkers than fiction writers.  And he smiled in pride as he proceeded to search with some difficulty for one of his precision instruments of surgical investigation. 

 

 

*

I managed to fetch up on the 'beach' of mixed sea and land that presented the edge of Proust's coastline.  Don't put words in my mouth!  Yet, I sense my thoughts – these thoughts – will one day be turned into writing, crystallised into print … and I can only hope the translation does justice to the original.  I hope there are no half-measures with regard to the truth of my thoughts, with regard to their narrative thread as a record of what actually happened to (and of what I actually thought as) Sarah.  And I repeat: don't put just any old words into my mouth!  I'm worth more than that.  Neither put any colour in my skin, no beauty in my face, no shape in my figure, no intention into my gratuitousness of free will, no faith into my frame of aspirations, no love for Hiver Jawn than simply that of a mother for a son or a lover for her lover or a subject for her personal version of what many call God.  Only I know the truth of why I slipped silently from the boat into the sea, allowing Jawn to travel onward to the next city in solitariness.  Only I can keep such cards close to her chest.  Only I can check the verities of time and endlessness.  The rudiments of myth and melancholy.  And, yet, none are my words.  They are, at most, my own thoughts, perhaps, in someone else's words.

 

I managed to stagger into the fibrous jungle as yet uncleared to make room for further city.  The gloom made the jungle's basic hues too dark to see, but I guessed them to be shades of yellow, as if stained by some internals gases of the world via rock-hid geysers or warm-water springs in the form of miscoloured blood.  Sea-water still dripped from my dress, clinging to me as if I had never known anything except innocent nudity all my life.  I heard groans.  I saw a human shape strewn between the woody fangs of deadfall plant-life.  It was Jawn, I soon discovered.  He was not aware of my presence.  His face bore the mark of teeth.  His limbs, too.  Half-chopped, with clumsy attempts at half-healing by means of lint and gummy plaster.  His belly showed signs of being penetrated completely by teeth.  At first, I assumed it was a wild animal that had attacked him. Or tried to eat him.  Remains of a loosely-woven net was round his left leg, a part of him that remained visibly untouched.  His tongue was half-chopped, too, as with a knife, showing a neater cut.  Crumbs as if from pastry or cake crusted the outside of his nostrils.  He snorted deeply as if finding it hard to breathe … or bleed.  The wounds barely revealed evidence of a clogged stream of blood – so much so its remains were mere flecks of a spent sluggish flow hardly worthy of the word seepage let alone haemorrhage.  There was more an appearance of flesh desiccating or crumbling out into a muckheap of curded yolk kept for centuries.  His eyes were filled with tealeaf tears, evidently hot to pass as he winced at every weep.

 

I did not dare look below his belly or higher than his thighs.

 

And yet, none are my words.

 

I wondered whether I could help.  I am no nurse.  I may not even have been there at all.

 

 

*

The gallery was dark as an even darker figure ghosted with a heavy pace towards the famous 'Yesterfang Panoply' between the margins of its intrinsic frame … then very carefully (so as not to awaken any shrill siren of sensed intrusion) it re-inserted a piece of the work's clumsy jigsaw beneath the subtle appliqué of hardened fibrositic flesh-tints.  The work was back as one. Its pest repositioned. The pest of all worlds. The work was now re-become an aesthetic gestalt that nobody visiting the gallery had noticed wasn't what it should have been or what it once was.  With beating heart but now lighter feet, the figure left without attracting the notice of any alarm by ill-thought touch or broken radar beam.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED