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Sunday, December 10, 2006
In The Belly Of The Snake
A collaboration with Paul Pinn
Published 'The Edge' 1996
Flash of gantry, flash of panty; the slow blur of London suburbs. A woman with post-mortem skin, dressed in sea-hues, sits opposite a man with toxic psychosis. When viewed directly, her eyes are the colour of dirty traffic lights, but opaque and decidedly odd when viewed obliquely. The man views obliquely, and as the train leaves Euston for Birmingham, the sun momentarily escapes from Victorian clouds and the woman says:
“Now it chooses to shine.”
And she rubs her foot against the man’s leg, smiling dysfunctionally rather than suggestively.
Flash of gantry, flash of gallantry; the man lets the latter pass, smiles, says nothing. The woman puts on yellow headphones, closes her eyes, tilts her head sideways, drifts into the realm of other people’s creations.
Flash of gantry, flash of caution; she looks more attractive when asleep, or pretending to be. Her lids hide the suspicious elements of squinty emptiness and translucent madness.
The slow blur of London suburbs is never-ending, and within its dreary rain-splashed conformity there are dark hints of an eternity to come, a never-endingness of London suburbs merging with other suburbs all the way to Birmingham and beyond, not a green or brown field to be seen, right up to the border with Scotland, and perhaps later, into the sea, and who knows, maybe all the way across the big puddle to Birmingham, Alabama; or east and south to Oslo and Rome.
Flash of gantry, the man absorbs: the slow trawl of a Tesco Superstore sprawled between the flash of anonymous stations. Its car park is full of cars but devoid of people. The stations are devoid of both.
The woman stirs, smiles at a point midway between the man and herself, and looks out the window. Her eyes appear divergent in their posturing, their focus, their proportions. Alien eyes, they catch the man writing in a notebook.
“Can I read what you’ve written?” the woman inexplicably asks.
“No,” replies the man, playing the same game.
“Why?” she snaps back, now too late to retract.
With a sharkish smile, he replies: “Because it’s about you.”
“Really?” She’s as incredulous about his answer as her question.
“Yes,” he confirms, in the full swing of the unexpected conversation. “It describes how I commit unspeakable acts on your chained body over the course of three days, then chop you up, bit by bit, until you die.”
The woman’s eyes narrow, part viper, part scorned. She watches him produce a book from a pocket. It’s called The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman. He holds it up high as he reads it, to make sure she sees the unavoidable title. A city-slicker with ashen hair and a complexion to match, sitting next to him, says:
“Do you like scaring young women?”
“Yes. But only when they invade thc silent eternity within me.”
“What do you mean - the silent eternity?”
“What I mean,” says the man impatiently, wishing the city-slicker had missed the train, “is what’s it to you?”
The woman opposite swallows her headphones and laughs like a wounded hyena.
It’s his turn to turn the conversation.
“Now it chooses to shine.”
She smiles, having healed her wounds with the dead hyena’s laughter. She’s no longer afraid of him, a fear that originated upon touching his leg with her foot - as if fear was something that could only be transmitted socket to socket. Now, she realises he’s simply a chauvinist, one who can only express his hatred of the opposite sex obliquely - even if all mouth and trousers.
She sinks back into her re-gathered head-set and expands into the wide-split sound of Eno. Yes, she’ll call the man Eno. A name as good as any. Nobody has a monopoly on a name. Eno. One backwards. Like Red Rum. Or Blue, she wants to scream.
Eno knows he’s being thought about. Her closing of the eyes doesn’t fool him. Still, plenty of opportunity for daydreaming later. Here and now, today, the suburbs temporarily slip into slide-away construction works - in tune with cities like Houston and Detroit. “Cities like” - because he’d never been to America. He lives a “life like” - and flinches a cross between a cringe and a shudder at a sudden flash of country.
A flash of cuntry. A flash of a flash. A flashback. A flushforward. Then again watching the lids of squinty emptiness flirt with her own upper cheeks. He senses the music from the “it is, it is. it is, it is,” of her tinkling ear-pieces. No longer Eno, but disco dancing.
The real One, him, he, resumes his self-conscious writing. He’s copying page upon page of The Serial Killers into his own notebook, believing he’s writing it for the first time. He has memorised whole chunks and doesn’t need to check with the book’s pages proper. Colin Wilson and that other guy, whose name he can never remember without the spine’s help, are imposters.
His life in the bush of ghosts, he knows, is ethereal, without the substance of touch. He will take Tiger Mountain and reduce them all to dust for laughing behind his back, before his face, in his fitful nocturnal interludes. He is a toxic psychotic. He has eaten bread, partaken of wheat, poisoned himself. Already the inner workings of his brain are trembling under the onslaught of bacterially produccd chemicals. Already his thoughts arc growing as dark as the dark side of the moon. Already he can feel the shift. Now it is only a matter of time before he is truly ready. The moon-train to a foreign Earth.
Country; cuntry: both now as threatening as each other. He’s never had the latter, and doesn’t like the former, imagining both to be equally spacious, equally suffocating. To destroy both would be comforting.
The woman stands, slips her bottom over the knees of the geriatric passenger beside her, and heads down the aisle to the toilets. Eno stares covetously at her walkman, the wire and headphones curled on the seat like a yellow snake he once met in a book. He wants to steal - no, possess - the music of his mentor. Instead, he rises, stuffs the Colin Wilson book and his own notebook in the wide, deep pockets of his oversized overcoat, and follows the woman. The city-slicker turns from ash to ermine as he stares disapprovingly at Eno’s back shrinking down the aisle.
By the time he reaches the malleable gristle at the interface of two carriages, the woman has gone, leaving him with a nagging doubt that perhaps Eno is not the One after all. He bites his lower lip, stares at a toilet door, then another, and wonders what Hannibal Lector would do. There are only two toilets here. Sniff her out, he decides, but his own imagination has never extended that far. Angrily he wishes he’d ate more bread, gathered a greater harvest of chemical dysfunction. He puts an ear to one toilet door and then the other, hears the ancient music of closet water and smiles.
Neither says engaged.
Yet she’s surely in at least one of them, he thinks, knowing, as he does, that the law of averages is not an average law.
He smells a rat.
Why has she kept both locks on vacant? Is this an invitation to him - or a paradoxical warning which she knows he’ll understand better than making it impossible for him? And, indeed, without warning, the city-slicker pushes past and enters one cubicle - snapping the slide-bolt to engaged behind him. Evidently on a slick kick, thought Eno.
Eno laughs, for perhaps the first time in his life.
So, the woman is in the crypt with the door still saying vacant. No need for laws to tell him that. He laughs again. A communal dysfunction is stirring every set of bowels by dint of simply belonging to travellers on the late fare express. The last rack track for Brum Bum. Hence, the lower belch squelch from the slicker behind the locked door.
But surely a squelch too loud for one person, even for somebody with the biggest load to shed. Without preamble, Eno ram-raids - bouncing off like a squashed medicine-ball.
From a whore of a law that opens its legals wide to anybody who cares to plunge real deep, Eno ratchets knowledge to the top of the mind. And, yes, that slick kicker does have a paperback face. He pulls the dog-eared book from his overcoat to check. Not Colin Wilson. But that other guy? Surely not.
A flash of gantry, cuntry - lavatory. A slash of thought.
He tugs the cord neatly slotted in the swaying stretched-stomach wall, knowing, indeed, that he is not, nor ever will be, the One.
The train screeches to a halt like a serpent dragster. He sighs with relief, because ... well, because the cubicles aren’t allowed in use when stationary. And, with the side of his foot, he tries to tidy back the silting stew of blue-veined curds that inches out from under the engaged door.
Eventually, however, he screams. One short blast on the tunnel vision. Blue murder. A sanitary flush.
Posted at 08:16 pm by Weirdmonger
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Wednesday, December 06, 2006
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
a collaboration with David Price
If it hadn't been for an overturned bottle of Veuve Cliquot and two half-eaten bowls of sushi, you'd swear the room had never been lived in. It had been cosy enough the last time I'd been there; but now there was a chill in the air, condensation creeping down the walls. I zipped up my jacket, even though I suspected the coldness to be nothing more than a product of my own, very vivid imagination.
But something very bad had happened in this room, of that I was certain.
What had caused Leonard and Kate Lawler to flee their home?
I surveyed the room – the half-eaten meal, the CD which was still playing Sinatra, the candles on the table which had all-but burned themselves out – and felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. It had been growing ever since I'd arrived and found the door ajar, then in the hall where I'd called out their names. My voice echoed around the walls as though I'd just entered a vast cavern instead of a semi-detached house. There was no smell of must, no accumulation of dust and cobwebs; just a feeling that the place had been abandoned for a very long time.
I left the living room, exploring the bedrooms, bathroom, conservatory. I even climbed up to the attic. I should have felt like an intruder, but I didn't; this was a totally impersonal environment, like the house of a famous person that had been recreated as a museum exhibit.
At this thought I developed a feeling of being watched, and began casting anxious glances around me.
Cursing my paranoia, I returned to the living room, still uneasy, but more concerned for my friends; less than an hour had passed since we'd spoken over the 'phone, and there'd been no hint of trouble then; whatever happened in this house had been sudden and totally unexpected.
I took one of the Lawler's art deco candle holders from a glass cabinet and smacked it against the palm of my hand. It was solid, as good a weapon as any. Oh yes, I really was naïve enough to think that an object thirteen inches long and no thicker than a man's thumb would be good enough to protect me.
I left the house, looking up and down The Mews. There were fourteen houses in all, each occupied by well off people; all double glazed, each door and window protected by intricate burglar alarms. And every one seemed as desolate as the house I had just left.(I might have been standing in the middle of a deserted film set; the camera's put away, the actor's and technicians gone to bed).
Surely I was wrong. The whole street couldn't just have vanished.
The subject is showing signs of awareness –
Simple brain patterns. You are reading too much into them-
Maybe. He is worth monitoring –
Suddenly - breaking through my wild preoccupations – I saw a single, ancient box brownie camera sitting in the gutter. I picked it up, dusted it off and peered into the viewfinder. These were automatic movements on my part; half derived from my knowledge of the Lawler's as collectors of such memorabilia from fifties and sixties Britain. The other half of the impulse was simply needing something to occupy my hands.
Through the aperture, I homed in on another object that appeared wedged between the bottom of the lawler's garden fence and the pavement, distinguishable from the more general litter by its apparent ability to move. It was a dead dog; so dead, the maggots gave it a semblance of life.
I lowered the camera and discovered that there was nothing like that really there, only a lolly stick and a blue rizla packet; still full, by the look of it. I raised the camera and there it was – via the lens – the remains of Kate Lawler's Trajan, that dog I'd often tickled under the chin; the friendliest mastiff this side of the Bristol channel, now fast becoming unrecognisable, even as a corpse.
"Won't last for long."
The voice brought me back to some semblance of life; having, no doubt, been stuck rigid for at least a few minutes. The voice strangely calmed me.
I thought I knew who used such a voice; somebody I loved dearly, and had died many years in the past.
"Nanna?"
My voice piped like the child I had been when she was alive. She was dressed in black and white – and her face was grey. Her fashionable gloves – which she insisted on wearing in public whatever the weather – appeared stone-washed.
"Say cheese," I said, and without warning, clicked the shutter.
I wondered why she left me. I'd been confused as a child, because my parents had quenched my gullible questions by saying Nanna had gone to a better place, where she'd play in gossamer meadows under silken skies with many of her Victorian playmates from schooldays.
And now I felt my heart empty again. And there is more space to be empty in an adult heart; a child's heart keeps the future inside it so it never seems half as empty as it might have been.
I was merely thankful I had never seen Nanna with maggots moving her.
Definite signs of emotion, I'd say –
That doesn't prove a thing. Under the circumstances, a confused reading is only to be expected –
My revery was broken by Kate's voice calling for Trajan and a waft of Sinatra. I turned but saw nothing. Perceived, yes, and if I' raised the camera I might well have seen her. But I couldn't bring myself to do this, the thought of seeing her beautiful face crawling with maggots staying my hand.
AND NOW THE END IS NEAR, Sinatra started singing.
But who was facing the final curtain?
The camera whirred, a photograph slid out of a gap at the bottom. To my knowledge, the old brownie box had never been able to do this; but then, they'd never been able to show you the inside of another dimension, either. I took the photograph out. A pretty young girl, some five or six years of age, smiled back at me. Her dress was late Victorian – lots of frills and a ridiculously large bonnet – and behind her, a magnificent-looking steed. A recently taken photograph, yet it had been posed for in 1898. This was my Nanna, over a hundred years ago, standing outside a stable that had once stood in what was now the Lawler's back garden.
The photograph began to fade, yellow, and curl around the edges as time seemed to catch up with it. I let it fall to the ground, watched it disintegrate. When I looked up a tall, elegant lady, some twenty years of age, was sitting atop a stallion. It was my Nanna again, as she had been during the early years of The Great War.
She raised her whip in greeting.
"A beautiful morning," she said.
I could sense a presence behind me. The Lawler's and their dog, perhaps; maybe even a complete stranger.
"You're not real," I argued. "None of this is real."
"Oh but it's real to you," my Nanna replied.
"You died a long time ago."
"I've never been dead. Not to you."
And this was certainly true; as a child, in times of illness or loneliness, she would become a (imaginary) comforting friend. My Nanna, who hadn't died, but moved to an idyllic country retreat with her old friends.
Had I willed her to be alive so much that she had actually returned? And if so, where did the Lawler's fit in?
"Are you thinking about your friends? You must be wondering what became of them?"
"What do you know?"
She smiled, and there was the slightest hint of cruelty in her eyes.
"You have the answer," she said. "Look all around you – can't you see the decay that lies beneath the surface gloss? Of course not, because you always blot out the bad things." And she lightly cracked the whip across the horse's flanks. It trotted forward a few paces, then vanished as though swallowed by an invisible mist.
Several more photographs slid out of the camera, snapshots of the residents of The Mews. Had this camera captured their souls? Had they been spirited away to some dark-room-created sepia world? The road was desolate, yet I no longer felt alone.
Did I dare raise the camera to my eyes again?
I glanced back at the house; it looked as if it should have been condemned.
How many bodies were crawling with maggots in there now?
I looked at the camera. One snapshot left. The candle holder in my pocket no longer gave the comfort it had offered just five minutes ago, but I still had to know the answer. Turning the camera on myself, I looked into the lens, hesitated…then took my own photograph. It was time to meet The Devil face to face.
*
This one came out in colour, a panoramic Polaroid slipping like fax paper from the antique netherslot of the Box Brownie; pixelled and polkadotted, poxed and pitted.
I stared at the image. There were, by now, even deeper undercurrents of sound that made Sinatra's version of MY WAY seem lily-livered and limp-wristed. Kate Lawler, with whom, clandestinely, I had been having a squalid love affair, had often played this to me when Leonard was away on business. Now here was a vision of our runtish foreplay in various shades of red. I dashed back into the Lawler's house as if to ask for forgiveness. A self-imposed history of faithlessness and deception needed to be re-enacted, back-tracked, fast-rewound upon spools of reality so as to retrieve some dignity from earlier times. Leonard and I were old school chums and he trusted me implicitly. And the guilt of playing fast and loose with his wife had given me the seeds of guilt, which later turned into today's rampant paranoia.
The house was now lived in again. But lived in by whom? Or what?
The place stank of dog dirt. The vinyl record on the turntable was being scratched along the run-in or run-off grooves by the sapphire stylus, a rusty silence that made me think of locks grating and hinges creaking.
Something HAD happened in this room. Or was about to happen.
The sushi and Veuve Cliquot were mixing in strange porridgy rivulets across the very carpet where Kate and I had once let slip the hare from the lips of love. Maggots squirmed in this mess, making it flow where it would otherwise have been stagnant.
Now, tonight, I was alone again in this Mary Celeste of a house, waiting for fulfilment of my own emptiness.
Trajan hovered past my feet and, instead of snuffling at my groin, as was his practice in happier days, he failed even to impinge on my consciousness, except as a potential off-shoot to the screen. My Nanna then worried at the roots of my childhood, teasing out all the buds of self-disgust which had later flowered as full-blooded paranoia in middle-age. She did not even put in a reappearance, but merely masqueraded as Kate Lawler.
The television screen flickered, the images blurred … and the living room itself burst violently into life.
Increased REM activity. Something is happening!
Leonard's collection of Beatles singles started spinning across the room like Frisbees.
The posters of old Hammer Horror Films, scrunched up with dreams of becoming comic silent movies, burst into flames.
Frank Sinatra appeared, glimpsed as a hologram between the TV and the pyramid of collectable Daz and Surf boxes across the room, a crooning version that was less convincing than even a Stars In Their Eyes counterpart.
I sat still.
I had to.
You could not have slipped even a cigarette paper between the concentration and the silence.
Someone had come into the room and was examining me. I pretended to be just one of the exhibits. I dared not blink, though I knew I was no good at not blinking; I could barely move my eyeballs in their basins without ripping the optic fuses from their earths. But I did manage to raise my sight, without too much further pain or visible flethering of the pupils. It was my Nanna, I saw, now dressed in between-the-wars fashion, but still sporting those elegant gloves from an earlier epoch. She tenderly touched my temple and I begged her to take off the glove so that her touch would be as real as she looked. Then the blessing would be complete. But instead of the kind words I intended to say to her, I choked on things that should have used the lower sluices, and rizla skins rose in my gorge like sick and I foully cursed her for the guilt she'd bestowed upon me.
For a moment I was plunged into thick darkness; then, as if by a sleight-of-hand, the light from a pencil-thin candle dimly illuminated my surroundings. Everyone was there – Nanna, Len, Kate, even my ex-wife. I reached out for a comforting touch, but might just as well have reached for the moon; for only in my mind did they exist.
And, tragically, so did I.
I looked around the Lawler's living room; Overturned furniture, the dulcet tones of Sinatra mocking the carnage. This was the scene that greeted me on that terrible night.
Spilled food, an empty room…
And yet there was a void near the fireplace, an amorphous mass struggling to take shape.
I clutched the sides of my head, trying to remember, yet knowing how terrible the discovery was.
The room was cold – as cold as death – and in that void a pattern began to emerge; silver, with a hint of gold; hair, pale flesh. I stared at the emerging figure with the horrified fascination of a viewer watching animals tearing each other apart on a wildlife programme, for this was death in its most brutal form. Kate, the marks of her husbands hands about her throat and neck, her own hands still clawed in a last, desperate struggle, the state of the room evidence of that brutal tango . Her face…
In panic I fled the house, stopping for nothing. Across the garden, then onto the road where I caught my last glimpse of the world; Len's BMW racing towards me, the face behind the wheel transfixing me with an expression of sheer hatred.
And then…
Only darkness.
Now all I have is these tortured images. I'm not in the Lawler's house, or walking down The Mews. I am in the same place I have been in for the last two years; a hospital bed, the music of Sinatra piped in through the speakers, a candle-holder accommodating an incense stick in the hope that a familiar smell might stimulate my brain. But they are wrong about people in a coma, we are fully aware; even with our perceptions of reality distorted; we still think.
I am once again in the dark, trapped behind my own eyes. If I could only open those eyes, look upon the light… But my eyes have been taped shut, and the only movement I make is when the nurses manipulate my limbs to prevent atrophy. I crave escape from this prison, but fear what awaits me when I do. Will I be a drooling, mindless vegetable confined to a wheelchair, unable to communicate or feed myself? I sometimes think that a swift death would have been better that this.
My own memory is short, and much as I try to fight the visions, I will soon be thrown into another, all-too-vivid nightmare. I only remember the last one, so I have no way of knowing if the experience has ever been pleasant, or if I have just been reliving the same day – over and over – in a loop.
*
I see a light and I am drawn towards it.
My memory is fading.
Wasn't there something about a camera?
I am entering a room…
(Published 'Redsine' 2001)
Posted at 09:35 pm by Weirdmonger
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Sunday, December 03, 2006
EXCERPTS FROM Brian Keene’s JOBS IN HELL 1999
===================
JOBS IN HELL Volume One, Issue Five
This issue is dedicated to Des Lewis, a true scholar and a gentleman, not to mention the undisputed star of the small press. Visit his website at http://dflewis.cjb.net/ or read a recent interview with him at http://www.mindspring.com/~toones/Whimsy.html.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. From The Editor
2. Market Listings (Special Mega-Sized Holiday Section)
3. Who, What and Where
4. Special Feature: Whither Ubiquity? by DF Lewis
5. Classifieds
FROM THE EDITOR:
The Holiday Season is once again upon us. Time to gather with the relatives that we avoid the rest of the year, send cards to folks whose addresses we’ve misplaced, gorge ourselves until our waistline vanishes, spend that last royalty check at the mall and basically not get anything creative done until January.
So, before the seasonal slothfulness creeps in, let’s have one last mega-submission blast! You’ll notice that there are no Market Updates in this issue. Don’t worry, they’ll be back next issue. This week, I wanted to make room for an extended Market Listings section. Hope you’ve all got plenty of paper in your printers, because it’s BIG!
Also featured this issue is a brand new non-fiction piece by the ubiquitous DF Lewis. Those of you who are unfamiliar with that name have obviously been living under a rock for the last decade. Pick up any small press publication and you’re bound to find a story by Lewis sooner or later. He admits to writing and seeing accepted over 1,200 different stories (although some claim that the figure may be as high as 2000). How did he do it?
Find out this issue!
Happy Holidays!
(Aren’t you sick of hearing that already?)
Brian Keene
=============
JIH SPECIAL FEATURE:
WHITHER UBIQUITY?
BY DF LEWIS
It’s as if it’s my real name: the Ubiquitous DF Lewis (called this so many times, I’ve lost count), even called “the ridiculously prolific DF Lewis” in a recent organ! How do I manage this? Or, perhaps more important, why?
Well, some have claimed that I play on my reputation to get so much stuff published (at the last loose count--over 1200 different stories in touchable organs like magazines and books from 1987). I counter-claim it is DESPITE my reputation that I’ve managed to achieve what I have achieved. I’ve been hauled over the critical coals so often--sometimes so devastatingly--I wonder why anyone continues to bother publishing the little rotters at all. But still they crank out, as best as I can muster them for the neat ranks of dead insects that some call print.
I suppose I started with a splatter-gun method of submitting, spraying all manner of stories to all manner of unlikely outlets. Some hit. Most missed. But some hit real big. I’ve been lucky, too. Some real nice people who knew their stuff took me under their wing and showed me how to crest the sometimes-thin thermals of creative writing. I played on my strengths and weaknesses, by beginning to quote in my blurb all the critical comments made about me—-and I mean ALL. By experience, I learned to target my submissions, but this was only perfected after about six or seven years of doing it. Luck continued apace. Knowing people, rubbing shoulders, pressing flesh, all these things HELPED. Also—-and it wouldn’t be fair to leave this out—-in order to work my method above, you’d need some capital to pay for the postage and materials, especially with so many missed targets, ‘black holes’ and fruitless acceptances. (It’s easier now, I guess, with the Internet.) I have never made any money from writing and never expect to do so.
Anyway, back to answering “how”--I started a few years ago something I’ve never regretted. Collaborating stories. Better than sex, I’d say. The mutual creative brainstorming is something else! And I believe some gems have been produced and have helped me through many a writer’s block. Helps you get published when you’re having it away with someone more famous than you! I could go into the philosophical/linguistic background to collaborating the way I do, but that is probably another article, some time.
I even collaborate, in effect, onanistically—-utilizing old unused pieces from the different think-world of an earlier, discrete self, mix-and-matching them with my current brain cycles. And talking about brains, mining a brand new story from fresh ore is also like collaborating … if you’ve got two brains, as I have! (Perhaps being a thick-skinned eccentric also helps in any venture; not that I’ve consciously nurtured this persona. I just am.)
I digress. I think I’ve covered the main points to answer “how”. As to “why”? Simple. Because DF Lewis believes what he writes is worthwhile. And, at the end of the day, that is hopefully the main answer to the question “how”, too.
DF Lewis was never born--he emerged in ineluctable slow motion. Des, however, his counterpart, was born 18 January 1948 in Walton On Naze, Essex, UK. Sun in Capricorn, Leo Rising, Pluto/Saturn close to Ascendant, highly aspected Moon in Aries and Jupiter in Sagittarius, two Grand Trines etc. School in Colchester, Essex. Lancaster University (1966-69 where he met his wife. Two children, Ivan (28) and Berenice (25). 1970-1992 Company Pensions expert. Lived in Croydon (South London) during that period. Now lives in Clacton on Sea, Essex. 1200+ different stories published in print outlets since 1986. His novella AGRA ASKA published to critical acclaim during 1998-9, but few seem to have read it. Received British Fantasy Society Karl Edward Wagner award in 1998. Now his website hosts an electronic forum called Weirdmonger.
CLASSIFIEDS:
Our classified section reaches over 300 professional and beginning horror authors, artists, poets and editors each and every week. The cost for an advertisement is only $10 per month. There is no word limit (within reason). To inquire about placing an advertisement, email jobsinhell@hotmail.com. Please be sure to mention “Classifieds” in your subject line.
TIM LEBBON’s “The First Law” is now available as an audio book from Elmtree Publishing. At 2 hours 45 minutes long it's a bargain at $11.95US. Email Elmtree for ordering details. elmtree@uniserve.com
TOM PICCIRILLI’s Deep Into That Darkness Peering (Terminal Fright Publishing): An omnibus collection of 40 horror and dark fantasy stories, 200k words. 30k words of
previously unpublished fiction. Includes all ten tales in the "Self series." Introduction by Poppy Z. Brite. Cover and interior art by Chad Savage. $45 + $3.50 s&h for Signed-Limited Hardcover Edition (1,000 copies) ISBN: 0-9658135-5-X $125, includes shipping, for Lettered Edition, leather-bound and traycased ISBN: 0-9658135-6-8.
Ordering Info: PO Box 100, Black River NY 13612 Fax #315-779-8310
email: kenabner@gisco.net (Kenneth E. Abner Jr., publisher)
STOKER RECOMMENDED! Houses At The Borderland, a tribute to William Hope Hodgson. Edited by Andy Fairclough, this critically acclaimed electronic anthology is going fast. Featuring 14 terrifying tales from Simon Clark, Tom Piccirilli, DF Lewis, Brian Keene, Tim Lebbon, John B. Ford, Paul Finch, and more. Limited edition of 100 copies on disc, signed by Tim Lebbon, Paul Finch, John B. Ford and DF Lewis. Price: U.S. only $5 plus $1 S&H, U.K. $2.50 plus 50p S&H. Order online via credit card at Masters of Terror: http://members.aol.com/andyfair/house.html. Congratulations to Tom Piccirilli, Simon Clark and Brian Keene, whose stories from this anthology have all been recommended for a Bram Stoker consideration, along with the anthology itself.
WELCOME TO HELL: A Working Guide for the Beginning Writer (Fairwood Press):
Written by Tom Piccirilli, this 13k word chapbook is filled with some of the most important aspects of the publishing industry. Due in May of 2000 and expected to go fast. Pre-order now. $5.99 ISBN: 0-9668184-2-3 email: talebones@nventure.com
GAUNTLET PRESS special! From now through December 31st, 1999, anyone purchasing a book from Gauntlet Press will get a free copy of Gauntlet #1 (the collectors edition). This copy normally sells for $12.95 and contained censored fiction from Harlan Ellison and Ray Garton, plus fiction and non-fiction from Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan, Isaac Asimov, Gary Brandner, Dan Simmons and many more. Mention the special with your order to receive the free copy of Gauntlet #1. Visit our website at: http://www.gauntletpress.com. Phone credit card orders 610-328-5476 or email gauntlet66@aol.com. Snail mail orders to Gauntlet, 309 Powell Rd., Springfield, PA 19064.
AUTOPSY FOR Bloody Muse #6. From the steaming entrails of this undead goddess, like a cornucopia of evil, we have found stories, poems, art, columns and reviews for your tasty consumption. Fiction by Walt Hicks, Jeffrey A. Katt, Rich Logsdon, Duana R. Anderson, David Whitman and Brian Rosenberger. Poetry from Carlton Mellick III, S.L. Robinson, David Messler, Rev. Jon A. Edans, M.W. Anderson and Jeffrey A. Katt. Plus columns and art to tantalize and leave you wanting for more from Adam Niswander, Chris Whitlow and Noel Bebee. And don’t forget, we have up to date market news. So get your ass over to Bloody Muse and roll among the dead for a while. Bloody Muse: http://westwood.fortunecity.com/chanel/338/bm/bm.htm
WEIRD TIMES: A Pseudo-Journal of Horror in the Arts. Reviews and commentary on past and present horror books, movies, comics, and more. Issue #14 is now available. Sample copy is cheap, only a buck! Make your dollar payable to Tim Emswiler, 116 Sutherland Rd., Apt. 6, Brighton, MA 02135 or email: wyrdtimes@aol.com
NEXT ISSUE: The return of the Market Updates section, a bunch of brand new listings, new non-fiction and the current results for our Excellence Awards. All that and more in JIH #6. Now put down that turkey-laden fork and go work on something!
JOBS IN HELL is a weekly, electronic newsletter edited by Brian Keene and published by JIHad Publishing. All material within this newsletter is copyright 1999 by Brian Keene, unless otherwise noted. All rights for published articles revert back to author upon publication in JIH. Not responsible for unsolicited submissions. All correspondence may be used for publication or quotes unless otherwise requested.
A one-year/52 issue subscription to JIH is $15 or $10 for members of the HWA or the Chiaroscuro. Payments should be made to Brian Keene, NOT Jobs In Hell, and mailed to Brian Keene, 218 Central Ave. Apt. 4, Lancaster, NY 14086. For inquiries, submissions, market reports, news or any other matters, please send email to jobsinhell@hotmail.com
Posted at 10:24 pm by Weirdmonger
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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Posted at 10:15 am by Weirdmonger
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Posted at 05:40 pm by Weirdmonger
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Monday, November 27, 2006
Posted at 02:23 pm by Weirdmonger
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Thursday, November 23, 2006
THE QUEST OF THE MOUTHER (pt 2)
In the lobby, a group of veterans dressed in uniform were waiting their turn. They oiled their shotguns and talked about old times, when they visited bordellos in Mandalay, Samarkand, Havana, Tangiers, Cairo, Shanghai, Vaduz and Birmingham. “No Platonic solids in my day,” mumbled one. “We had to make do with irregular shapes!”
“Bloody scalene pleasures, what?” chuckled another.
“Bloody scalene whores!” returned the first. “Morals like Euclidean theorems! Buttocks like Venn diagrams! Nipples like Lobachevskian corks! Found their G-spots easily enough but I tickled and tickled and just couldn’t locate their {e to the power of minus j Theta} spots!”
“Isosceles beavers! Need a bit of Fourier Analysis,eh?”
The king of Redonda jerked a thumb and explained: “The co-sines of our fathers. They’re all that’s left of the Male Joy Division, used in the last Surinamese civil war. They gather here periodically to awaken old memories and raise a flagpole or two.”
“Disreputable!” Godfrey and Lucy wrinkled noses.
The Madam of the establishment came in with two sacks. She cleared her syphilitic throat and announced that one held clay-breasts while the other held a family of pelicans. “Take your pick!”
As the soldiers raised their firearms, Sri Lankhmar rushed forward and snatched the second sack. He liberated the pelicans, who pecked the fabric of the tent and caused it to deflate with a deafening explosion. While the birds flew out, seeking refuge from the cruelty of men, harem and occupants were flung high into the clouds. Except the clouds were little more than teasings of cotton-wool that were stuck high in a tree like bits of fluff, where a nest of three fledgling chicks were succubating their breasts for future tweaking by the harem-aviary’s clientele. One spoke through its beak as if the words were formed by human lips, tongue and teeth:
“Where’s Mouser?”
The voice was bird-like with a cute lispiness without actually lisping. The other two chicks pouted as best they could but then made a complete fist of simpering. Why they were expecting Mouser was anybody’s guess, since they seemed entirely shocked by the abrupt arrival of the others questers in the treetop. Lucy decided to intervene at this point since she was slipping groundward from branch to branch:
“This is fast becoming a guest quest and Mouther has decided to become its object rather than a follow member. He thought, I guess, that with a tangible purpose akin to tracking a fox to its earth, the quest would become rather more than its erstwhile condition as a cerebral paper chase which only wispy Greek Muses (or cast-off characters from previous doodlings of our twin creators) would find attractive enough to join. Now, we can expect more men and women of substance like Godfrey and myself...”
Luckily, most of this mouthful of unworldly wordiness remained unfinished as Lucy, its perpetrator, together with the rest of the shifty shipless shiftless crew of goats, monkeys, quare fellows and kings, tumbled into a pile of golden scales at that very moment being weighed in the balance by one of those Greek Muses which Lucy had been so scathing of. The fishy stench was worse than the right old stink raised by the previous sentence ending so very uglily in of. Which of the two textualisers took responsibility for such dross was the very quandary the Muse was alchemically testing with equal measures of...
The debate was short-lived, since Feemy Fitzworth and John Gor’blimeysworth simultaneously equated the mutual spotting of Mouser’s tail flicking from the saddlebag of a Marowijne bike as the next stage of interruption in the meanderables of the rainbow quest.
“A follower may follow, a leader may lead but only the alchemick fallowness of miscegenation can eventually sauce our capon capers.”
With the inference of unalloyed pleasure at the tale of Mouser’s Muse, the cheering group God-sped after the narrow-saddled bike, wondering who or what it was that pedalled towards a segment of the out-stretched horizon which was geometrically furthest away from the rest of the sky-line.
The chase was arduous and required a better judgement of scale than what is needed to tailor socks for a giraffe. They followed the Mouser’s bicycle down a road crammed with cars headed to the west coast. From the centre of Surinam, the only west coast available is the one located over four political borders, across territory belonging to Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela and finally through the Colombian jungle to the Pacific. There would be only one chance for a rest - Bogotá, with its sad cafés, unsung in any ballad. A difficult journey.
Needless to say, the drivers were adventurers and traders, carrying cages of mothers-in-law to the galleys.
“Fool!” Godfrey cried, as the Mouser and his unseen abductor joined them and wove a way between incumbent automobiles. Exhausted, the troupe abandoned the quest for a while, sitting by the roadside, counting their blessings. Between them, they had twenty-four.
The sun set like a juicy hat. In the oblique light, a crescent moon no wider than a cough emerged from behind a wispy cloud, like a scimitar dancing in an exotic show. The company sighed.
“Perhaps we should split up?” suggested Lucy. “If we concentrate on different projects, the sum of our achievements may add up to success in the greater quest! It’s worth a fly!”
As if this word was the key to escape, the parrot undid Godfrey’s fly from inside, flew out of the gap with a triumphant squawk and headed in a direction opposite to that taken by Mouser.
The tier-eyed parrot gone, the trouser snake was left to mourn its fellow nestling’s bifocal biflycation. But soon falling asleep, it dreamed of the two textualisers (one young yet oaken; the other moonish and over-seasoned) carving a word upon an Andean peak: an ‘o’ with a polo-dibbler and ‘f’ with an ell-cross and skewer-ankh. Their ambition was to make as many forms of “of” as there were sentences to end them with.
Meanwhile, the company’s splitting-up was tantamount to a random coming-together, as it turned out. Godfrey and Lucy were the first to find themselves in the same quadrant of the horizon, followed closely by Feemy, Sri, John, the critter et al, in that order. There were two coasts and the company’s bearings were such that none now knew the westernmost version. What was more, a street bisected the two coasts as if it were a long, straggly city leading between the furthest reaches of Pan America. The plumbing and other amenities for such a city were a real headache. Populations needed spreading every whichway, thus to prevent chasms forming from service tunnels.
A multitude of bikes (one of which doubtless smuggled the Mouser in its saddlebag) negotiated the ley-line that stuck up like a fin between the pavements. The gaudy shops tilted, the street-lamps lightly kissed across the thoroughfare, urban trees wickerworked the width and darkened the piecemeal sky, kerbstones crepitated, gutters grooved deep and deeper still...
A pageant, with spectacular floats, managed to move along from behind the phalanx of bikes. Godfrey was agog, because there were people cheering from every window of the City street. He had assumed any inhabitants would be under their bedcovers, dreaming that they were only dreaming, because, otherwise, they would find themselves rats in a sinking City. Many were even crowding into the open, risking their steps to the subsiding sidewalks. Children tugged grown-ups to see the wondrous carnival, uncaring of the leaning steeples that both churches and cinemas once boasted at strict right angles. Once crooked oldsters preened themselves upright in mock stances. Spires aspired to retro-launchers.
A large magic carpet - typical of ancient oriental imagery - skimmed by. With one of its threadbare margins nearer the ground than the other, its starboard tassels dragged along a gutted groove of trees. And, upon this float - the actual one bringing up the pageant’s tail - sat Lucy, beckoning the rest of the company to jump aboard. She frantically pointed at one of the bikes that happened to be free-wheeling (pedals spinning, spokes blurring) into a side road or, at least, a side road that had once been a narrow blind alley to a shop’s backyard or merely an irrigation tunnel turned turtle as well as bottomless.
“Mouther Ho!” she shrieked at the others.
They slumped, they clambered, they skinned their teeth, they clawed their nails and they festooned themselves around by worried tassel and teased fray.
The carpet rippled like an intestine down the alley, avoiding rusty ladders and suspended buckets: all the surplus or expelled goods which a shopkeeper might like to season in the rain. The store’s backyard was an irregular polygon, which boded ill for questers who sought augurs in the cut of a fitted geometrical shape. The rear door of the shop was yawning like a cake; in went the bike, followed by the rug, Lucy at the helm but Feemy barking directions into her ear.
“Backthread driver!” she sneered.
The interior of the shop was gloomy, illuminated by the bike’s lamp and a phosphorescent circle far below. While they watched, the lamp fell in a perfect arc toward the eerie shimmer.
A chill updraught of salty air nearly capsized them. The shop-floor seemed absurdly deep and fluid. Lucy descended at a gentle rate, hugging the wall of jagged rock which dipped a toe into the darkness. Snakes and bats played a deadly game of hide-and-seek among the crevices; unused to low temperatures, John Gor’blimeysworth moved closer to Lucy, displacing Feemy, who reached into his pocket and retrieved a lettuce. Frozen hard, like a polar explorer’s gums, it made a fine tool for fending off snakes which took undue interest in the carpet’s pattern.
Godfrey had studied geology in Lima, where he learned all there was to know about limestone; also with the Sandanistas of Nicaragua, experts on sandstone; and with his grandmother in Torbay, the foremost authority on granite; not forgetting Rachel Mildeyes, the living proof that loess exists. Several perspectives on one discipline gave him a metamorphic edge over his colleagues, who led sedimentary lives. He knew the fissure was not a purely natural formation.
“The shop-floor subsided into the sewers,” he cried, “which in turn collapsed into a metro-tunnel, which broke down into the communication conduits and so on. Fractured water-pipes flooded the depression, making a subterranean lake inside the store!”
A splash indicated that the bike had connected with the water. Then as eyes adjusted, they saw the pool was full of swimmers, customers from forgotten shopping-expeditions. They were racing each other to the bike, which bobbed fitfully, kept afloat by the buoyant contents of its now sealed saddlebag. In the very centre of the lake, other swimmers sat aboard the oldest paddle-steamer Lucy had ever seen, made from galvanised baths and toy windmills, held together by shoelaces and brass screws. They greeted the arrival of the bike with cheers and applause, beginning an impromptu party to celebrate the visitation.
“Aqua-scavengers!” breathed Feemy. “Pooling their resources!”
“I wanna me milk mummy, I wanna me milk mummy,” thcreamed Lucy, suddenly aware of the object of the quest. Not Mouser. Not Mouther. Not even Mother. Lucy was in desperate search of an erstwhile wet nurse called Mrs Gray, the one who had given succulent suck even until the age when Lucy had begun her own pert breasts. And this was no part gimmick on Lucy’s party. Nor was it a random fol-de-rol for a rainbow quest’s dubious end. This was dead serious.
“But, gor blimey, Luthy!” complained Godfrey, his face serious with Sri, beamy with Feemy, critical with critter, carroty and parroty and snakey and cat’s-meaty and pan-fried all at the same time, each toe a lark, each eyeball a softmarine from Paramaribo, each finger a hard-headed puppet, thumbs shiftless blunt-ended polygons, trouser-snake a mere penis, mind just one of many bubbles blown by a carouserful of children with names like Pansy, Chelly and Lettuce. “Do you mean to say...?”
“Yes, Godders old man, I loved Mrs Gray, I adored her, and she is in that saddlebag, a human soul seeking opportunities for outward manifestation despite the death of the body it once co-habited.”
“But the tail hanging out of...?”
“Merely a loose end.”
And Lucy pinched her nose as she ducked under the water searching for an air pocket, each of her clay frontages with a nipply beak eager for a taste of either justice or coriander. Godfrey Fitzworth, losing blasphemous qualities one by one, found a torn and empty envelope upon his person and dried his tears upon it, blotting the address in the process. He saw, in the pan-Surinamese distance, other questers still in search of a whisper from a lisp. Or a ley-line shark ploughing through geomantic anglefish. Or a vegetarian whisker on a sprout. Or a precisely blurred cartilaginous carving of ...
“Most memories are false, but when I am faced with the only true memory, which is death, I have then no need for it.” (From Rachel Mildeyes’ AUTOBIOGRAPHY, posthumously published on 20 August 1990 as revised and completed by Allen Ashley and HP Lovecraft)
Posted at 10:33 am by Weirdmonger
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THE QUEST OF THE MOUTHER (pt 1)
THE QUEST OF THE MOUTHER
A collaboration with Rhys Hughes first published in 'Visions' 1997
"He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the temperament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite." From THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES by Robert Musil.
"Is that a parrot in your pocket?" Lucy lisped, "or are you just pleased to seed me?"
It was a question which coloured Godfrey's cheek crimson: a blush which, combined with his green shirt and yellow cravat, turned him into a macaw himself.
He stuttered, "It's a parrot actually, though I do have an erection in my other pocket. My back pocket, that is."
Raising a plucked eyebrow, Lucy continued, "well, I've always fancied a cockatoo."
A restrained lady, she forbore from further puns about peckers and nuts. These lingered unsaid, and unlicked, on the Surinamese air, humid as hot marshmallow, sticky as maté tea spilled on an anaconda.
Godfrey clutched his groin and announced, in a shrill voice: "Put the cleaver down, cocoa bean. Not on your life, you've plumbed my wife. Just a dalliance, wasn't my idea. Foul rascal liar! Don't cut it off, it's the only one I've got. A chopper for a chopper. Leave me alone, there goes my bell-end..."
Lucy stood with arms on hips and sighed. Godfrey was muttering, "Shut up!" to his lower regions. He hopped and strutted and grimaced; his coat flapped like wings. Was this the true parrot fashion?
"Godfrey, who the hell you talking to?" thaid Lucy, taking up the envelope he proffered as soon as her lips unparaphrased a password about a pocketeet. The air was then one huge chicken-wing that fantailed outwards, crowing drunkenly that it belonged to a god who could make feathers speak easy.
"Don't worry, it's only small talk," announced Godfrey, whose cheek was a deeper shade of crimson as he ducked under yet another wing the air had become. "Just open the envelope, and we can see where the trail leads."
"All well and good having a trail, but a trail to be a trail needs a pearl and a dean..."
"Nobody said it's a shiny fossil that we're after beyond Surinam's Crest or even a dog collar. Only a random quest knows where its rainbow ends."
Lucy, hitching her pencil skirt to the stocking-tops, slit the envelope upon a sharpened suspender-belt clip. But before she could read the enclosed yellow parchment, the air itself flew into the sky with a cackle. And both Godfrey and Lucy donned their face masks.
"It takes a good deal of pluck..." Godfrey began, wondering if his Pan image was marred by a mask that was identical to his real face. One good thing, his privates were communing quietly together now, since even pube talk needed air.
They eventually decided to push on through the forest, which was already choking
in the vacuum. A clearing opened round them, as the vegetation withered and died. In the centre of the widening circle hovered a yogi, oily and wise and rather spicy among the wrong Indians. He wore a goldfish bowl on his shaved head, full of water and fish.
Using sign language, Lucy said: "He looks like Sri Yuvaraj Beliram, the sage of the tilted scales. He once weighed justice and coriander and found them frying in the balance."
Godfrey replied: "But he died two hundred meals ago! This must be a mirage, some sort of exotic illusion."
Lucy silently snapped her fingers. "Without oxygen there can be no life. And life is what gives meaning to the passing of time. Thus we are in a region devoid of time, where the past and future can impinge on the present! He's certainly no phoney fakir..."
The yogi nodded slowly, anxious not to upset the fish, and gestured at the ground below. In a graceful loop, large lettered cards surrounded him. Lucy and Godfrey knew at once they formed a sort of Ouija board for a Hindu hoodoo. So they ganesh'd their teeth.
With his thumbs, Sri Beliram flicked cardamon pods onto the letters in deliberate order. Squinting, Lucy saw they made a sentence: "MY QUEST IS TO CONQUER THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE FISH."
"Does he mean flesh?" Godfrey wondered.
"I AM AT ONE WITH COD. MY SOLE IS FREE FROM HAKE."
Lucy sighed. "Sole? Does he want to heel us? I don't understand it. The past really is another country."
Godfrey shook his head. "No, no, Surinam is the other country. They do things differently here. That's worse."
Godfrey shook his name, shook his mane, shook his Codfrey, until Lucy couldn't differentiate him from any one of the various miners who were surfacing from the depths of an approximate coal mine. They were large animal creatures who sported wagging human appendages as well as leonine heads. The leader was carrying a cage with a dead goldfish in it.
"OK, OK, I know it was meant to be a canary," the leader said upon noticing Lucy's mocking finger.
The rest of the bunch were struggling to keep their lungs still. Having them on the outside of their bodies, their lungs looked like perfect pig-bladder moths, except one particular set of custardy lungs displayed the butterfly beauty of its panting wings...
Sri Beliram, noticing this fine pair of translucently yellow bellows, aimed a chili bean dart and cast it upon the lamina meniscus of the vacuum. And it squarely speared the butterfly, thus venting its left ventricle, allowing the breath within to propagate the otherwise expended atoms into a new swansong of air.
"Come on, you lot, only a random quest knows its rainbow trouts's end," Sri the yogi said.
Godfrey snatched off his face mask, Lucy straightened her pencil skirt, the critter with the cage snorted at the now blossoming wind and they all followed Sri towards Lankhmar, with only the tiny gills of Godfrey's trouser-snake keeping time to their steps with wet hisses.
They passed from jungle to uplands, a region of ribbon waterfalls which giftwrapped the mountains. Toothless caves in the young rock led to a sheltered valley where the houses of a rickety town stood on poles in a steaming lake. There was a market fringing the shore. In the foggy distance, saurians snapped at gliders.
The aircraft were bringing in produce from every corner of the country's pentagonal economy. Cocoa and lutes from Onverwacht; pepper and bicycles from the towns of Marowijne; priests and submarines from Paramaribo; shoelaces and machetes from the Sipaliwini Reserve on the Brazilian border; radium and jokes from the disputed lands beyond the River Litani and the Tumuc-Humac Range.
Godfrey and Lucy browsed stalls while Sri Beliram blew disapproving bubbles in his helmet. "Something smells fishy," he tutted. "This is no innocent casbah. Are we among slavers?"
"Yes, yes, a slave-market," nodded a German trader. "Buy them now, before the morning Jew evaporates."
"I'll have a ghetto," squawked Godfrey's parrot.
One stall was manned by a potter with the hands of a weaver. Polite as a polyp, he introduced himself as John Gor'blimeysworth, exiled king of Redonda. "My ascension was the start of a new era. But I was deposed and now must sell endings to earn my tea."
"Cheer up maté," punned Lucy, inappropriately.
The endings in question turned out to be the genuine articles. They were provided by impatient readers who skip to the climax of this story, looking for rhymes or reasons, and then return to this point to sell the dénouement to the exiled monarch.
"I'd like to hear it," said one of the bestial miners.
Upon the stall were gathered wax figures, representations of every member of the company, save Sri Beliram, whose image cannot be moulded. They were connected by strings to the king's fingers and danced to his delicate touch like fevers.
The wax images of Lucy, Godfrey and the others were shown standing in front of a tiny stall upon which were smaller figures, which in turn were standing before yet smaller puppets.
And so on, and so on, and so on...
"That's not the ending, that's now!" Godfrey protested.
The king of Redonda shrugged. "Best I can do. All the ripe endings have been snapped up. New batch expected tomorrow."
The German trader leaned over and said: "A slave-market, just as I told you. You're condemned to be free!"
Another stall was postmarked "THE WEIRDMONGER". A strange name for a trestleful of cat's meat - with Blasphemy Fitzworth himself beaming behind it running his fingers through sinewy strands and gristly melts.
"Cheap shit! Cheap shit!" was evidently Feemy's new Ratnerok salescry instead of his more legendary GOUT CAT, SPOUT CAT, WATCH THE WHISKERS SPROUT CAT!
But, by now, the rainbow cortege had left the market and was heading towards a distant bivouac. The critter, who had surreptitiously left his canary-cage with one of the stallholders in part-exchange for a soupcon of speech, announced:
"Hey, you three, that there place is a harem for scarums!"
Lucy was beside herself:
"Men are beasts! That's all they can think about. Sex and more sex!"
Sri Beliram, who had changed his name by inferral to Lankhmar in honour of the quest, was slightly more together, when he responded:
"A harem, yes, but one in which it looks as if the breasts fly around like birds."
Godfrey shrugged. For him, autonomous breasts were a smidgin more frightening than they they were enticing. The king of Redonda, whose harem it was, noting Godfrey's squeamishness, said: "But it's a great sport clay-breast shooting..." but not before Godfrey had interrupted with: "Ah, I see, they're only clay ones, so perhaps we can mould them into Sri Lankhmar's shape..." until he was himself interrupted by the sight of several pigeon-chested women beckoning to them from inside the approaching harem-aviary.
By now, the critter, the parrot, Lucy, Godfrey, Sri Lankhmar, the king of Redonda, Feemy Fitzworth, not to mention the trouser-snake, were more timid than toe-larks, having seen that the faces on the harem's loose-limbed lovelies were puppets being tugged by hair into grimaces.
One even had whiskers.
"Mouser!" ejaculated the king with a surge of recognition. "Your chest is nothing but a front!"
The said Mouser pulled another face. It was a godawful world where just about any quest was enough for him to follow. But, in his case, to follow was to be instrumental in actually leading them away from the ending they would have otherwise reached. Harem in tow.
Unknown to all, including Lucy, Lucy misheard his name as Mouther.
All the same, they allowed themselves to be enticed into the womb of the bivouac, which was a marquee shaped like a flaccid dodecahedron, the most perfect of the Platonic solids. When they entered through the air-lock, their bodies increased the inner pressure just enough to make the sides of the tent stand rigid.
"I prefer making love in a tetrahedron," said Lucy.
"I prefer making love in an allotment," said Feemy. "I like fresh, young lettuce." He licked his horrid lips.
Continued here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/199.html
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Posted at 10:28 am by Weirdmonger
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006
The Summer was hot that Summer. It was indeed that Summer. You know the one, when all the lawns and park swards were seared yellow, even the compartments of countryside competing to outdo each other with variations on the screaming spectra of rapeseed and baked beaches.
Only the sea remained true to its own description as bleached blue.
And walls were fried like egg-yolk left to harden on plates by lazy washers-up.
At the entrance to the baguette shop near the pier, the building's sandstone was bleached where the shape-sized lintel support itself was now emptied by the same shape that many remembered as being there but not quite what it was.
The boy who had once painted this newly missing 'thing' off-site within Mr Socrates' erstwhile classroom at the demolished Bonnyville junior school walked past. It was impossible to tell whether his eyes shifted to the side surreptitiously to check on the effect of any presence frustrated by the imposition of absence. Inscrutable, as the very notion of perception clouded by mismemory or mistelling.
Other colours invaded the town towards the heart of that summer.
The white of a supermarket's bedraggled biodegradable bags.
The spattered red of the memory sacs. The blood covering the body of Denise Dumond as it swagged between two carriages of the 'train'.
And yes things with intrinsic colours like the blue of not only the 'train' but also the electrical magnetism of the sea mists around the horizon's 'twin peaks'.
The white flesh of the snoutfish on Smee's slab. He had returned to Bonnyville quite as inexplicably as his departure had been full of confident surmising. Adrian was no longer his co-boatman, as Adrian had bigger fish to fry … on the 'Glittenburier'. Smee fished single-handedly now amid the seahumps. The totems of all modern childhoods. Except there were few such left in the dried out womb of Bonnyville.
The purple of day-trippers' faces pertaining to cardiac arrest should they holiday too conscientiously. Even the Summer Visitor herself bore her own colour. So yellow she couldn't be seen against the grass or beach she alternately sun-bathed on.
Finally, the pinkness of a basted, bloated circus tent or loose-strung portakabin in the fleshy shape of a huge creature waddling porkily to its site on the park's yellow sward under the hands of its pitchers and minders. All in church dome hats.
Not a circus tent, in actual fact, as it turned out, but the temporary police HQ for the murder enquiry.
CONTINUED HERE: http://elizabethbowen.fortunecity.com/blog/entry8.html
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Posted at 02:34 pm by Weirdmonger
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Monday, November 20, 2006
As close as one comes towards using confusion or obfuscation as methods of filtering, the further one stays beyond the last vent or flap making the baffle. The fable is just the letters mixed up and its moral the f-word.
Posted at 08:26 pm by Weirdmonger
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