(published 'Dark Star' 1991)
Tokkmaster Clerke was in fact almost a ghost. His winklepickers no longer fitted his shapeless feet. He could hardly grapple with the slide rule that was once all the rage before calculators. He rattled threepenny bits in his dressing-gown pocket, but they did not respond. And finally he tried to seek out haunting memories to underpin his present situation.
The parlour he knew very well, being his station of command in the old days when he ruled the roost on the Clockhouse Mount Estate. Despite following the relentless pendulum of the tall clock in the corner with his bleary eyes, he could no longer catch its sonorous ticking with ears which had been the first items to go ghost.
He withdrew his hands from the welcoming warmth of the deep dressing-gown pockets and saw the fan of veins were now clearly showing through the translucent flesh.
Only a matter of time.
He looked desperately for his file, the long heavy-duty hod-labourer's version with grooves as sharp and deep as steel could be cut. He often wore his fingers to the bone strumming it like a washboard in his own inimitable performance of 'Does your chewing-gum lose its flavour on the bed-post overnight?'. However, the file had always felt good, in the palm of his hand, on rampages against the lager louts. Being a weapon rather than a tool, it was hanging upon the blistered wallpaper as a trophy, with embalmed shreds of flesh-corrupted blood decorating its length. It once bore splinters of bone from a particularly virulent scraping of some yob's skull that Tokkmaster had undertaken whilst under duress. Rarely, but not unknown, the file itself showed signs of blunting from being ill-treated against hardnut cases who seemed to infest the Estate, their ears clogged with heavy rock-wax.
Tokkmaster recalled the several evenings he spent lovingly re-grooving the file with pure diamond chisels, a whole set of which he inherited from his father who had been a dustman with a hobby of jewel-facetting.
Today, the file slipped through his hands like butter. It crashed to the floorboards, momentarily stirring dim echoes of sound within Tokkmaster's still relatively substantial skull.
He seemed to stare at it lying there, tears weltering from the fraying holes either side of his bubbling nose. No more would he be able to tote this serrated rod of steel, no more swing its bitter crenellations around his wild head.
Then, he tried to stand up. He just managed it, his legs a couple of jellies. The dressing-gown slipped through his furcating bones and collapsed to the floorboards, audibly sighing with relief at leaving the anorexic ghost of a body.
Tokkmaster Clerke continued black-staring, as a column of pure white ectoplasm extruded from his wilting member and, whiplashing like an untamed tentacle, it grasped the hefty file from the wall and proceeded to scrape, scrub, gnaw, erode, grind at his own only just softening skull; gobs of pliable bone flying in all directions of the compass around the chintzy parlour - even stopping the pendulum with sickish coagulations.
