Written today and first published here

THE LOCKED DOOR 

I was shown a locked door leading from the corridor into one of the house's locked rooms.  But, really, hand on heart, did a locked door make a locked room what it was? Necessarily, did one lead to the other? 

I knew Arthur was the owner of the house and, as an unspoken secret between us, there was also the further knowledge that I was willing to buy the house and he was willing to sell the house ... if the right price struck both of us simultaneously as the same right price. It was as if our respective (perhaps vastly different) perceptions of the locked door represented each other's facial expression upon shaking hands ... and the locked room was something we both concealed behind those very expressions. 

So, the locked door was where reality met unreality, as it were.  A two-way filter. One leading to the other and back again.  Thoughts that were not in keeping with what I was really thinking. No wonder my tongue got carried away with its own flag-waving.

A room as an echo of its door was soon to be put to the test...

“This is the locked door to the late Mrs Archer’s room,” Arthur told me, as he banged thunderously on its panels. 

“Trying to wake the dead?” I laughed.  I bit my tongue to remove the unfeeling quality of what I had just joked about unwittingly.  A key to removing nonsense from reality.

Arthur was an enormous man, made from ill-seasoned forest timber, as he towered over me...shaggily. 

 Could such unequals as us ever strike a bargain?  I tried to keep the question from my eyes.  Business, in a housing slump, was more a game of poker than a straightforward transaction.

He echoed my laugh. He had told me to call him Arthur rather than Mr Archer.  I supposed this to be a mock friendliness to mask mixed emotions - the bittersweet feeling he must still possess about removing this house from a future where he had expected to continue living with his wife...until she had died so unexpectedly.

Neither of us spoke as we watched each other. Laughter had died to the last echo of the ceiling beams. Against any possible better judgement, I expected to hear a key scrabbling at the lock from the other side of the door...

I was, however, small enough to clamber through the keyhole ... into the vast locked room.  Only so vast, because I was so tiny. Arthur had lifted me and inserted me slotwise toward the darkness beyond the door. Halfway, my tongue managed to slip the tumblers one by one, as if I were the solution to every possible puzzle tree.  

Arthur entered through the now open door, seeking, in utter denial, his departed wife.  And he found me already primed to ignite a disease of toxic fundaments – ready to strike a deal for the next lease along the pecking order of infected conveyance.

The Spanish Flu killed many millions in 1918.  I killed a few more in 2008.

“Behind each closed door there is a sub-primate."

Rachel Mildeyes – from ‘Money Monkeys’

"I was 59 when Shakespeare died," shouted Shakewell from the tow-path.

"So was I," returned Tom Hopper from the bridge of a canal boat and, after much hesitation, as if trying to remember something he'd learned by heart, he completed his sentence: "...when I died."

Their contact established, Hopper threw a mighty hawser towards Shakewell who, in turn, fished it from the reeds and fastened it, hamfistedly, to a mooring-spike already hammered into the soggy bank.

Several other figures had now gathered around Shakewell. They were cross-grained, as if lately snatched from the warm chimney corners of the local inn. They pulled neckchiefs and flat caps from their deep pockets: they certainly felt the chill of the mist down their throats and between their joints, and scowled the more for it.

And Shakewell, too, was irritable with frowns, as Hopper flopped ashore from the Narrow Boat. Gathering his thoughts like scrumping for crab-apples and dredging rehearsed words from under his short breath, Hopper finally uttered another communication, not aimed towards Shakewell in particular nor to Shakewell's close-bosomed compatriots, but rather in the direction of the inky cut where his boat bobbed:

"I've got the Pope."

Shakewell remembered, momentarily, his makeshift role as inn-keeper and arch-gossiper, as he replied: "How can we accommodate His Holiness in the vile dens of our fithy barrows?"

Hopper shrugged: "Did I say Pope. I meant the dope is with me, several wafers of the stuff."

The flat caps guffawed in delight at the slight misunderstanding.

Another shape had pounced to the tow-path from between the frothing frenzy of the seemingly powerless paddlewheels. And then another ... and another. Hopper introduced his nephew Grimace (who smiled a lot), his son-in-law Padgett Weggs (who, according to Hopper, knew something mainly about nothing) and, finally, a nameless fellow follower whose role as hanger-on was made obvious by such a non-introduction.

Shakewell grasped their proffered vertical handshakes, acknowledged the partially accepted truce and tried to keep the fatty lumps in his tongue from engorging further and, thus, from protruding beyond his smirking lips: that would only have meant his visitors suspecting greed and pressing, as it were, fast reality rewind. Yet Shakewell wanted the dope, badly, impatiently...

On arriving at the inn, the rusted ruins of the Halt could still be seen, its broken teeth of rotting sleepers silhouetted against the fennish dusk, together with the giant bottle-openers and sardine tins of a steam train's ancient holocaust.

Grimace wondered what the fuss was all about, as he and the rest of the canal party arrived in the inn's erstwhile car park on foot. Being once a TV chat show host, Grimace's first impulse was to interview the nameless fellow.

"What's that they're stirring, John?"

"My name's not John. A bad guess. But to answer your question, I don't know. I'm only here for the company."

"I've seen it all before," suddenly announced Padgett Weggs.

"Well?" said Grimace, artfully enticing Weggs to continue.

"There are black wings in there," said Weggs, "a bit like coal and coke, and they come here of a night, from the cities. They swarm in batches from the stews. They make a fine fizzy wine when their scales are scalded off."

"Black wings, you say? But what about the bodies between the wings?"

"Well, Grimace, if they have bodies, they must've left them in the sewers."

"They're just crunchy wings, then, with juice inside?"

"Sort of. That's what Shakewell wants the dope for. It fattens the drink, yeasts it up, gives it body, kind of. Gives it, what they call 'consistency'. They sell it at ten bob a flagon in the Snuggery."

"Don't you think the bamboozers are being ripped off?"

"I don't see why. Without the Shakewells of the world, there would only be solid rings of grease in your Christmas soup. He at least uses the fall-out for a good cause. His own profit. Capitalism."

"Where are the wings from?"

"I know that," abruptly piped up the nameless fellow.

But then, Tom Hopper, having finished the deal, arrived, saying: "We need to return on board and take our cargo of human heads to Harchwee. Come on, let's git back to the jolly old cut!"

"Wait, Nuncle," said Grimace, "let this fellah finish off what he's about to say."

Hopper nodded quizzically, as the fellow continued: "Well, the wings are the winnowing of the Old Ones, who are about to take over the world, and their detritus flutters through the air, when their young are shelled, when their effluent is jettisoned, when their bilges are pumped, when..."

"A likely story," interrupted Hopper. "No time for further argument, ripe 'un - on to meadows afresh. We have a market to promote and punters to see."

The nameless fellow, either through being irked or as a result of sheer inertia, did not return with them on board. If the truth were known, he had forgotten that he was a member of the crew. The others had forgotten, too. He approached the huge copper cauldron vat, to listen to the muffled screams of the dark crab-wings as they scalded in the piping gruel. He could also smell the fetid reek of their mouthless breath.

Later, Shakewell poured the newly acquired dope, since powdered, into the vat, the wailing then reaching an unbearable pitch. The locals gathered around to partake of this unwholesome liquid barbecue, the end product of which would be sluggishly pumped into the kegs of best bitter.

The fellow shrugged, strolled towards the canal, just in time to see his erstwhile companions preparing to cast off. Their singing could still be heard as the boat passed the cut's last bend. He looked skyward and shuddered. Another black batch was arriving, by the look of it: swarming and flapping like scabby vulture-moths. Their Mothership hovered above them, humming monstrously. A Great Old One, if there ever was one, thought Blasphemy Fitzworth, who was more preoccupied with recalling his own name than with the fillings of the sky.

It was not long before they extended the inland waterways system in Surrey; and the long flight of locks from the Mount in Cullesdon to the inner reaches of the Southern Mysteries near Red Hill was an architectural wonder of the times.

"This is where Blasphemy Fitzworth, the great designer of the slip lock died - smashed his skull on that kerb between the oaken gates, when white water had just begun its spate..."

The guide stood, biting his lips, stemming the blood's embarrassing rise to his cheeks.

"What of that Fitzworth fellah?" queried one gongoozler with a remonstrative finger bowing and scraping in the air. "He's said to have been tiddlier than this finger of mine."

The Narrow Boat chugged sedately down a long stretch of freshly primed locks in the Surrey Badlands. The heavy lock-gates were tended, it was said, by the ghosts of gongoozlers. The boat slipped through the night between the tow-path and what locals called Onyx Meadow; and were it caught by the canal police, its lot would be rustication to the distant Ring near Wolverhampton, to tread those drizzly steps for the next eternity and a half. Or so the story went.

Old Tom Hopper stood at the stern, once a fine young architect with fresh sown beard, but now hunched and humbled by decades of weed-hatch tending, moor-spike hammering, not to mention several resorts to pumping the bilge by hand. His left cheek, barely discerned in the darkness, had been half sliced off in a battle with brown ones, revealing his weathered gums tracking like bacon rind below the ear. Another indescribable wound was the remains of one particularly nasty fracas in the vicinity of a winding-hole, one with a humourless fisherman whose wiring-systems were not much less than the iron netting used by the ancient Allies to entangle foreign submarines.

Nuncle Tom's Narrow Boat was narrower than most, because he enjoyed sliding between those parts of the new Surrey canals that were, even at this early stage, growing back to Mother Nature. His own backside may have been as portly as the next man's, but his boat had the slenderest hips to negotiate even the legendary Fitzworth slip locks.

"Ay! Ay! I could tell yer at the time, stripling, when I took three straight boats, each as long as the length of any healthy lock-pit you may have seen, by meself, through seventy hefty flights of 'em. The boats, they be called Nygremaunce, ReynBouwe and, ah yes, Cthulhu. By meself, I say, just me and me dog Harris. OK, I know it don't seem likely, but you'd better believe it, for I spent a month or more on that trip, mayhap a year and needed not one pump-out for me boat's honest-to-goodness excuse-mes. A pair of excuse-mes on each of them were enough for any man's voidings. Stink to high heaven, yer say? Course they turned up their noses as we pro-seeded through, young sapling. But me dog Harris, he were a real clean fellah - he used the boat's excuse-mes, yer see - he did not leave turds like they do in the posh streets that abound round here in Surrey. Well, be patient, yearling, I'm coming to the stranger parts of me tale. It's all to do with that Fitzworth fellah. He who..."

...miniaturised the scale of locks so that they were strings of pearls that you could pod like peas. Another voice had taken on the story at this crucial point, as if a character in the story couldn't be trusted to tell it properly. It was said that the whispered-of black-winged Old Ones were using the city churches further north as launching-pads for infiltrating the otherwise unfathomable parts of Our Green and Pleasant Land. They had masterminded the arterials of our lands south of the great M25 motorway, in an attempt to loosen up the clannish feuds around Seven Oaks and beyond into the Low Garden of Septic England. They had recruited this so-called Blasphemy Fitzworth to oil the workings of the waterways southward. It was then he came up with the slip lock, an idea of genius if ever there was one. Simplicity itself...

"...and why it be?" proudly intoned Hopper, finally shutting off the hissing valve of the rude co-narrator's interruption. "He had been, yer know, me lad, change-giver on Walton-on-Naze pier, so he got a good idea how to use turnstiles 'gainst Naze-men. If you put 'em on a strong rubber band or coiled spring, mebbe, after sev'ral turns they'll just wind smartly back, slicing off yer wotsits good and proper..."

The tale thus ended with guffaws of crude humour, but it tailed further off round a sudden bend that hours of pre-steering of the unwieldy craft were required to encompass. I could not be bothered to follow, being on foot. The environs of the hauling-bank had become clogged up with the nesting young of Great Old Ones, in any event. Also, I did not like being interrupted. Moreover, I'm browned off with spending my whole holiday as a gongoozler, opening and shutting locks for ingrates. Go find some lazy winding-hole ol' Hopper, and sleep away the rest of your life.

The guide stared at the foul-mouthed punter, who had thrown unreasonable doubt on the manliness of Blasphemy Fitzworth.

The group had been listening to an interesting lecture on slip locks, whilst jigging from foot to foot (for lack of convenience) around the sole version still in use. Could it be that Fitzworth had met his death here at this very place, after a particularly violent tiff with a lover?

The snide fingerer now waggled a lower digit; and the guide had no recourse but to set the lock slipping ... a wild hairtrigger affair, like an overwound heavy-duty alarm clock on feathertouch alert. The bamboozler was momentarily aghast - for the interdependent canal systems within his own territory of flesh were unbecomingly interrupted...

Feemy Fitzworth, to escape the fillings in the sky, thought to disguise his own person as an anonymous suburban man ... but Fate would dig deep to find its victims ... it would chase him through Victorian London in the belief that a cat's meat vendor was simply another version of him; it would skim along the ley-lines of Thomas Hopper's aborted ambitions for canal systems in Southern England; it would seek Grimace, Weggs and Harris until it discovered they were mere decoys of a diversionary destiny; it would sup, midway, a few enriching bevies in Shakewell's snuggery along with the tippling flat-capped gongoozlers who happened to be wink-eyed in tune with the strobe-alternations of history; and Fate, finally enlodged between its tasty tandoori wings, would, at the last, pursue Fitzworth, even to the extent of flapping into mundane reality itself...

Suburban Fitzworth tended to talk to himself. He tightened the dressing-gown round his waist and listened to the wall listening to him:

"Houses take on the characters of their owners ... or maybe vice versa. If so, what is the television aerial? My external brain, saluting the sky like a smart metal feather in my roof-hat? And what about the chimneystack? A blaster-gun pointing at the sky? And if so, why?"

Fitzworth believed that, at night, when the eyelid blinds toppled down the suburban windows, night-critters ("Call them Old Ones," he whispered) emerged from up-sky like hairy tentacled rocs to roost upon the ridges of the roofs. They climbed ("Call it clambering - whether they be upright or upside down") from gutter to gutter ("Gambolling on the gambrels.")

"Call it clambering, call it shuffling or shambling - long's we don't know about it. But one morning, I got up early - too early - and found one of them tangled up on the aerial outside. It stopped struggling when it spotted me. It had large, staring moon eyes, deep as the well at the bottom of Snow White's garden, almost pitiful - and limbs as red and raw as the pantile roofs themselves."

Feemy Fitzworth had been an officer in the army before becoming a cat's meat man or a canal smuggler or the slip lock inventor or, indeed, this now lonely old fart. He had had the smell of death in his nostrils, when he told his men to go over the top.

"Call it clambering, the mud flying at all angles, feet slipping through the soft mud - they couldn't go quick enough in their innocent eagerness. They wanted at the enemy, wanted real bad, wanted to tear them arm and leg. They needed to wreak their anger on the other ones..."

His monologue, when all seemed at its worst, was like making up stories. He had a yen to be another Homer - or was it Hopper? Or had he already been Hopper? But he usually forgot to switch on the reel-to-reel...

"My soldiers got to the other ones, they did ... and found them all brown and older than the hills where we had dug our trenches - or were they starts for canals? The others' smiles - call them enemies - were set into their faces like letter-boxes and, as they moved, they croaked - or was it creaked? My soldiers felled them like tall lumps of lumber and slashed them to red rubble."

He remembered that the reel-to-reel - or did he call it real-to-real? - was still switched off and decided to make one last statement, a confession that the suburban wall repeated to itself for years after.

"Call it clambering, call it anything you like, except learning or thinking or athletics round a Greek bowl. Yep, clambering is the best word, but scuffling, scrimmaging, skittering --- they will do, too. My soldiers turned on themselves, for they decided they had done wrong by the good old earth. My soldiers climbed up on each other, seeking for vital parts, a sheer mountain of clambering. I watched, but then went the other way, trying to blot out their screams and screeches and squawks ... growing feebler and feebler."

Fitzworth recalled the affair in outright disbelief, as if he were not now the same person who had witnessed it all. Having rid himself of the guilt, he decided to switch on the reel-to-reel. Night was then as deep as it was ever going to be and the semi-detached began to echo with bustling sounds from up the dark stairwell.

"Hear them? Proof in the pudding. It's not the central heating system, either, governor. It's those that squat and brood on my roof tree. It's like having them on my very skull. The gutters flow with their sweet juices, like heavenly canals..."

Tears weltered in his moon eyes at the last thought. Soon he would be off to Heaven himself, through Heaven's testing turnstile (manned by the Pope)...

The recording went on for some time with no further words from Fitzworth. Him breathing out sobs could just be heard, as other sounds grew in intensity. Snapping locks - lumping steps - rattling lips - blinking lids - creaking joints - wind breaking...

The dawn broke early the following day. The sun came as if out of nowhere, a margin of screaming orange across Cullesdon's cluttered roofs. The night wind had dropped and become unmoving balloons in the items hanging from the washing-line - anorexic ghosts of gongoozlers. The darkness had seeped to shoe level and pretended to be channels of mud. Yapping dogs (one mutt in particular) that had previously punctuated the otherwise complete silence of the small hours had either gone into hiding or died amid the empty video boxes in the pavement gutter. The incontinent dog dirt, too. And starved corpses of cat.

The roofs glistened with dew; some appeared sticky with waxy, treacly cuckoo-spit; and one roof among them bore a skewed TV aerial dripping an inchoate substance like brown flesh with hairy ridges of inflamed pores.

Mrs Hopper, in her winsome night-gown, was now to be seen pegging out her husband's smalls on the already over-borne washing-line. She scowled, as she saw her neighbour Mr Fitzworth raising the lid of his dustbin.

Blimey, he must have been in there all night, she thought.

(Rewitten version of 'Tom Hopper' in 'Midnight in Hell' 1991)

For years now, roughly twice in each of them, Clovis has shufflefooted his battered shooting-brake of a van into town - and he has always been struck by the large house silhouetted on the high hill. He could have sworn that the hill seemed higher with each visit, whilst the house itself remained in the same stage of distant dereliction.

The town was one not normally passed through. A traveller could only visit on one road and then leave by the same road. Yet Clovis was not entirely certain whether that had always been the case since his memory often played him tricks. He was half-convinced, moreover, that the place might have at one time been positioned near a short-cut to London. The town's buildings were rendered in chequerboards, often with the doorways partially set below the raised street level, the pavements being back-alleys in their own right. The town's name, Rosehearty, felt at odds with its nature.

Clovis had business in Rosehearty.

The populace was unusual in its proclivity towards such confectionery as boiled sweets, fudge and chews - and, indeed, towards saucy seaside bric-à-brac. Despite Rosehearty's proximity to an uncluttered coast, there never were any tourists to speak of.

Clovis was a free-lance confectionery salesman and purveyor of novelty knick-knacks and specialist prophylactics, bringing choice brands of sweets to Rosehearty, touring the corner shops (more such shops than corners, in fact) and re-stocking the neatly arrayed jars with jaw-breakers galore. He was particularly intrigued by the type of shopkeeper to be found there. Some wore smudged overalls as if grown on them like loose second skins. Others were round-faced individuals who had plenty of confectionary jokes to share ("Have you heard the one about the woman who couldn't resist bulls-eyes?" "No, but I bet she was a bit of a cow." Boom boom). Also there were narrow elbowy fellows who weighed out a quarter of lemon sherbets and then told the customer of the story of how these sweets lost their innards in the last dandruff shortage. Inscrutable chumps in red-stained aprons did a roaring specialist trade in beetroot-flavoured gobblers. One particularly nondescript man by the name of Poke sold throat sweets - which, indeed, looked like tiny throats torn from slightly less tiny living creatures. Clovis wondered who supplied Poke with such dubious delicacies because it certainly wasn't Clovis and, in any event, such 'sweets' should have been sold in a butchers shop - or so Clovis believed. And, finally, there was Clovis's least favourite sort of shopkeeper: the squat gleamy-eyed variety who did their business by slowly dropping the sweets (plop plop) into the home-made triangular paper bags, rather than in scoopfuls.

Most of all, it was the house on the hill that stirred the hackles of Clovis' fancy. So much so, on his last visit to Rosehearty, just before his planned retirement from the trade, he determined to climb up to it, in the hope of selling off his closing-down residues, gone-past best-bys, long-term returns and remaindered runs.

The path was long and nettly, the underfoot being particularly treacherous. But, by the late afternoon, he had made sufficient progress to spur him to the summit. Eventually, the house, itself in the typical local chequerwork, reared above the ragged edge of trees, a lugubrious sight indeed. The window shutters hung by the skin of their hinges. The roof appeared to sag around the protruding tent-pole of the central chimneystack.

He rapped, the slightly sticky front door feeling like hardened black treacle to his knuckles. He raised his eye-line to the top attic windows, suspecting that any inhabitants (if they could breathe at all this far up into the sky) were peering down to see who was unseasonably visiting their lair. But nobody could be seen, except the frayed frills of weather-worn curtains, flapping in spite of the stillness of the ensuing dusk.

For the first time ever in the vicinity of Rosehearty, Clovis sensed the heady tang of the sea upon the roof of his mouth. He had never seen the sea when visiting the place nor, indeed, questioned its whereabouts. The inhabitants were not obvious sea people, merely close to the coast by accident rather than design. And, notwithstanding their loose tongues on other topics, they could never be drawn by outsiders to talk about the sea nor, for that matter, the house on the hill. Not that Clovis was especially interested in the sea, even when he had been reminded of it by the rare screech of gull or the relentless undergrunting of rather inefficient fog-horns (which could do, no doubt, with a suck of Poke's throat sweets).

The house had no front door, but merely tangible darkness. Clovis walked through, realising that his own body was past the sell-by date and anything could happen. He had seen that the house was stacked over with all manner of chimneys, roosting like a battered hat upon the hill's hump. Brooding above Rosehearty, it caused the inhabitants to feel more than just a little persecuted. Apparently, Shamble Hall, as the house had always been known, was an architectural shipwreck, but nobody could be certain about its condition since the path which ancient maps once showed starting at the end of the High Street was nettled over.

"Perhaps the proper path is on the other side of the hill," was one suggestion on a day when nobody had anything better to do than chitter-chatter. The speaker resembled Poke himself.

"Don't be silly, the sea is on the other side," countered Padgett Weggs, the town clown. And Padgett Weggs removed a gobstopper, to allow freer speech, breathed deep, crystallising the salt in the air (upon his outlandishly long nostril-hairs) ready for use as seasoning upon his Mum's stew come supper-time - and then he spoke of amazing matters. He pointed with his pipe. "Last night, when I was the only one up, the moon was wide open, rising like a brown balloon above Shamble there."

Most of his audience did not conceal their loud jeers, because all knew that the geography of the known universe made it nigh impossible for any moon (let alone a full one) to appear in that quarter of the night sky. But Padgett Weggs did not pull his punch-lines. "I also saw a chimney smoke..." He blew a bubble of sooty mucus (more yellow than black) from the end of his pipe, as if in demonstration. "I saw it come out against the moon..."

"It must have been a ghost, Padgett Weggs." The others guffawed, as Poke tried to humour him. Then just as they split up amid the mumblings of dusk, lips still fresh from Weggs-baiting, they all saw a large blotched yellowy bubble slowly expand from Shamble Hall's tallest smokestack. In utter disbelief, they shuttered their red-rimmed eyes with their lick-fingers, as they ducked under the chequered lintels for their lardy bread and acid drops. Padgett Weggs screeched like a demented gannet. His words were garbled but they possessed the same rhythm as "There she blows!"

That night, whilst the townsfolk of Rosehearty moithered in their truckles, all they could hear was the distant swell of the sea. Padgett Weggs was out scouting for signs of life on the moon, which his mother had once told him was a blunt pineapple chunk. Poke was spitting things out into his chamberpot.

Within Shamble Hall, the ladies, flounced up in great variations of ball-gown, sported ruffs and frills. Their ribbed showy corsets led tucks and pleats towards the most accentuating bodices. The nodding bustles and multi-layered under-skirts rainbowed the polished woods of the dancing-floor. They also wielded gossamer wings upon their backs, woven with slender bones. Furthermore, tantalising skeins stretched between each of these ladies like the finest confection of sugar-glass: beating like fans to cool their ardour whilst they waltzed from one set of leering beaux to another. The brilliant chanderlumes shone along the avenues of bobbing dancers as they took reflective rhythm from an ensemble of elbowing fiddles, sparkling silver flutes and trembling drum-skins. Candy-floss was being served at the bar where a contraption also extruded endless sticks of seaside rock. One silken-breeched footman crouched in the great fireplace, sending invitation messages tied to party balloons up the chimney.

Into the midst of such scintillations of sight, sound and sensuality, there tottered Clovis in yellow waterproofs, scratching his head and blinking his bleary eyes. He looked as if he had just disembarked from some godforsaken trawler in the Minches. "Lummee!" he expostulated. "I must be deader than a door-nail, but I didn't reckon on Heaven being like this. One moment a common commercial traveller and the next right up to my neck in this right old malarkey, this flipping Cinderella rag!"

Abruptly, Clovis' privities began to itch and, with the habit of years, he mauled at his flies to staunch the irritation. Then, the big stand-up clock struck its own version of midnight! His sea-proofs disappeared in a flash leaving him nuder than a fish - to reveal broken glass embedded in his groin, jagged shards of it splintering into the tenderest parts. A fine lady, still in her juiceable time of life, previously unnoticed by Clovis, skimmed off in a right old huff. True, the glass condom slipper he wore was far too small to fit ... but had, in turn, caused his privities to shrink amid erupting gorges of blood. It was probably irrelevant (but worth mentioning) that she didn’t spot the huge animal feast (which made its initial appearance as a big brown oxtail) emerging from Clovis’ backside.

Padgett Weggs frequently kept watch - from downworld - upon the darkened hulk of Shamble Hall. He ruminated on next to nothing, whilst gently chewing what could very well be the end of the line in yellow bubble-gum. And he blew a fragile shimmering globe of it, growing more brown than yellow. The shopkeepers of the seaport's chequerboarded streets (Poke included) dreamed of new dreams, of old jokes, of Hansels, of Gretels and, finally, of alternate metabolisms that were interwoven with the rest, amid the rather inefficient fog-horns of their snores.

Nadine Dognahnyi sat in a deck-chair early one Autumn Sunday morning (early, for a Sunday), the sun shining low in the sky as if in league with the chill of the air. She was determined to lay claim to her ration of the sun before Winter set in and she pulled the fur of her coat collar tight round her scrawny neck.

The rustle of burnt leaves, as they fell through the branches of the nearby tree, was hardly more than the sporadic breeze that caused it. On either side of her (though not directly above) were the clothes she’d just hung on the line, moving flaccidly in the selfsame breeze. Their lives were lazy, those anorexic ghosts who inbabited the sleeves and leggings. Too early for them, also.

Nadine wondered why she’d plumped herself down in the unseasonable deck-chair at all. As the odd squawk of wintering birds mingled with the other more intangible sounds she’d first half-noticed, Nadine closed her eyelids, as if better to find her bearings.

The world inside her head was far more understandable, and it mattered not that the extraneous world of reality surrounding her infiltrated the daydreams like guest goldfish in the aquarium of her skull. Another bird (massive by the sound of it) squawked from somebody else’s roof. Unaccountably, it caused Nadine to think of her age and, in consequence, of her past. She’d been, what people call, flighty. A will o’ the wisp, with the emphasis on “will”. She’d married to suit herself, not others. How could she have helped falling in love with a foreigner? It was in fact his thick accent that had originally attracted her. She could not be expected to have dunked her then young and pretty head in a basinful of cold water to clear her mind. Love is not like that. She didn’t care that “friends” at the Ladies Group would snub her for the natural leanings of her emotions. If it weren’t one thing, it would have been another. The way the other members of the Group walked, noses held aloft, should have warned her that they would be only too easily insulted, put out of joint. They’d been born with solid silver dummies in their mouths. Others who actually earned their fortune (or even obtained it through a freak of fortune itself), were inevitably side-lined, humoured and merely tolerated. Nadine must have known that wedding an East European would result in worse than just rustication.

She opened her eyes again to the garden. The sun was now higher, the washing even less energetic. The shadows of the trees threw mottled patches of sunlight across the lawn and, actually, there was now some noticeable heat from the irititic eye in the sky. Dognahnyi, her one time beau and name-giver, had been dead now almost a year. In fact, tomorrow would be the anniversary, the Death Day, when it would be more appropriate to think of her widower. Incredibly (though she believed it), his face had dispersed into the past (like faces of old school friends never seen again since childhood). Surely one year could not efface the memory of a loved one.

A voice erupted from the house at the other end of the garden. It was her daughter arguing, shouting, making a nuisance of herself. Nadine was often the butt of such traumas, but today she’d consigned Berry to the care of the ghosts. That reminded her of why indeed refuge in the garden this early Sunday morning had been so urgent. The ghosts once arrived in the house had tried to appear playful, fatter than their cousins on the washing line, more jolly and rubicund, ready to lend comfort. . . Nadine had relished their coming, apt as it had been on the tail of her late husband’s departure. She needed company (and with Berry to rear), as many hands as possible were welcome at the pumps. They moved about the large house, gathering the dust to give them shape, shaking the mops out of the windows like heads, chatting of this and that much like unto the socialese of the Ladies Group. Then, things turned sour. Nadine blamed Berry, the teenage wildfire, for taunting them with her tantrums trawled from childhood. The ghosts should hvae been humoured, not blooded with petty squabbles; given a basis for existence out of the pride granted by gentle communion with real pepple, not foisted off with the frailties and fragilities of human misunderstandings. But how could you really blame Berry? She missed a father far more than Nadine missed a husband.

The last straw was snatched from the pigpen of the previous week. All had gone wrong. Nadine had lost all contact with her own daydreams. The Ladies Group had disbanded, she’d heard, just on the strength of a whim. (She’d known the whole affair was as capricious as Christmas snow but, nevertheless, the shock of never now being accepted back into the flock [at least she’d treasured a crumb of hope by the mere continuance of its existence] was a blow that made sitting in the garden at all hours of the day or night no eccentricity, compared to those that now faced her during the rest of her body’s old age.) Berry had lost her best friend at school, either by death or argument Nadine was unsure, for the tale was garbled, but the tears real. Berry even went so far as to turn on the ghosts and accuse them of being mere figments of her mother’s imagination. Nadine watched them slouch off like sagging barrage balloons into their respective corners of the back parlour, knowing that they were slowly filling with water, dragging them down towards the floor where the carpet did not reach the skirting-board. Berry sulked off, too, skulked off, with them, and as if by being their enemy, she’d grown more like them.

Since then, the ghosts had adopted the more traditional role of the prankster poltergeist, with seasonings of evil to soup them up.

The sun had by now crystallised out, the bird squawks more insistent, the washing-line ghosts dead in their own clothes. Nadine wondered if Berry was safe alone with the house ghosts. She did not really care. One them might be Dognahnyi himself, returned to claim his birthright within his daughter’s memories. Surely, if so, he would not allow her to be harmed nor even tranced. Or perhaps he wanted her to die away from Nadine to bring her closer to him?

Eventually, the strange, mysterious sounds that had opened the curtains upon Nadine’s revery did become nothing but the noise they had always threatened to become from the outset. All turned ordinary again. The house, at the far end of the garden, had by now gradually grown quiet again. At least, temporarily. None of it mattered, she realised. Being woken from her daydreams by the renewed ordinariness of everything around her, Nadine remembered that Berry had been slaughtered in the same road accident as her father (but in different cars). Berry could never die again, for she was already one of the ghosts. So, Nadine sighed with relief. The police suspected sabotage on one of the cars, but nothing was ever proved.

Nadine ambled into the house to see how the roast was getting on in the oven. With her bird’s appetite, there’d be plenty left over as tomorrow’s cold meat for Death Day.

(published 'Nutshell' 1989)