Beyond Belief

I imagined the ghost. This was because I knew such phenomena did not really exist - so what else could it be but a flip of my own mind, or a flick of the light on its last legs ahead of darkness, or a flap of a weathered window-shutter, or the flop of a dropped dressing-gown, a fleck of reflection, a flippety-gibbet that deserved less credence than a dream?

But, then, when my colleagues at work started small-talking about the ghost in my house, without me having breathed a word to them about it - in fact becoming a topic of conversation taken more for granted than that of the weather - I began to have my doubts. Not that doubt is tantamount to belief. But doubt is the next worst thing, surely.

So, I began to doubt the ghost, rather than imagine it was a freak of my mind. Its existence wavered upon the edge of tangibility, true. But it was still something I locked away in the depths of silent sleep, come the fullness of night. My dreams were full of routine matters, such as the ledger at work and colleagues who spoke as if they knew me - and a boss who did. Call him God, if you like.

Then I gradually grew aware of matters that most human beings never encounter. One was indeed the ghost. A real one, this time. No doubt about that. I had died in my sleep, you see. It was only natural. I could not claw my way out, past the dragging fingers of jealous colleagues. But a wisp of me managed it. A mere wisp. Call it the ghost, as I say. The nearest you will come to believing. The nearest to proving the old Cartesian maxim: "I doubt, therefore I am." Or was it a flip of someone else's mind, or simply an unpredictable fluke of the weather?

(Published 'Wearwolf' 1994)

It Must Have Been Toddington

The sky hung in warm wet blankets. Tim Overdale wiped threads at sweat from his hair-line, as he turned off the car's engine. He had gratuitously steered into a lay-by off the A426, not to get his bearings so much but to assure himself that the air pressure had not dropped - he had an obsession with the tyres: a deep dread of blow-out or unexpected seepage of their firmness.

Tim turned over the cassette and pushed it back into the slot on the dashboard. He began to listen as the static hiss became music, a Stabat Mater by a composer he had forgotten. Fumbling for the case, he forced himself to read his own untidy handwriting., finding that it was by Dvorak.

"Four-Jack," he whispered to himself.

Time enough to test the wheels later; he was early for his appointment anyway.

He grabbed hold of the Guardian purchased earlier in a motorway service station. Watford Gap, he seemed to remember: or had it been Toddington? Probably neither.

There was some news in the paper that the American president made all his decisions in the light (or rather, thought Tim, the dark) of Astrology. Something. to do with the alignment of planets determining whether he should venture out of the White House or not. Wonder what the man on the other side of the world thought of that, having summit meetings dependent on the cusp of Uranus!

Bored, Tim let his eyes wander: he looked out of the car window at a blurred factory chimney reaching. up into the sticky grey of the sky. Smoke started to belch from it, as if it knew it was being watched...

A sharp tap on the rear window made Tim jump - he swivelled around in his seat to see a woman staring in at him. She was smiling at him, but there was more than a hint of sadness in her eyes. He got out.

"Yes? Can I help you?"

She was in her mid to late twenties, dressed in a uniform of white blouse and navy-blue pleated shirt that came to just below the knees. Her hair was windswept, or perhaps just untidy, in view of the lack of' wind, thought Tim.

A flicker of recognition lit a dim memory in his mind - only to be snuffed out as she replied.

"I wanted to tell you that one of' your tyres is flat." Her voice was husky, as if she was suffering from a sore throat, or perhaps from trying to reach him over the loud music. She pointed to the rear nearside wheel.

Tim cursed. His immediate thought was to the spare in the boot, would that be flat too? He had not checked it for at least two days. "Thank you..."

He did not question the arrival of the woman, next to the middle of nowhere as they were. The only sign of life nearby was the factory beyond the roadside field that was speckled unnaturally bright. yellow in the gloom.

"You have a spare, don't you?"

"Yes, I think so... Don't let me keep you, I can manage. Thanks again, I might have done some damage If I'd driven off with that thing...." He pointed to the ugly rupture, the flesh of the tread splayed out on each side of the hub. Cringing, he knelt to examine the damage, inserting his finger into the various holes. This was no ordinary puncture - the whole thing had been flayed.

"Nasty business." The voice was above him.

Tim looked up. She was a peculiarly attractive woman; the outline of her bra showed vaguely through the sheeny blouse in the steel light. Her face was round, a bit puddingy perhaps, but the well-defined curves of' the lips and the spearmint eyes...

Tim wondered why he was studying her to such a degree. He had more than enough trouble on his hands now to be spending time sizing up a potential pick-up. Years ago, he was always on the look-out for female hitch-hikers. But now, what with aids... He was older too, more mature, less over-sexed, less eager. Still, his hands flexed involuntarily.

"You sure I can't help?" The words seemed to breathe into his ear.

"No - no, thanks all the same. It's a simple matter these days. Jacks are much easier to handle..."

Hearing the faint strains of music still coming from inside the car, he stood up to go and switch it off.

"I'll do it." As if reading his mind, she opened the driver's door and disengaged the cassette.

It was strange how quiet it was out here. The sky had even started to brighten up, the drizzle relenting just before he had climbed out of the car. The heat was still oppressive, damping down any sound, including the footsteps as they negotiated around each other. She was, he thought, trying to get in the way.

"You know we were meant to meet here today."

Squatting by the blow-out, Tim stared up at her, at a loss for words. What could you say to a statement like that. So he ignored it.

He went to find the jack in the boot.

The afternoon was far brighter, for the sun had burnt off the morning mists. Tim's white car was still in the lay-by. The yellow field, despite the sunshine, was no brighter, it seemed, than it had been in the morning. The colour was true. You no longer needed to study the sky to see the factory chimney - it was just plain there and not worth the notice. The odd cars that pounded along the road were merely reminders of other human beings.

Tim had the driver's seat leaning right back. A gluey heat seeped down his face, so that he could hardly see through the sticky eyelids or breathe out of the bubbling nostrils. A twitching lizard's tail peeped from between his lips.

Music played. He had not put it on, he was sure, for he did not like jazz: a husky, bluesy voice, a mix of Elkie Brooks, Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin. He could not easily decipher the words, for his ears were fast waxing up with yellowing brain...

His lower parts stank: he could not smell them, of course.

Tim suddenly realised something he had known all along - he had seen that woman before today: she had once been a hitch-hiker, unlucky enough to get the younger Tim Overdale as a lift.

The car slowly sank to its chassis.

Yes, it must have been Toddington...

***
Published 'Flickers 'n Frames' 1990

Jack The Cutter

As Therm thumbed his way towards the meanderable lanes of deepest Surrey, he maintained a picture in his mind's iritic eye of his old stamping-ground: the lamentable one-way gutters and blind alleys around St. Paul's Cathedral. He knew a dosser had to do what a dosser had to do - and that was probably die as soon as possible, both to rid himself of the world and vice versa. But death was never the easiest way out.

Of course, he could've used the services of another dosser called Jack who wielded knives in the dark like shooting stars just for the hell of it - but Therm decided he could think of better deaths than at the business end of one of those. Furthermore, he rather resented popping his cork beside some damnable City Bank. He wanted to taste sweet countryside, not only upon the pan-handle of his tongue but also with the very ends of his teeth. Only the twittering birds would suffice, he deemed, to attend his swansong, those in the beck-dripping woods further south. Not that he thought with such poetical turns of phrase and there was some doubt whether his mind generated such ill-cut gems of English prose, in any event, since he felt a larger than life force acting upon his mind - one that not only controlled his destiny like a Christian god so out of control it had forgotten about the free will of its flock, but one that also loved and hated him, in equal measures, more than any god of any religion ever could.

The lorry driver chuckled. She glanced at the hitch-hiker who was a mass of melted mutter in the passenger seat. She had never given lifts to thumbers like Therm before, so she couldn't comprehend why this old toothy toper of a tramp had managed to halt a reluctant juggernaut on the hard shoulder and wheedle his way into the cab for a lift to Ruffet Wood (where its route didn't lie, anyway). So, all she could do was chuckle: humour being the only cure for life's absurdity that humankind could ever find. The tall lights gradually faded from the sides of the road, whilst she steered between them, Therm thought, as if she were on a fairground ride. Gradually, humps of indistinct trees blackened the night around - leaving only hazy fleets of stars in the narrow inky channel above.

"Where do you want putting off, exactly?"

Therm thought her voice to be saying something quite different, since he replied: "Yes, I love you, too". And the lorry plummetted headlong into a massive tree which seemed to be planted smack in the middle of the carriageway, causing the trailer to jack-knife violently - rattling the bodies inside the cab, floppy dice in the game of Fate - and then tinning them like pig spam within a blood sump. Evidently, the Christian god hated one of them more than he loved the other. And there was very little poetry in that, other than the fact that the two iron-clad corpses of Therm and the lorry driver were discovered hand in hand by the cutting crew.

In a fleeting after-life, Therm was a woman, one without his teeth. The end of the world came suddenly, as the sun fell from the sky (faster than gravity could dictate) becoming smaller all the time, crunching towns in the near distance as it finally came to rest.

Once an undead always an undead - and Therm quickly regained his body's pigsweat. The most disturbing part was an after-life where he was female. The teeth didn't matter so much. He clutched at himself below the bedcovers in a sudden irrational fear which the resumption of reality had brought with it. Somewhat relieved, but further disturbed by the fact that he had actually seemed to need such relief, he turned over on his side to find his wife staring at him, with Jack the Cutter's luminous eyes. Her two hands each had a knife that looked like an elephant tusk.

Then he glimpsed a real after-life one which would eventually become his wife's. A Christian heaven was meant to be a home from home, wasn't it? How many times did they want telling? Her son had spilled all the cornflakes over the formica table. *And* her husband had done his favourite trick of making only one cup of tea - for himself.

"I didn't think you were getting up yet," he claimed.

"You could've brought one up, then," Therm replied in the shrill voice of his wife.

"Good job I didn't, as you're already up."

There was no winning of arguments with a pig, especially a man's man such as Therm's husband who had become a fire-officer by means of countless acts of bravery. Therm shrugged and turned her attention back to her son the piglet whose rummaging in his satchel finally gave birth to yesterday's sandwiches which he said he couldn't eat because they had too much blood inside. She was halfway through spreading a thin plasma extract on a new set, as if she were priming the surface for another generous smoothed-out dollop of fresh blood, in turn reminding her of the skidmarks on the underpants with which she was presented every other day by husband and son alike. She could not help thinking she was mad - because a mind in after-life automatically imported its own disbelief.

The house was dead quiet. Therm's husband and son had both gone. There was staccato twiddling with the wireless. Housewives' Choice was announced this week by one of her particular favourite disc-jockeys. What was his name? She couldn't get the station. The dial she twirled fine-tuned nothing but high-pitched whistles or a voice that called itself Jack. She wound herself up into a frenzy. Tying a scarf around her head in that pixied way most women did in the fifties and sixties, Therm released the heavy overcoat from the broom cupboard and bustled with it into the street. The sky was pink like the underbelly of a pig, with an aureole of teats around a faint white splodge where the moon had once been.

Organic spaceships. Unidentified Fixed Objects in the sky, sprinkler systems for a world about to catch fire. The words buzzed in Therm's head as if her bee brain had broken loose. She was Queen for a day. Nobody else about. She wandered the empty streets, weaving between the ill-parked cars, feeling herself undeserving of the senile dementia to which she had been abandoned by the head-lease dreamer. She was the tenant in a fleshy bivouac which could be sub-let no further down the scale of reality. She almost wished her two menfolk could return. At least, they presented some form of sanity, even if in the shape of teeth-tusks. The pink in the sky turned slowly black...

Therm woke from every conceivable after-life, including the one where he actually had a wife with his own name. Dressed in a cardboard suit, he levered himself over beneath the cold dark dripping arches. In the near distance sat the hunched silhouette of St Paul's Cathedral. He was alone in the whole world, neither demented nor sane. That was the worst thing of all. He tried to get back to sleep and retrieve some of the feminine wherewithal that he seemed to have in the after-life. There had been a Charles Lamb story about how civilisation invented roast pork. Such stories were almost sufficient to warm the cockles of his heart, like memories of his sandwich-making mother. He once loved the cold waking he had of it. The songs on the wireless still buzzing in his head. Would sleep never return? Could flesh be made palatable by freezing? Existence was like being encased in sheet iron which moved with the body, unfelt for most of the time. He poisefd his two protruding teeth upon the engorged arteries in his wrist. The yellow street-light flickered out, making it easier to sleep - and to welcome the cutting crew that rescued the undead from life itself.

Blacked up ready for the night, the Devil sat in his dressing-room, staring mindlessly into the mirror. His pointed face was ringed with flickering coloured light bulbs, so he could not fail to fathom his own eyes. They were staring so hard it seemed as if he were playing a make-or-break game with himself: the last to blink would explode.

Then, he plumbed such a long way, he saw a thought, an idea, a concept, a caprice, one which he did *not* want to see. Deep deep down in the dungeons of his soul where the funnel of his sight ended - deeper indeed than Hell itself - was a doubt. And never had the Devil doubted before. This doubt gnawed at his vitals and tempted him to believe that he was not the Devil at all, but a dosser called Therm: nothing but a wine-bibbing tosspot who spoke to himself in nonsensical rhyming couplets, to blot out the nagging loneliness in his heart....

There came a sharp rapping at the door: "Five minutes!" The voice was deep but heavenly sweet.

The Devil fled back up towards his sight, tussling through the blubbery membranes and red threadworms which surrounded the eyeballs. He would soon be on - if "on" is a word sufficiently weighty to convey the performance he was about to undergo, with no rehearsal, no other actors, no props, no stage to speak of, no audience....

Therm woke briefly from an undead's unnatural sleep. He sat up straight in the darkness, startling the other cardboard-suited dossers who had been lightly dozing nearby under the midnight moon. But now the moon was nothing more than an artist's careless smudge. This was because, upon the blackdrop of the sky, a circle of flashing fairy lights slowly revolved as they grew bigger or came closer.

"Blimey, they're piggin' spaceships!" muttered Therm who proceeded to squeeze his eyes shut tight like a child making pretend he was sleeping. Perhaps dreaming of tin-openers again. Or an after-life in Hell.

There was a raucous orchestra tuning up in the pit. Tap-dancing with cloven hooves was a deafening act to under-perform. So, he tip-clodded in, flowing mane coiffured by Hell's finest stylists, skewed antler-horn painted out against the scenery, forked tongue being tasted by its own guardian teeth. His mascara eyes were blinded by the searing twirling spotlights from above the seats in the gods. His innards felt like lolloping eels still alive, but he jabbed away desultorily with his furry hind-limbs. As the spots faded, he spied a spare pair of sparkles in the audience - like eyes on spikes. And Therm the vampire, thankfully, was consumed by a sleep like delicious death - too numb even to feel Jack the Cutter's preparing hands ... except from inside such hands like fingers in gloves.


Published 'Stygian Articles' 1996

The Philosophy of Love
Published 'Momentum' 1990    

‘One’s life is in itself a form of apprenticeship’, said the sailor to the girl, as the tardy afternoon began to slip on its eveningdress.

 

He was on leave from his ship: the Captain’s favourite, for his more than just a spark of intelligence compared to the rest of the crew. He had often been invited to the Officers’ table, to spin a yarn or two, to plait a tale, to hold forth on all matters philosophical, spiritual and mundane.

 

The port which the ship was visiting on this occasion was an occidental one, well beyond its beaten track seeking new customers. The arrayed cranes, lifting from the docksides, were huge stick insects, totems to some higher industry quite beyond the compre­hension even of one sailor with the uncommon nous.

 

His bearing-place was tucked away cosily within the gleaming gulf of the Home Territories, easier than the ship’s customers could even imagine; so it was unsurprising that the recipients of the ocean spice trails here in the waters of Upper Europe and the providers of such from the Home Territories could never meet cultures eye to eye.

 

Our sailor had discovered the girl lolling against a large bollard, mooning the time away till she could ply her trade more properly, she said, in the darker hours. He was immediately attracted to the uncanny planes of her face, compared to his own high cheekbones and sunken narrow eyes: her eyes were wide and innocent-seeming, he thought, also reading the lines of her features as he would a mandala or natal chart at home. In short, she was to him, a dreamboat

 

‘Wha’ d’ya saaay?’

 

Her voice too, was deep for one so fair, with a lilt and dialect fit for a fairy-tale princess. He found it difficult to follow her drift, because of the unusualness of the speech rhythms; but he took it with a pinch of salt, got the bit between his teeth and carried on without bothering to backtrack, confident that her all-encompassing mental nets would be able to trawl any­thing with which he could sow her feminine tides.

 

‘And being an apprenticeship, one shoud learn everything one can before embarking on the voyage beyond death.’

 

‘Aaay?’

 

Our sailor winced. This was the first time he had come across one who answered so readily. It was almost off-putting to talk along the knife-edge of such a sensitive audience. Her responses were so very much to the point ...

 

But then he continued: ‘By logic, there can only be one religious faith, that which represents the belief in the positive aspect of death. A faith without this as its paramount tenet would not be worth the parchment it s written on. Accept that as an incontravertible premiss, and all religions become one in such a faith. God is that faith. Faith is that God. God is not an entity with omnipowers, not an anthropomorphic puppet master ...’

 

‘Gor blimey mate, ‘as yer ‘ed swallowed yer tung?’

 

By now the sun had risen elsewhere in the world, probably in the Home Territories he surmised; the mist was gathering apace linking sea and land with trans­lucent mountains of dream, the coloured decklights of our sailor’s ship still seen bobbing spasmodically in the uncertain tide. A chill clung to his bones.

 

He deci’ed it was now high time to offer some spice as a reward for her kind attention. After all, it was in the nature of his race to chat up the local population in new client lands. The spice would no doubt hotten her bland stews ...

 

He passed her a free sample packet, with a smile. ‘I hope this complimentary gift supplements thy already warm heart ...’

 

‘Ey up guv, I don’ wan’ any of yer bleedin’ smack. It’s comin’ out our ears ‘ere, any rate. I only per­form for hard loot…’

  

She hesitated, then snatched the packet and darted off into the dirty underclothes of the night.

 

 

As our sailor rowed himself back to the ship, the gentle rippling of the oily sea as music to his ears, he determined to retain at least some of the wisdom he’d heard in the Upper European land for the benefit of the Officers’ table. The natives’ arcane rituals of gift-taking were a sight for sore slits.

 

Fanblade Six

A fable that has disappeared when it’s its time to be read and be absorbed and tested for truth or for life’s applicability is a fanblade fable. Yet when one can hear it sighing flickeringly in the background like Debussy injected straight into the vein, it becomes soon enough une jalousie sur le vent de la mer..

< Anything in French is a fable without even reading it! > thought Hiver Jawn, if he became a grown-up thinking back to when he was a child, and the sea was his real mother and his bedroom’s venetian blind a rattling that he never heard because it was always a rattling.

 

Ursula Urquhart
URSULA URQUHART

First published 'Inkshed' 1989



Mrs Urquhart was a woman who thought she knew everything about everything. But she knew nothing about imagination. Either things were or things weren’t.

But, eventually, she was to discover that between either “either” and the “or” was a space large enough to hold a whole ocean of things that neither were nor weren’t.

Mrs Urquhart, let’s he honest, was not a strikingly pretty woman, though it is not too far beyond the bounds of belief that she was once passably attractive when she finally left the school that had been the whole of her life up to the age of 14. Her headmaster - and only the memories of some of those ex-pupils who attended that school (none of whom I have been able to track down) would he able to remember his name - patted her on the head and said: “Ursula, one day. I have no doubt...” (but he did have some doubt, as all have who say “no doubt”) “…you will get married and have a clutch of bonny babes...” (his turn of phrase had much to be desired. for a headmaster) “…but always remember your old headmaster’s advice, beware of easy virtue, there is many an evil man who would do anything to catch a sight of your unclothed bosom - spurn them, I say, give them no truck. And, if they only want to feel them through your clothes, I have no doubt that you will give them the edge of your tongue and the look of your old-fashioned eves...” (and at this point, the headmaster would always stare up at the ceiling) “…and may Our Saviour Lord Who looks ever upon His flock and about Whom We have spent all our time here teaching you - may He cast plagues upon those who accost you in such an unseemly manner...”

Ursula Maybury (as she was then known) did not reply. But as she ironed her aprons. come her fifty-first year, she unaccountably recalled that interview, so strange in retrospect. She also recalled many other things that queued up for recalling…

Her craft of life had often hit reefs since leaving school and had been sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where other half-putrid fish-heads such as she was fast becoming would drift and dangle where the tides took them in and out of the darkest sea-caves of’ desolation and dissolution.

She rubbed hard with the edge of the iron to remove a particularly stubborn crease, but her mind was elsewhere. If she actually thought about what she was doing, she would no doubt not do it at all: probably true of all women who end up ironing aprons only so that they can wear them.

The men in her life had been many and various. One had led her into parts of the city she previously didn’t know existed, where fire escapes were bent and twisted into painful sculptures around living ghosts of those that once had failed to climb down them in time. Another took her from those parts to a town by the sea - and on the pier she played bingo and, come winter, when it was all boarded up. she took herself along the prom, seeking out those men of whom her headmaster had once warned her.

Each lover (if that word is not too kind to describe those to whom I refer) had a way about him that distinguished him from the others. One with eyes like dark pools caught heron his hook, line and sinker and showed her what else lurked along the sea-bed of his soul. The next had no soul at all, but what he had instead was nothing of which Our Saviour Lord could have knowledge, she thought, for it had sucking sides and utter emptiness...

And many others, each different from the next, but each with the similarity of hating her as much as they loved her.

Then. one day (exactly when I’m not certain), there came Urquhart. whose soul was even emptier than the one with sucking sides.

But, first, let me put us in the picture: she left the seaside town because she could no longer stand the stench of the fish. She bid farewell to the men she’d known, one by one, and it goes without saying there were a few words of recrimination and a thousand if onlys...

She played her last game of bingo, which turned out to be her first win: a cuddly teddy hear - which she immediately named aftter her late headmaster - was passed over to her with a few souvenir beer bottletops (that were used to cover the numbers called). Thrusting it into her bosom, she fled with ne’er a backward glance.

She tramped to the edge of town where she hitched a lift back to the city ... and he who picked her up on that fateful night was none other than Urquhart.

He was not going to the city but, to cut what is a long story short, he took her the whole way. wrote a farewell letter to whom he called his girl friend somewhere on the south coast and set up home with the future Mrs Urquhart.

But Urquhart had a secret: a secret of which even now his wife is unaware and, I suspect, he himself does not fully comprehend it. He does not exist. He never existed. And he never will. She did not guess for he acted quite normally, bringing in a goodly wage by selling policies to the dying, but filling her bed with fishy farts, teasing her up with his timely foreplay, widening out her defences (which were still spinsterish despite her many seaside lovers), entering her mouth with his searching tongue, splicing the mainbrace of her innards, dreaming of her, making her dream of him, and all manner of such devices to make her believe that he was as real as the next man.

Either she was a fool or she cared not at all whether he existed or she cared even less whether she herself existed ... or tickling her teddy bear into fits of telling laughter or seeing her headmaster in bed with her tut-tutting between her breasts or Urquhart becoming, if nothing else, a vision of Her Saviour Lord...

But more than one “or” after an “either” makes no sense at all. She was indeed a fool to believe that either things were or things weren’t. And now even she had no doubt gone, leaving nothing but an empty apron crumpled on the kitchen floor.

Madame Claudia

The first indication I had of Claudia’s arrival was the fuss and bother in the foyer. I was despatched to represent management - yet imagine my trepidation at the reputation that went before Claudia.

My speech had been instantly prepared as the fast down lift proceeded to turn my stomach over: “I welcome you, Madame Claudia, to our small but prestigious hotel wherein the mind is as important as the body. No untoward entertainments, such as the bonzo on an electric organ playing ‘A Bird In A Gilded Cage’ to a samba beat, nor the ugly belly dancer wobbling her oversized bosom to an amplified accordion accompaniment nor, even, the unmitigated tides of inconsequential musak that all other hotels allow to infiltrate their lobbies, lifts and powder rooms.”

 

I had another section of the speech to make where I would have invited her to try every bed in all our rooms to find the one, if any, that fitted her best - but I was loudly and rudely interrupted by her male companion. I was previously unaware of his existence this side of nullity, mainly because he hid among the concertina pleats of her voluminous skirt.

 

“Fetch me the manager!” he whined. “My mistress here has in fact a great interest, both spiritual and financial, in the provision of the subtle wallpaper harmonies and melodies to which I take it you have just referred so pejoratively as musak.” He paused to take on board his Claudia’s approving look, which she accomplished with an indistinguishable flick of the peacock mask that she held up before her face. “My mistress who even now stands before you as she has graced so many hotel foyers in the past is indeed the daughter of the inventor of the music sublimator device that allows the tape-loops of popular, catchy tunes (such as ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ and ‘Que Sera, Sera’) to be played without surcease directly into the consciousness without the need of passing through the ears first.”

 

He gloated, but not for long, since I replied: “My dear sir, I can only agree. I assure you that we have managed to reap the full potential of your Madame Claudia’s Father’s excellent sublimator. We have so painstakingly refined and worked it into the characteristic acoustics of the soul, that we can all now relish its pure, golden and incontrovertible silence which was no doubt the ultimate nirvana of its purpose.”

 

It was my turn to gloat. I breathed, in waiting. The lady did not remove her mask but I could tell she was surveying me with great interest. “REALLY?” Her voice was one I imagined a fat goose would have if its neck was a musical instrument and it was afraid of Christmas. She held up her hand as if to prevent me speaking again, but it was really her way of casting curses, as I was to discover soon enough, since all my orifices (alimentary, respiratory, sexual, optic and aural) clammed up with thick impenetrable hymens.

 

And, then, of course, I endured consecutively: suffocation, hunger, bladder rupture, bowel upheaval, a menses-surge into the lungs and, consequently, a little less hunger from being force-fed my own loose innards. But the real horror was the incessant minimalist singing music caused by my body’s own processes within the ears dammed-up cavities. Or was I being kept alive for something far more insidious, far more soul-wrenching than all this mere apocalypse of the flesh?

 

Yet all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The lady, if not Claudia, turned out to be the lumpy belly-dancer, with her midget accordion-accompanist, whose private performance had been specially requested by the honeymoon couple in the Royal Suite - between the pate-de-­foie-gras starter and the main course.

 

(published 'Daarke World' 1993)

Dark Films And Flapdowns

Chip had made a mental note of the car’s registration number, which was not too difficult, seeing that he possessed a photographic memory. He had seen it mow down a zebra-crossing full of schoolkids and imagined the carnage, if it had actually hit. Later, as the cinema reduced in noise, the credits of the main feature slowly scrolled. Chip was cramped behind a tall misshapen head which bobbed about to gain a clear view between further obstructions further beyond. Even the long-beamed torch that sporadically dodged its path of light towards the emptier seats at the front failed to pry into the nature of various obstructions. Chip wondered why the flapdown seats were not more tiered than they were. He returned his attention to his steady who was beginning to wipe off her lipstick. He was not self-conscious about snogging, since they had their backs to the usherette’s partition, so no patrons could complain of Chip and his steady coming together in front of the screen. People were arriving all the time, others leaving. Many had already departed amid the throes of this B film - maybe the point in the film when they had first come in. Chip failed to understand how they were able to enjoy a film back to front, as it were. He yearned for the Single Performance days of an intangible future, beyond the Sixties, when everyday colour would be more common. But why should it matter? Especially when one wasn’t here for the films in the first place. Chip felt a hand upon his knee, sending a tingle to every extremity. Puckering his lips, he took one last longing look at the black-and-white screenful of images - noticing that the patrons immediately in front were now much lower in their seats, eyes in the backs of their heads, or so he thought in a moment of misplaced paranoia. Yet he could not be sure, since the main feature film was light-faded. He vaguely remembered (as far as a photographic memory <I>can</I> remember vaguely) a poster outside - and some framed stills of dark shots. Wondering why such things were put outside (for they could only serve to deter), he shut his own eyes and waited for the hand to travel from his knee, before he gave himself over to a heavy session of petting... A sudden screech and bloodcurdling squeals sounded from outside, during the quiet romantic moments of the film with the actors half-asleep. Chip quickly untangled himself from the tentacles of snogging and dashed, via the foyer, into the street. His eyeballs were seared by the as ever unexpected daylight. This was where he remembered having come in. But now in colour - and more than real. Hit and run.

(published 'Atsatrohn' 1993)

An Infusion Of Dream

The parlour was crammed with party-frocked children, all eager to be let loose upon the games they thought in store for them. One boy (I think it must have been me) wondered if games could exist without children to play them. He imagined hide-and-seek with mere wisps of shadow darting in and out of the corners; musical chairs with a feast of empty seats; hunt the invisible thimble; sardines with only loneliness to come between; Nobody’s Knock...

Forgetting his thoughts, he surveyed the remains of food upon the excited faces, almost more to eat than they had in the first place. The dining-room had been a wondrous place that afternoon. With an early dusk outside, the candles had shone out a treat, casting golden tea-leaves of dream upon all the faces. The red jelly had wobbled deliciously. The cakes had dribbled fresh clotted cream even before they saw the tiny white teeth. Steaming samovars of infusions. Neatly manicured cucumber sandwiches. Drinks with more bubbles than liquid. The birthday cake decorated with a mysterious number none of the children could possibly count towards.

He had seen the girl for the first time around that table. Initially attracted by the pinafore frock, the face was very much second best. But the more he became accustomed to its frequently dimplish smile over the trifle, the more he fell in love with the rest of the girl he couldn’t see.

The parlour was lit by a log fire. The faces were keen to get the planning phase over and the campaign of games under way. He spotted the girl again … she was towards the back, the furthest from the fire that one could possibly be. She was no longer smiling but, even at his tender age, he knew that angels did not smile <I>all</I> of the time. There was at least one grown-up ranging about between the tangled limbs, so tall it was difficult to see the lines of the face. It was issuing instructions, however, which, for the boy’s part, were pretty pointless. He thought the best present he’d receive today was being the seeker and the pinafored girl the hider whom he’d find in some solitary part of the house. Apparently, though, he was not chosen to be seeker, despite the party being in his honour. Indeed, the sole grown-up was intent on the role of seeker.

Suddenly the children rose in uproar, the girl included, and scuttled off in all possible directions. Only the boy and the grown-up were left staring at each other across the shadows of the flames.

The deep mumbling had no meaning. But the boy understood only too well. He followed the tail-end of the children into the dark hallway outside the parlour. The landing at the top of the steep stairs looked forbidding … although, of course, he realised that nowhere was out of bounds today of all days. Even the servants’ quarters were eligible hiding-space, the occupants having been given the night off with a few halfpennies to spend at the Christmas fair. The night off? He wished he could have had the night off. He tore at his face as if trying to scrape the shadows of night from it.

The girl in the pinafore frock was disappearing up the very stairs he found so forbidding. Distantly, he followed the heels of her sandals … catching glimpses of thin calves in light seeped from some undarkened rooms elsewhere in the house.

Being polite, he knocked on the door. Even in hide-and-seek, one could not ignore the Privacy of the hidden one. She had slipped pursuit near the master bedroom, where the loft ladder had been left dangling by devil-may-care servants. She may now be adjusting the frock she wore. He’d not forgive himself if he disturbed her in such a private activity. She may be clambering into an empty tea-chest...

He’d forgotten, in his excitement, that he was not the seeker but a common hider, despite this being his birthday.

***

From within, the knock sounded as near to silence as a noise could be and still be called a noise.

“Come in,” she breathed.

Then from the communal chimney, she could still hear the gruff voice of the grown-up counting in the parlour till reaching the biggest number that existed those days. “Coming ready or not!” And the deep treads began far below in the hallway.

So, who was that already knocking at the bedroom door, she wondered? Probably nobody. Or, at least, nobody who had been born.

She slipped off the pinafore frock under the bed-covers, imagining that made her quite invisible.

 

(Published 'Trash City' 1998)

A Different Face

Drawing-paper was the best paper for the vampire’s purpose, because, if he should change his mind at the last moment, or, even, midway, concerning the matter which he was about to set out upon it, he need not then be hidebound by straight lines intended for writing. His own intention, in fact - one which still prevailed - was to make known his last will and testament but, having no legal background, he was quite non-plussed by his ignorance of the correct format. So - without recourse to his conscious mind - he started doodling nervously, only for him later to be astonished at the series of crosses he had inadvertently made in preparation for his signature ... and, with some of these crosses depicting a spindly human figure upon them, he shuddered, knowing that vampires always possessed an inherent hatred (or vice versa) for such symbols, the Christian iconography being anathema to Undead ones such as he ... especially to Undead ones approaching their own special brand of death.

And he drew his signature across the bottom of the paper. Now for someone to witness it, he thought, if it were not already too late. And he drew a different face.

(Published 'The Vampire's Crypt' 1995)