Hauled From Hell
A collaboration with Kirk S King
(published 'Masque' 1993)




"I'm afraid because I've never been afraid before."

There was not a flicker upon her staring eyes - the coolest of customers.

"What exactly do you mean?"

I pitched my reply within the range of informality.

"You have not programmed me to be in a blue funk," she told me, her means of speech coarse yet with a lilt: perfectly in tune to that of my wife's voice.

I shook my head and sighed deeply, "Oh, Catie, when I designed you I didn't want to hinder your thoughts and actions with such an expendable human emotion."

The Cyborg Automated TechIntegrated Emboloid did not respond and I wondered why she, yes, she - should miss fear if she did not have the capacity to fear. Gender, too. But how could I refer to my first operational model as an 'it'? After all, simply look at her - how could that beautiful creature be an 'it', even at the furthest stretch of lateral thinking?

Catie had been in the Chair before, travelling to places inaccessible by foot or craft and, after those successful experiments, she had returned safely: ready to compute her sights and impressions unto the disc. Why then did Catie feel perturbed by her next trip? To her, it should be merely another destination. Surely, surely, I had not graced her with the concepts of Hell.

"There are places where people can't go without the accompaniment of fear," Catie continued, picking up on her earlier First Cause fear of lacking fear.

I nodded, as if she were proving the falsity of her complaint. I held back the smile which would have made me seem smug. I had known only subconsciously before but now fully realised that Catie's emotions were upon circles of different emotions, feeding off each other. This, to my mind, proved that souls could exist without souls.

"Imogen's soul's in Heaven."

If she understood my statement, she did not say. She simply stork-legged to the Chair and sat there without any suspicion of fear. I was thankful I hadn't told her the truth of Imogen's soul.

The violet sky belched a cloud, covering the moon, greying the Institute. The lights inside the building automatically brightened, but this, I felt, paradoxically imbued my laboratory with a sense of foreboding. My powers to feel such shades of life had indeed increased once I shook off the madness instilled by Catie's circularity - and once I dealt with my own aspirations vis a vis Imogen. A wife like Imogen was beyond simple bereavement: even if it had been suicide: her body hanging by the neck.

Chaired Catie gleamed, patiently waiting, patiently calculating her inability truly to function on the same parity as her creator. But whether she was subhuman or not, I still needed to fathom how fear could become a concept of an essentially fearless Emboloid. Yet maybe the answer was so simple. Was fear a separate entity? A seed of inquietude fertilised with knowledge? Or simply the result of lacking any sense of the unknown? But my pondering such imponderables was interrupted.

"Professor Cordell!"

The video screen on my desk flickered and, a second later, Trustman's face followed his voice. The CEO's eyes glanced around the laboratory, hoping to have caught me being furtive: committing the unloggable. His nose was squat against the screen in his own laboratory and his cheeks were puffed red. He was a boar. Even if the pun was worse than I imagined, it was nowhere near as boring as Trustman himself. Although we were in the same field of investigations, we wielded a mutual understanding: we shared the same hate. We were brothers in the strongest emotion possible. Cain and Cain, without the escape valve of Abel.

"Yes?"

I spoke with trepidation, having often wondered whether an image on a screen could talk to another image on a different screen. I was adrift in ontological doubt. Yet, when I originally met Trustman in the flesh - so long ago now, it seemed more like a dream than a memory - it was he who had enlightened me regarding embolisms. In fact, the meaning of 'embolism' was diverse, as any dictionary-freak would attest: in fact, so bizarrely wide-ranging, could the word exist at all in a sane universe?

1. Extra day or days prodded into a calendar system to correct a

previous error.

2. A prayer for delieverance from evil often recited after the Lord's

Prayer - as belt-and-braces.

3. An obstructing clot in the blood vessels.

4. ...

Reciting the various definitions was almost a prayer in itself. I switched on the screen's override before Trustman could reactivate the automatic surveillance system. There was no time for the likes of him, since Catie was gurgling louder than being Chairbound justified. Her eyes redder, too - bulging on the brink of blow-out. She had guessed, I guessed, that my Heaven was her Hell, or vice versa: it didn't matter which. She was now engorged not with simply a single fear but with a ricochet of several trip-switch terrors. I guessed, too, that Catie sensed the return of Imogen to the body-hanger, with little to be done to prevent it. As if a coat was returning to its hanger with a relentless ghost inside.

My own sense of the matter was that there might be a surplus of Imogen to fit, since she had predictably saddled someone else's soul to her own, rescued it, as it were, from Hell. Or something else's. Or a soul so foreign, even 'something' meant nothing.

"Professor Cordell!"

Trustman had left his screen for the first time in forty odd years and was banging on my laboratory door! What he had to say, therefore, was more important that I had assumed.

Abruptly, Catie became as limp as her body would allow and her face a frozen mask of contortion that would need neo-plastic surgery. Shadows sweated from her artificial pores and pooled at her feet.

"Cordell!" All formalities vanished as urgency prevailed. "You can't go there! You can't go to a place that doesn't exist!"

The CEO's screams finally opened the electronic door where his fists had merely created self-inflicted pain. He darted into the laboratory and came towards me. Came at me, rather, since where I moved he also followed. Like a shadow that could know no pooling. Grabbing me by my arms, he screeched in my face: "I told you not to do it. You're killing her, Cordell. Can't you see that?"

I glanced at Catie and knew that Trustman was wrong. I was not killing her; I was giving her life. I was giving her the fear that she was so frightened not to experience. In essence, I was giving her Imogen, together with the sublimest fear of all: Imogen's. It all began to make sense. The ensaddled soul would be consigned to the body-hanger in the Institute's cellar. Imogen's soul to Catie. Even mistakes had a purpose.

I grabbed Trustman, our arms and fingers locked like a giant jigsaw and I bellowed in his podgy face, "She is alive!"

Whether, at that precise moment, I meant the embolisms floating in Catie's body or Imogen's soul being hosted by her own body in the cellar, I was never certain. Surely both Trustman and myself were on the verge of a discovery, one that could possibly drive us insane. Or insanely drive us to oblivion.

We continued to struggle until derailed by a shriek from the Chair: a squawking wail that betokened the switch of souls.

Yet, for fear of madness, I relegated the unrefined fear to a different fear. It was a past fear, one I'd already half-noticed. I had coped by channelling it to areas of my mind that knew how to process fears for transmission in easy stages to the brain. The fear in question was twofold. One - CEO Trustman did not quite look like the man I'd seen on the screen for forty odd years. Two - the soul Imogen had saddled to her own soul in Hell had returned to Catie in preference to the rat-eaten body-hanger in the cellar. (Rats could climb literally anywhere - or even fly?) Indeed, the body-hanger had not stayed neat and long in its hamstrung state, in once studious preparation for becoming a restful berth for a soul after its heavy haul from Hell. All to the good, I'd thought. A tidy vessel would not have been fitting for the shrieking soul that had now accidentally found its way into Catie. I sobbed - as it suddenly dawned on me that Imogen was now back in the cellar eating the rat stew of her own erstwhile body. I sobbed again - for Catie.

But such thoughts had yet to become thoughts. Meanwhile, the fact that Catie had spurned one emotion (fear) for another (hatred) was neither here nor there. The searing squawk that would have startled even a plastic monster in a Ghost Train ride at an old-fashioned fair was as nothing to me. But Trustman's face was a mask of the most abject horror - making me feel at least half of it myself. Either this was a bogus CEO in the flesh or his previous screen image was the bogus one. Both could not be real. Both could not be bogus. Each assumption excluded the other, as each fear, upon being sensed, excluded all other fears. As if emotions had to queue up for the mind's attention, with no possibility of overlap - thankfully.

Suddenly, before I could stop him, Trustman had approached Catie's writhing shape and started fondling the breasts I'd built. These swollen glands had been formulated with meticulous care from the most life-like substance, skinned with a satiny finish. Thus, I empathised with the attraction Trustman must have for them. Surely, this was the bogus CEO. CEOs should not make a habit of being both real and sex mad. I clumped him on the head, with the sure conviction that I was justified in so doing. The real CEO would certainly thank me.

Eventually, the Emboloid's screeching and wailing had faded to the back of its throat. Not Catie's voice. Nor Imogen's. But one belonging to the thing I could not even call 'thing'.

Slowly, methodically, it chanted the Lord's Prayer, or, on second thoughts, a bastardised version. The pronoun 'it' didn't fit. But, no matter, I had so many thoughts and emotions in patient line, the wrestling with words was, at the most, insignificant: as were the twin balloons of blood into which Trustman's hands had already pummelled Catie's dead mammaries. Whilst down in the cellar, the body-hanger, I guessed, spun on its suicide cord, throwing off gobbets of centrifugal splatter.

But here I am: Trustman at my feet. Here not there. In the laboratory. Crawling from Catie's erstwhile mouth, squeezing, grinning, jawing, is the thing that looks like me, the me that looks like thing, grinning, jabbering, lisping with no 'S' to lisp, whispering in shrieks, stuttering without faltering: "I'm home, Cordell. Have no fear. I'm home."

And, indeed, home I am: Cordell at my feet.

Hide and Sleek

http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/5478.html?1327392256

Column of Bertin

 

(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.

Dreams of a Dreamer
The dreams promised me that they would go alphabetical by Christmas.

Each time I had them, they were in random order. No rhyme nor reason to them. Even the subject matters didn't follow on, but became the ultimate non-sequiturs to each other, going in all directions through various tangents, repetitions and, at best, deja-vu's. I lost patience with them and threatened not to go to sleep. They, in turn, threatened to introduce me to a monster far more fearful than I could possibly imagine when I eventually did go to sleep, as I must.

As indeed I must have done.

Still, they had promised to go alphabetical by Christmas, which would at least give me some handle on the recurring dreams that constitute a lifetime.

But what letter of the alphabet does a dreamer (somebody sufficiently monstrous to be utterly unrecognisable and indescribable and unmentionable and, even, undreamable) begin with?


(published 'Psychopoetica' 1993)

Rich Seam
He cleared his throat and began watching my reaction to his poem. The fact that I was there at all was unpoetic, making everything turn prosaic. His original intention was for nothing but condensed symbol, studied elision and semantic exegesis. Indeed, his well-meaning meaninglessless of hemming a vocal disenchantment (a disenchantment with my presence?s potentiality for small-talk dialogue which close-knitted verse usually eschewed) caused me to poke my finger down my gullet in an attempt to reach beyond the seventh type of ambiguity, indeed towards another sense that even the sixth failed to reach: the most unwieldy elision of all: death.

(published 'Night Songs' 1997)

Neighbours

 

 (Published 'Eleventh Issue' 1991)

‘The house next, door is partially occupied.'

I looked quizzically at the friend whom I was visiting for the first time since the war.

‘Yea, the old woman ... you remember her, Mrs Charles ... well, she died Just before Christmas.'

I nearly said that was better than dying on Christmas Day itself when I realised I would be playing into his conversational hands as It were.

He had always been a little bit of a joker and I could see nothing had changed.

‘It’s a good job she’s there...’

‘Why?’ I bit my tongue. I had fallen into his trap.

‘Because my water pipes come via her property and they’d freeze up If her heating wasn’t kept going.’

I looked through the window at the cascading snow. The lane had been like an Ice rink and it was lucky I’d arrived at all, let alone in one piece. He had lived here man and boy, a terrace of two-up-two-downs, miles from anywhere ... well, from anywhere except Tipoak.

For several years, most of our contact had been by means of the written word, so it was with some consternation that I noticed those same years had not been as kind to him as to me. In fact, if it wasn’t, for the hearty handshake and the ready twinkle in his one eye, I could have easily imagine-i it was not him at all. We might be both growing senile, but I, at least, was insufficiently senile to believe that.

Well, after a period of friendly small talk, whilst thick bacon rashers sizzled oveU the open fire, we trawled and dredged memories for what they were now worth. We ended up discussing his neighbours again and it turned out that the following prevailed:-

‘What happened to Miss Welch?’

“She left to go up north.’

‘I always thought you had a fancy for her. I was surprised you never finally tied the knot.’

‘We did really, but it all came undone with loose frayed ends. You know what it’s like.’

Only too well, I thought, remembering his lame sister.

‘Is anyone moving in next door?’

‘I don’t think so. Tipoak’s a little bit too far away for comfort these days.’

He rubbed his back.

Then, out of character, he abruptly lifted himself from the easy chair and knocked vigorously on one of the connecting walls. I couldn’t quite recall which side was which, as I had lost my bearings soon after stepping indoors. In any event, the result was surprising: a double knock reply.

‘It’s Ok. She’s still there... You know, I’m thinking as well as being plumbed in like we are, we could knock that wall down - seems a shame, otherwise - I’ll be too old enjoy it. The only reason she’s hanging about down here, really...’

He was interrupted by a telling rattle in the pipes as someone somewhere drew off a kettle-full of water, no doubt for a warming cuppa.



After a tasty breakfast, I decided to be on my way. Trains weren’t so regular through Tipoak these days.

My old friend was not too upset my sudden departure. I tried to memorlse his face, as I shook hands with him. Despite the changes the years had brought, it was still, on the whole, as kind as ever.

Mr and Mrs Urquart’s curtains were drawn I noticed as I passed on the way to the station. I hoped there hadn’t been a death in the family.

Tight Corners

 

 (Published 'Purple Patch' 1990)

The streets were so narrow, the tall arched windows of the buildings stared greyly eyeball to eyeball, as if confident that taxes would ever be on doors rather on them.

"Oi!" said one greasy individual, "time was when you had to pay the government for every chimney you had on your roof."

"Oi! Oi! That's because people were religious in those days and didn't want God to get a cough as a passive smoker."

An oaken door creaked on rusty hinges, yawned wide to feel the spray of drizzle upon its vertical tongue.

"Oi! Don't give me that, doorways haven't any tongues," said a shoe which happened to be passing, fastened to someone or other's foot.

The smell of an evening meal wafted out into the narrow street, making the drains water.

And passers-by galore turned up their noses (and some their toes). One particular portly party got his belly stuck between the sides of a servant's entrance, so narrow the owners didn't have to pay so much tax on it.

There were grunts of people arguing around the next blind corner.

Oi! Oi!

TORCH MUSIC
A collaboration with M.F. Korn

George Llewellyn III was not exactly the typical suburban American. The generality of his neighbours, you see, had taken the trouble to clear their yards of endemic crabgrass. Not George, though. He was a bit anarchic on the quiet.

It was not as if his own parents were anarchic. They had got together in quite a planned sexual foray sort of way - a significant gestation period before the Millennium - and forged the makings of George. Nothing anarchic about that, I suggest. George's own children - mishaps, even miscegenations - were not, in any shape or form, anarchic personalities, despite their anarchic origins. They simply nagged poor old George into an early stiff gravity. Then went their own ways towards the stars.

So, George, left alone, still slightly anarchic, grizzled by once desirable grooves, enjoyed wading through the unkempt wastes of his yard - sometimes accompanied by one of his drinking cronies (usually ponderous Hoss), sometimes not - wondering if the skyline was really the sucking pit it was made out to be by the new Religiosos of 21st century downtown Towbar.

Then, he stumbled, upon a monolith. A monument of metal that had not been there the night before.

"My toe!" he cussed.

"Your what?" queried Hoss, spitting a quid of tooth-loose tobacco from his mouth.

"Shut your wipehole, Hoss! Can't you see this wadn't here before, now? Mother of Christ at Halftime, what is it?"

"You'd better watchit son! What the hell is it?"

Hoss swallowed a cuspidor's worth of brown fluid bacco juice backwash as his jaundiced boggle eyes popped out of his bulbous lard head.

The smooth, textural finish of the thing was immaculate and otherworldly. In the way that no 30 year machinist at the Exxon plant could have cut to specs if it were pure blue-twisted steel. Gunmetal but dark aquamarine, no, perhaps when they looked into it, they saw the black spectral absence of light - a proportionate object amidst these rings of smelly toadstools in George's yard, yes, of perfect dimension but a dimension of some other dimension, maybe not of this Earth. It stood magnificently, rising from the thatched rises of weeds and dandelions all ripe, like a futuristic Stonehenge triptych shooting to the celestial heavens from this rise of wild weeds.

"Don't touch it, Hoss!"

"I wadn't gonna touch it, now. Don't know what kinda metal that is? Do you?"

"I don't know. It ain't nothing like I ever saw before."

"It is kinda pretty, though."

A boy, evidently one of George's half-breed issue who hadn't yet left for the stars, yelled at him through a tattered screen door on the back porch.

"Daddy! Mamma said come inside and eat!"

"Go on and play Nintendo, boy! I'm busy!"

The boy cussed him behind his back, out of earshot and the door slammed on itself, the screen swinging in the wind at the concussion.

"Daddy, Mamma said come inside and eat!" whined George in mock of the voice now gone - an ancient habit whence he couldn't help himself. Yet, he'd been damn sure all his children left home yonks ago upon some godforsaken hunt for a better future - and his wife'd been dead for at least a tandem of eternities, or so it felt. A bit of a ghost, no doubt. He shrugged and spoke the! same words in sepulchral hushed tones as if to seek pardon for the earlier mockery: "Daddy, Mamma said come inside and eat."

Hoss ritually repeated the refrain, if a little off trail: "Daddy, Mamma said come inside to come inside her." He chortled as he spouted residues of plug juice every whichway of the wind.

The darkness was now taking store for the night - hugging the warm breaths of the stars to its bosom with fewer and fewer winks towards an approaching death ... hopefully a painful death of one of George's smart-arsed neighbours.

"Go get a torch!" snapped George. It being his yard, it was his right to make decisions.

Hoss scuttled off and the further Hoss scuttled off , the more George thought of a creature on all fours.

There was still sufficient seeping glow, by some trick of dusk, which allowed George to continue his examination of the metal monument. The rise of weeds honoured it with out-stretched leafy prayers. George knelt, too, as the wind again slammed the door.

It wasn't kneeling as in a genuflection, more that of getting a better look-see at his very own monolith. He daren't touch it, he thought; but why shouldn't it have been perfectly fine to touch it? - the contour, the smoothness, its capability as if it were charged with otherworldly kinetic energy, all wound up - but he didn't anyway.

The corrugated rusty shell of a 1973 Dodge Dart lay on its gut stomach, its life's breath long ago squeezed out of it like a carcrusher. Strewn about the tall sawgrass were rusty tools, a Big Wheel missing a back wheel, a jaded easy bake-oven caked in slimy mud and birdcrap, an old Sears washing machine engine, a Sears minibike chassis, gutted like a perch.

That night, despite the dying of the dusk, something compelled George to do something marvellous. Sucking in his slack dough pot, under the infinite palette of stars swirling, George cranked his Sears riding mower and attacked his lawn. He slew the five f!oot high dandelions, and longstanding perennial weeds, which before were so secure of their safety, and now which gallantly fell under the sheath of his power mower. The riding mower itself chocked and sucked in air, inhaling clouds of ragweed, dust, soot, old charcoal briquet mist of carbon, and minefields of petrified dog dirt. And yet the Sears mower persisted with George valiantly saddled atop his steed.

The odd thing was, George, who only liked Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb and Porter Waggoner tunes, found himself whistling the opening theme to Shostakovich's Fifth symphony, and actually heard the magnificent lush orchestration in his head, noticing well the ironical touches to the music that Shostakovich hid in there. And he hadn't the faintest idea why. As he cut a swathe around the pantheonistic monolith, and mushrooms, weeds and tentacles of crabgrass which radiated from several central hubs of root like that of octopi, he stared blankly at the black strangeness of the object, now whistling the second movement of the Shostakovich.

The stars suddenly seemed to begin talking to him in celestial harmoniousness. Melodiousness, too. Steeped and dipped in secret atonalities more fitting for Schoenberg than Shostakovitch. Holst made a ceremonial clash of astrological forces...

The noise was suddenly interrupted by the ponderous tympani of Hoss's paws arriving with a torch so powerful, George mistook it for a spotlight, shafting the night sky for the Luftwaffe around the peak of St Paul's Cathedral that he had seen in picture books. Silence ensued, as the Mower cut out. The stars were dead still. The monolith glinted in the strobes of a sudden electrical fault that seemed to beset the heavy-duty torch.

"Thought I'd bring the biggest baby in the shed," wheezed Hoss.

"I've been cultivating my garden, as Voltaire once told me I should," said George. He demonstrated with his wheeling arm the bowling-green garden his yard had become, the torchlight spluttering as it crested the black dunes of its imputed greenness. The monolith glinted like a wondrous emblem of Truth Foretold. There was a music about its shape neither man would have noticed, given the brash patchwork of a Towbar dawn. No, you see, with night, embossed by mankind's golden stuttering effulgence, showing the monolith up in its best light, there was a visible music moving around it like a kaleidoscopic halo.

"Who's Volt-Air?" croaked a kettledrum toad masquerading as a plugless Hoss, or vice versa.

As in answer, the monolith lit up like a colour organ and whined with its ondes martenot of Messianic fervour.

"Gee, Hoss, this like a Second Coming. I wish my dear old wife could come back and see it all..."

The door slammed, despite the lack of wind in the now soundless electricity of the air.

Though there was no glass but instead punctured rusty screen, a beatific light penetrated through the porch, of myriad colours to reveal the image of a Byzantine stained glass portrait, piercing the moth-ridden humid air into the sky. Blazing forth like an incandescent kleig light, the image was that of George as an old man, very old, lying in a bed in a pure white room. Hoss began crawling around on all fours, grunting like a pliocene ape, his cranium becoming bracheocephalic in nature, that of a Neanderthal, pointed skull. George's half-breed son came out of the door, and it appeared that he had rearranged his Nintendo 64 Gameboy to that of cleverly bypassed and manipulated circuitry, and he was holding this entertainment apparatus, which was clearly not for entertainment anymore. For some inexplicable reason, the wire extension to the Joystick was now soldered to a perforation in his left temple, that of "jacking himself in" to the now much more sublime and complicated Nintendo apparatus.

Hoss climbed the pecan tree, scuttling up its branches in a very economical and easy manner, grunting the whole way, the lycanthropic fur patches now visible through his workshirt, which now was in tatters due to his morphism. George stared into eyes of his son, and they melded into one symbiotic blend. The monolith beamed like a popsicle of pure evangelical white light, humming unknown microbytes of mathematical symbols unknown to the race of Man. Knee music. Torch music. The song went on.

George said, "Son, did you send the signal?"

Son or Song, he wasn't sure which. But the boy, his temple bearing wiring, replied, "The signal is going to the stars."

Hoss had regressed to that of a sort of pliocene or equine ape, oblivious now to the transcendence of George.

George woke up in a white room, one hundred and ninety years old.

The monolith grew as silent as the old Dodge Dart in George's backyard.

George blinked.

When he opened his eyes, he was sucking his thumb. The blue-green globe of Earth lay beneath the placenta-sac which contained him. George was a star-foetus.

Anarchy was his watchword. Or his curse. He tried to clamber back - through the nettles and crabgrass - to some semblance of reality whence he could take an overview. Towbar township floated in some aetheric miasma of religious half-growth - cults and cuirasses covering its crystalline chest. And the monolith rose from between his loins, playing such glassy music - unheard, even in the circular arguments of a minimal millennium. It became, eventually, a choral Requiem with an infinite number of deaths at its heart. His afforested garden-centre had given birth to a stiff gravity.

"Oi! Oi! Cuckold!" shouted Hoss, as he gallopped away on heavy hooves, towards the Rose Garden. Hoss himself, after all, was no more than a centaur, one with a cockadillo coxcomb.

George tried to shave his chin, this time, with the Sears. But then his dear dear wife emerged from anarchy and made his monolith stereo.

(Only the Bartok joke from Shostakovitch's Leningrad Symphony played out towards the playful end of time, where a better future waited, if not for George certainly for those he loved.).


Previously unpublished

Ultimate Creative

EVENTUALLY TO BE PUBLISHED IN PRINT

Cold Poker

Published 'Whispers From The Dark' 1995

  

The house had grown overnight. He was sure of this if of nothing else. That must explain why his own body seemed smaller than when he fell asleep.

 

Waking up from dreams, one usually needed to spend at least a few mental somersaults to acclimatise the self to reality. However, it was not long before one accepts the dreams for what they were: simply that, dreams.

 

Today, he woke from a dream which seemed like his real life and into a real life which seemed like his dream. Disorientated, he lifted the covers to look at his naked body. But it still seemed trapped in the dream.

 

His wife had left a crumpled dent beside him. She was evidently stepping somewhere in a distant wing of the terraced house, by the sound of it.

 

He tried to recall the whereabouts of the bathroom. The noise of rain on the window reminded him that the summer had been one long drought until now. He remembered the droplets racing down the ancient panes of childhood windows. But that seemed like a memory of someone other than himself. The past is not a foreign country but an alternate world.

 

These thoughts were untypical of him. He doubted his own identity even more than his sanity... until he recognised his wife for what she really was, coming in with a raised poker filched from the companion-set in the main living-room.

 

He got up, knowing in his heart of hearts that all scullery maids like him should have been hard at work long ago ... or else earn more ugly red welts on the smart end of her body.