THE IRREDUCIBLES OF NYGREMAUNCE
published 'Black Moon' 1997
"Your dreams are disowned memories, connected only by the singular first and third persons within us all."
Rachel Mildeyes (UPON THE WORKS OF HP LOVECRAFT)
"I'll skin yer face for yer, if yer don' look out!" snarled the gringo who was laid back against the City bar.
I decided I didn't like him, mainly because he was someone so entirely different from anything I could possibly be. But, not one to be unsociable, I trumped back at him:
"Pardon me! Pardon me! Sorry I spoke!"
"Yer didn't - I did. And less of yer lip!"
His stubbled chin was a sight to behold, more desperate than I was dandy. His nose hung on like grim death above the splitting snakehide around his mouth - but, his foot surprised me more than anything when, zippier-than-light, it kicked my fishing tackle.
"Ooh!"
I'd never felt such pain, almost ecstatic, the exquisitest thing this side of godliness. It sure did make me seethe and simmer. I'd teach this bonzo a lesson he would never forget.
"Nobody messes with Padgett Weggs and lives!" I forced out between my clenched teeth.
"Oh yeh!"
Suddenly the joint was full of faces. They had previously been just bar-flies upon the wall, flocking in for the kill and eager for the shit which was about to be laid across the carpet. A split second can hold a whole range of possibilities, and I scanned the past as well as the future for a clue...
Distant indeed were the days when I lived alone with my mother. Dreaming childish fears. Dredging monsters from the sewers of the world's collective unconscious, some of which monsters actually slept with me between the sheets. Listening to other Irreducibles that came in from the roosting on our roof. Bothering not a tittle about the ablutions of my body, since my creature comforts were in the hands of Elementals which crept beneath my bed, their jaws hanging open for any ripe bits of bodily produce that I could spare. And, above all, moulding a mind-shape above our teetering house in mock of an Irreducible which my mother called God.
Even further away were the days I had yet to live, full of masquerades, mounting excitement and unwrapping myself like a parcel being passed at a children's party. Yet this future became a full-blooded demon raising its snout above the ant-heaps which our civilisation was to become.
As I feared the trip-wire of repercussions my slightest free action would now spring, I was hidebound by the spluttering fuses inside my head. There were all my old pals now gathered in the bar, faces that were little better than loud wallpaper. The juke-box broke wind. Other gossipping locals were spreadeagled across the ceiling, grinning like monkeys between the quickening fan-blades. The split second eventually elapsed, as I turned my back on the grizzled lush at the bar and created the failure of Fate just with my own bare thoughts.
The door burst asunder. What was all this - a scene from some (God)forsaken Western movie? The juke-box exploded into a thousand shards. The ceiling fan choked on its own blades. And my head felt fit to burst with the thoughts which became events sooner than blinks. There were nails torn from their beds of flesh, splinters of bone, bifurcated teeth in a wild stinging snowstorm of gnashing, all seeking out the softest pin-cushion.
Yet I leaned back against the bar, a cool customer. I turned a surly glance to the gap-toothed geezer whom Fate had seen fit to cross with my path and stroked my own by now spiky chin in deference to the next move that was as inevitable now as it ever was.
"I'll skin yer, as soon as look at yer!" I snorted.
"Dosser! Dosser!" taunted the little kids when they saw me licking my wounds in the gutter.
I looked up, a pain welling from behind my eyes, a pain that turned the street into a strew of lights. I could hear their voices, but their bodies remained a mystery.
"Please go away!" I piped.
Once upon a time, my imagination would have been able to fit out such entities as these kids with the garb of high legend and cosmic wonder, as was my youthful wont; but, now, with brain deadened by the mind that fed it and a skull quickly filling with increasingly malign tumour tissue, the world had become, to me, what it always should have been: a straight place with no strange angles and very few unexplored corners, a reality that housed only standard people, animals, concrete, sky, metal monsters, fizzy pills snorted at every turn and, above all, gap-toothed geezers who took sudden dislikes. And this real world in which I now took my wrongful place was particularly incommodious. Nobody gave a toss. Nor did they give me money, because I had nothing to exchange for it. I could no longer while away the hours in the pub, earning a crust by telling tales of the universe within my head. That universe had ceased to exist.
The edges of the pavement were sharper whilst my back into which they poked was softer. And time travel was now off the agenda, quite beyond the capabilities that I once believed I possessed. I cursed the age which had forced me to live in it. But it was a sign of the times. Only a few were not dossers now - and those kids who had taunted me were indeed dossers' kids, only to become dossers themselves. And they screamed blue murder at the TV camera which was documenting their way of life. But, it didn't really seem to matter, as nobody watched television any more.
Dawn came but once a day, with time now more or less in forward gear. And, then, I, Padgett Weggs, would dream of the past - and it's the past that for most people comes but once in a lifetime.
My mother had believed in a God that, at the best of times, was difficult for anyone to believe in. And she had tried to impose this belief on myself, but Mystery being now in short supply, I could not even countenance the means, let alone the ends. In fact, once dead, all people cease to have ever existed.
That's the way of the world Padgett Weggs ended up knowing when he ceased to be eligible for calling himself "I". Memories always were hopes past their sell-by date and sex came from Kate Hood-of-Bed like the stench off a bad corpse. She was often in the company of Padgett Weggs before that occasion, of which she still speaks, when he died in her arms, in the backroom of a bar. To tell her side of the story, she always denied the rumour that Padgett Weggs had died a dosser, for that would have branded her a heartless hussy. Loved him when he was a hit, but lost him to the clawback of the streets when his mind became not all it was... Never that! She insisted to the point of boredom, as a new customer lay like a babe against her bald breasts, that Padgett Weggs was undeniably dignified towards the end - that end of his when night donned the garb of death and sucked the dreamlight dry.
With a busy career to maintain as the first ever woman breeder of werewolves, Kate Hood-of-Bed really had no option, she said, but to leave him alone to sleep it off beneath the blanket. At the very end of his human life, she had been the last to hold his yet unstiff tool between her slender nail-painted fingers, and then she took it into her mouth as if she were some backstreet dosser's kid sucking at a playground water-fountain. And she blew and blew - the only way to help make his spiky innards sprout out through the pores like fur hair. With the last blast of her lungs into his spinning balls, Padgett's mouth would pump open with the direst roars of beast hunger.
His life became a forgotten subtitle to an otherwise famous book. And on this new night beyond even memory's belated trawl, the glowing dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the hub of all dossers' haunts, suddenly reared from behind another building, It was strange how such nights as this one created new perspectives as well as new turnings into olden City squares that office workers could never even hope to find.
Padgett Weggs, having reached an age by which most dossers had given up their ghosts, wondered if he were as mad as he felt. Why had even his likes fallen into the trap called Love? Hate had always been so liberating.
That crone Kate Hood-of-Bed was the soulfullest mate and nicest sleeping bag he'd ever possessed during countless nights under the dripping stars. Her tongue, the sharpest this side of Shoreditch, but the warmest eyes. Her teeth were missing, but some had returned, in their wisdom, as wolffangs. Her clothes were more like strips torn from her own flesh that had previously hardened from sleeping rough with Padgett.
Now, she'd gone. Melted away into the last night's unseasonable fog. And as Padgett Weggs staggered into yet another misremembered square, any perceptive fellow dosser would have spotted diamonds in his eyes. Sadness was a fine emotion, mainly because it indicated wealth of soul: the actual capability of happiness, by comparison. Unbelievably, he found a free bench beside a broken water-fountain. The square's lamp posts were shorn at the top but still filtered a dim light as if from their cores.
The statue of a nymph (the daughter he never had, he wondered) was just another shadow, if more substantial than a ghost. A bench of cradled bones was a luxury compared to common or garden pavements. He wrapped himself in his own arms and legs (a feat of physical prestidgitation invented and jealously guarded by the brothership of freedossers) and dreamed of Kate - and of the anniversaries they would never now celebrate.
In the morning, a Confessional Priest wandered, apparently in an aimless frame of mind, with a large gold-clasped book in blackskin boards. He had it under his arm. He began to look from side to side like a one-eyed bird.
Padgett Weggs, who had been dreaming, yawned. Somebody must have moved him in the night to the Cathedral's steps, he surmised - at a time when even storytellers are fast asleep. The Priest handed him the imposing book in one surreptitious curtsy of his cassock. And darted off, no doubt, to clear away his own night's doings before the toffee-nosed tourists arrived.
Padgett was too bleary-eyed to appreciate the gift, if gift it were. But, eventually, turning to the first page, he managed to make out, through his chronic dyslexia, the title: COCOON MENNIR. But he could not quite make out the smaller print of the subtitle, even if there were one at all. But he decided it must say KATE HOOD-OF-BED, and he put a anagrammatic smile upon the newly risen sun.
Once dead, one ceases to have ever existed. That's the way of the world Padgett ended up knowing. And suddenly I know instinctively that I never ever existed, except perhaps as a fevered fiction of another - someone who, with tears in the eyes, has also now disappeared from all realities past present and future.
"If 'Necronomicon' is simply a conundrum of mixed-up letters and 'Book-of-the-Dead' another, 'Padgett Weggs' is yet another to fathom till we are all Great Old Ones."
Rachel Mildeyes (UPON THE WORKS OF DF LEWIS)
