The Solitary Review

819

Must have written this between July 2004 and February 2005. Updated to be set a bit nearer the present day.

 

819

by Chris Amies

 

Captain Volkov of the Imperial Russian Air Force stared grimly through the windscreen of his craft at the foul weather outside. From time to time the plane was buffeted by a particularly severe gust, and dirty rain streaked the windscreen.

"Tiger to base," he said, for the seventh time, clutching the microphone despairingly. "Tiger to base, I am having severe navigational problems."

There was no reply, only static, crackling in his ears .The compass was spinning lazily; if he believed it, the Tupolev T-819 was revolving on its vertical axis once every fifty seconds. He was sure it wasn't.

Then the grey roiling clouds ahead of him became brighter, as though something was lighting them from within.

Volkov's brow furrowed. He stared into the clouds, that should not have been there at all, the stick vibrating in his hands, a steady thrum that was also coming through the rudder pedals as well. A bang from the left and the aircraft slewed to port.

"Port engine gone," Volkov said into the unresponsive radio. He felt angry, that he had been sent up into this; but it had been a clear, starry black sky back at Alma Ata, when the T-819 launched from its midnight runway.

Another bang, this time from the starboard wing, and now the T-819 started tilting to the right, its left wing coming over and the aircraft started to spin slowly downwards. The controls were useless. The light in the sky grew brighter, and Volkov, falling with his aircraft into it, saw something huge like a mouth made of light, rimmed with teeth longer than his aeroplane, opening to swallow it.

*

On a comfortable pair of cushions on a large bed in a back bedroom in North West London, Jack Preedy and Toni d'Souza were lying close together. Toni, all brown curves, and Jack, all white straight lines. Jack told himself - and she told him - that even if they hadn't managed the best sex in the world, it didn't matter; being close to her was consolation enough in itself.

"I'll have to move," she told him, as he wound her hair in his fingers; long nightblack hair he could lose his hands in and cup that head towards him, kiss the sweet wide mouth that had been so adventurous before.

"Why?" he asked. "Aren't you comfortable?" Kiss, kiss, at random. All places were good for that.

"I mean, move house," Toni said. "This is all coming down."

"The house?"

"The street," Toni said. "We have to be out by the end of the month. They're widening the road. Don't ask me why that. C'mere." And she rolled onto him, Jack's hands around her firm little waist, Toni's arms around his neck on the pillow. She moved downwards, letting go silkily.

On his way home, Jack mooched through a half-derelict landscape inhabited only by rushing cars. He hoped he'd see Toni again, but it wouldn't be in the house he'd just left. Some of the houses nearer the tube station had already been demolished, and a pub - the Porton Arms - stood closed and boarded up, its sign removed, upstairs windows empty like blind eyes. It all seemed such a waste.

*

She was talking to an old Russian airman who'd fetched up in the hospital where she worked - recording ancient patients' memories before it was too late. The old boy had spent time in Angola, decades back, and she reminded him of some girl he'd known back then. It was a Jangolgery evening and the curtains were closed against a dark icy world; in the hospital it was bright and warm.

"We called it Black Project," he told her. "Very secret. But now, no Empire, so what harm?"

"Empire?" Antonia asked. "You mean the British Empire?"

"No, Russian Empire," Serge Druzhin said. "At time it was Tsar Alexander, may his nonexistent balls shrivel up and fall off as he burns in Hell, just like those of his son Nicholas. But it was a bad year - 1953. Much trouble with Americans, President Patton - you know, 'Blood and Guts'. Defeated entire French army in single combat, so he said. Have you heard about all that, young Antonia? The Newfoundland Crisis? The Bay of Whales? We thought we were all going to die."

"Go on," Antonia said. What was this? Russian Empire in 1953? He had to be suffering from dementia, but he hadn't seemed that way before. She gave him her best smile, which was very good indeed, and thought it was a good thing she liked old men. She'd had to deal with plenty of them, after all, one way and another.

"We built one special new aircraft," he said, "Tupolev 819. Designed to go under radar, cross water fifty metres up, destroy Amerikanski missile silos undetected. But, seventh flight ... Captain Ivan Borisovich Volkov is flying her ... takes her across Imperial Asia, no problem, then reaches Gobi Desert and things start to become strange."

"What things?" Antonia asked.

"Drink, please," Druzhin said. Antonia passed him her subtle hipflask of vodka.

"Spassibo," Druzhin said. "Now, we lose Volkov and aeroplane on radar. Strange noises on radio. Like music, da. Only with sucking sounds. Undersea noises, though far away from sea as you can be on Earth. I never want to hear such words ... is not human speech, is something not of Earth. Then is scream from radio." He grinned. "I am still deaf from that scream. Volkov screaming about teeth, a worm made of light ... numbers that should not be ... bozhe moi!"

The old man went rigid, the hand holding Antonia's gripped painfully. Druzhin's mouth opened wide and he breathed hoarsely, croaking something that Toni was certain wasn't Russian. It didn't sound like human words at all. Then his voice faded to a wheezing rattle.

"Nurse!" Antonia called, while Druzhin croaked and gargled horribly in the armchair. When the white-clad starched nurse arrived, it was too late. Druzhin sat, staring, pulseless. Antonia pulled her hand free, and reached towards the old man's face. Then she stood and hurried out, head down, clutching her bag with the recorder in it. As she left she glanced up at the clock over the doorway: 8.19.

One afternoon not long afterwards, Antonia d'Souza was sitting in the drawing room of her house in Chiswick, wearing an old green tracksuit, when the doorbell rang.

She looked up from her reading and padded to the door. It was a cold day and not too long after Christmas and New Year; she didn't relish opening the door on a cold wind, never mind the possibilities of an unexpected caller in the first place. She looked through the spyhole.

On the doorstep stood two men in dark suits. One a short-haired Italian-looking guy wearing a leather jackets; the other a tall thin white dude who looked very familiar.

"Ms d'Souza?" said the leather-jacketed man."We're from Naval Intelligence. My name is Sutherland and this is Preedy." He showed her a card that looked convincing enough. "Do you mind if we have a word?"

"Sure," she said, "Come in." She opened the door and let them in, then closed the door quickly behind them; it was plainly still cold out. She ushered them into the living room and asked them to sit.

"Nice place you have here," Sutherland said, looking around. Toni said nothing to this.

"Okay," Sutherland continued, "I'll cut to the chase. You were the last person to speak to Serge Druzhin, born 1933, died ten days ago."

"Yes," Toni said ."Poor old boy. I'd never seen anyone die before, and I hope I never do agai. I closed his eyes because the hospital staff wouldn't."

"Could you tell us in your own words what he told you?" Preedy asked.

"It was ravings," Toni said. "Something about a secret aircraft and the Russian Empire. But in the 1950s. I think he may have seen some science fiction film or other and got confused. Or he had a near death experience and he was remembering it."

"Did you record the conversation?" Preedy asked.

"Yes," Toni said. "That's what I do. I record the memories of older people so we have some kind of record of the lives they lived. But that one... for some reason it didn't transfer. I downloaded it to my hard drive and between the recorder and the drive, something wiped it. There is only static. Bloody cheap recorder. I'll need to buy a new one and do you realise what they cost?"

"I sympathise," Sutherland said. "We'd advise you to tell nobody about what he said. Or we'll need to sequestrate all your equipment, for security reasons."

"What?" Toni exclaimed. "What is all this about?"

"Security," Sutherland said.

"Isn't everything?" Toni asked. "Are you allowed to deprive me of my livelihood? You aren't the police and I'm not accused of any offence, so you don't have the right to remove my belongings. What is this really about?" She hadn't been lying about the recording ... nothing had come out, but she remembered the conversation. "The words the Russian pilot heard, the thing climbing out of the Gobi desert ... what was it?"

"Ma'am... " Sutherland began.

"And the numbers that should not be?" Toni continued. "That's what he said. I can tell you what he said. You don't need to take anything."

"That conversation never happened," Sutherland said. "I would advise you to believe that the conversation never happened. Neither did this one."

"It was complete insanity," Toni said, "the poor old boy was raving. Or he was telling me a yarn. Sailors do, so why not airmen? But if you say it never happened, then fine. It never happened. See ya."

The Naval Intelligence men looked at one another. Then they left. That was Toni; she never raised her voice, but guys always did what she told them.

When they'd gone she found a piece of paper on the seat where the familiar-looking man had been sitting. It read,

ROYAL GEORGE SALTER ST 7PM.

Toni walked into the Royal George at five minutes past seven. Past the bar, to the corner where Jack Preedy was sitting, nursing a pint of beer. He'd changed out of the dark suit and was in casgolgel clothes. He looked more like she remembered him.

"Buy a girl a drink?" she murmured, sliding in beside him.

They sat, knee to knee, looking like lovers, but what Jack Preedy whispered into her ear wasn't sweet nothings.

"It's the number," he said.

"What number?"

"You know your old house? You remember me, don't you?"

"Of course I remembered you, Jack," she said. "What was it you called it - erototherapy? You suggested I should set up the Erototherapy Institute in my house. But what about the number? 819?"

"And the number of the 'plane Volkov flew into the Gobi Desert. The Tupolev 819," Jack told her. "Volkov and his desert trip changed something. How many 819s can you name?"

"Well, none," said Toni, "but I never really tried, and there are probably a lot of other numbers that I can't put to anything either. 665? 798?"

"These are different," Jack Preedy said. "819s can't survive in our world. I've checked. No roads are designated 819. No manufacturers will assign the model number 819. Lottery ticket numbers stop at 818 and carry on from 820. Did you go back to see your old house after you left?"

"No," Toni said. "I thought it was best not to look back."

"It was the only one in that block that was demolished. There are no 819s, anywhere in town. It's more than an unlucky number. It can't exist, and something Volkov found changed things. Before 1953, there were plenty. Now there aren't."

"What about the things Druzhin was saying?" Toni asked. "The Russian Empire. The Newfoundland Crisis. That was all in 1953. I remember him saying. But there was nothing like that, not really."

"That's where it changed," Preedy said. "In his world, there was no Russian Revolution until the 1960s. The Germans did better than France at the peace treaties after World War I, so the French not the Germans became the Fascist power in mid-twentieth century Europe. They didn't fight the Imperial Russians, they sided with them and overpowered Britain and Germany. The British Empire was broken up, and England became a French client state. India sided with Russia from the start, Scotland and Ireland jumped into bed with the French, and Canada was ceded to Russia in 1951, so you had Russia and the USA facing one another across the fortyninth parallel. The Cold War happened but it was really just World War II continued.

"In October 1952, at the Bay of Whales, CIA-backed British forces under the command of Colonel Michael Eliot led a raid against a Russian radar station and blew it up. Unfortunately the Russians found out it was backed by the Americans and started building up their nuclear arsenal in Newfoundland, so as to place a barrier between the US and Europe.

"If Volkov and his T-819 had got to America, as he planned that night, it would have been one incursion too many. The US could handle provocation from Russian colonies, but not from Russia herself. It would have led to nuclear war. In some timelines it did." He looked somber. "There isn't much left of the world in most of them. Especially the ones where Fermi was right: high-speed winds picked up most of the world's topsoil and gave us denuded landscapes and nuclear winter that will last for centuries."

"So this 819 business has to do with Volkov?" Toni asked, wondering if it was best to go along with this as a pure fiction.

"Yes," Jack Preedy said. "Something called the golge. They're suppressing the number. If things that aren't even human can be superstitious, these are. '819' is a cursed number for them, like thirteen but much, much more so. And I do think there's something else: the figure 8 on its side is the infinity symbol. The 9 looks like infinity coming undone, and it has a line between them, like each is one side of a mirror. Infinity mirroring the end of infinity. That's what the 819 represents."

"What about 8.19 in the morning then? Or 8.19 pm? That's when Druzhin died, I remember."

"Where?" Preedy asked. "8.19 here is 3.19 in New York, and so on. It all balances out." He looked as though there was something he wasn't saying, but Toni carried on.

"What are these things of yours?" Toni asked. "If they aren't even human? My grandmother believed in the loa spirits, my mum and dad are R.C., but I don't believe any of it."

"We don't know exactly what they are," Jack Preedy said. "The name is from the Turkish word for ‘shadow.’ The Turks knew them and the peoples of the Caucasus. The remote mountain republic of Kajlar has legends about them. The golge have knowledge of all the parallel worlds. They may even be controlling our world, finding the timeline that suits them best."

"You said 'we' think. Who's we," Toni said, "white man?"

"Naval..."

"Intelligence," Toni said. "Yeah, right. I don't believe that, either. Who are you really? Don't get so mysterious, Jack. I've seen you naked, remember. I've undressed you. You've cried in my arms."

"If I was to try to tell you that, it would take a lot of explanation - and-that's-something-we-don't-have-time-for-kiss-me-now!"

Out of the corner of her eye, Toni saw the door swing open and the tall leather-jacketed figure of Sutherland swing into the pub. She pounced on Jack, lowered him onto the banquette, and gave him the best snog he'd had since he last kissed her five years before. Possibly even better, as they'd both been practising.

When they finished, Sutherland was sitting in a corner, not looking anywhere towards them. There were two other men with him, both rather similar. Then the door swung open and a fourth, remarkably similar to Sutherland, strode in and sat with them.

"Who are they?" Toni asked.

"Bad news," Jack said. "And they're by the entrance." Toni and Jack shuffled round behind a screen. He thanked the management for bringing back the old style of separate drinking areas in the pub; you could hide much more easily. "I don't think they'll try anything in here," Jack told her, "but we'd better stay here. Besides, there isn't another door we can use without setting off an alarm. If we have to, that may not matter."

"Okay," she said. "Who are you? How do you know all this stuff? Mind where I have my hand. Now start talking."

She'd insinuated those knowing fingers at the crotch of his trousers, around his testicles.

"I was recruited," Jack Preedy said with an impolite sigh, "just after I last saw you, five years ago. I'm as human as you, and from your timeline. Sutherland I'm not sure about, nor some of the others. That's why I had to see you. But I warn you - you saw what happened to Druzhin. And you said you never wanted to see anything like that again. Do you know what the date is tomorrow?"

"Today's the seventh," Toni said, "so tomorrow's the eighth. Of January. Two thousand and nineteen."

"Right," Jack said. "Eight - One - Nine." The silence hung between them like a sheet of glass, like a mirror dividing perfect infinity from its shattered counterpart.

"So it is," Toni said. "What's going to happen? Assuming you're right about all this?"

"I have no idea," said Jack Preedy, as Toni relinquished her grip on his collions. "The day begins here in four hours, but in parts of the world it's already started. I'd be careful. And I think that's why those guys are over there."

"You mean they don't want to kill us? That's a relief."

"Like I said, I'm not sure about Sutherland. Some of the things he's said to me suggest this isn't his world." The four men were still there, all now with pints of something green in front of them. Lemonade and lime juice, Jack thought. They were, after all, on duty. As he watched, the door swung open again and a fifth entered, squeezing himself in between one of his fellows and the rosewood panelling of the entrance way.

"I could always tell the landlord they're fans of the Orange Order," Jack suggested. "Get 'em thrown out. I wouldn't exactly shout 'Up the IRA!' around here but he is Irish."

Just then the landlord made an appearance, taking their empty glasses, with a "How are ya?" to Jack, then was gone.

"But you decided not to," Toni said. "Your round," she said.

"No I'm not," said Jack, going to the bar.

At ten before midnight, after most of the inhabitants of the Royal George had done their best to drink the place dry, and Ken the landlord and his favourite among the barmaids had performed their usual dance on the bartop, and Time had long since been called, the five men in black - having lived it up on lemonade and lime juice the whole evening - got up and surreptitiously shuffled out.

"Now where are they going?" Toni asked. "I thought they were keeping an eye on us here."

"Obviously not," said Jack. "I think we have to follow them. "

"We do?" Toni asked. "Why? I thought they wanted to do us in."

"No," Jack said, "that isn't what they have in mind. Let's go."

The five dark figures slipped out and across Leapale Lane, a narrow street at right angles between the side of the Royal George and an area of derelict ground known as the Old School Yard, though it had been many decades since anyone went to school there. Now it was several hectares of scrubland, concrete standings, bushes, low trees, fox earths, and halfruined brick sheds that sheltered sleeping tramps. The men in black went into the Old School Yard, followed at a suitable distance by Jack Preedy and Toni d'Souza.

Jack and Toni stopped, sheltering in the ruins of an old brick-built toolhut, whose conical roof was half open to the sky. The five men were standing in a circle, perhaps ten metres between each of them, on a broken concrete apron invaded by weeds. Jack wondered if it was an optical illusion, but there seemed to be a diffuse silvery light about them. Above them the sky was miraculously full of stars; it was as though the light pollution of the city had been suppressed this one night. Only further down, around the horizon, was the orange glow of streetlights. The men were dark silhouettes against the lit terraces and tower blocks that ringed the Old School Yard.

One of the men raised a hand and moved it in a slow pattern. Where his hand passed, the air itself seemed to turn opaque and whitish. Slowly he drew a symbol: a ∞, the sign for Infinity. It hung in the air in front of him. Then he drew a parallel line above it, and above that a figure that looked like a '9' on its side.

"Chaos over order," Jack breathed. "I wondered whose side they were on." To the East, towards central London and perhaps beyond it, there was a dim silvery tower of light, like a column of midges on a summer's day, rising into the night sky. The whitish aerial figure the man had drawn drifted towards the centre of their circle, and grew. Low chanting grew louder, syllables that spelt only bad magic…

Adeptus magister verminis ex profundis clamo, salvate ex inferi …

Then there was a click behind them.

"I knew you'd turn up," said a voice. "And on the wrong side. You didn't see the sixth man, did you? Too late now, old chap."

Jack Preedy tried to turn round, but something hard caught him on the side of the face.

"Keep looking," said the voice. "Hopefully I won't need to kill you. The change is coming. Our world comes back. The world that should exist. Not Druzhin's world, not yours. Ours. The one that belongs to the golge. And with it your disgusting little island will vanish off the map."

"Oh dear," said Jack. "Here we go. The England-hating. The 'disgusting little island' bit. You've no imagination, Sutherland, or whatever you really are."

There was a thud from behind, and Sutherland was mewling and cursing. Jack turned round to see him doubled up, and Toni grinning. She threw his gun into the bushes and kicked him again for good measure, somewhere very specific. He went out cold.

"Good one," he told her. But already the pillar of light was coalescing, and becoming something writhing and sinuous, a near-solid wormlike body made of golden light. It bent over towards them and they could see a mouth rimmed with tentacles and long sharp teeth.

"Is that the golge?" Toni asked.

"One of their creatures," Jack said. "The golge have never manifested. Just as well, from what I've heard. That's an ollgoi-horchoi."

"That's what Druzhin saw," Toni said. She stepped out from the shadows and took a pace forward. Jack grabbed her by the arm and she shook him off. He stepped towards her, but then stopped.

As she walked forward the worm-creature writhed down towards her; and Toni started talking to it, words that were unlike anything she'd spoken before.

The creature looked curiously down at her, its mouth huge enough to swallow her several times over, while the men in black kept up their chant. Then the worm reared up, away.

Then something appeared over the rooftops in the orange glow; something gullwinged and pale grey, ghosting towards them. Other shapes sliced through the silvery tower to the east, which had begun to writhe horribly. Its upper half detached and curled up, rising into space slowly. The grey shape cruised through the sky above the School Yard, cutting through the worm-thing, and turned lazily over the far houses, came back for a second pass.

Toni was back, standing by Jack Preedy in the shelter of the ruined tool hut.

"The T-819?" she asked.

"I think they built more of them," Jack said. The worm-thing above them lunged for the aeroplane as it passed, and bit off a wing. The aircraft rolled gracefully, wing over stump of wing, and impacted somewhere to the south, a crump and a dazzling orange burst of flame. The night was louder than any thunderstorm.

Then there was another T-819, flying straight at the creature. It penetrated it, and the wormthing, flapping horribly, rose into the night sky, where it broke apart into silvery tatters.

The five men in black were still standing on the concrete apron; the silver light had gone and now they were suffused by a weird red glow from within. Then they seemed to swell and split, the heads cracking open, and where each man had stood was a red creature, with an insectoid head with two huge eyes, and multiple limbs unfolding from a body like a bundle of sticks. They were more than just strange, they were disgusting in a way no Earthly creature could be.

"Christ," said Jack. "The golge." He felt sick to his stomach. Toni clung to him, making small retching noises. Over the noise of sirens Jack could hear their staccato chittering.

Then the sirens faded and inexplicable noises took their place; gurglings, weird undersea sounds.

All around them, the world was changing; the homely urban horizon replaced by vast bulking shapes, black and studded with lights. Something huge and cumbersome shifted in the middle distance.

The golge began to walk towards Jack and Toni in their hiding place. A low chittering started up from the ground behind them. Sutherland was awake and responding to his masters' call. He stood up, jerkily, and flung himself against his former assailants.

Toni dispatched him with a couple of very swift kata that had Jack, despite himself, wincing in sympathy. Sutherland gurgled and fell over.

Toni repeated the words she'd heard from Druzhin, but the chittering only grew louder; somewhere far off there was a low thrum of engines.

Then the five golge were upon them. In a blur of hideous bristling limbs, they launched an assault.

It wasn't just Toni who was punching and kicking now; Jack hit one of the golge and felt like he'd slapped a bag of wet sand. It was no use; the creatures kept coming.

Then the sound of engines grew to a howling, and something dark and multibranched, with a vague parentage from the T-819 but much bigger and more complex, came to a halt over the Old School Yard. It released a long black cylinder which fell into the pentacle, exploded, and a splash of weird violet light flooded from it.

The attack stopped, and the chittering creatures fled. When the violet light faded away, there was only the London that had been there before, with fires burning to the south, and the night sky torn, as far as the horizon to west and east, by curtains of light. They were like the Northern Lights, but infinitely more ragged and strange, and moving fitfully. The air-raid siren, long and mournful, cut across the noise of traffic and alarms.

There was no sign of the golge, nor of the aircraft.

"You knew the words," Jack said later, as the dawn was filtering through the blinds in Toni's bedroom. "To stop the worm, and let the T-819s come through. From the other world where Volkov was successful, and the Russian Empire kept going. Then to let the other one through at the end, to the golge's world."

"I remembered what Druzhin said," Toni told him. "The recording didn't come out, but the words weren't easy to forget. I just played them back, as it were, to the worm. It had to be some kind of calling spell, and I figured it was associated with the aircraft.

"Druzhin called the T-819 the 'black project'; I suspected there was more to it than a bomb run against America. I reckon Captain Volkov died because he got lost, released the spell too late, and the worm destroyed his 'plane. I didn't tell you any of this, because I wasn't sure whose side you were on."

"I'm on the right side," Jack said. "You see? No tentacles, no insect eyes. Sutherland was human but he was the golge's slave. He's in the right place now, back in their world."

Later on Jack and Toni wandered hand in hand through the streets. The city was full of police and ambulances, weeping people in the streets, wild headlines in the newspapers; a scuffed-out pentacle on the Old School Yard, a dozen fires still burning, and some inexplicable aircraft wreckage in the fires. And the 8.19 train from Wolverhampton to London arrived four hours late.

People explain things to me I already know all - the - fucking - time. Unless I've told them so, how are they to know that I know? And I'm not being sexist about who does it, either.

Diary from St Paul's Court - July 1997

4 July 1997
The jirds have settled in, pursuant to my occasionally messing them about by introducing new items to their cage. It should perhaps be an aquarium instead; I’m not sure. There are two local petshops: one in Jerdan Place (!) near Fulham Broadway, and one in Abingdon Street, off High Street Kensington just a little east of the Commonwealth Institute. Both would do; the Abingdon St. One appears to have more small aquaria so if i’d gone there I might well have ended up with an aquarium instead of a cage, so more burrowing space for jirds. The girl at the Abingdon St shop was quite knowledgeable on rats and such but had no knowledge of jirds; the woman in the Jerdan Place one was quite keen on jirds so I think i’ll go back there in future. Besides, ‘Jerdan’ is such a coincidence that I must milk it.
I want to suggest to the Hammersmith and West London College that the little piece of wooded grassland in the corner of Colet Gardens and Talgarth Road, which they appear to own, be called Dedman’s Piece, after the old Dedman’s Farm and Dedman’s Lane which were in that area until St. Paul’s School was built in 1884. The name ‘Dedman’ has vanished entirely from the map, and that corner of land appears to have no name, so Dedman’s Piece suggests itself ideally. My local history project has now gone behind the 19th century level of development (i.e. what was here last) to what was here before that; the aspect of the area in the early 19th century and before. St Paul’s Court was part, I think, of the aforementioned Dedman’s Farm, which may have been bordered on its eastern side by Black Bull Ditch, an alternative name for the Parr’s Ditch which flowed down Brook Green, through where St Paul’s Court now is, and meandered down via the present-day Yeldham Road to come out into the Thames at Chancellors Wharf. The Ditch is significant because it marks the historic border between Hammersmith and Fulham; Fulham itself going up to Hammersmith Road between the Ditch and Counters Bridge (the bridge by Olympia).
The Black Bull name itself refers to a pub which apparently used to be in the area. Now, in the last century and the beginning of this there were/have been six pubs on Hammersmith Road: the Goat (renamed the Suspension Bridge, then the Clarendon Arms, then demolished c. 1990); the Rose and Crown (where Novotel now is), the Red Cow (now Latymers), the Bell and Anchor (north side of the road, end of Blythe Road, so presumably opposite the Albion), the Albion (to which I have never found any reference in any of the local histories), and the Hand and Flower (currently Harvey Floorbanger’s Hammersmith Charivari). The Black Bull is not on my list. It probably sat somewhere near the High Master’s House (though not at the same time), near enough to Parr’s Ditch to give the ditch its alternative name. Pubs are the pinions of history, as Robert Rankin suggests in Nostradamus ate my Hamster. Well, actually he says ‘buildings’ are, but for Rankin any building may as well be a pub. It is instructive that he is more popular in Ireland than England: his brand of barroom mythologising is certainly very Irish.
I no longer have an allotment. Unfortunately the amount of work I was able to put in on it was not good enough for the committee and they red-carded me. Ah well, it was fun (sometimes) while it lasted.
26th July
Jirdland now swings, as there is an aquarium beneath the cage.
3 August, 1997
William Burroughs died yesterday, so did Fela Kuti. Now Burroughs you might have thought was going to go on to be immortal, so much he seemed to have cheated death, and who knows but his ba-soul is even now dealing for a new body to come back in. So obsessed with death he was that he outlived all the rest of them, Leary and Ginzburg who died this year, and the rest, Kerouac and whatever, who died a long time ago. Now at least I hope we shall see the release of the whole Burroughs œuvre. He had more or less given up writing conventional narratives since The Western Lands in 1987, which I saw at the time as being about himself being about to die, but he didn’t die for another ten years after that.
Dare we call for E.J. Thribb:
so
farewell
William Burroughs
ACCESS ALL CENTRES! YOU ARE A MINDSLAVE OF THE CENTIPEDE GOD FROM MARS! TLAXTICUTI THE SLEEPING SERPENT / YOUR BRAIN IS INVADED BY THE DEATH ORGANISM B-23
Keith’s mum puts an apple on her head
BANG
oh fuck

The serpent god rests sleepily by the Nile. His face is the face of a fellahin boy from the fertile plains of Lower Egypt. His wings are folded along his iridescent body. In the sunlight he looks like a huge and sleepy dragonfly, but let none by deceived; the mind inside that faceted head is sharp, and completely without care for the desires and aspirations of humans. He does not dream, but somewhere in the darkness of his consciousness he holds the memory of a time before Earth, when Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos held dominion among the stars, and our sun was circled by a swirl of hot matter that had only just begun to coalesce into planets. At the outer rim of this swirl Azathoth, the exiled god rendered blind and mad by the Elder Lords, capers and gnaws hideously to the piping of a flute held in nameless paws.
Nephret-Sekutmun, acolyte of the temple of Zavoor, is huddled into a fetal ball in the shade of a rock just north of the serpent god, hoping that he shall not be detected. He has been to the peak of unknown Kadath, that misty summit that stands between our time and a time unknowable, half in our universe and half in another; he has ridden the shunned plateau of Leng on the back of a blind, pallid Dhole, a beast whose stink and permanently questing snout make riding it an unpleasant experience (nobody likes to be on the Dhole). Nephret has stood barefoot upon the ice of the howling Antarctic plateau that guards the city of the Old Ones, beyond the barrier known as the Mountains of Madness. Were he in the same world his feet would have frozen to the ice at once and been lost to him; but this occurred, while not exactly in a dream, in that parallel universe from which the Old Ones came and from which they would eagerly come again to our Earth if so invited by careless humans.
Here lies a stupid son of a bitch who thought he could invoke YOG-SOTHOTH to help him win a card game. Wg’lai ng’lah mglw-nafh Cthulhu Rl’yeh ptah-nglui fhtagn.
Nephret realises that the face of the serpent god is identical to his own. It is wearing his face and in time it will come to take over his soul as well.
04/08/97
The American Govt. has just ‘come clean’, or so it alleges, on UFO coverups in the 1950s, 60s. Says that a lot of sightings which were dismissed were actually top-secret reconnaissance aircraft. Interesting that they wait until Brother Bill dies before releasing this.
Or So They Claim... this is of course a very plausible thing to claim, and using Occam’s Razor (more or less, the simplest solution is most likely to be the truth) is likely to be so.
Certainly the Roswell Incident might have grown out of a highly-secret jet aircraft (something very new in 1947) crashing and the debris being hurriedly taken away; this was the start of the Cold War and the US Military would have been very jumpy about anyone knowing about their experimental craft. I still have the Kyle McLachlan ''Roswell'' movie in the VCR but stopped watching it quite early on as I thought it was boring: an opinion I am apparently not alone in (We Are Not Alone...).
Clapham is apparently a fairly weird area; strange that I should have been considering a move there recently, like, yesterday; somewhere less polluted for a start. The other side of the river? Cierto, hombre. I wonder what house prices are like down there. I for one am tired of having a permanent cold which I put down to less the climate than the exhaust fumes from the A4 and the overflying aircraft.
I had a look at the A-to-Z and it seems like my old South Ken route to work is still the most direct, though going round Victoria could be replaced by a route further south. As far as walking it is concerned, that is probably a little shorter than the home-High St Ken - Hyde Park Corner - Vauxhall Bridge Road route, which I measured at 5.7km, or probably just over an hour's walk. (I could do with one of those map-measuring devices). I walked to High St Ken yesterday morning with no trouble, though as I then bought some groceries had to take the bus back (which then didn't stop by Colet Court, as the driver 'didn't see the stop'; perhaps someone was parked in it, I don't know). Just before that a chap got off the bus with a ginger cat around his shoulders. You could hear this 'miaowing' on the upper deck and steadily it grew closer until we could see nothing but the eye of that terrible cat. (Well, Poe apparently detested cats, so it's appropriate).

Panning - a Kazlari story

Panning

 

“There are wild beasts in our hills,” said Dorota Sallust with a smile despite the tension in her words.

“That’s why I’m going,” Clarisse said. “I’ve heard …”.

“I know you’ve heard,” the Kazlari woman said and pointed to Clarisse’s teacup. “You haven’t drunk a drop, dear.”

Clarisse sipped obediently. The apartment on Rua Marquart, with its faded grandeur, white paint beginning to peel, a strange cross of Kazlar’s fin-de-siècle height of fashion and the peasant gothic favoured by the old regime, seemed like coming home.

Well, for now, it was; Clarisse was renting the second bedroom. She suspected her landlady saw her as a replacement for her daughter Jana who had left University and gone to Australia. Clarisse wasn't a very sociable person but it was nice to have a friend.

"Well, do be careful," Dorota said.

 

But that had been last night in Savina. And out here in the grey hills, among the rocks, what must once have been a field - it still had tumbled walls, and the debris of a black stone hut - she unpacked the camera and slung its strap around her neck. The sky was taking on a blue-grey tinge, and warmth was building in the air.

There was something by a red rock, in the shade of the rock, a quivering animal, russet-furred. She picked her way over stones, imagining this was something slain by whatever lived out here, and she was grateful for the stout hiking boots with their good tread. A bone splintered beneath her heel; she was finding dead things again. But hearing the crack, the creature got up, bleated, and loped off. Clarisse raised the camera and sighted on the animal as it walked among the grey rocks.

As she took the picture, she saw something else flicker in the viewfinder; for a second, but she had the distinct sense of a tail, of horns. It was gone and when she lowered the camera, there was nothing there.

Minutes later she stood by a small outcrop of rock, where a stone slab half her height had once borne an image, perhaps a god; but its features were eroded now. There was a view over the next valley and she made to take its picture. Once more, in the viewfinder, she had a sudden intimation of something standing on the outcrop, horns, tail, teeth; but it was gone; and she and a few birds and some low-growing vegetation had the world to themselves.

But if there is something, she thought, and walked forward. She set the camera to video. Her dad had always said "thou shalt not pan," but she did sometimes. Hold the trigger down, turn around to get the whole scene in.

And when she turned, there it was. She lowered the camera and looked. Nothing there. Yet back through the viewfinder: a lean shape, a curved back, dark, thorny limbs, a ratlike tail hanging down over the rock it sat on; and it turned towards her a head like a lizard's, wedge-shaped, horned, red-eyed and with two long sharp teeth descending over the lower lip. She felt terror and revulsion start within her. The strange eyes with their slit pupils stared at her. She could hear its cloven feet clicking on the rocks as it turned to get a better look.

Clarisse felt terror rising in her, let the camera fall against her, and ran. She ran down the path until she came to the road, and she felt it was safe to stop.

 

"It was an oyg, dear," Dorota told her. "Oh my dear girl. I’m glad you’re safe."

Clarisse knew of the oyg; she travelled with a copy of Neriloc's "Mitologia Kazlariana" in her bag, but what she knew of that creature was something else. Nor did Dorota seem surprised that she’d seen one, despite the absence of the beast in the pictures she’d taken and despite its mythological nature.

Clarisse said, "The oyg's a kind of vampire ... it can only be seen in a mirror. I don't think ... oh."

Oh. That camera had a prism, and mirrors to let you see what the lens was seeing.

 

Later on in her room, Clarisse opened the 'Mitologia' and looked at the entry for the 'oyg':

"A bloodsucking creature, blamed for attacks on livestock that are really caused by dogs or wildcats. Sometimes glimpsed in a mirror or a mountain pool, the oyg is never seen directly, and causes humans disorientation and distress if ever they encounter it.

"It seems to be related to the figure the ancient Greeks called Pan; the god of the wild places. Pan was rarely seen and more often heard as a peculiar and unplaceable noise. The feeling of uncontrolled terror he produced is the root of our word, 'panic'."

Somewhere in the block, a dog started barking. Though the room was warm, Clarisse shivered.

And No Birds Sing

Author's Note

This story dates from the early 21st century and while it would seem to have been influenced by a certain Walter de la Mare poem, it may well have been but I don't remember that being the case.

 

And No Birds Sing

David Woodman finished his breakfast and helped himself to more coffee. His wife Martine was already in her studio, making the best of the early spring light, and David was alone in the kitchen. The children - fourteen-year-old Kate, Simon (twelve) and nine-year-old Daphne - were predictably in bed. It would take a lot to get the older two up before midday in the school holidays, and Daphne was adopting their habits.

Woodman was up early because the call had come through last night, an excited Fred Coomber on the phone. A pair of white-spotted bluethroats were nesting in a hedge off Roys Farm Lane, by Whitley Barton. Dave Woodman, like his friend Coomber, was a 'twitcher'; a birdwatcher, and one who would hare off at a moment's notice to try to spot a rare bird. So there was no question about it; he'd be off. Last night he'd read Daphne a bedtime story - she still got one until she was ten - and when it was finished the little girl said,

"The story had birds in it. You're off to watch birds tomorrow, aren't you?"

"You caught me out," Dave said. Daphne nodded sleepily.

"Enjoy it, daddy," she said and closed her eyes. Dave kissed her forehead and slipped out.

Bluethroats, and on his doorstep too! Dave Woodman had been born in Whitley Barton, forty years before. He worked as a telephone engineer for British Telecom in Barchester; Martine, refusing to commute or to give up working, was a silversmith and sold her wares over the internet. The family lived in a council house on the outskirts of Whitley proper, with a garden backing onto fields and a stream. Everyone loved it except Kate, who now thought the village was 'boring', but then so was nearly everything else.

 

Sedders and the Stolen Skull

This is a story I wrote in the late 2000s, sort of 'Biggles with the serial numbers filed off' with a touch of Harry Stephen Keeler. 

 

Sedders and the Stolen Skull

Chris Amies

 

John Seddington, pilot for hire, on the reserve list of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, stared fixedly at the opium pipe on the cunningly lacquered Chinese table before him. The pipe was twisty and brass, and held upon it many fine filigree figures such that Sedders ― as he was universally known ― understood that this was a fully Chinese pipe, and not some cheap copy manufactured in the West.

“You like?” said the Oriental gentleman standing over him. Yu Haifeng was a graduate of the University of Shanghai, a scholar of anthropology, and quite prepared in the name of research – or of his muse – to play the heathen Chinee to gweilos. To this end he was wearing a pale yellow robe ornamented with dragons in yellow, green and red silk, and a curious trapezoidal hat. Sedders was fully aware of Yu Haifeng ’s ‘act’, and also that the light made pretty patterns on the wall of the upstairs room of the former public house in London’s Limehouse district.

“Very much,” said Sedders, distractedly. There wasn’t much else he could do other than be distracted. For all this was before the matter of the parrot; and the black seacaptain with the wooden leg; and the peculiar encrusted item which came into Sedders’ possession shortly afterwards. Sedders could think of nothing but a little person – a very little person, being four feet and ten delightful inches tall in her tiny flat-soled shoes which were the height (or lack of it) of elegance, so stylish was this small person in her dark blue or black dresses and her prettily coiffed hair, and the Mexican sharkskin bag that she slung over her deliciously formed and lightly tanned forearm. From her dark hair and eyes and easily-tanned complection, she was clearly of somewhat mixed race, which many of Sedders’ less open-minded coevals had something to say about, but which Sedders found nothing less than encouraging, speaking as it did of a future where people of many races would live together in harmonious one-itude.

Less encouraging was it that Sophia Morgenuffer, who had sworn undying love for Sedders on the steps of the National Gallery in the Chicago of the East ― London ― not long before, now seemed dissatisfied with Sedders’ being a mere ‘flyboy’ as she put it, and as many of his missions were nocturnal, also a ‘fly by night’. Sedders was at a loss as to what he could do to win back her love. Not least when the spears of war were rattling in the east and even the most optimistic conceded that peace could not be maintained for more than two more years -- the end of 1940, say -- and it seemed likely that if war did break out, Sedders would be recalled to active service, which he didn’t really want to happen.

Sedders was equally aware that Yu Haifeng was still standing over him, concernedly. The Chinese sat by him on the padded dark red seat of the counch – that was a congress between a couch and a conch, a mere shell of its former shelf – and pressed a large bulky item into his hands. It was apparently spherical and covered in what, when Sedders could defocus his eyes from the non-present face of Miss Sophia Morgenuffer, his Tiny One – appeared to be black spiky baize, ruched in a way that was not entirely dispeasing. It was roughly the size of a small football, or a large cricket ball, not that cricket or foot balls vary from their normal size, but how else was Sedders to describe its size? As a member of the British sporting classes he was most given to describing things in terms of sporting equipment, especially when there was little of the aeronautical part about it, and in this case there was.

The Guns you Use

Fiction from 2014

 

Beatrice Flack lay on her sofa with a glass of wine to hand. Around her the music rose and fell and rose again like the crashing of waves.

At first when the telephone rang she thought this was just another thread to the music, that Arnold Bax had cleverly conjured a ringing phone out of the seas around Tintagel. Eventually she realised what was going on and reached out a long arm, picked up the receiver.

"'Lo?"

"Inspector Flack? It's Andersen."

"Kirsten. Hi. Yeah. What's up?"

"There's been a murder."

 

"So," Beatrice said. "what do we have here?" Hands thrust into the pockets of her raincoat, feeling the cold of the autumn day. She remembered the place from years ago when she had first come to the city. Then it had been a riding stables and dominated by a gigantic heap of manure. The only time it had raised a smile from her was when her now very ex-husband disdained advice to drive around the edge of the main field and took his car across the middle. Spinning wheels sinking determinedly into the mud, flinging mud and shit everywhere. Thinking about Richard didn't make her mood any better. Not with the court case hanging over her.

Now the area was small workshops, a bakery, a smithy, a ceramic workshop and so on, and the shit had been cleared away. Well, that shit anyhow.

It didn't make the inside of The Guns You Use any nicer, though.

"One victim," the SOCO said, "as far as we can tell."

"How do you mean, as far as?" Beatrice said.

"He's been sort of … spread out," the SOCO said. There were streaks of blood all around the walls and the scene of crime team were lugging things in bags.

"Who was he?" Flack said.

"Desolate Mambo," the SOCO said. "He bred guns."

"Bred?" Flack said. "Oh yes. Rabbit?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the SOCO. "Speciesist killing, guv?"

"No idea," Flack said. "Some people object to guns more than to rabbits, you know. Can't fault them really. But not to go as far as murder."

Even these guns, Flack thought. Ones that change the victim's subjective reality. Sometimes it's the weight labelled 1 TON that falls, sometimes it's … stranger than that.

Alternate Expectations

In the spirit of The Toast's 'Alternative endings to Great Expectations' I present: some alternate endings!

Great Expectations 

the Harry Stephen Keeler Ending

Chilton Wheelhouse, the four-legged carnival huckster from Wilmiquanahwee, just down the road from Idiots’ Valley, had been haranguing Philip ‘Pip’ Pirrip for several weeks, taking up residence in his – Pip’s – humble brownstone in the western part of London – the Chicago of the East – in order to attempt to wheedle money out of him, of which Pip of course had none, his expectations having materialised into making him a better person via a course of snobbery soon drummed out of him by his reacquaintance with Mr Joseph ‘Joe’ Gargery and his family, and we may imagine what effect this had on the assumption that he was going at some point to marry Estella, the heiress of the very strange grande dame Leonora Havisham. Fate, as the Way Out reminds us, had other ideas!

Wheelhouse, meanwhile, who reminded Pip that he had double the normal requirement for shoes and trousers having four legs instead of the normal two and thereby was in need of more money, as though this were somehow Pip’s responsibility – this individual was now haranguing Pip from the entrance to the secluded Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London where Pip and Estella were engrossed deep in a tete-a-tete. Pip had placed his Barr-Bag – that remarkable invention and identical to others of its kind – between them on the bench as a kind of strategic blockage.

But your Expectations, said Estella frostily. Pip observed that she was incapable of other modes of discourse.

I am unconcerned, said Pip, and besides I am already engaged to be married. Pip on so saying embarked on a defensive manoeuvre taught him by Annabel Lin Chung of Chicago (the London of the West) but it was unnecessary.

Who is your fiancee, said Estella.

She is Artemisia Wang-Brown, said Pip, the daughter of the Chinese physicist 'Bang' Wang and the renowned jazz singer Clytemnestra Brown. I do not know how I can account for such good fortune.

It is well done, said Estella, pulling on the cable that connected her and the squalling four-year-old child who was eating the roses in the flowerbed. Now I must bid you adieu.

And she stood up and dragging the child with her walked towards the exit of the gardens and the distant tube station and as she did so passed Chilton Wheelhouse and gave him three dead legs. Wheelhouse hopped in agony then collapsed like a stricken oil rig.

Estelle turned and winked.

See ya, she said.

Pip expected that she never would. Now, that was an expectation.

 

The Cormac MacCarthy ending

Behind a pair of roans of around seventeen hands in height, the one of them bearing a white flash on the offside fetlock, a carriage trundling as the tumbrils had trundled in lost Paris bearing the haughty to their appointment with the executioner’s blade. No less haughty the black-laced woman who leaned out of the carriage window and spoke to the driver,

- Que se para aqui un momento.

- Aqui?

- Si, aqui. Hay que contestar con este senor.

And the carriage trundled on, its barely hispanoparlant conductor unable to seize the essence of the woman’s language, for thus is it with men.

And so it was that Don Felipe del Pirip, passing, glanced up and saw the proud face of Estella vanish in the window and the carriage led by two roans pass by and into the howling din of Rochester as the cart of Jehu thundered the roads of ancient Sidon and past a tree hung with the dessicated corses of lifeless infants and the dark juzgado stained with nameless exudates and the jacaranda birds shrilled in the trees.

He would never see her again.

 

The William Burroughs ending (n.b. I find Burroughs incredibly tedious and not to be admired. Parody is not endorsement)

Barely a day went by when Pip did not mistake a woman for a centipede and this was not one of them. He moved into the shadow of a wall to avoid the liquid amber sunlight streaming into his eyes and blinding him to the horrific skeletal nags leading the dark carriage in the street towards him. He needed yage. He thought of his seven souls ren sekhem sekhet khu ba and the rest leaving his terrified corpus callosum and taking up rent somewhere else like the rent-scaping lowlives they were. Trust a man with a dog to hound you out of town. Pip looked like a sheep-killing dog and always had done. The carriage drew closer. Pip, slouching against the wall, raised his gun and sighted it on the parapet. Take Your Time. Take Your Time. Those who did not were dead. Organism B-23 activated in the frontal lobes. Towers open fire.

He could hear skittering like centipede legs on the road the horses no real horses but something from the Crab Nebula beamed to earth in a foulness like a vulture shat out rotten land crabs. Eyes that could neither give nor receive love nor conceive of it. The sort of animal that would eat a cat. God damn anyone who would harm a cat. Only that tiny spark of empathy saved Pip from being entirely scoured of humanity.

The woman in the carriage looked up and straight into Pip’s eyes and reeled back in shock like some indignant desert bird.

Pip fired and missed. Somehow he had always meant to.

Maisie and the Trunk

Maisie crept through the big house tasting the ancient dust on her tongue. She wasn't sure what the word 'condemned' meant but the more she wandered through the old pile the more she got an idea. The roof had long gone, beams unable to support the roof tiles split and foundered, daylight visible through holes in the ceiling.
Maisie thought daylight was all right in the right place. But her ancestors had long since moved away from daylight in the cornfields to the darkness and comfortable shadows of the urban world. They told stories, long involved stories that involved the ancestors who might, even now, come from the cornfields and fall prey to the evil wiles of city dwellers. The elders sang songs that the children thought were just pretty words but Maisie, growing up now, so nearly grown up, realised there was more to it than that.
She realised it when she heard old Polly describe exactly the same places and the same roads that her grandmother had described, but in different words.
This isn't just a nice story, is it, she asked.
The elders glanced at one another.
They said nothing but Maisie understood. It was a map. A map across time and space. The song told of huge puffing engines that swayed and clanked across roads and past stands of trees on iron rails; it told of ancients with farm carts and small horses that waited patiently. It told of clothes shops in hollow trees.
But for all that she had identified it, Maisie was dissatisfied. It wasn't her song. It wasn't the song she heard in her dreams. The one where she stood alone under a starlit sky. She had tried that and been dragged inside hurriedly by her older brothers and sisters. They never spoke of it except to tell her that that was forbidden.
It seemed to Maisie that everything was forbidden. Instead of standing out under the stars after that she had hunkered down in her cot, writing poetry while leaning against the bars of her cell. She knew - now she was older - that Things lurked among the stars of the night sky, things that called from the trees, things that could swoop down and pluck a youngster away.
Pluck, she thought. What an odd word. It means courage, yet she had once had the courage to stand under the open and naked stars. And it means to pull out, like pulling out the guts; just what the Things would do to her if they caught her.
She climbed the staircase again, carefully, tread by tread, her doll in her hand. In the city every corner was full of terror, every passer-by a possible killer, and justifiably - in her mind - she was afraid of everyone. Yet here, where there was nobody else and the roof was open to the sky that even now was growing dark, the first points of stars shining in the darkening blue, she felt no fear at all.
By the seventh or eighth circuit, she felt she knew the house very well. There was a main hall downstairs and a kitchen - beware cats, she told herself, but there had been no cream here for a very long time and even the spiders had given up and gone somewhere else. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom where an ancient water jug stood by a sink as though awaiting hair to pour water over. She imagined the long-gone occupants of the house and the things they might have done here. All the beds had collapsed, iron frames rusted, bedclothes yellowed where they had been left on. One of the beds had a canopy that itself was bowed in the centre where debris had fallen from the broken ceiling. She wondered if the point of canopied beds was originally to guard from insects and other such beasties falling from the roof above.

She felt very tired. She wondered if the owners would object if she took a nap in one of the beds. So thinking, she crawled onto the least foul-looking of the beds and lay down, the ceiling very close above her face. She smiled and clutched the doll.

The ghosts appeared after sundown; vague things, little more than a pair of dark, hollow eyes in a kind of mist. Maisie clutched doll and bedclothes and stared at them. One of them reached out a finger and poked - Maisie kicked out but it became clear the ghost wasn't poking at her but at the doll.
Maisie held the doll out. The ghost shook its indistinct head, put what looked like a shadowy finger to its equally insubstantial lips.
Then it vanished.
Maisie wasn't going to sit here to be shushed by ghosts. She got up, clutching the doll once more and walked straight towards the door. As she walked through the ghosts she felt a deep cold inside her - in her pluck, she thought, but no, you will not pluck it out.
Maisie went downstairs, to the front door and strode out into the night. Something far away hooted.

In the city she slipped through a door unnoticed and scurried into the house. There had, long ago, been a cat here; but it was long gone. She went upstairs, until she found the trunk where long ago she had discovered the doll.
She stood before it, looking out through smeared windows at a city drowsing in the early morning. She opened the trunk, climbed into it and lay down.
The trunk slammed shut with a refreshing clunk.
Maisie smiled.

And that's it, is it? I said. It's like a story told by a child who's run out of imagination. Can't think of anything else, so it's "And then a monster came along and ate them all up."
Oh no, Maisie said. In the half-light she was a dark figure in the shadows of her ancient room, in her wing chair. That happened just over there, she said. Pointed at the bay window.
No trunk, I said.
Well no, she said. There was one, though. And I climbed in, see. Too many stars and ghosts for me that night.
And the doll, I said.
Long since dust, she said. But then what isn't.
How, I said, did you get out of the trunk?
Who says I did, she said.
I think you just pushed and pushed, I said, until it opened. Let's not confuse the fear of the moment with the rational response that comes after.
You may be right, she said. But I always liked confined spaces. My crib did indeed have bars to it, so that I wouldn't roll out; gave me a lifelong taste for that kind of thing. You know Pascal? Said the main source of human unhappiness was that we can't stay put. Maybe he's right. We're wanderers. Back to the ancestral wheat field.
And the songs? I said. The ones you mentioned. About the route from, yes, the wheat field to the wainscot.
I passed them on, she said. You understand I won't sing the whole thing to you. Give the game away, that would. For all I know you're a cat.
I'm not, I said. Nor a Thing in the trees.
I wonder, she said. Thank you for coming to see me.
I got up and left that house of dust forever.

In the late evening I rode my bicycle out of town, up the hill, and stood looking out at the distant sea shifting beyond the drowsing lights of the town and its harbour. The night was clear and black and full of stars.
Something hooted mournfully. But not a ghost, something more real. A Thing. Its shadow passed across the moon; then turned, wheeled and began its slow descent towards me. I shuddered and reached for my bicycle, swung my leg over and pedalled. I could hear the wings of the creature behind me, beating, flapping, huge and relentless. Dirt and stones crunched under the speeding tyres. My heart racing, I rode down the hill, caring only to get away from the Thing and its terrible wings and the beak that I imagined tearing at my throat. I believed that the prey froze in fear, making the predator's job that much easier. So I wouldn't.
Only when I reached the main road did the thing give up its pursuit. I pedalled across the road, getting a blat of horn from a truck driver who thought I was too close - and on into the town.
I didn't sleep until the first daylight was in the sky.

The Important Matter of Sleeping

The Important Matter of Sleeping

 

John was sitting on the couch in the living room. The couch, bought from Wal-Mart at the time that John’s mom and dad had decided to refurnish the entire lower floor of their house, was angled at roughly thirty degrees to the back wall - the same back wall that provided  a structural member and division with the next house along, that was owned by an African-American family called the Davises, and faced the long front window of the house, roughly tour times as long as it was high, divided regularly into vertical bays by white-painted wooden pillars. Past the window John could see Joe Meyer and Chet Vole playing ball, and someone - a person unknown because not visible, hidden by the right hand (as John faced it) end of the window - making up the triangle.

John would very much have liked to go out and join in their game. Although he was unsure of the legality, or permissibility, of such a situation. The ball they were using looked soft enough - he was fully aware of the familial ordinance against the use of hardballs near the fronts of people’s houses, and their cars, etc - and would no doubt have bounced harmlessly off surfaces such as the front window of any house along the street, or the sharply raked windscreen of Bertha Mace’s Lexus coupe, or the shiny bald pate of Dervinus Scrope who just at that moment came shuffling along the street from Wal-mart with his weekly bag of groceries. John thought about Bertha Mace and the way she wore dresses that were too short for her, and regularly had gentleman callers, as his mom put it. Dervinus Scrope had once in John’s hearing, to Mr Davis, chuckled and said,

- The woman’s a whore. Nothing wrong with that, either.

John understood that it would not be a good idea to ask any responsible adults (or his older sister Marjorie, who was away at college anyway) what a whore was, and particularly why it applied to Bertha Mace (and why there was ‘nothing wrong with that’ when possibly there was), though it did seem odd that the woman was able to afford a shiny new red Lexus coupé when as far as he knew her job was cutting coupons. Mom forbade John to speak to Dervinus Scrope not because the man was African-American - the Davises were no way off limits - but because he was ‘a dirty old man’. Although John in later life - aged, say, twenty - was to feel mightily peeved by the fact that his parents had never warned him that Dervinus Scrope might attempt to pervert, manhandle, fondle, sodomise, or otherwise interfere with John, while his buddies, Joe Meyer and Chet Vole particularly, had been warned loud and long about the possiblilty of falling perverted prey to a pedophile. Although with double hindsight, John figured that Scrope probably wasn’t a pedophile anyway, there being no evidence whatsoever to that effect - it was much like assuming a shaven-headed man with a flattened nose is a bank robber because ‘that’s what bank robbers look like’. Scrope merely lived alone and spoke to people; had he been female this would have been treated as normal, but such behavior seemed to be unacceptable in a man, it being far more acceptable somehow to treat him as a neighbourhood pariah, never speak to him, and assume he was a dangerous pervert when there was actually no reason to do so. The later John would point out that most abuse happens within families so it was statistically less likely that Scrope was a molester.

    Thus it was for no reason of this kind that John wanted to stay on the Wal-Mart brand couch rather than go into the street and play ball with Chet and Joe and the third player who now was revealed as the Davis’ son Kelvin. John felt a woeful lack of engagement, unconnected with uncorrelated accusations of perversion against his neighbour, or the presence over John’s corduroyed thighs and patellae of the family cat, Howler, whose large brindled flank rose and fell in contented sleep; John was reluctant to wake Howler but knew full well that the ‘useless furry lump’ (as dad called it, usually when looking at the cat with a look full of loving kindness, thus the words were clearly not intended to be taken at face value) would take to being removed from John’s upper legs and placed on the floor without breaking his (the cat’s) stride in the important matter of sleeping.

    Dad’s approach to the cat had the air of desperation about it, moments seized between his apparently important work for a government agency and the desperate desire to watch ‘Jeopardy!’ on the television (a twenty-three inch JVC, bought from Cram’s Electrical in Burlington the week before it was closed down and replaced by a WalMart) or sit in the living room with a bottle of beer in the evenings. Dad’s approach to Mom had the air of a long-held armed truce. Marjorie, who was several years older than John, had gone away. In the eight years between their ages there had been another child, Matthew. Mattie had barely lived long enough to go to school, and of the family, only John couldn’t remember him. This, he felt, froze him out ever so subtly by comparison with Dad and Mom and Marjorie, but sometimes when Mom and John were in the kitchen, and Dad was elsewhere, Mom would hold John closely and he would hear her crying above him.

    The ball curvetted and bounced off the sloping windscreen of Bertha Mace’s scarlet Lexus convertible. Kelvin Davis’ face appeared at the window and his fingers tapped on the window, alerting John from his cat-excused indolence.

    John reluctantly shifted the cat and got up.