The Solitary Review

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.

 

There are fourteen hostages.

Shirley Bubbles, stage entertainer who in the daytimes is a pipe fitter from Greenford called Janet Marsyas, sits in the back room of the Fulham Working Men's Club and chews at one orange-painted nail. She does not even know why she is here. This is unusual for Shirley as she is used to the world of the evening entertainer, being called out for weddings, funerals and bar or bat mitzvahs, and when not doing that is fitting pipes or caring for her two teenage children or her elderly mother. This was supposed to be a wedding, but she has only seen the groom, a man in his forties dressed in a pretty good set of threads admittedly.
She is talking to a woman in a crimson skirt and matching jacket over a black silk blouse.
"I'm his ex-wife," says this woman. "Lydia."
"Pleased to meet you," says Shirley. "I haven't met the bride yet, I must say. Haven't even seen her."
"Bride?" says Lydia. "Oh yes, that."
"It's habitual," says Shirley, then checks herself. "Unless it was a groom, of course. Nothing wrong with that."
Lydia laughs and takes a gulp of dry martini with a somewhat shrivelled olive.
"Nothing at all," she says. "Though no, our James hasn't turned gay in middle age although I do believe he started something called the Asexual Single Men's club."

James Sartis himself is sitting against the far wall nursing a pint of Thorgood's Old Wobbler. The hostage-takers have declared no intention of stopping people drinking, indeed they seem only too glad for the fourteen to drink themselves into a stupor.
And the hostage-takers themselves? Half a dozen people in black military clothing and wolf masks. At eight-thirty-nine p.m. they took over the FWMC on one of the little side streets off Fulham Road to the north side. At this point most of the attenders at James Sartis's second wedding had drifted away or staggered out into the good old Fulham Road, perhaps stopping at the pub, the Old Smithy down the road where signs promise a Soul Night.
Nobody knows what the wolf-masked ones want. This makes it more frightening. Shirley thinks she could reason with them if she only knew what they wanted, but she doesn't.

They haven't robbed anyone, nor dragged anyone off - oh, wait.
A door bangs open and one of the hostage-takers staggers inside with a young woman, her clothing and hair dishevelled, tears streaking her dark, Mediterranean face.
Two of the other wolf-masks swing towards this one and one of the lupine individuals raises an arm and the purple metallic object at the end of it barks, dispatches two wires into the neck of the new entrant. There is a flash and a smell of urine as the taser discharges. The victim lets go of the girl and falls, spasming to the floor. The two stand over him and watch as he performs a bizarre neurological samba. They look at one another and then look down again. The girl staggers over to the corner where she sits between Shirley Bubbles and Lydia. The entertainer pulls her close to her.
Sartis puts down his pint but is gestured to keep drinking by one of the wolf-masks. One of the bar staff - a young Croatian man called Dragan Milovic - was among those who did not have the luck or the intelligence to get out before the hostage takers took over, and was the only one not to think this might have been some kind of stunt like a strippergram or a gorillagram or a grannygram or something of that ilk that British people like to irritate one another with, this kind of reaction being apparently the height of humour in this strange country.
But from his background in Croatia and the stories told him by his parents he knows enough to recognise what is going on right away. The wolf-masks have approved his perspicacity by allowing him to live. They do converse in some kind of language but Dragan can not understand it any more than the others; it does not sound like anything European. He is familiar with Chinese and Vietnamese although he does not understand them, and it does not sound like them either.

The one on the floor has stopped his odd neural dance and lies still. The girl in the corner with Shirley has explained that no, he did not rape her, but yes, he did get inappropriate. As far as Shirley is concerned the tasering indicates that the wolf-masks are by and large going to behave themselves re the hostages. Although they still don't know what they are hostages for.

The leader is wearing black cargo trousers, a black cagoule over a dark grey T-shirt; night colours. Suspiciously large black boots cover his feet. Shirley has a weird feeling about the intruder - she doesn't even think of them as 'men' even though most of them look more male than female. Something not human.

She remembers a house. A big place on a bend in the river. Her architect husband lived there with his ex-wife, who wandered around in short dresses and would make short work of any visitor, dragging them off to a corner, until one Maced her in the face and she fled, yelping. Then she married him and they lived happily for five years until the weird voices from the mist became overwhelming and both left. She never saw him again. Those weird voices were very similar to the yelps and howls she hears from the wolf-men. Some old movie she once saw. Graffiti on flaking walls, the thunder of the elevated railway, slow tracking shots over railway yards, sudden irruption of loud funk music from boom boxes playing their souls out into the cavernous street on afternoons so hot you couldn't sit on a wall because it would scorch your legs. In a place like that you would think you could leap from one building to another, swing round the aerials and fly off into space somewhere totally different. Girls she went to school with who tired of leaning against graffitied walls smoking and decided to disappear into the cracks in the brickwork, an epilogue of youth.

"I left my husband," says the ex-wife, "not because he is a bad man. He isn't. He is far from bad, indeed I would say as people go he is among the best. But he had another love and I didn't want to compete with that."

"I never gave a speech," Sartis says suddenly. People's heads turn, look in his direction. Talk stops slowly, becomes sporadic, the last talkers are quiet.
"I never gave one because we were, let us say, interrupted.
"But I am so glad you all came. It's a shame we have the presence of these others among us but still.
"Because I have finally married my one and only love. The most important part of any marriage is the determination to protect and care for the other. And what I care for is my home town, my beloved Hammersmith."

"That was his other love," says the entertainer, "Wasn't it?"
"It was," says the ex-wife. "I wasn't willing to share my husband with an entire town, suburb, whatever. We lived in his little house on Rowan Road. A nice house, we only had it because his mum and dad bought it in the 'fifties when the area was cheap - but for James, that was just where he slept. Where he lived was Hammersmith itself. He might as well have been living in a flat halfway up a huge flat-block. At first I thought he had a girlfriend, some little tart in the Guinness Buildings, say. But no, it was just him doing what he did."
There was nothing unique in him doing what he had done, either. In the Middle Ages the mayor or chief of a village would enact a form of marriage between himself and the village, promising to take care of it. This was decried from the pulpit as bigamy and blasphemy but what of it? Like many other old customs it went on under cover of darkness and pretending to be something else. But were even they in love with the place - not as in a slangy "I love this town, me!" but genuinely enamoured? Sartis was.

What the hostage-takers failed to understand was that Sartis was not some solitary unknown having taken vows to love, cherish and protect the town of Hammersmith. Everyone knew him. His work with youth centres and as a borough councillor meant that when word got around about his marriage and the hostage situation, the town mobilised.

Word spread along North End Road and lit Hammersmith Road and King Street end to end, spread out by phone call and text and tweet. And the people replied to the call. They came from Wormholt and Shepherds Bush, from Ravenscourt and Queen Caroline Street, from the flats that lie too close to the A4 road and those that sit south of Shepherds Bush Green. From the leafy Iranian enclave of West Kensington and from the student digs of Barons Court. Goldhawk Road and Uxbridge Road, Wormwood Scrubs in the shadow of the jail, and the riverside in the shade of the green-and-gold Bridge, Furnivall Gardens and Upper Mall, the smart St Peter's Square and the cafés and restaurants of Brackenbury. Through Hammersmith Broadway, stopping the traffic, from north side to south under the flyover. Under the bridges where the tube trains rattled over. The crowd took Fulham Palace Road at a jog and converged on Fulham Road.
Realising they wouldn't be allowed in they kicked the door down. And suddenly the room was full of shouting and brawling and smoke. Grabbings and shakings. Hisses and screams as the wolf-masks are seized and bundled like cats ready for a pill.

There are fourteen hostages, making their way outside in a sea of people.

Islands on Fire - Jules Verne

My latest publication is a translation of Jules Verne's 1884 novel L'Archipel en Feu. This is a fairly short novel, and lacks Verne's usual science fictional slant in favour of a tale of fighting, piracy and romance set against a backdrop of the Greeks seeking independence from the Ottoman Empire. 

"At the height of the Greek War of Independence, the bloodthirsty pirate Sacratif sails the Aegean looking for plunder. Captain d'Albaret of the French Navy commands a ship sworn to hunt the pirate down and bring him to justice. A novel of the fight for the soul of a country, heroic women and men at war."

You can find the Kindle book here.

Review of M John Harrison's "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again"

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel that I'm somehow supposed to give a good review because, y'know, M John Harrison. Amazing writer he may be but this novel left me with a feeling that I'd seen most of it before, probably in Iain Sinclair (question: did M John Harrison invent psychogeography? He may have done). Character lives a peripatetic life in Mortlake, SW London. And how peripatetic: walking to Kingston and round back to Barnes via Richmond Park is what he does for normal - that's around 18km depending on the route. So, over ten-mile walks he thinks nothing of. He also engages in joyless-sounding sex with two different women, falls in with a medium who seems at one point to have murdered her husband and he disposes of the body. This is not ok. If the husband had murdered -her-, this would now be a crime novel.
Victoria, the other principal char, is more interesting. She flees London and heads for Shropshire (MJH doesn't name the town but I'm presuming Bridgnorth as it's on the Severn gorge not far from Telford, although at one point a character gets a train to Shrewsbury). There she has a nice life but as is common with these characters dominated by others; she also (is it her) finds it all a bit Brexity. West Midlands (of which Shropshire is a part) is pure Brexit territory; I suspect Brexit happened while Harrison was writing this novel as it isn't mentioned until near the very end.
Is there some kind of correlation between West London and the West Midlands? I'm sure there is. Being in Hammersmith (by the Bridge or Brook Green) one day and in Birmingham the next is not unusual.
Then there's the Water Babies thing, and that gives TSLBTRA a whole new aspect. Starting with a drunk seeing green babies in a pub toilet and culminating in a character diving into her lawn like it was a swimming pool, Charles Kingsley's unpleasant and traumatising (well it was to me as a child) novel sits as a kind of background radiation to TSLBTRA. Translucent glowing children abound. People hand copies of that unpleasant book about.
A lot of it is about rivers really, and that isn't mentioned; a tale of two rivers, with Victoria by the Severn and Shaw by the Thames. Secret connections and influences are what MJH is all about. The book, unlike a river, just doesn't really go anywhere. The flaneux (my preferred spelling; neither male nor female, and 'eux' is a form of the French word for 'they') does not wander idly; but then again, the journey not the arrival matters. Finish lines not finish times (but there's still a line). Not all who are lost, wander.

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To the Wood we Came

a short fiction featuring Paul Nash and the War of the Worlds.

Few would have imagined, in the early years of the twentieth century, that humankind was being observed from afar, as a researcher observes the teeming of minuscule creatures underneath a microscope. And that slowly and surely they drew their plans against us.

Few, including the lean, asthmatic man who right now is sitting in a clearing in the woodland prosaically kinown as The Wood. He has a sketchbook on his knees and a 4b pencil in his hand and dreaming all the time of Weymouth, or the south coast around Purbeck, or his beloved Wittenham Clumps, fallen to the terrible rain of a Martian war-machine.
The Wood isn’t what it was; clumps of red weed swarm up the ancient oaks and the hornbeams, the elders and the beech. Infection, he thinks. Why is it always infection? Humankind is an infection on the surface of the Earth. Perhaps the Martians were the solution, like the barbarians.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” is one of his wife’s favourite poems. She has, after all, Egyptian connections like Cavafy himself. Dear Margaret. The only good result of his time at the Slade (“why do I have to do life drawing? I know what people look like”) was meeting and marrying her. But she, now, is somewhere on the south coast, probably in Weymouth, far from the war machines and their death rays, far from their building of a new world.
There is a sudden chuffing rumble and a metallic shriek and for a startled moment Paul thinks the Martians have found their way here; but it is only a train, hurtling along the nearby railway line, probably getting out of London. There have been so few trains lately that to hear one is a shock.

Paul coughs bitterly. Always a cough, always a cold, always wheezing. Even night-time in the desert wouldn’t have helped; but dear Margaret encourages him to move on, place to place. Some places are good, meaning he is inspired to paint, and others less so. There seems no formula for a good place versus a bad.

He shelters in wreckage embedded in the trees, something between the legendary Vedovelli V-class aeroplane (The Phantom of Issy-les-Moulineaux, so called by ace reporter Jacques Beauregard due to its being glimpsed around the airfield being tinkered on but never once actually seen to fly) and the equally legendary WSK-Mielec Belphegor, which to his surprise did reach production. I suppose in a command economy you do what you’re told. By all accounts many are still in regular use … as chicken coops. Useless as aeroplanes the wingless fuselages are ideal for your cluckers and layers.

Both planes were record breakers in their own way: the Vedovelli, possibly the largest flying machine in the world at the time, although ‘fly’ it scarcely did, has gone down in history as the weirdest, an over-engineered behemoth that appears to defy Euclidean geometry. The Belphegor on the other hand was the only from-the-outset jet-powered biplane and the slowest operational jet aircraft, as solid as a brick outhouse and better used as one (or a chicken coop, q.v.).
Paul contemplates the wreckage which partakes of these two machines equally; product of some Martian mind perhaps that had only the birds to go on and heard the wind in the wires, launching itself aloft on this strange new world they were building until it crash-landed in a dead sea of wrecked mechanicals.

He sneezes. Some new contaminant, perhaps, unbelievable desolation raining down from the stars, the very reason he gave up on those people with their depressing self-hatred years ago and became a wanderer around the south and west of England while as dear Margaret agreed he was temperamentally better suited to France. And yet had he gone to France he would have missed the Wittenham Clumps; no quick trains back up to the Home Counties for him. Now the Clumps are shorn of their vegetation and their very shapes are wrecked; but could he cast off the shackles of home and go to Paris, say, or the Cote d’Azur? It seems unlikely. He surveys the tangled wreckage around him and the shorn-off trees in this part of the Wood and thinks it a silver sea forever breaching on the safe soil of South London.And given the state of his lungs a new contaminant will probably kill him before long. He imagines the shapes around him rebuilt, equivalents for the wrecked tripods, the leafless trees.

Something shifts in the wreckage beneath him where he sits. He moves, stands up quickly, thinking he has disturbed a fox, something roosting in the tangle below. He coughs again, abruptly, and there is a scurrying from within the broken fuselage, if you can call it a fuselage. Something tentacular and almost completely void of energy flops limply into the dim sunlight; followed by another which waves in the air and collapses back like wrack dragged into the undertow.
There’s someone in it … people in it!
And Paul is face to face with a Martian, its oval-eyed, teardrop-shaped head lolling up at him and its breath wheezing and hissing as the rain begins to fall.
I know how that feels, old friend, he thinks.
He knows the creature beneath him is dangerous; and yet that it will not survive. Not just an enemy; The Enemy. Is it like a bear, able to lash out with a dying paw and smash a fragile human skull; or is it truly sinking back, powerless, into the primordial dark whence we all came and into which we must all go? The tentacles grip the broken controls of its flying machine and the V-shaped lipless mouth twists and hisses something.
You have not survived, he thinks, and perhaps, neither did I.
Paul reaches for the tentacle nearest him and grips it, half expecting perhaps the Martian to seize him around the throat - though only humans have ever done that to him - and choke the life out of him.
What, more than usual?
But as he does so the huge eyes close and the creature slumps back into its machine. Paul knows when something is dead, he has seen it often enough during the war against the Martians, and he is seeing it now.
A bird calls once from a branch and flaps off into the leaden air against a silvery sky. Paul lets go and walks through the wood, his thoughts tormented and as dark as the shadows between the trees.
Far away a train puffs asthmatically along, heading for the ruins of Woking and beyond them, the sea at Portsmouth.

We are building a new world.

Notes:

This story first appeared on "Archive of our Own" (AO3), a publication of the Organisation for Transformative Works.  The title "To the Wood We Came" is from a book I remember from that old fusty school library, but no trace of it have I found. I would think it's a quote from Dante - "In the middle of our life I came to a dark wood where the way was lost" but who was the 'we'?

I wanted to imagine Paul Nash if his war was the Martian War and not the 1914-18. The reference to the wrecked aircraft, as well as evoking his painting 'Totes Meer' (Dead Sea) is anachronistic in bringing in the 1970s-vintage Belphegor but I wanted to mix that reference with the equally peculiar Vedovelli (1910-12).
Of course it's all a reference to the pandemic, what with viruses ravaging the population, and also possibly Brexit, sealing our Paul in the UK despite his affinity for 'La France.'
Paul's wife Margaret Odeh is an interesting character and some time I mean to do a Wikipedia page for her.