Authors: D. F. Lewis
He wanted to be a dare-devil. He wanted to stir her into realising that it was too dark in the nursery, since she could have blindly knitted on forever—and that her little charge was in danger of being snatched by the Angel Megazanthus who, to the boy’s certain knowledge, lurked up the chimney.
So he broke wind. And a distant siren fortuitously boosted the noise.
She jolted in her wicker chair. Her neck creaked, turning a stern gaze upon him.
“Ptcha! There are places for such noises.”
“I know, Nanny Edith, but my tummy-ache—and the fire’s going out—and I’m worried sick about the darkness.”
“I know what will sluice out your belly, young man, a good dose...”
At that moment, soot billowed from the chimney, as silently as an army’s secret striking of camp at the dead of night. It caught his eyes, so he heard no more of her mad ramblings. She did however absent-mindedly brighten up the end of a candlewick.
He returned to the pop-up book to bury himself in its pages, whilst yearning to hear the hooves which bore his parents homeward from the Klaxon opera. He kept at least one ear pricked, despite the utter dread of what he expected to hear with it. Nanna’s bones cracked loudly as she lifted herself from the wicker-claws of the chair to attend to the fire, perhaps to entice a few more flames from the glowing ruby embers...
...and Edith, elsewhere, elsewhen, had by now lowered the glowing bloom and positioned it between the points of her bosom.
That part of the face bearing the stain of the birthmark lacked features and, possibly, substance, too.
It was as if one could look straight through her head at the point which oriental mystics had once believed to be the site of man’s invisible Third Eye or, at least, an optical illusion of one. And through it, could be seen the blacker eye approaching from behind.
The hair of the painter’s brush was known intuitively to be manufactured from a dictator’s moustache. He had dipped it in a generous mix of strange paints. It formed a colour but at the same time not any colour under the Zodiac.
The tripod camera had lifted the photographer’s legs into the air like wings and was in the violent process of flapping around the garden, a huge insect-bird of a creature, clicking insanely. Nowhere to go, it could not bring itself to halt the wild careering—until it became entangled in the ivy trellises of the arbour. There it flinched for a few seconds, with fitful bursts of fire from its black beak and the squeezings of purple venom for a naughty boy’s tummy, until it died...
...like the fire in the grate.
Nanna Edith had by now lit the oil lamp hanging above the boy’s cot. He could vaguely see the remains of a dead entity woven in and out of the wire fireguard. In disgust, he threw the book towards the fire and, despite falling short, it proceeded to pop and crack. He made his way to the cot to crawl between the covers. And, then, while he dozed, he imagined he heard hooves clopping on distant cobbles.
As Nanna bent down to give him a little peck on his petally cheek, he heard her churning, phlegm-clogged breath and saw straight through her head—and through this head he saw a bloated spider-bird glistening in the crook of the ceiling. The little boy squeezed his eyes tight, praying for sleep; even nightmares would be preferable to such reality...
...and the man into whom Arthur was eventually to grow woke with a start. It was freezing in the garret and he had a job to do. Not before fulsomely farting, he quickly dressed in darkness, picked up his heavy-duty paintbrushes and departed into the shivering Klaxon square, to await the arrival of the bosses with the ladders. He stamped his feet to rid himself of pins and needles. He felt along his hardening top lip—yes, coming on nicely. Even rind-growth was, in itself, a would-be entity.
The Sunnemo dawn, when it painstakingly arrived, was colourless and cold. The hooves of the decorators on the cobbles could just be heard.
The man’s ambition was to paint on palace walls in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch, whilst a thousand Popes screamed inside.
And nurseries exploded within him as the brain bloomed red. A bogus waking fetched the thud of his parents’ hooves clopping up the stairs. He prayed they couldn’t have fruited each other with him in the first place. The
real
frighteners, however, would come when the little boy stopped dreaming.
*
Though I never lived during that kingdom of war—the one that blitzed London—I could easily imagine the colourlessness (or, rather, variegated brown) in every wet afternoon, prefiguring the contrast of night’s man-made lightning. Séances were being held amid the chintz of every blitz-free sitting-room; tears being shed in every outhouse; tender hands held, over and over again, in every beach hut and every park.
Well, for every every, amen. I shook my shoulders—not a shrug as such; more of a shudder. I tramped the back-end streets, wondering if I had been transported in time to those very afternoons when shapes emerging in fragile freedom from the night’s shelters (the Underground included) became the slowly nudging together of lightly-fleshed ghosts in the hope that something worthwhile or tangible would emerge by this serendipity of touch. Ghosts, I guessed, were to be everybody, even you and me.
This was to have been a poem. But it felt like prose fiction, with all the trappings of a plot, albeit missing a beginning, a middle or an end, if not all three. I could have gutted this fiction of its protagonists, but then nobody would have been there to report its waywardness.
I met Sudra in one of the many parks where courting couples were more colourless than most, if less tearful. She was someone with whom I assumed an immediate mutuality. She smiled, wiping away her tears with a burnt hankie. Collateral damage, she said, from last night’s bombs. I didn’t take umbrage at her false modernity. I knew she joked; this was then, not now.
A fleeting image of an evening when Sudra and I did walk under a fleet of doodlebugs—and suddenly a thing like a plum-pudding bursting with a fiery sauce came down and a lot of glass fell out of the windows on to us.
“Good job we were not there”: my first ever set of words to Sudra upon meeting in the park. My second: “Ghosts were simply the future.”
“Ghosts will forever be the past,” were my sweet Sudra’s last.
But truth told no rhymes.
*
Crazy Lope’s head was a camera, or it seemed like it to him; he saw everything as if framed for a motion picture. As a film, he had been given an adult certificate when he reached a relatively young age, but now, with the years piling up on top of each other, even that was not sufficient to cover the scenes he sought out.
One day, Lope discovered a backstreet of his home town he had not previously explored in which there was a tall disused warehouse with a faintly glowing signboard on the vestigial gantries. He could just peer through the misted up lens and see the letters spelling out SUDRA’S SHOES INC. He tried to pan round but his feet were rooted to the crumbling pavement and his neck had stiffened: he felt a movement on his shoulders as if a creature had lodged there, squinting through a slot in the back of his head. Whatever it was, claws were penetrating his overcoat and, finally, his flesh... fastening on to the blade bones like steel. He tried to shake it off. It was all well and good to imagine being a camera but here he was actually being used as one by some frightful inhabitant of the night.
His eyeballs revolved in the sockets, and the warehouse sign flickered out of freeze frame, scrolling like an old-fashioned black & white TV of the fifties. He desperately needed vertical hold: but that was the least of his worries: before long, he found himself going into cinemascope and edges of the scene he had previously not been able to view encroached and fluttered in from the sides: things like wriggling hairs and, then, insect feelers which often used to blemish projections upon the flea-pit screens of the sixties; the technicolor oozed back, and a blood-red haze gave the whole vista a dream-like quality; like speech bubbles in comic strips, this was a token of dissolving ready-reckoner reality, a symbol of beliefs being suspended.
The whole vistavision screen was now acrawl with translucent bird-wings beating faster than the strobe of the frames. He could no longer make any assumptions about his own sanity. He turned his eyes downwards as far as they would go without detaching the optic nerve, to see his cylindrical nose extending forth from his face: zooming in on the entrance of the warehouse: where he saw a camera filming him filming it: but surely it couldn’t be a real one, because it seemed to grow wonky and misshapen the more he stared back at it. However, he was pleased on discovering eventually that it was a female camera: but, as their noses came together across the street in some primitive ritual of a kiss, all he could see was the utter emptiness of his own backscreen soul.
That’s when the thing on his back extricated itself from Crazy Lope’s bones and scuttled off somewhere, abandoning the tickertape of the film to flap uselessly... as it reeled off the spool and tangled up the inside of his skull. Since it left no other room in there, his brain slithered out of the ear like a white worm in search of a bird.
*
The Saw circled: seeing the nightmare of identities and words blurring upon Inner Earth’s texture of vexed text.
Angevin angevin sudra sunnemo agraska sunnemo mike amy arthur alter-nemo off-detritus man-city whofage klaxon siren-yellow angevin core hawling hawling hawling horla susan sudra hilda ogdon edith clare amy dognahnyi lope lope godspanker ogdon nemo sunnemo balsam clacton klaxon london weirdmonger blake swift dylan thomas mike jules verne proust sunnemo nemo-moon lovecraft hataz tho azathoth king in yellow angevin.
And gradually, as Greg and Beth (and their two children) concluded their stressful stay-over tour holiday of Whofage, not only their own human shape of deep and realisable characterisation emerged from the shuttling semantics, phonetics, graphology of that very italic list but also they saw—within the circular silhouettes of these laconic words—the emerging spectre of the halting-station and its still steaming burnished train of ratcheted carriages ready to take them on to Earth’s Core via the customised hawling-tunnels. The antipodal angst.
If only one looked properly at any form emerging from traditional childish scribble, one would see the Angel Megazanthus also beginning slowly to glide from the adumbration or limning of meanings even if the very words ‘Angel Megazanthus’ were not overtly included as part of that once pencil-annotated list. They were, as words, however, contained in previous and later syntactical blocks of vellumed vexture.
*
Stub of pencil: “Most memories are false, but when I am faced with the only true memory, which is death, I have then no need of it.”
*
My wife Beth and I have been married happily for as long as my receding memory stretches. Although being overbearingly carpet-proud, she actually forgot to empty the vacuum.
Now, in the quiet evening of our years, she has taken to strange doings. They are obviously harder to explain than merely to describe, so I shall only attempt the latter in the hope of finding a key to the mystery in the fullness of time.
Recently, with us both fast asleep following the customary early nights, she has woken up and extended her housework through the small hours, only to tell me in the mornings that daylight can only reveal the normal jobs. At night, she maintains, different dust emerges, slops and moulds gone unnoticed during standard waking hours.
“But, my dear, you’re being absurd. I’ve heard of housewives spending all their days making everything spick and span, but disturbing your valuable beauty sleep...!”
“You think I’m mad, I know, Greg.”
“No, of course I don’t. But there’s not nearly enough to be done in this house to keep you busy, anyway. It’s only a two-up-two-down, after all. There’s no need at all to get up in the dark when all godfearing people are asleep.”
Then she repeats her claims about the night being more suitable for seeking out the otherwise unseen corners where real dirt worth its salt collected… not your mealy-mouthed daytime muck which masqueraded as encrusted food or merely as motes stirred by sunbeams.
So, I have decided to see for myself.
Often, she has been up and about without me having even broken the rhythm of my snores. Tonight, though, I tried to prop up my eyelids with the matchsticks of will-power, listening to her breaths becoming heavier and with longer gaps between. I heard the church clock striking ten which was more often than not the hour that acted as alarm for the Angel Megazanthus to spread its wings upon us both.
I pinched my lips between the teeth, almost to the gums... also attached a length of thread between one of her big toes and one of mine. She tossed fitfully, making the job harder than it would otherwise have been. Eventually, we were tethered in dreams…
It was no dream, however, when she awoke within the death-lull that night creates between both margins of nothing. My toe almost parted company with the bone which held it out like a stringless puppet. I followed her on the tips of my feet, wincing away the anguish in them.
Firstly, she proceeded to the broom cupboard under the stairs, whilst I remained on the landing looking down at her black felt house-cap. Several jointed broom-handles came out like giant spider-legs kicking.
Abruptly, I had the crazy notion that she must always spend the small hours crazily hoping to earn pin-money as a chimney-sweep in the neighbouring back-to-backs. That would explain everything, except the craziness itself.
Before I returned desultorily to our bed, she had bustled into the front parlour, cooing with delight at the layers of minced shadow she expected herself to sweep up.
I now lie cross-limbed, unmercifully awake. I can discern the still dented pillow next my own, for there is a dimness thrown by the street light feebly flashing outside the bedroom window in makeshift pleas for repair.
Almost without thinking, I lift up my own pillow and retrieve the old toothbrush I keep under there for lost fairies. I poke this into one of my ears and out the other, thus scattering dust in the air like dirty Angevin powder.