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Feast Your Eyes on The Epifany

Träumerei (reverie or dreams) not Trauma!

THE APOCRYPHAN, aka THE APOCRYFAN

Eibonvale Press 2023

Available here: https://www.eibonvalepress.co.uk/books/books_Apocryphan.htm

The Presence in the Words

The mansion’s antechamber was bustling with people, bristling with barbed comments.

Richard Wiles wondered how all the various paths he could have picked in life had finally led him here of all places. Sooner or later, the double doors would open and he would be allowed entrance to the Presence; along with all the others who were currently standing with contortions of cups on saucers and iced biscuits on plates. Not forgetting the cucumber sandwiches for the still peckish.

There was an older lady in particular whom Wiles found attractive, her eyelashes batting like crickets’ legs: and a young lady he half-recognised from a different occasion. As if in echo, the latter half-smiled at him, but her eyes remained cold and self-seeking. He knew she was here, like all of them, on trial or, perhaps, audition. He decided to test the water: “Coffee’s up to scratch, for a change.” Or was it taste?

 She nodded minimally.

“I don’t know about you,” he continued, “but I’ve got butterflies doing pike-and-tuck in my stomach.” Or were they death’s-head moths?

However, by now, the double doors had swung suddenly wide — and Wiles, as a mere constituent of people-flow, was ushered into the Presence. Relative quiet had settled upon everybody, whispers intermittently breaking the silence, awe and wonder shrouding their earlier pointed remarks.

Wiles noticed the young lady’s hemline was too short for comfort. And she didn’t seem to mind him crowding her: the touch even of their clothes being a taste of deeper attractions. And the mixed-up sharing of a coffee cup.

=

The night before, Wiles had tasted a haunted mansion. Or was it tested?

The dream had been his earlier special assignment for the “audition”. He had left it to the last minute to ensure optimum build-up of “effects”. The edifice stood amidst the woods and the winding slopes at the very edge of the city, whence one could still just discern the distant sky-scrapers slowly rippling in the heat haze. The two towers of the mansion itself could easily be mistaken for trees, as Wiles clambered the nettly shingle. But he knew better. A full-fledged human being had built the main chassis earlier in the century from disused Elizabethan bricks and, there not being sufficient of them to finish it off, had erected its two front corner towers from well-seasoned planks of hybrid wood. The real trees, furthermore, sheltered the building against an all-over scrutiny from any angle of approach. This added to its mystery. Indeed, it had probably been built solely for its mystery by those early pioneers of imperfect humanity. And at night, both imperfection and darkness were indistinguishable.

Wiles did not bother to knock, despite a suspicion that something was at home. The chimneystack was smoking — surely such a constructed appendage, spoiling the otherwise regular lines of the roof, was not made of wood, too.

He walked straight into the hall, without further speculation, and bumped, with little or no foreplay, into the first vampire, which abruptly emitted a squirt of blood: boy-shaped with eyes all over its head like sunken wounds where eyelashes formed patches of hair. The neck was the colours of a peacock’s tail. The white frockcoat hid further disharmony.

Wiles did not have time to wonder why the vampire hadn’t hidden itself, when a second one slid down from the floor above, disguised as stair carpet. It led Wiles, squashy-underfoot, towards the lower bedroom areas.

The third vampire, lying inside a large cradle that was bent-coffin shaped, beckoned him with doughy fans. Confident of this being a dream, Wiles knew none of it was real; he burned a cigarette in evident nonchalance. Scientists were meant to be cool. And, after all, what else could he be called but a scientist with a metaphorical butterfly-net trawling “effects” to the hilt, indeed an objective ghost hunter of rational rigour. He somehow realised the vampires angled towards him leading them to the Presence in the city. Without realising the Presence might be already here in the mansion.

Meanwhile, he knew that things had become so clinical and impersonal, so technologically soulless, so “screen-staring”, the off-beat humours of outside-city idiosyncracies such as these in a vampires’ mansion were worth far more than priceless gold to the Presence, wherever it happened to reside.

As Wiles mimicked being upon a torrent of terrors, the vampire in the coffin-cot weltered in moony-eyed desire. So Wiles had to try blotting out his own lust by opening himself to other thoughts: for example, the Presence itself in the city, what was it? An essence constituted of all the sophisticated communication systems of the city vibrating as one? A god that needed to drain souls to fill up its own soul? Or just a building with meat ingredients, a combo of inner yells of pain and outer inscrutabilities of living death?

The thoughts tangled in the thinking. Wiles smiled and surrendered to the trawling flirtation of the vampire. Wiles thought he might as well enjoy himself while he was here in a dress-rehearsed dream on a test and he slipped into the wide cradle-crypt. Ghosts hung about like heavy, disused Christmas finery — dead, but intended to make the place alive with extraneous joy. The vampire in the cot, although girl-shaped, brought something special  to the sensual banquet upon a bed of pilau bristles. Wiles cursed for even all vampires seemed more male than was good for them.

=

She nodded maximally.

It was the same young lady with whom Wiles had attempted small talk, in the antechamber. The Presence surrounded them;  the change in ambience had driven her even nearer to Wiles. Better the evil you know than the evil you know even deeper. She took his hand; a haunted look batted back and forth between their faces: more than just love. Wiles was itchy with something he both wanted to scratch and not scratch, in equal extreme measures.

All the audition-makers were giving forth with their weekend’s assignments, releasing fluttering wings of gathered idiosyncracies into the chamber for the benefit of the Presence which needed such will o’ the wisps and human frailties to feed upon; otherwise it would be nothing but the brick walls it was made of.

Wiles swaddled his brain with a ravelling irrelevancy: there was not any wood at all in the city centre.

Then, abruptly, everybody, except Wiles and his adopted sweetheart, turned away from the Presence. They somehow suspected that there was at least one among them ill-fitting the ambience. Wiles visibly wilted in the wake of the others’ unswerving glances, crumbling under the memory of the unadulterated terror he had once tried to channel from carnal passion. He was indeed the inadvertent carrier of red-riddled death to the Presence, rather than simply the frills of human frailty. The young lady fleetingly flinched from his side, realising with whom she had been courting more than just small talk. No wonder the coffee they’d sipped from the same cup’s lip had become surface-mapped with crimson. 

Thankfully, they’d both learnt that true presence was in the deep draughts of earlier  dreams. Never upon the pages of a book that were originally sliced from wood. Real ghosts, you see, were mainly depicted on-line. And vanish as soon as they are printed.

Disconnected Miniatures (2)

COMPLETE LIST HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/28/mansions-as-miniatures/

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Continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/05/disconnected-miniatures-of-fiction/

1. Epilogue
2. Headless Hall
3. No Light To Travel Faster Than
4. Dream Notes
5. A Darning of Darkness
6. The Tea-Lady’s Urn
7. Following The Rhythmic Rakes
8. Nosebleed
9. The Painted Lady
10. The Colour of Pain
11. In The Carrel
12. Yeti
13. Particle of Time
14. Dream as a Form of Hitch-Hiking
15. Abrecocks & Zawns
16. Written Specifically For Each Reader
17. The Tangled Bones of Dream
18. Widow, Wraith and Wife
19. Upon Mansion Roofs

END

See also:

Fictoniatures

And:

#DFLewisThingie Links

Connections

Walking into that mansion was not unlike coming home – and after a lifeful of disasters, it was good to feel everything panning out at last. Everybody deserves at least one lucky streak. So, as soon as I passed through the double-doored entrance, which had been left partially open, I felt instantly that I needed to turn straight back, if only to find the Estate Agent to tell him I would definitely have it at the asking price. And what did indeed the price ask? Only a few years of self-deprivation, until my inheritance worked itself through the system.

Inside the mansion, as well as darkness, there was a faint but pervasive scent, rather like flowers left fractionally too long in the vase. Indeed, I questioned my own motives of walking into the mansion without permission – although it did have a For Sale sign outside, where its dark brown roofs had clambered towards a henge of chimneystacks, and I imagined my future children playing on them, as the dare-devils they would surely become. The walls that were half hidden by the shadow of the overhanging gutter were constructed from larger than normal bricks with generous fillings of grey cement – and, each about a yard apart, were set fluted pillars of what appeared to be creosoted wood. The garden path had led me, between rows of bending sunflowers, towards those double doors that seemed to be the open covers of a black book with its narrow spine pointing right out at me. However, I could not read the title until I arrived close up and discovered it was not a title at all but the glimmering of a candleflame being carried up the long winding stairs to the first landing. The light disappeared as soon as I thought I knew it was a candleflame. I had slipped the latch of the garden gate with some surprising ease – after having previously negotiated some dreadful roofed alley-ways which led from the centre of the city. What I had spotted roosting on one of the chimneystacks was not a TV aerial, but something with a similar configuration: angular bones and a tiny beating heart: brooding as it gnawed upon a gable-post: balanced upon splayed elbows.

I would have come through Hell to reach my ideal home and, having arrived there, I obliterated all idea that evil lived in or on it. It was indeed a family mansion being sold by an Estate Agent in a normal city. The heady scent of dying flowers was stronger as I backed along the hallway searching for a light switch. Yes, yes, my inheritance would surely pay for this place. No fear of that. But, I would have a few years to wait, since my Maiden Aunt was showing no promise of death, as yet. To borrow on the strength of an inheritance, young man, the consultants had told me, was difficult, because no financial institution worth its salt would accept as security the fortunes of death, especially if connected with the continuation of an auntie’s good will to her nephew.

For a moment, I believed I was still in the garden. The sky had disappeared altogether, leaving a black hole in its stead. The wafting of a sound like sea in the treetops became noticeable the further I edged towards the foot of the stairs, where the faltering candleflame had earlier climbed. Pull yourself together, young man, you were inside a mansion where you should never have ventured. You were not invited. Go back to the garden, where the flowers and daylight should still be fighting back the onset of darkness. Return down the garden path. Go back, young man, and found your dynasty amid a destiny elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I heard the stairs creaking, as if somebody was passing down them towards me – or something – or, even, something else.

“Who’s there?” I asked in the faintest whisper, in case it heard me.

No answer. Whatever it was, it did not have the courtesy to renew its candleflame to shine up its face and allow me to recognise it. 

“But I never had a candleflame in the first place,” it would snarl into my ear on eventually finding my ear.

“I saw the candleflame, when I came down the garden path,” I insisted, “like the gold lettering on the spine of a battered black book.”

When I had at first come to that city, the last thing I had expected was an adventure. I had arrived in search of a home, in some ordinary backwater close to an underground station. I had not anticipated actually having to crawl along the train-tunnels to get there. What else could one do, when there was literally nobody around to work the London Transport, with property prices in the city being so sky high? All to do with the base bank rate, my consultants had told me. My adventure was turning out to have no start nor end. Only an ever-expanding middle.

I remembered I had some matches in my pocket, for which I proceeded to fumble. Eventually, I produced a short-lived flame and saw sitting on the intricately carved stairs an entity with wide wire whiskers which turned widdershins and clockworkwise: the rest of its body not a body at all but a series of stair-rods erecting themselves from the treads. It was evidently related to the thing I had spotted brooding on the chimneystack when first I approached the mansion.

Travelling to the city, originally, had been a trial in itself. I hailed from north of the cotton mills, and all connections had to be arranged by my Maiden Aunt, she and I poring over the thick timetables for months in advance, till we both suffered the same small print headache. It all worked, though. Go forth, young man, and forge your connections. And so I did, bribing station workmen to bend the points in the direction I wanted to proceed and waving at railway children from the carriage, beckoning them to send their schoolfriends ahead into the tunnels to clear away the obstacles that old rail workings often had. In hindsight, I hope the wheels were soft on them kids.

Could this be the Estate Agent squatting on the stairs? Or a policeman, having been tipped off in advance about my breaking and entering? But I did not break anything, officer.

“Climb to the bedrooms, young man,” the entity seemed to indicate with one of its bony metal feelers. It clanked and churned. It stepped aside, only to become part and parcel of the iron banisters.

All that in the flame of one match?

The stairs wound up for longer than I anticipated and I was sure they missed out floors, heading me towards the topmost attic, giving me no choice but to follow a destiny that was only at its planning stage. As I ascended, the banisters closed behind me, of which ratchetting only well-oiled machinery could boast. It gradually grew lighter, for sky was filtering through the ill-made roof. Or a roof gradually attenuating  through wear and tear from what sat on it.

I had bid farewell to my Maiden Aunt with a light kiss on the wrinkled petal of her cheek. She sat buried in her four-poster bed, surrounded by a lifetime’s knick-knacks and her pen. She took me by the hand telling me to beware the city down south: “It’s like a big cobweb of tracks, cantilever bridges, tunnels and flyovers, and buildings too tall for their own good.” She had always had a wondeful turn of phrase and with her words ringing in my ears, I had entered upon the connections. Click, clack, click, clack, they went. And the roof was swelling down upon me, threatening to make the attic nothing but a room with no space, or a space with no room. Desperately, I pushed upwards. Changing direction, I realised that effort was now required elsewhere, and I pushed with straining muscles against the rising floor. I heard the crunching of my bones, as they splintered into my flesh. There was a war raging within my very body, so I quickly changed the track-points and escaped like a ghost down the empty stairs, leaving the rest of myself to its own devices.

It was easy now, because I had become the haunter and the mansion the haunted, instead of vice versa. With the likes of a ghost loitering along the stairways, the Estate Agent would find it even harder to sell. For a while, it didn’t seem to matter that all this may have been a story in a book into which I had inadvertently stumbled. But there was one vital connection I had missed till it was too late – the despicable class of person who was to read the story. I suppose it could have been worse: I could have become a mere image on a small flickering screen in the corner of that person’s room – fed by monsters to monsters – with no connection between fiction and fact except the TV aerial.

Somewhere else, I sensed that a little bit of me cried its heart out. And an old lady took off her wire glasses so as she couldn’t see me cry. Silence helped the pretence.

Repetitive Logic as Sic

Alan was ankle deep in the real mucky he’d’ve preferred to have avoided.  But Alan, when he realised that — to reach Edna — he needed to negotiate various spillages she’d left in her wake, decided to remove his sock and shoe with the aim of hopping towards her known whereabouts. 

This wasn’t an alien land.  Nor was it home. It was a cross between two worlds: the first being the sane environment of Earth where he’d been brought up and become accustomed to its logical causes and effects, the world of his earliest memories and subsequent education by similar creatures to him; and a second world, one with unpredictable motives (the motives of  the environment itself, of its inhabitants, even of visitors to that world as they became gradually subsumed by the cultures infesting it).  These two environments had merged in Alan’s mind and he had ceased to be aware of exactly which world he now inhabited.  Was he at home or was he visiting?  Edna was common to both worlds so her presence here proved nothing.

Common sense told him that he currently inhabited the second world, the alien one, but it had gradually and imperceptibly gathered to itself characteristics of his home world, a world which he loosely called Earth.  For example, he was treading over floorboards, listening to birdsong, and the wailing of wind in a chimney.  Yet the floorboards were covered with a colourless slime about two inches thick.  Even measurements were measured out by Alan in terrestrial terms.  The substance that held his footprints intact was a gooey one, more akin to glue than slime, but slime was the nearest he could reach it with his newly restricted vocabulary.  On Earth he had been a wordy soul, even been a writer of some literary note, but now, he found himself searching for the correct words for any situation.  Call it slime, then. Though, back home, or fully back home, he would have called it something else. Carpet deep pile perhaps. Or slug dust. Or cat sick. Or even rat droppings.  Best of all, a real mucky. But here, in his present predicament of place, time and  perceived ownership of mind, it had to be slime.  He did not even question it.  The word was sacrosanct.

He could now discern Edna at the far end of the mansion’s hallway.  Except it may not have been a hall at all, since there was a four poster bed somewhere along its length.  She was recognisable as Edna, since he clung on to a snapshot of her from Earth.  He kept glancing at it and comparing the features of the beautiful woman there frozen with the more fluid version at the end of the hall.  However, this method of identification and attempted self-assurance on Alan’s part did not allow comparison of Edna’s respective voices.  On Earth, he recalled it quite lilting and pleasant to hear, unlike some other women he had once known back home.  Yet, here, he heard only slimy gutturals emerging from her mouth.  Words formed in the throat or much lower and then set loose by the mouth, without any intervention of the mouth’s vocal implements.

“Alan, go away.  I can’t… I am not the person you once knew.  I am dangerous…”

Alan was not diverted by this perhaps autonomous disguise of her true personality.  He knew it was Edna, despite the slimy vowels and, incredibly, even slimier hard consonants of her speech.

He decided to respond vocally himself.  He hadn’t attempted this before here in this hybrid world of known and unknown forces of nature.  Not only did he have to dig deep for the correct words, he needed also to dig even deeper for a voice that would carry them towards Edna.  He noticed that she now lolled on the bed, beckoning him with the crook of a little finger.  Fear was the most natural emotion for Alan to feel in these circumstances.  But, unaccountably, he sensed a quite uncharacteristic courage building up in his loins, together with a passion and desire for the body he recalled to be Edna’s.  But first the speech, the one he owed her, to fulfil their mutual pretensions towards dialogue or conversation.

“Edna … I love you … I always loved you … nothing can come between us … nothing or nobody.”

There he’d said it.  He sighed with relief … except the sigh was more a phlegmy wheeze than a waft of expended air.  The toes of his hopping foot were now webbed with the consistency he’d once called slime.  Seemed ages ago now. He needed to use his other foot to prevent unbalancing.  An unbalanced mind – as his surely was – needed at least the countervailing force of a firm physical stance.  He placed the other foot – still shod – to the floor or ground.  The sole of the shoe immediately dissolved into the same substance upon which it trod.  As did the sock.  But the flesh of his foot stood firm.  That gave him more courage of conviction.  He gave a sudden sideways look at the window in the hall.  Through it he could see trees similar to those he’d seen all his life growing on Earth.  And in Earth.  As if life was a twofold process, outer and inner, and this applied to everything, even stone and wood.

By now – amid a further turmoil of ungrounded thoughts – Alan had reached the side of the bed, where the curtains had been pulled fully round.  Edna’s voice – still unpredictable and unrecognisable from his previous experience of hearing it – managed to thread its way through the curtains, but not without becoming tangled in further slimy appendages of tangible, visible quality.  A voice that Alan could see negotiating its acoustic path towards his ears.

“We are not here at all.  So go away, Alan, and nobody will know or see any difference. “

Alan scratched his head – but felt only the slime that he assumed to be his own brain.

“Why not go away yourself, then?” Alan managed to say — despite the touch of his fingers to his own brain having managed adversely to affect the mind’s powers of thought as well as of speech.  “Nobody would notice any difference.”  These last words he managed to emit were more like birdsong than human vocalisation.   He smiled.  As he pulled the curtains of the bed aside.

And then one heard only slime gurgling, at the grinding interface of two worlds emerging through the deep throats and chimneys of untenable reality into the possibility of carnal, if not cranial, congress as a softening superstructure.

A snapshot seen as a singular dropping to the floorboards. Then through the floorboards. More likely it was through the ceiling and then through the now empty mansion roof into the freedom of a birdsong sky. Assuming they were the right words to describe it. Whatever it is, it is, so take it as read.

Torque of Blood and Stone

Once upon a time there was a vampire and he resided in the city, basically minding his own business.  Nobody knew about him since everybody was moonlighting.  The waves of world recession were crashing over the dams and even vampires, no doubt, found it hard to get blood from stones.

He lived in the city’s periphery, accommodating himself in a large mansion called Rollingside.  Those of you owning cellars with outside access should beware of such Earth stowaways (as vampires have been called in some circles), especially if you seldom check out its integrity as a safe haven for you and your family … simply waiting for the odd rare occasion when Hell breaks loose (which, according to the political complexion of the world, is becoming less rare) and, then, you would have to clamber down there, with  daughter Maisie giggling a lot, your partner Rachel moithering over the supplies, little Dick squawking fit to wake the very bogey-man he fears at the bottom of the dark bunker stairs and, finally, yourself, heart in mouth, yet proudly responsible and decidedly in charge.

You had, of course, no reason to suspect that an Earth stowaway lurked in the cellar of Rollingside.   You had even less reason to believe in the existence of such creatures.  If anyone used the word ‘vampire’ in your presence, you were apt to guffaw loudly, slap the culprit on the back and buy him another drink in the hope that he might give you another laugh.  After all, you are relatively strait-laced, if good-humoured, well-respected, a slightly unimaginative individual who takes manly duties seriously enough to make you avoid anything resembling a free spirit.  And, what were vampires, if they were not free spirits?

Well, of course, there did come a day when you needed to visit the cellar.  It was not exactly an international crisis that caused such out of character behaviour — more your own fears.

You had had a dream. And dreams were usually things to ignore, if they were not forgotten first, which, of course, they almost invariably are. But this dream was sufficiently vivid for you to have recognised every corner of Rollingside, as the dream took you on a guided tour.  There was Maisie’s teenage hovel at the back of the building, walls covered in pop promos.  Rachel’s sewing-room, stocked with the tiniest and largest needles you had ever seen.  Dick’s nursery, all as realistic as it was during waking hours, except the jack-in-the-box was perceptibly larger.  Your own den, full of stuffy books, most concerned with the business whence your salary derived — and, yes, that old typewriter that was clattering away as if it were a word processor.  However, the trip round the cellar, was the dream’s tour de force.  Even the impenetrable darkness was penetrable enough to discern the dark shape cowering in the corner close to the old mangle you couldn’t remember stowing in the cellar all those years ago.  Yet, of course, it rang true that it was there.  

The shape moved. But you woke up before you could establish the shape’s nature. Shapes were often simply that: an almost formless form that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

And, today, being a national holiday, you were determined to establish the state of the cellar for real.  Rachel was in her sewing-room, making knickknacks for sufferers of the recession.  Maisie listened to some choking noise which she called music: well, if she weren’t listening to it, she must be deaf!  Dick was on his afternoon nap, having, all morning, driven you mad with his own incessant madness.  Indeed, Rollingside was culling no fungus, as you often said, when in a puckish mood.

But you were not in a puckish mood today.  The dream had been unsettling and the door to the cellar was sticky.  You examined your hands for tell-tale stains.  Your hurricane-torch splattered the walls with a light they had not seen for as long as it takes a page from one of your stuffy books to incubate a visible foxing.  You tentatively tread downwards, knowing that the steps were dependable stone.  Slowly, did it.  Ah, there was the mangle in the corner, remarkably similar to how you recalled it all those years ago, forgetting for a moment that a dream had reminded you as recently as last night.  No nondescript shape close to it, however.  But why should there be?  Dreams were never real.  

The aperture to the outside showed not even a glimmer of its presence, thus summoning a glow of satisfaction to your heart.  You had sealed it up all those years ago, leaving not even one crack to show the light through. Playfully, you gave the mangle handle a quick turn, expecting a rust-choked groan to issue forth.  It was, of course, immoveable.  A cause for a smile.  There was nothing more comforting than knowing nature was a stickler for entropy’s rights.

You squatted in the corner, to gain a few moments’ quiet meditation.  Your den upstairs was never sacrosanct enough, not sound-proofed, a place from where either Maisie, Rachel or Dick could easily flush you out upon the slightest pretext.  Here, you were supremely alone. Stowed away – like the mangle.

Someone else, the man you never wanted to be in the first place, left up the stone steps, and you heard the door slam decisively shut.  You were now even more solitary, with him gone.  Simply a shape.  Not even a bag of bones.  All the life-blood squeezed out.  And not one dream to disturb you.  Heaven, you thought, sheer heaven.  A breaking surf-wave of Nirvana. And, the mansion’s mangle turned of its own accord…

Ghosts Were Too Far Fetched

She reached behind her and adjusted the drawstring. Clive couldn’t see what she was doing because it seemed as if she were merely fidgeting. If he knew she was trying to signal to someone in the garden by means of the slightest movement of the curtains, he would have quickly moved her to another chair. As it was, she could barely reach the string and it had never properly worked even with someone standing up and giving it almighty tugs when the shorter evenings drew in. The curtains only worked by pulling them manually along the runners without the use of vertical pulley-systems.

Clive watched the pelmet shake. The girl was evidently creating this effect either by direct physical purchase between her and the curtain-rod or by mind over matter. The mantelpiece clock was shuddering nearer to the edge, threatening to fall off … but it always did this when it struck the hour. Clive had to re-adjust it every thirteen days before it could actually topple off. However, the coal scuttle had never before budged so significantly in the short space of time between him feeding the fire with more coal and the fire again threatening to go out. There must be a coaldust imp in there, he thought. All fairy tale stuff. 

The girl had by now slipped her hidden fingers along the length of the drawstring after adjusting it short of obviously tugging upon it – then allowing it to fall back with the clatter of its dangling aglet against the glass of the window. Clive turned sternly towards her. On her lap was the kitchen cat looking plaintively up at him. The girl’s eyes, though, were icy. The cat had just escaped from the coal scuttle, judging by the black smudges all over its white fur.

One of the servants stood in the open lounge door with a tray in his or her hand. Clive couldn’t actually see the servant – other than the shape – because of the shadows thrown by the firelight. The standard lamp cast one slanting beam right over the face. Meanwhile, the wireless at a barely perceptible volume tinkled in the corner, either with music or the high-pitched voices of a Home Service play on the wireless. The servant , having emerged from the rectangular wreath of the doorway, declared a feminine bosom as the tray was posited squarely on the tea-trolley – which proceeded to roll forward through some hidden momentum.

“Anything else, Sir?” piped the servant as she minced back toward the welcoming folds of shadow by the doorway.

“No, unless you have forgotten the strainer,” said Clive a trifle hesitantly. He did not want to give the game away. The girl had sat unnoticed near the window; the cat was also still on her lap, purring in tune with the wireless in the opposite corner. Whoever the girl had been abortively making signals to in the garden would, by now, be subsumed in the afternoon fog, fog that was fated not to lift until late morning the next day. Dusk was earlier every day – ad infinitum it seemed as the evenings continued to draw in – and he went over to pull the curtains together; but they stuck halfway.

“Let me do it, Sir,” called the servant bravely, it appeared, from the hallway, having no doubt heard the throaty catch of the curtain ring upon the rod. It sounded like a different servant from that distance. Clive shook his head absentmindedly, convinced in his own mind that such a gesture was tantamount to an answer for someone out of eyeshot. It worked – for the servant failed to turn up again. The cat scuttled from the girl’s lap and decided to preen itself in front of the dying warmth of the fire.

Something was riffling the inner layer of net curtains as it walked along the window ledge. He shuddered. In the garden with you, he mouthed. And with a flourish, he managed to tug the curtains together upon the grate and grind of a friction that should have swished along upon a coat of linseed oil. He had hated the cod liver sort of oil when he was force-fed it as a child for the good of his health. He sighed as he blotted out the night and whatever haunted the garden. Houses, these days – even old-fashioned ones like this mansion with lit consoles masquerading as ancient wirelesses – could not countenance being haunted. Ghosts were too far fetched. Only the outside world, Clive believed, could harbour the shudders and fears of yesteryear. And now he had blotted them out with one clumsy curtaincall.

The girl had followed the cat towards the dull embers of the fire that lit the room like one huge crazy-paved eyeball.

He decided that he would have to put the light on in the room if the teatray of goodies were to be shared out upon and into individual items of crockery. 

With the fire out now, who was coming down the chimney? Soot falling into the grate like droppings. Or something had been tugged up the other way through the flue. Clive shivered. He felt a chill working round him. It wasn’t just sickness. The girl had left for the kitchen: where she must work as an oven cleaner or cook’s assistant when she wasn’t dusting or acting as chambermaid. Light footsteps from the wireless gave the impression she was still in the room. Clive poured the tea with a gurgle more like oil than a scalding hot infusion of refreshment. 

Servants were far and few between in these days of modern living, where both men and women worked all hours God had given simply to earn a crust — or a roof: or at least one slate per week eventually to make a proper roof one day. He could hear far off scrabbling as if workmen were erecting scaffolding above the mansion itself: to mend its roof. Builders from Hell, the TV often claimed. Strange they should still be working during this Autumn when evenings drew in with darkness so quickly … a season shortened upon God’s own drawstring the aglet of which rattled even louder than the roofers at work.

The Web Across The Door

As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

He didn’t even comb his night-strewn hair. His face was not ugly, nor was it handsome. His figure was without even a sign of portly or lean.

His clothes were drabber than they were smart; so drab the darkness could hide them in further folds of themselves. His voice picked out words from silence, words which meant little more than the creaks of the floorboards. His touch was like touching one of my own hands with the other. I put him down to nothing but a haunting thought – or, perhaps, at least, the ghostly residue of some man who had once anciently been an infant chimney-sweep since become a man.

When I reached the top, I looked back to see his back backing off down the stairwell, disappearing into nothingness — if something could disappear that was never there in the first place.

I lowered myself into half-a-kneel, half-a-bend, all mixed with a crumpled crouch, and picked up from the tousled stair carpet a loose strand that must have floated there from his head of night-strewn hair. I held it closer to my child-young eyes and watched it scribble like the filmic interference on old celluloid, in shapes of words that meant nothing to my childish mind beyond their mere audibility as softest carpet-slipper sounds.

”What you doing dear?” asked my mother, as her tall figure half-filled the slanting yellow shaft of her half-opened bedroom door.

”Following myself up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,” I said as pipingly plaintive as possible. After all, I had a childish image to maintain.

“Don’t be a soppy and go to bed. It’s high time, darling, you were in dream land.”

My mother’s voice was the only one that could hold sweetness as well as righteous anger.

I dropped the hair that wasn’t there. I let out my lungs with breath blacker than the sooty air and sucked in a new draught, one that was tinged with the yellowness still left there by my mother’s now extinguished light from her now shut bedroom door.

I was suddenly a child again, one that no longer needed any childish image to remain my mother’s darling. But upon reaching the door of my erstwhile childhood lair, I found it wasn’t there. Only a mop of hairy air.

Just like any woman,…we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It’s all the same.” 
― Francesca Lia Block

The Haunted Tiredness

Sleep had long been serialised as quagmires of broken sweat and lucid dreams. The opposite of spit is swallow. There’s an animal in the room that’s gnawing the legs of the bed.

I  woke with a start — with those two fleeting images: all that remained of my dream. Indeed, I usually remembered nothing of what events my sporadic  sleep surrounded. 

But tonight was different. The darkness glowed brighter than the  luminous clock beside the bed. There was a lambency filling my eyes. I was unaccountably crying — the tears acting like tiny lenses, focussing the dull shimmer upon my retinas, almost blowing the optic fuses. I felt sick. But not with food. More with an over-fill of my own saliva — welling up like clear syrup from every corner of the body, along with mysteriously relentless urine in sore spirts. My pores seeped this fluid, too, like the slow-motion eruption from very tiny volcanoes. Surely all this was the dream and the animal-thing gnawing the legs of the bed was within real life: an event I’d left behind each time I fell at least partially asleep? 

But, in my real life, there should not be any animal in the whole house, let alone in my bedroom. Was the real life I’d left behind — to fall asleep and enter this dream of dull shimmer and bodily regurgitation — derived from earlier intakes of food? 

The real waking life I’d left behind surely must have an animal gnawing at the legs of my bed … because I was soon half-awake and half-dreaming and heard it coming from outside the dream.

I must now fully wake up. To face whatever it was. I called this animal (whatever it was) the Night Gnaw. But that was only because I called it this name from within the dream, the dream from which I was now trying to escape in order to cope with the danger represented by the Night Gnaw. I would no doubt call it something else in real waking life. To call it the Night Gnaw was decidedly a very dream-like thing to call it. So surely I must be dreaming to call it a Night Gnaw at all. Meanwhile, I was terrified that my sleeping body — the body that contained the mind that called it a Night Gnaw — was threatened by the thing in real waking life that I currently called the Night Gnaw while dreaming.

I was sweating, plain and simple, with dripping drops. My sleeping body felt slicked and slippery enough for the Night Gnaw to slowly — oh so slowly — swallow me whole, like a python with an ass. Then for it – even more slowly — to extrude parts of me back out, covered in the thick curds of the Night Gnaw’s own bodily fluids — like a slow motion salivation but now without appetite.

I must wake up before this happened. I  needed to battle against the Night Gnaw that I did not dream about but knew existed somewhere. And the darkness lost its lambent glow. My snores were no longer the dry gunning that they once were but more the rhythmic, rhyming gnaws of some animal with deeply irritable bowel syndrome, each of my limbs transmitting spasms of pain towards a new day’s haunted tiredness. Meantime, I knew the creature was to be reborn when I tried to sleep again. One day, I thought, it will vanish for good, and I managed to smile.