Nothing Comes From Nothing

It was as if something actually did … for once.
A small hand grasping for nothing, but nevertheless it was a real hand doing it. The moment felt sacred, even though it was just as easy to use the word ‘scared’. Was the sole witness scared or were the gestures of the hand having come from nothing indicating its own fear? But why was the witness’s first, if fleeting, impression that of the hand being sacred. Almost a religious act or a blessing, even a warning of greater things to come. Or a call for help to be rescued from a place that was the opposite of Heaven, a place that the witness dared not mention by name.
The witness looked around to see who else had noticed. But, of course, the witness was surrounded by nothing. The witness was alone. Except for the witness who witnessed the first witness and wrote this as description. Which witness came first? Which witness came third?
The hand was, by now, reaching further into sight; in fact the arm was showing itself up to the elbow. A small hand and an elbow to scale. The fingers wagged as if they yearned for a glove to be fitted snugly upon them. An imploring or importuning motion that hypnotised the first witness. Nothing had ever before given birth to such sadness by the hand’s apparent ability to bless or terrorise coming to nothing. It had tried to use methods of being both sacred and scary when hauled fully into the open, and given clothes to match the glove. The second witness who had written about the first witness, it seemed, had sacrificed a glove to satisfy the new arrival’s needs. And should another hand blossom forth, they seemed ready to sacrifice a second glove. Even a third glove. Nothingness had won or nothingness had lost. And the prospect of a third hand was an implication too far regarding exactly who was coming through. And how many!
We did not want our heartstrings tugged by such small hands’ pleading, strings that might otherwise be strung for Heavenly harps to play a more sacred tune than ‘somewhere over the nowhere’ elsewhere. All the witnesses, by now had vanished into nothing, scared that there could be no ending. A Hell of elbows linked each to each. Terror with all its gloves now off.

The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson

PART TWO continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/the-haunting-of-hill-house-shirley-jackson/

My other reviews of Shirley Jackson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/

My reviews of older and classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/

When I read this novel my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

Statement on Ai Visuals

It was exactly a year ago I started experimenting with AI Visual Art, little knowing what I was entering. There was indeed much stimulation in triggering shifting collages from my gestalt real-time reviews of individual authors. But that was then, and now is now. From today, I no longer have this facility.

Here are a few of the old aimages….

Gauche Stories

INCUNABULA MEDIA 2024

I am most honoured to have a second book from this publisher: https://incunabulamedia.com/fantasy

FINISH (Gibbon Moon Books)

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THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY by Gary Fry

A short story that appeared this year in NIGHTMARE ABBEY #3, available HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE.

***

“If that had been a gassy giggle, it surely couldn’t have emerged from anything that resembled a mouth.”

A horror story that might have got away from me, but I was somehow destined to return to my book-reviewing roots paradoxically to find myself reading this story (most of my previous reviews of this author are inexplicably rooted in my reading past and are linked from HERE), and this one is genuinely suspenseful, honestly and plainly horrific, with an evocative sense of place, in many ways unashamedly and gruefully what-it-is, perhaps echoing in some way my own journey from a grey financial humdrum job and bringing up a family in the 1970s and 1980s also somehow bringing me later to writing horror stories… but this adept tale is, of course, not about me nor my erstwhile situation; it is about someone quite different, but it is a sort of parallel, as the character diverts from a boring business meeting near Bradford (where I had a few business meetings myself!) and he eventually finds, in the area, the township where he was once a gauche youth in the first clumsy attempts of dating girls, and the place where one particularly coquettish girl used to live with her father, her house now derelict and haunted by old childhood games, and much more that comes through some telling slit in time  and place that we both fear and love. He sort of dared it to happen, although he was not the sort who could really dare anything.

As I, the reviewer, have, unashamedly in my own way, dared dilly-dally with an Al again…

ESSIC TH GH T TIL LIVSHRE

 

ESSIC  TH  GH  T  TIL  LIV S H RE

PLEASE LET GO by Johnny Mains

A new story being published in December 2023 in a re-issued ‘Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types’.

A REVIEW OF IT AS PART OF MY ‘DESSEMINATION’ PROJECT HERE:-

“…that Aickman, man, he is zipped up way too tightly.”

A story billed as the best story ever written, as gifted this morning to someone older by someone younger, yet the story itself is about the very vice versa or inversion of such an act. This being an as yet secret unread story by a man much younger than the ailing man like me to whom he has given it to review, a story about Robert Aickman and his death, written by a fan herein becoming an arms length confidant of the great writer during his period of  dying, with cameo parts by people who knew Aickman, and involving sickly spurts of blood that never quite erupt in the real church of his fiction, except perhaps in the secret unknown Aickman story that is somehow bequeathed to the younger man using the same title as this alternating-current fiction from the Mains man. 

Aches and pains, the growing pangs of death’s remains.

But spurts of blood can at least be inferred from the pages of PAGES FROM A YOUNG GIRL’S JOURNAL, from which pages are also found these words: “…fiction though it be, could hardly with sense have been written at all.”

My previous reviews of Johnny Mains:  HERE

Destiny’s Sanitation

“The sea is a sort of pants for the earth.”

 “Excuse me.”

“Pants for the earth, hiding any number of crabs and other crustaceans … whelks and winkles…”

“I don’t think that analogy bears much scrutiny, Fred.”

“I prefer to call it a poetic metaphor, Charlie. Not an analogy as such but a symbolic statement, a shorthand for carbon skidmarks…”

Laughter. Like squelches of breath. Or elbows greasing up for a fight.

“I know we humans need to clean up our act, Fred, but I’m sure there are better ways with which to flag these things up than imagining someone’s UNDERPANTS!”

“Charlie, if it gets people thinking, then that’s half the battle.”

The two figures disappeared into their own laughter, like shadows into night, except only one was laughing, the other still complaining that humanity had lost its way. From the other direction, two figures – whether the same or different shapes or silhouettes as those that had earlier disappeared – returned along the sea front. Night had passed around the world like an all-enveloping pair of trousers amid a soaking drizzle and only vague glimpses of the moon between the strides. The sea sounded even nearer when it couldn’t be seen. A plaintive, meaningful rhythm of the waves. A sense of slacks and tights. This time laughter was in short supply. In quick gasping bursts of breathless endeavour. But like with all good stuff, never mind the width, or its girth of mirth, one must feel the sheer next-to-skin quality. There was joy in the marching steps. Made-to- measure footprints in the light of new hopes, new beginnings. The two figures soon passed like strangers in the night, with no need to talk.

Come dawn – and a relenting of the drizzle into just light sprays of ghostly saliva – the sea was more like curdled ankle-sock than untidy Y-fronts. The sun rose as the burning head of a snake upon the ridge of the sky. Fred and Charlie bobbed sluggishly upon the now vaguely perceived swell. Laughter etched upon both faces as if they had resolved their differences with friendly boxer shorts just short of jutting fisticuffs. If it gets people sinking, then that’s half the battle. The wiry appendages of a sea monster dragged them under towards the half-submerged caverns where new races prepared themselves upon unmade seabeds for eventual emergence as denizens of the earth. Hirsute coils moving into alert states of variable concretion or vertical eyes flashing their eyelashes. But it was all a poetic metaphor. A pathetic analogy. None of it was real. Even Fred and Charlie seemed to lack any visible footprints in the soft squelching sand. And their once sharp elbows will soon be in torque to sanitary nirvana.

A Milestone of Mansions and Mentions

I don’t know how long this will last, but I thought I should try to reach a gestalt as I do with real-time reviewing from the guestroom in the mansion-without-roofs, turning to  the full meaning and  assimilation of a smile, the vertical eye, the third bed, the real mucky and the whitening ceiling. We all have to shape up to such a challenge. I know today it has come to a monologue I speak spontaneously as I approach the final, or perhaps not final, mansion-without-roofs that has come to symbolise something far greater than a ‘thing’ with something else missing. At the front of the building, a woman waves at me and tells me to remember the authors whom I have so assiduously reviewed over the years. I will not name them here, but she did mention all of you, every single one of you, and she smiled and invited me in as a woman I knew very well, someone to live with, it seemed, well, what should I say, for 50 years, and still counting, but that was another life in an alternate world, and I thought of the voice in the parcel, the wave and the kiss, the state of being drowsy with divinity, a maelstrom of miniatures, this milestone of miniatures, this eventual mountain of mansion, the thing that is the thing that is a ghost, but it is not a ghost as such however large it grows, because I seek the ghost. The ghost that is the gestalt that is the gruesome guestroom at the top of a bungalow mansion not a bungalow house, a mansion that has only two floors and the guest room is on the fourth floor! So, what happened to the third floor, I asked myself, and I stepped back from the building, knowing that the woman who would welcome me had already gone somewhere else. I see a  huge tree leaning against the mansion, but is it the tree yielding, or the building yielding? The building that had once been a bungalow, and it was actually growing up alongside the tree, so as to fulfil the vision of the further floors above the original two floors that I already knew and the roof was healing itself with some slow and arduous precision. A huge finger from the sky tapping tiles into place, touching chimneys into an upright position, and I knew I had to get to the fourth floor to find the gruesome guestroom, before it became the fifth floor, then the sixth, and so on. And then I knew I would see all you authors I had reviewed in that gruesome guestroom, as I did so much yearn to do so, standing  around me as you would as if you knew that you should. And I continued walking up the stairs, one by one,  slowly in a paradoxical gait that Zeno would’ve been proud of. The floorboards were bare as already adumbrated in the story I wrote yesterday, bearing the dance of dents from soldiers’ boots, and if you look at my list of miniatures, you will find this story in the last few that I linked yesterday,  and there were these dents clear to the eye today. I also thought of the other stories, or miniatures as I call them, and the steps seem to represent each miniature because I would try new steps now because I was just as tiny as them, perhaps like the tiniest Lilliputian and I passed the floors I already knew, and beyond that were a network of attics and lofts choked with a tangle of loft ladders, not real floors or bedrooms or guestrooms, but just interlocking attics with cobwebs and discarded toys and further bric-a-brac, but I managed to get to the fourth floor beyond those attics of which  the third floor was completely constituted,  but the fourth floor was more resplendent beyond the last loft ladder. It was actually what you would expect in a mansion. Now that the roof had been healed and towards the back of this large room I saw an old gent sitting gently intoning to himself as I am also intoning as I spontaneously dictate this about nothing gruesome in a guestroom.  I thought nothing strange, just a sort of homecoming whether it was my doppelgänger or my ghost that I would soon merge with, to join my intoning of words with his, but I never seem to be able to end, but just go on and on walking towards him. Null Immortalis.

Dedicated to the silent author mentions.

Mansions as Miniatures