She stretched out and turned over. Pale morning light slanting between the curtains illuminated his pale handsome face on the pillow beside her. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and his face came into focus revealing the dry tracery of fine lines in his skin. Good god, how ancient he looked! She had assumed he was in his late fifties but could he be even older? Her Count Dracula, Chloe called him. Tall, thin, and handsome with thick black hair that belied his age.
So old. It was a family trait, some strange genetic tilt, perhaps. She had never known her father but he too had been a man in late middle age. Her mother was a virgin of barely eighteen when she met him. According to her mother, her grandmother had also fallen pregnant at eighteen by a middle-aged man. Not her. Her first love would be a handsome young man, someone of her own age to grow into life with. Yet here she was in bed, her virginity freshly lost to someone old enough to be her grandfather. Then he woke and touched her and none of it mattered, not really. Old or not, he was devilishly attractive and charming and loving. She loved it when he told her how special she was to him, how long he had waited, just for her.
Six weeks later she found she was pregnant. He told her he was leaving her barely a moment after she told him. He seemed unsurprised. It almost seemed as though he had expected the news and was just waiting around for the formality of hearing it from her. So cold. All the charm and concern, and, she had thought, love, was gone. As if he had never loved her. Not as if. She knew suddenly, he never had. As he turned to walk out of the door she tried desperately “Surely you can’t just walk out and never know your child?”
He paused, one thin and pale and long fingered hand on the door. “Know her? You will not see me again but yes, oh yes, one day, one day I will know my daughter”. She did not understand. He looked briefly and contemptuously at her tear stained face and with a gesture of annoyance, walked to the dresser and pulled out her mother’s stained brown leather photo album. Opened it at a page without looking at the album or even glancing at it and thrust it roughly into her hands. “You see?” The photo showed a family wedding. Her mother, then about her own age in the foreground, in the fashion of the late 80s. She shook her head in bewilderment. “Look closer”. Among the people in the background, a tall dark thin middle-aged man that looked like him. She didn’t understand. They were related? Her half brother? But how could he have slept with her knowing that? “Related?” She had said nothing but he knew her thoughts. “Oh yes my dear we are related but I am not your half brother. You see, I have had an interest in your family for a very long time. The female side of it anyhow." What was he saying? surely not Her own father? but he looked no different in the photos. He saw the recognition and the bewilderment. "That's right, my love" The last said with contempt. "Your father and the father of your unborn child”. The album was snatched from her grasp, opened at another page, again without a glance, before it was thrust roughly back at her. Another family gathering, this time the fashions were of the late 60s. Her grandmother. And in the background a tall dark thin middle aged man.
“And your grandfather. And your great grandfather. And your great-great grandfather…”
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In "The Call of Cthulhu" the American pulp horror writer H.P. Lovecraft wrote:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
Being an HPL fan (as you may have guessed from the xoggoth tag) I hate to contradict the great man, but it might be worse than that. Maybe one's mind does not need to correlate anything. Maybe one does not need to study arcane law as his characters did. Maybe sometimes no effort is required at all. Perhaps it is all down to just how you look at things. Literally.
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He had always been imaginitive as a child, but in the worst possible way.
"You managed to see ghosts and monsters behind every cupboard" his mother had told him, "Just trying to get you off to sleep was a real nightmare. You needed a nightlight until you were ten". What she did not know was that he had needed one long after that. It was only the shame of being ridiculed by a schoolfriend for having it on the wall over his bed that had made him insist he no longer needed it. He must have been at least fourteen before he stopped sleeping with his head under the bedclothes and that was only because thoughts of all those ghosts and monsters had been relegated by the more urgent bedtime thoughts of an adolescent schoolboy.
Even now, a creepy horror film on the TV had him starting the night with his head all but buried under the quilt cover. His mind conjured hideous leering faces from the the swirling patterns of the bathroom tiles. Did any other adults do that? He assumed not but it was hardly the sort of thing he could ask anyone; he would look a fool.
Sitting in the smoking room. "Have you seen these?" A colleague had produced a small book of stereograms. This was about the time they had started to appear in books and he had never seen them before nor even heard of them. No matter how he screwed up his eyes or advanced his nose towards the page, retreated it from the page or looked through the page, he was the only one who could not seem to get the knack of it. All he saw was a mess of small dots. It crossed his mind that it was a joke but nobody seemed amused so he supposed not. Oh well, not being able to see stereograms was not exactly a great handicap.
It was some years later, in a small backstreet second hand booksellers near his hotel, that he had come across a much thicker dog-eared book of stereograms. He was stuck in a small hotel near Cardiff and had to be up early and sober for an important presentation to a prospective client the next day so there was not a lot else to do with his evening. He would master the art of seeing stereograms! He read the tips at the front of the book but it did no good. He looked at every picture, stared at them for over an hour and got nowhere. Waste of time! Next morning, showered and suited, he reached for the open book to put it in his suitcase, glanced at it briefly and there it was! A snowman standing boldy out from the christmas wrapping paper background! The next page, a lion. The next, two runners. He flipped briefly through the rest of the book and he could see every one without effort. Maybe that was the secret, don't try. Let them surprise you.
He was on form and the presentation went rather well. He knew he was through to the next stage of the bidding at least. Only one of the directors noticed his slightly distracted air during drinks after lunch. He apologised. A touch of heartburn. The dining room walls held a number of reproductions of paintings by French artists including Cezanne's "Les baigneurs au repos" Not really his favourite artist or art movement but he glanced at it briefly as he moved away from the drinks table, still talking budgets and support contracts. And almost dropped his drink. He knew the painting slightly, or thought he did. Since when did it have those deformed and rotten figures clutching and heaving at the bathers?, a revolting combination of carnality and putrescence. It looked more like some obscene Bosch painting, the sort the galleries hide from public view in darkened cellars. Saying his goodbyes, he glanced at the painting again. Just scenery and the usual lumpy nudes in the foreground. Maybe he really was overworking recently. His wife was always telling him.
His company got the contract a few weeks later and he went away for a few days with his wife to try and unwind before the hard work really started. They went back to their favourite guest house near Exmoor. It was a romantic return as they had gone there fifteen years earlier soon after they met. This time around and after twelve years of marriage they saw more of the countryide. There was a beautiful spot overlooking the rolling moorland of Dartmoor, one of the few places they had got out of bed for all those years ago. The only place that was almost worth it the wife had said. Sitting on the dry stone wall gazing at the hills, he felt relaxed. Then suddenly it came into focus like an explosion without light or sound. The figures in the painting had been unexpected but they had been unmistakably just paintings in Cezanne's own impressionist and undetailed style, as if the artist had painted them in himself. This thing on Dartmoor was something else. It straddled the entire landscape, covering it and being an intricate part of it at the same time. And it was alive, an immensity of pulsating flesh and malignancy. It was a dam breaking. He saw crawling evil and oozing corruption and obscenity in everything and he could not shut it out. It seemed like he screamed for ever.
It was an unusual case but not unknown, the psychiatrist said. With proper care he should make a full recovery. It seemed to be true. Three months later he came home and despite the drowsiness from the tranquilisers he began to feel a little more like his old self. The world appeared mostly normal again and full of mundane things like cars and televisions and white clouds with little hint of alternative hideous truths. When he did see something others did not, he accepted it and did his relaxation exercises until it went away. After a while it always did. After six months he was off the tranquillisers and thinking about trying to pick up the pieces of his business. The world was back the way it had been.
It took a long time to get his business back on its feet but it was happening. Life was starting to get back on an even course again. He and Gillian had for the first time in months splashed out on some household gadgets including a top of the range sound system to replace their ageing stereo. "Third generation surround sound" the saleman had called it. Whatever the terminology it was amazing quality, when he played his favourite Wagner it was like being right there in the orchestra pit. Amazing that speakers on one side of the room could create this illusion that sound was coming from all around. An illusion. Some tiny edge of panic struck him and he could feel the fear imediately in his stomach like a whole swarm of butterflies. Illusion. What if? No, he would not think it; he was still too fragile. Something beyond himself asked the questions for him. What if illusions are not just visual? What if illusions like the sterogram can encompass all senses? What if they are not the illusions?
And as the opening notes of Siegried hit his ears, just as he had with the stereograms, he got the knack. He got the knack of experiencing everything that none of us are born to experience. With every sense and feeling he suddenly knew all the horror that the universe holds and which has festered within it for ever and that nothing else truly exists. Every form of evil which stretches to infinity and from the beginning to the end of time. All those things that for you and I, so far, have stayed just outside our ability to perceive. He heard the sounds of hell, saw all the terrible never ending ugliness, smelt the burning and foulness and corruption, felt all the pain and fear that has ever been known.
This time, somewhere deep inside, he knew he would never stop screaming.
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My fellow members
Welcome to the 4th quarterly edition of the Lower Malmsly Ghoul Society newsletter.
Well, it scarcely seems like just a year since our society was founded. Hard to recall now that it is only a few short years since our mutual enthusiasm was something we had to keep secret. How is it that an interest shared by so many could have somehow been a taboo for so very long? Like most of you, the only time I could really indulge this great passion of my life was on those rare fortunate occasions when, travelling on the motorway to some dreary family occasion or the like, I was privileged to witness one of those major road accidents that we then had to pretend we found so terrible. Back then we drove past as slowly as we could, hoping to see every morbid detail, while pretending to the world that our tardiness was a concern for safety or perhaps arose out of some sort of respect for those whose lives and/or happiness had been so tragically cut short. Ah! the joy these brief chance occurrences gave to our lives.
Thank god for the Human Rights Act and that historic decision of Lord Keithley in the Jacobs case which paved the way to the enlightened laws we have today. It was the inalienable right of every individual to find pleasure where they could, provided only that no other was placed at a disadvantage. Of course the dying, like Jacobs in that historic decision, will die anyway and there is no true disadvantage. A few emotional types argued that the nearly deceased suffered loss of privacy and dignity perhaps, but the far sighted Keithley dismissed that trifle as a minor thing in the face of an overwhelming public need. The rest as they say is history, which brings us to the fortunate position we enjoy today. That of a thriving and growing society, one of many affiliated societies in the UK at the peak of popularity.
To the present. At our meeting last month we were honoured to have as our guest "departee" Mrs Doreen Williams. In accordance with our rights under the Public Access To Human Expiration Act more than thirty members were able to attend her last moments at the Willows Sanitorium. I know all our members will wish me to extend our heartfelt thanks to Mrs Williams, wherever she may be (if indeed she is anywhere other than in St Judes Cemetery) for a most interesting and stimulating departure. Although Doreen was clearly handicapped by the many tubes and machines to which she was attached, she gave a most stimulating exhibition of shuffling off her mortal coil which should be an inspiration to us all. Our membership clearly appreciated the shear entertainment value of Doreen's evident terror at her imminent demise, despite the tranquilisers she had been given. Thanks are due to the Willows's Dr. Hibert, who is also one of our earliest and most supportive members, for his moderation in this regard. Doreen's evident embarrassment at her olifactorily obvious loss of bowel control, despite her dire condition, was also a great hit with our members. Thanks Doreen!
No "live" performances at next month's meeting I'm afraid, but we do welcome Mr John Maynard who was a UN observer during the recent bloody tribal conflicts in Beninge Masso. Dr Maynard assures us he has some most fascinating photos and even some short video clips, taken at great risk to himself apparently, of the amputations and disembowellings that they do so very well in that part of the world. Members may regret with me that these skills seem to have been lost in our unnatural society.
In closing I would ask you all to remember to sign our petition (sheet attached, please return to our secretary at the address overleaf) for a return of public executions. The prospects for the act passing in the next parliament now look promising but we need your support. Who knows? Perhaps if the enlightened attitude persists in British politics we may see a return to the golden age of punishment in the next ten years. Not just public hangings but burnings at the stake, boilings in oil and hanging, drawing and quartering. A great future awaits and you can be sure that your committee members on the National Ghoul Society will play a full part.
J S Ransock
Secretary
LMGS
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This one has been contributed by No 1 Son who is rather odd. Not sure where he gets it from. I blame his mother for her lamentable opposition to necessary character-forming cruelty. Spare the sledge hammer and spoil the child, that's what I always say.
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There are many so-called experts who periodically predict threats to our way of life, from planet destroying meteors to global warming. I’m not a professor of anything at a university, but I do believe I have found a catastrophe in the making that appears to have been overlooked by everyone else. The problem lies in cryogenic freezing, which is essentially the removal and freezing of a human head after death, kept in storage in the hope that one day medical technology will be able to thaw it out and re-attach it to a new body, be it a human one or a giant cyborg elephant, I know which I'd prefer.
So here is the problem scenario. A child 2 years of age dies and gets frozen, he may undergo the resurrection process 70 or 80 years later (beating Jesus's resurrection period of a few days well into 2nd place), and be released as the same 2 year old he/she was before death. Age isn't decided by height, appearance or any other anatomical factors, it’s decided by paperwork. So now you have a small child released in society with a registered age of over 70. A child that can apply for a driving licence, smoke, drink, have sex and worst of all....draw a pension of 80 pounds a week that he/she has never contributed anything to! The whole world would be turned upside down, elections would be won not on policy or charisma, but on factors like which candidate looks most like a Telly Tubby (hope for Prescott hmmm?:). Paedophiles would need to request ID from children before they conducted their seedy business, just to be sure they're getting the real deal and not someone old enough to be one of their parents.
You would have to conclude from the above that this is very bad for all concerned, except the children in question! Imagine being able to live the high life as soon as you were out of nappies, and being owed decades worth of birthday presents before you were 3. If any of you have children that you really care about and want the best for.....Kill them (with an axe if possible, save on head removal bills at the clinic), they will thank you for it in the end, even though you'll have been dead for 50 years.
Copyright Tim - son of xoggoth
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Wouldn't it be annoying if...
...your past really caught up with you. Literally.
Who knows why?, perhaps you buttered your toast in a way that happens just once in any galaxy once in a trillion years.A bit like that mouse setting where the cursor leaves trails on the screen or the time lapse effect they are fond of in commercials where the runner leaves a blur of after images to indicate speed, except that your past selves are an absolutely solid and totally continuous record of all your life in correct relative position to your current self tapering back to an invisible point at conception.
It would look horrible. A sort of grotesque deeply grooved python, with great jutting ridges and flaps, reasonably smooth lengthwise during the times you are resting, a nightmare of spikes and lumps when you were playing tennis. Fortunately, most of it would not be recognisably human except during the odd times you advanced in one direction and then backed up the way you had come, when the python would have a huge excrescence with a person stuck on the end of it. Unfortunately, backing up the way we have come applies to some of the more private activities in life and it would be very embarassing as many of those bedroom and toilet moments would no longer be in private or even in bedrooms or toilets, they might have been demolished years ago. You would have irate people tracking down your python's front end (your current self) raging "Do you know what you are doing in my front room right in front of my telly?"
It could also disrupt the entire world. If you were a well travelled type your python would cross continents, blocking roads, seas and airways. Planes would have to divert to avoid you travelling 25,000 feet up thumbing through that boring BA mag because you arrived too late to buy a paperback at the airport shop. There would be nothing else they could do because, although your previous selves can affect the present and future, the reverse is not true. Your past was what it was. Your python would be entirely invulnerable to chainsaws and even nuclear explosions.
What are the consequences for Newton's laws? How did your previous selves occupy space already occupied by something else? I am still working on these technical points just in case it happens. One thing is sure, the authorities would soon suss that they could not let your python keep on growing. Since you yourself could not go where your past selves had been, only total immobility could stop your python growing.
If your pasts came back to haunt you you would have no future. Be careful how you butter your toast, or indeed how you do anything else today.
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They say we journalists have no honour when it comes to a news story but that isn't true because I have kept one of the biggest stories of the decade inside me for nearly six years because of the promise I gave to someone who I had then thought of as a truly great man.
He was more than that; he was an inspiration, a living example of the way that even the worst of men can rise above his own cruel and selfish nature. Now, his state funeral over, I am free to publish and I don't know where to start. I don't even know if I should publish at all because it was not out of honour or respect that I kept my promise, but because I had no wish to destroy that inspiration for the rest of humanity. Should I destroy it now? Perhaps. The reputation of all great men begins to be destroyed sooner or later and maybe that is the natural way. We move on to a new icon who is more in keeping with our times. Listen to my story, or rather, to his story and tell me what you think.
I heard it when I went to interview him at his modest Munich home in the spring of 1959 just after he had turned seventy. Back then I was one of the rising stars in the newspaper business and the literary world. He liked my column and my books, and although I was an Englishman, I was the man he wanted to be his biographer. I sat in his lounge facing him, a seasoned reporter with over five years experience and feeling as nervous as a complete rookie. Here was the longest serving German chancellor, the man who steered his country from near ruin and anarchy into the longest period of peace and prosperity that it had known. A respected artist and writer. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and numerous other honours and awards for his well known efforts on the world scene. Nobody would have believed it just twenty years earlier. You know the story I am sure; everyone knew of the nature of his speeches, the annexation of Sudetanland, the ruthless and brutal nature of his regime there and in Germany. There was violence and intimidation against anyone who dared to disagree, mass rounding up of political opponents, the removal of rights from those with Jewish blood. In that summer of 1939 the German army was amassed on the Polish border and there was hardly anyone who doubted that a major war in Europe, fueled by his lunatic ambitions, was only just round the corner. Suddenly, in late August, it all began to go into reverse and we saw the diplomatic initiatives abroad, the start of democratic reforms at home, the beginnings of a negotiated settlement in Czechoslovakia. In a few short years Germany had became a decent place for everyone and a major force for good in the world.
Why? Many had asked him the same question before and had never had a proper answer. He either ignored the question or gave some vague answer; he had simply awoken one morning and seen the light. And why did he tell me the real story? I am sure it was because it was shortly before he went into hospital. Although he did not say so, I think he was worried that he would not survive the operation and just had to tell somebody. So here it is, from the notes I took that day. The story from that much loved and now greatly missed man, Adolph Hitler.
"It was close to the day we had planned for invasion. We had been finalising our preparations well into the small hours and I was dog-tired. I wasn't sleeping well. Anyone who had mentioned such a thing at the time would have been arrested of course; I was the indomitable Fuhrer. Since the term came into use, some have said I was a psychopath but I suppose even a psychopath will have his anxious moments ahead of such a momentous event. I felt excited and exhilarated too, we were confident of victory, but the excitement was blunted by an odd feeling that something was coming, something fearful that was still just out of sight. There even seemed to be a sort of patch of darkness at the edge of my vision. As I say, I put it down to pre-invasion nerves. When I went to bed that night, I went out like a light and just before dawn the darkness came with a rush. I sat bolt upright and in the slight gray light, a tall thin dark figure stood before me. It said nothing and made no gesture but I knew I had to follow. You do know Dickens’s 'A Christmas Carol' I assume? Well in a way it was like that I suppose but nothing in the book would have prepared me for the total reality of the experience. It was more than reality because I saw and felt with abilities well outside my normal senses"
"I saw the Jewish Ghettos that were springing up, by no will of the inhabitants, among our cities. I saw the miserable way they lived. I saw the great queques waiting for passes to enable them to leave Germany and the fear on the faces of those quequing and it seemed I was one of them, that I felt with them. Then I saw ahead in time. You will never believe what might have followed had I continued on my course. We created vast death camps where millions were gassed or exterminated through starvation. It was all my doing" He paused. What he said was probably nonsense of course but who really knows?
"So it was your vision of the suffering of those millions that changed your mind?"
"No, not that. I have never been described as an imaginative man" He looked ruthfully at one of his paintings of Nuremberg on the wall. He was a good but not a great artist. He knew that, what galled him was that one of the few criticisms this much loved man got was that his paintings lacked feeling. He once said he had poured his soul into that picture, it expressed all his passion for his beloved homeland and all the critics ever saw was the slight flatness in the perspective. "Yes I felt for them, we all feel for those who suffer when we can see their suffering, but that faded away in the light of the morning sun and the vision I had. I could no longer see those images in my mind. My vision was for a thousand year Reich, a glorious Aryan wonderland and at the time a few million sub humans seemed a small sacrifice."
"The next visitation came the next night. This time I saw the devastation of Europe. Not details at first. It seemed like some gigantic war game was being played in outline newsreel form except that it was totally real. A newsreAl perhaps" The fuehrer smiled, his love of terrible childish puns was one his endearing characteristics. "Tanks rolling into Poland. Occupation of France and Belgium. An invasion of Russia. The massive destruction of London and Coventry in your own country under the onslaught of the Luftwaffe. Great victories in North Africa. Our enemies being strangled into defeat by our submarines. My heart soared. It was everything I had hoped for. Then I saw the detail, all the millions of dead and felt the agonies of the injured survivors. I saw every one of the burned bodies, the rotting corpses, the devastation and loss of so much that had been once been alive or beautiful"
"So it was more to do with the scale of the havoc that your ideas would reek?"
"Not that either. On the third night I saw the endless destruction again but this time, and I knew it was just a few short years later, it was of Germany and her allies. I saw Dresden in flames consumed by a huge firestorm, a Berlin that was so devastated I could barely recognise it. I saw cities in Japan consumed by an atom bomb, that bomb that only a few countries, including your own, now possess and which, thank god, has never been used. It was the end of all my dreams. In a miserable wasteland surrounded by the Russians the messenger showed me my own end. Just another corpse on a fire"
So that was it. It was not a rediscovered passion for humanity that reformed the Fuhrer, rather just the revelation that his dreams would never come to fruition and would only bring about his own death before his time. Another of my cherished ideals had just died within me. Was any man what they seemed? He must have seen the disappointment in my face. Some need to confess all ahead of what he thought would be his end drove him on to twist the knife a little deeper.
"No, that still isn't the reason. My life must surely have told you that I have never really feared death. You still haven't had the whole story. In my summer Christmas Carol there was one last visitation." The Fuhrer paused for a long time, searching for words, or perhaps trying to raise a memory that was too painful. Abruptly. "You know of Churchill in your country?" It seemed an odd question as Churchill had been a rather obscure man. It was only because of my studies into the life and times of Hitler that I knew that Churchill was a politician who had been one of the few to warn against the Fuhrer but in the end, although Churchill's warnings had appeared to be spot on right up to that summer of 1949, they had turned out to be false predictions. After that and the scandalous revelation that he was being treated for syphilis, like father like son they said, he had retreated into obscurity and drank himself to death a few years later. "The last visitation came on the next night and I saw the future much further ahead. In this vision I saw your Churchill, not as the disgraced politician you know, but as my enemy, the leader of your country and the man who eventually led you to victory over my own. I saw that overweight cigar-smoking man feted by the world. I also saw how everyone had vilified my own name. I saw his amateurish daubs and his pompous books given a respect greater than any of my own attract, even here in this real world. I saw my own paintings buried away in cellars where nobody could ever see them. Worst of all, I was seen as a failure, one who had even contributed to and perhaps even caused the failure of his dreams by an arrogant and amateurish pursuit of the war."
He looked at me and I knew that he was finished. Not even the fear of his own demise then, which was at least human and understandable. His ambition had been something wholly less natural. The usual failing of his kind. "So your reformation, all the good you have done for the world? All that? It was all just about your place in history?"
"Hell, yes" Another of his endearing characteristics was his adoption of John Wayne mannerisms when speaking in English. The Fuhrer paused to light one of the small cheroots he occasionally allowed himself. The shade of his cupped hand fell across his moustacheless upper lip and he peered at me with narrowed eyes. For a brief moment he appeared as evil as he had done all those years ago.
"I'm a politician"
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It has been almost twenty years now since he died. I never did publish anything of what he told me. What would be the point? Why destroy peoples’ memories of that miserable little man?
I hated his memory. At first I hated it because this man that I had idolized had revealed himself to me, not as one who had discovered some core of good in himself, but as a vain man who had made a self-seeking decision. Much good had flowed from that decision but I was young and idealistic then and practical outcomes did not seem enough. I have come to despise his memory since for an entirely different reason. But I am jumping ahead.
It was the mid seventies and already I had come to recognise much of my youthful idealism for what it was. Ignorance and naivety. Like many others I was already concerned about the direction that the world and our own country was taking. The way that ordinary people seem to count for so little in an increasingly global world, the one Hitler used to rail against in his unreformed Mein Kampf days. Like many others too, I was concerned about the transformations that immigration was bringing about in our society. Where before I had been a darling of the liberal left, my writings now found most acceptance among the right.
Maybe it was this shift in my own perception that triggered the visitation. For some days I had been strangely anxious but quite unable to find any obvious reason for it. It seemed as though something terrible was about to arrive but I had no idea what. I remembered the Fuhrer’s words when the patch of darkness arrived at the edge of my vision but I dismissed it as coincidence or perhaps just some new symptom of the migraine that we both suffered from. I had never believed in the reality of what he told me, that was just the delusion of a man who had brought more pressure on himself than he could handle.
Delusion became fact for me a few days later. I awoke to find the figure at the foot of my bed. Just as Hitler had described, the experiences were not just real, they were more than real. I had no doubt whatever of the truth of what was shown me. I was shown a possible future with my England inhabited by a mongrel breed, a vassal of an international Jewish dictatorship. The next night I was shown the future as it could be if I had the courage to help shape it.
Hitler was a weak and little man. I now know why he was shown those visions of the future his actions would bring. It was not that some foolishly benign force was showing him the human suffering that would flow from his actions. Rather, it was because a wholly more glorious force wanted to deter him by showing him the failure his limited vision would bring about. Germany never stood a real chance of of bringing about Hitler's dreams, not with most of the world, including the rest of the Aryan world, arrayed against it. His incompetent meddling in the conduct of the war only made defeat more certain. After his failure, all those ideals he held so dear in his earlier days would have been covered in ignomony, the Jewish conspiracy would have seen to that, and our cause would have been set back for a hundred years, perhaps destroyed forever.
I know too why that force chose me. Because I was a man who combined vision and practicality and I would not repeat Hitler's mistakes. Instead, I have found common cause with the other white nations and we have gone forward together to start establishing the racially and ideologically pure realms that were always our birthright. We have come a long way together, you and I, since those first steps to take back our own country. Now most of the blacks and the worst of the other inferior races have gone and the few that are left are being rounded up. We have a solution for those. All over the white world those who think like us, in The United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, New zealand and Russia, we whites are taking back our lands and our cultures. In a few minutes I shall go out there before the thousands who are cheering for me. Shortly, I will be speaking of my vision for obtaining the living room we need, those wasted lands occupied by sub human breeds. Our forces are poised and ready to go.
We, the united white nations, are a far greater force than Germany ever was alone and we cannot fail. Tomorrow, together with those other white nations, we will begin to build that future. A necessary first step my friend. As I say, I am a practical man but it makes my heart ache that for now we must ally ourselves with those we despise. For now, this must be a white crusade that includes those inferior Slavs and has men visibly tainted by negro blood in our high command. It makes my gut crawl that we must even call the Jews our friends, there are too many who have wormed their way into positions of influence and power in our great nation and we need them. How easily those avaricious worms were brought onside by the cleansing of Palestine and the creation of the tiny Jewish state of Israel. How muted was their indignation about the fate of the Arabs we slaughtered and drove off the land when they themselves bleat so continually about anti-semitism. Is there anything so low as the morals of a Jew?
We must be patient my friend, this great crusade we begin tomorrow is only the start of a great journey and we must compromise to reach our goals. Nothing matters but that glorious future and we must not lose sight of it as that little man Hitler would have done. We must be patient for it may be a decade before we can begin the next great journey, that journey that only you and I and a few others know of and have planned for. To take the great white empire we will have created and to shape it into the true Aryan empire that is our dream. To start to cleanse the Jews and other inferior races, to eliminate those contaminated by impure genes, to breed the pure Aryan men and women who will be our future.
An Aryan realm, an empire that will last a thousand years.
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Dear diaries number 6 and 14
Don't tell my other diaries, but I went round Bob's house last night to find out why they'd been spying on us all and passing details of my bathroom habits to the FBI. My voices argued bitterly with his for over half an hour but we prevailed in the end, something that would never have happened a year or two ago when he was more like his normal selves. Bob had not been any of his selves for over a year. One of his wife's personalities said he had been behaving strangely, walking confidently in daylight, looking cheerful, talking to people, he had even taken up a hobby. Overwork maybe. It's always the noisy ones you have to look out for. I killed him, or rather Eli did, (yesterday being Tuesday) with one of the firedogs from his living room, the one that barked the most, and smeared his brains over the full length of the kitchen wall. I thought it would help to ward off the alien mind melds; traditional Baco-foil seems to be losing its effectiveness recently. When his wife Hecate/Ruthvenna/Cratorella/Zorastra/HatShepSlut/Mavis came back from the cemetery she approved. "He always was a narrow minded bastard,” she hissed "you seem to have broadened it considerably". It was a decent sized kitchen, so I had broadened it by a good 18 feet I'd say.
I declined the cup of tea they offered, as I knew the story with their kids. A pretty common story. Munchies we called 'em, victims of Munchausen Syndrome by proxy. So many kids were Munchies the survival to adulthood was nearly zero and of course the government was very concerned about that as it left so few potential victims for the future. Life expectancy generally was falling at an alarming rate and there was talk of rationing victims. No more than 1 a year had been mooted, with a complete ban on murdering under 16s. It was an alarming prospect. Already, serial killers with a gerontophilic bent found themselves almost victimless. Most of them without the funds to secure the few elderly left had to make do with much younger people with masks on. That new skin shriveling acid was supposed to be quite good, but hell, not my bag really, but so much of the thrill is in the mind I could well understand why that wasn't satisfying.
So anyway, me and Mavis (it was after lunch and HatShepSlut had clocked off) just had some normal sex, taking it in turns to suffocate each other until the other was near death. That was the agreement anyhow but I always cheat as it was Friday and I got a dispensation from god. All of you other bastards who claim to speak to god on Fridays, especially the one that follows Tuesday, are being fooled by minions of the devil, god speaks to me alone on Fridays. So after 5 goes each she never got her next turn. I left her head in the oven. I couldn't find it in Dehlia but Gas Mark 4 seemed about right. Unfortunately, it didn't quite fit in the microwave. What is the point of labour-saving devices if they don't design them properly? Same with shower basins. They say small children can drown in less than two inches of water. Crap! My sister tried for twenty minutes to drown their youngest in the shower last year, had to give up in the end and drive it to the reservoir. The bath was in the grip of satanic forces that day apparently, so was out of action.
Off to work. After washing myself eighteen times and then wrapping my knees in cling film as usual (for a Sunday) I ran for the car. "They" were watching me again but for once I had to grit my teeth and let it go as my shotgun was in for repair. Too much trouble trying to get them with the chainsaw and anyhow it made such a fearful mess of my lawn last time. Note to self: Try luring them onto the rose garden next time, dried blood is supposed to be good for roses and it's very expensive at B&Q. I am the senior nursing manager at the local psychiatric unit. Not well paid (the bastards will pay some day in blood for that, let their guard slip just once) but very fulfilling. It's good to feel you are doing something useful with your life.
We had a really bad case admitted today. If you knew the details, I daresay many of you would wonder how this guy had managed to move around in society for so long without anyone noticing his deviance but I have seen it all before and regrettably it isn't really all that uncommon, especially these days. Something fundamentally rotten in our society in my view. Or the conspiracy. You know to whom, or what, I refer. These abnormal types are often masters at concealing the extent of their deviation and to anyone not skilled in recognising the tell tale signs they can appear totally normal. I knew one of them personally once, not just the straightest chap you could hope to meet but a pillar of society and immensely respected by all who met him. I well remember his entertaining story about burying his wife and kids alive inside some old oil drums in the garden. Everyone does that now I know, yawn!, but back then it was quite novel and he was he first to do it in our little village anyhow. It was all lies as it turned out. His wife had actually run off with a salesman from Cleethorpes, taking the kids with her. When they were all murdered it was miles away and he had nothing to do with it! What a fraud! So when the gnawed remains of their bodies turned up at Mabblethorpe and the Police ran a DNA check on saliva and found it wasn't his, the game was up. Turned out he had not murdered, maimed or even sexually tortured anyone for years. I hesitate to describe what they found when they searched his house. Books like "Principles Of Accounting For Small Companies", The "Readers Digest Book of Home Repairs". You get the picture. As for the images on his PC!! Sunsets over the Taj Mahal, snapshots of his Mother at Land's End. Quite sickening! Not a hint of normality anywhere, not even a dog being kicked to death.
Anyhow, this new case we had in was a similar deviant. We applied the usual remedies, ten hours of ECT, 20 minutes to his forehead and 9 hours 40 minutes to his genitals in accordance with standard medical procedures. (Not in that order of course as we did not wish him to miss out on the fun). Then we ate his liver with baked beans and a nice cup of tea.
It's been a good day all in all.
PS. I will not have you all plotting against me. If I find you have told any of the other diaries about any of this...
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This will make even less sense unless you have already read The horrid tale of EVIL WORM
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Oh, it's you. Come in if you must. You want to hear what happened afterwards I suppose, that business with the MUTANT SLUGS. Is that wise? Just how much horror can the normal mind take without being driven to insanity? Come to think of it you should be ok though. If not, well, it isn't as though I like you anyway. Sit down, no, not that chair, it's clean, over there on the log box.
Yes, I suppose it would seem unlikely to you that one tiny vegetable patch should see so much terror. It isn't really, because the events were entirely connected and the terrible sequel came about because of Clarence, the earthworm that grew from EVIL WORM's bum end that had previously wielded the terrible WORMCAST OF DOOM. No, of course he was not more evil and powerful than EVIL WORM. Tchoh!. You are forgetting about the mystical power of seven. Have you ever heard of an eighth son of an eighth son being able to tell the future? Of course not, eighth sons of eighth sons are just as likely to be boring accountants or unimaginitive insurance brokers as anyone else. Here in the UK anyhow. In Azerbaijan, apparently, it is the ninth daughter of the twelth son of the fifth cousin of a man with a club foot who gets the mystical powers. Quite rare as you might imagine. Well, not that all rare, I expect most Azerbaijanis have huge families and severe limb deformities, but unusual enough. What do you mean, that's a racist statement? I am not a racist! I would never dream of singling out any race or nation for adverse comment. ALL foreigners and dusky people have something seriously wrong with them! Can I be more inclusive than that? Can we get on now?
Clarence would not have been the life and soul of your cocktail party but as earthworms go he was really quite amiable and just went about his peaceful business munching earth like any other earthworm. Parted from its satanic master the previously formidable WORMCAST OF DOOM comprised nothing more sinister than nutrient depleted soil with a faintly poohy aroma. Now the serial severings were past the fateful seven, even the nastiness had departed. Clarence was not totally normal though. Let me tell you what happened next.
It was about a week after the happy demise of EVIL WORM from constipation. All the tiny invertebrates from the old vegetable patch had just about got over their traumatic experiences. The free counselling from the "Victims of Satanic Annelids" support group had helped, but small creatures that live a few months, or a year or two at best, tend to MOVE ON WITH THEIR LIVES a lot quicker than humans in any case. But like you, they were terrified that Clarence would take over where EVIL WORM had left off. (Understandable in their case as they are primitive creatures with pinhead sized brains, what's your excuse? Oh, I see!). So they armed themselves with tiny cudgels, worked themselves up into one of those B movie - angry - mob- storming - Frankenstein's - castle sort of group frenzies and rampaged over the vegetable patch looking for Clarence.
Poor old Clarence, he got a right bashing and only just managed to retreat deep into one of his burrows before the stinging wasps arrived in force and put paid to him. He lay in his burrow and nursed his wounds and his greivance. He wasn't too badly hurt but even minor wounds are very embarassing to an earthworm. This is because they are almost entirely composed of horrible gooey stuff which, being under enormous pressure (the internal pressure of a large earthworm is some 2300 psig), tends to squirt out in inordinate amounts through even small abrasions . Rather like being a human teenager but much worse. The more he thought about it the madder he got. It wasn't fair blaming him for EVIL WORM's misdeed's. As he gazed down at his horrible gooeyness he got madder and madder. He would teach them. They had tried to kill him because they thought he would unleash the WORMCAST OF DOOM. Well...that's just what he would do! He would be avenged!
Clarence tried. He concentrated very very hard on his bum end and imagined it unleashing a tidal wave of burning acid. It released some poohy earth. He clenched his sides, strained until the gooey stuff ran in rivers, thought dark thoughts of molten lava and razor blades, and released... a thin trickle of soggy (and poohy) compost. He tried relaxing, he tried chanting, he tried scrunching himself up into a ball and then flinging his rear end out suddenly, he even had a go at cracking it like a bullwhip. Nothing. His bum end just emitted what bum ends emitt the world over, and not even that after it ran out of ammo. It was hopeless. Clarence was very tired after his efforts and his anger had cooled. He nodded off for the last time, thinking he had acheived nothing and that the diabolic power of the WORMCAST OF DOOM must have died with EVIL WORM.
Not so, as anyone with even the tiniest smattering of knowledge about maleficent bumholes would know. Do they teach nothing in schools these days?. Clarence's bum end performed nothing more than its natural task because poor old simple soil-eating Clarence did not have sufficient evil knowledge to control it. But the power was there, once you have evil of that magnitude lodged up your bottom nothing is going to remove it, not even the finest Vindaloo from the Kuma Montaz Pak in Wapping. His efforts had not been entirely without result. The dreaded WORMCAST OF DOOM was like the centre of a giantic spider web with strands to other "Earths" in many dimensions from which it stole its power. EVIL WORM had known how to channel and control this power. Poor old Clarence knew nothing, his best efforts had twanged the web slightly and briefly opened a few random portals to some of the nearer dimensions. As any fool surely knows there isn't much power to be had from these, it's the ones with the biggest serial numbers that have the greatest potential difference compared with our own. An inhabitant of reasonable size in any of these dimensions right next to one of the portals that Clarence briefly created would have noticed little more than a sudden chill and a brief dimming of the light.
In the first dimension (we are dimension 0 obviously) they would not have been bothered. First dimension inhabitants are very very laid back. In fact so laid back that they never do anything at all worth speaking of. A typical day for a first dimension inhabitant is to get up, scratch several of its bellies, (a different selection every day, that is one of the few things they are picky about) eat its cornflakes and go back to bed. It's a damn good thing that cornflakes grow naturally in that dimension and hop into bowls of milk by themselves or they would all starve to death. They might have got a little miffed in the seventh dimension. You can tell when a seventh dimension inhabitant is miffed because its recycle rate speeds up. Some scientists believe that aeons ago they were much like us but then they started recycling and took to it with such green fervour that it became the purpose and way of life and eventually became life itself. I'm trying to put it as delicately as I can - they recycle EVERYTHING in the most direct way possible. Oh for heavens sake, what do you mean, what do I mean? I mean, every orifice on a fifth dimension inhabitant that is used for output is connected directly to another orifice used for input. No it doesn't violate the laws of conservation of mass, not there anyhow, as they repealed all the laws of conservation a million years ago. Their weekly bills at Tescos are way down on ours I can tell you.
And then there was the fateful fifth dimension. For all its political failures the fifth dimension is really not very sinister and, had it not been for the VORTICES OF MINNNGE, the little vegetable patch would have been quite safe. I am jumping ahead here. In the fifth dimension the inhabitants are fervent socialists. Like human socialists they believe in fairness and equality and would be totally opposed to the idea that any individual should personally benefit from some chance accident of birth such as bigger teeth or longer legs. Unlike humans who came to this lunatic philosophy late in evolution, the fifth dimension inhabitants discovered socialism not long after emerging from the primal soup. Since a competitive advantage shared is not a competitive advantage at all, evolution in the fifth dimension had halted almost entirely. Although life first appeared there many hundreds of billions of years before it did in our own world, its inhabitants have not yet managed to evolve beyond tiny crawling black blobs. For want of a better term, I have called them slugs after the familar creatures they most resemble, although they are a lot smaller.
Some of these little slugs had been attending a gay and lesbian disability awareness meeting right next to one of the portals that Clarence opened. As I said earlier, the portal would have been a pathetic affair compared to one EVIL WORM would have created, but the fifth dimensional slugs were tiny and during the few seconds it was open, a couple were sucked into it due to the pressure difference between their world and ours. The term wormhole was very apt in this instance as it twisted through time and space before dovetailing seemlessly into Clarence's real life wormhole. The little leftie slugs gazed in dismay around this gloomy miserable composty tunnel and at the oozy pink monster it contained. Being the typically cowardly little GAY COMMIE PINKO things they were they would have been terrified. By the time they had recovered from their disorientation the wormhole, i.e. the interdimensional one, had closed and they fled, albeit in a very slow sort of flight, in panic along the wormhole, i.e. the earthworm-made one, to the far end, where they huddled together miserably expecting that the long gooey monster would come along and eat them at any minute.
And there, in the normal way of things, those little TROSKIEST AGITATOR POOF slugs would eventually have died of starvation. Good riddance too, the ghastly MAOIST QUEER LEFTY little bastards. But by a rare quirk of fate the wormhole (i.e. the interdimensional one) had happened to snake its way through the top corner of the VORTICES OF MINNNGE in the farthest flung reaches of the galaxy, close to where where god (the proper Christian white one) puts his bins out and where the mysterious JOHNWAYNE radiation is at its strongest and deadliest. There is nothing known that can resist its penetration and a couple of little RED FAGGOT slugs had no chance. In the few milliseconds it took for them to pass through the vortices they received 50,000 times the usual lifetime exposure of those rugged individualism rays. By the time they reached Clarence's hole the changes had aleady begun deep in their DNA and 800 billion years of raw red-in-tooth-and-claw evolution that had been so lamentably repressed by the DEAD HAND OF SOCIALISM began to flower with a vengeance. Their mans-gotta-do-wotta-mans-gotta-do-1-2-rivoflavinic acid began to form a complex helix with their amino-d-stand-on-your-own-two-feet peptides and dog-eat-dog glycerides. Emerging normantebbit nucleic acids began to create unbreakable bonds with ronaldreagan proteins. Strange alien thoughts of strike breaking and making a fast buck and screwing the scum-sucking lower orders began to fill their tiny heads. Their little bodies began to expand and grow in complexity. Bewildering varieties of appendages and organs - tentacles, beaks, claws, spikes, suckers, poison fangs and many other things grew from them and were immediately re-absorbed as their tiny frames tried to run through billions of years of adaptation in a few hours. Strangely, it was at 10.30 the next morning, the exact same time when a chance thrust of the old gardener's spade had created EVIL WORM, that the greatly swollen MUTANT SLUGS burst forth from their underground lair onto the vegetable patch. Poor old Clarence had already been well digested as had much of the surrounding earth and all the other life it had held but they were still hungry.
After millions of genetic experiments their DNA had returned to its roots and decided that, with a few adjustments, the slug shape and means of locomotion was actually very efficient. (Just as ours will one day - it has already made a start with John Prescot). Although they were vastly more advanced, the MUTANT SLUGS still looked superficially much like large Earth slugs, although there were many visible differences for any who dared to investigate more closely. Have you ever wondered why our slugs and snails move so slowly? It's obvious really, their speed has to be matched to the rate they can produce slime to slide on. If they try to go any faster the poor little sods sandpaper their tums something horrible on rough surfaces. The MS had solved this problem, they could squirt out graphite-enriched slime at up to 0.5 gallons per minute that would lubricate their course even at great speed. A MS could accelerate from 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds and had a top speed of almost 85 mph. Naturally, to produce this amount of slime, they had to ingest large volumes of food. Here their DNA had taken its inspiration from Clarence. Earthworms do not waste energy chasing down individual prey, rather they simply munch their way indiscriminately through their environment and let their digestive tract extract the goodness at its leisure. So with the MS but they did not eat just earth, oh no. They ate everything.
Just a few of the numerous tiny inhabitants of the compost heap had a glimpse of their doom as a slight sheen on the surrounding vegetation and a gossamer thin film in the air but by then it was too late, the MUTANT SLUG had them enveloped. The living net, a single cell in thickness but immensely strong, started to contract and it was all over. Soon the powerful digestive juices had extracted every ounce of nutrients from the compost heap and every living thing it contained - weeds, ivy, worms, woodlice, centipedes, beetles, spiders, frogs, slow worms - even an unfortunate nest of baby rats. And this takes us to other adaptations the MS had that no Earthly creature has ever evolved - they could digest food and convert it into body tissue with astonishing speed and efficiency and their growth was limited only by their food intake. The MS excreted a huge ball about half the size of the compost heap and its own size was now that of a large slug plus almost half a compost heap. Meanwhile, the other one had eaten the garden shed and the old gardener's hover mower. There wasn't very much nutrition in either of those but after a long struggle (excreting a largely undigested lawn mower is bloody painful, believe me, I know!) even that was the size of a small cat.
By noon, doom had come to the entire vegetable garden and all its tiny inhabitants save only a few who had escaped through the hedge to the woodland behind. It was now a desert devoid of any life. In the middle, having a brief kip after their efforts were the grotesque MUTANT SLUGS, about 190 lbs each of black sliminess. MUTANT SLUGS don't need much sleep either and given another twenty minutes their depredation would have continued. The more they ate, the bigger they grew and the bigger they grew the more they ate. Had they been allowed to continue in this exponential vain, all life on dry land would have been consumed within 15 months, or to be exact, 436 days, 4 hours and twenty nine minutes and at the end of that time the mutant slugs would each have been the size of 2,603 Everests. The horror would have ended soon after as they would have died of starvation, having nothing left to eat but rock, each other and billions of tons of MUTANT SLUG poo, but this would have been small consolation to all the former land dwelling flora and fauna of Earth, I think you will agree.
Indirectly, it was the old gardener who saved the day again, although it was a great tragedy that he was too late to save the tiny invertebrates of the vegetable garden this time around. I am really still rather upset about that. Well, yes, he did save humanity I suppose, but that's not much of a consolation in my view. Did you know that over 99% of humanity are BLOODY FOREIGNERS in any case? More importantly though, he saved all the little several-legged or no-legged creatures in gardens throughout the world. Nice they are, not like people, millipedes don't run off with the bloody washing machine repair man like my wife did or give one the sack for a few unfortunate misunderstandings over internet usage. LOLITA is an acronym for Large-scale, Object-based, Linguistic Interactor, Translator and Analyser - look it up on the net yourself. I thought it looked just the approach the client needed, hardly my fault the bloody internet cache stored a few inappropriate images found by accident was it? Must have been a computer virus that put them on the CD. Yes, sorry, off topic again, where were we this time? Oh, yes, the gardener. The old chap was frail but no coward and had distinguished himself in three world wars and killed loads of KRAUTS and JAPS and other nasty greasy foreign sorts, but I doubt even he would have tackled the MUTANT SLUGS had he appreciated the full horror of them. When he saw that his beloved veggie patch had been decimated and that someone had apparently left two damn great slimy black sacks in the middle of it, he just assumed his scummy neighbours on the North side were trying to steal his vegetables again.
It was too much! The old chap was livid!. Mr Scum-to-the-North happened to be in his garden at the time playing with his grandchildren when a half used pack of Homebase Bone Meal hurtled over the hedge and hit him right in the mouth. Retaliation was not long in coming. There wasn't much else immediately to hand on Mr Scum's manicured lawn and his fury was too urgent for delay. He was a big man. The smaller and uglier of the two grandchildren flew over the hedge, missing our old war hero by a foot and landing plumb in the middle of the nearest MUTANT SLUG where she immediately sank without trace. Her name was Jessica by the way, I always think horrible fates are so much more fun when you know the victim's name, don't you? The MS woke up, shuddered briefly, spat out clothes, bones, NHS glasses and a mouthbrace and was instantly bigger by almost a full small ugly child increment. The old gardener was even more livid than he was when I said he was livid a moment ago( I have mislaid my Thesaurus) and did not notice. Over the hedge went the plastic watering can, right through a pane of Mr Scum's greenhouse. Back came the retaliatory strike in the form of the second grandchild, missing the old chap by a bare few inches this time, plop into the other MS. The MUTANT SLUGS were ecstatic; everything in this marvellous new world was just getting better and better, now it was raining delicious ready meals that tasted even better than insects, vegetables and compost heaps. They reared up ready to catch any more of this manna that came their way. Our old war hero was in great danger but the STALE OLD PERSON smell of the octagenarian put them off while there was more tasty fare to be had. His hearing not being what it used to be and he had not noticed they were right behind him. (The DEAF OLD TWAT)
Mr Scum had run out of young relatives and had decided on more direct action in the form of a good slapping. He charged towards the hedge and began to force his way through the Leylaandi. The old gardener was begining to regret his hasty action, but in true Desert Rat spirit he gripped his rake and prepared to defend his life in exactly the same way as, half a century earlier, he had faced the guns of Rommel. He had pissed and shat himself then too. Mr Scum freed himself from the broken stems of the hedge and took two steps towards the SILLY OLD FART. He stopped and his face froze in an attitude of terror at the sight of the two monstrous black creatures behind him. Hideous black ridges and flaps dripping with grey-green slime covered the creatures and gigantic maws seething with needle teeth opened and shut expectantly. Hanging from a corner of one maw was Jessica's half digested slime covered skull with a few bits of face still stuck to it. She looked nearly as ugly as she had when she was alive. The old man felt as proud as punch when his bully neighbour turned and began to frantically fight his way back through the hedge. He must still cut a fearsome figure! (SENILE OLD GOAT) Mr Scum had no chance, the MUTANT SLUGS were on him in an instant. When the old gardener saw his neighbour disappearing into these hideous creatures his limbs went weak and he sat down with a thump on his skinny bottom.
It was a million to one chance. He never even noticed it but he had sat on a tiny pink blob half buried in the slimy soil. It was the rear end of Clarence, and therefore also the rear end of EVIL WORM. Nothing in the universe could digest that and one of the MS had spat it out, it gave it heartburn. The old gardener's skinny and poohy old rear end thumping onto that tiny rear end did what Clarence had failed to do; it triggered the WORMCAST OF DOOM and opened a portal to dimension 4,867. That dimension is regrettably limp-wristed I'm afraid to say. This time it was the POLITICALCORRECTNESS radiation that bathed our slimy black villians. Once more their immature and sensitised DNA began to change. Strange contradictory thoughts again crowded their tiny brains. Everybody knew that crime was due to poverty and lack of education. On the other hand, poor uneducated immigrants ENRICHED our society and were NEVER criminals. These same paragons, despite lower pay and poorer health than average and financial support for families abroad, nevertheless managed to defy the laws of mathematics and raise the standard of living for all of us while simultaneously paying for our future pensions. Asylum seekers were all genuinely fleeing state oppression. It was just bad luck that they all mislaid any documents that might tend to prove this just before applying for asylum. Everybody had a right to their own culture and to determine their own futures but white British people were racist and xenophobic to want such things. What was wrong with our society was a lack of democracy and the best way to ensure proper democracy was to appoint lots more tiers of politicians to tell people what it was correct to think and do while handing all real power to an unelected body in Brussels. Their brains started to make no logical sense at all and very soon their bodies, right down to cellular and then nuclear level, followed suit. When nothing in your body makes any sense you cannot survive for too long. The poor MUTANT SLUGS writhed in their agony and slowly the little solidity they had began to vanish.
Barely an hour later, the sun shone on puddles of formless jelly with no power over anything. The MUTANT SLUGS had become LIBERAL DEMOCRATS. Soon they would dry out in the August heat and be blown away in the gentle breeze. That particular threat to our dimension was over. The old gardener? He didn't survive as he was sat right on the WORMCAST OF DOOM and got the full force of some deadly but short range radiation from another dimension, probably 890,134,505. Look on the bright side. The old chap had been waiting for a prostate operation for over nine months. It was just a little vigorous that's all, removed his inflamed prostate right up to his forehead. Good value if you ask me. Mr Scum? Who cares about neighbours? If you really must know, everthing of him, with the exception of his right knee, got thoroughly digested before the MUTANT SLUGS were halted. Once the knee had become a little ripe it attracted the attention of his Great Dane, Lucy, who had gone hungry for three days. Lucy pushed her way through the hedge and ate it. There was so little left of any of them that nobody ever knew what became of the old gardener, Mr Scum, or his grandchildren. For a few days the mystery was in the news but it was soon displaced by the latest tale of a celebrity who was found to have 36 dead schoolchildren in his swimming pool. Well, it was news as he did not have a licence apparently.
What did I mean by what? Oh when I said that particular threat to our dimension. Well of course there was yet to be the problem of the SPIDER WEB THAT CAUGHT NO FLIES but that's another story. Can you get out now please? you are starting to smell up the place and I have to catch my dinner before it gets dark.
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This story had been contributed by Trinity. As you can see, the woman is quite depraved. What's a vibrator???
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She still couldn’t believe she had got away with it.
All that damn stupid security and she had got through it with a six-foot trunk so easily. Mind, it hadn’t been easy using the lifter to get it in the trailer. She had watched it used so many times over and over again but when it was time for her to engage it, her hands had shaken so much and her brain had been so frozen with fear of discovery that it had taken far longer than she had anticipated.
She had driven past the security guards with a wave of the hand and a smile. They were used to seeing her there. She was the chief designer at Cybernetics Inc. Security class A1, but that did not give her permission to take the main project out of the complex. Oh no! It certainly did not. Her employment with the company was now hanging on a very thin wire. “Well, to hell with them” she thought, ‘I have given my very whole for those assholes’. And she drove on into the night putting her foot down on the gas pedal, delicious anticipation filled her very soul and her senses tingled expectantly. As she neared the house she pressed the button for the electronic garage door to open. The house looked warm and bright as she approached and the car slid quietly into the safe little haven. The doors shut effortlessly behind her. She was home. Once the trailer gates were opened she unlocked the metal trunk and stood back to view the contents inside.
She drew a deep breath as she always did when she saw him for the first time in the day. They had named him Adam, from Adam and Eve theory. Adam was Jane’s project. The first android build to satisfy women’s sexual needs. Jane had worked on Adam for the last five years and was pleased with what she had designed. Gradually the mannequin had been built and perfected to her highest classification. She had hovered over him like a mother hen. She was a bitch to work for; expected 110% and was driven by this project. Some say she was obsessed. Others said she was a lonely woman who had nothing else in her life.
Who cared what they said, she had become enamoured with Adam. She would stand and watch him for hours. Feel his arms and chest. Run her hands down his tight strong legs and when she thought absolutely no one was watching , she would examine his penis, letting her fingers linger over each and every wrinkle. Seeing the skin go taunt and flaccid again, marvel at its perfection. It was so damn real, so special. And now at the moment of testing they were going to bring in some Sheep for Adam… she was appalled. It brought a whole new meaning to the word Laboratory Animal.
No, her Adam was not going to be used in this way. It was obscene and indecent. She gently and deftly removed the tiny control panel from behind Adams right ear and inserted the tiny electrode. Replaced the panel, and held her breath. ‘Hello Jane’ Adam seemed to jump alive. His first few movements were slightly jerky but it soon settled. She felt his head with both hands and inspected his face. Yes it all seemed to be working. Damn he felt so real, he was even warming up. He stared at her and looked into her eyes. “My, you look beautiful tonight Jane”. She took his hand and beckoned him out of the garage and up the pine stairs to her house. She felt like she was floating. She was so excited she could hardly breath, her heart seemed to be thumping out of her chest. At the top of the stairs Adam stopped and took Jane’s face in his hands. “may I kiss you Jane?” He gently pulled her face towards hers and took her soft lips onto his own. Jane felt on fire. Her vagina seemed to have come alive and was thumping and bumping. As he pulled her closer she felt his penis bulge. She remembered that any contact with the lips or penis i.e.; stroking or touching caused Adam to have an erection. She pulled away and led him to the sofa. Adam was in love mode now and he was hot. His aim was to remove her clothes and pleasure her. His prime directive was to fuck, and fucking was what he was going to do. Jane’s dress slid off easily and underneath she was naked.
Adam took her breasts in his mouth and kissed and caressed them until Jane moaned and shouted with frustration. She wanted sex and she wanted it now. Adam gently pushed her to the floor and Jane guided him inside of her. At the moment of penetration Jane felt that the earth had given way and she was in heaven. Everything except Adams delicious cock and luscious mouth didn’t matter anymore. She was complete. Adam was in full love mode now. He pumped and rocked contently. This was what he was built for; this was his prime directive. This was his life. After what seemed a very long time and after several orgasms Jane asked Adam to slow down, take his time, but the Adam Android didn’t respond. His face was set in one expression, that of lust and enjoyment. For a while Jane got back in the groove, then she began to worry a little, She tried again to stop him, but it was futile. The Adam Love android seemed unable to stop he didn’t want to stop. This was why he was here. This was his aim. He continued on and on and on. Jane began to cry and shout, after a few hours she blacked out.
They found her three days later. There had been a major alert when they found the Android missing and when Jane also went missing the state police were sent to her home. The scene was one that shocked the poor young 23-year-old officer into needing counselling. The android was lying on top of the now well dead Jane. He was short circuited by over exposure to sex.
The headlines screamed ‘Woman fucked to death by machine’ There was a huge outcry about misuse of public money for such research. Cybernetics Inc went into liquidation. But the research went on underground for many years afterwards. I believe there are many of the Adam Love bots infiltrating our society at present.
Beware women, vibrators are a much safer option.
Copyright Trinity
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This story had been contributed by Trinity.
It needs no paragraphs. For once I have no stupid comments to make.
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Once Long Ago there lived a girl She was a happy friendly girl with lots of friends and seemed to have a full and contented life. One day she came across a Castle. She had never noticed it before. It stood tall and proud. It was beautiful with magical turrets and a wonderful wooden drawbridge. She didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed it before. She went back to her home but it seemed so insignificant and small now she had seen the castle. She began to visit the castle every day sometimes two or three times. She would sit on the banks of the huge moat and talk to the walls. She dreamt that they spoke back to her, wonderful warm words of love and security and of a world she never knew existed. Then one day something magical happened. She was standing By the drawbridge when it suddenly dropped. She walked inside with nervous excitement. Inside was everything she had ever dreamed of. She forgot all her worries and problems and felt happiness like never before and security and peace. It felt like it was meant to be, like she was meant to stay there all her life. But it could not be. The powers of the land only let her stay a very short while and she had to leave. She cried for days, even weeks when on her own. She wanted to return inside the castle walls, but the drawbridge wouldn’t drop down again. She worried and fretted and thought hard. Maybe if she gave it gifts it would see how much she loved it and let her in. So everyday she would come to the walls and throw gifts over the turrets. The castle seemed to like them, it made encouraging noises and she felt overjoyed. The gifts became more and more elaborate and expensive. The castle fretted but she was still encouraged. She would listen for a need, a book, it needed a book and she would scurry off. Nothing else mattered except finding the right book for the castle. Her whole essence would be consumed into finding just the right thing. Often the gift was not appreciated and she would feel hurt and rejected, but after a day of misery she would see the beautiful walls again and, nothing else mattered. She brushed the rejection away and started again. After all this was her life and if she didn’t get to live in that castle then, life was not worth living any more. The gifts turned into money. She heard that the castle was expensive to keep so she started to send money, not huge amounts as that would have been impossible but enough so as her own life became meagre and poor. Then on one such visit she heard the drawbridge lower and saw to her horror another being allowed in his walls. She was destroyed, but the castle whispered to her that it liked her still and to keep sending the gifts and this ‘other’ was only a play friend. She fretted over it and was wildly jealous, but she loved the castle so much that she would have forgiven anything at all, and so she kept on. She KNEW that one day the castle would realise that it was foolish and open its bridge for her alone and her life would be complete and happy forever and ever. Her life in her meagre home was suffering and money was tight. She needed to move home and still see the castle so she borrowed money, money that wasn’t hers to keep. She knew it was wrong and she felt she should burn in hell for what she had done, but she couldn’t help herself. She was all consumed and all infatuated with the beautiful Castle of her dreams. Sixteen months later, is a sad scene. The girl still sits by the castle walls, but now out of habit more than anything else. She fears the drawbridge has seized with rust and will never come down for her. She thought about swimming the moat but it's full of crocodiles and sharks. She would certainly die if she did that. So that would be the final act. She always had that to fall back to. She knows in her mind that she has no hope of ever living in that castle. But her heart won’t let her depart. Her heart is broken into a million pieces and emptiness is left and confusion and apathy. What is to become of her? Without the castle to dream about all seems so grey and misty and unsure. So she continues to sit on the banks of the moat. She stares up at the sky and cries and cries until there are no tears left.
Copyright Trinity
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Hello, my name is Ahmed and I'm a suicide bombe
Hello, my name is Nasim and I'm a sui
Hello, my name is Karim an
From the monthly newletter of the Westheath Branch of Suicide Bombers Anonymyous. Will all members please refrain from blowing themselves up at the weekly meetings. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find suitable venues for our meets.
Hello, my name is Muhammed and I'm a s
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The peeling sign on the drab little building said "The Hurricane Foundation" It was funded in a small way by various companies looking for tax offsets and therefore indirectly by taxpayers' money, and in a rather larger way by a Columbian drug cartel as means of laundering money, although none of the handful of worthy geeks who worked there knew anything about that. Some of the small number of souls who ventured down the small cul-de-sac wondered what it did. Some of those assumed and questioned briefly why anyone would research hurricanes in a small trading estate at the edge of a small town in Berkshire.
Its sponsors were mainly interested in what it really did and didn't really care too much what it ostensibly did, although it had to look convincing. The research was therefore well funded and organised and taken deadly seriously by the eight staff that worked there and the geeks in the labs were five of the brightest misfits that UK universities could produce.
Being largely devoid of any human charm that could appeal to others, the geeks hung out together. They had common interests in cars, online gaming, porn and politics. Or rather the absence of politics; our geeks were all fervent anarchists. Like many who are both practical and intelligent but entirely powerless and lacking in influence, they resented what they saw as the control of their lives by those of inferior intellect and the donation of the fruits of their industry and abilities to those who neither exercised the first nor possessed the second. Most of all, as all of us of sound mind do, they hated HIM. The one who is never off our screens with his pointless charming soundbites and his half thought out philosophies that are never taken to the realistic conclusions before being acted upon and his endlessly floated impractical initiatives and his moral crusades that cost so much to the donor and do so very little for the supposed recipients.
Their research was about the practical applications of chaos theory and the name on the peeling sign was from that well known idea about the flap of a butterfly's wings triggering a hurricane on the other side of the world. The specific area of research at the present time, for no better reason than because it sounded worthy to the shadowy backers, was application of chaos theory to spread of contagious diseases in human populations.
As the geeks got tired of pointing out to their very few other friends and acquaintances who learned of their occupation, one hardly needed to be an expert to realise that the old butterfly/hurricane saw was at best an impractical concept. If it was indeed true that the minute air disturbances from the wings could have an effect around the world, it was equally true that the disturbances of a piece of paper falling off a desk somewhere else could have an effect preventing the hurricane or countering the tiny perterbations from those tiny wings long before they even got near the hurricane site. There is no such thing as "almost infinite" but the limited human mind would perceive it as that - a near infinity of events with equal or greater influence so that no single one could ever be isolated as a determinant of another, yet alone controlled to create it. All chaos theory really was was a mathematical method of understanding apparently random events which were related at the micro level.
At least that was what they had thought back in those early days. These guys were very very bright but it has to be said it was perhaps just a leap of imagination, perhaps a half remembered dream, by the dimmest of them, George, that took them on to the realisation. It helped too that they had just started to lease time on one of the new and still rare super nano-computers. The annual leasing charge paid to a company in Miami was satifyingly large for their backer's purpose but to our naive and spotty geeks it was the astonishing simulation power handed to them that mattered.
George's realisation had been a simple one. Most of the disturbance of those tiny wings had been lost in the noise by the time it reached the other side of the world, but it was still finite. Yes, it was true that for every tiny effect, the fluttering of those bright wings for example, there were an unimaginable number of other random effects that would counter or nullify it. But each of those effects would also counter each other, meaning that the effects of all them together were essentially not much more than neutral. What if you could introduce a pattern into several selected events that would introduce a bias? Further, what if by choice of those effects in the immediate locality you could act both to neutralise the damping events and augment the reinforcing events creating a chaotic event amplifier? What if, with only a broad mathematical knowledge of chaos theory and without having a detailed knowledge of any of those "nearly infinite" sequences of events, you could somehow select the events so they would propogate and grow and spread to acheive a desired result. In short, was it perhaps possible to build a chaos amplifier and link it to a chaos transmitter?
It took them over a year of hard work, both their own time and the foundation's time; work which they had no trouble disguising as research on transmission of diseases as their backers could not understand the difference. They spent impossibly long hours on it but our geeks had very little else in their lives but their maths, each other's company and their increasingly bizarre hatred of authority. George's theory was sound. They discovered that not only could the amplifier and the transmitter be created by a carefully timed combination of trivial events in one locality but that they could even focus the chaos result in space and time with precision. Better still, the desired event could be switched on or off by one single causative event in the chain and this event could be one local to the site of the desired result. The maths was stupefyingly complex but the conclusions and the methods were simple.
It was the last day of the Labour Party conference and the PM mounted the podium to loud applause. The security at every event involving the PM was intense. Every hotel he stayed in and every conference room he went near had been thoroughly searched. Every delegate at the conference has been checked out beforehand to obtain a pass and they were still searched on entry to the hall. Every road he travelled on had been cleared, every manhole sealed and every vantage point overlooking his route monitored. He was totally secure and any terrorist would have had to be mad to even go near the place.
Two hundred and fifty miles away. George got up from his seat where he had been watching the news. He took the broom out of the kitchen cupboard and dropped it on the tiled flooring. In the next room Joseph started the stopwatch when he heard the clatter. When it reached 68 seconds he lifted the vase and tossed it against the wall. Shortly afterwards Sue gently kicked the armchair and then went over to the light switch. She flicked it on and off on a count of 27. Just down the road, Kieran slammed the front door. Standing on the steps of the public library a hundred yards away, Reg dropped the tissue. It was done. There was a sudden slight murmour of wind that scattered the litter of wrappers outside the McDonalds and then it was gone.
When the conference ended it had been a resounding success for the PM personally. As usual, his enormous charm and eloquence had triumphed over the emptiness of his promises. Many in the army of newshounds believed his troubles were behind him. An hour later, the PM, flanked by security gaurds, started quickly down the back steps of the conference centre to the waiting armoured limousine. He was ecstatic at the success, of the conference, and especially of his final rousing speech to the party faithful. The PM looked towards the small selected group of reporters, paused and waved. His mouth opened in that well known flash of straight white teeth and for once his grin was sincere.
It was an inevitable event and it was what George called "the enabler". High up above the road, out of an almost still sky, a sudden squall of immense power struck the cracked chimney stack of the Armada Conference Centre and 3 tons of victorian masonry began its brief and rapid descent.
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He turned to god after the death of his beloved wife. He was only 25 and embraced his faith eagerly.
His new found religion was his consolation in the dark days that followed his loss. The only thing that stopped him following her by his own hand was his knowledge that some day he would see her again and in a far better place. Knowledge or hope? As his loss receeded he realised that his failure to follow her had been more about doubt. He was just one of the many who, in times of despair, had cried "Help me god and I will believe" and who forget their promises when life improves. He tried to enforce his faith with prayer and mediation and devotion, to truly believe in god. Whatever he did, he could never wholly shake off those doubts.
Another thought haunted him. What was it for, this faith he so desired? He tried to be honest to himself. Because he wanted a place in heaven, he wanted to see his wife again. It was all about his desires and needs. His faith, shaky as it was, was about nothing but serving his own ends. He directed his mediation and prayer towards finding a love of god without thought of his own rewards. His failure seemed even greater in this area. There seemed to be times when he was coming close. Then those others when his whole thoughts seemed to be of his own eternity in paradise.
There were those few times too when he felt confident and strong in his faith and it was at those times that he sometimes felt contempt for those who had none or who followed the superstitious beliefs of other religions. He knew it was not his place to judge, that judgement was for god alone when the time came. He could only try to guide. Yet there were times when he caught himself feeling triumphant at the fate their own willfulness or venality would bring down on them.
Perhaps that did not matter so much. Jesus has required him to love his fellow man. Maybe his doubts and poor character would be forgiven him if he did all he could for others. He became involved in a number of charitable concerns and spent many of his free hours in their service, helping the elderly of the parish, fund raising for the poor abroad. Some nights he got home tired after evenings spent at these events and all his doubts about his own motivations flooded back. He had done his duty but surely mere duty was not what Christianity was about. Where was the love?
This was much more difficult because in all honesty his fellow man were not always terribly loveable. The smelly incontinent old gent in the village he visited and sometimes helped to clean up, the inhabitants of countries abroad who created so many of their own problems. But he tried hard to equate their own frailties and failings with his own and to forgive them and to feel genuine love. Yet there were many times when he would search his heart for tolerance and love and and could find nothing but exasperation and contempt.
But everyone who knew him thought him a good man and he was not unaware of their opinions. Was that, deep down, what all his charity was really about? Was he just a modern Pharisee? He tried to exorcise the pride from his own soul, to lose his sense of his own worth. In this most difficult of all inner struggles he failed dismally. He could not eliminate that sense of personal pride he felt when his efforts and abilities led to a sizeable donation to his charity. He could not even totally expunge the knowledge that he was so much better than many of the charity's recipients or the indifferent majority who did nothing to help.
At 55, on the the same stretch of road where his wife had died 30 years before, his car collided head on with a lorry. In the short period of lucidity while the fireman where cutting him out, he knew he had failed in everything he had attempted. He realised, now that eternal darkness beckoned, he had never even really had any faith.
The darkness came and went and he found himself journeying towards the light. God himself as the son was waiting to welcome him. "I never thought I could be here" said the man "for I have failed in everything I did to make myself worthy of it".
"You did all that could be expected of you" said the Lord "for man is a frail and fallable creature and I expect very little of any of you. This is the paradise I made for you and for all men who would just make a reasonable effort within the limits of your own capabilities. For those who would try to believe in and love me with just some thought beyond their own place in paradise. Who could hold their version of faith without feeling contempt and hatred for those who followed a different path. Who would try to love and serve their fellow man without being solely motivated by a love of praise or a secret sense of their own worth or a need to think themselves so much better than other men"
They breasted the small hill and gazed down on the glory of paradise. An endless landscape of unbelievable arcadian beauty. "You will find all you need there" said the lord, gesturing at a magnificent temple in the valley. The man looked, Perhaps his wife would be there waiting for him. But there was no sign. Looking around he saw no sign of anyone in the whole beautiful landscape. The Lord knew his thoughts and smiled sadly. Even in that place of perpetual light it seemed that a darkness of sorrow fell upon the land.
"There are no others" said the Lord, "you are the only one who has ever made it."
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We are writing this from one of many tediously similar futures.
As in the film of HG Well's novel, the time machine was invented by an individual in England and the first prototype really did look a bit like a bath chair with a big wheel on the back but apart from those coincidences almost nothing about time travel turned out as fiction, or the physicists, had told us.
We had all read the dire warnings in sci fi stories about altering the past and we all knew that a single butterfly stepped on in the Jurassic would totally change the course of history. We would suddenly exist, if we or even mankind were lucky enough to exist at all, in a totally changed world and be completely ignorant of any other possibilities. There was therefore considerable panic when attempts by the government to take over the patent and prevent any use or disclosure of details of the invention were thwarted by the courts due to recent badly worded enhancements to the European Human Rights act, especially when production of the machines was funded by a well known media company who owned several newspapers and TV stations in Europe and America.
The first commercial model came out at Easter and it was too good an opportunity to miss, Judas Iscariot "My side of the story". Judas was paid 800 pieces of silver by the News Of The World and with all that money in his pocket it hardly seemed worth becoming history's greatest villian for a mere 40, so on betrayal night he never bothered to turn up, preferring to get drunk on the Famous Grouse whisky they had given him and spend the night with a whore. The Roman soldiers wandered about a bit looking for Jesus but in those days all male Jews looked like Jesus and they could not spot him. Peter did suggest he should wave and go "oi! I'm Jesus!" but he did not want god's plan for mankind to look too obvious, things have to be a bit more unfathomable and mysterious to attract religious types, so he decided to put it off for a while and look for another betrayer. A couple of days later he got run over by a runaway mule cart carrying crucifixion crosses for Barabas and others and was buried in the tomb from which he never emerged. The Almighty presumably decided there was not much point.
As alterations of history went, time travel could hardly have got off to a worse start but that's where the Sci Fi stories turned out all wrong. Christianity never happened but it got replaced by something almost identical founded early in the 1st century by a Roman chap called Janus who claimed to be the favourite nephew of god. Like Christianity it was a religion of peace and love and thus spent most of its first 1500 years burning and torturing people throughout Europe who did not follow its principles before becoming enlightened and just having them thrown in prison instead. That was lesson number one of time travel, whatever anyone did, things turned out pretty much the same. It seemed as though there was a structure and pattern to the course of history and only insignificant details of it could be altered. Even in those details there are numerous immutables, for example, no matter what is done to alter history, Ken Livingstone will always end up as Mayor of London.
After the time machines became slightly cheaper and more readily available there were all sorts of organisations who tried to alter history according to their view of what it should be and they were all disappointed. French activists attempted to change the outcome of Waterloo and create a French dominated Europe by assassinating Field Marshall Blucher. Due to his horse rearing at the crucial moment the modern bullet only injured him and his rage only reinforced his resolution causing the French to lose half an hour earlier than they usually did. Attempts by American Indians to sabotage Christopher Columbus's discovery of America appeared on the brink of success when he was disgraced by a trumped up scandal but then it was discovered only a few days later than formerly by his cousin Colin. No matter what attempts were made to change history it would cling obstinately to something very close to its usual course.
Even in small things, after the machines became available to the masses, those who wanted to change their lives by doing things differently found their lives not greatly altered. Why, oh why did you not get married to Harriet when you had the chance? you would not be stuck with fat neurotic Julie and you would be happy! So you go back and propose to Harriet only to find after a few years than she is even more fat and neurotic than Julie. Why did you not study harder and pass your A levels? you could have been a vet instead of a garage mechanic. So you go back and study harder, drop out after the first year at university and end up servicing vending machines because you were always a lazy bugger with no real ambition and fixing machines was all you were any good at. Those who say life is predetermined were very nearly right.
But the main departure from all the theories is illustrated by the fact that Judas's story in the News Of the World proved to be a considerable boost to their circulation. I can see the reaction from my pre time travel readers; how was that possible? If Christianity never existed then Judas would be a nonentity, just a sidekick of yet another messianic Jewish character that nobody outside of a few historians of Roman history had ever heard of. Not so, for although Christianity had never existed in the current time stream people still knew who he was from the memories of the former timestream. The time machine did not tap into and alter a single thread of time, creating a branch that evolved from that point. Rather it did something that natural laws had never done and simply killed one stream and swapped everyone, complete with all their memories, into another. That was another of the immutables, although their lives could be altered slightly, prolonged or cut short by the odd week or two, everyone (and this probably applied to all living things although that has not been proven) who has existed in one stream will still exist in the other at much the same time.
Naturally, this proved a boon for contact websites like formerlifefreindsunited.com who specialised in putting people into contact with those few they did not still know in the current one. It had many drawbacks too especially given that most people's different life streams were so very similar. It was really hard to remember which was which. Perhaps you should go to Malaga this year as a change from The Algarve, or did you normally go to the Algarve and it was the previous life where it was the other way round? Was the wife's name Vera this time round or was it Veronica? No hang on, Veronica was three lives ago, perhaps it was Valerie?
It came as a great relief when a small band of intrepid men discovered that one major event could be altered, perhaps because it was an anomaly and had never had a place in the timestream at all, the invention of the time machine itself. After a hard knock on the head the bearded genius totally forgot all his plans and it was never invented. Everyone was deliriously happy that life could follow a regular stream and they would not be continually shifting into a slightly different world, waking up to find a wife with a bigger nose, starting to eat toast and marmalade for breakfast and ending it eating toast and Marmite, tripping up on steps because there were three treads instead of the two there were when you started down them. There was a huge celebration in every capital of the world to mark the fact that the time machine had never existed.
Time travel is a preposterous concept and some day, when you reach the future we live in today, you will all realise it.
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It all started on a very dismal day. Back then he had not thought it could get worse.
It had been spitting as Ryan drove through the ugly 1980s yellow-brick sprawl of Chesley Bank village and it was bucketing down as his tyres crunched onto the gravel in front of the Victorian mock-gothic ugliness of St. Gunters.
Damn Ray. "As you're down Chelmsford way I wonder if you can drop by and look at something an old friend of mine has found". If he didn't owe him a few favours he would have told him to stuff it. He could be eating lunch at Mason's by now, discussing some profitable business, not outside this red brick abomination in a drab London overspill area.
Father Jack Brennan was pleasant enough and couple of whiskies saw Ryan in a slightly mellower mood as he was led down into the whitewashed crypt. "We had just started doing it up for a youth club and found this bricked up room behind the old wooden cupboards. Nothing in it except this." "This" was a large wooden chest that stood open in the centre of the room. "Well, as I say Jack, not likely to be anything worth a fortune in a Victorian church and there isn't a great market for ecclesiastical stuff but maybe we can help pay for your youth club"
The chest did not disappoint in its disappointingness. As he removed the collection of mostly well-thumbed hymn books, small church ornaments and cheaply plated communion wares he reflected that the chest had probably been left in the sealed off room because nobody thought it worth removing. Cleaned up, the chest itself was probably good for about £200, the rest looked like about a k's worth at auction on a very good day.
"Ray said there were some rather ungodly history about St. Gunters?" he started tactlessly, "Always a good market for occult stuff if we can find any". The Father sounded thoroughly disapproving of society's relative values. "Not really, just rumour, people love to create mysteries out of nothing. A wealthy Prussian industrialist built St. Gunters in about 1850 for his family and estate workers and it was bequeathed to the parish after his death. There were also unverified rumours about St Gunter himself and the reclusive monastery he set up. He wasn't a real Saint you know, we wanted to change the name if only for that reason but the terms of the bequest didn't allow it."
The last item in the chest was flat and so similar in colour to the bottom of the chest that he nearly missed it. An oak slab about an inch thick and 18 inches square intrically carved with leaves and with a regular arrangement of small squares each with an abstract symbol. This looked more interesting. There was an inscription at the bottom. " Zwanzig vier Tage bis er kommt” If he remembered his school German correctly, “24 days until he comes”. An advent calendar? For the first time since he had driven into Chesley Bank he felt interested. The German connection fitted and if this came from around 1860 like the other items in the chest, it would be one of the earliest purpose-made craftwork advent calendars ever found, of considerable historical interest and quite valuable. Father Brennan was very pleased with the possibility. He could never have been comfortable with the idea of funding his parish work from the sales of Satanist paraphernalia but now the lord had provided out of his own righteous bounty!
Ryan took the chest and its contents away with him and dropped everything off at his London shop for examination and valuation by one of his most junior employees, except for the advent calendar, which he took home. He would need to do some research. Sitting in his study, he examined the board more closely. The slightly raised squares with their odd symbols did look very like small doors, there was a small gap round some revealing what appeared to be the edges of tiny hinges, but he knew that was impossible. Even though it was not his field, he knew the idea of opening a small window for each day of Advent was a commercial invention of the twentieth century. The squares on this board would have been for the placing of candles. Still. He tried to lever up a couple of the squares with his nails. Just as he expected, no movement. Ridiculous trying.
As he had told the good father he was not an expert in eccliastical relics and he found nothing in his extensive book collection that was any help. This would be a job for Tony Cuelho when he saw him, more his area. A check on the Internet yielded very little. The church had been founded by Han Claas, a wealthy Prussian philanthropist, who made his money from armaments manufacture. He had set up communes in Prussia based around his own reclusive Christian sect and supported several orphanages. He had purchased the British estate in 1851, employing mostly Prussian workers from the same sect, and ran an orphanage on it for the children of East London.
There was even less on St Gunter. An obscure 14th century figure that founded a monastery of ascetics. The church had begun the long process leading to it but Gunter had never been canonised, St Gunter was a title conferred only by his followers. It was not clear why his beatification had not proceeded but one suggestion was an association with one Baron Canthus who had been accused of being a devil worshipper and was subsequently burnt at the stake.
Business took him away for a couple of days and he had no time to consider the calendar. He had forgotten all about it when he came home late and tired on Sunday. He was sitting having one or two very strong nightcaps to unwind before going to bed and the calendar was on the coffee table where he had left it. Tomorrow, he would do something about it. December 1st, an appropriate time to find an advent calendar, if indeed it really was. Pity he had not got it ready for sale already, proper timing really helped in the antique business.
He picked idly again at some of the raised squares. When he touched the bottom right hand square it opened instantly. Rather, it flew open as if spring loaded although no spring was apparent, releasing a small puff of dust and a slight smell of old wood. Something else too, like burning and rot together. A calendar of the modern style with opening windows from the 1860s? Impossible surely! Yet he himself had taken it from the bottom of the chest beneath a pile of books and other items that he could date with certainty from that decade and earlier. Father Jack had showed him parish notes of the period that had suggested the chamber was probably bricked up at that time. How convenient! Was the good priest or somebody else was trying to con him? They must be damn fools if so, he knew experts who could tell him pretty exactly when the thing was made. He would get onto Tony Cuelho in the morning, if this thing was a fake or a later artefact secreted in the chest there would be hell to pay. He left for bed in a foul mood.
At the bottom of the stairs it occurred to him he had not even looked to see what was under the tiny door and turned back. Nothing. The recess revealed was painted matt black. Not too interesting even if it was genuine but on the other hand he had been in the antiques business long enough to know that amateur forgers usually went over the top, maybe the lack of a picture was a good sign. It would be more in keeping with the supposed date if you were supposed to stick the picture in yourself. Another thought struck him. He picked at the other doors, each one in turn from top to bottom and left to right. None would open. Just this one, but surely that was one he had tried a couple of days earlier? Or perhaps he had had a few too many nightcaps to think straight. That was it. He sniggered and swayed slightly. Of course, it was only December 1st today, you can't open advent calendar doors before the proper day!
He slept badly and awoke to a headache and a faint sense of unreality. He really should cut down on the booze. The calendar lay where he had left it. He would do something about it tomorrow; he really wouldn't have the time today. As he got ready for work he could remember a little of a strange dream, of being crowded in by many tall people and an enclosed darkness from which he could not escape. Perhaps it was the darkness under the little door. Funny how minor things can get into your dreams and grow into monsters. On leaving he glimpsed a small blond child watching, motionless. He hoped the kid did not belong to the new neighbours, the expensive but tiny Mews was not suitable. He loathed kids.
He got back late and tired but pleased at a profitable day. Too much whisky again. He really should slow down, he had enough to retire comfortably even without the money his fashionable London Antique shops would bring, but he no longer knew how to live any other life. Damn it, he would try. He had said it a thousand times. He promised himself a day off tomorrow. He had said that a thousand times too but relaxing was something he no longer knew how to do. The calendar was there again on the coffee table. The first window was open although he thought he had closed it. December 2nd. Maybe another door would open today. He picked at all the little doors and none budged until he got to the second right on the bottom row. It flew open with a puff of dust and that faint smell of decay. For some reason he wasn't even surprised, had half expected it. It wasn't possible but it was somehow certain.
It was a strange week and it was not just the way that the previously opened doors were open each morning even though he had closed them before retiring or even the oddly inevitable opening each day of the next tiny door which he felt somehow compelled to pick at. Several times he awoke to the grey dawn in something like panic and had to go downstairs, make himself a coffee and pace the kitchen for twenty minutes before the stark normality of the tiles and stainless steel under the cold strip lighting chased away the feeling of terror and claustrophobia. An echo of a feeling he had not had for a long time, since his breakdown ten years ago. He seemed to have been in a cold pitch-black place, unable to move. Somehow, he had known he was not alone, that he had been there for a long time and also that he would be there still for a very long time afterwards. There were other vague recollections. Of being crowded with many other people as before, a bearded face that was there and then somehow shut out as the darkness closed in. Then there were those damn children. He kept catching glimpses of small kids hanging around the mews but they were never in full view. What were they up to? Round at the King George he asked Harry if the latest arrivals to the Mews had children but it seemed not. A divorced lawyer in his 50s he’d heard.
As he had expected, Tony Cuelho had not been able to help a great deal without seeing the calendar. He had felt unable to explain the strange circumstances of the opening doors and you don’t put superglue on what might be a valuable artefact so he had made an excuse about being in a rush and forgetting to bring it. Privately, he doubted if the superglue would have worked, he had tried closing the doors using a non marking adhesive and the next day they had all been open again although they all closed very easily and stayed closed when one was looking at them. Tony did tell him a little more about Claass and St Gunter. Baron Canthus, that sinister acquaintance of the almost Saint, was apparently one who believed in the principle that far older pagan gods, identified with Satan by the Catholic Church, had created and ruled the universe before God had cast them out. Since that time each had been looking for a way back and the negation of Christian sacraments by similar but opposite rituals was a major part of the process of countering God’s power.
“There is a similar principle in what we call Satanism of course” said Tony, “The use of the black mass with communion celebrated using blood or excrement instead of wine and so on but the idea that good and evil have superficially similar but countering principles and rituals is much older and has roots in the Sumerian mythology. This Baron Canthus supposedly worshipped several evil gods led by Zu, a storm god represented as a black bird. Hans Claas? Not much about him I’m afraid, there were local suspicions of the closed sect and gossip about what went on in St Gunters church but nothing concrete. There were also rumours of orphan children disappearing but this was still Dickens’ time and proper records were not kept. There was probably no great concern about street urchins in any case. I think it was mainly the third hand association with Baron Canthus via Gunter that damned Klaas in the eyes of the locals, plus he was a foreigner of course. Essex was a backwoods in those days”
Tony called on him with a festive bottle just before Christmas but there was no reply to his ring. Ryan was lying on the bed as he had mostly been doing for two weeks, dog-tired but unable to sleep; he wanted nobody to see him like this. Those dreams of being locked in a dark place came to him now whenever he started to nod off. It was easier to take another pill and stay awake, to flick through the TV channels and just watch anything. The children were everywhere, peering in through the windows, even inside his flat hiding behind the furniture, He could never seem to see them properly, they were shadows at the edge of his vision, behind the furniture and in the corners but never there when he looked directly at them. He knew he should get some help but had no energy.
Christmas Eve. He knew there was one thing he should not do but he no longer acted under his own volition, he was no longer sane. Last night the dreams, so vague before, had filled his mind with total reality. He saw the dark cellar of St Gunters and its chanting congregation. He had seen the tiny figures of the orphan children, twenty-four ragged little urchins, one for each night of Advent. He had seen each one bricked up alive in a tiny square space beneath the floor, one of twenty-four spaces laid out just as on that square of oak on the table in front of him. The pitifully thin children were drugged and passive when they went into these apertures but he knew and felt with them the panic as the drugs wore off and they screamed and kicked and hammered fruitlessly on the walls of the coffins until they bled. And he knew that that was the purpose, that the power of each sacrifice to an evil being was being harnessed and stored in this slab of oak in front of him, waiting to be released. Who knows why it had not been released already? Perhaps just the mundane circumstances of Klaas’s sudden bankruptcy and his death soon after had prevented the necessary ritual. When Christmas had next come to St Gunters the estate had been derelict.
It mattered little, for what is 150 years when you have waited for thousands? For every ritual of power, for every symbol of good and hope there must be an equal and opposite ritual, a symbol of evil and despair to counter it. Klaas, Gunter and Baron Kanthus had disappeared into history but that matters little too. There are always those who serve, willingly or not and he no longer had a will. Ryan reached for the last of the tiny squares on the little wooden board and it opened at his touch. Outside in wealthy Mayfair there was a sudden chill in the unseasonably warm air and the overcast sky darkened further as if some huge black bird was unfolding its wings.
It was Christmas Eve. Something was coming and it was not Christmas.
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Lady Sarah Gormon poured another whisky; some of it hit the glass, the expensive rug received the rest. Christ, she must have had more than she thought.
Just as well that a couple of the maids were in the room getting things set up for Sir Chesholm's visit and one of them, she forgot the name, scurried over from the table where she had been arranging the cutlery and then went off to find the sponge or whatever it was that these people used. The other, Davies, she knew all too well who SHE was, stared disapprovingly. Did she know or not? As she looked at her, wondering whether it was wise to rebuke her insubordination there came another of those strange shifts. The dark wood-panelled room was garishly bright and full of shambling figures and then winked back to normality so quickly she was not sure if she had imagined it at all. In its wake just a slight sense of déjà vu, as if she too had once stood laying cutlery on a table just like that one.
Nurse Larkins tchohed impatiently at the sound of splashing on the vinyl floor, not her now! Mary had always been one of the less problematic patients, lucid much of the time, and when she was away in whatever world it was that these people went to she just sat quietly. Just recently though, the normal periods were becoming shorter and now it looked like she would have to go into pads like most of the others. Leaving Nurse Carlisle to continue handing out the medicines she scurried off to get one of the cleaners.
Thank god her husband was away on business for a while. She had really needed the whisky but then again it was the last thing she needed, she had to think, the rest of her life depended on it. Life was like that, just so many things you didn't need that but you just had to have them. Like Harry, the assistant estate manager. She was not entirely sure she even liked him, he was a shallow man and not a patch on her lovely old husband Lord Richard Gorman but her life yearned for more excitement, just a little more youth and humour before she crossed the twinset portal. And, she should be honest, a lot more physical passion and there Harry was tops. It was contrived and predictable like most of Harry's humour but when he called her his Connie and became her crude and grunting Mellors she reached heights, or perhaps it was depths, she had never experienced with anyone before. She found him sunbathing in the small garden behind his estate cottage and kissed him passionately. The words left her mouth the instant her mouth left his. "What the hell are we going to do?"
There was once a time when delusions were carefully refuted with the idea that this would somehow prevent recurrence and hence diminish future distress but it almost never does. For the insane, even more than for the rest of us, reality and sense are like the waves breaking on a granite lighthouse, they come and go in roaring fury and leave the decor within quite untouched. If there is a murderer hiding in the cupboard today's carer goes and arrests him and if there is another murderer in there tomorrow, well, they'll arrest him too. In 18 years of psychiatric nursing Clive had had his share of humouring infatuations from slightly odorous 60ish ladies and when she grasped him again just outside the dayroom he disengaged her gently enough. He did not think to ask "About what?" It meant nothing.
Harry knew what she meant. He was not the sort to pass up any sexual encounter and an affair with a lady, in the aristocratic sense of the word, had a sort of kudos that more than made up for the fact that she was a good twenty years older. The problem was that he had not passed up the lush younger body of Tessa Davies either and had not had the wit to hide the signs of his "Mellors" encounters. Tessa was not sure who her rival was but in the blazing row they had had the previous day she had made it clear she was going to find out and she was damn well going to make both of them sorry.
As anyone who has ever been caught out in an infidelity knows, the guilt flows much more easily after the catching. Why had she done it? She loved her husband for all his seriousness but he was a prudish, proud and unforgiving man and she knew she stood to lose all that made her current life. Why had he done it? Harry loved his job and the estate manager's position had been as good as his when old Phillip retired at Christmas, Lord Gorman himself had told him so. Neither of them cared for the other and they both knew it but they clung to each other like frightened children and an observer would have thought them lost in their passion. "You fucking old cow, I knew it was you" Tessa was in the doorway.
Afterwards, neither of them could fully recall how it happened. Tessa was a hysterical woman by nature and the row of cheap and tasteless ornaments on Harry's mantelpiece bore the brunt of her hysteria before she started to calm down. She should have left it to him, it was her offer of money that started Tessa off again, she was "going to go out of here and tell the entire effing estate". When Harry pulled her back she hit him and when he pushed her away she fell and struck her head against the fireplace. Groggily, she rose and headed for the door and Sarah struck her with one of the brass fire dogs, one of Harry's few tasteful possessions. And although neither of them had intended to do it, the fear inside drove them, the matching fire dogs rose and fell in their right hands, matching strike for strike, until they dropped, still matched in their redness.
At the weekly meeting there was no disagreement when doctor Heins proposed changing Mary's medication. It was a shame that one of their brighter patients had started to go downhill so quickly but the safety of staff was paramount. Nurse Davies fingered the faint bruise on her forehead from Mary's assault, it was lucky that Dr Heins had been there at the time to pull her off so quickly. What on earth had set her off? She had been shouting "You can't tell him, you can't tell him!" It was pointless even wondering what was in her mind.
The law abiding imagine that in these days of forensic science there is no possible chance of getting away with a murder. Real criminals know different and luck was on their side. Tessa had not been a mixer and nobody knew of her affair, let alone that the same man had been tupping the employer's wife. She had also been a drifter and had abruptly left jobs and accomodations without any notice before. Had the butler not been so enchanted by her figure and checked her references properly she would probably not have been employed at the manor. Tessa went on the missing persons list, but the police never took it too seriously. As for the numerous traces on Harry's floor, not to mention the fire dogs, they could only have been found if anyone had had the slightest notion to look there.
Mary's symptoms in that period were unusual in Dr Heins's experience, in one sense she seemed more aware of the real world but in another sense she became more withdrawn. The oddity was it was a withdrawal more usual in relatively sane people, the withdrawal of those with acute anxiety and depression. Those with the sort of diagnosis she had were usually too far out of the real world in their bad periods to suffer such things. They tried to get out of her what it was she feared but although she responded to their sympathetic questioning the response would only be a shake of the head followed by more tears and exhausted sleep.
Life for the next couple of months was hell for both of them, a hell of guilt and fear of discovery and had her life with Lord Gorman been rather more intimate or if he had been at home more often she could never have kept it from him. No matter how she tried to distract herself, her thoughts kept running on the same tracks with all the precision of a tram following the rails, that day in Harry's cottage and what crumbled in the hidden well in an untended part of the estate. Thoughts repeating and repeating and repeating. And she was sure she was losing her mind, at times when at last she started to slip into an exhausted sleep she seemed to see figures standing by her bed and they were questioning her. "What is it that you are afraid of? What is it you think you have done?
The slow passing of the season did nothing to take away the dread. It was late summer. Sarah looked out of the bay windows of her bedroom window as the early morning sun glanced on the great row of Oak trees beyond the lawn and for the first time in a long while thought how beautiful they were. She had made a decision.
One Sunday, about four months after the start of her abrupt decline, Nurse Larkins was astonished to find that Mary had washed and dressed herself and even more so to find that she seemed lucid and aware of her surroundings. She even seemed to have a purpose although nobody but Mary could know what it was.
The slow passing of the season slowly took away the dread. It was late summer. Sarah looked out of the bay windows of her bedroom window as the early morning sun glanced on the great row of Plane trees beyond the lawn and for the first time in a long while thought how beautiful they were. She and Harry had got away with it. She could start to live again.
She was in bed with Mellors, AKA Harry, when the police came. That too chimed rather well with what the letter said. Her resistance did not last even as long as the journey to the station. "How did you know?" she sobbed as soon as she sat down. "We got your letter madam or at least one that is signed with your name" She looked at the photocopy they gave her, the large childish handwriting that looked like the letter of a near illiterate. "I didn't write this" But, if she had not who could have? Not Harry, there were something there, among the accurate details of the murder, that only she knew. Had guilt and worry made her insane? Had she somehow written this herself without being aware of it? It didn't make any sense.
It didn't make sense to the police either. The cheap paper and the handwriting hardly went with the signature and it had looked like a malicious hoax but things it said about the missing maid chimed with what little they knew and the location of the old well was described in the letter. After only four months the young constable they sent up to look hardly needed years of expertise to know there was something down there.
Police can never view confessions as the end of the matter. Who knew but that each defendant would not seek to blame the other at the trial? The authorship of the letter mattered. Although the poorly scrawled address said HighField Manor the letter had gone out in an official envelope marked St Mays Hospital. It was a small hospital and it did not take long to track down the one patient who had been lucid enough or trusted enough at the time to send a letter outside. The more normal patients, as Mary had been until recently, were encouraged to be creative and the staff found a few scribbles that confirmed her authorship.
How on earth could this woman in a secure psychiatric unit have known about the murder or known the things she did about Lady Gorman? Had she ever worked at the manor? That was the strangest thing. The secretary confirmed that she had once, for about a year, almost 40 years ago and it was during that time that she had started to become delusional. The notes did not state the nature of her delusion, the claim that she was the real Lady Gorman.
Real, fake, imagined, does it really matter? All that counts is how things seem. In one of these worlds a Lady Sarah Gorman sobbed in her cell. In another, back in the Manor, a Lady Sarah Gorman felt happier than she had in a long time. Somehow it seemed that the self she had known for so long had been an impostor and now, quite how she could not grasp, there was a new her. She felt as if she had been set free from something. Thank god she had not confessed as she had intended. She had thought about it so many times, drafted so many letters, come so close to posting them, that there had been times in her weariness when she really thought she had.
The sun shone through the window of the day room. The inspector sat on the hard hospital chair and stared at the large shapeless figure of the deranged woman who did not respond in the slightest to his gentle questioning. Mary did not notice him at all, she would never come back to the real world again. The inspector sighed, one hand clutching his luke warm coffee, his forehead supported on his other hand. This was the wierdest case he had known in his 25 years. He did not know whether he was coming or going.
In the little cottage, in the little bed, her crass but lovely Mellors shouted Ohaaargh! Lady Sarah Gorman was definitely coming.
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I reach to get my razor from the bathroom cabinet and even with this tiny exertion my limbs protest. I rub the condensation from the mirror and an old face gazes from the almost clearness. Dimly, I recall how it used to look 60 years ago. I am not so bad for 86 but then I wonder, would I have had the same perspective before the day that hell came? Compared to the ugliness we live with, those of us who do still live, so very few of us now, we are all beautiful.
Hell is among us now, the living, and most who are left remember nothing else for we are surrounded by the tormented. As if in response to my thoughts, the red haired girl drifts between me and my reflection although the mirror shows only me. She lived here once and died young. The photographs show a thin faced but pleasant looking teenager. The face I see now, although there is neither warmth nor sound, is engulfed in a lambent flame. It is a face sculpted by pain, rendered ugly with an unspeakable torment, the mouth almost tearing apart with a silent scream that never leaves her.
Why did they come back? The religious cranks and would be prophets had many answers and logically tortured quotes from Revelations or Nostrodamus. Was it an illusion sent by Satan to make us seek answers in devilry, a vision sent by god to test our faith or to warn us that we should seek deeper repentance? Who knows? The more rational of us, or rather those who had thought we were the rational ones, those of us who has never believed in hell, had no answers at all. Perhaps Satan died or the bottomless pit was not truly bottomless and just ran out of space. We only knew that suddenly, in May 2009, the countless billions, all the men and women and children who had ever lived and died came back among us and wandered the areas they had been in life in unspeakable torment. We the living were outnumbered by more than ten to one.
They are all of them like her, every single one who ever died. Back in those early days, men of science still existed and they looked for answers, checking the backgrounds of the tormented, why these people? But it seemed it was all people. The wicked, the good and the average, the bloody dictators, the murderers, the selfless charity workers, the saints, the atheists and sinners, the priests and the popes and Imams, all of them, every one, in perpetual torment. In Berlin, Hitler wanders government buildings engulfed in flames, his face contorted with agony, in Calcutta Mother Theresa drifts through the mean streets, her body blazing and contorted with pain.
If there was a hell, why was there no heaven? Many had asked that question and none had an answer. Perhaps it is simply that god demands more of us than we can give. We are commanded not to sin in thought, word or deed. Some of us, to the limited extent that free will exists, can exercise our wills and control our words and deeds but how can we control our thoughts? If we sin each time an uncharitable, selfish or angry thought enters out heads what hope is there for us? Maybe somewhere, there is a vast and empty heaven where a god frets over an endless paradise made for riteous men that has never once admitted even one.
Mankind began his end the day that hell came and all hope died. Many went mad at being surrounded by images of torment, often seeing their own departed loved ones engulfed in agony without end. Perversely, many saw the horror that followed after life and took their own lives, for madness is never rational. Few cared to carry on and raise children and few of those survived in a disintegrating society of frightened despair and short term headonism. Those of us who had lived before hell came, who had imbibed of the normality and optimism of a childhood in those days, managed to cope the best and our skills carried a few along with us. We are fewer now and mankind may not long survive our passing.
I finish shaving and walk downstairs, passing through two screaming children, their faces ugly with torment. I lean heavily on the bannister as I descend, my joints aching with every step. My own life cannot be much longer, who knows, maybe it will end tonight while I sleep.
Either way, I will see you all tomorrow.
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They were only acquaintances so maybe I am being unfair but I have been thinking back to some people I have known, people who did not seem to be real people at all.
Before Josh I could think of three offhand, two girls I had a couple of dates with and a bloke I went to college with. They all said things, did things, ventured opinions, laughed at jokes but there was nothing there. On leaving them I was left with no impression of character at all, it was as though I had spent the time alone watching TV or reading a book.
It was a long time ago now. I met Josh one summer while on contract in Bristol and rented a second floor flat in a rather dingy house in Eastville. Josh had the ground floor flat. We were of similar age and chance encounters in the hallway led to the odd walk to the pub together. I suppose I got to know him quite well, in so far as I knew the basic facts, but there was nothing I could actually like or dislike. He just did not register as a person at all. When we went out for the evening I did not have any sense of having company and I mostly avoided these trips, pleading (and usually inventing) other arrangements.
That wasn’t anything I felt guilty about, after all, I was the one staying away from home in the week in a strange city with little to fill my evenings, Josh had a great social life. He had at least two girl friends on the go and a bunch of mates on the other side of the city where he used to live. He would tell me endless stories about the things they would get up to, the late night drinking, the crazy practical jokes of his best mate Alan, the wild weekend parties.
Perhaps my lack of empathy with the guy had a little envy in it, or resentment at the fact that he never invited me to these wild nights out with his mates but then again why should he? Maybe he found me as uninteresting as I found him. He did ask me to a party at his flat a few times, although he knew I always travelled home to the family on Friday evenings and couldn’t make it. Except that one occasion when the wife was at her mother’s until Sunday morning and I decided to stay in Bristol. The party never happened, apparently his best mate Alan was taken ill at the last minute and it had to be postponed but if I could make the next one, probably in a few weeks, then it would be just great. I never had another invite.
It was early September when Josh collared me outside his flat door and asked me to come in for a drink and I couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough. I was seriously thinking of feigning illness when he got out a photo album but actually it wasn’t so bad. There were numerous shots of all his mates on various holidays, on beaches, hiking in the hills or standing in front of well known tourist spots in the UK and abroad. What a sociable guy he was, I never knew anyone before who had quite so many friends, every double page of photos seemed to have a different bunch of people in them.
What some great girlfriends too. He was especially keen to show me the pictures of his latest conquest whom he had taken for a long and very dirty weekend in Rome. I turned the page at his urging and immediately recognised the Trevi Fountain in the background; the wife and I had been there earlier in the year. As the photo showed. It was my wife standing there in front of the fountain staring straight at the camera with a slightly bemused expression on her face. I remember asking her about that expression after I took my own photos. “There was some bloke standing behind you and I am sure he was taking photos of me, he has been watching me for a while”
I hadn’t see anyone in the crowd when I turned to look but suddenly it made sense. I flipped back to the photos of all those friends. All a little further back and filling less of the picture than would be normal, all looking slightly to one side as though posing for a picture taken by another camera. I said nothing, I had no idea what to say. Pleading tiredness after a long day I left. What should I have done? There was no evidence the guy was a stalker in any malicious sense. Just a harmless fantasist. How many others had he regaled with tales of his social life, his sexual prowess? How many others, not handed the truth by a trillion to one chance, had been taken in by that album?
I was coming back from the off licence a little later and Josh was coming out of his flat dressed to kill. He glanced at my lonely bottle of vodka disapprovingly. “I’ll be having a few myself tonight, off with Alan and some of the others to a club, end up at the lap dancing place I expect, we always seem to. Hope I don’t wake you up when I come in” Was it all untrue? The girlfriends, the mates, the best pal? I don’t know why exactly but I had to know. I politely murmured a hope so too and went up to my room closing the door loudly before silently opening it a crack. I saw Josh quietly creep back to his room.
The rest of the house was silent that evening apart from the TV of the middle aged couple on the top floor. At around 11 I went out and around to the back by the bins. Josh’s flat was dark. Maybe he had gone to bed or perhaps he had gone out after all. Maybe, despite the apparent stealth, he had just returned for something forgotten and was now at that lap dancing club. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could make out his figure in the armchair, staring at the wall. A trace of tears glistened in his eyes.
I left Bristol soon after that when the project folded unexpectedly. Occasionally, some chance thing reminds me of Josh and I think of him sitting there alone and staring at the wall night after night, thinking of the life he has no idea how to make except in his imagination.
And all I can think is "How strange" I know I should feel sympathy but that is a feeling one can only have for real people.
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What do dreams mean? The question has been asked countless times and forests of paper have been filled with attempted answers. Pointless. It’s a question for cranks, kids and love-struck teenagers. My interest in dreams was wholly more practical. Dreams were threatening my sanity and I had to find a solution.
I had had these dreams on and off for as long as I remember. There was always something terribly important I had to do but I was completely unable to do it. The details varied but the basic task set me was always something borrowed from the mundane waking world. I had an important exam in the morning and passing it would determine my entire future success but I did not even know what the subject was and could not find my course books anywhere. I had to make a presentation to a client in Zurich at 3 PM and the survival of the company I worked for depended on getting the contract but it was gone noon and I was still at home packing a suitcase that, no matter what I put in it, remained obstinately empty. I was competing in a race I had to win but was still sitting by a swimming pool drinking when I heard the starting pistol. Whatever the task set me, I always knew that the consequences of my inevitable failure would be dire.
Dreams like that are pretty common I believe and I had never given them a second thought. Then suddenly they began to come more frequently and the nature of them to change. The context did not alter and the Promethean tasks set me remained as commonplace as ever but the imagined penalty for failure in each doomed night time task no longer ended with each waking to be created again each night. Rather the perceived doom carried over to the next night, to be compounded, worse, to grow and multiply with that night’s. I had no grasp of what exactly this doom might be, but I knew that the punishment for my failures was growing to something incalculably beyond a mere damaged career. In my dreams, the immensity of the vengeance that would be visited on me seemed to grow to infinity. Yet though already infinite, every night it would grow larger with my latest failure.
With this escalation of terror it seemed that my sleeping state was no longer able to fully contain it. I started to wake in a panic and some of the horrors of my failure came into the waking world with me. Initially these feelings would remain with me for only minutes before the sunlight through the window and all the other tangibles of the real world chased them away. But soon I was never free of them. The dreams came almost every night and the fear stayed with me all day. I had not been to work for almost two weeks, pleading flu. It was hard to think straight. What should I do? Should I accept the fact that I had had some sort of breakdown and seek help? I was deterred by the fact that my job in defence was the sort where any hint of “mental trouble” could seriously jeopardise my future. Already the dreams were threatening to drag their failures into my waking world.
Then came that day when a ray of hope penetrated my tired and confused state. Had some way out been presented to me? Did it really mean anything at all? As I said at the beginning, do any dreams mean anything? Yet, like the fear of my terrible fate, this chance seemed real. In all my other dreams, in that interval of half sleep before full waking, it has seemed as though my waking self had watched the bumbling incompetence of my dream self, powerless to help. The dream me was an absurdity! It was always outraged at the cruel hand fate has played it, yet every failure was down to gross thoughtlessness. Who leaves revision for an important exam to the night before or starts packing just hours before an important meeting in Switzerland? If only I could intervene to stop the rush towards my doom, to halt it with a success but there was nothing the more competent and organised waking me could do to help. I could hardly revise for a non-existent exam, travel to meet an imaginary client or compete in a dream race.
Yet maybe this time I could help. There was a small difference in my dream that night. I was back in school, perched absurdly at a tiny school desk in an empty classroom, even though I did not seem to be a child. I knew the teacher was there in front of me but she was not visible, there was only the blackboard which, in that surreal style dreams often have, looked like an empty aquarium. Neither did I hear her voice but I knew that she was demanding something of me and as always it was a mundane demand and one that in my normal waking state I could readily deliver. I had to provide an essay, the title, “What I most love apart from myself” Teacher’s final sentence was a shout. “You must hand it in to me tomorrow!” I woke up with a start.
I had my task and I knew that, like the others, it was a task I had to complete if the juggernaut of doom was not to continue. Unlike the other tasks, it was one that my dreaming self had not already failed in and it was one my waking self could help with. Could it help or would my ludicrous sleeping self lose or forget the essay? Oddly, it was my confused and fearful mental state that told me I had a chance; just as my dreams were spilling into my days, so too were my waking thoughts and hopes spilling into my dreams, my dream self was even aware of my scorn. If I wrote this essay I felt I could carry the contents with me on the following night, maybe for once I would not fail and could stay or even halt the escalating deluge of catastrophe.
Somehow, although no stipulations were voiced, I knew that honesty was an essential, when one is dealing with one’s own psyche there can be no secrets. “What I most love apart from myself” The only answer was Lorna. We had been together for three years and we shared everything. Except perhaps that breakdown, if that is what it is, that I was going through. That I did not fully share, in part because I could not understand it myself but mostly because I felt that to voice my fears would only make them more real. Even though I answered her questions with mute misery, she held me close and was there and it is perhaps that, more than any intellectual understanding or shared interests or common goals, that is the thing we all need most, that makes love what it is.
And so I wrote, although no writer. I told of the big things, our first meeting, the realisation of my feelings and our first lovemaking and I told of the small things, the time we missed the late train and got stranded in Eastbourne that was so much a part of bringing us together and the happiness of coming home to her from a long trip abroad, even though she had burnt the cottage pie. Later that night before bed I flicked through the essay although I remembered almost every word. It was just pile of paper but it was everything that mattered. I fell asleep weeping.
I knew it was a classroom, the same classroom 2b, although it seemed to be outdoors and I sat hunched and alone at an absurdly tiny desk in the middle of a plain. There was still what I knew to be a blackboard although it resembled a range of hills with towers upon it. The dream me and the waking me were both there in my shivering body, both of us too afraid to look down to see if we had the essay or to try and recollect the words the waking me had written lest there be nothing there. Some imposed change of perspective saved us from our cowardice although we did not move; the desktop was there in front of our faces. It had a pile of paper on it even though the paper looked like slices of meat and we knew what the writing contained even though there was none. The pile expanded, the pages spreading out and fanning across the landscape, becoming larger the further away they got until they filled the horizon. There were no words but we knew it had been accepted and approved.
When I awoke all my anxiety had lifted and curiously, although I could recall all that I had felt in the last few months, none of it seemed real, it was as though it was something I had read in a mildly interesting book. Was I cured or was this just a temporary relief? Strangely, I had no real anxiety about that at all. The following weeks went by and all was normal, I went back to work and picked up my social life again. “How do you feel now?” Lorna asked, snuggling up. Hmm? And for a brief moment I would think “What does she mean?” The way I thought then seems strange looking back on it. When you are young and live more of your life in the real world and less in your head, when there is so much more of the real world to live in, you do not stop to ask “Is this normal? Does it make sense?”
There was something else that only seemed strange in retrospect, when I looked at her after she asked the question I felt nothing. Everything I had felt for her, all the previous emotion and physical attraction had gone. She stayed with me for while, putting up with my complete indifference, my disinterest in the homely little tales I had previously found so endearing and the way I pushed her away when she got too close. I suppose she thought I was suffering from the aftermath of my breakdown and I would come out of it. Four months after my recovery I came home to find her gone as if she had never lived there.
There was no note, at least I don’t think so; maybe it went to recycling along with the junk mail and other bits of paper one doesn’t bother to look at. Later that year my oldest friend was hospitalised in a car accident and I never visited him. The once enjoyable weekly visits to my mother fell to twice a year, and that was only out of a vague sense of duty. That side of life was over for me but I did not miss it, I could not recall what it was I once had. I concentrated on my ambitions and threw myself into my work. So much a capable man can achieve without these pointless distractions and five years later my career was starting to be what I had dreamed of.
Then the dreams began again, about an important package that could not be delivered because my bicycle had no wheels, about standing on a rostrum in front of expectant thousands with no ideas about a speech in my head. The weeks of failures went by and just as before I stopped going to work. And as before there came those nights perched at a tiny desk, the essay set in a classroom that was a leisure centre in front of a blackboard that was a huge advertising hoarding, the essay accepted in a classroom that was desert fronted by a blackboard like a huge black cloud. “What I would like to be when I grow up”
As before the relief was immediate and as before, although I felt that I had lost nothing, all that I had previously thought to be most important to me had gone. I went back to work or rather I started turning up at the office again but I took no significant part in meetings and back at my desk did almost nothing. They were a decent company and, like Lorna, put up with it for a surprising number of months before they terminated my employment. I suppose they also suspected some depression that I might come out of despite my truthful assurances that I felt fine. And I did feel fine. All of this may sound like a personal disaster but it wasn’t, not then, I was quite happy. I had no ambition and no need for love or close companionship but life was still pleasant. I used my savings to do some of the things I had always wanted to do, either alone or with the only friend I had left, a lonely sort for whom any company, even company of someone as cold to other humans as I was, was worth keeping. Art galleries, adventure holidays, extreme sports, travel in Europe, I even found time to take up painting again. I had the time and life was good.
I had absolute certainty in my head that the dreams would never recur, until, less than a year later, they did. Dreams of missed trains and deadlines, unopened letters, important news not passed on. This time the little desk was perched on an enormous glacier and then beneath the surface of a slimy canal, the blackboard was a dead lion then a huge clock. The topic was “What I like to do in my spare time.”
I awoke with that same certainty of safety to a world that held nothing of interest. If that sounds like depression it wasn’t, I was quite happy; I just had no interest in continuing. The razor was only a logical solution, a way out for someone who had no interest in eating or following the other pointless processes necessary to stay alive. The cutting was painful but the pain would be over soon enough.
Somewhere, in a classroom like an immense chessboard, in front of a blackboard like a mile high tree, on a school desk that was a million snail shells, an A+ awaited me.
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“Is Will coming to see me today?”
Grace has only been there for ten minutes but it must have been the fifth time she had heard the question. She did not reply, just held her friend’s hand a little tighter and stared down at the drab off-white blanket. She did not have any answer that would help. Assurances, excuses, the truth; they were all equally pointless. They were all met with the same incomprehension and would be followed in a few minutes by “Is Will coming to see me today?”
There had been no other Will in Wilhelmina’s life for almost forty years, not since that day, shortly after her fiftieth birthday, that her great love William walked out on her for good and went off to live with his latest mistress. Grace did not get to know her until long after it happened and they were both elderly but she had heard the tales more than once. Wilhelmina had been a wealthy woman from a successful business in the fashion trade, William had been an idler. She had never said so in so many words but it seemed to her that Wilhelmina was better off without him.
The phone call came the next morning as she was getting ready for her visit. Wilhelmina was gone. Peacefully in her sleep, they said but she wondered how true that really was given her friend’s agitation in recent weeks. At least she had had a good life judging from her accounts, spending her money on all the things she wanted to do. What fun the two of them had had together, even though they were both in their twilight years. She looked through the photos of their last Pacific cruise. There was Grace standing tall and thin with her rather masculine face in front of the plush opulence of one of the liner’s bars. Just as well she had had no near relatives as she had probably spent most of the money she might have left them.
Wilhelmina still had her house and almost everyone has heirs even if they are not aware of them and a month after the funeral a lawyer contacted Grace. As Wilhelmina’s only friend that they could discover, did she know if Wilhelmina might have made a will or could she otherwise help in tracing any relatives? She arranged to meet a Mr Mathews at Wilhelmina’s house. Mr Mathews seemed a pleasant man but she regretted agreeing. In part because it upset her anew thinking about all the pleasant chats over a few whiskies that she and Wilhelmina had in that front room. In part it was because, now that she was being asked specific questions about Wilhelmina’s life, she realised that there was so much she did not know about the woman she called her best friend. In the whole of that big house it was only that front room and the lavatory that she ever actually seen.
Mr Mathews had been in the tracking business a long time. Friends and relatives of the deceased could be much more useful than they first appeared to be and sometimes it just took something to jog their memory. A photo or a letter could sometimes bring back a recollection, a mention of a relative perhaps. They looked through several rooms which were musty and appeared unused and Grace’s memory stayed firmly unjogged. What appeared to be Wilhelmina’s bedroom also had little in the way of personal possessions and not for the first time Grace reflected how oddly unsentimental her friend had been.
She mentioned William to Mr Mathews but he confirmed what Grace had told her, there was no record of marriage. William Morrisey, wherever he was, had no claims on her estate. The last room they tried was at the back of the house. Here there were no photos or mementos, the skeletal remains on the bed, the knife still partially embedded in the ribs, made such things redundant.
The detective inspector interviewed her very gently but she could be of little more help to him than she had been to the solicitor. It was a fortnight later and Grace knew she had to accept the probability that her friend was a murderess. That in a fit of jealousy she had killed a lover and invented a story of his departure. And yet such a thing seemed so out of character, Wilhelmina had been a lively and fun-loving woman but scarcely an over passionate one.
The interview was over. The inspector leaned back and seemed to be casting around for words. There’s something you need to know Mrs Baillis as it is all going to come out anyway. The report on the remains you saw in the house… well the fact is, it was a woman. “What? “Why would Wilhelmina conceal a woman’s body in her house for decades?” Before the inspector could reply, her memories, the recollections of odd references she had put down to her friend’s quirky sense of humour, her lack of sentiment and her strangely masculine face provided an answer. An unsentimental woman might not kill out of passion but an unsentimental man might in order to live a life of ease. An unsentimental man prepared to go to a very long way, even sacrifice his own gender. After murder, what does deception matter?
She began “Then it was William?” and trailed off. The inspector knew what she meant. “We will have to wait for an exhumation and autopsy of course but our suspicion is that you went to his funeral the other week”
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The Okapi swerved suddenly between two of the less experienced hunters and they nearly lost it when it dived into a cluster of Oak trees. It was Brian Who Stands Tall who saved the day again and cornered it before it could reach the dense pine forest beyond. The corpse was skinned and gutted in the centre of the gathering place and the haunches were parcelled out among the tribe’s families according to their size and status. They put the rest in the Zanussi freezer.
It was a good kill and deserved to be celebrated with the sacred food ceremony of their tribe. Paracetomol, their high priest and senior director, wore an identical plastic loin cloth to the other huntsmen but donned the holy top hat as he ascended the metal rostrum. He turned and spread out his arms towards the closest place of The Watchers in the cliffs that surrounded their little valley and chanted the holy theme that had been passed down through generations “You’ll be a little lovelier each day with fabulous Pink Camay”. None of the tribe knew exactly what Pink Camay was except that it had a deep spiritual meaning lost in the mists of time. Following their leader, they all opened their arms in a gesture of submission towards the blank windows of The Watchers.
The next day was a joyous one. Births were rare in their tiny valley of some 30 families but some seven months previously a young women had become pregnant. For several weeks the men of the village had been searching the forests in the valley to find the happy couple’s new home and just two days ago there had been a forbidding in a small part of it. In the usual way, nobody had been able to enter or see into this section of the forest and strange sounds has emanated from it. Now the forbidding had gone and most of the tribe escorted the couple to the new home that The Watchers had provided for them. It was of identical construction to that of every family, with an external mock mud coating over block walls and a moulded plastic roof with the external appearance of straw. It was clean and beautiful and the young couple were happy. The tribe opened their arms and gave thanks to The Watchers.
When they needed more shelter for young families, a house appeared. When they needed meat, although the pine forest was normally silent and devoid of any life, a creature would appear for them to hunt. Clean water poured from an aperture in the cliff at a constant rate that did not vary with the rain. Their crops flourished as if given nutrients and pesticides they did not have themselves. Areas of the valley would be claimed by the forbidding and when it lifted they would be restored to a landscaped beauty, free of any debris or mud.
When someone was sick or injured the forbidding would claim the patient and spirit them away and most would later walk from the forest cured with no recollection of what had happened. They knew nothing of death but there was the vanishing when a seriously sick or injured individual taken by the forbidding would not return. The forbidding took the old too but, until it was their time, it was an idyllic if unexciting life that they led in that valley cared for by The Watchers.
Once again it was the main topic of their discussions at that evening’s council meeting of the elders. What was happening to The Watchers? None of them had ever properly seen a Watcher but their presence had once been abundantly clear in the continual movements that were just discernable through the reflective surfaces of the windows that were evenly placed all around the cliffs that surrounded their valley. Of recent years though, far fewer of these movements could be seen. Were The Watchers deserting them? If so, who would provide for the tribe? As always, their discussions reached no conclusions.
The conclusions began to be drawn for them a few months later. There was a rock fall from the surrounding cliff that crushed a part of the forest and brought down with it one of the windows of The Watchers. The forbidding did not come and the broken window, dark and empty, looked down at a valley that became increasingly unkempt over the next few years. Their crops became smaller and the weeds grew more freely and only the increasing efforts by the tribe enabled them to continue feeding their numbers. The animals for the hunt came less frequently and it was during the hunt that the tribe first saw death when a youth fell and struck his head. After an hour they took him to the gathering place and waited for the complete recovery that was certain for those not taken by the forbidding. They could not understand what was happening to him over the next several days as he lay there in the hot sun for they had never seen that transformation. Human burial was discovered out of unpleasant necessity.
It was Hugh Who Finds Tracks who first muted the suggestion. He had second thoughts when the other elders all agreed that he was the man for the job but summoned all his courage and managed the 30 foot climb up the pine trunk to the broken open window of The Watchers. He found himself in a huge circular tunnel that, from the small segment he explored, appeared to circumscribe their whole valley. It was lit only by the windows of The Watchers. Looking down he could see the gathering place and the figures of his tribe staring up. Of The Watchers there was no sign. On the other side of the tunnel were doors with strange inscriptions but none would open.
He had walked almost to the other side of the valley when one such door was opened for him. The Watcher was huge and strange indeed, but curiously Hugh had no real fear, there was no menace in it and it seemed familiar, like a friend he has long forgotten but could not recall. He died instantly at the touch of the rod. The Watcher felt only regret. Many experts argued that the site was a historically inaccurate depiction of human life before the occupation but these humans were interesting animals and he had devoted much of his life to studying them. Ah well, you had to be practical. The reserve was no longer of much interest to the paying public and had ceased to be a commercial proposition some years ago. A good location made it far more valuable for housing the many settlers who were pouring into the Earth.
It could not be helped. The Watcher walked back into the control room and finalised the connections. Then he pressed the button. Down in the valley a faint mist began to emanate from the tiny vents and roll towards the last tribe of humans.
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“Me and Linda are going down to see the two bs this weekend. Why don’t you come with us? They are getting on you know. Do you really want all this hostility to be your last memory of them?” I knew I was wasting my time. I must have said the same thing a dozen times and my brother didn’t even bother to reply, just raised his eyebrows at me over his pint and carried on drinking.
I had been at all of the family dos before that real dingdong when my brother stormed out and I couldn’t honestly blame him. He was probably brighter than me but while I was getting stressed out in a well paid city IT job he worked in a garden centre and enjoyed doing it. Brian was one of life’s drifters and he was happy but they wouldn’t leave him alone, badgering him to get some qualifications, to look for a job more suited to his ability while there was still time. They embarrassed us all by nagging him at the family dinner table; perhaps they hoped for our support. He snapped on hearing “You could so much better for yourself” for the umpteenth time and flung his dinner plate at the wall. It wasn’t until a lot later that it dawned on me just how deep his resentment went and how little chance there was of a reconciliation.
My sister and I loved them simply because they were our parents but to be frank, they were not the most loveable characters. Quite why they were so ambitious for us all I am not sure as neither had been failures who would want to realise their ambitions through us nor enjoyed such great success as to make them feel we should follow in their footsteps. Much of their wealth, including their big house and smallholding, was an inheritance from my grandfather. My father was a medium ranking accountant in an insolvency firm and I don’t think my mother ever had a real job or business, unless you count the bit of money she made from keeping bees and selling the honey. It was Brian who bitterly coined the derogatory term “two bs”, the bookkeeper and the beekeeper.
That weekend I had something to tell them. I had been interviewed for a promotion and one of two of us should get the job; the managers would make their final decision at a meeting on Friday. The two bs were very pleased. We were saying our goodbyes when they looked at each other and dad said “hang on a minute”. He went into the house and came back with something in his hand. As soon as he began “I know you don’t believe in this stuff but…” I mentally groaned. The silver disc he gave me had meaningless patterns and symbols on it. I rather switched off and did not pay too much attention to the details of its origin but it supposedly held great power. On the morning of the promotion meeting I should cup it in my hand and think of success. Then I was to score a line on both sides with a sharp object to release the psychic energy and whatever I most wanted that day would come true.
We had a good laugh about it when me and Linda and Brian met up for a drink on Wednesday evening. We had all grown used to the two bs’ wierd new age Wiccan stuff, my sister always joked that if we went to dinner and they brought out a goat she was off, but the idea of a magic talisman that guaranteed success was crazy even by their standards. Brian looked at it before tossing it contemptuously onto the pub table. “Probably brought at that shop in the high street where they sell the healing crystals, the only difference between that and the joke shop the other side is the price”
Brian had some great news too, he was getting married to his long standing girl friend and they were hoping to buy a place although it was going to be a real struggle on their wages. He had applied to a mortgage broker to see what they might lend him but was not very hopeful. “Perhaps I should have been a bit more ambitious” he mused. “You could do so much better for yourself!” Me and Linda chorused and fell about laughing. Then we all got drunk.
When I emptied my pockets the next day I could not find the talisman; I must have left it on the pub table. I meant to go to the bar and ask that weekend but events put it out of my head. After lunch on Friday I was called into the manager’s office and told I had the promotion. The phone call came just after I arrived home from work. My parents had both been killed in a pile up on the M4.
The three of us met up a few days later and it was a sombre occasion with talk filled with reminiscences, mainly of earlier times, of happy childhood. When it reached the later times when our parents had become so strange and demanding the conversation dried up and I told them of my good news. Brian’s news was not so good, the amount the mortgage company were prepared to lend would not pay for even a small flat in our area.
A few weeks after the funeral the solicitors arranged a meeting with us all about my parents’ will. The estate was split three ways and there were no major complications, everything should be sorted within six months. I was happy for Brian, at least now he and his wife could afford somewhere, his share was probably enough to buy a small house outright. Afterwards we went for a drink at the place I had lost the talisman. It seemed important to get it back now; daft as it had seemed at the time it was part of the last memory of my dad. “I’ll just nip up to the bar and ask if anyone found it” “No need” said Brian “I picked it up after you left. Meant to say but what with everything I forgot. What complete and utter nonsense that all was”. He tossed the talisman onto the table and raised his pint to his lips, gazing at me over the top.
I picked it up, and turned it over, feeling its weight in my hand and looking at the strange markings, the runic symbols and at the heavily scored lines on each side.
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Friday 18th
Most Britains, if you ask them their opinion on topics like spiritualism, Tarot cards, witchcraft or faith healing, will quickly dismiss all of these as nonsense. But dress these same things up in a pseudo-scientific veneer and a significant number of these will buy into them. I suppose people just really want to believe there is something beyond the mundane.
So I wasn't that surprised, in a small town near the North Wales border, to find a software shop, 'Karmasoft' that specialised in that sort of thing. It was fascinating. Along with stuff you can buy anywhere, PC games with an occult theme, CDs on yoga and astrology etc., there was some very niche stuff indeed, even a software version of a ouja board that the box proclaimed to be internet enabled. For those dear departed who could manage to cross the great divide but could not stray far from the site of their fatal car crash perhaps. Nice to know that ex-uncle Dick could pop into an internet cafe in Frankfurt and let you know his lost will was behind that loose brick in the attic.
Very interesting but totally nonsensical in my view and I suspect it was all pretty dire stuff, probably cobbled together in VB 3 by wierd bearded blokes in bedsits. I left with 'Ghouliz and Ghostiz - Spooky Screen Utilities', £15 from the bargain shelf.
Saturday 19th
Neat the way the desktop picture changes at random from time to time - graveyards, haunted houses, crypts, wierd alien scenes, Bosch-like landscapes I assume are supposed to be hell and so on. Apart from that, it seems to be a B horror movie version of 'Dogz' that was popular some few years back in the Win 3.1 era. every so often little ghosts, ghouls, demons, vampires, zombies and so on mooch around your applications.
Tue 5th
Those utilities are the sort of thing you get bored with and uninstall after a week or two. Except this one does not get boring, the scenes and the creatures never seem to repeat exactly. How? I know what space even a compressed full screen image needs and this application only requires 140Mb of hard disc space according to the box blurb. Is it somehow recombining sub-images in different ways? No amateurish application anyway.
Weds 21st
Imagination perhaps but both scenes and creatures seem to be getting gradually more sinister.
The desktop pictures are becoming darker, more detailed, more disquieting. You could look at these background scenes, and I find myself doing that more and more, and imagine all sorts of things hidden under the surface. Hidden leering things behind the twisted trees or lying half rotted just below the surface of the black soil with open staring eyes. Waiting.
And the little animations too, it seems scarcely credible that so much menace can be packed into a maximum of 100 pixels each way. The increasingly realistic way they creep or flap or ooze about the screen. Even the pixels shift somehow in the tiny faces, they gnash and mumble and grimace as they move, dribbling and mouthing things that I know must be horrible but cannot hear as the application has no sound effects.
Fri 23rd
It seems to me as though these creatures are somehow aware of me watching them. I swear on more than one occasion their behaviour pattern changed when I sat in front of the screen. They become more guarded. I catch them peering at me from behind the application borders. This must be my imagination surely, I had not even touched the mouse or the keyboard.
Another strange thing too, and I never saw this in any demo of Dogz. These things actually seem to get INTO the applications. Doing my monthly invoice in Excel and there were moving distortions in the sheet, mole-like tunnellings causing the words to shift disconcertingly. Deathly thin and tattered little appendages clawing momentarily from the menu bars. Sections of text that bulge suddenly with veinous lines and then collapse into fretted darkness like crumbling graves. Entertaining but a damn nuisance, can't make out some parts of the sheet for a minute or two until the dark area fades out. It has to go.
Tue 27th
No sound? There wasn't. But there seems to be now. I sat down this evening and was aware of tiny noises as the creatures moved, scarcely audible above the CPU fan.
The audio volume control had no effect so I had to strain to hear. It sounded like, at different times, the click of barely covered bones, hissing and crackling like the feeding frenzy of tiny maggots and beetles and scavenging filth on putrid flesh, shrieking and wailing and weeping and a roar of flames. Whispering and mumbling, the words indecipherable, but full of menace
Imagination. The sounds were so small I could hardly make them out or even be sure they were there at all. When you listen for a tiny sound, like a mosquito in your bedroom, your mind seems to make the noise so you don't know if it's real or not. This thing is plainly getting on my nerves anyhow. I tried to uninstall it but there is no uninstall program and nothing in add/remove. Must be an old Win95 program. I will have a proper look tomorrow.
Wed 28th
They're starting to get into my dreams now. Got up to go to the loo last night, half asleep, but in the office I could have sworn I saw faint shapes moving on the dark VDU screen, was it still on? Checked and it wasn't. Nothing visible with the light on but when I turned it off I had the odd feeling there were little creeping things hidden there behind the screen surround, waiting in the dark for the phosphor glow to fade before emerging. I did not wait to see.
Later
The audio volume control still has no effect but I just can't turn it down now. The sounds the things make are horrible, they must have really worked on the effects. Unplugged the speakers. Still seem to hear them faintly in the buzz of the VDU.
Thu 29th
Managed to finish that update for Chris so have at least the afternoon free until the next lot comes in. This is ridiculous. I have searched everywhere in program files and in the root for these awful screen utilities. There are no shortcuts, nothing in start up, nothing in the run section of the registry. No obvious programs or processes. Filemon does not even show any non-standard files opening but these damn things are still creeping about. How? Clearly I know even less about Win 2000 than I thought. Could reformat and reinstall everything I suppose but it's always such a fag. I never seem to quite get my PC back to just the way I like it.
Had a look on the Internet. Whatever problem you get, there's always someone who's had it before but "Ghouliz", "Ghostiz" and "Spooky Screen Utilities" all drew a blank. Did get one link for the name of what I assumed to be the name of the company, Necrosoft, in tiny letters on the back of the packaging. As minimalist as a site could be, nothing except a dark whirlpool of blackish purple fading to black in the centre where I could just make out 'Contact us'. Clicked on it but just got a 'not found' error. No support phone number anywhere. Not sure I really want to spend ten minutes listening to the "Four Seasons" at £1.50 a minute anyhow.
Hey the site seems to be working now! Those little horrors are crowding around the edge of the screen like bluebottles round a corpse. Looking inwards. The dead droning and shrieks are worse than ever. The speakers are still unplugged. How can they they be getting noises like that from the tiny internal PC speaker?? God, this site's slow to load, there's a wierd pulsing and swirling. Hello? How about just providing a useful support page? Bloody Flash.
The cacophany is quieter now and seems rhythmic. Chanting. Underneath, a faint sound like immense footsteps far far away. Far away but nearing. There's an odd light spreading from the centre, a strange hellish colour I've never seen on a monitor, R, G, B and... something else. That odd sloshing tread, still far far away, yet near and deafening and all around. The light is spreading, growing, to the edge of the screen, beyond it. Something...
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The early morning sun shone down through the glass onto the orange beauties. The tomatoes this year were big and there were plenty of them too. Just another few days and many would be ripe enough to eat.
There was much excitement among the people, these plump and tasty fruits promised so much more than their usual drab fair of lichen, hard seeds and the insects that were small enough for them to hunt. Had there been any among them with any significant long term memory it might have been the best crop that any of them could have remembered. As it was, they sniffed the aromatic air and gazed in hungry awe at the ripest fruit, way up at the top of the big plants.
Out came the ladders and the ropes from the hiding places in the crevices of the nearby walls and under the leaf litter. The damp winter had not been kind and the repairing this year took longer than usual. They worked quickly with grass and twigs, passing the items and materials from man to man in coordinated precision, each man performing his task according to instinct and age old learned behaviour, spinning, weaving and wrapping as they always did until the damp and rotted equipment was once more neat and serviceable.
Then came the fixing. The sun has risen and set three times before most of the ladders were lashed to the stem, spiralling almost to the top leaves. His extended family had inherited responsibility for one of the most difficult tasks in the chain; that of lashing the ladders to the highest stems. It was not unknown for one of them to loose grip and fall from the leaves high above to land in a heap on the hard ground. These events were always cause for great hilarity among all the families and the unfortunate would grin sheepishly before beginning the long climb back up.
So it was that he and his were the last to finish, the others had all returned to their holes and crevices. They turned for a last look at the fruit silhouetted against the evening sun. The boy was jumping up and down, pointing at the largest fruits in turn and making sounds of glee. The boy turned and ran to his mother babbling his excitement. As the head man of the last fixers it was his job to make the final inspection and it all looked good. It was getting dark when the fallen fruit among the leaves caught his eye. It was almost as ripe as those near the top of the plants and far too good to waste. It tasted as good as it looked and biting into it he felt tired and content. He dozed off on the soft patch of leaf litter.
When he awoke the next day the sun was already high. He and his had no crucial part in the actual harvesting but he hurried towards the place where it would be going on. Why was it so strangely quiet, where was the usual shouting and laughter? As he approached the place designated for the placing of the fruit he saw them lying, singly or in small groups but all of them inert and doubled up by the pain that had taken them. The naked bodies of his woman and his boy, befouled with their own emissions, were among them. He pulled them this way and that, expecting them to get up but they did not and after a few minutes he lost concentration. The morning sun was gleaming on the ripe fruit above and he was hungry again. He walked to the nearest plant, his feet crunching on the blue pellets that scattered the ground and began to climb. He was almost at the ripest fruit when he was plucked from the stem by a great black slimy appendage.
There was always one that escaped the pellets! It held the curious little creature up to the pale red light from the sun that covered a quarter of the sky and gazed in disgust at the four short flailing legs, feeling the unnatural warm dry feel of its skin, listening to the high pitched noise it made. It squeezed and felt the crunch of the strange internal hard structure it had inside. It couldn’t believe for a moment that these things had been the dominant species a billion years ago as the scientists said; that it had once been its species that had been the insignificant unintelligent creatures.
Well they weren’t getting the tomatoes this year and it would put more pellets down to make sure. It turned and slid towards the shed as fast as the slime on its belly would carry it.
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The first I saw of Linda, she was sitting in the restaurant of the Swan, a plain and mousy woman with a bald and burly man who I now know was her husband. Jake waved at them and raised his glass, receiving in response only an imperceptible nod. "Not the friendliest of characters" I remarked "who is that?" "They’ve just moved into our road" was the reply and "No, they don't seem to be, either of them”
Ours was a small village and in the succeeding months what little was known about the couple soon got around. Neither of them had shown any interest in getting involved in the village activities. They had moved from London, he was the owner/director of some specialist employment agency and was away a lot; a rather brusque individual was the general consensus. As for her, nothing was known at all. One of our WI stalwarts had invited her to come along to their gatherings but she had only been to one, while her husband was away, and was exceptionally quiet, downcast according to one description. She had had a bruise on one cheek and that triggered the obvious speculation but then, uninteresting though it may be, domestic accidents really do happen.
Their house was on the very edge of Crostin St Marks and on the side facing the hill where my small cottage stood. When I went to the village on foot I would follow the footpath that took me right behind their garden and I often saw Linda there, tending one of the vegetable patches. My good mornings often went unanswered but after a while, just sometimes, they were. I soon learned that these friendlier occasions were when he was away. If I emerged into the road after an ignored good morning his car would be in the drive. If I emerged after a returned greeting the drive would be empty. Was the man really so jealous that she was afraid to return a neighbourly greeting?
It didn’t really bother me. She was, as I say, a plain and mousy woman and I only felt sorry for her apparent unhappiness. Her life had been transplanted to a little village where she knew nobody and perhaps where she was discouraged from trying to get to know anybody assuming our impressions of a possessive husband, a violent one according to the gossips, were correct. I suppose her isolation became too much because after a while, on those empty drive days, she began to chat a little, at first just about her garden. It’s always supposed to be us men who drive these things but I don’t think I played the lead in the way things developed over those first months. Our progress from broccoli to her bed were mostly driven by her loneliness.
From the little she told me all that the village had suspected about her husband was correct, he was a possessive and violent man and after that first time she was terrified that somebody had seen me going into her house, that he would find out. For a couple of weeks we went back to the good mornings and the broccoli.
The candle was her idea. From the attic of my cottage half a mile away up the hill I could just make out her bedroom window through the trees below. I should only come to her on dark nights, climbing over the wall in the corner of the back garden where nobody would see and go straight upstairs. She would signal when it was safe for me to come by placing a candle in the window. So began ten months that I will never forget. It was a strange relationship, not love exactly, our encounters solely confined to that one room were too cut off from the real world for that, but it was far more to both of us than just a physical thing.
I had imagined I had a happy life but I suppose I must have been as lonely as she was, there had been nobody special since my divorce and our liaison became almost an obsession for me. I would get back from work and be unable to concentrate, would watch TV and then be unable to recall much of anything I had seen. All I wanted was for darkness to fall so I could go up to the attic and look for that tiny glimmer of light through the trees in the valley below.
That night seemed just like the others. The candle was there in the window. It was only as I started to climb over the wall that a reflection of the street light from the wing mirror caught my eye. The big saloon was there in the front drive. As I froze there, one leg on each side, the back door flew open. “Who’s there?” he bellowed, then “I know what you’ve been doing with my wife, I’ll kill you, you bastard”
I had the advantage of knowing the countryside behind while he had almost certainly never set foot outside the path from the drive to the front door. She had said he was not a man to appreciate the beauty of nature, that he had no idea my place overlooked his as he had never once stopped to really look at the hills. I watched him running about cursing and flailing at the bushes and then I watched him storm back to the house. I was afraid for her but to my shame I was more afraid for myself. I heard the banging and I heard her screams. I saw the glass break in her bedroom window and she looked out at me, a bloodstained face lit on one side by the candle that had somehow remained untouched. She screamed for help and I ran. When I got back to the cottage the gleam of the candle was still there. Was it her flame? Had he come back unexpectedly? Or was it his flame, lit to lure a man who had made him a cuckold?
The murder was a huge event in our tiny village. Everyone said they weren’t surprised, a man like that, although the only evidence the gossips had was a brusque manner and a quiet timid wife with a bruised cheek. Only one of us knew the truth, only one of us, perhaps, had had the chance to stop it happening. I sleep little now, my mind going over and over what happened. And on the darkest nights I go the attic and look out and sometimes it seems as if I see the flicker of that candle in the valley below. And at times it seems so real that I walk down the long footpath to stand behind the wall of that little vegetable garden. I stare at the boarded window and I can picture her face lit on one side by the candle as it was that night and the reproach and contempt within it grows with every imagining.
They say you never really know if you are a hero or a coward until you are put to the test. For most the test never comes. The test came for me and I know which one I am.
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The main road was empty as she drew up to the give way sign but she came to a complete stop anyway, looking this way and that, unsure if she was still on the right route. She hated using these tiny roads but the traffic alert had warned of long delays on her normal route. The man was standing there in the lay-by just past the junction. He was tall, middle aged and very scruffy and held a sign with one scrawled word, Ashcombe. “Not a chance” she thought, she never risked picking up a hitcher on her own, let alone one as odd looking as that.
Just as she passed him the engine cut out and she had to pull over to clear the way for a four by four coming up fast behind. The moment she rolled to a stop the door opened and the man got in. “Thanks for stopping miss, very kind” “Oh no I…” she began and the words trailed off, lost in her fright. What should she do? Insisting he get out might trigger the unpleasantness she dreaded. The engine started instantly at the first turn of the key. Twenty miles on was as far as she went in his direction and she pulled over to let him out. He had seemed normal enough but she was relieved when he opened the passenger door, panicking anew when he turned back and grasped her hand. “Let me give you something for your trouble miss” and what felt like a coin was pressed into her hand. She stammered “Oh no, really I…” but he was gone. She started the car and roared out of the lay-by, tyres spinning.
Ten minutes later at home she picked up the gift lying on the passenger side floor where she had flung it. If it was a coin, it didn’t look like any modern currency; it looked old, was over an inch in diameter and had a slightly irregular edge. One side had two small symbols and there was a third on the other side. It was only a worn bronze disc but just holding it made her feel ill at ease, it must be the association with that frightening journey, and she hurriedly tossed it into the glove compartment. Where had he been going? Ashcombe, wasn’t it? About thirty miles further on than Jenny’s place. She and her once best friend Jenny had drifted apart and hadn’t seen each other for about 5 years but over the next few days she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her. Why was her mind playing these tricks on her since that day? In the end she phoned Jenny and they arranged that she would go and see her the next weekend.
The reunion went ok; there was plenty to reminisce about. Towards the end she told Jenny about the hitchhiker and gave her the coin saying that as Jenny’s husband Pete was an amateur archaeologist perhaps he could identify it. It was strange but as soon as she passed over the coin all the anxiety she had felt since that trip with the hitchhiker was gone. As she drove home she found she could scarcely remember what he had looked like. When Pete came back from work he inspected the coin Jenny had given him. It was certainly old and the single symbol on each side looked Saxon although he had never seen a coin on which the symbols were so small relative to the size of the disc. He meant to check it out in his books but for some reason he felt curiously disinterested. He didn’t quite know why he put the coin in the rucksack that he would take hiking on the moors with Simon and the other guys that Saturday.
As he drove to the job in Ashcombe on the following Monday Simon was furious. First he had had a major row with his suppliers who had delivered the wrong tiles and then he had got stuck in traffic fetching the right ones. All this on top of a Sunday spent arguing with his wife over money. He breathed deeply and tried to calm down before he met the new client. He didn’t usually let things get to him like this, what the hell was wrong with him today? As he lifted the small toolbox off the front seat the lid came open and tipped all the tools on the floor. That’s all he bloody well needed! As he picked the tools up he found the coin that Pete was going on about, he must have dropped it when they took the van to the moors. What a bore the guy was getting to be. Valuable my foot, what valuable coin is completely blank on one side? He flung it on the ground in exasperation.
The job was at a swanky mansion and the new kitchen was top of the range. Ok for these rich bastards, he fumed. It was at the end of a day when nothing had gone right when he was packing the van that the owner came swanning out. The tile colour didn’t look as the sample and the edging wasn’t lined up. “And another thing” he began. Simon, normally such a placid and even tempered man snapped and it was unfortunate that he had a heavy hammer in his hand when it happened. It was a clear case of murder, the other builders and the victim’s wife were witnesses, and the only question was why a normally even tempered man like Simon would lose it like that. The forensic scientists had wrapped up at the scene and one picked up the coin where it lay in the mud. It was a bronze disc, completely blank on both sides.
435 miles North, a tall man checked out an identical disc, just as he did every day, and smiled in satisfaction when he saw it was blank. It had taken 20 people and over 5 months but another of his business rivals was gone and in a way nobody could ever link to him. He went to a desk and took out a box of identical bronze coins. He picked one out and inspected the ten small symbols crowded onto each side.
That night after a drink in a small pub out of town he dropped the coin in the collection box and another chain had started.
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Ok, that’s settled then, we’ll see you here for the next big game and you can take over from Rizthaq but I must stress again how important it is that you keep this to yourself, if they find out we’ll all be in trouble and the games, on this planet anyway, will be finished. It’s quite ridiculous really, this fuss about creatures that are hardly different from the dirt they grow up in. Using things like that for a bit of fun is perfectly reasonable in my view. Yes, I know scientists say they use some chemical means to think in a similar manner to ourselves but really, how the hell can creatures of matter like that be compared to us? Their limitations are almost laughable! It’s daft enough that they are locked in time so they can only go in one direction but they can’t even go from A to B without passing through every point in between!
The scientists reckon from their studies on planets where this physically bound life has evolved without our interference that the evolution of their so-called intelligence usually brings cooperation and harmony to a world. In unintelligent creatures the survival of each species is guaranteed by inbuilt rules based on aggression but once intelligence evolves and provides better means of ensuring survival all those instincts tend to disappear. I suppose they know what they are talking about but really, where’s the fun in that? For the likes of you and me who enjoy a game anyway. These creatures are just perfect for our war games because we can control them so easily. The skill is in picking your characters and making your moves at the right time. World War 2, as the creatures called it, was a classic game. We really thought Llixfo was going to win that game, his Hitler character was brilliant, but he overstretched himself and Gagex’s great Pearl Harbour ruse to bring in the Americans sunk him. Now things are looking promising for Llixfo again, he’s controlling this new character in Iran developing Nuclear weapons and manoeuvred over a billion people into sympathising with him. If he plays his hand properly he may get him to use them in the next game and that will really stir a lot of things up. It will be a good game; the rest of us will have to be at our best to stop him winning.
Do they know about us and how we use them in our games? Well, not exactly, not the truth anyway, although in some way we haven’t quite figured out they do seem to sense us. In the wars we push them into, many of them do see themselves as doing the bidding of things greater than themselves, things they call gods. That can sometimes be very useful to us in motivating them. At one time though, they seemed to have rather too good an idea of the way we make use of them and that was dangerous. If they had realised the full truth they might have resisted us and that would have spoiled the game. It was necessary to misdirect a few of those individuals they call prophets and now most have a much vaguer idea of a single god who does not directly interfere in the real world. Do you know, they got so close to twigging us at one point that they were even referring to some of us with names that, in their own curious language, approximate our own? They have even named things after us.
See you at the game. With that, Mars winked out of existence in that part of the galaxy to reappear in his own.
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The Book of Revelations is interesting to believers and non believers alike. Many of a religious nature have claimed to find messages in it and a whole religion has been based upon it. For non believers of a somewhat geeky nature it’s a rich source of material to support dark Lovecraftian tales of ancient and mysterious forces. It is like an ancient version of The Matrix which makes even less sense and is therefore so much more mysterious. For centuries the men of faith have been applying their own interpretations to the text and the men of none have been ridiculing them. Was it ever meant to mean anything at all? One mistake we always make is to imagine that men in the ancient past thought entirely differently to those of our own time. Maybe whoever wrote it was just indulging a love of writing weird tales, perhaps he was man who would have loved watching The Matrix has it been around at the time. Who knows? Maybe he even started writing it because he belonged to a writer's club and couldn't think of anything more sensible.
I never read Revelations until I retired and had time on my hands to do things simply because they interested me and I was interested in hidden messages because of my time with the anti Terrorist squad checking emails and phone messages looking for exactly that. The thought occurred to me that perhaps there were really were messages hidden in the Book of Revelations, the only error was to assume that they were messages from god foretelling the fate of the world. Maybe the texts contained messages meant to be read by real people. The authorship of the text is the subject of debate but one theory is that it was written by a man called John of Patmos who was exiled to that island. There is no information on who had exiled him and why. Was he a a political threat to some leader of the time? Whatever the reason, exile suggests that whoever it was would not have wanted him communicating with others, plotting with fellow conspirators perhaps or telling friends and family of his treatment at the hands of his guards. Normal communications would have been censored but if every parchment had contained apparent nonsense, stuff about death sat on a pale horse and the like, maybe they would just have scratched their heads and laughed and let the messengers take them.
My years with the security services decoding hidden messages and the years on internet security projects before that trying to ensure confidential data was not read had given me a pretty good knowledge of the techniques for encryption and decryption. Drawing on all my experience, I began to look at the patterns and the many repetitions in Revelations and at how a 1st century man of high intelligence might have been able to devise a code to contain meaningful messages among so much nonsense. The text has an almost poetic cadre in places and many obvious repetitions, like the use of the number seven, phrases like "come see" and the many allusions to angels and horses. The more I looked at it the more I became convinced that there really was a crude code within it. I don't mean it all had a secret meaning in the way that some religious believe; on the contrary, most of it meant nothing at all and was, to use the technical term, obfuscation, meaningless material added simply to hide the much smaller volume of meaningful text. Anyone reading it without seeing the clues as to which words and sentences were important could simply have no idea that short messages were contained within it. John had very simply encrypted his real message with some coded allusions and then just used his imagination to come up with volumes of religious allegories to hide them in.
The encryption was simple, in keeping with the knowledge you would expect of a 1st century man but that did not mean that translating it would be easy. I had a pretty good idea what rules had been used but not all were certain and there was all that mass of obfuscating text. In addition, errors had been introduced into the text by the translation process and the rules would not be consistently applied. In such cases we use what we term brute force methods, program in what you believe to be the basic rules and let the power of a computer run through all the combinations. Depending on how accurate your assumptions are, the output could be as much gibberish as you fed in, the correct message or something in between.
It took me many months, checking the output, improving on my ideas, reprogramming, running the program overnight again but eventually I found the right methods. The PC had decoded the passages in 12.1 to 12.3. The input text was at the top of the screen:
A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.
I scrolled down to the decoded message beneath it:
Hi Mary. Sorry I haven't written for a while but there haven't been any ships going your way. Things are ok here considering but my piles have really been giving me gyp again.
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It had seemed amazing at the time how quickly a life could fall apart although, looking back on it, he realised that it had been falling apart for some time.
Just a few months before, life had been hectic and work filled but if anyone had asked he would have said he was happy. Ok, he drank a little too much and smoked a bit of weed to ease life’s tensions but who doesn’t? Then a major client went broke owing a lot of money and he was running around trying to deal with that when the letter came from HMRC kicking off a major tax investigation. Suddenly his life went from mainly satisfying to hugely worrying and it did nothing for his temper or his drinking. Then Janet left. It was clear from their increasingly acrimonious exchanges that their marriage had been going wrong a lot longer for her.
He was an independent man, one who hated to ask for help from anyone. What can an independent rational man do to cope with a life suddenly gone wrong except drink? He thought back to the days of his childhood when he still had the faith the parents had filled him with and recalled how comforting prayer had been in those anxious childhood moments but that faith had long drained away. It was while idly watching a program on Buddhism that he decided to try meditation again. He had done a bit in his youth and it wasn’t so daft; it was the mental techniques of concentrating that mattered, not the spiritual significance.
It wasn’t worth joining up to some weird group again. What did that “majoram savaram” stuff mean to an English speaker anyway? Anything should do, the important thing was to concentrate on saying the words to clear your mind of other worries. He cast around for something he could chant and the first thing that came to hand was the Tesco shopping receipt on the kitchen worktop. He soon found that saying the prices gave it a repetitive rhyming cadence that did not fit the Vajrayana style so he left those out and it worked. He wasn’t sure if it was the effect of meditating in this manner or the childish silliness of it that lifted his spirits but soon he was meditating several times a day while chanting from a grocery bill that had become a lifeline.
FIG FRUIT ROLL
CHOPPED HAZELNUTS
FARMLEA COND MILK
WHITE TIGER BREAD
DOM BLEACH SUNFRESH
FRESHBAY PRAWN COCKTAIL
...
It wasn’t always the same receipt since each weekly shop handed him small changes to inspire him anew. As with the Buddhist texts, there were many variations but they all had the same core message of enlightenment. He found ways to make meaning in the shopping list that he could meditate upon while chanting and began to order his items on the belt accordingly, putting things in cadences of number, one of these, two of these, three of those and then back down to one perhaps. He felt that was symbolic of the way we must strive and never give up. He always had two Freshbay Prawn Cocktails and would ensure that they gave a pleasing rounding to his chant, making sure that one always reached the cashier first and one reached her last.
Slowly it became more than just a way of meditating to relieve his anxiety; these small things began to have a meaning to him, at first dimly observed, but growing to be his inspiration. It was inevitable that his respect for this inspiring text would spill over into a reverence for the source of it and so it was that he began to indulge in tiny rituals during his weekly shop when he thought nobody was looking and concentrating on those things gave him peace. His path through the store mattered too. At first it was simply important that he concentrated to relax but increasingly it became to have a significance that went beyond that as did the way he chose the shopping trolley or held the shopping basket or selected which checkout to go to.
As his real life fell apart his spiritual life, his Tesco life, grew within him. Was it so daft? If the religious are right, is there any real difference between the life of a man and that of a can of Heinz beans? Both are created by some means unknown to them, both spend a short period in the light before they are taken away and judged. The man is judged by the sins in his soul, the beans by the barcode on its label. There is no salvation for the beans which are always destined to be consumed but maybe our own fate isn’t so different for all we know.
And it came to pass that, on a wet Friday afternoon in the sugar and jams aisle as he somehow always knew it would, he received the revelation. And the truth of the oatmeal bread and the "Two for One" sun dried fruit and the cornflakes and the "Buy One Get One Free" kitchen cleaners and all the other Tesco sundries came together with all the other truths of the universe, with all of the things of existence which they simultaneously both represented and were. And rejoicing he walked into the light.
Jack turned up for the late shift just as the police car and the ambulance were leaving. Rob, the day shift security guard, was just inside the doors talking to the store manager. “What was all that about?” asked Jack when the manager had gone. “That was our nutter, you know, the chap that kept walking around muttering and gesturing and shifting stuff about. He went really loopy this time, chanting loudly, waving his arms in the air and bowing, then he just froze; he was completely oblivious to us. Not sure what he was chanting but I could swear there was stuff about cornflakes and condensed milk and Cillit Bang in there somewhere. They took him away for evaluation, and about time too. I told Mr Fairfield we should have banned him a long time ago, he was giving the other customers the willies"
"They left his trolley here so somebody needs to put all this stuff back” He picked up a pot of Freshbay Prawn Cocktail from the curiously ordered purchases and the overhead light glinted in the plastic. Must be another migraine coming on but for a brief moment he felt giddy and full of vertigo, as if poised over an immense pit.
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Money was tight that year so their holiday was a staycation. They had never been to the Grampians or Ben Nevis and, as both were enthusiastic walkers, touring round that area of Scotland seemed an ideal choice. They were lucky with the weather and the week had more than lived up to their expectations. Just one day left before they headed home but tomorrow was Ben Nevis and it was with a sense of anticipation that they drove into the car park of the last hotel they had booked. It turned out to be a room over a very old country inn.
After dinner they went for a stroll around the nearby village and it was as they walked back towards the pub that June said “Doesn’t this place look familiar?, Isn’t it that pub they did on Haunted Britain a couple of months back?” They stopped and looked, that slightly newer but still ancient extension to the left certainly looked like it. Wasn’t that a Black Swan? And surely, yes, KiIlkenmore, now they thought about it, this was the village.
“Do you think we’ll see the ghosts?” she said as they undressed for bed. “Doubt it” said Roger “they probably charge extra for blood stained ladies walking through walls”. The spirits came soon after. They couldn’t sleep so they got up and raided the drinks cabinet. Neither of them were great believers in things that go bump in the night; they occasionally watched the TV program but they watched it from a mostly sceptical and often sneering viewpoint. Yet now they were here in a house where entire royalist families had been massacred, where the haunting was supposed to be of a particularly harrowing nature, they suddenly felt a lot less sceptical.
It was all nonsense of course and a few drinks helped to calm their nerves. They would just have one more each and then they really must get to sleep; Ben Nevis would not be an easy walk. As Roger opened the drinks cabinet again he felt its chill through his pyjamas. He was just thinking that there seemed to be a lot of cold air from a rather small box when June screamed behind him. The woman came from the left hand wall, through the fog of the rapidly dropping temperature, a bloodstained 17th century woman with a long gash on her face. The wound was nothing compared to that on the child she clutched to her bosom. They felt a horror that went beyond that created by the vision, as if the evil that made these things happen had returned.
They never walked on Ben Nevis. They spent the night in the car, settled the bill the next morning without mentioning their experience and drove home the next day. They didn’t feel able to speak of it to each other for a week until some of the horror had faded in their minds and it was another week before they felt able to check out the details on the internet. It wasn’t the same place. It was a Black Swan but the haunted inn was near Kilkenny, not Killkenmore. They had taken a photo of their inn on the afternoon of their arrival and, while it looked similar to the picture of the haunted inn on the net, they were plainly different buildings. On the other hand, the description of the haunting on the net exactly fitted the one that they had experienced. How could that be? Surely there were not identical hauntings in two different places and, if there were, why were there no reports about the inn they had stayed at? Had their nervous expectation in that place created the haunting in their minds, had they simply seen what they had feared to see? But that didn’t make sense either, how could two minds act in precisely the same way at the same instant to conjure up the same illusion in both of them.
They sat at the kitchen table, glasses in their hands, mulling it over. June said “Maybe imagination doesn’t work quite like we think, perhaps our minds can interact in some way, each reinforcing the illusions of the other. If you think about it, there are lots of reports of mass hallucinations where hundreds claim to have seen the same vision at the same time, The Angel of Mons for example. Maybe we somehow created the things we saw. Ghosts, imagination, what’s the difference really? Perhaps they are the same thing.” Another drink would help; they seemed to be drinking rather a lot since that night. As he was opening the freezer door to get some more ice, Roger paused “Maybe, but in that case why would there be any need to be in some particular location like a haunted house? If imagination is going to conjure up something like that from nothing what’s to stop it doing it anywhere, at any time?” He was thinking about it while vaguely wondering with another corner of his mind why there was such an enormous wall of cold air from the freezer.
Behind him June screamed.
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Johan found himself before the light and the light was beautiful beyond mortal understanding and he walked towards it.
He had tried to be a devout and good man but like all truly good and devout men he had grave doubts about his worth, unlike so many who were not. Now here he was, yet was he puzzled, for he had no recollection of dying. He recalled only being in his greenhouse potting Geraniums, looking up at the Sun’s light and finding himself in front of THE LIGHT. He did not recall pain or struggling to breathe, nor hitting a hard floor, nor lying and watching the normal light of the world slowly dim. Perhaps he had suffered some massive heart attack or stroke that had taken him instantly. He hoped his wife would not be too distraught when she found him. This concern puzzled him in turn. In paradise, should not such earthly worries be left behind? Are those not the illusions of the limited human intellect?
They say that only those who are received and prepared by HIM can behold the almighty. The light in front of him was made manifest and he was prepared by means that no man can know and he saw. He saw three almighties in front of him and, with senses far beyond his earthly ones, he saw also behind and around him, some thirty or forty almighties. Almost almighties anyway, for absolute supremacy allows of only one. All of these not quite supreme beings were looking at him. The almighty in front and to the centre adjusted his spectacles and peered harder at this being of infinitesimally small importance before him. Almost infinitesimally small anyway, for only if the absolutely supreme exists can there truly be an infinitesimal.
With senses that were not those of mortal man and that would have been incomprehensible to him minutes before Johan was aware of another mortal being by his side and it was alien although with the familiar sense he called visual it was a man like himself. The words were not conveyed by any norm of physics and yet he understood. “My lords, I present to you this last piece of evidence, a randomly selected creature of the type called human from the planet Earth which, as you can see from the submissions so far and which are summarised in front of you, is entirely typical of its species in form. You can also plainly see how very closely it resembles the specimen of the creature from my client’s planet and I put it to you that such closeness cannot be accidental, that my client has had his design and his copyright deliberately infringed. I ask that you find in favour of my client and enforce his rights in this matter. The three almighties conferred and made notes. Suddenly he was in the greenhouse holding a pot of geraniums and the only thing on his mind was that he was running out of potting compost.
Later that day, he and his wife were sitting in the conservatory with a glass of wine. What a lovely sunny day, she remarked. He looked up towards the light and some strange memory was in his head, he struggled to recall it. At the same time, in a place where time and place have no meaning, the verdict was in. “We find in favour of the plaintiff and the damages claimed will be awarded in full. The defendant will cease and desist from using the plaintiff’s design with immediate effect”.
Johan and his wife raised their wine glasses to their lips but they were journeys their arms never completed. Like every other human on Earth they had suddenly ceased to exist.
In the space of just six months life had come full circle for both of them. Liz had suffered the death of her husband and her brother Mike had been through an acrimonious and expensive divorce. They had always got on well together and both were miserable so it seemed a logical step, after the tenants left, to move back into the old house they had inherited from their parents, the one they had grown up in. It seemed comforting and natural too, so natural that they did not even discuss it, for each to move back into the same bedrooms they had occupied almost thirty years earlier. Drawing comfort from each other′s company and shared memories of happier times, they began to repair themselves. Sharing a bottle of whisky and the comforting warmth of the log fire in those first few weeks together they retreated from their recent painful memories and the reminiscences came frequently.
"Do you remember that strange dream you kept having?" asked Liz. He nodded. It had never recurred after he left the house for University in the West Country but he had never forgotten it because it had always been so vivid, so real and unvarying. It wasn′t a complete dream in itself, just a scene that would be tacked onto the end of other dreams just before he awoke. Whatever he had been dreaming of, impossible exams, pirates, huge holes in the ground or any of the other nonsense that fills all our heads in our sleeping hours, would stop abruptly and he would find himself on an immense white plain. All around there were people converging on him, beautiful, smiling, welcoming people. In front of them all was a tall man whose white robes marked him out as a leader. He would raise both hands to his face as if about to make some strange gesture of greeting and open his mouth as if about to speak. Then Mike would awake, feeling good.
Maybe it was her mention of it or the familiarity of the old bedroom with its plain white emulsioned walls looking much as they used to but the dream, or rather the dream fragment, began recurring. It did not bother him any more than it ever had, rather the reverse, as he had always seemed to awake feeling happier and more alert when it did happen. It was strange but then maybe it was inevitable that being back in that old house that had changed so little, being back with his sister, would reawaken thoughts and memories at all levels of his consciousness.
It was a good two years for both of them and the hurts they had suffered were in the past. All his years ended for him when, on his usual commute home on a stormy evening, his car was hit by a lorry on the M6 and ran off an embankment. Liz was already at home when the call came and she rushed to the hospital. He was in a coma and not expected to recover. Distraught, she stayed the night, unsleeping, in a small unoccupied private ward the hospital provided and was at his bedside the next morning just before 7. This was the time he would usually awake to the sound of the alarm and, ever the thoughtful brother, bring her a coffee in bed soon after. She gazed down at his motionless figure, the tears pouring from her eyes.
Somewhere deep inside his still head a dream abruptly ended and he was back on the immense white plain. Those beautiful, welcoming people were converging on him and the tall smiling chief raised his hands and opened his mouth as if about to speak. Back in the old house the alarm clock ticked over to seven and its shrill beeps sounded through the empty room but, even had he been there to hear it, he would not have not awoken because he could not. The chief′s hands touched his face and moved back down. The face went with them and beneath was an aspect of evil and corruption. All around those beautiful people became shambling, creeping monsters and with the transformation the ugliness spread out and permeated everything. "This time" came the bubbling hiss from the growing monstrosity in front of him "This time, you shall not escape from us, this time you will stay to see us as we really are"
The figure on the bed began to twitch and writhe. Liz called out and the doctor came and began to prepare an injection while the nurse hurried her away. The doctor came to her soon afterwards. He was very sorry but there was nothing anyone could have done, the injuries were too severe. She went to say goodbye to him a little later. She told the nurse about his strange dream. "Maybe it was heaven he dreamed of, perhaps he is there now on the bright plain with all those beautiful people" The nurse did not know what to reply, she only said, as she had said so many times in similar circumstances, "At least he is not suffering"
You cannot expect honesty from evil, only deceit until it gets its way. Mike's time for waking had come and gone and he had not awoken. On a dark, dismal plain of tormented and tormenting creatures, assailed by an evil that permeated all, he would suffer for ever.
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The shrill beeping of the alarm clock woke him from a sleep that, despite the sleeping pills, had been all too brief. He had no rational reason to set it any more now his job and everything else in a once full life was in the past but he had to try and cling to something. Routine was all he had.
Still groggy, he gazed out of the window drinking his coffee and remembering what had been. It would be again, he told himself; if he had nothing else he had his logic and his will. Cracking up, one of his friends has said; those friends who had been so sympathetic but hadn't called for weeks. He would show them. The loud beeping from the microwave interrupted his thoughts with the mundane signal that his instant porridge was hot.
Tomorrow he would start to get out of it, phone one of those friends, join something, go for a walk if it was sunny, just get out of the dark house and try and get out of the dark inside him. Today, just today, he would rest. He turned on the TV which started with its signature chime and he started flicking through the channels, a small beep sounding on every press of his finger, that repetitive theme playing on every access of the index. He really should look at the setting and see if he could turn that off.
He was still there flicking through an hour later, unable to concentrate on any of it when the beeping from the kitchen, exactly like the beeping from the microwave as they were of the same make, signalled that the dishwasher had finished. What the hell. Why did these bloody things have to tell you they had completed whatever mundane task they were built to do? Surely it would make more sense if they beeped to signal failure, if they had not done what they were supposed to do?
He took the pills they had given him at the hospital although they seemed to do no good, just like the ones before. Outside the clouds had broken so perhaps he would sit in the sun for a while, surely that should lift his spirits a little. Maybe he could catch up on some sleep. He was just opening the door when the washing machine signalled, with a shrill beeping exactly like the microwave and the dishwasher before it, that its cycle had finished. He wrenched open the door to silence it. The answering machine beeped to say the store was full. He ignored it.
Outside it looked peaceful but there was little peace to be had. It was the busy season for the builder’s merchants just behind the housing estate. The chugging of engines overlaid the sound of the aircraft overhead and over them all was the irregular loud beeping of the reversing lorries and forklifts, performing their dances to the sound of their pointless health and safety music. He went out again after the work had finished for the day and for a little while it was quiet before the alarm went off on the van over the road. It would sound shrilly for a minute then was quiet for a while before starting up again. What the hell was wrong with that thing? He knew there would be no peace until its owner got back and went inside. He flicked through the TV channels, beep, tune, beep, tune, beep... Later the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen although there was no obvious reason.
He would get an early night although he knew he would not sleep. Just maybe, perhaps, tomorrow he would feel better and be able to begin to make his new start. Against all expectations he had actually dozed off before being woken by a beeping. Not the alarm. What the hell? The culprit was in the corner at the top of his wife’s handbag, her mobile phone was signalling that it needed charging. Had it really taken all these weeks to run out of charge? It brought back everything he had been trying to keep out of his mind, the accident, the hospital, the sound of the police sirens and the ambulance. Most of all he remembered the beeping of the life support machine.
As her mobile beeped his mobile and all the house’s alarm clocks joined in. He picked up the bottle of pills and walked out of the house as the TV, the dishwasher, the microwave, the washing machine, the computers, the Sky box, his wrist watch, the answering machine, the smoke alarms, the intruder alarms and every other appliance in the house joined in and it made no difference if they were turned off. He walked into a silent garden full of the beeping of reversing lorries, house alarms, car alarms and emergency sirens, sat on the patio and washed the pills down with a can of lager.
A neighbour saw him the next day. She was almost in time and the life support machine was beeping for a while before turning into an uninterrupted signal. The nurse turned it off and opened the window. Outside it was abnormally quiet, nothing but the murmur of the wind in the trees.
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It was not an upmarket neighbourhood but the residents of the tiny crescent were largely content with their lot. Quietness, friendly neighbours and the large and beautiful park behind their small gardens made up for the shabby terraced houses. There were occasional downsides to the park in the form of litter thrown over the fences and the odd football-retrieving boy but a bushy area screened them from most of the public traffic.
They had never had any major problems until early that summer when one of the owners came home from work to find broken fences and garden ornaments. This was followed by similar vandalism to other properties within a space of a month. The police were informed but it was clear that their problems were not a priority. James suggested they should get CCTV and, being the crescent′s most technical resident, he arranged it all. A couple of weeks later all the houses were equipped with Chinese-made cameras showing the bottom of each garden and the park beyond.
Maybe the bored youths got bored with their new pastime or the cameras visible beneath the eves deterred them but either way there were no more incidents. None of the residents regretted their £150 outlay; it gave them peace of mind but more than that, there was something fascinating about flicking through the day′s recorded clips on their TVs. Each clip was 20 seconds long and had been triggered by motion sensing. The movement could be a man walking a dog, a child running, a bird hopping around or a fly on the camera; it was very mundane stuff and yet there was an exciting power in this innocent voyeurism, a feeling of control. They could be miles away at work yet their own little domain was still under their gaze, it could be pitch black and the infrared cameras were still monitoring the park′s activity.
It was James′s son, even geekier than his dad, who took it a step further using their broadband WIFI routers and cheap video transmitters. Soon the residents could all sit at their TVs or PCs and flick through each other′s video shots or see live views of the park from their neighbours′ cameras. They had little competitions like whose camera could catch the most after-dark furtive entrances into the bushes. Some of the neighbours, mainly the wives, expressed half-hearted reservations about some of this. Wasn′t it rather voyeuristic? Verging on illegal? They let themselves be reassured, it wasn′t as though the cameras had great resolution or could provide close ups and the night vision was just black and white. It was just innocent fun and anyway the previous vandalism had justified their use.
James′s next innovation was computer generated imagery. Using powerful simulation software hosted on his expensive machines they could now alter the images in real time and superimpose virtual reality onto the park scenes. Some of the neighbours competed to see who could make the best juxtaposition of reality and fiction. Children would run happily across the park pursued by ferocious dinosaurs. The magnificent Maples transformed into strange alien predatory shapes and lashed out at couples strolling beneath.
It was quickly clear that Harry had the most talent at their new found games. Superimposing a moving monster onto the park was quite easy but only Harry managed to master the complex rules that allowed recognition of real objects and triggering of effects accordingly, to allow virtual objects to move behind real ones or to make real ones disappear. His dislike of football inspired his first script "Vanishing footballers". When a game started on the park′s football pitch a click would start erasing it. Whenever one footballer passed sufficient close in front of another there would be a virtual explosion and the images of both would disappear, masked out of the picture by a piece of the stored background pattern. Soon, although the players continued to run around the pitch accompanied by their ritual shouts in real life, on the crescent′s screens the football pitch was empty.
Harry got so fond of providing his brief virtual versions of park life for his neighbours′ entertainment over many months that the distinction between reality and fiction began to be blurred. There was a sense of disappointment in looking out of the window and seeing a woman wearing a scarf on her head when your screen showed it to be covered with large spiders. Sometimes there was a momentary feeling of disbelief. Were park users really that small? Did they really have so few legs?
Harry had been watching "Land of the Dead" on DVD and what better tribute to George Romero than "Park of the Dead". There were very few dog walkers braving the freezing cold that evening but when a neighbour clicked the link each was horribly assailed onscreen and dragged into the bushes by rabid zombies. It was horrible, more realistic than anything he had done before and it was the unanimous opinion that Harry had overstepped the mark. None of them could watch more than one such incident.
It was Saturday and most of the neighbours were woken early by the police sirens and watched from the windows as the park was cordoned off. Few details of the murders were available in the first reports but a jogger had found bodies in the bushes and the condition of every one was unpleasant. In the years that followed nobody was ever apprehended for the infamous Stark Park murders and no motives were ever established. The circumstances were unusual in that the mutilations indicated lunacy but more than one person was involved. This was the work of monsters.
The neighbours of Park Crescent could not help. Afraid of explaining their motives they had waited until evening and quietly removed the CCTVs before they could be noticed and before the police started house to house enquiries. Their videos showed nothing that could help anyway, just a fictional horror film imposed on a real scene. The timing of the real life murders and the fictional murders by fantasy horror characters created by digital technology was a bizarre coincidence.
Fiction is fiction and reality is reality; one cannot create the other no matter how real the fiction may seem or how many people have started to believe in it.
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“Gordon bloody Bennet, they’re at it again!” The loud hurrumphing of her husband drew Audrey in to look at what he was reading. This time the article in The Sun was about an image of the Virgin Mary at the entrance to a cave in Devon.
"For crying out loud! what is wrong with these people?” he ranted. "It’s just shadows on the rocks! There seems to be some crap like this in the press every week, an image of Christ in the bark of a tree, a ghost at the window of a castle, shadows of figures moving in a house and some idiots really think there is something in it. Maybe we should send them pictures of that knothole in our bedroom wardrobe that looks like Lenny Henry or a video of the weird shadows that track across our bedroom wall when Joe over the road drives off to his night shift”
She could have pointed out that perhaps he shouldn’t read The Sun if the articles annoyed him so much but she refrained, it wasn’t worth a row. Since his recent retirement he seemed so on edge, so ready to blow up at every little thing. She sighed inaudibly and hoped that in time he would adjust, find other ways to fill his time.
The same story was reported on Ceefax the next morning and he blew up afresh. "For Pete’s sake! Doesn’t it occur to the idiots who believe in these apparitions that when umpteen million people are carrying cameras every day, when they are seeing umpteen things from different directions, superimposed in different ways and in different lights, it would be very bloody surprising if sometimes there was not an uncanny resemblance to someone or something familiar? When the resemblance isn’t perfect they paper over the cracks with wishful thinking. How can it be the virgin Mary when we actually have no idea what she looked like? Assuming she existed at all that is, looks more like Florence Nightingale to me”
There was a brief pause while he summoned up breath for a fresh rant. "And do you know what the stupidest thing about this is?” He glared at her until she shook her head "No dear, what? "I’ll tell you what, last night I found some photos on the net of this cave that had other details, like people on the beach below and the footbridge above that could be used to estimate the scale” He paused "This virgin was about 12 feet tall! Maybe I’ll start a blog and point that out, I think that some of us should at least some attempt to get people thinking rationally”
He couldn’t seem to leave the issue alone and Audrey was in two minds as to whether that was good or bad. On the one hand, he seemed rather obsessed with it and it did not seem to stop him drinking. On the other, he had some purpose to his life for the first time in months. He would scour the world news online, looking for any reports of visions or sightings of ghosts, angels or anything else from the beyond and debunk them. It didn’t matter how many people has seen something or what sort of people they were, these were the inventions of frauds, the imaginings of the delusional, the chance conjunctions of objects and shadows or the product of physical effects like reflections or mist. His blog gained quite a following, especially among the more unbalanced rationalists, those whose belief that only logic should rule has become a faith and those whose opposition to religion has become a religion.
He began a section for people to send in photos and started it off with his uncannily lifelike picture of Lenny Henry in the cupboard knothole next to a photo of the man. The idea was to show just how common such appearances were if you looked for them. That took off quite well too. He got photos of Osama Bin Laden on a piece of toast, President Obama on some tree bark, Gordon Brown on a steaming cow pat. The last was very popular. On weeks when he got few contributions he tried to fill in the gaps and looking for these resemblances became an obsession.
It was all about how the mind processed what the eyes gave it, he told Audrey. In real life we tend to focus on one thing and do not see the patterns in the whole scene. It is often only when we look at a photo with its flattened perspective that they become apparent. On their regular walks he would sit on the park bench squinting, swinging his head from side to side or getting up and walking back and forth, ducking down or stretching up to try and get a different viewpoint. "Look at that, if you come and stand just here and see the top of that old tree against that big cloud you can see Mrs Perkins. That dead branch there is even exactly where the big furrow in her forehead should be”
It may be that you can always make resemblances out of random patterns if you look hard enough. On the other hand, it may be that when we fail to focus on what matters everything is lost against the background. Was it early onset of Alzheimier’s or was it truly the case that we see whatever we train ourselves to see? Whichever it was it happened that spring morning at the kitchen table. Audrey sat opposite and passed him his coffee, something that usually invoked a grunt of acknowledgement but none came. He sat and stared across the table, seeing the juxtaposition of the patterns on the kitchen tiles, the utensils hanging on the wall, the edge of the cabinet, the doorknob, the shadows from the window and all of these came together to create an image that resembled his wife. He found he could not remember her name.
The swift moving clouds outside darkened the window and the shadows disappeared. He sat at the table, blinked and stared across. There was nobody there at all.
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She loved spending the day with her sister but had never been a confident driver and the 80 minute road journey to and from her place out in the sticks was always arduous. It wasn′t so much the South London traffic congestion or the Motorway hold ups, she was used to those in her every day commute, it was those miles of narrow country lanes that she hated. The worst part was coming back in the winter in the dark when the tiny B roads were made worse by the dazzle of oncoming traffic that made it hard for her bespectacled, 51 year old eyes to make out what was ahead.
It was late in January and snow has just started to fall as she got into the car to go home. Her sister suggested she stayed the night but there was an important meeting at work tomorrow that she couldn′t miss and she feared getting snowed in for days. She set out on the return journey with more than her usual trepidation. With each mile the snow got thicker and it began to settle on the near freezing roads. The car skidded as she slowed a little too abruptly when another came in the opposite direction and her trepidation began to turn to panic. She was half way to the motorway and it was too late to turn back, all she could do was press on, although the car, responding to her inexperience and ineptness in such conditions, was beginning to slide on every corner.
The lights from the houses as she drove into the tiny village of Ravendale provided only the briefest of respites from the darkness. There was just enough brightness for the road sign to be readable, London Road, and, not for the first time, but far more fervently than ever before, she wished that somehow it would keep its promise, that London could be just at the end if this road. The road turned sharply left past the old pub at the end of the village and the car slid again, bumping its tyres on the kerb. She stopped the car and closed her eyes, sitting there shaking, her panic rising out of all proportion to the incident. At that moment she vowed she would give anything, pay any price, for this London Road to take her straight to London. It was the unexpected brightness through her lids that made her open her eyes again. She was stopped in an urban street under the garish orange glow of its street lights where the snow fell futilely to perish on the capital′s warm tarmac. She was so confused she scarcely knew how she got home, she remembered finding a familiar route by chance and from there it just a short drive. She remembered also the name of the street, Ravendale Road.
What had happened′ Was she losing her mind? Over the next few weeks, as life went on as usual and her project at work kept going well she realised she had no long term problem and it could only be that her uncharacteristic panic had somehow caused her to excise her memory of driving to London. Or could it? There was another explanation but, ridiculous as it was, she couldn′t stop wondering. She was feeling foolish as, on her next trip to her sister′s, she drove into Ravendale Road. She felt numb as she passed the street light and found herself outside the old pub in Ravendale, just 15 miles from her sister′s place. "I left early today" she told her.
Could it work with other street names? If so, why drive even 15 miles along dark country roads to her sister′s? There was the small town of Rutting much nearer that had a London road and a minute′s perusal of the London A-Z turned up a Rutting Crescent less than 25 minutes from her own home along well lit urban streets, the sort she was used to. Somehow she knew it would work and had no real surprise as she passed the midpoint of Rutting Crescent and found herself in London Road, Rutting, on the right side of the road, just a part of the rush hour traffic flow, with nobody around her apparently aware that anything strange had happened. She told no one, they would think her insane, but as the months went on she grew to accept this strange gift and to take advantage of it.
It was an amazing ten years and her life had been transformed. She had been on the point of turning down a promotion because it involved a lot of travel and she so disliked driving but now there was scarcely a place in the UK she could not get to in under an hour. Nobody was better placed to use such a gift as a Londoner as few areas did not have a city, town or village with a London Road and London has so many streets that a corresponding street, road, avenue, way or crescent can usually be found. Twenty minutes at most spent checking online maps could save her hours that she would spend at home or sightseeing at her destination.
She found herself far better off too, she saved petrol money on personal and business trips and even got paid for the latter. It seemed dishonest to claim mileage for petrol she didn′t use but on the other hand what could she do? She could hardly tell them, for example, that her trip to Edinburgh involved driving to Edinburgh Road in London and then from London Road in Edinburgh to the client′s office, she would be dismissed for insanity. She placated her conscience by knowing that she did a better job by not being as tired and stressed out as she would be if she really did have to cope with hours of travel. She became adept at hiding her gift from others. Her clients, friends and relatives got used to her unfailing punctuality and the lucky way she always seemed to just miss those 5 hour motorway pileups. Hardly surprising, as amazing luck was so much more believable than the truth.
It was ten years to the day since that Sunday in Ravendale and, recently retired, she was driving the short distance to an old friend′s house in Cornwall. The route took her to St Stephen′s road in London via the village of St Stephen in Cornwall just a few miles from Polgoth where her friend lived. She was somewhere in Enfield and that area of London was an unfamiliar one, so he would have to stop to check the A-Z. Where was she now? She kept a look out for a street sign as she neared a large junction. What did that sign up there above the department store say? It was hard to make out while keeping her eye on the road. Fortunately, the lights turned red and she had to stop right next to it. She looked up. She read World′s End and then the lights changed. Only the traffic lights changed for the other motorists including the one who had been behind her and was now waiting at the white line unaware that her black Astra had ever existed. For her the light of the entire world changed from that of a dull spring day to a hellish red glow in front of her lighting up the pitch blackness.
No matter how desperate or scared we may, we should be careful what we wish for and what we promise in return. Strangely, she had never dwelt on why this gift was given her and who or what it was who gave it. She realised too late that it was not a gift but a purchase and now it was time to pay.
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When they look back on their lives, those who live in the normal world think about the things that happened, the triumphs and failures, the happy and the sad times, the loves and the losses.
James had slipped out of the normal world and his memories were more introspective. How did he get to be the lonely and isolated man he now was, what errors had he made in his thinking, what could he do to get back? The death of his wife had not been the start of his journey into isolation; her company had only insulated him from its consequences. The friends he had once had had long gone, the pub acquaintances he used to share a boozy evening with now barely nodded when they saw him, turned off by the awkward silences. He had become one of those isolated old men that every English pub seems to have, the one that sits at the table in the corner over his pint before walking home alone. He had tried to get back, to talk to those he had once known but could think of little to say, had gone backwards to become a grizzled version of the shy and friendless boy he had once been. Maybe it was inevitable, the events of a varied life can lift us above our own natures but, like any flying thing, we always come back down.
In the end he had given up, concentrating on his solitary interests, particularly his bird watching. Their fluttering activities through his binoculars took him away from his loneliness. He was well placed for such a hobby, not only did his village adjoin an area of outstanding natural beauty but his house overlooked a long abandoned stone quarry where nature had grown back in abundance on the steep slopes and a small lake attracted a variety of water fowl.
It was the first sunny day after a period of torrential rain when he sat in his bedroom window to inspect a newly arrived pair of Herons. The fissure in the rocky slopes above the lake would not have been obvious to anyone who did not regularly gaze at the quarry through binoculars but he noticed it immediately. It had been exposed by a minor rockslide although the debris seemed to have disappeared without obvious trace into the lake. This could be an opportunity. His window was not close to the lake and parts of it were obscured by trees; perhaps he could use this small place as a hide.
He crept under the mesh fence and clambered up to the place and it was better than he had imagined. Not only was there just enough space for his small frame to lie in and inconspicuously train his binoculars or camera over or between the rocks in front onto the lake below but the lie of those rocks and the trees around the lake’s fringes made it possible to enter it without being seen from any of the houses adjoining his. The slopes faced North and were in shadow on sunny days so the tiny cave was invisible to the naked eye unless someone knew exactly where to look. He did not want his twitching activities to be misconstrued by his neighbours.
And so it was that his bird watching hobby took a step up. There were no rare birds but that didn’t matter, he loved watching the common ones too, like the Canada Geese, Herring Gulls or Moorhens and he got some great pictures. From his high vantage point he could also see his neighbour’s houses, the kids playing in their gardens, the barbecues and the people just sitting in their lounges watching TV but those activities did not really interest him.
Not initially anyway. At first it was probably the occasional similarity to avian behaviour that amused him. The way that lone male swan kept bullying the smaller and more numerous geese - was that so different to that kid who kept picking on his younger brothers at number 31? Was that pair of ducks building their nest so unlike that newly-arrived young couple at number 37 who spent their weekends decorating and furnishing their new house? Gradually he spent more time looking at the houses than at the lake or the trees. Birds, men. If you are outside either society, what difference is there except that the latter are less predictable and sometimes more interesting?
There were the odd intimate happenings in the backrooms and bedrooms but there was nothing sexual about his interest. Even if a distant glimpse through binoculars could be seen as titillating, his libido had long vanished. His voyeurism was just a way of connecting with a normal life he had left behind and to which he did not know how to return. He started to live through these people, imagining their conversations and their arguments and joining in from his little hideaway over 200 feet away. It became his society and he would spend hours every day in all weathers except fog, just gazing and muttering his imagined conversations from both sides. What’s for tea tonight mum? Isn’t it time we decorated this kitchen? Why are you so late again? Is there something I should know about? Are you having an affair?
A letter from his daughter in Australia brought a rare chance for normality. She and her family were coming to the UK and would be staying with him for two months. The day of their arrival came and he had hope again. Maybe just being with them would bring him back from his isolation. Maybe? No, he would do it; he would build a normal life again! He made his way to the little cave, picking his way through the deep mud from last night’s heavy rain. This was a farewell visit; just one more time he would spend a couple of hours in his binocular world and then he would drive to the airport, pick up his daughter and her family and be back in the real one.
They had waited at the airport for over an hour before, having had no answer to their phone calls, taking a taxi to the house and finding it locked. When the police broke in the house was empty. Now after two months the police enquiries had provided no answers, none of the neighbours had seen him and none knew him well enough anymore to provide any clue to where he may have gone.
Work commitments meant the family had to get back to Australia and Jenny was sad. This was something she had never expected, was her father still alive or was he dead? Tomorrow they would have to leave without knowing and that was something she found hard to cope with. She stood at her father’s bedroom window and gazed out at the quarry. He had told her many times in his letters how much he loved watching this place. She picked up some binoculars and scanned the muddy slopes. It was obvious from the fresh colour of the mud and rocks and the lack of the vegetation that there had been a minor collapse directly opposite the house. Her husband put his arm around her to comfort her. “Don’t worry love, they might still find him. And if the worst has happened, well, he’s in a better place”
She longed to believe it. She gazed up at the steep slopes of the quarry and told herself he was out there somewhere.
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They say opposites attract. Observation suggests that to be one of the more idiotic sayings in general although it certainly seemed to be the case with me and June.
We had met at a course on meditation, one of those grey areas where science meets the spiritual. For me it was the science, the techniques for relaxing and focusing the mind. I was the practical, sceptical, down to earth one who never believed in anything I couldn't see for myself or learn about from some supposedly reliable source. She was the spiritual; for her the Hindu concepts behind the techniques had meaning. She was always into some strange wacky thing, Yoga, crystal healing, Tai Chai, Holistic health and other stuff I entirely forget the names of. I didn't really follow what some of her enthusiasms for mystical or oriental beliefs were about and used to pull her leg about being a witch. It really didn't matter to me if she had been, given her lovely nature, she would have been one of the white sort.
She got less into these things as time went on and as both of us got more into building successful careers. In 99 our salaries were sufficient for us to move out of rented property into our own home. It would take a lot of work and quite a bit more money to restore it but we were young and successful and the big old rambling house with its large unkempt garden was everything we had dreamed of. Between the mortgage, the renovations and the furniture it was a tough five years financially but at the end of them we were almost there, our dream house was nearly complete.
Then Charlotte came to stay for the weekend. Charlotte had been one of June's old college friends and they had been reunited through the college alumni website. I had never met her but June told me they had shared the same enthusiasm for things "beyond" She arrived on the Friday evening and she and Charlotte were upstairs when I came back from work. My first experience of her was hearing a posh strident voice. "My god, you don't want to do that". I went upstairs and was introduced. 'That' was the position and layout of the larger second bathroom that we were having installed next to our bedroom. Apparently having a bathroom parallel to a bedroom was bad Khama since bathrooms has a negative energy about them. If we couldn't change the rooms, and she graciously conceded here that one could not always shuffle a house around, we should at least move the bed or the bath so that they weren't parallel.
In my line of work I get very used to spending time with all sorts and being diplomatic so I kept it polite and friendly but just an hour into the evening I had decided that I couldn't stand the woman. There was something wrong with everything; we had too much furniture, the colours were not in harmony, the dresser was too tall and having it directly opposite the door like that would invite fierce Chi. There was a lot more but after a few minutes I just switched into polite mode and largely stopped listening. I avoided her as much as possible for the rest of the weekend, finding other things I had to do when she was around. Monday was a relief. I was more relieved that evening when I found that June rather shared my opinion, both of Charlotte and her ideas. She had changed a lot since her college days, she has been more fun loving and not the obsessive we had seen. As for Feng Shui, June was pragmatic. She did think there something in the principles, that man should be in harmony with his surroundings but after all, if you liked something, and we did both like the decor we had chosen together, what was that but being in harmony?
Maybe I should have known, given her enthusiasm for new age beliefs, that that would not be the end of it. The things Charlotte had said, the few I had been obliged to listen to, had been water off a duck's back to me but in June's case some of the water had soaked in. I brought a coffee up to her office and she was looking at some article on Feng Shui. "Christ, love, I'm not going to come home and find all the rooms rearranged am I ?" Her "Don't be silly, just curious" did not quite have complete conviction about it and it did not surprise me when ornaments and the smaller items of furniture started moving around or disappearing into the spare room. A few weeks later that dresser opposite the door, the expensive one we had brought from the antique shop, made the room look cluttered. We shifted it into the garage pending resale back to the antique shop at a much lower price if we were lucky or a trip to the Charity shop if we weren't. No, it was nothing to do with fierce Chi, she insisted, it was just too big.
As I said, I had always put up with her strange beliefs because I loved her. In the succeeding months I realised that a more important reason was because her strange beliefs had never really impacted me in any way. Weird books filling her shelves, a bit of incense burning and chanting, strange herbs bubbling in the saucepan, seeing her stretched out on the floor with a large lump of quartz on her Adam's apple, what did those things really matter? This Feng Shui was something else. We had stretched ourselves and gone without holidays to pay for the home we had both wanted and now everything about it was suddenly wrong. It was a steady drip, maybe we should get rid of that to give us more space, perhaps we should redecorate in here in a lighter colour to make the place look a bit more airy.
They were the first real disagreements we had had in our marriage and to me they were not trivial. We had scrimped and saved to buy expensive furniture, pictures and ornaments that we were now throwing out and spending more money to replace it with minimalist but at least as expensive items. We were redecorating rooms that had cost a small fortune to decorate only months ago. This was all at a time when I was hoping that, our major outlays complete, we would have a bit more money to spare for the other good things in life, like dining out a bit more often or going on that holiday we had not been able to afford for two years. The friction increased over the coming months and, as with all conflicts, it grew to absorb other issues. They say most marriages fall apart over one of two things, sex or money, and it was true for us. Money began our break up and sex completed it. The last straw for me, the final row, happened when she accused me of being rather less interested and capable in the bedroom than I had once been. Perhaps if we turned the existing bathroom into a bedroom and the spare bedroom into a bathroom that would not be parallel to our bedroom, it would no longer influence us with its negative energy. I exploded and for the first time ever I really wanted to hurt her. "Spend another £15,000 so we can shag more often? I could buy ten high class whores with that and they would be a big improvement as they wouldn't care which way the fucking wardrobe faced or be fussing about what colour the fucking wallpaper was!"
It was the end. I moved out a week later but not before another blazing row revealed one thing. I had been wondering what some cheque payments from our joint account had been and now I knew. These ludicrous Feng Shui ideas were not June's own, she had been seeing Charlotte and paying the cow for her advice. I had disliked Charlotte almost from our first encounter and now I hated her. As the months passed in my lonely rented flat, especially at those times when the evening and any socialising it contained had finished, when the front door shut on just me and my bottle of vodka, my hatred grew.
I should have found out her surname when I had the chance but there were other ways to find Charlotte. June and I were to saw little of each other for six months but I saw a bit more of her than she did of me. Parked in one of my employer's cars at the end of the road I occasionally kept watch on what was still my own home. It seems June had found solace in her old interests, much as I had found solace in Vodka, and I recognised some of the weird but harmless friends she had seen little of in the last few years. It was about the twelfth occasion in as many weeks when I saw the woman I had been waiting for. When she left I followed Charlotte to her house about 15 miles away.
Her maisonette was on edge of a fashionable leafy area with large gardens. I had done my own research on Feng Shui when I was still trying to figure out what June was going on about, when I had hoped there might be alternatives that could satisfy both her and our bank balance, and Charlotte's place was much as I expected. The carefully spaced layout, the excessively neat flower beds with herbs to promote health and longevity, the low trees, the Bagua Mirror over the porch, the continual tinkle of the moving or Yang water in the artificial waterfall and the lights all around the boundaries to create good luck all told me a Feng Shui nut live there. Countering the Shar Ch'i must have hiked up her energy bills.
It wasn't exactly a garden one could hide in but that of one of her neighbours, normal rational people probably, was quite overgrown, with tall trees and dense bushes and it was higher up the hill, so it wasn't too hard to find a hiding place in a hedge overlooking Charlotte's minimalist front room. Why was I there? I wasn't really sure. No, I couldn't murder her. Like all of us I had indulged in acts of great violence but, like most of us, it was a violence that was only meted out in my fantasies. But this woman had wrecked my life and, if I couldn't take or wreck hers I would at least get back at her in a way that would express my contempt for her life-afflicting superstitions.
Friday week, early evening, and I was parked opposite her house. I waited until she went out a little later. From her immaculate evening attire in all its carefully matching subdued colours, she would not be back soon. The spare key was under a plant pot near the back door, maybe being too original about security exuded negative energy. I had a few hours and I made good use of them to put everything where it shouldn't be. I put a large mirror facing the front door and another in line with her bed and moved other beds to be parallel to the bath or in line with the sharp corners of alcoves. I moved the larger items of furniture so they were directly opposite other doors. I swapped all the carefully arranged coloured lights so they would clash with the walls, as much as tasteful pastels could clash anyway. I would have liked to do much more, fill the house with masses of old and ugly furniture, splash the walls with paint in garish colours, replace the pot plants with ones that drooped, get the builders in and move the toilet to the middle of the house but none of those were practical given the time and the need for secrecy. I would have loved to seed her home with the negative energies of all the things that reminded her of the bad times in her life but I did not know here well enough to know what they were.
Later that evening, once my anger has cooled down, I started to regret what I had done. Not out of any sympathy with Charlotte but because it seemed likely that I might be caught. She knew what had happened to my marriage and June must have told her how I felt, surely she would guess it was me as the nature of my vandalism indicated that it was not just the random destruction of some thieving drug addict. I began to wish I had simply smashed the place up in some manner that did not betray even a superficial knowledge of her Feng Shui nonsense, stolen the DVD and other saleable things and shat on the carpet like normal thieves and vandals do. Every day that week at work I was waiting for a phone call from the police and in the evening I waited for their ring on the bell but it never happened. After a few weeks it was clear that it was not going to happen. Maybe Charlotte was dumber than I thought or perhaps she did not think that the police would be interested in pursuing somebody who had simply moved things around, however much negative energy it might have released.
Three weeks June phoned, suggesting that we should try again. I wasn't going to blame her but right at the start of that first tentative evening together she blamed herself. She admitted that perhaps he had let the whole thing get out of hand and not properly considered the impact on our finances, practical Feng Shui was also about coping with realities, finding affordable ways to oppose the negative aspects of the real lives of ordinary people. She had let herself fall under the spell of Charlotte and taken the whole thing far too seriously. The woman had been a money grabbing fraud, one of the many in today's materialistic society who exploit the yearning for something beyond. She realised now that she had been one of those fools but she had learned a lesson.
"So you won't be seeing here again" I asked. "Didn't you know? No, I suppose you wouldn't. Charlotte had a fatal heart attack three weeks ago, I was with her when it happened. We'd been to a party of some of her posh friends on the Friday and then gone back to her place for a nightcap. As soon as she turned on the lights she started panicking and hyperventilating and then just keeled over. I called the ambulance but they couldn't save her" Was that my doing? Given the timing it seemed probable. I hadn't intended it but in a way I had murdered her. Unlike June, I had always thought Charlotte to be a charlatan, just one of many who push the new age nonsense because it was fashionable and made money, how could I have known that the whole thing of the negative energy was actually so real to her that it would throw her into a fatal, heart-stopping panic?
Now it was June the willing believer who thought her the charlatan while I, the cynic, knew she had not been. "How do you know what she was?" I murmured. "Because I saw for myself that night. I am really rather surprised she invited me back in the circumstances; a bit too much to drink or something worse I reckon, they were a Bohemian lot, her friends. Do you know, after all that stuff she told me, all the expensive things she said we had to do to create the positive energy in our house? She obviously didn't take any of it seriously enough to practice it herself, almost everything in her house was wrong. The woman was a fraud! Actually, I'm not sure I believe in any of it anymore, you were probably right all along" I did not reply, just reached over and took her hand. What a strange reversal of attitudes the circumstances of Charlotte's demise had brought about. Now it was June who was the sceptic.
On the other hand, I had just come to realise how positive a change a few simple rearrangements of furniture could make to a life.
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