Saturday, 21. March 2009, 11:15:44
"Here we have the laundry, which is specifically set aside for the raiment and bedding of the royal household. No other item from the palace or outside the palace is to be washed here. It will be your job to ensure this rule is kept to, and when the washer-woman is not here, you shall fill in for her until she returns. Now, the royal maids deposit the garments here in these baskets. Each of the royal family has a basket allotted to them so there is no mix up. The King's laundry is attended to first, the Queen second and after that," the major-domo tapped his nose, "use your judgment."
And he ushered me out of the room.
"Next door we have the pantry for the palace servitors - don't go in there yourself. Your meals will be laid out in the servitor's hall with everyone else. Along this corridor we have access to the courtyards. Occasionally a guardsman may use this to, oh, I don't know; maintain security, something along those lines. It is not to be used as a shortcut, under fear of death."
The major-domo chuckled. I wondered if I had shown that much fear at his warning.
"What else should I show you today? Yes, I could show you the cellar level."
The major-domo put his hand into a shadow and found a thin door studded with strong looking nail heads. It creaked like my mother's aged voice.
"In you go. The torches should be lit all the way down, unless the maid for this area has been remiss in her duties."
A stone staircase wound downwards out of view. The torches mounted on the curving wall danced as I descended, sending the light into a furious confusion that shrank then deepened the shadows upon the steps. My feet echoed ahead of me.
"Come along. No need to fear. Down you go."
The stairs wound thrice before letting me out into more of the same darkness: blotted with the thankless circles of illumination from sparse wall sconces. Doors red with rust sat sternly within most of the pools of light. We seemed to be alone.
"To the right," he said, prodding my arm." You're not afraid of deep dark places, are you? Some are. It's too late to apply for a job higher up in the palace. The King prefers his servitors to be women, in the turrets and bedrooms anyway; unless you find a way of beefing up and picking up a guardsman's pike?"
"I do not mind the dark or the depths,” I told him.
"Well done. You'll spend a lot of time down here. We have someone famous staying at the moment. You've heard of Count Bergarran?"
I did not want to tell the major-domo that my only source of information on Count Bergarran came from the alley rhymes of children, the lines of which I quickly tried to remember.
"I know of him, sir."
"Well, he's down here, with his allies. And people who follow a similar route through life."
"But, is the Count not dead?" I felt a fool to trust a street song, but I was certain it was fact.
"Yes, he's dead. Now, to the right and keep going. Come along. I have new maids to train in the art of chamber pot cleaning."
The major-domo, who's name I had yet to learn, walked me into the fitful darkness; not caring that his familiarity of the shadows was still to be gifted to me. What choice did I have but to walk into alcoves so dark that I held my breath to contain my fear. I begrudgingly found the man's presence the only source of comfort.
"I started down here too, but not in quite a lowly role as yours. I enjoyed it. Not many do. Understandable. My years of service put me in good stead for the promotion to major-domo. I was thirteen summers old when I first lost myself down here. There are other levels below this. It's a warren. No rabbits though."
The major-domo skipped ahead of me and turned a corner, which I quickly took after him. It was then I began to notice a smell of cooking. Mother had fed me with bread and fish before I left home, unsure when I would see food again- but that smell woke my stomach afresh.
The major-domo was stood in a pool of torch light now, twisting a large iron ring. It was a door handle, and not, as I first feared, a shackle.
"Bloody thing! This hasn't worked right since the floods. Ah, here we are."
I had not seen the door, which his shadow covered, but now it opened with a gritty bark of metal against metal. The smell of cooking came out to greet us properly.
"This way, boy. I'll introduce you to the Count."
The room was dotted with flames licking from coal-filled braziers on long legs. They brought the only light and I struggled to put a name to the meat the flames worked at. I could see butcher hooks and chains gleaming near the ceiling, and that was all.
"You shall come down here and refuel the fires; three times a day should do it. You will also help with recording any activity."
"Activity?" I had to ask.
"I'll just light this torch and show you."
He picked up something long from a barrel shaped silhouette and pressed its end to the nearest brazier. The flames crawled across the stick and he held it aloft.
"See? Count Bergarran, at your service, “he said, placing the torch flame near a lump of darkness that quickly took shape. He had lit up the face of a corpse; red in some places, green in others, and what was left was black, charred.
"You will have heard about the Count's treachery to the King, of course?"
"Yes."
"Betraying the King's confidence is a grave offence. A devil must have moved him to such a tragic act, and a tragic consequence."
The major-domo moved the torch away from the Count's face and I was glad of it. Then he strolled further into the room and lit up another face, and another, and another. I had to guess at what was shadow and what was not.
"We have a full house. Some have been here months. They generally don't last a year. Although, when I was an apprentice here there were boasts of seven months and fourteen days on the flame."
"Please. I do not understand. They are dead, aren't they?"
The major-domo held the torch close to his own face. For one second I thought that he also would be black and charred.
"The Kingdom has secrets, child. Things that the man in the alleys and sweating on the docks will never know of. Secrets that are to be imparted to select members of the palace servitors, such as yourself."
"Me?"
"Yes. You look like a person who can keep a secret, keep his tongue."
I had no choice but to nod my head furiously.
"Well then. Here it is: the Count is dead, all these people are dead. They died in the torture chair, after weeks of justly administered pain. They are indeed dead, but that does not mean that their agony should come to an end."
"It doesn't?"
"No."
"No?"
"No,” the major-domo said in a whisper, slowly shaking his head. "Science has shown the way, filled the yawning gap between here and there. With special practises and little known unguents and fluids, the flesh can be used to convey the King's righteous punishments beyond the veil."
"Into the heavens and..."
"Into the hells, yes. The body is kept in a state akin to life and the slow flames, that you will feed, lick agony into the soul that has abandoned its limbs and its responsibilities. And if done right the pain is intense enough, insistent enough, that it plucks the writhing souls of these back stabbers from their non corporeal realms and returns them to their bodies."
I tried to swallow.
"Then, my dear boy, your most important of chores requires your utmost attention: when you record the activity."
The major-domo brought his torch to a corner of the room, to where a small table and chair sat, looking like firewood nailed together. A quill sat upright in a bottle of ink, upon the table. Below it a piece of paper with writing on it. It looked like the messiest handwriting I had seen outside of the schoolroom.
"Activity?" I asked again, my head swimming.
The major-domo drew back the torch flame to illuminate his face.
"Yes. Activity. You shall record their confessions."
Wednesday, 18. March 2009, 11:31:13
It was another glorious day in Magicland, Zibbin decided as he rushed around his bedroom in the clock tower, unable to decide which window to peer out of. The view through the west window looked so full of balloons and boats, but the south was alive with musicians crawling across the rooftops and playing their trombones down chimneys. And wasn't that a pie fight towards the east? How long since his last pie fight? A week?
Yet the north, with its open fields curving like cushions, dotted with swaying trees and sign posts...he found it so hard to make a choice that he spent another hour bouncing up and down on his bed, holding his hat on with one hand and his clown sized pants up with the other. Last time he had done this he had shot through the ceiling into the clockworks of the tower and gotten stuck in the cogs and springs for days. He had had to wait for the lazy clock-keeper to notice that it had been quarter past two for most of the week.
"Oh, boo-babs and snimpoles! I'll make a big leap and see which window the bed sends me out of. That's the best way to choose."
And he closed his eyes, span around and bounced on one foot until he lost his balance and flew through the air. It was only when he found himself dangling from the bakery lightning rod that he realised he had fallen northwards.
"I knew I would do that!" he cried, reaching for his red bowler had, which had landed in a crow's nest. One drain pipe fireman slide later he was dusting himself off and dancing to a bright tune in his head. Only it wasn't in his head really, not now. The music was flowing from the bakery.
"I bet my yellow teeth old baker Miles has just cooked some lovely piping hot pies. Piping hot pies always make that racket."
As if by magic the wobbly glass window of the bakery swung open and the music grew louder. Now Zibbin could hear what must have been the baker singing along with his piping hot pies. Zibbin dodged towards the window and sprang through in a blur of green jacket and blue and yellow trousers. The air was always hot and sweet in the bakery. Pink steam from something nice and fresh from the oven filled Zibbin's googly eyes. There was no sign of Miles the baker or his pal Joddy the horse.
"Now there's a splashgorgeous thing." Zibbin declared, tightening his white braces so that his trousers didn't fall down. If baker Miles and Joddy were out then that meant they had found something better to do than baking piping hot pies and doughnuts - doughnuts so crispy coated in sugar and so full to bursting with jam that biting into them was like biting into an egg.
Zibbin opened all the silvery black oven doors and all the wooden cupboards with dancing flowers painted on them. He even called up the stairs to the attic and down the stairs to the cellar. No sign at all. Yet the music?
Then, under a towel with a blue sailing boat stitched on to it, he found a single piping hot pie. It was still hot enough to be blowing steam through its pie crust.
"It's you making that musical racketty rack racket, pie!"
The pie changed its tune at that. Zibbin felt a little sad for the solitary pie, singing all alone. The tune was sad too, so maybe that had something to do with it.
"Where are all your pie friends, and where is the baker and Joddy?"
The pie, with some effort, began to sing in a hubbly-bubbly pie-filling popping voice.
"Don't you know today's when Uncle Creepus goes on holiday? Uncle Creepus, Uncle Creepus, Uncle..."
The pie went on, trying to form a song from the words, but it couldn't find a word to rhyme with Uncle Creepus. Zibbin took the pie in his hand and sniffed its golden brown crust, covered in fat cubes of sugar like gnome gems.
"Sing us a song about gnome gems, pie, " Zibbin begged, as he peered into the pie's little sugar droplet mouth, at the bubbling pinky red filling. The pie was too confused by now, what with having so much to think about. It decided to sing its original tune- the one he had been baked for in the first place. On hearing this, Zibbin used his green finger- as opposed to his yellow, blue, pink, purple or black finger - to lift the pie's lid. He could see all the filling now; cherries, strawberries, black berries, moonroot, riverseeds and jumbo clots.
"Wait a sunstroke minute! Zibbin exclaimed, "Uncle Creepus is going on holiday? This is news to I. Why, if he goes on holiday then who will look after the haunted castle? Who will paint the trees black by the golden swamp? Who will be in charge of chasing after the piglets in the clown chasm? This needs further investigation." And he dropped the pie's lid back on and asked the pie what it had meant about Uncle Creepus.
The pie had cooled, however, and had no steam left to make a single sound. It just sat there.
"Oh saggy-sops! You're no fun," Zibbin told the pie, before dropping it on the baking tray and rushing off outside. Intent on finding out the truth, Zibbin knocked on doors -but became so distracted by the sounds each door made when he struck it that he quickly forgot everything else. After an hour of creating the oddest tune he had ever heard he remembered why he was knocking in the first place. He decided to peer through windows if nobody was going to answer their doors. Some of them were wobbly, some green, some had lace instead of curtains. The insides of the houses were so interesting that he wasted another hour peering through windows. Curtains that danced at the slightest breeze, a man with a face so big he was stuck in his pantry, haunted furniture that rearranged itself in a fit of indecision. The list was endless. It took Zibbin a tremendous effort to get his quest straight again in his head.
"Uncle Creepus is going on holiday!"
Where was everybody? The only person he had found was the fat headed man stuck in his pantry, and Zibbin didn't fancy getting into a conversation with him. Then Zibbin spotted golden coins glinting between the cobblestones of North Street. It had been raining while he slept. He immediately began to fill his pockets with the fat golden coins. They were everywhere; in the gutters, in rain buckets, sticking out of flower pots and gardens. No two coins were alike. Some weren't even coins, they were buttons. But then buttons were even more collectible than coins. After a few minutes Zibbin's pockets were so full to bulging that he heared his braces straining like piano wire tuned too tightly. When they hit a high C he started to bale out, peering this way and that in case anyone was around to see his braces snap and his pants fall down. Soon he had only slightly bulging trousers and was ready to sit down on a rock shaped like a lion's head to think.
"I just know there was something I was all preoccupied over. Was it something to do with a pie fight I was invited to? Or was it Uncle Creepus up to something? Or maybe it was that weird house I saw growing through my super powered telescope?" He quickly gave up thinking when a wind-up man, carved to look like a policeman, sped by in the direction of the Northern Woods.
"If I chase you, then maybe the rush of blood to the head will get my brain fixed better for thinking." And he did just that, his bright orange sandals slapping and tripping and flapping on the cobblestones. The toy policeman had been wound up good and proper and Zibbin was soon panting and red eyed.
"What's...going...on?"
Zibbin collapsed by a horse trough with a small boat bobbing in the sparkly water. The sails of the boat caught Zibbin's breath and sent the tiny vessel in the corner of the trough, pink dots ran up and down the deck, struggling with ropes and giving orders.
"How can Uncle Creepus possibly go on holiday?" he pondered loudly, capsizing the boat completely with his words.
"Where would he go that's better than Magicland?" He picked himself up and looked around for the toy policeman. The only thing similar he could spot was the tall green statue of a man peering over a mossy garden wall. Red lights flashed where its eyes should be. Grey snails or mushrooms gave it hair of sorts.
"You look like Uncle Creepus, on bathday," Zibbin joked. Or was he joking? He couldn't decide. And now he wasn't even so sure it had ever been a thought he had had at all, or just a thing his mouth had said to fill the time.
"I...I..." and now he was too frightened to speak altogether, in case he didn't agree with anything his mouth might say. So he ran in the direction he had been travelling so far, and hoped he could catch up with whatever he had been chasing. Had it been a rabbit with a wheelbarrow full of carrots? A cat drawn chariot? A balloon with a glove tied to it? No, that had been his last birthday gift to Softy Sue, who no one had seen since she ran off after the silly balloon.
"I'm getting a stitch now!" Zibbin complained, clutching his forehead, "or a head-ache!"
As luck would have it he had slowed to a crawl beside Bell Street, with its many bell shops and bell wells and bell gardens. The last time Zibbin had been down Bell Street it had been snowing so hard that the flakes had hit all the bells and the tinkling had chased away a nest of mice who had been chewing people's shoe laces so their shoes flew off then they walked too fast. Come to think of it, it had been Uncle Creepus who had made it snow in the first place. Another thing about Bell Street that came to Zibbin's mind was that the underground steam train started there and it could take him to wherever he was going.
"But where is that little train?"
He dimly recollected having a pie fight on that very train, not a year ago. They had all lit candles to see in the dark otherwise the pies would have gone astray. But the candles had been splatherised by the pie custard and they had ended up rumbling through dark tunnels, pieing each other and not getting the benefit of seeing any pie splats. Not until they emerged, white lumpy ghosts, at the station.
"Not an efficient pie fight, you see," he told his reflection in a mirror flower. Still it could save his sandal leather, and give him time to think.
"Think about what?"
He didn't recollect right now. But it had something to do with many cold pies and drowning sailors. Oh, and a green statue. So he set about investigating Bell Street, which did have rather too many bells indeed. He looked through a cat flap, under a toy car, inside a flower pot. He even searched his pockets. But no train station. It was like he had dreamt the entire thing up. Which was likely as he spent just as much time dreaming as he did being awake.
"Did I dream that pie fight?" He asked himself. "Even the secret underground chambers that I saw through the train windows? The gnome streets and the gnome parties? How about the scary grotto with the lion pouring out tea for a woman in a veil? Surely not? I've seen her on Jumble Avenue, washing her china pots in the fountain." Every detail that sprang to mind now seemed unsure and probably just part of some dream he had had when he was ill with a stomach ache. He was so worried that the gnome cinema he had seen flashing by in the train tunnel wasn't real that he crawled up against a cottage door and wept like he had never wept before.
Then he laughed hard.
"The station is on Station Street, you duffoon!" he cried, scaring a red bird out of a white tree. Station Street was far down the other side of town, in the south. That was no use to him then.
"I need to get to the northern woods," he realised with all of his brain. He picked himself up again and brushed silvery bell dust off his pants.
"If only I had my flying belt, " he said. Then he realised that his flying belt was a dream he had definitely had when he was ill with a stomach ache.
"That was a horrible dream, indeed," he decided.
Many things happened on the rest of the journey to the northern woods. Zibbin tripped four separate times, each time smadging his nose against a post box. Then he found a nice yellow and blue hat with a golden rose sprouting from it and decided to swap it for his own hat. Then he had to run back to where he had dropped his old hat and unswap it for the new hat because the new hat had begun to smell of sprout gas. Then he climbed a lamp post and forget how to get down again. Then he woke up at the bottom of the lamp post with another smadged nose and a funny dream in his head that was all sparkly and black. The he sat on a rocking chair for an hour wondering if he should have helped those tiny sailors out of the horse trough. Then his pants fell down, twice, but nobody saw. Then finally, at long last, he was fighting his way through the northern woods, leaves and branches hurting his smadged nose.
"Why hadn't I taken the path?!" he asked himself. An owl hooted in response and Zibbin spent half an hour travelling in circles, each time passing the same owl that hooted and stared at him.
"You're no zimming help, owly pants, " he informed the bird, who should have been in bed anyway. Zibbin started to run after he had insulted the large bird, because he thought he heard it scuttling around in the leaves, looking for him.
"Get away from me, you birdy!" He cried as he fell from the overgrown trees into a clearing. Although it was called a clearing it was far from clear as it was packed tight with all the people who lived on the northern road. Except for Fatty Fathead, stuck in his pantry.
"Miles the baker, " Zibbin cried, "Joddy, Smokey Ben, Snorkings the Mayor, Skinny Barry the sweetshop keeper." And many more.
"Zibbin? What kept you?"
Zibbin darted this way and that to find the speaker. It hadn't been Joddy because Joddy had a sillier voice like a child pretending to sound like an old man. The voice hadn't been Snorkings the mayor either, because he never spoke to Zibbin at all, unless it was to ask the way to the tobacco shop on Sunflower Avenue. How many more times would he ask for directions before he remembers it for himself? Seven? Four?
"Zibbin, step forward."
The voice again. This was driving Zibbin crazy-haired. He could feel his trousers falling down he was that crazy-haired.
"Who keeps saying my name?" he demanded to know, tightening his braces.
The crowd of people began to mumble and move about. They parted down the middle, and on the other side of them sat the man known to Zibbin as Uncle Creepus.
"Uncle Creepus?!" Zibbin cried, racing towards him. Uncle Creepus was sat cross-legged on a little brick wall. He had on his dark green cloak with the zillion of red buttons dotting it like chicken pox. His white and orange chessboard face was as clean as Zibbin had ever seen it. Living in the castle and poking all the fires left a lot of soot on him.
"You've had a big bath, Uncle Creepus!" Zibbin declared as if telling him something that was new to him.
"Yes, Zibbin. It was a most frightening event. You are late."
"I am?"
"Did you not get my postcard? Informing you of my trip?"
"Well, I got a letter from Cardinal Jimmy, about a bun fight."
Uncle Creepus gave him a look that creased his chessboard face like a paper flower with a bright blue eye at the centre of it. It wasn't the sort of flower Zibbin wanted to sniff.
"No matter, Zibbin. I should have taken the trouble to kidnap you this morning and then you would have been here on time for the big pie party we all just enjoyed."
"Pie party? I missed a pie party because you didn't take the trouble to kid..."
"Never mind that, nephew of mine. You will have an eternity to indulge in pie parties and bun fights and riding around on lemonade horses, so long as my mission pays off."
There was much commotion in the crowd of pie stuffed people. Heads were nodding, hats were falling off, beards were glowing. Zibbin scratched his chin, confused.
"Mission? I thought you were going on holiday?"
Uncle Creepus threw back his orange and white head in laughter, even though no sound actually came out of him.
"Yes, Zibbin. A holiday. Certainly it will be a trip for some."
"Some? Who? Me? Am I going too?"
"No! That would be horrible. I'll show you who I mean," Uncle Creepus swept his cloaked arm into the air and a rubbery boinging noise occurred. Zibbin wondered if Uncle Creepus had meant for that to happen. No matter for it served its purpose. Something was rising from the ground at his Uncle's cherry tipped feet. Zibbin leapt aside in case that something melted sandals. He watched from a safe distance as a glittery red hoop as wide as a fat man's bed slowly ascended until it was fully free of the soil. The hole in the hoop was difficult to see through, like dirty glass or water after a bath.
"Is this your funny hoop, Uncle?"
"Oh do shut your fat mouth, Zibbin! Look!"
Uncle Creepus began to waggle his fingers in an odd manner. He continued to waggle and waggle until a look of confusion crossed his chequered face. Zibbin was fighting so hard not to mention it that his trousers slipped down a few inches. Then the red hoop trembled as if it was cold, or scared, or scared of the cold. The dirty glass vibrated now and turned white and then all manner of colours, even that colour nobody was allowed to talk about. Just before Zibbin had grown tired of the colours and was about to wander off in search of any leftover pies, the flashy glass in the shaking hoop began to speak. A face appeared. Zibbin pulled his pants up at last and concentrated on the woman talking. Even though he couldn't understand anything she said.
"Who's that?"
Uncle Creepus peered around the side of the hoop.
"That is my mother, Zibbin. Or will be."
Zibbin felt like his head would fall off and bounce away with his brain.
"Your...mother?"
"Yes. In a few minutes the man she is talking to will...perform a special act that will allow me to enter the lady's body. I shall grow there and eventually begin my mission."
Zibbin grabbed his own head, sure it was about to topple any second.
"But why? Why, Uncle Creepus? You're giving me scaremares!"
Uncle Creepus smiled. His teeth were pawns and bishops, black and white.
"These are special and important people, Zibbin. Their world is not like here. But our future lies with that world and those people."
"Tell me more, then!"
"I am! That man taking his clothes off is very rich and involved in a thing called politics, which..."
"Polly ticks? Polly Bandyarms from Crumple Alleyway? She's not a clock, is she?"
"Oh, for fu...no! Politics. It doesn't matter. It's boring. Well, you all know how good I am at being boring."
"Yep."
"And as their son I will be in a position to become the head politician of their world. A thing called a president."
"Yep."
"You see, the universe abhors balance. Our world of magic and wonder and foreverness exists because of an imbalance. So long as their world of pain and dullness and fear exists, so shall we. So every now and then I have to cross the boundary to maintain the pain and the greyness...by all manner of devious means."
"Yep."
"And...why do I bother? You're not even listening."
"Yep."
Uncle Creepus twiddled his thumbs and a yellow crab ghost flopped onto Zibbin's head, clacking its gluey claws.
"Yep."
"Zibbin!"
"What? Arrgh! Everything is yellow and stuck on me!"
"Pay attention, slack trousered nephew. While I'm gone it will be your duty to look after my castle. You will be the bogey boy in my place. You will be in charge of scaring the puppy brigade, the piglets in the clown chasm and anyone else who takes your fancy. You will need to paint the swamp trees black, amongst all manner of things. I've left you your instructions at the castle."
Uncle Creepus began to disrobe. Zibbin laughed.
"His pants have fallen down! He cried, scraping crab ghost off his hat.
"I must go now, nephew. The moment is at hand."
"The trousers of the people in your hoop have fallen down too." Zibbin laughed so hard that he needed the toilet. He rushed away, not sure where he was heading. It was only when he smelt farty swamp gas and felt black bird eggs crunching underfoot that he recognised where he had ended up. The castle stood on a jagged hill of rock the colour of liquorice. Bridges and walkways snaked this way and that across the smoking swamp that surrounded the castle.
"I wonder if Uncle Creepus is in," he said. Then he remembered, he was Uncle Creepus now. Some how. The details would come back to him.
"This is so crazy I imagine pie fights must look quite sensible now, " he pondered as he crossed the biggest safest looking bridge and watched the fangs of the castle rise up to allow him entrance.
"I suppose my role is to cause evil here, in this world, so that there is at least some good over there, in the real world. I would assume that a total world of pain would just destroy itself, hence destroying our world." Zibbin had never felt so sure of what he was saying. He wondered if his shirt collar had been too tight before now. Or if the tendrils of blue cobwebs dangling down from the roof of the castle entrance were really whispering all these things to him.
"So if I cause too much evil here, that world would become more like here. It would serve Uncle Creepus right if I did just that. Seeing as he neglected to kidnap me in time for the pie party."
As Zibbin heard the castle door sliding down behind him he wondered of there was anything like a flying belt amongst his Uncle's marvellous collections of devices and implements.
Monday, 24. November 2008, 10:13:47
Mogan uncorked the last bottle of holy oil took a bulging mouthful of the salty liquid and spat it at the crawling skeleton. A black gas spewed where the liquid met bone and dry skin. The skeleton continued to pull itself along the floor, its fleshless fingertips finding purchase in the gaps between paving slabs.
Beyond, in the darkening chamber, more pale thin figures staggered from cobwebbed alcoves.
"No hurry, Ruch. But could you try you foot on that door rather than pick at its hole with that pin?"
Ruch sighed as loud as he could and prepared to charge the thick wooden door to the sub chamber. This was no use of his hard earned talents, but then Mogan had fended off more than an innful of skeletal guards while he had made little headway with his now bent precision tool.
He crashed into the door shoulder first, aiming at the point where the metal bar intersected with the framework.
"You realise, Mogan, that after I've completely smashed in this door that it will be impossible to secure it after us?"
He smashed the door again, to coincide with Mogan's cursing. Something snapped and the door gaped, swallowing Ruch. A powerful gust of wind forced its way through the opening, blowing out Mogan's torch flame, and the candles he had found sitting on low shelves in the corridor wall.
"Witchery!" Mogan cried, feeling a bone claw tap against his boot. He kicked out with enough force to shake a large tree empty of its apples, hearing the bones slide away down the corridor. All was dark as he quickly made for the now open sub chamber.
"Ruch? Do you still carry a head on your shoulders?"
"Aye."
"Well get out your flint and light the torch. I'll brace the door."
Movement in the darkness. Ruch swearing as he found his flint set. Mogan slammed the door and leant all his weight upon it. Finally the fumbling of fingers as Ruch sought out Mogan's torch. The door shook with a bang. Clawing noises on the wood. Then the repeated striking of the flint, each time followed by a curse from Ruch.
"You've got it wet, Mogan."
"The holy oil. Wipe it, man."
A black panic shot through them both as the creaking of wood filled the darkness.
"Mogan! Are you keeping them out?"
"It's not the door. Keep sparking."
Mogan unhooked his morning star from the reinforced belt and considered flinging it blindly into the unseen room. He had to strike something, even if the weapon was useless against the magical and the undying.
The creaking continued maddeningly, and culminated in a high pitched squeak that made Ruch cry out and scuttle towards Mogan's legs. And then a rectangle of light sprang from the darkness. A figure stepped into it, its head low to the shoulders.
"You need not fear the bone guards anymore, looters."
The voice was like stone scraping on stone. A growl, yet it held no malice. Its host stepped forth and raised a thin hand. Ruch yelped as the torch he held burst into healthy flame. The sight of the illuminated figure pulled another womanly shriek from Ruch. Mogan thought he had encountered another of the bone guards; such was the thinness of the man. The head was without hair and the skull so close to the skin that he immediately visualised scraping his finger through it as if it were moist dust. Still, eyelids worked over the bulging yellow and red eyes, encrusted around the edges with a blackness that put him in mind of the skin paints of the women of the Black Inn.
When Mogan had recovered his wits he awakened to the splendour of the ghoul's finery; a gold and red gown the likes of which he had spied royalty adorned in.
The thing spoke again.
"You wish to disrobe me? To wear this fabric yourself? Please, do as you wish. I will not raise a hand."
Mogan stared at the man, his heart still beating from battle. He turned some of his strained attention to the door that still bore his weight. All was silent. He quickly opened the door an inch and then, seeing naught, pulled it wide so the torch in Ruch's hand proved the corridor empty.
"I have dispelled my guardians." The stone voice explained.
Ruch pushed past Mogan to check the corridor for himself. Then he pulled the bottle of holy oil from Mogan's hand. He held it out to the skeletal man.
"Get out of our way, fiend. Or I'll corrode you with the spittings of this blessed unction."
"Of course. You have come for the treasure? I shall take you to it."
The creature beckoned them into another chamber, that blazed with the light from dozens of ornate wall sconces. They appeared at odds with the mould scarred tomb walls.
The dead man shuffled slowly to the far end of the room where a throne peered through cobwebs and black fungal flowerings. The red cushion fabric was stained, and split so grey cotton wadding extruded,
The man sat in the throne and it creaked.
"The chest is there." he said, pointing to a mound of black mould flecked with rust.
"Open it. I no longer can." He raised his hands, which slipped from his long red sleeves: bone claws, streaked with worm red tendons.
"Open it. let me see it glint one last time and savour each memory it conjures of its gathering."
Mogan exchanged a glance with Ruch. Ruch nudged his partner and nodded towards the black shape.
"Go on them."
"You."
Ruch handed the unnecessary torch to Mogan and kept his eye on the dead man as he approached the chest. Before touching it he slipped his rowing gloves on.
"Is it trapped?" he dared to ask the corpse lord.
"It was. I have drawn back the nefarious cloak for good."
Ruch glanced at Mogan and probed the chest. It was so covered in mould and rust that it could pass for a beach rock. He pushed this way and that until something gave. The lid flopped open and slumped to the floor. Blackness massed within.
The dead fiend leant forward in his decaying chair.
"Has it been that long since I ran my fingers through those gems and coins? The signs of time passing so...sicken me."
Ruch poked the black jagged booty with a gloved finger. Gold shone through, flickering with the lights. He backed away.
"It is as he says, Mogan. At last."
The fiend fought his way up back onto his hidden feet.
"Touch it." he offered. "Like this."
The skeleton crouched over the casket and stabbed his bone hands into the moulden booty. He clutched as much as he could and held the golden clusters to his parchment face. The treasure trickled through the gaps in his bones as he kissed his wealth. When his claws were empty he dug them into the casket again, over and over until all the gold and jewels shone, free of mould.
"It was this that wore away my hands. The years of burying my once fleshy fingers deeply into these trinkets. My skin, my muscle...came away...away."
The fiend laughed.
"Oh. I am being discourteous. I should explain why I am not sucking the life from you as you stand there."
Mogan let his eyes widen as he listened.
"You are not the first party to find this tomb, in this region of small islands. I thought it safe from such people as you. For years I have sat here staving off the final stages of death...with my magical art."
The fiend returned to his red throne and smiled, lifting his eyes to the mottled ceiling, where his memories crawled.
"Some years ago a colony of people arrived on a land mass north of here. Took root. Fished the waters. I watched them in my dreaming state, at first. Wary of their prying. For a time I managed to influence them with my prayers. I kept them from these islands with visions of such terror."
He shifted in his chair, smiling a different smile.
"Then I became too curious, which was always my major flaw. And I ventured out into the inky night...in a more solid representation. The fisher folk had made my cold wasteland their home and they were here to stay. I knew this final truth...when their woman began to swell with offspring. Perhaps you came here because of the disappearances? And the tales of some monster haunting the smaller isles? Was it a giant spider? A black serpentine creature? How did they personify the superstitious fear I cast their way?"
There was a pause, as the dead man stared into Mogan's eyes. Mogan shrugged and urged himself to speak.
"We came because a friend passed through this way a few seasons ago, and he and his mates fell foul of your sorcery."
"Indeed? I recall many such intrusions."
"Our friend survived, with only one hand and a story. It is well true that where magic is found treasure is not far away."
The fiend nodded.
"Yes. I would have fared better if I had paid that fact its due. Back then my conjurations gave me such pleasure."
There was another silence as the candles flickered all around.
"Well." the sorcerer said." The treasure is yours now, and I will be beholden to you if in exchange you could pass on the news that these tomb isles have been plundered of all they held of worth to man. And if you could also, in your heroic tales, put about that the evil that lurked here has been vanquished? I can assure you that no more of the little ones shall go astray. It will be as if I had been slain."
Mogan nodded and looked at Ruch, who repeated the agreement.
The sorcerer closed his blackened eyelids at that, and moved his fleshless hands through the air in a complex and swift motion. He began to rise from his ancient throne, his gown dangling but not reaching the stone floor.
"A simple enough trick, but a draining one. I shall see you both out to the surface. Take the chest. It is yours now, and my solitude is mine again."
Ruch was glad of his rowing gloves as he hefted he casket up the slippery stone steps to the tiny square of grey sunlight. The salty air was the smell of home. Mogan followed, and in the read, the levitating form of the sorcerer.
Once in the open, Ruch began to feel his trepidation lighten. The boat waited, the tide lapping at the shingle.
The sorcerer followed them to the water's edge and watched them push off into the black water. In both their stomachs a sickness told their hearts a truth blacker than the ripping waters. When they were out of sight of the tomb isles, and hopefully beyond other means of viewing, Mogan and Ruch both took up the casket and tipped it into the sea. The gold fell away like frenzied scattering sunfish, and then vanished into the tireless gloom.
And they rowed in the direction of the setting sun.
Monday, 24. November 2008, 10:12:42
An Extract From The Hagiography
Gorrunx ponderously surveyed the interior of the tomb -slowly moving the flaming torch around in a complete circle- before he took another step into the lifeless chamber. He saw nothing glinting amongst the rotting wood and stone. Tall ceramic pots on low pedestals bore the only sign of colour. He stepped closer to prove that only paint adorned the containers: no gems or gilt filigree. Not even the treasure of wisdom in the archaic lettering. Just words of sorrowful adoration.
He backed up towards the tomb entrance and flung his axe at the pots. A puff of dust billowed amongst the clattering sherds. After it had settled Gorrunx approached, sniffing the air. There was no tell-tale scent of ashvile. He had been informed that it was customary amongst the Hoxian people to poison the remains of their dead ones. To keep them sacred from the prying fingers of people like Gorrunx. Although Gorrunx was far from ready to dip his fingers into this ash pile. More direct deterrents were used -other than ashvile-to sanctify ash pots. Fingerstabs; razor snappers; cursed glass shards; the hibernating larvae of the toxic spider jack. Although these pots were old enough that any spider jack larvae would have perished or crawled away to find a mate by now.
He slipped his shiv out and risked the point -rather than his flesh- in the ash. Nothing. He retrieved his axe and smashed the remaining pots in similar careful fashion, before leaving the tomb to its darkness and silence.
Shenn waited for him outside, stripped down to the waist, skinning a tree rat by a fresh fire.
“Nevermind dinner, lockpicker. We travel to Scurn. I want to kneel before a chapel sigil and offer up a boast to the miserliness of my ancestors.”
Friday, 31. October 2008, 12:21:25
Bokk felt the tree shudder as the graveman lost his grip and fell, hitting several thick branches before landing on the heads of the other gravemen and gravewomen. Bokk laughed heartily and leant over to get a better look at the damage inflicted by the falling flesheater. He saw a leg roll away, flapping with shroud bandages, and noticed with glee that some of the mob now had heads sat not so plumb on their shoulders.
"I can sit here stamping on your fingers all day, my lovelies. You won't get near enough to smell my breath. And by the looks of you you'll not last a few more of those heavy falls."
The torn and rotting faces turned his way to listen, and when he had said his piece they returned to fighting their way to the lower branches to attempt the climb again.
They would not be turned away by words or the discouragement of suffering twenty foot falls. Bokk knew enough of them to have no illusions about that. Not that the workings of grave people had been covered in the training he had received from Master Fraddis. In his, at present, short career as a Corpsepicker, Fraddis had not seen fit to illuminate his students on evading the undead. Bokk had spent enough time talking to Old Throat in the tavern after classes to blame council cuts for the uncommonly rushed pace Fraddis had adopted in familiarising his underlings with the ins and outs of collecting body parts from the recently slain. He had learnt the necessary parts to gather-eye lids, nails from the toe, grey hair, noses, navels. The list was not extensive but the requirements complicated things. Times of day, the days of the year, the freshness of the corpse. It went on and on and it had taken him all two weeks of the course for him to store the knowledge in his head.
Fraddis had taught them the bones of the chore and no more. He had no idea what magic a nose snipped at mid-day had business with. Or what potion required a collarbone. At more abundant ages in the empire he would, no doubt, have had a fuller education in the art of corpsepicking. The present war, on which fringes he and his classmates had been despatched, had reached the borders of the Hill Counties and threatened to spill over into his home town of Corrow any day now. He did at least have no great distance to travel to work. Soon, he had joked with Old Throat, he would simply have to step out of bed to find his first eyelid of the day.
The tree shook as another graveman managed the task of pulling himself to the next branch in the ladder towards Bokk.
"I can't wait for you to get up here so I can break your hand. In fact, I'm half inclined to clamber down and meet you half way."
Did they even understand his speech? Their swollen faces held no semblance of comprehending him. But he had heard stories all through his youth about gravepeople. None of it from official sources. The gravepeople liked guts best. Pain was like pleasure to them. They were the children of Soggan The Crypt Whore. None of the alley play stories seemed of use now. The only sane thing he learnt was that gravepeople came when war had gone on too long. The war he could hear right now, but not see beyond the shaggy crest of the hill, was surely a good candidate. It had shrunk the council coffers and taken their slain.
Bokk shifted on his branch, to match the route of the graveman beneath him. His corpse bag slipped from his shoulder and dangled from his wrist. The graveman groaned and stretched a ruined hand up towards it. The smell met Bokk's nose.
"Hurry it up green face. Come on." Bokk waggled his corpse bag to tempt the creature.
"Come on. Lovely noses and moustached lips. All gathered within minutes of death. No guts, I'm afraid. There's no demand for them."
He wound the bag back up and slipped it over his shoulder more securely He had a day's hard work inside it, not to mention his picking blade and gloves.
The undead man wanted him, he figured. It wanted his warm, red meat. His coils of entrails. His screams. It had climbed another rung towards getting them. Bokk slipped down and let his booted feet connect with the green fingers clasped around the lower branch. There was no cry of pain. The last one had not cried either. Some of the childish stories maybe true then.
"You smell like a goblin's outhouse." He spat, landing his foot on the hand again, and again. Bone or wood crackled, split. Bokk ground his heel in and pushed against the higher branch to favour his weight on the claw. At last he heard a snap and felt the tree shake with a collision and then another.
"I can do this all day, guys."
And all night.
The sound of cannons, which had kept sleep shallow and short for the last four months, were now a welcome aid to staying awake. He almost wished the battle would come his way. Perhaps a stray cannon ball could knock some limbs off the hungry dead waiting in the darkness below. He wouldn't have minded a bit of that fire he could see glowing dimly on the hill top. Just enough to keep his hands and feet warm. At least the darkness had confused the gravepeople. They had made several more attempts to pluck him from his perch, and he had fended them off each time. When the night had crept over head their interest seemed to have waned. He fancied that in their simplicity that they needed to see him to have a desire for him. Something he would impart to old Throat -and anyone bored enough to hear his story -once he had found a way home. Sadly, the same darkness that kept him hidden, also prevented the walking corpses from wandering off to bother someone else. With nothing to see they had no impulse, and he could hear them groaning still, squabbling occasionally, as they accidentally bumped into each other. Perhaps they would mistakenly tear each other to pieces before day break. Just in time for his shift to start. He wondered of he had been missed at the college. Samples were always handed in to Fraddis at the end of day, to be pickled, cured, bottled, baked. Ready to be sent on to the battle wizards, so they could keep the war from Corrow's streets. But no one would come looking for him. He would be assumed dead, like Spran; who on his first ever shift had not turned up by night fall. Nor day break, or any time. Until Drippog had found him on the edge of the River Corr, too dead for his eyelids to be of use. His collarbones and knee discs still made it back to the college. Fraddis had betrayed no hint of solemnity as he boiled them clean. The point being that nobody had been sent to look for him. He could see Fraddis now, whistling as he stirred the bubbling pot. White bones bobbing to the surface.
An explosion shook the tree. A pillar of fire, or a bolt of lightning, had erupted on the hill top. Too powerful to be a cannon. Maybe a dozen cannons, or magic. Perhaps Spran had made a contribution to the war effort after all.
More explosions. More light. Then a sound that sent a shiver up his arms. The shiver continued. It had set off his body's need for warmth. Blessed heat.
What makes a noise like that? Something heavy, trampling swiftly through long grass? A Battle-Bull? Free of its harness? It wouldn't be the first time. All sorts of things got loose during the chaos of war. Whatever it was had stopped moving, and close by. Dawn would solve the puzzle.
The branch was about as comfortable to his hind quarters as a dozen whips of the cane, but Bokk imagined that he had managed to nod off at some point. Not for long, but enough that the scraps of a dream -no, a nightmare -still littered his mind. His body felt like a part of the tree, and his circulation had been cut off enough in his legs that he feared he may well be as wooden. It was light, just about. A sunless dawn of white endless cloud. The air felt wet around him. His shirt and coat stuck to him by a sickly dew. At some point he had used the strap of his corpse bag to tie himself tightly to the trunk. He fancied he recalled the moment, but wasn't wholly convinced. The fitful sleep had played with his mind. Juggled his memory. Perhaps he had come up with the idea in his sleep. He felt around for the knot that had saved him from a deadly fall, and picked at it with fingers that felt foreign to him. How long had the pale dawn left him in sight? He peered down the tree and saw bare ground. Something had lured them away. A wounded soldier? A passing cart on the road nearby? The sounds of battle on the hill top? If he could undo his own knot he would be free to climb down and make for town.
"By Khell, this knot is like iron."
He had no doubt pulled it taut to secure himself. Or had made it so with the weight of his sleeping body. Even though he was impatient to be off, he couldn't help but admire the strength of it. No good, he would have to slip under the strap. Getting his arms and his bulky coat sleeves through the proved impossible. He finally had to worm his coat off to give him more slack. At last he was free to adjust his position and let his legs waken like the rest of him.
"Stinking troll pizzle."
He had reacted before realising what he was seeing. Even after a minute or so of scrutiny, as his legs remembered themselves, he still puzzled over the scene on the hill side. The gravepeople were not as far as he wished them to be. In fact, if he wasn't more careful with his oaths, they might well be distracted from their work to try and shake him from the tree again.
The green figures, barley half dressed in rags and shrouds, were directing their attention on something that appeared -to Bokk-to be a large boulder, painted in thick layers of blood.
They swarmed around it, fighting each other as they had done at the base of his tree, grasping at the shape. Some clawed, others gnawed -most attempted both. Bokk watched through the almost leafless branches, unsure of how to feel about the situation. He had not seen a large boulder when he was running from the battle edge, avoiding the staggering forms of the gravepeople. Why would they mutilate themselves in such a way? Was it part of the horrors of being grave-disturbed? Is this what the agonising hungers of decay brought you to, when the mind no longer could discern what was fit for the belly? He had to get a closer look. He could not take back with him another childish myth. No matter how many eyes would widen to its telling. If he was careful he could slip down unseen, keeping to the branches on the blind side of the tree. Then he could creep up. It wasn't the easiest descent, in places his legs almost gave out. His fingers twice held him alone, filling his nails with bark and mould. Finding solid ground underfoot cheered him more than he could have guessed. Black slime streaked his clothes he now noticed. Sliding down the last six foot of trunk had been the culprit. That and the hunger of the decaying gravepeople, breaking themselves on his perch. The grumble in his belly had to be a pale reflection of the hungers hey suffered. No large breakfast at the tavern could satisfy what tore at their innards. A hunger that forced them to spoil themselves on hard rock? He peered around the trunk. The mob were a stone's throw away, on the edge of a gathering mist. None had been alerted to his escape so far. No doubt the insanity, the pure mindless urge to eat confined them enough that he could get near enough to be sure of what he thought was happening. He crouched in the grass and stalked forth, darting his eyes from his steady footfalls back to the bloody scene. He could hear them now, moaning in angst when one of their brothers flung them aside to steal their place, softly groaning when the red, jagged surface was free for them to attack. Blood and ruined flesh sat everywhere around the horror. The grass dark tipped with it. Some of the crowd had pulled away parts of the boulder to devour it away from the mass. Such was their eagerness that their bones and teeth had beaten the rock.
The one of them had crawled atop the thing like a green spider, slipping on the red juices as it buried its face into a cavity...and disappeared completely. So sudden and odd was the action that Bokk almost turned and fled. He caught himself and again urged himself closer.
He would never mind snipping lips from a dead man, he realised, now he had seen this. And now he knew what he was seeing. It was not rock they fed on, no, it was a gigantic head. The blood was not that of the feeders. They were not mindless after all. Simply opportunistic.
One of the gang roared with delight as it pulled away a large chunk. Something white with a flash of blue. Bokk watched in disgust as the giant eyeball was held aloft in bone hands and lowered to the mould covered jaws of the graveman. Another had pulled free a giant pink flap from the gaping mouth of the giant. It was large enough to make a cape from. That's how he would tell it later, as fine detail to refill his tankard.
Giants in battle? It had never been heard of, as far as he knew. They were forbidden from any battle activity due to the unfairness of their power and size. It did not bode well for Carrow, unless the lofty ones had sided with them to begin with. Giants never fought other giants. They were of one mind, so Old Throat had mentioned once, or twice. An allegiance brought about by their scarcity, he wondered?
Bokk had seen enough. As the battle on the hill top began to rouse again, now the generals had breakfasted, he quickly made back for town, keeping an eye out for more oversized body parts.
Carrow was lighting its fires and filling its chimneys with breakfast smoke. The morning guard -old women armed with ancient weapons – scrutinised him as he trotted the quickest route to the college. The gate guard recognised him with one sleepy eye and waved him through as if swiping at a fly. Bokk almost stopped to pass his story on but kept his tongue for later. He had work to do yet.
"Open the door, Master Fraddis. Open the door."
"Stop banging, will you? Who is that?"
Bokk pushed though the door once it was unbarred. His hungry eyes picked out the pot of something bubbling on a small stove by the fire. The he thought better of taking a spoonful, given his Master's profession.
"Bokk? You missed last bell. I'll have to reprimand you..."
"Giants." Bokk interjected, locking eyes with Fraddis.
"What?"
"What magical properties stem from the corpses of giants?"
"Well, Why do you ask? Your training is not extensive enough to cover that, unless you can pay the graduation fees. Can you?"
Bokk quickly judged his Master's words.
"I think-if we can come to an arrangement -that I may well do, Master Fraddis. But I'll need a bigger corpse bag."
Tuesday, 7. October 2008, 12:34:24
Story#1
Purple Grandma rises from her tartan shoe and clambers down the black stairs to where Green Grandma sits in an empty bath. Purple Grandma strikes the head of Green Grandma with her fist. Purple Grandma looks at the blue wound in Green Grandma's head. It has glitter in it that dissolves and pops. A piece of red string drops from the ceiling and Purple Grandma starts to paw it like a cat. The string keeps out of her reach. "I made you, I can destroy you!" she cries, laughing.
Story#2
The house slides five feet west, towards the oak tree. The branches touch the windows and even bend slightly. The man of the house steps out of the front door and creates a silver smile on his pink face. Later he washes a cluster of red screaming babies in a tin bath. "Aren't you happy now we are closer to the shade?" He asks.
The babies blow soapy breath bubbles and dodge the green flannel. Steam fills the house and leaks out to wet the leaves of the oak tree.
Story#3
The yellow, transparent gelatinous figure with the white curly hair stroked the black cat, slowly picking up a glove of cat hairs. The grey room he was in shivered as a loud machine passed by. The gelatinous figure dropped the cat and pulled himself to a small window smattered with flower stickers. He pushed his featureless face to the glass and peered out. Something like a map of a town was laid outside in the leaf clad street. It lifted its four corners and the wind swept purple leaves under them with intricate care. The yellow gelatinous man turned to his startled cat. "They have enhanced the notion of inside and outside again." he said.
Story#4
Blue liquids in the spoon. Blue Liquids in the bowl. Blue liquids in the sink, the carpets, the hair. Blue liquids everywhere.
Story#5
Billy is mostly brick dust and glue and likes to hang around the fenced off courtyard down a back street. He climbs the seven foot wire mesh fence, feeling its springy strength and hangs on to the top. Here he gets a glint of sunlight in his eye that soaks his mind and makes him especially happy. He sees things in the sunlight that are akin to the memories of the small courtyard. He clings there for hours, enjoying the stories in the light; until the moon replaces the sun, and then he sees the dreams of the courtyard in the cold white glow.
Story#6
The green faced Connoisseur dropped from the black tree and strode towards the orange houses, leaving a small, footprint shaped grave at every step. Small pink stick figures pushed their way up out of the graves and ran for the nearest shadow, shrieking musically. The green faced Connoisseur had shrunk to an ember by the time he reached the first orange house. The orange houses burned throughout the purple night with a greenish flame.
Story#7
The Librarian with red wings and a gold face caught the bus to work, clutching her large pale blue handbag with an orange trombone inside it. She missed her stop near the black statue of the photocopier machine and was alerted by the sound of the sea and the redness of the streets the bus was lost in. She was not familiar with the sight of the red statue of the cooling tower, nor the giant red light in the sky. “I shall be late for the first time in my life.” She told herself. “I should never have been so brazen.”
Tuesday, 19. August 2008, 11:26:00
The pink skinned man drops down into a grey dining chair and wriggles his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His skin is neither naturally pink nor painted so. It has a suggestion of both. As if rubbed raw it exuded a protective layer of soft plastic.
He is a stark contrast to the room.
The room is black and just large enough to lie down in either way without touching the walls.
The corners of the room are clogged with a slick material, akin to partly mulched litter, mostly black and...shifting slightly. It is undulating, in a fashion that betrays no normal movement of animal or physics, stirring the mixture of dark plastic flotsam and layers of stretching, snapping membrane.
It is a constant unveiling of wet familiar shapes lost in an oily abstraction.
The pink skinned man stops fumbling in his pockets and notices the masses of trash. The pile to his left, closest to his bare, pink feet seems to be of interest to him. Perhaps the half corroded tin can being brought to the surface was his. Perhaps he tossed it there. Perhaps it wasn't often that anything he recognised manifested in the junk waves.
The man stands up and approaches the creeping corner, his hairless head down, chin resting on his chest. He waits on the edge of the slick, watching. Then puts out one foot, perhaps to touch it.
His big toe has no nail, just an empty red socket where one may have been rooted. The red and the pink brighten against the shifting shades of grey and black. He balances there, like that, for a few seconds, his toe an inch from the slowly spewing, swallowing glue.
Then, as if by intention, dips his toe into a sudden bubbling pool of grey brown liquid caught between angular peaks of cardboard and plastic, and allows it to fill the red socket where his nail used to be.
The intrusion of his foot goes unnoticed by the gunk. Its flabby unfolding continues. There is no change in speed. Nor of direction.
Flap. Squeeze. Flap. Squeeze.
Equally, the man shows no sign of discomfort. He simply balances on one foot and stares at the other, at the ragged horseshoe of grey water cupped in his toe.
*
The pink skinned man walks in the gardens. He is surrounded by a group of grey hooded figures that sway in time with him, sway as they make their way along the gravel path between the avenue of thin trees. The purpose of the figures is unknown.
They have adopted his stance, their cowled heads slumped onto their chests. If they have any purpose it is emulation. If this emulation is out of honour then they have failed. The grunts they produce as they sway have a pitch of warning about them. Perhaps.
The structure of the garden seems to go unnoticed by the man and his followers. All eyes seemingly lowered to look upon the gravel path. Then again, maybe they are already familiar with the lumpy, unkempt lawns and the straggly black vines slung half heartedly over rusting iron trellises. The stone fountains, so mottled with fungi that their original colouring is now lost, could have no interest for them any longer. It would seem that way, for the slow group aim not one eye in directions other than the gravel underfoot.
The sky churns itself black above the darkening garden, as the figures shrink into the silence of the woods at the end of the path.
*
The woods aren't all they seem, unless the natural process of growth here is influenced by intentions akin to perversion. Branches, peeled and white, form grasping cages over the slightly shimmering gloom, their ends burrowing back into the grey earth to unseen depths.
Worms of black bark coil between the bars of the pale prisons, heavy with stiff loops of an orange moss that seem to attract midges of the same shade. There was nothing green that wasn't also smattered with a soot-like mould or intruded on by bright parasitic buds.
The cycle of growth and death appeared to have overlapped here, and formed an unclear compromise.
The pink skinned man raises his eyes to look upon the surroundings. His eyes seem to search the puzzle of limbs and torn leaves. Does he recognise that this place has been destroyed and remade?
He stoops to pick up a twig that has as many knuckles as a finger, and snaps it.
His hooded companions stir, their grunts almost complex enough to be a language now. They begin to take in the wild world around them at last, and some venture away from the man into the edges of the wood. Not before long they are crashing through the interwoven mesh into a flashing area of thick shadow, where only stray suggestions of light have made it past the canopy.
And soon they have diminished into distant noise alone.
And then nothing.
The pink man watches the disturbed branches settle back into near stillness and begins to walk back to the garden.
It had started to rain.
Tuesday, 19. August 2008, 11:23:50
The Day
Ray turns the CD player off as he answers the phone. The sound of waves crashing against a beach fills his ear. Jenny wipes the plate and puts it on the draining board. A man appears at the kitchen window. Benjamin pulls the car into the drive and gets out. He hears a noise in the garage. Mary locks her front door and buttons up her coat. A man with a burnt face steps out of the neighbour's porch. John kicks the swing harder. The swing next to him is grabbed by a man wearing purple rubber gloves. Diane slips the file in the cabinet. The door to the stairwell opens and a man with a length of rope walks towards her. Sarah switches on the TV. She flicks through the channels looking for one not showing a sea life documentary. Andrew pulls on his t shirt as he walks into the living room. A man with blood on his face is sat watching TV. Gordon checks the display on the digital camera to check if the picture of his wife is blurred. He hears his wife say his name with fear in her voice. Dan switches the computer on and loosens his tie. Something yellow smashes against the window behind him. Anne-Marie puts her dog on his leash. She notices a man in a long black coat sat in a tree. Janet wipes her nose as she carries her shopping home past an alleyway. A man with a stocking on his face steps in front of her. Simon turns the volume up on his stereo as he turns the car onto the back road. He feels the car rock hard as something moves in the back seat. Sue uses a trowel to remove a weed from her rose patch. A dark shape leaps the garden wall and moves towards Sue, ignoring her question. Andrea takes off her coat and hangs it on the peg by the front door. A bruised hand slips through the letter box and begins to pull on the string for the spare key. David closes the dictionary and puts it back on the shelf. Behind him he hears shears open. Ron opens his eyes and looks at the time on the clock. He hears his window being opened. Marcus slips the DVD into the machine and presses play on the remote. A man with a hidden face walks into the room and knocks the remote out of his hand. Claire locks her bike up by the art department and checks her portfolio. A figure grabs her from behind and covers her mouth with a purple hand. Adam leans against the wall to tighten his trainers. Something long and black with a white hand on the end is slung over the wall. Amanda squeezes a blob of shower gel into her palm. The warm water spraying on her body turns purple. Richard posts the leaflet in the door and moves on to the next house. Something large and yellow appears in the glass of the door and he feels his fingers jam in the letter box. Celia sticks her thumb out as she walks beside the road to the next town. A grey car with windows so scratched they hide the interior slows to a stop and signals to her with rear purple lights. Paul rummages through his toy-box looking for his favourite action figure. His hand closes on something that makes him shout out. June leans on her walking stick to answer the door. A man with a swollen purple face and yellow overalls pushes the door open for her.
Monday, 28. April 2008, 12:10:17
A thin wind crawls across the flat, black ground, stirring nothing, and making no sound. The surface of the sky is a uniform pink, and luminescent from within. It casts no light on the perfect black land.
The horizon is a sharp and featureless edge all around.
Time passes without measurement.
And then a grey blanket of vertical energy flickers through it all, north to south.
The energy vanishes and another weak breeze attempts to make progress in the featureless landscape.
Time passes silently.
Then another vast, grey blanket of energy, this time horizontal, descends from the pink sky and sinks into the black metal of the ground.
Time passes again. And sounds are heard all around. In the pink sky, in the black ground.
The black ground most of all.
The black ground stirs, catching a small reflection from the sky. It puckers and rises in one small place, forming an aperture. A sound of ripping ensues. The sky darkens into a greyish red. Time passes. The ground around the aperture begins to expand.
Time has nothing to gauge itself by but the slow expansion of the ground, which has turned grey where it has bulged, and developed even paler striations in all directions. The raised aperture itself has expanded and widens now in strenuous lurches.
Something pale pink and angular has pushed its way up through the aperture. It begins to rise up further, entire lengths of it in one go, and show its cuboid structures. It is almost uniform in its shape, twin rows of peaked cubes with a deep groove; all of it varying shades of the same pale pink.
It glistens with a thin layer of liquid as it rises and lengthens and begins to slowly topple over. It is almost free of the aperture and the ground is now almost flat again to receive it. The object falls with a soft thump and rests.
After time the aperture vanishes, and the land is perfectly flat again, beneath the perfectly flat object. Time watches on as the object loses its gossamer layer of slime and begins to dry; the wind dancing around the object, over its triangular tops, through its deep groove, along accurately manufactured measurements.
As it dries it begins to darken, to take on colour. Orange. Grey. Black. Green. Blue. The colour defines the different textures, picks out varying types of surfaces and structures on the cubes and peaks. Squares of mottled grey, rectangles of colour that have no pattern to them; as if that is the point. The object has little or no pink left to it after a period of time.
Then the sounds begin. The sounds of movement. Somewhere within one of the cubes, or several of them; a soft scuttling. Sometimes a thump. Sometimes several thumps. The sounds become more certain, as if there is a purpose now. A seeking out. A testing.
Then one sunless day, a red rectangle opens outwards in one of the cubes, and the pink, formless shape of a man runs out into the street.
Monday, 28. April 2008, 12:09:12
The fat green ring of gelatine throbbed and the space in its centre flashed with a membrane of silver light. A high pitched electronic sound echoed into the room and wavered as the light from the membrane lurched suddenly back and forth, spilling its reflections into chaos as something prodded and sucked at it. Below the floating ring rose a rough surfaced tangle of dark blue limbs, connected to the slime covered floor by several large black pods, with sketchy white veins streaking across and just below their surface. The spindly structure arched upwards and touched the thick green ring with its uppermost region. Purple light from somewhere unseen rushed across everything for a few seconds and disappeared with a loud click.
Then the room went dark, except for the white veins in the pods, which glowed with their own grey luminescence.
In the almost dark a square door opened with a slight sound of bubbles passing through a liquid.
The white sand outside the door had been disturbed by many tracks. Pale yellow orbs with sickly green and grey limbs pulsated amongst the dunes, rocking back and forth before sending themselves across the undulating white surface; leaving more of the indicative tracks in the sand.
More and more of the yellow orbs, varying slightly in size and number of limbs, propelled themselves across the dunes to the square door opening in the cuboid structure. Slowly something began to leave the shadowy interior of the dark vessel, stretching forth a black pod with white veins, connected to a blue limb, pocked and bumpy.
The yellow orbs began to emit a chorus of hissing that rose and fell in pitch from an inaudible peak to an inaudible growl. The orbs themselves throbbed larger and all along their green grey limbs tiny lines of black dots flicked into existence and, with as much energy, flicked out of existence again.
The thing crawling from the vessel had come fully into view, its green ring of slime encompassing a thin, fluid disk of oil rising high atop its dark blue limbs.
The ring expanded it's thickness and the disk of flickering light it held contracted into a black dot, producing a precise note of sound that mirrored the orbs' own hiss.
The orbs stood still for a moment and the only sound was the wind howling as it began the job of covering up the disturbed sand.
The green ring atop its blue legs and black pods followed the smaller orbs across the sand, the wind blowing sheets of white in all directions. Some orbs rocked back and forth for a few seconds and sped ahead, across the crests of high dunes, and down the other sides. In the blurred distance an angular orange shape stood. Lights flickered across its surface as if to signal something to the arriving group, which plodded on at the speed of the blue limbed visitor.
By the time the group had reached the orange structure it dwarfed them, and was tearing itself a large rent in its slightly metallic surface to allow entrance. The green ring with its blue limbs was allowed ahead of the yellow orbs, but they followed closely, hissing as they collided with each other and the sides of the new doorway.
The visitor crawled through a corridor fashioned from woven orange fibres, forming an uneven fabric held in place by large black knots of twisted metal. A low whirring sound, accompanied by a higher clicking noise, filled the long passage. Ahead a small assembly of yellow orbs waited, their limbs flickering with black spots.
The visitor stood before them and its green ring began to glow brightly and expand, thinning into an almost white hoop, with a wide membrane of light in its centre. A sound like a wet buzz emanated from the ring as several small objects fell from its dancing fluid disk, tumbling to the fabric floor in front of the yellow orbs. The pale pink objects had their tiny limbs bound with a crusty blue substance, which also covered their small mouths to prevent them making noise.
Hissing, the yellow orbs fell upon the thin pale figures, gripping their limbs with their own stronger, flickering appendages. The orbs pulled at the weak creatures, snapping their encrusted bonds and allowing them to flail their arms and legs. Then they scraped away the crusts over their mouths, so they could make noise; as they were slowly devoured in methodical sucking bites from the orbs' blue mouth slits.
When all the tiny bodies were clean of flesh and only the thin white bones sat in small piles on the floor, the visitor expanded its green ring of slime to its utmost diameter and released more for the rest of the clan.
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