The Jester's Bell, Part Three

Dan Lippitt’s feet fell like anvils into the peat as he soldiered towards his last confession. He was full of beer and whisky and his knuckles were dripping a trail of something that was neither. He trudged single-mindedly; his capacity for guilt had atrophied long before this evening. All that was left was resolve, absurd and hard. Everything, he realised in those rare residual synapses capable of reflection, had been taken away from him. He was adamant to ensure he never remember the taking. Dan knew now what he had to do and he knew that it was for him alone that it would be done.

Looking up through heavy lids, he glowered at the dodo-like steeple perched atop the mouldering tiles, fancying itself a rejoinder. He stumbled on obstinately despite it: the past months had exposed it as little more than a vainglorious weather vane, ignorant as to man’s beginning and laughably so concerning its end. He knew this because during his time with Reed he had been privy to more authentic revelation. His ears had been opened to unholy glossolalia groaned by choruses of suppurating seraphim, made eloquent in their fall. They had taught him that every God-fearing soul on this planet would have done far better to fear something much, much grander.

As he walked up the abbey path he remembered those days with Reed: the initial excitement, the infectious sense of discovery hitherto so unfairly denied to him, and then the creeping sensation that he had been waylaid - that he had yolked his services to something of which his ancestors and the gods that they had invented would disapprove. He remembered Reed’s grin, his small teeth licked in delight at aesthetic perversion. Reed lusted to wrench schematics and invert composition until the items produced made Dan fear the unspoken implications of every moment he had throughout his entire existence taken to be happy ones. Those stairs - stairs which he realised now that he had since birth never not been destined to build  - physically led down to Reed’s basement, yes, but what was physical had never interested his employer as anything other than a gateway. Reed had gleamed instead at something more askance, less real but upon epiphany much more palpable. He surreptitiously skewed Dan’s sketches and strangely sanded his carpentry – first achieved with cooperation and then quickened through eagerness – so that they began to insinuate themselves into spaces elsewhere and invisible, loci whose inhabitants had during the midnight hours spoken to, provided for, and danced with Reed, promising him powers yet possessed by no mortal man and bequeathing unto him knowledge never before desired but also strangely needed.

Dan reached the large oak doors, stopped, and took in a deep breath. He began to push them open and resolved to himself that by the time he exhaled, Father Clemence would be dead. He could not allow that man to propagate the lies with which he had grown up when he had now seen truth. He couldn’t deceive the people of this town any longer. Furthermore, Dan told himself, it would be an act of mercy to the man. Clemence’s burning of the Jester’s Bell had invited the wrath of things from which no god, no matter how nonfictional, could protect him from. Better to martyr the ecclesiastical bastard now than allow him to become a pawn in a battle he could never understand. The doors flew open. Dan scoured the scene before him for the victim of his merciful kill, started, and exhaled.  

Dan Lippitt would not be murdering Father Clemence today, or on any other day for that matter. In between the pews the cleric’s naked body lay sprawled, his neck broken and oil-black blood pouring from large gashes cleft into his armpits. The desiccated hull of Jim Reed’s corpse stood over these spoils. It beamed a rictus grin.

Dan watched as Reed began to towards him, charnel metatarsals clicking against stone like castanets. The smith stood rooted to the spot, more stoic than afraid: in the metaphysical game played according to rules beyond his means, he had already lost. Reed stopped about five feet from Dan and turned to the left, sauntering over to the faceless iron clock in the nanthex. Reed stood in front of the contraption and Dan saw that it was standing on top of a large rectangle of wood cut set into the stone. A trapdoor. Dan had not known that the church had a basement. The clock stood as tall as a man and was composed of a number of cogs as pitch and spindly as the abomination observing them. It nodded for some reason and then clasped impossible digits over one of the cogs. It hauled on them as if on a ship’s wheel. In its efforts the wraith’s finger, shin, and hip bones splintered and cracked.

Dan lit a match and threw it at the scene, putting an end to everything that he still could. The next morning all that remained of the village church was a charred trapdoor and a smoking, faceless clock that was now turning the wrong way.

************

They went for a walk down a path through the surrounding woods. Rather than calm them their environs’ silence just made it more clear that they weren’t exactly filling the void that had been presented to them. They walked over a makeshift wooden object halfway between a bridge and a storage carton, traversing a babbling brook. It mocked Leo and Meg, who had exhausted the capacity to babble. The verdure around them was rife with beautiful fauna with names they had never bothered to learn. They hoped that the sporadic sighs they exhaled were sufficient to constitute a viable alternative to utterances like “that bit of green looks nice, doesn’t it, against that other shade of green?”

Incapable of verbalising thoughts of their own, each considered asking the other about theirs but thought better of it lest it come off as trite. Leo wished that his iPod hadn’t run out of battery. He started to mentally compose a countryside walk playlist that he could blog later. He scoured his mind for songs to put on the list and panic promptly set in: he couldn’t think of any. Since his undergraduate days he had found it harder and harder to keep abreast of current trends, and the frequency of his blog posts had lessened considerably. He found that, what with his job at HMV and upholding his role as co-conspirator in the long con that was Meg and Leo, there was so very little time left in which to discover new stuff. He found that more and more recently he was simply listening to his favourite five Springsteen records over and over again. At a party last year friend of his had told him that when people start listening to the lyrics it means that the party’s over. Leo had been listening to them for a while.

Perhaps one of his friends had called him, or somebody had tweeted something interesting and he could grab onto those one hundred and forty characters like they were climbing holds. He frantically pushed his hand into the pockets of his jeans, a task which was more difficult than he had expected. Was he putting on weight as part of this general acceptance of defeat, or was it just because he had washed this particularly tight pair of skinnies the other day? He conformed to trend by neglecting to worry any further about which one of the two it was, lest either of the options be allowed to trouble him. He latched his fingers around the phone and in his rush for digital input he pulled it up a little bit too rapidly, so that it flew up out his hand and carved a curving trajectory through the air and towards Meg’s face. It thunked against her left cheekbone and ricocheted off into the babbling bastard brook with a splash that sounded more like a cackle.

“Fuck, Leo!”

He moved his hands towards her face in a rushed attempt at tenderness. She put hers up against it first. She swore to herself under her breath for being with him and she glared at him with bloodshot wells. Leo felt less than a man. Meg didn’t consider questions of gender, but she still recognised an inadequacy.

As she stood in the shadow of an elm silently tending herself by standing as still as she possibly could and trying to an imagine an existence where she wasn’t stuck here standing next to him, Leo decided to sit on a tree stump and wait for time to heal her wounds. He looked eastwards, and saw the path leading out of the wood and onto the grounds of a large hotel, a hive of afternoon tea and gimlets. On a particularly picturesque grassy knoll between them and the hotel’s forecourt lay a succession of three stone steps, old and covered with weeds, insinuating themselves out of the freshly cut grass. He wondered how the groundskeeper had so neatly cut around the stonework for a moment before looking down at his stomach and wondering if the roll of stomach fat that overhung his belt had swelled at all over the past couple of months. It didn’t protrude that much when he stood up, did it? He’d stand up and check, but Meg would see him doing it and this probably wasn’t the time. He resolved to start running again soon and probably quit smoking, too. He coughed and thought about how he had just thrown a mobile phone into his girlfriend’s face.

*******************

That evening they decided to dine out at the restaurant by the knolls. It had at least three vegetarian options, they’d noticed as they had walked past and looked at the menu, which was three more than the dining facilities where they were staying. Leo and Meg were both vegetarians. They had both said so on their blogs last year. Upon returning to their room, Meg promptly sheltered herself in the bathroom. She tried to conceal the dark blue bruise that was rapidly spreading from the bridge of her nose up over the left of her forehead and towards her side parting. She tried doing something with her bangs to salvage the situation but it didn’t quite work.

Leo stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on the patio. He knew that their relationship had become banausic and he knew that Meg knew it too. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence. The way they viewed their social obligations was a perfect example: all of Leo and Meg’s friends were couples, and Isn’t it wonderful, one of them had once said, that we can spend time with our friends and each other at the same time? In time, though, that breezy convenience had ossified into a shackle. Now each feared a break up, lest they find out their favourite friends were on the other’s side. He lit up the American Spirit, pulled it in, and looked up at the regurgitated smoke dispersing into the night.

He couldn’t make out many stars. Leo had never thought about existence in sufficient detail to construct anything as schematic as a cosmogony but he knew that looking at the night sky for too long made him less predisposed to all the stuff underneath it. He had read on the web that one of Saturn’s smallest moons, only three hundred and ten miles in diameter, might be the most likely location in the solar system to discovering life of some kind. It had an atmosphere, apparently, and geysers of water that surged forth from a subterranean ocean that remained liquid due to some interior heat source. This heat source, and the waters about it, the article told him, could be conducive to engendering life, which Leo thought sounded nice. The article informed him that any manned mission to ascertain whether any life forms occupied this aqueous satellite would take at least twenty years to reach its destination. Leo conjectured that, things being as they were here, he probably wouldn’t mind putting in the time.

He did know that thinking like this was indulgent, but he also knew that he was only twenty-four and that he was anxious not to think like this by the time that he reached twenty-five. Putting an end to the entire charade really was the best course of action for all concerned. Meg wouldn’t mind. She’d probably thank him for it. It was very simple really, if only he could find a way to deal with the crippling fear. The crippling fear, and his ability to obey it, had always been something that he had welcomed - an expedient precaution – but rather than prevent the unthinkable it had recently begun cultivate it. He needed to do something decisive, but for that he needed gumption. Alas, sadly, he’d always been short on that stuff. There had to be a way of attaining it quickly and painlessly. That was it: he’d get very drunk at dinner and that would mean that he would be able to be a man and that he would be able to put an end to it.

He resented the multiple miniscule turns of event that had led them here, all so individually insignificant the accumulation felt like a curveball to the gut. There was a time when their souls had warmly coiled, he was sure of it. He remembered the first time he had met her and the curious dichotomy of sensation resulting from it. Dormant parts of himself had instantly leapt to while others had gone suddenly weary. It was as if they had only just now realised how exhausted they had always in fact been and how desperately they now were in need of her presence to lay down by and rest. That recombobulation had felt so defining, so indefinitely entrenched, that he never expected such a polar shift. It had happened, though.

He walked back up the stairs to their shared room and opened the door. Meg turned from the mirror to face him, ready for their evening together, and smiled a little. She looked beautiful but he didn’t feel like saying so.

******************

They sat down at the table they’d been led to by a waiter who kept looking at Meg’s bum but declined to pull the chair out for her. They perused their menus for a few minutes, fingering the card awkwardly and hoping they wouldn’t order the same thing. In the end Leo settled for a vegetarian cottage pie and Meg plumped for something the menu called ‘chilli con quorney’. That at least gave them a few snatches of mocking conversation, an opportunity to laugh at something else rather than themselves. The drinks arrived first and they set to lining their empty stomachs. The silence returned, pregnant and loud, a mutual abuse.

Leo needed to do something and it was still too early and he was still too sober to break up with her. “What did you reckon to those steps out on the grass over there?”

She looked up at him as if he had kicked her in the shin to catch her attention.

“Which steps?”

“The little ones, on the grassy knoll over there.” He pointed out the window, across the grounds. He put on his best curious face to hide his worst resentment face. “There’s like three steps, and they don’t lead anywhere. They just poke out of the grass, like they meant to lead underground but then thought better of it.”

“It’s a mounting block, Leo. There are loads of them around here.”

“A mountain what?”

“A mounting block. They’re steps so that people can mount horses more easily.”

He thought of making a joke about the word ‘mounting’ but she probably wouldn’t find it funny. He didn’t even find it funny. He hoped this bespoke maturity rather than etiolation. “Really? But it doesn’t look like it would help. I mean, they’re pretty meagre.”

She poured herself another glass. “Did you not see the ones abutting the stone wall leading to this place?”

“Yeah, I saw those. They were big, I can see how you could get onto a horse from that one. But those there out on the grass barely ascend.”

She sighed. “They’re probably just more timeworn.”

He poured himself another glass.

The conversation from the neighbouring table spilled over into their void and filled it like draught ale. It came from a couple at least a decade older than them but who looked healthier. Leo bet that neither of them smoked and that they probably weren’t even going to order a second carafe. The man looked like an estate agent, garbed in an ill-fitting suit that too was narrow at the shoulders, too wide at the chest, and went far too down past the rear. The woman looked like she hadn’t even noticed. They were talking about Strictly Come Dancing and they looked as if they really took pleasure from it: not just the viewing, but the discussion of that shared experience. Leo hated them for it.

Leo and Meg looked to each other, the soundtrack of the happy couple’s nattering playing over their silent film. He wanted to express his pain because he knew that she felt it too and they should be able to share that at least. That would never happen, though. Whenever they wanted to tell somebody what was deep within themselves they would run up against a wall: a barrier built of irony, fastidiously constructed by an entire generation, brick by apathetic brick, making it impossible for anyone anywhere to say anything to anybody.

He ordered the last drinks he’d ever share with her.

Some stuff on 'Prometheus'

I've recently written a couple of pieces on 'Prometheus' for www.alternatetakes.co.uk - I thought I'd link to them here because in them I've concentrated on the film's use and renegotiation of Lovecraftian themes. The first piece is a short review of the movie and the second is an in-depth essay.

Short review: http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/?2012,5,402
Essay on franchise filmmaking, H.P. Lovecraft, and narratives of cosmic disappointment: http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/?2012,7,413

The Jester's Bell, Part Two

Ida Lippitt washed little Joshua with the same cloth and in the same basin that she used to clean their pots and pans. Then she took the baby out and wrapped him in the softest towel that they owned. Upon removal from the water the bundle began to cry a little, so she laid his head on her shoulder and patted his back.

She heard a fumbling at the door and then it flew open, exposing their home to night. Her husband Daniel stumbled in, tired from the forge and filled by the tavern. He flung his boots into the corner and his body into a wooden chair, which promptly buckled, and ran his hand over the rivulets in the oak table. He pulled a hip flask out of his pocket and swigged back some additional strength. Then he sat still. Ida tentatively edged towards to her husband now, concerned but loathe to ask what the matter was, lest his fists provide the answer.

She put the hand she wasn’t using to burp the baby upon the other’s shoulder. He turned with a start to look at her, as if he had only just realised that he was not alone in the room. She started too. There was noise in his eyes. The baby began to cry loudly. He shouted that she had better make that thing put a sock in it soon or else he would have to and he would be sure to use more than a sock.

She knew that the past few weeks had been hard for him. The only mason in the village, he had been commissioned by Mr. Reed to help him design and construct a stairway for the Bell. Daniel had set to work with gusto: Reed’s pub itself had been a strangely designed beast, widely commented upon for proportions so oddly accommodating that it seemed to make space for any conceivable grouping or occasion. This idiosyncrasy meant that the project would be no ordinary commission: it offered Daniel, finally, an opportunity to be recognised as something more than a mere artisan. He had come home excitedly night after night with talk of unconventional treads, ornate risers and curlicued nosings, descriptions that were born in technicalities but blossomed into something more, imbuing him with a new youth, so excited was he about the chance to create.

However, as the weeks had passed, Ida began to infer that the project was souring; Daniel was now coming home irritable: he had become contemptuous of the publican’s despotism, his lack of familiarity with masonry, and his seemingly willing ignorance of economic limitations for which Daniel was having to compensate. Her husband was now captious, volatile. Then there had been a final falling out between the two  men, triggered by something about which Daniel had been unwilling to speak. He had started to drink more and had become increasingly violent. To make matters worse, his dealings with the apparently  sacrilegious necromancer now meant that nobody else would hire him, and so bread was becoming harder and harder to win. Ida bore the bruises of the town’s wrath.

He had had not been present at last week’s burning. He had sat at this same table, his head in his hands, for hours and hours, as if any movement of any kind might incriminate him in the eyes of some higher power. Since that night his irascibility had morphed into something more ineffable and paralysing, accompanied by an almost evangelical desire for silence, so that the slightest noise would set him off headlong into storms.

Tonight, though, Daniel Lippitt looked at his wife and tears streamed down his face and he asked her if they might leave Combe for ever. She nodded, not hoping but somehow knowing that leaving would change everything for the better.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the section on haunting, located on the final pages, the pamphlet evinced a desperate attempt complicate what was the glaringly uncomplicated thatch and stonemasonry of the town the impression, giving Meg and Leo the impression that its publishers had realised the first four pages had done all that they could do, that that wasn’t quite enough, and that something else was probably necessary. The most notable paranormal event revolved around the apparition of a lugubrious centurion which had been sighted on the stone bridge to the north of the town. Leo crossed his legs and reclined against the wicker chair, closing his eyes to the light of the sun that had shifted out from behind the large willow tree which loomed over the village’s eastern side.

“I don’t know”, he said, his voice confident in the midday shine. “There’s something about Roman ghosts that isn’t that scary. You know? I mean, they’re blokes in skirts who speak Latin. Very public school. Plus their swords won’t work anymore, ‘cause they’re made of ectoplasm. So even though they’re right on display there – it really calls attention to how useless they are. What you really want it creepy monks or nuns or kids - that stuff’s just better.”

She scanned her eyes over the pamphlet, frustrated not only by his reluctance to make an effort, but also, more annoyingly, her agreement with his reasoning. She quelled herself, volunteering to steer the day onto a brighter course. “What about the church, then?” She could hear the affected singsonginess in her voice, but persevered nevertheless. “We’ll go and look at the church and then we’ll go somewhere else and have something to eat. It’ll be one by then, at least.”

“A pretty late lunch, then.”

He had seen through her plans for the desperate time-serving that they were. She resented that. She wanted to balk. Over the past couple of months, Leo had begun to openly flout the cardinal rule of maintaining an unhappy relationship, which is that you never acknowledge the relationship's unhappiness. She glowered at him with a disdain, but saw that it was in vain: his eyes were still closed. Savouring this opportunity, she flipped him the bird. He didn’t notice that.  Meg smiled.

Then she stood and walked over to his chair. Standing behind and over him, she put her arms on his shoulders and moved her face over his raven thatch to kiss him lightly on the forehead. He opened his eyes, looked up at her and smiled, though not before letting slip an expression that betrayed surprise.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get penitent.”

They walked along the cobbled market square in the direction of the spire, taking in the cottages with their framed windows peering out from 14^th century stones onto the sprinkling rivulet that trickled through and beneath the centre of Combe. It was, they had to admit, remarkably pretty.  Megan, cheeks suffused with sun, was suddenly buoyed. She turned to her boyfriend and smiled, “We could live in a place like this one day.” The accompanying vision promptly caused her soul to retch. Leo didn’t say anything at all. They entered through the oaken door into the smooth quiet within.

It was a humble edifice, closer in scale and atmosphere to the open-plan ground floor of a show-cottage than a place of worship: the nave was about twenty feet long and the transept, which was about eight feet away from the entrance, was little more than two small cupboards adjoining the main body of the building, their doors taken down in the interest of space. A cobwebbed chancel glowered over a paltry altar. The space was dotted with posters and donation-boxes, garishly decorated with solicitous potpourri. Access to the aisle on the east side was blocked off by a colourful display promoting the local Sunday School. This mass of discordant finger paintings and drawings of stick men had been created by children who would one day grow to be desperate to leave Combe: upon returning for holidays, they would probably not happen to caarrying any change so as to provide the donations necessary to keep the anachronism afloat. The church struck Leo as little more than a tourist attraction, a spectacle of unimaginative conservatism rather than a devoted perseverance of faith. He wandered away from Megan to indulge these thoughts, affecting an air of contemplation he hoped would impress her.

Stood in front of the altar, Meg felt pressed by competition with Leo into some manner of reflection. She made a sudden scramble within for some kind of meaning, a significance that had always – she now realised - had been somewhat absent. Her parents had been religious, yes, but she had never really understood the fuss. She only really now was able to put her finger on the ramifications of that slow-burn process. Presently inside ‘the house of God’ she could not help but feel outside it, could not for the life of her refrain from mentally putting it in scare quotes. Where was her altar? This question crashed around her. An abyss promptly opened, and something inside her crumbled in a collapse that registered as a physiologically palpable event. For the first time, she became certain that whatever this thing was that people throughout the ages have labelled the soul not only physically existed – it was apparently just behind the left lung, lower down, right above the guts – but that it also functioned as a sort of petrol pump, and that it was filled with an essence that could be exhausted at any moment. Looking up and down, side to side, she frantically scoured for something to plug the emetic: her soul was about to shit itself. Her gaze whipped over across the floor towards Leo, occupying himself by examining something at the north side: no. She raised her eyes up to the stained glass windows at the back of the apse and glared at sunken-eyed holies saving themselves for later. She understood then that she had herself been guilty of the same folly.

She felt as if she was about to fall, and worried about her body smacking down against the stone. Something might break. She put her arm to the wall to steady herself.

She composed herself and walked past an ornamental faceless clock in the nanthex and over to her boyfriend to see what he was looking at. Leo had assumed a pensive attitude, slowly scratching the barely post-pubescent hairs on his lower chin hoping to qualify them as a beard. He stared intently at a stone tomb, with a monument in the image of its incumbent knight, horizontally serene, carved into the stone wall.

“You see how his legs are crossed?” he asked her.

She nodded. They were, and she did.

“That’s what they do to show that the person fought in two crusades.”

She turned to look at him, impressed: she would never have bothered to learn anything like that. This brought on a wave of guilt, and she regretted the copious wells of hate that she had filled in the name of what was essentially a rather harmless young boy. She realised, suddenly, that she would have to end the relationship soon. The wells were overflowing, and she did not want to drown them both. She would not do it this weekend – that would turn all of this into a real horror story – but soon after. A week after they returned, perhaps. Knowing that she would have to do this, and assuming that it would crush him, she felt even more guilt, and blurted a kiss onto his cheek. His features once again registered surprise, though he was quicker this time to obscure it, smiling back with something approaching charm. He promptly wandered off to look at the faceless clock, as if wishing to leave their interaction on a high note. She turned her attention back to the tomb. She simultaneously envied the dead man’s belief and felt contemptuous of its purpose. She looked to his face, granted relaxation through effigy, and noticed a small placard nailed to the wall to the left of his head, the view of which Leo had previously blocked:

"Sir Walter de Dunstanwille, Baron of Castle Combe, who died in 1270. In the window above the tomb you can see the arms of the Scrope family who held the Manor of Combe for over 400 years. His crossed legs indicate that he went on two crusades."

She quietly laughed to and at herself.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

That night, in the Keeper’s Lodge, they lay in bed and neither of them could sleep because of what they each thought were completely different reasons.

To Meg’s mind, one had always felt more than the other. Originally it had been she, though sustained exposure to his listlessness had tipped the scales in the other direction, inversely buoying the desires of this boy who always so wanted what he could not have. The untenability of the situation saddened her. She scoured her mind for memories, wondering if there had ever been a point in time when they had faced each other eye to eye, level across a long seesaw plank – and, if there had been, whether either of them had realised at that moment that it was actually happening.

All of her kind feelings towards him were now suffused with melancholy and regret, neither of which were particularly arousing. Nevertheless, they were now on a romantic weekend away in the country, and he would probably want some. She would have to rebut him, and that would make him resent her. She felt him nibbling her ear, something he did that she had never told him she found sexually exciting in any way. She wondered how long it would be after she said no that he would fall asleep so that she could sneak off into the bathroom and calm herself down in the only way that was left to her now.

 “Can we not tonight?” she asked, playing the get-out-of-jail-free card.

Leo’s face registered something he wasn’t very proud of, but he masked it quickly enough that he hoped she didn’t notice, and kissed her quickly on the forehead. It was a gesture which once spoke of affection but had by now calcified into an acknowledgement of abstention. He turned to face the other wall, and began to count the months since this had started happening. She had started to say that she had a headache, or was too tired. This continued for so long that it had risked beginning to appear as though she might have a rather serious medical condition, so she had simply stopped coming up with such excuses. Tired of arguments, he resigned himself because he had always respected her disinclination to lie. Silence was a more comfortably indisputable truth. So Leo dozed off, thought steadily melting into calmer dark. At one point he was woken slightly by the light being turned on in the en suite. He took advantage of the empty bed to see to himself.

This was a moment that, for Meg and Leo, qualified as a shared experience.

The Jester's Bell, Part One

Moonlight filtered down through burning rafters. Publican Jim Reed struggled to lift the erstwhile roof-beam from his midsection, but it had fallen over not only his abdomen but also his left arm. Both were crushed. Ivory splinters toured arteries, scratching corridor walls. He heard the celebratory laughter of Father Clemence and his retinue of townspeople petering out as they discarded their torches on the other side of the hillock. Reed grappled at the beam with his remaining arm, but only managed to shift it so that it crashed down on the lower section of his left lung. He felt something bubble, and then give way, and his torso housed a breaking dam. Reed began to wheeze, the blood he spat singeing in the crackling flames.

His eyes moved from the encumbering wood up to the moon, and he whispered something under his breath, something much like the words that, in being much too holy, had provoked Father Clemence’s parochial crusade. He looked to his right side then, along the floorboards, and towards the iron trap door that steamed like a griddle beneath conflagrating kegs. Reed smiled at the sight. Death came and froze the irony his face .

By morning, the flesh under Jim Reed’s nose had charred to the bone, making that smile even wider.

…………………….

The eleven thirty-four Virgin Pendolino to London Paddington moved more quickly on the outside. Inside they sipped lattes, occasionally looking out at fields that they would never roam. Megan McColl and Leo Campbell were due to alight at Chippenham before getting the bus to Castle Combe, where they had decided to share a quiet and romantic weekend in fourteenth century pubs and in castles and in other assorted quaint and pretty things. The mini-break would remind them that there was a history outside of themselves, and one that hadn’t all been composed of blood and guts and forced hierarchies, at that: from the looks of the brochure, it was a place that would reassure them that some of the nation’s past had actually been rather lovely. Both Meg and Leo had forgotten whose idea it was to go there.

Meg was reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. Leo had forgotten to bring a book, and his iPod had run out of battery. Initially she was glad about this, because he had always been too cheap to buy headphones of quality and so a tinny reverberation of whatever Bruce Springsteen song he happened to be listening to – and it would definitely be a Springsteen song, as he never listened to anything else - would always infringe upon her relaxation like an adolescent bluebottle. She discovered, however, that the alternative was much more frustrating.

“Which bit are you at?”

He had been asking her that every five minutes, as if he was acutely familiar, on an incident-by-incident level, with every event and emotion in Elizabeth Bennett’s life, and wished to be reminded of each and every one. This literary equivalent of punching someone in the arm whenever you see a yellow car punctured her personal experience of the narrative so unceasingly – the word “the” seemingly qualified as a yellow car - that after an hour she wanted to throttle his neck and throw his pathetic gropings at connection onto the oncoming rails.

“She’s just met Wickham,” she relented.

“Isn’t he the one who dates her older sister? ‘Courts’, I mean.”

Evidently, he wasn’t as familiar with it as she’d thought, and was just bored. This was not something to be welcomed: she had head the adage that ‘only boring people get bored’, but the person who had come up with that one had never met Leo, who had a tendency, whenever ennui struck, to become – in his own eyes, at least - cloyingly, overwhelmingly interesting . She leant over and brought her bag into her lap, and proceeded to fumble within, scrambling for mp3s, praying to the relationship gods that there would be battery power.

“No,” she said, trying hard not to make it sound like the “fuck you” that permanently-holidaying courage would have provided. “That’s Bingley. And she marries him.”

“Bingley, that’s it.” He beamed suddenly. “I remember. I liked him. He was cool.”

She found herself at very risk of starting to hate her favourite book, which was now soiled by his banal textual commentary. Thankfully, at that moment, her fingers clasped around the cold surface of her iPhone and she was free. She told him she was tired, and was going to sleep the rest of the way. She told him she could read the Austen, if he wanted.

Leo didn’t want to read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. He didn't particularly enjoy reading books, let alone rereading them: the only reason he was familiar with that one is that, at a time when he still thought it germane to do his homework, she had said it was her favourite. She had read that book five times since they had started seeing each other two years ago, and he got the distinct impression that each time she read it he receded further in her eyes from the ideal that its landed gentry promoted. She seemed unhappy with him again and he could not understand why. A few months ago, this would have angered him, or caused him to worry about how to rectify the situation, but now he did not want to understand why. Situations like this now only left within him a dull tension that was bearable and would only deteriorate were you to fiddle with it further, like an old television with which one has made a compromise: accept the mild interference on the image, because if you start to play with the aerial any more you’ll lose the picture entirely. He would let her sleep now, and make sure to do something charming later to resolve the situation and save the weekend. He started to think about what this adorable act could be (should the situation call for it, he was, if he didn’t mind thinking so himself, always rather good at being adorable), but, petulant that it was again left to him ameliorate matters, he resolved that he would leave thinking it up on the bus from Chippenham. If she was still visibly irritated when she woke up then he wouldn’t bother, anyway. Right now, all that Leo wanted was to look out of the train’s window and to not think about it. He sighed, wondered if that was possible, and wished his iPod hadn’t run out of battery. He could really do with listening to ‘Born to Run’ right now.

 ............................

The village was quiet in a manner that justified the tour guides’ decision to label it serene. They ambled through the old square as a quaint sun shone past spires overhead. They had to amble; there wasn’t enough square to facilitate walking. There was a lot of thatch, though, and a few of pubs and tea shops. That was something they could see themselves doing: a blog had told them that they were supposed to like tea shops. Still, the overwhelming quietude of the village exposed other, less welcome silences, and they grew uneasy with one another. Leo lamented the lack of a Nando’s, in an attempt at compensatory charm for earlier. That only made things worse: unbeknownst to him, his river of charm had run dry a long time ago, and unveiled to Meg a bedrock of overwhelming conceit. Seeing as it was still eleven in the morning - the taverns were out of the question - they decided to sit down at the tables outside a tea room facing the Market Cross. They hoped the blog was right.

Each ordered an earl grey, both (mistakenly) thinking that it was the others favourite. When it arrived, they chinked their cups, and smiled at one another, dappled attractively by the beams refracted off mottled stonemasonry. There was a moment or two where nothing much was said. It was a rather prolonged moment. Meg was loathe to say ‘this is nice’ - that would be as much of a death-knell as bringing out the iPhone - so she delved forthwith into her bag, rifled about, and pulled out the stapled-together printouts she had pertaining to ‘The Prettiest Village in England.’

“I was thinking we could look at the church after this.  Apparently it has some rather lovely stained-glass windows.” She was hoping he’d fail to observe that she had never cared about stained glass windows before in her life.

He looked away from the indeterminate point in space that had been occupying his attention: “Where’s that?”

She regarded the printout, looked right past him, and pointed. “It’s right there.”

It really was right there. Where else would it have been?, they both asked themselves. There wasn’t a lot of town in which it could be.

“Sure, I guess,” he said, before resuming his previous ocular engagement.

She scoured to find something that would interest him further, resenting the fact that she once again had to do so. After a couple of minutes she felt she had reason to interrupt his activity once again.

“Apparently this place we’re staying tonight is haunted!”

“Yeah?” His eyes lit up.

They both loved ghosts. Things that had died and found within or without themselves the supracosmic wherewithal to actually come back fascinated them. They had discovered this shared enthusiasm a few months ago, and it had facilitated the most passionate, lengthy, and cod-philosophical conversation they had shared since the early days when they were still wrapped in each other’s illusions and their eyes were filled with smiles. During this talk, a rekindling felt immanent. Eventually, however, and before that connection could be consummated, something in the conversation had caused them to  stop, and they had been left agitated, awkward and unable to sleep. The accusatory silence had confused them both at the time, but its hidden meaning was beginning to dawn on them: that night they had exposed their shared desire for their relationship to come back, and in doing so they had betrayed the reality of its current state.

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Seven

There wasn’t really much else left to do after that happened. There wasn’t the time. Never again would Bob share shibboleths with as game a partner. Instead, he would continue to go out to Mike’s to get the paper every morning, and he would continue to sit in his usual moth-eaten chair by the window watching Loose Women. He’d simply carry on existing alongside those people he’d known for years whose names he had forgotten, and welcoming with a nod new arrivals whose names he would never both to learn. Not in the way that he learnt Estella’s name, at least: Bob had really learnt that name. He’d breathed it in and memorised it and engraved it into mossy stone. All its possible permutations had filled him with warmth at some point during one day or another: Estella; Stella; Stel; all of them were Estella. Sometimes he would go so far as to recite under his breath the five floating sashays followed by three sprightly skips that she insisted upon writing in the top right-hand corner of all her books’ first pages - Estella Ada Finn-Higgins  – and he’d be smiling, full-beam and gap-toothed, by the fourth syllable.

Did those sounds continue to mean anything, though, without a referent for them to sign? Were they names still, or merely elegies? Bob clung to the possibility that they might be something in-between. And perhaps they were, if the cosmos was kind.

To him, though, those phonemes simply didn’t hold the same truth that they had one; there was a time when they had once stood so much for life and the possibilities it still held. They still carried a sense of possibilities - he couldn’t deny that - but these were solely past potentialities, different vantage points the memory mass of his mind could recall to hold up against different lights of day. There were to be different interpretations and readings ahead of him of what had gone before, and yes, he’d look forward to them, but Bob began to feel the distinct impression that the bookshelf was already rather full.

*****

That evening, The X Factor was on television (it was too late for Loose Women). Bob was sitting in his usual chair, and had reached the page of the paper he usually reached at this hour. Unusually however, Bob’s eyes felt tired, and he felt no desire to read to the end of the world news section. He decided that this time, just this time, he would watch the television with his fellow residents instead.

There was a very old man stood on a stage, wearing trousers and a cowboy hat, but nothing else. He was rake thin, excepting a swollen medicine ball of a stomach, and the skin by his eyes that had wrinkled into crows’ feet so entrenched that they had resultantly swollen the leathery hide out around them, windows shuttered in the winter of the soul. The judges of the contest smiled at the man as he introduced himself as “Rob,” from Bristol. Bob was grateful for the diminutive selected.

Rob proceeded to sing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ at the top of jaundiced lungs, his voice cracking whenever a higher note even hinted to suggest itself, so that half of the performance was inaudible - one would be forgiven for thinking that somebody was toggling with the volume control were it not for the studio audience’s shouts of derision or patronising encouragement. At the end of this sporadically sonic performance, the crowd erupted into a cacophony of hoots and hollers, with close-ups showing audience members standing up, some of them even crying. The show cut back to Rob, exhausted on the empty stage. Between restorative heavy gasps, a smile shone through on that prune of a face, and Bob noticed that the performer’s eyes were blue. One of the judges asked Rob if he had enjoyed the performance, and the man’s head moved back-and-forward in a nodding so vigorous that it caused a chain reaction whereby the lined folds on his forehead whacked against the lipoma on the bridge of his nose. The judge with the Frankenstein’s monster profile asked him if he had anything to say to anybody watching.

“I’d like to say a big hello and thank you to my lovely wife, Jinnie, who’s here tonight.”

The crowd cheered more loudly than ever before - they loved that one. The programme cut to a close-up shot of Jinnie, who happened to have joined the crying crowd. She started when she realised when the camera was focused on her - self-consciousness revealing a humility that must have in some way been critical of her husband’s escapades – but she quelled it with alacrity, and her face was bounteous with affection and indulgence. The judges asked if she as proud of her husband, and she said that she was, yes - very much so. On any other day the directness of this sentimentality would have caused Bob to baulk, but it had been a long day, and he watched as Rob piped up with another crowd-pleaser:

“Eh Jinnie, my loverrr; we did it our way, didn’t we - eh?”

That one sent the crowd into paroxysm. Rob repeated the line once more, for good measure. Bob raised himself from his chair and walked away from a chorus of “aww”s and “bless”es performed by the other residents, who clearly appreciated the wordplay.

Bob made sure not to get in the way of the television as he got up.  

*************

He led what remained of his body down on his crumpled sheets and, leaving the lamp by his bedside table on, looked up at the ceiling for a time. Whereas the walls of the room were decorated with cream wallpaper wrought with stucco mottle, they all reached up towards the communal destination of a ceiling that was unadorned and painted white. He closed his eyes for a while, and then opened them again to look up at the ceiling once more. It was still plain. Outside, the surf sounded strange – almost as if it was moving in throbs rather than waves - and Bob, ill at ease, dragged himself out of bed to go over and close the window. Despite his actions, the thrum persisted, and seemed to permeate the room even more virulently than when the windows had been open; vibrations the aqueous mass emitted seemed to signal that there was something shifting within, and in response to this the abyss proffered an impersonal and indignant harrumphing at having to accommodate a presence that it had never hitherto assumed to be such a recalcitrant upstart. Maybe it would be better if he shut the curtain, too: they were awfully thick, oppressively woolly things which shut out sound as powerfully as a kiss shuts out dismay. Bob rose himself for what felt like the millionth time and ambled on over to the window. Before he closed the heavy cloth over the night, he observed that the sea appeared both closer and blacker, almost as if it had something to say to him personally, and as if that something was only expressible through bleak churn. Bob, quite sensibly, closed the curtains.

He might have been asleep for hours, or he might have only blinked. Time began to have discombobulated. Waking, he was then spurred on by an unknown sense that overcame sleep, which moved Bob over to the curtains and whispered to him to open them wide. Bob obeyed. A drawn George stared in at him, standing on the slippery sill. Bob looked into the revenant’s eyes, and something in them looked back at him. 

Once again, Bob closed the curtains in a manner that, considering the circumstances, could be described as sensible . He threw on his dressing gown, and, paying no heed to the brittle splinters snapping throughout his shins, made for the door. He threw it open, audibly pulling muscles in his arm that he had forgotten he possessed. The world reeked of rotting squid. He ran down the long green corridor towards the stairs, at whose top stood the recently deceased Ness, her eyes bloodshot from salt and her mouth frothing with sand. There was seaweed in her hair and she smelt of kelp. She smiled, but there were barnacles on her eyelids.

He fell down the last five stairs, and felt something in his back go never to come back. Looking up to whence he had fallen to see Ness slowly descending towards him, he noticed that her feet were webbed as if with rubber. Where those suction cups he had seen underneath that raised heel?

Bob pulled himself to his feet, and ran pell-mell across the foyer floor towards the Home’s main door. He felt parts of himself falling off. He pulled the door open, only to find himself standing in the middle of the empty peat-streaked Blackpool beach under static stars.

Bob looked about himself, only to see nothing but the boggy desert for kilometres in every direction. The Home was a dot on the horizon: he had seemingly skipped straight through the dunes. He found it hard to place himself, and he knew then that it would be impossible for anybody else to place him at all, being as he was now just a black speck on a dark horizon. All about him there was only dark, sand, and mud. He heard the sea, which must have been near, though the moonless night meant that he could not see it. This far out, he should have been submerged by it. Where was the tide that sang so?

The moon whispered itself into being, then, dappling Bob with pellucid ether. The sea was shown to him now: it had stopped singing, and for the timeless moment rested still and shimmering and sad. Bob squinted towards it, then, for he thought he saw shadows emerging from its surface, like ashen char espied prancing atop the lip of a dormant volcano. A clammy hand rested on his shoulder, and he turned to see what had up until very recently been George smiling at him, encouraging him with a nod to walk towards the shadows. Bob followed the advice, and began to approach the bounding main.

He kenned the shadows. Those silhouettes at the end of his sight made sense to Bob, and made sense to Bob alone, for they were that forever-dreamt-of palimpsest of inaccessible days yoked together and made flesh through absurd desire. Composed of remembered eyes and hearts and hopes, stood before him were the thens which he had all his life used to cloak himself against the now.


As he had always known that they would be, Rosalind and Estella were standing there, waiting for him, their ankles in brine. They both looked younger than they ever had, the moon’s light bouncing off eldritch skins beautifully scaled with a corpse porcelain suppurating a liminality the living can never witness. There they were, his loves, his love, his life, and they were laughing. Now they were sharing a private joke at his expense – he just knew that they were - and sending surreptitious smirks in his direction implying an understanding, and a home. Their laughter sent Bob's soul soaring against the starless night, ringing like a rushing brook against the locker's tomb silence. 


On this empty stretch under squid-inked night, the past faced up to the future, and the latter yawned. Bob walked on up to his histories, with nary a glance back to the dunes, and Estella and Rosalind’s arms opened up to him in watery welcome. They enveloped him, and they smelt of fish. The three of them began to dance together now, becoming one and all in a coagulating waltz moving towards a nameless city that was so long ago covered by that which our ancestors once happened to call the sea. This was the way in which, as salt-water rushed in to fill up his lungs, the cosmos decided to show Bob its kindness.