Richard Wiles sighed and tilted back on his chair, arms furled behind his neck.

He looked down at the carpet. It was of a design he did not favour - but who cared? Having come with all the other fixtures and fittings, he did not have a wife to worry unduly about mixing and matching the colours.

He laughed to himself, for if stupidity had been dosed out at birth, then his spoonful had been as from a ladle. Why had he bought this crumbling old house at all? Not that crumbling was something which could easily be attributed to it, despite its age, unless feelings were stranger than observations.

He stood up to peer through the semi-frosted glass at the desolate surroundings of creek and marsh. He had yet to spend his first night here, tonight in fact, and he shuddered, his flesh seeming fleetingly to work loose from the bones.

Little could he afford this strange edifice but, let it be said, he had been shot through with the solidity of the walls; they gave off an earth magic he could never have explained, even to himself. The walls were standing thick and mighty, indicating, beyond too much argument, that the house had been planted at this spot in an indefinably distant past and would still be there at the end of Adam's line. The place was riddled with it. But at the back of his mind...

Folly! Folly! Rich as he might be, he would find it almost impossible to upkeep such a spread. Loneliness was not to be the only other problem, either, for he believed, he was sure, in ghosts: he did not know whether this was as the result of influences outside himself, but he suspected that a whole hive of them lurked in the upper galleries of the house ... a situation he viewed with mixed feelings.



He was started awake by a loud scraping sound rising from below stairs. He had chosen one of the bedrooms in the top storey as master over all the other ones and he had laid his troubled brow there on the pillows plumped up by the batting-lady during one of her late excursions from the kitchen areas. The log fire had long since died away; the ashes crumbling into the grate had earlier disturbed his beauty sleep.

The noise was of someone scrubbing the kitchen's stone floor - but surely not now at this time of night! Too loud by half. He scrambled further from the grasp of dreams, for the ghastly scraping continued its growing din - chafing against a frightful grain. It was climbing the stairs! Rubbing two rough-cut granite blocks together, climbing the stairs? Wiles tried to calm the pangs and cramps which were taking purchase of his limbs. Not yet reconciling himself to the fear that was stirring up his imagination, he heard the scraping nearer and nearer, louder and louder, until it actually passed right outside his bedroom door.

Cutt House gradually retained its respectful silence. But Wiles failed to sleep for the rest of the night, stewing, fretting, threshing...



Morning came with the sun shafting through the open beams of the bedroom window, dissipating the final remains of night and its attendant fears. Wiles was remarkably freshened at the sight of a golden-eyed breakfast, brought to him by the batting-lady and, as he admired the well-turned coddling egg, he asked whether she had heard any ... peculiar noises in the night.

She had slept like a log, sir. She couldn't, Wiles felt, be stirred even by her husband's lovemaking.

She had been batting-lady to the old Cutt family until they sold up to Wiles. The last of the Cutt masters, the seventh in the line, had died unexpectedly. How? Wiles had failed to discover; the batting-lady continued to assume an air of ignorance and indifference on the subject. Wiles had gained the impression that the Cutt family had literally fled the house. However, he could not remember whether he had learnt this before or after his committment to the house.

The batting-lady returned every morning with stacks of crusty bread and pancakes dripping with molasses. But the scraping itself did not return ... for a while.



In the intervening days, he researched the Cutt family history by visiting the house's cellar library. The earliest reference was in "The Annals of Time" by William Mather, dated 1687. There was one particular passage which came off the page at him, telling of a certain John Cuthe who had built this very house. He had wanted a really solid construction and, although the book grew vaguer here, it had evidently been designed with certain experiments in mind. To this lonely marshy spot, Cuthe had transported mighty blocks of stone that would have set the toters of Stonehenge cringing ... thick and solid, impenetrable, already tested by eons of undecaying. The floors and rafters were made meticulously of the most tightly grained oak. This peerless strength was shafted into the deepest foundations that it was possible to dig. How many labourers werehired remained unclear ... but they could not find billets enough for them in the nearest villages.

Another rotting volume with "War in Spain" by Charles Dipp on the spine, had within a manuscript, presumably a diary of John Cuthe himself, dated 1681. The words had been fading for centuries, but Wiles managed to glean a few strings of sense from it, viz. "rock hath hardness on the Sabbath", "my wife doth not like that which I do", "the core didst suck well tonight", "there is a cuckoo which pecketh ever", and further such cryptic phrases meandered across the badly foxed pages, as if the fluid Cuthe used as ink still possessed a life of its own.

Mystification on the heels of folly! Wiles shrugged at such arrant nonsense, but the cellar library itself bothered him - it was bitten deep into profound bedrock and vaguely, instinctively, he began to think he felt the bowels of the earth pulsating beneath his feet ... as if a stony heart were throbbing.

Another disturbance of the night was to follow ... and yet another a few weeks later. Wiles sat bolt up like an automaton at the first hint of scraping. Teeth on edge, a desultory dream of chalk screeching on a blackboard, turning into some insidious joker scratching his uncut nails along a plaster wall and, finally, into an anguished mockery of reality itself. Every nerve of his bones, every cavity of his skull winced ... and his nails were likely plucked one by one from his fingers and toes. Hideous friction within the otherwise loose-limbed fibre of his soul. Up the stairs, past the bedroom door, dying away into relative silence, scraping, grating its time-worn course.



Then Wiles met Eugene Cutt, heir of the late James Cutt. He had to be sought out in London, where he had fled following a particular fracas at the house, the superficialities of which even the batting-lady had cause to remember (but pretend she had forgotten).

Wiles could not easily sell up. Nor could he forget the troubles of Cutt House since he felt a force driving him to plumb the intrigues and unseasonable hauntings of the night. If he left without attempting to rationalise it all, and thus creating an acceptable smokescreen context to the wrenching in his very gut, a force which he had no option but to call Terror would then tread on his tail till his life's end and into death. He had to open that bedroom door, even if metaphorically, at the height of the scraping and he would do it, come what may, with Eugene Cutt by his side.

Wiles did not have reason to like this last human remnant of the Cutts called Eugene but, not being able to put his finger on it, he trusted him. This was despite the outlandish tales that Wiles forced from him.

Cutt was shamefaced to learn that the house had not shaken off its troubles, following the departure of he whose ancestors had set it all in motion in the first place. He should have come clean at the outset. He murmured behind his hands so Wiles could not catch it all.

"I thought us Cutts were the only ones to be cursed by the Infinite Cuckoo..." Eugene touched his temples, as if to say he had the bird in there anyway, to forgive himself talking poppycock. "Yes, I must tell you all. I should have told you before you instructed your solicitors yes, I will explain myself, sir, not before time, as you say ... yes, yes, you have the right to know, I'm so very sorry. I don't know where to begin..."

The dawn chorus in London comes even sooner than that in the country, and for a time Cutt's voice was hindered by the many parkland squawks.

"Yes, I'll try to begin ... the first of the Cutts made a pact with the Core of our earth. He called up the power of the Core ... the legend goes that there is an unholy force at the centre of the earth, a knot of stone needing sustenance. A sick force..."

Wiles winced as he felt his own stomach crawl towards his throat. His toes curled, for the ground shook with the passage of a tube train.

"The core lusts for everything, to be the core of nothing, if you see ... well, legend, true, but my ancestors died for it. The Core feeds on humanity, on mineral, on anything. Soaking them down through the white stone of the earth's inner crust, to the curdling oceans of cream. The story goes that it has allies amongst humanity, like my original forebear, and it has given birth to its own allies, to provide food for it, such as the Infinite Cuckoo..." Again he lightly touched his temples.

Wiles complained to himself that ghosts he could even barely begin to believe in ... but this was undreamable!

"I tend to agree with you and, seeing you here, has persuaded me that the mystery must finally be solved. The curse of the House of Cutt must be lifted, it's my obligation."

Breakfast was stony silent, for they were in communion. Wiles envisioned a chaos that gave birth to the cosmos. He saw the Core sucking in all in its path, firstly things on the earth, then the earth itself, turning it inside out as it were. Then gobbling the rest of the universe.

Out of the Core came life, space and time, and now it was lusting for its original nature, God to Dog without passing Go. No wonder his mind raced out of control, in paradoxicons of fear and awe. But hardly more than sub-intellectual concepts ... hardly a solution for Cutt House!



They travelled across the wild marshes, late in the afternoon. The flatness was so vast, only broken by an odd malformed tree, Wiles chuckled at ideas that God must have entered a horizon-throwing competition when creating this part of the world, and had won it hands down. The first glimpse of the house was a travesty of such fennish nothingness.

Little to do that night ... and they retired early, not without noticing that the batting-lady had been busy peeling wallpaper in the hallway. Richard Wiles and Eugene Cutt were as ready as they could be for what was about to unfold...



The following afternoon, they began a systematic exploration of the whole mighty structure of the house. They ripped up floorboards, tapped the walls, including those recently stripped by the batty; they left no stone unturned, but nothing was to be found. They knew instinctively that the cellar library was a prime place to concentrate their efforts. Day after day, they chiselled at its stone floor, chipped away at the rutted wall, only breaking off to delve deeper into the mouldering volumes interminably lining its cavern walls.

Then success came. Cutt, re-examining the floor more closely, discovered a swirling-shaped knot in the stone, a flaw created at the beginning of time in earth's raw material, no doubt. Wheeling his finger around it several times, he received what he felt as a touch of power, but this was soon forgotten by a fever of activity, since a part of the stone surface had slid away, to reveal a pit of white mud.

"Richard! Richard!" he shouted, forgetting formalities in the mode of address, and Wiles came running. Glancing downward with a shudder, he saw the hole in the actual bedrock of the earth full of shifting slime, even now starting to burp and seethe as it met the air of the library.

"O, my dear God!" blurted Wiles. "It's so ... utterly pure white!"

It heaved and twitched, put out sticky fingers and melded lumps of pink-veined fat.

"O God, please shut it! For the sake of sanity, shut it!" moaned Wiles, turning away in disbelief from the cacky blubber.

Cutt, re-tracing the convoluted knot of stone in the floor, closed the rocky cover above the nightmare albino pus. All he could say, like a visitor in a dream, was "Cuckoo-spit! Cuckoo-spit!" over and over again.

Both men soon recovered from their shock. They simply now knew that they had discovered the power house of the building. They must keep watch over it, at all times. The disturbances had not occurred since Cutt's return to the house, so one was to be expected at any time. That night, they both sat by the "hole", furnished with revolvers, a net and a heavy-duty pick-hammer. What they inteded to do with these they had not the slightest idea. But nothing happened on that, the first night after discovering the "hole".

The second was a different story. Or they wished it had been.



The hurricane lamp threw distorted shadows across the rocky walls. Then, they heard it, after a long night of diffident conversation. Very faint, at first, and still vilely slow: it was the scraping sound which Wiles had heard on the first night in the house, initially like the scrubbing of a stone floor and then sickeningly like two ill-shaped granite blocks being rubbed together. It seemed to rise from the very soul of the earth, nearer and nearer with every gasp bursting from their lips.

"Let's get out of here!" screamed Wiles.

"No, wait! We can only see this thing out!" shouted Cutt in an attempt to be heard against the rasping din, his eyes afire with terror's orgasm of fear.

From that point on, all was very simple, so simple it more or less describes itself, with merely the lightest narrative intervention by one whose memory survived the affair.

The stone lid moved from above the ungodly scraping, revealing the turmoil of gulping whiteness below. Out of these churning separates of blinding muck, there rose a beaked head. Its huge elbows levered up the bony branches of its malformed body.

A mammoth bird, insidiously cuckoo-like, vented from the depths of its muscle-ripped chest those musical notes that usually welcomed Spring, but here meant death.

It was the grisly beak champing which was the appalling snicker-snacker of its scraping.

Congealed in its runnelled flesh was the white juice of its birth, of its hideous hatching and, although moving in concrete, it migrated from the poultry devil of mediaeval art to twentieth century's version of reality with the greatest of ease.

Wiles screamed and screamed as the birdish thing clambered from the roiling pit and grated over the floor towards them. Cutt was silent, but quivered and twitched uncontrollably,

Simultaneously, the earth throbbed apocalyptically and, many horizons away, a volcano lost its guts.

On and on came the clucking beast with stone bones, on and on, and took Cutt into its beak, raised him from the floor and whiplashed his body with a sabre-rattling yelp. Wiles saw the blood pumping from Cutt's mouth and striping the creature's creamy breasts; and Cutt's head, severed at the root, fell into the sickly curds of the Core.

The cuckoo sank back, duly satisfied. And finally, all Richard Wiles could see was the slime surging, imploding...

He could not budge, for he realised, realised that what he ridiculed was in fact ridiculing him, realised that the universe was doomed, if not already extinct; and, with an insane shriek, jumped into the virgin pit, to forget that to which he had now sacrificed himself.

Sydney Greatorex lived a long while in the past. Too early for checking out in any sense historical or fictitious. But the expectations lived on.

Expectations that he would return like a lost messiah and tell us why.





"Any idea why?"

The speaker nodded as if answering his own question. His student—a female one—blushed. She thought she was here for yet another Dickens seminar, but Dr Rebock managed to make any atmosphere seem dirty; despite there being insufficient salaciousness in Pip or Magwitch to warrant such leering from a crusty old don towards an attractive young lady from St Osyth. The non sequitur of his question—fired from between thin yellow lips and splattering his huge frayed waistcoat with a thin spray of saliva—threw her momentarily off balance.

But then: "I feel, Dr Rebock, that the symbolism of the escaped convict purely represents Dickens' self-denial regarding his own soul, keeping it locked away as one would any evil, only for it to suddenly emerge, unbidden, to taint the innocent Pip..."

Dr Rebock, with a lurch, which in turned threatened to topple him from his seat, began to laugh.

"My dear Miss Jay, I know the 'flu epidemic has prevented the two gentlemen to attend this seminar so, please, please, let me say what I think that at least one of them would have said. Too many symbols clog the story, they'd say, and why does Magwitch need to represent anything?"

Myra Jay just stared ahead of her. She wondered if Pip was just another word for core or heart or soul. She had been taught to analyse fiction to the nth degree, wringing sense from the slightest innuendo of semantics or accident of syntax or coincidence of expression or sound of a word's phonetics or just the look of a word as opposed to its meaning. Dr Rebock was no doubt acting as Devil's Advocate in this argument, putting himself in the place of the absent students, those unimaginative idiots whom he'd often seen leaning against the college bar. In her heart, Myra knew that she was in danger. One-to-one was never easy at the best of times.





Sydney Greatorex looked down from a great height. He thought he was God. He could see that Rebock was indeed a reincarnation of Magwitch; in certain universes, you see, even fictitious characters could come back to life as real people, whilst real people, in turn, could later reassemble themseves as fictitious characters; real person-to-person reincarnation was also possible, Sydney being a throwback from Dickens himself or, perhaps, even a precursor of that bear-headed gentleman with the roar of a reading-voice and pen of many colours (including Victorian grey)...

Sydney suddenly turned round on his Grecian plinth to see himself being watched by someone who wanted to become Sydney Greatorex or wanted Sydney Greatorex to become him.

"Stop staring."

Both said this at the same time.





Myra Jay left Dr Rebock's study, glad that she had protected her honour with a swift response to his increasingly garbled repartee.

"I feel something working round me, Dr Rebock, so please excuse me," she had said, grabbing her brief case and essay notes. She had implied it was the 'flu.

"Think nothing of it," he had roared at her parting figure.

She felt whatever-it-was stirring in her stomach, a new consciousness aiming to invade her brain, in the mistaken belief that the brain housed the mind, if not the soul.





Magwitch crouched behind the gravestone, breathing hard, as he followed, with his eyes, the small figure.

"There'll be a fire one day, boy, a fire that'll leap across the festive table...", he whispered to himself. He knew the plot was failing to follow the correct channels laid down for it. The boy was fleeing up the sodden lane, having sensed the whisper of Magwitch on the air like a spray of saliva.





Sydney fiddled with his harp. It needed re-stringing. There was no tightness there. Each pluck was a twang.

He looked down again. He saw the one big WHY painted in the air below, as if it were plumes of white smoke left there by passing aeroplanes. Then through the ghostiness of even lower clouds, he spotted the humped shape of Dr Rebock churning, with furled umbrella, through the college quadrangle, his blimp of a bulk wobbling in uncharacteristic haste. Sydney clucked, recognising the route, sensing that even this don could thread an eye of a needle better than the lollopping camel he would otherwise have resembled. In short, Rebock was heading towards the high-rise student digs. Whether Rebock was out to stir those blockhead absentees from their 'flu-ridden beds or intent on deflowering Miss Jay whilst she was still dozy with Lemsip, Sydney was not yet sufficiently omniscient to judge.





Pip snuggled in his bed, trying to sweat out the fever by natural means. You see, Boots had not yet opened.

Not even a twinkle in its founder's eye.

But, then, of course, Pip dreamed fitfully of a girl called Myra. She would have to change her name for her face to fit, however. He smiled. There were many women he would cross, in times to come. Fictitious as well as real ones. He wouldn't be kind to any of them, given the chance to survive the dose of the hot rots that fed to the very bottom bone of his soul ... no doubt a dire dank disease caught in the graveyard from the rancid air given off by a mouth too big to close. It'd consume a flitch of bacon in one fell swoop soon as swallowing was within its power. The fetid room. The feeding frenzy. The rank ripeness of an apple. Pip thickening into a chuck-steak stew.





Dickens swore he was still alive. As if he were the world itself. A Pantheism of all things real and unreal, true and fictitious. A god of gods. A heavenly feaster-with-panthers. A progenitor of every soul, good and bad.

So even Sydney Greatorex must be one of his creations.

"No I'm not!" abruptly claimed the said Sydney from his plinth.

"Am I your creation, then?" Dickens asked.

Sydney glumly shook his head.

"Perhaps, there is a creator greater than us both," said one of them; it is uncertain which.

"And if it is not one of us?" said the other.

"Rebock, then. Perhaps it's Rebock who controls us all?"

"Surely not that damned cemetery toad!"

"Who then?"

"And why?"

There was silence, there being very little expectation of reply.

Written years ago but unpublished

I sat in the park, wondering why it was so dark, when my instinct (as well as my wristwatch) told me it was Noon. Even the TV weather forecast had indicated a sunny day, not this wall-to-wall sky of stars and empty gaps. The trees shook in a breeze: a sudden unexpected disturbance of the otherwise still air which, in my experience, only happened during the small hours of night. There was an ill-lit moon which, true, did manage to pick out for me variously sized children playing on the swings and roundabouts; courting couples cuddling on the grass in the normally discreet fashion that daylight usually dictated; park-keepers tending to the seemingly dark monochrome flower-beds with trowels and hoes; the flapping silhouettes of shrikes even darker than the sky itself...

I woke with a scream.



Grace had come in from the kitchen, red-faced, near to tears, holding her left fingers, which were already forming blisters following a relatively bad scald on a plate that had been under the grill.

"Shit!" she said quietly, as she battled with various emotions: annoyance with herself, annoyance with me (for leaving the plate there as the cheesy mash crusted), determination to appear brave, determination to make me sorry for her state of crumpling up under the pain.

I took one look at the fingers and suggested it was a hospital job.

"Naw! I've dashed cold water over them," she near sobbed out.

"I'll find the Germolene," I offered, getting up from before the blank-screen of the TV. I found it quite calm staring towards the erstwhile entertainment centre, despite its being broken.

At that moment, our three children arrived home from school. They usually turned up in ones or twos, but, today, was different. Apparently the town centre where their schools were situated had been evacuated following a bomb scare. Hence, their excitability. As it was too late in the day for them to need returning, they scuttled up the stairs to their own individual live TV sets in bedroom land, having given a cursory glance at Grace's hand—deciding whatever she'd done to it was not serious enough to prevent an establishment of untimely routines for their precocious evening. And, yes, by the time I had managed to find (with some difficulty) the topless tube of old-looking Germolene, I, too, saw that Grace's injuries were far from life-threatening.

Only life itself can threaten life. Death is merely the spin-off.

Well, my name is Jeremy Twist (unrelated to the Dickensian character), married to Grace Twist, née Saraband, both of us pretending we had three children, whereas, in reality, we had none at all. Not for the want of trying. There was something physical in our make-up, as if we were always connected—even when, bodily, we were miles apart. As far as any unlikely bystanders were concerned, this invisible phenomenon crossed some hyperspatial ocean, whilst, to Grace and myself, it was more like a telephone wire of plaited flesh, quite otherwise transcending our fitful and clumsy attempts at normal sex.

Such mixed-up matters were not, however, very conducive to procreation. Much to our sorrow.



I shook off these crazy preoccupations. I needed to go shopping for sandwich bread and cucumbers, together with a quarter of Earl Grey. My Aunt Teresa (Terry) was coming for tea. She was younger than me but I still called her Auntie, more as an in-joke rather than anything of more nephewly respect. Grace was quite friendly with sweet Terry, too, both of them sharing sisterly shopping jaunts up west in combined attempts to beat Council Tax bills to the bank. How I had such a young, yet fullblooded, Aunt was to do with the wide spread of child-bearing in which my Mother's Mother had indulged—in tune with a different age of non-political correctness and sexy sexism.

Maternity, in the old days, was a combination of mutual back-slapping and career gossipping: starting as soon as the womb could warm sufficient spaghetti connections into autonomous life and continuing until it was cold enough to keep plasma as well as pasta indefinitely. Birth and cryogenics were just two sides of the old coin. In vitro fertilization another way of spinning it. Or just another way of dying.

"What time is Terry actually coming?" asked Grace, as she bent close to the hieroglyphics of a knitting pattern (one for a toddler's jodhpurs). Her needles clacked together on her lap, each spoke at cross purposes with the skein of wool she was simultaneously trying to ball up. She hadn't even started casting anything on.

"Auntie's due about three," I answered, casting off.



Lady Teresa Mandeville (Terry to her friends and relations) was at this very moment holding court in her own Commonside apartment. Despite the aura she still retained from a sweet childhood, many of her visitors were quite scared of her knitted brows when (as they thought) they had said something quite innocent. Today, was a case in question. Rifty (Thomas Riftage) was a dwarfish individual who often ensconced himself in Terry's corner, hoping not to be noticed, merely basking in the state of having company. He was a rare and antiquarian book-seller, whose brain was like a bookshelf of dog-eared dust-wrappers without the books inside to keep them from flopping over. The whites of his eyes, like old pages, were foxed. Rifty had merely announced—quite uncharacteristically—that Terry (their hostess) looked decidedly blooming today. What was he after?
"I beg your pardon," said Terry, her voice thickening through lack of refreshment. She was storing up her appetite for nibbles at mine. She hated consuming anything. So, she delayed and delayed, threatening anorexic angst in various parts of her body. Mind and flesh were two-way filters of impending infection. Not that she perceived the battles within her in such a light.

"You're looking fit and well, dear Terry," continued Rifty, oblivious of the uncharted waters into which he had accidentally waded. "Better than I've ever seen you." He was digging a pit both for himself and for his shit—in that order.

Terry imagined digging her cultivated nails into his neck.

Then into her own, to prevent the shit becoming shit.

Bulimia was never quite her sick-bag. She preferred prevention to cure. Diversion to hindsight.

Often, my wife Grace, was party to these lunchtimes at Terry's apartment, after which they could both abscond to the frock shops. But, today, there were two other girls, so young they were not fully grown, of similar flimsy frame as Grace's, and Terry was free to admire their slender charms amid the diversionary company of Rifty and the portly man who kept a butchers shop on the other side of the Common. She forgot the name.

The two girls were called Felicity and Carmel. Now that Grace was thickening slightly more at the waist, it was such a delight for Auntie Terry to be bringing up these svelte creatures to take Grace's place. Soon, Grace would indeed be consigned to the dark. And, then, Lady Teresa Mandeville would no longer—the sooner the better, perhaps—need to visit me for unseemly afternoon teas. But, not quite yet. There was still at least some mileage for her in Grace Twist.

After Aunt Terry had left, the company were trusted to stay in the apartment and help themselves to the refreshments which had been kept out of sight for the sake of propriety.

Out of sight, meant out of mind. Now, as they mindlessly tucked in, the butcher (whose name can now be revealed as Michael Ogham, a small tradesman of high standing, despite his calling) beckoned Felicity and Carmel to have a dance. He was turning the handle on Terry's wind-up, ready to insert the rusty needle into the well-grooved jive music. He imagined the two girls laid out on his bloody trestle back at the shop, his axe raised to part joint from joint, knowing exactly where the bones were in such revealing skin-tight shapes so as to avoid nasty crunches and unacceptable pain. Meanwhile, Rifty had got for himself spiked chunks of cheese and pineapple and was shaking his smiling head from side to side in readiness for the rhythms. But never judge a book by its cover. Inside, Rifty was a turmoil of anxiety about the ensuing darkness. It had been his dream, not mine, after all.



Outside her apartment, Terry had managed to hail a taxi, despite most of such black beasts crawling over the innermost parts of the city, rather than here around the Common. The driver was ignoring her presence in the backseat. She had forgotten to tell him where she wanted to go (my place in Croydon) and he had, supposedly, forgotten to ask. Still, she had managed to make this identical journey on several previous occasions. And thus was tantamount to déjà vu.



"It's gone three," said Grace, as she packed up her knitting.

"Not much past," I said. I peered into the darkening window overlooking East Croydon Station. It was the season when evenings arrived earlier every afternoon.

The sandwiches were already made. The minute cucumber steaks sticking from the sides like scarred finger-tips. Grace was so tired she had cocktail spikes propping up the eyelids. Cherries on splintered skewers. Old-looking tea in the samovar was already refusing further to infuse. Thickening into an ointment mixed with dark brown blood.

Crawling out of Grace's eyes, towards mine, a twisted plait of uncast ectoplasm stretched.

Through the unlit air, the window cast its glow upon the street below.

There drove to a halt outside a black set of wheels, headlights doused, and Terry alighted, trailing two wee spirits in her tailwake. But unseen, straggling behind, was that nameless fat Shite of a butcher with a chopper...

I screamed as I desperately tried to open my dust-wrapped eyes.

I had forgotten fate had already allowed me to locate the Germolene.

THE MEANING OF DES
First published 'The Weirdmonger's Tales' (WYRD PRESS 1994)

The writing came too easy. Not at all like a letter of apology which, more often than not, was a question of breaking each word upon the page as one would eggs into a sizzling pan - some resulting in ruptured yolks, others perfect domes islanded by a thick-whitening sea, such sea itself another island. Nor like a love-letter. Nor a novel. Nor even a story to be frittered away in a reader's moment of nothing better to do.

No, what Des was writing so easily were thoughts. Thoughts that should never have been written. Thoughts forcing themselves into the pen and, then, upon the page, as if their life depended on being thus expressed. During each hiatus between their fitful inscriptions in ink, Des retrieved his own thoughts from the scrambled brain, one of which being his erstwhile surprise at the ease the writing came. That's where we came in - if 'we' was a pronoun with which you could be saddled.

For all Des knew, you might have been the perpetrator of the thoughts and, hence, of the writing itself. If that is so, he certainly hoped you were a nice 'you': not a vampire, nor a werewolf, nor a wraith, nor a zombie. Particularly not a zombie. If you were a zombie, all Des's theories as to the nature of these words and their autonomous source would have been thrown out of kilter. Zombies were not intended to have thoughts of their own, were they?

No answer.

Maybe that was the answer.

Thankfully, the act of writing became less easy, which indicated that Des was regaining control of the thoughts generating such writing. Bit by bit, as he moved against the grain of the thoughts, he brought his own mind to bear, so that it controlled the hand which controlled the fingers which controlled the pen which controlled the ink. Still, the words were never his. Not wholly his. Yet, they were now no longer steeped in a 'he' but in a 'we': a step in the right direction, perhaps - but he could not be satisfied until an 'I' had full automatic jurisdiction. He needed to turn the 'we' into an 'I', near as dammit: the double yolk to a single capsule of yellow slime.

Fearsome creatures of the night, those monsters that most of us dream about existing without really believing in their intrinsic existability, well, such creatures fed off the words we worked. Without words, such terrors would've been even more tenuous, if not mere phantoms of the mind. Vampires were stitched with icons, albeit those visual imprints ..uloid or, even more real, those imaginable vessels of verbal meaning, words, so-called, describing words with different words. Werewolves, too. Ghosts were even more real by dint of bearing less substance per se, but that was because they were indeed more insubstantial as creatures went. So, words were the ideal medium for such whiskery wraiths: spectral semantics of the spirit: utterly graspable by virtue of being endemically ungraspable. Finally, zombies. Those lurching lynch-pins of lobotomy, those lumbering lickspittles with a lavatory-chain - some mummified, others merely banadaged like the invisible man, yet others as bare as the day as they were not born. Like werewolves, zombies had the moon as their cursor - and, more often than not, zombies sported wolfwhiskers to make them more like men. Yet, zombies yearned for the tenuousness of ghosts, so that they could haunt themselves with at least a smidgeon of ratiocinative consciousness. Zombies envied vampires for knowing their own minds. Vampires were never at cross purposes with each other.

Our thoughts were gathering page-pace, weren't they? Almost time to ladle the hot oil-skinned yolks from deadpanned existence. One last chance to separate the whites from the bone-shells, the 'I' from the 'we', the present from the past. I'm writing with an invisible ink. What else can an invisible man do? Hope you (or someone like you) can type it up for me: on a word-processor. Whisked words: if only for the cake mixture. Beaten words. The proof of the egg-pudding is in the eating and in the gnawing and the gobbling, gulping, guzzling and the girning and the gypping up. The eye is in the seeing. In the seeping and the weeping. Behold, I love you and I'm sorry.

A certain indication of a possibility.

The flatness of the paper feels clean and crisp under the heel of the hand. I often feel awkward at a keyboard, facing a screen, eyes primed for finding gaps in the processed prose. It's all too easy to slip in and out of modes. With these new-fangled things, there's no excuse for not rewriting whole passages or inserting brand new paragraphs like cancerous growths. Even the words seem to dodge about the screen like viral tics, the tireder I get. No, I feel much better with a pen in my hand. Man and word, face to face. Texture and meaning. It's a pity that the publisher will turn it all back into neat rows of impersonal print. I prefer the jumble, the scribble, the squashed insect crossings out.



The publisher stares coldly at me as I shuffle into the front office, a sheaf of papers tucked tightly under his armpit. The man I've to see is Mr Ogg.

"I'm due to see Mr..."

Damn, I've forgotten the name. I hastily fish in my pocket with the free hand for the appointment card I may have abandoned somewhere at home. Thank goodness, it's still there - but all the details have been crossed out - as if the words are dead beetles and the meeting was cancelled at the last moment.

"There is nobody here of that name. Are you sure you have the right address?"

But all I'm sure about is the impossibility of having yet said anybody's name.



Des sat back, head resting on his finger-locks.

The screen blinked; somewhere else in the city there must have been a short. The piece was not heading in the right direction. He decided to pilfer a section from another piece and plant it between two sections in this one. He often made things grow from the middle. Beginnings and endings got in the way, usually. He leant towards the keys again, running lightly over them with the barest touches.



I've been ushered into an even more Kafkaesque office behind the first one. At least I've managed to find my way past the jobsworths. Mr Ogg'll no doubt see me shortly, even with a blotted appointment card. But how long is shortly? In Mr Ogg's world, probably forever, or as good as. Definitely dubious. The only string worth measuring is the fray-ended one I always used to keep in my trouser pocket at school, amongst the bubblegum. Finally, an unimposing individual closes the door after him.

"Yes, can I help you?"

"Well, I've an appointment to deliver this to your safekeeping. It's my novel. I've been working on it man and schoolboy."

I release the papers from the crook of my arm and they fall with a thud upon the desk. Smiling, I remember with what care I tied up the papers earlier in the day. The knot has red sealing-wax helmetting it. When I melted it with the lighter it made me feel heady. Now I'm proud of a job worth doing.

"I'm afraid we do not read unsolicited manuscripts."



But it might have been a masterpiece. What did they know, if they hadn't read it? Des's fingers raced over the keys in a fury. The screen flashed red. He felt tired. But he must plug on. Get the words out of his own system into another's. Make the meanings buzzzzzzzzzzzz.

But there is something decidedly unsatisfactory about it. The title has turned out entirely irrelevant. Nothing's been thought out properly; least of all the ending. I never know how long a piece will be until it finishes. It might turn into a blockbuster novel. In any event, the pen has run out of ink: a sure sign of a likely metamorphosis into something shorter.

Thus, time for simple chitchat face to face. Des's a chatterbox. So am I. So are you, no doubt - although neither Des nor I have any narrative control over you, which goes without saying, supposedly. But you're not a chatterbox in the usual sense of that word - because you often chat in writing. Your pen (with more ink than liquid death) races across the page at breaknib speed, spilling words to all sides, like there are no tomorrows. But you do not write for publication. You do not even write letters to your friends (if friends you have). You merely produce, for their own sake, sheaves of paper which grow into white mountains, with a million weaving paths of strange, indecipherable foot-, paw- and claw-marks turning the ruled lines into haphazard slopes like false clues in an Alpine paper chase.

That is not to say you are dumb - you possess a tongue and you indeed use it to form words in your mouth rather than on paper. You suck on them like boiled sweets, before releasing them into the light of day. But why do you need to speak? You are on your own most of the time after all. Well, YOU SPEAK TO YOUR WORDS AND THEY SPEAK BACK. More frightening than all those aforementioned monsters put together. Some of the words accuse you of plagiarism, of you using them willy nilly without due regard for their true meaning and, often, of not using them at all so that they will become mere redundancies or archaisms. In short, you are a great believer in the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

THE MEANING OF A WORD IS ITS USE, apparently, was that fellow Wittgenstein's great maxim. And perhaps there is more than just a grain of truth in that. For example, if the word DUSTBIN is used several times instead of TELEVISION, and it catches on with others, after a while, DUSTBIN will mean TELEVISION. Wittgenstein spent several complex volumes expounding and explaining that theory.



There was a whole clutch of words that banded themselves into a trade union - they came from the left-hand pages of the dictionary - and complained to Des that he never even bothered to use them. There they were, God-fearing words, as good as any, pregnant with multifarious shades of meaning, honest to goodness phoneme-clusters, almost erotic if he simply took enough trouble to get his mouth round them or filled his pen up with them.

They hustled and bustled, they badgered, and he finally decided to surrender to their whims. He gingerly took each one, like a gem, lifted it to the light, assessed the contrast of facet upon facet, bit into it to test its currency and bowled it along the table to see how far it would go. He carved some into monsters and, in the end, set them up against each other to see if they either fought tooth and nail or entered into a form of sexual communion with the view to hatching neologisms.

But, soon, words lost all their shine. He was now forced to take whole mouthfuls and roll them off his tongue so as to make them shape up. But, being so rarified, few even reached his ears. Even fewer managed to attain the paper, via the channels of the fountain pen; however, those that did manage to do so spun round like dying bluebottles and, with cries of semantic pain, merely became little more than smudges.

Even today, I can still hold reasonable conversations with brand new words Des once concocted. But, sooner or later, they will flee the cuckoo's nest of my brain and take up home in other people's meanings, your meanings. Or fall prey to the Dyslexia monster. Or be regurgitated by the worst chatter-box of all: the twenty-four hour electric dustbin in the sitting-room corner. And then Des will have an abandon-edit 'me', like everybody else, mindlessly swatting each 'you' with a folded dictionary as it buzzzzzzes near to oggle him overegging the cake of literature.

Published 'Psychopoetica' 1996

If, indeed, I could explain the day itself, nestling as it seemed between Monday and Tuesday, I'd be a normal man - or a more normal man, able to return, in his smart suit, to his 9 to 5 office job. I was due in North London for a business meeting, one of the few that I'm now asked to attend - in contrast to a few years ago when there were many more, all over England ... but for some rea­son, there's not so much call these days for me to make visits outside the office. Being early (as was my wont) and not knowing the area at all well, I decided to rest my weary bones in Highgate Wood quite close to the venue of the meeting.

This wood turned out to be a delightful green oasis of towering trees and twittering birds in the midst of relentless roads and gaping undergrounds - and as I settled down upon a bench, I could still hear the traffic on Muswell Hill Road ... a noise like some outraged (or outrageous) God muttering at my escape from his jurisdiction.

The day was Monday. I'm certain the day was Monday ... except. an hour later, after I emerged from the secret garden (for that was how my mind had idealised this retreat) and following my typically apposite arrival for the meeting, I was informed by an officious receptionist that I had missed the meeting by one whole day. In­deed, once upon a time, there was a wood in the middle of a city which, for a specific day each year, had a sabbatical from time. It was forced to have this Awayday, since life in the city was other­wise unbearable. Thus, God allowed the wood's spirit-of-place to become an annual oasis of non-existence, where not even trees nor birds could disturb the peace let alone His own self-confessed grumbling attentions to its natural processes.

Unlike death, which is probably the longest holiday of all, this day-break into nothingness could spruce up the trees and wood­land paths, harmonise the birdsong and remove the litter which the local council had missed. Death, on the other hand, being the mother and father of a day-off, served very little purpose in itself, only encouraging those who believed in reincarnation to come out of the woodshed and prance about in smart birthday suits. Which is why, I suppose, they put me away. It wasn't because I was 24 hours late for the meeting, nor even for my strident shouts of "Blessed Be The Traffic And Its Wardens" - but the fact that I didn't have a stitch on (or in) ... even my wristwatch having disap­peared (and my fingernails). All I can do is look forward to a sab­batical from madness, I suppose.

Written today and posted here

When the teapot moved not once but twice, you realised that the first time it moved could not have been as imaginary as you had originally imagined, given the evidence of the second time.  You have often been in situations with inanimate things moving where there was no obvious cause for the effect. All to do with mirrors, lights, angles, tiredness. Nothing supernatural or psychokinetic. Only you watching.  But when it happens out of the blue, you often do a double-take.  Does it really move?  Probably not.  It'll need a ruler to measure any give or take in the situation.  But if it moves as a result of you looking at it, even without you consciously willing it to move, it becomes obvious that there are strange happenings abroad.  The darkness settles in early, despite the clocks going forward an hour yesterday.  You wonder if it's a clotted cloud formation, rather than the leading edge of night's blanket being used to make your bed, tucking you in as comfortably as possible so that premature sleep might explain any subsequent dreaming.  And, surely, the act of seeing the teapot move on the tea-table before the dream started would surely make you wonder if you were dreaming that you were awake.  The window was now blacker than if you had covered the glass with an opaque gloss paint stolen from a dead person's lock-up.  Night was never that dark, was it?  The bulb hanging from the kitchen ceiling didn't even swing. It was stock still. But it was dimming faster than the sun must have done in the last few minutes.  Dimming, however, was not a movement as such; dimming was never as strange as an object like a teapot budging of its own volition. The stewed remains within settled into a coagulation of leaves and black space. There were exactly one thousand tealeaves and you wonder who had taken the trouble to count them into the teapot before pouring over the scalding water. It needed other eyes to see what was happening inside the pot, as yours were busy watching events from outside. One single abrupt jolt, and the first movement was complete.  You only now needed – with the requisite suspense – to await the second movement ... except you were unaware that there was due to be a second movement, especially as you thought you had merely imagined the first one.  You decided it was time for bed. You pray a thousand prayers to a God addressed as thou or thy or thee.  You must have assessed the passing of time differently from its reality.  And if time is misjudged, you were unsure that the time correcting itself might cause objects to move, as if you had moved the teapot during the period of time that had now been blocked or short-circuited so as abruptly to change dusk into night.  You were now found to be in your bedroom, not the kitchen, pulling back the blanket ready for your body to be finally laid to rest.  Steeped in sleep, infused with dream, cosied by darkness, motionlessly reaching out for a silent prayer that you ached to pray but couldn't. Wedged in by a sodden mass of dead insects which, even beyond a dream's unreason, were still alive and eager to become your single-minded stew of consciousness - a spout for a thousand thoughts or a thousand thous. Dead ... until I moved.

THE TEAPOT MOVED

Written today and first published here

The stranger wondered if the rest of the hotel's users thought he was a stranger.  The rooms were of a style suitable to the passing trade so in fact all the guests should have been strangers.  This particular stranger was no different.  One never considers oneself to be a stranger. All the others were strangers, surely. The others were real strangers inasmuch as they were not only strangers to each other but, strangely, to themselves.

The stranger was without a name, although he could remember signing the guest register at the reception desk earlier in the day.  Now being nameless was not a good sign.  Perhaps he was a stranger, after all. Just like the rest of them: sitting solitary in his bedroom: dependant on room service and the entertainment from the TV and the use of en suite facilities and the trouser press.

He hadn't taken advantage of room service as yet but he continued to inspect the tray of free goodies always left by good hotels for weary strangers with which to refresh themselves.  A few individualised bags of infusable tea or coffee. Scattered  tabs of milk or sugar. Wrapped gingernut biscuits. Strangely, for such a set of freebies, a bone china teapot was set upon the tray: to be used for steeping rather than just a teacup directly open-mouthed for a tea-bag's dunking. An electric kettle was already full of water.  He wondered how long it had been stagnating there.  He could see the only source for water was from the sink's cold tap in the bathroom.  Strangely, despite travelling all day with few comfort-stops, he had not yet been forced to use the bathroom's facilities.  He shouldn't have been surprised.  Only true strangers would be unaccustomed to the relative strength of their own bladders.

The red glow of an advertising sign just outside his room's window was relentlessly pulsing.  Strangely, the window possessed usable shutters rather than curtains. Strange for England. He stood up and stared down at the city's main-street. Despite it being the rush hour, there was very little traffic along it.  Only an odd taxi turned up outside the hotel with guests: more strangers, no doubt.  He shrugged.  He was determined not to slip into being a stranger himself.  It would be all too easy to become someone else's stranger, a person who simply shuffled about a hotel bedroom at a loose end, listening for others behaving similarly, given the sufficient thinness of the walls between them.

He returned his attention to the tray of freebies.  He had already given a cursory glance at the room service menu, but he was always reluctant to use it. It always made him feel self-conscious and slightly awkward.  He never knew what to do with the dirty plates after he had eaten.  Whether to give a tip or not.  Despite having plenty of money, he always resented paying through the nose simply for a waiter to bring the food to his room.  'Never', 'always': he couldn't possibly be a stranger to be able to use such words about his general behaviour and feelings.  That rather satisfied him. Maybe he would venture downstairs later to see if he could find the hotel's dining-room.  There was no reason, of course, why he would not be able to find it.  But there was always a doubt.

He then heard the stranger next door shuffling about.  Having been sitting on the bed, the stranger next door was probably visiting the en suite bathroom.  The TV next door could not be heard through the wall, so it was probably still switched off.  Possibly for fear of accidentally igniting the Porn channel rather than the News one. The former made him feel dirty.

'Dirty' reminded him. He needed freshening up in the bathroom.  He hoped it would also be full of freebies.  But nothing was really free, was it?  Room rates always included overheads.

When he returned, the trayful of freebies was glowing more readily in the onset of dusk from outside while the advertising pulse continued but at a slower shutter speed. He suddenly saw that the teapot had been moved.  Never had the stranger been so frightened before.

Published ’Dark Regions’ 1995

          The man with the eye-patch stared at me.

          The white of the visible eye was riddled with red wriggling thread-worms.  Its pupil seemed a grey weeping pustule of something that I imagined to be knotted brain extruding from further back in the skull.  It was ringed by hardened ridges of blackened flesh which gradually became pinker the further they reached from the eye-socket itself.  Judging by the sight of this "good" eye, I wondered what could be under the patch and shuddered inwardly.

          I was stationed in the Lounge of the pub from where I could barely discern him nursing half of bitter in the Public Bar—so it was astonishing that I could see the eye at all...

          I must have been staring at him...

          He winked...

          Abrupt as that—without warning.

          It was not simply a cute quick flash of the eyelid, but more a slow motion retraction of his soul behind the gnarled ribbing of a tiny wing, as if a creature lived in his head, rather than a brain.  It was as awful as that, and worse.

          The preservation of personal and communal sanity forces me to take half measures.  So, no more of the wink.

          He beckoned me from the Lounge by slowly bending and unbending his finger.  I had never been in the Public Bar, so I expected spit and sawdust on the floor.  I was pleasantly surprised to find the ambience almost bearable   But the drinkers themselves were decidedly second-rate, a shaggy collection of human wrecks—derelicts who raised their heads in a desultory fashion as the swing-doors continued to clatter together behind me.

          Their faces did have the requisite appendages such as noses, eyes, mouths and so forth, but their utter blankness could not be concealed behind such disguises.  One snorted into his tankard, dislodging his flat cap in the process.  Another waved imbecilically as if he and I were both long lost bosom pals.  A third revealed the ugliest, most toothless grin I’d ever seen, as if I were the stand-up comic come to entertain them.

          The winker by the bar did not turn.  He knew that it was necessary for me to approach first.  The fact that I had come this far...

          It was then I spotted that his eye-patch was now hanging from one of the empty tankard hooks above the bar ... a flat spider with its legs all running into one.  I noticed, too, his drink was fuller now than it was before.  Surely, he had not had sufficient time to finish the previous one and order another in the odd few seconds it had taken me to go out into the cold street and back into the pub through a different door.

          Gingerly, I clopped nearer to him, so close I knew he must have been aware of my presence.  The floorboards seemed to soften under my touch.

          Even at that late stage, I need not have tapped him on the shoulder. I could have slipped out of the Public without further repercussions.

          He revolved like a clown’s head on a seaside pier with a two-way neck, his wide mouth gaping up and down—for me to toss a ball in—to win a teddy.

          The face turned away without turning back ... too fast even for surprise.  I simply glimpsed a tiny knife-blade sawing in and out, as it cut a raw-edged path through the gristle around the newly visible eye-socket. Some thing must have been wielding it from inside.

          The second revolution of the head was slower, as it said, "I am pleased to see you again, my one and only truly love" – and the smile was even worse than the wink.

          And my stilletoes were stuck fast in the floorboards, as he leaned towards me for a taste of my tongue.  Love at first sight.