Laughter In The Distance

LAUGHTER IN THE DISTANCE  (previously published ‘Lost Pages’ 2005)

     The room was unaccountably quiet – in a way that made it seem more spooky than it was.  Charlie sensed that there should be more  noise, as he watched the people in it miming conversations.  They were trying – very successfully as it happened – to keep quiet for someone who was ill upstairs.  Charlie knew this fact because Susie – he thinks her name was Susie – told him that this was indeed the case.    

“Who’s ill?” Charlie had asked.  He asked it again because he was now talking – whispering under his breath – to someone else.  This time he didn’t even guess her name.

  

“I thought Susie already told you,” this new girl answered – so quietly that Charlie had to read her lips.

  There were at least twenty people in the room.  Some were still coming in, others leaving, a few neither.  A ghostly gathering – and growing ghostlier by the minute, Charlie thought.  He laughed to himself.  It was hard to explain the purpose of the room, let alone of the meeting itself.  The room was a cross between a lounge (or what they used to call front room, sitting-room, drawing-room or parlour) and a neutral waiting-room at a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery.  The electric fire with too few bars actually seemed to make the room feel colder than if it weren’t there at all.  Psychological, Charlie assumed.

 

 

He felt as if he were the only person of substance in the whole place.  The others acted so low-key, he wondered if they existed at all, barely negotiating the bad reception on a TV screen as they came and went. 

  

Charlie recalled he had earlier met a lady called Isabel Barnett – a name that sounded slightly familiar to him but he wasn’t old enough to check out a sufficient length of past time to judge whether it were a name that prefigured his own tenuous existence.

  

This Isabel Barnett was in fact the hostess who had greeted Charlie at the front door – a heavily made-up face with billowing gold-trimmed drapes below.  A mouth like a brightly pursed rose-bud  rather than one that was defiantly clamped shut behind lip-stick.

  

“Come in, Charlie,” she had said.

  

He remembered her welcome like the back of his hand…

  

***

  

“I thought Susie already told you,” the girl repeated, bringing Charlie back to the present moment.

  

“Told me what?”  he had forgotten.

  

“Who’s ill upstairs.”  This time her voice was not even silent miming.  Pursed lips had become gritted teeth, merely with the implication of articulated words.

  

***

  

Charlie was in the kitchen.  He was used to spending most of the time at parties in the kitchen talking to those who happened to be passing through to get a drink or some more food.  Charlie found the kitchen the best place at any party.  A sort of Way Station. 

  

This was not one of those parties, however.  It was a gathering of hushed whispers, some bordering on a silence beyond silence itself.  Even the silence of the grave was subsumed by shifting earth or the conversation of worms.  There was no music coming from the waiting-room or lounge.  And there was no booze, only cups of tea that clinked on their saucers like percussion instruments in a fastidious invisible prelude.  A delicate intaglio of glances and tunes underhummed from some memory of a signature tune in ancient wireless days.

  

Charlie soon returned to where most people found themselves.  As soon as he realised this wasn’t a party as such, the kitchen and its passing inhabitants lost all their fascination.  Mutual, he thought.

  

Isabel Barnett smiled at him from where she was standing alone.  Susie had vanished, probably to the kitchen, now that Charlie had left it.  What was the point, he asked, in holding a party where someone was ill upstairs?

  

Suddenly, as if in some oblique reply to his question, he heard laughter in the distance.  The distance was vertical … which was strange as, more often than not, distance tended to be horizontal.  Vertical in this case was, however, unclear whether it arrived from above or below – but it certainly was laughter.  Unmistakeable as it cut through the studied silence, despite its own tones of snigger and ponderous giggle.  So ponderous, perhaps, it was beneath the threshold of most normal hearing.

  

Charlie guessed this was the ill person laughing upstairs.  Laughter is a much better deal with death than groans of pain.  He laughed at his own thoughts and found himself suddenly in the company of Susie again.  Every girl here was called Susie, or was that just his imagination?  But imagination more customarily multiplied than reduced.  Isabel Barnett was more a single lady than a girl – yet still a mother figure – and Charlie could often see her fading into the background whenever she was caught watching him … watching him watching her.

  

“Who’s ill upstairs?”  This time it was a question, rather than Susie telling him he’d already been told who exactly was ill upstairs … or downstairs, depending on the floor where the questioned was asked.

  “How should I know?” said Charlie.  This was obviously not the same girl as he was talking to earlier … or even the nameless girl before Susie who had, reportedly, told him who was ill upstairs.  

Susie offered a kiss.  At first, Charlie assumed it was destined to be a mere peck.  But it was more than this – and indeed at-close-quarters was where one was supposed to be at parties, Charlie knew.  Yet he was shy.  Nevertheless, he allowed her to press her breasts into his chest – and both of them snogged and petted with barely perceptible gulps and gurgles and intermittent excuses of breath-taking or coughs on bodygas or embarrassed laughter.

  

Isabel Barnett stared at them.  Charlie knew this fact instinctively and he remembered, with a shiver, who exactly was ill upstairs or even near to death, in fact – as he continued to hear laughter in the distance.  It amused him, placated his worries.  He had to grasp the nettle, take life in both hands, as he  led the girl called Susie upstairs – away from Isabel’s increasingly distant clucking.  Not even in two minds about it, he wanted to hear Susie’s laughter louder still.

 

  No point in being in a Whodunnit if you knew who was about to do it, thought Charlie.  Stifled laughter as the mystified ghosts dispersed from around both culprit and victim.

 

DFL's Baffles - No. 5
Inching towards being called a fable, the baffle slipped and became an allegory too short to be called anything.

THE DEAD HAND

 

“You know - dreams sort of fritter away along some narrow blurred margin of existence for ever and ever.  Flitters of image, to which we return from time to time when we’re not awake and ready to dream.”

 

            The man speaking had been a complete stranger only hours before, but Eloise now listened with growing, if guarded, respect.

 

            “So, the dreams carry on eternally, all dreams, everybody’s dreams?”

            Her voice piped plaintively.  She’d never been one for making a mark.  She was a sounding-board that merely sounded out external realities, with only the gentlest touches upon the tiller of conscious communication.

 

            “Yes, dear lady, eternally and infinitely.  It is true also to say that we return to our own shapes of self that interact between the jiggling channels of dream.  When we’re not in residence, the shapes simply sort of carry on without us.  Yes, they can indeed exist without us, those selves we think we are when we dream.  We just re-inhabit them when we think we are dreaming.  In the meantime, they own the bit of our consciousness that never wakes.”

 

            “How do you know, when most dreams are forgotten?”

 

            “Quite simple, dear lady.  Think for a moment.  Vulnerable and beautiful creatures such as yourself can only find sufficient illogic in a dream to bring you to talk with hard old strangers like me.  So, even now, you must be drifting along that rippling course which itself travels onward over the weedflows of the dreambed...”

 

            To his horror, Eloise’s face suddenly took on a new strange hard look itself, as she felt the tiller spring to life in her dead hand.

 

 

 (Penny Dreadful 1999)

 

 

 

REFLECTIONS

 

 

The vampire vampired vampires — there being no better verb to describe what vampires do. So, there is a definite need for such a verb as to vampire. The noun certainly exists, however, even if the thing which the noun names does not.

 

In any event, whatever the grammatical niceties, the vampire in question vampired other vampires. Better than a self-draining onanism. Better, even, than vampiring rosy-cheeked maidens (especially from the victim’s point of view, needless to say, whether or not there was any need to say it). But if vampires don’t exist prima facie why all this concern over one particular vampire whose fancy was to vampire others of his (or her) kind? Well, in short, and with no further preamble, I was (if not am) that vampire.

 

My teeth were long and so sharp they would have given off silly sparkling stars at their points if I were in a cartoon on TV. I could not reflect very well. (Well, anyone can see that for themselves, so no need to dwell on that point.) I had a strange inexplicable loathing of anything connected with the Christian Church. A regularly occurring aversion to daylight. A phobia of garden fence manufacturers. And, surprise surprise, a shake-down full of crumbly dirt. So, if I were not a vampire, nobody was.

 

And I went vampiring at night (the verb being intransitive as well as transitive). I met others of my persuasion. We sucked each other off. Really lapped it up. Then home in time for a good day’s kip. Often, the sun would be just rising as I turned the key in the door of my lock-up. And prickles would rise on the back of my neck. I knew I was being watched. One’s body always sensed such things. Ring-fenced. Criss­crossed. Each had its reflex reflection in my body and/or mind. I even knew when somebody was writing about me, circumscribing me. I had dreams, erotic dreams, wild wild dreams as well as more mundane ones, any such dreams as the writer cared to give Earth stowaways such as me. That’s how I knew. And I also know when he (or she) stops writing - I stop vampiring.

(Bats & Red Velvet 1993)

YORICK

 

 

 

Chaos snatched me up and, before I could gather my bearings, dropped me amid a romance, a family row and, worst of all, a life I had been trying to avoid at all costs. I yearned for the return of that state of pre-embodiment with which many were satisfied for as long as eternity took. She welcomed me into the man’s body with a gentle squeeze of the hand, followed by a light kiss on the cheek. It was an instinctive reaction on her part, since she was unaware that I had not been possessor of her sweetheart’s body for as long as she had known it. Reluctant souls, like me, torn screaming from the substitute-bench of Fate are bound to provide a seamless transfer of responsibilities for those involved with the emotions of the receiving body. I thus returned the kiss. Surrogates of all shapes and sizes gathered around. These were, on a superficial level, relatives of the woman, who had arrived for our engagement party. However, I knew most of them as others of my kind. The individual, whose disguise as my future mother-in-law was wearing thin, winked an involuntary twitch of the cheek-muscles, perhaps, but one I took to be a romantic enticement to another actor such as me in a theatre called reality. Here, then, I had been landed with two romances: one dictated by the logic of a pair of human-beings ineluctably intended to be in love both mind and body - and the other romance generated in the shape of the foul old winking bird who was being surreptitiously spiritual behind the wrinkle-ringed eyes in her attempts to dupe Fate. I could not possibly reciprocate the latter, since the former was meant to be my whole preoccupation for the next few decades. Furthermore, the rest of the family members had begun arguing. They were picking at the carcass of a roast chicken, one that some had intended to save for tomorrow’s dinner, others to consume now at the party. It was a trivial row, yet with a high significance derived from the objective viewpoint of timescales far in excess of human comprehension - simply an extrapolation, a spoiling tactic, a diversion, a decoy, a wild goose chase of small talk since wild chickens were indeed rare. Ill-cooked, in any event - and I hoped that food-poisoning would rectify the few flinches from Fate now being rehearsed by such rogue spawndrift of Chaos. However, I suffered the abrupt realisation that I had not given my sweetheart an engagement ring. It was evidently expected of me, the climax of current proceedings, one that my predecessors had forgotten, either through the typical inefficiency of deputy souls who have no material or spiritual incentive to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s -  or, more likely, sheer bloody-mindedness. More likely, of course, because, when minds bled, realignments inevitably ensued. And I ripped out the red-dripping wishbone and raised it like Yorick towards my smiling lips...

 

 

(The Weird monger's Tales Wyrd Press 1994)

 

COUNT THE DREAMS
  

Rachel Mildeyes bad been writing for a living since she could remember. A bit like sleeping...

 

Her first novel “Love In The Sick Ward” had been a successful feminist pot-boiler. She never cared to read it, however, simply because she could not understand it any more. Her mind was too convoluted and twisted for a straightforward narration. A beginning, middle and end (in that order) was not at all what the shrink ordered. She was confident that she had something growing inside her head, something sharp and incisive, but which could only best come out bent and skewed.

 

Thus, after a series of gradully compounding fiction sequences under various outlandish pen-names, at the age of thirty seven, she embarked on what she considered in advance to be her tour de force and raison d’etre Not that it was written in French. The working title was “The Miscreant And The Moonstream”. She tried out a number of her old pen-names, but none seemed to sit well on the title page. Eventually, she resorted to her own name, believing this to be as good as any - though, of course, nobody could credit that Mildeyes was her real surname at all but merely an invention of a miscegenate heritage. She finished up calling the book “The Wild Man of Hurtna Pore”.

 

The epilogue came first, leaving the rest until later. She did not own a word processor, only a wireless continuously tuned into the Home Service as it used to be called. She particularly enjoyed medical programmes, but that was before the National Health Service had grown sicker than its patients. So, without a processor, she couldn’t juggle paragraphs willy nilly like the more modern moveable feasts with which creative writing seemed to have become endowed. What she committed to the old-fashioned typewriter stuck fast...but the first drafts were naturally nothing but meaningless handwritten deletions, insertions, scribble and scrawl.

 

She knew the epilogue was to end up the most important part of the piece, which could be easily skipped by the busy reader (a la Henry Fielding in Tom Jones), though woe betide any who should dare...

 

Incredibly, “Wild Man” was not a horror work. Her reputation had been built up, over the years, on plots with macabre incidents and bizarre cruelties. Some critics had called her pieces sick. Simply that. Sick. No mistaking that word, with its decided lack of innuendo: no double entendre nor finer feeling, there. No dodging responsibility under cover of ambiquity or deep symbolism

 

The new one was indeed a romance, any horror simply playing second horn in the wind band. It would doubtlessly be a dis-appointment to the fervent fans who were used to finding her works amid the latest splatterfests. But could the bookshops put it anywhere else? She feared not. A real rosy-tinted tear-jerker would not be seen dead back cover to front cover with a Mildeyes.

 

Her publisher clucked meaningfully as he listened to Rachel’s plans for “Wild Man”. He had a businessman’s head, but pretended his heart knew something about literature.

 

“I’m afraid a cheap romance will not do, Rachel, you’ve got a duty to the ghastlier, gorier side of human nature.”

 

She stared at his domed head, sown with tussocks of grey hair. She found herself thinking of a sub-plot where a huge rhinoceros horn suddenly burst through the top of his skull, scattering shards of bone shrapnel across the boardroom table and splintering the oil painting faces of the publisher’s past directors. Thus she failed to pay attention to what her current editor had to say. She did infer, however, that “The Wild Man Of Hurtna Pore” was to be relegated to the back burner of her fevered muse, until she had enough loot in the bank to finance it herself. And life was too short for earning money...

   

As she wound down the car window, the policeman looked puzzled. She was not the lay-by queen, after all. It was a complete stranger behind the wheel, with something missing. But what was missing he couldn’t fathom.

 

She asked him whether he needed to wear the tall domed helmet to hide his horn. It sounded to him as if she were speaking some form of French. He shrugged, patted her boot and waved her on. No clashing antlers with the likes of Rachel Mildeyes...

 

The night was SO shallow, its dark wreaths were not much more than head height. Above this, as far as the eye could see, were apparent layers of a grimy sea of light. Salt-green shapes, at the same time like and unlike old-time aeroplanes, floated wirelessly through this luminous murk, lights flashing to warn off others...

 

She wrapped her scarf tighter round her neck, as the darkness through which she waded was cold to the skin’s touch. Red-flecked mist sprayed from her mouth as she breathed. Her feet were numb with the cold, being deeper in the mire of the sunken night. Her brow was feverish, but that came more from the dreams therein than the relatively warmer light to which it was closer. Her bones cracked with the same sound that often comes from inside butcher’s shops at the dead of night.

   

She had awoken in a strange bed. The curtains were undrawn, allowing the milky sun to stream through upon her head. She could see seven hundred and fifty-five thousand six hundred and twenty two dust particles riding in the slanted beams. Amazed at her perspicacity, she began to count the floaters in her eyes, the single petals on the wallpaper, the constituents of the bed sheets, the pores in the palm of her band, the split seconds that passed in so doing...

 

It was a pity that she didn’t know bow old she was. Or it may have been a boon.

 

The door opened and a young girl, dressed in a uniform, entered with a trayful of breakfast. She called the one in the bed by the name Rachel.

 

Head motioning downwards at the tray, she enumerated: gently coddled duck eggs fluted with the re-constituted ducks that had layed them; rare back bacon rashers interleaved with a sauce that was so strong the integrity of the bacon was in question; freshly squeezed citrus fruit laced with honey wine; doorstops of toast topped with whole kidneys and anchovies; a steaming urn with a medley of infusions from far off Erotica...

 

Leaving these beside Rachel’s bed, she quickly turned tail, allowing a glimpse of the cut of her behind. The shape of her bosom had been concealed by her uniform, but Rachel had noticed it was over-large, no doubt plum-tipped and graspable.

 

Every speck of food she counted down as she consumed it. Much harder to count in than out. She wondered if the young girl’s own juices had been squeezed over the food to season it. She recalled the dream of the half-hearted night which, at the time, she had felt was so cold. The blankets now were warmth itself, between which she had been embedded since she could remember. She was sick, simply sick.

 

Having breakfasted heartily, she felt heavy with child, for the food seemed to take on a life of its own in her belly, squirming, kicking, and, even, she was sure, squealing. Her bodily innards were strange creatures that passed in the night of blood.

 

When the slurry waters finally broke, several hours later, she feared for the integrity of the bed-clothes, Her headache was like an ingrowing horn.

She drowsed off during the late afternoon. She had given up hope of the girl returning to give her a blanket bath. Rachel was evidently sicker than she had originally thought and the girl, who was probably a nurse, was far too busy to tend to a dream. The dead may die, whilst the rest live only by the words they exchange.

 

Rachel returned to the earlier dream, where night had fully taken back its own. She could no longer see the floating salt-green shapes nor even the cut of her own body. Impossible now, even to fish her out from more than one dream away.

 

No clashing hooks with Rachel in the moonstream.

 

She first typed out the epilogue and wondered whether it would throw any light on the rest of it. Probably not - (only thirty seven words, the last of which were in brackets any way, and therefore quite irrelevant).

  (Sodem 1993)

SALT RITES

 

The beach was empty of all things unseaworthy, except for the flowers, palely bedraggled and indistinguishable from the salt-ridden seaweed. The mourners cast them upon the grey waves only for the waves to cast them back.

 

The wake was being held in the cliff-top manor, the noise of which could even be heard at the sea’s edge. Tiny shapes danced slowly across the bay windows, since nobody had possessed the foresight to draw the long heavy curtains across the huge expanses of moonglit glass.

 

From the beach, though, with fitful frothy gurgles of prematurely night-stained sea in frisky dalliance with my bare toes, the manor appeared as small as a windswept dolls house precariously set against the precocious deepening of the sky.

 

I was to try to force my pebble-stung body up the sheer cliff to join the jollity, for jollity it would surely become if the corpse became a guest.

 

(Night Songs 1992)

IF BREATH BE FIRE

 

If breath be fire, then we shall finally go up in smoke. As they say, there’s no breath without life. But life without breath? Who knows. Yet I really must start at the beginning: the graveyard: a place that would normally have served better as an ending. Furthermore, in that same graveyard, Mary Louise lost her innocence. When she possessed two Christian names up front when other people had to make do with merely one (with any additional ones barely hinted at by initial letters) I am still uncertain. Perhaps she needed the force of two Christian names when faced with evil in the shape of myself. But I was not evil until she created the evil in me simply by her act of existence: like bait. And, yes, I am fully aware that graveyards were not exactly prime places for ‘wooing a sweetheart’; but as her widower father seemed to know more about young men’s intentions than an old man had any right to know, what alternative had I other than to sneak here out one moonless night, ensuring that the latch on the garden gate didn’t click? Only darkness, in the end, could further our possibilities. It was a short hop to the graveyard where I set about proving to her father, if vicariously, that I was no motherfucker, but simply someone who wanted to lay a ghost.

 

Mary Louise, I hasten to add, was no easy target. Her prerequisite was love. Indeed, we had already undergone a relentless period of ‘courting’: a word her father would have used in his right royal failure to call spades, spades. Public places had worn rather thin as means of passing time together. Time, if nothing else, needed to be spent expensively, given the nature of Mary Louise’s passion for nothing-but-the-best. If the trust were known (and, even upon the bring of breathlessness, she failed to grasp it), I was both nothing and the best: a fact which could not be understood other than by inference. Strong words and exactitude merely subtracted from meaning. Truth had to be worked at: worried and teased from the unsurrendering past. Only digging would suffice: through one of the loosened earths: towards a sainted fire.

 

 

(Vampires Anonymous 1993)