ISBN: 978-1-4710-8275-7
Table of Contents The Rape Waved Yellow ................................................................ 1 Who Begat Crow Man .................................................................... 2 The Function Room ........................................................................ 3 The Butcher’s Confirmation ......................................................... 11 The Butcher’s Progress ................................................................. 12 Sac ................................................................................................. 13 The Butcher’s Scat ........................................................................ 14 The Blood Promise ....................................................................... 15 A Worrying of Sheep .................................................................... 16 The Earth is a Drinker of Blood .................................................... 17 Leech ............................................................................................. 18 A Development ............................................................................. 19 The Estate of Things ..................................................................... 20 Disc Eyes ...................................................................................... 21 Zombie Ho! ................................................................................... 22 GODsWILL .................................................................................. 23
The Rape Waved Yellow Despite the pleasant heat from the late summer sun Marsyas Mire wound his window up as soon he left the motorway. He decided, as the fields and thickets closed stealthily in upon him, that he did not like the countryside. He also decided that he could not be less suited to his new job on the features team with Rural Life magazine if he tried. So much nature felt unnatural to him. The air tasted of manure and so he lit a cigarette. He turned on the radio and daydreamed of cities erupting from the plain like concrete fungi as he drove. He gripped the steering wheel tightly, expecting tractors to zoom out in front of him from gateways, or for wild horses to leap over hedgerows and into his path. The narrow road taunted him, unwinding into the distance like incriminating videotape from a dropped CCTV spool. The fields of rape lining the road glowed a dazzling chemical yellow in the sunlight and the downs that rolled so monstrously into the valleys mocked him with their lack of wine bars, take-aways, and convenience stores. By the time he arrived in Leddenton he felt quite unwell. “So you’re a journalist,” said the landlord of the Royal Hotel. “I work for Rural Life magazine. I’m covering your corn festival tomorrow,” Marsyas replied. “And you get paid for this?” “Well, it’s my job. So yes, I get paid.” The sun bled like treacle through the window of the inn and glistened on the liqueur bottles that lined the shelves behind the landlord. Marsyas squinted and brought a hand to his throbbing temple. The landlord had a shiny round face and big wet eyes that lingered like irrelevant remarks. “And we get nothing, even though we provide the story?” he said. “Hopefully my story will bring more visitors to your town,” Marsyas said. “You might get more people wanting to stay here at your hotel.” 1
Who Begat Crow Man Marsyas recalls a comedy sketch that he had once heard in which Sir Arthur Strieve-Greebling tells of a life dedicated to teaching ravens to fly underwater; and he thinks too of Saint Francis of Assisi, preaching to the birds that eat from his outstretched palm. Now, presented with a task that that is seemingly impossible for one such flayed and feathered man, he renames himself and seeks to make use of the abundant bird life that fills The Function Room. The crow man points to a grey and porous dial that protrudes above from a lattice board of ribs and other bones. “Two clicks to the right,” he says. A mistle thrush that he has trained over the previous evenings flew out from the dusty gloom and obediently gripped the disc in its beak and began turning it. The crow man turned to the pinned mouth of a windpipe pipe stretched open beside him. “Fly through,” he instructs. Several starlings flutter up from the windowsill and soar into the pipe where they are funnelled through to a container on the other side. Their weight causes the container to slowly sink and its movement sets off numerous pulleys and turning cogs. He rubs his feathered hands together contentedly and gazes around the workings of The Function Room. Around him harnessed birds tug on sinewy pulleys as they fly up towards the flaked plaster ceiling before they are pulled back again to The Function Room floor. Then they tried to fly away again, their endless efforts to escape powering the cranial cogs and bony axles that filled the centre of the room, endlessly turning and pumping and grinding. The air around the machinery is filled with a constant cacophony of pained squawks and screeches over the chirrups and chirps of the untethered birds that bat their wings against the rafters and peck at the woodwork above him. Nearby, woodpeckers endlessly beat their beaks upon a millstone, the fragments of which he plans to mix into a cement-like paste with body fluids so that he might seal up the doorway that he no longer needs. 2
The Function Room In the undulating folds of the green vale there lies the grey and old town of Leddenton. From the skies you imagine it appearing to a cosmic observer as a dying fly in a corpulent web of trundling downs and the laser trails of ley lines. In its dark heart stands your home and workplace, The Function Room, an awkward construction that you imagine might appear to that observer above as a crooked canvas begging to be straightened. It is an unassuming, though somewhat askew building of red clay brick. A small plaque upon its wall deceptively reads, Church Hall. Despite the plain exterior, it is a complex work of architecture that you live and work within; the nooks and crannies inside The Function Room very much defy comparison to the orderly nature of the town outside. The regular homes upon regimented avenues and the straight roads both seem to impose orderliness and regularity upon the routines of the townsfolk, unless it is after all your occasional efforts in observation and control that sustains their plain monotony. Around you tiny white wheels spin like bony tops and pink pulleys pump like the workings of some great, fleshy perpetual motion device. Within these tilting walls that openly challenge gravity every day they remain standing, you have learned, and unlearned through laziness, the importance of staying on top of things and keeping your eye on the ball. Sometimes, with despair, you feel as though you are but a mere dust mote inside the workings of a giant clock, for it seems that allowing your attention to wander has, in fact, no consequence; the machine continues to function, outside the same lights go on at the same time each evening, the dog walkers depart their homes just as they did the day before and the day before that, regardless of your intervention. It is hardly your fault that you have become a little idle, but a certain irony is lost upon you, as it was such a tendency towards slothfulness that first brought you to The Function Room. You once worked for the town’s rail company. Your job was in the signal box, a simple but secure occupation that 3
essentially involved, only very occasionally, pulling a lever that lifted a sign that would stop one train when another approached from the opposite direction. One day, arising in panic from bored reverie, you pulled the wrong lever and found yourself quite inexplicably in The Function Room, watching what was very nearly a catastrophic train crash through a very small and dusty window. Above you a spring unfurls in perfect serenity, but as a cog whines gently behind you, you underline your mental note to obtain lubricant from the storeroom, just as you had reminded yourself yesterday. “I really should oil that,” you grumble to the dull walls that are latticed by the shadows of the machinery like corpse dust upon grease-stained paintwork. All around you, from the window to the murky recesses of the cellar and attic, wheels turn, spindles rotate, and great axles spin as you grudgingly pull levers and twist dials with infinite weariness. The gentle groans from the machinery that now occur with growing frequency have become an issue that could almost disrupt your tedium with thoughts of urgency. “Going to have to stop being so lazy one day,” you say. Your words drift upwards into the murk like ashes on crematorium vortexes. In another room a shaft the colour of aging ivory clunks awkwardly and you wince once more, cursing your procrastination. “I’ll maybe fix that tomorrow,” you say to yourself. But already all is on the verge of going awry and an indescribable horror contemplates alighting one stop early at Leddenton station in hopeful expectation of the exercise benefiting its cosmic essence. Not unlike like you, Gormo Gloom is oblivious to this impending disruption. Gormo Gloom is the owner of Gloom Butchery, he is a purveyor of meat and his store is in the building next to yours. He has never knowingly met you, and yet you know him well; perhaps better than he knows himself for you know that when a certain piston begins to pump, Gormo Gloom will rise from his bed, and when at the opposite end of The Function Room a little wheel 4
wobbles unevenly to life, you know that Gormo Gloom will visit the bathroom. Today that particular piston has already pumped and so too has the little wheel turned, and Gloom is in his butcher’s shop. Gloom sets his clock by Daisy Time for Daisy always enters his shop at 9.15 to buy chicken liver for her cat’s breakfast. Neither you nor Gloom knows it, but it is 9.16 and so Daisy is late. Daisy surveys the meaty cuts beneath the glass counter in a pantomime of choice making. The air is heavy with the metallic aroma of fermenting blood and stagnating bone. Daisy is old, a pensioner, but perhaps not as old as she dresses. She wears the uniform of a coffin dodger; a woollen coat as murky as a drizzly autumn wood, knee length stockings, and she clutches her handbag like a kiddie fiddling priest with his rosary. You observe the scene next door by pressing your eye to a vial of liquid as murky as conjunctiva juices. Around you the womb of intricate workings turns, the coils of muscle-like length, the belts that stretch like tendons, and the bony levers, how they are like a giant body, the corporeal extension of some divine controller. “Two fresh chicken livers, please,” says Daisy. Gloom doesn’t answer immediately. He is setting his clock. He eases the minute hand forward with a podgy index finger and stops it at quarter past. His slow and deliberate movements have an animal grace that quite fits his ovine physiognomy. His long and sheep-like face reminds you of a bust carved in wax that droops a little more each day as the sun settles briefly upon it as it traverses the firmament and passes his shop window. His jowls and the bags under his eyes surrender a little more to gravity each day. His hair, worn like a helmet of wire wool, has an animal texture too and his sheep teeth, flat and yellowy pebbles of random shape, suggest many an hour of peacefully chewing the cud. “Coming right up, Daisy my dear,” says Gloom. You hear their voices through one of many leathery eartype shapes that project periodically from the wall. “Actually,” says Daisy. “Let’s make it three.” 5
How curious, you think to yourself, noticing the variation in their interaction. Like a pastoral stroller contemplating the last leaf to fall from an autumn tree, you are suddenly entranced. Gloom pauses, unsure that he has heard correctly. He too has detected a change in their routine, a shifting in the dismal spheres they inhabit. “Three?” he asks. “Three,” says Daisy. Gloom puts his plastic glove back on to his hand and selects another liver from the tray under the counter. He holds it up and with Daisy’s nod of approval he drops it into a small white bag with the others and seals it with a strip of red tape. Outside the sky clears and the sun streams hazily through the shop window and the scene is momentarily captured in illumination for you like a still life from the oeuvre of an artist, who although skilled, persists in depicting the mundane. “Is it the cat’s birthday?” says Gloom, knowing his suggestion to be most unlikely as many a year had passed with him serving her livers and never before had Daisy treated her pet to an extra portion. “No, it isn’t,” she replied. “I just thought I’d buy three today.” Like Gloom, you can’t help but forge a spontaneous frown. Minor discrepancies in routine can lead to disaster; everyone in Leddenton knows this, not least of all you, but experience has taught you that the necessary ingredient for successful indolence is unfounded optimism, and with this in mind your attention turns for a moment from Gloom The Butchers. Through a different murky vial you can see Daisy’s home where her cat usually waits for the key to turn in the front door before it stretches, yawns, and rises from the divan. Daisy’s cat surely sensed that today was no ordinary day, for you watch her rise from her snug patch of quilt early and go to the window to watch the day unfold. Daisy drops the livers into her tartan shopping bag and turns to leave. Gormo takes his cleaver from the chopping board and waves goodbye with it, as he always does. However, out of 6
sorts somewhat from the odd break in routine, he has forgotten to remove his hygiene glove and the cleaver slips from his hand and spins through the air like a circus performer’s knife. You watch its graceful journey in slow motion, as if absently observing a dragonfly hovering between lilies before deciding where to settle. Gormo finds time to will his cleaver a landing place in the wooden frame of the shop entrance, and to debate the considerable advantages, were the cleaver to strike Daisy in the head, for it to do so with the handle rather than the blade. Both hopes culminate in disappointment, a spray of blood, and finally Daisy collapsing to the floor like a marionette with severed strings. A room already dense with the aroma of death achieves greater aromatic depth. All of this abruptly disturbs you with a sense of utter horror and dismay, for this sort of thing does not happen in Leddenton where every day is the same. Somewhere air wheezes from a stuttering piston and the machinery in a distant room grinds with the awkward gear change of a learner cyclist. Somewhere even more remote, in a cosmic colour pool that begins to stir like oil upon water in the light of an uncharted sun, a tentacle straightens like a flaccid plague-pink stamen with the wet foretaste of arousal, for the territories of the world carefully plotted and painstakingly mapped have been disturbed. An ancient being has awakened, invoked by the abandonment of routine and reason, and its body trembles like a jelly being set upon the table of the universe. Your fingers clench the grip of a cold bony lever and your knuckles whiten. You have felt this sense of panic once before. The stress creak of a floorboard distracts your tension and you turn to the floor. “What shoddy workmanship. This mess is your fault, not mine!” you shout at The Function Room walls. This grotesque distraction then gives form to words of unspeakable terror, a grinding rotor groans a noise like Cthulhu, a steam turbine wheezes something that sounds like Ishakshar, and together they form a tangible mess of seething gore-sound. An aural shape so repugnant that the very sound of it could kill a man; reverberations of that frightful drone conjures in your mind a vile montage of sewerage and offal, castration off cuts and Leng Tch’e 7
burgers. Somehow in this terrifying moment of dread you realise that it is this manifestation of horror that has instructed you, silent and invisible, in your work, a gaffer that you have never met and should have prayed that you never would. Your superior expands seamlessly throughout the universe until its presence closes around you like the sweaty hand of a failed fornicator gripping his doughy, limp worm in a shameful rage. You rise staggering from your stool, your pants ballooning at the rear, warming at the crotch, and you frantically brush at the screaming green slime upon your arms and face, gagging at each mouthful of air that clots reeking in your throat like anal mucus. Then invisible shears snap quickly at your fingers leaving bloody stumps, and then your hand is gone with the next snip; you watch it flutter like an autumn leaf until it settles on an axle, replacing the worn cog that had previously whined with each revolution. You observe in sweating horror how a cloud of sour spittle settles to coat the grey, dead flesh and strengthen it against wear. Scalpels carve canals in each thigh and nimble fingertendrils extract sinews from you to weave belts that will power the decaying pulleys. A red thread like the first sign of dawn over the horizon etches itself instantly across the crown of your head, and your scalp places itself where a creaking disc had spun. Your scream aborts, like a foetus that knows that the warm embrace of the womb is the best this planet can offer, as your ribs crack and burst from your chest; a lever replaced here, a spindle there, an explosion of intestinal carnage everywhere. Gloom hears the commotion and screams and is then frozen briefly by indecision, transfixed by the murder before him and the sound of mutilation and bloody dismemberment coming from the Church Hall. He decides that he would very much prefer not to be caught with his cleaver in Daisy’s dead head and so he opts to drag her body into the back of the shop where he does his chopping and keeps his meat chillers. He pulls Daisy along behind him by her feet, leaving a scarlet slug trail of gore on his tiled shop floor. His intention is to place her in a fridge until a more suitable plan mushroomed in his confused brain from the spores of such strange circumstances and bewilderment. But this plan changes, for before 8
he can reach the fridge he passes a murky recess that although he must have walked past every day, he had never before noticed. It conjured a quite irrational curiosity given Gloom’s situation. One of Daisy’s legs drops to the floor as he stretches a hand out into the shadows expecting his fingertips to meet brickwork, but no end to the recess is forthcoming and so he steps inside, pulling the body of Daisy along limply behind him. “What strange kind of cubby hole is this? Odd how I have never noticed it before,” says Gloom quietly, perhaps to the dead body of Daisy as she slides wetly along the floor. Inside the recess Daisy’s body is now completely engulfed by darkness and so Gloom lets her ankles go and waves his hands in circles before him in search of walls that might mark an end to this interior void that logically must protrude deep into the Church Hall. There is a sudden sound of rushing air like sucking gullies in a cliff face. He senses somehow that the space around him has become confined and when he reaches behind him his hands press against cold brickwork. The blackness mutes to a foggy grey and before him he sees a light blinking in the murk. Clearly he cannot retreat and so Gloom begins making his way towards the light. The light is being emitted from a tiny diode above a grey lever that looked to Gloom like an old bone. Above the lever there is a dusty window, and when Gloom clears a peephole and peers through it to the street outside he sees a police car pulling up outside his shop. “Oh dear, what will become of me now,” he whispers to himself. The diode begins to flash with increasing urgency and so Gloom, fearing imminent arrest, decides for want of any better option to pull the lever above it in the vague hope that somehow it will save him. Given the queer events of the day, stranger things had happened than him being saved by pulling a lever, he thought. To his pleasant surprise a burglar alarm at a nearby shop on the High Street began to ring, the policeman paused halfway out of the vehicle and then opted to investigate the piercing bell rather than to purchase one of Gloom’s special breakfast rolls. Gloom had 9
forgotten in his panic that the policeman always purchased a roll from him at 9.30. Gloom allows a sigh of relief to whistle through his uneven teeth, but this calm moment of being oblivious to this newfound demonstration of cause and effect is desperately short lived. Gloom’s eyes roll slowly down, slowly adjusting to the half light, until they become fixed on the console before him and then rest upon the fossil-like phallus-lever gripped in his hand, its base resting on two bulbous bearings in a leathery encasement of leperwhite lips. There is a hissing sound as of gas escaping and the room shimmers for a second like a mirage. Gloom is alone and surrounded by inexplicable machinery; pulleys tug in silence and great wheels spin with mysterious purpose. Bending low beneath fleshy pulmonary sacks that inflate and empty quietly above him, he decides to explore this strange world that he has found himself in, and he soon discovers his wanderings are limited by walls the colour of decay and a distinct lack of any exit. The windows are few and without hinges, and besides, they are all far too small for him to fit through. In each room he enters, the same machinery turns to obscure ends and Gloom begins to panic. He feels claustrophobic. Gloom returns through a corridor of eldritch shadows and heavy cogs to the control panel where he first entered this strange place. Beside him a chattering piece of machinery comes to life. Rigid wires whose extremities terminate in pointed tooth roots tap up and down on a piece of paper that extends jerkily before him. A bar toothed with sharpened fingernails suddenly drops and guillotines the paper sending a slip drifting downwards to Gloom’s feet. He picks it up and reads the message upon it. Welcome to The Function Room.
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The Butcher’s Confirmation Now amputated and dissected, with your parts strewn throughout The Function Room to replace the worn cogs of bone and leaking pipelines of unfurled intestine, you see everything. It is upon your flesh stretched between the rafters that the records will be printed in your blackened blood with the jittering nibs of carpal fragments. The first dark entry to be written will be the confirmation of the butcher and new Function Room controller, Gormo Gloom. Outside, grave shirkers dawdle along the pavement into the heart of Leddenton like deadly blood clots. They cast slow curtaincall shadows across The Function Room as they pass. Above them house martins dive-bomb the eaves that creak in the morning sun and steam rises like wraiths from the rusting gutters. Your thoughts are distempered, layered like the bloodstains upon the wall. Dissected like Osiris, and with the vision of Horus, you dissipate the myriad detail into The Function Room where Gloom assesses his new environment. Confusion stirs the coils of bacon rind and slithers of black pudding in his stomach. He strains his eyes in the grey mist of belligerent shadows and tries to make sense of his new surroundings. Slowly The Function Room takes shape around him with hues grinding together like tectonic plates as his focus steadies. He sees fleshy pulleys tugging arbitrary rhythms, and ivory pistons rising and then falling in skittish time. Trepanned bony discs spin back and forth in a furious white blur above him like diseased sycamore seeds suspended in their autumnal descent. The walls lean in like neglected tombstones. Nearby your lung expands and retracts with a wheeze between supports of stiffened tendons and elongated tumours. You watch as Gloom reaches out cautiously to stroke it as one might pet a sleeping cat. He turns from the strange mechanics and finds that his interest in dead meat draws him towards your eye, peeled open like a litchi and pinned wide on the wall to form a wet aspic portal in vulval lips. His fingers splay on the damp brickwork as he leans forward to peer through. 11
The Butcher’s Progress A malignancy of red brick and slate is concealed behind the vines and fir tree shadows, its influence spreading like cancer through Leddenton. Within, clinging limply to The Function Room wall like an anemone, your eye gently turns in its pink flesh cup. Ass sputum bubbles gently in the folds like hot fudge and then films briefly over your iris. A mess of machinery works around you, glistening with uterine juice. Pulleys of your fresh tendons ease wetly back and forth to spin shimmering white discs upon bony spindles. Lung sacs balloon and deflate and skulls on femur rods map the lives of the townsfolk beneath a network of your nerves. Outside a car pulls away as within The Function Room a kneecap rotates in its vulval socket. Alarm clocks wake the sleeping residents as a vertebral pendulum begins to swing. A gallstone tumbles through a dried intestine oiled with smegma and a milk float responds, commencing its journey down the High Street. You watch your replacement explore his new domain, a curious insect in your web of gore, and you begin to assess the new controller, to ascertain his purpose. His fat oafish feet scuff away your imprints in the dusty floor, smearing the marks of your struggles to escape. Eventually, with a wet rasp, he presses his eye to yours. Like a night watchman starting his shift, you wait for a moment as your eye grows accustomed to this new play of light, and then you focus as the past of Gormo Gloom, jittery at first like old cinefilm, begins to unfold. You see Leddenton as it was when you first entered The Function Room, and you see Gloom the Butcher looking up at the moon hanging fat and pallid in the sky over pink hills of cloud. He checks his watch before walking up Gladly Chunner’s overgrown garden path to let himself in through the front door. “It’s only me again, Chunner, my old pal. I’ve brought you some food to keep you going,” he calls up the stairs. Gloom walks down the hall and sets his bag of leftover stock upon the worktop in the kitchen. 12
Sac His was not the first to disappear. Abraham’s beloved daughter Carla had vanished and she was the third little girl to go missing from Leddenton in as many years. He had responded with an appeal in the local paper and wandered the town searching for her, scouring the local woods, fields, and riverbanks. He closed down their little bed and breakfast and dedicated his time to rooting through the tips and rubbish dumps, searching for clues or bodies with the other parents of lost girls. He was beginning to think that he had done all that he could to find her, until a lady from Wessex Police calling herself Annie visited him at home one day. She urged him to get on with his life and to leave the police to do their work, suggested that it was unfair on his wife to be so stubborn in his belief that Carla would be found. “Do you have children?” “No,” Annie had replied, resting one bony hand upon his shoulder as she plucked her knickers out of her ass crack with the other. “But I know what it’s like to lose something precious.” “Oh, really,” Abraham had snapped, quivering with rage as he opened the door for her to leave. What difference did it make to Annie if he had chose to spend his time wandering the streets in vain, looking out for his daughter, shining his flashlight under hedgerows, and calling her name into crowds of shoppers whenever he spotted a child in a red raincoat like the one that Carla had worn? He learned that Annie had visited the other parents of the lost girls too, and delivered the same message, wearily twirling the heavy gold ring upon her little finger, stroking the engraved square and compass. “Let the police deal with it, accept that it is out of your hands. If a runaway does not want to be found, then chances are they won’t be. You have to accept that.” Something had not seemed right to Abraham then, and still troubled him now. 13
The Butcher’s Scat Dusty light seeps through the bluish slates above like pus from a gangrenous wound. A split bowel bursts above your eye and pours viscera to the floor where it foams pink like a seal massacre on a dismal beach. Your concerns about Gormo Gloom are verified; he refuses the role of a non-interventionist controller. He cannot resist tinkering, dreaming of wholesale butchery, of an entire town suspended from meat hooks. The vulval lids around your eye prise open with a wet rasp. You watch him randomly turn carpal dials and flick cuneate switches of grey ethmoid as nerve coils tense and unwind. “Let me out of here!” Gloom screams, frantically racing the perimeters like a trapped rat, stopping for a moment to flick levers of briny ilium as if some fearful code can be broken that might release him from this fresh hell. Outside the rain begins to pour over Leddenton. The riverbanks swell like leeches and burst, washing the High Street in brown, scummed water. Thunderclaps reverberate around the moist walls of The Function Room. Worms rise from the lawns in the gardens of the red brick townhouses like offal squeezed through a sieve. Gloom stops, exhausted, and hammers his fists upon the walls. He is a liability; that much is clear to you. He has taken to wearing an emptied bosom stretched over his head like a skullcap. Medallions of pudenda hang from his neck on a spinal cord, slapping against his butcher’s apron whenever he moves. He wears the scalps of previous controllers over his butcher’s boots, tied with bleached veins. Intestines dangle from his waist like a hula skirt of gore and your wrinkled and pallid scrotum hangs from his chin, quivering as he struts from calcified levers to renal pumps like a deranged turkey. There have been so many lessons, and he has learned so little. You determine to tempt him with visions, flicking your lids coquettishly, parting the wet labial lips that frame your gorged eye. 14
The Blood Promise “Let’s do it now,” said Keren. Carla bobbed her little head over the edge of the sandpit and peered around the park. The only person who might have been paying them any attention was Gormo Gloom. As always he was sitting on a bench beneath his parasol, feeding the pigeons from a brown paper bag. The other children were engrossed with their play, and the other adults were engrossed with their children or chatting to each other. The girls were in their own little world. “The weirdoes are still huddled beneath the climbing frame,” Carla said, pointing at a group of children playing some mysterious game in the shade that seemed to involve simply sitting still and gazing vacantly ahead. “It doesn’t matter even if they could see, they don’t speak to anyone anyway,” Keren replied. They both giggled. They always made of the fun of the same group of kids that cowered together in the shadows whenever their parents brought them to the park on sunny Sundays. “Pasty skinned freaks,” Carla whispered, and they both exploded into fits of giggles again. Carla and Keren had been friends for almost all of the nine years of their lives. They were both introduced as babies when their mums attended the same mothers and toddlers club. As soon as they were old enough to like things, Carla and Keren liked each other. When they were old enough to play, they played together and now that they were old enough to have secrets, they intended to share them with each other too. Every Sunday their mums brought them to the park to play and watched them from the coffee shop. The girls felt a deep bond and they knew that they would remain friends forever. Today, hidden in the sandpit, they decided that like adults they would mark their commitment to each other with ritual; it was to be their secret. 15
A Worrying of Sheep Annie arrives unnoticed by night in a caul of reeking excreta. She lies unconscious at the foot of the trembling escape tower left by Gloom. The lid of your eye, a fine fold of coral flesh as delicate as tissue paper, does not open and your attention remains elsewhere. The rains of yesterday have recalled a memory that surely cannot be yours, of preparing for battle as red raindrops as big as rose petals fall upon the lines, and of a fellow Achaean who turns to you and speaks of Zeus, the bloodless god, with a sense of dread that is almost palpable. Later, as dull red light, like the stuttering glow of a dying ember, trickles through the hole in the roof, you see the construction that Gloom had used to climb free of The Function Room quiver as if with excitement. The whole place seems askew, like a wrongly buttoned shirt. Somewhere a fibular spindle strains against a patellar cog caked in wet grime, groaning like a heavy table being dragged across the floor. Awakening slowly, your pupil contracts and dilates in time with the slow throb of his ferly campanile of bone and cartilage bound in brittle tendons, trembling in reeking air. A woodlouse scurries over your eye, and through the segmented darkness of The Function Room she comes into focus, the new Controller, supine upon the filthy floor, her hair coiled in clotted tendrils like intestines tumbling from a split gut. You watch her eyes flicker rapidly, mimicking the wings of the blue bottle flies that buzz around her like errant apostrophes. Raindrops fall from the perforated ceiling and splash upon her face, leaving pale lines like war paint in the crusted filth. Steaming shit encircles her prostrate and dreaming form like a grimy collar as her ripened reveries open themselves to you like the thighs of a barren nymph, and like a maggot in a windfall apple, you burrow in. In your dream you see a murky pond. A boy named Spine washes his hands in the water, breaking its filmy surface to sift cold tadpole jelly through his fingers. 16
The Earth is a Drinker of Blood They arrived on foot beneath an aching sky, heads bowed, and bedraggled. Their sanguine scent tainted the spring air, cloying the musky odour of wet hawthorn and bird’s eggs. Despite their puffed faces and rotund bellies they were as vague as wraiths, like the swollen shadows of promenade walkers at dusk, shadows upon shadows, and they were instantly forgotten by the few drivers that passed them travelling along the country lanes. Wet trench coats flapped against their bloated frames and their soaked holdalls were slung over their shoulders like dead animals, the straps carving deep rosy ridges into their doughy shoulders. Raindrops hung from their noses in pink droplets, and their skin, as pale as alabaster, was viscous from the unceasing storm. And with their journey complete they set up camp beneath the hill, and there they waited, fat with blood. In his cottage on the other side of the chalk hills’ backbone Abraham closed the kitchen door, muting the shrill noise of his bickering children in the next room. He sighed and, thinking he had heard distant thunder, stared out of the window over the sink. Dark clouds loosened their sleeves and released another blackout curtain of rain. The bored sounds of Adam and Oliver grated him and he felt his temples throbbing in time with the storm that beat its rug against the window. He remembered Carla, their daughter, and knew that she would never have annoyed him as the boys did. He peered outside at the chalk hill bearing its teeth to the relentless rain as it recalled lost gullies from its receding, green gums. He leaned his head against the cold glass and cursed. He had taken a few days off work to take the kids on some day trips to give his wife Zefferus a break, but so far each day had been ruined by one incessant downpour after another. He felt as though the walls were closing in. He reached up, opened the cupboard and found the tea caddy empty. He cursed again, unable to fathom once more how a day off from work could actually be worse than one in the office. 17
Leech Bastian Leech crouched in the shadow of the church spire, waiting for his man. The breeze smarted upon his glistening skin. The Dagon users had formed a loose community of outcasts and losers within Leddenton, instantly recognisable by their glassy fish eyes and briny skin, the back of their hands forever at their noses wiping away strings of kelpy gunk. Bastian knew about Apache; he was reputedly the first to starting pushing Dagon on the streets of his town, and he was an ugly fucker. He was famed amongst Dagon users as a maverick dealer who took genuine pleasure in his work. Bastian didn’t care if their deal was to bring a smile to Apache’s face; he just wanted his fix. The dark and littered street between the churchyard and the old church hall was Apache’s natural habitat, the dark shallows beneath the yew trees where he crouched like a foraging squirrel, watching, always watching; evolution had adapted him to trading in hallowed alcoves and skulking behind gravestones, seeking business in close proximity to death as if he were mocking his clients. Most dealers did it for the money and saw associating with low-life Dagonites as an unpleasant but necessary evil, but money seemed to mean little to Apache. It was all about deals in the shadows and trading in murk, compelling addicts to wait patiently at the church door like drunks seeking the warmth of a midnight mass as he skulked around inside like a rat in a run, or daring them to form a queue at the bus stop in the summer sun as he dangled his toes in the Stour by the shade of the nearby bridge. Bastian remembered him from school as a little ferrety boy, the son of a butcher. He had always been in trouble, fighting anyone no matter how much bigger or older he were. He had gotten his name after stealing petrol from a parked car whilst still in junior school, he had wiped his hands clean in his hair and then lit a cigarette; now his scalp flashed through his hair like the moon reflecting in a weedy pool. 18
A Development The extra hours put in at Doghouse and Umbridge Property Developers had finally paid off for Maudlin Time, and at last he had enough capital to invest in a property of his own. The derelict Church Hall in Leddenton was to be his grand project, a tribute to his mother and a tidy source of income for some years to come. Returning to his hometown after years away working in the city, the building he had grown up opposite appeared quite suddenly before him as the road turned. It seemed to be a looming tangle of jade towers and turrets, but as he came nearer this slowly focussed. He saw how overgrown the evergreens had become in the narrow grounds between the building and the road, creating an illusion of some fairytale castle. He parked at the kerb and found the Church Hall to be almost invisible for the overgrowth. Only when he parted the thorny hawthorns and advanced some way up the path was he able to perceive its bowed walls and crumbling roof. Maudlin pondered upon his architectural training and wondered if even De Selby, renowned hater of interiors, might have approved of such an odd construct. It met none of the structural definitions listed as responsible for the degeneration of the human race listed in his famous work, Country Album. It had little of the imposing magnificence that his approach had suggested and bore little resemblance to his memories. In fact, a closer inspection of the exterior revealed a building so anonymous that it was almost invisible. The interior, however, could have been no less different for there was a bewildering kaleidoscope of details. The walls seemed to undulate with fleshy eruptions and bony projections. Doors opened onto damp walls and dark corridors led off into darker passageways. It was far larger inside than the faรงade suggested, and Maudlin found himself once more drawing upon his training.
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The Estate of Things “It’ll be a baptism of fire,” his new colleagues at the Methodist office had declared before he set out. “He won’t last five minutes on the estate,” he heard them whisper as he headed out into the dusk. “He just doesn’t look the part.” “True enough,” thought Bastian Leech as he took a shortcut across the park and headed towards the town centre. He may well have seen the light, but he had his work cut out visualising himself in his new role as a missionary. The estate was a symbol of our fractured society according to a recent article in the local newspaper that he had read, and the towers before him were populated with welfare-claiming immigrants who were high on drugs and low on civil responsibilities. Bastian knew that the estate had kept the local police in jobs long before the Council had moved asylum seekers in. But he also knew that even when the Church Hall had stood on the site, there had been problems with very English squatters and junkies. His knowledge of Leddenton’s social history, however, did little to instil confidence as he walked down the High Street with the tower blocks of the estate silhouetted before him against the fat and pink moon. As he approached the estate, he saw a kid with a tollgate belly standing sentry at the entrance, his green underpants bulging like a hernia through the open fly of his school trousers. The pouch of a catapult hung from his pocket like a leaked stretch of intestine. The kid watched him with eyes like stray currants in a plain bun, and whacked his toy Action Man against the wall with irregular menace. Bastian kept his head down as he walked, tucking his new Bible tightly under his arm and fingering the rosary in his blazer pocket nervously. The tower blocks loomed before him, casting a shadow of cliff-face nausea. He looked up and saw a face emerge from a window above and then quickly withdraw. The tower blocks absorbed the sounds of Leddenton like yew trees around a churchyard, and the click of the catch seemed thunderous as the window closed above. 20
Disc Eyes Detective Inspector Spicer slammed the door shut and stamped across the room to rest his forehead against the cool glass of the window. Their hotel room overlooked the promenade; it was a wet spring day and the sea was grey, the sky greyer, and his mood several shades grimmer than the two combined. The deep pulses of bass from a bar below drifted in waves against the glass and made his head throb. If he stood on tiptoes he could just see the top of Blackpool’s famous tower. His assistant and mistress, Amanda, lay upon the bed. She observed him briefly before rolling her eyes and returning her attention to the television. “Shit. Bloody shit,” he said, knocking his head against the warped pane with a dull thump. “What’s up, babe?” said Amanda. “Are you stressing again about your wife?” “I don’t think about her when I’m with you, babe, in fact I don’t think of her at all anymore. But my fucking notebook just fell down the chute with our rubbish,” he replied. “Well, it’ll be right on the top. Just go and find the manager. Then come back and let me have some more hot loving.” “Babe, when we catch this guy I’ll ride you like Streethawk,” he said, grabbing their room key from the dressing table and throwing her an unconvincing grin. He retraced his footsteps across the worn carpets in the corridor and went down to the reception where he rang the bell at the desk and waited. He flicked through tourist brochures, feeling as anaemic as the décor and quickly grew impatient. He turned to face the lounge where a man sat alone in a tired and threadbare armchair reading a battered old book. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But have you seen the manager around here?” The man dropped his book to study him, his face for a moment appearing as plain as eggshell in the sickly light. 21
Zombie Ho! Detective Inspector Spicer peered over the top of his sunglasses and licked his lips as a group of girls tumbled drunkenly out of a bar just ahead, their shoulder straps hanging loose, and thongs flashing above low-cut jeans like jewels glistening in bedrock. Neither police work nor his assistant Amanda could compete for his attentions with all this flesh on show in the sunshine. “Spicer,” hissed Amanda, startling him with an elbow in the ribs. The promenade was bustling with tourists and revellers in the evening sun. Huddled clusters of guys nudged each other, swigging from cans of lager, cheering, as another gaggle of party girls swung their hips and kicked their heels, pausing to drain bottles of brightly-coloured booze beside a candy floss stall. Spicer’s head swam in a kaleidoscope of bikini tops and tight shorts, and every shade of flesh between lily-white and orange cordial. “Now I know why you wanted this case so much.” “No way, babe. I just wanted some time alone with you, away from Leddenton,” he replied, taking her hand in his. “I couldn’t care less about catching this murderer.” “Yeah, right,” Amanda said, swinging her handbag high on her shoulder, tossing her hair. “So suddenly you don’t want to be a Chief Inspector. You’ll be telling me you’re going to leave your wife for me next.” He puffed his cheeks in disbelief as one of the girls bent over right in front of him to choose a stick of rock. “Sorry, babe, did you say something?” She tugged his hand and pulled him away from the promenade. “I fancy a coffee,” she said. “Come on.” He took one last longing look at the parade of nubile and drunken flesh, then allowed himself to be lead from the seafront and towards the coffee shops in the town centre.
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GODsWILL Zeferus presses herself against the retina of your memory. You focus acutely, as if seeing the world through a pinhole camera. “You are nothing to me now,” she says, and then turns from the kitchen window to face you. Outside the rain taps its fingers impatiently upon the glass. “But you are the only one for me,” you hear yourself say. “You always were, ever since that time in the summerhouse...” “I’m leaving you,” she replies. You gaze past her and see through the window that outside the sky is as turbulent like a stormy sea. Against the dark backdrop of rain clouds, the outline of the church hall’s roof in the distance looms ever darker. The wind mouths something incomprehensible through the double-glazing, a prompt perhaps. She turns to the window again. Over her shoulder you see an old man cycling down the lane, dressed in a waterproof cape and with the rain falling from him in sheets. He looks like a foreigner, and a childish memory urges you not to trust folk like him, but you can somehow sense that Zeferus wants to speak to him. Her head moves slowly, following his progress. Then she turns abruptly and pushes past you. You go to the window now and crane your neck to look down the lane. The old man rests his bicycle against the wrought iron gate and you watch him climb in to the neighbouring field where an old long barrow lies like a grassy shipwreck. You hear Zeferus thumping around in the hallway and then the front door slams as suddenly as a match strike. You see her walk up the garden path and then turn down the lane. You move away too quickly and dizziness takes hold, and the world spirals around you. Once the spell has passed, you find that something feels different and wrong now, but at first you cannot establish in your mind what it is. The air has become warm and moschate and you sense that there is less of it than there was before. White light 23
slices through the room and sprays shadows at the walls. Where are you? You roll your eye in its pissy pink cup of flesh and look around for the cause of the atmosphere’s displacement. “Hospital? What’s wrong with me?” The words crawl fall from your mouth to the glistening tiled floor like abandoned chicklets from a nest. You smack the taste of sour milk from your palate and look around you, dazed. “What we don’t have, is phantom limb syndrome after all,” Old Black Lip laughs. You look down and see that stretched below you is a soft mass of repulsive white flesh, caked in a reeking continent of vomit. You gaze for a moment upon the disgusting specimen below, and to your horror you find yourself gagging, but worse than that is the discovery that you have a stomach to turn, and a throat for bile to bubble in, and a hand that rises to the corners of your mouth to wipe away the thin yellow stream of fetid stomach acid that appears in response to your thoughts. You want to cast your mind out like an angler’s line, to Maltese temples, to country towns and church halls, to nightclubs and neon. “You’re one of the first to go. This is a rather big day for us. My name is Old Black Lip, and I’m in control here. You might say that I am The Controller.” Your mouth opens and your tongue flaps like a leech in an eddy. You feel your body shake uncontrollably. The light blinds you and you shrink back like a spent cock, receding into warm visions where once you were in control, where you were The Controller. A peculiar and distant memory surfaces and you recall making a lot of money when the rail networks were privatised; it was in the eighties, you think. You had helped your company make their bid and it was because of researching the South West train line and liking the countryside that you had invested in a property in Leddenton. Some of your colleagues back then, finding themselves quite suddenly wealthier than they had ever imagined, had decided to buy yachts whilst others had invested in expensive sports cars, but you had opted for a second home in the country. 24
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